Category Archives: Teen

The Fault in Our Stars (Josh Boone, USA, 2014)

Film Blurb, Teen, , , , , ,

The Fault in Our Stars
The Fault in Our Stars is not as retchingly bad as I expected it to be. Beautiful young people do die of cancer of course; and not before they LOVE and suffer tremblingly to an exquisite soundtrack full of the very saddest songs. However, Wilhelm Defoe appears as the emotionally closed-off, selfish artist who listens to Swedish rap and represents everything that’s horrible, which is to to go such lengths to avoid pain that one ends up not feeling at all. He hasn’t quite lost his Green Goblin attitude and is great fun to watch. Shailene Woodley is brave yet vulnerable, all through a constant trickle of tears. Luckily she also manages to be spiky enough to avoid being cloying; it’s a difficult part and she’s wonderful in it. Laura Dern and Sam Trammell are perfect parents and thus annoying but much less so than they could have been. My eyes did well up a little and I did find it manipulative but that’s what goes to one of these movies for – to cry; which is not to say that the filmmakers couldn’t have earned those tears more honestly and more imaginatively. What I liked best was the witty visualizing and pacing of the text and e-mail messages – a delight. As for the rest … Seeing it as a treatise on the true meaning of life will result in inevitable disappointment. However, as emotion porn for the stony-hearted, it offers its share of interest and pleasures. Going to see this type of movie does require a ‘love-means-never-to-have-to-say-you’re-sorry’ attitude. I didn’t love it. But I’m not sorry I saw it either.

José Arroyo

The House at the End of the Street (Max Tonderai, USA, 2012)

Teen, , , , , , , ,

House-At-The-End-Of-The-Street-Poster-Jennifer-Lawrence

 

A mother (Elizabeth Shue) and daughter (Jennifer Lawrence) move to a different place to start a new life together. The mother has until now been neglectful. Each has something to prove to the other. Their new home is near a semi-deserted house where the son (Max Theriot) of a family who were actually murdered by their own daughter lives. As The House at the End of the Street is teen-horror, Jennifer Lawrence confronts all the clichés of the genre; she encounters the cool crowd but rejects the sex and drugs; the town bullies victimize the object of her affection etc. Of course, everything is not as it seems and nothing is surprising.

Of interest is the use of meth (which I take to be used as a metaphor for the state of American culture in many works across film and television at the moment, most famously of course in Breaking Bad), again shown here as the reason why the parents are too zombified to notice one of their children has fallen of a swing. The other issue of interest, this time in particular relation to Jennifer Lawrence films, is the extent to which dead, distracted or absent mothers figure (In The Hunger Games and Winter’s Bone they’re both present and absent (due to mental problems and meth respectively). Here Elizabeth Shue is the woman who was a slutty party girl in her youth, has been a neglectful mother and wants to make it up all in one go. The film would seem to be a vindication for her but for the coda where you see the fault for the villain becoming a villain is that his mother treats him like a girl, forces him to be the Carrie-Anne whose death was caused by her own neglect.

The film, on the surface at least, seems to have very reactionary politics. At one level it seems to say that the bullying, prejudiced, violent neighbours had been right about the boy who lived down the street thus giving them a reason for their vile behavior (whilst making those who defended him and who died seem to deserve what came to them). It’s a stupid and confused film redeemed only by Lawrence and Shue; Theriot is fine but could have done more with the role (though he is always interesting to look at).

 

José Arroyo