How I Live Now (***)

This has all the hallmarks of a teen coming-of-age movie. Sixteen-year-old Daisy (Saoirse Ronan)—don’t use her given name, Elizabeth—is a New Yorker sent to summer with relatives in Wales. With mild-self-loathing (we hear this as whispered injunctions) buried under an obnoxious exterior, she’s the perfect candidate for a big learning experience under the guidance of her country-living relations, consisting of a mother and her three kids, and how convenient that the oldest is handsome, age-appropriate, and not actually biologically related to her. But wait, what’s this about a bombing in Paris, and the mother being an expert in World War III planning?

I didn’t mind at all the combination of sci-fi adventure story and teen romance. Do threats of martial law quash desire? Not at all. What was jarring was the way the story requires fresh Daisy to transform from snotty girl who can barely sit in a messy car to lovelorn teen to plucky self-starter in about a week. Perhaps Ronan is channeling her role as another Daisy, this one a teen assassin, in Violet & Daisy. I suspect, however, that the effects of compressing a novel (by Meg Rosoff) into feature-length movie account for the whiplash transformation, as well as the too-brief appearance of the mother character, whose job sounds rather interesting. Alas, we never learn what she was working on, or exactly why Britain may cease to exist. We do learn that the UK government will be pretty darn efficient at organizing things if the shit ever hits the fan. An intriguing premise, aided by director Kevin Macdonald’s great use of rural landscapes. At the end, we get the usual lessons-learned voiceover I was expecting.

IMDb link

viewed 11/14/13 7:05 at Ritz Bourse and posted 11/14/13

The Spectacular Now (***)

There are basically two types of movies about high schoolers. One plays in multiplexes; it usually has a bunch of actors in their mid-20s, divides the kids into a bunch of types, usually sorted by popularity, prominently features a prom or other party as a major plot device, and can be summed up in a sentence. The other, indie-type feature is usually adapted from a novel, features more age-appropriate casting, a first love, more prominent parents, and main characters who are writers or artists. It can be summed up as a coming-of-age story. This one is a little bit of a mash-up. The main character, Sutter, is played by Miles Teller, an actor in his mid-20s who a few months earlier was in 21 & Over, in which he played a kind of obnoxious life-of-the-party type who drank too much. Here he begins as a kind of obnoxious life-of-the-party type who drinks too much and is busy trying to get his nerdier pal laid. Pretty conventional, as is the college-essay-question framing device and lengthy narration employed.

The other main character, however, is played by Shailene Woodley, whose angry-daughter role in the Descendants was as memorable as George Clooney’s lead. She’s every bit as good here in a completely different kind of role, a brainy girl who’s into genre novels and Japanese animé. She draws, too. Unfortunately, all of those characteristics are depicted in the very beginning of the movie and dropped thereafter. She is unfortunately mostly a character there so that Sutter can work out his issues. Still, in every scene she is utterly natural.

As for the story, it is kind of a first-love story (first for her — he’s getting over a breakup), in some ways a popular-guy-meets-unpopular-girl story, but also a coming-of-age story. The drinking issue is handled with subtlety. Sutter drinks too much, but he has other characteristics.

IMDb link

viewed 8/21/13 7:15 at Ritz East and posted 8/21/13

Mud (***1/2)

Who’d have expected to see Matthew McConaughey in a thoughtful coming-of-age story set on the Arkansas/Mississippi border? The titles of Fool’s Gold and Failure to Launch might almost have been metaphors for his career, although he’s mixed in some good movies too. Still, with his turn as a male stripper in Magic Mike, his upcoming role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and even his small part in Bernie, he seems to a have been choosing a higher percentage of noteworthy projects lately. (The July/August 2013 Atlantic includes the actor in a list of “Once-Discredited Ideas Now Staging Comebacks.”) McConaughey is the biggest name here, and plays the title character, but not actually the main one. Instead, Mud becomes the vehicle through which an idealistic 14-year old (Tye Sheridan), Ellis begins to understand the complexities of adult relationships, and romantic ones.

Ellis’s parents are threatening to split; for him, the primary meaning of this will be having to move from his home by the river and become a “townie.” A more programmatic plot might have made Mud into a wise father figure imparting wisdom. But wise men are not often found living alone on an island, where Ellis and his best friend find him. Why Mud is there, and what/who he’s waiting for, becomes clearer as the movie goes on, even as his true character becomes murkier. (His name stays mysterious.) Mud does impart wisdom, but subtly. The ending is probably less subtle, and less ambiguous, than I’d have preferred, but I suspect I’d be in the minority, and it’s certainly not awful.


IMDb link


viewed 6/13/13 and reviewed 6/14–17/13

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (***1/4)

Stephen Chbosky’s coming-of-age novel as brought to the screen by Stephen Chbosky himself.

