Ham on Rye

Original, thoughtful, beautiful, intelligent. The film takes significant moments we all confront during our coming of age years, and concentrates them into loosely connected symbolic vignettes, exploring issues around identity and the roles we're assigned in life, willingly or not. It utilises a tone of suburban isolationism and being lost in the meaningless unknown to keep us off balance and wandering through uncertainty. While the narrative structure does not present a palatable or traditional plot or any form of character development, nor does the presentation guide us on what we're supposed to think or feel about anything, there is an opportunity to see the world through the lens of melancholic but unthreatening nihilism. If you can sit with slow burn, abstract narratives then you might be into this.

This small gem of an 'indie' movie has 'indie classic' written all over it. Opening on one of those American summers we all wish we could have lived through Tyler Taormina's "Ham on Rye" is a film that, in its first five minutes, could go any way. A Sofia Coppola "Virgin Suicides" rip-off? Surely not. Another gross-out teen comedy? No, these teens are too well-scrubbed, their parents perhaps just a little too off-the-wall. Come to think of it, everyone we meet in the first five minutes is just a little too off-the-wall. Is this a horror movie? Is Michael Myers lurking in the sunshine?

Perhaps it's that uncertainty demonstrated in the first five minutes that makes this the kind of movie you know you're going to treasure and if there's a precedent maybe it's the early films of Richard Linklater or something David Lynch might have made when he was sixteen, (as it progresses it certainly drifts off into Lynchian surrealism). There's no plot and the lack of 'action' is bound to alienate even its potential audience, teens of a certain age. Cineastes, however, will have a field-day with the onscreen images conjuring memories of other films as well as, hopefully, their own teenage years when doing nothing actually felt like doing something, (and there's an awful lot of doing nothing here). It's a young person's movie for sure and you could say Tyler Taormina has definitely arrived. i loved every bizarre moment.

This film seems mostly to be about the disappointment of getting older. The first half of the film is sureal and magical, it was also quite funny with bizarre existential questions being thrown around but never answered; I guess the subtext is: you don't need answer them because you're young. The second half of the film seems to be about the inevitable unfulfilled expectations and the loss of connection with people who have taken a different life path to you. Overall the first half is more enjoyable to watch and the second half is incredibly slow and down beat however, I think it leaves you feeling exactly what the film makers intended.

The first 20 minutes teens are pretty much just walking on the street. Very little dialogue. Sets the tone for a move where...not much happens.

There is an air of unrest and subversion across it. It feels entirely new. When the girls speak about the wonders of getting older, the film vows to prove them wrong. Through Deuter's music it ramps up as a german fairytale. The entitlement such as going into strangers homes or being the powers to decide on boys fates shows it's about privilege, especially choosing who was worthy of ascension. She seemed to find it cruel and immoral. The film is sometimes 50s, sometimes 80s, sometimes today, or all at once. Same as how it shows multiple generations in relation to the event: the children lively and innocent. the teens nervous and bracing for it. the older kids lost and dazed. the old, zombies and shells. The event seems to allow the squares lucky to be chosen to disappear away into some orgy of paradise. It becomes metaphysical, not horror, or almost a quotation or subversion of horror. These scenes of openness in the park, the searching, being scoped out somehow to me feels as these eerie metaphysical horror films popular in the art house where 'It' is always near. Or it captures the heightened psychology of horror without the areas of fear. Look at the rocker guy viewed from afar, which was one of its powerful moments. In standard films he would be eaten one scene later by The Thing. Then, I could not not think of Vietnam and PTSD with the older kids. Were they never chosen and doomed to be there? There is a vacuum and divide between the chosen and not. Maybe why the phone message cuts out and why the father couldn't see him in college. Why the girls messages weren't received. It is some metaphysical fish tank of those inside versus outside. It would be the ones with means ascending society's ranks, the others without privilege left to rot. The funniest part of the film is how lame old people are in it, they are these pathetic dullards. There is also an ingenuity here for low budget that its emotional climax revolves around a balloon. That it is so gentle, simple, but startling of an image. The high concept creates an infinite budget by showing plain things with enormous implications. When going in I had expected a school dance comedy, that Tamberelli would be partying and rioting, Lori-Beth would be up to some wild sh-t, as the beginning seemed to promised in its notes and breadth. But these icons of Nickelodeon are there in trances and dazes in a purgatory awaiting the 'All That' reunion. I don't blame her for escaping the event as I would have done the same in order to mount a revolution from within.