Every Friday Chris hand-selects a streaming recommendation for your weekend.
This Week’s Featured Flick
The Spectacular Now on Amazon Prime
THE TRAILER
THE DETAILS
DIRECTOR: James Ponsoldt
WRITER: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber
CAST:Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Brie Larson, Masam Holden, Dayo Okeniyi, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Jason Leigh
GENRE: Drama / Coming of Age
RUNTIME: 95 min
YEAR:2013
THE PLOT
With sly humor and an intensity of feeling, The Spectacular Now creates a vivid, three-dimensional portrait of youth confronting the funny, thrilling and perilous business of modern love and adulthood. This is the tale of Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), a high school senior and effortless charmer, and of how he unexpectedly falls in love with “the good girl” Aimee Finecky (Shailene Woodley).
THE REASON
Just before Miles Teller enraptured audiences as a borderline-sociopath drummer in last year’s Sundance darling turned five-time Oscar nominee, Whiplash, just before James Ponsoldt transformed Jason Segel into David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour (tune in next Friday for our review), and just around the time I was falling even further in love with Brie Larson in Short Term 12, they hit Sundance with this not-too-saccharine-coming-of-age-love-story-with-real-stakes-that-don’t-feel-overly-Sundancey-or-manipulative film, The Spectacular Now.
The film handles teenaged alcohol addiction with all the gravitas it deserves and none… or at least less of the melodrama you’d expect. Teller gives the type of performance that announces a a career, and Ponsoldt proves you can in fact deliver a young adult adaptation that goes far beyond pandering fluff. The long-take conversations between Teller and Woodley have a Duplassian spontaneity that helps ground moments that could potentially go full-on after school special if executed differently.
The Spectacular Now doesn’t fall into the category of essentail viewing, but there are certainly worse ways to spend your Labor Day weekend. Plus, where else are you gonna get the chance to see Kyle Chandler play an absolute douchebag?
WATCH NOW ON AMAZON PRIME
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