Quiet City

Saturday night Amy and Cleo and I went up the street to The Hollywood Theatre to see a film the newspaper raved about, Quiet City, by some guy from Portland named Aaron Katz.

The plot: Boy meets girl, they hang out, movie ends.

You've maybe seen in done in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, The Puffy Chair and Once.

It's artsy to not have an ending, that's what I have learned. It's even artsier to not have a plot, and to scrub the idea of written dialogue in favor of letting the actors make up the words. The realism of "like" and "uh" cast every other word into conversations certainly does make it seem like you are watching two real people having a real conversation. A real boring conversation.

So, in the end the movie was a shrug. There was a question and answer period after the movie with the writer/director (he introduced the film also). We cut out of there before I could impertinently ask him why he took 80 minutes to tell a ten-minute story. And I liked it more than Amy, I think. I am including an elaborate illustration that captures the feel of the movie but is more entertaining...