The Low Life

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May 2, 2009 Well I can see why no one else has seen this. Kyra Sedgwick is as bafflingly obnoxious as always. Something about that woman just annoys the fuck out of me regardless of what she plays or how she plays it. It just dawned on me: She's the female version of Nicolas Cage, who I also loathe for reasons I'm still incapable of explaining. It all suddenly makes sense! See more Oct 10, 2008 I absloutley love this movie See more Sep 6, 2008 I'm not sure what it is that make people admire and relate to movies about failure. Well, wait, I take that back. People like to watch other people fail because doing so let them indulge either their sadistic schadenfreude ("these people fail in the ways I don't") or their masochistic melancholy ("these people fail in the same ways I do"). What I really don't get is the appeal of watching movies where the failure is unmitigated by success or redemption of any kind, where the attempt of art to mirror life mistakenly becomes a portrayal of only the negative side of that life. The main characters of The Low Life are a collection of slackers, misfits, and also-rans who, upon finding that life (or Los Angeles) was not going to hand them their dreams on a silver platter, decide to settle for passionless, boring and unambitious existences. Would-be-writer John (Rory Cochrane) is emotionless and withdrawn, his friends complain like whining children, and his potential love interest can't or won't remove herself from an unending cycle of rich but creepy potential husbands whom she could never really love. Nearly everyone in the movie is self-absorbed to the point of near-blindness. And the one character who manages to stay unselfish and positive in the face of his own failures--John's roommate Andrew (Sean Astin)--is not only socially maladjusted to the point of annoying everyone, but is eventually killed in a random car wreck and mourned by all of three people, his parents and John. There have been other movies that explore the hopeless grind of an unfulfilling life or the frustration of dreams that just won't come true, and been successful and popular in doing so. But most of those movies were either supposed to be funny (Office Space), redemptive (American Beauty), or both (Swingers). The Low Life had the benefit of a strong cast (Astin and Kyra Sedgewick are two bright spots), but its characters' blase negativity, bitter boredom, spoiled whining and unsatisfying routines end up making the audience almost as bored as they are. See more Aug 3, 2008 Interesting characters and dialogue. See more Jul 30, 2008 This film is the embodiment of generation x independent cinema, with it's witty dialogue, underlying sense of complete hopelessness and it's gritty depiction of life in LA.Astin gives a career defining performance, balanced perfectly by the emotionless acting of Cochrane. Everyone who is under the age of twenty two should watch this movie. See more Jul 12, 2008 Sean Astin's superbly moving performance nearly saves this flick. See more Read all reviews

The Low Life

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