Film Freak Central

TIFF '03: Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran

**½/****
starring Omar Sharif, Pierre Boulanger, Gilbert Melki, Isabelle Renauld
screenplay by François Dupeyron, based on the novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
directed by François Dupeyron

by Bill Chambers Set, for the most part, against the backdrop of a Paris ghetto circa the early 1960s, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran ("Coran" being the French spelling of the Qur'an) is an agreeable coming-of-age fable in the Tony Gatlif vein. Moses "Momo" Schmitt (Pierre Boulanger), an artless Jewish youth accustomed to holding down the fort while his father sweats away in an office for a piddling wage, regularly purloins items from the grocery run by "the Arab," Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif, poised for a substantial comeback), who goes easy on the lad when he at last confronts him about his shoplifting: "Better you steal from me than steal somewhere else." Soon the Arab is giving Momo advice--some of it solicited, more of it part and parcel of the social contract between the old and the young, the wise and the naïve--on money and women, and if there's anyone whose advice on money and women you should probably heed, it's Omar Sharif's. Before mortality and spirtuality become opaque spectres in Momo's process of maturation, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran is a transporting, pop-hued period piece brimming with "local" colour--including worldly streetwalkers, from whom Momo gets a crash course in the birds and the bees--straight out of the collective unconscious. Which is to say that the picture eventually turns parched-looking and strange-feeling, even as it remains inherently predictable. (Think of a more subversive Finding Forrester with a third act set in Turkey.) The film's conclusion is oddly disturbing in its implication not of torches passed but of bodies possessed--an extreme reading, to be sure, yet I can't think of a better way to convey the melancholy that suffuses the sticky closing shot. Programme: Special Presentations

Thirteen (2003)

***/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I'm a bit surprised to have liked Thirteen as much as I did. For one thing, it has no particular point of view--things simply happen in and of themselves and aren't much related to the outside world. For another, the film is somewhat obvious in the way it depicts its various outrages, almost cuing us to register their brutal nature instead of simply letting us draw our own conclusions. But Thirteen's heavy-handed chaos mirrors that of its teenage protagonist, who is in the grip of emotions she doesn't understand and whose responses are as arbitrary as they are destructive. The agony depicted is real, and while the film is no aesthetic miracle, it manages to blast through its limitations with its primary emotion.

Felicity: Season Two Six-Disc Set [Sophomore Year DVD Collection] (1999-2000) - DVD

Image A- Sound B Extras A-
"Sophomoric", "The List", "Ancient History", "The Depths", "Crash", "The Love Bug", "Getting Lucky", "Family Affairs", "Portraits", "Great Expectations", "Help for the Lovelorn", "The Slump", "Truth or Consequences," "True Colors", "Things Change", "Revolutions", "Docuventary II", "Party Lines", "Running Mates", "Ben Was Here", "The Aretha Theory", "Final Answer", "The Biggest Deal There Is"

by Bill Chambers

What is a haircut?

According to Merriam-Webster, it is "the act, process, or result of cutting and shaping the hair." Maybe the definition should be expanded to account for the transmogrifying impact a haircut can have on public perception of the vehicle for a fictional character. I encountered my own follicular prejudices when I went to see Lethal Weapon 4 and found myself even more put off by the absence of Martin Riggs's signature mullet than by the film's idiotic script, abject racism, and incongruous delivery-room hijinks--none of which were quite so indicative of Richard Donner's undisciplined direction as his electing to leave Mel Gibson's 'do as short as it always is outside the Lethal Weapon franchise. Perhaps we can trace this back to the Sunday funnies: imagine how disconcerting it would be if Ziggy or Charlie Brown suddenly had hair. With the ingratiation of comic books, motion pictures, and television in the latter half of the twentieth century, our escapist figures got deported from the realm of imagination; transmuted into visual icons, they consequently became far less malleable.

