Three Films Make A Post: She's a fabulous, loving, caring mother, who er... ...happens to be a serial killer!

Paper Moon (1973): If you ask me, I’d argue that at the point in time when this was shot, Ryan O’Neal was usually a frightfully wooden actor with a peculiar voidal quality to him. Turns out that Peter Bogdanovich’s choice to cast him alongside his first-time acting little daughter Tatum O’Neal worked absolute wonders on that front, the rapport between the two bringing out Ryan’s personality and easing Tatum into as natural a performance as you could ask of any child actress. Their performances stand at the core of a movie that sometimes seems nostalgic for Depression era America, but never forgets the abject poverty and the other horrors of that time while still somehow managing to still be a comedy. The film carries a deep belief in the ability of people to get through the hardest times with a love it treats without any sentimentality; there’s great sadness at the core of the film, but that sadness is always smaller than the warmth of Alvin Sargent’s script and and that between the O’Neals.

The Spectacular Now (2013): I think I’ve expressed my discomfort with mainstream film critics’ and their love for coming of age films about teenage boys at the cusp of adulthood who learn some lesson or other via an encounter with The Mystery of Femininity™ – or as we here call it “desperately underwritten female characters”. James Ponsoldt’s film belonging to that genre featuring Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley does seem to deserve most of the accolades it gets, though, seeing as it never pretends its female main character Aimee is somehow completely unknowable because she’s a girl, or only interesting to the audience because she teaches the male main character Sutter something. The film does centre around Sutter, mind you, but it never forgets that he’s not the centre of the actual world. Otherwise, the film quite precisely explores the influence parents have on their children, the way love and sex and confusion intersect. It always feels honest about its own convictions and more interested in also being honest about its characters than in making a point about them. It’s also beautifully shot, and well acted, so there’s nothing here even for me to complain about.


Bottom of the World (2017): This is another one of these somewhat Twilight Zone-like small films of a type we get four or five a year of at the moment. There’s your typical for the sub-genre tendency to present mild mind-fuck ideas, a use of Americana that reminds a little of a less interesting David Lynch, and a plot resolution that seems a bit too moralizing to be fully satisfying. Douglas Smith and Jena Malone are certainly convincing enough in the main roles, and from time to time, director Richard Sears (apparently the guy who’ll direct the next Transformers film, because that’s how blockbuster cinema rolls at the moment) hits on an interesting, ambiguous element and doesn’t resolve it too clearly. Just as often, the meaning of metaphors is much too on the nose and things are just too clean and simple to make for a truly satisfying film of this sort. Well, at least I’d argue that this sort of film thrives on the elements that aren’t completely resolved and explained. It’s not a bad film, though, it’s just not a terribly satisfying one either.