{"id":12568,"date":"2018-04-19T21:00:36","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T02:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=12568"},"modified":"2018-04-18T22:29:25","modified_gmt":"2018-04-19T03:29:25","slug":"american-animals-2018-bart-layton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/12568","title":{"rendered":"American Animals (2018, Bart Layton)"},"content":{"rendered":"

After another good True\/False fest, and a killer first half of the day with Bisbee<\/a><\/em> and Shirkers<\/a><\/em>, we ended on a lightweight heist film, with strong truefalsian elements, but whose protagonists made Katy fully angry. Tim Grierson nailed it in Paste<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Crafted to be a breezy, self-conscious heist film \u2014 the characters study Rififi<\/em> for inspiration, and a key fantasy sequence is scored to the remix of Elvis Presley’s \u201cA Little Less Conversation,\u201d which was memorably used in Ocean’s Eleven<\/em> \u2014 American Animals<\/em> uses a lot of giddy flash to make a sobering point: These callow losers are incredibly privileged white males with little reason to execute this crime except for the fact that they’re bored. But despite strong performances from Peters and Keoghan, who both hook into their characters’ suffocating vapidity, Layton never entirely makes the case that his movie has much more intellectual heft than his protagonists. American Animals<\/em> is a zippy, forgettable film about dunderheads, which isn’t the same as having a sharp perspective on those boobs.<\/p>\n

The real fun comes in the first half as we meet the real boobs via interview footage and see their stories played out – sometimes in multiple versions if the narrators mix up their details – by the great Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk<\/a><\/em>, The Killing of a Sacred Deer<\/a><\/em>) and his wild buddy Evan Peters (Quicksilver in the X-Men<\/a><\/em> movies). Peters flies to Amsterdam to meet Udo Kier and see about fencing some rare books, which they clumsily steal with the help of two more dudes (including Everybody Wants Some!!<\/a><\/em> lead Blake Jenner) in the more sordid second half. Katy wishes we’d closed with the Mr. Rogers movie instead.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

–
\nMusicians seen this year:<\/strong> Mary Lattimore, Lomelda, Esme Patterson, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, Burney Sisters, Nevada Greene, Samuel James, The River Arkansas, Ohmme, Molly Healey, Skyway Man, <\/p>\n

Food and drink<\/strong> from our old favorites: Craft Beer Cellar, Cafe Berlin, Cafe Poland, Main Squeeze, Nourish, International Tap House, Gunter Hans, Pizza Tree… plus good stuff from Seoul Taco, and next time we’ll skip Flat Branch and not venture into 44 Canteen unless we have no movies scheduled afterward.<\/p>\n

Esme Patterson at the Missouri Theater:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After another good True\/False fest, and a killer first half of the day with Bisbee and Shirkers, we ended on a lightweight heist film, with strong truefalsian elements, but whose protagonists made Katy fully angry. Tim Grierson nailed it in Paste: Crafted to be a breezy, self-conscious heist film \u2014 the characters study Rififi for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,2413,2414,631,2410,2245],"class_list":["post-12568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-barry-keoghan","tag-bart-layton","tag-perfect-crime","tag-reenactment","tag-true-false"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12568"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12607,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12568\/revisions\/12607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}