Caring Is (Not) Creepy: On Matt McCormick's Some Days Are Better Than Others

SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS (Matt McCormick, US, 2010, 93 minutes) 

I get to sleep in my own bed at the end of the day. And my back doesn't hurt as much. -- Carrie Brownstein on the advantages of acting over touring 

Rather than the musical or comedy one might expect, based on the primary participants, director Matt McCormick's Some Days Are Better than Others revolves around loss and the things people leave behind. 

Before the IFC series Portlandia, with Carrie Brownstein, and the debut from Broken Bells, with James Mercer, Brownstein and Mercer starred in this, McCormick's first feature, which premiered at last year's SIFF. 

Since that time, Brownstein formed Wild Flag with three other women, including Sleater-Kinney's Janet Weiss, while Mercer continues to front the Shins. It's fair to say these two have been keeping busy, but who knew they could act--not counting the shorts they made with McCormick, which I haven't seen. They're rough around the edges, but I enjoyed spending time with Brownstein's Katrina, who works at a dog shelter, and Mercer's Eli, who works temp jobs and helps out Otis (David Wodehouse), his step-grandfather, who's making a film out of soap-bubble reflections. 

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Click here for the trailer 

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While Eli hangs out with Otis, Katrina works on art projects and makes audition tapes for a reality show. McCormick contrasts their stories with that of Camille, a middle-aged woman (Renée Roman Nose) who sorts through new arrivals at a thrift shop. She takes most items in stride until the day she uncovers a brass urn bearing the name of a child, and spends the rest of the film trying to find a home for it. Eli has a similar reaction when he helps to clear out a dead woman's house, which means rifling through her belongings--and answering to a self-centered creep. 

As for their love lives, Katrina's been seeing the same guy for five years, but their relationship comes to an end when she finds out he's met someone else (she logs into his email account). When Otis asks Eli why he isn't seeing anyone, he explains, "I have a bad habit of falling in love with lesbians," a reference to his attractive roommate, Chloe (Erin McGarry). 

I didn't buy the reality TV subplot, but found the rest of this low-key entry engaging. It's not that the audition process seemed unrealistic, but that Katrina never came across as the type to fall for it. At least she's not chasing fame or money, but rather the desire to express herself and prove to her ex-boyfriend that she's moved on. Or so she says. 

Though I expected Katrina and Eli to cross paths sooner, they don't meet until the end, at which point McCormick reveals the surprisingly mundane connection between them. Until that point, there was no obvious through-line, and Katrina never runs into Camille as Eli does (in an oblique way). 

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Click the links for McCormick's videos for the Shins' "Australia" and "The Past & Pending" (unfortunately, embedding wasn't an option). 

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Throughout, the filmmaker displays a refined eye. There's a studied symmetry to most scenes, which may strike some as cute or quirky, but I appreciated the attention to detail, especially in a low-budget production (which becomes clear in an early driving scene, where the looping is off). 

A minimalist organ score from Eluvium's Matthew Cooper adds to the feeling of Miranda July-like wistfulness, and compensates for the lack of any selections from Sleater-Kinney or the Shins. On the contrary, there's a sequence in which Eli, a karaoke enthusiast, limps through "Total Eclipse of the Heart" as if it were his first time at a mic. It's believably painful. 

Lately, I've been watching a lot of Portland-set films. If Some Days isn't as light on its feet as Aaron Katz's Cold Weather, which played the Northwest Film Forum last month, the city seems brighter and more welcoming here. Katz was going for a cold, clammy, noirish look, and he succeeded. The Portland in McCormick's movie recalls the one that anchored 2007's Paranoid Park, so it only makes sense when Gabe Nevins, who played the lead in that picture, shows up for a cameo here (as a grocery store clerk), alongside Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker (as a customer at the store). 

Pitchfork confirms the link between these projects: "Neil Kopp and David Cress, the producers of Some Days Are Better than Others, also produced Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park and Kelly Reichardt's Will Oldham-starring Old Joy" (in which McCormick played "weed dealer"). 

All that said, it’s hard to predict how fans of Brownstein and Mercer will react to this film, since it doesn't capitalize on their mu- sic/musical personas, yet they represent the biggest names associated with it. I hope they like it better than Slant's Simon Abrams, who dismissed it as "the kind of American independent quirk-fest that needs to be quarantined and examined." 

The debt to You and Me and Everyone We Know may be too clear at times, intentionally or otherwise--Brownstein has also worked with July--but McCormick flirts with indie rom-com tropes, only to abandon them along the way, which seems fitting in a film about abandonment. 

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Some Days Are Better than Others plays the Northwest Film Forum from 4/15-21 at 7 and 9pm. Matt McCormick will be in attendance on opening night, along with Renée Roman Nose. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. between Pike and Pine. For more information, please click here. The title, incidentally, comes from a song by Seattle's Carissa's Wierd. According to Urban Honking, source for the image at top, "McCormick was heavily inspired by their music in the creation of this film."