Reviews

What, only 15 reviews so far? O.K., I'll play! *SPOILERS FOLLOW* "The Runaways" plays out like a series of "scenes", rather than a coherent movie. This not totally a bad thing- many of the scenes are quite compelling. Stuff I liked:

• The sense of time and place. There is a total lack of anachronisms. The period detail is so convincing, you'd swear this film was SHOT in 1975. Hair, clothes, speech idioms, cars, cityscape, all perfect. The Valley looks flat, hot, smoggy, and seedy. Pup 'n Fries? Hell no! Pup 'n Taco!

Hollywood looks hilly, hot, smoggy and seedy- right down to the missing "O" in the battered old, pre-restoration Hollywood sign, where the kids gather to drink, huff, smoke, and share war stories about their messed-up families.

• The performances. These are teens playing teens. All are excellent. Stewart's Joan is a study in cool, raw, intelligent ambition and contained rage. Her family life is a cypher, but we can fill in the blanks. Fanning conveys Cherie's pain,confusion,and inner moxie, a false front of courage behind her saucer eyes. She is an abandoned child, but she's ready to try to break out. All the girls do drugs, but the drugs do Cherie. She is "lost in hell without a map". Joan is in hell too, but she's got the tourist's map, folded up in the hip pocket of her leather pants. You just know that, come what may, she's going to make it.

-The girl-centric focus. The only real male of any consequence in the film is Shannon's Fowley, and he is sexually indeterminate. Joan has guys hanging around her, but she kicks them to the curb (literally) when she doesn't need them. Cherie bags a couple of the roadies, but, again, the boys serve a purpose, and it isn't as mentors or soul mates. The closest thing to a romance is what passes between Joan and Cherie. But, in the end, given a choice, Joan chooses rock 'n roll over her messed-up young band mate. Good choice- "Look me up when you get your act together, honey. Meanwhile, I got work to do"

• Random nude scenes. None involve the principles, but what a welcome and unexpected delight in our Age of Hypocritical Hang-Ups! It's a flashback to the time when movies earned their R's the honorable way- with SEX, not blood and gore. Yeah, we ARE back in the '70s!

• Rockin' soundtrack. And, yes, the girls do fine. The climactic performance of "Cherrybomb" in Japan was great, but my favorite was the early days house party scene, with the band blasting out "California Paradise" in someone's living room, taking crap and dishing it out with the unruly crowd, till the cops come and break everything up. Ah, nostalgia!

Won't see it again in the theater- no need really, it's an intimate movie, not an epic. But, definitely a DVD to buy.

7/10

The idea behind this movie wasn't terrible-a retelling of the classic psychological horror story "The Turn of the Screw", only, let's remove all of the ambiguity from the the character of the Governess, and make her an overt nutter suffering from childhood trauma. There are no ghosts- Little Miles and Flora are threatened by their crazy delusional governess. BUT, the movie falls flat on its face- bad acting, bad direction, bad script, bad editing...Leelee is particularly disappointing- has she given a good performance as an adult? The four points are for LeeLee's breasts (they are easily worth two a piece!) Want a good "haunted house" scare? See instead- "The Innocents", "The Haunting" (the original, not the remake), "The Uninvited" (best séance scene in history), and, most recently, "The Orphanage".

"There's a land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair"

Robert Service would have understood Chris McCandless. So would Jack London (though he would have wished Chris payed closer attention to the lessons in "To Light a Fire")

As many outdoorsmen and women on this board have said, if you enter the Wild without the proper humility and respect, there will be a price to pay. Chris set off for the Alaska in his mind, and wound up stranded in the real one.

Was McCndless a narcissist? Yes, but not a malignant one. One gets the sense he would have reconciled with his family eventually. Was he a saint? Maybe, especially when he gently deflected Kristen Stewart's overtures!

Was Chris a selfish spoiled brat, or courageous explorer of inner and outer spaces? We Americans are uncomfortable with ambiguities. Couldn't he have been both?

Penn's movie mirrors its subject- deeply flawed, yet unforgettable. Watch it and form you own opinions!