Terri (2011)

Fantastic!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

Blistering performances.

Cute movie with likable Jonah Hill clone, Jacob Wysocki, about an awkward, overweight non-conformist and his relationship with his understanding principal and chief advocate (John C. Reilly), his interactions with his dysfunctional friends and family, and his dysfunctional interface with the straight world at large.Terri is more of a darkly comic, bittersweet ballad than a film with a decisive progression from Point A to Point B; nothing is resolved, and Terri neither receives particularly sound advice, nor gains any meaningful epiphanies into how to make life easier for himself.Despite this, we do get the impression by the movie's end that Terri has at least stepped onto the long path to self-actualization. The film takes a cue from A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), repeating that story's poignant message that the world isn't going to come to an end just because you fail to meet mainstream society's expectations, and that it's OK to be who you are.

My Score: 5.6Terri is not a movie meant to wow you and primarily is a film about the struggle of a young 15 year old named Terri to get through everyday life. He is overweight, a social reject, wears pajamas to school, and lives with a dying uncle to name a few. It is fair to say that this movie is fairly depressing, but it has some comic relief.Terri is played by Jacob Wysocki, who gives a great performance and overall the acting is impressive. John C. Reilly is very solid as Principal Fitzgerald. Truthfully, the story doesn't offer much outside of the struggles of an overweight 15 year old, who is having to deal with a ton of unfortunate stress. I would only recommend to viewers who are interested in seeing a movie that really is about a struggling teen as it offers very little outside of that.

A comedy drama? They could have fooled me. "Terri, you're so funny," says the blond. Which Terri has she been watching?"Terri" is yet another non-saga about an outsider, another lone-boy/misfit tale that the world of film doesn't necessarily need. A dull fat kid hates his life, and he has every reason to. If I had to carry that much extra weight around with me then I'd jump off the first bridge – or go on an extreme diet; no third option there. But it's this third option of Terri just walking around depressed and glum that the movie focuses on, which is admittedly how it is in real life. (It is this inertness and lack of self-initiative that gets fatties into their unhealthy predicaments in the first place). As if we hadn't seen it all before, on film or in real life.Fat Boy has his reasons for being obese and undisciplined (as much as having layers of flab during teenage years can ever be justified), but it's hard to care that much. Perhaps if Chubbs were more interesting or at least a little more animated. While I do not support direct verbal abuse of obese people (ridiculing them behind their XXXL backs is perfectly fine), especially abuse of lard-ass kids, in any kind of public situation, I do nevertheless believe that most fatties need some amount of harassment and abuse in order to wake and smell the coffee, a reminder that the excessive crap they're carrying around with them isn't anything they should ever get used to. For those who don't change their gluttonous ways even after they'd been mocked for the umpteenth time and can barely get out of bed without the aid of a crane or three strong wrestlers, they don't deserve either our time or our pity. Terri's P.E. teacher is right on the money with his criticism of Blob Kid. Terri's response to whether he wants to participate in P.E. class is a resounding "no". If I were that teacher I'd have him crawling on all fours until he's blue/red/yellow/green in the face and until he'd vomited his last five bean-based breakfasts."Terri" has no point to make, aside from a few observations about "the human condition", which is, I guess, why this movie's poster is full of those useless-movie-festival and hopelessly-deluded-critics' quotes that are supposed to elevate a merely solid movie into the status of a minor classic. Indeed, the writer/director was obviously clueless about how to end the movie, which is why it has no real ending; no conclusion, no main event, nothing tangible to wrap up the story in a meaningful way. This might as well be the first episode in a TV mini-series.That wasn't the only part of the script the writer/director was unsure about. He must have been puzzled how to make Terri and the blond beauty interact (considering how relatively boring he had made the title character) in Blubber-Boy's house, so he inserted the highly predictably plot-device of Chad interfering with their first meeting/date, acting as a catalyst to the movie's worst and dumbest moments.Speaking of which, while Terri at least appears like a reality-based character i.e. someone we can believe actually exists on planet Earth, Chad doesn't – in the slightest. Chad is one of those absurd dime-a-dozen High-School-movie inventions of the sort that we'd already seen in countless cliché teen flicks about very fictional kids. Even worse, this badly written part was also badly miscast; giving it to some skinny little runt-of-the-litter loser kid who can't weigh more than 35 pounds was just adding insult to injury. (I suppose we were supposed to find the body contrast between the heavyweight and the ultra-featherweight kids very amusing.) Both Chad's character and the actor who plays him are highly annoying, adding nothing to the story except unnecessary nonsense. Chad's overly adult (hence absurd) humour and the illogical amounts of confidence he carries (for a runt of his kind) weigh down the director's attempts at realism. The film hits its low point when Chad gets high and starts urinating on his pants, a ludicrous scene that must have caused that deranged, empty-headed buffoon Harmony Korine ("Ken Park") to cry out: "I wish I'd thought of that!" Perhaps John Waters would have gladly done it too, in one of his older movies. Chad offering his tiny pecker to the blond was just as absurd; perhaps a scene more fitting in a "Porky's" movie.That whole awful blond-comes-over-to-Terri's-house segment utterly sinks whatever seriousness or momentum the film had built up until that point. It failed comedically too – in case that had been the writer/director's goal, which is hard to tell. In fact, there wasn't one moment in the movie that I could label as truly funny. There was a handful of mildly amusing moments, but that's about it. Terri should have signed up for an episode of MTV's "Made"; that would have been funnier and no less "poignant". In reality, the blond would have wanted Terri only as a friend; the fact that this experienced harlot wants him sexually, drugged or not, has no basis in reality.The pajama-wearing hasn't an iota of realism, nor does the masturbation scene; these kids would have done it in the toilet.The movie does have a solid look though, and the dialogue (apart from Chad's) is generally OK. Reilly's school principal has some originality, and ultimately this should have been a story about him, not the fat kid who needs the boob-job. I'd like to use this opportunity to recommend Ricky Gervais's stand-up comedy, during which he often has a lengthy segment in which he ridicules obesity. It's some of the funniest stuff I'd seen in a while.

Hollywood films have their clichés, but so do Sundance indies as well. We've all sat through underwritten sensitive stories about loners where so much of what is going on is "left unsaid." It's a fine line between poetically subtle and just plain underwritten, and this film falls in the latter category. Who is Terri? Why is he the way he is? Who are any of these people? And none of the relationships here are at all interesting. Nor is there any attempt to provide any kind of psychological insight. Several times characters are confronted about their behavior (Terri in gym class, the girl regarding a sexual encounter, the principal in his office), only to shrug and fail to offer any insight. There's no "there" here. It's an empty bag, a "Sundance favorite" that has nothing to offer. This is something anyone could have written over a weekend. It's been 6 decades since Holden Caufield, and yet people still try to do the sensitive teen thing. Rent Rushmore instead.