It ought to be no fun watching characters you came to know as randy, unruly high school students turn into grown-ups with jobs, families and crappy sex lives. That’s what happens to real-life people; why subject fictional characters to it? But somehow American Reunion — the third movie sequel to Paul and Chris Weitz’s hall-of-fame teen sex comedy 1999 American Pie — makes the harsh reality jolt almost painless.
The picture is devilishly entertaining, not least because it’s laced with just the sort of dumb raunchy jokes you hate yourself for laughing at. But it also preserves, to a degree, the elemental sweetness that made the original (though not the two subsequent sequels) so distinctive: In the first movie, embarrassment and awkwardness over sex results not just in a mess in the kitchen, but in painful and unbridgeable rifts between people. In American Reunion, that awkwardness may have lessened somewhat, but it hasn’t completely gone away. You can think you’re trading old problems for new ones, only to find that the old ones are perennial – they just find different ways to flourish in your life.
That’s a discomforting idea in the midst of a picture that trades mostly in gags about tube socks’ being used for illicit personal business, nostalgia for the mind-blowing oral sex of yore (meaning high school) and men who, as they near middle age with all its attendant spare tires and love handles, can’t help looking hungrily at the nubile teenage babes they used to be able to attract. Directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg (the masterminds behind the always-silly but also surprisingly progressive Harold and Kumar franchise) are perhaps more comfortable dealing with ridiculous sex jokes than they are with raw human feeling. Still, American Reunion chugs along with brash confidence, unembarrassed…
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My heart sank a little when Carlos (Demián Bichir), a Mexican working as a gardener in Los Angeles to support his teenage son Luis (José Julián), lays out all of the reasons he should not buy a truck near the beginning of A Better Life. On the terms of the illegal immigrant narrative, his reasons — no license, no papers; fear off getting pulled over, or into an accident — were as good as a gun in director Chris Weitz’s hands: You know that thing is gonna go off.
Films like Babel, Fast Food Nation, and Under the Same Moon have laid out the agonies occurring over the United States’ southern border with varying degrees of bathos. Weitz’s touch with the subject is only slightly lighter than that of the newly established norm, but the film benefits from its grounding in a nuanced take on a classic storyline. I’m talking about Bicycle Thieves, the Italian neorealist film about a man struggling to support his family in post-World War II Rome. For Carlos, as with Antonio in Bicycle Thieves, the vehicle represents agency, the ability to provide and thrive. But rather than an adoring tyke in short pants for a son, Carlos has the surly product of a divided cultural upbringing. Luis treats his wistful but stoical dad with impatience and sometimes contempt; he represents the wrong cliché. In the film’s least successful scenes he is tempted by the ties of L.A.’s Mexican gangs, whose tattooed members look the part but can’t survive the…
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Chris Weitz’s L.A.-set drama A Better Life features no stars (well, its lead is ‘the George Clooney of Mexico’) and no vampires, but it got a profile boost Tuesday night when two of the stars of Weitz’s last movie, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner, made a red carpet appearance in support of their former director. Fresh off of filming on November’s Breaking Dawn, the Twilight duo posed for photos but left the media spotlight to Weitz and Co. to talk up their potential awards contender, about an illegal immigrant father and his teenage son struggling to make it in East L.A.
A Better Life, something of a Bicycle Thieves set in the vast, disconnected urban landscape of contemporary Los Angeles, was a passion project for Weitz even before he took on his career-boosting gig directing 2009’s The Twilight Saga: New Moon. The film follows hard-working gardener Carlos (played by well-known Mexican actor and Weeds star Demián Bichir) as he invests everything he has into the chance to build a business for himself, then connects with his troubled son (17-year-old newcomer José Julián) when crisis strikes.
“I was raised in the same situation, the same environment that my character was raised,” said Julián, recalling his early connection to A Better Life’s central teenager, Luis. “So I understood what he was going through, his frustrations and everything.”
18-year-old actress Chelsea Rendon, who plays Luis’s tough-as-nails gang-related girlfriend, also drew on real-life relationships for her role. “I grew up in the East L.A. Montebello area, and I do have family that has been in gangs and has been in jail,” said the high school senior,…
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