Events Transpiring Before, During, and After a High School Basketball Game Parent Guide

Although classes are done for the day, there’s plenty of activity at Middleview High School in the year 1999. The basketball team is preparing to face a formidable opponent - a rival team which has gone undefeated for three years straight. Assistant Coach Brent (Andrew Phung) is determined to try a new offensive strategy, although actual Coach Davidson (Paul Cowling) is just as determined not to. Ken (Jay Morberg), one of the referees, has given in and against his better judgement allowed his wife to drop their dog off at the school while she goes to take care of her sister. A radical student drama club has just been informed that their take on King Lear (which involves hanging an effigy of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien) has been banned by the school and begin planning their protest.

This is one of those indie movies that isn’t really about anything specifically. Instead, it focuses on the bizarre experience of being a high school student with uncanny accuracy. The closest thing to a theme the film has is the terribly overwrought pretension which seems to burden teenagers – one of those things that you don’t notice at the time but which haunts every recollection of your past. I’m no exception: If I met a younger version of myself, I’d just as soon clobber myself with a tire iron. There’s no moral lesson about that specifically teenage ennui, just a joking look at how silly it looks in hindsight.

As such, the film also shows some of the behaviors teenagers engage in – including profanity, smoking weed, and streaking. In fairness, that last one is pretty uncommon, but as someone who’s been to high school in the last century or so, I can attest to the accuracy of the first two. Not that this makes for suitable family viewing, but that’s primarily due to the profanity.

Events Transpiring is only 75 minutes in length, meaning you can practically watch the movie faster than you can read its absurdly overlong title. But that is, in fact, a good thing. This is at best a series of loosely related vignettes and dragging that out longer than absolutely necessary would have made this an ordeal. Instead, it’s an amusing diversion, but nothing more.