7 Chinese Brothers
Director: Bob Byington
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 0.5
Day-drinking Larry (Jason Schwartzman) - who spends most of his time with his French Bulldog Arrow - gets fired from a chain restaurant, applies for a job at an auto-repair shop, visits his ailing grandmother (Olympia Dukakis), buys medication from a custodian at his grandmother's rest home (Tunde Adebimpe, who's a hell of a musician) and basically ... bums around. Almost aggravatingly pointless - apathy in Los Angeles, how novel - it leans on Schwartzman's smug charm to guide it along, and when it gets to an actual "human" moment (naturally, the grandmother passes away) ... he remains the same jerk, only with a sizeable inheritance. Making a movie for the sake of making a movie (decent-script-be-damned) more often than not leads to failure but I'm pretty sure Byington is apathetic if his final "product" is "good." The title has nothing to do with the movie - it happens to be the name of an R.E.M. song - which just 'adds' to the "whimsy."
