There have been a spate of tiny, reform-touting documentaries lamenting the dismal state of American public education recently, including The Cartel, The Lottery, Teached and Paramount Duty, but the 800-pound gorilla on the block is Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting For Superman. As director of the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim built up a following of admirers, swayed by science, on the political left and in the middle — and an equally passionate cabal of detractors on the right, who decried his “activist” filmmaking. This film would seem to be a less politicized issue to tackle, but that would also assume our capacity for partisan scapegoating is somehow on the wane.
Taking its name from an anecdote about intractable stasis and the absence of any single superhuman rescuer, the movie explores a variety of reasons for public school underachievement, and paints a fairly dire portrait of future American readiness in a global economy. Unions and entrenched bureaucracies take plenty of heat; perhaps most frustrating is how Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C. Public School system, has a merit-pay proposal stymied by a teachers’ union that won’t even let it come to a vote.
Still, Guggenheim doesn’t demonize in a blind rage; instead, he flips the script on the conventional wisdom that failing kids are a product of failing (largely urban) neighborhoods and uninterested parents, showing instead how schools that let down children actually help foster larger social unrest, and how smart, targeted reform — including the type peddled by Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone — can not merely close but flat out obliterate the achievement gap between poor kids and those in better economic households.
While it has glancing statistical devastation on its side (there are more than 2,000 so-called dropout factories in the United States, where more than 40 percent of high school attendees fail to graduate), Waiting For Superman also has an unhurried rhythm and personal grounding (Guggenheim narrates the movie, and talks about his tough decision to send his own children to private school) that produce an emotional wallop as it winds its way toward a montage finale involving various educational lotteries. There may not be a more heartbreaking scene this year than Anthony, a fifth-grader being raised alone by his grandmother, talking quietly about wanting a better life for his own future kids, and them not having to grow up in “this environment.” (Paramount, PG, 102 minutes)
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Red White & Blue
A lot of otherwise quite avid moviegoers avoid horror films outright because of an aversion to gore or violence, but if you dig deeper in conversation you’ll find an equal or greater number that are more turned off by the violence’s lack of connection to tangible motivating factors. They want to know and be able to identify with — albeit sometimes in only exclusionary fashion — a killer if they’re going to take a trip to a nasty and brutish place, in other words.
Red White & Blue is a film that invests wholeheartedly in the foreboding set-up of its characters and their predicaments on its slow, winding road trip toward Very Bad Things; it’s one of those stunning, gem-find indie movies that creeps up on you like a dark, sudden storm cloud in the middle of a summer afternoon. Marked by stellar performances and sophisticated storytelling, the film is a powerful, visceral and surprisingly emotionally tangible dramatic thriller — an edgy, psychologically charged tale, unfolding in triptych structure, that grounds itself in real-world problems before veering off into darker territory.
Austinite Erica (Amanda Fuller) is a troubled nymphomaniac whose tough veneer and sexual acting out masks deep and private wounds. She lives rent-free in a small co-op as a trade-off for housework, but when her living situation changes she gets a job at a nearby hardware store. Despite getting off on the wrong foot with Nate (Noah Taylor, above), a mysterious Iraq War vet who claims to be mulling over a job offer from the CIA, Erica forms a hesitant bond with her neighbor, in part informed by the fact that he’s the only guy who doesn’t seemingly immediately want to sleep with her.
Old actions can have terrible lingering consequences, however. Though his mother Ellie (Sally Jackson) is suffering from a terminal illness, things seem to be on the occupational upswing for musician Franki (Marc Senter). Until, that is, his previous one-night fling with Erica — part of a boozy orgy with a pair of his rocker pals — comes back to haunt him, bringing to bear unforeseen costs for a whole host of people.
Red White & Blue is British writer-director Simon Rumley’s follow up to the acclaimed and oddly personal horror film The Living and The Dead, and his deft touch with multiple tonalities is again in evidence. The first three-quarters or more of the film doesn’t touch the rails of horror at all; it’s a gritty little drama about fringe-dwelling characters in pain, and Rumley trades in woozy montages and still frames that convey a sense of depressed place with startling economy and clarity. Once the discrete narratives coalesce, though, the movie picks up a certain doomed downhill momentum, wringing tension from violence lurking around the story’s edges, and then, finally, bursting forth in ugly fashion.
A couple of the narrative pivots or reactions may at first blush seem odd (Franki’s behavior toward Erica, for one), but they stem from recognizably human places. There’s an almost subliminal electric energy attached to all the characters, and Rumley doesn’t overwrite his story, stuffing it to the seams with explanatory dialogue pitched at highlighting action for a lowest-common-denominator audience. Instead, he invests time and energy in establishing an audience connection to the largely unarticulated but nonetheless engaging, parallel inner dialogues and lives of these characters, and then foisting terrible choices and situations upon them. What happens is not pleasant, but it’s darkly understandable, in its own way, and perhaps that’s the most effectively unsettling element of Red White & Blue. For more information on the film, and its special theatrical engagements and VOD listings, click here. (IFC Midnight, R, 103 minutes)
Freakonomics
An adaptation of University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and New York-based journalist Stephen Dubner’s 2005 book about hidden and surprising causality, Freakonomics represents an unusual cinematic experiment, bringing together as collaborative directors the documentary filmmakers behind Super Size Me, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Jesus Camp, Why We Fight and The King of Kong.
The title of the book stems from Levitt’s coined term about social science research and other empirical data shattering common (but untrue) assumptions about human behavior, and society. Breaking from the convention of more structured, formal review, it’s just easier to flat-out say what doesn’t really work about Freakonomics, especially since its partitioned structure and insistent flitting to and fro makes the movie come off as a hit-and-miss collection of appetizers. I’m generally a sucker for these sorts of documentaries — movies that take big, meaty swings at matters political, anthropological and/or behavioral — but this movie is wildly uneven, and doesn’t really coalesce in a meaningful way.
