Just saw this at the Tribeca Film Festival - yipes.
It felt like the people at MTV wanted to make a film mythologizing the 'live fast, die young' rocker, but without any connection to reality or plausibility. A clichéd piece about the cliché of dying at 27, though really it's not like hundreds, or even dozens, of rock stars died at that age it's only 5, really Morrison, Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin, Carpenter. You might as well make a movie about a fictional rock star who dies in a plane, and try to tie it into some larger narrative.
Instead of simply reviewing the plot, which you can read on this page already, here's a PARTIAL list of glaring implausibilities and ridiculous plot occurrences that I worked up over drinks after the movie. By all means, feel free to see it for yourself and email me a few more of your own:
1) At the beginning of the movie, when Eliot needs someone to drive him across the country, he asks a kid in a very small-town grocery store to do it, offering him $10,000 cash (which he pulls out of his shirt pocket). The kid then goes back inside, deliberates over this with his parents for about 10 seconds, and the next scene is the family saying goodbye to him. They let their 16-year old son drive off with a completely drugged out junkie on a cross-country ride for $10,000. They live in the Heartland surely they've seen America's Most Wanted before, no?
2) The guys pick up a hitchhiker, a 16-year old girl introduced to us in a scene which takes place in a cafeteria, where she sits at the counter and watches a wall-mounted television playing a pseudo-MTV which is showing a tribute to the recently fallen rocker. She mentions to the counter boy how sad it is. In the next scene, she is on the side of the road hitching a ride, and the car that stops has the other guy in the band SHE JUST SAW ON TV sleeping in the back seat. And when she gets in and sees this, she takes it in with complete equanimity. She doesn't mention to the kid driving that she knows who he is, she doesn't SMS any of her friends, and, in fact, she makes no comment regarding the fact that she's aware of the situation she's in until five minutes from the end of the movie, when she says, smugly, "I guess you know the words to this one" as she and Eliot share her headphones and listen to the group's song on her IPod.
3) The boy's militant father (in one of innumerable flashbacks) makes his son shoot his own dog after it gets hit by a car and breaks a leg, because he won't take it to the vet. The other boy has to dig the hole to bury it in while this is happening. Dad makes some comment about 'being a man' and 'killing to live'.
4) The boys, as teenagers, are running away from home to go to LA and 'make it big'and while they are waiting for a ride at the side of the road, Mom pulls up to give them a bag of money she's managed to sneak out of their father's bank account. This is not that implausible. But as they are standing talking with her, another car pulls up and waves them over to give them a ride a car pulls up to two hitchhikers who are already talking to a driver and asks them if they need another ride. How hitch-friendly is this town?
5) Eliot gets knocked out by a gang of Nazi skinheads while symbolically throwing away his bag of prescription (and non-) narcotics and is then taken in for the night by a haggard homeless man casually toting a rifle. Eliot notices the man has no shoes, so he offers him his own boots, and then spends the rest of the film barefoot, even walking across cities and towns this way.
6) In the subsequent scene, the homeless guy invites Eliot to join his choir, where he goes to 'get spiritualized', but the two of them are 1) the only two white people in the choir and 2) the only two who look homeless, as everyone else is dressed quite decently. Add to this the fact that 3), Eliot's face is still covered in blood from the previous night's attack when he walks into the choir room, and no one in the choir expresses the slightest alarm at this.
7) The band has only one song. It is used at every key, emotive moment in the film. It is so stock that it seems as though it could have been made by computer program, like the 'hitmaker' they purported to have designed in Josie and the Pussycats (which I admit, unashamedly, I kind of liked). It may well have been.
and finally
8) not an implausibility, but yet another ridiculous inanity: When Eliot goes to Tom's dad's house to visit the old man (Mom died while the boys were in LA), they have a kitchen conversation during which the old man is framed by the camera standing in front of a canvas of the 'Our Father', and Eliot is framed in front of a canvas of Jesus on the opposite wall. Get the message, everyone? We thought you would. (But actually, Eliot's reason for visiting Tom's dad is to give him a note Tom left, which turns out to be a red Post-It which simply says "We are all a**holes" the fact that Eliot would want to deliver a Post-It, and the fact that he would deliver one as utterly devoid of meaning as this one, counts as an implausibility, I guess).
