Second Chance Theater: Home of the Giants

By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 5, 2008 5:18PM

A movie we saw at last year's Chicago International Film Festival has a return engagement at the Midwest Independent Film Festival this Tuesday, and it's got our seal of approval. Home of the Giants was one of our surprise favorites last year, partially because going in we weren't expecting much from a high school crime thriller starring Haley Joel Osment. But we were impressed:

Osment plays Gar, a journalist on the school paper who serves as unofficial mascot to the basketball team's hotshot star, Matt, who uses him to to get rides around town and stroke his ego. When Matt's no-good brother gets out of prison and hatches a plan for a robbery, you know things are going to go south pretty fast. And when a girl on the school paper realizes something's fishy, she starts doing a little digging.

Set in Indiana but mostly shot in North Carolina, local director Rusty Gorman's movie is a modest affair, which makes its clear-eyed dissection of high school hypocrisy and fresh-faced corruption that much more satisfying. Riverton High is the kind of place where the journalism teacher angrily explains that "we don't write articles that bad-mouth the team," while every post-game celebration seems to center on the local Wendy's. Gar faces a tug of war between his sense of right and wrong and his hero-worship for Matt. The ending tries to have things both ways, but it's a minor flaw in a movie that consistently offers up surprises. When the story goes into thriller mode it actually works because these are well-drawn characters instead of just plot devices.

Gorman will be at the screening for a Q & A. A pre-show cocktail reception kicks things off at 6:00 and the film starts at 7:30. It all takes place at the Landmark Century in Lakeview.

Osment is about to make his Broadway debut in a revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo, directed by the Goodman Theater's Robert Falls. Mamet's classic concerns a trio of would-be thieves who hang out at a Chicago junk shop. The cast in this new production also includes John Leguizamo and Cedric the Entertainer. Weirdest cast ever?