How to Deal (2003)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Mandy Moore, Allison Janney, Alexandra Holden, Peter Gallagher
screenplay by Neena Beber, based on the novels Someone Like You and That Summer by Sarah Dessen
directed by Clare Kilner

by Walter Chaw Based on a pair of Sarah Dessen novels that apparently deal with the tribulations of a particularly sour adolescent girl, Clare Kilner's How to Deal is a disastrously twee Judy Blume knock-off that compacts every ill of growing up female into a hysterical parcel of over-reaching and hollow sanctimony. It's the kind of movie that has its maudlin protagonist reading Madame Bovary to parse, I guess, some portion of romantic martyrdom when the irony of the reference is that at the root of Emma Bovary's problems arguably lies her infatuation with mealy romance novels into which she might substitute herself for the heroines (not forgetting the role of Dessen's books in the first place). Irony and incompetence being the two rules of the day as Kilner and her cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards (once Gus Van Sant's DP, now relegated to stuff like this and Britney Spears's Crossroads) make unforgivable decisions in lighting and camera placement that cast How to Deal as an unintentional horror film with at least three scenes loaded with tension and free-floating anxiety for no good reason save that the filmmakers don't seem to know what the hell they're doing.

Ten (2002) + Lilya 4-Ever (2002)

Dah
**½/****
starring Mania Akbari, Amin Maher, Kamran Adl, Roya Arabashi
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Lilja 4-Ever
***/****
starring Oksana Akinshina, Artyom Bogucharsky, Lyubov Agapova, Liliya Shinkaryova
written and directed by Lukas Moodysson

by Walter Chaw The plight of women in oppressive and/or emerging cultures, on film, is a slipstream metaphor for the travails of all the citizenry of that place and, from there, the existential struggle of modern man--a heavy burden, to be sure, and one that forever teeters on the precipice of trite to the one side, affected to the other. (With "condescending" the great beast, crouched and ready to pounce.) Women are too often grail repositories of fear and loathing--indicator species, much like children in film, to be examined for hints of what's toxic in the spirit of the time. That two foreign films by male directors find their way to the United States in fast company of one another, dealing with the plight of women (all women, all society, all the world) in ways frank and raw, is arguably not so much coincidence, then, as a synchronicity that, no matter their relative success, represents a sharp spur and a whip to the collective flank.

Me Without You (2001) - DVD

***/**** Image F Sound B-
starring Anna Friel, Michelle Williams, Oliver Milburn, Kyle MacLachlan
screenplay by Sandra Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat
directed by Sandra Goldbacher

by Walter Chaw Sandra Goldbacher's Me Without You is feral and alive and home to two of the best performances of last year, courtesy Michelle Williams and Anna Friel. One of the more uncompromising films about the things women do to one another over the course of a long friendship, it becomes a bit repetitive by the end and a bit like a Jane Austen novel ("Emma, actually," the film helpfully informs) transplanted to the England of the past three decades, but its conventions skate with the honesty of performances from its main trio of Williams, Friel, and Oliver Milburn as the prototypical rakish, misunderstood Austen hero.

The Emperor's Club (2002) [Widescreen] - DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Kevin Kline, Emile Hirsch, Embeth Davidtz, Rob Morrow
screenplay by Neil Tolkin, based on the short story "The Palace Thief" by Ethan Canin
directed by Michael Hoffman

by Walter Chaw Saccharine, derivative, and overlong, Michael Hoffman's often-painful The Emperor's Club is remarkable only for the extremes to which it goes to avoid the clichéd ending--and the sad karmic (and ironic, given the film's carpe diem, hakuna matata catchphrase) completeness with which it fails to do so. Set in the Sixties at an exclusive all-boys prep school, The Emperor's Club is immediately recognizable as another iteration of Dead Poets Society, even more so when one realizes that the film features the same quartet of student types (the troubled one, the trickster, the bookish one, the gregarious one--also the same breakdown you'll find in Stand By Me, come to think of it) and the same crinkly-eyed inspirational professor who finds a lesson for young lives in the heartening words of dead versifiers. That The Emperor's Club spends its second half flashed-forward twenty-five years as said crinkly-eyed scholar discovers that his truest legacy is the success of his students reduces it to a variation of the miserable Mr. Holland's Opus.

