Date Night: It's Such a Beautiful Day

In which I review a randomly-selected movie from Netflix.

It's been a while since I've done one of these.  Between the big move, working two (and now three) jobs, my weekly Unreality,  articles, the Oscars and the recent deluge of news, new movies and trailers, there's hardly been time for the article series that made me start this darned thing in the first place.  Well it all ends today, as I am redoubling my efforts for Date Night and From the Vault articles: aiming for one of each every week.  So lets get back into the swing of things with It's Such a Beautiful Day: a trilogy of short, animated films re-edited together into a (barely) feature-length production.

Following a series of devastating health and personal problems, Bill struggles to get by in his everyday life.  He goes to the grocery store, watches TV and obsessively sucks blood from a sore in his mouth.  His stream-of-conscious observations on everyday life - like how he always buys the fruit from the back of his grocery store's produce displays because the fruit in the front is crotch-level with the other patrons - are as downcast as they are amusing.  But Bill is going through a profound change that nobody around him is aware of, and he will soon transcend existence as we know it.

I don't know what I was really expecting when we started streaming It's Such a Beautiful Day, but it certainly wasn't this.  Despite what it's animated origins might suggest to the casual moviegoer, this is an art film: not something meant to be taken up as broadly watchable entertainment.  That doesn't make it any better or worse, just something that most people generally won't be interested in seeing (like Enemy or Under the Skin).

For as radically perplexing as the narrative was, however - and despite a jarringly disconnected second act - It's Such a Beautiful Day is one of the most uniquely memorable films that I have ever seen.  Writer / director Don Hertzfeldt presents a character that it as once as foreign and familiar to us as anybody struggling to fit into society without a prescribed role.  His insights are equal parts poignant and hilarious, insights which build upon previous insights and will build up to ones further along in the film, like a compressed version of How I Met Your Mother or Archer.

That being the case, however, the film is astoundingly uneven in pacing and overall entertainment value.  Some parts are absolute gems of comedy or commentary, while other parts seem to exist only to connect those gems to one another within the narrative.  The first third of the film is consistently fantastic; the second third is good, but doesn't connect well to either the preceding or forthcoming segments; and the final third is good, but gets especially weird.

As long as you can look past its faults, It's Such a Beautiful Day is a remarkable film: unique enough that immediately after seeing it I recommended it to nearly a dozen others on that strength alone.  It admittedly doesn't have much rewatchability, but the one experience should prove to be sufficient.  If you have Netflix especially, where it is still streamable, I would definitely recommend that you check it out.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy it on BluRay:  No

So what's your favorite off-beat animation?  Let me know in the comment section below.

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