EssenceStory Well Deserved Praise

AboveDeepBuggy Some things I liked some I did not.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Augie W This is a pretty great film and as a fan of the national I'd been waiting to watch it for ages and it nearly pulls it off. It's funny affecting and obviously the tunes are great, the one thing that let it down slightly for me was the slightly 'scripted documentary' feeling I got in a few places, where you'd questions the veracity of what's happening and why there's a bunch of other camera people shooting a seemingly intimate set up. However, maybe this is being slightly pedantic. At the heart of the film it's a story about two brothers and their relationship and a very universal tale that I certainly related to, I found myself cringing and laughing in equal amounts. Overall well worth checking out.

MisterWhiplash Mistaken for Strangers is a film that I saw back in early 2014 at the IFC Center in New York. But it's also one of those films I almost forgot I saw- not because I meant to, it just got shuffled briefly out of my memory so far as the title - but I but was extremely glad just now I found the title as the subject matter. You may not know who the Berninger brothers are before going in (or you'll probably know one of them more likely than not), but by the end they leave their mark due to their personalities and how they relate to each other and the world around them.This is about a filmmaker brother (not a great one, but trying) who follows around his up-n-coming brother musician, who leads the band The National (you may/may not have heard them, big hit singles) while he's promoting a new album and playing concerts. Oh, and there are some incidents that make things awkward, weird and at times it's just a matter of this guy Tom Berninger messing up while kind of 'attached' with this band. Does he know what kind of movie he's making? Does he tell the band? What happens if this all falls apart and he goes back to making schlocky horror movies? Now there's stakes here - at one point the National is even involved at an event with the POTUS (that's an intense, kind of hysterical scene as I recall).So really, it's about this band The National, but only in the secondary sense. It's much more of a self-portrait, what it means if you keep mucking up your own work and getting in the way of doing what you know you can do creatively (this happens more than once, sometimes just due to the Party-of-One mentality Tom has). But in the light of this guy and his brother - a man who Tom looks up to, but also isn't sure he can really live up to in the sense of creative engagement. Can he make this a great movie? We're along for the ride either way, and it's a funny, affecting, and honest on all sides kind of experience. Charming, even.

Neil Procter Most reviews cite this as being an accidental success. If that is true isn't there an implication that spending years learning a craft and perfecting it is unnecessary? What I saw when I watched this movie was a sibling who was being indulged by his family and his brother's band members, and this afforded him the chance to film the band's world tour. What he did, however, in classic narcissist style,was film himself most of the time. Organisation and planning were concepts he had no idea about. When he interviewed the band members he not only had no questions prepared, he could't actually think of any. He was employed to be a roadie but avoided this responsibility to the point where he lied about completing tasks and was eventually fired by his brother. There was no indication that this thirty something had any kind of job history. In fact, truth be told, the film - his own film mind you - presents him as intellectually challenged. When asked to give an idea of what he'd filmed so far he showed a previous film he'd made - a rank amateur schlock horror movie that a ten year old might make. To their credit, his brother and the members of The National were incredibly tolerant of him. He didn't understand that 'celebrities' at a private gathering might not wish to be filmed because they were filmed all the time in public. At another time he stated that he felt alienated from the band and didn't know why. Well, if you worked for twenty years in any career, banking, computing, taxidermy, whatever,and built up your knowledge and experience, ascended the ladder of success, made yourself known, and then brought your brother into work, wouldn't he be bound to feel alienated; he has no idea what is going on?In summation, it is an indulgent movie made by a sibling who has not taken time to learn how to film or make a film. To laugh at it is to laugh at handicap.

db528 It was supposed to be a documentary about a band called The National, but it turned out to be a documentary about an amateur filmmaker's struggle making a documentary about a band called The National. The filmmaker, Tom Berringer, is the lead singer's younger brother, and he was hired on as a roadie for the band. Tom expresses feelings of insecurity living in the shadow of his more successful brother, so it's not surprising that the movie was about Tom with incidental shots of the band. To be fair, it would be difficult to find enough interesting material about a well-mannered band like The Nationals to fill a two-hour movie. The film was self-indulgent, but it was amusing, nonetheless.