Coming-of-Age

Morris from America: In a Strange Land, Father Still Knows Best

Jeremy BeckReviews
Markees Christmas and Craig Robinson in "Morris from America"

Early in the modest and winsome crowd-pleaser Morris from America, a father scolds his son for writing vulgar, misogynistic rap lyrics. When the son counters that his father curses constantly, the father explains, “I’m not mad because it’s explicit, I’m mad because it’s bullshit.” That judgment applies to parts of Morris from America itself. A slender study of disenchanted youths, the film is sometimes false and artificial, even when it postures as authentic. Yet the incisive honesty with which the father delivers his verdict exemplifies what makes this small, heartfelt movie worth watching. As a portrait of a teenager straining to find himself in a cruel and uncaring world, it’s fairly rote. But as a story of the fragile-yet-powerful bond between parent and child, it is wonderfully specific and true.

The son in question is Morris (Markees Christmas), and you can guess where he’s from. The more interesting detail is where he lives; Morris resides in Heidelberg, the touristy German town where his widowed father coaches soccer. His status as an immigrant lends some spice to the film’s otherwise mild recipe. By which I mean, despite its European location, Morris from America—which was written and directed by Chad Hartigan—fits snugly within one of the most durable genres of American independent cinema: the coming-of-age story. It tells the tale of a diffident outsider who struggles to connect with his peers and understand his elders, but who also, thanks to the careful nourishment of his confidence and the attentions of a pretty girl, gradually discovers how to accept and assert himself. As the movie progresses, you can be sure that Morris will fall in love, make some questionable decisions, get his heart broken, lie to his father, and ultimately learn some valuable life lessons. Read More

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The Good Dinosaur: Lost Lizard, Seeking Family, Finds a Friend

Jeremy BeckReviews
A giant lizard and his boy, in Pixar's "The Good Dinosaur"

To say that The Good Dinosaur is a mediocre Pixar movie is to praise it with faint damnation. For the past 20 years, the pioneers of computer-generated animation have been churning out imaginative, provocative entertainments on a regular basis, with nary a dud in the bunch; hell, the studio released a stunning masterpiece on the human condition just five months ago. So if you find yourself grumbling that this latest entry fails to climb to the extraordinary heights of Pixar’s (now owned by Disney) greatest films, remember that we grade these movies on a curve. An easygoing charmer, The Good Dinosaur may not be as transcendent as Wall-E or Finding Nemo—in fact, it doesn’t come close. But it remains a durable and intermittently astonishing work, with typically splendorous animation and an emotionally satisfying third act. Two decades ago, Toy Story rewrote the playbook on how animated movies can be made. The Good Dinosaur is less revolutionary—it plays by the rules—but its by-the-book approach has its own gentle appeal.

The film boasts a tantalizing premise that seems novel, until you realize it’s just window-dressing for a typical lost-boy narrative. It ponders a scenario, conveyed economically during a silent prologue, where the meteorite destined to wipe out the dinosaurs actually missed the Earth, resulting in a planet where giant lizards and humans coexist. That universe is rife with possibilities—one of which, sheer disaster, formed the backbone of the biggest-grossing movie of 2015—but the primary characters are essentially dinosaurs in name only. The hero is Arlo (voiced, in an irritating whine, by Raymond Ochoa), an anthropomorphized apatosaurus (think brontosaurus, but with a longer neck) and the runt of a family of mild-mannered herbivores. They live a peaceful farming life on a sun-dappled field that’s only a shade removed from Little House on the Prairie. Arlo’s father (Jeffrey Wright) is a stoic but warmhearted patriarch, while his mother (Frances McDormand) is a cliché of maternal kindness. Arlo himself is somewhat useless, too weak to perform hard labor and too fearful to stop small pests from harming the crops. Arlo’s perpetual petrifaction prevents him from “making his mark”, which, as his father tritely explains, involves planting a muddy footprint on the side of a corn silo. Read More

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The Diary of a Teenage Girl: Hungering for Sex, Love, and Womanhood

Jeremy BeckReviews
Bel Powley gives a breakthrough performance in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"

The very first line of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s uneven, appealing coming-of-age story, is “I had sex today”; it is immediately followed by a very Fifty Shades of Grey-like exclamation, “Holy shit!” But despite her youth and initial lack of worldliness, Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) is no Anastasia Steele. She is not timid, nor is she entranced by notions of masculine dominance. She is instead a confident, eager, and often foolish femme who does not apologize for her desires, even if she does not entirely understand them. “I like sex,” Minnie tells us early on, and in case you didn’t believe her, she clarifies, “I really like getting fucked!” That may strike some as vulgar, but the most satisfying thing about The Diary of a Teenage Girl—beyond the powerful performance at its center—is its frankness in discussing sexual desire and its attendant emotions. Minnie is the hero of her story, she wants sex, and she refuses to cast herself as the victim.

