"Assisted Living" (2003), written and directed by Elliot Greenebaum

A low-budget movie filmed in a nursing home using the actual residents as extras and co-stars, about a women with Alzheimer's and the pothead nursing assistant she befriends. Wow, sounds like a fun night at the movies, huh? Mortality on parade! You're dying as we speak! Being old sucks, sons living in Australia and refusing to take your calls suck more!

This movie should've been bad, and after reading about it in some indie film magazines when it was screened here in L.A., I was convinced it would be. Too precious, trying to hard to be relevant, so damn Indie Indie Indie it makes your teeth hurt. Not entertaining, and so cheap it probably looks like a junior high video project. I rented it just to see how bad it was.

Boy, was I wrong. This is a helluva movie, unique and funny and touching without being sentimental. It's a ballsy piece of filmmaking because it focuses on the ugly in life -- not the pretty/ugly, like glamorized gorgeous limp heroine addict teenagers, and not cool/ugly, like underworld mobster killers, and not ugly/beautiful, like Shrek and Steve Buscemi. Plain Ugly, like life smells sometimes, it's tedious and weird and other people are difficult and argumentative and your reward is that you get to die, possibly alone and forgotten.

This movie got to me in the following ways:

1. Unique storytelling -- the video interviews with the nursing home staff at the beginning blur the line between fact and fiction, actors and people who are just like the people they are portraying in the sense that aging and aging parents affect everyone sooner or later.

The fact that Greenebaum filmed in actual nursing homes not only makes for a great (gimmicky) production note story; in this case, it also adds a shocking level of reality to the fictional story, reminding you that you can't get comfortable in the narrative world. You are forced to consider the real world at every turn, and that makes this movie awesome.

2. Beautiful cinematography -- some dude named Marcel Cabrera shot this with a great eye for color and light. The lame thing to do would've been to shoot it flat and sad, but he didn't. He and Greenebaum showed the stunningly dream-like aspect of life that smacks you in the face every once in a while, like in the beautiful golden and creamy white tones of the nursing home hallways and the emerald green of its grounds. When they focus on the hands of the elderly residents, they force you to see these bits as part of a continuum. Accept the hands as you'd accept the trees outside. Don't be afraid to stare, because it's just the way it is here on earth. Damn, this is sounding too much like that plastic bag reverie shit from "American Beauty", but ugh, that is what I mean after all.

3. The leads. Movies are about faces, right, I mean Norma Desmond told us so. Maggie Riley and Michael Bonsignore have wonderful faces, calmly expressive and thoughtful. Their acting is absolutely natural and of the moment. Great acting isn't about showing off; it's about inhabiting the character, and that's what they did.

4. The phone calls.

5. The dog.

6. The plot. The movie wouldn't work without a driving plot. Mrs Pearlman wants what she wants and goes after it right to the end. Todd keeps trying to avoid responsibility, and has to actively work to do so. Stunned numbness is a popular movie characterization these days (hello, “Garden State”), but this movie shows how it should be done. It isn't about staring just off camera and blinking slowly and wearing funny clothing; it's about how that state of mind manifests itself in the character's relationships with other people. Moment-to-moment, what choices do they make to avoid connecting with other people? Todd makes a lot of choices with a lot of consequences. Small, tiny, tiny consequences in the scheme of an infinitely large world, but all the more important and resonate for being so. Because we're all just ants on the anthill.

7. The phone calls. Seriously.

Whatever, just watch it. It's hard to talk about this movie without sounding pretentious or like I'm pitying old people or something gank like that. It moved me, that's all, it woke me up in a way. Watch it.