Tag Archives: Coming of Age

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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LAKKI… THE BOY WHO COULD FLY (1992)

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Gutten som kunne fly; AKA Lakki, Lakki… The Boy Who Grew Wings

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DIRECTED BY: Svend Wam

FEATURING: Anders Borchgrevink, Nina Gunke, Bjørn Skagestad, Jorunn Kjellsby

PLOT: A young man dreams of escape from his grim life; salvation may be coming in the form of the wings that seem to be sprouting from his back.

Still from LAKKI... THE BOY WHO COULD FLY (1992)

COMMENTS: Lakki comes by his pitifulness honestly. His father is intensely self-centered and will walk away from a relationship without a moment’s notice. His mother fosters a deep narcissism that expresses itself through wanton promiscuity. They’re both heavy drinkers. The boy’s grandfather was hauled away for insanity, and mom has a friend who comes over to the house and just sits around, day after day. Lakki’s school days are miserable, particularly thanks to his hyperaggressive gym teacher, who of course is now sleeping with his mom. None of these adults seems interested or capable of taking care of a child, and Lakki would happily remove their obligation if he weren’t only 14 years old. Growing wings and flying away is honestly the best idea he can think of.

Those wings are, one supposes, the most fantastical element in Lakki. Whenever he hits a particularly low point, he hustles to a mirror sneak a peek. Notably, we only see them when he does. While the film is cagey about how genuine we should find this, there’s no mystery about their metaphorical heft as a means of escape. But on another level, the characters are so outlandishly extreme and the situations are so cartoonish that the whole thing plays as unrealistic. Even Lakki’s ventures into the dark side of his situation play almost as parody. An attempt to offer himself as a rentboy results in a comically violent encounter in which he beats up the wishy-washy would-be John. Meanwhile, a walk down the path of drugs is met with overwrought hellfire and screaming. Far from being a cautionary tale,  even the most dire situation Lakki faces is laced with heightened ridiculousness. It plays like an ABC Afterschool Special, International Edition.

The dialogue is similarly purple, usually making Lakki feel ever more weighted down by the responsibility that the adults disown. His mother is especially dismissive, over-sharing, then dismissing her son’s frustration. (She’s pretentious, too. In a flashback, she tells Lakki, “We mustn’t shout. The night might punish us.”) In a pair of fascinating scenes, Lakki’s parents treat him not as their child but as the peer they yearn to confide in, right down to sharing their booze, and Lakki laps the attention up with needy urgency. Young Anders Borchgrevnik is in every scene trying hard to embody the emotional torment in Lakki’s soul, but some scenarios defy the talents of even the finest actors, and the multiple moments where the boy buries his face in his arm and sobs feel uncomfortably inauthentic.

Writer/director Wam and producing partner Petter Vennerød earned a reputation in Norwegian cinema for exploring social issues, but this, one of their last collaborations, doesn’t really pull back the curtain on the human condition. (After the initial release flopped, the film was recut and issued under new titles to give it another go.) Lakki’s situation is unique and odd, and his resolve to take on the responsibilities that are repeatedly abdicated to him feels more like a surrender than a culmination. Lakki doesn’t fly, and neither does Lakki. He never could.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Lakki is a complete chaos, and the style suggests that Svend Wam for a moment thought he was David Lynch.” – Fredrik Gunerius Fevang, The Fresh Films

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ICE TOWER (2025)

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La tour de glace

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DIRECTED BY: Lucile Hadzihalilovic

FEATURING: Clara Pacini, , August Diehl, Marine Gesbert, Gaspar Noé

PLOT: Jeanne, a fifteen-year-old orphan, leaves her foster home and comes across a film shoot for a dark fairy tale.

Still from The Ice Tower (2025)

COMMENTS: In the realm of the Ice Queen, the snow is vibrant, ethereal—and menacing. Drifts of crystalline flakes reflect muted light as it swirls aimlessly, falling upon and around the Queen, whose dusky gaze is a terrible, beautiful thing to behold. Jeanne beholds this gaze, and is immediately entranced by the fictional queen, as well as the actress who portrays her. Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s new film is as atmospheric as it is contemplative, unfolding Jeanne’s journey toward womanhood with all the portentous flair that cinema can offer.

