Mean Creek (2004)
Directed by Jacob Aaron Estes
Teenagers living in small-town Oregon take a boat trip for a birthday celebration. When they get an idea to play a mean trick on the town bully, it suddenly goes too far. Soon they're forced to deal with the unexpected consequences of their actions.
3 connections found
View:
3 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Mean Creek to
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."
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").