rocket science

[pete]

has anyone seen it?  I was sure that there was a thread dedicated to it, but the search yielded no results.
written and directed by the guy who's directed the documentary "Spellbound", the movie centers around a shy, stuttering high school kid joining the debate team to impress the girl he's got a crush on.

trailer here

It came and went pretty quickly last fall, I'd just caught it on the DVD.  It does pretty amazingly through most of it, despite its needlessly "indie" decisions that plague most quirky comedies these days, but the ending is quite underwhelming.





tiny SPOILERS, highlight to read





the script's structure is a tiny bit similar to "No Country for Old Men", in that it spends most of the film building up the conflict and beating down on the good guy like a genre film would (even though you know it doesn't pursue that route) and then cuts the familiar plot short towards the end by injecting its bleaker, more real, worldview, almost spelled out loud.  While it worked in No Country, I am not sure if it works in this instance.  This is a shame because since the tease in "Thumbsucker", I have been wanting to see a debate scene that delivers.  This film again only uses it as a ploy to explore other facets of the character.  I don't know, I'm all for giving the finger to the three act structure and bleaking things up for more truth, but sometimes that type of "keeping-it-real" storytelling gets real self-righteous and becomes a waste of everybody's time.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

Yeah it's a great film. It should have gotten the recognition Juno received last year.