Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

robinsonfeatures Micah and Jo meet at a party, get drunk, have sex and wake up the following morning with hangovers. She is more than willing to let it end there, to the point of lying about her real name and running away, but Micah has other ideas. After discovering her name and address he tracks her down to the apartment she shares with her white curator boyfriend who is away working in London. Jo reluctantly lets him in and he proceeds to question her about who pays her rent, whether her boyfriend is white, why there are no pictures on the wall as well as questioning her blackness. Although he comes across as somewhat annoying, for the purposes of the plot we are led to believe that Jo is so charmed by his behaviour that she agrees to spend the day with him. Micah spends the time continuing to criticise Jo's awareness of black culture, complaining about the gentrification of the city which parallels the gentrification of black people, questioning Jo's lack of employment and finally berating her for not being involved with a person of colour.For all his blackness Micah is ignorant about why Black History Month is in February. For all his complaints about gentrification he is not part of the campaign to halt it. He complains about Jo's boyfriend being white but it is clear from his MySpace page that his former girlfriend was white. Micah is not impressed with Jo spending her time printing teeshirts to sell but his job cleaning out fish tanks is hardly anything to brag about and his final rant that she should be going out black or Latino men doesn't carry much weight as he doesn't appear to have any black or Latino friends. Heck the party where they meet is thrown by a wealthy white guy who he is clearly friends with. Although Jo seems to be relatively intelligent and confident, she fails to stand up to many of the criticisms levelled at her, or call Micah out on his obvious hypocrisy. So we are left wondering why it is Jo gives Micah such an easy ride. Is it because she shares Micah's rather narrow view of the world? Or that she simply sees no point in making unnecessary waves when their association is just a one day distraction from her real life. How much more satisfying would it have been for her to turn the tables on Micah and get him to open up about his real reason for pursuing her so hard and why he had such a problem with her boyfriend being white. Was it that he'd had his heart broken by a white woman and felt things would be easier with a black partner? Or was he looking to exact some kind of revenge?I stumbled across this film pretty recently. It was categorised as part of the mumblecore genre presumably because it had an obviously small budget and featured then unknown actors and playing characters of a certain age who spend most of the film simply talking to one another. Where it differs from the usual mumblecore offering is that the characters are black and that race along with gentrification are big themes. It's interesting to read the glowing reviews about this film and while part of me agrees with the poster who suggested they were written by people involved in the production, I think it's more likely to be dow to a willingness to overlook the film's obvious flaws because there are sadly so few films featuring hipster black people happily listening to indie music and part of the indie scene.

TheQuietStorm And this is coming from someone who eagerly anticipated seeing this film. I was not impressed. In fact, I was bored stiff for most of the film.It started off with a lot of promise. I was engaged to the mystery of these two totally different characters, brought together by a one-night stand and reunited by curiosity--possibly loneliness. Despite her cattiness, I approved of the idea of him pursuing her and finding out who she really is. As I expected, she turns out to be a lonely yet worldly, intelligent, open minded woman who became smitten by the equally lonesome, pro-black charmer with radical ideologies. The dialogue was great and the cinematography was solid.Then, the film went left for me. It started with the preachy conversation they had at her place. It was appropriate but too convenient for the telling of this story. Then we move on to some uninteresting visuals inside a museum, some angled on passages I needed to be a speed reader just to take in before it was cut away, only to learn that I was being preached to even more. The whole 2nd ACT seemed to be stretched out in order to reach the necessary amount of minutes needed to be categorized as a legitimate feature. I mean, that party scene was longer than the both of "House Party" and "House Party 2," and what happened? Nothing. Just a long, drawn out uneventful party scene.To make things worse, the filmmaker threw in this moment featuring a community group discussing gentrification, a subject I'm deeply concerned about. However, it was touched on just enough to feel forced and not enough to hold any relevance for the story.Also, the acting seemed flat, mostly due to the male lead.In the end, I didn't know these characters at all. I wanted to care but I really didn't. I learned absolutely nothing. I even found myself reaching for a connection between gentrification and the love story. I may see how the main characters and their choices are being influenced by it, but that's me pushing it. The connection was unclear, leaving me with the only option of looking for something that might not be there. It wasn't a good film. 4/10.

