Night Windows

Creating a new entry in an established film series is a difficult task, especially when, as is the case with the “Star Trek” franchise, the series has a rich mythology and a particularly devoted fan base. Appeal to too broad an audience and you risk alienating the fans, but if you honor the fans and the old installments too much, you risk making a film unwatchable for most and unoriginal for the rest (see: “Superman Returns”). Deviate too far from the source material and you risk losing what made the series a hit in the first place, but stay too close to a formula and the film becomes boring, a mere replica of the rest of the series (this is why so many Bond films are forgettable). But J.J. Abrams’s new film “Star Trek”, a reboot, finds the right balance between all of these components, yielding a film that is not only highly enjoyable, but also a more than worthy addition to a film franchise that has seen far more misses than hits. It is referential without lapsing into parody, original without losing its roots, but most of all, “Star Trek” is just fun.

The film is a prequel to the original television series, telling the beginnings of James T. Kirk, Spock, and all the other characters aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise that have permeated pop-culture. It begins with the birth of Kirk, which is threatened by an enemy Romulan ship. We later find out the strange circumstances of its arrival (it emerges out of what appears to be a lightning storm in the middle of space) are due to the fact that it traveled across space and time through a black hole. This complicates things for the characters, but makes them easy for Abrams and company. By this ship going back in time and causing the kind of damage that the first, breathtaking sequence foreshadows, it alters the events of the original series, thus giving this reboot the ability to operate within the framework of the original, but to free themselves of the burden of an already meticulously crafted timeline, allowing them to explore different facets of the characters and races within the film, and, in doing so, making it their own.

One area where the film is particularly fortunate is the cast. Each member, from major characters like Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) to supporting characters like McCoy (Karl Urban) and Scott (Simon Pegg), performs, as Spock would say, “admirably.” Pine particularly brings such a charisma and humor to his role, paying homage to the campy though arguably very self-aware William Shatner while adding his own smarter, more focused enthusiasm to the role, bringing Kirk from a from skirt-chasing Iowa townie to a member of the Star Fleet. Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) also fill out the bridge with small but effective performances. Nero, the vengeful Romulan responsible for most of the film’s chaos, is played with substantial nuance by Eric Bana, especially given his relatively short screen time. Bana plays Nero with such anger, hatred and a sense of loss that makes his performance feel (pardon the mixed metaphor) entirely human.

Abrams’s “Star Trek” succeeds in almost everything it sets out to do, and most importantly for fans and studios alike, sets up the groundwork for a lucrative and potentially phenomenal series. With a fantastic new cast and a new timeline, Abrams and company have made a near-perfect blockbuster and have settled into their roles, but hopefully, in the second film, they won’t settle down.

“The Limits of Control” is the visually arresting, if narratively banal new film by Jim Jarmusch that follows a hitman through a simple journey, enveloped thinly with basic ideas of metaphysics, towards his objective. It borrows, just as Jarmusch’s own “Ghost Dog” did, heavily from Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï”. Whereas “Ghost Dog” was an homage of substance and meaning, dealing primarily with the importance of a warrior’s code, “The Limits of Control” is much more concerned with capturing the tone of “Le Samouraï”. Here, Alain Delon is replaced by Isaach De Bankolé (credited only as “Lone Man”), a stoic figure whose life, like that of his inspiration’s, is dictated largely by routine. The way he unbuttons his jacket, his repeated order of two expressos in individual cups, and deciphering and subsequent ingestion of codes written on small paper (further instructions, most likely) all indicate a precise, though not entirely meaningful method behind his actions.

And like in Melville’s film, we find our film’s central figure cast oscillating between two areas: sparse, barely furnished rooms and the low roar of urban areas. Most of the action in the film takes place in near silence, though it is occasionally underscored by menacing tones or a roar of shoegaze. The film follows the Lone Man as he waits for further instructions, getting them in bits and pieces from equally obfuscated characters that riff on different subjects (i.e. molecules, the universe, Hitchcock, subjectivity) while carrying out the same task: relaying messages to the Lone Man through the exchange of matchboxes. They even all begin their conversations with the same question: “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” This repetition of form, of both conversation and composition throughout the film, emerges initially as its strongest motif, but eventually loses its effect.

