Before I become an independent small-businessperson who will never again get fired or collect unemployment insurance, I used to go on job interviews from time to time. The vast majority felt pretty good from my end. The interviewer would smile and joke and good-vibe me, and often flatter me with admiring comments or by mentioning glowing recommendations that had come from former employers or colleagues. It took a few years but I finally figured out that being good-vibed meant I probably wasn’t going to be hired.

The flattery, I finally realized, was about the interviewer making him/herself feel good. He/she had more or less decided I was a no-go before I came in or seconds after I sat down, you see, and so he/she poured on the compliments as a form of emotional compensation (for me) or guilt relief (for him/her).

If an interviewer is seriously interested in hiring you he/she will lean in and narrow the eyes and ask you a lot of in-depth questions about this or that. That’s because they like your resume and your manner but they want to be sure. But if they go “tee-hee-hee” or smile or joke around or sing your praises and pat you on the shoulder, you’re almost certainly dead meat.

Well, not really. My heart always goes out to the rugged individualist fighting the entrenched powers-that-be. It’s just that Finke’s vibe and manner puts that belief system to the test. I used to think “well, she may be a strange duck but she’s a hard-charging go-getter and a necessary component.” Now I’m just sick of her. I don’t wish her ill. She can do or say what she wants. But if Finke were to disappear I wouldn’t feel that badly about her absence.

This looks like harmless dumb-ass fun, except any movie that works strenuously to talk you out of believing in the basic elements (story, characters, action sequences) is all but impossible to have fun with. Just put a little bit of effort into selling this as a piece that could actually happen on some level…that’s all I ask. Just put a little elbow grease into selling the plausibility. No? Can’t do it? Just want to shoot it and quit it and cash the check and go home to the ranch? If you wanna play it that way, fine. You just won’t get guys like me to cheer along. Not that fans of this stupid franchise give a damn what Hollywood Elsewhere thinks. They’re cretins for the most part, and I’m saying this as a fan of Sylvester Stallone’s 2008 Rambo film.

If you live in Los Angeles or New York, James Ward Byrkit‘s cerebral but quite chilling Coherence is the film to see this weekend. Definitely. Anyone can make an “uh-oh, something’s not right, weird things are happening” movie, but the trick is to make one that doesn’t devolve into the usual screams and shocks and knives and axes. You can call Coherence a sci-fi thriller of sorts, but it’s really about the power of dark suggestion and clever writing and how a talented group of actors can make a preposterous idea feel not just plausible but — this is the really odd part as far as my own reaction was concerned — vaguely threatening.

I watched it last night, alone in a motel room, through a private Vimeo link on my Macbook Air, and I honestly felt a tiny bit creeped out. I made sure the door was locked. I avoided looking in the mirror. I knew this feeling would pass but I was surprised that I felt unnerved in the first place.