The Three Potatoes

8th October 2008
Rocket Science (2007)

Director: Jeffrey Blitz
Writer: Jeffrey Blitz
Starring: Reece Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Nicholas D'Agosto, Vincent Piazza

A high school boy with a stutter is recruited by an ambitious girl to join the debating team.

The only other work I've seen from Nicholas D'Agosto is from Heroes (yes, he's West) and I am happy to see he's not annoying by nature. Ben Wekselbaum (D'Agosto) is a debating legend who up and disappears, leaving his debating team mate Ginny (Anna Kendrick) short of a partner. Enter Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson), a boy who doesn't have much drive and his stutter doesn't help. For her own reasons, Ginny decides that Hal would be the perfect addition to the debate team, citing great potential he clearly doesn't see in himself. At home, Hal and his brother Earl (Vincent Piazza) are less than excited when his mother begins to date a new man (Stephen Park) with a son (Aaron Yoo) who goes to their school. Romantic dramas, growing pains and social discomfort are the battles Hal must fight. Writer/director Jeffrey Blitz also had a stutter and joined a debate team to overcome it and we can really appreciate his perspective. Blitz and Thompson's work here has reached out to a lot of viewers with stutters who feel the struggle is finally well represented. I also enjoyed the representation of Koreans in this film. Some argue on the IMDB forums they are yet again stereotyped as 'those zany asians again' while other asians say it's not at all stereotyped. Personally I didn't think they were any more odd than the other characters. And they made definite distinctions between asians and Koreans.

Why does it matter if there are a lot of quirky teen movies out recently? I would far rather have a pick of Juno, Thumbsucker, Napoleon Dynamite, and Rocket Science than have to decide if I'm going to tune into Laguna Beach or MTV's Next featuring real life teen morons.

There are not clear paths to success, no cheesy resolutions, no answers to all the questions, just characters who grow and change and find out more about themselves and what they might be looking for in life. Some may find this boring, others may find it a bit of truth about themselves. That's life, really.