Hey everyone!
Sorry this is so last minute, but between planning the summer and planning next month's Horror Fest, September kind of got away from me. First let me thank everyone who made it out to our Shakespeare series, it was far and away our best attended series, and we had some great discussions! Also, to everyone who brought food, again, no amount of praise is enough, you guys rock. For the month of September, I'm just going to go with a quick pick I've wanted to show for a while. We will be watching the indie sci-fi film
Coherence.
Coherence is an American science fiction thriller directed by James Ward Byrkit in his directorial debut. The film involves eight people at a dinner party who must deal with strange occurrences following a comet sighting. Byrkit came up with the idea for the film after deciding he wanted to test the idea of shooting a film "without a crew and without a script". While he did have a specific idea for how the film would unfold, he selected improvisational actors and gave them the basic outline of their characters, motivations, and major plot points. He said, "instead of having a script, each actor was given a page of notes each day with their back story or sort of motivation for the night. But they wouldn't know what the other actors had received so it had a very natural, very spontaneous collision of motivations that ended up being what you see on film." Critical reception for
Coherence has been predominantly positive and the film currently holds a rating of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for Rogerebert.com, gave the film 3/4 stars saying this in his review, "
Coherence is proof that inventive filmmakers can do a lot with a little. Written and directed by James Ward Byrkit, the movie starts out looking and feeling like half the no-budget indies you've seen: a bunch of seemingly well-off people attend a dinner party at a nice suburban house somewhere in Northern California on the night that a comet is scheduled to pass near the earth. They introduce themselves to each other, hang out, drink, eat and deliver expository banter. Then things get weird, and weirder. Amazingly, none of the movie's technical or artistic shortcomings prove to be deal breakers. Once
Coherence delves into its premise, the viewer is bound to come down with a bad case of the creeps. This is less-is-more science fiction, indebted to the original "The Twilight Zone" as well as Luis Bunuel's
The Exterminating Angel...this is a confident movie that feels like the first entry in a career worth following."
We will be meeting next Thursday, Sept. 20th at 6:15pm. Again, sorry for the short notice, but I hope you will join us for this mind-bender of a movie. Hope to see you there!
Here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxAOewNzz-8
