I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I love this movie. It is of the genre of the absurd life in a small southern town and the humor is understated. For that reason it is apt to be unrecognized as such. But it is the North American version of magic realism with the unlikely being taken in stride by the characters and the likely made interesting. On the surface it is a tale of two people who are confused for very different reasons, who find that together they make one functioning whole. His reality is that of the artist who puts together words and images to make a feeling, and hers is him. She loves his music, words and the man. He needs security and someone to attend to reality. She is not beautiful but she understands him. He makes a plain girl who normally hides from the world into someone who values herself and enables them both to change. I love his songs too.

I just caught this film on IFC late one night and was drawn to it by two actors I've always admired in other films: Lili Taylor and Guy Pearce.Although Lili delivered her usual unique, offbeat take on a complicated character, I was especially impressed by Guy Pearce, an Aussie who nailed the Carolina dialect and surprised me by his musical acuity. I found him as magnetic as Evie/Lili did, though you wouldn't find me carving his name on my head for love or money! But I get why she did it. She's living a stultifying quiet life, wondering if she could just disappear off the face of the earth and probably no one but her devoted Dad would notice. She looks in the mirror and sees a plain, blank face and slumps through her plain, blank life. Several people have commented that his almost grunge musical stylings are way ahead of their 60's time setting, although I found no difficulties accepting that premise. Evie sees him as ahead of his time and bursting with potential, while the rest of the town (with the exception of the hoochie women attracted to his fine physique) just view him as a weirdo. And I think that's the bond that eventually makes him fall for wise and weird little Evie.I missed the first few opening credits so I didn't notice that this was an Anne Tyler concoction. But halfway through the movie I found myself thinking that the internal lives of these characters were very reminiscent of Tyler: Think about Geena Davis' quirky and devoted dog trainer pursuing the emotionally stunted William Hurt in "The Accidental Tourist," and you can see the parallels.No, this wasn't a "great" film in the Hollywood mode, but so what? It moved me. I was drawn in and wondered how their lives played out at the end. They probably should have headed for Seattle, where young Drum could have found himself giving Kurt Cobain a run for his money later on. Pearce himself should think about diversifying into a musical career: what a voice and presence! Not a flick for everyone, but it will hit home to those who are able to suspend their disbelief and "be there" for it.

This film is an absolute gem. It was filmed in and around Austin, and I didn't even know it until I saw the landscape. Not to mention the cameo of our former mayor Kirk Watson! What can be said about Lili Taylor that hasn't been better said by superior raters? She's simply amazing as Evie. I've read other reviews that claim she was too old for the part and I completely disagree. She brings a clear and clean strength to this role that was absolutely required for the part to shine as it did. She just simply glowed through the movie like a firefly. Guy Pearce made this viewer fall in love with him the way Drumstrings made Evie fall in love. Evie's relationship with her father was warm and touching. Her soul is so strong yet so fragile because of it's capacity to love that at one point I caught myself saying to the screen, "Don't break her heart. Please don't break her heart". This movie is a special treasure.

Tonight I watched "A Slipping-Down Life", Toni Kalem's film based on Anne Tyler's 1970 novel by the same name. It was originally released at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, but just released commercially in May 2004. I saw this with a friend on the spur of the moment, not knowing anything about it, when the film we went to see was sold out.The film takes place in a sleepy small town in North Carolina around 1962 or 1963 (based on the music we hear on the radio). Naive Evie (Lili Taylor), who lost her mother at childbirth, lives with her father (Tom Bower). She hears musician Drumstring "Drum" Casey (Guy Pearce) on the radio, is drawn to his ego and voice, and seeks him out at his performances. Other women flirt with Drum, but shy Evie can only take a quick photograph of him and then in a strange (and, I found, hard to believe) act, carve his last name on her forehead with broken glass. The story is of their relationship to each other and to life in their small town, where they fear nothing changes and their existence or non-existence is hardly noticed.I didn't enjoy the film. I couldn't understand where it was going, and found the utter simplicity of Evie unrealistic. I found Drum to be rather wooden and two-dimensional as in fact I found many of the characters. The only characters commanding any admiration were the gentle father who seemed to indulge Evie, their gutsy housekeeper, Clotelia (Irma P. Hall), who told it like it was (reminding me just a bit of Dilsey in William Faulker's novel, "The Sound and the Fury"), and Evie's loyal friend, hairdresser Violet (Sara Rue).I wondered about the raucous music of Drum's band, which seemed to me at least a 15-year anachronism in the early 1960s. I didn't find the editing to make a dull, uninspiring, and "so what" story anything but even more dull. Of course, my comments could be attributed to my unfamiliarity with Anne Tyler's novels or lack of attention to slow, sleepy, small-town southern culture (though I enjoyed the 1989 film, "Steel Magnolias"). --Dilip June 15, 2004