A movie about good moods, bad moods, varicella-zoster virus, and the in between.
After an old friend's visit ends, Lori is feeling a bit down. Bored with her job, agitated at home, and frustrated with money problems, Lori takes out her anger on her ex-marine boyfriend, Anson. However, after a broken mug, a trip to the zoo and a case of the shingles, Lori's mood changes.
"HOHOKAM exceeds in humor and human authenticity any half-dozen recent Hollywood romantic comedies put together." - Peter Keough, Boston Phoenix
"Frank V. Ross is the Mike Leigh of post-digital revolution American independent filmmakers. No -- he's the Charles Burnett. No -- the Allan King, except he writes scripts. No. Any attempt to couch Ross' four features in references to master auteurs feels both overblown and reductive. This Chicago filmmaker's deceptively simple dramatic ethnographies have earned the praise of Ray Carney and Andrew Bujalski and collaborations with contemporaries Joe Swanberg, Kentucker Audley and David Lowery, but the films themselves have gone widely unseen.
And so you hold in your hands HOHOKAM, Ross' third feature and probably his most accessible, probably the best place to start. It stars Allison Latta as Lori, a collection agent who can't stay on top of her own bills, and who seems most comfortable dishing on the phone to her long-distance gay best friend. Ross regular Anthony Baker plays Anson, Lori's ex-Marine boyfriend, who subconsciously worries 'about looking like a sissy in front of Bruce Willis'. In lives neatly contained within shabby duplexes, dreary office cubicles and Arizona strip malls -- all of which could have been built yesterday and could be gone tomorrow but seem to occupy miles of the Southwestern so-called frontier -- Anson and Lori work, eat, fight and worry. To make a bad day better, they reenact scenes from Troy; to extend a good mood, they go to the zoo. Spiler alert: somebody pukes.
As Ross himself told ShortEnd Magazine, 'Plot is a dead end. Morals are a dead end. Themes are a dead end. Everything is a dead end but the characters.' With his HD camera trained on capturing the minute details of his actors' naturalistic behavior (and the almost surrealy bland suburban landscape which contains them) as unobtrusively as possible, Ross drops us into the lives of this 30-ish, working-class couple, stays a few days until his characters come to a natural catharsis point, and then pops right out again. That we forget that what we're watching is fiction and assume these lives go on without us is evidence enough that, when it comes to avoiding 'dead ends', Ross is on to something." -Karina Longworth, Spout