IMDb link

viewed 10/17/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East

Moonrise Kingdom (***3/4)

The best clue to whether you’ll like a Wes Anderson movie is whether you’ve liked other Wes Anderson movies. That’s not necessarily true of most other directors, or even most writer-directors, but even when translated to animation, as in 2009’s fantastic Fantastic Mr. Fox, the hallmarks of Anderson’s style remain intact. In the opening minutes of his young-love tale, we see them—the curious use of the zoom lens, and split screens, and especially the bright colors. The random elements, like Bob Balaban as the on-screen narrator discussing this history of the small (fictional) island of New Penzance, where most the story takes place. He even, lately, uses his own titling font, a la Woody Allen. In the main, I have found that these hallmarks both maintain interest and place the viewer at a remove. Watching Anderson’s work, which includes The Darjeeling Limited and The Royal Tenenbaums, one doesn’t so much suspend one’s disbelief as ignore it and marvel at the inventiveness so prominently on display.

But even though I’ve just said that, it is possible that someone who didn’t like other Anderson movies might like this one, because of all his movies, the ones where genuine emotion does creep in the most are his two about young love, Rushmore (about a teen boy’s crush on a teacher), and this one, about a a boy and a girl who are not even teens, yet decide to run away together. They are smart kids, articulate even, and they are about as unusual as Anderson’s adult characters, but there was still some kind of realness about them. Both played by first-time actors, they are particular characters. We see this in the boy’s digressions about scouting, and in the way the girl brings along her record player and her favorite books, not common ones another filmmaker might use to evoke the time period, the mid-1960s in this case, but ones that she would have felt were hers alone. Most likely you will not precisely identify with these children, but will perhaps remember the way you too had a now-faded obsession or favorite object at a similar age. You will remember when you wanted to be older and allowed to do what you wanted.

In other words, while much of the plotting, which involves a scout leader (Edward Norton), an officer (Bruce Willis), and the girl’s parents (Frances McDormand, Bill Murray) tracking down the missing couple, has the slightly artificial quality I associate with Anderson, I forgot that in the scenes with the two young leads, and to some extent in the scenes with the officer and the boy, who is an orphan. They speak to the sense of being alone felt by many children. Even the way the children are played by actors who look the actual ages, she being taller than him, helps set these segments in a reality. They place the audience in that time of life where one has begun to understand the world enough to see its possibilities and want to grasp them.

IMDb link

viewed 7/5/12 7:45 at Ritz East and reviewed 7/5/12, 7/12/12

Submarine (***1/2)

An affecting coming-of-age story set in Wales. The hero is teenage Oliver Tate, who like many an unpopular boy imagines himself the hero of his own movies. His object of affection (Yasmin Paige) is chosen, he tells us, for her own modest unpopularity, which makes her possibly attainable. She’s not the nerdy kind kind of unpopular but the edgy kind. They have a charmingly odd romance that involves lighting small fires and such, but, in the manner of many a teenage boy, it barely occurs to Oliver that there may be tender feelings behind her cool exterior. And so he hides his, which prominently involve worrying about his parents’ low-functioning marriage. The quiet, odd father is played by Noah Taylor, who long ago starred as the same character in a pair of equally good coming-of-age stories, The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. The mother is always-good Sally Hawkins.

While maintaining humor throughout, director Richard Ayoade (adapting a Joe Dunthorne novel) evokes the drama of teenage existence with particularity as to character and setting (although the time, probably in the near past, is vague) and universality as to the feelings.

IMDB link

viewed 6/6/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/17/11

December Boys (**3/4)

Four orphans get a seaside holiday in this adaptation of Michael Noonan’s novel. The mixture of coming-of-age drama with hinted-at dark subtext recalls Stand by Me. Daniel Radcliffe gets his first substantial non-Harry Potter role as the oldest of the boys, Maps. He’s after a lovely local lass, while the youngest boy, called Misty for his sensitivity, concentrates on appealing to a young, childless couple. It is the unseen adult version of Misty who narrates. The records the girl plays for Maps pinpoint the date as circa 1970, but the southern Australian coastal area where most of the movie is set is meant to represent an idyllic, timeless place. In this it is effective, though a longer prologue at the orphanage would have established more contrast. This is one of the few movies I’ve actually thought could benefit from being a little longer. The supporting roles, including the older couple who shelter the lads, seem underdeveloped, and this makes a difference, because the point of the movie would seem to be how the boys’ personalities alternately cohere and fray when they experience life beyond the orphanage. Director Rod Hardy pushes things slightly too much in the direction of heartwarming where they should be bittersweet, and tacks on an inevitable, throwaway epilogue that is neither. Radcliffe, essaying an Aussie accent, does well to establish his acting bona fides, and his first-romance tale, though familiar, is perhaps stronger than the main storyline.

IMDB link

reviewed 9/21/07