Tag: reviews

The Long Walk: Marching Nowhere, Hoping Anyway

damionferrellLeave a comment

I just finished watching The Long Walk, and wow, bleak doesn’t even begin to cover it. I love a good “crush my spirit and leave me staring at the wall” film as much as the next emotionally unwell cinephile, but this one? This one is mean. I have so many curse words floating around my brain right now they’re bumping into each other like pinballs.

Some movies telegraph their emotional doom early. This one does it in the first ten minutes. The premise is brutally simple: in an alternate 20th-century America, after some unnamed war and economic collapse, a military regime decides to boost national morale by… forcing 50 teenage boys to walk hundreds of miles until only one survives. The winner gets a big check and one wish granted.

Why? Great question. I have no answers and neither does the film.

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What Jamie Did: Adolescence, Masculinity, and the Quiet Collapse

damionferrellLeave a comment

“Adolescence” caught me off guard in a good way. I read the summary and knew the program was a show about a kid being accused of murder. I assumed we would spend four episodes figuring out whether the kid actually did it. It took all of an hour to flip that on its head.

By the end of the first episode, our thinking on 13-year-old Jamie Miller is subverted: Jamie did murder his classmate Katie Leonard. It’s caught on film. The what of the story is already answered. Even with CCTV footage, the viewer is encouraged to question if the evidence could somehow be wrong. We see a young and innocent-looking Jamie ripped from his bedroom by police as his parents watch in horror. We want to believe there’s more to this story.

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