If one were feeling glib, The Ice Tower could be described as “art- haunted-house”; but perhaps the film is too serious for that. That’s not to say it isn’t permeated by camera magic, on display for the viewer, and for Jeanne, who serendipitously falls into a film studio (almost literally) as the team there attempts to re-bottle lightning caught in a previous adventure featuring the cold, enigmatic Ice Queen. The Queen is played by Cristina, a cold, enigmatic actor interchangeable with her on-screen persona. As troubled as she is beautiful, Cristina relies on her “doctor” to help her through the her quotidian routine of performance, and curb her ambitions for an unreachable perfection. (This perfection, unattained, is the responsibility of the film-within-the-film director, played with graceful frustration by none other than Gaspar Noé.) While Cristina cannot abide flaws, the director lives in the real world—even if he is a magic-maker of cinema—and is quick to recognize that “good enough” is, by definition, good enough.

The Ice Tower is primarily about the bond between Jeanne and Cristina, the former replacing the actress who was cast as the queen’s protégé. By the finish, after all the narrowly framed widescreen shots, scant illumination, and a hauntingly dangerous venture to a remote cliffside, a fissure splits open; Cristina sought a lover, Jeanne sought a mother, and neither ends up contented. The clash between innocence and despondence worms through the gloomy corridors of Hadzihalilovic’s vision, with bright, minute illuminations crowded on all sides by murk. She has conjured a melancholy view from her dark crystal ball—with the sorcery of cinema forcing its light through the umbra.

The Ice Tower is in theaters now. We’ll let you know when it comes to home video.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a twisted retro fairytale that sits somewhere between Frozen and Mulholland Drive… an Old World children’s tale set in a place that’s both eerily real and utterly weird.”–Jordan Mintzer (festival screening)

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CAPSULE: MAGNETOSPHERE (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Nicola Rose

FEATURING: Shayelin Martin, Patrick McKenna, Colin Mochrie, Mikayla Kong, Steven He, Tania Webb

PLOT: A 13-year old girl with synesthesia deals with a new school, first crushes, bullying, and other typical teen problems.

Still from Magnetosphere (2024)

COMMENTS: Synesthesia, the neurological condition commonly described as “seeing sounds” or “hearing colors,” provides a tempting, if underutilized, possibility for filmmakers. A director can use “draw on the lens” techniques, easily achieved on the cheap through commercial software, to depict a protagonist’s subjective experience of seeing rainbows and candy-colored floaters overlaid on reality, providing an easy excuse to add phantasmagoric visual flair to any story. Typically, an in-film illicit drug trip would provide the pretext for such effects. By addressing synesthesia, director Nicola Rose can create a childlike world of sparkly kiddie psychedelia—fluffy unicorn and cotton candy stuff, but with a tie-dye aesthetic—while staying safely within the confines of a Disney/Nickelodeon storyline.

Protagonist Maggie almost constantly, if inconsistently, hallucinates. Sure, there are the green and purple and yellow sparkles that fill the screen when she sings a ballad on her portable keyboard, and the fact that, when she concentrates, she sees all the other characters with individual colored auras: pink for her sister, brilliant green for her crush, a squiggly mess of multicolored threads for her conflicted bestie. That’s textbook synesthesia. But Maggie can also draw lines and shapes in the air, persistent tracers that form hearts and crowns and words that glow with neon colors. An art lesson is so visually intense for her that the screen glitches into an incoherent muddle as dissonant music plays, causing her to puke. Her Barbie doll, Cassiopeia, talks to her, frankly confessing that she represents Maggie’s insecurities (while denying that she’s part of her host’s “weird brain thing.”). This expansive magical realism, transcending the bounds of simply “hearing colors,” is poetic license that expresses Maggie’s inner sense of alienness. But it also makes the girl seem like she suffers more from Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder than synesthesia. Perhaps her parents slipped LSD into her bottle back in their hippie days?

