Films of Youth List Discussion + Suggestions (Genre Project)

[colinr0380]

I've been mainly approaching Trash not just a Slumdog cash-in but also inextricably related to the whole carnival surrounding the 2014 Brazillian World Cup. It is sort of trying to ride that wave of interest in the country.

Plus as much as Slumdog it is also a very belated City of God-inspired film, which is another film that should be in consideration for this list!

[swo17]

The best Pan adaptation is of course City of Pirates. I remember the P.J. Hogan version from 2003 also being pretty good.

[bottled spider]

Lastly, I want to mention a film I've talked up here before; I'm not sure how well-known it is at this point but Keith Gordon's The Chocolate War, whatever one thinks of Robert Cormier's relentlessly pessimistic YA novel, is among the few films to capture high school -- Catholic school specifically, but really in general -- as the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-like horror show it seems to be while it's happening to you. Gordon seems aware of the sheer absurdity of a mere chocolate sale causing such emotional destruction and runs with it, eloquently returning to the thesis that unites all three of these films: that the pettiness of a problem doesn't stop it from attaining enormity in one's life, especially when you're 16 or so.

I saw this once a very long time ago, but it left a vivid impression. What makes it so effective is the keen antinomy between deeply sympathising with an admirable and likable protagonist, and reluctantly delighting in the acumen and nasty charisma of his Machiavellian adversaries. The film makes a fascinating exploration of how power works.

[Trees]

A few off the top of my head:

Whisper of the Heart (1995) Directed by then-heir-apparent to Studio Ghibli, Yoshifumi Kondō, I would say that this film is not only the most underrated of all Ghibli films, but is the best in terms of dealing with the life of a young person and how they fit into the world. Obviously, that's a bold statement, given that Ghibli has made almost nothing but masterpiece films about young people. Miyazaki wrote the film, and his influence is all over it, in a good way. Sadly Kondō passed away not long after Whisper, so the world will never know what more cinematic treasures may have come from him.

A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985) Mostly autobiographical tale from Hou Hsiao-Hsien about growing up in Taiwan and dealing with the mortality of loved ones. Hou deals with the subject of sacrifice and the fact that as a young man he drifted into delinquent behavior. This film reminded me a bit of Malick's Tree of Life. As with Hou's similar (but less effective) Dust in the Wind, the Grandma steals the show when she is on screen.

Big (1988) Tom Hanks comedy about a boy who is magically placed into the body of an adult and lands a job as a toy tester at a major toy company. One of my favorite comedies growing up. I rewatched it about a year ago, and I'll be damned, it's still just as great as I remembered.

I will try to contribute more to this when I have more time.

[dustybooks]

A couple of unseen youth-related titles from the forum's consensus lists.

Never Let Me Go (2010, Mark Romanek): This disappointed me quite a lot; while theoretically I love the idea of science fiction that centers wholly on a small, personality-driven story, this seemed to me too polite to achieve the emotional catharsis it was attempting. I felt little investment and sadness when

Spoiler

the "relationship exception" turned out not to exist, as it seemed almost arbitrarily introduced even at first mention. And on reading the film's dedicated thread, I see I wasn't alone in thinking that after all of the careful restraint in the performances, Andrew Garfield's out-of-nowhere scream of agony toward the sky felt very much out of place.

Fish Tank (2009, Andrea Arnold): This, on the other hand, I loved... and in part because considering its setting and subject matter, it's so incongruously pretty -- colors and compositions clashing with the misery playing out on their stage. Not a thing about the plot isn't fairly obvious from the beginning -- indeed, even the timing of its story beats is fairly easy to predict -- but I found Mia as a character so engaging and believable that my empathy won out over my skepticism as a viewer. It's a lively film full of engrossing detail.

Spoiler

I'm a sucker for the kind of ending this employs, when the three members of the shattered family silently dance to "Life's a Bitch" -- I cried at length at the end of Margaret for probably similar reasons -- but I can see how some would decry it as obvious or sentimental. What can I say? It felt justified to me.

