Justin here with a look at the movie, Vacation! Which is playing as part of this year’s Starz Denver Film Festival.
In Vacation, 4 friends from college decide to go and spend a week at a beach house in North Carolina. The only real aim is to hang out and drink a lot of beer and pina coladas. They’re accosted by a smarmy townie, have an impromptu synchronized dance, pass around a book about a serial killer, and don ridiculous blonde wigs. Then things get weird.
My recommendation to enjoy this movie is to go in knowing relatively little about the actual plot. So I’m not really going to get into it too much. What was really remarkable about this movie is how it blended so many different elements to make a movie that was truly unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
Vacation is about alienation. One of the characters, Sugar, remarks upon arriving at the house that, “Every where I go, it feels like that’s the only place I’ve ever been.” The girls from Vacation want a vacation from themselves, but at the same point there’s a lot of apprehension to do so. There’s a hide-and-seek game that was weirdly terrifying, some Lynchian weirdness in a seafood restaurant, the best acid trip sequence I’ve seen in ages, and camp all the way through.
Director Zach Clark has a great handle on the feel of Vacation. Every aspect of the movie feels crafted to defy our expectations while at the same time delivering a great deal of satisfaction. This is a cult movie, and one that I suspect will gain quite a following some day. The structure of the movie is quite interesting as well. A major episode at the heart of the film is surrounded by lighthearted and darker versions of similar events. It creates an interesting formalist effect that’s at odds with the general free-wheeling weirdness of everything else. There’s a lot of great crit papers to be written about Vacation, and I can’t wait to read them.
I adored this movie, but I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. It’s a sort of acid washed day-glo version John Waters with the stron eye for shot composition of a Wes Anderson. However, the pacing is slower than either of those directors, and it’s somehow weirder and less sensationalist. At the same point, there’s a very strong GLBT element. Vacation also passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. Vacation definitely isn’t for everyone, but those that gravitate towards that kind of weirdness will love this movie as much as I did.
Vacation is playing TONIGHT at the Denver Film Center Colfax at 9:45! Get yr asses down here!