Expired

Expired world-premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival to outstanding reviews. It is probably one of the best reviewed films at the festival. I saw the movie with a thousand plus audience - and all I can say: THIS IS A MUST SEE FILM! Expired is a turbulent love story (to say the very least) between LA parking enforcement officer Claire and LA parking enforcement officer Jay. Simply put, Samantha Morton is outstanding, so is Jason Patrick. With respect to Jason Patrick, most likely his best performance to date. I caught a review in USA today, which says:"Patric plays a violence-prone hot-head, who may be one of the nastiest dinner date since Joe Pesci in Goodfellas." I have to agree. He's something else. Not sure how - what Italian born filmmaker Cecilia Miniucchi did with her actors, the chemistry between the two leads makes everybody in the audience twitch on their seats. What direction!!

When it comes to the theaters, go check out this unlikely romance. You'll see that I wasn't exaggerating one bit.

about halfway through this film i came here to see if i should continue... like i said, 'not easy viewing'. granted, i've seen 'harsher' films...slower films...less 'adrenalized' films...and many films that TRY to be this film that, at the end, i sit and wonder, 'WHY did i put myself through THAT?!!?!' but i knew that when i got to the end of this ride, i had come to the end of some brave storytelling... the strong point of this film would seem to be the casting/execution of parts...everyone seems to excel in communicating their part of the story...and it IS both dark and quirky...and designed to not 'coddle' us, unlike so many stories with their eye on success. not that i'm knocking success... but the point, i guess, is that this IS a success although i doubt it will EVER be a best seller... like i said, brave story telling...moments of absurdity(takes comic relief a step further) relief... if you didn't find this comment helpful, why'd you read this far?

Expired is one of those films that remind you about simply just being human. I was fortunate enough to watch this at it's Los Angeles screening. I found myself, as the story went along watching the audience just as much as the characters on the screen. The story is exquisitely woven, I felt the writer was a maestro just when I felt like laughing I wanted to cry. There were moments so poignant that even as the film progressed you find yourself thinking back to those scenes. This film is an emotional roller coaster, but worth the ride. Basic human emotion, empathy and relationships, this is the film to watch. No bells and whistles, just magnificent writing and performances. Jason Patric gives the performance of a lifetime and Samantha Morton is the reflection of the human soul.

The movie Expired is really unlike most of the feature films you'll see these days. It has an intensity, a committed vision that grabs you and holds you in its grips for the entire hour and a half or so. Of films in recent years that share this quality, I can think of Todd Solondz' "Happiness".

Expired is the story of two L.A. parking officers, or "meter maids", one female and one male, who meet on the job and have an increasingly dysfunctional, mercurial relationship. Samantha Morton plays it extremely sweet, wide-eyed and gentle as Claire, a meter maid who lives with her stroke-incapacitated, essentially mute mother and hates having to ruin peoples' days with tickets. Jason Patric is Jay, a taut, seething, bull-shouldered ball of defensive machismo in a blue uniform with a ticket-gun and a hilarious dark mustache. He likes slapping parking tickets on folks the way some LA cops like cracking heads.

The first two thirds or so of the film especially are darkly comedic, and the purposefully stylized elements- lighting, dialogue, supporting actors, visual action, set design, musical score- create a very sharp, bittersweet, somewhat tragic kind of comedy, like the best of the Coen Brothers films. This isn't broad American multiplex comedy, this is comedy that comes from true pathos, sadness and the small calamities of life. While Morton's face shows sensitivity and vulnerability- two of her big strengths- Patric's Jay character is fantastic because he offsets the angry disciplinarian guy with loose moments of real charm and also sarcastic, almost whimsical humor.

The film progresses with a few traditional "plot points" that serve to accelerate the conflicts and create moments of challenge and decision for the characters, but really the film is also greatly a close-up examination of the attempted close relationship of two equally extreme opposites- the "naive, yearning do-gooder" and the "previously injured, prickly, defensive bully." At its core it's just a film about human beings- what they have, what they want and need, and the different places they're coming from emotionally.

Visually, the film was shot in a crisp, almost beautiful way, at once seeming straightforwardly no-nonsense and yet heavily atmospheric. A lot of the production design strongly complements the film- from the richly hued, antique-laden apartment Claire and her Mom live in to the various LA coffee shops and streetscapes. The musical scoring is also highly evocative and appropriate- with the best of it reminding me of great melodic work Michael Penn and Jon Brion did in P.T. Anderson's film 'Hard Eight'.

Ileana Douglas is perfect as Claire's decent-hearted, energetic busybody neighbor and Teri Garr is rock solid as the mute, wheelchair-bound Mom but hilarious and deliciously campy in a second role as the Mom's crazy sister in Pomona! With its strong vision and execution, 'Expired' should certainly put writer/director Cecilia Miniucchi on the Hollywood map.

This was the first movie we attended at Sundance 2007. There was quite a bit of food for thought in this movie. The main character, Claire, is a very likable person who is quite lonely. Because of her desperation, she finds herself dating a totally reprehensible person "Jay" (Jason Patric). He was such a horrible person that I had a hard time seeing just why Claire continued to let him into her life. At one point in the movie, Claire's character implored Jay to "be nice to me." That was a very poignant moment in the film. As I said earlier, this movie had lots of food for thought, most of it about why women are attracted to men who seem like jerks to the rest of the world. The movie truly didn't answer these questions, and it was a depressing film to watch. Teri Garr was very good in a dual role as Claire's stroke affected mother and as her perfectly healthy but obnoxious aunt. Samantha Morton was brilliant as Claire, and Jason Patric also did a wonderful job. It was a movie that was quite difficult to watch, however, so I don't know how successful it will be.