TRAILER: "Please Give"

I don't normally go to the movies to see indies. That's more of a free-screening/Netflix Instant Watch/cable situation. Why?
1) My friends rarely want to see them with me.
2) I feel robbed if I pay $12 for enlightenment and I unexpectedly get recycled drivel.
3) Sometimes indies are so heavy, intimate, and mind-blowing that it's difficult to soak in at a theater full of disruptive strangers. (i.e. Slumdog Millionaire)

Indie comedies, however, are of a different breed, making it easy to convince my friends to see them, pry a few bucks out of my pocket, and manage to not rock my world in 90-minutes-or-less, which is why I'm psyched for Please Give.

The film is about a woman (Catherine Keener) who owns a shop where she buys and sells property of recently deceased people after hounding their mourning families. Sounds depressing, right? She thinks so too. So much so that she insists on subverting her bad karma by doing good things, like giving to the poor, doting on an old neighbor, and volunteering at an old person's home. Of course, her husband (Oliver Platt) and daughter (Sarah Steele from Spanglish and "Gossip Girl") only see her guilt as an infringement on their lifestyle—the husband wants business to be booming and the daughter wants to buy expensive clothes. It essentially explores how commercialism and greed in the face of the nation's rising poverty can be looked at from a comical and morbid perspective. Who's ready to laugh at this recession?

Release Date: April 23