It felt like the people at MTV wanted to make a film mythologizing the 'live fast, die young' rocker, but without any connection to reality or plausibility. A clichéd piece about the cliché of dying at 27, though really it's not like hundreds, or even dozens, of rock stars died at that age it's only 5, really Morrison, Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin, Carpenter. You might as well make a movie about a fictional rock star who dies in a plane, and try to tie it into some larger narrative.
Instead of simply reviewing the plot, which you can read on this page already, here's a PARTIAL list of glaring implausibilities and ridiculous plot occurrences that I worked up over drinks after the movie. By all means, feel free to see it for yourself and email me a few more of your own:
1) At the beginning of the movie, when Eliot needs someone to drive him across the country, he asks a kid in a very small-town grocery store to do it, offering him $10,000 cash (which he pulls out of his shirt pocket). The kid then goes back inside, deliberates over this with his parents for about 10 seconds, and the next scene is the family saying goodbye to him. They let their 16-year old son drive off with a completely drugged out junkie on a cross-country ride for $10,000. They live in the Heartland surely they've seen America's Most Wanted before, no?
2) The guys pick up a hitchhiker, a 16-year old girl introduced to us in a scene which takes place in a cafeteria, where she sits at the counter and watches a wall-mounted television playing a pseudo-MTV which is showing a tribute to the recently fallen rocker. She mentions to the counter boy how sad it is. In the next scene, she is on the side of the road hitching a ride, and the car that stops has the other guy in the band SHE JUST SAW ON TV sleeping in the back seat. And when she gets in and sees this, she takes it in with complete equanimity. She doesn't mention to the kid driving that she knows who he is, she doesn't SMS any of her friends, and, in fact, she makes no comment regarding the fact that she's aware of the situation she's in until five minutes from the end of the movie, when she says, smugly, "I guess you know the words to this one" as she and Eliot share her headphones and listen to the group's song on her IPod.
3) The boy's militant father (in one of innumerable flashbacks) makes his son shoot his own dog after it gets hit by a car and breaks a leg, because he won't take it to the vet. The other boy has to dig the hole to bury it in while this is happening. Dad makes some comment about 'being a man' and 'killing to live'.
4) The boys, as teenagers, are running away from home to go to LA and 'make it big'and while they are waiting for a ride at the side of the road, Mom pulls up to give them a bag of money she's managed to sneak out of their father's bank account. This is not that implausible. But as they are standing talking with her, another car pulls up and waves them over to give them a ride a car pulls up to two hitchhikers who are already talking to a driver and asks them if they need another ride. How hitch-friendly is this town?
5) Eliot gets knocked out by a gang of Nazi skinheads while symbolically throwing away his bag of prescription (and non-) narcotics and is then taken in for the night by a haggard homeless man casually toting a rifle. Eliot notices the man has no shoes, so he offers him his own boots, and then spends the rest of the film barefoot, even walking across cities and towns this way.
6) In the subsequent scene, the homeless guy invites Eliot to join his choir, where he goes to 'get spiritualized', but the two of them are 1) the only two white people in the choir and 2) the only two who look homeless, as everyone else is dressed quite decently. Add to this the fact that 3), Eliot's face is still covered in blood from the previous night's attack when he walks into the choir room, and no one in the choir expresses the slightest alarm at this.
7) The band has only one song. It is used at every key, emotive moment in the film. It is so stock that it seems as though it could have been made by computer program, like the 'hitmaker' they purported to have designed in Josie and the Pussycats (which I admit, unashamedly, I kind of liked). It may well have been.
and finally
8) not an implausibility, but yet another ridiculous inanity: When Eliot goes to Tom's dad's house to visit the old man (Mom died while the boys were in LA), they have a kitchen conversation during which the old man is framed by the camera standing in front of a canvas of the 'Our Father', and Eliot is framed in front of a canvas of Jesus on the opposite wall. Get the message, everyone? We thought you would. (But actually, Eliot's reason for visiting Tom's dad is to give him a note Tom left, which turns out to be a red Post-It which simply says "We are all a**holes" the fact that Eliot would want to deliver a Post-It, and the fact that he would deliver one as utterly devoid of meaning as this one, counts as an implausibility, I guess).