Shared Darkness

A polished technical package lends considerable emotional weight to Supremacy, a siege/hostage drama shot through with racial animus. Based on real events, director Deon Taylor’s movie connects largely on the strength of its solid acting and charged stakes, but suffers a bit from muddled plotting and a dramatically diffuse end game. For the full, original review of the Los Angeles Film Festival premiere, from ShockYa, click here. (Hidden Empire Film Group/Media House Capital, unrated, 106 minutes)

Several years ago, in 2011, multi-hyphenate director Evan Glodell and a group of collaborators with whom he shared a long list of short-form collaborations made a weird little film, saturated in feverish tones, called Bellflower. Whatever one thought of that movie itself as a finished narrative product, its construction was so audacious and of a piece as to almost take one’s breath away. The Signal, directed by Will Eubank, is an extraordinarily different work, but one every bit as charged and shot through with cool assurance and technical savvy. It’s the type of indie offering that cuts right through all the noise and clutter, signaling the arrival of undeniable new talents.



Co-written by director Eubank, his brother Carlyle Eubank and David Frigerio, The Signal, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, unfolds in confident shorthand strokes, its characterizations winnowed down to spare essences. It starts off as a road trip movie. Nic Eastman (Brenton Thwaites), his girlfriend Haley Peterson (Olivia Cooke) and his friend and fellow MIT student Jonah Breck (Beau Knapp) are heading west when they decide upon a detour. A mysterious hacker known only as “NOMAD” has been messing with Nic and Jonah, and when they’re able to pinpoint his location, they decide to pay an unscheduled visit. Their directions lead them to an isolated area, however. Suddenly, there’s a flash.

When Nic regains consciousness, he finds himself trapped in a waking nightmare. He’s groggy and injured, and sealed off to boot from Haley and Jonah. A doctor in a hazmat suit, Wallace Damon (Laurence Fishburne), keeps Nic in isolation, informing him that he believes he may have come into contact with aliens. Eventually Nic escapes his enclosed compound, but encounters a number of strangers (including Lin Shaye) who force him to further re-evaluate his impressions of his situation.

The Signal is nominally a science-fiction-rooted thriller, but it’s powered by mystery more than incident, and dread more than horror. In this this regard, the first act especially is rapturous. The film as a whole is beautiful, though — an experiential treat. Eubank has a previous directorial credit under his belt (the little-seen Love), but has also served as a second unit director and cinematographer on a variety of features. Collaborating here with cinematographer David Lanzenberg, Eubank delivers a movie with a visual template that is alluring and hypnotic — the cinematic equivalent of a lonely drive down a dark desert highway. Composer Nima Fakhrara assists this evocation of mood with a score — a slow piano leitmotif which incorporates droning elements — that connotes a kind of high-brow menace.

That the film’s narrative eventually paints itself into a bit of a corner is perhaps somewhat expected. It’s here, too, where the representational tack of the movie’s first act comes back to bite it in the rear end just a little. While the performances herein are uniformly great, the plot separates Nic, Haley and Jonah, and when the story brings them back together it feels like too much time has passed. A stronger channeling of subjective point-of-view or, conversely, a slightly more conventionally structured narrative of investigation that keeps our frazzled trio together would have rooted The Signal, and afforded it more emotional punching power.

Still, the dark, involving swirl of this thought-provoking low-budget effort — a blend of Moon, The Blair Witch Project, THX-1138 and Chronicle, among other titles — doesn’t let go of a viewer easily. Even if there are some hiccups in its wind-down, there’s nowhere else one would rather be while watching it. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 97 minutes)

A stirring nonfiction sociocultural curiosity that taps into the power of sports to bridge divides and develop kinships across incredible distances, director Mirra Bank’s The Only Real Game tells the story of a small pocket of India obsessed with baseball. Narrated by Academy Award winner Melissa Leo, the film is an involving reminder of the fact that ambassadorships need not be political, and that human understanding and connection turns on a much more intimate axis.



The Only Real Game takes place in Manipur, a remote eastern Indian bordering Burma, beset with 25 percent unemployment plus many other problems — not the least of which is violence which has racked the area since a forced territorial merging post-World War II. Nationalist police, under threat of insurgent attack, operate with impunity, often beating and bullying residents indiscriminately. Caught in the middle are normal residents, who have lived under martial law for decades.

