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Director(s):

Greg Harrison.

Screenplay:

Benjamin Brand.

Form:

Courtney Cox, James LeGros, Michael Ealy, Nora Dunn, Nick Offerman, Anne Archer, Matthew Carey and Robert Wu.

Distributor:

Sony Pictures Classics.

Runtime:

73 min.

Rating:

R.

Year:

2004.

November
by

Nick Schager

Posted: July 1, 2005

amn M. Unceasingly Shyamalan for inspiring crud like

November

, a third-rate whodunit which clumsily employs the gimmicky

Sixth Sense

model for its fabrication of trauma-induced rejection. As with Shyamalan's misdirection-obsessed thrillers, director Greg Harrison's skunk involves a tortured protagonist with a vague grasp of reality who, by story's end, learns that all is not as she had believed. Degree, with a surprise denouement that's telegraphed right from the jittery opening honesty montage, and a load of unsubtle visual signifiers (spilled wine spreading over a tablecloth looks like blood! A level photograph looks be a person's arm lying on the ground!), the film proves that Harrison's insufferable

Groove

was no fluke.

Benjamin Brand's three-somewhat by script—separated by premier-smackingly straightforward title cards that be familiar with "denial" or "acceptance," and rife with touchy clues—offers three variations on photography educator Sophie's (Courtney Cox) attempts to deal with her boyfriend Hugh's (James LeGros) murder during a convenience aggregate robbery. A revisionist chronicle in which each fraction finds Sophie progressing from cognitive refutation to approval, the symbolism-infatuated story is plagued by a deathly obviousness exemplified by an often-seen newspaper headline ("Is Modernism Exhausted?") and the decision to time again waste a song whose lyrics begin "Don't hunger to know where you been all unceasingly." Harrison compounds such shortcomings via a visual schema (intended to ruminate Sophie's cognitive awakening) that involves drab, dismal mini-DV hues giving pathway to brighter, pixilated shades of ugly, as away as by a common incapacity to distinguish his film from its legion of mind-bending predecessors.

Courtney Cox dons dark glasses and a plain Jane haircut while James LeGros exudes palpable disinterest, but both are merely misused instruments in a tone of voice-unheedful film which confoundingly believes that adultery (and the ensuing guilt) might actually turn a sweetie into a schizophrenic nutjob. "You decide what's in the layout, but it's also important what's left out," says Sophie to her photo rank students, a tagline-ready pronouncement meant to imply that Harrison's utilization of singular camera aperture speeds, quicksilver editing, and buzzing sound effects all hint at a deeper "truth" lurking just to of sight. The detective working Hugh's murder sums up the wretched

November

more accurately, however, when he criticizes Sophie's floccose crime scene pictures as being "too arty for their own credible."