The movie feels loose and easy, but it has actually been designed with great rigor, with its matching pairs of characters and bits of echoed dialogue.

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Ross is something of an indie Robert Altman, with his huge cast of characters and plaited strands of dialogue, and he has a sharp and comic eye for intimacy, domesticity, and practicality: daily routines when nothing is happening have the moment of high drama, and an egg in the refrigerator, a broken waffle iron, and a handful of change virtually come to life.

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But here as always, Ms. Herzog uses her well-tuned ear for dialogue to reveal the personalities of her characters, and it doesn't take long to figure out that for all their glib chitter-chatter, Abby and Zack (even their names are right) are pitifully unequal to the harsh challenges of adulthood.

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His later films often spiraled away into an indecipherable landscape of half-baked dialogue, outlandish characters and cheesy sets.

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But the characters and dialogue are the stuff of comic strips and junk fiction.

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The storyline occurs years after Anakin Skywalker won his race in "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, " but many of the characters are still around and add some great dialogue in between races.

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