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Okay, yeah, this is an odd one on the surface. We here on Please Consume always strive to help you think about film in new and interesting ways. Today is no exception.
Tyler Clark
July 12, 2023
Good morning Consumers. This is Please Consume, the newsletter that loves the Godfather and Fast Five equally.
Holes (2003)
Okay, yeah, this is an odd one on the surface.
We here on Please Consume always strive to help you think about film in new and interesting ways. Today is no exception.
We want to take a chance to reexamine this film and hopefully give you a better appreciation for it. We understand this might sound like a stretch. When we first pitched this, one of our team members said, “I remember loving that movie, but is it good?”
To answer their question, yes! Holes is actually very good! So let’s talk about it.
Our Relationship to Shia
If you know anything about the movie industry, you probably know that Shia Lebouf’s career has been, as Shakepeare would probably put it, a defecation production.
Starting from his roots as a child actor on Even Stevens, Lebouf eventually got the starring role in Transformers in which he reportedly alienated costar Megan Fox. He engaged in bar fights and self destructive art pieces.
He tried to make up for the sins of his past with the breathtaking Honey Boy, but it just ended up being yet another toxic environment for the people involved, at the hands of LeBouf.
There’s a reason why spoilers for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Lebouf’s character, Mutt Williams, is unceremoniously killed off-screen in “the war”.
End Spoilers
For people in my age range (early 20s) this is kind of a seminal movie. It's a part of that era of Disney films where they are clearly marketed at a specific gender and age, but when you actually are in the theater, Princess Diaries appears to just be a funny comedy to everyone and National Treasure plays to the adventurer in all of us. They’re movies for the whole family!
Rewatching this movie made me realize how much it informed my taste in a lot of ways. I prefer to use warm tones. I like comedy that’s zany with fully committed performers. I'm frustrated with flashbacks in movies. I love Tim Blake Nelson. And most importantly, I owe a lot of my music taste to this film.
To this day I love Moby, Beck, and of course, the artists known as the D-Tent Boys!
This is a real chicken or egg situation, though. Did I like this movie because it fit what would later become my taste or did it become my taste because I watched it so much as a kid.?
No matter which it is, I love it all the same. But I wasn’t prepared for what came next…
What Came Next?
Holes is weirdly filled with a lot of social commentary.
Again we say, stay with us on this and we can explain ourselves.
Rewatch Holes as an adult. It’s a film that carries with it discussions of prison reform, forced labor, racial and socio-economic discrepancies in our justice system in a way that would be loaded for a “movie for grown-ups”.
Holes is, after all, the story of a kid that lives in a two bedroom apartment with his mom, dad, and grandfather who goes to a work camp after being sent there by a judge who feels no empathy after the kid’s first offense and is seen as a PR stunt to show off the caring nature of a famed athlete.
Once there, he is surrounded by delinquents who the system has failed or ignored.
Namely Zero, an illiterate young man whom the camp wants to keep from learning to read and write because he is their best free labor.
All this is done under the guise of self improvement and character building. The film very clearly echoes many problems in our prison reform system such as “social workers” who are just there to check off boxes and don’t care for the children who are being absolutely grinded by this system.
It’s a privately owned prison (to which there are 411 currently being operated in the US) that is looking for ways to keep people in the system and keep the government out of their business because, in their mind, if you lose inmates you lose your revenue streams.
Holes, weirdly, is a film that touches on all these themes and today's clip shows off a lot of them.
Today’s Scene
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