A One-Time Cinema Chance

Hitting the 45365: An "achingly beautiful" movie about small town Ohio gets aHouston night

45365 tells the tale of little Sidney, Ohio — which is the story of manyAmerican small towns really.
Sidney downtown, with the municipal courts in the Monumental Building
The Shelby County courthouse where the legal dramas for some of the film'sreal-life characters plays out.
Unusual architecture of the 1918 Thrift Building in Shelby County, home to thePeople's Federal Savings and Loan

Thanks to the venturesome folks at the Alamo Drafthouse West Oaks, H-Town audiences have a one-night-only opportunity to see one of the most impressive American nonfiction films of recent vintage: 45365, winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2009 South by Southwest Film Festival and, not incidentally, the very first honoree to receive the inaugural Chaz & Roger Ebert Truer Than Fiction Award bestowed last spring at the Independent Spirit Awards.

It will play at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Alamo Drafthouse — and I’ll be on hand to introduce it.

So what’s it all about? Nothing in particular — and yet, in many ways, everything that’s important. 45365 is an up-close and irony-free view of life beyond the bright lights of big cities that demands — and rewards — close attention. By tightly focusing on particulars, it mines universal truths.

Meticulously balancing cinéma vérité intimacy and dreamlike reverie, 45365 fashions a seductive, fascinating tapestry of small-town life by interweaving seemingly random glimpses of residents in Sidney, Ohio. Sibling filmmakers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross are natives of the Ohio hamlet, which may explain how they gained the confidence of the unaffected locals. Even so, the Ross brothers often come across as dispassionate anthropologists, treating their subjects with a bemused curiosity that, fortunately, never curdles into condescension.

Rarely devoting more than a few minutes to any single sequence, 45365 (Sidney's zip code) captures events over a few weeks in autumn 2007. Townspeople appear at gatherings — a country fair, a court hearing, high school football games — and in their homes, only occasionally addressing the camera.

A few plot lines are forged through the accumulation of disparate details. A reckless young man moves inexorably toward arrest and trial, much to his anxious mom's dismay. Another fellow, appreciably older, faces charges of drunk driving. Two of his ex-wives follow the progress of the case, taking time to argue over why (and when) he left one and then married the other.

For the most part, however, it's left to the viewer to draw connections and conclusions while hearing the snappy patter of the local radio DJs, noting the ebb and flow of romantic relationships and hoping the best for participants in a local carnival that runs the risk of being rained out.

Roger Ebert has called 45365 “an achingly beautiful film” — thanks to the Ross brothers’ exceptional high-def videography — and marveled: “There is a beautiful shot during a church service which pans slowly to the right over the congregation and pauses looking into a door to a stairwell. A woman and small girl come up the stairs. The camera follows them back to the left until the girl is deposited back in her pew, having obviously just been taken to the potty. Were those two people cued?

"Obviously not. I suggest the cameraman, Bill or Turner, observed them getting up, intuited where they were going and why, and composed the camera movement instinctively. A brief shot you may not even consciously notice, but a perfect shot, reading the room as our minds do. All human life is in it.”

Yes, it is.

Watch the trailer for 45365:

unspecified

Movie Review

'I Know What You Did Last Summer' reboot lacks energy or thrills

Photo by Brook Rushton

Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

When the original I Know What You Did Last Summer came out in 1997, it was riding the coattails of Scream, which came out in 1996. Like that film, it featured hot young actors of the time, albeit with a story that was much more standard than the inventive Scream. Still, it made enough of an impact for some studio executive to think it was worth reviving nearly 30 years later with its own legacy-quel.

In the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, a group of five high school friends — Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) — have reunited at the engagement party for Danica and Teddy on the 4th of July. While on an impromptu trip to watch fireworks on a twisty road in the nearby hills, Teddy goofs off in the middle of the road, causing a truck to swerve and drive off the cliff.

A year later, having sworn to each other to not speak of the accident to anybody, they start getting stalked by a mysterious person in a fisherman’s slicker carrying a hook. With Teddy’s rich father, Grant (Billy Campbell), actively trying to cover up what his son did (as well as the fallout), it’s up to the group to figure out who is coming after them and how to stop that person.

Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and co-written by Sam Lansky, the film doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel; in fact, it barely builds something that can roll. It might just be the laziest and most incompetent attempt to capitalize on an existing piece of intellectual property. There is almost zero effort put into establishing a connection between the members of the friend group, making them feel like strangers for the entire film.

It doesn’t help that the young male actors in the film — which grows to include Wyatt (Joshua Orpin), a new fiance for Danica — serve no purpose other than to be generically good-looking. The most impactful of the men in the film is the returning Freddie Prinze, Jr., who — along with Jennifer Love Hewitt — has his old character from the first two films shoehorned into the new story. The filmmakers undercut any good feelings from their return by giving them hardly anything to do and then having Hewitt deliver the line, “Nostalgia is overrated.”

The film as a whole never has a sense of momentum. The inciting incident is so tame — they even attempt to save the driver before the truck goes off the cliff — that the guilt they feel and the anger of the person going after them doesn’t feel warranted. Once the attacks start, it is shocking at how low-energy the sequences are, providing no sense of suspense or thrills. The filmmakers resort to the lamest of horror movie tropes, turning the film into a paint-by-numbers affair.

Cline (one of the stars of Netflix’s Outer Banks) and Wonders (The Studio on Apple TV+, Bodies Bodies Bodies) are the clear stars of the film, but their characters are made into inert scream queens, negating any acting talent they possess. Hauer-King, Withers, and Pidgeon don’t bring anything interesting to their characters, existing merely to have someone else for the killer to go after.

Even the worst films can have some kind of redeeming value if you look hard enough, but the only thing I Know What You Did Last Summer has to offer is that it becomes so comically bad by the end that you can’t help but laugh at its ineptitude. Both fans of the original and fans of horror movies in general will feel cheated by the experience.

---

I Know What You Did Last Summer opens in theaters on July 18.

movies film