Shared Darkness

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)

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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)