There are basically two segments in Freakonomics that connect. The first is helmed by Morgan Spurlock, and looks at whether there is such a thing as a financial value in a baby’s name — whether it’s a predictive or determining factor in adult happiness, opportunity or wealth. Given its focus on the unique nature of certain predominantly African-American names, this is a fascinating inquiry, whatever one’s previously staked out position or lack thereof, precisely because it’s something recognized in perceptive circles but wildly underdiscussed. In the other engaging portion, Eugene Jarecki investigates Levitt’s original research which postulates that the national drop in crime rates in the 1990s stemmed chiefly not from new law enforcement measures enacted by politicians (sorry, Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton), but instead the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which allowed for choice in pregnancy
The rest of Freakonomics is a collection of sputters and half-measures, however, weaved together by interstitial
interludes from Seth Gordon, which provide a bit of context and sit-down commentary from the authors. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s look at attempts to incentivize high school learning with cold hard cash provides moments of engagement courtesy of some of its teenage subjects, but only scratches the surface of their relationship to continued education, and fails to really give a voice to those conducting the research program. Alex Gibney’s look at the crumbling façade of sumo wrestling’s honor
system, meanwhile, weighs Freakonomics down (no pun intended) mightily. Stretching on for far too long in the film’s middle, it’s so self-satisfied with its uncovering of Japanese corruption and bribery that it fails to acknowledge its insights or revelations are far less about any sociocultural specificity than they are about… money. As in: where people can make large amounts of money betting, corruption and gaming will follow. For more information on the movie, click here. (Magnolia, PG-13, 93 minutes)
Make Me Young
It’s not all Michael Jackson. America’s obsession with staying young and beautiful through augmentation has ballooned to a $60 billion annual industry, with almost 10 million cosmetic surgical and nonsurgical procedures combined performed in 2009. And it’s seemingly recession-proof, too, as a recent industry report noted only a two percent drop from the previous year. Vanity? Mere modern, auto-style maintenance for humans? Whatever you call it, the death-grip of that personal panic forms the basis of the new-to-DVD documentary Make Me Young, which originally premiered on HBO under the title Youth Knows No Pain, and gets a longer, unedited cut here, replete with bonus features.
The daughter of the former chief of plastic surgery at Michigan’s biggest hospital, and a self-professed “product girl” more than a little panicked about turning 38, director Mitch McCabe begins her quest into America’s relationship with aging by examining her own preoccupation with short-term remedies (hair coloring, for her), and crosses the country to speak with surgeons, multi-procedure patients and even a would-be Jack Nicholson look-a-like. In turning the camera on herself and her own upbringing, and serving as her own narrator, McCabe presses the question: why are we obsessed with turning back the clock?
McCabe chats up doctors and a collection of industry types (Allure editor-in-chief Linda Wells, authors Charla Krupp and Nicholas Perricone) to get their perspectives, and begins her travels across the country doing sit-down, very formal interviews. She quickly hones in on a small handful of subjects, however, and develops surprisingly intimate bonds with them. Among these are several plastic surgery aficionados, most notably 53-year-old Sherry Meecom (above), a cheerful Dallas housewife who readily undergoes the knife in her pursuit of personal fulfillment, and Southern California-based Norman Deesing, who’s spent more than $50,000 to transform himself from a short, balding dude into a happily (re-)married man who gets music video work as a Jack Nicholson doppelganger. There’s also creepy Houston plastic surgeon Dr. Franklin Rose, and his busty (non-enhanced) 25-year-old daughter Erica Rose (who would later go on to achieve notoriety as a participant on The Bachelor and VH-1’s You’re Cut Off).
Make Me Young is fairly facile, and engaging throughout. McCabe peppers her film liberally with family home video footage and all sorts of (potentially embarrassing) asides, which makes it fairly relatable, and probably even further endearing to women. For better or worse, she is the prism through which this issue is being examined, not unlike Michael Moore in his films. If there’s a knock on the movie, it’s that it does dawdle more than a bit with some of its interviewees, which, when paired with McCabe’s more laid-back personality and style, can give off a bit of an aimless vibe.
Yes, Make Me Young admirably avoids alarm-bell advocacy, and lets viewers form their own opinions about both McCabe’s subjects and their choices. (A plastic surgeon cooing, “What bothers you would bother me,” ranks among the creepiest professional come-ons; it just seems something one does not particularly want to hear from a supposed medical professional.) But sometimes one longs for a pinch of subjective fire (a couple such moments exist in the excised scenes), or some more naked conflict, rather than the movie’s studied, professorial, birds-eye view. And a bit more of an intellectually ambitious film would have perhaps tried to incorporate a look at mainstream mass media portrayals of retirement-age men and women, and how that in turn effects our own personal relationships with aging. Still, these are sins of omission, not commission. On balance, Make Me Young makes for an entertaining look at adult vanity, which we all possess, to varying degrees. Oh, and Lyndsay Bertie? Fret not — your smile is not noticeably asymmetrical, no.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Make Me Young comes to DVD on a region-free disc. Its ample bonus features consist of an engaging feature-length audio commentary track from McCabe, as well as a seven-minute behind-the-scenes featurette in which she talks about the state of Texas representing a breakthrough point in her interview travels for the movie. (Apparently everything really is bigger in Texas, including folks’ honesty about their surgical procedures.) There are also six deleted scenes running approximately 20 minutes; the most interesting of these, which would have made for a nice inclusion in the movie, involves a trip to a cryogenics lab and storage facility. There are also a half dozen extended interviews as well. For more information, click here. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Let Me In
When mysterious, 12-year-old Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her dad (Richard Jenkins) move next door to Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a social outcast who’s being bullied at school as his parents undergo a divorce, Owen forms a profound bond with his new neighbor, who he can’t help noticing is like no one he’s met before. As a string of strange, grisly murders grips his small town, though, Owen must confront the reality that his new friend is actually a vampire.
