Review: THE END OF OAK ST

We open on a community barbeque and the narrative telescoping of every plot point we'll see along the timeline of this movie. The main family is stressed to collapse. Dad's still delivering pizzas, Son sees the coming scission and regrets and brings his dog to the party against Mum's wishes, Daughter wants to go to Cornell to be taught by Carl Sagan but it's too expensive, and Mum's writing a bitter novel about all of it. Then, the whole neighbourhood gets yanked out of the present by unseen forces and now they're in the land of the dinosaur.

Then, for the remainder of the running time, they have to workshop their troubles and fighting for their lives so they get a forced perspective on things while they try to figure out what has happened and how to get back to where they once belonged. That's it.

This is David Cameron Mitchell's third feature after the brilliant teen horror It Follows and the (can't comment, haven't seen) Under the Silver Lake and I'm getting reminder notes from the legacy of Richard Kelly who, so far, really only had one great movie in him. (Kelly did crap on his own legacy with a hasty new cut of Donnie Darko which lowered its IQ but we can talk about that another time.) People got It Follows wrong, thinking it was punishment for teen sex (it was more about knowledge and responsibility) and it looks like he never wanted that to happen again. Well, it won't with this one. It's even set in the '80s, as though that's going to protect it from people who find it too literal and pointless.

As an example of that, I'll cite this movie's use of the dioptre (diopter for those of US spelling bent). There is a scene of the family discussing the situation. We see tight two-shots where both characters (mother and son, daughter and father for e.g.) are in sharp focus but couldn't be. They are in focus but the lens is focused on two points with an attachment that looks like a halved lens. It's almost as old as cinema itself but I'll give a very famous example: when Chief Brody is talking to Bad Hat Harry on the beach in Jaws, the beach behind Harry should be a blur but it's sharp. When dioptres are used there's usually a telltale seam, often with noisy subjects like hair but sometimes it's right along a seam in the set design like a doorway or darkness. As this is a technique I notice on sight, I was distracted in locating the seam. There's one in which the corduroy couch in the middle distance goes suddenly from sharp lines to a blur. Have you noticed how long this paragraph has gone explaining this? Well, watch that scene and try to explain to me how it served the narrative even slightly. It's there because someone watned to do it. That's all. And there are a few more. Anyway...

The thing about it is not that it doesn't cut it as an action adventure, that works a treat, it's just that you have seen this action adventure more times than you can count. Anne Hathaway leads the cast with dependable skill and the whole thing goes at a clip before it ends. I didn't stay through the end credits but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that there was a post credit scene.

Apart from some slightly new takes at the detail level there is really little more I can say. If you want popcorn with a zero-challenge movie, this is it.

Viewing notes: the Shogoth behind me in the cinema murmured something at one point but I let it pass. Then, when a cataclysmic event happened, he groaned out loud: "was that really necessary?" I swung round and met his Friday-night-with-beer-pizza-and-the-boys grin with the hiss: "Please be QUIET!" regetting the "please" instantly. He was silent for the rest of it.