'Gasoline Rainbow' is a 'Good One' at 'Handling the Undead'

I get rant heavy here on Day 6 of the Chicago Critics Film Festival. [5/9/2024]

By now you probably know the drill: short reviews of each festival film, very loose, not much filler. With only one day to go in the festival, I’m starting to realize one cannot live on popcorn alone. But I do it for you! So please, remember to subscribe and share this post with your friends, because if I have to pay another $3 at the Music Box for gas station-level coffee, I will lose it. Let’s get to it!

Gasoline Rainbow

You know that scene in The Perks of Being a Wallflower where the three teens too self-aware to be real blast Bowie's “Heroes” as they drive through the tunnel while one of them stands up in the truck bed and screams? "In that moment, we are infinite,” our protagonist narrates, as if he’d know. Gasoline Rainbow is like that for about 2 full hours. The mostly improvised vacation of a film follows a group of teens heading from their small Oregon town toward the beach with no money and less of a plan. Along the way, they meet other wanderers and interrogate themselves about who they are and want to be, mostly in opposition to their home lives.

They want to be understood accepted and loved. And they're also teenagers, so they want to do whatever while doing it. I love this film as a beautiful fantasy. The journey to get to a party called "The End of the World" is the thing that grounds it in a generation unsure of their tomorrow, but most of this film could have existed at any time, with any American generation that has felt misunderstood. An intimate beauty of a crowd-pleaser, I can't help but get swept into this feeling that all we need is love, even if the film doesn't seem willing to interrogate any actual conflict. This movie is a party you don't have to grow out of, a pill to forget the world's problems. It is for children, and that's okay. Sometimes that's what cinema is. 4/5

Good One

Wow, don’t I have mixed feelings on this one. The teenage Sam (Lily Collias) goes hiking with her father (James Le Gros) and his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy), both divorcees. While camping out in the woods she seeks to connect with her parent and help him better understand Matt. Giving away the rug pull that tells you what the movie is actually about is giving away the film. There isn’t an abrupt genre shift or anything like that. The film just doesn’t really resemble a statement until its third act. This relationship drama between a father and daughter is littered with dull shots of hiking that serve very little purpose. The script itself could be a short film, and better for it, if it weren’t for all this “mood setting” that basically amounts to nothing.

I’ll get more into this in my next review, but this has been a problem for the festival thus far. Stretching a 40-page script into 90 minutes doesn’t make it any better. At least here what has been stretched is thick. The conversations in this three-person drama illustrate a difficulty in communication between a daughter and her father, and how they attempt, or don’t, to understand one another. The intimacy of that connection, the raw way this movie feels just like real life, is poignant and well executed. But viewers will quickly start wishing a simple request: less walking, more talking! 3/5

Handling the Undead

Don’t let the image above fool you; you’re unlikely to be scared by this zombie flick. In each of Handling the Dead’s three storylines, a family member comes back from the grave under mysterious circumstances. But they are undead shells of themselves, unable to eat or speak. And then, and I can’t believe that this is a spoiler, they turn out to be the kind of undead that eat people! I just spoiled the third act twist for you because this film joins Good One and In a Violent Nature this year as a film spoiled by snail-slow pacing that prevents the whole thing from being more than a failed genre experiment.

Grief is the theme here but with no real grasp of reality. Filmmakers like director Thea Hvistendahl and In a Violent Nature’s Chris Nash seem to be imitating slower arthouse in an attempt at “elevated horror” while forsaking an audience that has to watch their movies. Handling the Undead slowly builds to the point of interest where a zombie movie can take place in mostly dialogue-free moments where we bask in the sorrow of these sad people looking at their undead. But we know something they don’t! Rather than playing with our zombie knowledge, the film just doles out small bites of overly cliche plot points. Feeding me a McDonald’s burger in slow bites doesn’t make it caviar; you’d be better off living up to the name fast food! 1/5