«Disconnect» - Film Review & Official Trailer

"I'm living with a family of fake people."

So says a text message sent by Ben Boyd, a moody, introspective, Radiohead-loving adolescent who's more at home in his head, in his music and online than he is with his own family.

Ironically, the person Ben thinks he's communicating with, a young woman named Jessica who's friended him on his social media page and taken a liking to music Ben's posted, really is fake. "She" is actually two bullies who are preying upon the unsuspecting Ben the way hungry lions go after vulnerable wildebeest calves. By the time he realizes Jessica isn't Jessica, Ben has been baited into sending a naked picture of himself, a picture that soon goes viral … and prompts the horrified youngster to hang himself.

That's just the first of four seriously cautionary tales in Disconnect, a movie about how Internet-enabled relationships promise more intimacy than they deliver, even as digital connections unwittingly undermine our most important real-world relationships.

Disconnect's second story revolves around an alienated husband and wife. Derek and Cindy are struggling with the loss of their one-year-old baby and their inability to get pregnant again. Derek has shut down emotionally, retreating into his work (which requires lots of travel) and into online gambling. Meanwhile, Cindy is desperate to talk, and she finds a compassionate ear in a widower who goes by the username "fearandloathing" in a grief-and-loss Internet chat room.

But when Derek and Cindy become the victims of identity theft, online security specialist Mike Dixon tracks down fearandloathing and discovers that Cindy's confidant—real name Stephen Schumacher—is actually a savvy thief milking her for information. When Derek asks Mike what he'd do in their situation, the latter replies, "I'd strangle the son of a b‑‑ch." Thus, Derek and Cindy perilously seek to turn the tables on the thief.

Mike, however, has problems of his own. A widower, he's doing the best he can to raise his adolescent son. But even though he's adept at sorting through other people's online missteps, he's not so good at it with his own flesh and blood. His son, Jason, is one of Ben Boyd's bullies—yet another blow to the father and son's already troubled relationship.

Finally, putting an exclamation point on 21st-century society's damaged ideas about intimacy is Kyle, a formerly homeless 17-year-old who now lives in a house with other teens doing sex webcam work under the watchful eye of their digital pimp. It's a story that ambitious reporter Nina Dunham wants to tell. But when she convinces Kyle to talk—anonymously, of course—it ends up on the national news and invites the attention of the FBI. If Nina wants to keep her job, high-powered lawyer Rich Boyd—Ben's father—tells her she's going to have to turn Kyle and his outfit in.

Disconnect invites viewers to wrestle with the suggestion that many people in the Internet age are more likely to seek emotional (and sexual) intimacy with complete strangers online than they are with the people they're closest to. The results, the film further suggests, can be devastating.

Ben is an artsy, quiet, misunderstood kid who's not only an outcast at school, but an outsider in his own home. When he tries to commit suicide, his action serves as a catalyst for the family to take a hard look at what they value and how they're living. Dad spends hours going through Ben's pictures and music, really getting to know his son and lamenting the fact that he didn't do so earlier. Sis mourns the fact that she did nothing to protect her brother from those who taunted him. And the family comes together in a way that they never have before.

Rich also reaches out to "Jessica," who at this point is being personified via texts by Jason. Jason feels guilty about a prank that got out of hand, and begins an odd relationship with the older man—one in which Rich acts as a kind of accidental surrogate father. It's clear that Jason's relationship with his own father, Mike Dixon, is damaged, and Rich's willingness to reach out and "talk" proves strangely cathartic for both … until, that is, Rich learns the truth about Jason's role in his son's suicide attempt. Still, this odd relationship once again illustrates the film's main point about how easy—and dangerous—it is for complete strangers to fill important emotional roles in one another's lives online.

Meanwhile, Derek and Cindy's quest to track down Schumacher is fraught with peril. But as they go forward, the couple begins to talk again. And in the end it turns out that Schumacher is also a victim of identity theft, a fact that ultimately stays Derek and Cindy from perhaps assaulting the man. He's "just another victim," Mike tells them, reinforcing the movie's theme that the Internet claims many such victims.

As for Nina and Kyle's relationship, it's a muddy one, to say the least. At some level, Nina genuinely wants Kyle to get out of his "career" doing sex work on webcams. On another level, though, Kyle (brutally) helps Nina see that she was just using him to get a story that would burnish her career. Kyle accuses her of being even more exploitative than the job he's in, an accusation that clearly rocks Nina.

Thanks to social media and the Internet, we're digitally connected to more people than ever before. But as many social commentators have noted as of late, the word digital may make all the difference between those connections being a great thing or a devastating thing. Instead of real, life-giving connections with others, many people get conned by counterfeit intimacy—virtual relationships that ultimately serve as a shallow substitute for the genuine article. Or worse.

Disconnect locates the scabs of online wounds and then digs underneath them, relentlessly picking at this painful reality.

It's brutal to see the end result of a young boy's longing for love and affirmation get turned so horrifically against him, an outcome that leaves him dangling at the end of rope.

