Share
Ben X the Best Teen Movie Since Donnie Darko
By Brian Miller
Tuesday, October 21st 2008 at 11:09am
Details:
Directed by Nic Balthazar
Film Movement
Opens October 24, Cinema Village
The best movie I've seen about teen angst since Donnie Darko comes from Belgium? It's also the best film about a bullied teen with Asperger's Syndrome that I've seen from any country, and its blurred life-into-vidgame fantasy sequences makes it seem doubly topical. Ben (Greg Timmermans) spends waaay too much time logged onto a multi-user fantasy role-playing game, but what other consolation does he have in life? His peers torment him; girls won't look his way; and his divorced parents seem powerless to help. On-screen, however, his pimple-faced avatar smites rival warriors and wins a comely princess (whose braces make her resemble a certain girl from his high-school class). Timmermans looks too old for his character, whose past-tense voiceovers portend a certain ominous, Columbine-style denouement, but director Nic Balthazar—adapting his own novel—has carefully constructed Ben X so that its twist ending isn't borrowed or cheap. And the barrage of screen graphics, text messages, and cell-phone videos speaks to modern teens' isolation-in-connectivity. "2 late 2 heal," Ben texts his vidgame paramour. You don't have to be Belgian to know that feeling.
Site Search «
Most Popular
-
The Strangest Landlord-Tenant Relationship In Town? Stacked up in cubicles for decades, immigrants living in a Bowery tenement may have a very unusual situation.
-
Spike Jonze Can't Quite Get Spirit of Where The Wild Things Are On Screen Max and the gang's all here. Let the mild rumpus start!
- A Bloomberg Score Card: The Mayor's Hits and Misses
- We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?
- On Michael Jackson's Mercifully Goofy, Cheerful This Is It
| buy, sell, trade 10,273 | musician 3,583 |
| rentals 12,791 | jobs 2,037 |
| adult entertainment 34,867 | |
| classifieds | backpage.com | Post ads for free! | |
|---|---|