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Earthquake Weather is a film evocative of the great character studies and cinematic moods of The Graduate, The Ice Storm, You Can Count on Me, and the Last Wave.
Set in contemporary Los Angeles Earthquake Weather is the story of a family on the brink of collapse. As things fall apart, the corrosive effects of our society on human relationships are revealed. The four members of a middle class family living in a faded modern home on the bluffs of Los Angeles become filters into a world permeated with anxiety, restlessness, fear, and rage. The 22 year-old daughter Alex, while bright and beautiful, struggles with the loss of her political idealism and the horrifying prospect of replacing her lofty ideas of humanity with something cheap, fast, and far less meaningful. Her brother Jonathan, a portrait of contrived detachment, burns with a nihilistic restlessness; their father, a gentle man in his late 60¹s, implodes as all he has worked for vanishes in the aftermath of a corporate takeover; and their German-born mother, clinging to her version of a promised American dream, disintegrates.
Like the weather the title describes, the film is about the intersection between our mental and physical environment a stultified, airless world filled only with hollow promises and growing helplessness where characters are literally straining for breath.
Alex and her brother find themselves alone in the home they grew up in - stuck in a nether world between their past and their futures. Each will have to find a way to create a life out of what has been left to them both by their family and their culture. They are forced to confront a world filled with quick fixes but no lasting answers to the anxiety and emptiness it provokes. The cacophony of cheerful consumerism that saturates their world grows more sinister as suffering deepens and a real and abiding meaning to life threatens to allude them.
Ultimately Earthquake Weather is an inspiring story of renuion and love as the bonds of a brother and sister and the love of a stranger allow these characters to find vindication and redemption in a world where everything seems to have gone terribly wrong.
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