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Indie Memphis Does Music

This weekend, Live from Memphis will present its second annual Music Video Showcase, part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival (see Cover Story, page 19). Twenty-five music videos will be screened during the Saturday night showcase, held at Peabody Place‘s Muvico theater, augmenting main-theater music-related screenings such as Return of the Blue Moon Boys, which documents musicians Scotty Moore, DJ Fontana, and the late Bill Black; Soul of the Delta, a 30-minute movie about the Mississippi gospel scene; and the fictional Stomp! Scream! Shout!, which follows the exploits of an all-girl garage-rock band, circa 1966.

John Michael McCarthy, who has cast local musicians such as Jack Yarber and Poli Sci Clone in movies such as Sore Losers and E*vis Meets the Beat*es, has a few videos in the showcase, including a scripted short built around California garage-rock group The Willowz‘ “Equation #2.“ Muck Sticky will screen his self-directed opus “Thingy Thing,“ while other offerings include videos for Lord T. & Eloise‘s “Million Dollar Boots” (produced by Old School Pictures), Mr. Sche‘s “Front Me Somethin'” (directed by Marc A. Dokes), Chess Club‘s “Devastortion” (directed by Amy Frazier), and Skillet‘s “Rebirthing” (directed by Darren Doane), as well as animated videos for “Linchpin” from Clanky’s Nub (directed by G.B. Shannon) and Arma Secreta‘s “Segue/Debris” (directed by Clayton Hurley).

Additionally, Live From Memphis will screen footage culled from performances by The Secret Service, captured at the Buccaneer; The Reigning Sound, filmed at the Hi-Tone Café during Goner Fest 2; and Lucero, shot at Young Avenue Deli.

Live From Memphis founder Christopher Reyes also directed two music videos on the schedule — Organ Thief‘s “Psychochauffeur” and a Ballet Memphis performance choreographed by Garrett Ammon, called “In Ways Ungrateful” — while Sarah Fleming, Reyes’ creative partner, will be showing “Can You Hear Me Now,“ a Spinal Tap-inspired video for John Pickle‘s mock rock group Mung.

“As a music lover, I would much rather see footage of a live band,” says Reyes. “With live videos, we try to recreate what it’s like to actually be at a show, to give a sense of what the band is about and document that moment. But as a filmmaker, I like the creativity of making a music video, which affords me a lot more visual leeway.”

Reyes says that he shot the Organ Thief video on a zero budget, working at night with his Panasonic VX 100 camera and using a hearse belonging to the Memphis Roller Derby Girls as a prop. “It was fun and loose,” he says. “I had a concept but no real time to create something with tons of thought-out shots.”

He sees the final product as a marketing tool that the band can use on Web sites like MySpace and YouTube or send to MTV2 and cable-access video shows.

“YouTube,” Reyes notes, “can be so beneficial for bands, but I’m seeing a lot of single-camera, shaky from-the-back-of-the-room footage. You can’t really see the band, and the audio is distorted. I usually turn that kind of stuff off. So, at times, having a video can do more harm than good.”

“Music videos are just another form of media that’s available for exploitation,” Fleming says. “If you have something that looks good, it can lend professionalism to the band’s overall image.”

Local musician and filmmaker Geoffrey Brent Shrewsbury also has an entry in the showcase: a video for Evil Army‘s “Friday the 13th.“ Shrewsbury is no stranger to the Indie Memphis festival: He won an award for Best Narrative Short in 2004 with 17-inch Cobras and snagged the Tennessee Filmmaker’s Award with San Quentin, a series of static shots cut to the Johnny Cash song, last year.

“I haven’t made anything in a while, and I wanted a new project to practice with, something more contained and quick to turn around,” says Shrewsbury, who made the minute-and-a-half video using a camcorder and some blank tapes he had lying around.

Jeff Pope stars in the black-and-white horror flick, which, says Shrewsbury, was shot without spending a dime. “The goal was to make something as creative as possible with no budget and the least amount of stress on the band,” he explains. “It sounds like I was cutting corners, but I intentionally designed it that way. It was really a creative exercise, a challenge to remain simple and tell a story in under two minutes.”

Look for more from Shrewsbury later this fall, when he hopes to release a DVD of his short films, including videos from local bands the Lost Sounds, The Oblivians, his own group Vegas Thunder, and more.

