Shared Darkness

Winner of jury and audience prizes at both the Sundance and Los Angeles Film Festivals, Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man is an unexpectedly fresh nonfiction tale that rustles up deep feelings of a life stolen. Part docu-mystery, part uplifting valentine about the universality and resonating power of music, the movie tells the story of Sixto Rodriguez, an enigmatic, Detroit-based singer-songwriter who in the early 1970s released two soulful but commercially irrelevant albums under his surname, and quickly disappeared into complete oblivion, only to find unlikely reception and fame in a completely different context, half a world away.



In 1968, two music producers went to a smoke-filled downtown Detroit bar to see an unknown recording artist who’d attracted a small following with his affecting melodies and mysterious penchant for playing with his back to the crowd. They were immediately bewitched with Rodriguez, a Mexican-American folk singer whose evocative lyrics seemed a beguiling mixture of wistful regret and dark prophecy. They recorded two albums, and despite superb reviews, 1970’s Cold Fact and its follow-up, Coming From Reality, were unmitigated commercial disasters, effectively marking the end of Rodriguez’s recording career. He disappeared, and all that followed were stories of escalating depression, and rumors of suicide.

But a funny thing happened. A bootleg recording of Cold Fact found its way into South Africa, where its socially plugged-in lyrics found welcome reception with a generation of Afrikaans struggling with the moral failings of their country’s apartheid. Over the next several decades, even though he was banned from government-controlled radio playlists, Rodriguez became a phenomenon (bigger than Elvis and the Beatles, we’re told). Two fans — an ex-jeweler and a music journalist — would eventually set out to try to get the bottom of his presumed death, with surprising results for all involved.

Music is at its core, which gives Searching for Sugar Man a passing familiarity to fellow docs like Anvil! The Story of Anvil and The Devil and Daniel Johnston, the latter about a troubled singer-songwriter whose mental health struggles precluded any grander commercial breakthrough. The investigative/questing aspect of its narrative, however, is much more of a piece with Mark Moskowitz’s superb but grossly under-recognized 2002 film Stone Reader, which chronicled the filmmaker’s attempts to track down the seemingly vanished author of a striking 1972 debut novel. Unlike that movie, however, which leans on the critical assessments of Moskowitz and other talking heads, viewers of Sugar Man are able to bask in the contemplative melancholy of Rodriguez’s soulful music — a unique and frequently heartrending melding of Bob Dylan’s poetic lyricism, Donovan’s lilting phrasing and delivery, and Marvin Gaye’s pained urban unrest. There are plenty of lazy and unworthy nonfiction lionizations bumping around out there, but this isn’t one of them.

What gives Sugar Man plenty of extra “oomph,” though, are its socio-political heft as well as the engaging mode of its telling. In regards to the latter, plenty of documentaries are presented in staid fashion, as little more than a collection of talking heads; Bendjelloul’s movie, on the other hand, has a much more thoughtfully constructed visual template. Working with cinematographer Camilla Skagerstrom, the director presents an inviting pastiche of sweeping Cape Town cityscapes, and contrasts them in compelling fashion with the burned-out rubble of Detroit, both past and present. This, in turn, reinforces the amazing and unlikely social connection, spanning thousands of miles, found between young, mostly white South Africans and Rodriguez’s stirring poetry of defiance.

As more details regarding his life and family come into focus, a heart aches and swells for Rodriguez. Still, Sugar Man doesn’t offer up much in the way of definitive insights about its subject. Rodriguez remains a rather enigmatic, almost shamanistic figure. As well, given the manner in which he raises it and the strong feelings in viewers it evokes, Bendjelloul would also be better served addressing more substantively the issues of artist royalties, and the money trail leading to Clarence Avant, the onetime impresario of the label which held Rodriguez’s overseas rights.