Writer-director Matt Reeves, working from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s bestselling novel Let the Right One In, ups the gore quotient a bit, but retains the artfully deliberate pacing and wintry desolation of the original Swedish film that it spawned. His experience on Cloverfield with chaotic, jumbled, yet still involving cinematography is richly evident here, and Reeves also recognizes that, current commercial appetites notwithstanding, this isn’t a vampire movie in any typical sense, it’s a movie about loneliness. Let Me In pegs the lingering, character-molding anxiety of adolescent humiliation and degradation, and in doing so breaks one’s heart while simultaneously quickening one’s pulse. At once tender and brutal, Let Me In is a transfixing elegy the likes of which the supernatural horror genre rarely produces.
Cinefamily Hosts Director Lucy Walker For Discussion of Work
Cinefamily hosts an excellent event Monday, October 18 when it features in person Lucy Walker, a rising star of documentary filmmaking whose recent films Waste Land and Countdown to Zero have dominated some of 2010’s major festivals. International Documentary Association Board President Eddie Schmidt will lead viewers through a behind-the-scenes look at Walker’s body of work: Waste Land, which follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys to the world’s largest garbage dump to photograph self-designated pickers of recyclable materials; Blindsight, about the emotional journey of six blind Tibetan teenagers who climb up the north side of Mount Everest; Devil’s Playground, an examination of the struggles of Amish teenagers during their Mennonite-sanctioned period of experimentation; and Countdown to Zero, a wake-up call regarding the intensifying nuclear arms race. The evening’s on-stage conversation and film clips will be followed by an audience Q&A, and an open reception on the Cinefamily’s backyard Spanish patio. Tickets are $20, and $15 for IDA members; for information, click here.
Adrian Grenier Gets Snapped By a Paparazzo While Talking About Teenage Paparazzo
Adrian Grenier became famous on HBO’s Entourage playing an actor who shoots to stardom and has to cope with paparazzi marking his every move. Naturally, Grenier then became a real-life target of the paparazzi. Last year, Grenier directed a movie, Teenage Paparazzo, which introspectively chronicles the true story of his unlikely, evolving relationship with a precocious 14-year-old paparazzo, Austin Visschedyk (below left). And while I talked to Grenier a couple weeks ago about this project, in advance of its September 27 premiere on HBO, paparazzi snapped his photo. Snake, meet tail! The conversation is excerpted below:
Brent Simon: The idea of a youngster skulking about at night as a paparazzo evokes a strong first response. How objective or subjective did you want your film to be?
Adrian Grenier: Well, obviously I have my own opinion about paparazzi, especially so often being the victim of their disrespect. I think when I saw Austin that was the last straw for me. I knew I had to do something. I had to figure out, just for myself, what was going on in a culture that would embrace that, and encourage young people to engage in it.
BS: Austin comes across as pretty bright, if typically self-involved. How reticent was his family to participate?
AG: Oh look, there’s a paparazzo! (pause) You should put this shot they’re taking of me right now with the article. There they are. I hope I look OK. (laughs)
BS: Irony of ironies! How much of an influence are paparazzi on your everyday decisions?
AG: They always tend to dominate a situation. You could be having a casual stroll with a friend or loved one, and they just come in and destroy any nice moment. But I think as an actor and performer, we speak in the language of images and stories, and paparazzi are really no different. They get content for tabloids to make stories. And who better to use than performers? What upsets celebrities is that they don’t have control over the story. I don’t think I’ve met any celebrity that doesn’t love a nice fluff piece about them, a picture that says look how gorgeous they look. But what they don’t like is when all the media can’t be positive about them; they can’t take the bad with the good.
BS: Paris Hilton has some interesting insights in the movie.
AG: One thing I really respect about Paris is that I consider her an artist of a different art form — her canvas is the tabloid media. She’s extremely talented in being able to utilize and create on that platform, and I look up to her for that. She taught me a lot about how to be able to roll with it, embrace it.
BS: What percentage of paparazzi maybe is charged mainly by the thrill of pursuit, and actively antagonizing celebrities?
AG: Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s the same proportion of douchebags in any population. They’ll make more money if they can conjure a good story [and] prod a celebrity to do something, whether it’s do a little dance, hold up a peace sign, pose, or throw a punch. They’re like mini-directors on some level, I guess, no different than Stanley Kubrick pushing someone to the brink of sanity to get the shot. The only difference there is that the actor is a willing participant who’s being paid.
BS: The film talks some about parasocial relationships, those one-way feelings of intimacy people have for celebrities. Are any paparazzi like this?
AG: I think we mostly tend to have very simple relationships in our capitalist, consumer society, and paparazzi aren’t different necessarily. They look at celebrities as a paycheck, as food on the table. One thing I am excited about is that the Creative Coalition has invited the film to be part of their spotlight initiative slate, and take it to high schools and colleges around the country as a way to invite students to look at the way they consume media. And I hope TeenagePaparazzo.com will be a continuation of the film, where people who’ve seen it, and users in general, can have a two-way conversation.
BS: How about Austin today? Are you still in contact with him?
AG: Austin will be a presence on the website. I want to give him an outlet to express himself, and also give people an opportunity to see what he’s up to, and what sort of photos he’s taking. Right now we’ve yet to see. I think he’s growing up in his own way, and thinking about college. He’s a much more mature person than he was, and I’m curious to see what the experience of the film’s release will mean for him.
For more on the film, click here.