Live From Memphis Music Video Showcase

Saturday, October 14th, 9 p.m.

Muvico, Peabody Place

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Film Features Film/TV

Matt Dillon shines as Bukowski’s liquor-store cowboy.

I’ve never been convinced that Charles Bukowski is much more than a bohemian Harper Lee, another decent author whose mystique and legend overcompensate for obvious literary shortcomings. However, I got a nice, pleasant contact buzz from Factotum, Bent Hamer’s mellow adaptation of an early Bukowski novel about women, writing, work, and alcohol.

To call the plot “loose” is misleading; it’s sort of like saying Peyton Manning has trouble winning big games. The film begins and ends almost arbitrarily, with Bukowski’s fictional alter ego Henry Chinaski (Matt Dillon) drifting from job to job, bar to bar, and woman to woman while developing his writing style and feebly attempting to preserve some kind of dignity in the grinding, dull, hourly-wage world. The pungent one-liners Bukowski is famous for (“I’ve probably slept longer than you lived,” “I fucked better as a bum,” etc.) punctuate scenes and yank the narrative through the urban landscapes of working-class Minneapolis, whose down-at-heel neighborhoods and dive bars form a surprisingly apt backdrop.

To call Factotum a comedy is similarly inapt; the punchlines of many scenes are so far beyond deadpan that the jokes scarcely register until midway through the next scene. So call it a romance, maybe; the bulk of the non-bar, non-job scenes sketch the on-again, off-again romance of sorts between Chinaski and his occasional girlfriend Jan (Lili Taylor). These two actors’ refreshing, unglamorous chemistry revitalizes several otherwise clichéd sequences. The screenplay typecasts Jan as a boozy shrew, but Taylor sidesteps her lines and reveals her character through sheer physical presence. Even within Taylor’s rich filmography, this performance is memorable; it’s the first time I can remember thinking about Lili Taylor as a flesh-and-blood being rather than a “good character actress.”

As Chinaski, Dillon carves out a chesty, soft-spoken, endearing brute whose drive to prove everyone wrong is his only real pleasure. Dillon does a great deal with a guy who seems so nonplussed about everything. Gambling doesn’t excite Chinaski, sex is a chore, and liquor is about as special to him as the next trip to the john. He’s not exactly a character you root for — his code of honor is impenetrable and he punches Taylor in the face in one scene — but Dillon’s performance is strange and compelling. This is Dillon’s best performance since Drugstore Cowboy.

These two fine actors create a Chaplinesque moment when Jan and Henry go downtown to recover a paycheck: Jan casts off her heels in frustration and disgust, and Henry takes off his shoes, puts them on her feet, and walks alongside her to the next bar. It’s an anachronistic moment in an odd little movie that serves its shaky source material pretty well.

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Film Features Film/TV

Gangs of Boston

From Mean Streets to Taxi Driver to Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese has made plenty of movies about urban crime, but, oddly, The Departed is his first film that spends much time on the law-enforcement side of crime stories.

The movie, which revolves around the symmetry of two rival undercover agents — one a South Boston neighborhood kid (Matt Damon) who is rising fast in the Massachusetts State Police while serving as a mole for Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the other a state trooper (Leonardo DiCaprio) who accepts a prison bid on made-up charges in order to infiltrate Costello’s organization — is a remake of 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs. And while noted auteur Scorsese doesn’t seem a likely candidate for an Americanized remake of such a recent movie, he seems to enjoy the freedom of what feels close to a director-for-hire project.

The Departed opens with file footage of social unrest in ’60s/’70s Boston and then segues into fictional scenes that show a kid’s perspective on neighborhood crime and Catholicism. But from this promising beginning, The Departed launches into a well-executed but oddly impersonal crime movie. It’s more contained and probably less flawed than Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, but it certainly isn’t as interesting.

With its cops-and-robbers narrative, epic length, and powerhouse cast, The Departed seems less a remake of Infernal Affairs and more like a Scorsese version of Heat, the Michael Mann crime epic that pitted Robert De Niro against Al Pacino. And, as satisfying as The Departed is, score one for the younger director with older stars.