The supporting cast is also responsible for most of the talking in the film, each giving their separate monologues to the Lone Man, asking questions he doesn’t answer and making assumptions he doesn’t necessarily agree with. Tilda Swinton (credited as Blonde), with her ridiculous leopard print boots and her delicate taunting of the fourth wall, and Gael Garcia Bernal (credited as Mexican), with his eager hands and interesting metaphors, are the two finest of these minor roles.

Jarmusch has always been interested in music, the aesthetics of cool, and where the two intersect, but this fascination alone does not make a film. Every shot in the film is carefully planned and executed with a precision mirroring that of the protagonist, but, as is also the case with the Lone Man, we’re left wondering whether there’s something behind the immediately visible. The moments that are supposed to give the film meaning end up, instead, floating on the surface of it. The pretension of the film’s images, it seems, are meant to cover up the simplicity of its ideas. Considered visually, the film is a success, but finding anything much deeper than that is a difficult task. In this way, it’s strangely like the art house version of a summer action film: it’s well shot, it oozes cool, and it’s not unenjoyable, but it’s also not much else.

“Is Anybody There?” is the story of Edward (Bill Milner), a young boy trying to find his place in the world, and Clarence (Michael Caine), and old man trying to make peace with his time in it. Set in a English seaside town in the 1980s, the film begins with Edward, a boy whose parents run an in-home retirement community that’s led him to have an increased awareness of and fascination with death. “I’m not scared [of it],” Edward tells his mother after one of the residents dies, “I just want to know what happens.” Edward is a outwardly quiet, though sometimes very rebellious and bellicose with his parents, and spends most of his days trying to track down spirits and the supernatural. When he knows a resident is about to die, he leaves a tape recorder under their bed to try and hear the sound of the soul leaving the body. And for a boy of ten, this kind of macabre ritual propels away potential friends.

Clarence is an entirely different story. A retired magician, Clarence comes, somewhat reluctantly, to their senior home to spend the twilight of his life. He resents being surrounded by strangers after having lived with family or loved ones his whole life, and above all despises the senility of those people around him. This despise is the outward manifestation of his own fear, as he himself slowly succumbs to Alzheimer’s during the course of the film. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” he tells Edward, quoting Thomas.

And it is upon this central point that their relationship hinges: Edward is fascinated by death and Clarence is terrified of it. Edward believes that there is an afterlife, and Clarence believes it all just goes black. But both of them, through alienation and loneliness, find friendship in each other. Clarence teaches Edward magic tricks, trying to convince him to “join hands and make contact with the living.”  On top of this, Edward has to deal with his father (David Morrissey) who, while mostly well meaning, is trying to have an affair with a girl that works at the house and Clarence has to deal with the guilt of his own loss. “You accumulate regrets” he tells Edward, “and they stick to you like bruises.” He was unfaithful to his wife, and was never again saw her after they were divorced, though she died sometime later. This guilt has built up in his stomach and makes him lash out in sad desperation.

“Is Anybody There?” is a decent film, accomplishes most of what it modestly sets out to do, and is, in small ways, successful not because of some brilliance of storytelling or a particularly affecting screenplay, but by the power of the performances. Michael Caine has the age and the gravitas to authenticate every last ounce of Clarence’s pain, and his gentle fall into senility is handled as gracefully as something so ugly can be. Bill Milner, recognizable for his heartbreaking performance in “Son of Rambow”, works with most of the same notes as he did in that film, but adds just enough to personalize the performance. Anne-Marie Duff as Edward’s mother also brings an understated grace to the matriarchal position, as working-class woman who juggles her son and husband, strange and straying, along with a house full of seniors.

“I remember looking up at the stars and thinking what a great, big universe it is,” Clarence tells Edward in a particularly emotional moment of the film, “and now it’s very, very small.” “Is Anybody There?” is, for the range of emotions it deals with, a small film, and like every good film that deals with death, it’s also a film about life. It is about abridged time, regrets, and the indelible moments of our lives, at the beginning or the end, however brief.

