UPPER END
It was 1993 and I was just out of high school, going to a packed house to see Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs were pretty nasty in "Park" and well, they're even nastier in The End of Oak Street (my latest review). "Oak Street", yeah it takes place in Michigan until Michigan starts to look like some prehistoric landscape from millions of years ago. "We can't leave." Uh, you got that right chief. You sure got that right.
Reflecting on theropod vehicles of the past and near present, The End of Oak Street is definitely a retread, having denizens run for their lives in order to not get swallowed up by T. rex and its merry meat-eaters. The runtime is a tight 100 minutes, the soundtrack by Michael Giacchino has a certain Afterschool Special residue to it, the setting is 1982, and the old school zoom shots by helmer David Robert Mitchell will have you saying "tubular" before you even know it. "I think our neighborhood and whole street has moved." Yikes.
So OK, "Oak Street" has solid casting in the forms of Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor and the critics (including this one) have been pretty positive in their nostalgic assessments. Despite a rather pat ending and some cliched tyke characters, The End of Oak Street is still a thrill ride that never lets up, a kind of Spielbergian, Super 8 hybrid that's so suburbia acute you might actually question its PG-13 rating (I initially thought it was a borderline R). I mean if you ignore the fact that "Oak Street" came out in the dog days of summer and it just had to compete with Hathaway's other pic, the massive blockbuster The Odyssey, you'll find a succinct surprise here, a sci-fi wormhole-r that Robert Zemeckis would have made in between Back to the Future and that movie about a rascally rabbit (you know which one I'm talking about). Fleet "street".
Written by Jesse Burleson
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