Hair Slicked Back, Wayfarers On

The summer theme continues as I somehow avoided the worst of the rainfall and took in a Monday matinee of 2013 Sundance entry The Kings of Summer, the feature film debut of director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Fifteen year old best buds Joe and Patrick (Nick Robinson and Gabriel Basso) decide to ditch their annoying parents for the summer and go Thoreau, running away to build a secluded ramshackle cabin in a clearing in the woods with their tagalong weirdo pal Biaggio (Moises Arias).

Ostensibly a run-of-the-mill coming-of-age flick, it manages to tickle all the right parts of my funny bone with the supporting cast, notably familiar faces Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Mary Lynn Rajskub, and Alison Brie. Through debut writer Chris Galletta and (I'm guessing) a fair amount of improv, the straight-faced non-sequiturs fly fast and furious, led by the scene-stealing Arias (of "Hannah Montana" fame), whose character manages to channel a mini-Galifianakis, out-of-left-field vibe that keeps things light even when the proceedings get pointy and grim.

Cinematographer Ross Riege squeezes the most out of the the gorgeousness of the settings, guiding the action through vibrant sunny fields, glistening riverbanks, and lush forests with the eye of a true outdoorsman. When combined with the overabundance of here-and-gone montage sequences of the boys' adventures, however, I get the feeling that the time spent pitching style could have been better spent in developing the characters and the substance of the story, which is rather flimsy and haphazard at times, and frankly a little misogynistic. The Kings of Summer is a boy-centric, Lord of the Flies-lite with a snarky heart, but a smart, lovely little summer flick, nonetheless.
79/100



Tuesday, I felt like this pretty much all day:

Hey, even during the Summer of Jim, some days are just gonna eat you alive

Once I shook off the shark, the newest Noah Baumbach entry awaited me on Wednesday. Frances Ha, co-written by and starring Greta Gerwig, is another witty navel-gazer from the director of Kicking and Screaming and The Squid and the Whale. Frances is a wandering soul, a dancer in NYC who can't quite manage to lock down her dream job or affordable living arrangements. She is awkward, impulsive, outspoken and prone to over-drink. Her friends winkingly refer to her as "un-datable," despite her Ingrid Bergman-esqe beauty.

As a portrait of a rootless twenty-something with grand ambition but still seeking direction, Frances Ha straddles the line between her dreams and reality in a way that is both cautionary and celebratory. Her evasions and delusions can be sad and dangerous, but sometimes they are absolutely necessary, forces that can either throw her into blind adventures or enable her to swallow her pride to step back and make hard choices. She looks around and realizes that she and her friends are maturing into "grown ups" at different rates -- if at all -- and whether it is healthy to push back against this maturation process to hold onto a nostalgia of youthful idealism is a powerfully resonant theme.

Shot in (sometimes too-dark) black and white and off-the-cuff in the streets and parks of New York, it immediately recalls the visual sensibility of the French New Wave, early Jim Jarmusch, and especially Woody Allen's Manhattan. With the focus on the trials of a liberated NY chick, comparisons to Lena Dunham's series "Girls" are also inevitable (they even share a lead actor). Here, sometimes the characters go too far off on the quirky/hipstery tangents, but they are rounded out with heart and humor and are pretty likable, and the cringe-worthiness is kept pretty minimal.

While it has a loose, ephemeral feel to it, Frances Ha was meticulously scripted and directed, and Gerwig's lead turn is nothing short of phenomenal. During one close-up monologue, she travels through what seems like a hundred different subtle quirks and facial expressions within the space of about a minute, a mastery of character detail and delivery.

Oh hey, and there's always room for a little Bowie.

83/100