Investing & Maybe Fantasy Baseball

If you want to see how three white, spoiled upper middle class high school losers spend their time outside of school then Palo Alto is the movie for you. I’m 32 years old so I’m 14 years removed from the life of a high school student so I’m probably going to come across as the “get off my lawn” old man, but do all teenagers party, excessively drink, smoke cigarettes, weed and other substances all the time? When I was in high school I never had anything close to that experience and neither did my friends. Granted, I was kind of a nerd, but I wasn’t at the level of Sam Weir, Neal Schweiber and Bill Haverchicck from Freaks and Geeks.

When I watch a film I try to emphasize with the characters, but all these characters do is get wasted while their parents do nothing and are getting high themselves. I grew in a suburb in the Bay Area and I never experienced close to anything close to what’s depicted in the movie, but I grew up with kids like the protagonists. The two male protagonists are the types of people who you’ll find working at a Costco their whole life while the female protagonist is attractive enough she’ll end the CMO of a middling app start up that folds in three years. When I was high school I thought those kids were losers and that’s exactly what I was thinking the whole time when I was watching the film.

Maybe I’m missing something and this is a hyper reality. An example of how this could be the case is one of the characters leaves a party after drinking and smoking weed all night, gets into a car, hits another moving vehicle and flees the scene. The character gets caught by the police. When the character goes to court he/she is sentenced to 150 hours of community service and has to give an in-person apology to the person he/she hit.

Even though I didn’t relate to anyone I have no idea what the movie was trying to say? Maybe parents have forgotten to be parents? Kids are growing up without any direction and their only ambition is to party all the time? There were some nice shots and the writer-director definitely had a vision for how she wanted the film to look, but overall I found this movie to be a mess without direction. At one point one of the characters was driving down the freeway on the opposite direction and I was rooting for that person to hit the oncoming traffic. It takes a lot for a movie to get me extremely angry during and after watching a movie, but Palo Alto achieved just that.

Grade: 20 (on the 20-80 scouting scale)

Jaime Marks Is Dead is an ambitious film that will have its faults overlooked by the audience because it is an independent movie. The movie is at its best when no one is talking. Some of the shots are breathtaking gorgeous, but the holes in the script take what could have been great story into a film that makes you feel just as lost as Jaime Marks.

The movie opens with Gracie, a young teenage girl, finding the body of a dead teenage boy, the often bullied Jamie Marks, near a creek. As someone who was bullied very early in life (not nearly to the degree what’s depicted in the movie) seeing that took me out of the movie and made me remember some memories I didn’t want to remember. In one bullying scene Adam, the main character, sees what’s happening to Jaime and does not help or ever had a conversation with him.

In the aftermath of Jamie’s death the life at the high school goes on seemingly normal, like nothing ever happened. It was as if a ghost no one thought was real to begin with disappeared. After school Adam visits the creek where Jamie’s body was found and he meets Gracie for seemingly the first time. After a brief conversation she invites Adam over to her house. (If only it was that easy to receive an invite to a girls house back when I was in high school.) While in Gracie’s room Adam sees Jamie for the first time, standing outside. To Adam’s surprise Gracie sees and has seen Jamie for quite some time. At this point you’re either going to go with the story or just turn it off.

When Adam leaves her room he meets Jamie and they begin a friendship. The biggest tragedy is they could have been really good friends if Adam ever had the courage to talk to Jamie while he was still alive. The idea of a lost great friendship is sprinkled throughout the film, but I think the film would have been better served if it focused more on that than the subplots about the courtship with Gracie, the new found friendship between Adam’s Mother and her new friend and the other “people” Adam and Jamie meet.

Some plot points were unnatural and occurred simply to move the plot, which took me out of the film (I was saying to myself, “Why would he do that? It doesn’t make sense for him to do that.”). I applaud the filmmakers and the financers for taking a chance on a movie they had to know going into it the subject matter they’re exploring are subjects most people do not instinctively want to see. There are few scenes of horror that feel a little misplaced, but the biggest horror was no one knew how smart and caring Jamie was; that Jamie had to create his own Shakespearean Tragedy in order to feel love.

Grade: 40-45 (on the 20-80 scouting scale)