Billy the Kid
dir. Jennifer Venditti
Billy the Kid is a documentary about 15-year-old Billy
Price, an adorable, hollow-chested eccentric who rules the downtown
strip of a small town in Maine. If the camera is to be believed, he’s
cheerily tolerated by his mainstream peers at school, and he easily
befriends the twerps who ride their bikes in circles in front of the
local diner. It’s only when he tries to date the twerps’ older sister
that his program of systematic chivalry falters and his basic weirdness
carries the day.
Billy’s behavioral oddities are apparent from the beginning. He
launches into an introductory discourse that’s as precocious as it is
out of touch: “I have a big interest in girls, but I’m not a jerk about
it. I despise drugs; I hate terrorism; I’m not a very big fan of
politics. I don’t hate it. It’s just something I don’t want to get
mixed up in.” Weirder still for a teenager (even a New England
teenager), Billy recites a Robert Frost poem from memory and then
applies its lessons to his life. He’s almost compulsively forthcoming
about his personal struggles, which involve his biological father’s
drug abuse—but at least his mom is stalwart. She fields strange,
overly literal questions like “Do teenagers always bite off the heads
of their elders?” without blinking.
Billy was diagnosed with Asperger’s after the film wrapped, and if
you know anything about the autism spectrum, this will not come as a
surprise. So were the filmmakers somehow exploiting Billy by not
acknowledging they had a real disorder on their hands? I think not.
This documentary is a totally refreshing look at a person dealing with
autism. Unlike Autism: The Musical or Temple Grandin’s
memoirs, you see the kid first, and the autism second. Billy the
Kid is about liking KISS and kittens, about the role of poetry and
professional wrestling in contemporary life, about not being able to
get even the thing you thought you were settling for. It’s
heartbreaking. ANNIE WAGNER
The Bucket List
dir. Rob Reiner
Rob Reiner’s latest film stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as
grumpy old dying men. The former is billionaire Edward Cole; the latter
is trivia-nut mechanic Carter Chambers. Both men have been informed
that their final days are upon them, and hoping to go out with a
bang—or at least on a globe-trotting tour—they sit down in
their shared hospital room and scribble out a list of things to do and
see before they shuffle off. On the list are such experiences as “kiss
the most beautiful woman in the world” and “go skydiving,” but the
underlying wish might as well be “win one last Oscar.” To say both
Nicholson and Freeman chew the scenery is an understatement; the
effects work of them sitting atop the pyramids is so atrocious you
can’t help but wonder if Reiner was forced to go the digital route
because his leading men had actually devoured the ancient wonders.
Despite such blatant statuette reaching, it would be a lie to
claim The Bucket List isn’t effective, especially during its
predictably somber third act. Reiner’s direction is for the most part
clean and, in a real shocker, fairly restrained, and the interplay
between the two leads often sparkles. And while you could easily find
yourself distracted by the film’s preposterousness, not to mention its
whiff of misogyny, there’s always Freeman’s voiceover to soothe the
fight right out of you. For its intended audience of geezers, The
Bucket List will no doubt play as a proper tearjerker; as a
showcase for careers nearing their end, it’s harmless and agreeable.
“Never pass up a bathroom, never waste a hard-on, and never trust a
fart,” Nicholson advises at one point. If those words speak to you,
make sure you’re in line on opening day.
BRADLEY
STEINBACHER
Honey and Clover
dir. Masahiro Takada
A friend of mine once announced that the world would be a better
place if it was run by teenage Japanese girls. I don’t know if I agree
with that sentiment, but I do know that, in this hypothetical
Harajukracy, every movie would be like Honey and Clover. Based
on a popular art-students-in-love manga/anime, Honey and
Clover is a live-action iteration that stays close to the source’s
cornball, soap-opera roots.
Ayumi (Megumi Seki), the most popular girl in school, loves the
bespectacled, shaggy-haired nerd Mayama (Ryo Kase), but Mayama is busy
stalking an older woman named Rika (Naomi Nishida)—he even keeps
her discarded tins of lip gloss and other bits of garbage tacked to his
walls in plastic bags. Meanwhile, Takemoto (Sho Sakurai), “the least
arty student in our school,” loves the eccentric and talented Hagumi
(Yu Aoi), but he—choke!—can’t work up the nerve to tell
her.
The students frolic at the beach and throw parties all around
campus, making bad abstract paintings all the while. The soundtrack is
full of cheesy expat American bands fighting through lyrics like, “Why
is lonely in my life?/Does everyone feel lonely, too?” Along the way,
our young artists learn lessons: “You should paint the pictures you
like however you like, whether you win a prize or not.” When their
unrequited love remains unrequited, they mope at the same beach where
they had previously frolicked: “Where had the sparkling sea gone?”
The most frustrating thing about Honey and Clover is that,
after nearly two full hours of castrated flirting and characters
getting tremendously sad just because it’s the time in the movie for
them to get tremendously sad, it doesn’t really end: One character
fights the urge to sell out his art to the establishment (represented
here by two flaming gay gallery owners named Mario and Luigi) and
everyone else is still mooning over their crushes. This is fine for
manga, or a cartoon, but for a cutesy teen-romance movie, it’s
absolutely intolerable. I bet the teenage Japanese girls are clamoring
for a sequel. PAUL CONSTANT
