Tag Archives: Teenagers

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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Bruce McDonald

FEATURING: Elliot Page (as Ellen Page), Zie Souwand, , Slim Twig, Ari Cohen, ,

PLOT: A look inside the troubled mind of a teenage girl who is dealing with a hostile school atmosphere, emotionally hostile parents, a fixation on the cool new boy, a random drugged-out loser who may be the best friend she has, and the disappearance of her little brother.Still from "The Tracey Fragments" (2007)

COMMENTS: Split-screen photography has been a filmmaking tool almost since the beginning of the cinema. The technique took a giant leap, though, with the debut of filmmaker Christopher Chapman’s “A Place to Stand,” the groundbreaking short that he created as part of Canada’s Expo 67. Far from merely dividing the image in twain, Chapman developed a technique of isolating images and enabling them to move through the frame in concert with other images, like a moving mosaic. It was called “multi-dynamic image technique,” and it gained a foothold in popular culture a year later when deployed it in The Thomas Crown Affair.

Maybe it’s a Canadian thing, because Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments may boast the most splits any screen has ever seen. The story of a girl whose mind is shattered by disaffection and tragedy (a simile Tracey employs in her first monologue) is suitably embodied by a narrative and a screen image that is similarly fractured. Humans are notorious for holding multiple viewpoints and emotional states at the same time, and the mosaic method allows the film to display all of them at once. Unexpressed rage and undelivered ripostes share space with silent pain and vast landscapes, while grids of pictures give way to clouds of dozens of images, sometimes with a sharp triangle piercing the frame. One particularly memorable image features Tracey in a desperate run for freedom, perfectly overlaid with shots of a horse in full gallop while the score by Broken Social Scene lays down an appropriately desperate groove. Rarely has the complexity of the mind, especially that of a teenager, been captured with such fidelity. 

The Tracey Fragments is a technical marvel. The film supposedly took a month to film and nine more to assemble, and the work shows as McDonald, editors Jeremiah Munce and Gareth C. Scales, and sound designer Steve Munro create an impressively clear story out of a deliberately jumbled set of pieces. It’s frankly remarkable that it works as well as it does, given that Tracey’s story is pretty one-note. While her life does seem legitimately grim, the nonlinear approach represents her situation as an unchanging condition: disaffected teen girl, touched by tragedy, cast among the losers in high school, disdainful of her aggressively distant parents, and yearning for a bland boy who promises escape but evidently is a cruel, cavalier lover. (If we can believe what we see; our point of view is entirely Tracey’s.) It’s authentic, but it’s not dramatic.

This was Page’s first release following the starmaking breakthrough of Juno (although Tracey was shot first), and it solidifies the actor’s inclination toward challenging material. Page doesn’t always look as scruffy and homely as the character’s situation would suggest, and Tracey’s monologues sometimes feel inappropriately formal and clear-minded for a girl in such distress. The whole film rests on Page’s shoulders, though, and he carries it with confidence. Notably, some scenes have taken on a stranger veneer with the passage of time. One of Tracey’s tormentors verbally taunts her for her lack of perceived hot-girl femininity, calling her “It” and demanding, “Is It a boy or a girl?” Scenes with Tracey and her therapist are particularly odd, with the trans actor playing opposite Richings in drag in an ex post facto head-scratcher. 

Split-screen is hardly an obscure technique. If you’ve seen any heist movie, you’ve probably been treated to a collage of lasers, hands, and beads of sweat. What distinguishes The Tracey Fragments is the way it gives the split-screen a psychological dimension. Instead of delivering information, it delivers character and mood. It’s not an entirely successful effort, as that mood has little chance to develop and grow. It does serve as a valuable reminder that all the cool things we can do with image and sound have the potential to do much more, if we give them a shot.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film’s split screens create a hallucinatory ripple effect, jumping back and forward in time, in and out of synch, and alternating between emotional states of characters to create an oddly cohesive whole… the results are breathtaking and exquisite…and a real mind-bending trip… no matter how otherworldly and strange the film feels and looks, THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS breathes with poignant genuineness and contains yet another performance of staggering and guileless determination by Ellen Page… Its shockingly bizarre and virtuoso use of cutting edge split screen techniques may have many people fleeing for the theatre exits within the first few minutes. However, if you’re patient and stay with the film it’s even easier to see what an absolutely thankless work of painstaking filmmaking resourcefulness and originality it is.” – Craig J. Koban, Craiger’s Cinema Corner (contemporaneous)

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

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The Tracey Fragments

The Tracey Fragments

  • DVD
  • Multiple Formats, Color, Dolby
  • English (Original Language), English (Unknown)

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CAPSULE: SNORKELING (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Emil Nava

FEATURING: Daniel Zolghadri, , Tim Johnson Jr.

