The Way Way Back

I loved every minute of it. Being a fan of coming of age movies and teenage angst it is a perfect example.

A movie to see. Funny and with good values.

Pam: Where were you Duncan? Duncan: Nowhere.

Throughout this film, I felt a sense of truth that I don't often encounter in a film. The Way, Way Back is a story of a 15 year old boy named Duncan who lives with his mother now that his parents have split up.

The Way Way Back is marketed as a thoughtful, funny teen flick but, though it is thoughtful, funny and co-stars a couple of teens, the younger audience members shuffled and whispered as if bored, while the belly laughs and satisfied smiles came almost entirely from the 'more mature' audience members. It's not that this is an adult film but so many references require a certain level of life experience or simply that the audience was 'there' at a particular time.

Finally saw "The Way Way Back" before the summer was over and I must say it was one little cute and fun film. One that after watching makes a lot of us remember our childhood, and growing up with personal and social problems like being shy and noticing girls for the first time.

The coming of age story is one of the oldest in human history, but more recently (at least since the 1950s when the concept of the "teenager" was born and instantly bottled and marketed) it has taken the form of the angst ridden youth whose adolescence is a pained period of self- loathing, clumsy first love and sexual experimentation, struggles with unworthy pathetic parental figures and alienation from a school milieu consisting of people who would have been kicked out of the Hitler Youth for being too evil. Usually salvation comes in the form of some other outcast world, ridiculed by the contemptible "normals", where a father/mother figure can be found who will guide them to eventual, though not pain-free, self-realisation.

"The Way, Way Back" comes from the same school as "Stand by Me" and "Little Miss Sunshine" and a lot else in-between. It's a coming-of-age movie, a summer movie and a feel-good movie and it's the movie that could finally win Allison Janney, and perhaps Sam Rockwell, an Oscar.

This movie is a giant ball of nothing.the characters are all flat, emotionless, unidentifiable drones who have no purpose other than to fill up space and try and create conflict in what is an already trite and clichéd story idea.