“Gigantic”, the debut of writer/director Matt Aselton, is a fantastic indie dramedy that works fluidly within its genre but creatively breaks enough rules to raise it above many similar films. Its tight 98-minute runtime is filled with small moments which thread together to display larger gestures,  amalgamating to make something, as the title suggests, gigantic.

The film follows Brian Weathersby (Paul Dano), a 28-year-old mattress salesmen in New York that divides his time between his job, his friend’s lab and pursuing the adoption of a Chinese baby. He’s got all the trimmings of an indie protagonist—he’s smart, fashionable, slightly depressed, has great taste in music—but he seems to have circumvented the state of infantilism that so many mumblecore heroes are stuck in. He is, if anything, too grown up. With his father having already been 52 years old by the time he was born and his older brothers out of the house, Brian never had a normal childhood, or, perhaps more accurately, he never had one at all. For his eighth birthday, his father (Ed Asner) later tells his adoption contact, all Brian wanted was a Chinese baby to take care of.

Brian is content to sulk around the mattress store and wait for a spot on the adoption list; that is, until he meets Harriet Lolly (Zooey Deschanel), a strange but endearing twentysomething Dickensianly nicknamed “Happy.” She is emotionally stunted, an overgrown child herself whose problems are, because of her beauty, dismissed as quirky idiosyncrasies by the film’s characters and seemingly the film itself. Beyond their initial attraction, however, Brian and Happy provide functionally relevant support for each other. She represents his missing childhood and, in a way, fills the need he has to love someone or something unconditionally. He provides structure for her, is the first person outside her family to take her seriously.

But the strength of “Gigantic” comes from its ability to avoid centralizing Brian’s relationship with Happy. Whether he’s hunting for mushrooms with his family on his father’s 80th birthday or discussing anti-depressants with his friend, Brian is a well-rounded character with a number of different motivations and loyalties, something rare in romantic comedies, which are more concerned with totalizing relationships that wrench away the central couples separate interests. Meeting Happy also doesn’t diminish Brian’s interest in adopting a baby, something that would’ve occurred in a lesser film as a device to show that she was “what he was really looking for all along.” “Gigantic” is not that naïve, nor that simple.

The film’s superior casting shows not only in Dano and Deschanel, but also in the secondary characters. From Happy’s father, the fast-talking but ultimately tender John Goodman, to Zach Galifianakis in a surprising and dark role as a violent homeless man (if the beard fits…), the film’s talent has no weak spots. Even Jane Alexander as Brian’s mother, in the one real scene she has, provides a meaningful performance that, if bobbled, would’ve jeopardized the weight of one of the film’s central relationships.

In the beginning of the movie, Brian watches an experiment where lab mice are forced to swim in a container from which they cannot escape while the results are recorded. The point is, his friend tells him, to monitor how quickly the mice give up, resign themselves to their fate and stop swimming and how those results differ while the mice are on anti-depressants. “Gigantic” is a superb film, one that blends perfectly the absurd and the emotionally truthful, and ultimately, it evaluates whether, in his relationship with Happy and his abilities as a father, Brian will, like the mice, sink or swim.

It is widely accepted that film adaptations rarely capture the complexity and emotional resonance of the novels from which they originate. If you can’t judge a book by its cover, it’s equally true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its movie; both are, most often, simply the interpretations of other artists. “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (whose previous credits—the most recognizable of which is “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story”—do little to encourage hope for the film’s success), is one such example: a forgettable, poorly-executed film that stumbles far more than it stands and would not be considered good by its own merits, let alone as an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 1988 debut novel.

Watching the film, it’s clear that Thurber loves the source material, but we’re never sure that he fully understands it. He loves it in the way that Lennie Small loves his cat in “Of Mice and Men”: by squeezing the life out of it. The changes he makes, whether upheavals like folding the character Arthur Lecomte into Cleveland or minor shifts in tone, obscure the motivations of the characters and the narrative rather than sharpen them. Thurber also doesn’t seem to understand the medium he’s working in and the way it functions, at least dramatically. The film is saturated with music; Thurber is so unconfident in his own visuals, so afraid to let them speak for themselves that he envelops nearly every scene with music meant to instruct the viewer. Feel this way now, feel that way after, dramatic swell.

