r/CultOfCinemaKnowledge

The bright ice cream-and-candy colors of run-down dreams, the fairy tale false narratives of as-yet unrealized hopes, all this can be yours for $38 a night.

The sad destitution of human sacrifice zones that are the circles of purgatories and hells around the Happiest Places on Earth are traps with no releases, with no recognition for time served. You make the best of it, sometimes in the worst ways possible, then game over, make room for the next prisoner of circumstance.

Sometimes bad choices are all you get.

What if this Sister of Misery, Our Lady of Bum Luck, this wrecked Rapunzel just isn't a sympathetic character? If she's got one last coin for the fountain, one last candle to blow out, or if she spots a falling star that isn't on a collision course for the planet, she'd better pray for a moment of clarity to appreciate Bobby, the tolerant and patient manager of the purple place, the Magic Castle Inn and Suites.

Halley (with a long 'a', played by Bria Vinaite) is this unsympathetic character. Her daughter, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince) is a virago, not really sympathetic but a fascinating creation of scary proportions by a child actor. “I can always tell when adults are about to cry,” Moonee tells a fellow ragamuffin, and Prince makes you believe her.

Bobby (Willem Dafoe) is sympathetic – to his last-chance denizens just trying to cling to the best circle of this Dantean world they can, for as long as they can. And film maker Sean Baker found the actor that actually looks like he could be Bobby's son, Jack – Caleb Landry Jones.

Nothing really happens, but somehow everything seems to happen, or to befall, the women and children in this film, mostly in the categories of no job, no money, no prospects, no home.

For $38 a night.

he year is 1965, the place is New Penzance Island, and the story is love, redemption and reclamation.

It is a Wes Anderson film that will make you laugh and cry, will make wish for the world where the Sam and Suzy in all of us is ascendant, and where that ascendancy triumphs because peoples' hearts are irrevocably good.

The prepubescents, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) meet-cute at an elaborate church production of the Great Flood story. Sam is a member of Scoutmaster Ward's (Edward Norton) Khaki Scouts in attendance at the play, but he grows restless and goes snooping about the vast old church. His prepubescent spidey sense leads him to the girls' dressing room, where the chicks are transforming into their bird characters. Suzy, with a bloody bandage on her arm from being hit by a mirror, is The Raven, the first bird sent out of the ark to find dry land.

Spoiler alert – the raven never returns.

Sam is an orphan, ping-ponging from Juvenile Refuges to foster homes after he loses his parents. Suzy lives with her three little brothers in a dollhouse home parented by two “counselors,” lawyers, played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand. Both children are misunderstood and outcast, driven from the Eden of hearth and home created for "good" boys and girls.

Sam and Suzy exchange addresses and correspond; eventually they plan their escapes and their meeting in the meadow. Scout Sam is wilderness survival trained, Suzy has a different approach, like bringing her tiger tabby kitten in a fishing creel.

Included in the adults is Bruce Willis as the island's police captain Sharp. Willis, who's talents we have lost to a cruel debilitating disease, plays Sharp as a tender and gentle man surely hiding out from a harsh world that doesn't understand him, either.

The missing children must be found, and Social Services' Tilda Swinton muses to Captain Sharp and Scoutmaster Ward that Sam will probably be administered electric shock treatments once found. Incorrigible, don't you know.

It's an all-island effort just hours before a historic storm is headed for the region. Ward tries to mobilize the scouts as a non-violent rescue force, the boys quickly become Lord of the Flies armed vigilantes. Harvey Keitel is the Kurtz-eque Scout Commander Pierce who reprimands Ward and relieves him of his office when he appears to have lost his entire troop.

The tides turn for Muskrats Suzy and Sam (sorry) and they are escorted by their rescuers to (supply sergeant/chaplain?) Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman) who has the power to marry them in a non-binding but emotionally and morally meaningful ceremony.

The storm makes landfall, lightening strikes, the wooden dam bursts, Social Services arrives by pontoon plane, the chase for the children still enjoined.

Eventually the storm moves out, much of the island has been clobbered, but the sparingly-used narrator (Bob Balaban) tells us that the crop yield the following year was the most abundant in island history.

No! No! Please tell me Sam and Suzy were not the human sacrifices to the heartless bloodthirsty Harvest Gods!

Dry your tears, for tho' weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning.

Suzy and Sam are reunited with visiting rights in an age-appropriate way, Suzy back with her character-arc-experienced parents and Sam with Captain Sharp as his legal guardian.

OK, now you can cry.

Rotten Tomatoes gave this film 79%, about 40% higher than I would have. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes. What do I know.

It's running time is as long as The Watchmen, by the way. However, actually more full frontal male nudity (McCaul Lombardi as white trash hottie Corey) than The Watchmen, so there's that.

American Honey is about a traveling band of teenage flotsam and jetsam ostensibly selling magazine subscriptions, with made-up hard luck stories, across “the heartland.”

“Newsstand sales of consumer magazines continued to decline in the beginning of 2016, according to the latest figures from MagNet, which tracks single-copy sales across the U.S. and Canada...The number of magazines distributed by wholesalers also dropped compared to last year.” - Erik Sass, MediaPost, June 6, 2016.

Bleak statistics; so is this the last press of the skins for these wandering wastrels?

Jake (Shia LaBeouf) (I've always thought it takes a lot of nerve to wear that name) (if you're a guy) (a stripper with a boa constrictor, maybe), in a pin-on braid, is the boy toy for Krystal (Riley Keough), the boss lady of this, er, enterprise.

Star (Sasha Lane). Oh yeah, plays the lead opposite LaBeouf.

I watched it because maybe I have a slender connection to the premise.

Long ago I drove a school bus during the day and worked a phone boiler room selling tickets to police and fire benefit shows at night. The shows were legit, but we didn't have to use our real names. There I learned how fast a dry Christmas tree will ignite when you throw lit matches at it. Wicked fast, in case you're wondering.

This week we are watching Aftersun from 2022.

I've been wanting to see this for a while, so I'm glad we will be watching it and talking about it. Paul Mescal rules.

How do you guys feel about this one?