Stop-Loss and The Beautiful Ordinary

Stop-Loss
Just a quick word about Stop-Loss, as I realized I had seen it two weeks ago and not yet written about it. It is the second film by Kimberly Peirce, coming almost 10 years after her debut, Boys Don't Cry. What took her so long? Regardless, Stop-Loss is probably the best film we've had about the Iraq war so far. It kind of fizzles out in the third act, but the rest of the picture is quite satisfying. My biggest qualm? It needed to be either a full half-hour longer, or a couple characters needed to be removed. The secondary characters are underwritten, and you can feel it. On the other hand, the cast is filled with the best actors of the last 10 years in independent film: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Channing Tatum, and my personal favorite - Victor Rasuk (Raising Victor Vargas). It's a shame such wonderful actors were given such little to do.

The Beautiful Ordinary
One of the hardest things to get right is the "high school movie". It's extremely easy to go way over the top and become the latest teen soap opera. On the other hand - and no less sinful -there's the temptation to pull punches and go, well... not far enough. The truly great high school movies are few and far between. American Graffiti, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed and Confused are the ones that really get it right (with honorable mention to Elephant). They may not encapsulate every facet of the teen experience, but more than anything, they get the "feeling" right. Perhaps that's why it's so hard to make a good film about this time in a person's life. It's more than anything else a somewhat indescribable feeling - melancholy with a little bit of youthful joy and heartbreak thrown in. And by the time you've grown up enough to put that feeling on film, it has most likely faded from memory. Probably the best depiction of high school ever put to celluloid wasn't even a movie at all, but a TV show - unlikely as it may sound. Freaks and Geeks had 18 hour-long episodes to shape its characters and refine its tone. And it stands as the pinnacle of high school on screen, because, for all intents and purposes, it had more time than any film could to build and define its characters.
What I'm getting at is that any film that tries to depict high school - especially with a two-hour running time - should focus on that "feeling" more than anything else. Because with the dozens of possible characters such a film could include, one has to face the fact you could never give each of them equal narrative justice.
And saying that, I now arrive at a film called The Beautiful Ordinary. It is the first film from Jess Manafort, and although it has its problems, it's the best high school film I've seen in quite some time. It's an independent production, and the film was dumped by its distributor after a limited release, and retitled "Remember the Daze". Yeah, I know... horrible. Don't be scared by the title. It's an obvious play off of the popularity of Dazed and Confused, and a ploy by the distributor to make some quick cash when it goes to video. I will keep referring to the movie by its original title, both because it was the director's intention, and because the new one is really fucking bad.
So anyway, back to the movie. This is a film of broad brush strokes, not fine details. It's a film that wants to create a portrait of people in a time and a place, and I applaud it for that. It's not a character study. It's a study of characters in an environment.

The picture has strong direction and acting. The cast reads like a who's-who of the best of this generation's independent film: Melonie Diaz (Raising Victor Vargas), John Robinson (Elephant), Chris Marquette and Leighton Meester are solid. But unknowns are where this movie really shines: Shahine Ezell and Lyndsy Fonseca make strong impressions; as does Brie Larson, a scene-stealer as an overbearing younger sister. But the real star here is the direction: sure-footed and confident, Jess Manafort is really going to go places. She shows real potential.
Well, enough of my rambling. Take a chance. Watch this movie when it comes out. Pick up the tacky-looking video box with the title of "Remember the Daze" - what really awaits you is a little lost gem of a film called The Beautiful Ordinary.