PLOT: Teenagers Michael and Jameson start a relationship while delving deeper and deeper into the trippy landscapes concocted in their minds by a trendy psychedelic inhalant.

Still from Snorkeling (2025)

COMMENTS: Disaffected teens have been fertile ground for cinematic drama for decades. Going back to Rebel Without a Cause, and probably well before, young people have sought out entertainment that gets them, and the movies have responded with tales of kids whom the squares refuse to get. Snorkeling is a proud inheritor of that tradition, and seems especially in tune with a moment where teenagers are too beaten down to rebel; they just want to escape.

Snorkeling finds America’s youth in an especially despondent mood, and it’s hard to blame them. We only catch glimpses of adults, but the world they’ve created for their kids is a selfish one; they’re dedicated to satisfying themselves, leaving nothing behind for the next generation. We hear from several teenagers in quasi-documentary segments where they explain their rootlessness and highlight the relief that snorkeling brings. Our guides through this defeated landscape are Michael, a half-Iranian pothead who affably goes through his days just trying to put it all behind him, and Jameson, an effervescent young woman with a home life she is so over. (One suspects that her father named her after a bottle of his favorite spirit.) She introduces Michael to a new kind of high, and they embark upon a curious push-pull relationship where he always tries to get closer, and she’s always anxious to get away.

Looking inside their drugged-out world doesn’t tell us much about its appeal. Scenes take on a pink hue, featureless bodies writhe in the sky, and everyone seems to be caught up in a blissed-out, laid-back hippie vibe. Every now and then, the disconnect is so intense that characters literally become animated, swirling around in a hand-drawn fantasia for a few seconds of true escape from the real world. (These are the moments that take the most advantage of Nava’s background as a go-to music video director for stars like Ed Sheeran, Calvin Harris, and Eminem.) We have to take it on faith that this is as satisfying as the characters tell us it is. But while these peeks inside the hallucinations are mildly interesting, the truly shocking images are what these cosmic travelers look like back in our world. They’re half-comatose bodies, staring blankly into the sky with oxygen masks strapped to their faces, as if some titan had picked up a hospital and shaken all the patients out onto the ground. We’re trading one empty room for another.

The big paradox at the heart of Snorkeling is that Michael and Jameson—and presumably all their contemporaries—desperately seek connection, but their solution is to engage in the most isolating activity imaginable. That’s the driving force behind the awkward finale, which feels like adults showed up at the very end and shoehorned in a climax from an ABC Afterschool Special. It’s a relief to see them recognizing the trap they’ve escaped, but it feels stagey in a way that the earlier surreal naturalism did not. Snorkeling has some interesting ideas about the reasons the kids are not alright these days and is very sympathetic about why they’re downright anxious to get away from it all. But the only way out it can think of is to harsh everyone’s mellow. That’s disappointing, but for a little while, it’s a nice mild buzz.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…perfectly captures the disaffected mood of a generation through its stunning, hallucinatory visuals and immersive soundscape, creating a potent atmosphere of beautiful despair. However, this stylistic triumph comes at the cost of story and soul. The characters are hollow vessels, and the film’s sanitized portrayal of addiction feels like a profound failure of nerve.” – Naser Nahandian, Gazettely (contemporaneous)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DETENTION (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Joseph Kahn

FEATURING: Shanley Caswell, Josh Hutcherson, Spencer Locke, Aaron David Johnson, Dane Cook

PLOT: A serial killer is loose in the halls of Grizzly Lake High, and there may be a connection with events 20 years in the past; only a pair of eye-rolling millennials, uncool vegetarian klutz Riley and popular slacker screwup Clapton, can save the day.

