Change Your Image
ollieberger
Reviews
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Is this for real?
Uncanny that a film like this could be made, in America, in the 21st century. Who could have imagined that somewhere out between the two oceans there was such a sensibility married to such sure-handed skill? Watching the film, one has the feeling that it was made as if no film had ever been made before. To convey that feeling must be the product of great knowledge and sophistication, but the illusion of innocence and sincerity remains utterly enchanting ... even when it's undercut by razor-sharp irony. And the unpretention, the lack of pretension, the immediacy of this movie -- again, can such a film really have been made, here, now? Without fully revealing the ending, I have to say still that the scene at the exhibition was unfortunate, the director having in the end succumbed to sentimentality or predictability or both. To have marred the masterpiece is regrettable, but still and on the whole, what an achievement.
Seraglio (2000)
Wonderful, wacky, and very funny short about the strange ways of love
What a riot! An utterly original and competently produced little comedy that's deceptively simple on the surface while also tapping into the deep roots of the comic tradition. Given the light touch, one might be tempted to dismiss it at first as fluff, but it's just wacky enough to draw you in, and you begin to realize that there's something peculiar going on below the surface. Somehow reminiscent of David Lynch, but without the extremes of exotic weirdness and with a spirit finally more Joycean in its embrace of the human comedy. Not to exaggerate: it's a short, modest work. But full of promise and again, genuinely funny: I was cracking up like walnuts, walnuts.