Monday, January 18, 2021

How I Live Now (2013)

  When this movie came out, there was a big thing about not revealing too much about it.  Like there's an Incident and then everything changes.  This may have made the movie seem cooler than it actually is.

Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) is an American teen sent to spend a summer with cousins in England.  She feels it's a punishment and acts correspondingly with the entire household.  But when war is declared and the countryside is under evacuation orders, Daisy must choose whether to go back to the safety of America or stay with her new family.

It's a pretty typical teen drama, complete with the "I'm so broken, how can I change the world?" narrative.  Daisy starts as a narcissistic neurotic and ends as a responsible adult.  Okay, sure, I'm just saying there are probably easier ways to do that than surrogate motherhood.

Also, and this is really the dealbreaker for me, she fucks her cousin.  Like, that's her impetus for deciding whether to stay in a war zone.  Maybe in the source novel it's explained that these are very distant relatives or only family friends, like you call your mom's best friend Aunt but there's no blood involved, but there is nothing in the movie.  Just "these are my cousins from England.  Hey, one is my age and hot.  Oops, guess we're fucking now."  I get it.  It's George MacKay.  If I were ten years younger, you bet he'd be top of my crush list.  But that's your cousin.  That's gross.  

Anyway, if light incest and nuclear fallout is your thing, How I Live Now is streaming on Tubi.

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