Janet Planet

Good movie i have watched it you have to watch ittoo thats good move kkkkkkk

Sometimes stories are so rich and compelling that they don't need to be well told. Sometimes the telling is so rich and immersive that they don't need a story. Janet Planet is the latter. It's visually beautiful and keenly observed. You get to know and like some characters in their moment. And can imagine some arcs. I just prefer to see something, anything, resolved in some way. This just is. It's nice.

This is the kind of flick that gives Independent film a bad name. Pretentious, plotless, and boring. I get there is a lot of subtlety in the script and the acting, but it seems (at least in my viewing) to no real end or purpose.

There’s a difference between minimalist and vacuous, and writer-director Annie Baker doesn’t seem to know the difference. The playwright’s debut feature, to put it simply, is boring, pretentious, meandering, unfocused and a big, fat waste of time. It’s so dull, in fact, that the film makes the works of Kelly Reichardt appear utterly fascinating. Set in 1991 in the hippie-dominated arts community of rural western Massachusetts, the film follows the story (if one could even call it that) of middle-aged acupuncturist Janet (Julianne Nicholson) as she struggles to sort out what appears to have been a wayward, meandering life. And, as this tale plays out, it faithfully sticks to that course, too, an influence that’s clearly wearing off on Janet’s equally clueless, incessantly brooding, 8-year-old daughter, Lacy (newcomer Zoe Ziegler). Along the way, the duo experiences an array of cryptic, inconsequential involvements with others who are apparently fascinated with Janet (though goodness knows why), all of whom (Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo, Elias Koteas) are just as lost and boring as Janet is. So what’s the point in all this? Who knows – and, not long into the picture, who cares? The raves that have been showered on this tedious, tiresome piece of filmmaking are a complete mystery to me, given its prevailing mundane nature and monotone performances by players who all sound like they’ve been shot up with sodium pentothal. Nicholson, in particular, comes across as so disengaged that she probably could have just as easily phoned in this performance (despite claims that this is the breakthrough role that she’s supposedly been waiting for – please, watch her in “August: Osage County” (2013) instead). What’s more, this picture probably has some of the worst sound quality I’ve ever seen in a contemporary production – so bad that I had to struggle to be able to hear what was being said (and I was sitting in the theater’s second row). And the film’s feeble attempts at trying to incorporate some kind of subtle, nuanced metaphysical undercurrent fail miserably as well, treated almost as if their inclusion was an afterthought. If you dare to consider giving this one a look, make sure you don’t watch it when you’re tired – you just might fall asleep soon after the opening credits roll, an understandable reaction, to be sure.

The previous day, I had approached the watching of Ceylan's 197-minute masterful "About Dry Grasses" with trepidation, wondering if it would be engaging for its unusual length for modern filmmaking. The appearance of the end credits took me completely by surprise, so involved was I by Ceylan's creation of the society in this part of his Turkish homeland. In complete contrast, Annie Baker's film was so static in nature that tedium set in after ten minutes and its 113 minutes length seemed interminable. Add to that, a truly poor quality sound "design" by Paul Hsu - do none of headline creative talent here sit through a performance of the film in a genuine cinema before releasing it on the paying public - made watching this film a cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. And yet you look at the cast assembled - Julianne Nicholson, Sophie Okonedo, Will Patton, Elias Koteas, - and you wonder how they were convinced to join this project. Maybe they were seduced by the much- maligned award given to Annie Baker of a Pulitzer Prize for writing a play back in 2014. This proves once more that a prestigious prize given in one medium does not necessarily guarantee success in another. Still it was good of A24 and the good old BBC to give Baker the money to make what is essentially a home movie. If I was the editor, Lucian Johnston, I'd be wary of putting this on my cv if I wanted to progress in the world of filmmaking. Hsu's notoriety is already cast-iron.