Also:

Big (1988) Tom Hanks comedy about a boy who is magically placed into the body of an adult and lands a job as a toy tester at a major toy company. One of my favorite comedies growing up. I rewatched it about a year ago, and I'll be damned, it's still just as great as I remembered.

I love this movie as well -- though I remember it more as a mostly serious elaboration on its fantasy premise with some well-placed humor than as a pure comedy -- and I think it still boasts Tom Hanks' best, trickiest performance. There's real feeling and insight in its portrayal of young male friendships, probably even more than in fellow 1980s chestnut Stand by Me.

[Michael Kerpan]

...Hou's similar (but less effective) Dust in the Wind...

While I do very much like Time to Live, Time to Die, I have always _loved_ Dust in the Wind.

[bottled spider]

Duck Season (Fernando Eimbcke). I switched this off in despair about fifteen minutes in, feeling that I'd rarely seen a film make so little effort to engage the viewer, even the lenten B&W seemingly designed to enhance the tedium of this gritty, kitchen sink uncomedy. I soldiered on the following day, in the spirit of completing homework, when the film sprang to life the moment

Spoiler

the boy confesses to his would-be seductress that he's been fantasizing about his buddy. Shortly after they eat the brownies, and there follows the most delightful (and epic) stoned out scenes. Normally I find drug humour lame, but the movie was amusing and fun from this point on.

So this proved to be a highly (sorry) enjoyable film once I got into it.

[bottled spider]

Some recent second viewings for this project:
Littlerock (Mike Ott). This won't land high on my list, but I'd like to put in a good word for it anyway. A couple things I liked about it were the way the story kept taking a different tack than I expected, and that my impression of the characters kept altering over the course of the film. A small, quiet film, quite lyrical in places.

Fucking Åmål (Moodysson). It's a good movie of course, but I enjoyed it less the second time -- it just seemed rather more ordinary than when I first saw it. Needless to say, its sweet and jubilant ending is among the best.

A Time for Drunken Horses (Ghobadi). Another film that sank in my estimation on rewatching. Ghobadi's films are arguably sensational/exploitive/sentimental -- what have you -- aspects I was willing to go along with the first time. Second time round, he just seemed to be laying it on too thick. I liked Turtles Can Fly and Marooned in Iraq better, and will be watching Nobody Know About Persian Cats for this list project.

[zedz]

Duck Season (Fernando Eimbcke). I switched this off in despair about fifteen minutes in, feeling that I'd rarely seen a film make so little effort to engage the viewer, even the lenten B&W seemingly designed to enhance the tedium of this gritty, kitchen sink uncomedy. I soldiered on the following day, in the spirit of completing homework, when the film sprang to life the moment

Spoiler

the boy confesses to his would-be seductress that he's been fantasizing about his buddy. Shortly after they eat the brownies, and there follows the most delightful (and epic) stoned out scenes. Normally I find drug humour lame, but the movie was amusing and fun from this point on.

So this proved to be a highly (sorry) enjoyable film once I got into it.

Yes, the film takes a while to find its true personality (and I hope you stayed right through the end credits for a lovely capping gag). Eimbcke's follow-up Lake Tahoe is a much more confident and impressive film, in my opinion. It's less overtly funny, though, but cinematically it's way more ambitious.

His third feature, also eligible for consideration for this project, is Club Sandwich. It's about a kid on holiday with his mum at the world's most boring resort (it's off-season and the hotel is almost completely deserted). It's well-observed but nowhere near as interesting as his previous films.

[bottled spider]

Luckily I did catch that last joke (I don't always watch closing credits). I'll try to get hold of the other Eimbcke films (Duck Season was the only one available at Ye Olde Video Rental).

[movielocke]

I'm going to spotlight "800 Balas" by Alex de la Iglesias. It's a wonderfully warm comedy about a child swept into what amounts to an alternate world of the old west by his absentee father. I've not seen it in several years but it's one of my favorite films of youth, I'll have to rewatch it for this project.

