Skills Like This
Review from UK:
Skills indeed. The winner of two audience awards at SXSW this year, this is a comedy so slick and sweet, so confident in the execution of its neatly-crafted story, that it's hard to believe it's the work of first-timers. Spencer Berger has penned a wonderfully sharp script, and also turns in a lead performance of devastating charm, while director Monty Miranda decisively proves himself a director to watch. Berger who is possessed of an impressive white guy's Afro, which also provides the film with its snappy logo plays Max Solomon, a playwright who's getting nowhere. When his latest work proves bad enough to actually cause a death, Max finally brings himself to tell his friends that he has no future in theatre. They are quick to agree. Max then faces the crisis common to those young-ish bohemian types who have always vaguely regarded themselves as artists, but who lack any discernible talent. What now? What is he for? And how is he going to pay his rent? An offhand conversation about crime provides an unexpected opportunity. Max leaves the diner table, crosses the road, robs a bank pausing only to flirt with gorgeous teller Lucy (Kerry Knuppe) and returns to his seat. His friends don't even notice he's been gone. He's a natural. The changes wreaked upon Max's life once he has identified larceny as his calling are handled here with an easy charm that lands Skills Like This somewhere between To Catch a Thief and Bottle Rocket. Though its humour is sometimes on the risky side (witness Max's friend Tommy blithely assessing the future hotness of pubescent schoolgirls!), it bypasses the sneery tone of much US indie comedy in favour of a defiantly uncool strain of goofy positivity. Though it evokes with stinging accuracy the wayward social world of the constituency that Hal Hartley memorably defined (in his short Theory of Achievement) as "young, white, middle class, college- educated, unskilled, unemployed, broke", this is ultimately a warm-hearted, affectionate film. And just as Max finds himself suddenly propelled into the top tier of non-violent crime on the strength of one job, so this film will surely upgrade its creators swiftly from the status of hopeful unknowns.
-Hannah McGill, Edinburgh International Film Festival Director
Review from UK:
Skills indeed. The winner of two audience awards at SXSW this year, this is a comedy so slick and sweet, so confident in the execution of its neatly-crafted story, that it's hard to believe it's the work of first-timers. Spencer Berger has penned a wonderfully sharp script, and also turns in a lead performance of devastating charm, while director Monty Miranda decisively proves himself a director to watch. Berger who is possessed of an impressive white guy's Afro, which also provides the film with its snappy logo plays Max Solomon, a playwright who's getting nowhere. When his latest work proves bad enough to actually cause a death, Max finally brings himself to tell his friends that he has no future in theatre. They are quick to agree. Max then faces the crisis common to those young-ish bohemian types who have always vaguely regarded themselves as artists, but who lack any discernible talent. What now? What is he for? And how is he going to pay his rent? An offhand conversation about crime provides an unexpected opportunity. Max leaves the diner table, crosses the road, robs a bank pausing only to flirt with gorgeous teller Lucy (Kerry Knuppe) and returns to his seat. His friends don't even notice he's been gone. He's a natural. The changes wreaked upon Max's life once he has identified larceny as his calling are handled here with an easy charm that lands Skills Like This somewhere between To Catch a Thief and Bottle Rocket. Though its humour is sometimes on the risky side (witness Max's friend Tommy blithely assessing the future hotness of pubescent schoolgirls!), it bypasses the sneery tone of much US indie comedy in favour of a defiantly uncool strain of goofy positivity. Though it evokes with stinging accuracy the wayward social world of the constituency that Hal Hartley memorably defined (in his short Theory of Achievement) as "young, white, middle class, college- educated, unskilled, unemployed, broke", this is ultimately a warm-hearted, affectionate film. And just as Max finds himself suddenly propelled into the top tier of non-violent crime on the strength of one job, so this film will surely upgrade its creators swiftly from the status of hopeful unknowns.
-Hannah McGill, Edinburgh International Film Festival Director