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unpassive-viewer · 1 year

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Kings of Summer (2013) Review

“Hey Joe? Did you know we’ve been walking for half a mile? I can tell by how much we’ve bonded.” - Biaggio

“He took the Monopoly, too. As a way to spite me.” - Frank Toy

Hey gang, wow. It’s been like... eight months since I was here last. Still no Northman review in the works. To be honest I sort of forgot I had this account. I started grad school in January, so my other passion projects sort of went out the window.

Instead of reviewing a movie that anyone remembers or is in theatres, I’m going to review/break down one of my favourites - Kings of Summer. I don’t think that many people know this one. It was Nick Robinson pre-Love Simon. I have endless love for this film. It feels like a warm hug. Every time I need to bring myself back to reality or chill the hell out, I watch this film. Considering the whole grad school thing, it’s likely I’ll need to watch it again pretty soon.

The movie follows three teenagers who are frustrated with their families and decide to build a house in the woods to escape them for a summer. It’s a coming of age story about navigating relationships, self-discovery and growing up. Sounds simple enough, right? But this film is so much more than a typical attempt at engaging a teenage audience. In addition to the coming of age element, it’s also a look at a father/son relationship that’s on the rocks, as they tend to be when you’re 15. I really believe it has something for everyone, it is so funny and so wholesome.

The cast is “star-studded” in the best way. Nick Robinson (as mentioned), Alison Brie, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Moises Arias (maybe better known as Rico from Hannah Montanna), Lilli Reinhart (Riverdale), Erin Moriarty (The Boys), Marc Evan Jackson (Kevin from B99), Eugene Cordero, and Hannibal Buress and Kumail Nanjiani in smaller roles, among others. All of the adult actors are pretty established in comedy, and bring really interesting depth to the characters they embody.

The soundtrack is fantastic. Like I could not think of better music for a coming of age movie. I regularly listen to it while studying or writing papers. ( https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2c86gY4Ehvpngyxx8LwnTX?si=c2f2381ee3c2468f for anyone interested).

The art direction is phenomenal as well. This movie is very close to Arrival in that watching it feels like taking a breath of fresh air. There are so many shots that seem to place you into a cool summer evening in the woods. They remind me so much of the summers of my childhood, where I’d be out before noon and come home as the streetlights turned on.

And it is funny. The humour is very much typical of Nick Offerman, paired with capitalizing on tension and awkwardness among all the characters. It gives me a little secondhand embarrassment, but some of the most effective humour is within the scenes you sort of wish would just end.

So, clearly I’m already biased to this film. It’s in my top five movies of all time, if that says anything.

From here on is more of an analysis, so spoilers inbound:

I’m going to organize the content of this movie into two sections - one which will follow the standard three-act play, and the other which I will affectionately label “fuck around and find out”.

Before we start, some general character sketches of everyone so I don’t have to go through the entire synopsis.

Joe Toy: Fantastical thinker, head-in-the-clouds-syndrome. Rebellious, sort of petulant, and at least in the beginning expects to be able to do whatever he wants just because he wants to. Bottom line, he’s a selfish teenager.

Patrick Keeney: Joe’s best friend. Cautious - a total reflection of his household. Patrick is caught between wanting to make Joe happy, his realistic thinking, and figuring out who he wants to be in relation to those around him.

Biaggio: A-grade comic relief. Awkward, a little strange, but very loyal. We don’t hear anything about Biaggio’s family until the last 30 minutes of the movie. We don’t find out if they anticipated his disappearance or not since he seems to trust his father, but at the very least they were not worried that he’d gone missing. We can only imagine the kind of household he lives in considering his personality and the relative ease with which he returns after being gone for three and a half weeks.

Kelly: Joe’s love interest. Clearly has her own shit going on. She opens with a boyfriend who is visibly a lot older than she is, and is working a job where she has to deal with idiots constantly. Kelly needs someone who is kind to her and treats her like a person, which is 100% not Joe for like 95% of the movie, which is probably why she ends up with Patrick.

Frank Toy: Joe’s dad, widower, typical Nick Offerman character. Headstrong and combative. Not bad, just lonely and punishing others for it.

Mr and Ms. Keeney: overbearing helicopter parents who love their son a whole lot, despite how in his business they are.

Heather: Joe’s older sister. Must be somewhat similar to her mother, based on the way that Frank describes their mother as being someone who just “let Joe be”. She’s a sort of voice of reason, but is also fed up with her father’s antics. She’s the quintessential “sibling who got out of the oppressive household” character. Often a catalyst for Frank’s realizations.

And with that, I will break down the acts and the things that I noticed. This is mostly a commentary on how the acts set one another up, and the ways they transition between one another.

