Michael Ledo
This is what we call a major league indy plot with loosely connected characters...intertwine is the phrase they like to use to make it sound artsy. There is a missing young girl. Beckworth (Greg Germann) the neighbor is a person of interest. Frankie (Julie Benz) is the investigating officer. Her friend Kate (Elizabeth Mitchell) is the sweetest thing this side of candy, and she is married to a psychologist Ryan (Dane Cook) who lies and cheats. One of his patients is TV writer Allegra (Kali Hawk) who is African-American and hates blacks. There is also a woman who cares for her brother. He is in a vegetative state. She wants to push his wheelchair in a marathon. There is also a rock band, the woman Ryan is cheating with, a rookie cop, and a teacher so obsessed with the missing girl, that it screws up his on-line video role playing game.The film builds up multiple characters in a mostly boring fashion. It isn't until the climatic ending that you begin to feel you have just seen a decent film. This film reminded me in many ways of another indie, "Garden Party." If you don't like one story or character, wait it will change. The acting was exceptionally good, however a story being all over the place is not everyone's cup of tea. If you are not an indie fan, you may not enjoy this feature.F-bomb, sex, nudity.
anicole-preston
Answers to Nothing is so many things in one but most of all it is a roller coaster of emotions. As a vignette film it spends just enough time on each character so that you still get to know what is going on in each situation. Not too much time is spent so you forget the rest of the characters, and it is all interconnected in some way. This feature of the film shows how small the world really is. Deep and poignant, each character is looking for something to fill the void that was left in their lives, like many peoples lives today. The dialogue and some stories are charming and heartbreaking. The characters are each trying so hard for something that is wanted so badly in each of their lives and seeking to overcome those obstacles. Dane Cook does an amazing job at something we aren't all used to normally seeing him do. Answers to nothing is a film about the fragility of life and relationships. I would recommend this film to anyone who wants a film to make them feel, Answers to Nothing is one for you.
ArtandJoyofMovies
TMG says titles to movies can often be telling. Answers to Nothing? Yeah? Well let me tell you. When I see a film, I want answers to at least one thing—like why I spent my time and money suffering through it. If you are too happy for the holidays and just feel good about life in general, then go see this film. It will turn you around quick. If I want to be this depressed, I can take a handful of Valium and watch reruns of Nancy Pelosi speeches.Why so many movie producers and screen writers are just dying to load us all up with piles of depression, cynicism and angst is beyond me. It is the same affliction that hits many country western singers. If you are among the three, whacked out northern Vermonters who were inspired by Melancholia, by all means, take your friends at the Jack Kevorkian Society to see this film.For starters, there is no plot or storyline. You simply have a depressed guy named Ryan (Cook) in a loathsome affair trying to gather sperm for his wife Kate (Mitchell) to have a baby and deal with her own, tragic inadequacies. All around him are vignettes of people with atrocious insecurities, hangups and severe mental illness. Worse, you later learn Ryan is a mental health therapist treating one of them. You pretty much have a pyromaniac tending the fire department here. The most pointed line of the film is Ryan's estranged Dad advising him "In human relations, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths." I think he was quoting the Bible according to Tammy Faye & Jim Baker.There was some hope because their is one subplot of a guy who kidnapped a young girl and an interesting twist that resolves that situation. There is one funny scene of Allegra (not allergy medicine, thought this young black gal is sort of allergic to everyone for awhile) doing an obsessive-compulsive thing trying to sugar her ice tea through a straw. But that is about it. There is a guy pretending to be a cop woven in here, but it makes no sense.At the end, nothing is resolved and nothing is really answered. The writers should have stayed with the kidnapped little girl theme more. It had some promise. Nothing else did. I bet you anything a lot of mentally unstable people and a few manic, tree huggers around Boulder, Colorado or tripping down State Street in Madison, Wisconsin will proclaim this to be a great and inspirational film. Hence, my analysis will be proved correct.The trailer says this film is about "choices that define us." Indeed. One might be choose to see a better film this holiday season.
