Some Days Are Better Than Others Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

Some Days Are Better Than Others Blu-ray Movie Review

"Or a movie so crass / and awkwardly cast / that even I could be the star."

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater May 1, 2012

Rapper-turned-actor? That's a fairly well-established career trajectory. Indie rock artist-turned-actor? Not so much. Nonetheless, Some Days Are Better Than Others features not one, but two independent music icons in the lead roles. The Shins' James Mercer makes his screen debut here--where he gives off a vaguely Kevin Spacey-ish vibe--and he's joined by Carrie Brownstein, the former Sleater-Kinney guitarist who's perhaps best known now as Fred Armisen's comedic foil on the IFC sketch comedy show, Portlandia. The film too is set in and around Portland, the drizzly Pacific northwestern city that Mercer, Brownstein, and writer/director Matt McCormick all call home, and it's practically overgrown with the town's carefully cultivated sense of eccentricity. (If you've been there, you've seen the famed "Keep Portland Weird" mural downtown.) Where Portlandia winks at the place's oddities, though, Some Days--a low-budget drama about disaffected early thirty-somethings and their white-bread existential problems--is often painfully sincere and too indie-twee by half. If you need visual proof, look at this screenshot of Carrie Brownstein wearing a homemade hat, "upcycled" from a castoff teddy bear:

Brownstein plays Katrina, an animal shelter employee who's basically a sadder take on an "adorkable" Zooey Deschanel-type character, a Polaroid camera-toting indie doll in a thrift store dress, ballet flats, and canary yellow cardigan. She has an account on a social networking site called "Bumblespace." Her bedroom's decorated with teeny-tiny lanterns. She's almost obnoxiously cute. And she's obsessed with reality TV, especially of the soapy Bachelorette variety, where emotions run high and the heartbroken are given sympathy from national audiences. Katrina has been working on a series of audition tapes, hoping to land a spot on a show, but when she finds out that her boyfriend has been cheating on her, her VHS videos become increasingly more confessional and awkwardly honest.

In a scene that plays like dull-edged, too obvious satire of everything that's wrong with reality television, Katrina goes to a seminar to learn how to be a viable contestant, but only finds out that bubbly vapid blonds have a far better chance than her. Well, dur. At one point, she compares herself to a pound puppy that no one wants. I know: boo-hoo. This whole conceit might've seemed relevant in the late 90's and early 00's, when LiveJournal and Myspace and reality TV were just starting to make over-sharing a national pastime, but Katrina's incessant moping and need for acknowledgement here is more grating than empathy-inducing. Maybe that's precisely the point McCormick is trying to make--that self-indulgent public wallowing is seriously lame now that we're into the 2010s--but do we really need a movie about that?

There's more to Some Days than Katrina's bleary-eyed soul-baring, thankfully, but not much more. In a completely separate narrative thread, we also follow Eli (Mercer), a feckless post-grad school layabout who's yet to sort out what he wants to do with his life. He's too principled to sell-out and get a corporate job--not that there are many to go around in this recession-y economic climate, the film's subtext seems to say--so he supports himself by working $6/hr. gigs for a shady temp service called Man Force. One day he's counting milk jugs at the local grocery store, a pointless Sisyphean exercise, and the next he's joining the crew of a moving service that specializes in hauling away the possessions of the recently deceased.

Ends, it goes without saying, barely meet. To inject some wistful emotion into the story, Eli is also tasked with looking after his step-grandfather, Otis (David Wodehouse), an adorable old Australian coot who's obsessed with filming the iridescent sheen of bubbles under a microscope and then narrating the footage. (How indie-quirky is that?) James Mercer probably shouldn't quit his day job, but he's decent here, especially in the scene where he busts into a rambling karaoke rendition of "Total Eclipse of the Heart." His character is more interesting than Brownstein's solely on the merit of being less annoying, but they're both the same sort of aimless, ennui-ridden young adults we've seen shambling through countless indie dramas made by first-time directors who are simply filming what they know--what it's like to be an aimless, ennui-ridden young adult. It's a valid-enough topic, I guess, but one that's become comfortably ambitionless and easy.