While the tastefully trippy visuals are novel in this context, the plot is formula, occasionally approaching pure corn. Insecure teen girl has some ultimately minor affliction that makes her self-conscious, experiences normal teen girl problems, gains confidence and the tools to resolve life’s little disappointments with maturity, the future looks bright. There’s bullying, an inappropriate crush, and an LGBTQ subplot to deal with, and it all gets resolved as neatly as you’d expect. To pass the time while the pattern plays out, we have not only the hallucinatory bursts, but a lot of comedy. Maggie’s dad is a goofball thespian directing a community theater production of “Pirates of Penzance” (which also has a predictable arc, with the scrappy citizen-singers overcoming obstacles with help from an unlikely source). The primary comic relief comes from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” veteran Colin Mochrie, who plays weirdo handyman Gil, a guy who comes off like a kid-friendly version of Creed Bratton from “The Office.” He has a mysterious private existence somewhere outside of polite society and is given to inappropriate, absurd non sequiturs (“I saw action in ‘Nam so that boneheaded, ungrateful numbnuts like you could have a kitchen toilet!”) Gil also hunts rats with a chainsaw. I didn’t find his silly, unmotivated antics particularly amusing, but humor is subjective, and the jokes are for a much younger crowd.

We provide allowances for the script’s formularity, since the film is prosocially pedantic and aimed at a pre-teen to young teen audience. Still, the high ratings on this low-budget film are astounding: an 8.4 on IMDb (the original Toy Story has an 8.3), 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (Lady Bird has a 99% rating). Admittedly, that’s on inappreciable numbers (a mere 88 IMDb voters and 12 RT critics), but even accounting for the small sample size, these scores are a bit baffling. The movie is perfectly fine. The acting is competent, the effects cheap but effective, the message heartwarming, the comedy… probably works for some. But it seems that Magnetosphere is largely lauded for its good intentions rather than its actual quality. It’s a nice movie. There is a large element of self-selection here: with a very limited release, only people already well-disposed to this material are likely to queue it up. There aren’t enough teenage synesthetics to form a cult audience, and even those kids will be drawn more to the same mainstream Marvel/Hunger Games fare their peers devour—it’s mostly their parents who will be cheering Magnetosphere. For curiosity seekers like us, this is a decent, modest movie that won’t feel like a waste of time, but it’s not some hidden classic that justifies those gaudy metrics. A reminder to always be skeptical of high internet ratings on low-distribution niche items.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Magnetosphere is for the weirdo in all of us who believes in the beauty the world has to offer.”–Tina Kakadelis, Beyond the Cinerama Dome (contemporaneous)

Magnetosphere [DVD]

Magnetosphere [DVD]
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BOYS GO TO JUPITER (2024)

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Boys Go to Jupiter is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Jack Corbett, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, , Tavi Gevinson, Julio Torres

PLOT: It’s winter break in Florida, and teenage dropout Billy 5000 is gigging to get five grand, but instead finds a donut-shaped alien creature.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Mid-’90s-style computer-animation visuals in a mid-’00s-style slacker dramedy with a mid-’10s-style soundtrack make Boys Go to Jupiter something of a disorienting experience. Also: a dozen or so odd little aliens, a hyper-intelligent dolphin running a juice concern, and a Spanish-speaking mini-golf dinosaur skeleton.

COMMENTS: Too smart for school, but not mature enough to succeed as an adult, Billy 5000 also suffers from a strange last name, a misguided sense of purpose, and the weight of an impending technical correction crushing down on him. He seems all right, though, being one of those lucky teens: laid-back, sensible, and at least subconsciously accepting that life is stacked against him. Besides, he’s about to happen upon a singular opportunity for personal growth—it just won’t be the “Moolah” variety proselytized by the influencer he follows, or by rocking his Grubster™ gig.

Julian Glander has concocted (programmed? certainly directed) an unusual bildungsroman here, which could have so easily been drab and charmless had its pieces not been this selectively chosen and particularly assembled. The vibe from the simple 3-D animation isn’t uncanny so much as dreamlike, an element heightened by the prudent use of narrative pop songs. Billy flies above his delivery route, musing on life and wondering why everything feels so heavy… only to ground the scene with the realization he’s been carrying a sack of golf balls in his insulated delivery bag. (Freckles, the protagonist’s slightly younger—and far frecklier—friend starts as an aspiring hip-hop artist before deciding that the acoustic guitar is much more his thing: his grunge-style power ballad about different ways to eat eggs is a credit to the genre.)

