Desert Blue

It took awhile to get going, but I ended up loving "Desert Blue" quite a bit. It was nice to see Sexton play a character without the need for anger-management, and I also liked Kate Hudson also. It wasn't the greatest, funniest or most touching movie I ever saw, but it was certainly better than most. I liked practically every character on some level, and I can't say that about a lot of movies. It made me think of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" & "Bagdad Cafe" with a touch of "Firestarter".

I enjoyed this movie thoroughly. This movie, led by an ensemble cast of young and rising actors (Brendan Sexton, Kate Hudson, Casey Affleck, Christina Ricci), starts slowly but gathers momentum nicely. Skye (Hudson), an up-and-coming actress with her own cable comedy, gets trapped in a small California town well off the highway when a chemical spill shuts down the only road in and out of town. Stuck far from her world -- in a town without cable or cell phones -- Skye is befriended by Blue (Sexton) and meets the local "gang" -- five kids without much to do. Over two days punctuated by explosions -- the results of Ely's (Ricci) love for illicit bomb making -- the group bonds together in unexpected ways.

Nostalgia got me on this one. I was 14 when it came out and it was everything I was about back then. It spoke directly to my teen angst. Takes me right back, everytime I watch it. It might not be the best film ever made but I really like it. For me it's an 8/10 but I'm biased and realistically, I know it's more of a 6/10.

If you followed my reviews since I began to write them in the summer of 2017, you'd certainly have noticed that I am not the typical movie viewer. In fact I reviewed old movies, TV episodes of shows I love or of which I watch all episodes, modern movies, theater releases and bizarre movies of which nobody has heard except two or three who dare to review them. About bizarre movies, I might have seen various of them such as UNDER THE HULA MOON, SLEEPWALK and MOJAVE MOON and they amazed me for how bizarre they were. But DESERT BLUE is like they put those three movies and mixed them in a blender. Let's see what I mean, shall we?

Skye Davis (Kate Hudson) is a starlet that one day is riding with her dad and they end stranded in a town in the desert where they gradually meet the town's eccentric residents. Some of them are Blue Baxter who is obsessed with tube bombs, athlete Peter Kepler (Casey Affleck), professor Lance Davidson (John Heard) that often discusses about his classes even tho we are in the summer, and Cale who wants to build a water park in the desert because it was his father's dream.

The acting was good by all (Hudson, Affleck, Christina Ricci, Heard, Michael Ironside, Peter Sarsgaard, Aunjanue Ellis and Liev Schreiber) but the reason why I consider this movie strange is because the characters are all unlike others you'd see in other movies, the situations were often bizarre and especially the ending came by surprise, with the river that comes out of nowhere in the desert and then is used as a swimming pool... you just have to see it to believe it!

Highly recommended if you are fans of the odd like me or fans of the cast members and if you are in the right mood you'd end up liking it like I did.

Desert Blue is a very simple story of a spoiled Hollywood actress who, along with her dad (the impressive John Heard) gets stuck in a tiny town whose only pride comes from having the 'World's Largest Ice Cream Cone'. Once in the town, they are forced to stay because of the spilling of a mysterious Cola ingredient, and soon enough the spoiled actress falls for Blue.

The films is full of cliches, and the eccentric characters are not original. The plot is standard and the performances just par. Christina Ricci, as in most of her most recent films, plays a bitchy cynic, while all the other characters do little: they have a goal and chase after it.

Very disappointing stuff, unoriginal and a script which was not very sharp, treading over similar ground. John Heard is the best thing in the movie, and he's not in it very often as Morgan J. Freeman instead focuses on the youth.