Abandon (2003) + Dawson's Creek: The Complete First Season (1998) - DVDs

ABANDON
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Katie Holmes, Benjamin Bratt, Charlie Hunnam, Zooey Deschanel
written and directed by Stephen Gaghan

DAWSON'S CREEK: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C+ Sound B- Extras B-
"Pilot," "Dance," "Kiss," "Discovery," "Hurricane," "Baby," "Detention," "Boyfriend," "Road Trip," "The Scare," "Double Date," "Beauty Contest," "Decisions"

by Bill Chambers Abandon is a damn good movie detested in some quarters because, he hypothesized, it's not very comforting, because it subverts the entrenched John Landis approach to depicting college life, and because it's determined to be meaningful within the framework of a supernatural potboiler. The film stars Katie Holmes, whose career has caught its second-wind with the near-simultaneous DVD releases of Abandon and the first season of "Dawson's Creek", in addition to the title role in 2003's Sundance favourite Pieces of April and upcoming appearances in Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective and the Joel Schumacher thriller Phone Booth. She's also seeing the end of her aforementioned TV series "Dawson's Creek", which sails into the sunset this May after five years on the air. It will leave her more time for movies, and with her remarkable taste in film projects (see also: The Gift, Go, and The Ice Storm), I'm anxious to see where that freedom takes her. Especially if it's anywhere near the territory of her poised work in Abandon.

City of God (2002)

Cidade de Deus
**/****
starring Matheus Nachtergaele, Seu Jorge, Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino da Hora
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani, based on the novel by Paulo Lins
directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund

by Walter Chaw I'm uncomfortable with Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City of God--not for its brutality, but for the slick cinematic treatment of that brutality as it manifests itself through the harsh realities of Brazil's favelas ("slums"). Social Darwinist and serio-mythic in equal queasy measure, the picture is more influenced by Tarantino than Meirelles's background in commercial and video filmmaking, finding itself trying to balance its sizzle with social conscience before choosing in the end to remove itself as a strict adaptation of Paulo Lins's book Cidade de Deus. That being said, Meirelles does a magnificent job of parceling out--of marketing--the key touchstones in the history of a slum seething with violence. The result is a film that suggests what it might be like if Guy Ritchie helmed The Pianist--kinetically intriguing and technically proficient, but deeply troubling for its pop sensibility.

Felicity: Season One [The Complete First Season Plus Pilot Episode] (1998-1999) - DVD

Image B Sound B+ Commentary A-
"Pilot", "The Last Stand", "Hot Objects", "Boggled", "Spooked", "Cheating", "Drawing the Line Part 1", "Drawing the Line Part 2", "Thanksgiving", "Finally", "Gimme an O!", "Friends," "Todd Mulcahy Part 1", "Todd Mulcahy Part 2", "Love and Marriage", "The Fugue", "Assassins", "Happy Birthday", "Docuventary", "Connections", "The Force", "Felicity Was Here"

by Bill Chambers

"Starring Golden Globe Award-winning actress Keri Russell and today's hottest young stars, Felicity introduces us to a wide-eyed college freshman and the most exhilarating journey of all--self-discovery. From co-creators and executive producers J.J. Abrams (Alias) and Matt Reeves, along with executive producer Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Tony Krantz, comes to Felicity, which explores the excitement and uncertainty of living in New York City--a setting where anything goes and anything can happen."
--DVD liner summary for "Felicity: The Complete First Season"

I had what I consider a pretty good excuse to watch the well-hyped pilot of "Felicity", a show that is not necessarily mine to judge: A year before, I directed co-star Scott Speedman in a short film--I like to keep track of the Ursa Major alumni. But, and the name-dropping/bean-spilling ends after this indulgence, Scott does not belong on a teen soap, per se--as far as my experience with him goes, the format is too rigid for his improvisational methods, which happened to lean towards the profane. It was a bit like observing a caged tiger throughout "Felicity"'s run, though I'd bet my bottom dollar that the first time his character, Ben Covington, called someone a "dick," it was unscripted. The moment sparkles.

