Die Flucht ins Ungewisse

I am not gonna say too much, but this is one of the best movies ever made, River Phoenix, deserved the award a lot more than Kevin Kline. Maybe River was young and they thought he will have many other chances to do it, unfortunately you never know and now River is no longer with us. So I think that the members of the Academy should consider this, like when Leo DiCaprio was nominated for Gilbert Grape. Anyway, this is a MUST see movie, it´s definitely a classic!

When I was 16, I used to hang out with a tough crowd and my best friend at the time was a real trouble maker, we would always get into fights with other guys our age and sometimes men, and he was a really tough kid, anyway one night he calls me and tells me that he watched the saddest movie he had ever seen, he said it was the first time he actually cried since he saw E.T. I was laughing at him continuously, until I watched it and got so profoundly effected by it that even thinking about that last scene makes my eyes water. I really feel that this film was a major catalyst for many changes I made during my progression from teenager to young adult.

Running on Empty is quite an achievement in filmmaking, it is as real a film as you could watch and everyone involved should be absolutely proud of it. River Phoenix will forever be missed.

Running on Empty

First of all, what a great performance by River Phoenix. In fact, there are smart, convincing, warm performances by all the main cast. At first you might feel this is a movie about a couple on the lam for a long-ago crime, and that they happened to have two kids. But really the opening of the movie, an inside view from Phoenix's character's situation, makes clear that he is the start, and the fulcrum, around which the rest of the characters swing. So the movie ends up being an interpersonal drama, and you sympathize with everyone, even if they have done a "bad" thing. This is open to your judgement, for sure...a 1960s radical sentiment on the part of the left leaning director, Syndey Lumet, who had the early uber-classic "12 Angry Men" as well as "Serpico" and many others. It was Lumet who drew me to the film, but it was Phoenix who stole the show (and who breaks your heart knowing how young he committed suicide). Look for the kind of classic filming and editing you'd expect from this well-schooled director. It's a warm film, and it avoids pretentiousness and artifice, turning instead to the innate abilities of the actors, including a young Marth Plimpton. Plimpton is wonderful, and she is given some classic lines, funny and perceptive just as you'd expect this kind of girl to be. (Plimpton was in another movie with Phoenix, "The Mosquito Coast," two years earlier.) So watch this, for sure. It was nominated for a ton of awards, and overcomes what seems to be a contrived, tightly focussed impossibility of a plot and makes it work. Very well!

Why this has an average rating of only 7.3 is beyond me. This is really darn good, maybe not a "masterpiece" as some of the other reviews have stated, but one of those criminally underrated and overlooked movies. And, heck, starring River Phoenix for crying out loud. Why had I never heard of it? Yeah, it's got a touch of cheesy '80s things about it (music, clothing, etc.) but I've learned to overlook that sort of thing if it's actually a good story. Take this and another coming-of-age movie, _This Boy's Life_ (starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio -- why hadn't I ever heard of that one either?), and you have a couple of the best great-but-underrated movies in recent memory. I'd love a good explanation for why this should only get a 7.3 out of 10, given the quality of a bunch of material with a higher average rating. (I thought 6.9 was the average rating here. This isn't even close to just average.) Compared to the body of Sidney Lumet's work, this has got to rank right up near the top, doesn't it?

This is a fantastic movie. Definitely one of the 5 best I've seen in recent memory. Someone that wrote a review here felt that the two parents are placed upon a pedestal by the film makers, but I don't think this is the case at all. They are accountable for their actions and know what they did was wrong. They have to pay for their actions throughout their lives and will likely turn themselves in as soon as they can be assured that their kids will be safe. The kids are the ones I feel sorry for, not the parents.

I think the main point of the movie is to make people aware of how the actions/decisions they make can hurt other people, including themselves. People often make rash decisions without thinking about the long term consequences their actions cause for themselves and other people.