Shop Middle of Nowhere DVD 2008 at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up. Price Match Guarantee. Find trailers, reviews, synopsis, awards and cast information for Middle of Nowhere (2008) - John Stockwell on AllMovie - A seventeen year old screw up enters into a&hellip. Middle of Nowhere (2008) Synopsis. Read Full Synopsis Cast + Crew John Stockwell Director Susan Sarandon Rhonda Anton Yelchin Dorian Eva Amurri Grace Willa Holland Taylor. Middle of Nowhere (2008) Buy posters from this movie: by brianorndorf 'The kids aren't alright' The good news about John Stockwell’s “Middle of Nowhere” is that the movie features 25% less ogling than his previous motion pictures. The bad news is that the movie is 100% melodramatic and cringingly formulaic, running a few sleepy coming-of. From the Tonga islands to the Mulanje Massif in Malawi to Babushkina, Russia, the travelers dare to go to places that really are situated in the middle of nowhere. Flag Like see review Jan 29, 2008 Gina rated it.
by brianorndorf
Middle Of Nowhere 2008 Full Movie
The good news about John Stockwell’s “Middle of Nowhere” is that the movie features 25% less ogling than his previous motion pictures. The bad news is that the movie is 100% melodramatic and cringingly formulaic, running a few sleepy coming-of-age drills while stewing in the juices of class discomfort and deadbeat parental routine. Stockwell’s never been much of a filmmaker, but at least the mopey teen shuffle of “Middle of Nowhere” offers a path of sincerity to follow. Instead, the director mixes up a batch of exhausted cliché, paralyzing a few promising performances with his hackneyed vision.
Middle Of Nowhere 2008 Film
Grace (Eva Amurri) desperately wants to attend medical school in the fall, lacking the funds to do so due to her mother’s (Susan Sarandon) frantic overspending and destructive tendencies. Taking a summer job at a water park, Grace meets Dorian (Anton Yelchin), a privileged teen whose acts of defiance have helped to alienate him from his family. Offering Grace an opportunity to make her first-year tuition by assisting in the selling of marijuana, Dorian hopes to gain a friend and a chauffeur, only to fall in love with his colleague. Working through the summer chasing a steady cash flow, the pair find their agreement tested when Grace takes interest in a hunky rich kid (Justin Chatwin), and her little sister, Taylor (Willa Holland), starts to act out sexually to escape the tension at home.
The mind behind “Blue Crush,” “Turistas” “Crazy/Beautiful,” and “Into the Blue,” John Stockwell has built his career on capturing beautiful bodies involved in very bad business. He’s a lascivious filmmaker with a feeble grasp on dramatic nuance, preferring the steamroller approach of screen hysteria and thespian flailing to make his points. Working from a screenplay from actress Michelle Morgan, “Middle of Nowhere” avoids most Stockwellian pitfalls in the first act, setting off on a personal journey of financial desperation and small-town, working-class woe. Outside of the director’s insistence that Amurri wear low-cut tops for every occasion and Yelchin prance around shirtless, it seems Stockwell might have something here with this modest, moderately felt story of acceptance.
It doesn’t take long for “Middle of Nowhere” to run off the rails, despite the efforts of Amurri and Yelchin to provide a unique feeling of hesitancy within their roles. In fact, Amurri accomplishes quite a bit in the limited space Stockwell gives her, conveying relatable moments of panic as lofty dreams of educational freedom are slowly pulled away from her. She’s a promising actress, but the script soon turns to odious exaggeration to provide conflict, scattering to the four winds as each character takes on a heavy load of turmoil to position the film toward cheap emotional catharsis. The worst subplot belongs to Taylor, a character barely developed in the movie, yet gifted an unexpected sexuality that Stockwell employs as shock value, eager to get Holland half-naked and boozed up to make an after school special statement about the character’s distorted development and escalating objectification.
Also half-baked is Grace’s dalliance with Chatwin’s character, which is intended to represent the good girl’s eye-opening moment of betrayal, but is so ludicrously pared down to basic emotions, it seems more suited for a “Saved by the Bell” episode. Dorian also has his share of undercooked motivation, as the film whittles down his misery to trite battles with adoption blues to make its point about the boy’s pariah status.
Evocative, gorgeous cinematography from Byron Shah helps “Middle of Nowhere” achieve a sense of poetry it doesn’t otherwise earn, soon wasted by Stockwell as the film dissolves into ineffective conflict and inflated turns of fate. As the title suggests, “Middle of Nowhere” is an aimless, unremarkable feature, trying to grasp profundity while wandering through a series of uninspired encounters. It comes off artificial and unpleasant, which appear to be the only two sensations John Stockwell is capable of summoning as a director.
originally posted:07/10/10 13:28:03
printer-friendly format