The film centers around Art Bechstein (Jon Foster), a recent college graduate whose mob boss father (Nick Nolte) wants him to live a clean, productive life as a stock broker. Studying for the Series 7 exam and working at a local bookstore, he’s content to spend his summer with “as little responsibility as possible.” He soon meets Jane (Sienna Miller) at a party, the kind of girl who’s supposed to change his life by teaching him to avoid responsibility and worry about making “indelible moments” with people he just met by confessing secrets. It’s strange just how much of a non-presence Jane actually is in the film; falling short of human complexity or even manifested male wish-fulfillment, she blends into the background, content to simply forward the plot.

Art is soon introduced (in the mandatory pay-attention-because-the-metaphors-in-this-scene-will-be-important-later scene) to Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard), Jane’s bisexual boyfriend, with whom Art also has a short but passionate affair. Sarsgaard’s performance is far and away the best part of the film. He pulls off dangerous charm without becoming a cliché, his scenes adding an eloquence and precision to the film that evades the rest of the cast. Foster, who seems to be an otherwise adequate and somewhat dependable leading man, looks almost foolish in his scenes with Sarsgaard, dwarfed by the gap between their two skill levels. Miller is not immune to this either. Her shifting accent and coyness, when matched with the charisma of Sarsgaard’s performance, seem to belong in another film altogether.

But the opposite seems to be the case. Sarsgaard, here, lends his formidable talents to a clumsy film, the caliber of which he is above. In fact, the disappointment of the film might come not from the inadequacy of the adaptation, but from Sarsgaard’s performance itself, a look at what the film could and should have been. Without him, the film would’ve been able to enjoy its own mediocrity, been able to let the audience turn off their brains for two hours and watch attractive people think they have problems.

“Observe and Report”, writer/director Jody Hill’s follow up to the quietly hilarious “The Foot Fist Way”, is dark. It follows Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen), a recently unmedicated, bi-polar mall cop with a hero complex, a history of violence, and an unhealthy obsession with Brandi (Anna Faris), a perfume girl at the mall. All of these character flaws collude and drive the central plot of the film: a flasher has been exposing himself to women, including Brandi, in the mall parking lot and Ronnie will stop it nothing to take him down. As he does this, he becomes an increasing danger to himself and others, using excessive force to fuel his delusions of being a hero and, one day, a real police officer. During a psychiatric evaluation, he even points an imaginary shotgun at his interviewer and pulls the trigger, laughing ignorantly through a big grin.

If Rogen’s character doesn’t sound all that likable, it’s because he isn’t. Hill has a history of creating unlikeable protagonists that still manage to be engaging and, more importantly, hilarious. In “The Foot Fist Way” or “Eastbound and Down”, his new HBO television show, his protagonists (in both cases played by Danny McBride, who makes an appearance in “Observe” as a fatherly crack-dealer) are arrogant without being competent and angry without recognizing that they cause most of their own problems. Like many modern directors, Hill finds parts of his comedy in the awkwardness of his characters and their situations, but it is perhaps more accurate to say he finds it in absurdity. At one point, Ronnie fights a large number of police, hitting at least a dozen over the head with a heavy metal flashlight and injuring a number of others in various ways, yet we see him spend less than 30 seconds of screen time in jail before he’s released. “Observe and Report” is, at times, very realistic, particularly in its portrayals of violence, but it’s never firmly rooted in a realistic world.

The film, while centered around Ronnie, is fortified by a number of smaller roles that allow for more comedic freedom. Ronnie’s second in command, Dennis (Michael Peña), gets laughs every time he bobs his head or gives a heartfelt talk through his heavy lisp. Saddamn (Aziz Ansari), a vendor in the mall and supposed nemesis of Ronnie, has an extended shouting match with Ronnie halfway through the first act and it’s one of the movie’s strongest moments.

This is also new territory for Rogen, who’s made a career out of playing amiable, if sarcastic men in various states of arrested development. Ronnie is not too smart or self aware, described by his perpetually drunk mother (Celia Weston) as having “special needs” which drove away his father, and his belligerent confrontations with nearly everyone around him mix pain, comedy, and sometimes genuine shock. Rogen usually plays someone who cracks jokes, but here, he’s the butt of them. We’ve spent years laughing with him, but in “Observe and Report”, we’re mostly laughing at him.

