Posts Tagged ‘Kristen Stewart’
The Runaways
“I don’t give a damn ’bout my bad reputation”. Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) are provocative teenage girls in misogynist times. Both want to challenge gender norms, and idolise musicians who dispute the status quo.
Cherie introduces herself, after a menstrual mishap, with a high school talent show performance as David Bowie – an arresting and elegant routine concluded, amid jeers, with Fanning flipping the bird. Surely part of the objective in casting Dakota Fanning was to articulate the gradual corruption of her character: the progression from a famously recognisable face of innocence and purity to something crippled and despoiled is seamless; the joint is sewn up in several dreamlike scenes of performance and indulgence, sexual and narcotic. It is through musical performance that her self-assertion and, sadly, sexual commodification are fertilised. Her implicit corruptibility precipitates a spiral of self-destructive behaviours that lead ultimately to the band’s disintegration.
Catch my review from EIFF 2010 at The Ooh Tray.
Adventureland ****
Expectations can be a real bummer. The way a public accesses film now depends almost entirely on marketing, on names attached, on distribution channel. Those who walk in expecting a repeat of past directorial success will be often be sorely disappointed. And such disappointment is no valid basis for criticism. In the case of the inimitable Adventureland, inappropriate expectations were set up by Greg Mottola’s last film, that Apatow behemoth, Superbad. But it has more in common with the low-highbrow indie comedy of The Squid and the Whale, star Jesse Eisenberg’s last picture (yet without the distance and seriousness to temper occasional dalliance with smarmy pseudo-intellectuality; although thankfully, it keeps on the right side of the line). It has even drawn comparison to Richard Linklater’s Dazed & Confused, and Before Sunrise, for its intimate and sensitive exploration of the trouble with finding oneself before embarking on a career and life.
In that sense, it called to mind the themes of The Graduate, and with similar indirectness, it penetrates to the heart of the feelings and the half-chance commitments that define this stage of life. And like The Graduate, it deals with loss of virginity, rediscovery of identity and nihilism, but with an up-to-date candor and sense of humour. Yet oddly, it is set half-way between here and there, in 1987′s Pittsburgh.