Scorsese and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker wind the movie’s double-helix plotline into tighter and tighter circles. Initially unaware of each other’s existence, Damon and DiCaprio spin around each other, as when one alerts his police contact (Martin Sheen) that a deal is about to go down and the other alerts Costello that the police know about it. After it becomes clear to each side that their inner circle has been infiltrated, the respective “rats” work on exposing each other. It’s interesting for such an old-fashioned director how much of a role technology, especially cell phones and text messaging, plays in the plotting. But as the story gets more intense, some character motivations become hard to ascertain and some of the action/suspense set pieces are disappointingly ordinary.

But if The Departed is ultimately less weighty than you might hope, it is good, engrossing fun in a pure genre-flick kind of way. Scorsese has great fun pushing the pieces around, with leads Damon and DiCaprio totally convincing (DiCaprio is more believable here than in Gangs of New York) and Nicholson achieving just the right balance between actorly menace and his patented mugging. The film’s deep supporting cast also shines, particularly intentional unintentional-comedy masters Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin as energetically foul-mouthed cops and Sheen as avuncular straight-man.

The film’s local color is also a strength — The Departed would make a good double-feature with Mystic River — from the underlined accents (especially from Boston-bred actors Damon and Wahlberg) to the series of shabby bars and corner stores that populate the movie.

Despite some cracker-jack direction and a distinctly Scorsese-esque use of pop music, The Departed is essentially an impersonal genre exercise — much like Spike Lee’s Inside Man from earlier this year. That these are two of the better American movies of the year despite falling so short of their respective directors’ best work is an indictment of the worst year for movies in recent memory.

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News The Fly-By

Close to Home

Leonid Saharovici lives a quiet life. The 79-year-old retiree has two grown sons and five grandchildren and lives happily with his wife in their Germantown home.

But Saharovici’s life wasn’t always so pleasant. When World War II broke out, he was a 13-year-old Jewish boy living in Romania.

“The Germans occupied Romania, and my father was taken to a labor camp, leaving me with my mother and grandmother,” recalls Saharovici, a soft-spoken man who, despite living over 30 years in Memphis, still speaks with a heavy accent.

Two years later, Saharovici was also forced into a labor camp where he and other children dismantled bombs, gardened, and shoveled snow.

Saharovici’s story is one of 14 featured in Transported Lives, a documentary on Holocaust survivors living in Memphis. It is set to premiere on WKNO on October 5th at 8:30 p.m.

The film was an independent project of Lunar Productions, a locally owned company that specializes in videos for corporate marketing. For the past six years, president Mark Wender and senior director Trish Warren interviewed survivors.

“Most people in Memphis don’t know that there are people who survived the Holocaust living in our community,” says Wender. “In 10 or 20 years, all the survivors will be gone, so we wanted to have something permanent to tell their stories.”

The film follows a chronological format, starting with people remembering their lives before the war and ending with their living in Memphis.

“Many of them hadn’t talked about the Holocaust in years. Some hadn’t even told their children,” says Warren. “But by the time they got to us, they were ready.”

Most of the interviews were arranged through Saharovici. After moving to Memphis from Romania in 1972, Saharovici formed the Baron Hirsch Holocaust Memorial Organization, a network of local survivors focused on Holocaust education and outreach. In 1982, the group had 40 survivors. Today, only 13 of the original members are left. However, there are other Holocaust survivors living in Memphis who are not a part of the group.

“We want to educate people in Memphis and elsewhere about the Holocaust,” says Wender. “Ultimately, we’d like all the schools and churches to have copies of the film, so when they teach the Holocaust, they’ll have something authentic.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Jet Li’s cumbersome farewell to the martial-arts epic.

Fearless is being billed as Jet Li’s final martial-arts epic. If this is true, it’s too bad for a couple reasons: One, the performer is abandoning the genre that has seen his best work; two, the martial-arts movie that he’ll last be remembered for is such a subpar product.

Fearless is inspired by the life of Huo Yuanjia, a Chinese martial-arts master from the turn of the 20th century who was famous for uniting various styles of wushu, or martial arts, under one banner, the Jingwu Sports Federation. The film opens in Shanghai, 1910, as Yuanjia must face foreign fighters to defend the honor of his homeland — a symbolic gesture of solidarity against the increasing impositions of the West and Japan. The story then flashes back 30 years, when Yuanjia was a child, and commences to show the path his life takes on the way to national celebrity.

Yuanjia is the son of a wealthy martial-arts master, and his early years as a burgeoning fighting champion are characterized by arrogance and lack of respect for his opponents stemming from, one is led to infer, the haughtiness inherent in being born with a silver chopstick in his mouth.