Weapons of War: Volume 1
Along with America’s fascination with flexing its military might, there is a correlative interest in celebrating said fascination, albeit in nothing necessarily more than the fashion of an armchair general. This is the reason for the entire existence of the History Channel — so that those who never paid attention in high school history class can regale their coworkers with newly learned facts about World War II and the Vietnam War. Ergo, there’s also a highly receptive audience for something like the three-volume Weapons of War: Volume 1, which examines in fetishistic detail the history of warfare and how new technologies have changed the ways battles are fought.
Ground War is the first title, a two-part feature film, narrated by R.J. Allison and co-directed by Roger Finnigan and James
Millar, which explores the key technological advances that have defined ground warfare through the ages. With classic examples like the stirrup and lesser known innovations like the gunner’s quadrant, the series reveals how even the smallest innovations can have a wide-ranging effect on not only the way armed conflicts are waged, but also their outcomes. Next up is Warplane, narrated by Stacey Keach. As one might surmise from the title, this sprawling title shines a light on the 100 years since the Wright brothers first took to the air, and how the airplane has evolved from a tentative eye in the sky into the ultimate weapons delivery system, via unmanned drones. Finally, narrated again by Keach, Warship tells the story of the evolution of the warships, right up to the United States’ current cutting-edge navy battle groups — made up of nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines, and a range of other high-tech and immensely powerful ships.
While the technological and spec detail here is sometimes wonky, Weapons of War also does a good job of locating enough personable in-points to make military culture and infrastructure make sense (and even seem appealing, in its just-the-facts-and-mission rigidity) to the average layperson. It would be nice — or at least more honest, and challenging — if there were a correlative look at how military industrial complex spending has both sometimes helped spur private industry offshoot technological advance and innovation, and also sometimes drained needed resources from other government programs and budget necessities, but that’s not what this set of movies is about, clearly.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a snap-in tray, Weapons of War comes to DVD spread out on three discs, in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language stereo track. The meaty length of its feature presentations — totaling almost a dozen hours — renders the set’s lack of supplemental bonus features a bit less distressing. To purchase the DVD, phone (800) PLAY-PBS, or click here. Or if you need a DVD with public performance rights, click here. Finally, if Amazon is totally your thing, click here. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)
Growth
There are any number of ways to commit a cinematic fumbling — to fritter away a decent concept or creepy set-up or what have you — but one of the more common, at least in the direct-to-video genre realm, is to not trust your story, writing and characters, but instead double down on a reliance on special effects, which too often come across as chintzy when delivered on a budget-level basis. Such is the case with Growth, which features absolutely great DVD cover art and an effective trailer to boot, but, alas, doesn’t deliver the squirmy horror goods.
Written and directed by Gabriel Cowan (Breathing Room), Growth opens in 1989, when a breakthrough in advanced parasitic research on remote Kuttyhunk Island gives scientists a jump in human evolution, endowing subjects with heightened physical and mental strength. Naturally, though, the experiment goes horribly wrong, producing a lethal parasite that kills off three-quarters of the island’s population. Cut to 20 years later, when Jamie Akerman (Mircea Monroe), who lost her mother in the outbreak, returns with her boyfriend Marco (Sleepwalkers‘ Brian Krause), step-brother Justin (Christopher Shand) and best friend Kristin (Nora Kirkpatrick) to sell the family property. There, they uncover details about Jamie’s disturbing past, and horrifying secrets long suppressed by the town’s leader, Larkin (Office Space‘s Richard Riehle). Just when the past seems to be finally buried, a slithering new strain of parasite emerges, and threatens the island and its visitors once again.
An intriguing set-up and some effectively delineated backstory put Growth in a good spot to wring elemental dread out of the inherently human fear of things getting under our skin, and/or otherwise invading unintended orifices (as Star Trek II aptly demonstrated, with those earwigs). Cowan doesn’t fully trust the material, though, and Growth thusly pivots from a movie with the potential to unnerve to a shambling film of goosing provocation and little insight. Without the budget to pull off big-level special effects, the narrative leans on them to an unfulfilling degree.
Growth comes to DVD housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover with raised lettering and artwork. It’s presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional English SDH subtitles. Its package of ample bonus material is anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track from Cowan and fellow producer Amiee [sic] Clark, as well as a separate audio commentary track with actors Monroe, Krause, Shand and Kirkpatrick. There is a nice little behind-the0scenes featurette built around interviews with cast and crew, and there’s a separate featurette look at how Cowan — via online camera, from Los Angeles — directed one scene shot in South Korea. A clutch of deleted scenes and the movie’s trailer round out bonus materials. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Directed by Oliver Stone, Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps is the rarest of Hollywood sequels, in that it seemingly has
an artistic rather than financial motivation for its birth. This is all the more
ironic given the subject matter of the first film, a financial drama of spotlighted moral decay, and that it saw life in the go-go 1980s, both deftly encapsulating the mantra of its setting-sun era (“Greed is good”) but also, and perhaps much more tellingly, providing a fleeting glimpse into the future (“I create nothing — I own“), and the working mindset of financial services wizards and captains of industry for whom the American economy and electorate are seemingly little more than their grown-up sandbox and toys.
Having served more than eight years in prison for securities fraud, disgraced Wall Street tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) emerges in 2001, just after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Seven years later, he’s peddling a half-apologetic, half-prophetic book forecasting doom for the American economy. Young Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), meanwhile, is an ambitious proprietary trader whose affection for both green energy as well as the green of money gets tested when his company fails. Against a backdrop involving both opportunity and jostling related to an old rival, venal trader Bretton James (Josh Brolin), Gordon tries to use his professional knowledge base to arm-twist Jake in friendly fashion into helping him reconnect with his estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), to whom Jake is engaged.
