BEFORE: All right, it's Monday so I'm back on back-to-school stuff. This makes so much more sense than watching this film on a weekend day, right? Adding that extra film ("Ophelia") did the trick, and now I know that I've got enough slots to make it to Christmas, so that was a fine choice, to drop that film in at the last second. Now my last step to make sure my chain is good is to start with tonight's film and follow the links myself, through IMDB pages to make sure my chain is good - AND that's a big fail. It turns out that I'm using Steve Coulter as a link at the end of September, and I accidentally included films with two DIFFERENT Steve Coulters. Yes, there are two actors who share that name, which I thought wasn't supposed to happen, like one needed to add a middle initial to distinguish himself from the other one, like Michael B. Jordan did, also Michael J. Fox when he joined the actor's union, there was another Michael Fox already registered. SO, OK, I have to drop one film because it's the WRONG Steve Coulter who has a role in it, do you want to guess which of the four films with Steve Coulters I was most looking forward to watching? The one I have to drop, of course.
But it's all right, I only need to add one more, and as I was taking my journey through the IMDB pages from here to Christmas, I spotted another animated film I can add, "Kung Fu Panda 4", I already was doing an animated section this month, this one will slide right in perfectly, then I still have the right number of movies in total, 300 for the year. Just 55 to go at this point.
Denis O'Hare carries over from "Infinite Storm".
THE PLOT: Looking for answers to life's big questions, a stuttering boy joins his high school debate team.
AFTER: This is a high-school film from 2007, and I'd really never heard of it until some time last year when I put it on my list. I had been airing on one of the premiums, HBO or Cinemax maybe, but it's not airing any more, but it's still available On Demand, I guess they just aired it too much but they can't quite seem to delete it from the platform completely. There's just something about it, and I've really had this feeling ever since "Divergent", it's a kind of feeling that these are the kind of movies that you would only watch after you'd been watching 300 movies a year for the last 15 or 16 years. Do you know what I mean? Probably not, because nobody else is crazy enough or obsessive enough to watch this many movies in a row. Like, I'm at movie critic level based on how many films I've seen since 2009. And sure, there are absolutely movies I had to watch in Year 1 of the project, then I thought, well, of course in Year 2 I'll watch the films I didn't get to in Year 1, and so on. Repeat that process 15 times and you may find yourself scraping the bottom of the movie barrel, although I've determined that there really is no "bottom", the barrel seems infinitely deep and holds thousands and thousands of movies, most of which I will never watch, even if I keep doing this until I return to my home planet one day.
Like, what was even the GOAL here, to make a movie as quirky as "Napoleon Dynamite"? This did come out three years later, so possibly - but come on, you just can't do it, that movie is the king of Quirk and its success and charm will never, ever be repeated. Sure, it's not a perfect film, like eventually you notice that Jon Heder is like 35 (and the bullying teen is even older) and trying to look and act like a high-school student, and some parts fall flat or just don't work, but still that film had so much heart and such a great dance sequence that you just have to love it. "Rocket Science", not so much.
The whole premise doesn't work, it's about a kid who stutters and is so filled with nervousness and anxiety that he can't even order the lunch he wants in the school cafeteria. The word "pizza" refuses to come out of his mouth, so he has to eat fish. NITPICK POINT: Did he somehow also lose the ability to POINT? Can't he nod his head to indicate "NO" when the lunch lady offers him fish? Jeez, it's simple, there are two choices for lunch, if she offers fish and he nods his head side-to-side, with a gesture that everyone already understands, then he'll get his pizza. If he can't even work this out, then really, I have to assume that he doesn't want help.
What's worse is that the effects of his stuttering are magnified here because everyone else talks a mile a minute during the debates. How can the judges even understand them and judge them if they're all talking so fast? Anna Kendrick's character is the worst offender - and yes, I understand there is a scene where they're quick-tutoring the new debaters and they've sped things up so that an 8-minute speech will only take 30 seconds, but isn't the point of teaching people stuff for them to, you know, understand it? "Look, I know this is your first time watching a high-school debate, so to make things harder to understand, we're going to cover a 30-minute process in five minutes, and you won't be able to distinguish the words spoken in our arguments." No, that's just not going to help, you need to SLOW things DOWN when people are learning, not speed them up.
Hal Hefner is only trying to understand life, and if that's not possible, he just wants to be able to get through the day at high school. But for someone with a massive stuttering problem to join the debate team, well, how's that going to work. Short answer - it's not going to work. But he's already fallen in like with the girl who asked him to join the team, and she keeps saying that there's a plan in place for him to be able to debate stuff, and then never gets around to telling him what that plan is. It turns out that she's some kind of active recruiter for debating, and she gets other people to join the team, even if they're no good. I can't explain this, except to think that if she's captain of the team and more people join, then her school club is bigger than others and maybe they get a larger practice space or something? Because I can't think of a reason why she would get people to join the debate team who are not good at it.
