Great Film overall

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

College student Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson) conducts a study by interviewing men with stories of disturbing behavior. She also starts observing men in the outside world. She has dates with Ryan (John Krasinski).Nicholson is playing it very passively. The interviews are visually extremely static. There are so many men as subjects that none of them are compelling enough to care about. I suspect that the source material is difficult to adapt. John Krasinski may not be equipped to do so much of the heavy lifting. In the end, he did not find a way to translate this into a watchable movie.

I watched this on cable initially because of my admiration for David Foster Wallace's work. The movie just plain blew me away. If I'd seen it in a theater I'd probably have been crying at the end of it.This is a loosely connected series of monologues by men- young, mature, White, Black- who are bound only by the issues of being men in the confusing world we live in. A graduate student is videotaping these men, working on her thesis project about how men navigate the post-feminist world.The best realized segment is about a man whose father worked six days a week as a men's room attendant. Having a modern consciousness about being a Black man, subject # 42 can't understand how his father degraded himself that way; his father tells us that it is what he could do to keep food on the table and a roof over his family's heads. Worse yet, the man has not seen his father (presumably still alive and in the same job) since 1978.There's so much unresolved loneliness on view here. This is a fine movie that seems to have gotten just about no release, and that hurts.Watch this. Learn. Grow.

Although you're unlikely to see it if you live the UK, with only a fourth quarter 09 release for 'Brief Interviews' in the States, and curiously Greece, at the Athens Film Festival, John Krasinski's adaptation of American maverick David Foster Wallace's book of the same name is something that you really shouldn't allow to go under your radar.This shortish film (eighty or so minutes, dependent upon the version you see) has many head-spinning nuances that warrant your attention. Personally, this was a surprising turn for Krasinski, who displays a brilliant eye for a project and impresses upon his audience an ability far outweighing his popular persona of goof or funny man. It is delightful to see a harder, more serious edge to him. I was both shocked and delighted by this film and have happily become a convert of Krasinski's work, but on a whole new level.Having not read the Wallace book and knowing little about the film prior to watching it, I feel I have benefited from not having any pre-conceptions about the story or how Krasinski decided it should be filmed.I am grateful for the fact that I went about my usual business and avoided the reviews that had gone before me, as most reviewers have found that they either love or loathe it. Regardless, the film cannot be ignored once seen, and opinions abound about its relevance. Such is the subject matter and wealth of passionate feelings it both incites from its audience and the messages it dares to tell us about ourselves.The 'Hideous Men' of the title are few and far between, however, and this may be different in the book, but the majority of a clearly hand-picked multitude of talented actors come across as having opinions on women that are heard all too infrequently. You get the impression that these voices would have remained unheard had a tape recorder and a camera not been placed in front of them and the right type of questions posed from an apparently unassuming and coercive questioner.The acting talent throughout is exemplary, with one notable exception. Our lead Julianne Nicholson came across as slightly average through an uninventive, passionless and oblique performance as Sara Quinn. This is quite possibly due to her fellow performers and who can be surprised. These hideous men we come across all deliver outstanding monologues with Krasinski, Dominic Miller, Michael Cerveris and Frankie Faison being particular examples of unmissable, gripping talent.The story is simple enough, Quinn is interviewing men on the back of a project to understand the progress of feminism and decides that the best way to understand at least half of that would be to interview men on their feelings about women, taking a broad cross-section of subjects to get as broad a result as possible.What we get is a warts and all (and I do mean all) story about how some of these men view women in general. How some are unmoved in their philosophy and how others, at the more cognitive end of the masculine spectrum have started to realise that maybe this isn't their world after all. While some are bitter or delighted, most are confused by their relationships with the women in their lives, but all of them are nonetheless vocal about their feelings, even if those feelings are not what Quinn would really like to hear.With an impressive cast, who appear to be mostly right on form, a screenplay adapted by Krasinski that is at times witty, funny and above all brilliantly observed by Wallace and some impressive editing by Zene Baker and Rich Fox, Brief interviews With Hideous Men is both a lesson of our times for men and women everywhere with meaning in every line. This makes romantic comedies seem dire by comparison and I would suggest that even though this is most definitely a look at relationships as much as anything else, it would be wise to avoid it when picking a DVD for a second date, as this raises some uncomfortable questions that are thankfully not glossed over with comedy.A real treat for fans of rational thought and superlative acting skills.

I have been on IMDb for about 5 years now and have never had the urge to write one of these reviews, until I saw this movie. How this thing has a 6.9 rating on here is beyond me, it's getting a spot in the bottom 20 - the worst movies I've ever seen.Here's the story so you don't have to waste 80 minutes of your life the way I did. A hideous looking red-haired woman (who the other characters inexplicably find attractive) is writing a sort of "paper" on the nature of relationships, specifically looking at how feminism has affected men. To this end, she conducts a series of interviews with a variety of men about their thoughts on women and life in general. Of course, I am taking liberties, because I want my synopsis to make sense, unlike the actual movie.The reality of the movie plays out like a person with MPD that is obsessed with rape and using large words to sound important or intelligent. The movie can't decide if it's about relationships, the dark side of human nature or just monologuing until the end of time. Inside this "gem", you'll find such treasures as a 15 minute diatribe about an African-American man whose father was the server inside a bathroom. There's no rhyme or reason as to why this scene is in there, but the director and writer thought they'd throw it in for kicks.Overall, the real problem I had with this movie (one that anybody with even the slightest bit of sense will also have) is that the director, writer, and actors all think they're SO smart because they can use the word "proclivities" 20 times in the same thought. The climax of the movie's self-indulgence comes at the end, when director Krazinski comes into the movie to deliver a roughly 20 minute monologue about a hippie he meets who tells him an "anecdote" about her experience being raped. I'd like to think I'm an understanding person when it comes to this sort of thing, but I just wanted Gallagher to come from outside the frame and smash Krazinski in the head for all trash that was coming out of his mouth. When a movie ends and you want to yell at the screen for the time lost watching it is when you know that it is a terrible movie.My suggestion? If you're in the market for indie movies, there's about 2,000,000 movies ahead of this stinker.