[domino harvey]

I [...] will be watching Nobody Know About Persian Cats for this list project.

Great music in this one, but be forewarned, the ending is awful and seemingly carried over from a completely different film in tone and execution. Part of the charm of the film is in its amateurish construction, but the finale here is just embarrassing.

Recent viewings:

Big (Penny Marshall 1988) I was never a fan of this as a kid and rewatching… eh, gimme the Jennifer Garner female-centered ripoff, 13 Going on 30 instead. And while it’s my own fault for watching the extended edition on the Blu-ray, this really does go on waayyyy too long. Bizarre item of note I spied in the end credits: Saul Bass designed the unremarkable title sequence.

Bring it On (Peyton Reed 2000) I’m sure there is a good cheerleading movie out there (or will be one day), but neither this or (the comparatively superior, but still not good) Sugar & Spice, released a few months after, are it. I was looking forward to this, as I’d been recommended it before as a superior example of the late 90s teen comedy run, but sad to say I did not even laugh once, When even a late appearance by Upright Citizens Brigade member Ian Roberts fails to make anything funny, something has gone seriously astray. The social politics are questionable at best (and certainly “East Compton”’s high school has a fantastic looking gym, uniforms, and mascot for being a charity case school) and the film commits the greatest sin of all for a film about cheerleading routines: it barely lets us see any, and those we see are chopped up, edited to nothing, and barely present. In a film about cheerleading routines and competitive dancing. Great call there, movie.

Maid to Order (Amy Holden Jones 1987) A childhood favorite, this is a silly but sweet movie about Ally Sheedy’s wealthy spoiled brat who pisses off daddy so much that he wishes she wasn’t his daughter. Suddenly, thanks to magic, Sheedy is homeless and forced to fend for herself. The film’s funniest joke is its most un-PC, as Sheedy is only employed and able to initially keep her job because she’s the only white maid in the Beverly Hills area. The film wrings a surprising number of laughs out of this simple joke at the expense of the racist rich folks, and nothing else here is nearly as daring or comic as this Paul Bartel-esque runner. Of course Sheedy eventually learns to embrace being a peasant and becomes a decent human being, but it’s as cute and harmless a movie as it is predictable. Still, nothing tops the list-worthy Troop Beverly Hills in the Poor Little Rich Girl category.

Meatballs (Ivan Reitman 1979) / Ernest Goes to Camp (John Cherry 1987) / Camp Nowhere (Jonathan Prince 1994) Three camp comedies, and all three utterly miss the mark for laughs. Though it spawned a legacy of imitators and convinced Hollywood that Bill Murray could lead a film, I pretty much hated Meatballs, which is centered around Murray riffing endlessly and obnoxiously, occasionally interspersed with other campers trying to get their wick dipped. As in my revisiting of Ghostbusters, I found Murray’s character to be a repellent asshole and not the charming wiseacre he once seemed to me. Maybe I’m just getting old (though I wasn’t even born when this film came out). I think Murray’s a funny guy and a talented comedian, but not here.

Ernest Goes to Camp fares best of these three films in that it procures one genuine laugh out loud moment involving something one must never do when encountering a family of badgers. Unfortunately, the film runs longer than twenty seconds and so we get the “Hey Vern” guy floundering about with juvenile delinquents in his first feature. While I had a positive experience revisiting Ernest Goes to Jail (and to a lesser extent, Ernest Scared Stupid) a few months back in the 90s List thread, it became clear early on why I could barely remember this one. Cliff Notes for the film: Everyone is a jerk to poor Ernest, but he soldiers on obliviously. The end.

