Personal Velocity: Three Portraits

The first story was relatively interesting and then went downhill.

Rebecca Miller's second feature movie is just what you would expect to win awards at a Sundance festival (if you can take those ‘styles' you may be somehow ‘entertained') Others can expect to sit through very roughly sketched plotlines - in this case, it's three shallow stories about women that don't particularly link up well or offer any satisfactory resolutions. The photography by Ellen Kuras consists of shaky (cheap and trendy) video handheld shots, mostly taken with the zoom lens on extreme tight --producing a nauseating wobble cam-- with the operator attempting to frame the subject within a rocky, sea-sick making image. The crass, sensationalistic situations and course dialogue are mostly drawn from the perspective of modern, disenfranchised immature females - with some of the title characters preferring to live out female fantasies (even when in successful relationships of their own making), actions that predictably lead to utter chaos. All these women are quite unbelievably devoid of the ability to learn from any obvious life experiences or moral convictions. It's difficult to fully sympathise with these somewhat sordid characters or feel all that much empathy for their all too obvious and inevitable outcomes. Performances are OK with Michael Rohatyn supplying a cute minimalist main theme. Rebecca's Dad, Arthur Miller, may have been a notable and worthy writer but that's clearly not always guaranteed to transfer to the offspring. Strictly for undemanding viewers of the ‘type'- others will give up within the first 15 mins and be better off.

Not my cup of tea. I don't mind the short stories, but other that the fact the three women are having troubles in part due to their upbringing, the stories do not inter-relate at all.

This film is comprised of three portraits of women, one escaping from an abusive marriage, one considering adultery, and one who picks up a hitchhiker. Overly expository, these stories are undeveloped. The transition between short story and film is a difficult one, and Rebecca Miller clings to her prose with an obsessive compulsion that doesn't recognize the visual nature of her new medium. And the need to give backstory on all of her characters doesn't even work in prose. All three of the stories revolve around the theme of characters being stuck by their own identities and pasts. It's an interesting theme, but I don't see anything new in the way it's presented or the individualities of the characters, excepting the final story with Fairuza Balk. Overall, there is a difference between film and prose, and Miller doesn't adapt to that difference.

3/1/13? My review for this film somehow disappeared, so I'll have to try again over a month later. The 3 stories don't tie together, which was very disappointing b/c I assumed they would. This was a big let down at the end. The stories in themselves are fairly interesting to watch, but each one just ends, leaving it feeling incomplete. The transitions between the stories is non-existent. One story abruptly ends, then the other begins. Obviously, this left me pretty frustrated.

Loved the direction and the way the stories were portrayed...very different insights into different lives...well enacted

More of an art with Vibrant characters then a random movie of the week film.

More of an art with Vibrant characters then a random movie of the week film.

This is a mediocre feminist drama at best. The best thing it has going for it is the fact that it has all these terrific actors in it like Parker Posey and Lou Taylor Pucci. Otherwise, it's really just another lame affliction story about how women are constantly mistreated and abused by crazy and ruthless men. To tell you the truth the three characters this centers around are very well drawn out and are interesting to observe, but the antagonists, or should I say the males, are flat-out typical stereotypes of abusive, perverted, and/or vaguely bland men. I see the realism that it's trying to attain in how it's shot in this documentary style and completely through the use of DV cam, but it ends up just looking really kind of amateur to me. I understand that the film was on a very low budget, but that doesn't change the fact that the film itself looks like a sort of low grade docudrama. I think my main beef with this really is the fact that it's another entry in this sort of heavy-handed, male guilt series of films that blame everything on arrogant, egotistical men. It just gets really tiresome and in the case of this film, it doesn't even attempt to examine the perspective of these one-noted male characters, rather it jumps right to indicting them as horrible people from the get-go. I honestly do like some of the writing here and a lot of the acting is really terrific, but it just doesn't have enough depth to be what it really thinks it is, a serious examination of real life relationships.

This movie makes me proud to be a femenist