LOL
January 13th, 2008
The prevailing image of Joe Swanberg’s second feature is a pasty-faced young man transfixed by a tiny screen — a cellphone, a laptop, a camcorder, what have you. Often, there’s an adorable young woman with the man, but he’s oblivious to her charms. Talky and mundane but equally fresh and fascinating, LOL won me over because it’s topical — our metathesizing gadgetry is usually taken for granted– but also because it proves that male pigheadedness is timeless. (It’s just getting better bandwidth.)
LOL. Joe Swanberg, 2006. ***
The Motel
November 24th, 2006
In my experience, pitching anything as “coming of age” story is instant death. Somehow, it reeks of overly familiar stuff that everybody is supposed to have moved past long ago. Bildungsroman has a slightly better ring to it, especially if you can hyphenate it somehow, but the idea is the same: teenagers learning about responsibility and identity and love and sex and death–ugh, right? Well, no. As Frederick Barthelme once told me, semi-cryptically: “It’s a rug.” Categorizing something doesn’t fully describe it yet, and it certainly doesn’t imply a value judgment. Most stories owe a huge debt to the major arcana and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, but that doesn’t make them bad rugs, dig?
What I’m trying to say is this: The Motel, written and directed by Michael Kang (not that Michael Kang) and based on the novel Waylaid by Ed Lin, is a thoroughly winning and funny coming-of-age story, and that shouldn’t scare you away. Thirteen-year-old Chinese-American Ernest (Jeffrey Chyau) is growing up fast, helping his stern mother run a seedy hourly motel in what looks like somewhere, New Jersey. Hookers and tricks cum and go, leaving behind porno magazines and unpaid credit card bills. Ernest meets his only friend at the dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant, deals with racism, the local bully, and his obnoxious little sister, and enters writing contests in hopes of leaving the motel behind for good. Yes, the individual stages of Ernest’s story are familiar, but it’s their specificity that makes them fresh. It’s been a while that I’ve seen a movie that feels so much like what an independent film is supposed to be: unassuming, sharply written, poignant, and surprisingly unique.
The Motel. Michael Kang, 2005. ****
- The Motel Official Site
- List of cities where The Motel is currently showing
- The Motel trailer on YouTube
- The Motel on Rotten Tomatoes
[tags]film, independent, michael kang, motel life, 4 stars, coming of age[/tags]
Little Miss Sunshine
November 13th, 2006
Come and see the latest industrial-strength Sundance hit, now with 40% more quirk! Our new & improved independent™ formula leaves no storyline unsolved, no character trait unexplored, no minor role cast with an unrecognizable face, and no dry eye in the house with focus-group approved climactic superfreak dancing! But all the random quirkiness can’t make this thing any less predictable. It’s cute though; they got that much worked out. Marcy’s review is much too kind; I suppose it’s easier to be won over by all the charm-to-spare if you’re in a crowded theater. I took another half star off for the libellous portrayal of quality German engineering.
Little Miss Sunshine. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006. **
[tags]film, 2 stars, cute, independent, comedy, toni collette, abigail breslin, greg kinnear, paul dano, alan arkin, steve carell, quirky[/tags]
