wildcat

Finishing up watching Mike Mills's Thumbsucker, another in the increasing genre of films about waifish boys with long hair undergoing Coming-of-Age rituals against a muted colour scheme while everybody delivers their lines with muted emotion and oddly detached camera work. Well, the genre's a bit more than that, but it includes things like Junebug and A Whole New Thing and even Little Miss Sunshine. They feel, on the whole, like someone watched the entire run of Wes Anderson's movies but didn't pick up on his desperate flourishes of Tableau or High Artifice.

Okay, maybe "Faux Indie Flick" works better. You want to believe it's independent but really Sony Pictures made it and Keanu Reeves wanders around delivering painfully satirized dollops of "zen wisdom" and indie pop plays in the background.

I like a few of these films. Little Miss Sunshine obviously, was highly enjoyable and managed to get out from under the potential meteor strike by being thoroughly antic in places. Junebug focuses on a big city woman unable to connect with her new husband's family on any kind of a real level, and it had some fairly solid acting and decent cinematography; it had an interesting effect of all these characters operating inside their own worlds which can not in any way connect, try as they do.

Thumbsucker's okay. I'm not sure why they continue to cast Vincent D'Onfrio and Vince Vaughn in the same movies, given that they appear to be parallel universe dopplegangers of each other. The movie failed to evoke the complexity of the Little Miss Sunshine characters and Justin came across as a bit two-dimensional at times, as much as they tried to flesh him out - he was a boring Max Fischer without any depth. "In my professional opinion," states Vaughn's debate teacher character, "You've become a monster." And Justin is, yes, he's a monster, an insufferable boy who is, of course, just deep down longing for something, as we all are, only I couldn't bring myself to care about whatever he was longing for. The movie trumps Little Miss, though, by actively giving Tilda Swinton's mother character depth, personality, and a fleshed out character that were denied to Toni Colette's character in LMS. Justin's female counterpart, Rebecca, his on-and-off stoner girlfriend seemed like a poor substitute for Jena Malone who offered only the blank-faced equivalent of chemistry with Justin (or, perhaps, it was the other way round). The movie was all right but it didn't move mountains. The tropes were a little tired - Vincent D'Onfrio as the football hero who broke his leg and could never play again, unable to connect with his waifish intellectual son who is clearly smarter than he is. The neglected little brother who's just a dickhead because no one will actually pay attention to him for very long and occasionally we even forget that Justin has a brother, between scenes.