Act 1: The transitions between acts are marked with the song “The Pipe”. The first time we hear this song is prior to the director giving us the first shot - it plays, and eventually opens on Joe (Nick Robinson), Patrick (Gabriel Basso) and Biaggio (Moises Arias) in what we will later learn is a flash-forward. They’re in-sync, hammering on a pipe in the middle of the woods. As any film major will say, the opening scene is always the most important of the movie. It sets up the entire rest of the film. This shot gives us an important look into their dynamic - Biaggio dancing, and Patrick and Joe complementing one another’s beats on the pipe. In this scene, they are still youthful. We then jump to “one month earlier”, with Joe in the shower dreaming about Kelly (Erin Moriarty), and Frank (Nick Offerman) pounding on the bathroom door, “you’ve been in there for fifty four, no, fifty five minutes!”. From these scenes we know several things - 1) Patrick and Joe are the best friends of the group, Biaggio is adding his very particular flare to the dynamic, 2) Kelly is Joe’s love interest, 3) Joe and Frank are at complete odds with one another. In act 1, we’re at the beginning of our character’s arcs. Joe is rebelling against his father, Frank is bringing down the hammer on his son, Patrick wants to get away from his helicopter parents, and... well, we don’t know much about Biaggio. It’s Biaggio and Joe who initially discover the clearing in the woods where they’ll build the house, and so the plan is hatched.

The crucial parts we learn in Act 1 are all the things that motivate the change which takes place in Act 2. The art direction here is more simplistic, since we’re just setting up the characters. Much of it is reflected between the beginning and ends of the narratives with the characters external to Joe; Biaggio is the first to find the clearing where they build the house, as they walk in darkness after escaping the beach party. Biaggio is conversely the last to leave, also under the cover of darkness. Patrick stumbles into the clearing with the two of them the following day, unsure of the plan, and is the one to tear a hole in the wall of the house they built together. I’m sensing metaphors all around...

Act 2: The second time we hear “The Pipe” it shepherds in Act 2. It comes after a scene with the parents of Patrick and Joe check a greyhound bus for evidence of where their children have gone, and find their phones and a single Monopoly piece. Frank’s Monopoly piece. The scene ends with Frank saying, “he’s taunting me,”. Act 2 begins with, of course, “The Pipe”. Now in the present, we return to Patrick, Joe and Biaggio at the pipe in the woods, followed by Joe’s speech about “being men and answering to no one”. This, of course, will be the catalyst to all of Joe’s character development.

The art direction begins to take on a warmer tone leading up to Act 2. The boys have broken out - they’re free, they’re having fun. There are multiple shots of the scenery, of the sunlight coming through the leaves of the trees - this is the part that really speaks to my childhood.

Act 3: Act 3 begins again with “The Pipe”, but this time we don’t see Patrick, Joe and Biaggio. The music starts after Kelly brings Frank to the hideout in the woods, and Biaggio shows up to try and redirect the attention of a copperhead that has backed Joe and Kelly into a corner. This is where we somewhat of a resolution to Joe’s struggle with his father, when they begin to work together as a team. There’s as much of a heart-to-heart as you can get between them.

Leading up to Act 3, after Joe kicks Patrick, Kelly and Biaggio from the house in the woods, the shots take a cooler tone. Joe’s scenes are overcast, whereas Patrick’s are still warm now that he’s back with his family. Patrick’s narrative at this point has mostly been based around how he’s already mature, he had much less learning to do than Joe, and could go home. Joe on the other hand suffers a radical shock to his worldview, which is reflected in the scenery. I’ll discuss in a moment the divergence between the fuck around and find out sections of the movie, but I’ll note here that Patrick’s scene immediately follows a scene showing Frank and Joe. Patrick is mirrored in the same position, but is the only one of the three who is actually happy.

The resolution to Act 3 is somewhat ambiguous. We don’t totally get resolution between Patrick, Joe, and Kelly, but we can see that there’s at least forgiveness between them. Ultimately we don’t need to, because we can see that Joe has grown up, completed his character arc, and he’s less of a petulant child than he was before. This leads essentially into my next method of breakdown:

Fuck Around/Find Out: The Frank and Joe Dichotomy

This breakdown I am making based on the character arcs of both Joe and Frank in relation to one another. This is split almost evenly 2/3 to 1/3 of the runtime, and is how we learn that Joe and his dad are very much parallel to one another. As much as Joe’s is the critical character arc, the narrative underpins the entire film. Frank is really a grown-up version of Joe, navigating his own grief and isolation, with no interest in doing any of the things that would allow him to have a better relationship with his son. They exist in opposition to one another, with Joe perpetually looking for the upper hand on his father. Even when Joe disappears, Frank maintains a “he’s messing with me” narrative, which Patrick’s parents do not have. This childish back and forth is what I’d label the “fuck around” portion of the film, which translates to at least the first 2/3.

