Restless

Restless is far more precious than profound. But that takes little away from this soulful teenage exploration of love, life and death.

As clearly calculated and self-consciously cutesy as it is, it's also tender and meaningful stuff -- and far more watchable than other recent attempts to capture the existential angst of adolescence. ("The Art of Getting By.")

Gus Van Sant directs his players just shy of mush; he's a filmmaker capable of brilliant dares (Milk, Paranoid Park) and shocking whiffs (Finding Forrester, the pointless remake of Psycho). This one's kind of in the middle.

The insistently quirky details don't disguise the fact that the drama grows ever more predictable and precious, complete with falling-in-love montage. Screenwriter Jason Lew's character insights take the form of the obvious.

Gus Van Sant's latest - a middle-class hetero teen romance, no less - walks the line between mainstream sentimentality and dark art-house humor so effectively that it seems noncommittal.

A torpidly precious love story about death-obsessed adolescents, the film's becalmed and embalmed in its own sensitive self-pity.

Gus Van Sant's cinema, which of late has been fixated on immersing viewers in particular times and spaces, takes a detour into excruciating quirkland with Restless.

When expressing my views on a film I examine my feelings. Did I "feel' something? Was it strong, believable? Did I cry, laugh, hide my eyes, etc. The characters in Restless made me feel something. They communicated their situation. They made me see how their reactions to their personal challenge made sense. In this film plot-lines or a story faux pas does not matter. Two wonderful portrayals of people who fall in love and must deal with heart breaking issues. They do it, they understand the "thing" their dealing with, and hopefully reach a better place in their lives. I "felt" their pain, sorrow, but most of all their happiness in finding each other when they needed someone the most. An A-.

A Febiofest screening, nothing signposts that 3 years after multi-Ocsar nominated (including 2 wins) MILK (2008), Gus Van Sant will cook such a cancer-ridden romantic flick grappling with a soul-healing recovery of a parents-bereaved boy after his short relationship with a dying girl although death has been a persistent topic all through his omnibus. The over-simplified structure may impede Gus from a more spacious platform to perform his mastery, and precipitating an out-and-out snub from all sorts of awards consideration and the disastrous box-office turnover is fatal to destroy its investorâ

The first hour of this film is wonderful, funny, touching and underplayed. Mia Wasikowska is something special (as is Schuyler Fisk as her sister struggling to accept the reality of the situation) and the relationship between her, Henry Hopper and the Japanese ghost is nicely drawn (after you give in to the logic of it). The problem is the last third of the film. What was being built up to be quite an emotional conclusion, dissolved into cliche quickly and undercut the impact of the film's conclusion.

This tedious and sophomoric examination of death stars Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) as a youth who's troubled by the death of his parents, Mia Wasikowska who's facing death from cancer and the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot. Did I saw this was about death? They mope and make moon eyes at each otherâ

Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) has cancer, but donâ