The conundrum facing many independent-minded would-be filmmakers is how much, if any, attention to pay to the marketplace. Ignorance to the commercial realities of eventual distribution (in whatever form) is dangerous, and yet pandering to patty-cake notions of superior “character-rooted narrative” has resulted in its own set of collective sins, I’d argue — a robust slate of risible low-fi product in which ethnically diverse families come of age in America, small town soldiers return home from Iraq, or various combinations of philandering hipsters grapple with heroin, dyslexia and coming out of the closet. Multi-hyphenate Todd Berger’s The Scenesters intuitively understands this — what makes voracious but mainstream-leaning film audiences queasy or skeptical about “indie” film as a more broadly categorized movement — and has loads of fun twisting it in all sorts of pretzel shapes in service of a rangy, noir-tinged murder comedy.

A quirky and engaging film that honors many of the conventions of classic whodunit? cinema while also giving them both a modern spin and a deconstructive nudge to the ribs, The Scenesters centers on a smarmy, out-of-work film director named Wallace Cotton (Berger, above
center) and his equally self-centered producer, Roger Graham (Jeff Grace), who land work as crime scene videographers, and set out to make some great art. They quickly stumble across crime scene cleaner Charlie Newton (Blaise Miller, resembling a cross between Casey Affleck and Dwight Yoakam), a schlubby, down-on-his-luck guy who’s quietly honed a superb sense of deduction through his work.

As a couple of apathetic detectives (Kevin Brennan and Monika Jolly) investigate a series of killings in ultra-hip East Los Angeles, Charlie discovers clues that link together the killings, which convinces Wallace and Roger that Charlie is himself the perfect subject around which to center an investigative movie. As the body count mounts — and Charlie is encouraged to romantically reconnect with a beautiful reporter, Jewell Wright (Suzanne May), at the center of the story — Wallace and Roger angle to stay ahead of the killer, and craft a winning documentary, no matter the outside corporeal toll.

Reminiscent in some slight ways of Russell Brown’s The Blue Tooth Virgin, another inside-Hollywood tale that wasn’t afraid to showcase under-the-radar ambition in ways that didn’t always flatter its characters, The Scenesters unfolds against the backdrop of a (n appropriate) hipster soundtrack that includes the Airborne Toxic Event, the Cribs, Wallpaper, Le Switch and more. Scream is obviously something of a touchstone inspiration here (and Chinatown, too, for the film within the film), but the shoegazing, mumblecore cinema of the Duplass brothers also rates mentioning, both because of this movie’s DIY ethos and the fact that it’s simultaneously self-aware about the dangers of arthouse pretension. Berger’s film spins off all sorts of jokey asides (Charlie’s crime scene training video, a music video from a side project rock band one of the cops fronts), as well as a trial session framing device that features Sherilyn Fenn as a prosecutor and John Landis as the judge, and sometimes these bits don’t connect. Or, rather, they play OK as scenes, but muddy the editorial collection as a whole — a sense of how much what an audience is watching is formed after the fact, and by whom, after the conclusion of the murder spree mystery at its core.

Smartly, though, Berger seeds his film with all sorts of mini-conflicts and personality clashes, which makes for much fun and amusement. His dialogue has some salty bite (“Would it kill people to find bodies during magic hour — I feel like I’m on the face of the sun” Wallace bitches at one crime scene), and doesn’t always dwell on its punchlines, in a hamfisted effort to drill them home, and let you know how “smart” it is. A few of the performances aren’t quite up to the par with the material, and the movie could have benefited from a bit more rakish snap to its telling, particularly in the finale. But The Scenesters has in abundance what every independent film yearns for — intrigue and a cocksure rhythm that doesn’t ever feel false. If its plotting doesn’t in the end leave much room for a big surprise, that’s no reason not to surrender to the pleasures it provides along the way. Sometimes a nice slice of archness can be a good thing. For a trailer and more information, click here. (Vactioneer/Midwinter Studios, unrated, 101 minutes)

Hollywood comedies, more often than not, go big in terms of everything — concepts, emotion, stakes and action — because there’s always the fear that if the laughs aren’t coming at a certain clip, and always out loud, then they’re not really there. Comedies with more modest, recognizably human stakes — that aim for smiles or silent, inwardly reflected laughter — are a rare breed, and often end up shuttled off straight to video, or released in top-market, platform fashion by independent distributors.