In the land of cricket and soccer, baseball arrived on the wings of war, and quickly found a welcome home. American airmen stationed in Manipur after the Japanese bombing of the region in 1942 would stage games on their bases, which were staffed with locals. Baseball caught on — the seeds planted for future generations of fans. (“It means more to me than having a husband,” says one of the many area women obsessed with the game.) With Muriel Peters’ First Pitch non-profit organization spearheading a charity effort, manufacturer Spalding donates a bunch of equipment and Major League Baseball dispatches two special envoys, Dave Palese and Jeff Brueggemann, to head up clinics and help instruct Manipurian coaches and players alike.

Editorially (if somewhat understandably), the film gets tangled up just a bit in the thicket of history and politics. But Bank is quite smart when it comes to interweaving the stories of the American coaches and their Indian counterparts, striking an easy, engaging balance. And she also finds a nice parallel to the stalled or blocked dreams of several native subjects in the story of Brueggemann’s promising pitching career, derailed by a summer job taken out of economic necessity.

As sad as its surrounding reality is, The Only Real Game has the good sense to still locate and indulge a playful and occasionally dark sense of humor. When Brueggemann and several of his cohorts take a trip into a rebel-controlled area to look at habitats that an architect wants to incorporate into the construction of a proper baseball field and complex, a uniformed military officer says, “This area is very calm — a very calm place,” even as a soldier walks by with a shoulder-mounted bazooka.

In an ending admirably devoid of pat, artificial uplift, there’s no way of knowing whether this simple act of outreach and baseball instruction will help bring the community of Manipur jobs, and/or a measure of peace. But The Only Real Game reminds viewers of the power of shared passions, and the ability of so-called trivialities like sports and the arts to transcend borders and false adversarial designations. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Only Real Game opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall. For information about other screenings and more information on the film in general, click here to visit the movie’s website. (The Only Real Game Movie LLC, unrated, 82 minutes)

A busy, energetically pitched ensemble comedy that ultimately elicits more weariness than laughs, director Tim Story’s follow-up to surprise spring 2012 hit Think Like a Man, adapted from Steve Harvey’s 2009 book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, can’t decide whether it wants to assay modern relationships or just thrash around in the wading pool of Las Vegas-set clichés. It settles for waving its arms, making noise and pointing out that change unsettles all of us, men and women.

Returning scribes Keith Merryman and David. A. Newman ably deliver delineated characters. But they’re so busy servicing the various relationship crises of their couples that there’s a paucity of jokes that push past anything other than the most obvious, surface-level set-ups. If the first film traded on friction between established types (e.g., “The Mama’s Boy,” “The Non-Committer,” “The Player,” “The Girl Who Wants the Ring”), the extent to which the advice of Harvey’s book still serves as an inspiration seems here to be limited to a couple rejoinders and a scratchy, ill-fitting voiceover narration from Kevin Hart, in which he randomly invokes basketball analogies.

Story (Barbershop, the Fantastic Four films) is capable of locating humor amidst resonance, but here he seems beholden to some invisible, overcharged pace car, chasing loud, cheap laughs in a manner that reliably undercuts any moments of more emotionally grounded reality. For the full, complete review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, PG-13, 106 minutes)

A documentary about its titular talent manager, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, directed by writer-actor Mike Myers, has the potential to be a slice of yawning, self-congratulatory star-fuckery of the highest order. After all, in addition to its famous director, it has plenty of recognizable celebrities who all line up to sing the praises of its subject. And yet, thanks to whip-smart pacing, this warm-hearted and unfussy nonfiction valentine emerges as an engaging portrait of a life less ordinary — a man who embraced and promulgated selflessness, even while, in his early days, indulging in druggy partying and frequently sporting a T-shirt that read, “No head, no backstage pass.” For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Radius/TWC, R, 84 minutes)

When one talks about personal filmmaking as a pathway to something special, they’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better example than Evolution of a Criminal, director Darius Clark Monroe’s documentary examination of a bank robbery he committed as a teenager. The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Full Frame Film Festival and part of the Summer Showcase section at the Los Angeles Film Festival, the movie — lent his name by executive producer Spike Lee — is an engrossing evocation of poverty in America, as well as, more pointedly, a moving look at redemption and second chances. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its Facebook page. (Aliquot Films, unrated, 83 minutes)

There wasn’t necessarily reason to attach a lot of expectations to 2012’s 21 Jump Street, starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, but the irreverent and self-referential reboot of the same-named, late-1980s TV series that helped launch the career of Johnny Depp delved into young male anxieties and issues of adolescent-adjacent friendship with considerable aplomb. Its sequel, 22 Jump Street, even more fully embraces and explores masculine relationship dynamics, while also wittily working over like a heavyweight’s speed bag Hollywood’s empty-headed love of franchising. Abundant in charm and loose-limbed energy, it’s a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, possessing everything one wants from a big Hollywood studio action-comedy. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Sony, R, 112 minutes)

A West Coast premiere at the recent Dances With Films Fest, the documentary 120 Days throws an affecting spotlight on the personal side of immigration, telling the story of a man who counts down the final four months with his family while weighing his options facing a federal “voluntary” self-deportation order.



