The Racked Focus Review: Your Sister's Sister (2012)

The quiet moments in life are something that should be cherished.  They come too infrequently as we run about our lives keeping busy.  We don’t want to think about our emotions, or what is stressing us out.  We want to be doing something at all times.  As a species, we no longer allow for as many quiet moments since we’ve got different forms of technology to fill up every waking second of our lives.  What if we took a moment and just thought about things, talked to people, or just be?  There is something special about those kinds of moments.

Lynn Shelton made a movie called Your Sister’s Sister that took advantage of how special the quiet moments can be.  On July 6, 2012, Maxwell Haddad posted his review of this delicate movie.  The review can be found on The Racked Focus, as most of his reviews can be.  Rich with the flourishes of vocabulary that Max tends to weave through his reviews, this is surely one of his reviews, and one that undeniably suits the movie being reviewed.

Something about Maxwell Haddad’s review of Your Sister’s Sister feels laid back and relaxed, even though the movie is being analyzed just as thoroughly as any subject.  It’s an interesting detail to have within a review about a movie in which most of the time is spent with quiet scenes of dialogue.  One of the special traits of Maxwell’s writing is how he, possibly unintentionally, adapts the style of his reviews to fit the movie.  I’ve pointed this out before, and the review of Your Sister’s Sister is no different.  The calm contemplation of the review is similar to the feel of the movie, though, of course, the movie has some underlying drama throughout it.

That isn’t where the commonalities between movie and review stop, however.  Max is able to infuse humanity into his review that attracts me to the prose and keeps me reading until the end.  It’s obvious that he is simply writing a review, but there is a life and soul that Mr. Haddad puts into his review that lines up perfectly with Your Sister’s Sister.  The analysis of the film is well articulated and concise, yet allows for the infusion of Max’s own personal opinions.  This warms up the review from feeling like a clinical dissection of a movie and what makes the movie tick.  Instead, the review feels more cerebral as Max puts himself into it.  It does not get deep into the psyche of the man, but it does allow the reader to connect with the writer, which is something that is sometimes missing from reviews.

Maxwell Haddad’s review of Your Sister’s Sister points out the good and bad aspects of the film while also highlighting Max’s own opinion in a way that does not tarnish the critical analysis.  The style in which the review is presented helps to express the style of the film without feeling out of place within a review.  It’s a wonder that there are reviews like this that can both be a review and some strange sort of art, but Max manages to get a mixture that works perfectly.  Intentional or not, his reviews bring a second layer that makes them all the more enjoyable.  Or I find some second layer that doesn’t exist and I write about it.  Either way, I see it, and that’s all that matters.

Maxwell Haddad’s review of Your Sister’s Sister gets 4 ½ broken condoms out of 5.