That said, Sugar Man is still a little gem — an engaging rumination on fame and inspiration, swollen with feeling. It shows the world to be a wide place, and yet a hearteningly small one as well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. To purchase the movie’s soundtrack, meanwhile, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, unrated, 85 minutes)

Kind of loosely of a piece with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip, by way of The Hangover or Bad Santa, Scandanavian import Klown is another comedy that wrings most of its laughs from the premise that in the absence of a civilizing female presence males are apt to revert to despicable and idiotic behavior. A raunchy road movie starring Danish comedians Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen as exaggerated versions of themselves, director Mikkel Norgaard’s film is crisply acted and peppered with enough legitimately funny set-ups to win over the subtitle-averse, even if toward the end it seems to compromise the nature of some of its characters. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Drafthouse Films, R, 89 minutes)

A wearying, lackluster sci-fi comedy about a group of suburban men who form a neighborhood watch group in the wake of a murder, and then get caught up in defusing an alien invasion plot, The Watch is a premise in search of a compelling story, and an exemplar of indulgent improvisation gone wrong and too long. Reteaming Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn for the first time since 2004’s Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, the movie is a collection of small handful of ideas strung out into set pieces, and a superb example of the pitfalls of Hollywood studio comedy-by-committee. For my full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, R, 101 minutes)

A winning deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl subgenre by way of Stranger Than Fiction, the beguiling, effervescent Ruby Sparks is a movie with both charm and a certain psychological heft. The screenwriting debut of costar Zoe Kazan — the daughter of screenwriters Robin Swicord and Nicholas Kazan, and the granddaughter of director Elia Kazan — this fun, enticing little curio deftly juggles disparate tones in a manner reminiscent of (500) Days of Summer, existing at a fanciful intersection of romance, literary invention and self-delusion.



Beset by writer’s block, Los Angeles novelist Calvin Weir-Field (Paul Dano) is coasting on the fumes of his celebrated first novel. After being given an assignment by his therapist (Elliott Gould), Calvin has a breakthrough, diving into yarns of rhapsodic prose about a girl, Ruby (Kazan, above right), who visits him in his dreams. Then she shows up in his living room, every detail as he wrote. Certain he’s gone mad, Calvin confides in his older brother Harry (Chris Messina), the only person to have read his manuscript pages on Ruby.

It’s then that Calvin discovers this wild, unlikely power isn’t yet capped. He’s conjured Ruby into existence, but can also still change her by simply sitting down at his typewriter and adding to his story — something he swears not to do. As the idealized glow of Calvin’s relationship with Ruby begins to fade, however, he tinkers with her character around the edges, which has consequences in the real world.

Its premise is set up for broad farce, but there’s a pleasant tenderness and intimacy to Ruby Sparks, as well as a blistering immediacy. As helmed by Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, it’s a movie that feels alive and caffeinated in every frame, but not in a showy, look-at-me sort of way. It’s cute in a bit of a mannered, bohemian way, yes, but its ideas are much more fruitfully explored and cast into relief in this budgeted telling than they likely would be in a grander, big studio re-imagination of the same conceit.

Kazan comes at the concept from a literary perspective, exploring the notion of a writer who pens the lover he thinks he wants — a bundle of “adorkable” qualities whose messy past make her endearing, but also a girl who Harry assures Calvin doesn’t exist in real life — and then finds himself threatened by the live-in complexities of those very same traits, and the chaotic problems to which they lend themselves. Somewhat common characters are also rendered far less so by the fact that Kazan knows she’s playing around with a couple archetypes, as well as the depth and skill with which she sketches them.

Like the more swooning, romantic portions of last year’s Like Crazy, Ruby Sparks movingly captures the bloom of young love. Dano and Kazan (a longtime off-screen couple) obviously have a rich, infatuating chemistry, and it’s put to fantastic use here. The rest of the supporting cast — Annette Bening as Calvin’s hippie mother, Antonio Banderas as his wood-carving artist stepfather, and Steve Coogan as a passive-aggressively competitive fellow writer and mentor — is equally fantastic, but it’s chiefly the show of these two young actors, and they deliver nuanced, emotionally perceptive work.