DIFF '02: Blue Car

*/****
starring David Strathairn, Agnes Bruckner, Margaret Colin, Frances Fisher
written and directed by Karen Moncrieff

by Walter Chaw An object lesson in how Swimming could have turned out had Swimming been weepy and apparently based on a bunch of Carpenters songs, ex-soap star Karen Moncrieff's hyphenate debut Blue Car is a coming-of-sexual-age puberty melodrama that plays like a film written and directed by, well, an ex-soap star. Sayles-favourite David Strathairn plays crinkly-eyed poetry teacher Mr. Auster, who has a yen for quoting Yeats, Rilke, and of course Whitman with the kind of earnest evangelism that points to easy uplift in mainstream twaddle (Dead Poets Society, The Emperor's Club) and a dark Humbert Humbert unreliability in independent twaddle (Smooth Talk). Meg (Agnes Bruckner, a talented young actress) is the product of a broken home: mom is never home, dad is missing, and little sister Lily (Regan Arnold) likes to cut herself and talk as though reading from an overwritten script. Naturally, then, Meg is a bad poet fond of barren-tree imagery and referring to the titular blue car that bore her father away on a "road to nowhere." Blue Car is the sort of film where funerals only take place in the rain and throwing oneself on a bed in a welter of tears is akin to striking the Christ pose on a tabernacle (which also happens)--there is the instantly-regretted, probably justified maternal face-slap to introduce the third act, and a climactic act of public demonstration that summarizes, shames, and elucidates. When Meg looks mournfully over a box of scattered pictures (lighting the corners of her mind, no doubt), Blue Car, already maudlin, suddenly and terrifyingly becomes Purple Rain.

DIFF '02: Roger Dodger

***½/****
starring Campbell Scott, Jesse Eisenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Berkley
written and directed by Dylan Kidd

by Walter Chaw Roger (Campbell Scott) is a fast-talking lothario with the usual laundry list of the insecurities, sexual or otherwise, that plague the modern man. But this far meaner and smarter version of The Tao of Steve--and what slight praise that is--takes a turn to the intriguing when Roger's 16-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) appears for a few lessons on the art of pitching woo. In three brilliantly-scripted and wondrously paced sequences, Kidd points his Casanova Virgil and virginal Dante into the concentric circles of casual sex hell: the Happy Hour pick-up, the drunken party encounter, the brothel-bound hooker. A nigh brilliant stream-of-male-consciousness black comedy filmed with genuine flair and theory by first-time hyphenate Dylan Kidd, Roger Dodger is a film with Labute-ian teeth minus the accompanying misanthropy. It hits its marks with a feline surefootedness, eliciting career performances from Scott, Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Berkley, and young Eisenberg, who, mark my words, will be a star. As satisfying and accomplished a debut since Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, Kidd represents another in a new wave of Hollywood film brats with the chops and love to rejuvenate an American industry that has fallen into disrepute: they are the true successors to Zoetrope's romantic promise, and Kidd has a lot to live up to with his sophomore feature.

TIFF '02 Raising Victor Vargas

***½/****
starring Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, Melonie Diaz, Altagracia Guzman
written and directed by Peter Sollett

by Bill Chambers The remarkable Raising Victor Vargas (formerly Long Way Home) stars soon-to-be somebody Victor Rasuk as the titular Victor, a 17-year-old raising the ire of his strict abuela (Altagracia Guzman) during the long, hot New York summer by virtue of having outgrown her idle threats. As the film opens, Victor asks out the beautiful Judy (Judy Marte) at a public pool in a pre-emptive bid to salvage his reputation for getting it on with a neighbourhood lass nicknamed "Fat Donna." When Judy shoots him down, she only stokes his attraction, and he devotes his waking life to the pursuit of her affection, which gives Victor's grandmother another hollow reason to believe he's a bad influence on his younger brother and sister (Silvestre Rasuk and Krystal Rodriguez)--though the reason Judy's ultimately drawn to him is that he projects safety and security. For the first couple of minutes of Raising Victor Vargas, you're worried--or maybe titillated--that Larry Clark might have sparked an imitator, but even though I'm a devout Clark fan, I feel the premier Peeping Tom of American youth could learn a thing or two from Peter Sollett, who makes his feature-length writing and directing debut here. Like Clark, he ekes transparent performances lacking in narcissism from inexperienced talent, but Sollett's characters are a kindler, gentler breed; Victor's 'make love, not war' attitude (some contentious debates with his elders notwithstanding) has a revolutionary quality, perhaps, given its milieu (which Tim Orr photographs with the same sepia brilliance he brought to George Washington). At the risk of hyperbole, I treasured every single scene of this film, especially the tender exchanges between the Vargas boys (played by brothers in real life). Ending on a low-key but by no means emotionally reserved note that induces goosebumps, Raising Victor Vargas is filled with truthful observations that add up to more than just another entry in another year's coming-of-age sweepstakes--much, much more. A goddamn poem, actually, one that transcends age, race, and finally genre. PROGRAM: CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 11