Yuanjia’s transgressions eventually catch up with him and cause him great personal loss. He leaves his hometown to wander in the wilderness, eventually befriending and cohabitating with a blind girl, an old peasant woman, and a gaggle of children in a pastoral paradise. Faster than you can say “Pei it forward,” you can bet these kindly simple folk will teach him valuable life lessons which Yuanjia will return to society to proselytize about.

Jet Li’s best work — from Hero back to the Once Upon a Time in China series — has been Chinese-produced, and if these films are often well-intentioned or principled, they at least aren’t cloying. The biggest flaw of Fearless is fundamental and it’s American: Take away the rickshaws and junk boats and leitai fighting rings and all you’re left with is just another bland formulaic piece of Hollywood-style feel-good trash, à la Cinderella Man.

The fighting in Fearless is above average, particularly a scene where Li and an opponent beat the hell out of a teahouse as they do to each other. But the audience is not given much reason for dumbstruck guffawing at the martial arts on display and Li is shackled tightly to that cumbersome story. No amount of clever choreography by Yuen Wo Ping can break him free.

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Film Features Film/TV

Low-Tech Dreams

In an era dominated by computer-generated special effects and other expensive production trickery, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep is charmingly modest and tactile: The romper-room effects here are hand-crafted with cardboard and cellophane and yarn and plaster, like a grade-school crafts project turned installation-art opus. The resulting mise-en-scène is like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse via Salvador Dali. The cinematographic trickery is equally low-tech.

Prior to this highly personal film, Gondry had emerged a major filmmaker via two Charlie Kaufman collaborations (Human Nature and, far better, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and one Dave Chappelle collaboration (Block Party, still one of 2006’s best films). But before his rise as a feature filmmaker, Gondry made his name via creative music videos for arty acts such as Björk and the Chemical Brothers. The Science of Sleep, in which Gael García Bernal plays a young man who works out his waking-life problems through a rich dream world, is reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in its romanticism (a little more adolescent this time — sweet, wild, with undercurrents of melancholy) but is really a nod to this music-video heritage in that visceral and emotional impact takes precedence over storytelling.

Bernal is Stéphane, a young French-Mexican man who has been living in Mexico with his father. As the film opens, he’s returned to Paris to see his estranged mother, taking a job she’s arranged for him at a printing company that specializes in producing calendars.

Stéphane thinks he’s taking a graphic-artist position and hopes to sell the company on his morbid calendar idea, in which each month is accompanied by a drawing depicting a celebrated disaster. Instead, Stéphane ends up performing rote tasks in a colorful but stifling workspace that could double for a French version of The Office. Meanwhile, Stéphane’s personal life is also troubled. He doesn’t get along with his mother’s new husband, and he lives alone in an apartment that was his childhood home, growing obsessed with an equally artsy next-door neighbor, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg).

Though Stéphane struggles with real life, he sorts things out in dreams that make up half the film. These dreams branch out from the cardboard-and-crayon set of Stéphane TV, a would-be late-night talk show in which Stéphane — dressed in a mod suit — is host, guest, and band all at once. This dreamscape gambit is a conduit for many witty visual eruptions. Stéphane battles his office superior with hands that have grown to comically huge proportions. There’s an electric razor that grows hair rather than removing it, giving its user a huge mountain-man beard. One dream sequence has Stéphane in a plushy costume, playing drums and singing a Velvet Underground song.

If The Science of Sleep seems old-fashioned in its effects, it’s notable just how old-fashioned. Gondry’s movie doesn’t merely evoke pre-CGI cinema. It’s a seemingly intentional nod to the dawn of filmmaking, to the now seemingly quaint wonderment of such turn-of-the-century films as Georges Méliès’ Voyage to the Moon or Edwin Porter’s Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.

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Film Features Film/TV

A deliriously disreputable misfire

The last time one of James Ellroy’s seedy California crime-fiction opuses was brought to the big screen, 1997’s L.A. Confidential, the result was one of the sturdiest Hollywood entertainments in many years. That film was directed by Curtis Hanson (8Mile, Wonder Boys), one of the finest movie technicians around but not the kind of auteur known for leaving a personal imprint.

