A solitary pair of Vans opens onto the overly dramatized and underwhelmed life of Alex (Ryan O’Nan), and it would seem the film itself. After a girl’s locker room style scene of heartbreak sobbing and some morally questionable comedy at the expense of a special needs class, the no-hoper in Alex is revealed.
Keeping with gender dysmorphia …
The familiar burden of moving house and settling in is a ritual painfully experienced at the best of times. Celine Sciamma’s TOMBOY enacts this right of passage with the added hardship that new boy Mikael, is actually a girl. Famed for her cult classic Water Lilies, Sciamma beautifully depicts another idyllic French journey into sexual confusion.
Any concept of normality is scrutiny to a sickening moral crisis within Gyorgy Palfis 2006 TAXIDERMIA. The repugnantly comedic family tree that grows all too rapidly before us offers a bizarre alternative to a father son special.
A self-explanatory title. Harmony Korines TRASH HuMPERS brings new meaning to fucking weird. Opening with the age-enhanced socially deranged and their sexually exploitive partners (any inanimate object), we enter the arena of the “free”.
Insignificance and ostracization are commonplace in high school; their consequences however can be a much more sinister game of play. No more so bluntly created, or recreated, than in Gus Van Sant’s 2003 ELEPHANT, where the hardship of what seems every imaginable teenage depravity is brought to a tragic conclusion.
Forget hope, if the sincere are as corruptible as the rest of us, then we must accept our austere living as fate. Miranda July’s 2011 release once again crafts a delicate embodiment of tedium and desire reminiscent of her troublingly beautiful Me and You and Everyone We Know.
Two ghosts, a wheelchair and a mechanical horse. Probably the weirdest form of self-discovery, but ineffably cute.
And so paranoia breaks the common man. TAKE SHELTER sees the disruption of a man in wake of the wellbeing of his family, a proverbial story in a twisted narrative.
Tristan Patterson’s DRAGONSLAYER will indulge you in a reminiscent picture of your teens, with the bittersweet undertone that you grew up. This skate park bum documentary leaves you in a disorientated state of emotions, questioning why you care so much for the tie-dye sprawled vagabond that is Josh “Skreech” Sandoval.