Still from Detention (2011)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Plenty of movies like to subvert audience expectations by mixing genres and deploying radical shifts in tone. Yet it’s hard to recall a film that pursues these goals with such ruthlessness, rapidity, and thoroughness as Detention. The filmmakers practically carpet-bomb the audience with twists, references, and backstories, producing a tale of such density the only people who could possibly keep track of it all are the men who made it. Detention is a movie that would make Dennis Miller say, “Whoa, Chachi, dial it back with the pop culture smorgasbord.”

COMMENTS: The opening credits of Detention are the essence of the whole film in microcosm: exceedingly clever, with names appearing in every possible location: sneaker brand, chocolate bar, upchuck in a urinal. (The director reserves that last one for himself.) Several have even been thoughtfully chosen to match, like the costume designer’s name stitched on a letter jacket or the sound designer appearing on a fire alarm. The flip side to this visual wit is that the names go by so quickly, amidst so much activity and chaos, that there is precious little opportunity to take the information in. The signal is overwhelmed by the noise, and you feel assaulted rather than edified. This will become a theme.

Even if Detention weren’t determined to be some kind of tonal chimera, it would still be a massive millennial snarkfest. The first five minutes play out as a kind of Clueless-meets-Scream, as a too-cool ice princess outlines the secret to high school success (complete with whip-pan edits and onscreen text) before having her head briskly removed from her body. It’s a whole postmodern vibe, and it telegraphs the desire of director Kahn and co-screenwriter Mark Palermo to pile on the jokes and references like so many hats on hats. But this is just an appetizer. The movie adds characters and plotlines like courses in a fancy meal. After introductions to our heroes, all the other high school archetypes get their turns in the spotlight, including the blond cheerleader, the lunkhead jock, the nerdy sidekick, the tech wizard, the bitter administrator… heck, even the stuffed bear that serves as the school’s mascot gets its own storyline. But Detention finds its own path by layering on incongruous genre elements that stupefy with their appearance. Time travel, UFOs, body swapping, predestination paradox, Cronenbergian body horror, and even a Minority Report-style touchless interface are among the twists and turns that arrive unexpectedly.

It’s tempting to view Detention as a parody or send-up of horror and teen comedy genres, and it does work on that level. But Kahn is such a committed nerd that you have to take all the sci-fi tropes as legitimate ventures into the genre. For all the seeming randomness of each new element, the film studiously connects everything in the end. No matter how arbitrary – a cheesy horror film within the film, a teenager obsessed with the 90s, a legend of a student engaging in sexual congress with a stuffed animal – it all ties into the plot. And cast’s commitment to playing every bizarre left turn earnestly (especially Caswell, who should have found a springboard to stardom here) helps keep you engaged, even as the dense plot pushes you away.

Kahn, an incredibly successful music video director, is excited for the opportunity to try his hand at the big-screen format. (He reportedly provided the bulk of the budget himself.) He’s willing to take his lumps – one student speaks disparagingly of his debut feature Torque, while another snarkily references the coke habits of music video directors – and he puts his experience to work on some appealingly offbeat setpieces. Easily the film’s highlight is a montage of one student’s 19-year-long detention, a one-shot tour backwards through changing fashion styles and popular music of the day. But Kahn also refuses to let a moment be a moment, and every bit of wackiness is decorated with more wackiness, so that there’s no real opportunity to take any of it in. Like a McFlurry with a dozen different mix-ins, it’s undeniably sweet, but dizzying and ultimately too much.

For a film as cravenly derivative as Detention, there’s honestly nothing quite like it. It stands as a fascinating artifact, a celluloid Katamari Damacy collecting genres and tropes and stereotypes into one big stew. It’s a piece of pop art, fascinating to observe even if difficult to admire.   

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A seriously (and unapologetically) bizarre piece of work… while Kahn deserves some credit for attempting something different within the teen-movie genre, Detention is simply (and finally) too weird and too off-the-wall to become anything more than a mildly amusing curiosity.” – David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

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

Detention

Detention
  • Blu-ray
  • AC-3, Blu-ray, Dolby
  • English (Audio Description), German (Subtitled), French (Subtitled)
  • 1
  • 93
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Capsules

CAPSULE: DAYDREAM NATION (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Goldbach

FEATURING: , Reece Thompson, Josh Lucas, Andie MacDowell, Ted Whittall

PLOT: A teenage girl and her dad move to a small town populated with drug-addled teenagers and a mysterious serial killer. Feeling alienated and struggling to make friends, she sees a fellow intellectual outcast in her English teacher and decides to seduce him, while her bumbling classmate Thurston starts to fall for her.