Stone’s sequel to his 1987 zeitgeist hit, which won Douglas a Best Actor Oscar, would seem positioned to really sink or soar, given both its unique standing as a Hail Mary-type throwback drama, and its desperately au courant status given the nation’s newfound focus on its economic maladies. Thankfully, Stephen Schiff and Allan Loeb’s script is admirably rooted in character, so the drama pulls one along fairly naturally, abetted by performances that don’t forsake the human element. Whether by cajolement, threat or end-around obfuscation, Stone squeezes out of LaBeouf so much of the nervous-chatterbox energy and too-cool-for-school insouciance that characterize the bulk of his work. Similarly, Douglas taps into nicely layered reserves of an alpha dog brought low, and in significant ways reformed — but someone who still has a burning, hardwired ambition for relevance, above all else.
There’s a pinch of ridiculous alpha-male jockeying (involving a scene of motorcycle racing), but overall Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is engaging and slick without ever coming across as pompous — its story hinging on believable twists and turns born of personality, not wildly fluctuating narrative convenience. Take note, Hollywood moguls. For more on the film, click here. For another, longer take, meanwhile, from Telly Davidson, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 131 minutes)
Paranormal Activity 2 Works Hard To Whip Up Fan Demand
Paramount is doing a fairly wise thing with the sequel to its 2009 low-fi smash hit Paranormal Activity. Dolling out a handful of viral clips to horror flick sites, certainly — that’s a given. But also debuting the movie for fans that “demand” to see it first, via the movie’s web site. The top 20 cities with the highest registered online demand for the film will be invited to attend a free screening on Wednesday, October 20, before the movie’s nationwide October 22 release. Buzzy word-of-mouth from rabid fans of the first film and other genre diehards will be key in trying to deliver commercial success, since this sequel is bucking the slow-build, platform-release strategy of its surprise $108-million-grossing predecessor, which didn’t top 1,000 screens until its fourth week of in theaters, and finally hit the #1 spot at the box office in its fifth weekend frame. For the movie’s teaser trailer, click here; for more on the film, click here.
That Evening Sun
In the autumnal stretches of each year, it seems, there’s at least one spare, micro-budgeted indie film, a la Starting Out in the Evening or Venus, that features a ruminative, calling card performance by an aging actor. Last year that film was That Evening Sun, and that actor was Hal Holbrook, Oscar-nominated a few years back for his supporting turn in Sean Penn’s adaptation of Into the Wild.
Based on a short story by William Gay, and gracefully adapted for the screen by director Scott Teems, this movie might best be described as a coming-to-terms-with-age tale — part mournfully rustic, part delightfully crotchety, and entirely a fitting vehicle for Holbrook’s under-appreciated talents. The erstwhile big screen “Deep Throat” stars as Abner Meecham, an aging Tennessee farmer who absconds from the assisted living facility he’s been set up in by his lawyer son (Walton Goggins), and catches a ride back to his country farm to live out his days in peace. Upon his return, though, he discovers his property has been leased to an old enemy and his family. Not one to either suffer fools or be dictated to, Abner moves into the old tenant shack on the property and declares he will not leave until the farm is returned to him. But Lonzo Choat (Raymond McKinnon), the new tenant, has no intention of giving in to Abner’s demands, and so an increasingly edgy and dangerous battle of wills ensues.
Trading in slow pans, simple set-ups and outdoor locations that match the material, Teems doesn’t try to showcase a bunch of directorial razzle dazzle. Southern characters are frequently woefully misrepresented in American film, but, if you ignore the molasses-dipped names, That Evening Sun has an easy, unforced sense of authenticity that takes it a long way. There’s a Faulknerian specificity here, and Holbrook doesn’t overplay the emotion, expressing the grace notes of a man swallowed up by both frustration and regrets he won’t as readily admit. Abner’s decisions are sometimes a bit more impulsive than seem genuine for a man of his age, no matter the heart behind them. But That Evening Sun poignantly reminds us that feeling is often stronger than thought, in adolescence and old age alike.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, That Evening Sun comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of the movie’s theatrical exhibition. Its audio comes in the form of an English language Dolby digital 5.1 mix, with optional English and Spanish subtitles. Cinematographer Rodney Taylor and editor Travis Sittard sit in with Teems for a feature-length audio commentary track that’s somewhat amusingly dubbed an “anti-commentary track,” part of Teems’ only-half-kidding protest at not simply letting the movie stand by itself. There’s also a nine-minute, somewhat impressionistic making-of featurette, set to music from the movie; over 70 minutes of cast and crew interviews; the film’s theatrical trailer; and a 30-minute scene-specific look at the production design and overall collaborative construction of the movie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the film on Blu-ray, meanwhile, click here. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Catfish
Co-directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the absorbing, low-fi Catfish is a very generational cinematic offering, a digital-age mystery about identity, human frailty and social connection. Less is truly more when heading into the film, but in the broadest strokes the movie centers on a 24-year-old New York City photographer, Nev Schulman (Ariel’s brother), who is contacted on Facebook by an eight-year-old Michigan girl who asks permission to paint one of his pictures, and then falls headlong into a complex online relationship with the girl and her family.
A documentary pieced together like a thriller, Catfish highlights, in ways funny as well as squirmy and uncomfortable, the parasitic nature of parasocial relationships, and how technology can feed intimacy in ways both new and exciting and also inherently false. (For all the shrugging ease that the use of the Internet provides in terms of facilitating lies or mistruths, the film also shows the flipside — that the Internet makes it that much easier to investigate people, and their claims.)