Look, I was on math team myself, and we wanted other people to join the team, but only if they were good at math, that's kind of the point. I would imagine that the school's football team would prefer to have people sign up who are good at the football, same for baseball and tennis and chess club, and would you want someone to join the hockey team if they couldn't ice skate? No, of course not. So this makes no sense here.
After Hal kisses her awkwardly, though she didn't seem to mind it at the time, shortly after that she transfers to a prep school and is obviously dating someone on her NEW debate team, so, yeah, umm, what exactly happened there? Did she not want to date Hal? Or did she want to date Hal but she was afraid that would negatively affect her social status? I guess that's possible, but it's still all a bit odd. The only other possible explanation is that she was left hanging when her previous boyfriend/teammate suddenly stopped talking in the middle of the state Debate finals, and umm, didn't start again? So they lost the match because he suddenly ran out of things to say, or didn't want to debate any more? I don't think that's how debates work, you can't just stop, nobody just stops.
Anyway, without Ginny, Hal has to track down that guy, Ben, not to get him back with Ginny or to get Ben to finish high school and get out of working at the dry cleaners, but because he somehow knows that only Ben can coach him, be the Mickey to his Rocky Balboa, and somehow figure out a way for him to speak in front of other people, and somehow enter the state debate finals as a home-schooled kid and win, and then somehow Ginny will come back to him. OK, it's nice to have goals but absolutely none of that is likely to happen, especially when the solution to Hal's stuttering is to sing everything to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". OK, that's not how debates work, and that's not how people get over stuttering, I'm fairly sure.
So I don't know, I can't take anything in this film seriously, I think it just exists to be weird and quirky and live in a space that's somewhere between "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Superbad". But I'm glad that I'm burning off this film here and I'm not saving it for February, because it's NOT a romantic film, it's kind of like the opposite of one. Hal's parents split up around the same time that Ben loses his voice and Ginny loses her debate finals, there's some kind of implication that everything is connected, I guess, only that's not possible. Then at the end of the film, Hal sees his father again for the first time in a while and seeks advice about when life stops sucking, he's sure that happens some time after high school, only WHEN? His father's advice is that it may never happen, life is going to continue to suck, but at least when you get older you're more used to it. Gee, thanks, now I feel a whole lot worse.
The title is very misleading here, because you'd think this would be a film about a high school's rocketry club, only it's not, it's about a debate team at a New Jersey high school. Last night's film had a similar misleading title, because the storm depicted in the film was NOT infinite, it ended at some point. The title instead came from something a character said about looking up into the stars and seeing an infinite storm of beauty, so there you go. Here Hal complains to his father that life and love shouldn't be "rocket science", but that's all part of life sucking and all, you never really get to figure out love and sex and the meaning of life, at least not while you're still in school.
"Rocket Science" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, then was on the festival circuit for a good long run - yeah, it feels like a Sundance-y film, something that would do well at festivals - but then of course it tanked in theaters during a limited theatrical run. There's nothing overly offensive about it, but neither does it end on a positive note or present a world in which problems can be solved or overcome just by being in love with someone else. Maybe that's OK, but watching a film where things just don't get resolved doesn't really thrill me, it's just a little too much like life, and as we just determined, life never stops sucking.
Also starring Reece Thompson (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), Anna Kendrick (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Nicholas D'Agosto, Vincent Piazza (last seen in "Jersey Boys"), Aaron Yoo (last seen in "The Namesake"), Margo Martindale (last seen in "Cocaine Bear'), Michael Kusnir, Josh Kay, Maury Ginsberg (last seen in "The Week Of"), Utkarsh Ambudkar (last seen in "Ride Along 2"), Lisbeth Bartlett (last seen in "Suspect"), Virginia House, Marilyn Yoblick (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Emily Ginnona, Dionne Audain (last seen in "People Places Things"), Dan De Luca (last seen in "Rustin"), Steve Park (last seen in "Asteroid City"), John Patrick Barry, Jane Beard (last seen in "Species II"), Herb Merrick, Carol Florence, Betsy Hogg, Brandon Thane Wilson, David DeBoy (last seen in "Jackie"), Andrew Collie, Huong D. Nguyen, Susan Duvall, Elisabeth Noone (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Roland Gomez, Lee Sellars (last seen in "Tár"), Joel Marsh Garland (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Tyson Sullivan (last seen in "Heist"), Tia Latrell
with the voice of Dan Cashman and a cameo from Jonah Hill (last sene in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life").
RATING: 4 out of 10 pieces of unspecified fish
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