Krasinski stitches these raw blasts of the subconscious with interludes that exude a pleasing, Woody Allen-esque tone, all fall colors and potent theorizing over white wine
Comment
09/24/09
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)
44
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:27
Fresh:12
Rotten:15
Average Rating:5.2/10
Consensus: Ambitious but uneven, John Krasinski's adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men tries hard but doesn't match the depth of the book.
Synopsis: Based on the book by David Foster Wallace, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN is a darkly funny and disturbing exploration of men and their complex relationships with women. Sara Quinn is... [More]
Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, Josh Charles
Director: John Krasinski
Reviews for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Sometimes humorous, sometimes repulsive, never insightful, the movie comes off like the work of an overeager college student.
09/24/09
The most impressive thing about Krasinski's direction is his self-assured ability to know when it's time to mix in visual elements, and when it's best to simply point a camera at a good storyteller and let the actor speak.
08/03/09
The movie provides more questions than answers.
10/31/09
Will surely allow you to see John Krasinski in a different light, both as a filmmaker and as a dramatic actor.
09/22/09
John Krasinski’s adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s ... Brief Interviews With Hideous Men works only in spurts, but when it does, it’s enough to remind us how much deeper our dramatists could drill -- and of the magnitude of Wallace’s loss.
09/21/09
The question is, could someone turn these full-frontal-dudity snapshots into a satisfying, cohesive movie? Answer: no, but not for lack of trying.
09/23/09
Krasinski preserves Wallace's whooshing roller coasters of words, powered by the fuel of confession.
09/23/09
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a noble failure of a film that's worth a lot more than many of the safer if more achieved works premiering beside it at Sundance 2009.
01/28/09
An uneven, intriguing adaptation of David Foster Wallace's book of short stories, the film and its bits-and-pieces structure ultimately don't add up to as much as hoped.
05/09/09
Compacted into an 80-minute mishmash of interviews, confessions and sketches, melded into a shaky mosaic, the answers from a cross section of men are shallow, self-serving and ultimately unenlightening.
09/25/09
Top CriticKrasinski re-creates the interviews using Wallace’s original, but this isn’t exactly a letter-of-the-law adaptation -- he tightens the interviews and defangs some of the language.
11/13/09
Krasinski literalizes Wallace’s stylistic love of asides too much, but it helps that he’s aware enough of his movie’s limitations to keep Brief Interviews blessedly short.
09/25/09
The place where consciousness runs into itself is where this author reigned supreme, and Krasinski brings Wallace’s concentric, self-aware ironies to the screen.
11/05/09
Too awkward, disjointed and bland while lacking dramatic momentum and true insight.
09/27/09
I worry that this film is static enough and stiff enough that it’s going to keep people away from discovering David Foster Wallace if they haven’t read him.
09/28/09
[Krasinski's] generosity of intent is really the main impression that remains. He read, he loved, and unfortunately, he did not conquer.
09/28/09
It's an undeniably ambitious, if uneven, effort. Some of Krasinski's directorial flourishes are inspired, such as Christopher Meloni's imaginative re-telling (and offbeat re-enacting) about a woman he met as she stood crying at the airport.
09/25/09
Top CriticOffers is the opportunity for a bunch of actors, many of them tethered to TV series, to deliver theatrical monologues pulsing with misogyny and narcissism. It's like second-rate Neil Labute.
11/12/09
Tthough this experiment doesn’t quite succeed, there’s enough intelligence and insight in this movie to make it worth the attempt.
09/28/09
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