Hits

This movie was a surprise.

From the beginning, the plot and the evolution of the story depict characters' "passions" and obsessions. Those obsessions are moving the characters away from self awareness. I understand that there is a tendency in the movie to criticise the presence and the usage of social media in our every day lives. Which may lead to the obsession of image cultivation, of a successful media persona. Everyone want a piece of the success story so bad, without analysing what success is.

Well no spoilers but the finale is simply magnificent. A psychiatrist's happy end. A real substantial drama.

Sundance London gets underway this weekend with a neat selection of American independent narrative and documentary films that premiered at the US Sundance in Utah. One film we would like to recommend is Hits, the directorial debut of writer, comedian and actor David Cross. Many will best know Cross as the character Tobias Fünke in the American sitcom Arrested Development.

Hits provides an amusing vehicle to satirise a number of aspects in modern US society from celebrity wannabe culture to the YouTube generation.

The movie is set in a small town in upstate New York where we find Katelyn (Meredith Hagner) a young woman, who spends a lot of time pretending that she is being interviewed by chat show host Ellen. Katelyn, who is obsessed with celebrity and fame spurred on by reading "real life" magazines and watching reality TV, is confident that she has the talent to be a famous pop singer. Katelyn has been offered the chance of having a demo made of her singing if she can find the money and sees this as a guaranteed way to getting on the singing show The Voice.

Then there is Katelyn's dad Dave whose main purpose in life outside his normal day job is to attend public council hearings arguing about poor public services and upkeep, potholes and his rights as a citizen under the Constitution. Although Dave is obviously somewhat unhinged he ridiculously becomes part of a huge media circus after a YouTube video is produced portraying him as a notable and worthy small town activist taking on the system.

Bewildered by her dad becoming the focus of national media interest Katelyn becomes even more determined to get her demo made giving in to the demands of a stoner guy who has his own studio.

It's pretty fun stuff as the laughable hipster activist crew headed by Donovan turn up to help Dave's quest for justice only to find a rival hipster activist 'think tank', news teams and others muscling in with the same idea.

Given the easy and seemingly numerous targets for critique in our internet, celebrity obsessed culture there is obviously a lot for the taking and which Cross does manage to nail. How anything stupid can become a YouTube hit, how having no talent of any kind may not be a hindrance in becoming famous, the kind of people who use social media to bluster or do "projects", without much initial fact checking or preliminary research, or undiscerning ranting citizen's who listen to or read too much extremist or hyperbolic media.

Along with the obvious targets Cross also manages to weave in little insights of dark and sad nuances of our modern world but always with a touch of humour for good measure. Like hipster Donovan's wife Maddy who seems to be more in love with a kind of consumer's passion for all things cute as much as she is about actually having a kid. There is a funny scene where Donovan and Maddy get supremely weird talking with their young weed dealer-cum-possible surrogate son, a cameo role played by Michael Cera (Juno, Arrested Development, Superbad). There is also a sweet but sad moment when Katelyn muses about how great her dad is but at the same time seemingly aware of how self centered she may be in the relationship. You get the feeling that mass media has made her that way and that the media has a lot to do with stoking the dark underlying views of her father who on the flip side does indeed seem like a stand up dad.

So all in all Hits is as much about how the media today is out of control and the type of people and society it is creating – a funny ride definitely worth catching if you can.

A fame hungry food server will do everything to be a star even if she literally has nothing to back it up. When her father suddenly became an internet sensation and hooks up with a local hipster group, she tries to capitalize and get her 15 minutes of fame.

Not my cup of tea.

Another film that does not live up to its mocking premise. It just happens. I think the main culprit to the rather cold reception of the film is since it went for an ensemble it does not really have a strong narrative to back it up.

The characters are mocked without really giving a lot of earned moments or clear connective themes. The narrative also does not rise to its boring America premise. In addition, The 'I want a son like him scene' or just the general sense of the whatever that the Voice CD went, or the hipster movement is just plain non-sensical and never really have any kind of stakes. The film did everything all at once. By having more than one focus, none of which landed - leaves you just plainly thinking that happened without any emotional impact. It just happened. Ha.

Not recommended.

... following in the footsteps of Becky Sharp and Tracy Flick (with, in Hagner's case, maybe a touch of Kimmy Schmidt). Others on this site have focused mainly on the director, David Cross, and on supporting players like David Koechner and Michael Cera, mysteriously ignoring the star of the movie. To my mind, Hagner is by far the best thing in it: funny, indomitable, slightly crazed, touching in a small-town American way, and thoroughly adorable. In scene after scene, she's never less than charming and amusing. I wish we'd seen even more of her, as well as more of Amy Sedaris, disappointingly wasted in a tiny role. As for the rest -- the satiric thrusts at small-town eccentrics, etc. -- I willingly went along with it.

It was also nice to see a film set in unglamorous upstate New York. (The last one that made such good use of an upstate town, I think, was "You Can Count on Me.") For that matter, too few films target the politically correct hipster culture of Brooklyn, or at least too few do so with such merciless accuracy as this one.

I wish the damn film were currently available on some streaming service, as I'd like to see it again. But for now, it seems to have disappeared into memory.

I wasn't sure about going ahead and watching this one, but upon seeing that David Cross directed it my interest was piqued. In particular someone who would like to examine the nature of our social-media driven culture consciousness, ready to laugh at the absurdity of it all, should give it a shot.

What Cross has achieved with his film is a funny, well-cast and multi-layered story that makes up for what it lacks with well developed characters, excellent acting from all cast members, and a completely plausible plot line that very well could be a true story in your hometown.

'Hits' makes great fun of skewering demographics of hipsters, rednecks, teenage delusions of grandeur, ordinary small-town Americans, far- right libertarians, stoners, cops and more, and yet all of the characters portrayed in the movie have a refreshing complexity. Each principal character in the movie (excepting perhaps a brutal cop) has some good trait that we see even as we watch them self-destruct or clash with someone or some situation.

The pace of the film, the editing and screenplay all could have perhaps been tightened up to spare some screen time, but there are multiple branches in this story to tell and somehow it all gets wrapped up in just enough time. There are plenty of sharp-witted laughs along the way but the real humor lies in the increasingly outrageous sequence of events - the big picture.

I recommend it for anyone who suspects that something is amiss in our media consciousness today, and/or wants to see a story about everyday Americans with real, common hopes and dreams all mixed up in an almost-black comedy on the edge of the ludicrous - that same edge being where we find ourselves today!