Easier with Practice

As young, first time director, Kyle Patrick Alvarez, created quite a film, Easier with Practice, and is creating quite a stir. A passion of his since forever, was to direct and create movies. A lot of people do not know he is very musical also and brought great independent music to the film. He is very well read and a great writer. He really understands the entire process of movie making. Not every director has that gift. Everyone who worked with him on the film, have nothing but respect for Kyle Patrick. A 'true' Indie film made on a small budget. He casted the film perfectly. Although there is phone sex, the movie is really about an experience, a love story, a troubled soul. Based on a true story that was maybe 3 pages long, Kyle Patrick immediately knew upon reading it, he could make it into a full length movie. He is a Hollywood 'REFRESHER'! SOMEONE TO WATCH indeed.....

"What are you wearing?" A late-night call to his motel room brings writer Davy Mitchell (Brian Geraghty) an unexpected introduction to the mysterious "Nicole" (Kathryn Aselton), who likes to seduce guys over the phone. Before long, Davy's dull book tour of New Mexico has been transformed into an onanistic odyssey that shocks even his brother Sean.

I shudder to think about the prurient comedy that could have resulted from this set-up if Judd Apatow or the American Pie team had got their sticky fingers on it. Fortunately, Davy Rothbart's GQ article "What Are You Wearing?", has been adapted by writer/director Kyle Patrick Alvarez into a low-key but surprisingly affecting drama about loneliness and the yawning gap between romantic expectations and real life.

The opening credits feature a montage of images from the covers of those dime store romantic novels that feature big-shouldered heroes ravishing big-breasted ladies with huge red lips. It turns out that Davy keeps one of these books in the car that he and brother Sean (Kel O'Neill) have been sharing during their extended road trip. A brief reading from this torrid romance suggests that Sean has a rather more earthy approach to relations with the opposite sex than his elder brother does.

The film begins in a bookshop with the earnest, bespectacled Davy giving a reading from his collection of short stories, Things People Do To Each Other. When the brothers check into yet another nondescript motel in Albuquerque, Sean goes out to buy cigarettes and Davy settles in for an evening of channel surfing. Moments later the phone rings and Nicole enters his room. Of course she's not actually in the room -- it just feels like it to the audience and especially the flustered Davy. At first he thinks it's a mistake or Sean playing a prank. After all, why would an alluring young woman be calling him out of the blue? In the 10-minute scene that ensues the camera doesn't move from the figure of Davy sitting on his bed cradling the receiver. Soon she's telling him what she's wearing (nothing as it turns out) and encouraging him to lose his inhibitions and engage in the kind of explicit chat that you normally find on premium rate numbers.

It's early in the story so we don't know much about Davy, but the way this conversation plays out is more psychologically than sexually revealing. Alvarez isn't interested in showing us his awkward fumblings. From his expressions and rather stilted responses we gather that 28-year-old Davy doesn't have much imagination or confidence when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex.

This riveting sequence is pretty much guaranteed to leave audiences shaken, stirred and full of questions about who Nicole is and whether this movie is going to have a nasty sting in the tail. After all, in the horror and thriller genres, getting dragged into a phone conversation with a stranger tends not to be a recipe for long life and happiness. Think of Drew Barrymore's quiz ordeal in Scream or Colin Farrell's Phone Booth nightmare and you'll get my point.

The first half of Easier with Practice plays out like a road movie, as the brothers move through a succession of bookshops, motels, cafés and bars. There's a comic feel to Davy's attempts to conceal his ongoing relationship from his sceptical brother, who reminds him "She could be an obese middle-aged woman with a thousand cats." But overall what Alvarez really captures is a feeling of romantic yearning on Davy's part, as he tries to get Nicole to open up about herself: "Can't we talk a little bit?" he pleads during one of their late-night chats.

Having opened his hero up to the possibility of intimacy, Alvarez brings him back down to earth as the book tour ends. Back home in his poky bachelor apartment festooned with Post-It notes, Davy is just another loser with an unfulfilling temp job. Except now he believes that in Nicole he's found someone who really gets him and that they might eventually meet up.

