ghost_dog86

Featuring a cast riddled with amateur actors (aside from Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough (granddaughter of Elvis Presley) "American Honey" is more than just another Cannes Film Festival calling card for writer/director Andrea Arnold, it is a gritty, startling master-class example of "slice of life" direction, the likes of 2016's "Manchester by the Sea" or "King Jack".

Synopsis: A teenage girl, living in extreme poverty, is recruited into a traveling sales crew filled with other teens in her same situation. The group travels cross-country, scamming people into buying magazine subscriptions by day and partying incredibly hard by night.

Arnold's hand-held camera work only helped immerse me into this lesser known subculture, watching these economically disadvantaged teens make sketchy life choices as they come of age inside a van sized commune of their peers. But it's the stellar performance from newcomer Sasha Lane which gives major credibility to this film and justifies some of its more minor flaws as well as the run-time. Much of the satisfaction I received from "American Honey" came from watching Lane's character evolve throughout.

Final Thought: There are a few misplaced lines of dialogue, which seem to force-feed a bit more than I would have liked, and at a nearly three hour run-time, this Indie will be perceived as an intimidating venture for some, but boy is it worth your time. The genuine atmosphere of "American Honey" speaks to this generation like not many movies do, and will stay with you for days after viewing.

Writer/director Jon Watts made a little low-budget drama called "Cop Car" which received fair reviews from critics. "Clown" was his other film; a film universally panned by critics as something akin to hot garbage and produced by Quentin Tarantino's forgotten stepchild, Eli Roth. That said, is it an absolutely disgusting notion that I liked a movie about a clown who eats children? Synopsis: A man finds an old clown costume and wears it for his son's birthday party. In the morning he can't seem to get it off. And when he tries, things get bloody. Layered atop this plot line is a really creepy eastern European clown origins story, which is actually more frightening than most monster movie horror origin stories.

"Clown" isn't without flaws (shocking, I know). Basically everything Roth touches tries to be funny and just isn't. And much like many B-movie horrors, this film suffers from a reaction problem from the people being perused by the titular monster (in this case, the reactions from friends and family are curiously calm) but that can be attributed to the level of actor used in this.

On the plus side for novice horror fans, much of the violence here is not as gratuitous as I would've imagined (as far as violence towards children is concerned) but more importantly, every kill is extremely well choreographed; not overly campy or silly, even with visible budgetary constraints. In fact the direction is the best aspect of this film by far, really elevating the more unbalanced and underwhelming melodramatic material in the 2nd Act into something visually disturbing and half-way scary.

Final Thought: Not going to lie, there were some quite disturbing and morbid sequences involving suicide (the best filmed suicide of 2016) and child consumption, which I rather enjoyed. But all that is an acquired taste.