World to the West

Published at Digitally Downloaded.

Indignation

A Jewish boy from working class New Jersey goes to a Ohio college, partly because of smarts and partly to avoid the Korean War that is killing many of his acquaintances. There he meets a girl with mental problems who introduces him to sex. He does not know how to handle this newly found gift; his mother, on the other hand, knows what's best for her son.
In parallel, our boy confronts the Dean over his absence of conformism: he's an atheist that won't join his fellow Jews at college, won't mingle in general with fellow students, avoids going to the college's obligatory sermons, and instead takes pride in his love of Bertrand Russell. In other words, he and I have a lot in common.
Indignation deals in many themes, but the dominant one is to do with the price society demands of us when we do not conform: our lives, be it in the physical or spiritual sense.
Overall: While trying to tell the good tale, it felt to me like Indignation is rather lacking in focus. It might have worked well as a Philip Roth book, but as a movie it too compromised. 3 out of 5 crabs.

No Stick Shooter

Published at Digitally Downloaded.
On a completely unrelated note, I will add that by my reckoning this blog's queue is more than twenty reviews long at the moment. The management would like to apologise for these delays.