Four of Them

-After a one night stand, two twenty-somethings (Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins) spend the day together, awkwardly discussing race, gentrification, and the racial hypocrisies or being 'indie'.

-I'm mixed. On the one hand, Wyatt Cenac is adorable, and he and Higgins have good chemistry, even though she spends half the movie berating, insulting, or otherwise treating him like shit. They are what I'd call casual hipsters, as in, he installs aquariums, she makes T-shirts with women directors' names on them (these are extremely hipster jobs). What differentiates them from other movies amid the mumblecore movement (as best as I can describe it, really) is that they actually talk about things that don't always involve the dynamics of their relationship. I mean, certainly relationships are the main focus, just not always their own specifically.

-The first twenty minutes are torture. While capturing the awkwardness of going to breakfast with your one night stand for lack of anything better to do, the main characters (Micah and Jo) literally shift weight from one foot to the other, Micah trying to pry some conversation out of Jo, her coldly shrugging them off. Why would anyone be mean to Wyatt Cenac? If he can get away with a beard, he can get away with anything, is what I'm saying. I love that guy.

-Right. My point. Half the movie is a diatribe about the evils of gentrification (which I won't argue with, but I don't want to hear people argue over its merits for 80-some off minutes), how the (ugh) indie scene boasts racial blindness, but really, it's always just 'a black person hanging onto a white person', never an Asian or an Indian or a Latino in the mix. This eventually crosses the line from natural conversation to dropping an anvil on the whole thing.

-Still, this is a case where shaky cam actually makes it better. The cinematography can either be described as black and white but for reds, greens, and yellows, or regular color, just very, very muted. The mike, for what it's worth, captures every sound, really putting you into San Francisco. The characters pause to choose their next words, have to piss, argue and debate without either being seen through the lens of 'blatantly wrong'. These characters aren't the smug assholes I've grown accustomed to in such films, but intelligent, complicated people who evolve organically (or not at all).

-Right. I never really laughed out loud, but I chuckled quite a bit (because, yeah, Wyatt Cenac). The script it clever and funny, the performances pretty incredible.

-Myspace? Really? I imagine, at this point, that Myspace is something akin to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with people cautiously wandering out to their profiles, lest they be seen. Raiding abandoned pages for swag, scrounging for an applicable button. Tragic, really.