Wed, Mar 22, 2006

: The United States of Leland

This wasn’t what I expected; it’s good, not great. I thought it was supposed to be funny, but it’s dead serious. It’s about a boy who murders another for apparently no reason and we track his time in jail and try to figure out why he did what he did (even he doesn’t seem to know). If that’s all it was, it’d be a decent Kafaesque premise, but unfortunately the film undermines itself by gradually trying to show us why the boy did it. Since the main interest in the film is that we don’t know why, revealing the why is anticlimactic and not satisfying. I’d have prefered if it would have remained a fascinating mystery.

Topic: [/movie]

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