Gasoline Rainbow

I was really looking forward to this, a road-trip, coming-of-age film shot from eastern Oregon to the Pacific coast with a group of rural kids looking to expand their worldly horizons. It was shot decently enough but the problem is there wasn't much to shoot in terms of plot and character development. I love "hang-out films" but I need to know who the hell it is I'm hanging out with and this just leaves it all up to the imagination who these people are.

Granted, in my view, you do get to know them in the sense that they seem like good kids. It was refreshing not to see this turn into some 'Kids'-like doomsday view of America's future. There is no development however, and its simply unsustainable for a film nearly two hours to be lacking so severely in both that and plot. These missing pieces are very glaring by the film's end where it seems to be relying heavily on coming-of-age tropes - uplifting, revelatory music cues over scenes where not much is actually happening sticks out the most to me - to squeeze some sort of emotion out of the audience.

Overall there's nothing inherently bad here, it's just missing a lot of elements that would've made this work. I appreciated the cast, and the overall positive vibes, but it all just kind of floated along without a core story beyond "Im bored let's go driving." We've all been there, and it simply doesn't make for a feature-length film. I felt NOTHING.