The Circuit

The quiet build of Alex Holdridge's indie postcard to LA romance -- "In Search of a Midnight Kiss" -- found a lot of ink in this week's New Yorker.  Before reading the review I sent an email to Alex, congratulating him on the prize.  That much real estate in the New Yorker can't be bad, could it? 

I didn't hear back from him.  Then I read the review, where Anthony Lane waxes for several pages on how the film is neat and beautiful while being strange and obscene. 

... in Holdridge’s movie there is as much to repel as there is to allure, and I cannot imagine leaving a screening of it in anything less than two minds.

Thus, the review is of two minds - the positive and negative are mashed and blended.  If you're the filmmaker, I'd suspect the harsh sentences overwhelm the praise. 

But Lane's characterization of the romantic drama is perhaps the best explanation of the review's direction.  He blames it (or praises it) on the tendency of American indie film:

And that pretty much sums up the mixed mood in which Holdridge’s film unfolds, and which makes it such a neat distillation of what we mean by American independent cinema: the compulsion to proceed by nudges and sidelong glances, to build a character through the accumulation of quirks, and to gesture toward the deep end of human behavior and then dart quickly away. If mainstream Hollywood cleaves to the story arc, indie creators prefer the story sine wave, with a trough for every peak.

In LA the film will open August 12 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown LA (much of the film is set in LA's underrated downtown). 

For info, click here.