Ruby Sparks recalls other films (certainly Harvey and Adaptation) in flitting fashion, but it doesn’t cede or trade away its unique personality to any other work, in the gimmicky pursuit of pat resolution. After Ruby finally learns the truth about how she and Calvin came to be a couple, the film’s conclusion both puts a bow on things, closing a narrative loop, and leaves them ambiguous and open-ended. Is Ruby Sparks a morality tale, per se, a bedazzled cinematic meditation on free will, or just an inventive romance jazzed up with some metaphysical jewelry? It’s all three, really. Or at least enough of each to kickstart a wonderful conversation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox Searchlight, R, 104 minutes)

A narrative competition world premiere at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival, Pincus is a delicately shot curio about the meanderings of an emotionally adrift man-child, laced with autobiographical elements from writer-director David Fenster’s life. Picture a much more melancholic, down-tempo Greenberg, vacuumed free of its pin-prick wit and sardonicism, and one begins to approximate the bobbing-cork-in-an-ocean qualities of Pincus, which exhibits a slight hold but eventually comes across as a series of posed moments in search of a clarifying signifier.



David Nordstrom sits in for the filmmaker, starring as Pincus Finster, a directionless Miami thirtysomething who lives with and cares for his Parkinson’s-stricken father (Paul Fenster, the director’s father, and an actual Parkinson’s patient). His father used to own and operate a contractor business, but Pincus’ halfhearted attempts at keeping things going seem maintained chiefly to just provide him with an excuse to get out of the house. He hangs out with Dietmar (Dietmar Franosch), an illegal German immigrant and one of his father’s old employees, drinking and smoking pot. Phone messages from disgruntled customers start piling up, but Pincus instead seeks a sort of refuge in a holistic yoga class, where he sidles up to instructor Anna (Christi Idavoy). She agrees to help Pincus try out some alternative therapy treatments on his father, but remains ambivalent about any romantic connection.

Any discussion of what’s right with the easygoing Pincus begins with its beguiling naturalistic style. Fenster blends documentary elements (his father, simplistic editorial framing) with occasionally improvised-seeming dialogue, which focuses attention on the film’s characters in hard and fast fashion. It is to the movie’s benefit, then, that Nordstorm is such an amiable peg on which to hang this loose a story.

Unfortunately, while there exists around the edges of the unfolding narrative the opportunity for much more dramatic engagement, Fenster seems allergic to conflict. His film toes the line between stubbornly minimalist and, if not pointless, then at least futile. Pincus cries out for an injection of dynamism from somewhere, be it in the form of romantic intrigue with Anna, more ruinous and concrete financial consequences, or some other problem. The sudden disappearance of Dietmar crops up as a minor mystery, but is poorly integrated into Pincus’ quest. This is shoegazing cinema — perfectly serviceable for curated, air-quote appreciation, but lacking in breakout insights or vision. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Pincus, unrated, 78 minutes)

Award-winning filmmaker Yung Chang drew praise for 2007’s Up the Yangtze, which focused on the many socioeconomically disadvantaged people impacted by the building of the massive Three Gorges Dam in Hubei. With his latest movie, he returns to China for another unexpectedly lyrical snapshot of that country’s rapidly changing economic landscape. A nonfiction look at the recruitment and training of young boxers for future hopeful Olympic glory, China Heavyweight is an unadorned, guileless work that starts slowly but accrues a deeper emotional hold and resonance as it winds on. In not dissimilar fashion from the recent Pelotero: Ballplayer, a documentary which examined teenage baseball prospects in the Dominican Republic, Chang’s film illustrates how sports are still one of the most widely pursued avenues out of outright familial poverty or working-class despair. China Heavyweight opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall and the Laemmle Playhouse 7. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 94 minutes)

It’s perhaps something of a nautically-titled coincidence, the meandering nature and theatrical roots that Drunkboat share with Jack Goes Boating, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s 2010 directorial debut. But both movies represent passion projects ill suited to cinematic adaptation, or at least sludgy, unresolved, mannered and grating in their realized incarnations.