Catfish hums along and works on several levels, not the least of which because Nev (above) is both engaging and vulnerable. Its few missteps are less outright failings, and more sins of omission. For all the ghastly ruminations summoned forth by what Nev and his filmmaker friends uncover when they finally trip to Michigan to uncover the truth, it would be equally legitimate to more deeply assay the need for connection that drove Nev in the first place. Of course, that’s something that resides in all of us, which perhaps cuts a bit deeper to the bone than is comfortable for both those involved as well as an audience, who naturally like to retain the right to pass judgment. For more information, click here; for an interview with the directors, meanwhile, click here. (Universal/Rogue, PG-13, 86 minutes)
Teenage Paparazzo
Actor Adrian Grenier is most famous for playing a young, famous actor on HBO’s Entourage, so that gives him a somewhat unique perch from which to assay the curious nature of celebrity and the often aggressive shutterbugs that, in symbiotic if frequently somewhat diseased fashion, make their living off of snapping as many pictures as possible of actors, athletes and other figures in the public eye. And it’s just that high-ground perspective that informs and elevates his entertaining and thought-provoking new documentary Teenage Paparazzo.
The movie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and makes its bow this week on HBO, jointly documents
the actor’s well-mannered exasperation and irritation with paparazzi, and his burgeoning personal relationship with 14-year-old Austin
Visschedyk, a home-schooled shutterbug whose parents routinely let him troll around Hollywood streets until midnight and beyond, stalking dining and partying celebrities like Grenier. Further contextualizing this vivid, unusual relationship are interviews Grenier conducts with other celebs (Paris Hilton, Eva Longoria, Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg and Matt Damon) as well as psychologists and historians, who weigh in on the changing nature of fame, notoriety and gossip in the New Media age.
Young Austin is precocious, characteristically self-centered, and possessing of the same type of moppy-haired bangs that Justin Bieber has recently made all the rage, but he’s also a more complex figure than on the surface he might seem. The title conjures up very specific (and not at all positive) notions of parental neglect and failure, but in the beginning Austin seems less obsessed with celebrities than merely excited by the thrill of a chase — in getting a picture of a personal moment. He’s something of a snob (“Hell no, I’m not following anyone from Dancing with the Stars!”), but more because of the monetary value of his work. Yes, while not yet able to drive, Austin rakes in hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for his photos.
The inherently navel-gazing nature of Teenage Paparazzo sort of cuts both ways. While on the surface it seems like it could come off as little more than a well-funded incursion into woe-is-me self-analysis — and it very occasionally tilts in this direction — Grenier’s film doesn’t merely spotlight the antagonism between paparazzi and their subjects, it also digs into the mutual-use nature of their relationships. (Hilton is an especially interesting and enlightening interview subject on this front, even if a segment in which Grenier explains the story of Narcissus to her comes off as unintentionally hilarious.) If Grenier is a bit hands-off with Austin’s parents — wanting to retain their participation and cooperation, and so approaching their son with a bit of a clinical, “hey-that’s-cool” alien distance — his subject eventually obliges him, exhibiting increasingly bratty behavior, and morphing into a miniaturized version of some of the same prissy, entitled rich folks he spends his time shooting. (A proposed E! reality show centered around Austin helps fuel this fire, and provide an ironic production-crew-pileup that Christopher Guest would surely appreciate.)
Grenier has a certain laconic charm, and so his movie is incredibly spry and facile, and thus entertaining in a base-level, empty-caloric sort of way. But it’s also at its best when really, substantively trying to dig into the nature of falsely intimate, one-way connections between massively marketed celebrities and their fans, or “parasocial” relationships — as it does in a conversation between the filmmaker and a social scientist at Fenway Park that is interrupted by a (slightly inebriated) fan who tells Grenier, “I’m not trying to be gay, but I love you,” and, “This’ll get me so much ass on Facebook, you have no idea!”
This candid, unplanned interaction, and other moments in the film, seems to lend credence to the idea that unlike past generations, or milennia ago — when we would each achieve some measure of notoriety and recognition within our smaller social structures — fame for fame’s sake is in the digital age, with connected societies and worldwide economies, now its own surging currency, and something to be valued over more tangible personal qualities, like talent or intelligence. (Italian import Videocracy, another documentary, also has some interesting insights in this regard.) It’s an unsettling thought, perhaps, but ultimately also a humanizing one; as Teenage Paparazzo shows us, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it ultimately cannot capture a human being in all their complexity. For more information on the film, click here. (HBO/Reckless Productions, unrated, 100 minutes)
Cassandra Peterson Talks About Her Latest Elvira Incarnation
Over at the L.A. Weekly, Karina Longworth chats up Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, who is pushing 60, remarkably enough, and has a new Movie Macabre, launching tomorrow in syndication.
In Regards to Gemma Arterton’s Gams and Short-Shorts
It’s an image whose appeal I totally understand — not arresting, exactly… but eye-catching, certainly. That said, Gemma Arterton’s clingy red top and short-shorts, the entire thrust of its American marketing, are going to give plenty of folks the wrong impression about Tamara Drewe, for what it’s worth. There are Thomas Hardy references and a bovine stampede in this film, people.
Howl
Years before the infamous obscenity trial of comedian Lenny Bruce,
counter-cultural icon and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg also stood trial — or,
more accurately, the publisher of his long-form poem that gives this
film its title did — for deigning to hold up a mirror to American
hypocrisy. Co-written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman,
Howl isn’t a commercial work, or satisfying on any predictably plotted
dramatic level. But, like a great song one surrenders to, its
tangential, multi-varied approach captures the urgency and dread of
Ginsberg’s groundbreaking, semi-autobiographical work, which recounts in
searing detail various underbelly road trips, love affairs and his
search for personal liberation.
Starring James Franco as
Ginsberg, Howl unfolds in a fractured and cerebral style, interweaving
four stories: a Socratic courtroom drama that follows the aforementioned
landmark 1957 obscenity trial, with Jon Hamm’s prosecutor and David Strathairn’s defense attorney squaring off against one another; an imaginative, feverish animated ride
through some of the text’s stories; a chat between Ginsberg and an
unseen interviewer; and a slightly more conventional,
black-and-white-lensed biographical portrait of a man who strove for
new ways to express himself and capture the aching ambivalence of those
he encountered.