The casual inclusion of outright surreal imagery is rattling, in a cute kind of way: simple faces may take up entire window frames, and, as hinted above, a Brontosaurus skeleton at a miniature golf course offers words of solace to its proprietor. Coupling the animation and the absurdity with an indie-drama vibe pays off handsomely, and that’s before we even get into the alien podcasters and dolphin machinations. Boys Go to Jupiter is both very strange and very laid-back, and zaps you for almost an hour and a half; a slice of life served up as exotic cocktail.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a movie notably unafraid to manifest the weirdest of the weird…”–Natalia Winkleman, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987)

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DIRECTED BY: David Wheatley

FEATURING: Caroline Milmoe, Tom Bell, Kilian McKenna, Patricia Kerrigan, Lorcan Cranitch

PLOT: An orphaned girl is sent to live with her brooding uncle, a toymaker who makes elaborate marionette shows to cow and terrorize the members of his household.

COMMENTS: You have to hand it to the Brits; they just do coming-of-age stories a little bit differently. Here in the States, our budding young women are coping with love and loss at the hands of farm equipment or bee stings. But across the pond, the full flower of the newly mature female is as likely to coincide with psychic revenge upon a distant father or the wholesale collapse of civilization. It’s a whole other ballgame over there. 

Our heroine, Melanie, is coming into adulthood and knows it. Ogling her own youthful, unblemished form in the mirror and comparing it to Boticelli’s Venus, she observes, “Physically, I’ve reached my peak. From now on, I can only deteriorate.” It’s a charmingly lofty and pretentious declaration that highlights her actual immaturity, given her comfortable home and the security of her parents’ oversight. Naturally, it takes their demise in a plane crash (over the Grand Canyon, an appropriately yonic piece of symbolism) to make her realize just how unprepared she is for the adult world. She and her younger siblings are promptly shipped off to a cramped London flat where her foul-tempered Uncle Philip sells handcrafted dolls and wind-up toys in the front and holds oppressive court in the back, demanding total subservience from his mute wife Margaret and her brothers Finn and Francie. Philip is a petty dictator, issuing his cruelties through rigid house rules and cutting remarks. He’s the sort specifically designed to foster rebellion in the young people he despises, and given that Melanie is just starting to come into her own, their collision is inevitable.

The use of the word “magic” in the title implies a fairy tale element that isn’t really the story’s focus. The toys in his shop promise a level of enchantment that Philip is quick to stifle. His peculiar passion is for puppets, which he brings to life as the expression of his cynical view of humanity. That’s where we see the line between childhood and adulthood, between toys as best companions and toys as childish things to be put away. That dichotomy is the story’s pivot point, as Philip repeatedly denigrates Melanie until he finally comes up with a use for her: to play the lead in a re-enactment of the Greek myth in which Zeus rapes Leda under the guise of a swan. When Melanie comes face-to-face with the mechanical bird, it’s the crucial moment when she has to decide if she is interacting with a toy or with the malevolent soul giving it life.

Screenwriter , adapting her own book, has been seen ‘round these parts before—specifically, her reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves. Magic Toyshop similarly explores notions of burgeoning sexuality, both in Melanie’s unsteady flirtation with the roguish Finn and in the strange abuse heaped upon her by Uncle Philip. It’s a powerful simile (far too overt to be a metaphor), although one that is undercut by its sudden and unsatisfactory resolution. Yes, we get the revolution we expect, but with no follow-through. Melanie, who once declared that she had peaked and could only deteriorate, now looks at the flames consuming her world and says, “Everything is lost now.” It’s as though Carter refused to countenance an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after, but can hardly see a world in which anyone lives at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A gorgeous, strange and mesmerizing fairy tale for adults… ‘Toyshop’ is less a film of sexually charged transformations, man into wolf, than one with magical, spellbinding effects…” – Sheila Benson, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)