Shared Darkness

French actress Isabelle Huppert, nominated for a record 13 Cesar Awards, has made a career out of playing nervy characters with all manner of sexual foibles or secrets. In Special Treatment, she’s a high-class prostitute with dormant issues fueling a desire for a career change. The eighth feature offering from cult filmmaker Jeanne Labrune, this generally well sketched and set-up drama cashes in its early intrigue, though, abandoning darker overtones for rather wan interpersonal revelations. Those seeking kinky erotic drama of the sort found in early David Cronenberg will be sorely disappointed.

The story centers on Alice Bergerac (Huppert, above right), a well-to-do fortysomething who serves up high-end sexual fantasies for her clientele, from schoolgirl submissiveness to S&M dominance. Neurotic psychologist Xavier Demestre (Bouli Lanners), meanwhile, is stuck in a marriage in which he and wife Helene (Valerie Dreville) can no longer conceal their distaste for one another, lobbing open attacks in front of mixed company at a party. When a friend recommends Alice to Xavier, he gives her a call, just on the heels of Alice suffering a nasty incident with another client. They meet, and she explains that she only offers bundled packages of a minimum of 10 sessions, and so they embark on a professional relationship in which Alice gamely tries to coax out of Xavier his preferences, and get to the root of his unhappiness. In doing so, each party learns a little something.

Special Treatment is at its best when it’s mapping out and concentrating on the parallels between psychoanalysis and prostitution — the discreet locations, the exchange of money, the promise of anonymity, the establishment of rules, and specific time limits. Never mind that its inciting incident for Alice’s occupational second-guessing feels relatively tame, and for a moment seems a part of her extended role play. Once it settles into a more standardized groove of interpersonal blossoming, maturation and desired occupational flight — no matter how elliptically sketched, in achingly European fashion — the movie is considerably less interesting, because its big-picture plot movements and character decisions all feel staked out and predetermined. Alice will feel increasing frustration with Xavier’s inability to articulate his sexual wants, and Xavier will recognize her latent unhappiness and eventually start taking steps to try to help Alice ease out of prostitution.

Director Jeanne Labrune, working from a script co-written with Richard Debuisne, also does a fairly risible job of explaining the holes or conflict in Xavier and Helene’s marriage. If it were merely or only a matter of sexual incompatibility or stasis, the film could still exist fine as is, but the sheer glee with which Helene attacks Xavier in certain scenes raises all sorts of questions that go largely unanswered. As it moves toward its painfully French finale (it gives away nothing to say that the movie ends with a character staring off into the distance in reflection), awkward symbolism — in the form of an antique angel sculpture — is also visited upon the story, a sighing reality which seems remote in the quite solid opening act.

Through it all, Huppert has a sly technique, and an endlessly fascinating face. Ergo, Special Treatment never slips in holding one’s attention when she is on the screen. Unfortunately, the film’s intrigue unravels with each passing minute. There’s great promise in this premise — of a dissection of the value of arguably substitutive experiences, and how long they can or even should last — but this Treatment falls short, and delivers no special and lastingly memorable catharsis or insights. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run, R, 96 minutes)

Another unimaginatively plotted horror film which unfolds in a cursed house and pairs a young girl who thinks she sees monsters with parents who don’t believe her, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark arrives courtesy of co-writer/producer Guillermo Del Toro’s own childhood imaginations, and a 1973 teleplay that cast a chilly spell over him. Precious little of that menacing mood survives this technically proficient but rather yawning exercise in genre literalism, however — a disappointment considering the high-end creepiness and dark fantasia on display in some of Del Toro’s own films, like Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth. The general feeling that materializes is that something much more interesting could have been done with the concept. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. Mind the paywall, though. (FilmDistrict, R, 99 minutes)

A hit in its native Hong Kong, Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is getting a boutique release across the rest of the world, including major metropolitan areas of the United States. And why not, really? Screening in both 3-D and 2-D, the slickly produced film is a lurid, wild and weird attempt to reboot the 1990s’ Sex and Zen softcore franchise, in which outlandish sex and borderline gnarly-cartoonish violence were commingled. The end product lives up to its title, that’s for certain. A demented, Faustian-infused Flash Gordon episode crossed with a Chinese costume dramedy and some sort of discarded “Masters of Horror” script, Sex and Zen is a memorable viewing experience, in however many dimensions one watches it.

