Igby Goes Down may be familiar to you as the flick what has the younger brother of Macaulay Culkin in it. You may have heard that it has something to do with the sarcasm and the Bohemians. You may have read about the wit and the comedy contained herein. You may or may not have heard that it's pretty good.
Several of these nuggets of accepted wisdom, however, turn out to be somewhat misleading. There's wit and comedy, sure, but there's also misanthropy, nihilism and Ryan Phillipe.
On the plus side, though, this film has not one, but two Culkins propping up the credits, both playing the same character. Really, it's enough to get a Culkinologist all worked up is what.
And to remain with the Culkinology for a paragraph or two, let us ponder where, pray tell, this film what goes by the name of Igby Goes Down might fit amongst the Culkin canon. The answer is to be found somewhere in the darker chasms of said filmography, somewhere alongside The Good Son, where Macaulay played an uppity youngster with a thirst for the murder, or the video for Sunday by Sonic Youth, where Macaulay played a youngster with a thirst for making kissy faces at the camera. This Igby affair is quite like that, except with much better music.
It does, however, have at least one delightful reference to Culkin senior's more light-hearted work; When Igby approaches a hotel clerk, wearing a woollen hat with floppy ears, and explains how he'll be staying in a room on his own, on account of his mom has gone off someplace, The Duke was filled with a nostalgic euphoria and sundry memories of Home Alone 2 - Lost In New York.
Really, the only thing missing was a woman covered in pigeons.
Kieran Culkin plays the Igby of the title, a sarcastic adolescent burdened with a highly luxurious lifestyle and a family full of drug-addicts and schizophrenics and Young Republicans. He spends much of his young existence getting thrown around from one school to another, on account of no-one wants to have him as a student, even though his brother was in Richie Rich.
Basically, this is one of your Bohemian-slacker type affairs. All the characters are either heroin-riddled actresses or performance artists or extremely wealthy landowners. Except for Igby, who is in fact a spoilt, foul-mouthed malcontent.
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