The latest Ellroy adaptation, The Black Dahlia (the novel is the first of an “L.A. Quartet” that includes L.A. Confidential), is a different matter altogether, matching the pulpy Ellroy with a director who would seem to fit his stylistic temperament — Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface) — especially considering the subject matter: a fictionalization of Los Angeles’ most notorious unsolved murder, the 1947 killing of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, whose body was found — bisected, disemboweled, and drained of blood — in a South Central vacant lot.

But, instead, The Black Dahlia is a fascinating misfire. The movie is one-third conventional Ellroy adaptation(à la L.A. Confidential), one-third De Palma personal cinema freak-out, and one-third film-noir cliché. And though there are some fascinating scenes, performances, and moments here, the movie’s parts never cohere.

The film-noir stuff is a drag because Ellroy’s always been dismissive of the lone private-dick shtick and because it seems beneath such intense material. As far as the Ellroy/De Palma clash, some elements of the film bring the book to life: an opening boxing match between young cops and future partners Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), the richly conceived squad-room scenes, the fashion-forward décor of the house shared by Blanchard and his damaged consort Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson).

But the film’s clunky compression of the investigatory detail in Ellroy’s novel makes the movie’s mystery aspect nearly incoherent and makes the fictional solution of the actually unsolved case that Ellroy conceives seem ridiculous (which it almost was in the book).

De Palma also fails to capture the emotional obsessiveness not only of Ellroy’s book but also of the case itself. Characters say the right things but the movie doesn’t feel it, despite the intense performance of Mia Kirshner, who plays Short in a few screen tests and one stag reel. The utter sadness and metaphoric richness of the Black Dahlia story — the innocent who comes to Hollywood dreaming of stardom and is devoured — is beyond this movie’s grasp.

Where The Black Dahlia does work is as a potential midnight movie. The director goes too far in replacing the book’s biggest subplot (Blanchard’s disappearance in Mexico) with a more concise invented scene that’s just an excuse for a familiar stylistic set piece, complete with Vertigo reference and gratuitous gore. But other gambits fare better: The first, incidental glimpse of Short’s abandoned body is brilliant. And the ghoulish dinner scene where Bleichert meets the family of a Dahlia-obsessed femme fatale (a captivatingly weird Hilary Swank) is delirious macabre comedy. Given all the parties involved, The Black Dahlia is a disappointment but a memorable one.

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Film Features Film/TV

Under the Influence

If Half Nelson had merely been a great film about school, I would have left the theater happy. Director Ryan Fleck shows viewers several unglamorous aspects of teacher life: overstuffed classrooms, boneheaded cheaters, dingy apartments that are the only affordable living spaces for young and single teachers, and burnt-out veterans in the staff lounge whose only conversational gambits consist of reading strange articles from the local paper and praying for summer. But Half Nelson is more than a sharp and smart look at American education. In its refusal to offer easy answers to difficult problems and its unconditional love for its characters, Half Nelson is one of the few American dramas to build on the films of John Cassavetes.

Film critics who can’t seem to agree on anything seem to agree that the dozen or so independent films Cassavetes made between 1960 and 1984 are landmarks of American filmmaking. Cassavetes’ characters leap headfirst into raw, messy emotional brawls with each other; the films often consist of their attempts to scream, kick, punch, drink, laugh, or even hug their way out. At their best, films like Shadows, Opening Night, and A Woman Under the Influence are exhausting but necessary struggles whose galvanizing scenes and dead patches both gain power and meaning in retrospect. And even at their worst, the films are dogged, passionate attempts to find decency in all human beings. No other filmmaker I know left behind such a legacy.

Fleck’s film, which depicts the complicated friendship between white, crack-addicted junior-high history teacher Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) and his African-American student Drey (Shareeka Epps), deepens that legacy. By abandoning such ridiculous absolutes as “good guys” and “bad guys,” the film is free to explore how morally compromised people — and really, what other kind are there? — help each other endure. The hand-held camerawork and uncomfortable close-ups keep each character’s internal struggles at the forefront of each scene. Anna Boden’s rigorous script is very fine, but this is an actor’s film. And the main actors here are magnificent. The wry, sad-eyed Gosling has already won much praise for his performance, but Epps’ guarded, intelligent teenager and Anthony Mackie’s pragmatic drug dealer are as good, if not better.

