Review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) by Matt G — 13 Nov 2009

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is hideous, and although brief at only 80 minutes, feels like at least twice that.

I'm really disappointed to see just how badly Krasinski dropped the ball. I was pretty interested after seeing the trailer, but much to my disappointment, any and all of the humor seen in the trailer is out of context and occurs within the first 20 minutes.

From there, it's 60 more minutes of flat, dead, and useless cinematic meandering. The film crawls along like a scatterplot, jumping randomly from one subject to the next in a completely random manner. There is absolutely no reason that everything should jump around the way it does. It's told out of order for god-knows-what reason and it's incredibly irritating because NOTHING HAPPENS!

The story, from what I could piece together afterwards, was about a grad student writing a paper about men by interviewing them. Why is this much-needed setup the LAST SCENE of the film? We spend 80 minutes with this cold, dejected woman who is talking to a bunch of guys about relationships and sex and there is no rhyme or reason to it. No purpose, no story, no nothing. If the audience had been given a story to follow or a character to root for, it would be a pretty interesting film.

But instead, it plays out like an off-off-broadway reading of The Cock Monologues. It's just one long monologue after another, and it gets really tiresome after a while. Like another film I saw recently (Women in Trouble), this is yet another example of something that was executed in a stage-like manner instead of something for the screen. It's like watching a bunch of men auditioning for a role for 80 minutes with the slightest hint of a story peeking through when it would have benefitted from a more direct approach.

Krasinski directs this very adequately. There aren't any glaring problems to be found, but there's not a lot of really interesting things either. There's one scene that takes place at an airport that's done in a unique manner, but that's pretty much it. Everything else is very by-the-numbers.

I can appreciate what Krasinski was going for with this, but it comes off as very pretentious, masturbatory filmmaking. This film was seemingly made for nobody but himself, which is fine I suppose, but even the most inward film can have something the audience can appreciate. This is just a cold and alienating experience. Watching this felt like watching a film by that one douchebag film student in your class who fellates himself all the time and makes films that nobody likes but him. I can't imagine Krasinski is that kind of guy, but if this film is any indication, maybe he is.