Image

Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Daily Archives: September 2, 2011

Angela Sarafyan Talks Orgy, Breaking Dawn

It’s another sweltering late summer day in Los Angeles, and Angela Sarafyan, our interview having just wrapped, has had enough. Her professional obligations for the afternoon apparently complete, Sarafyan strolls over to the rooftop pool at the swanky hotel at which we have gathered, and climbs in for a quick dip. In her dress.

It’s a bit nervy, sure, but actually not that thematically or behaviorally detached when one considers the occasion for our gathering: to discuss A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, a new ensemble comedy about a tight-knit group of friends who, when faced with the prospect of losing the summer getaway house that’s served as the crash-pad for years’ worth of great parties, decide to go out with a bang — literally. Shooting on location in Wilmington, North Carolina, gave Sarafyan the opportunity to re-enact many of her favorite Dawson’s Creek moments of yesteryear, but, alas, there was no Dawson or Pacey to sweep her off her feet. I had the opportunity to recently chat one-on-one with Sarafyan, about Orgy, what people might most recognize her from right now, and what people might most recognize her from in the very near future. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here.

Littlerock

A nicely photographed and initially intriguing character study of a road trip gone awry, and a sibling pair of foreign travelers waylaid in a land foreign to them, Littlerock quickly fumbles away any sense of delicate engagement, and ends up a collection of posed and meandering down-tempo moments in search of an inciting incident or clarifying signifier. Pleased with itself more than it ought to be, the movie seems to believe or feel that dawdling for dawdling’s sake is in the end its own kind of precious artistic statement, a fact only underscored by a heavy-handed political statement finale.

Written and directed by Mike Ott, Littlerock is one of those indie films where the actors (non-professionals or neophytes, one assumes) all play characters with the same first names. Whether this was because the film is “real,” and rooted in actual experiences and their personalities or just so no one got confused on set, one can’t be certain. Regardless, the story centers on brother and sister Atsuko and Rintaro (Atsuko Okatsuka, above, and Rintaro Sawamoto), Japanese tourists whom we glean through a small handful of narrated postcards written back home, have a rocky relationship with their father. The pair gets stuck in the title town, a sleepy ex-urb of Los Angeles, when their car breaks down. Later that night, the duo happen upon a party at a nearby hotel, and make friends with Cory (Cory Zacharia), a kind of feckless loafer with loosely defined ambitions to be an actor or model.

Rintaro speaks a little English, and Atsuko none at all. The next day they “site-see” with Cory, meet some more people, and then head to another party. Despite the language barrier, Atsuko bonds more with the locals than her brother, and when he presses her to continue north as part of their agreed upon itinerary, she balks and stays behind. Staying with Cory (who lives with his father), Atsuko further tethers herself to her new surroundings, striking up a quasi-relationship with another boy, and taking a job at the Mexican restaurant where Cory works when he feels particularly gripped by the urge. Will Rintaro ever return? And what is bonding Atsuko to this place? Ah, these are the mysteries of Littlerock, where twentysomething kids ride bikes for fun when they’re not enjoying some beer and a smoke.

Somewhat (very loosely) like the recent Bellflower or the Polish brothers’ 2001 dramedy Jackpot, Littlerock aims to be a portrait of arrested place and curious ambition. It means to be a sort of dusty, Southern California thematic companion to Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia, in which characters drink, smoke pot and passive-aggressively hassle one another while figuring out what to do with their lives. (Instead of parking lots, though, we get empty, rundown state parks and dingy apartments and RVs.) The problem is that there is no substantive and sustained outside force acting upon Cory, or Atsuko and Rintaro. Everyone is drifting, like a tattered leaf caught in a lazy breeze. Even when Cory is hassled over money he mysteriously owes an acquaintance, the stakes ($200) and pressure (a verbal berating, a poured-out beer) never amount to much of anything.

The performances, too, fail to engage. Okatsuka has a certain watchable mysteriousness, but that chiefly owes to the fact that she doesn’t speak any English. Zacharia, meanwhile, cycles through a thoroughly unconvincing catalogue of babytalk-inflected mannerisms in his dealings with Atsuko, whom his character is supposed to have a crush on. He comes across as an open-mouthed trout; it’s an annoying turn that only becomes more irritating when the script requires him to repeatedly fail to pick up on any nonverbal indicators. (At one point late in the film, he even gets cross and says, out loud, that it’s like Atsuko can’t understand him. Ummm… yeah.)

