{"id":725,"date":"2007-09-20T05:35:49","date_gmt":"2007-09-20T09:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinemacrazed.wordpress.com\/?p=725"},"modified":"2007-09-20T05:35:49","modified_gmt":"2007-09-20T09:35:49","slug":"twelve-and-holding-2005","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/20\/twelve-and-holding-2005\/","title":{"rendered":"Twelve and Holding (2005)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SbktrSn\"<\/a>This, ladies and gentlemen, are children. Or preteens. They\u2019re nasty, violent, swear like truckers, and make horrible mistakes. Cuesta creates possibly one of the most exceptional, down to Earth portrayals of childhood and adolescence in the face of tragedy I\u2019ve ever seen, next to \u201cMean Creek\u201d and \u201cStand by Me.\u201d Void of clich\u00e9s, void of any false pretensions and completely void of any fictional happy endings, \u201cTwelve and Holding\u201d is a wonderful depiction of actual children, and that\u2019s a rarity in modern cinema.<\/p>\n

Children live as tools in family cinema for as long as film has existed, and Cuesta depicts children that are far from Disney icons, whose life and death depends on what seem like minimal trials in their lives. Filmed with a handheld realism and ominous adventurous preamble, \u201cTwelve and Holding\u201d is leading to something horrible, and the viewer can feel it from minute one. And Cuesta leads in with his actual narrative by delivering with what is an incredibly disturbing opening twenty minutes that rightly establishes our characters, and attaches us to them with strings that will leave us anxious to discover how they deal with this horrible tragedy. \u201c12 and Holding\u201d simply had me grasping my head in shock, and Cuesta doesn\u2019t vie for shock value, he simply just suggests a horrific crime amidst cries, and oncoming events, and then follows through with a blunt punch to the gut. What Cuesta\u2019s drama really involves is progression; progression into adult hood, progression into teenage adolescence, all of which are done in the face of tragedy.<\/p>\n

We watch Leonard, a morbidly obese boy learning that he must drastically change his weight and dietary habits in the face of scrutiny and torture from his classmates and complacent parents, Malee learns about love and crushing as she begins menstruating, and Jacob, Rudy\u2019s twin must learn to be an individual when his twin Rudy is involved in the horrible accident in the introduction of the film. Meanwhile the parents grieve in their own forms as his parents bicker over every trivial issue including the punishment of the bullies, and while his father enlists a complete demolition of the site where Rudy died. \u201cTwelve and Holding\u201d involves a group of young children forced to grow up early just as they\u2019re blossoming into their teens. They come face to face with a death and must learn how to cope with that as new issues and developments introduce themselves; it\u2019s an endless conundrum that\u2019s handled with sheer finesse thanks to Cipriano\u2019s excellent writing. The film is at once disturbing and yet so completely realistic.<\/p>\n

He never resorts to reducing our characters to simplified text book archetypes, and the excellent performances from our young cast is also a helpful aspect. \u201cI want to kill them,\u201d Jacob says about the inadvertent murderers, \u201cI can handle a year in prison.\u201d One of the most fascinating sub-plots involves Malee\u2019s charming and at times completely inappropriate friendship\/crush with her mother\u2019s therapy patient Gus (played with sheer strength by Jeremy Renner) that make for some rather insightful moments that show that some of these characters, thrown into adult issues, are willing to accept adulthood even when it\u2019s far beyond their grasp and understanding. Her intent on charming him, even by listening to his therapy sessions, make for even more burning social themes in this disturbing amalgam.<\/p>\n

Leonard\u2019s complete loss of taste enables him to see food as an option not worth exploring with usual gluttony, and that inspires him to gain a new outlook which he finds his parents aren\u2019t willing to help him with (\u201cYou shouldn\u2019t eat apples all the time, it\u2019s unhealthy\u201d Leonard\u2019s mom says with sheer conviction). \u201cTwelve and Holding\u201d shows the example of innocence lost in a cruel world, and children forced to grow up and decide by this loss of a friend whether they want to revert back their old habits, or gain a new perspective for better or for worse. Jacob begins to wreak his own form of personal vengeance on the boys that killed his brother and it\u2019s a clear indicator of the person he will soon become. He centers his life around this tragedy, as his parents crumble under the weight of the grief, and constantly appears at the detention center of the culprits to mentally torture them.<\/p>\n

Rudy\u2019s clearly the character who may progress into a bitter shell, and Cipriano never shies away from his digression into this form. \u201c12 and Holding\u201d displays three children who may forever grasp on to their childhood issues, and will never evolve beyond what they were thrown into, and the issues dealt are disturbing and yet utterly true to life. Do any of us ever really let go of our childhood? Cuesta\u2019s film is the perfect summary of innocence lost in the face of childhood adolescence. It\u2019s the picture of children shaped by tragedy that will inevitably decide how they live as adults. Excellent performances, wonderful writing, and a sheer sense of realism peg this as one of the best films of this sub-genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This, ladies and gentlemen, are children. Or preteens. They\u2019re nasty, violent, swear like truckers, and make horrible mistakes. Cuesta creates possibly one of the most exceptional, down to Earth portrayals of childhood and adolescence in the face of tragedy I\u2019ve ever seen, next to \u201cMean Creek\u201d and \u201cStand by Me.\u201d Void of clich\u00e9s, void of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[225,240,302,1013,1020,1033,1087],"class_list":["post-725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-coming-of-age","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-suspense","tag-t","tag-teen","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}