Harry + Max (Harry and Max) (2003)
Average Rating: 3.2/10
Reviews Counted: 22
Fresh: 1 | Rotten: 21
Despite impressive performances from its leads, Harry and Max is prurient, disturbing, and underdeveloped.
Average Rating: 3.2/10
Critic Reviews: 9
Fresh: 1 | Rotten: 8
Despite impressive performances from its leads, Harry and Max is prurient, disturbing, and underdeveloped.
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Average Rating: 2.7/5
User Ratings: 432
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Movie Info
Following up his critically acclaimed third film, 2001's The Sleepy Time Gal, filmmaker Christopher Munch helmed this dramedy about a pair of brothers who embark on a camping trip together. Harry (Bryce Johnson) is the eldest of the two, a 23-year-old former teen idol who has stopped off for the long-promised expedition while en route to a gig in Japan. Max (Cole Williams) is Harry's 16-year-old younger brother, a burgeoning pop star himself. As the siblings begin spending time together in
Feb 4, 2005 Wide
Jul 20, 2005
TLA Releasing
Cast
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Bryce Johnson
Harry -
Cole Williams
Max -
Tom Gilroy
Josiah -
Rain Phoenix
Nikki -
Justin Zachary
Jordan -
Michelle Phillips
Mother -
Roni Deitz
Roxanne -
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-
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All Critics (23) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (2) | Rotten (21) | DVD (2)
Seems like the work of a novice, with self-conscious expository passages and emotionally false conversations.
Top CriticTo consider Harry and Max as being about incestuous feelings would be shortchanging it, because the film is really about the evolving nature of love and the need to define it.
Provocative without being especially thoughtful or credible.
Too superficial to shock or surprise.
Director Christopher Munch deftly raises disturbing questions, but he fumbles badly when groping for answers.
There are brave, boundary-breaching movies, and there are mad, foolhardy ones. Harry and Max belongs to the latter breed.
As disturbing and unsettling as the subject matter is what is truly sad is that the performances of the two leads were impressive and they ended up being wasted by the trash content of the script.
Though Williams and Johnson fit comfortably into the European naturalism that's become Münch's stock in trade, they can't quite wriggle out of his high-concept premise and become plausibly real.
The actors are tender and raw and believable as boy band fodder.
...incest...pedophilia...the film seems to be nothing more than an attempt to affirm a sense of I'm-OK-you're-OK normality for any viewers with such issues in their own lives.
You watch this prurient would-be porn, treated with kid-glove 'sensitivity,' in a state of disbelief.
The movie is a congeries of half-formed ideas about pansexuality and other social taboos, but Munch fails to accomplish what he seemingly sets out to do.
The blurred boundary between intimacy and sexuality ... isn't broached with the sensitivity and maturity that it demands.
Harry and Max is writer-director Christopher Munch's seemingly candid exorcism of any number of self-consciously naughty fantasies.
Chatty scenes ramble on and on, supporting characters are underdeveloped, and all the sibs' angst does little to make their tortured relationship very credible or interesting.
The film winds up dancing around the 500-lb gorilla in the middle of the room rather than facing the pathology of its real subject head-on.
Intermittently insightful, but a disappointment from the talented Munch.
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