Truly Dreadful Film

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

College student Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson) conducts a study by interviewing men with stories of disturbing behavior. She also starts observing men in the outside world. She has dates with Ryan (John Krasinski).Nicholson is playing it very passively. The interviews are visually extremely static. There are so many men as subjects that none of them are compelling enough to care about. I suspect that the source material is difficult to adapt. John Krasinski may not be equipped to do so much of the heavy lifting. In the end, he did not find a way to translate this into a watchable movie.

Couldn't finish watching this film. It used the contrivance of men being interviewed to create an exposition on male / female relations.I found it choppy (quick cuts between scenes and interviews and even within interviews). It pontificated and had the stilted quality of a stage play. The interviews were uninteresting and stereotypical monologues and the men were mostly caricatures. While it tried to be deep, it was deep in the way an undergraduate is deep (meta criticism within the film itself) - a fist full of knowledge, poorly digested and portentously revealed.The lead actress was a passive doll throughout most of what I saw with whom I neither empathized or cared. I didn't care about any of the characters, and the construct of people talking to the camera outside the interviews was too self conscious.It was a film school, self-conscious mess with no heart and too much head, uninterestingly directed.

This film has, as the director John Krasinski put himself, strong indie influences. The non-chronological time-line, the frequent cuts between scenes, the overlapping of events...I think this is perhaps some of the reason why it receives such conflicting reviews. Every person has a subjective experience of every film and mine was, bluntly, that I was blown away. As I just pointed out, the chronology of events is completely out of whack, and while reviews of the film point it out as a weakness, I think it's a strength. It makes you focus on what's going on and to really pay attention to it, and it's rewarding when you do. There is so much depth in this story, or rather series of stories, that their sparsity and seeming lack of coherence is a statement in itself. Pretentious sounding statement followed by pseudo-profound insight. I know. But I think it's true. There are four distinct episodes in the film that are in my mind the strongest, and are my four favourite - so watch out for them! They are as follows: 1. The episode featuring Christopher Meloni and Denis O'Toole. Meloni tells a story about a girl he met in an airport, and the end of the scene is superbly acted out as far as I'm concerned. 2. Subject #42 and his father. It's an emotional thing to watch, the generation gap between these two men, and yet how fiercely they love each other, though they don't say it. I know it's kitsch and an overused plot line, but I think it's acted out so realistically that it ceases to be cheesy but instead very moving. 3. The storyline concerning Dominic Cooper's character, Daniel, who wrote his paper on how sexual assaults can sometimes be character building - making clear that of course the assault is awful at the time, but afterwards, the person can become stronger and use that experience to build up their strength and sense of self. The scenes which follow are an almost schizophrenic stream of consciousness as we see Daniel in four different places - Sara's office, the function room, the café, steps on the college campus - but having one monologue which remains uninterrupted except for the change of scene. The monologue gets more and more frenzied as the plot begins to unravel and the climax is heart-breaking. Concomitant with all of this is one or two clips of previously seen footage and all the while there is some kind of rock music playing which, when I first watched the film, seemed completely out of sync, but now I think perhaps that was the point. It makes Daniel's monologue even more uncomfortable and heart-wrenching. 4. The monologue that is the ultimate climax of the film, spoken by Ryan, the character played by John Krasinski.You should watch this film and see what I'm talking about. It's well worth it.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a movie that is so unafraid to openly criticize the feminist movement and, more importantly, the effects it has had on men. But to call the movie masculist or an example of the Men's Movement would be to contradict the entire point of the movie.John Krasinski makes his debut as writer/director and also does a little bit of acting with this film. Most people know him from his fantastic portrayal of the sarcastic Jim in The Office. On The Office John Krasinski is a smirking young man who always has a witty remark to make. Here he is a tad more than that...Don't get me wrong, the movie has several comedic scenes, which are presented through the film's interesting narrative structure which mostly consists of the titular interviews, such as when one subject states his trouble with sexual relationships is due to his screaming of "Victory for the forces of Democratic freedom." Sure this is funny at first, but over the course of the movie as we keep coming back to this man, we see that the more he talks about it the less he treats it with humor. This is where the movie begins to make its point.In each interview the men begin to speak in a way that is humorous but then becomes less and less comedic as they speak about it. Because they realize the truth of what they are saying. They understand that they shouldn't make a joke out of it because it isn't funny for men to get hurt by women. The movie is essentially several examples of this, aside two vignettes where one man describes how to be an actual "good" lover and another discourses on whether or not he should love or hate his father for being the passive bathroom attendant.Few of the men are hideous, even in a spiritual way and I believe the movie's title refers more to the way the woman who interviews them would like to see them and how easy it is for her to demonize them and call them hideous and think that they aren't human beings. This is the movie's final message, that everyone is a human being and that everyone should be seen as such.The movies ending is one of the few perfect endings I've seen from a movie. It shows John Krasinksi's character tell a story to his ex-girlfriend and conductor of the interviews about the hippie he cheated on her with and how she was once raped, but could see the humanity in her rapist and that in that moment he realized he could never lose her. But she left shortly afterwords. It then shows a flashback to before any of the interviews were conducted and why the interviewer is conducting them. Her college professor friend asks her why. When she begins to answer he says something like "Don't tell me the reasons, tell yourself" Then it ends with nothing else but a quote from David Foster Wallace, the author of the book on which the movie is based. Which is perfect, because to try to extend it beyond the point of desolation that the movie ends on would be an exercise in futility.To cap off this lengthy analysis of the movie, I would like to plead to John Krasinski, who said he probably won't write and direct another movie, to reconsider this position, because you are a fantastic writer/director.