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5. Saved!
Above: Left to right, Roland (played by Macaulay Culkin), Cassandra (played by Eva Amurri) and Mary (played by Jena Malone) as pious and not-so-pious students at a Christian school in Saved!.Hilary Faye: Mary, turn away from Satan. Jesus, he loves you.
Mary: You don't know the first thing about love.
Hilary Faye: [throws a Bible at Mary] I am FILLED with Christ's love! You are just jealous of my success in the Lord.
Mary: [picks up the Bible and gestures at it] This is not a weapon... You idiot!
Starring Jena Malone and Mandy Moore, this movie does something that you don't see very often -- it critiques Christianity without being anti-Christian and without offending people. As most of you know, whenever you dip into arguments about politics or religion, things tend to get nasty. But in this film, it doesn't.
The plot involves students at a Christian high school (filmed at Clayton Heights Secondary School in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver) whose lives revolve around Jesus Christ. And I do mean that in the strongest sense. For the first part of the movie, their piousness is exaggerated so much that every sentence seems to contain one of the following words: God, Christ, Jesus, Lord.
The main character, Mary (played by Malone), finds out that her boyfriend is gay while swimming in his pool. Immediately after the revelation, she hits her head while underwater and hallucinates an image of Jesus (actually the poolboy who dove in to save her from drowning) telling her that she must help him overcome his homosexuality.
After doing some research (including typing "gay" on a search engine and finding a pornographic site), she comes to the conclusion that having sex with him (and having her virginity "restored") is the only way to save him. Unfortunately, she doesn't realize that sex can often lead to pregnancy because the Christian school didn't feel it was necessary to teach sexual education until the last minute.
While this has the makings of a farce, this movie is far from one. It could've easily turned into the stereotypical teen movie focused solely on Mary's whoopsie-doodles through unplanned teenage pregnancy. But what this movie does for me that is "unendable" involves not only Mary but practically the whole cast of characters.
Every character is extremely multi-dimensional, from the hero Mary to the villainous Hilary Faye (played by Moore) to the outcast characters of Roland and Cassandra. One quality that all my "unendable" movies have is that the characters have so much depth to them that you wish you can learn more about them. After the pregnancy causes her to question her faith in God, I want to see how Mary copes with "real life." I want to see how Hilary Faye rebounds from committing some rather heinous sins. I want to see how Roland and Cassandra's relationship blossoms despite their differences. I want to see how Tia deals with her newfound courage after standing up to Hilary Faye at the prom.
There's just so much more that you want to see that cannot be condensed within the plotline presented by the movie. Had Saved! not been a movie, it would have made for an interesting television series; it certainly has enough material to be one. And if that kind of movie can impress me, a self-described "agnostic bastard," then it has certainly done something right.
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6. Home Room
Above: Busy Philipps as Alicia, left, and Erika Christensen as Deanna, right, play binary opposite characters dealing with a school shooting in Home Room.Alicia: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? You think you can come in here and you can spend ten minutes and come out with all the FUCKING ANSWERS? Hey, I've got one: kids pick up guns and THEY KILL OTHER KIDS. That's it! And if that answer isn't good enough, then maybe you should see a doctor or a priest and you can ask THEM why. And they'll feed you all the psycho babble you can stand or they'll tell you that God has some "greater plan" for everyone. And when you keep pressing and those answers aren't good enough, all they'll have left to tell you is the unholy truth, that KIDS JUST DIE.
Home Room is a movie that isn't very well known. It's about a school shooting and was coincidentally made around the time of the Columbine shooting. The film was already a work in progress when the Columbine shooting occurred but instead of backing off from the project, director and writer Paul Ryan modified and re-worked the movie according to what people seemed to overlook at the time -- what happens to such a community when the television cameras and the reporters go away.
The premise is quite simple -- there was a school shooting in which Deanna (played by Erika Christensen) was shot in the head but miraculously survives and Alicia (played by Busy Philipps) was also in the same room as the shooter but somehow escapes injury of any kind, effectively becoming a top witness and suspect in the shooting. The principal, in an effort to make things better, suggests (somewhat coercively) that she visit Deanna in the hospital.
What results between Alicia, a makeup and black-clad loner, and Deanna, a popular student with a bright future, is an unlikely friendship. But perhaps "friendship" is too strong a word -- it is more of a mutual understanding more than anything, and they end up helping each other through the grieving process.
I love awkward "friendships" in movies. I just do. This friendship between Alicia and Deanna has so many subtle signs to it that you feel that they have more in common than one would think, considering their polar oppposite appearances and personalities. What makes this movie "unendable" for me lies in the premise itself -- what does happen when a community experiences such a tragedy, after the news crews go away? Using Columbine as an example, everyone knows what happened. But how many follow-up reports do we get? One per year, if we're lucky?
A lot of people across the country came together when it happened, but that caring seems to have an expiry date; after that, the people in that community are left to fend for themselves before the scars even heal. Instead of treating a school shooting like a spectacle, what this movie does right is treat the human aspects of the event and show that its repercussions stretch far beyond what is covered by the media.
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