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Fall Movie Review Roundup: The Hottest Rocket
Thanks so much to all of you for your kind comments, e-mails, text messages, and one horrified phone call about the Alan Alda short. If you can spare a second to bring that kindness to the FunnyOrDie comment board, I wouldn't object. The sketch is doing extremely well over there -- it's currently one of the top ten highest rated shorts with an overall score of 4.83 out of 5.0. We'll be posting it to YouTube shortly.
Today I'm looking at two independent movies that deal with young love in completely different ways.
ROCKET SCIENCE (C+)
The film is about a stuttering, awkward high school boy who is enlisted by an overly ambitious girl to join the debate team. It's Rushmore meets Election, but with little of the insight that description implies, and none of the humor.
Wes Anderson's first three films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) hit me at a very impressionable time of my life, and they hit me in powerful ways. It seems they hit a lot of other people too, and now there's a huge subgenre of indie movies doing Anderson rip-offs with half the style and none of the substance. Rocket Science has been extremely well reviewed, but it's just more quirk porn -- a bunch of forced wackiness trying so hard to be original and different that it feels like exactly the opposite.
Rocket Science was written and directed by Jeffrey Blitz, whose first film was the great documentary Spellbound. Had he gone back and studied his own movie, he might have learned that adolescence is a lot more interesting when it's sloppy and not trying to appeal to the indie elite.
Some of this works, and it's hard to hate on any movie that includes so much Violent Femmes music on the soundtrack and score, and yet hate a lot of it I did.
THE HOTTEST STATE (B+)
Boy (the very good Mark Webber) and girl (the beautiful Catalina Sandino Moreno) fall in love. Girl falls out of love with boy. Boy has trouble dealing with it. Tale as old as time.
Here's what really annoys me about the indie rock/indie film culture, of which I am a reluctant part: anything resembling actual human emotion is dismissed as schmaltzy, self-absorbed, and laughable. The Hottest State has earned some of the nastiest, most vicious reviews of the year, and in most areas hasn't even been given a release. And I see what people hate about it. Hell, I was prepared to hate it -- it's a semi-autobiographical love story that was written and directed by pretty-boy actor Ethan Hawke for God's sake.
But here's the thing a majority of critics have missed. Yes, the lead character is pretentious. Yes, he's way too into himself. Yes, he thinks that his tiny problems are Earth-shattering. But the kid is twenty years old, and he just had his heart broken for the first time! The way he acts is obnoxious, sure, but it's also remarkably true to a certain time in a young man's life. I have a hunch that the largely hateful reaction to the film stems from the fact that the lead character is an exact replication of how almost all guys act for the insane couple of years surrounding their first love. And all guys are (rightfully) humiliated by how they acted during those years, and would rather not be reminded of them.
The desire to spend every waking moment with a new girlfriend. The agonizingly slow build to sex, followed by sex, followed by nothing but sex. The discussion of your love as though it surpasses any and all others. The commitment to that love to the extent that literally every other aspect of your life suffers. The complete personal destruction when the love falls apart or is no longer reciprocated. The obsession that gradually gives way to semi-stalking. It's all here. And as far as I'm concerned, it's one of the most truthful portraits of that time and those feelings I've seen. I'm not happy to admit it, but a lot of it looked mighty familiar to me.
The movie also has a terrific sense of location -- when the lovers take a trip to Mexico you feel swept away right along with them, and the stuff in Williamsburg completely nails the hipster culture there. If Hawke's script had not been so sincere, and had poked some fun at these hipsters instead of presenting them as completely real people, the movie would have been just as praised as Rocket Science, no question.
I'm not sure when or why sincerity became such a detested quality in music and film, but here's proof that dropping the irony can be a very good thing.
You guys are now in the top four! Well deserved, hilarious Pat.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who liked Hottest State. Your video has
swept my office, and the girls here love you. The lesson you can learn here
is that if you talk about graphic gay sex with old men, the ladies will
come running! Best, Kerri
100% agreed. Everyone today is so sarcastic, so ironic, all the time.
It's tiresome, even obnoxious. Sincerity will make a comeback someday.