Socially awkward and sexually gauche men provide great material for comedy -- especially when they fall into the embrace of rapacious women. But this film doesn't take that approach, though there are some painfully funny moments during Davy's conversations with Nicole. Geraghty's skill lies in making Davy sympathetic and believable as he blunders through a meeting with the attractive Samantha (Marguerite Moreau), with whom he's had some kind of failed tryst. As with the young student who tried to chat him up in a bar during the trip, we see a man who wears his reticence like a badge of honour. He's disapproving of the way his brother casually cheats on his girlfriend, though you sense there might be some envy, too.

As Davy struggles to reconcile the reality of his relations with women with the fantasy that is Nicole, the film moves towards a climax that is in keeping with what's gone before, but doesn't neatly resolve the hero's problems. To say any more about the plot might spoil what is an emotionally resonant and well-acted drama.

Brian Geraghty, whose geeky look here is reminiscent of the young Harrison Ford, was previously in The Hurt Locker and Jarhead. This is a role that takes him and the audience on an emotional journey, though in many scenes he's alone -- just staring into the abyss. It's a great performance and one that is beautifully framed by Alvarez and cinematographer David Morrison, who have woven an air of romance around banal locations like parking lots, laundromats and motel rooms.

Easier with Practice is an impressive debut from Alvarez that deserves to find an appreciative audience. I just hope that its thoughtful approach to issues of sexual identity and isolation won't go over the heads of film fans weaned on a diet of stoner dude comedies about idiots with overactive libidos.

While far from a perfect film, this is a welcome reminder of why indie film-making is so important. This is a story you haven't seen before, told in a bold and honest way, and willing to deal with complex emotions and no answers.

It all starts when a shy, introverted writer on a pathetic book tour(accompanied by his brother) gets what seems to be a wrong number a call from a sexy sounding strange woman that morphs into hot phone sex (all in one long multi minute take).

The odd development of this intense and mysterious ongoing phone relationship, and how it effects Davy's lonely life makes up the rest of the story, often going in delightfully or disturbingly unexpected directions (which I won't spoil here).

There are some real weak spots. Some of the actors aren't quite up to the sophisticated subtlety of what Averez is going after. No one is 'bad' but great actors in certain choice roles could have brought out much more. There also a cinematic cheat that is so obvious, and so central to the story that it really alienated me at a key moment. But I'm still glad I saw the film, and I find it resonating with me the next day.

Aside from some nice moments from its young ensemble, this movie is the film equivalent of a sloth. Slow, odd-looking, it never seems to find its pacing, and by the end I was left wondering if the theater offered refunds to dissatisfied film-goers. Perhaps worst of all was the film's predictability: The kitschy neo-folk indie soundtrack, the droll low-budget aesthetic of New Mexico, the denouement and "twist" reveal, everything was extremely predictable or familiar. No originality here, whatsoever.

Everything about this film felt laborious. Two hours of shifting in my chair left me exasperated and exhausted. That this film merits award nominations only shows how thin the field is these days. Boo.

Davy, a twenty-eight year old white male author is on a road trip with his brother to promote his collection of short stories, when one night, in a motel, he gets a random phone call for sex and embarks on a series of phone call encounters with a voice called Nicole. Inexperienced, pronouncing quite often the word "embarassing", he seems unable to find his way with embodied, to put it that way, women. The phone calls persist, one way always, then cease after Davy gets furious about the unreal premise of such a "relationship." Things, days drag, until weeks later Nicole calls back, and they finally arrange a revelatory meeting.

With a cinematic vocabulary proper for indie rock videos, and with a deceptively minimal approach, Alvarez may lure us into believing his film mode fits, even converts the story into a Raymond Carver one. There may be the random, fleeting and nostalgic empathy his stories exemplify, but here this roots into fully fledged individualization in the final confrontation.

Aided with a sensitive cast and armed with Brian Geraghty's most tender and haunted and Eugene Byrd's rustling, miraculous performance, the film from indie isolation and generic alienation transforms masculine identity's vulnerability and sense of precarious confrontation into poignant human recognition. The final scene, impossibly delicate and difficult to handle, preserving a sense of secrecy that signifies shared affect, is an instant classic. A very moving, delightful film.

(The opening credits are also pleasurable: tactile, from the snap-shot rhythm accompanying the soundtrack to the traveling of the camera revealing fragments of pulp fiction covers, as if tenderly mocking the human erotic interest, they are the most meaningful opening credits I have seen since Croneberg's "Spider" Rorschach opening.)