Photo: Azazel Jacobs's Momma's Man
If Mikey were, instead of a frumpy, balding thirtysomething, the hero of a classic adventure like The Searchers, his secure home life would be pitted against endless adventures of unbridled excitement. Instead, he's forced to choose between two lives going nowhere (or so it seems until the perfect final shot), two secure homes without much promise. Pretending to be a childhood superhero is as thrilling as Mikey's life gets, or he wants it to get; homecoming is both an unattained goal, always out of reach, and an unavoidable snare. He simply feels the allure of inertia: Not far from Hou Hsiao-Hsien's upcoming masterpiece, The Flight of the Red Balloon, all things always stay the same safe inside the hearth, while outside, Mikey finds himself older, the cool guy buying beer for underage kids by the river. David Pratt-Robson
If Mikey were, instead of a frumpy, balding thirtysomething, the hero of a classic adventure like The Searchers, his secure home life would be pitted against endless adventures of unbridled excitement. Instead, he's forced to choose between two lives going nowhere (or so it seems until the perfect final shot), two secure homes without much promise. Pretending to be a childhood superhero is as thrilling as Mikey's life gets, or he wants it to get; homecoming is both an unattained goal, always out of reach, and an unavoidable snare. He simply feels the allure of inertia: Not far from Hou Hsiao-Hsien's upcoming masterpiece, The Flight of the Red Balloon, all things always stay the same safe inside the hearth, while outside, Mikey finds himself older, the cool guy buying beer for underage kids by the river. David Pratt-Robson
