Quiet City (2007)

This trifle of a movie seems a shameless ripoff of "Before Sunrise," which succeeded where this one fails because we never care a whit for the characters.Set against the considerably less impressive backdrop of Park Slope, Brooklyn, "Quiet City" follows the maunderings and meanderings of Jamie, an Atlanta waitress, and jobless Charlie after they have met randomly in a subway station. Not exactly Dumb and Dumber, this pair more approximates Uninteresting and Uninterestinger.Both "Before Sunrise" and "Quiet City" owe a huge debt to Woody Allen, as both seem to strive for breezy candor between interlocutors. Whereas the former film's protagonists had some life experience behind them and thus compelling things to say, Jamie and Charlie are staggeringly vacant and dull. It's painful to watch Jamie self-stimulating with a Superball (during a walk with Charlie) and escaping him at a party to tinker with a drum set. (Perhaps such pursuits are more gratifying than trying to penetrate this lunk.)But Jamie -- who always seems to want to connect more than Charlie does -- just labors on. In the penultimate scene, she manages to get him to actually lean his head against hers during a nuzzle. But then she's headed back to Atlanta in the next frame. I guess all this is supposed to be deep.This movie was co-written by the actors who played Jamie and Charlie, making this glorified film-school project the movie equivalent of a vanity novel.At 125 minutes in length, it's such a quiet waste!

Well, this i can i say is my first independent films in English. The start was great, it made me curious to continue watching as it had real life characters with real incidents with actual pace like in real life. The camera used was great, and some scenes were good.But somewhere the movie lost itself, the story was no where to go and made it a bit lengthy even though movie was some 70 odd minutes, it seemed much more than that. I was to be frank waiting to end for very long time. The end in the end was realistic but not enjoyable.If u have plenty of time to be wasted then u can probably watch this movie. i would give 5 of 10 to this movie for good camera work and the interesting start.

I might not be an aficionado of the "mumblecore"-genre, and this film didn't make me one either. But it did give me a minor crush on the female lead (and writer) Erin Fisher, maybe that's a good thing.So in this film we see a cute girl from Atlanta (Erin Fisher) who visits New York, can't get hold of her friend, and then instead hangs out over 24 hours with a random slacker (Cris Lankenau) she meets at the subway station in Brooklyn.It's cute, and you do get to feel that the boy and girl are connecting over an intense period, but it didn't really made an impression on me. Maybe it wasn't dramatic enough, maybe the realism bored me, maybe the long shots were a bit too long, or maybe it was the "American" dialogue.What I mean by that is that they use all of these "pause words" a lot. I even spent a few minutes counting them (by opening the subtitles in Word): "like" (229 times), "you know" (28 times), "kind of" (39 times), "sort of" (22 times), "uh" or "um" (43 times), "I don't know" (22 times) and "really" (55 times).It isn't that much dialogue in the movie, so that is a LOT of pause words, all of which are basically unnecessary for saying something. (Sarah Hellman's two-minute random monologue might have accounted for half of the "like"-quota, for instance. How ditzy is it possible to come across as?)Even if this is how Americans actually talk, for us europeans it sounds like they have no vocabulary and are very slow thinkers who need to insert a lot of "pause words" just to get through a sentence."Mumblecore" might be supposed to be ultra realistic, but I am pretty sure it could benefit such movies to tighten up the script, thereby making it more interesting and transcend boring reality just a little bit.Finally I have to make the obligatory reference to "Before Sunrise" and say that it's unfortunately much more interesting, substantial and memorable than "Quiet City", even if the two movies are a bit different in style and shape.I realise this review will blow all my chances of ever getting to flirt with Erin Fisher (and Sarah Hellman), but it's mostly meant as a warning for people who are interested in "real" movies, and also as a message to the director Aaron Katz.A movie like this would have been much more interesting if the dialogue was better and more meaningful, and if it just had more of a "real" movie-feel about it. Right now it seems like something anyone could improvise over two days. And that's unfortunately not a compliment.But of course I would rather have a thousand indie-movies like these instead of the usual predictable Hollywood-crap. I only wish they could be better than this.

Much like Hannah Takes the Stairs, Aaron Katz's Quiet City focuses more on dialogue than on plot. I mean, here's the plot, in a nutshell. Girl flies to a strange city to meet her friend. Girl meets strange boy and asks strange boy for directions to diner so that she can meet her flaky friend that is always late and sometimes never shows up (I mean, we see where this is going, don't we?). Strange boy accompanies girl to diner, into diner, after diner, and several days following. There's some other people involved; an art show and after party; and some six degrees action to make the plot a bit more interesting; but that's about it.But it's a nice film. That's really all there is to it. This is yet another film by another "ultra-indy" filmmaker, focusing on twentysomethings and the way they communicate. The scene, cutely coined mumblecore seems to lump together a group of filmmakers (coincidentally, all of them seem to like each other and/or work together) who all seem to be focused on the ultra-indy tactics like self-distribution, microbudgets and digital marketing of their own films. It's interesting how the six degrees theme in the film, Quiet City seems to ring true for this whole mumblecore thing. These guys all started out individually, but we've seen quite a collaboration this year. I'm anxious to see what's next for the "mumblecorps"?