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)
Daily Archives: July 13, 2012
Union Square
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)
Top Priority: The Terror Within
An intensely felt but jumbled and poorly reasoned cinematic treatise against governmental bureaucracy run amok and specifically a series of Constitutional rights abuses by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, documentary Top Priority: The Terror Within tells the story of Julia Davis, a whistleblower who found herself on the receiving end of a years-long campaign of vindictive persecution. A tangled mess of sprawling and sometimes vague allegations never wrestled into any sort of coherent and compelling shape, the movie chronicles a shocking story, but one that seems better suited to the television news magazine format, or at least a more polished, experienced nonfiction hand.
In addition to desperately needing an editorial trim, a fog of unclear charges, motivations and facts hangs over Top Priority. Owing to the fact that actress Brittany Murphy was at one point dragged into a hearsay allegation related to Davis’ initial professional investigation, the film (sort of) posits that she and late husband Simon Monjack were also targets of some sinister governmental payback, which seems tenuous at best. Some outside perspsective on this story is sorely needed; the Davis’ both serve as producers here, on their own tale, and their (understandable) dander, combined with director Asif Akbar’s hackish instincts, overwhelms the movie. At least Stephen Colbert would be proud, though, since more than truth, an aura of “truthiness” surrounds this messy offering. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fleur De Lis Films, unrated, 115 minutes)