There’s a quite contradictory nature, a fiery
reticence, at the soul of Ginsberg and his confessional writing, and in
his virtuoso performance Franco captures that quite well, especially in
his vocal timbre, which swells and recedes like an ocean tide. The
inclusion of animation — another potentially tricky thing — connects in a
certain roundabout way like similar footage from Ari Folman’s Waltz
with Bashir. Neither flat-out surreal nor entirely subjective, it
instead aims for (and captures) the heat of feeling, for those
unfamiliar with and/or resistant to the text. We all have to howl, from
time to time. For more information on the movie, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 90 minutes)
The Locksmith
Originally titled Homewrecker when it bowed at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, The Locksmith, from brother writer-directors Brad and Todd Barnes, is a rough-around-the-edges screwball comedy, offering up charms fleetingly similar to the Martini brothers’ Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire, which was one of the toasts of the 1999 Toronto Film Festival, back when they still handed out awards.
A quirky romantic comedy that unfolds mostly over the course of a single day, the film follows Mike (Anslem Richardson, of Life on Mars), a rehabilitated felon who, after a four-year stint in jail for selling drugs, gets out and tries to start putting his life back together, including reconnecting with his ex-girlfriend Monique (Michelle Krusiec). After taking a job as a locksmith, however, Mike unsuspectingly gets dragged into the neuroses of a desperate customer, Margo (Ana Reeder), when she recruits him to help her spy on her supposedly cheating art gallery owner boyfriend, Charles (Stephen Rannazzisi). Madcap zaniness ensues.
Margo’s obsessive, chatty, force-of-nature personality drives The Locksmith, and New York stage actress Reeder makes her sing — a bundle of contradictions that convincingly fit together. If she’s the octane, meanwhile, the subdued Richardson is the project’s oil, and his steadiness gives The Locksmith a much-needed counterbalancing presence. The Barnes brothers’ experience in a New York filmmaking collective entitled the Institute of Magical Dance (yes, seriously) gives the project a shared sense of unanimity and positivity rare to independent productions. Some audiences will definitely want more “meat,” or conventional dramatic substance here, but The Locksmith is a pleasant little surprise.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Locksmith comes to DVD presented in a fine 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with an English language 5.1 Dolby surround sound audio track, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Apart from a slate of previews for other First Look titles, there are unfortunately no supplemental extras. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) D (Disc)
Client 9 Trailer Serves Up Sex, Power, Politics, Revenge
The trailer for Alex Gibney’s Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, is online, and the documentary detailing the ex-New York governor’s tumble from elected office in the wake of his dalliance(s?) with high-end call girl Ashley Dupre looks to be a crackling piece of entertainment, just based on all the narrative gristle. Sex, money, power, politics, revenge — it’s all there, as on the surface as it is on the poster. This thing should be a Beltway/arthouse smash. For the trailer, click here.
You Again
Yet another contrived, manically pitched romantic comedy centered on forcedly farcical nuptial hijinks, the wearyingly unfunny You Again — in which Kristen Bell discovers her older brother is marrying the same girl, Odette Yustman, who made her life completely miserable in high school — is the cinematic equivalent of a loud, sugar-fueled kid desperately
calling for his or her parent’s attention from a pool. There’s an interesting and even quite possibly very funny movie to be made about the manner in which women filter their competitiveness with one another through men, but You Again is so divorced from the real world as to immediately negate the possibility that this is it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG, 105 minutes)
The Social Network
A $25 billion idea began with something to which almost everyone can relate: a sense of drunken aggrievement. One night in October of 2003, having just been dumped by his girlfriend, status-obsessed, socially maladjusted Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg hacked into the university’s computers to create a site that featured a database of all the women on campus. An instant viral hit, the stunt crashed Harvard’s servers, but provided the underpinnings for Facebook, which today has over 400 million users.
All this is chronicled in director David Fincher’s wildly involving The Social Network, which deftly intercuts the story of this creation with depositions from two separate lawsuits that would spring up — one by a pair of blonde, preppy, upper-crust rowers, the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer, pulling double duty), who argue that Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) stole their idea, and one from Zuckerberg’s friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), eventually forced out of the company via the gamesmanship of interloper Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), Napster’s co-founder.
The accelerated trajectory of these characters — brilliant, brash and soon to be flush with cash — underscores the bullet train of progress represented by the collision of their imaginations with the immediacy of the Internet, where desire gets out ahead of reason, and sets moral compasses spinning. The natural inclination on the part of many filmmakers would be to ladle on artifice, in an effort to play up the movie’s zeitgeist quotient, but Fincher keeps the movie’s tech-y elements at the periphery, focusing instead on the time-honored dramatic elements of isolation, determination, avarice and betrayal.
Eschewing the sort of more naked play for emotionalism that marked his last work, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fincher instead — with great assistance from Aaron Sorkin’s bristling screenplay, adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires — presents a consortium of tricky narrators, playing a delightful and engaging game of ping-pong with audience sympathies. The result is undeniably one of the year’s best films — an absorbing thriller for both Luddites and the plugged-in alike. (Sony/Columbia, PG-13, 120 minutes)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Blu-ray)
Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley and Gemma Arterton headline this action-adventure slice of period piece derring-do from producer Jerry Bruckheimer, filled with the sort of exotic locales and visual effects that Hollywood peddles quite well on an annual basis. Oh, and there are ostrich races, too.
So does Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time really catch fire? No, not really. It works reasonably well as a piece of escapist, forgettable small screen entertainment, but it’s not for nothing that the movie was seen as something of an under-performing theatrical dude domestically, grossing $30 of its $90million haul in its opening weekend (even though it would rake in an additional $224 million overseas). For all the Herculean effort expended to give this project lift and consequence, its stakes still feel small, its jostling banter familiar and all its punchy action-drama preordained.
