Actor Chris Lowell has an expansive list of small screen credits, including Life As We Know It, Private Practice and the role for which many people still most remember him — Stosh “Piz” Piznarski on the CW’s Veronica Mars, a role he’ll reprise later this spring in the big screen spin-off. He also has a starring role in a new movie in theaters now: Maggie Kiley’s striking Brightest Star, about a young man’s post-college romantic and occupational wanderings. I recently had a chance to talk to Lowell one-on-one and in person, about his new film, twentysomething ennui and what he thinks of how the Veronica Mars movie came to be. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
Daily Archives: February 4, 2014
At Middleton
A predetermined audience demographic shouldn’t be the guiding principle behind creative decision-making, but it’s so hard to get a clear read on the target viewer for At Middleton, a bittersweet adult romance starring Andy Garcia and Vera Farmiga, that that thought is the one which keeps returning to one’s mind for the duration of its running time. A bewildering dramedy in which two temperamentally contradictory parents meet while accompanying their teenage children on a college visit, this unusual film alternately charms and frustrates, in nearly equal measure.
At Middleton has a workable, if fanciful conceit, but co-writer-director Adam Rodgers and his writing partner Glenn German deliver a screenplay with a lot of exposed seams. And yet when Garcia and Farmiga rip into one of the five or six scenes in the film that really work and connect, none of that matters. This is most roundly evidenced in a sequence in which their characters, after getting busted eavesdropping on an acting class, are given an improvisational exercise by the instructor, and then proceed to lay their souls bare. It’s a master acting class in miniature, and it makes everything else almost worth one’s time. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Anchor Bay Films, R, 100 minutes)
Sundance: We Are the Giant
The clarion call of a grander moral calling anchors the documentary We Are the Giant, and in large part saves it from its own overstuffed passion. Profiling a handful of activists involved in Arab Spring uprisings in Libya, Syria and Bahrain, the film mixes unsettling firsthand protest footage with involving stories of self-sacrifice. For the original capsule review, from Paste, click here. (Passion Pictures/Motto Pictures, unrated, 90 minutes)