The story centers around a Ming Dynasty scholar, Yangsheng (Hiro Hayama, above left), who marries Yuxiang (the beautiful Leni Lan, above right), but finds himself lacking as a lover and unable to please her. Obsessed with the smallness of his penis and seeking carnal knowledge, he visits the conniving Prince Ning (Tony Ho), who has a Tower of Rarity (you know, with a blood-sweating horse and stuff like that) and a Pavilion of Ultimate Bliss. Yangsheng eventually wins admittance to the latter, and Prince Ning sets him up with “sex healer” Ruihu (Vonnie Lui). Then he has an operation to replace his penis with that of a donkey. Yep… seriously. During this time Yuxiang takes a lover, but still misses her husband, so she sets out to retrieve him. Additional insanity ensues.

The film starts with and maintains as a sort of touchstone a generally goofy tone. When Yangsheng and Yuxiang honeymoon, he pronounces her breasts “so cool,” and when she worries about the pain associated with her first time having intercourse, he proclaims, “It will hurt, but it will be extremely awesome!” In its final third especially, as Prince Ning turns jealous and villainous, the movie’s wild violence spikes, though not enough to completely derail its carnival atmosphere, which comes across like an Oriental take on Werner Hedman’s Danish In the Sign of… 1970s sex comedies crossed with the aforementioned influences with maybe a little bit of Circle of Iron thrown in for good measure.

Sex and Zen is kind of bizarrely captivating, and not necessarily because of all the nudity and sex (though that certainly helps). It’s watchable chiefly because one never quite gets a firm grasp on where it’s headed. Part of this is no doubt a reflection of cultural differences, and part of it is undoubtedly just because it’s some disorienting combination of silly, poorly scripted and outright insane. So when Ruihu pops up and turns out to have another set of sexual running gear, and then starts flinging around and smashing massive wooden wheels with her firehose-length phallus, well… one just sort of shrugs and goes with it.

In the end, one can’t really recommend Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, at least not with a straight face. It starts to get into male and female sexual insecurities that cut across cultures and eras, but it’s too slapdash to emotionally connect, and while portions of it are certainly arousing, it doesn’t have, ahem, a lasting erotic charge. The degree to which one might feel truly cheated by a viewing, though, is dependent only on one’s company, level of alcoholic imbibement, and post-screening coital success level. For the full, original read, from ShockYa, click here. (China Lion/China 3-D Digital Entertainment, R, 113 minutes)

The idea of sexual swinging, or committed couples swapping partners, opens up all sorts of rich avenues for exploration of feeling, but the London-set comedy Swinging With the Finkels does so little of substance or sincerity with the subject that one starts to yearn for the comparative honesty of a lonely hearts drama with a forlorn guy swigging a beer and staring at a computer screen. In fact, the movie evinces no particular reason for existing other than to seemingly provide its pleasant but half-heartedly invested cast with paychecks, and perhaps serve as the answer for the trivia question of in which film Mandy Moore mock-masturbates with a cucumber.

Ellie (Moore) and Alvin (Martin Freeman) are a young, married white-collar couple seemingly suffering from a bit of the seven-year itch. Friends Peter (Jonathan Silverman) and Janet (Melissa George) are little help, the journey into parenthood having thrown something of a speed bump into their relationship. Seemingly because one attempt at “spicing it up” in the bedroom went awry (she wore sexy lingerie and lit mood candles, and he donned a fireman’s costume… ha!), Ellie and Alvin make the (entirely il)logical jump to swinging, eventually settling on a seemingly normal couple (Angus Deayton and Daisy Beaumont). After the Saturday night deed is done, things proceed but, magically, don’t get immediately better for Ellie and Alvin. What’s a committed but sexually frustrated couple to do?

