64/100
Second viewing (last seen at ND/NF '09), down from 75. Still agree with what I wrote at the time (see below), but its virtues now strike me as more modest, notable primarily for what Bechis avoids. Also wish there'd been some followup to the opening scene—indigenous Brazilians collecting pay and donning their street clothes after standing on a riverbank looking "tribal" for tourists makes for a superb reveal, but the self-exploitation angle never resurfaces thereafter. Well worth a look…
42/100
A.V. Club review, in which I sadly couldn't find room for my favorite moment: Luke Wilson's football coach, who doubles as a math/science teacher, inviting a student up to the blackboard to show the rest of the class how he figured out that 16/4 = 4. The kid gets angry "(You're the teacher, you explain it!") and the scene abruptly ends, but I'm dying to know how this film's three credited screenwriters imagine that it might have continued, since the only plausible answer is "Uh, I memorized my times tables when I was six."
(These are high school students, to be clear.)
