Summer Roads

The scouts

Road-trip-to-meet-your-hero is basically the most well-trodden coming-of-age shorthand imaginable; if Pang's doing anything here that subverts the form, it's buried under so much whimsy that I honestly can't find it.

A competent execution of the road-movie form with clear emotional beats and a sense of genuine tenderness in the friendship—the kind of assured, unflashy work that programs well alongside festival darlings, even if it doesn't quite linger.

There's a specific choice in how Pang frames the two characters in the car—something about the timing of cuts and the silence between dialogue that makes the friendship feel lived-in rather than performed, and that single commitment to understatement carries the whole thing.