Laura McNeal

How John Lithgow ever got cast again is a mystery. Also wondering if they wrote any of the scenes ahead of time or just put a soft-focus lens on the camera and said, “Pretend you are suffering from an indescribable loss.”

Cannot believe this movie got made.

Spoilers ahead. Two things about the plot seem brilliant, and one seems nonsensical. First brilliant thing: the parallel structure—alpha and omega—of a motion picture made by a famous white director of a galloping horse ridden by a black man. The second is the conjuring of a UFO not as a machine full of foreigners but as a wild, fragile carnivorous beast that can be killed (like our own monsters of the deep) by plastic. But would a child who witnessed the brutal killing of his co-stars by a fragile carnivorous beast really become the impresario of a show featuring another, far more unknowable one?

Am I the only one to point out that BJ Novak is too old to play this character? Or do 40-year-old guys (and guys in their 30s, which Novak could pass as) continue to hook up and talk about hooking up in this exact way? The character and the writing are as briskly satirical as I expected from Novak—he has perfect pitch for nerdy self-awareness, for the obnoxious and yet somehow painfully needy patter of Men Who Will Treat You Badly. But doesn’t a 20-something commitment-phobic dude with brash ambition eventually morph into a different kind of man?

I wanted to love this movie. It appeared to have all the elements I most enjoy: verisimilitude, an inquiry into the nature of love that is also an inquiry into the nature of art, actors with whom I have no prior relationship. But it was a crushing disappointment. Too much verisimilitude, too little art, while at the same time too much artfulness about the things left unexplained or undramatized. The scenes that contributed almost nothing to the story--brief, slice-of-life vignettes that would ordinarily be sort of charming--were so numerous that I became impatient, and they made the movie seem both endless ("was it six hours or seven?" we asked on the way out) and incredibly self-indulgent.