BEFORE: Dennis Hopper carries over from "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead" - it doesn't really matter that he only appeared in archive footage there, I don't discriminate. I could just as easily have flipped the two films by/about Orson Welles, it didn't matter, but I just preferred to watch the narrative film first, cold, and then the documentary about it.
My pandemic lockdown is over, but the countdown keeps moving on, and we don't stop until we get to the top - er, the end of the year, that is. There's still progress to be made in New York City, I would like to be able to go to a diner or other restaurant some time in the near future, but that could take a few more weeks or another full month, assuming the stats stay low and there's not a second wave of Covid-19 caused by people gathering together in mass protests and yelling at cops without wearing masks. We'll see. I'd love to drive or take a train up to see my parents in Massachusetts, too, but it's still too early to think about travel - maybe the weekend after Father's Day or something.
THE PLOT: A high school slacker commits a shocking act and proceeds to let his friends in on the secret. However, the friends' reactions are almost as ambiguous and perplexing as the crime itself.
AFTER: By coincidence, I've circled back to Keanu Reeves on the same day that the preview for "Bill & Ted Face the Music" has dropped. This wasn't planned, of course, but I've had that upcoming sequel in my sights, which led to a debate over whether I should watch two movies with Reeves now, or save them for linking possibilities in August. Since I still don't know for sure if movie theaters will be open in August - though I'm hopeful, so I can see "Wonder Woman 1984" and "The New Mutants" - I figured it was better to maintain the chain I want now, rather than hope for something that may not happen. For all I know, there could be a second wave of the pandemic in summer, and everything that's opening up now will have to close again.
What I'm willing to do is add "Bill & Ted Face the Music" to my secondary watchlist, where I've got the cast lists for the other 2020 films that will (allegedly) get released in late summer. For all of the films that have been delayed until 2021, like "Ghostbusters", "Bob's Burgers", "Morbius" and "Minions: The Rise of Gru", all I have on that list is the titles, no cast lists - because my entire overview could be completely different once 2021 rolls around. But you never know, I may face a linking dilemma in August to connect "Wonder Woman 1984" to the start of my October chain, and maybe the new "Bill & Ted" movie could help me with that.
As for "River's Edge", I'm left once again scratching my head - I just didn't think there was much here, certainly not enough story to fill up 90 minutes of screen time. One high school kid kills his girlfriend, but we never really find out why, and then he shows the body to a bunch of other kids, then the rest of the film is spent driving around and trying to figure out what to do. One friend offers to bury the body, but he bungles that job, there's talk of the killer leaving town, but he never quite gets around to that, other than a couple of confrontations over who snitched to the cops and a younger brother threatening to shoot his older brother, not much else happens. There's a weird older man who deals drugs to the teens, and he's got a sex doll for a girlfriend, but this all just seems like more filler.
I don't know, did I miss something? Or was this the point film in the new "slacker" genre of the late 1980's and early 1990's, popularized by James Linklater and Gus Van Sant, moody films like "My Own Private Idaho" and "Slacker", where the goal was to focus on the mindset of the misfits and the oddballs, while having only enough narrative thread to hold all the nothingness together? Sure, maybe when you're in high school it feels like every day is much like the last one and the next one, and maybe you're life's never going to change or amount to anything (a feeling also prominent during the last couple months of lockdown and isolation) but that doesn't mean that I want to see all that in a movie. Movies should be about stuff happening, and ideally there's a set of actions and consequences that form some kind of story arc, making sense out of the randomness of the cosmic void. Right?
This story was based on a real-life murder in Broussard, California, and though several students were taken by the killer to view the body that had been dumped into a ravine, none of those students alerted authorities for several days, either out of friendship or out of fear of getting in trouble themselves. I guess there's something there in this movie along those lines, but it's not much. And the symbolism of the little girl's doll being thrown in the river, and then the girl holding a funeral for her doll and making a mock grave-site for her, was just so obvious and basic that it barely even counts as symbolism.
Between this film and "The Other Side of the Wind", it's been a very rough week for dolls and mannequins. Other than that, I feel like I just want to take a mulligan tonight and move forward - hey, some films are bricks, and others are mortar. This is definitely just mortar that's going to connect to the next film and get me closer to Father's Day.
Also starring Crispin Glover (last seen in "The Con Is On"), Keanu Reeves (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), Ione Skye (last seen in "Four Rooms"), Daniel Roebuck (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Joshua John Miller, Roxana Zal, Josh Richman (last seen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), Phillip Brock (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Tom Bower (last seen in "North Country"), Constance Forslund, Leo Rossi, Jim Metzler, Richard Richcreek, Taylor Negron (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Danyi Deats, Christopher Peters.
RATING: 3 out of 10 cans of warm Budweiser
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