Chris_Pandolfi
I can't help but believe that somewhere within "Answers to Nothing" is the great film I very much wanted it to be. Told as a series of interweaving subplots linked together by a single event, it touches on a number of issues that are both fascinating and compelling, including infidelity, recovery, loss, intolerance, love, faith, and strength of character. It features a decent cast, led by Dane Cook in his first dramatic role since the deliciously enjoyable 2007 crime thriller "Mr. Brooks." It had, in short, all the right ingredients. Unfortunately, the film falls victim to indecisive editing, character overload, implausible dramatic situations, and surprisingly unconvincing dialogue. All of this rests squarely on the shoulders of director Matthew Leutwyler, who's also the co-writer and editor.Taking place in Los Angeles, we meet a plethora of characters whose lives are in some way touched by the disappearance of a young girl. There's Frankie, the detective assigned to the case (Julie Benz); although she has yet to prove it, she seems convinced that the girl's neighbor, Beckworth (Greg Germann), is responsible for her disappearance. Indeed, he gives off creepy vibes in every scene he's in. He even makes the grossly impertinent gesture of asking Frankie out to dinner during his interrogation. Frankie's friend, an attorney named Kate (Elizabeth Mitchell), is attempting to get pregnant through in vetro fertilization. So badly does she want a baby that she initially fails to see then turns a blind eye to the infidelity of her husband, a therapist named Ryan (Cook). He has been dating a fledgling rock singer named Tara (Aja Volkman), who gets gigs but has yet to get her big break.Ryan doesn't believe in anything, love least of all. He's angry at his father for abandoning his mother and not telling her the truth. His mother, Marylin (Barbara Hershey), is unquestionably the happiest person in the whole film, although it's obvious she gets by on nothing more than blind faith. She tried to instill this in Ryan by repeatedly telling him the highly romantic story of how his grandparents met during World War II. Whether or not it happened in the way she tells it, no one knows for sure. I'm not criticizing her for being this way; I'd take happy lies over sad realities any day of the week and twice on Sundays. She even makes a good point about how her love for Ryan lacks empirical evidence. The only way he knows that she loves him is because he believes her when she tells him so.We now branch out further into subplots that are either (a) so distantly related to the child abduction subplot that they seem to belong in another movie, or (b) are so badly developed that they should not have been included in the first place. Kate's current client is a recovering alcoholic named Drew (Miranda Bailey), who's fighting her parents for custody of her brother, Erik (Vincent Ventresca), a former runner who's now a vegetable. She seeks redemption by entering herself and Erik into the L.A. Marathon, and by training hard for it. Meanwhile, we learn that Frankie is a single mom. In her only significant scene, Frankie's adolescent daughter (Karley Scott Collins) has a highly staged conversation with her teacher about Martin Luther King. The teacher, Carter (Mark Kelly), spends most of his time playing internet fantasy games. He has also, for reasons known only the filmmakers, become obsessed by the missing girl case.Then there's Ryan's patient, a self-loathing black woman named Allegra (Kali Hawk). A television writer, she soon meets and begins dating a white man named Evan (Zach Gilford), who sits in a booth and balances the sound for Tara's band. Something might have developed here had it not been merely a subplot. It deserved a film of its own. As it is, Evan is essentially a non-entity, and the root of Allegra's problems – including an extensive and arbitrary list of things she hates – remains undiscovered. Finally, there's Carter's neighbor, Jerry (Erik Palladino), who's introduced when he pulls over Tara for speeding. In due time, we see him scanning the obituaries and attending very specific funerals.Inevitably, some will compare this film to Paul Haggis' "Crash," in which Los Angeles is the setting for several interweaving stories that address social issues. Unlike this Oscar-winning masterpiece, "Answers to Nothing" is terribly unfocused. It spends too much time on certain subplot, not enough time on others, and develops all of them with the idea that there truly are answers to nothing. Certain scenes seem to have been included for purposes no greater than creating drama, most notably an unprovoked and unbelievable confrontation between Carter and Beckworth late in the film. Many passages of dialogue, including Marilyn's observations about faith and love, sound less like flowing theatrical conversations and more like sermons from a speech and debate class. It always makes me sad when a good idea is ruined by bad execution.-- Chris Pandolfi (www.atatheaternearyou.net)
