BEFORE: The 9/11 anniversary is coming up this week, and I'm finally going to watch a few films devoted to that topic. After tonight it should be pretty obvious how I'm going to get there. Linking is suspended for the purposes of screening documentaries, or when a film contains mostly non-professional actors, like last night's film, or this one.
THE PLOT: Several ordinary high school students go through their daily routine as two others prepare for something more malevolent.
AFTER: Again, as with "Catfish", it's somewhat unfortunate that I knew where this film was going to end up. It would have been a different story if I had seen it at a film festival, and it were screened without any introduction or program notes - then it would probably call to mind Richard Linklater's film "Slacker", which followed ordinary teens through their ordinary lives on an ordinary day.
Similarly, this film opts for an "over the shoulder" technique, following teens on (excessively?) long walks through their high-school, doing ordinary things like changing out of gym clothes, or eating lunch, or participating in a "gay-straight" alliance discussion group. It's only when we see two kids in camo gear carrying full duffels entering the school that we get our first hint that something is amiss.
Then there's a lot of time-jumping, and overlapping scenes - we're given certain prominent references, like a photographer asking a kid to pose for a picture in the hall, then talking about a concert that night, which we see again and again from different viewpoints, allowing us to start to piece together who's in what location, relative to who. And the fact that such information is relevant starts to look like a bad, bad sign.
I get the point, that a day at high school is perfectly ordinary, until it isn't. But the film seems to make a point of showing what a boring day it is - which is where some non-improvised lines of dialogue might have come in handy. Otherwise teens just resort to talking about going to the mall, or mundane stuff like the Dewey Decimal System, and that's just not very engrossing, no matter what's looming on the horizon.
Now we come to the incident in question - I'm going to try and be somewhat non-spoilery, in case you haven't heard what takes place in this film. Also, tomorrow night's film could give me some insight into what takes place here. Note that I'm not demanding a WHY, because I realize that often in these cases there is often no WHY available, there is just the tragedy that takes place.
The ending here is unresolved and unseen, even though our minds can probably guess that it's not good. But there are endings, then there are unresolved endings, and then there are cases where it just looks like the project ran out of film. The latter is what we're dealing with here, so to some degree there is no ending, or there is a non-ending - so I question WHY the film was made to stop where it did. And something that's unresolved can easily be mistaken for something that never got around to making a salient point, and that's a problem.
I reserve the right to adjust tonight's rating if I gain further insight after viewing tomorrow's film...
Starring John Robinson, Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, Timothy Bottoms, Matt Malloy (last seen in "Changing Lanes").
RATING: 4 out of 10 library books
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