Thumbsucker

OK, so before I go on a rant about this trailer I'd like to first point out that I actually do like it. I think it's a well put together trailer. It's funny, touching, well shot, original and all kinds of other things that one would normally associate with a good trailer and thereby a good movie. However, I'm going to defy expectations. I'm worried about this movie and how it seems to be fitting into this new breed of hipster cinema that I think Wes Anderson and Garden State have spawned.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love Wes Anderson's films. I adore Garden State. But I think we're in for a new style of films that Thumbsucker and Chumscrubber will be a part of. Earlier this year Jim Jarmusch contributed to it with the vastly (vastly, vastly, vastly times infinity) overrated Broken Flowers. In these films the protagonists will be completely emotionless, detached outsiders who silently look on as the world moves around them. We are supposed to feel sorry for these people because they don't fit in. However, as these films become popular they will immediatly lose their effect because the feeling of being an outsider will be appropriated and glamorized into popularity. Each of these protagonists will have some quirky little trait like sucking thier thumb (or creating bad conceptual art like in the other overrated film Me, You and Everyone We Know). They will be filled with imagery that reeks of said character's loneliness (for example, trash falling out of the sky and protagonist crawling out of it and dusting himself off). And the characters will come to learn that thier differences are what makes them beautiful and unique and triumphant hipster music will play as it does in this trailer.

I think Garden State was an excellent start. But let's face it, what made that movie was not Zach Braff's lonesome, depressed self. It was Natalie Portman. The disaffected thing was never really that interesting but just at the right time he introduced a bright, exciting character who actually MADE CHOICES throughout the film. They were not always the right ones, but were always somehow endearing. Once these films start to focus on the disaffected people who just beg the audience to love them while the rest of the world is populated with characters whose sole purpose is to understand them by the end of the film, these movies will become boring and tedious.

That said, I do like the trailer. It looks like something I'm actually going to like Keanu Reeves in. Sometimes I forget that he's been quite good before. And not just in Bill and Ted. Watch him in My Own Private Idaho and you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm excited about the rest of the cast as well. Tilda Swinton has always been really good, but after Broken Flowers and this she may be heading back to the hipster video-art world where she got her start. I've always been convinced that Vince Vaughn and Vincent D'Onofrio were somehow the same person. I don't know whether this movie will confirm or deny that. We shall see. I'll see the goddamn film inevitably. In fact, I'll probably like it unless we're supposed to feel sorry for our poor thumbsucker because he doesn't fit in and is thin and has no hips.

Fucking Hipster.

Trailer (Apple)