Maybe it’s a result of the source material, and the film’s blindingly obvious franchise ambitions. Adapted as it is from the bestselling videogame series of the same name, the story here is pretty simple and straightforward, built up around fraternal/familial honor and distrust. Some ridiculously solemn opening crawl text and voiceover (“Where Persian sword went, order followed…”) plunks us down outside the holy city of Alamut, where adopted prince Dastan (Gyllenhaal) reluctantly teams up with a native princess, Tamina (Arterton), to safeguard a magical dagger that gives its possessor the power to reverse time and rule the world.
After the sudden death of his father, the king, Dastan finds himself at odds with his brothers (Richard Coyle and Toby Kebbell) and uncle, Nizam (Kingsley), and has to work hard to clear his name and uncover the truth. Adventure, desert escapes and backstabbing ensue (that fun with ostriches, too), all against the backdrop of a narrative that, believe it or not, manages to none-too-subtly sneak in some political statement. (The villain of the piece has secret government assassin squads, and his blundering invasion of a foreign land on trumped-up charges leaves the occupiers unsuccessfully searching for special weapons caches.)
Producer Bruckheimer has enough of a track record of success with these types of film that there are wads of money to throw at the production, and so there is plenty of color and detail in Prince of Persia, though for my money some of the lavish sets — constructed at great cost in Morocco, where the film lensed — actually look a bit chintzy, and too perfect and neat for what should be something a little more gritty and dirty. Or, strike that: could be more interesting if it were so.
Though he has some experience with spectacle in the form of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, director Mike Newell doesn’t have a natural sense of action rhythms — several of the sequences feature both slow-motion and quick edits, to mask deficiencies in coverage — and Prince of Persia suffers mightily in this regard. There’s plenty of swashbuckling and energetic, accented running about, but some of the movie’s comedic relief (in the form of Alfred Molina) feels like a heavy lift, and the film’s playful romantic bickering is fairly insubstantial, owing to a dispiriting lack of engaging chemistry between its leads.
At least technologically speaking, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a solid film to experience the cinematic magic of Blu-ray; Bruckheimer’s productions are nothing if not frame-stuffed, and the pristine 1080p picture and DTS-HD master audio sound quality definitely enhance the action and special effects more than an average action title. In addition to single-disc DVD and single-disc Blu-ray versions, Prince of Persia is also available in a three-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, stored in a cardboard slipcover, which also includes a digital copy of the movie. On DVD, the movie preserves the theatrical exhibition’s 2.40:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with Dolby digital 5.1 English, French and Spanish language tracks, and an English language 2.0 DVS track. On Blu-ray, the film is presented in a 1080p high definition widescreen transfer, with English 5.1 DTS-HD master audio (48kHz/24-bit), English 2.0 DVS, and French and Spanish Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound tracks. Optional English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles are available on each version, which leads to some amusing (and telling) translations of all the background din and clatter (“whooping rhythmically” and “clamoring all” are among the more memorable descriptions).
Most notably, a combo-pack-exclusive interactive “Sands of Time” feature gives fans control of the dagger of time, allowing them to rewind the movie and uncover spun-off, behind-the-scenes magic in over 40 separate segments, each lasting no more than three minutes. It’s a nice touch, certainly, for those given to repeat viewings of the film, or wanting to, say, immediately know more about Gyllenhaal’s workout regiment and the movie’s stunt work. Otherwise, there’s just a single deleted scene, though the DVD version also contains a behind-the-scenes featurette on the film’s production. Running under 20 minutes, the piece includes interview chats with the principal stars, plus all sorts of on-set footage, and interestingly delves into the handcraft work that went into prop making and set construction on site in Morocco. To purchase the three-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, click here. For an eight-dollar coupon off said combo pack, meanwhile, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)
Special Screening Set for Secretariat Foundation
Walt Disney Studios announced plans yesterday for a special advance screening of director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich’s upcoming film Secretariat, to benefit the Secretariat Foundation. The October 3 event, which takes place five days before the film’s mainstream October 8 theatrical release, will be held at the Kentucky Theater in Lexington, Kentucky, with a cocktail reception following the screening at Portofino Restaurant. For those in the area with means, tickets start at $125 per person, which includes general admission to the
screening and cocktail reception. A $250 ticket also
includes reserved seating at the screening and reception. Tickets are available at Secretariat.com, or by calling 502-893-7997. No word on if John Calipari will be attending.
Kristen Bell’s Movies Strip Away Sight, In Addition To Laughs
It has many more noteworthy sins, certainly, but it’s interesting that Kristen Bell‘s You Again is her second film this year to feature sensory deprivation eating. The other was punishingly unfunny When in Rome, which also essentially had two settings: broad, and broader. That film’s one potentially amusing bit — in which Josh Duhamel’s character takes Bell’s character to a pitch-black restaurant, in which the lack of sight is supposed to heighten other senses, and an appreciation of the food and drink — is botched and rushed. In You Again, it’s Bell’s screen dad, played by Victor Garber, who’s undertaking a diet where he blindfolds himself, in order to let his stomach tell him more naturally when he’s full. No word yet on if this has worked or will work for any audience members, who might blindfold themselves in an effort to even more accurately gauge how full of shit the movie is.
GQ Takes a Look Back at GoodFellas, Minus John Malkovich
Twenty years after the making of GoodFellas, GQ interviews nearly 60 members of the cast and crew, for a comprehensive look back at one of the most endlessly rewatchable American movies ever made. Sadly, there isn’t a knife fight about the various spellings of the film’s title. Money quote from the piece, from John Malkovich, who turned down the role of Jimmy Conway: “It sort of came at a bad time in my life, when I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to think about working. It’s hard to explain why you end up in Eragon and not GoodFellas. But Robert De Niro is fantastic.” For the full read, click here.