Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011)

Jack, Marcia, Hugh, and I loved this little independent movie about a slacker, his brother, and their mother searching for meaning in their lives. Though our local paper saw fit to publish a bad review from wire services and wrote a new, mean-spirited headline, plenty of our fellow audience members laughed and cried, and rottentomatoes gives it 73% critics/71% viewers.

As Jeff, Jason Segal (detailed in The Muppets) gives us the perfect blend of hopeless and hopeful as he puts down the bong and ventures forth from his mother's basement. In fact, hopeless plus hopeful also describes the characters of his brother Pat, played with energy by Ed Helms (after I wrote about him in The Hangover he was in Cedar Rapids and The Hangover Part II), and their mother Sharon, an actual grown-up portrayed by Susan Sarandon (detailed in The Lovely Bones, then was in A Solitary Man and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps). I wrote about the directing/writing team of brothers Jay and Mark Duplass in Cyrus, and they clearly have the brother dynamic down pat, so to speak. Also featured are Judy Greer (the Other Man's wife in The Descendants) and Rae Dawn Chong (the daughter of Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong fame, she has been working fairly steadily since her more memorable roles in the 1980s, but I didn't recognize her, even in Cyrus).

The lovely music, by Michael Andrews, is, like his Cyrus soundtrack, not available online. You can hear a loop of some of the themes on the movie's official website. If you have a myspace account (I got one when Amy was in middle school), you can listen to some nice songs of his on his myspace page. And here's a list of the five other songs listed in the credits.

My post on Cyrus reminds me that the Duplass brothers' first feature The Puffy Chair (also about brothers) had a lot of handheld camera work like this one does. So my advice to those prone to motion picture motion sickness: sit near the back of the room. I couldn't, and had to cast my eyes down from time to time to keep from getting nauseous. That being said, you should definitely leave home to see this one.