Funny,deadpan, brilliant
- The Unbelievable Truth review by CP Customer
I accidently caught a Hal Hartley film a few years ago and I now own quite a few on DVD. The films are absolutely great. Paced quite slowly with humour you are not always sure is intended! He is a genius. This was one of the first films that got him a level of recognition. Do yourself a favour and just watch this one. If it is on your wave length you will love his work forever.
3 out of 4 members found this review helpful.
I am a Hal Hartley fan
- The Unbelievable Truth review by CW
This is early Hal Hartley. Very simple story but you can tell that director had potential. All the actors seemed as though they had fun making the movie. Interesting interview with him on special features. I got The Unbelievable Truth because I thought a later movie of hisThe Book of Life, was astonishing. I like that his movies just sort of drift off without happily ever after or ending with everything tied up.
2 out of 3 members found this review helpful.
The Unbelievable Shelly
- The Unbelievable Truth review by griggs
How do you write about The Unbelievable Truth without mentioning Adrienne Shelly? You don’t. In her film debut she practically vibrates off the screen — fidgeting, provoking, treating the end of the world like a personal inconvenience. She needs all of that energy to hold her own against Robert Burke, who plays Josh like a man trying to disappear into his own silence.
This is Hartley’s debut, the first of the Long Island trilogy, and for me the sharpest. It has the same deadpan swagger and stop-start rhythms as Trust, but here they feel properly in sync. Where Trust kept me at arm’s length, The Unbelievable Truth peels back the small-town gossip and quiet hypocrisy to uncover something genuinely beguiling.
Shelly is the reason it works. Nobody else could make that mix of nerves, wit and volatility feel so effortless.
1 out of 1 members found this review helpful.
Quirky Quickie
- The Unbelievable Truth review by Steve
Hal Hartley's feature debut is proper independent cinema, self financed rather than rolled out by the subsidiary of a major. It feels like a superior graduate picture. It's a comedy without laughs, but the script is witty and the performances are likeable. The dayglo cinematography is ideal for this kind of hyper-irony.
This inevitably gets labelled 'quirky'; it's an 'offbeat' Long Island romance between a paroled murderer and a teenage kook who is waiting for the bomb to fall, and mainly satirises small town life. It conveys the new ironic tone in '80s US cinema borrowed from Lynch and Jim Jarmusch before it got tiresome in the '90s.
So the understated performances are about ironic detachment. The two leads are also on debut, with Robert John Burke as a saturnine mechanic who returns to his hometown after a long spell inside and picks up with a schoolgirl/model, played by Adrienne Shelly. In 1989 she was an instant pinup for cool indie kids...
While everyone else went for Melanie Griffith. Any response will depend on how much whimsy can be tolerated. But this is decent quality stuff and surprisingly entertaining because very little is happening. Nice to see those '80s haircuts and clothes again. Maybe the budget prohibited the usual jukebox soundtrack.
*RIP Ms. Shelly
0 out of 0 members found this review helpful.