Quiet City (2007)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This was without a doubt the WORST hour and 18 minutes of my life. The acting, the directing (or lack thereof) was mind-numbingly bad. I cannot believe that people are giving any good comments for this movie.There is no plot, and for a "dialogue-driven" film, it literally had the worst dialogue I've ever come across in my 28 years of life. I think it was all improvised, and horrible at that. I am an indie film fan, live in NY and frequent Sunshine to see great indie films. This, however, cannot even be called a film. It is like some horrible home video, some horrible documentary. Nothing happens.Save yourself, DO NOT watch this movie. Please. I have nothing to do with the director or actors and this is not some sort of review aimed at hurting anyone involved with the movie. I have never felt anger after watching a movie, but I feel so angry right now. I cannot believe this passes for a film. And I cannot believe my girlfriend made me watch it.Save yourselves!!! It is like watching a 78-minute awkward moment! Nooooooo!

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!

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.

I must admit I don't know anything about independent films('mumblecore', is it?), but I stumbled onto this one after seeing more commercially successful indie films like Donnie Darko, Memento and Interview. 'Quiet City', a beautiful sounding title I might add, pleasantly surprised me. As another reviewer mentioned, the writers/directors focused on dialog, which is a refreshing experience for this blockbuster frequenter. I've seen some other small films where they take on too heavy subjects like really finding the meaning of life or why we die etc. Which, for me, made those movies come across pretentious because in my humble opinion it's pretty arrogant if you think you have a quick, easy answer for life's most difficult questions. It's not wrong to have a vision of your own but if you're not Stanley Kubrick (see: 2001) you probably shouldn't touch the subject (especially as a young filmmaker). 'Quiet City' did not make this mistake, the dialog seemed realistic and honest and the acting was very natural. No big climaxes or plot twists but a little taste of the good simple life in New York. Nice, but only for people who like alternative film.