But the important thing is we’re laughing. “Observe and Report” is uniquely funny; much darker and more confrontational than Rogen’s previous works or the film’s advertising campaign let on, it will, unfortunately, have a much narrower audience. But the film is, in almost every other respect, a success and a worthy new installment in the already promising career of Jody Hill.

Things fall apart. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), a recent college graduate, gets his heart broken. Then his father loses his job, forcing James to cancel his summer trip to Europe and risks the possibility, or rather the financial feasibility, of his continuing to graduate school at Columbia.  In order to earn some money for the fall, James gets a summer job at Adventureland, a local theme-park/summer carnival headed by two endearingly odd managers, Bobby (Bill Hader) and his wife Paulette (Kristen Wiig). Here, despite a heavy case of post-graduate ennui, James quickly makes friends with the other employees of the park and takes a particular romantic interest in Em (Kristen Stewart), who, though she’s going through her own crises, reciprocates his affections with caution. The film is, ostensibly, familiar territory; we’ve seen the ups and downs of a summer romance in many other iterations. But familiar acts, as Shelly wrote, are beautiful through love.

Greg Mottola, the film’s director, is no stranger to good comedy. He made a name for himself directing films like the widely successful “Superbad” and the wonderful independent, “The Daytrippers”, as well TV work which includes the brief, hilarious “Arrested Development” and the briefer still “Undeclared”. With “Adventureland”, Mottola has created a film that’s far more complicated than its premise and more realistic in its approaches to both character development and situational outcome than its contemporaries.

Adventureland is, while hilarious throughout, not as “funtastic” for the characters as the signboard reads at the park’s entrance. Joel (the dependably great Martin Starr) is another recent graduate, as poor and depressed as a character from any of the Russian novels he studied in school. Em, while dealing with her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, is sleeping with Connell (Ryan Reynolds), a married man, out of habit now more than love, and it’s proving to be extremely emotionally unhealthy for her. It’s more than likely that their relationship grew out of something resembling fun and furious affection, but has since become a bitter routine.

James, the heartbroken academic, is similarly confused and out of his element. Despite his obvious interest in Em, he also doesn’t quite know what to do with her attention once he has it. He tells her about past girlfriends, sexual inexperience, and stares at her longingly from the passenger seat of her car while they listen to a “bummer mix-tape” he made for her, all things that Connell tells him, in one way or another, not to do. But it is, perhaps, for all these reasons, all these ways in which he is so different from Connell that make his relationship with Em work so well.

The same can be said for the film as a whole. It is for all the ways it is different, all the ways that it departs from and rises above its familiarity that make it worthwhile. The characters aren’t separated into binary groups of good and evil, even the ones that cause harm to the supposed protagonists, but instead they all blend into the middle as flawed, entirely human characters. The mistakes they make are also dealt with in a more or less rational, realistic way, keeping them in perspective rather than reverting to melodramatic attacks and proclamations of disbelief that litter the genre. The characters are also forced to face disappointments in their life and, throughout the film, become increasingly aware that things won’t turn out the way they were planned.

The narrative only lasts the summer, but the events and relationships formed during that time  make imprints on the characters that will stretch much further. The end of the film deal with uncertainty as much as it does with resolution, as much with disappointment as it does success. James is still a twentysomething armed with a B.A. in comparative literature and aspirations of Dickensian travel writing, but he’s had to reevaluate the way he’ll be able to achieve that goal, and the people in his life while he does so.