Important side note: I am a high school teacher. And if the idea of a functional, drug-addicted educator sounds fanciful, such people do exist. Thankfully, they are rare; out of hundreds of colleagues, I have worked with only two or three of them. But these teachers, whose magnetism and charisma can inspire cultish devotion from their students, give so much of themselves in the classroom because their personal lives teeter on the verge of collapse. One of the many points Half Nelson makes is that it is exceedingly dangerous for teachers to rely on students for emotional support and purpose. But this insight is replaced by a larger, lingering question: How does a person find purpose in the world, much less make a difference in it? The lovely open-ended closing shot of this lovely film hints at an embrace of simple virtues — forgiveness, tolerance — that would benefit our schools and our film culture, if not our world.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Protector

According to The Protector, for centuries in Thailand, herds of elephants have been kept so the king can draw supernatural and physical power from them for war and defense. A class of warriors is trained to guard the elephants from the king’s enemies who wish to poach the pachyderms for their spiritual ivory. When two elephants are stolen and taken to Sydney, one of the protectors, Kham (Tony Jaa), follows and has to punch his way up the food chain of the local crime syndicate to retrieve them.

The Protector‘s derring-fu is captured by director Prachya Pinkaew, who teamed up with Jaa for 2003’s Ong-bak: The Thai Warrior. The Protector is suffused with whacked-out visuals and crack editing, and sometimes the screen is so saturated with grainy color that the Sydney underworld looks as humid as a rain forest. Even so, Pinkaew knows his greatest asset is Jaa, and more often than not he stays out of the way and lets his lead lead. Together they produce two fight scenes that are instant classics.

Get past some of the plot’s forays into silliness, occasional painful overacting, and the film’s dialogue-dubbing inconsistencies inherent to the genre: Like Jaa, The Protector is one of the most exciting things seen in martial-arts film since Jackie Chan in Drunken Master II.

Now playing, multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Growing Pains

Twenty-four years ago, Barry Levinson made Diner, a classic film about a group of twentysomething male friends confronting adulthood in the days surrounding another friend’s wedding.

A quarter century later, veteran actor/director Tony Goldwyn (who has worked behind the camera on television series such as Grey’s Anatomy and Law & Order since his underdog 1999 directorial debut A Walk on the Moon) offers an update of sorts with The Last Kiss, which tracks four old friends approaching 30 and negotiating different states of romantic crisis.

Most of the film’s relationships and developing conflicts are introduced efficiently at a wedding of a fifth friend. On the perimeter of the main plot, playboy bartender Kenny (Eric Christian Olsen) is shocked out of his complacency when his latest conquest seems to be looking for something more, and Izzy (Michael Weston) is stalking an ex-girlfriend while confronting his ill father’s impending death. At the center of the film, Michael (Zach Braff) has just found out his longtime girlfriend Jenna (Jacinda Barrett) is pregnant and is panicking about what he perceives as the finality of “making a home” with her, while Chris (Casey Affleck) is increasingly unhappy about his strained home life with his wife Lisa (Lauren Lee Smith) and infant son.

More drama than comedy, The Last Kiss is not as good as Diner, but it might be more honorable. It’s like an indie-rock update and with a sexual evolution that the 24-year gap suggests. It’s less funny, more earnest, and — most crucially — has a much greater interest in and respect for the perspective of the women in the film.

The other movie you can’t help but compare it to is Garden State, with which The Last Kiss shares a lead actor (Braff), a supporting player (Weston), an indie/alt soundtrack (here heavy on British bands such as Coldplay, Snow Patrol, and Turin Brakes), and a sensibility.

Braff’s character in The Last Kiss is sort of a cousin to his protagonist in Garden State, moving the earlier film’s anxiety from mere rootlessness to life-altering decisions about parenthood and marriage. Braff’s character is a more active agent in his own troubles here, but the characters have a similarly woozy engagement with adulthood.

This is a very honest film: the rare commercial movie about young adults that is very much for young adults, illustrated by its “R” rating and its not-so-tidy conclusion. There’s also some attempt to make the emotional complications The Last Kiss traffics in generationally specific. Rachel Bilson’s collegiate seductress utters a key bit of early dialogue: “The world is moving so fast now that we start freaking long before our parents did because we don’t ever stop to breathe anymore.”

Ultimately, though The Last Kiss courts an audience much like its protagonists (see that soundtrack), it knows better. Tom Wilkinson and Blythe Danner, as Jenna’s sometimes estranged parents, offer a constant reminder that though the questions the film’s younger protagonists face may be the growing pains of young adulthood, time doesn’t always provide an answer.