Detention / Retenue (Bilingue) (Bilingual)

Author: Josh Hutcherson

Format: Subtitled

Release Date: 31-07-2012

Details: This crazily slapdash mash-up of teen movie genres, '90s nostalgia, lightning-round sketch comedy, and pop-culture overload is cause for metaphoric double takes and spit takes thanks to its cleverly schizophrenic design. The jokes, shocks, and bewildering jumble of references are a deliberate attempt to leave its youthful target audience gasping for breath, even if they're three or four allusions and punch lines behind. The movie begins in high gear with the introduction of an unpleasantly clichéd high schooler who narrates the rigors of her lifestyle with the help of witty graphical elements, trick camera shots, and the nonstop patter of speed-dialed dialogue. That she's killed off even before the ingenious title sequence rolls is a hint at how the rest of the movie is going to play out. Detention seems to be constantly breaking off into inexplicable tangents and dumb asides, though it's far from being clueless. But Clueless is one of the many movies Detention pays homage to. Others include, but are not nearly limited to, The Breakfast Club, Back to the Future, the Scream franchise, Heathers, Mean Girls, House Party, Freaky Friday, and a slew of period music videos from the last decade, many of which were the work of Detention's director and cowriter Joseph Kahn. There's really no way to describe the demented and often random plot points that coalesce into a hodgepodge of slacker comedy, slasher horror, and preposterous sci-fi, whether you can keep up with it or not. Among the large cast of stereotyped teens who inhabit the high school halls and suburban streets of Grizzly Lake are hipster dude Clapton (Josh Hutcherson), the brainy but bumbling Riley (Shanley Caswell), her popular blond best friend Ione (Spencer Locke), and the loser nerd Sander (Aaron David Johnson). Add to that a football hero who's channeling Jeff Goldblum's character from The Fly, a drunken cougar mom, a couple of sexpot teachers, and a venal principal who has the good fortune of being portrayed by Dane Cook, and you have a mentally unbalanced movie that never slows down to inhale. Within it are various proms, science projects, wild parties, and a life-size grizzly bear mascot that reveals itself to be key to the whole story. Detention is one continuous expulsion of absurdist hot air that flirts, farts, and foams at the mouth between an unending series of time shifts, flashbacks, flash-forwards, and flashes sideways. Almost everyone dies at some point, but they somehow all end up very much alive in a world that thrives on slick meta analysis of movie and pop-culture history. Though it seems off-the-cuff, there's actually a great deal of precision in the story of Grizzly Lake High and the 20-year lead-up to how its students and staff ward off apocalypse. Just don't try to figure out what's really going on. --Ted Fry Though marketed as a horror film, Joseph Kahn's Detention actually belongs to no particular genre, as its hyperkinetic structure borrows from a wide variety of styles, tropes, and influences in telling a story that appears to be about the confusion and chaos inherent to high school life. Shanley Caswell is Kahn's nominal heroine, a terminal outsider whose crush on the popular Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) is blocked by former best friend Spencer Locke. Their triangle is complicated by the presence of a stranger tricked out like Cinderhella, the villain from a popular series of violent slasher pictures. The murders that follow in his wake eventually become part of a larger, weirder canvas that includes aliens, time travel, genetic mutations, and a dizzying array of '90s-era pop culture references. Veteran music video director Kahn, who also helmed the genre-bending 2004 action pic Torque, will undoubtedly polarize audiences with his approach, which takes meta-storytelling à la Scream to unheard-of levels while pitching the action and dialogue at a vertiginous speed. The picture's self-reflexive nature and ADHD pacing does, at times, approximate the bewildering barrage of information slung at high school-age culture consumers, and at times, the absurdity of the subplots, especially the complicated time travel/body-switch storyline, plays like a broad parody of the surrealism inherent to teenaged social interaction. Whether that adds up to an entertaining movie experience will vary from viewer to viewer, but one can't fault Kahn for not trying to provide a unique experience. The DVD offers an all-in-one commentary track and behind-the-scenes featurette in Cheat Mode, a full-length, picture-in-picture discussion of the film featuring members of the cast and crew. --Paul Gaita

UPC: 043396403246

EAN: 0043396403246

Languages: Thai

Binding: dvd

Item Condition: UsedVeryGood