Joyce, just divorced from Elliot, is looking for a place to live in New York City, and she has found something nearly ideal. A safe neighborhood, a nice view, upstairs from Hanks's antique store, with only one other neighbor upstairs.Unfortunately, Charlotte, the upstairs neighbor, likes to play her music loud, and sometimes she plays music when she can't sleep--even at 4 in the morning. She seems mentally unstable, though she has some sort of a publishing job. But at least her music isn't loud music. It's just played loud.Joyce gets a job as a copy editor for a publisher. Her boss is nice. Joyce seems ideal for such a job because, after her parents died when she was 6, her grandparents raised her to be a perfectionist. But she has too many of her own ideas, and being new at the company, she is discouraged from trying to shake things up.With her other problems, Joyce has difficulty coping with Charlotte, but in one really weird scene with fast editing and dreamlike sound, friends tell Joyce what to do about Charlotte. And Joyce's boss is actually a friend of Charlotte's--though this may not necessarily help. Eventually, Joyce finds her own solution, which eventually works, but not in the way Joyce had hoped.Halfway through this movie, I was prepared to say this was one of the worst movie experiences I ever had. But part of the problem was the fact I had an allergy headache, made worse by really hot weather. Perhaps this gave me a special insight into Joyce's state of mind. But I didn't give up. Joyce didn't move, and I didn't turn off the movie because I didn't know when I'd ever see the rest, and I did want to. By the end of the movie, though, I was feeling better, and maybe not just because of the medication. I think the movie actually improved.I couldn't stand Joyce. This did not necessarily mean Trish Goff gave a bad performance, though a really good actress might have helped me to like the character. As she was, though, I just couldn't care about Joyce. If her whining and constant drinking weren't enough, there was also the support group. Until I saw "divorced women" in the credits, I didn't know what that meant. It might have also helped if Joyce had been played by a good-looking actress. One character said she was beautiful, but she wasn't in my opinion.Ally Sheedy did a good job, but she wasn't on screen enough. Her character was likable in a quirky way, but it took work. She looked her age early, but later she turned out to be quite a beauty. Giancarlo Esposito also did a good job as antique store owner Hank, who became Joyce's friend and was quite easy to like. I don't know the name of Joyce's boss, but the actress playing her also did a good job.As to whether this film was really noisy, I found Charlotte's music irritating, but like Joyce, I have a low tolerance for noise, and my situation was even worse the day I saw this. Yet I'm not sure the noise level really communicated how bad it was for Joyce.In the credits it said this movie was filmed in a quiet place. Strange, considering there wasn't any other comedy to speak of here. The whole film seemed to have an eerie tone. Maybe some people enjoy a film like this. It's just not what I'm looking for.

I have a hard time with movies about annoying people, and a hard time with movies about inept people, but put together -- and this movie does that in spades -- it's just painful to watch. Any person with any idea of how to deal with the world will want to scream. On top of that is the whole the decent into madness thing, which only works in the hands of geniuses and campy hacks. Imagine Planes, Trains and Automobiles crossed with Repulsion, all done on such a limited budget that it seems like every take must have been the last one of a grueling 20 hour day in which the actors weren't able to consume anything more than coffee and jujubes. There, now you don't have to see it.

Noise boasts, among other things, being in the vein of the Roman Polansky film, The Tennant. My advice is see the Tennant, which is one of the more creepy and trippy psychological dramas you will find. Noise, on the other hand, doesn't know what it wants to be. It falls short of trippiness by sticking to a plot that has few delusions. The ridiculous events of the film really do happen. The characters (especially the most annoying Alley Sheedy) are not believable. The irritability of the "neigbor upstairs" is more like the antics of the old woman from the even more pathetic film Duplex. What you get is an attempt at a funny film that isn't funny. It strives to be Duplex which itself was just annoying. Yet the ridiculousness takes away from the lame attempt at being creepy.

I saw this film last night as part of the River Run film festival in Winston-Salem, NC and found it to be quite entertaining. The trailer seemed interesting so I figured I'd give it a shot. While watching, you can clearly see the mental breakdown of the main character Joyce and I found it easy to identify with some of her "issues." It has some explicit language and some brief nudity but that shouldn't really be a big problem. A day later, I'm still putting pieces of the movie together in my head. The ending also grabs you at a point where you feel the most vulnerable, much as Joyce is in the movie. All in all, a very good independent film. I recommend it if you have the opportunity to see it.