A- | Four boys hike through the woods in search of a missing kid. Directed by Rob Reiner Starring Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, and Corey Feldman Review by Jon Kissel |
Stephen King’s particular brand of nostalgia gets its most straightforward representation in Stand By Me, one of the best film adaptations of his extensive catalog. King comes at the past with a clearer eye than most, refusing to dress up the ugly parts while still idealizing the freedom-filled summers that present-day Americans lament as a long-dead part of childhood while leashing their own children indoors. Stand By Me, adapted by Rob Reiner from King’s novella The Body, is perhaps the most well-known cinematic depiction of this kind of adult-free upbringing, given critical longevity thanks to its performances and a tone that implicates every onscreen adult as a betrayer or abuser of children. King will make this explicit with his epic novel It, published the same year of Stand By Me’s release, but the non-supernatural cruelty of Stand By Me is just as memorable. The world is mean enough to kids who don’t deserve it, with or without killer clowns.
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The family-friendly adventure gets a modern update with Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Waititi’s fourth film and easily his best gives him a larger budget, but large within the context of New Zealand independent cinema. For a mere $7.5 million, Waititi creates a kinder Goonies and a funnier Stand By Me, the equivalent of an 80's Amblin film in a setting outside of American suburbia. By this point in his career, Waititi has honed his golden Simpsons ratio of 90% comedy and 10% pathos and is about to cash a big check from Marvel, all while demonstrating a creative strength behind the camera that makes his film look more expensive than it is. His transition away from New Zealand micro-budgets and into major commercial and critical cinema has yielded mixed results. The fulcrum of Hunt For the Wilderpeople is the height of one phase of his filmmaking career that later phases are measured against, and come up short.
Richard Linklater is the foremost filmmaker when it comes to American male childhood. He nailed high school in Dazed and Confused, college in Everybody Wants Some, and boyhood in… Boyhood. Linklater takes another crack at being young and Texan in Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood. If that seems like a retread after Boyhood, it does to Linklater, too, because he mixes fantasy and reality here in way that he couldn’t in Boyhood. Apollo 10 ½’s nostalgic journey into unsupervised exurban bliss gets its greatest oomph from the tiny details of Galveston beach instead of its moon-walking adventure, likely because Linklater’s been stung by a jellyfish but never left footprints on the lunar surface.
My number 1 and number 2 favorite films of 2020, Possessor and Nomadland, oddly rhyme with each other despite a complete lack of violence in the latter and a rarely-matched brutality in the former. In Possessor, a vision of the near-future is corrupted from gleaming office buildings as tech magnates invade the homes of users and monetize their every thought, while in Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, the latest wave of those who opt out of late-stage service-oriented, barrier-to-entry capitalism take to the roads with their vans and their shit buckets. Many of the characters, likely real-life nomads themselves who happened to be around when Zhao was filming, have been injured in some way by neoliberalism and globalization and the general cruelty that’s touching more and more Americans as they try to live as their parents did in the latter half of the 20th century. Possessor crystallizes that cruelty in a pitch-black view of a future that, in Nomadland, is starting to develop. However, stripped of competition and most of one’s possessions, left with no one around other than those who are going through the same experience, a quiet charity and camaraderie develops where security and predictability and insulated comfort used to exist.
If anyone’s been reading my reviews over the seven+ years I’ve been writing them, they might know that I’m an atheist and a materialist who sees no reason to buy into non-corporeal entities like souls. Consciousness is a side effect of brain chemistry, alterable by the addition of chemicals or physical injury, and death is a light switch that returns a human, or any organism, to the same state of unbeing that preceded their lives. With all that said, a film that’s about afterlife and ensoulment is going to have to work hard to overcome my latent skepticism and get me to the buy-in stage. Pixar’s latest film, Soul, is in-house director Pete Docter’s third, after Up and Inside Out, two top-tier entries into the film-as-tear-producing-machines genre that Pixar specializes in. Inside Out also had problems of visualizing personality development and memory, a process that Docter is obviously interested in, but the best parts of that film overpower any knowledge of neurology and get to some level of emotional truth. Soul is even more arbitrary with its developmental allegories, but it has a lot on its mind beyond the Pixar clichés of hidden worlds and communities beneath the surface. My consciousness might exist solely in the folds of my brain, but it does get charmed and moved when Soul is at its best. |
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