Go see Half-Nelson
(as seen from the lobby of one of the theaters on Shattuck Ave.)
So. Movies.
First, let me be up front: I am shilling for a friend here. Once I’ve disclosed the full extent of this, I’ll go on to convince you that it doesn’t matter. Ryan Fleck directed this film and co-wrote it with his girlfriend, Anna Boden, who produced it. Ryan’s dad and my dad lived in a Berkeley commune together, and Ryan’s kind of like my fictive cousin. Friend of the family, not terribly close, but still related, but not technically. Communes make things complicated like that.
So when we went to see it at the SF Film Society’s International Film Festival in April, I was totally willing to cheer my head off for whatever the hell he had made, and clap for family’s sake. Luckily, he’s made an insanely good film. Like, easily the best film I’ve seen in two years–and I’m hard to please. It picked up the Fipresci prize there, and from what I can tell just about every critic who’s ever seen it loved it. It got reviewed on Ebert & Roeper, where Roeper and guest critic Kevin Smith couldn’t stop telling the audience to see it. Entertainment Weekly gave it an A, Time Out New York gave it 5/6, and The Onion gave it an A-. Its Rotten Tomato meter is just under 90%.
The short version? This is an amazing film. It opens in a handful of theaters on Friday. If you pass it up, you’re missing out.
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