There is an air of unrest and subversion across it. It feels entirely new. When the girls speak about the wonders of getting older, the film vows to prove them wrong. Through Deuter's music it ramps up as a german fairytale. The entitlement such as going into strangers homes or being the powers to decide on boys fates shows it's about privilege, especially choosing who was worthy of ascension. She seemed to find it cruel and immoral. The film is sometimes 50s, sometimes 80s, sometimes today, or all at once. Same as how it shows multiple generations in relation to the event: the children lively and innocent. the teens nervous and bracing for it. the older kids lost and dazed. the old, zombies and shells. The event seems to allow the squares lucky to be chosen to disappear away into some orgy of paradise. It becomes metaphysical, not horror, or almost a quotation or subversion of horror. These scenes of openness in the park, the searching, being scoped out somehow to me feels as these eerie metaphysical horror films popular in the art house where 'It' is always near. Or it captures the heightened psychology of horror without the areas of fear. Look at the rocker guy viewed from afar, which was one of its powerful moments. In standard films he would be eaten one scene later by The Thing. Then, I could not not think of Vietnam and PTSD with the older kids. Were they never chosen and doomed to be there? There is a vacuum and divide between the chosen and not. Maybe why the phone message cuts out and why the father couldn't see him in college. Why the girls messages weren't received. It is some metaphysical fish tank of those inside versus outside. It would be the ones with means ascending society's ranks, the others without privilege left to rot. The funniest part of the film is how lame old people are in it, they are these pathetic dullards. There is also an ingenuity here for low budget that its emotional climax revolves around a balloon. That it is so gentle, simple, but startling of an image. The high concept creates an infinite budget by showing plain things with enormous implications. When going in I had expected a school dance comedy, that Tamberelli would be partying and rioting, Lori-Beth would be up to some wild sh-t, as the beginning seemed to promised in its notes and breadth. But these icons of Nickelodeon are there in trances and dazes in a purgatory awaiting the 'All That' reunion. I don't blame her for escaping the event as I would have done the same in order to mount a revolution from within.
