Jacob Aaron Estes
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Though it is clear from the start that something bad -- very bad -- is bound to happen here, and does, there is satisfaction in the film's defiantly unhappy anti-resolution that will appeal to the same quirky subset of people who appreciated the darkly depressing "River's Edge," "Kids" and "Bully."
"Mean Creek'' takes its place alongside "Stand by Me'' and "River's Edge'' as one of very few films to accurately portray the experience of growing up male.
If they were adults, in an action movie (or even teens in River's Edge, which Mean Creek resembles), Sam and Millie's dire circumstance might lead to the sort of desperate, ardent sex that happens in such movies.
Mean Creek slots itself nicely in that catalog of macabre coming-of-age stories like River’s Edge and Stand by Me by way of the existential panic of Deliverance.
The title Mean Creek is a kind of plainspoken, water-borne homage to ''River's Edge,'' a beloved and influential 1986 movie about adolescent moral choices.
At first blush, "Mean Creek," by first-time writer-director Jacob Estes, is a film in the tradition of "River's Edge" and "Stand by Me."
From the looks of it, director Jacob Estes is deploying inspiration from Gregory Hoblit’s Frequency , a movie that uses the conception of time travel to layout an unforeseen situation where a man in 1999 is able to communicate to his father in 1969, even though his father died when the man was only 6-years-old.
Jacob Aaron Estes’ new movie Relive feels like that show mixed with Frequency, the Dennis Quaid/Jim Caviezel movie in which father and son communicate across time.
You’re probably going to read other reviews that make comparisons of Don’t Let Go with Frequency (2000) and See You Yesterday (2019, currently streaming on Netflix) which I won’t make because I never saw either one of them.
Think the Dennis Quaid-starring Frequency meets Christopher Nolan’s Memento .
As thus with shades of the Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel talk across time flick "Frequency," the filmmaker opts for the confluence of intersecting timelines.
This is remarkably similar to the plot of Gregory Hoblit’s 2000 supernatural thriller Frequency , although that movie was rated a family friendly PG-13 and this one is a clear R both for its bloodiness (including way too many shots of dead dogs) and for its language (if you want to see the girl from A Wrinkle in Time call someone a “stupid motherfucker,” here’s your chance).
Much as in Larry Clark's controversial Bully (2001) or David Gordon Green's superb George Washington (2000), the crisis the kids face in Mean Creek doesn't produce a resolution so much as it raises questions about social systems, absorbed and acted out by kids.
On the surface, Mean Creek invites comparison with films such as Larry Clark's Bully and Tim Hunter's River's Edge, movies that explore teenage alienation and affectless behaviour.
Mean Creek has thematic similarities to the 80’s classic River’s Edge as well as Larry Clark’s Bully (which was based on a horrific true story).
Chazelle, who based his screenplay on his own music school experience, has constructed his film beautifully, using closeups to punch through the emotions on display (cinematography by Sharone Meir, "Mean Creek," 2009's "The Last House on the Left").
Don’t Let Go is superficially reminiscent of Source Code and Deja Vu in how it plays with the storyline and tweaks viewer expectations.
Ditch The Butterfly Effect notion, Don’t Let Go is more set on giving Uncle Jack the chance to redeem himself and potentially save his niece with very few restrictions.
“Don’t Let Go” is definitely not going to bump “Looper” or (the underrated) “The Butterfly Effect” out of the Top 10, but when it comes to time-travel plots, it’s more surprising and solidly thought through than 90% of sci-fi movies.