All of which brings us to The Switch, toplined by two stars, released by a major studio, and featuring an outrageous concept (unwitting sperm swap!) that would seem to augur much more slapstick demonstrativeness than is present. Starring Jason Bateman and Jennifer
Aniston, and adapted by Alan Loeb from a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides), co-directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck’s movie is a curious but not unpleasant thing, not the least of which is because of the wide gulf between its concept and how it’s being marketed and the more melancholic reality of what it is.

Bateman stars as Wally Mars, an uptight white collar New York City investment guru whose best friend is Kassie Larson (Aniston). When Kassie deems the ticking of her biological clock too loud to wait around any further for a guy, she decides to pursue artificial insemination. Wally has carried a torch for Kassie forever (they dated briefly, we’re told), but, unable to hoist the bat off his shoulder and take a real swing at things, he glumly agrees to attend her impregnation party, where he meets her sperm donor, Roland (Patrick Wilson), before consoling himself by getting wasted.

Kassie further breaks Wally’s heart by leaving New York, wanting to raise her child back in Minnesota, where she’s from. Years later, however, she returns, with her six-year-old son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) in tow. Wally is initially less interested in getting to know the kid than in simply reconnecting with Kassie, but soon starts to notice similarities between himself and this little smart, sensitive hypochondriac. Could he have really switched sperm samples the night of Kassie’s party? And how should he break this news to her? Things are additionally complicated by the fact that Roland, fresh off a divorce, is now in play romantically for a possibly interested Kassie.

So hijinks ensue, right? No, not really. More like low-fidelity fumbling and uncertainty, all slipped under some downbeat narration from Bateman. A mid-tempo work that’s not wildly dissimilar from Steve Conrad’s The Promotion and Stephen Belber’s Management (another film in which Aniston appeared, opposite Steve Zahn), The Switch takes a narrative conceit seemingly built for zany flight and tries to find the grounded human angles, which is sometimes tough. If the sense of scene-to-scene attachment and investment at times feels a bit sluggish or lacking (particularly early on), it’s because, as with many books but far fewer films, The Switch invests heartily in scenes with Wally figuring out what the audience already knows (e.g., a long talk with a pal, played by Jeff Goldblum, in which he eventually reconnects the dots of the drunken evening in question).

This isn’t a disqualifying problem so much as an observation. Owing largely to its source roots but also marked by choices in its cinematic adaptation, The Switch is deeply concerned with character and interior feeling (Wally’s ambivalence regarding possible fatherhood, and whether he can accept it either with or without romantic strings attached) and so it takes its time in meting out conflict; its unfussy slipstream rhythms are the exact opposite of the look-at-me gyrations and gesticulations that comprise so much of modern big screen comedy. If one counts their enjoyment of a film of this ilk solely based on laughing out loud, then The Switch is most assuredly not for them. If, however, they enjoy laughing silently to oneself, and then thinking a bit about where that laughter comes from, The Switch has some enjoyable moments to offer.

Kassie, thankfully, isn’t completely oblivious to the notion of Wally’s attraction to her, but the film is least persuasive in sketching out the deep-set particulars of their relationship, which seems to exist in an entirely desexualized state — somewhat ironic, given the nature of the movie’s conceit. Where The Switch is also very much in lockstep with its romantic comedy colleagues is in its flubbing of the penultimate moment of conflict, wherein Wally has to decide how to come clean to Kassie about what he’s done. Kassie reacts angrily, not because of anything rooted in logic, but seemingly only because the story then requires a stormy moment.

Still, Bateman is the exact right anchor for this sort of material, able to convey a quiet inner desperation while also still ringing up laughs and smiles purely off of line readings, based on his impeccable sense of timing. (Aniston, while still radiant, is a bit less successful, if only because Kassie seems underwritten, prone to flighty rationalizations.) While it’s being sold as another comedy of anarchic male ribaldry, the title of The Switch actually plays two ways since its atypicality is its biggest blessing. (Disney, PG-13, 101 minutes)