The slick, feel-good "Liberal Arts" has enough dark notes to make the smug, obsequious performance of its star, Josh Radnor, who also wrote and directed, tolerable and at times even likable.
(Scott) 'Liberal Arts' (No rating, 1 37) This slick, feel-good film about a college admissions counselor who returns to his alma mater has enough dark notes to make the smug, obsequious performance of its star, screenwriter and director, Josh Radnor, tolerable and at times even likable.
But the company is likely to be far better resourced than many of its advertisers to work to gain that consent (via — for example — slick, feel-good 'infomercial' videos seeded in the Facebook News Feed).
With such a focus on a slick look and feel there's almost no air left for the characters to resemble actual human beings.
There's a slick, sailor feel to both.
El Mechri's skilled direction — which lends humor to the shifting time frames and different points of view — has a slick documentary feel to it, and the biographical approach to the star (touching on Van Damme's past flops, his custody battle, drug use, womanizing, etc).
(The cinematographer is Ruben Impens). But the picturesqueness and the flowing, music-video rhythms of the editing give the film a slick, evasive feel, as if it were too cautious or too cool to confront the worst of what it's about.
