Saw a couple worthy additions to this tired yet never waning genre: My Summer of Love and Thumbsucker. Both are definitely worth the effort. My Summer of Love hovers somewhere between the work of Ken Loach and Eric Rohmer–an atmospheric love story suffused with dejection and desire about two adolescent girls whose sexual relationship is shaped by class division. Thumbsucker is that rare bird–a funny yet poignant, American coming-of-age film that actually feels deftly original (I didn’t read Kirn’s novel). Strong performances (in particular, Tilda Swinton, Lou Pucci and Kelli Garner) and a serio-comic script that captures the awkwardness of adolescence while also showing great respect for those adults (teachers, parents, dentists) whose commitment to working with young people often leave them confused and floundering in that liminal space between these two worlds (Vincent D’Onofrio and Vince Vaughn should not go unnoticed). I did not imagine I would like this film as much as I did.
Summer of Love is a little bit like Match Point, don’t you think, where sexual identification and desire coincide with lust for luxury and possessions. I hadn’t thought of it until Li’l Pony pointed it out, but it’s so true. The richer girl is not really in love with the other one, is she? She’s just having fun. Whereas it’s all so damn real for the poorer girl with the wacko brother… and so real for the wacko brother too!
I’m not sure I read as much “lust for luxury and possessions” as you did in Summer. In fact, I do believe as I said before that the girls’ relationship is shaped by class division (and diversion). I’m not certain I’m willing to equate love with a relationship (which can be empty fun if you want it to be).
but that’s what i meant. class disparity fosters desire. and what is love, my man?
I thought Thumbsucker was sort of interesting but ultimately not that good. Jeff’s right about some great performances–and, yeah, standouts include the Vincents and Swinton and the kid Pucci. But I found myself terribly detached; the style is so steeped in music-video montage that the narrative’s episodic quality is even more prouncedly jagged and ineffective.
That said, in the last half-hour we finally get some great–GREAT–conversations between Pucci and his respective parents, and the impact of those oblique interactions is strong and clear. I wish the whole movie had been more invested in that unexpected and moving examination of family dynamics; insofar as the film also piles up satires of addiction and high school and self-help, its impact diffuses to the point of dreaminess, which doesn’t help given the disengagement provoked by its style.
Only for the narratives-of-awkward-adolescence and/or Keanu-Reeves completists among us.
I’m going to post on Hostel here. (I thought Jeff had given this a couple lines, but I can’t find the title or the director in a search.)
You all know I have a very public, long-standing love affair with sleazy exploitative gore flicks. This is one of those, but … well, I didn’t mind the one-night stand, but I’m not going to write the parents about this one.
Roth, who also made the more delirious Cabin Fever, seems to be mining somewhat Tarantino-esque territory in his two films, revisiting the sleazy horror crap of his youth. But there endeth the relation to Tarantino–there’s no synthesizing, there’s no glorious collisions of film styles or forms, there’s no real reimagination… instead, Roth reiterates faithfully and with some flair those kinds of films.
So in brief: as far as crappy exploitative films that start with t&a-obsessed (annoying, Male) Americans abroad and end with extravagant (but actually semi-tasteful, emphasis on the semi) depictions of torture for fun, Hostel has its charms. I confess to being more than a little annoyed in the overlong set-up–there is nothing particularly witty or reflexive or even structured about the opening sequences of misogynistic jingoistic travel. The characters are dull–and, yeah, probably purposefully dull. However, while in Cabin there was some glee in the exaggerated recitation of character types, there’s little glee here. It’s half an hour with assholes. You kind of want ’em to get tortured.
And tortured they are. I did relish the panache of these scenes–Roth concentrates on reactions rather than the points of insertion, and does a good job screwing with his audience.
But that’s about all this is. Fans of the genre can delight at the needlessly gushy fx of an optic nerve being cut, so that a dangling eye can be removed (so that the stricken character can run faster). But the film seemed ripe for some interesting self-reflexivity: that as we cringe at the immoral pleasures of the rich consumers of torture in the film we are ourselves reveling in the muck; that in the time of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo a horror film emerges where Americans are tortured. But unlike a Tarantino film, none of that is text–it’s all context, and maybe–if you’re generous–deep subtext.