Casual Encounters (2013)

The below words are what I just posted on Facebook. I haven't unfortunately had the time to post much in here about movies or television (let alone keep up with the main blog's music demands) for Life-based reasons.

I will say, 2013 has been somewhat lacking in great movies. Probably the best 3 movies I've seen before seeing this have been.

-The East
-Short Term 12
-Despicable Me 2
(Oz the Great and Powerful and some others had their value, but, were hardly great. And I'm a The Wizard of Oz-fanboy)

but I would probably include Casual Encounters in this group.

I am hoping though some good stuff will be coming this fall, both Independent and Hollywood

(Anchorman 2? The Hobbit Part 2? The Zero Theorem-the new Terry Gilliam movie without known distributiion?).

I also haven't seen Gravity which maybe mostly on hype, I will think about seeing soon.

http://www.casualencountersthemovie.com/
Facebook Page

I saw this funny little film last evening at the Twin Cities Film Fest in Casual Encounters . As the title suggests, it was about "Casual Encounters" from an previous online communication (Craigslist presumably).

This is a film that shows these people meeting with unexpected results, but I guess that wasn't what made it so interesting. The way many of the characters meetings intertwined with other characters, added a lot of humor.

In one, an Asian gay man talks online to a straight Caucasian man, but the gay Asian man impersonates a Japanese girl in the process; then later the exact Japanese girl whose picture the gay guy was using to say he was, is shown having a casual encounter of her own, but with another guy, but her interest is purely platonic. But the straight Caucasian guy who we are introduced to in that previous casual encounter, sees the Japanese girl in person meeting with another straight Caucasian guy, and runs in and causes a funny argument (and more) between the 2 guys.

It was basically a series of vignettes of personals with different intentions. But it seemed so light-hearted that it worked better than you might expect. No big names and not a huge budget or anything, but it didn't matter.

I'm sure there have been other films of it's type (some of Woody Allen's vignette-types like To Rome with Love for example), but maybe not done as well or in the way this one does.

I would be surprised to see many other people talk about this movie, but so be it. It was one of the better movies I have seen in 2013 (which I have not seen too many great movies this year, for whatever reason). And it also supports like in 2012 with It's A Disaster ,for the 2nd year in a row, the Twin Cities Film Festival has stuff to check out that I may not be able to see other places.