Alvin and Lance paint lines in the road in the wake of devastating forest fires. Walking through a bizarre landscape of blackened tree trunks, punctuated by the verdant green of the recovering land, the two men bicker and grate on each other before forging some kind of bond. Much of this dialogue-heavy film centres on the men's contrasting approach to relationships. Alvin is dedicated to his partner, sending money and seemingly on the road to give her space. Lance just wants to get laid. Both are dysfunctional in their own way, as Alvin indulges his own wishes and fails to notice his partner needs him by her side. Lance's unreformed misogyny is simply crass and remains problematic even after the credits roll. Along with an equally chauvinistic older truck driver, included ostensibly for comedic value, the female-loathing exchanges become repugnant. In the end, the boys get drunk in clichéd bottle-swigging, slow-motion style, indulge in some wanton vandalism, then decide to go raid a beauty pageant. Some bizarre magic realism is thrown in at the end. Paul Rudd shows another dimension to his acting, and Emile Hirsch does enough with a one-dimensional character, but acting nous cannot save a film that relies too heavily on the evocative setting to compensate for poorly developed characters, tiresome dialogue, and long irrelevant montage sequences. Like the lines drawn when they are drunk, this is an aimless, meandering film, that does not know what it wants to say.

With still having good memories of co-writer/ (along with Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson) director David Gordon Green's 2008 Comedy Pineapple Express,I was thrilled to discover that a family friend had recently gotten hold of Green's collaboration with Paul Rudd,which led to me grabbing my best suit,and getting ready to meet Prince Avalanche.The plot:Asked by his girlfriend to get her brother a job,Alvin arranges for Lance to work with him during the summer time repairing traffic lines of a quiet country road.Bored to death of being stuck in the middle of nowhere,Lance begins to make plans to take the weekend off,and visit a near-by city.As Lance sets off for the big city,Alvin begins to question everything which he has left behind.View on the film:Backed by a haunting score from David Wingo and the excellent Post- Rock band Explosions In The Sky,director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr strip the film to a docu-drama rawness,as Green and Orr avoid giving the title any elegance,by using rough tracking shots to firmly place the viewer in the wilderness.Along with the tough tracking shots,Green & Orr also use short,brittle shots to display the near- nuclear bomb effect its rural Texas location suffered in the Bastrop County Complex fire.Whilst Green does well at giving the movie a striking appearance,Green's and Gunnarsson's adaptation of Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson's film Either Way disappointingly fail to explore the depths of Alvin and Lance's friendship,which leads to the characters and the title feeling extremely stilted and dry.Going against his traditional comedic roles,Paul Rudd gives a very good performance as Alvin,with Rudd showing Alvin's straight-lace attitude to have a blistering effect on Lance,as they both begin to enjoy the silence.

It's 1988 and wildfires have ravaged the Texas countryside. Alvin (Paul Rudd) took a job to paint the lines on the road to get away from the world. He takes his girlfriend's slacker brother Lance (Emile Hirsch) along for the job. Alvin doesn't see much in the sex obsessed Lance, and Lance is chaffing at the isolation.This is a very small indie with basically the two main actors in most of the scenes. These are two good actors with a lot of sex talk, relationship struggle, and an aimless story. There are a couple of chuckles and a few interesting scenes. However they are too few and far between. It doesn't have the energy of a road movie or the poignancy of a relationship story. The last third turns up the heat, but it quickly becomes silly. I think there is a good half-movie here. The rest of this doesn't have enough energy. It's very subdue.

I took this DVD out from my library so I can at least say I didn't waste any money on it's purchase(other than my taxes). Two men in the Texas back country get jobs painting stripes on a road. That's about as exciting as it gets. What we're told on the cover is that two men of very different backgrounds and sensibilities bond in this job. What I saw were two fairly unlikable guys who share some misery with each other. There's no journey of self-discovery, no real humor other than a strange drunken truck driver that appears a few times during the film. The only bonding I could see was done with a large helping of alcohol along with a pointless destruction of a large portion of their equipment (yet it all gets packed neatly back in the jeep at the end??). Just a lot of empty, meandering dialogue as you would expect from two people with nothing in common. I was really hoping that at least someone would say a few witty things but it just drifts off to nothing, leaving us stranded as viewers in the wilderness.