Pretty Good

Absolutely Fantastic

Absolutely Brilliant!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

disturbing. complex. realistic. like the book. a film about the manner to assume the past. to define the life. to impose the measure under pressure. to survive to the shadows to becomes parts of present. its gift - a wise script, great acting. and the art to capture the nuances of a sensitive age, the violence of image as expression of profound honesty about a taboo. one of films who explores the universe of its public. fragments of memories, impressions, stories. and the feeling of a strange, splendid trip. a remarkable film about the truth as basis for become yourself. not comfortable. maybe fascinating because Joseph Gordon Levitt does a great job. a bitter experience. and its exorcism. and the cold air of freedom.

It was really upsetting and heartbreaking to see the two boys being sexual abused by a sick human being who was meant to be their coach. I wish these boys could've told their mums about what happened. They could've that sicko arrested and make him pee his own pants for what he has done to those children!It might look as if Neil was the only one traumatized by this trauma but really, himself and Brian were both really disturbed by this incident. It's just horrific and terribly sad for them both to go through their precious life with this. It would've been better if they both called for help and that they could've been able to cope better throughout their entire lives. I honestly felt so so sorry for them. This really gives us a message on how we live in such a evil world which is our species and we can't blame animals for this. We even can't blame the good people here but it's the truth, we live around evil in this world.

Here we have two boys, both narrating their memory of that childhood night that changed the universe.The film is about child molestation but it's not a 'message movie' up front, the hurt wrapped in something more weird about the hole it leaves in the soul.One boy goes on a teenage life of cheap sex that makes him feel desired, the other tries to piece detective-like the puzzle of what he's sure happened to him: alien abduction one night.It is more deeply about a hole in the memory of who you are, about missing time, wonderful stuff. The catch? We implicitly value ambiguity in films but it's not always clear why. My definition of ambiguity is of a simultaneous view, of things being both so and in some other way, this and not this. This means temporarily suspending judgement, to resist saying things are only one thing. Here we have it clearly, two stories that we're called to figure. So to get the full effect, the catch is that you have to be able to quickly juggle a whole cloud of mirrored story, to ambiguously hold how the two stories are about the same boy, that it's neither just this nor unlike it.In short, simultaneously hold how one narration may have splintered off in the other and both mirror the same pathway to mind, and whole sequences will open up as you watch, like the Halloween night that goes through masks and bullying in a 'scary house' and ends with a blurry passing-out.Suspending judgement extends in another way. We see stuff we could easily be judgmental of, a boy who prostitutes himself, a mother who's reckless of his pain, but see past just this without denying it and you'll see a soul in the same need of affection as the rest of us.You have to quickly get in that space because the filmmaker makes it gradually more clear until a protracted (literal) explanation in the end of one boy to the other of what actually happened that night that clears the air of confusion and restores painful clarity.So here's a film that takes after Lynch of his mid-period (that is until Mulholland), the sunny picture of middle-America that hides something, for a while attempts the same ambiguous blur of submerging cause to bring to the front images of its having been lived; the dreamlike opening shot of colorful cheerios raining on the smiling boy and we soon find out what that was a part of.In the end it falls back to the logic of explanations, clearly separating real and not. No mistake, it's the most difficult narrative challenge to pose on oneself, one that Lynch has been perfecting his whole career, so all told I'd rather celebrate here the imaginative attempt.I saw this with a previous film by the same guy, that one a critique as superficial as the TV walls it projected on. Here I'm happy to see him grow.

A subject such as the sexual abuse of children will always be one cast down to the independent filmmakers with far less money and far less at stake. Greg Araki, always an outsider looking in due to his graphic and intentionally shocking style, may have felt an intimate connection with the material, not necessarily because of the child abuse so much as the isolation and alienation experienced by the two main characters. Even in a place like Hollywood, it cannot be easy being a gay Asian-American director with a penchant for explicit stories and characters.Despite this treacherous foundation, Araki was able to gain funding on the basis of adding two up-and-coming actors of their time, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michelle Trachtenberg. Interestingly, the scenes these two share together garner the best emotional elements of the film, conjuring up feelings of unrequited love as well as a kinship expressed without words, instead based on implication and shared past experience and secrecy. However, Trachtenberg has far too little time on-screen, making her character close to obsolete and nearly ruining the sweet chemistry her scenes with Gordon-Levitt create. Curiously, Araki maintains a strict editing style of crosscutting between two young men on very different pathways who nevertheless will inevitably come together since they always do in these types of stories. Brady Corbet, in the film's best performance, plays the shy, introverted and perpetually skittish Bryan, a marked distinction from Gordon-Levitt's Neil, who is sexually self-destructive and unafraid of whatever crosses his path.Corbet, looking like a young, more passive Jeffrey Dahmer, brings a quiet sensibility to the film through his tousled blond hair, thick and bulging glasses and a still, intimate voice that can boom when necessary. His scenes involving a search for aliens as a possible solution to his nightmares are both quirky and seductive, giving us an off-balanced portrayal of isolated teens in a faraway town doing what they feel is absolutely nothing of importance or value. In the same area, Gordon-Levitt's Neil, with a strangely shaped black mullet and lips curled slightly down to give off a sexual charge, reacts to domestic insecurity by being as irreverent and adventuresome as possible. This decision eventually takes him to New York City and back home again where he is forced to confront something he has known his whole life but has kept from everyone except Trachtenberg's Wendy, despite it involving Bryan.Without going into the full details, it requires one to say that the last few minutes of the film will certainly challenge almost everyone watching. Yet, for some, it may be a challenge of logic rather than taste and acceptance. Gordon-Levitt recounts the film's early events so plainly that it makes it impossible for us to feel any sympathy for his character and how he turns out. After all, he seems to feel no trauma, so perhaps he wasn't? Furthermore, his decisions of vocation as a young man leave one feeling he gets what he deserves rather than empathy and victimization. The only true victim of this film is Bryan, who reacted in such a starkly different way that it makes us more interested in his case rather than Neil's, whose story has been told before in other films. This disconnect leaves Araki with the irony of having a story line that he does not need but cannot get rid of if he stays on the course he wants. In the end, he holds onto his straight and narrow path, giving us almost exactly what we expected from the beginning. This causes the early scenes to be uncomfortable but not for the reasons Araki intends. They are uncomfortable and unnecessary, a most lethal combination. Whatever Araki's intentions with this story, it can be safely assumed that his message was already widely accepted beforehand, rendering anything he had to say all but useless and redundant. Even though one may have the reputation for being provocative and graphic, this may not always be the best course of action in order to lure in a consistent audience.