In a third storyline so scant that it barely qualifies as a subplot--but one that presumably serves as a loose thematic connector between the other two-- we're introduced to Camille (Renee Roman Nose), a middle-aged thrift store employee who finds an urn filled with a child's ashes in a donation bin. That someone could so carelessly throw away such an emotionally-loaded item weighs on Camille, who figuratively adopts "the child"--as she calls the contents of the urn--and does a simple good deed that's meant to, I dunno, suggest that it's still possible in these oh-so-cynical days to be selfless and thoughtful and in-tune with the rhythms of life and death. Or something.

Whatever McCormick is ultimately getting at, it doesn't quite register and it doesn't really matter. The film's sense of heartbreak and collective listlessness is dealt with only superficially. Expect much emoting and lots of would-be evocative shots of boarded-up foreclosure houses, concrete overpasses, and street lights jutting up into the barren sky all lonesome-like, set to a pensive ambient score. It's enough to make you wanna shut the blinds, take a few pills, and sleep the clock around, and for that, Some Days Are Better Than Others is practically a study in self-serious indie drama cliches.

Some Days Are Better Than Others Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

IMDB.com lists Some Days Are Better Than Others as being shot with the digital Red One Camera, and while I can see that in a lot of shots, it also looks to me like some DSLR footage might've been used as well, possibly from the Canon 5D Mark II or similar. The film certainly has that distinct "DSLR cinema" look, characterized mostly by extremely shallow depth of field. (The depth of the part of the image that's in focus.) The area of the frame that is in focus is typically fairly sharp, with a good degree of fine high definition detail, but there are occasional shots that are noticeably softer. Color is somewhat inconsistent as well. Most of the film goes for a fairly realistic look, with subdued, natural colors, but there are a few scenes where highlights are softened and shadows given a strong purplish/maroon tinge. Elsewhere, highlights are extremely blown out, as if the footage were overexposed from the start. (Which it very well could've been. It doesn't look like the contrast has been pushed in these scenes, because black levels seem elevated too.) Overall, the Blu-ray's 1080p/AVC encode is undoubtedly the best way to watch the film, but this is very obviously a low-budget production. Aside from some periodic spikes in noise and some faint banding, however, there are at least no overt compression/encode issues.

Some Days Are Better Than Others Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Like it's mumblecore/slacker brethren, Some Days Are Better Than Others is a largely quiet, dialogue-driven film that has no real need for aural fireworks. On the sound effects/ambience front, the film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is almost purely functional, with a modicum of environmental noise panned into the rears--ocean surf, barking dogs, humming insects, etc.--and a few extremely rare cross-channel movements. Dialogue throughout is clean, muffle-free, and easily understood, resting at the top of the mix. The real allure here--and what might sell a few people on the film--is the soundtrack by Eluvium's Matthew Cooper, a Portland-based musician who makes beautifully quiet, textural, somniatory compositions. The music sounds wonderful--rich and clear, if maybe a bit too bright at times--and, for better or worse, it's responsible for much of the film's mood. (I'd argue that the score is much better on its own.) For those who might need or want them, the disc comes with optional English subtitles.

Some Days Are Better Than Others Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Short Film - Light-Tiger-Eye (1080p, 4:33): A short film by McCormick that features Mercer trying to guess the names of Pantone colors and Brownstein chastising him when he gets it wrong.
• Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 1:35)
• Deleted Scenes (1080p, 1:13 and 2:42)
• Trailers: Includes trailers for First Beautiful Thing (1:28), This Is Not A Film (1:30), and All That I Love (1:28).

Some Days Are Better Than Others Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Some Days Are Better Than Others is too twee for its own good; it feels like the kind of sensitive-guy local film production Portlandia would make fun of in a sketch--like the ribbing of Etsy sellers in "She's Making Jewelry Now"--which is odd considering star Carrie Brownstein is on Portlandia and should probably know better than to be involved in something so treacly. If you're a fan of The Shins or Sleater-Kinney, you might want to check out the movie to see your favorite indie idols in a different setting, but you should definitely temper your expectations. For Portlanders only.