Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) is an engrossing, intoxicating, and devastating modern-day fable.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

2012
90 minutes
rated PG-13
Opening June 27th in select theaters.

By Scott Mendelson

Beasts of the Southern Wild is among the most transporting films you're likely to see. Director and co-writer Benh Zeitlin, using Lucy Alibar's play Juicy and Delicious, crafts a fully enveloping world that is both pinpoint specific and all-encompassing enough to be a timeless fable.  On the surface, it is a character study of one six-year old girl as she comes to terms with the possibility of becoming an orphan as a natural disaster devastates her dirt-poor backwoods community.  Yes, it's about people surviving Hurricane Katrina and yes it contains certain social/political commentary, but it is a universal saga of grief and survival.  The film's greatest narrative strength is that it refuses to be a representative saga of the impoverished victims of that 2005 storm.  It is merely a heart-wrenching would-be myth told from the point of view of a single child.

How Kevin Smith's Red State could have been the new face of Video On Demand.

There are people with stronger feelings one way or another about Kevin Smith than I. I loved Clerks II and Dogma, hated Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, liked Clerks and Chasing Amy, and I have yet to see Mallrats, Zack and Miri Make A Porno, Jersey Girl or Cop Out. So I'm not going to get terribly worked up over the hurt feelings allegedly inspired by Smith's decision to distribute Red State in the classic Road Show style (sometimes called 'four-walling'), taking the film around the country as if it were a traveling circus attraction. It would seem that Smith is, if anything, guilty of announcing a perfectly-okay personal choice in a manner that put him in a most negative light. Similar to James's press-conference last summer, Smith basically failed at that whole 'tact' thing. James had every right to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers after seven years, but the self-aggrandizing press-conference probably wasn't the best way to go about it. Same thing here: if Smith wanted to turn his film into some kind of sideshow exhibit, then more power to him. But perhaps the Sundance Film Festival wasn't the best place to criticize the various means of distribution for smaller films (while showing a token amount of ignorance about how smaller films are marketed), especially after (allegedly) implying that the film was going to be put up for sale following the first screening last night. More importantly, even if much of the fanboy criticism of Smith was truly overblown, Kevin Smith doesn't realize that he missed out on the chance to truly be a pioneer.