Camp Nowhere has a premise that makes my skin crawl: a bunch of kids decide to form their own camp and run it themselves, with some light supervision from a former drama teacher turned Easy Cheese salesman, played by a slumming Christopher Lloyd. Remarkably, these kids don’t kill each other or starve or spontaneously create a new Larry Clark film. This movie is so confused that it casts a thin and appealing young girl as the “fat girl” (and as a result she is the butt of several jokes that seem lost in translation regardless of the language being spoken), and an equally appealing smart and likable guy as the allegedly socially-poisoned “geek” protagonist who nevertheless is able to organize, run, and finagle the entire con, all the while leading his fellow kids, who follow his words and plans. Yes, that certainly sounds like a loser.

Ah well, I already have Wet Hot American Summer and Little Darlings, I guess I don’t need any more camp comedies in contention for my list.

[dustybooks]

Bass also designed the credits for the other Gracie Films hits of the period, Broadcast News and War of the Roses; I have long wondered why his work for James L. Brooks is so anonymous, but I guess that's for a different thread.

[colinr0380]

I see Bill Murray in a similar way to George Clooney: I much prefer the wryly suave, though a little world-weary, current persona to the somewhat callous youthful one! (Although I remember Osmosis Jones being a nice throwback to those old Caddyshack through to Quick Change days)

I suppose Meatballs was the catalyst for other summer camp stuff like Gorp, which features very early roles for Dennis Quaid and Rosanna Arquette!

[domino harvey]

Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble 1999) On the whole this is a better (loose) adaptation of the source text than Stephen Frears' take (haven’t seen Valmont), but it completely falters and chickens out in the last act. Ryan Phillippe is the heartless lothario and Sarah Michelle Gellar his coke-snorting step-sister who offers to let him sodomize her if he can bed Reese Witherspoon’s proud virgin. The film is nicely tasteless, especially in the early scenes with Selma Blair, who plays her role as though the character were mentally retarded (and the acts of Phillippe and Gellar are even more effective is one assumes she is). But then Phillippe’s utterly unredeemable protagonist is given half-hearted rehabilitation by the narrative needs of the plot, and the film falls apart.

Drive Me Crazy (John Schultz 1999) Though future Veronica Mars / iZombie creator Rob Thomas wrote the script, this garden variety 90s teen comedy is virtually witless as it hits all the expected teen movie notes with catatonic pacing. Melissa Joan Hart stars as a walking Delia’s ad who fakes a romance with slacker next door Adrian Grenier in order to make their respective exes jealous. This makes even less sense in the film.

the NeverEnding Story (Wolfgang Petersen 1984) This… has not aged well. Third rate Jim Henson wannabe special effects are the only thing this confused “inspirational” kid’s pic offers, as the actual story is fairly stupid and slapdash. I knew I had seen this as a kid but could not remember a single thing outside of the dog-dragon. It will mercifully fade again from my memory soon enough.

O (Tim Blake Nelson 2001) Shelved for years due to fallout from the Columbine massacre, this smart and stylish reimagining of Othello transposed onto a high school basketball court is a surprisingly effective Shakespeare adaptation. Mekhi Phifer is especially strong as the jealous central figure (here “Odin”), and Josh Hartnett and his duck’s ass haircut makes for a good manipulating Iago (or ‘Hugo” in this version). Nelson treats the material with seriousness and solemnity and it’s one of the rare Shakespeare reduxes that could function equally well without knowledge of the source text. The first list worthy film I’ve seen since starting this project. Highly recommended.

Soul Survivors (Stephen Carpenter 2001) One of those movies where a character is in a deathly accident and then afterwards finds themselves haunted by mysterious ghosts trying to impart a message and the gist of the twist becomes pretty obvious ten minutes in and all we the audience can do is sit there and wait for the film to catch up to us. No one here will ever watch this, but if you do, I dare you to tell me how the first five minutes have any relation to the rest of the film, or make any narrative sense in conjunction with anything else that happens in this movie.

[dustybooks]

Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble 1999) On the whole this is a better (loose) adaptation of the source text than Neil Jordan’s take

minor correction: I assume you mean Stephen Frears?

[domino harvey]

Yes, whoops! Fixed!

[dustybooks]

I still believe that The Neverending Story II (which I've never seen) has the funniest title in film history.