The “find out” part of this breakdown takes place once we see that both Joe and his father are alone - physically and emotionally. Joe has cast all of his friends aside after finding out Kelly is with Patrick, and Frank is alone after Heather leaves their house with the conversation, “Heather, am I a bastard?”, “no dad, a bastard would make everyone around him miserable just because he is,”. That’s the tie between them, when both of their arcs meet - they’re both making everyone else miserable because they are.

The scene I’m most interested in is where their parallel scenes with food. Joe has run out of money for the chickens that he was “hunting” (buying form the Boston market) and elects to eat a mouse which we can assume came from inside the forest house, whereas Frank hasn’t bothered to cook anything and instead finally eats the leftover dumplings that he’d previously complained about. They are united in their pathetic meals, neither deciding to take initiative and eat something other than what’s immediately available to them. They’re feeling sorry for themselves, why would they? The scene then cuts between them, both lying on their couches, looking up towards nothing. They are both alone, and they feel it.

This is the scene I’d mentioned which leads into Patrick’s; Patrick is also reintroduced to us sleeping on a couch, but he’s the only one who is in a good mood. He’s been able to rest, and he’s given up on his idea that his parents are the villains (it’s debatable that he ever thought that in the first place). Throughout the film Patrick’s family is cast in contrast to Joe’s. They have inverse problems with their parents, but at the end of the day what Joe has that Patrick doesn’t is a perpetual power struggle between himself and his father.

The scenes in the “find out” portion of the movie are where we start to see divergence between the characters. Joe is thrust into the realization that he needs to grow up for real in his isolation. I’d argue that his father also has to come to terms with admitting that he’s wrong, but Joe’s is the arc that is more glaring in this instance. The reason I say this is that if Frank had his own similar character arc, it’s unlikely that Joe would have felt the need to run away in the first place. Their dynamic culminates, of course, in them being able to at least somewhat settle their grievances at the end of the movie. Like any tumultuous parent/child relationship, there’s no real “sorry” moment, just a mutual understanding that settles between them. It’s the equivalent of your parent bringing you a bowl of fruit after a blow-out, or waking up to find they’ve taken your car to get its oil changed.

So yeah, that’s my little (not so little) stream of consciousness assessment of Kings of Summer. I may come back and edit this one later - I’ve been writing about Harry Truman for the last three weeks, which makes it hard to switch into coherent creative-style writing.

Have you seen Kings of Summer? If you haven’t, please watch it. It would make my nerd heart so happy to know other people like my favourite movies.

Oh yeah, and if it wasn’t clear already - 5/5 stars. or 10/10. I have no idea what metric I’ve been using to rate movies, or if I even had for the last few posts. All you need to know is it’s good, ok?

#Kings of summer #nick robinson #nick offerman #movie review #alison brie #movie recommendation #watch this movie #my favourite movie #favourite movies #good movies #coming of age

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shanastoryteller · 24 days

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The day his deal comes due, Sam goes missing.

Dean tells himself it’s nothing, that he’s gotten caught up in some research, some last ditch, hail mary nonsense and that he’s just turned his phone off and everything’s fine, that he wouldn’t do something stupid, that he wouldn’t break his promise.

He tells himself that for the first two minutes after he cracks his eyes open and sees the empty bed across from him, and the first time his call goes straight to voicemail, and not much after that. Sam’s broken his promises over things significantly less important to him than his brother’s life.

Dean is dressed and in the Impala five minutes later, heart thudding wildly in his chest. He calls Bobby, Ellen, everyone he can think of, but none of them have heard from Sam, none of them have eyes on him. Sam was with him last night, even if he boosted a car, there’s only so far he can get.

He keeps calling, keep searching, desperate to stop whatever he’s trying to do, to find him, to see his brother one last time before he’s dragged to hell. To make sure Sam is going to be okay after he’s dragged to hell. But the hours tick down, the sun sets, and he can’t find a trace of him. He’s so exhausted and heart sick that when he goes to call Sam again it takes him a long time to read the number on his phone, eyes swimming, the time not making any sense.

1:03

That’s not possible.

That’s not –

His phone rings, blocking out the time with Bobby’s name across the screen, and he answers it but his throat is too thick to say anything.

“Dean?” Bobby says tentatively. “Are you – I got an email from Sam. It just said, I mean, did–“

“What did it say, Bobby?” he asks, even though he’s sure he knows.

