Stream a Kat Coiro/Kate Bosworth mini-fest: AND WHILE WE WERE HERE & LIFE HAPPENS

The name Kat Coiro (the actress/writer/director/ producer is shown at right) is coming up a bit on Netflix these days, what with the recent limited theatrical release of her movie AND WHILE WE WERE HERE and an earlier one, LIFE HAPPENS, both now available to stream. Neither film is spectacular or must-see material, but both have things going on that make them worth a watch. Both also star Kate Bosworth (below, left), a performer TrustMovies usually enjoys watching. Ms Bosworth -- a very pretty, blond actress who may initially seem like this millennium's version of Sandra Dee

-- possesses more pointed, sharper features than the round-faced Ms Dee had in her heyday, while her choice of material (Black Rock, Another Happy Day, Big Sur) has proven rather dark, and sometimes as sharp as her pert features. In these two collaborations between Coiro and Bosworth -- one lighter, the other darker -- we get a chance to see (to some extent) just what both women are capable of.

While the rom-com Life Happens is an ensemble piece, offering a host of good performers doing their thing and mostly making it work, And While We Were Here, is a rom-dram

(tending toward melodram) showcase for Bosworth, who stars as an unhappy wife named Jane, vacation-ing in Naples while her musician husband works a gig there.

Jane herself is working on a book about her grandmother's time in England during WWII, and much of the movie is given over to her listening to tapes on Gran's reminiscences (voiced by Claire Bloom, whom we never, unfortunately, get to see). Out walking one day, Jane asks directions of a young man, and her question leads eventually to a relationship developing.

The husband is played by Iddo Goldberg (above right, with Ms Bosworth), the young man by Jamie Blackley (below). Both are effectively used as foils for Jane, one seeming to imprison her, even as the other offers freedom. The real questions, however, involve identity: Who is Jane and what does she really want?

Ms Coiro and her crack cameraman, Doug Chamberlain, use space and composition quite well, and some of the shots of Naples and its bay and famous castle, in high-definition, are eye-poppingly gorgeous. After watch-ing the film, I felt as if I'd taken a nice vacation to a country I dearly love.

Ms Bosworth is unafraid to make Jane sometimes annoying and petty, and she pulls us into her situation as well as possible, given the so-so screenplay (also by Ms Coiro) that goes from not begin nearly detailed and specific enough in its almost impersonal dialog to occasionally and obviously spelling things out that would be better left unsaid.

Overall, though, the movie works, thanks to the performers, the exquisite location, and the fine visuals throughout.

In Life Happens, Ms Bosworth plays Deena, a bent-on-success writer and best-friend/roommate of Kim (Krysten Ritter, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ms Coiro), a dog-walker and animal lover who longs to open a shopping mall devoted exclusively to pets. The third roommate is a 20-something young woman named Laura (Rachel Bilson), whose main claim to fame is that she is still a virgin. The three -- shown below, with Bosworth at right, Bilson center and Ritter at left -- make a fetching trio.

This is a rom-com, and so into the mix must come some men. Three of them --  Jason Biggs, shown below, left; Justin Kirk, center; and Geoff Stults, right -- do their studly stuff just fine, with Stults' non-pushy sexuality and Kirk's comic quirks a big plus (Biggs' role is barely there).

There are some cute moments -- off an on -- in the film's first half, but as written and acted, these characters, the girls in particular, seem so insistently spunky and cute that the movie is always threatening to curdle on us. Again, it's the screenplay, which offers up girls so dumb regarding everything from condom use to job hunting that our sympathy is soon in short supply. "When one of them finally admits, "We acted like total mental patients!" you will sadly agree.

If you last out the first half, however, the remainder of the movie brightens considerably. Characters begin acting like real people and the adults they are, and you realize that the film might just earn its happy ending. (How Bilson's professional virgin makes her condition pay off is particuarly juicy.)

You can stream both movies off Netflix now, although DVDs and other viewing sources are also available.

