Easy Living

A truly excellent character study, anchored by strong, believable performances and nuanced writing. Sherry's struggle with getting herself onto the ladder that she has until now ignored, and the existential despair that entails, is easy to relate to. The director (Adam Keleman) imbues the proceedings with a touch of absurdity, just enough to make it feel as if the universe is aligned against her. And a jarring final act initially seems out of place until it fits squarely into Sherry's path towards self-actualization. A tiny gem.

The story is about a woman with a very sad life and she's looking for a way to make money. This is such a bad movie. I can't believe I watched this till the end. It is absolutely not a comedy and I don't know why it's written in its description. It's very sad and it's not exciting at all. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Easy Living seemed to be warmly-received in its world premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. It is entertaining quirky film about Sherry Graham, a door-to-door makeup saleswoman, who is struggling to fix her rather messy life. The writer/director Adam Keleman has crafted a strong lead character. The lead actress, Caroline Dhavernas, delivers a really strong performance. Sherry is trying to turn a corner and escape her dead end job and really her dead end life. While much of the film is entertaining and provocative, the bizarre ending doesn't really do the rest of the movie justice. It is as if the Keleman wrote himself into a corner and couldn't figure out how to get out of it so he just came up with a completely unanticipated and illogical way to resolve the story. It is unfortunate, because it undermines the intelligence nuanced writing and acting that had occurred up to that point.

I stumbled upon the 2017 movie "Easy Living" by random chance here in 2024. And with it being a movie that I had never seen, much less actually heard about, of course I opted to check out the movie. I virtually had no idea what I was in for here, as I sat down to watch it. So I suppose that writer and director Adam Keleman had every opportunity to entertain and bedazzle me with this movie.

The movie is listed as a drama thriller, but I found it to be anything but thrilling. The storyline in the movie, as concocted by writer Adam Keleman, failed to catch my interest. The contents of the storyline just had no appeal to me, and I find no entertainment in watching people perform mundane daily chores and tasks on the screen.

The pacing of the narrative in the movie was so painfully slow, and I have to say that my interest in the movie was waning rapidly as the movie made next to no progress. And 35 minutes into the ordeal, I was good and ready to toss the towel in the ring and give up. I was under the impression that the movie was a mixture of drama and thriller, but there was nothing thrilling about this sluggish narrative. 10 minutes later, I gave up on this dumpster fire of a movie.

I don't think I was familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list. And despite the fact of having a boring storyline, I will say that the acting performances in the movie were fair. But the acting performances had little chance of salvaging the movie, as the storyline was such a massive swing and a miss.

This is definitely not a movie that I will ever return to attempt finish watching, as I wasn't even remotely entertained the first time around trying to suffer through the sluggish narrative.

My rating of writer and director Adam Keleman's 2017 movie "Easy Living" lands on a very generous two out of ten stars.

I was surprised by this movie. I guess the slacker main character with plenty of slacker quality flaws brought he into this movie, and let me go at times. But it was a great movie to watch when bored with all the others. Definitely a good watch, and I was surprised by how good an indie film can get.

7 Stars!