Painfully pretentious and shallow.
Comment
11/30/09
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)
41
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:29
Fresh:12
Rotten:17
Average Rating:5.1/10
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
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
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 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
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
The movie provides more questions than answers.
10/31/09
Feels like 25 very brief stage plays jammed together -- maybe five of which are worth sitting through.
02/02/09
Will surely allow you to see John Krasinski in a different light, both as a filmmaker and as a dramatic actor.
09/22/09
Krasinski preserves Wallace's whooshing roller coasters of words, powered by the fuel of confession.
09/23/09
Fails for all the reasons you'd expect it to fail.
02/25/09
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
09/24/09
Sometimes humorous, sometimes repulsive, never insightful, the movie comes off like the work of an overeager college student.
09/24/09
A haunting exploration into men's minds that becomes too much of a psychological study to qualify as accessible entertainment for most.
10/12/09
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
Actor John Krasinski deserves credit for having the ambition to adapt material as difficult as David Foster Wallace's short stories.
09/25/09
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
Everyone speaks in the sweatily polysyllabic, Look-at-This-Writing-I'm-Doing tone that makes a page of Wallace pass like an hour on the treadmill, and the men are dopes or creeps.
09/25/09
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
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