Brief Review Of Hideous Movie

KIDDING! I just liked the way the joke worked. I just saw Jahn Krasinsky (main guy on American The Office)'s adaptation of David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Get it? My joke, I mean.

The flick's not bad. It's not great. It's OK. Only a few days left at the IFC on 6th so I figured I'd better see it.

The "plot" concerns a grad student interviewing men about relationships (and a few other topics) for a nebulous research project about feminism. There's a few scenes about her own relationship ending and a few more about an overzealous student of hers and his shocking paper, but there's really not much of a story per se.

You can kind of tell that it's a first-time film written and directed by an actor. It's got a great cast of indie film (and rock! Duder from Death Cab!) vets; they each take turns addressing a juicy monologue to someone just to the left of the camera; and there's some clumsy "arty" editing with a few heavy-handedly ironic cuts.

So overall it's a little insubstantial as a movie, and I probably wouldn't recommend it too highly to a non-Wallace fan. But as a fan letter-slash-loving tribute to Wallace I think it's worth seeing. Krasinsky certainly doesn't desecrate the man's work, and is reportedly a big fan. He shows up at all the conventions, and has spent several years making it his own pet project to get Wallace's work to the screen (big or small). The closing credits start with a great Wallace quote. There's a copy of Infinite Jest on a table behind the desk in Tim Hutton's office (look for it). Details a fan would insert for other fans to recognise. As a fan, it made me happy. Definitely puts Krasinsky in the upper tier of the list of people I'd like to see develop the Jest as a 30-hour HBO miniseries.