WITH SOME DAYS Are Better than Others, local filmmaker Matt McCormick is responsible for some of the prettiest footage of Portland you’ll ever see. Whether he’s shooting an overpass or the inside of a Goodwill, McCormick’s representation of the city is arresting, with a heft and depth that demand you consider Some Days as a visual statement as well as a narrative one.
By the unavoidable metrics of character and plot, though, Some Days is a flop, with a predictable, overlapping-lives setup that’s doused in hipster melancholy and uninspired quirk. The film follows Eli (the Shins’ James Mercer), Katrina (Portlandia/Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein), and Camille (Renee Roman Nose; not a rock star), three lonely Portlanders filling their empty lives in different ways.
Mercer’s low-key performance is fine, but you’ll want to slap his unmotivated, diffident character as he works a series of demeaning temp jobs and harbors a hopeless crush on his lesbian roommate. Renee Roman Nose doesn’t have much to work with as the quiet Camille, a depressed/depressing Goodwill employee who, for no reason we’re given to understand, becomes obsessed with a donated urn. But worst of all—and this is painful for a longtime Sleater-Kinney obsessive to acknowledge—is Brownstein’s performance as Katrina, the Saddest Hipster. The Saddest Hipster compulsively hacks her ex-boyfriend’s email account to read his mail, crafts hats out of stuffed animals, and works on her reality TV show audition tape. The character is a note-perfect embodiment of the very clichés that Brownstein takes aim at in her sketch comedy show Portlandia, and Brownstein’s dour performance lacks both nuance and depth.
David Wodehouse as Otis, Eli’s step-grandpa, provides a small grace note. Sure, wringing pathos out of a lonely old man isn’t exactly tough, but Wodehouse brings dignity to a character that could’ve easily been just another float in Some Days’ sad-sack parade.
The hipster class likes to make movies about themselves, which is fine—as long as those movies can distinguish themselves somehow, as another local filmmaker, Aaron Katz, did with his recent noir Cold Weather. Some Days, though, just feels like the desiccated husk of a Miranda July movie, drained of all humor and joy.
Mopelandia!… perfectly puddletown. jc
Previews seem god awful… seems like he used all the miranda july gimmicks he could.
Awful!!!
I’m going to see it just to see how many areas
It rips off Miranda July … I see four just in the
Preview… The lesbian that works at goodwill…that
Was Miranda in real life. I feel like dying on
The days that feel like this movie. Why would
You make a movie like that. You can have
Whatever movie you want. It’s your movie!!!
This film blew me away. So, it’s like a group of different stories about different characters, right? All of these stories seem entirely unrelated. But here’s the catch — and hold on to your seat, because this is amazing — in the end, you realize that they are all interconnected in some way you hadn’t anticipated at the beginning of the film. Woah! It’s like that Don Delillo book about the baseball and the garbage man, or whatever. I hope this narrative device is employed in more films!
I have seen this film and completely disagree with the review. In today’s world, the audience is completely comfortable with overlapping and interwoven narrative. We are tired of Portland magnified and idealized. This is real, and by its nature, universal to other cities in many people’s experience. See it readers and decide for yourselves.
I too disagree with all the negative reviews. I think people are allowing their bias against hipsters to ruin this film. I found it to be honest, charming, and lovely to observe.
Mr McCormick definately has talent as a cinematographer. His photography is pure poetry, but a talent like that is seperate from screenplay writing and directing. I think he felt obligated by the stigma of his talents to create a narrative screenplay. He should embrace what he does best, and hopefully someone else will too and let him DP a great script resulting in an epic film.
Carrie Brownstein is not meant for visual mediums.
@Chuck, nor auditory ones.
@Ovidius, CURSE YOU! Next time you feel like ruining the ending of a movie, have the basic common courtesy to type “SPOILER ALERT!”
Matt McCormick is a talented filmmaker and I have respect for him (he’s also a super nice dude), but choosing to use Carrie Brownstein, and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent James Mercer, was a major blunder on his part and ruined any chances this film had of being any good. This Brownstein woman especially, so mightily offends with her baffling mix of incompetence and conceit. Hopefully she will get that tremendous ego deflated enough to realize that she has no business trying to “act”.
I loved the first paragraph of this review.
Cool, the Portlandia chick is in it, now I don’t have to watch it.