Bondage

Totally not what you expect it to be. Lot's of cool music and cool scenes. Michael Angarano might be the next Sean Penn. This guy Jose Pablo Cantillo is probably going to become a big star also off of this. The ending seems like it would be a great beginning for like an HBO series or something. How come so many movies these days totally suck? This is more like "Napoleon Dynamite" or "Garden State" but more serious. However, totally different from anything I've ever seen - and I haven't seen the whole film. I have a feeling it will probably get picked up by Lions Gate or Fox Searchlight. Seems like their kind of picture. The soundtrack is going to be awesome. I don't know why Mae Whitman isn't in more movies because she is really, really good. So is Micheal K. Williams from "The Wire". He plays a totally badass Juvy security guard.

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

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.

"The Bondage" by Eric Allen Bell has one of the best endings to a movie I think I have ever seen. If you have not seen this movie, see it. This is incredible. It's available for download on a bunch of sites. The storyline is amazing. I could not stop myself watching the movie until the very ending. Every single scene of this movie was amazing to watch, and the best part was the ending. I think it really exposes the horrific juvenile justice system. And the industry built up around medicating kids instead of looking at other factors, like their horrible parents. Every parent of a teenager needs to see this film. It is from first time film director Eric Allen Bell.

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.