Chris Knipp Micah (Wyatt Cenac) takes Joanne (Tracey Heggins) to the Museum of the African Diaspora on a Sunday afternoon. They woke up that morning in somebody else's house not knowing each other's names after a one-night stand at a party where they both got very drunk. It's San Francisco. They're black. They ride bikes. She was very unfriendly at first, not just because it was a drunken coupling but because she has a white curator boyfriend she lives with who just happens to be in London for the moment, but she loves him.The first part of this first film by Barry Jenkins, which is shot in digital video tuned to be almost but not quite totally drained of color (like the city, as we are to learn), with pale grays and very white whites, is sustained by Micah's efforts to make Joanne want to spend some time with him. He thinks they ought to get to know each other, and it's a Sunday. She's not at all interested at first. They're both hung over, after all. She lets him take her home in a taxi and then just gets out and runs. But she leaves her wallet on the floor. To go back and find her it takes a search, on his bike, across town, because the address on her license isn't current. The film is also sustained by being very specifically shot in San Francisco. When Joanne goes to a gallery to run an errand it's a very specific gallery. The Museum of the African Diaspora is the Museum of the African Diaspora. The light is San Francisco light. Micah and Joanne are young urban sophisticates. That, as Micah points out, is not only specific but makes them a small minority of a small minority, because gentrification has shrunk the city's blacks to 7% of the city population (New York's proportion is 28%).Later buying groceries for dinner at his place (because Micah succeeds and Joanne does spend the day with him, and more) they happen upon a group discussing what appears to be the imminent banishment of rent control in San Francisco. Is Jenkins lecturing us, or just treading water? It doesn't matter so much, because the interactions of Micah and Joanne and the wry, cautious words they use when they talk to each other remain central, and are as specific and accurate to who they are (if not to San Francisco) as the cityscapes and the special light. These two fine actors and this sensitive filmmaker certainly know how to make it real and to record how unpredictably things change from minute to minute. When Micah takes Joanne to the museum, instead of SFMoMA (her original suggestion), and then to the Martin Luther King Memorial at Yerba Buena Center, maybe it's turning into a pretty cool date. But when he leads her over a little bridge there and says, "This is like LA," she just rather coldly says, "Never been," and then, rubbing it in once more and pulling back, "This is a one-night stand." A ride on the merry-go-round at Yerba Buena, she seems to be saying, isn't going to change anything. This delicate homage to a moment is also a rueful acknowledgment of how hard it is to change the way things are.And it has to be a bit of a lecture, because Micah is "born and raised," while Joanne is a "transplant," and he wants to remind her how the Fillmore and the Lower Haight were wiped out in the Sixties in "Urban Redevelopment:" goodbye black people, goodbye white artists. Micah lives in an immaculate little apartment in the Tenderloin. Micah, as the voice of Barry Jenkins, wants to reclaim San Francisco for everyday people. Actually, Micah and Joanne seem like a perfect couple. Maybe that's why they can't be together, except just for this one day? You want to just shout out to them, "Can't you just be friends?" They fit so well together. Is this 'Medicine for Melancholy' or just 'melancholy'? Maybe it's medicine 'and' melancholy. That must be it. A fine little lyric of people and a place. And wholly without cliché except maybe for the tagline: "A night they barely remember becomes a day they'll never forget. " Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2008. This had its debut at SXSW, the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas. 'Medicine for Melancholy' tied for the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature in San Francisco with Rodrigo Pla's 'La Zona.'

jamespark Just saw the premiere at SXSW. An absolutely beautiful movie. I love the look of the film. The way it's shot changes over time as the story unfolds subtly reinforcing events on screen. The actors work so very wonderfully together. The protagonists are able to connect via a shared circumstance not easily communicated to others. The feelings and thoughts of both over the 24 hours of this film's settings really came through and affected me greatly. Kudos to the whole team. They were able to make a professional-looking film with a skeleton crew and a nearly nonexistent budget which any auteur would be proud of. I can't wait to be able to see this movie again, next time in SF.