It’s been almost a week since I sat down to watch “The Great Buck Howard”, the film inspired by the “worlds greatest mentalist” The Amazing Kreskin, and already I feel the memory of it slipping away. The basic plot structures are still there, as well as a few hilarious scenes or moments, but the details are obscured by time and frankly, lack of interest. The film is best thought of as a representation of Buck Howard himself: more or less pleasant to watch, kind of cheesy, and something that will never really, and for any reason, rise out of obscurity.
Troy Gable (Colin Hanks) is a law-school dropout and struggling writer living in Los Angeles who quickly finds out that things like rent, utilities, and food cost more than he can make not selling his writing. He finds a job in the paper, road manager to who he later finds out is Buck Howard (John Malkovich). Despite Buck’s long career and somewhat impressive resumé (he claims, again and again, to have been on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 61 times), Troy doesn’t know him. This isn’t a surprise. Buck has fallen far from the limelight that we’re never sure he really had; he now goes from small town to small town playing half-filled venues. The surprise, however, is that he does all of this with a huge smile on his face, a powerful handshake, and audience pleasing show.
Troy and Buck quickly hit the road, running into the same folksy people in ever city. Small venues and large women dot the roadmap they follow. Buck is usually a genial guy, but can sometimes throw eccentric tantrums and yell at the people close to him, whether they deserve it or not. Buck Howard is the type of guy that would literally cry over spilled milk. Troy seems better able to handle the job and Buck’s flare ups than his previous road manager Alan (the always funny Adam Scott), who has a stress induced grimace and a penchant for the aforementioned large women. He’s able to roll with the punches and still come out with a degree of awe for Buck.
Most of this is revealed to us through narration, used here as the crutch of lazy screenwriter. The play-by-play Troy provides for everyone exactly what is happening and what the characters are feeling, removing the gap of inference, cementing the audience in a passive role and the film in mediocrity.
Malkovich is predictably great, oscillating between seething, barely-contained anger backstage and jovial, smiling meet-and-greets. Hanks is harmless, playing the dependable leading man with just enough heart to keep the audience from falling asleep. The smaller roles end up making the movie more than a failure. Adam Scott’s ex-road manager, Steve Zahn’s small town theatre owner/Buck Howard enthusiast, and most of all, Emily Blunt as the semi-love interest of the film and only person to really stand up to Buck’s neuroses all carry the film, despite their limited screen time. Blunt’s comic timing alone is enough to steal each scene she’s a part of.
“The Great Buck Howard” is nothing special. We’ve seen all of this before, and we’ll see it again, but there are a few scenes and, more accurately, a few performances that make it a decent, if forgettable way to spend an afternoon.

For every movie glorifying someone’s journey to find his or her inner-child, there’s another movie demonizing his or her inability to let go of their past and grow up. Separate movies will  inevitably arrive at different conclusions, different life advice. This struggle between a J.M. Barrie-esque recapturing of youth and flat-out arrested development plays out between two characters in John Hamburg’s “I Love You, Man”. Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is a tight-laced guy who’s always put his career and his girlfriend before making friends of his own, while Sydney Fife (Jason Segel) is a man with few social reservations whose friends are rapidly leaving him behind for the “next step,” married life. “I Love You, Man”, a funny, sometimes pleasantly absurd movie, finds that true happiness not in either of these polar frames of mind, but instead in a middle ground between the two. Peter and Sydney work best when they’re together, when they meet in the middle (a move I like to call the “Benjamin Button”); they find happiness in balance and meaning in symbiosis.

The film opens with Peter proposing to his girlfriend, Zooey (Rashida Jones), who, after accepting, begins to call a long string of girlfriends and family members. It quickly becomes apparent that Peter doesn’t really have anyone to call, and after a number of slightly funny scenes (the best being with the always fantastic J.K. Simmons, who plays Peter’s father), the premise of the film is set up: Peter needs to find a best man for his wedding, and more importantly, a friend. The search for a friend plays out much like it would in any romantic comedy. He goes on a series of “man-dates”, none of which go particularly well (including a mismatch of intention with “Reno! 911’s” Thomas Lennon), and it’s not until Peter all but gives up that he finds the perfect candidate. Until this point, even with the occasional laugh, the film feels incomplete and poorly paced, like it too is searching for something. This “something” turns out to be what both Peter and the film need. When Sydney shows up at Peter’s open house, later explaining that he’s just there for the “free food and divorcées” as the two bond over paninis and social observations, the film finds its footing.

