Filmgirl Force

Filmgirl: 1416 and Counting

A few months ago, I got an e-mail from the director of How I Got Lost, a nice man named Joe Leonard, asking if I wanted a screener.  I said yes, and a few weeks later I got a copy in the mail.

That was a while ago.   Underneath the deluge of unemployment information, regular bills and trying to catch up on my Netflix rentals which I’m always behind on, How I Got Lost fell a bit to the wayside, and having to sort of hustle like crazy to try and find work fast (my unemployment benefits got denied), I kept looking at the disc and thinking, “It’s on the schedule”.   To the nice people who sent me the screener:  mea culpa, mea culpa.  I should’ve taken a look at this long, long, long before I did.

I grabbed this image from HERE.   Didn’t want to hotlink it.

Andrew and Jake are best friends.   Functioning alcoholic Andrew is meandering through life a screwdriver and a cigarette at a time, getting locked up every so often and trying to wing his career as a Wall Street trader without totally screwing up.    Jake is a writer who squanders his time working a terrible, low-rung sports beat for a New York newspaper, frustrated with his career and has his heart constantly stomped by the beautiful Sarah, who seems to up and leave on whims, coming and going with no rhyme or reason.

A night of drunken commiseration leads the two to decide to take an “impromptu” trip to Cooperstown turns out to be a misdirection on the part of Andrew.  His father has died and he can’t bear to go to the funeral by himself, so he asks Jake to go with him.

It is at the funeral that the cracks in the friendship begin to show.   Jake and Andrew begin to take two different paths; both are two different people.   Jake is all internally focused, both in motivation and problems, while Andrew is driven by external forces.

How I Got Lost is interesting primarily because it examines two men, both lost in life, both unsure of how to navigate and deal with the bad things in life, and the different approaches both take.   One begins to learn, one runs away.

This is less a movie about discovering the meaning of life or something along those lines and more a movie about getting a handle on yourself.   Bookended by two distinct major events (September 11 and the 2003 Northeast blackout), a good chunk of the movie rides on Aaron Stanford and Jacob Fishel, who play Andrew and Jake respectively.   Stanford takes a character that was easy to play by loading his performance with cliches and instead turns out something familiar but thoughtfully played.   Fishel is sort of the quiet hero in the back; he’s measured and intelligent in how he plays Jake.   Both Stanford and Fishel make the film really work.

That’s not to strip Leonard of any credit; he wrote and directed this.   How I Got Lost is not a perfect movie; it has some soft parts, some parts that don’t feel whole, but this one is really quite good.    The film’s beautifully shot, I have to say and has a wonderful score to go with it.    This is a film that you can tell was shot with care and made by people who are smart in their craft, who genuinely had some love to give this movie.

Every so often I fall back on the old idea of “if this blog ran on the star rating…”    If I did run on that, How I Got Lost would get a solid four out of five stars.

Links!

Official Website (you can pick up a copy of the film there, if you’re so inclined)

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Go to 1416 and Counting.