In 1998, Miguel Cortes crossed the Mexican border into the United States. After working for a year, he saved up enough money to send for his wife, Maria Luisa, and two daughters, Yael and Saydrel, paying coyotes to traffic them illegally across the border. In 2005 the family moved to North Carolina, and settled into Raleigh area. They worked hard, paid taxes, broke no laws, settled into the community and enjoyed watching their children grow up.

Things changed when Cortes was stopped by a police officer. Having no driver’s license (banned for illegal immigrants in the state of North Carolina since 2006), he then found himself a victim of an expanded ICE federal mandate, 287(g), which deputizes local law enforcement to check the immigration status of people they pull over. Originally designed to help curb gang-related activity and other violent crimes committed by non-citizen residents, the program is now frequently used as a catch-all to weed out undocumented immigrants of all types. After paying a bond, the judge offers Cortes 120 days to get his affairs in order and return to Mexico. With the clock ticking, Cortes considers leaving his wife and children or changing his name, moving and disappearing into another American city illegally, either alone or with his family.

Contributing occasional narration but otherwise eschewing an investigative tack, director Ted Roach instead chooses to focus more tightly on the Cortes family unit. It’s an approach that yields emotional dividends. Making liberal use of warm home video footage, 120 Days is an atypical family film, but a family film nonetheless — sort of a true-life version, minus the more pronounced criminal desperation and moral compromise, of the same type of razor’s-edge existence dramatized in Chris Weitz’s A Better Life, in which a man goes all-in for the betterment of his loved ones, damn the consequences.

Roach’s film could stand to broaden its focus just a bit — not pulling in talking heads to rehash heated and entrenched positions on the immigration debate, but including more family members. Maria Luisa and the Cortes girls participate freely, and their reminiscences provide the spine of Roach’s film. But it’s revealed late in the movie that two of Maria Luisa’s brothers (and, indeed, many family members) have entered the country illegally, and live in concert with Miguel and Maria Luisa, just across the parking lot in the same apartment complex. While they may have been understandably hesitant to be interviewed on camera, their perspective would have given more clarity to the Cortes’ situation, and also bolstered the strong ribbons of family and community already threaded throughout the movie. This has been the immigrant experience for every ethnic group that has come to America in its history — the development of a pocket of émigrés who support one another, as assimilation then happens by degrees, and the younger generation in particular capitalize on the sacrifices of their parents. Showing the Mexican-American experience of undocumented families to be no different than so many Italian, Irish, Jewish and other families before them would have given the film even stronger resonance.

Still, in addition to its considerable emotional punching power derived from simply watching a loving family being rended apart, 120 Days shows that we as a society can’t and don’t really want to know the full truth about immigration. Cortes is employed gainfully, sings in his church’s choir and works in his community, where he and his wife are honored by the local parks and recreation department for a traditional dance class they teach for youngsters. He has friends who care about him. And he’s the victim of a broken system — but only one of many, sadly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Sammy Slate Productions, unrated, 79 minutes)

A recent presentation at the Julien International Film Festival and a competition title at the Dances With Films Fest in Los Angeles, well-meaning indie effort Being Awesome cycles through well-worn clichés of stuck-in-a-rut, cusp-of-thirtysomething frustration, but adds nothing much new or of interest to the emotionally-adrift-guys subgenre. Written and directed by Allen C. Gardner, it’s a haphazardly staged, genially plotted tale of navel-gazing masculine woe that shouldn’t see much of a life outside the festival circuit. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Open Dialogue Productions, unrated, 80 minutes)

A world premiere and Grand Jury honorable mention selection at the recently concluded 17th annual Dances With Films Fest, writer-director Jesse Rosen’s The Jazz Funeral is a relaxed, shrewdly observed portrait of the sort of crucible that a lot of young men must pass through in entering into a functional, adult, peer relationship with their father. Smart, modulated performances and a professional, unfussy technical package mark this as a superlative indie effort — one that augurs good things for a lot of the young talent involved. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Malvern Productions, unrated, 79 minutes)

An amusing, madcap blend of social satire, character comedy and well-worn road trip tropes, Gone Doggy Gone, co-written and directed by Kasi Brown and Brandon Walter, unfolds against the backdrop of a kidnapped canine. The low-budget indie film effectively winds up a bunch of characters who are by degrees self-centered, delusional and inept, and then spends the remainder of its 89-minute running time bouncing them off one another at odd angles, like rubber balls in a stairwell.



