Coming-of-age movies may be, on balance, my favorite kind of movies. When done properly, coming-of-age stories generate a universal compassion for the eternal plight of the adolescent, regardless of era or culture. We all remember those years. They’re rough!
Didi, the buzzy new indie hitting local theaters this month, is a semi-autobiographical story from first-time director Sean Wang. The film chronicles One Crazy Summer in the adolescence of California high schooler Chris and his loving-but-complicated Taiwanese family. Set in 2008, Didi features pop-punk bands and MySpace-era Internet complications, but also timeless dilemmas like Chris’ first kiss.
Didi won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance film festival, and Wang made some interesting choices to keep his story authentic. Most of the performers are first-time actors, several scenes were filmed in Wang’s childhood home, and he cast his real-life grandmother as herself. Also, look for the reliable Joan Chen as Chris’ mom.
For a different riff on the coming-of-age theme, consider Between the Temples, the new comedy from prolific microbudget director Nathan Silver. Jason Schwartzman headlines as Ben, a struggling cantor who agrees to facilitate a late-in-life bat mitzvah for sixty-something Carla (Carol Kane), his former grade school music teacher.
Clearly, there’s some rich comic potential here as Ben’s midlife crisis collides with Carla’s extremely delayed adolescent rite of passage. But the very funny trailer suggests that the film is aiming for something deeper than situational comedy. Silver’s film reads as a throwback of sorts —the sort of carefully observed, character-driven comedy we used to see more often on the arthouse circuit. Older movie nerds may sense some quantum connections with Hal Ashby’s great 1971 comedy, Harold and Maude.
Meanwhile, sci-fi and horror fans will have a familiar decision to make this month with the release of Alien: Romulus, the latest installment in the wildly uneven xenomorph franchise. The first two movies in this series—1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens—are stone-cold classics. Results have been infamously mixed ever since. Every new Alien movie is a roll of the dice.
The new film exhibits some hopeful signs. Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez (the 2013 Evil Dead reboot) is a genuine talent and he wrote his own script on Romulus, which is usually a good sign with franchise films. The story is reportedly set in the timeframe between the first two movies, so we can pretend all the other movies never happened.
But the thing that always keeps me coming back to this franchise is the series’ rich backstory and lore. The Alien movies inevitably orbit the sinister machinations of Weyland-Yutani, the fictional future mega-corporation that operates with the reach and power of a psychotic nation-state. This bleak vision of our future seems more prescient with each passing year. In fact, if you cross the first two Alien films with the early work of sci-fi author William Gibson, you’ll get a remarkably accurate picture of our current trajectory toward de facto corporatocracy here on planet Earth.
For those of us prone to a certain paranoia around this stuff, it makes for a very effective scary movie experience. See you at Romulus.
Quick Picks
For a lighter take on the dystopian thing this month, look for the gonzo sci-fi action-comedy Borderlands with Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Cate Blanchett. (Cate Blanchett?)
The Carolina Theatre in Durham is hosting the annual OUTSOUTH Queer Film Festival from Aug. 8 through Aug. 15, featuring a curated selection of shorts, documentaries, and feature films.
If you’re out Chapel Hill way, the Chelsea Theater’s summer Classics series has a crazy good lineup for August, including new restorations of Blood Simple, Stranger Than Paradise, The Conversation, Brother From Another Planet, and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s immortal Three Colors trilogy.
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