jos25

Unique and engaging. Clever storyline, starts violent, gets very heartfelt. Keeps you on your toes and is quite brilliant actually. Dotted with many funny moments. Watch it. PS Learned that the main two actors are also the writers. Such talent. Now I need to go watch everything they've produced!

I adored this movie. Awesome character development. Intelligent and interesting dialogue. Unique and quirky plot line. I've now seen the movie 3 times, and still want to watch it again and again. Funny, heartwarming, interesting, and suspenseful. Music is interesting, too-- I loved the song at the campfire. Mark Duplass is amazing. All the actors were awesome. This review is now over but IMDb wants 10 lines; that is ridiculous! This is the first time I've been able to write a short review. That's because I loved the quirkiness of this movie and I find it best to leave the watcher to discover it for him or herself. The movie speaks for itself. It doesn't need me to write 10 sentences about it!

From the first scene, I was distracted by what I perceived to be Lily Colin's contrived acting.... It strongly appeared to me that she was "ACTING," regurgitating memorized lines with fake flare.... This distracted me the whole movie! The girl is beautiful, and looks like she could be Jennifer Garner's daughter, but other than that, I just found her poorly-cast. (And judging from the other ratings, I am very alone in this opinion. But I had to speak up!) Lily's swinging between, "I'm the surly, angry teenage," to a super-smily flirty girl, to surly-angry again, to "I'm so happy, yippee, we're all together again!" was just so unbelievable to me that it clouded the whole movie. Many scenes, in fact, were unbelievable and unrealistic to me. (I mean, why would a whole family, especially one that was broken from divorce, dart out together, in one car, from the daughter's book-publishing party, just because the son couldn't find his girlfriend? If anything, just one or two of them would leave. Or they'd leave in separate cars.The whole scene was like fake drama to me.) The one person who made the movie for me (other than the wonderfully cast Greg Kinnear) was Kristen Bell's housewife character, "Tricia." Kristen was funny and believable as Tricia, and had heart. I thought Greg Kinnear performed his role 100% convincingly. But the dialogue made no sense. He tells his high school son to go out and have experiences, but then complains when the son begins partying and finds a druggie girlfriend. What else does a father expect, when he encourages a teenage son to 'get out there'? These people seemed to have average intelligence (or, vapidity combined with pretentiousness, in Lily Collins's character), and they just didn't come across as whip-smart enough, or wordsmithy enough, to be writers. Too many characters, such as the girlfriend Kate, or even Lily, seemed unrelatable or undeserving of our empathy. Even the mother, a central character, has practically no personality to the viewers, until a 5-minute scene near the end, when we learn a little about her and begin empathizing with her. I don't mean to sound harsh but someone had to write in to average down the confusingly high IMDb ratings here. I totally rely on these ratings for movie night, and I don't find myself to be picky with movies, but more and more, I am finding some of these IMDb ratings so skewed, that I will need to start chiming in for democracy's sake!! Truth is, I'd probably give this movie a 5 or 6 for its intrigue factor, and its heart at the end. It, despite all its flaws, is somewhat thought- provoking. But I have to give it a 2 or 3 just to weigh down the ridiculously high 7.3 average here on IMDb.