Though she is very much that, at least in one sense. Minnie, as you may have gleaned from the film’s title, is a teenager—fifteen, to be precise. That’s young enough as it is, but it becomes alarmingly so once you learn that the person she is so happily, repeatedly tumbling into bed with is her mother’s thirtysomething boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Yet Heller, who also wrote the screenplay (adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel), is not interested in the legal or moral ramifications of Minnie and Monroe’s illicit union. She is more concerned with exploring how it makes Minnie feel: how it affects her sense of self, her demeanor, and, most distressingly, her relationship with her mother (a very good Kristen Wiig). In so doing, Heller puts a tremendous amount of weight on Powley, a 23-year-old British actress appearing in her first American feature (the movie takes place in 1970s San Francisco). She shoulders the load with aplomb, capturing Minnie’s vitality and hunger while also revealing glimmers of her fragility. Read More

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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl: The Schmaltz in Our Stars

Jeremy BeckReviews
This is a sappy movie about Greg and Earl and the Dying Girl

I often censure movies for being generic; no film is more hollow than one without a personality. The flip side, however, is the movie that pummels its audience into submission via a surfeit of quirk. This is why Me and Earl and the Dying Girl—Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s skillfully made, unrelentingly precious, ultimately insufferable weepie—is a strangely worthwhile brand of disappointment. It is by no means lacking in individuality, and it sporadically sparkles with wit and ingenuity. But it channels its eccentricity in frustratingly clichéd ways, bludgeoning viewers with an onslaught of tackiness and schmaltz. It tries very hard to win your heart, and its calculated efforts to do so make it both laudable and oddly detestable.

Here is an example of this movie’s shtick: During one of his shaggy-dog voiceovers, Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) analogizes hot girls—in particular the oblivious manner in which they exert their sexuality and power over horny boys—to moose inadvertently trampling over helpless chipmunks. It’s a cute enough metaphor, and the first time Greg describes it, Gomez-Rejon cuts to a crude piece of claymation that playfully illustrates two such animals acting out that very scenario. That’s a wry bit of visual inventiveness and formal looseness, but Me and Earl and the Dying Girl can’t let well enough alone. For the remainder of the movie, every time the token hot girl carelessly touches Greg’s shoulder, Gomez-Rejon returns to that image of the anthropomorphic moose and its pitiful chipmunk victim. The film desperately wants you to sympathize with the chipmunk (and, by proxy, Greg), and it actually half-succeeds; by the time it ends, you, too, will feel like you’ve been stomped on repeatedly. Read More

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Dope: A Harvard Wannabe Gets a Thug Life Education

Jeremy BeckReviews
Shameik Moore gets in over his head in "Dope"

An early scene in Dope, Rick Famuyiwa’s highly entertaining mess of a movie, perfectly encapsulates the film’s tone. It features its protagonist, a black high school student named Malcolm (Shameik Moore), fleeing with his two best friends from a pair of Los Angeles gangsters. It’s a frenetic scene, with Malcolm and his pals riding pitiful bicycles while the thugs give chase in a roaring red El Camino. Then, as the desperate teenagers pedal across an overpass, the camera suddenly switches to a static wide-shot, revealing that the overpass is labeled, in austere capital letters, “Thurgood Marshall Justice Plaza.” That level of silent wit—the confidence to quietly slip in a reference to America’s first black Supreme Court Justice in the middle of a frenzied chase sequence—is indicative of Dope‘s sly sense of humor, not to mention its hectic, erratic sensibility. This mélange of styles and tropes is far too chaotic to be a great movie, but it’s precisely that sense of unruliness that makes it so much fun.

Dope initially scans as a lively satire of Boyz N the Hood, John Singleton’s seminal coming-of-age story about black youths growing up on hard streets in hard times. Malcolm, the son of a single mother, lives in The Bottoms, a crime-ridden district of Inglewood. His neighborhood is swimming in drugs and beset by gang violence (the red-clad Bloods are especially prominent), and he’s under constant threat of thievery or worse. Yet Malcolm, contrary to expectation, is neither a reprobate nor a victim. He is instead, as Forest Whitaker’s playful opening voiceover informs us, a geek. He dresses like a goofball, he rocks a ludicrous high-top fade, and he and his aforementioned friends, Jib (Tony Revolori, the lobby boy from The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Diggy (Transparent‘s Kiersey Clemons), are utterly obsessed with ’90s hip-hop culture. His top priority is not avoiding jail or scoring drugs—it’s getting into college, which is why he’s penned a singular application essay entitled, “A Research Thesis to Discover Ice Cube’s Good Day.” Read More

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