Bondage

I saw this movie while I was at South By Southwest. What particularly intrigued me about it was the fact that asked a lot of questions and answered none of them. You rarely see that anymore. Most movies, even the independents, will give the audience some sense that all of the questions have answers and that the conclusions to people's dilemmas are satisfying to anyone sitting in a dark room eating popcorn.

Don't get me wrong, I like going to the movies and I like a lot of what I see. I work a 9 to 5 job and a lot of the time I just want to watch mindless comforting good old fashioned entertainment.

But that's not all I want to see. Somethings I enjoy a movie with characters and themes that I can empathathize with on some level, a story that is making observations that no one else is making. Bondage did that for me. It showed a different side of the American dream. It's a movie that dares to show what happens when everything breaks down, who pays (the next generation) and how that cycle perpetuates itself.

That alone is interesting enough, but it also serves as an allegory for what is happening in the world today. I'm not an independent film snob by any means. Most of them are boring actually. I really liked Titanic when it came out. But what I liked about Titanic, besides all of the obvious stuff, is what I like about Bondage. Both movies are saying something bigger than what they appear to be saying.

Titanic says that if we get big enough and arrogant enough we will become vulnerable and this could sink the whole ship. If the ship sinks, most of us are going down. Clearly that movie is talking about America.

Bondage does the same thing, but in a much different way. Bondage not only gets into the private lives, yearnings, secrets, regrets and longings (to be free of something) of each of its characters, but it also seems to be asking a much bigger question. And I think that question is what makes it almost a cautionary tale (like Titanic). The question is, "What are we, as a society of civilized people, doing here? What are we ignoring? What is the loose thread that can unravel the whole garment?" I found the interview with the director and cast very interesting at the end because the director, who also wrote the script, was talking about this. It was as though the movie had set out to take the temperature of an entire nation and hold up the thermometer. I will not be surprised, when this movie is in theaters, if some people look at that thermometer and don't like what they see. I've read some of these posts and I can already see the desire on the part of some people to attempt to kill the messenger because they don't like the news he brings.

Bondage is a story worth telling and it is well told. It is rich and entertaining, darkly funny at times, unbearably sad at others, engaging the whole way and sometimes even hard to watch. If it were out, I would have gone to see it again by now. It's just one of those films that stays with you.

So... What the FAWK does it take to see this movie??? I'm a big fan of the lead character, Michael Angarano. And I suspect he was perfect for the part. Being a former staff person at several youth facilities myself, I would really like to see this movie, even if just to see this supposed true life story from the writer's eyes. From what I've heard, the CA system is pretty brutal, NOT like the facilities >I< worked at. It also seems like a lot of people put a lot of hard work and money into this. Just as a side note, Director and Producers might want to think about changing the name so this film doesn't come off sounding like some cheap porn flick. It would be nice to see this work finally get released somewhere, even IF it goes direct to video. Good Luck and Best Wishes to all involved.

So I work in this crazy business, the film business. And the word I've been hearing is that it is a "teenage Taxi Driver". So, I got my hands on a copy of the script. I can see why people are comparing it so much to "Garden State" because of it's sort of coming-of-age appeal. However, "Girl, Interrupted" was slow and introspective while I found this script to be a real page-turner. The story was non-traditional and very unpredictable. I also get the comment that somebody made about "Trainspotting". I can see that. However, the "Taxi Driver" comparison is the one that, to me, makes the most sense. It deals with a person who has been through too much, seen too much, and the only way they can express it is through rage, which comes out when you least expect it. At least, I never saw it coming. Nor could I have ever predicted the end for that matter. This movie is in competition at South By Southwest this year and I wish them all the luck in the world. The script reads confidently, like a movie that should be seen.

I saw this movie at the South By Southwest film festival. I didn't really want to go but I was there with some friends who really wanted to see it so I came along.

Having come from a pretty close-knit family and not one with a lot of problems, I never really stopped to consider how drastically different my life would have been, would be, if I had been adopted by someone else. What if I had different parents, a different circumstance, hand't gotten away with some of my pranks in high school? Not that I had never given this thought, but "Bondage" really made me look at it from an entirely different point of view.

This movie showed me dysfunction from the inside. I got to see what Juvenile Hall looks like, feels like. I felt what it was like to have your own parents betray you. I got the vicarious thrill of running from the cops, deceiving authority figures and wanting to get away with it. I also gained some insight into the world of Psychiatry.

About psychiatry... this started me reading the book "Toxic Psychiatry" which is mentioned on the IMDb page for "Bondage". It is amazing to me, just like the director mentioned at the end of the Q&A (yes, I stayed for that), what a huge industry is built around more or less creating these labels, these alleged mental disorders and then medication youth with expensive drugs. This satisfies a "Toxic Parent" into believing that they are absolved of responsibility and that the child just has some "chemical imbalance". This aspect of the film was particularly thought-provoking and eye-opening for me.

The hero, Charlie Edwards, is such a perfect anti-hero. He might be the only sane person in the movie. The world outside of him might have the chemical imbalance, or some kind of imbalance. But what's cool is that there seems to be nothing preachy about this movie at all. In fact, the audience was laughing quite a bit through it and there are some pretty emotionally hardcore moments. It can be very intense at times, and then just innocent and funny at others.

I would recommend this to all of my friends. It's been 9 days now since I've seen it and I still can't get "Bondage" out of my head. This is the kind of movie, like "Fight Club" that I would see again and again.

I was lucky enough to see the world premiere of this film at SXSW just the other day. I knew little about the movie but wanted at least one screening under my belt at an actual film festival. The screening was in the morning, so I ended up talking about it to everyone around me the rest of the day. It's been the highlight of the trip, other than meeting the cast and director.

In the opening moments of Bondage, a first time feature for directer Eric Allen Bell, young Charlie Edwards is arrested for vandalism and arson. The corrections industry in California is uninterested in addressing his emotional trauma; they just want to store his body for the course of his four year sentence. To escape the harassment of the gangs and the corrections officers, Charlie feigns insanity and moves to a psychiatric hospital. The doctors push drugs on top of drugs to nullify everything in Charlie's world. And all Charlie wants for himself is to live his own life without the oppressive rules made up by other people.

The narrative flexes the sequence of events, seamlessly incorporating past, present and future moments into a coherent storyline. There are moments when the film explores the tactics Charlie's parents would use to enforce their standards of control, including a particularly harrowing sequence where they drag him into the bathroom and force his hands to scrub out the tub as he pleads for mercy. A character late in the film makes this observation: parents who box their teen into a corner with rules and emotional manipulation are so shocked when he comes out fighting, it's no wonder they call him crazy.

Michael Angarano in the role of Charlie had a formidable task carrying the film, and he excels at giving the character a sense of tragedy. By mere body posture and softly spoken lines, we see Charlie as a damaged and frightened person, who understands little about why he's so deeply interred in a system that cares little for his well being. Illeana Douglas and Eric Lange as Charlie's parents are haunting with the complexity they bring to what is essentially the forces of old and evil. The film does not forgive them, but it creates in them real people, who do both wonderful and terrible things. Just like Charlie. It would be an oversight not to mention the adorable Mae Whitman as another product of an abusive home. Her character may have the least amount of screen time, but her impact on the film's final thirty minutes could be felt for hours after the credits rolled.

There's a famous poem by Phil Larkin called "This Be The Verse." It ran through my head the entire time I sat in the theater. IMDb won't allow me to post it here due to the expletives it contains, but it's not hard to find after a quick search on Google.

Go see this movie.

• Jon