I have a soft spot for Rob Reiner movies. The moment I see that Castle Rock Entertainment logo, I settle in for two hours of human connection stories steeped in history and nostalgia.
Flipped is Reiner doing what he does best – taking us back to a version of America that feels like sunshine filtering through trees, where the worst thing that could happen is the girl next door not liking you back. Set in the early 60s, this coming of age romance follows Juli Baker and Bryce Loski through their middle school years as they navigate the messy business of first love, told from both their perspectives.
The dual narrative is the movie's secret weapon. We flip between Juli's and Bryce's viewpoints of the same events, and suddenly what seemed like typical teen awkwardness becomes this tender examination of how two people can live the same moments completely differently. Madeline Carroll and Callan McAuliffe play the leads with the kind of earnestness that could have been cringe but instead hits you right in the chest.
What gets me about Reiner's period pieces, whether it's Stand By Me or this, is how he captures that specific ache of looking back. The sycamore tree Juli loves, her chickens, the carefully manicured lawns of suburban America – it's all shot with this warm nostagia. The production design nails that early 60s aesthetic without being showy about it.
The supporting cast is stacked too – Aidan Quinn and Penelope Ann Miller as Juli's parents, Anthony Edwards as Bryce's dad. There's a dinner scene that escalates from uncomfortable to devastating that shows Reiner hasn't lost his touch for quiet, powerful moments.
Flipped won't punch you in the gut like some coming-of-age dramas. Instead, it reminds you that first love, family dysfunction, and learning to see people for who they really are - these things are awkward and messy and occasionally involve chickens and eggs.
We were all twelve once. If we had regular childhoods, I did, we know there is nothing like those endless childhood summers with our friends-in-arms. That pit in the stomach sense of nostalgia of things we lost as grownups is captured in the heart-tugging lines from Stand By Me - "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"
I often make the mistake of forgetting how amazing a writer Stephen King is. He is so mainstream with his paperbacks overpopulating airport kiosks, that one falls into the trap of underestimating King's story telling abilities. Stand By Me is one of the novellas (The Body) from Stephen King's book Different Seasons. The director Rob Reiner said that this was the one movie among all his movies, that he connected with the most. Makes sense, the movie is set in late 50s and Rob Reiner was a 12 year old in 1959, just like the four protagonists in the movie.
The story follows the events of a couple of nights - Labor Day weekend 1959, in the lives of four 12 year olds in a small town in Oregon called Castle Rock (Rob Reiner named his movie production house Castle Rock later.) In the picture above from L to R they are - Gordie Lachance played by Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix as Chris Chambers, Vern Tessio essayed by Jerry O'Connell and Corey Feldman as Teddy Duchamp.
The Sixties was around the corner. Kids stayed out late till the sun went down, rode without seatbelts and on truck-beds of strangers' trucks and a penny had more value than what it cost to produce a penny. It was the search for some buried and lost pennies that led one of the characters, Vern to gather his friends and go on a quest to recover a dead body.
The four kids go into the woods armed with the innocence and invincibility of childhood and emerge out of it robed off those powers. Although all of the four actors live their roles, the one that made the most impression on me is the late actor River Phoenix. His sensibility, commitment and passion shines through his portrayal of Chris Chambers - the intelligent and sensitive roughneck who wants a break from his family's ill reputation.
Whenever I watch this movie it brings tears to my eyes not just because of the nature of the story, but it also reminds me what a big loss to the movie industry (and probably to humanity as well) River Phoenix's death was. I wrap this up with a quote by another one of the actors we lost young, here is Brandon Lee in his final interview, quoting Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, this quote is also Brandon's tombstone.
"Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really… How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless..."
The River meandered in and met me on one of my many internet jaunts.
Never knew of this movie's existence before a search for 'a movie to
calm your mind' brought it up in on the inter-webs.
This Jean Renoir film from 1951 is one of the most accurate and
realistic depictions of India from a Western perspective. There is even a
question that one of the characters - new to the subcontinent asks a
long time settler from the West, that whether he
would see any person climbing on the rope and vanish into
nothingness and the settler answers in the negative. Even today that is the
kind of India the West has come to believe exists, but nothing could
be farther than reality, even in 1951.
It is a coming of a age movie with real blood and bone characters. As
someone brought up in India in the latter half of twentieth century who
has never seen any Caucasians living as residents of the country, it was
interesting and informative to see how the
whites (not just the ruling class of British citizens) co-existed with
the locals and how common it was in pre-independent India.
The story is set in Bengal in an area which falls in the present day
Bangladesh. The Indians in the story celebrate Hindu festivals of Diwali
and Holi. The director Jean Renoir shows the landscape of India in
vibrant colors, but none which feels synthetic
like a Bollywood movie or the caricature of India portrayed in the
Temple of Doom or many other Hollywood movies fully or partially based
in India. Like the director, the writer of the story, Rumer Golden
deserves credit for having the guns to stick to reality.
Holden Caulfield simplified and brought into the nineties.
I was a little disappointed to learn that Logan Lerman is unlike the nerdy Charlie he portrayed, as a viewer I had invested so much into liking Charlie. I read the book first. Maybe because the writer himself was the director of the movie (Stephen Chbosky) there is nothing amiss in the movie that was in the book.
Jamshedpur, Jharkhand is transforming into ‘the’ place for
coming of age movies. Maybe lot of new crop of directors/writers grew up as offsprings
of steel plant or ONGC employees which provided stable white & blue collar work in
Northern India from seventies onward.
Bubblegum is teen coming of age story narrated in first
person by a guy who is probably in his thirties looking back at a Facebook-less
cellphone-less world. A time of sweet innocence, right? Wrong, FB, Twitter and
texting might be new but teenage was a wicked time since time immemorial, even
before language and written word started making matters worse.
A housing society in Jamshedpur is the setting of this
good-natured teen drama which has the fourteen year old Vedant(Delzad Hiravali)
in lead vying for the attention of girl next door, Jenny(Apoorva Arora.) Two
other significant characters are Ratan, Vedant’s arch enemy who has his eyes
set on Jenny as well and Vedant’s deaf and mute brother – Vidur.
The life of teens back in that era has been vividly captured
by the script and characters, so is the life in a housing society (apartment
complex in urban India) of the eighties shown with its small but important
nuances. The events of the story happen around the days leading up to Holi and
the festival forms the thread that holds the story together.
You have reached one of the oldest, continually updated blogs on Blogger / Blogspot. Active since 2003. Twenty three years and counting. Enjoy your stay. If you are interested, you can read the beginning of my blogging journey here
This blog started as a movie log way back in 2003. About 20% of the movies I watch makes it to these pages, the rest are gobbled up by my powerful Procrastinator machine. I, the author of the blog hides under a fictional profile called Different Drummer. But please don't misunderstand that I am an authority on drums. I won't be able to tell a snare drum from a bass drum and the only drums I've ever owned are ear-drums. Nor am I any different from any of you. It is just a name. For more, read the About page.
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