From here on out, Rudd and Segel take what could’ve easily been a mediocre film (like the director’s own “Along Came Polly”) and, with their quirky improvisations, make it one of the best comedies so far this year. The movie is undeniably funny—from Peter’s terrible impressions that always end up sounding like a leprechaun and terrible, off-the-cuff slang (“totes magotes”) to Sydney’s masturbatorium and penchant for naming his pets after former presidents of Egypt—but it’s also relevant. It explores the near-uncharted territory of just how awkward and difficult it can be for two adults to find and make friends. This is, in fact, the best such telling of that type of narrative since Patrice Leconte’s 2006 film “Mon Meilleur Ami”.

But despite a wonderful supporting cast full of stand-out performances, what really elevates this movie beyond its premise are the two leads who attack the film’s central problem with such earnestness, vulnerability and outright goofiness that by the end of the film, we’re more concerned with the outcome of their friendship than Peter’s marriage. The film is about friendship, its difficulties and its rewards, and like any good friendship, the film is worthwhile.

Most music is inevitably regionalistic, its sound shaped by the time and place it was produced. This is why specific scenes seem to develop and flourish, why a distinctive sound—Seattle grunge in the early 90s, D.C. hardcore punk in the early 80s, New York art rock—is sometimes created simultaneously by numerous bands in one area. But these bands, these genres, often lose momentum and relevance as time and the city change, rarely outlasting the decades they inhabit. The artists that last, then, are the ones that successfully reinvent themselves. This is why, with each release, Beirut proves that it has the mutability of a band that’s not only relevant, but essential.

Beirut, in their approach to music, function much like U.S. foreign policy in the late 19th and early 20th century. More than any band in recent memory, they cultivate their sound from a number of different nations, the result of which is a kind of aural imperialism. With the band’s debut “Gulag Orkestra”, Zach Condon (the group’s founder and frontman) belted out Balkan ballads in ¾ time and sent flugelhorn dashing over ukulele chords. With “The Flying Club Cup”,  his interests moved to French traditional, blending violins and accordions more heavily into his already layered sound. His latest,“March of the Zapotec” (the first half of a double EP with Realpeople, Condon’s electronica moniker), was written and recorded on a vacation to Mexico, drawing inspiration from and even recording with local funeral bands such as Teotitlán del Valle. His music, to say the least, international.

“March of the Zapotec” begins, like its immediate predecessor, with a short overture. “El Zocalo” fades in, drums pounding, and, like the EP itself, is over far too early. It’s followed by “La Llorona”, an accordion march that uses silence as effectively as any instrument. The melody trots along, accompanied by trumpets and Condon’s instantly recognizable basso profundo, breaking into arpeggiated horn lines. Its title, roughly “the weeping woman,” comes from an old Spanish legend of a woman who kills her children to be with the man she loves, only to have him reject her. The song is not so morbid. “My Wife” similarly saunters and sways, but Condon’s voice is notably absent. In fact, much of the EP is instrumental. The finest track on the the Beirut portion is “On the Bayonet”, a slow, bag-pipe swelling tune that fits its funeral band origins, its depth and reach almost ecclesiastic. “March of the Zapotec” exists as a snapshot of his experiences as well as the culture that inspired them.

If Beirut is Zach Condon’s vacation slide show, Realpeople is home video. Condon has recorded under this name before, putting out a small, self-released CD-R when he was 15. This new EP, “Holland”, though it includes two previously released tracks, is a return to form. “Holland” is the better of the two releases, if only because it is more personal, confident ground. “My Night” starts the album, bouncing through keyboard arpeggios and waning delay artifacts while a drum machine keeps time. It also seems to be the most fun Condon’s had with a song since “Elephant Gun”. In fact, with the exception of the throwaway closer “No Dice”, every song on the EP shows a renewed confidence and a relief from the seriousness of his other releases. “Venice” is otherworldly; Condon’s layered vocals wail over the ebb and flow of a quiet synth and subdued horns.

The two EPs contain some of Zach Condon’s best work; he is, here, at his most mature and secure in his changing sound. These releases, however, feel abbreviated. They fail to carry the significance of his other two albums due mostly their brevity. Like a cut-off sentence, these don’t function, even together, as a fully realized work. But they are, like all of his music, entirely worthwhile.