Drunkboat centers around a down-and-out Vietnam veteran and drunkard, Mort Gleason (John Malkovich), who has an epiphany of sorts and returns to his childhood home in the Chicago suburbs, where his sister Eileen (Dana Delaney) still lives with her son and Mort’s other nephew, Abe (Jacob Zachar). She’s at first distrustful and suspicious of his newfound and fragile sobriety, but eventually leaves him in charge of Abe to go on a date out of town. With dreams of busting out of this sleepy one-horse burgh, teenager Abe has dreams of… buying a boat? Yep. And his desires dovetail with the latest scheme of con man and salvage dealer Fletcher (John Goodman), who’s puttied and painted up a heap of wooden maritime garbage with an eye on unloading it for a couple hundred bucks. Abe is interested, but needs an adult signature on the bill of sale.

Drunkboat is directed by Bob Meyer, and co-adapted from his own (apparently semi-autobiographical) stageplay of the same name. Its music occasionally seems to posit that the movie is some sort of vaudevillian comedy, and Fletcher is written as a comedic figure as well. But the movie is a stilted, tonal mishmash, and its insights are spare. Drunkboat toggles listlessly between the conceptual and specific, never successfully translating to screen ideas that might connect more readily on stage, in the abstract.

As an alcoholic ex-poet teetering on the edge of self-destruction, Malkovich is great, lost in a boozy self-reflection laced with notes of pained regret. Naturalistic and reactive, Zachar is also good. But Goodman grates, and the movie invests a regrettable amount of time in his pointless shenanigans. Many other films assay the slippery qualities of drunkenness and repentance in far more arresting fashion. Drunkboat unfortunately just ambles along, in languid fashion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, click here. (Seven Arts/Lantern Lane, PG, 98 minutes)

Warped, testosteronized rivalry has informed the cinematic canon of the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark, in films like Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home, but that area of inquiry actually has its roots in The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, a fun little bauble they shot in 2008 as their third feature film, after The Puffy Chair and Baghead and before those two aforementioned movies. Buzzing with a low-fi honesty and intimacy, the movie exudes a charming quality of realness and small, to-scale catharsis that mark it as a treat indie film fans should definitely seek out.



Based loosely on a pair of ultra-competitive brothers who grew up down the street from the Duplasses, the film centers on Mark (Steve Zissis, above left), a schlubby thirtysomething guy who’s visiting his mom (Julie Vorus) with his family when his estranged brother, Jeremy (Mark Kelly, above right), shows up. The pair, once close, have basically stopped speaking to one another as the result of a massive, three-day, 25-event athletic competition as teenagers that ended in a disputed tie (their underwater breath-holding contest was interrupted). Egged on by Jeremy’s sniping and clucking dismissal, Mark finds his competitive impulses re-awakened. Even though his wife (Jennifer Lafleur), worried about his health and stress levels, tries to limit Mark’s contact with Jeremy, the duo conspire to hold a clandestine rematch, and settle the matter of brotherly superiority once and for all.

As a comedy of men behaving badly, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon is a lot of fun. Zissis and Kelly needle each other in fine fashion, and the Duplass brothers capture in smart, shorthand strokes how self-esteem can get caught up in sibling rivalry, and battles for parental attention. But the movie is also about awakened fraternal bonding. While the events — everything from pool and ping-pong to arm-wrestling and basketball — offer up the chance for a few fun little set pieces, the Duplass brothers’ film (a focused and unfussy domestic snapshot, at only 75 minutes) is mostly concerned with assaying masculine norms and methods of communication and respect. There’s a lot of recognizable truth here, amidst the considerable silliness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Red Flag Releasing, unrated, 75 minutes)

A horror movie in only the loosest sense, writer-director Nicholas McCarthy’s The Pact is actually more of a psychologically rooted chiller, in which the dark, repressed memories of a turbulent and unhappy childhood come bubbling to the surface. Whether its disturbing twists are meant to be taken literally or as intense manifestations of trauma is a matter of debate up until the final reel, and then even afterward.

