So I felt like watching a ‘thriller’ (officially designated as such) and went into the folder on my external hard drive to trawl through all the films I’ve downloaded on spec, the key criterion being that they’ve all got 70% or more on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a bit pathetic – I should be ready to watch films that get widely panned by critics but it’s about time, not having enough of it to watch the hundreds and thousands of movies I’d ideally manage to.
This was alphabetically near the top, so quite early on in the trawl. I had no idea what it was I watching, which is ideal as far as I’m concerned. I try not to know when it comes to new and current films.
One thing that’s cool about my system for sourcing films is that I’ll come across low-budget, often crowd-funded, affairs that won’t make it to any of the cinemas whose street-facing publicity I pass on various weekly routines. Half-way through, I skimmed some reviews of this – I was just looking for a Wiki page for it so I could learn a bit more about how it was made, but found no such thing. I did find a Guardian review, though, for which the headline was: ‘drug-fuelled road trip takes a very wrong turn.’ That sentence belies a horrible underlying tone of the whole review, which is this kind of sensible-centrist-nice-young-dad bourgeois unstated judgementalism we’re all expected to be in tune with because it’s the proper-moral ‘normal’, particularly for a Guardian reader. It’s what the new Oxbridge super-academics are like and late-Gen-X BBC presenters who’ve learnt how to wear the perfumes of a post-counterculture social ethics, but will always renege on them once the stakes include their own personal interests (or their kids’, their nurturing of whom somehow takes on a fascistic edge – as in, there is a normal, a good normal, and you really shouldn’t veer from it). I’m feeling more and more inclined towards this equating of ‘normal’ with fascism, the former is bogus, the latter was anyway sort of originally meant as ‘normal’ (by Mussolini and his gang), as in normalized/undifferentiated. I’m making a lot out of this, but it’s the way in which Leslie Felperin’s review singles out the drug-taking as somehow out of the ordinary. But my understanding of their drug consumption was that it was part of an almost inescapable modern condition wherein the general sense of hopelessness the 21st century increasingly infuses everyone’s life with leads to a casually pervasive nihilism where the only game left in town was to get fucked up, as royally, as constantly, and as multi-substance as possible.
One covert narrative in the film is the locations they use for most of it, which are these crazy abandoned suburbs and communities, apparently – where are these insane places? California? Why were they built and how/why did they fail? There’s a definite post-apocalyptic feel to the film like the last laugh’s on these two brothers who don’t realise the rest of the world is dead. In that sense, the film reminds me of The Comic Strip Presents’ A Fistful of Traveller’s Cheques. There’s a claustrophobia to the movie, too, which reinforces the sense of isolation and entrapment within a kaleidoscopic daily experience of pervasive alienation, manifest in apocalyptic modern epidemics of mental health issues and how to manage them, by any means avaialble.
It's a story-non-story that never gets anywhere, despite the all-too-unreachable destination of the film’s title: two brothers have a trunk-load of pills they’ll make better profit with if they drive all the way to Alaska to sell them there. Most of the film takes place in these apparently abandoned, half-built suburbs where they stop off to get fucked up on reckless cocktails grabbed from their cargo washed down with hard liquor. The locations really appealed to me, they felt like the sorts of places me and Elvin used to seek out to shoot video performances back in the day. But the central performances are dominated by Dakota Loesch as an off-the-hinge elder brother; he seems like an interesting guy, Dakota Loesch – he also wrote the script while Scott Monahan, who plays his trying-to-keep-this-shit-together brother directed it… it’s all very DIY and self-contained. Another Yeah You resonance, for me, is how the film is mostly a sequence of extended improvised dialogues, which are the essential substance of the film overall - in fact, there’s virtually no actual plot: it’s just 79 minutes of fervently intense improvised talk (actually brilliantly delivered) with a brutal ending tacked on.
There’s a small rabbit hole to descend into here, a handful of equally underground movies the two of them are in, or involved in, for me to check out.