Armand it is a special film. a delicate, fragile, profound reflection of life with its many sides. it is bitter and warm and nice and cruel. a man, his children, wife, neighbors, a woman. and splendid dialogs, touching performance. vulnerability and search of happiness. deep social problems. and fear. innocence in strange clothes. and need of the other. a fish in a bag and a dialog. a picture with bird and the sun. a woman and a child in park. and too realistic atmosphere. after its end - the image of Brandon Ratcliff amazing performance. and the traces of a film about basic common things. like a modern fairy tale. only shadows of dragons is different. and the sleep of Charming Prince.

Framescourer A thin film bulked out with portentous, indie-sensibility design, music and open acting... I don't know the term I'm after, but it's that manner of acting which allows the audience to simply insert whatever they want to make of it. There's a fair bit of dead-pan staring, put it that way.It helps to pass the time of this otherwise pretty trying film that director Miranda July has hired John Hawkes as her leading man and that she herself is an attractive, sympathetic figure. The rest of the cast have their idiosyncrasies. But these are all amplified in substitution for character, relationships and narrative, just as the small episodes which make up the film are concentrated on in isolation to the detraction of the whole.I saw the film with a short introduction narrated by July herself. Her suggestion that a feature could be three of her half-hour shorts stuck together tells you much of what you need to know about this film before watching it. 3/10

handbledzoin Look at the box cover. Seems like a nice cute quirky indie comedy, right? And all those awards. It must be good! Well, you'd be wrong, my friend. Dead Wrong.In the first fifteen minutes or so, a man sets his hand on fire in front of his two young sons, two people in a car try to rescue a goldfish in a bag on top of an SUV in traffic, and a middle-aged man sexually propositions two teenage girls. It gets worse from there. It's as if Nia Vardalos had tried to adapt a really bad John Waters screenplay and effed it up. I am mostly a liberal person, but this movie sent the needle on my Wrong-O-Meter straight into the red zone. Afterwards, I had to scrub myself down like Meryl Streep in SILKWOOD after being exposed to radiation. Avoid this movie like a dead rat on the sidewalk.

gutsy_gibbon This is an out-of-the-way type of movie, much different from the standard painful crappy oeuvre offered by Hollywood. The main elements of its plot revolve around a recently divorced salesman (played by John Hawkes) and a struggling performance artist, played by Miranda July, who also wrote and directed the movie and is herself a performance artist. Because this movie involves some very uncommon plot elements, including adolescent sexuality, it is evident that July was trying to portray some of the stuff which we do not normally never see in movies, but is nevertheless a very important part of the human experience. This movie deserves credit for being so light-hearted, romantic and satirical that one is easily transferred into the world of the movie and feels to experience what the characters experienced. The portrayal by the young child actors was also very good. Overall, an easy 10 out of 10.