Following their estranged mother’s death, Nicole (Agnes Bruckner) leans on her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) to return to their childhood home and help settle her affairs. Annie is reluctant, but when she arrives, Nicole is nowhere to be found. After the funeral, a series of unnerving events follows — noises in the night, objects moving about, and then more even powerful paranormal disturbances. Annie reports her sister’s disappearance to the police, and also discovers a hidden room in the house. Further digging then leads her to more revelations about her mother’s past.

Though it’s his feature debut as a filmmaker, McCarthy’s movie is based upon a short of the same name, and his familiarity and level of thought, investment and comfort with respect to the material is evident. There are echoes of the same sense of weighty familial and inter-generational guilt explored in movies like Steve Kloves’ Flesh and Bone, from 1993, and 2001’s Frailty, directed by Bill Paxton, and McCarthy also possesses a good grasp of effective, tension-building technique. The low-key production design and level of attention to detail is also superlative. If some of its narrative pivots come off as a bit fantastical as The Pact winds its way to its conclusion, the performances help hold an audience’s interest. Lotz is a solid guide on this journey, and the troubled Annie’s quest invites considerable sympathy. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Midnight, unrated, 91 minutes)

If a catchy, memorable and/or weirdly evocative title made a film, then surely Nipples & Palm Trees would be among the year’s best releases. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of color and sizzle but precious little of substance in this unenlightening tale of a down-and-out Los Angeles artist and his fitful relationship with his muse. The script for Nipples & Palm Trees smacks of Eric Schaeffer-dom, which is to say that it’s centered around an angsty, capital-a artistic protagonist, and created seemingly with the prime objective of giving the creator (in this case writer-actor Matt James) the chance to roll around naked with lots of ladies. Here, the nonsensical fantasy constructs include dinner-party gang-bangs and busty women who offer up joints and handjobs to strangers within five minutes of meeting them. Energetically shot enough to qualify as a travelogue curio for hardcore indie fans in search of another City-of-Angels valentine, there’s otherwise little to recommend this low-budget misfire. Nipples & Palm Trees plays July 13-19 at the Laemmle NoHo 7; for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cinema Epoch/Jackson County Films, R, 90 minutes)

A half-sketched tale of familial floundering, Nancy Savoca’s Union Square is a suffocating and pantomimed sisterly drama that makes an unconvincing and headlong dive into sentimentality for its finale, wasting a lot of effort and investment from lead actress Mira Sorvino.

Co-written by Savoca and Mary Tobler, Union Square is devised with strict parameters (of space, cast and type of story) in mind. But it’s not merely that the movie feels cramped (eschewing handheld camerawork in favor of boxy formalism, Savoca and cinematographer Lisa Leone fail to figure out a way to open up the apartment space that dominates the film’s middle) and lifeless; it offers no significantly deep insights into its characters, beyond a well-tailored set of pedestrian baggage. Union Square recalls plenty of other thorny big screen sister relationships, including those on display in Margot at the Wedding, Rachel Getting Married and Pieces of April, to name but a few. The complications here, though, are given surface-style treatment, and eventually swept aside for a strange and emotionally phony ending.

