BEFORE: Normally, this would be the week I'd be headed to San Diego for Comic-Con, staying up all night on Tuesday, leaving early AF on Wednesday morning, arriving at noon West Coast time, checking in to an AirBnB and then heading straight down to the convention center to set up a booth. That's usually about 36 hours with no sleep, unless I grab a nap on the plane. Then three hours of convention, a burger and a beer float, then collapse with exhaustion, repeating as necessary for the next five days. But for the first time in a LONG time, I'm not doing that, I'm staying in NYC where it's hot and crowded, and well, very comic-con like, only with fewer celebrities and people in costumes. If later on this week I feel like I'm missing out, I'll just go stand in a long line for lunch or something and get very aggravated.
I'd also be looking for a place in my chain to take a week's break, and now I don't have to do that. (Oh, but it would have been perfect, leaving off after today's film and then starting the new subject matter when I got back...) Sigourney Weaver carries over from "The Meyerowitz Stories", and she's going to help me kick off the Summer Rock Music Concert series tomorrow, if you can believe that. I'm all set to "rock out with my doc out" - documentaries, that is.
I could have just gone straight into the docs after yesterday's film, but I decided to squeeze one more film in here, largely because it helps my numbering, but also because it's been really freakin' hot in NYC, and a film with a bunch of thirsty kids digging in a desert seems very appropriate. The only potential problem here is that I've got another film with Shia LaBeouf in it, which now will be relegated to the unsinkable section at the bottom of my list. It might have been better for linking purposes to keep those two films together, but then they would have been two unlinkable films together, so maybe that wouldn't have been much help. It's tough to say - but maybe with enough time I can find a way to link to that other film, or eventually I may have to give up on linking entirely and just deal with what's left in some other order.
THE PLOT: A wrongfully convicted boy is sent to a brutal desert detention camp where he joins a crew digging holes for some mysterious reason.
AFTER: I've known about this film for a long time - it was released in 2003 - but never was curious enough to watch it and find out what exactly the kids were digging in the desert for. I was OK with leaving that a mystery, and I'm glad now that I never read any reviews with spoilers, because then I'd be less inclined to watch it, and now I could go into it with a clear mind and a lot of unanswered questions. It's based on a book for kids, I think, and usually that would be a bad sign for a movie (cough - Spiderwick Chronicles - cough) but the story here was very detailed and kept me interested.
And I got really worried whenever the story flashed back to something that seemed very tangential, like the story of the Western outlaw, "Kissin' Kate" Barlow, or the story set back in the old country about Elya Yelnats, Stanley's great-great-grandfather, how he got cursed by a fortune teller and then left for America. These stories were so wild, it didn't seem at first like there was ANY WAY that they could have an impact on the present-day storyline. But they did, it all came together in the end, and there was a point to everything, which is more than I can say for some other movies.
But let me back up just a bit, and put the non-extraneous side stories, umm, on the side. Stanley Yelnats IV (yes, his first name is his last name spelled backwards, making him a human palindrome) is a regular kid who gets accused of stealing some valuable sneakers, when in fact they just fell on him as he was walking down the street. He's sentenced to go to camp, which doesn't seem so bad, except it's not the kind of camp where you learn to paddle a canoe or sit around a bonfire singing and roasting marshmallows, it's a labor camp where kids are made to dig holes in the desert. Hey, I just realized that a 2003 film about kids being taken from their parents and put in camps was about 15 years ahead of its time. But these aren't immigrant kids, they're kids in trouble with the law who may need some discipline, and digging holes seems to be the method of delivery. But is there some other reason why they're digging holes in the desert?
Well, it turns out there is. But what they're looking for and why they're made to dig there is really the point of the story, and that's where the flashbacks (eventually) come in. It turns out that the story of Stanley's ancestors (several of whom share his palindromic name) stretches back to the old country (they never say what country, but they filmed in Latvia) and that old curse, and then reaches the Old West, where Stanley Yelnats I apparently had an encounter with not only Kissing Kate, but also the ancestors of the mysterious warden. It almost stretches believability to think that the descendants from these two families were one some kind of collision course of destiny, but hey, it's a story.
I didn't pick up on a couple of things right away, namely the significance of Stanley carrying Zero the way he did, and then when they went back to the camp, why they chose to dig in THAT hole again, over the others. But my main NITPICK POINT concerns the gypsy seer back in the old country, who cursed Elya Yelnats because he forgot to come back and carry her up the mountain. Why the heck did she want to be carried up the mountain in the first place? Why was this so important to her? It's a weird thing to have there and not explain.
Also starring Shia LaBeouf (last seen in "Bobby"), Jon Voight (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Henry Winkler (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Patricia Arquette (last seen in "Boyhood"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "Going in Style"), Dulé Hill (last seen in "Men of Honor"), Eartha Kitt, Khleo Thomas, Nathan Davis, Rick Fox (last seen in "Blue Chips"), Brenden Jefferson (last seen in "Crimson Tide"), Jake M. Smith, Byron Cotton, Miguel Castro, Max Kasch, Scott Plank, Shelley Malil, Damien Luvara, Sanya Mateyas, Ravil Isyanov, Ken Davitian, Noah Poletiek, Zane Holtz, Steve Kozlowski, Roma Maffia, Michael Cavanaugh, Ray Baker, Eric Pierpoint, Nicole Pulliam, Allan Kolman, Louis Sachar.
RATING: 6 out of 10 cold showers
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