CineNiche

Normally we here at CineNiche have standards, but on this particular day we were roped into this one.  Jennifer Westfeldt wrote, directed, and stared in this slightly amusing rom-com that offers you and hour and a half of fulfilled expectations. The moment Friends With Kids  starts you already know the end, and as usual the perfectly acceptable retort to this type of film is that it is all about the journey.  The only trouble with stock answers is that they normally come attached to sub par films. The journey Friends With Kids  offers is the very American institution of monogamy.  From the offset we have two best friends who sleep around in an attempt to find, "the one," this is not their fault because popular culture dictates that soulmates exist so we cannot foul them for their search.  What comes next is the fundamental flaw of having a child - not that child rearing is a flaw but the instilled notion that it is what one ...

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden team up again in this coming of age film that steals a few ideas from every teen film ever made and infuses them with a hint of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest .  The directing duo created a powerhouse film in Half Nelson but here lack the imagination to transform seemingly cliché material into something extraordinary.  Ned Vizzini’s novel is the stepping stone for this pseudo-memoir piece, but as with any novel that is told from the first person point of view things are lost in translation or become too contrived from narration.  The film carries some feel good moments that stand out and sequences of mixed media that attempt to go beyond the normal teen fare but seem forced.  Anytime a film switches from normal narrative structure to animated sequences or a music video it has a inorganic feeling of manipulation, but certain films are made with these elements in mind from the beginning and weave in well, but here they stop the forward m...

Bill Maher, the stoned genius, creates a wonderful religious debate in his comic documentary directed by the controversial mind behind Borat , Larry Charles. The biggest problem with this otherwise brilliant dissertation on the logic of religion is that the dogmatic masses who should see this film - won't. In fact they tried to ban it. Religulous preaches to the choir, in this case its agnostic/atheist choir. The public whose immersed in their religious beliefs steer away from it and ignorantly label it as simple blasphemy. What makes this film brilliant is Maher's approach to the subject. No matter which faith monger he interviews, he remains level-headed without harshly attacking their beliefs. He's done his research here and the questions he posits only point out gaps or illogic of religion. Mostly he debates with evangelical Christians, but also Mormans and of course Scientologists. He is attempting through these interviews to fill in these gaps, but the questions he a...

Prior to Milos Forman's groundbreaking adaptation of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST , he made a wonderfully radical film called TAKING OFF which featured extreme hippy overtones. This film has never received a wide DVD release and thus is holy grail to find. I viewed a VHS of it recently and it still lives up to what it was in 1971. The basic plot is simple: a married couple Lynn and Larry Tyne cope with their runaway daughter. What makes this so interesting is how they cope. The Tynes' have decided that their daughter shouldn't be the only one having fun and seize the opportunity to relinquish their parenting duties to dance, drink, smoke pot, gamble, and be merry. Among the twenty films in Forman's repartee, the Czech born director has achieved international acclaim with only a select few. First with FIREMAN'S BALL (1967), then ONE FLEW... (1975), AMADEUS (1984), and finally MAN ON THE MOON (1999). Each one with its own independent theme and feel. ...