Now this was a really sweet film. It combines two of my favourite genres - teen movie and that stream of literature that takes in The Great Gatsby, The Secret History and perhaps most pertinently, Brideshead Revisited - and presents the resulting amalgam in a nostalgically rendered early 90s package, complete with glorious indie soundtrack (Smiths, Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses, etc).
There were plenty of moments that had the potential to throw the viewer out of the extended moment that the film invokes, but it's good enough - and, of course, completely enough in my personal zone - that it instead carried me straight through; the best example is probably the first tunnel scene, the suggestion that these kids of such great musical taste could have not heard Bowie's "Heroes" and then Emma Watson's Sam's (she's good, as is the rest of the cast) arms-outstretched pose, wind pulling at her as the car races ahead, both potentially risible in a slightly different context but instead combining to create the kind of ecstatic moment that is inevitably rendered nostalgic when played out by people of an age and in a time that is long behind us, but of course would have been experienced as at least potentially bittersweet, albeit perhaps in a different way, even at the time.
(w/ Kai, David + Justine, and Cass)
There were plenty of moments that had the potential to throw the viewer out of the extended moment that the film invokes, but it's good enough - and, of course, completely enough in my personal zone - that it instead carried me straight through; the best example is probably the first tunnel scene, the suggestion that these kids of such great musical taste could have not heard Bowie's "Heroes" and then Emma Watson's Sam's (she's good, as is the rest of the cast) arms-outstretched pose, wind pulling at her as the car races ahead, both potentially risible in a slightly different context but instead combining to create the kind of ecstatic moment that is inevitably rendered nostalgic when played out by people of an age and in a time that is long behind us, but of course would have been experienced as at least potentially bittersweet, albeit perhaps in a different way, even at the time.
(w/ Kai, David + Justine, and Cass)