Sorvino does a good job of channeling her character’s angsty, overwhelming energy; it’s actually a credit to her performance that you kind of want to strangle or slap her. Like Lesley Manville in Mike Leigh‘s Another Year (albeit in different fashion), Sorvino’s Lucy is a totally suffocating presence, an unending cascade of breaking waves of neediness. The movie’s other performances, though, fail to catch fire. It doesn’t help poor Tammy Blanchard that she’s playing the habitural doormat sister, but even an inversion which is meant to reverse audience sympathies with respect to the characters provides no relief from her dour, unimaginative reading of Jenny. Mike Doyle, meanwhile, registers as a complete zero as Jenny’s live-in fiance Bill. Movies characters need not all be likable or interesting. But Union Square has so few characters that it would certainly help if at least one of them were, in even the most remote fashion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Dada Films, unrated, 80 minutes)

Sports as a tool for upward social mobility is of course nothing new — in generations past, boxing was a big way out of miserable poverty, and followed in short order by baseball, football and basketball. As the world has grown smaller, however, enterprising clubs in various sports, seeking to better compete, have turned their attention abroad, with an eye on harvesting fresh young talent at less than premium prices. Nowhere is this truer than in baseball, as illustrated by the engaging new documentary Pelotero: Ballplayer.



While it compares to just two percent of the total population of the United States, the tiny island country of the Dominican Republic currently fills a whopping 20 percent of combined major and minor league rosters, and has produced a steady stream of impact players and big stars, from Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz to Neftali Feliz and Hanley Ramirez. The craze has its roots in the huge success of the 1962 San Francisco Giants, which included Juan Marichal, Felipe and Matty Alou, and Manny Mota — major talents, all. The reasons for the significant uptick in Latin American investment over the past 15 to 20 years in particular are myriad, but in the broadest strokes relate to a relative downturn in American-born talent (see also: the surge in popularity of football, combined with the fact that baseball still takes more kids to play than hoops), or at least the cost to develop that talent over the course of several years, in a far more expansive and rigorous feeder system than other major sports leagues employ.

Narrated by John Leguizamo, Pelotero (which translates as ballplayer) focuses on two top prospects and their trainers as they prepare for July 2, the national signing day during which players can ink formal contracts with teams on their 16th birthdays. Miguel Angel Sano is a rangy shortstop with a smooth swing and plenty of power. Jean Carlos Batista is an infielder with quick hands and a quicker bat. Their respective trainers have each invested plenty of time in them (and other prospects), so they look to the 35 percent commissions on what they hope will be seven-figure signing bonuses as a means to fund their pro bono work, and keep their academies open. Before things are over, though, both Sano and Batista will have the validity of their ages called into question — not uncommon in the Dominican Republic. Hospital records, DNA tests and even bone scans (!) will ensue, spotlighting both the work and extraordinary pursuits and measures of an inter-American dream.

Pelotero: Ballplayer would make a great double feature with last year’s Elevate, which examined a Senegalese basketball academy which served as a feeder to the United States. Both movies examine, in interesting and sometimes uncomfortable fashion, the strange combination of moral benevolence (having lost his dad several years earlier, Jean Carlos talks candidly about his need and search for a father figure) and almost parasitic business interest that informs non-familial adults helping shepherd these kids.

In the sport of basketball — and particularly coming from Africa, where pro leagues are few — while the ultimate goal is to get paid to play professional basketball in the NBA, the Senegalese academies work their charges with an eye on prep school scholarships in the United States, and then college grants. There’s some focus on education, as well as a sense of collective social responsibility being instilled. In the Dominican Republic, these kids are signing binding financial contracts at younger ages. It’s hard not to have some moral ambivalence about that, and Pelotero indulges a bit more curiosity on this front than Elevate.

With as of yet no international draft, Major League Baseball has a clear and understandable motive to keep down foreign player development costs relative to Stateside signing bonuses, which routinely run into seven-figure territory for the most valued prospects. And in lifting up a few rocks in the stories of its two chief subjects, Pelotero seems to shine a light on that (other) dirty “c word” — collusion. Would teams mutually agree upon not paying the same rates to a foreign player that they might to an American-born prospect? Or even smear, malign and spread rumors in order to drive down competition and market price on a player? Well, it’s a sport, and a sunny summer pastime for many, but baseball is also a business. And Pelotero is the athletic equivalent of an unannounced Nike or Apple factory tour. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Strand Releasing/Endeavor Films, unrated, 77 minutes)