By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Bill Ross IV | Turner Ross
Starring: Makai Garza | Micah Bunch | Nathaly Garcia | Nichole Dukes | Tony Aburto
Year: 2024
Running time: 111
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28494031/reference/
Aaron says: “Film fest fans, we’ve all been there. You’re lining up your schedule and want variety (range is good) and safe logistics (can you make the commute work between tight screenings?). Two titles catch your eye: GASOLINE RAINBOW from hot doc directors Turner and Bill Ross and JANET PLANET from the best playwright working, Annie Baker. They’re playing back to back at the same theater. The films are in your wheelhouse. Maybe nothing much happens from a plot perspective, but everything happens in the fraught silences. The kind of film where you feel you’ve read a novel in a character’s face and you’re fundamentally changed from the experience. You scan early reviews and it appears both are can’t-miss gems. Adjectives from the reviews sound eerily similar: ‘quiet’, ‘languorous,’ ‘observational,’ and ‘delicate.’ The logical part of your brain warns that too much of the same thing eked out slowly over four hours can be a festival morale-crusher. And yet you go for it. Because nothing is scarier than FOMO at a film festival.
“GASOLINE RAINBOW unfolds at a genial clip as five Oregon teens search for adventure and a good party. If the beginning feels self-consciously quirky with its restless camerawork, isolated moments come loaded with a haunting quality: as our heroes smoke and talk, their towering silhouettes seem poised to reach for something more against the lonely desert landscape. They smoke weed, they drink, occasionally they open up about their troubled families and cry. From hobos who teach them how to hop a train to the skateboarder who takes them into his sunny orbit, the people they encounter are there to help and eager to connect. Nothing much happens, but it happens with such “fuck it” anarchic optimism that it’s hard to doubt these kids and the community they create.
“The Ross Brothers cast non-professional actors and give them wiggle room to color in their own sad backgrounds with ad-libbed dialogue. The result is that we never feel condescended to—it’s semi-scripted but the actors feel natural and free of hyper-articulate dialogue that might ring false. It’s too bad that the last 30 minutes start to buckle from tedium as the kids pivot from a broken-up party to a bonfire on the beach—the charming drift of the early sections gives way to an aimless stretch that tries too hard to wring meaning out of it all. Still, late in the film, there’s a shot of the kids in close-up as they suddenly run out of things to smile about, and it feels like an obituary for the carefree spirit that often makes Gasoline Rainbow such a meandering pleasure. 3 cats“
Chris says: “Five teenagers set out from Nowheresville, Oregon in a worn-down van to make the 500+ mile trek to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, they chill out, toke up, run into obstacles (including a fairly major one) and meet a variety of similar transients and loners along the way. It almost sounds like a group Gen Z equivalent of the road trip Lily Gladstone took in THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY, except that it feels more casual and like a documentary. Given that this is directed by the Ross Brothers, it’s probably not the latter, liberally bending the real/fake line as they did in some of their past films, most notably 2020’s last-night-of-a-dive-bar reverie BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS. Unfortunately, this doesn’t retain the momentum or the interesting ‘characters’ of that triumph and goes on for a little too long. There are great moments scattered throughout–the hopping of a freight train, a massive bonfire on a beach–but as a coming of age portrait of friends on the cusp of adulthood, it has nothing on something fully scripted/fictionalized like DAZED AND CONFUSED. 3 cats