Most damningly, though, despite the ambivalence of its characters, Littlerock has no headstrong, purposeful sense of its own identity. Ott constructs a cutesy, willfully modest and submissive cultural mash-up, and proclaims it profound, or art, merely by virtue of its construction. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s web site. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance, unrated, 83 minutes)

Technical Difficulties / Please Stand By

I don’t have a picture of a monkey in the control room, but it seems as if a simple monthly switch-over into September capsized/dumped a punch of recently updated SD posts, from the past week-plus. We’ll aim to resolve issue, and/or get those re-posted as soon as possible. And then… revenge!

ShockYa DVD Column, September 1

Over at ShockYa, in my latest DVD/Blu-ray column, I take a look at the unintended bonus of Mel Gibson‘s casting in the darkly comedic The Beaver; a killer-car flick that rather unabashedly rips off Predator; a surprisingly decent straight-to-video buddy-cop flick with Jason Statham and Paddy Considine; Disney’s tween-targeted Prom; a documentary about the mysterious death of Andy Kaufman; and more. Again, it’s over at ShockYa, so click here for the full, fun read.

Semper Fi: Always Faithful

If one conducted a day-long survey of random persons from any given major metropolitan street, and asked them to name the biggest polluter in the country, it’s doubtful that the Department of Defense’s name would come up at all, and if it did then almost certainly one wouldn’t need a second hand to keep track of that tally. And yet that’s the central assertion of Semper Fi: Always Faithful, a damning new documentary about drinking water contaminants at a military training base spanning a period of 30 years. At once emotionally powerful and a little more under-sketched than one might like it to be, the film is a frustrating yet nonetheless engaging and heartrending entry in the all-too-swollen canon of social-justice nonfiction films.

A presentation at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, where it won an editing award and was runner-up in the Audience Award balloting, co-directors Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon’s movie tells the story of toxic cleaning chemicals that were improperly disposed of at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base, beginning in 1957 and stretching well into the 1980s. The result was that nearly one million Marines and their families were exposed to high levels of carcinogens through drinking water drawn from wells on the base, and when the Marine Corps eventually closed the toxic wells they compounded their sins by never making the contamination public. Using technology to connect, a group of committed ex-Marines — many of whom have lost children, and some of whom are now sick themselves — work together and try to bring about long-delayed justice.

Semper Fi undeniably has emotional punching power, largely courtesy of one of its chief subjects, Jerry Ensminger, a former Master Sergeant and drill instructor for nearly 25 years. When he recollects his dying daughter — who had for weeks resisted any pain medication — asking for a morphine shot to be shared with him, because she knew her dad was in pain too, it is absolutely devastating. If there are failings, it’s that Libert and Hardmon do not construct a particularly strong narrative backbone beyond the chronological one attached to the quest fronted by Ensminger, or, frankly, attempt to expand their story beyond the limits of an emotional cudgel.

Neither do they make a deeply persuasive case for the potential reasons (or, indeed, the existence) of widespread military environmental abuses, or broad misconduct and cover-up. Simply tossing up title cards that indicate there are “130 contaminated military sites” in the United States, and pointing out that one in 10 Americans lives within 10 miles of a military base does not do justice to the gravity of Semper Fi‘s central story. While it’s understandable that the narrative is partially impacted by the fact that the story is still ongoing and unfolding (a bill mandating that the DOD notify all those who stayed at Camp Lejeune during the impacted timeframe is awaiting a final Congressional vote, and has been since February 2010), Libert and Hardmon don’t dig quite deep enough.

They’re content to stay with the activists, and while their journeys are all engaging on a human level, the film’s basic failure to aggressively seek out the contrasting point-of-view means that a viewer leaves uncertain as to whether this is all part of a sinister, coordinated cover-up, mere bureaucratic incompetence unrelated to government, or actually part of a larger military-culture “code of silence” in which the notion of honest, greater-good whistle-blowing, or standing up to and reporting problems up the chain of command, is not merely frowned upon but beaten into submission. Semper Fi tells one hell of a story, but unfortunately it’s just not the complete one. For more information on the film and its subjects, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, meanwhile, click here. (Wider Film Projects/Chicken and Egg Pictures, unrated, 76 minutes)

Twitter