Swinging With the Finkels is supposedly rated R, but it’s quite possibly the tamest R in recent memory, especially for a film dealing with matters sexual. Director Jonathan Newman’s movie is definitely the “fem” version of a swingers’ tale, with relationship mechanics valued much more over any possible prurient interests. Problematically, though, it also exists chiefly as a collection of nipped sitcom contrivances, from Ellie’s theatrically gay coworker (who gives her the initial idea of partner-swapping) and a montage of “zany” bad fits who respond to Ellie and Alvin’s sex ad to a forced-uncomfortable sequence in which an old person (in this case Ellie’s grandfather, played by Jerry Stiller) dispenses sex advice. Wow, how novel.

The script digs into none of these scenes with great aplomb, and it additionally requires Ellie and Alvin’s friends to nonsensically implode their marriage by having Peter tell Janet about a one-off affair, merely so there is some minor element of introduced contrast to Ellie and Alvin’s plight. Two grossly overwritten office pals of Alvin also serve this function, and an extremely flat shooting style and hammy music cues additionally do the material no favors. The Finkels manages to make both stanch, devoted monogamy and quiet singlehood look attractive — no small (or purposeful) accomplishment for a movie about swinging and its churned-up feelings. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Freestyle, 86 minutes, R)

An unusually intimate peek behind the curtain of the Followill fraternity, Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon arrives at particularly bizarre time, coming as it does on the heels of the successful, Grammy Award-winning band’s cancellation of the entirety of its remaining U.S. fall tour dates after a disastrous show in Dallas in which lead singer Caleb Followill (below, second from right) suddenly left the stage. After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, the documentary bows on Showtime this evening, with repeat presentations scheduled over the next several weeks.

The sons of Betty Ann and Ivan Followill, a homemaker and traveling Pentecostal revivalist preacher, Caleb, Nathan and Jared joined forces with their cousin Matthew to peddle their own brand of Southern garage/roots rock, riding a couple well received albums to overseas touring success before truly punching through Stateside with 2008’s multi-platinum Only By the Night. Co-directed by Stephen C. Mitchell and Casey McGrath, the former of whom was a Nashville A&R rep who initially signed Nathan and Caleb to a record contract, Talihina Sky unfolds somewhere between fan document and tantalizing expose. Mitchell’s decade-plus-long relationship with the group gives him access to personal home videos, interviews and behind-the-scenes rehearsal and recording studio footage, not all of it flattering. And he and McGrath also make the decision to frame their film around the Followills’ return to one of their annual family reunions in rural Oklahoma, where various cousins, uncles, second cousins and uncles who might be second cousins provide — in their sometimes drunken ramblings — provide in cumulative a telling portrait of familial roots that implicitly if sympathetically offers up a psychological explanation of some of the Followill boys’ behavior and (latent) problems.

Still, even though Ivan and Betty Ann submit to interviews, and there’s a proper accounting of the circumstances that led in particular Nathan and Caleb from Jesus-praising hymnals to peddling “the devil’s music,” Talihina Sky unfolds at a bit of a remove, probably in large part because the band members are all producers on the project, and therefore reluctant to sign off on anything that lastingly portrays either them or their loved ones in too negative of a light. Caleb talks rather movingly about the shame of being poor as a child, and how that is definitely a motivating factor in his young adult life. And Ivan speculates about the impact that the divorce of he and his wife had on his kids. But every time Talihina Sky seems close to offering up penetrating insights — in regards to Ivan’s alcoholism, say, or any of the other Followills’ bouts with booze and marijuana — it pulls back, and throws in some old public access performance footage, or clips of a spirited game of horseshoes at the aforementioned reunion.

There’s a lot between the lines, in other words. In the sparse and seemingly free-association interview segments, Mitchell and McGrath obviously don’t press the Followills for a lot answers. So when Caleb ruminates about an A&R rep stopping by the recording studio and giving his opinion recording singles choices, and evocatively compares it to a smut film, there’s no clarifying follow-up. Similarly, some gripping tour bus footage in which one of the band members rips into Caleb for his drunken selfishness appears out of nowhere, and lacks any contextual placement.

Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon is a picture of a group of twentysomething guys in motion, and development. It lacks definition, and clarity. Still, that’s hardly a mortal sin, given the not-yet-cast maturity of its subjects. Both the sheer amount and quality of achingly personal footage here is easily worthy of a viewing by even casual fans of the group, or just those for whom modern music and the accompanying tour lifestyle holds interest. Just don’t expect firm answers about some of the problems that plague these guys. That speculation is left up to each individual viewer. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Phreak Creative, unrated, 86 minutes)

A pumped-up remake of the same-named 1984 vampire horror-comedy, director Craig Gillespie’s Fright Night (not to be confused with Fight Night) represents a well oiled machine of goosed senses that has no clearly defined motivating purposes, even within the genre confines of its own story. Fun and engaging performances from especially Colin Farrell, David Tennant and Anton Yelchin carry the film a great distance, but it eventually bogs down courtesy of loosely defined stakes and poorly incentivized action. Overall, the story feels beholden to a series of character choices and
actions that make no particular sense. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Touchstone/DreamWorks, R, 105 minutes)

If one has on their “bucket list” seeing a live-action, achingly precious ensemble drama in which a butterfly recites some of the lyrics to “I Want Candy,” then they should definitely see Cafe. Then, and only then. Actually… you know what? They may want to hold up and wait a bit longer, rolling the dice to see if some other enterprising would-be auteur works that left-field tidbit into their armchair-philosophizing cinematic treatise on paying it forward or embracing life or some such malarkey. A sincere and wildly self-serious film that seems to chiefly exist due to some pact/dare to do a hiatus-schedule movie together that erstwhile lovers Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jamie Kennedy forged on the set of The Ghost Whisperer, this Cafe should have its beverage license revoked, no matter the lack of alcohol.

The story unfolds entirely in a West Philadelphia coffee shop (insert The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air joke here), where Claire (Hewitt) works, an in-debt druggie (Garrett Lee Hendricks) falls under the dark sway of a dope-slinging former pal (Kennedy), and a nameless writer (Richard Short) observes a couple (Michaela McManus and Derek Cecil) enjoy some post-movie banter despite the fact that one of them is married. Other characters kind of drift in and out, and the film’s big putative shock/twist occurs when a girl (Madeline Carroll) pops up on the laptop of a dweeby guy (Hubbel Palmer) and tells him he’s an avatar, and that his entire world/life (and that of those around him) doesn’t exist. He resists her revelation, but engages in a series of tests and conversations, and eventually comes to believe her. But should the audience?

Writer-director Marc Erlbaum — who one has to assume is a recent film school graduate who wrote plenty of tortured poetry in high school — is clearly aiming for some grand metaphorical statement with Cafe, but his reach far exceeds his grasp. Nothing about the computer girl’s revelation (whether real or phony) particularly deepens or colors any of the action we see unfold (even after she directs her chubby confidant to tell Claire the same things she told him), and the movie’s insights consist of yawning bromides like, “There is no more brilliant light than that which follows darkness.” Wow, deep. The film’s ending, meanwhile, opts for both cheap melodrama and an additional twist, which hints at yet an additional layer of hokey artifice.

Stooping to the level of the material, Erlbaum’s cast does Cafe no great favors, apart from the young and talented Carroll, who radiates an unfussy trustworthiness and benevolence a cut or two above the cheap, college-level Philosophy 101 nonsense she’s pitching. Hewitt is lovely and flirty, which casts a bit of sunshine on a couple brief moments (not even entire scenes), but as her friend-zone-trapped coffee shop coworker Todd, Daniel Eric Gold telegraphs and overdials the bumbling nervousness, almost to the point that you want to reach into the screen and punch him. The single, cuts-both-ways bemusement of Cafe comes by way of Kennedy. Cast against type as a thug, he seems to be using the movie as some sort of low-fi acting exercise, so for a while it’s actually cool and kind of interesting to see him underplay things in several scenes. The problem is that he also mumbles all of his dialogue, apparently doing his impression on Fenster from The Usual Suspects, and that gets old rather quickly — kind of like all of Cafe‘s stale offerings, actually. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Maya Entertainment, PG-13, 101 minutes)

What would possess a person to stay and live in (or move to) a small, dusty town in the scorching Death Valley region of California, with a population of 35? That question is at the heart of Nick Brandestini’s Darwin: No Services Ahead, about a same-named, dried-up burgh at the end of a weathered road on the outskirts on a nearby mountain range where the government tests top-secret weapons. A unique and in some respects staggering work, Darwin is an involving portrait of people propelled from society by various tragic turns, and yet also curiously bound together by their estrangement.