Bobby sucks in a breath at his voice, because he knows just as well as Dean that he should be screaming in hell right now, not answering his phone. “To take care of you.”

Dean drops the phone, hears Bobby still talking as he grips the wheel and presses his forehead against the back of his hands. This is what he’d been afraid of. This is why he hadn’t wanted to mess with the deal in first place. This is the one thing he’d begged Sam not to do.

It's easy to find a crossroad.

The demon is laughing at him when it shows up, wicked grin in a pretty face. “That didn’t take you long, boy.”

It’s a different demon than the one he delt with, obviously, but Dean figures they all know the same shit, since demons are a bunch of gossips. “This wasn’t the deal. My brother lives and I die.”

“You traded your soul for your brother’s life,” she corrects, so amused by all this that all he wants to do is kill her, to exorcise her, to make her scream. “Just like your father traded his for yours. There’s no reason Sammy can’t make his own trade. Man, but is your family fucked up. Maybe if you’d just settled down like little Sammy wanted, you wouldn’t all be bargaining for each other’s lives like haggling at a flea market.”

“Untrade it,” he snaps. “My soul for him alive, come on, no year, no waiting, you bring him back and take me to hell right now.”

She laughs in his face. “You don’t have anything to bargain with, boy.”

“My soul,” he repeats, “That’s what this is about, isn’t?”

“Oh, it’s what it’s all about,” she says. “But Sammy’s a clever boy. You know that, don’t you? He didn’t trade his soul for your life, he didn’t have to. You didn’t die. No, he traded it for your soul. Sorry, honey, but your credits been declined.”

At first he doesn’t understand. Sam traded his soul for Dean’s, exactly, so there’s no reason he can’t trade it right back. Then he gets it.

She sees the exact moment it clicks, the moment despair and horror sweep across his face too quickly for him to stop them. “That’s right. Little brother owns your soul now. For some reason he didn’t think you’d take proper care of it. You have it because that’s where he wants it, but no one will be making any deals with you, Dean Winchester. You can’t sell a soul you don’t own.”

“You can’t,” he has to clear his throat, “you can’t just come in and change things at the eleventh hour-”

“Eleventh hour?” she interrupts. “Sammy made his deal eleven months ago.”

His mouth is so dry he can’t speak.

“Isn’t it funny?” she asks, head cocked to the side. “All this time, the deal he’s been trying to get out of wasn’t yours, but his own. Maybe the two of you might have even managed it, except you just wouldn’t help, would you? Insisting that he not research, that he not look for a way out, and he spent so much time trying to convince you, coaxing you to talk about your feelings when he knew you were safe, all he because he thought it would make you feel better when he was gone, because he couldn’t tell you the truth and talk about how scared he was, so talking about your fear was as close as he could get.”

Dean’s going to be sick. “Don’t – please, please, I’ll give you anything-”

“You don’t have anything,” she says, gleeful. “You want to know why I agreed? The thing that made it just too delicious to refuse? Sammy’s down there, just starting in on an eternity of torture, and all he has to do get out of it is give up your soul. It’s his, after all, and he can put the original deal back in place any time he chooses. Just one moment of weakness on his end and his beloved big brother will be on the rack instead.” She sighs happily. “It’s almost as good as anything we’re doing to him down there, the knowledge that if he slips up for even a moment then it would all be for nothing. I couldn’t have found a way to twist the knife deeper if I tried.”

There’s vomit crawling its way up his throat and he has to swallow it down before he can speak. “I can’t – I’ll do whatever you want, please, there has to be something.”

She leans forward, cruelty and delight shining in her eyes. “The only thing you can do is what you’ve been telling your precious baby brother to do for the past year. Accept it. Move on. Live a good life so his sacrifice isn’t in vain.”

God. How can she – how can Sammy expect him to –

He’s doubling over, finally upchucking what little he’s ate today, and he’s dry heaving on the dirt when he hears the fading sound of her laughter.

This can’t be real. This has to be Hell, he has to be in it right now. He has to be.

#supernatural #sam spends like a couple weeks at most on the rack before pro azazel and therefore pro boy king sam demons steal him away #going wow we're so glad you're in hell and here to take the throne #and sam is like. well. i guess it's better than being tortured for eternity #he rescues his dad and gets such a disappointed look for being in hell that he sort of almost regrets it #anyway 40 hell years later things are mostly in order #so he shows up at bobby's 4 earth months late with starbucks and i don't fucking know an ascot #going hi dean :) you'll never guess what i did on my summer vacation :)#dean is like i am going to fucking kill you with my bare hands (i love you so much)#fandom ficcery

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