Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/12/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Terri (Azazel Jacobs, 2011)

Jacob Wysocki in Terri

Cast: Jacob Wysocki, John C. Reilly, Creed Bratton, Bridger Zadina, Olivia Crocicchia, Tim Heidecker, Justin Prentice, Mary Anne McGarry, Curtiss Frisle, Tara Karsian, Diane Salinger, Jenna Gavigan. Screenplay: Patrick DeWitt, Azazel Jacobs. Cinematography: Tobias Datum. Production design: Matt Luem. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Mandy Hoffman.

Terri sounds like another teen movie, but it isn't. It has all the elements of the genre: misfit kids, mean girls, horny guys, uncomprehending teachers, absent parents, and so on. Terri (Jacob Wysocki) is an overweight high school student whose misfit status is signified by the spelling of his name, which is usually that of a girl. He lives with his Uncle James (Creed Bratton), who is some kind of an invalid -- we never learn what the illness is, whether mental or physical, other than that he sometimes takes too many pills and blacks out. We also never learn what happened to Terri's parents, only that he doesn't know where they are. He wears pajamas to school and is usually late, which gets him sent to the office of the vice principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), who is something of an eccentric himself and specializes in trying to connect with the school misfits. What director Azazel Jacobs and screenwriter Patrick DeWitt do with this setup is to keep the audience off balance as Terri learns to embrace his misfit status. Terri is a wholehearted embrace of eccentricity, with good performances, engaging twists and turns, and a welcome lack of preachiness, but it left me feeling that there was too much quirk for quirk's sake. It's a bit like someone watched The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985), Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989), and Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997) and smoked too much weed.