I watched O many many years ago, rented it on VHS in fact. My only strong memory of it is finding Phifer very compelling and having most other feelings drowned out by my then-girlfriend's all but obsessive hatred of Josh Hartnett. Perhaps I should see it again now.

[domino harvey]

Good luck finding it, I think I bought the Blu-Ray for eight bucks a few years ago and now it's going for ~$50. Definitely worth seeing even if you don't think Hartnett is hunk of the century (and really, hating Hartnett should add to the pleasure of this film, shouldn't it?)

[gorgeousnothings]

No one here will ever watch this, but if you do, I dare you to tell me how the first five minutes have any relation to the rest of the film, or make any narrative sense in conjunction with anything else that happens in this movie.

Challenge accepted.

[knives]

the NeverEnding Story (Wolfgang Petersen 1984) This… has not aged well. Third rate Jim Henson wannabe special effects are the only thing this confused “inspirational” kid’s pic offers, as the actual story is fairly stupid and slapdash. I knew I had seen this as a kid but could not remember a single thing outside of the dog-dragon. It will mercifully fade again from my memory soon enough.

I haven't seen it since, I think, but the moment where I decided the film was one of those wrong memories was encountering the original novel which is simply put better in every way. The movie only adapts the first half and does so very close to the narrative. What rises the novel is Ende's voice which has a crazy wit for genre and a welcome sense of melancholy. The second half of the book isn't as good which makes it understandable for lack of adaptation (though the sequel movie does an even worse attempt at that). It essentially goes for shock value as it shows how the terribleness of real kids would ruin the positive feelings of the fantasies they like to imagine themselves a part of. It's a smart and daring decision on Ende's part, but the purpose seems a bit lacking and very grumpy. Still I recommend it.

[bottled spider]

Ponette

Spoiler

I wonder if I understood this how the director intended. It seems to me that the film took a highly critical stance toward religion, implying that it complicates mourning, impeding understanding and acceptance, without offering much solace. But then, as far as I can make out, the film ends with an actual resurrection. The literalness of the ending is evidenced by the red sweater, which the mother is carrying as she enters the scene, and is identified as belonging to the mother (which explains why it is much too large for Ponette). This would make it similar to Tolkin's Rapture, which seems to take a sympathetic but definitely skeptical attitude toward the characters' faith throughout the film, before ending in an unequivocally actual Rapture. Unless that's another film I've misunderstood. Skimming through the IMDb reviews, most of them seem to take the ending of Ponette as unambiguous fantasy.

Am I insane?

Note: the above also includes a spoiler of Tolkin's Rapture, which isn't separately obscured because the software does not apparently allow nested spoiler tags.

[TMDaines]

The Wonders in the Dark blog did a genre countdown for "Childhood Films" last year. Unfortunately, they haven't parsed their results into one easy-to-read list, but there are individual essays or comments for each film that made their final reckoning.

[Trees]

Legend (1985) - Ridley Scott

For me, Ridley Scott's 1985 fantasy-romance film Legend is probably his most underrated film. A 15-year-old princess and her friends run afoul of an evil, devil-horned villain named Darkness. Tim Curry's Darkness is a crowning achievement of makeup design. The story is simple, sweet, magical and adventurous, but it's the film's art direction -- much as with Blade Runner -- that once again steals the show. The film is exceedingly beautiful. Scott constructed a massive fairytale forest inside the 007 soundstage at Pinewood (and later accidentally burned the entire soundstage to the ground, luckily near the end of production). The film deals with themes like friendship and loss of innocence. I recommend it.

[bottled spider]

Eimbcke's follow-up Lake Tahoe is a much more confident and impressive film, in my opinion. It's less overtly funny, though, but cinematically it's way more ambitious.

Lake Tahoe was great. I found its quiet, deadpan humour very amusing, but then it gradually, gently reveals itself to be a more serious film; the comedy and sadness seamlessly merge. I've never seen anything quite like it in terms of tone and humour.