by Walter Chaw

SWIMMING (2002)
***/****
starring Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Dundas Lowe, Joelle Carter, Josh Pais
screenplay by Lisa Bazadona, Robert J. Siegel, Grace Woodard
directed by Robert J. Siegel

An insightfully-written, delicately-performed coming-of-age piece that is good enough not to be cheapened by that genre appellation, Robert Siegel's Swimming captures one summer at tourist-filthy Myrtle Beach. (A film professor, Siegel directs his first feature here in some 20 years.) Frankie (Lauren Ambrose) works at her family's restaurant, right on the main drag next to childhood pal Nicola's (Jennifer Dundas) piercing parlour. Frankie's plain and pale, Nicola's brash and blonde; their banal day-to-day is interrupted by the introduction of floozy bombshell Josee (Joelle Carter), who begins as the standard catalytic plot device but ends as something complicated and possessed of unusual depth. The same could be said of the rest of the cast, from Dundas's volatility to Ambrose's amazingly transparent and tricky performance. Even-handedly negotiating the tricky shoals of hormone-addled actions and emotions, Swimming excels in presenting the sort of small-town yearning I most associate with Steve Earle's early production, the cruelty of teens on the make smartly presented with the same kind of nostalgic affection as the moment when a plain girl recognizes the strength of her decency and the inimitable quality of her difference. Observations of the ebbs and flows of adolescent angst are interesting in Swimming, though not interesting enough to make this charming adolescent melodrama resonate with the melancholia of Bogdanovich's similarly themed The Last Picture Show, and the picture runs out of steam with a goofy subplot involving a sweet-natured ganja-burner played by Jamie Harrold.

Tadpole (2002)

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Aaron Stanford, John Ritter, Bebe Neuwirth
screenplay by Heather McGowan & Neils Mueller
directed by Gary Winick

by Walter Chaw An underwritten indie The Graduate (a connection the film makes itself) that plays a little more like one of J.D. Salinger's terrible short stories than like Wes Anderson's dead brilliant Rushmore (which it aspires to be at every turn), Tadpole emerges as exactly the kind of self-conscious product that crowds equate, knee-jerk-like, with independent credibility. Buoyed at times by an occasional sweetness and Bebe Neuwirth's fantastic performance as a hippie still flying her freak flag (or at least her free-love banner), Tadpole hints at what it might have been had it the courage to follow through on the ramifications of a fifteen-year-old boarding school Voltaire-quoting brat using the language of his absent mother to attempt to win his stepmother Eve (Sigourney Weaver) away from his ineffectual academic of a dad (John Ritter).

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 5

by Walter Chaw

RAIN (2001)
***/****
starring Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, Sarah Peirse, Marton Csokas, Alistair Browning
screenplay by Christine Jeffs, based on the novel by Kirsty Gunn
directed by Christine Jeffs

Based on a Kirsty Gunn novel, Christine Jeffs's hyphenate debut Rain is a dulcet, haunting evocation of that moment of crisis in a young woman's life as she's poised on the precipice of sexual maturity. The film is golden and beautiful, edged in its understanding that a desire for sex almost always precedes an emotional or intellectual ability to cope with the fallout of the act itself. In honouring that concept, Rain makes no distinction between adults playing as children and children playing the grown-ups in scenes juxtaposed in ways whimsical and poignant. As much as it is a coming of age for a young woman, Rain is very much about the broader issue of power in gender politics as it defines family and relational dynamics.

