Here are two suprisingly similar films, both about a ‘charming’ stranger who comes to down (I meant to type town, but comes down also seems right) and disrupts and exploits the weaknesses of a family – Baptist evangelicals in the case of “The King”:http:\/\/www.channel4.com\/film\/reviews\/film.jsp?id=147379, and a down at heel Californian family in “Down in the Valley”:http:\/\/www.rottentomatoes.com\/m\/down_in_the_valley\/. This male stranger starts off attractive, charming, mysterious -almost with no background, seductive, offering something authentic in the face of a not-quite-functioning family\/society. In both, the target, at least initially, is a rebellious or would-be rebellious teenage daughter, but a brother is drawn in in both films – though with very different consequences.<\/p>\n
Guns and weapons figure large in both as property of both the father (the menace of American force behind the veneer of civilisation and\/or religion) and in the hands of the outsider who uses them more appealingly but with no less, or actually, more destructive effect.<\/p>\n
This outsider is ambiguous, offering energy and a relationship to teenage children that parents\/fathers\/step-fathers can’t seem to, but he ends up offering or delivering something quite unambiguous in its destructiveness – a devil in The King, and a disturbed, disowned and hurt young criminal in the Valley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here are two suprisingly similar films, both about a ‘charming’ stranger who comes to down (I meant to type town, but comes down also seems right) and disrupts and exploits the weaknesses of a family – Baptist evangelicals in the case of “The King”:http:\/\/www.channel4.com\/film\/reviews\/film.jsp?id=147379, and a down at heel Californian family in “Down in the…Read more The King and Down in the Valley<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/obliquepanic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}