It kind of reminds me of Rushmore, but the Max Fischer-type character isn’t the hero. And it’s definitely quirkier.
I ususally like quirkier. This is one of those times.
It also kind of reminds me of Revenge of the Nerds, but not raunchy. Thank goodness. This isn’t the 80’s anymore.
While Shades of Ray tells us its good to be with your own kind, I think that Dear Lemon Lima tells us that it’s good to be yourself. And to make the most of it. The most of yourself. Go long. Live large. Grab the gusto. But this movie is not a beer commercial.
It does not take place in your father’s Alaska. I think Alaska is just a metaphor for being out on your own, without any help. It’s just you against the world.
Our hero is completely suppressing her native Alaskan heritage. Oddly enough, all the anglos at the prep school are obsessed with fetishizing native Alaskan stuff, even if they can’t tell Athabascans from Aleuts. So that’s another metaphor. She’s got what they want: Authenticity.
But she thinks she wants what they’ve got: pretense. Pretension? Pretendosity? Pretentiousness!!!
There’s one part of this movie that I really didn’t like. You’ll know it when you get to it. At the time, I thought that it was a cheat. Toward the end of the movie, as shadows of trees whiz by, I thought that they were going to actually use the cheat. Can you imagine anything more disgusting than a used cheat? But instead, they only barely referred to it. And that made all the difference, and it wasn’t a cheat any more. In fact, is was kind of all transcendant, but in a way that was almost un-noticable. That’s exactly how I like my transcendence!
The soundtrack includes 3 songs I’ve never heard before. One by Becky Stark called “Don’t Go to Sleep” haunts me with it’s simplicity. It’s two minutes and twelve seconds of perfection.
So even though there’s no snow, I really like this movie. Take a look, and don’t concentrate just on what you see. Think about what it’s trying to say, what it means.
