Multiple Sarcasms (2010)

What this film was really missing was a real turnout to explain a playwright's boredom with all the good things he couldn't enjoy. Or a real, Allen-like neurosis (but that is overdone), perhaps of the psycho kind.Unfortunately, the intelligent dialog and the good cast can't really make it memorable. From the way the story is told, the viewer becomes unsympathetic towards the main character (and it's nothing wrong with that), but the latter's motivation is thin at best, and that's wrong and makes him a spoiled whining nerd. Which most real writers and real men aren't - hopefully.Well, it's disappointing, but it still might win an award, the Have a Great Cast and Dialog and Still Ruin the Film award.

A seemingly happy man with an unscratchable itch blunders in to a solution that is neither heroic nor mundane but nevertheless seems satisfyingly right in a very ordinary way. Without quite knowing what he knows that he has been battling with a conundrum his whole life, to find a solution he turns away from his life and decides he must write a play. He then finds himself describing his conundrum and the movie unfolds like a detective novel with odd clues dropped from time to time, as he traces the root of what's been bothering him. He finishes his play and better yet its production is financially rewarding, he's a made man and he does not have the itch any more. I gave the film an eight because even though the dialogue stank in parts, the Director still manages to convey a voice and evoke empathy and a sense of shared human experience.

I guess it all depends on what one brings to a movie. If I were only going to watch this film once, I would miss most of it. On a film binge, long vacation, I watched 2 other films of other genres before I got to _Multiple Sarcasms_. I wouldn't classify it as a comedy and I got unsorted mush. I even stopped in the middle and went to bed. The next morning I decided to see it through. I will watch it again. Scenes of exceptional beauty, characters that are real, believable (uh, is this a movie or did I get into somebody else's head). Terms one learned at school, well, for example about theater -- for example, "vraisemblance" -- help to "defamiliarize the text". We may have seen movies with bits, tropes, business, cutting and editing like this before, but this one is still original, subtle, and inviting with sufficient refractions with stage and staging to place us both inside it and outside it. Very near the end of the film, the writer places himself as an actor on the stage, then also to one side as editor/actor critiquing the writer/actor. This was not over done. Life into stage or film is very strange and wonderful. There are characters playing the role of audience members whom we have gotten to know during the course of the film. The music was excellent, the scenes, the character development of supporting characters was fine (getting good and drunk with "Eric"). We could probe the messiness of the protagonist's life "as life" with the "vraisemblance" probe (Living out of a suitcase? His dwelling was no suitcase.) By the end of the film we have seen a man's life shuddering into chaos as he takes up writing, and the miracle of the process is that a beautiful coherence emerges. He has become more grounded, centered and real. The process works! I should write a play. This is pretty good film alchemy. India Ennenga's "Liz" was radiant.

My wife and I just couldn't muster the energy and will to watch a movie about a man who has everything (wife, daughter and job), and is in a rather enviable position overall. And his problem is... well, we couldn't figure out. He's bored? Doesn't "like his life"? So, let's make a movie about it, shall we?The premise to this movie is so preposterous, that his audience may be left completely unsympathetic to the main character, or even less sympathetic to the whole enterprise that made the movie possible.The saving grace of this movie is the good directing - there's a pinch of comedy to give a genre direction to the movie, but apart that, the characters seem rather genuine. Sadly, the whole plot is stillborn and worthless.