Hello, hello, it’s Burl reviewing on you again! I thought
I’d give you the lowdown on one of these independently produced regional
pictures today, one called The Myth of
the American Sleepover! That’s a sort of a grand title for a picture like
this, but I guess it’s as good as anything else! Maybe they could have called
it Eagle Class or Journey to Frenchman’s Drop or Three Times That Night, but they didn’t!
I’m glad they put the word “myth” in the title, actually,
because otherwise I’d have thought that hey, maybe it’s true that teenagers
across America attend mass sleepovers on the last day of summer, that it was
some sort of national tradition I’d never heard about up here north of the
border! Ha ha! But I suspect the big sleepover theme is just meant as a dramatic
device to get all our characters in the places and situations the
writer-director wanted them in!
I won’t tell you the plot, because there isn’t one! It’s a
picture very much in the tradition of American
Graffiti and Dazed & Confused
– so much so that it almost felt like one of those unofficial remakes, the same
way Stoker felt like a remake of Shadow of a Doubt! It’s not a patch on
those pictures, but I’ll say this right now: it’s not bad either!
It’s laid (as they used to say in Variety) in a Detroit suburb, and there are all sorts of different young
folks preparing for various sleepovers at different houses! You get the blond
girl with piercings, the young guy who talks a good game but in fact has never
kissed a girl, the running girl who looks like a young Scarlett Johansson and
ends up getting punched by another girl, and quite a few others! There’s also a
satellite plot involving a college-age guy driving to a sleepover to talk to
some twins!
That gives you some idea of what’s going on! It’s all pretty
mellow, I must say – the punching I mentioned earlier is pretty much the single
point of high drama! I don’t mind the mellowness, because I’m a mellow sort of
guy myself, and also I understand the impulse behind it! After all, ha ha, I tried to
make a similarly mellow picture once myself!
I must say, though, it’s hard to watch the movie and not think
of those other, better movies it apes! As in American Graffiti, one of the plot threads has a young fellow
chasing all night after a seemingly unattainable blonde! As in Dazed & Confused, there is a larger
party in a communal area which pulls people away from the sleepovers, and the
whole movie is woven with a sense of tribal ritual! None of this is necessarily
bad, of course, but it does tend to undercut the movie’s own cinematic individuality
while pulling you out of the situation and mood it’s working so hard to create!
It’s also one of those indie films in which everyone seems
to have been heavily dosed with barbiturates! I’m not sure who decided this was
some kind of shortcut to Grand Artistic Truth, but that style never really works for ol’
Burl! I did like that no one had cell phones or knew about the Internet – one
of the guy sleepovers, for instance, has the fellows sitting around watching a
horror movie containing boobs, just like my friends and I used to do! So there
was plenty of good stuff in there, and I have to admit, I’m always game for a
hangin’ around picture! I give The Myth
of the American Sleepover two and a half scenes from Mothra!
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