When, in the spring of 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was captured on audiotape making comments about small towns whose jobs had dried up and vanished, and were thus characterized by a populace with antipathy toward outsiders or those different than them, and clinging to guns and religion, he was in theory speaking about rural Rust Belt voters, but there are certainly significant overlaps with some of the denizens of Darwin. The remarkable thing about Brandestini’s humanizing movie, though — which also recalls David Lynch’s web-produced Interview Project, co-directed by his son Austin — is that it doesn’t sit in superior judgment of them, even as it slowly reveals some of their cracked and warped thinking.

Monty Brannigan, a salty ex-miner who’s lived in the town for almost 60 years and is old enough to remember its wild(er) roots (after several openings and closings, the mine shuttered for good in 1977), lives in as much of an unexamined cocoon as he can with his second wife, Nancy, estranged from his two adult children. Hank and Connie Jones, a couple with seven previous marriages between them, give occasional town tours, and take care of Connie’s transsexual “son,” Ryal, and his partner, who are contemplating a move. Susan Pimentel holds the town’s one real job, as postmaster. (Michael Laemmle, meanwhile, the grand-nephew of Universal Studios co-founder Carl Laemmle, oversees the 55,000-gallon water tank and single-pipe, gravity-fed waterline that descends from the mountains and serves as Darwin’s literal lifeline.) These and other interesting characters serve as a reminder that certain pockets of America are not for the hearty and hale, but for people — consciously or not — looking to avoid or run away from something.

Brandestini doesn’t load up his movie with fancy directorial gimmickry, or even prod his interview subjects with a seemingly specific agenda, instead leaning on an ethereal Southwestern-inflected score from composer Michael Brook for mood and just letting them talk. The skillfully edited result is fairly remarkable. A history of the town emerges first; its namesake was Dr. Erasmus Darwin French, a U.S. Army deserter who headed west during the Gold Rush and spent years (unsuccessfully) mining in the area. When silver was discovered nearby in 1874, the town briefly boomed, achieving its peak population of 3,500 in 1877. Then, in a roundabout way, colorful unseen supporting characters are illuminated through survivor’s memories. One Darwin dweller who passed in 2003, Greville Healey, lived in a hollowed-out metal water tank, having been “banned” from living in a home (trailer) after burning two of them down while falling asleep with lit cigarettes.

Finally, of course, the characters themselves come into crisper focus — with edifying details and sometimes shocking stories about their pasts, and ruminations (spoken and sometimes editorially implied) on what’s drawn them to and/or kept them in Darwin. There are few explicitly religious zealots in the mix (fistfights or the threat thereof seem more likely to broker peace than the blessed holy scripture), but more than a handful of Darwin residents confess a belief in apocalyptic, doomsday scenarios. To that end, one gentleman leaves a variety of loaded handguns, rifles and shotguns scattered around his home; another, for reasons unclear, has buried his guns outside of his trailer, in the desert. It’s fascinating and more than a little moving to contemplate the histories and dilemmas of all these people. They are by degrees damaged souls, yes, but in their basic needs not so different from you or I. (Nick Brandestini Productions, unrated, 86 minutes)

The latest big screen iteration in a character that has held a grip on fan imagination for almost eight decades, Conan the Barbarian is a full-bodied piece of throwback sword-and-sorcery entertainment that dutifully meets its target-demographic quotients for nudity and violence, but otherwise inspires little in the way of crossover thrill or appeal. A convincing backdrop can’t completely save a narrative stuck somewhere between unapologetic pureblood retribution and something a bit more ambitious, just as neither can Jason Momoa — who has a certain snarling charisma that, combined with his well honed physique, nicely matches the needs of the part — or the wasted presence of Rachel Nichols. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 112 minutes)