Kieran Darcy-Smith & Felicity Price's WISH YOU WERE HERE: These feeble folk are Patrick White's kind of Australians!

A couple of weeks ago in The New York Times Sunday Book Review appeared a review of the new edition of Patrick White's The Hanging Garden, in which it was noted that White, generally considered Australia's finest novelist, had little good to say about the Aussie populace. In one of his more memorable statements, he noted that Australia is the country that has proven shit can be recycled. Watching the new film WISH YOU WERE HERE, that statement came to mind, for this is one of those movies, the convulsive and well-edited style of which does wonders in masking its rather paltry content and a collection of characters who are, to put it bluntly, not too bright.

If the story, complete with that rather lame set of characters, played out in strict linear time, we would not be half as interested as we are when that tale is broken into shards of memory, complete with guilt, pain and the whole damn thing, along with performances by actors who are quite good enough in their limited roles. Directed and co-written (with Felicity Price, below, who doubles as one of the film's stars) by Kieran Darcy-Smith (shown at left), the film begins with a wealth of tasty visuals that set up the story of two couples -- a husband and wife, her sister, and sis' new boyfriend -- vacationing in Cambodia, from which Southeast Asian country only three of the four characters return home.

What happened and why? Enough hints are dropped into the first minutes of the film -- which shows our foursome in bits-and-pieces action -- to justify a bunch of theories right off the bat. Then we spend the next few post-vacation days, which run into (I think) weeks, living with each of the three remaining characters' grief, guilt and amends-making, even as we see and hear mini-flashbacks that begin, incrementally, to clue us into what has gone on here.

When we eventually find out the answers, that old question, Who are these people? surfaces big-time, and we realize that, due to all the time spent on flashy back-and-forth time frames and editing (which, in fact, begins to seem a little repetitious as the movie wears on), we barely know these people at all. Everything we do know about them has had to do with that vacation and its aftermath. And despite the publicity materials carefully explaining to us "how one misjudged moment in life has the potential to cause everything to fall to pieces," by the finale we note that this has hardly been a single misjudged moment, but rather, say, 23, 35 or, hey -- maybe even 48 of 'em.

Would you choose Cambodia for your vacation (yes, it's relatively close to Australia), considering that the little country has a stark modern history of self-inflicted genocide, mass murder and near-extinction. (Our foursome even visits the famous museum-of-the-dead, though they seem to give it about the same amount of time and thought that they spend on the other tourist attractions they view -- like those spiders, above and at right.

And of course, when moneyed white men go traveling in non-white countries, they'll seek out those out-of-the-way, sleazy native bars in which to have a drink. And if you earned your living via, shall we say, underhanded black-market schemes, you of course would inform your new friends of all this. And I won't even get near the question of who has sex with whom.  "One misjudged moment in life"? Get real. (Oh, and get over the coincidence of someone being in exactly the right/wrong place at exactly the right/wrong time to finally answer the big question.)

Well, the actors get real, at least, and their performances go a long way toward making us buy this guff. Joel Edgerton (above and above) plays hubby to Ms Price's wifey, and both get to show off their joy and humor and anger and sex appeal. As the wife's sister and her new boyfriend, Teresa Palmer and Antony Starr (below) have less to do but handle it well enough.

So I'm of two minds about this movie: I liked it on one level, for its tapestry-like construction of past and present, but also found it not very believable – unless you are willing to almost entirely suspend your disbelief. Overall, I am leaning toward labeling the movie hogwash -- but artistically done hogwash, indeed!

From eOne films and running 93 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, June 7, in New York City at the City Cinema Village East, and in the Los Angeles area at the Landmark NuArt -- where actress and co-writer Felicity Price will appear in person on Saturday, June 8 for a Q&A after the 7:30pm show. The film will also be opening Friday, June 7, at Landmark Theaters in the following cities: Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington DC, Minneapolis and Denver. Click the Landmark link above to learn which theaters.