Old Joy Movie Download

6 / 10

“nothing happens”, which isn’t necessarily ‘bad’, not all great either
Kelly Reichardt’s second feature film is aptly lumped in with the ‘mumblecore’ crowd of independent films that have improvisational dialog (or maybe, more than Cassavetes, that people just make s*** up on the spot on set) and a kind of anything-goes attitude towards the story. This isn’t to say that Old Joy doesn’t have a place it’s going towards, since it’s so short a feature as to not have a lot of place to roam… at least, not from its main trajectory, which is that two friends in their thirties- one a father-to-be with an anxious wife and the other a stoner with a lot of dreams and physics information- go to the woods in Oregon and hang out. It’s not hyperbole to say that ‘nothing happens’, though I’m sure there are a lot of things going on under the surface, in-between what is said, and in those pauses Reichardt takes to film nature.

In other words, it’s kind of like Ozu-lite, only with its meaning being not as easy to read really. A lot of audiences and critics find more than, frankly, I could find in it. If you do see a whole plethora of meditative brilliance in it, I’m genuinely happy for you with your experience. And if you curse it to hades I understand as well. For me, it was somewhere in the middle. The cinematography is gorgeous, even when its just driving along and shooting the outside woods or Oregon city-scape at night, and the Yo la Tengo music evokes a kind of somber-but-cool spirit that works well for the material. Perhaps I was hoping, yes even with a ‘minimalist’ mumblecore movie, that more *there* was there. What else is there to these two guys except the possibility that they might see each other a little less now that one is having a kid and the other goes amblin’ around?

A friend of mine laid it down even better for me, in an odd way: it’s kind of like a video game, where it’s more about the architecture of things, be it the woods or just the low-rent areas in Oregon that Reichardt filmed, with the soundtrack being either moody guitar or angry political dialog on the radio. I really do appreciate the effort of the filmmaker, in its own way its even ambitious to be so simple with things. But at the same time I wish there was more *there* there with the characters, their conflict, which was not a problem with Reichardt’s follow-up Wendy & Lucy – and that was just a girl and her dog!Read More