It's brutal to hear a 17-year-old argue that performing sex acts in front of strangers is a fulfilling vocation for him—not to mention seeing the other young men and women deceived by this lie.

It's brutal to see a veteran reporter come to the realization that she herself is willing to exploit someone if it means furthering her career.

It's brutal to see parents and husbands and wives learn, too late in some cases, how badly they've failed one another.

It's brutal to watch Disconnect, an unflinching movie—and unflinchingly graphic at times—that paints a dark portrait of the even darker side of our technological age.

«Captain Fantastic» - Film Review & Official Trailer

A story of love and extremes, the pleasurably freewheeling “Captain Fantastic” centers on a family that has found its bliss in splendid, unplugged isolation. Somewhere in deepest Oregon, amid the tall pines and soaring mountains, young and old hunt and holler and drop lines from Noam Chomsky. The clan’s father isn’t a superhero, but because he’s played by Viggo Mortensen he’s the next best thing. Mr. Mortensen, whose intensity has the sting of possession, has a way of making you believe his characters can do whatever they set their minds to: fly, leap over buildings, save the world.

Mostly, though, Ben Cash takes care of his children. For years, he and his ailing dream of a wife, Leslie (Trin Miller), have been living with their six kids, who range in age from 7 to 18, on a compound where they have thrived beautifully without electricity, a sewer line or trend alerts about the Kardashians. By day, Ben teaches and trains the children, racing them through the woods like Olympians or Special Forces soldiers. At night, the family plays music together and reads by firelight — leafing through books one page at a time — before bedding down in the communal tepee.

Perhaps it all sounds fairly ridiculous, like a story about a little survivalist house in the woods or the start of a joke about puritanical parenting (no gluten, no grease) that has Gwyneth Paltrow as its punch line. But lifestyle doesn’t begin describe the Cash family’s alternative reality, and despite all the self-aware joking this isn’t a goof. From the moment the movie opens on a deer hunt — in a scene that suggests “Apocalypse Now” by way of “Lord of the Flies” — the writer-director Matt Ross makes it clear he has something weightier in store than mindful napping and snacks.

It begins with a sweep of green, a flash of silver and a smear of red. Discreetly staged and shot, rightly serious and intimate, the hunt turns out to be a rite of passage for the family’s eldest son, the teenager Bo (George MacKay). It’s all very solemn, but also over quickly, and Mr. Ross has soon shifted focus to the stream of younger children straggling out of the woods. Faces and bodies smeared in mud, they are a mesmerizing, surreal spectacle — one of the smallest, a Dennis Hopper-esque runt, wears what looks like a skinned bobcat for a hat. Soon, everyone is laughing while washing off the dirt and blood, a cleansing that gives the movie something of a sustained metaphor.

At first, the outside world looms in “Captain Fantastic” through its stark absence, even though the compound is well-equipped and stocked with necessities from that world, including sharp knives, heavy books and bales of mismatched clothes. Ben and Leslie have opted to live in seclusion as a matter of principle, having embraced protest as an ideal. At its loftiest, their profound seclusion suggests that they’re spiritual and philosophical heirs to an isolationist like Henry Thoreau; at worst, it suggests fanaticism, cultishness, selfishness. Touchingly, the children sometimes seem closer to the castaways of the Swiss Family Robinson, whose self-reliance was involuntary.

American movies about families tend to come in two flavors: the upbeat (the mainstream default) and the catastrophic (the indie brand). “Captain Fantastic” tries hard to find a third way. The story kicks in when a death forces most of the family off the compound and on the road, where they have silly and sober encounters with strangers and relatives on the way to a collective epiphany. (Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, Frank Langella and Ann Dowd fill out the familial ranks.) Along the way, Ben keeps on keeping on about the evils of capitalism while his children discover themselves and other people, including in a sweet, trailer-park stay where Bo learns how to kiss a girl.

If “Captain Fantastic” doesn’t cram all of human experience into that box we like to call the dysfunctional family — a category that suggests that all anyone needs to get through Thanksgiving is therapy talk and a group hug — it’s partly because its characters have politics, not simply feelings. The Cash children stumble, but they’re supremely capable and self-aware. What makes them unusual isn’t their knife skills; it’s that they talk seriously about ideas. The same holds true of Ben, whose worldview falters only because Mr. Ross seems anxious to soften the extremes he’d sharpened. There’s something moving about his search for balance, something a little pleading too.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Mr. Ross ends up nudging “Captain Fantastic” into more generic terrain. He never sells out his characters, but after all the radical power-to-the people talk he finally comes down on the side of compromise and the soft landing. It’s left to Mr. Mortensen, who can make menace feel like vulnerability — and turn vulnerability into a confession — to keep the movie from slipping into sentimentality. He’s the most obvious reason to see it, although Mr. Ross’s insistence on taking your intelligence for granted is itself a great turn on. His characters don’t need smartphones to do their thinking for them; he assumes the same holds true of his audience.