Still from Daydream Nation (2010)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though its dark undertones, nonlinear format, and attempts to comment on the violence and sexiness apparently inherent to small-town teenagers have garnered comparisons to Donnie Darko and Twin Peaks, this is just an angsty, poorly-scripted knockoff with very little true weirdness.

COMMENTS: Narrated by the gorgeous Kat Dennings, who switches back and forth between her recent past and the present, Daydream Nation attempts to mesh poignant high school drama with erratic comedy and suburban darkness.  Caroline, our protagonist, is intelligent and disaffected, often sneaking in awkwardly sophisticated references that her peers don’t understand.  She embarks on a relationship with her teacher on a lark, in an effort to try something new and become a different person for a while; the unstable Mr. Anderson quickly becomes obsessively infatuated with her.  Their relationship falters as Caroline starts responding to the advances of Thurston (Reece Thompson), a druggie classmate mourning the recent death of a friend.  These core proceedings are surrounded by a lingering industrial fire, serial killings, parental interventions, and a ghost or two.

Seemingly shot entirely through a high-contrast haze, the film offers a few visual treats but nothing in the way of ingenuity.  The same can be said for the script, which has a few shining moments of interest but lingers in derivative mediocrity for most of the runtime.  Writer/director Michael Goldbach doesn’t seem to have much confidence in his ability to tell a story, inundating us with unnecessary amounts of narration and several needless plot devices.  The central character of Caroline—while played wonderfully by Kat Dennings—suffers the most. The best parts of the film involve her speaking her mind, calling out the hypocrisy and sexism of those around her, but these scenes are immediately followed by the character chastising herself in private, thinking herself a “bitch” just because she spoke the truth. It’s as if Goldbach wanted to write a strong female character, but then lost his momentum and copped out to typical gender stereotypes.

Daydream Nation aims for subtlety, but comes out with blaring obviousness thanks to the clumsy pacing and script. The performances from Dennings, Thompson, Lucas, and MacDowell are solid, but can’t save the ridiculous dialogue or self-indulgent shooting style (not that I’m complaining about the myriad drawn-out, close-up shots of Dennings, but really, it’s all a bit much). And it isn’t even that weird!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…rolls elements of ‘Juno,’ ‘American Beauty,’ ‘Donnie Darko’ and ‘Twin Peaks’ into a potent blunt.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: BATTLE ROYALE [BATORU ROWAIARU] (2000)

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DIRECTED BY:  Kinji Fukasaku

FEATURING:  Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda,

PLOT:  Intergenerational relations in Japan have broken down to such an extent that

Still from Battle Royale [Batoru Rotaiaru] (2000)

youngsters are rebelling by committing acts of violence and mass truancy.  The situation has deteriorated so badly that the government reacts by passing the “Battle Royale Act”: each year a randomly selected high school class is sent to an isolated, uninhabited island, fitted with remotely detonated explosive collars, given meager supplies and told to fight to the death.  One must emerge a victor or three days later everyone will die.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although I consider Battle Royale to be a “must see” film, it really can’t go on the list.  It’s just not weird.  It’s funny, violent, overblown, disturbing, both operatic and banal, but not weird.

COMMENTS:  My first review of the film was a little flippant and then, quite randomly, I overheard a man say it was the “sickest” film he had ever seen.  He appeared to be quite sincere and I was driven to go back and watch it again, and again, to try and see what he had seen, what had disturbed him so much.

I don’t think that there’s anything in Battle Royale which will upset “366-ers.”  Yes, it is a film filled with images of youngsters killing each other and it would not be unnatural to find that disturbing.  The violence is so over the top, however, that it’s difficult not to be amused at times.  Who would have thought that a saucepan lid could prove to be such an effective weapon in the right hands?  It’s not even a very good saucepan lid.

The controversy surrounding Battle Royale on its release centered on the graphic violence and the age of the participants, but there is no connection between the violence in the film and real life violence involving teenagers.  The high school class that we follow are being forced against their will to participate in a life or death game, and they have been forced to do so by adults: adults who have stooped so far as to rig the game.  Despite having their backs against the wall, some of teenagers behave quite nobly; pleading for peace, setting up Continue reading CAPSULE: BATTLE ROYALE [BATORU ROWAIARU] (2000) →