Shot like those old Bruce Weber homoerotic prepubescent ads for Calvin Klein and scored with wind chimes, raindrops, and grunts, Cam Archer’s feature about a 13-year-old boy with a crush on a high-school wrestler (Patrick White) is willfully inscrutable. Only a few words are spoken throughout, and it takes a good 17 minutes before you even learn the name of the lead character, Logan (Malcolm Stumpf, a prettier Wiley Wiggins). An exercise in the artsy and fartsy, Wild Tigers owes as much to Jonathan Caouette’s skittering, self-reflexive doc Tarnation as it does to the early movies of exec producer Gus Van Sant. On the one hand, you want to applaud Archer for making a movie that asks you to feel more than follow; his film is less story than mood music—a sad song about a troubled, needy outsider trying to find his way in. The best scenes are those between Logan and his pal Joey, an outer-space-obsessed nerdling who makes lists of ways to be cool (“Mohawk, designer shades, subscribe to Vice“) that are genuine, funny, and sad. But the film is more a feat of look-at-me-Ma derring-do than something resonant, meaningful, and just the slightest bit moving.
Wild Tigers I Have Known
Gay tween longing presented without leering (or coherence).