My Bodyguard (1980) - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Chris Makepeace, Matt Dillon, John Houseman, Adam Baldwin
screenplay by Alan Ormsby
directed by Tony Bill

by Bill Chambers My Bodyguard, not to be confused with the sudsy Costner-Huston thriller The Bodyguard, has been described to me as "the ultimate bully movie." I won't even toy with the idea that this feature-length Afterschool Special is the best at anything, but the film does have some merit as a teen revenge fantasy. Making his low-key directorial debut, Academy Award-winning producer Tony Bill brings visual grace sans style to this tale of the new kid in school and how he masterminds one bully's downfall through another's redemption.

My First Mister (2001)

*/****
starring Albert Brooks, Leelee Sobieski, John Goodman, Michael McKean
screenplay by Jill Franklyn
directed by Christine Lahti

by Walter Chaw Something's fatally off about My First Mister, veteran character actor Christine Lahti's feature-length directorial debut. Awkward and atonal, it appears to be some strange cross between a reverse-gendered Harold and Maude and a mainstream Ghost World, and despite its desperation to appear so, it's neither as intelligent nor edgy as either. Jill Franklyn's screenplay (her first produced) just doesn't work. It's hollow to the ear and disagreeable to the taste, only ringing true occasionally through the Herculean intervention of Albert Brooks, here in his most restrained and affecting performance since Broadcast News. That noise you hear when Leelee Sobieski's weary (and wearying) voiceover confides, "My clothes are not all black. Some of them are blue. Sometimes I wear them together so I look like a bruise," is an audience's worth of eyeballs rolling skyward. The problems Franklyn's script presents to the rest of the cast, however, particularly the Helen Hunt-ishly smug (and similarly limited) Sobieski and Carol Kane as another gnomish manic eccentric, are insurmountable. They're crushed beneath the weight of convenience, contrivance, Lahti's unfortunate impulse towards the cutesy, and a score that is as insulting and invasive as any to be found in a Chris Columbus film or from the recently-flaccid baton of the once-great John Williams.

Liam (2001)

**½/****
starring Ian Hart, Claire Hackett, Anthony Borrows, David Hart
screenplay by Jimmy McGovern
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Liam is an Irish coming-of-age story that has more in common with John Boorman's The General and Hope and Glory than it does with Alan Parker's Angela's Ashes. It balances the deprivation and desperation of growing up with crippling unemployment, a peculiarly sadistic brand of Irish Catholicism, and rising anti-Semitism with a good sense of humour and a lively feeling for pace that better captures the seesawing emotion of childhood than unrelenting horror or unleavened bliss. The truth of childhood, after all, lies somewhere in the grey liminal spaces between William Blake's songs of innocence and songs of experience, though liberal time is spent in both extremes. In other words, the true power of Liam is not in the now-familiar images of scrounging for bread and cigarettes while enduring whippings at the hand of Sadeian priests, but in the shame of a little boy who walks in on his mother bathing and the embarrassment of a stuttering child unable to say his own name.

L.I.E. (2001)

***½/****
starring Paul Franklin Dano, Billy Kay, Brian Cox, Bruce Altman
screenplay by Stephen M. Ryder and Michael Cuesta & Gerald Cuesta
directed by Michael Cuesta

by Walter Chaw A marriage of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark's bleak suburban sensibilities and Michael Mann's smooth visual sense, veteran commercial director Michael Cuesta's debut film L.I.E. ("Long Island Expressway") is a coming-of-age drama that includes a trio of knock-out performances, a gritty, wise screenplay, and directorial choices that are pitch perfect. It opens like Korine's Gummo, with a child on an overpass and a voice-over providing brief backstory and mood. Like Gummo, L.I.E. betrays itself as a subversive literary piece: Korine's work following the major tropes of John Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn and Cuesta's film faithful to the philosophy and tone of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Further, L.I.E. sets itself up as one of the most technically accomplished (and restrained) members of the dissident teen social genre, lending a direct thematic explication to the generational paranoia subtexts of 1970s cinema paid visual tribute by Korine/Clark and Todd Solondz.