Sunday, June 16, 2013
"The Kings of Summer": boys play Tom Sawyer, for fun as much as for rebellion; Snowden incident recalls an important 80's film
“The Kings of Summer”, the new comedy about youth by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, rather stiches together
ideas from “Lord of the Files” with “Kids in America”, and maybe even “Moonrise
Kingdom”.
Nick Robinson carries the film with his charisma as Joe,
pretty much the ring leader as some boys (Patrick – Gabriel Basso and Biaggio –
Moises Arias) move into the central Ohio woods and build their own clapboard
home with amazing speed, after Joe runs away from his bossy single dad (Nick
Offerman).
They have fun, with their board games and country music
(guitars and violins), and live in the woods without electricity just
fine. They could survive an
electromagnetic pulse and never know it.
Oh, they do have their cell phones.
They cheat a little
bit – scavenging for chicken wings from the waste at a nearby restaurant –
although the “woods people” in “The East” (June 9) also scavenged. Nick teaches himself to stone, skin and roast
a squirrel.
At a critical point, Biaggio says that he is gay, although
there’s not a lot made of it. Pretty
soon, he gets the chance to try to place hero at the film’s denouement, upon
seeing the slither of an automated rattlesnake.
CBS Films offers this site.
I’m rather reminded by the film of the idea of an “intentional
community”, like Twin Oaks, VA (which I covered April 7, 2012 on the Issues
Blog) or even Lama.
The kids do use alcohol (hence the R rating) but don’t have
weapons – they’re not exactly Doomsday Preppers, or activists. They’re having fun.
I saw this at the Charles Street theater in Baltimore, in a smaller auditorium, before a good crowd, during the lull in the Pride Block Party.
I have to say that memories of another film, “The Falcon and
the Snowman”, by John Schlessinger (Orion) in 1985, came up yesterday in
conjunction with media discussions of Edward Snowden. I recall both the book by Robert Lindsey
(about Christopher Boyce [timothy Hutton] and Dalton Lee (Sean Penn) back from my says in Dallas – I think I saw
it at the old Northpark. That was during
a Cold War experience with major differences from what we have now (although the differences are not as great as
we think). A documentary about Snowden
will surely get made, alongside Assange
and Manning.
There was also an
off-hand report in the media yesterday about a supposed prediction by Steven
Spielberg and others that Hollywood could implode, producing many fewer movies
and adopting a “Broadway” model for performances, which we see with Fathom
Events already. How would that
prediction affect the festival and smaller films market?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment