B-Rant

- submitted by b-team on 10/01/2007

  

Top 10 Movies Centered On Suburbia (Part 2) -- "10 More"

We heard you. We appreciate all your feedback (1000s of responses!) on our first Top 10 list. As promised, we now offer our second Top 10. Reflecting many of Burbia users' picks as well as some of our own.

Our only Rule: Suburbia has to be more than a setting in the pic; it has to play a meaningful role in the plot or story.

Are there other good pics still out there? Yes. We just can't include them all. We also know our lists feature only American films. There are many great non-American films; we'll tee up our selections of those shortly.

As always, let us know what we missed, what you like and don't like.

Let the second debate begin...

Our Second Top 10 (in no particular order):

The Burbs (1989)
Tom Hanks in the gleeming burbs, convinced his new next door neighbors are wack-jobs (cannibals?) burying bodies in their backyard. And that’s their good traits! They’re not cannibals, of course; but they are strange -- and noisy and very un-neat – and their dilapidated eye-sore-of-a-house isn’t doing much for property values. Pic is an over-the-top slapstick comedy that is (if sometimes unremarkable) definitely an antic entertaining ride, with loads of suburban details and nutty characters (Bruce Dern as a gun freak is comical) that will make any suburb lover (or hater) simultaneously laugh and wince.

Donnie Darko (2001)
Fascinating, multi-layered take on conventional mainstream suburbia, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a high school prep student who sees and receives wisdom from a giant purple rabbit. He (Jake) tries to peal back life’s layers (including multiple universes) in preparation for the end of the world -- to occur at the end of the month, according to the rabbit naturally. The movie is both funny and disturbing. Highly imaginative, sometimes surreal, it’s a truly engaging, original and impressive work.

Arlington Road (1999)
An intelligent and suspenseful film that inexplicably sunk under audience radar when first released. Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack play the seemingly perfect suburban couple who are actually ultra-right-wing domestic terrorists. Jeff Bridges plays their increasingly suspicious neighbor who at first befriends them (in fact saves their child’s life) and later learns the truth -- and, against escalating horrific obstacles, tries to stop them. The ending is near-spectacular, both for its quietly building nail-biting suspense and its ultimate shocking unraveling.

Clerks (2004)
Kevin Smith’s first feature (25K budget) detailing a day-in-the-life of 2 suburban New Jersey slackers working at a convenience store and video shop. Lots of talk, loaded with “off” nutty (yet authentically drawn and sometimes hilarious) characters filtering in and out of the guys’ lives. Confounding ex-girlfriends, a-hole bosses, friends from hell, consumer-customer jackasses, etc. Sometimes you want to scream in frustration at the film – it’s so raw, meandering. Other times you want to scream in laughter and pleasure because of the same rawness and authenticity. Better, more honest and personal than Smith’s next similarly themed (and Hollywood-studio muddled) pic, Mallrats, which isn’t ultimately too bad a suburban-themed pic either.

Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982)
1980s classic, still a riot. California suburban high school cool. Teens looking for love, sex, drugs, parties – and, once in a while, purpose. With young, hilarious Sean Penn playing the school druggie-surfer dude (Jeff Spicoli) who just grooves on life -- and, in one of the 80s’ pop-culturally defining movie images, casually orders pizza delivered to him in the middle of class…to the awe-inspired appreciation and laughter of his mates and to the disbelief and horror of his hapless teacher. Great cast includes, in addition to Penn, Judge Reinhold, Jennifer Jason Leigh and a stunningly gorgeous Phoebe Cates.

SubUrbia (1996)
Richard Linklater’s film adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s play. Suburban ennui reflected in a group of post high school slackers hanging out in front of a convenience store, literally “hanging,” with nothing better to do than vent, rant and wait…for their friend, the one person among them who escaped the strip mall and their collective stultifying malaise by inexplicably becoming a rock star. The pic is sometimes hard to take; its characters are often ugly and narrow minded. But the film’s rawness and its characters’ frustrations and limitations and anger come through often with beautiful honesty and simple emotion. It’s not everybody’s suburban experience – thank God – but at that time, in that place, and in many burbs like it across America, the pic captures moments and sharp-edged fragments of the experience of many.

Pleasantville (1998)
Clever, entertaining story of two teens, brother and sister, from the late 1990s world of jaded consumerism and supposed deteriorating values, suddenly catapulting (literally) into the world of a black & white TV series set in the 1950s. Pleasantville is the name of the fictional TV town and the show. Of course, hijinks ensue. But the film takes on the notion of “happy” wholesome 1950 values -- self-control, conventionality, not making waves – and flips them. Where’s the passion, the spontaneity, the wackiness and fun – yes fun – in the safe clean “pleasant” 1950s? Where’s the color? And indeed as the two modern siblings (the sister mostly) introduce their color into their new world – their emotion, joy, unpredictability – the dull B&W world of Pleasantville literally becomes sparkled in color.

Gross Pointe Blank (1997)
Funny yet (amazingly) often poignant story of a hit man (John Cusack) who, after a decade away, returns to his home town -- upscale Gross Pointe, Michigan – to fulfill a “hit.” Instead (or addition) he attends his 10 year high school reunion, reconnects with his old girl friend (Minnie Driver) and confronts a rival hit man (Dan Akroyd). But not before learning great truths about his personal “issues” from a therapist (Alan Arkin) who’s terrified by this nice but professionally homicidal patient. Fun, quirky, often surprising, the pic features a great cast and a twisted take on the can’t return home again theme…at least not happily until, in this case, you find the love you lost years earlier and, of course, kill the ones you’re supposed to.

The Virgin Suicides (1999)
Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut, based on the Jeffrey Eugenides novel. Film hauntingly captures the beauty and sadness and mystery of young adults, high school students – whose confused and intense stirrings of love, infatuation, sexual desire, disappointed expectations and repressed emotions unfold with subtle and ultimately brutal consequences. The pic is set in 1970s midwest suburbia; and the 5 sisters at its center seem at first to have it all – beauty, intelligence, family. Yet they don’t – or what they have (or how they have it) isn’t enough. They kill themselves and we simply don’t know entirely why. Neither do the boys or anyone else in their lives. The film, which manages at times to be light and even comical in the face of tragedy, doesn’t try to answer the answerable. It’s powerful and affecting, sometimes luminous, with a terrific cast including Kirsten Dunst who shines as one of the sisters, Josh Harnett as her confused suitor, and James Woods and Kathleen Turner as the girls’ overwhelmed and wrong-headed parents whose family incomprehensibly disintegrates.

Over the Edge (1979)
A new “planned” community – New Granada -- springs up in the Colorado desert, like so many generic antiseptic communities did in the west and southwest during the 1960s and 70s. Thing is, the kids are bored, in the middle of nowhere. There’s little for them to do in this plastic sterile environment except medicate themselves (drugs galore) and become increasingly disaffected. The film depicts a nightmarish spiral downward toward ugly violence, reflecting unsparingly elements of teen alienation and frustration, rampant materialism and the false allure of surface beauty. What’s best about the pic is that, for the most part, the teens and grown-ups aren’t rendered as comic book characters – they’re real and not all bad. But that doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen; they just feel (to the audience, at least) more painful and frightening when they do.