| Overall Grade: |
C- |
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| Story: |
B- |
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|
| Acting: |
B+ |
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|
| Direction: |
C- |
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|
| Visuals: |
D |
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|
TIRED OF BEING MADE TO IDENTIFY MAUDLIN GEEKS
by (movies profile)
May 31, 2008
Goes in circles, circles, never escaping its premise, tormenting its protagonist, only offering the scrawniest of development and nothing in the way of denouement.
Stuttering high-school underclassman is taken for a ride by conniving cold-hearted upperclasswoman, who suckers him into attempting the impossible, for nefarious motives of her own. Movie withdraws from the battlefield of most similar adolescent little-train-that-could homilies (“Bad News Bears†redux), but fails to offer much in its place, ending pretty much where it began.
Relies all too heavily on the omniscient voice-over (filmmaker as god) to provide Perspective and Wisdom (note capitals), assurance that these trails, this pubescent suffering, too, will pass – remember the “The Wonder Years†(cringe – where is Fred Savage now, pressing pants at a dry cleaner’s in Trenton)?
Only center that holds this flimsy cookie-cutter Sundance-clone indie together is Reece Daniel Thompson, who offers a marvelous performance, all rough-edges and stumbling dignity.
Don’t buy it: Adolescence just ain’t the transition from purity to corruption, from childhood’s Garden-of-Eden natural state to adult society’s degradation. No, tis just another genre, still another prostitution of reality dreamt up by hard-up dream brokers, vis, “Superbad,†ad nauseum.
Movie could have used heavier doses of absurdity, healthier smatterings of irony, and a hell of a lot more umpff. |
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