The Best of Fest winner at the First Glance Film Fest and the Audience Award winner at the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in April, Gone Doggy Gone centers on Los Angelenos Abby and Elliott Harmon (Brown and Walter, above), a married professional couple on emotional autopilot who dote on their teacup terrier, Laila, treating her like a baby. After a series of personal and occupational humiliations send their (overly) devoted dog-sitter Jill (Shaina Vorspan) into a tailspin, she snaps and kidnaps Laila, emailing the Harmons a ransom video. Abby and Elliott quickly uncover the truth, but Jill hits the open road. A pursuit follows, with the Harmons’ wisecracking, weed-smoking friend Kat (Kate Connor) tagging along for the ride. After disastrous attempts at interception on their own, along with other assorted mishaps, Abby and Elliott hire Dan (Jeff Sloniker, seemingly channeling John Belushi), a slovenly, bumbling, would-be private investigator who works with his father Stan (Office Space‘s Richard Riehle). As they then nominally tail him and await results, though, Dan becomes smitten with Jill, further feeding a roundelay of misunderstanding and haplessness.

At its core, Gone Doggy Gone has a great concept — something that’s both easily relatable from a comedic perspective and, in the manner in which it essays the way pets are kind of a starter baby for DINK-ers who in earlier generations would’ve already started a family, plugged into the current zeitgeist. Brown and Walter’s instincts encompass plenty of comedy of debasement, but the ranginess and rapid-fire pacing of their work as much as anything else assure that Gone Doggy Gone never loses hold of a viewer’s interest. There are also some great purposefully terrible local commercials and a dream-sequence riff on The Silence of the Lambs, showcasing a canny sense of spoofery.

In its third act — with a pit stop at a hippie friend of Kat’s, and a reversed blackmail plot — the film succumbs a bit to the kitchen-sink instincts of so many independent films, in which bigger and more clamorous is confused with necessarily better. Low-budget films that lack the resources of some of their bigger-budget genre counterparts often seem to reach for hijinks, writ large, in an effort to clinch market salability. The character of Dan, already a bit broadly sketched, figures into the proceedings more and more, but what’s meant to track as a strand of misguided obsession paralleling Jill’s just seems like misspent time. It feels like there’s a slightly more reigned in treatment of the same premise and end game that could have yielded even richer results.

What Gone Doggy Gone has going for it, though, is solid banter writing and some crisp, engaging characterizations and acting. The diminutive and demure Vorspan, playing a character who seems like she’s from a Todd Solondz film by way of the Farrelly brothers (or perhaps the other way around), is a real treat — cracked and vulnerable in a uniquely compelling way. Brown, meanwhile, has the wicked gleam in her eye of a raging, on-the-warpath, manic-sad compulsive, which works well in contrast with Walter’s more baseline, normalized exasperation at the unfolding situation. Ultimately, whether you’re the one who’s pooch-fixated or it’s someone else in your life, the freewheeling absurdism of Gone Doggy Gone will strike a chord of amusement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Buzzworm Films, R, 89 minutes)

From mid-May 2007 through the summer of the following year, Sebastian Junger and his colleague Tim Hetherington chronicled the deployment of a platoon of American troops in a remote and notoriously deadly Afghanistan valley. The resulting experiential travelogue of war reportage, 2010’s Restrepo, picked up a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. The follow-up, Korengal, comes three years after Hetherington was tragically killed covering the civil war in Libya, and builds on the psychological perspicacity of its predecessor, delving in a very simple and direct way into what war and some of its aftereffects feel like. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Saboteur Media/Goldcrest Films/Outpost Films, R, 84 minutes)

It’s immediately clear by the film’s odd, buzzy opening — the raucous reception of its septuagenarian subject in a Taiwan airport — that Burt’s Buzz isn’t going to be a normal documentary. Unfortunately, though, it turns out to be atypical in a variety of exasperating and ultimately fatal ways. In fact, if there were an upper-level college or film school class specifically about burying the lede, it would be difficult to immediately think of a more fitting example than Jody Shapiro’s nonfiction portrait of an amiably deposed hippie businessman, which putters about aimlessly, getting to its most essential questions only an hour into its running time or leaving them entirely unasked.