Shared Darkness

After dipping a toe into the pool of arthouse embrace and rejuvenation with James Mangold’s Cop Land, and finding the reception a bit chillier than he would’ve liked, Sylvester Stallone has mostly retreated back into his man-cave of 1980s-style actioners. This is not entirely a bad thing. His reasoned, surprisingly smart and moving Rocky Balboa, from 2006, stands as a compelling drama in its own right, and a worthy bookend to the original film. But this wounded mindset also begat 2008’s Rambo, a sloppy, nihilistic and near-pointless exercise in sadism and explosions-go-boom! theatrics.



The forthrightly titled Bullet to the Head, an adaptation of a French graphic novel set in the Louisiana bayou, would on the surface seem to fall comfortably in the mold of the latter — a block-headed, meat-and-potatoes-type action movie in which nuance is as much the enemy as any on-screen foil. And sometimes… well, sometimes the cover is the most appropriate way by which to judge a book.

Stallone stars as Jimmy Bonomo, an unapologetically direct hitman who, when his partner gets killed after a recent job, is thrown together by circumstance with Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang), a by-the-book visiting cop from Washington, D.C. Each targets themselves, Jimmy and Taylor form an uneasy alliance, to try to bring down a shady figure of the criminal underworld (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and the psychotic enforcer, Keegan (Jason Momoa), doing his bidding. When Jimmy’s daughter Lisa (the not-unattractive Sarah Shahi) gets caught up in the mix, it only further stiffens Jimmy’s resolve to finish things definitively.

The most disappointing things about Bullet to the Head have to do with just how much of a retread it feels like — from the villains, with their master list of all the politicians and cops on their payroll, to even the bizarre, declamatory voiceover narration that opens (“Sometimes you gotta abandon your principles and do what’s right”) and ends the film. Screenwriter Alessandro Camon’s adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s Du Plomb Dans La Tête delivers its exposition in comically chunky paragraphs, and never quite figures out a way to make the targets that Jimmy and Taylor must work their way through seem like more of a viper’s nest and less of an obligatory mortal ladder.

Director Walter Hill serves as a pace-master, and keeps things moving briskly and effectively — even if the staging for one sequence where Keegan walks past a bunch of thugs, loudly murders guys in another room and then returns to the aforementioned room, where said thugs are not ready for him, is thunderously stupid. Stallone and Kang, meanwhile, have a bit of a nice, prickly rapport, even if their conflict seems largely manufactured. The problem, in a nutshell, is that Bullet to the Head isn’t quite insane enough. If you’re going to have a movie with an axe fight, and an Eyes Wide Shut-style drugs-and-sex costume party where topless women tango with one another, then shouldn’t you also not have the incriminating evidence your bad guy is paying to retrieve stored in a folder marked “evidence”? That’s insane, but not in a good way. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Warner Bros./After Dark Films, R, 93 minutes)

A wan, overly precious and self-satisfied psychological thriller that tries to toe the line between gender statement and ambiguity, Girls Against Boys is a kind of junior thrill-kill revenge flick that doesn’t touch the same high points of any of its many inspirations or antecedents. While it eschews overheated sensationalism in a manner that rather belies its most forthright plot synopsis, the movie doesn’t engage in the necessary heavy intellectual lifting to blossom into anything special.

Shae (Danielle Panabaker) is a naïve college student who, after getting dumped by her older married lover (Andrew Howard) and assaulted by a guy (Michael Stahl-David, of Cloverfield) she meets on the rebound, appears to be teetering on the edge of withdrawing into a cocoon. Her seemingly unstable co-worker Lu (Nicole LaLiberte), however, takes Shae under her wing, and suggests a brutal and unnervingly direct plot of revenge. Shae quickly acquiesces, and a number of men pay the price for, variously, their actions, inaction or gender. After a wild swathe of retaliation, though, Lu’s dangerously obsessive possessiveness threatens Shae’s burgeoning relationship with a shy classmate, Tyler (Liam Aiken).

Powered by a sometimes dizzy, sometimes grinding techno-type score that seems to aim for some sort of opaque mood statement not always matched in the movie’s visual vocabulary, Girls Against Boys is a revenge flick, but almost incidentally so. As grim or unsettling as some of the action is, Shae and Lu don’t manifest much reaction during their crimes. All the film’s men, meanwhile, are entirely incapable of reading reactions, which as rendered seems less a gender commentary and more the function of a poor script.

Writer-director Austin Chick seems chiefly to want to stir up a carefully crafted mood-bubble of indistinctness, but his scenes are entirely self-contained, and lack a grander cohesiveness — he doesn’t seem to have the interest, bravery, skill or combination thereof to push past the crust-layer of his conceit and into a truly interesting direction. The lack of deeper explanation here — Shae is too easily “in” with Lu’s plot, and lacking a strongly differentiated personality — gives off a thick feeling of no psychological seriousness. It is of small credit that, despite its premise, the movie doesn’t descend into lowest-common-denominator gore, but Girls Against Boys also has nothing of substance to say about the actions of its characters, so Chick instead has the girls just do things like sing along to Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.”

Within the parameters of Chick’s narrative, Panabaker and LaLiberte deliver grounded, watchable turns. The former is quiet and introspective — a fact that Chick takes advantage of in the framing of his close-ups — while the latter, with a thousand-yard stare and almost comically large eyes, summons an elemental dread that outstrips the nastiness of her actions. The film, though, doesn’t achieve any of the absorbing backdrop grittiness or deep-rooted character insights of its assorted forerunners, like Lilya 4-Ever, Single White Female, Fight Club, Baise Moi or The Brave One, among others. Girls Against Boys is good at standing in contrast — and not being any of a number of dumb or reductionist things it could be, just based on its story. It’s far less successful making any sort of proactive and persuasive case of its own, however. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay Films, R, 92 minutes)

A genre-bending, psychologically twisty, meta-horror tale, Resolution bears a deceptively simple and straightforward title and logline synopsis for a movie that is anything but. When a well-meaning guy holes up with his old junkie friend in a cabin in the woods and forces him to kick cold turkey, strange events, mysterious visitors and personal demons commingle to intriguing, ambiguous effect. A fresh conceit told with an unfussy assurance, Resolution marks a solid calling card for co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead, auguring good things for their respective futures.

After receiving an email with a video message and a map from his friend, Mike (Peter Cilella) leaves behind his two-months-pregnant wife Jennifer (Emily Montague) and heads into the woods, where finds semi-estranged high school pal Chris (Vinny Curran) holed up in a run-down house. A paranoid crack addict convinced the government is spying on him, Chris is busy shooting at birds and play-acting some fantasy life of indeterminate origin. Mike has peddled his wife a more genteel version of his planned intervention, but once he separates Chris from his gun he tases his friend and uses a pair of handcuffs to secure him to a pipe.

The plan is to hang out for a week of forced detox. Soon, however, a series of weird incidents and contacts — involving everyone from two of Chris’ dirtbag drug buddies (Kurt Anderson and Skyler Meacham) and the Native American land owner of the house in which they’re squatting to New Age cultists and a traveling con man of some sort — upsets Mike’s mental stability. Discovering bizarre journals and audio recordings of telekinetic researchers further puts him edge, and then pictures and video of he and Chris start showing up. Are Chris’ rantings not so delusional, or is Mike perhaps suffering some sort of mental breakdown himself?

Benson and Moorhead’s collaboration is a fruitful one, evincing a well planned look and feel for the film. The latter serves as cinematographer, and the pair also edited the movie together, resulting in a spare but smart mystery that straddles the line between literalism and a metaphorical tone poem. Variously, Resolution evokes Christopher Nolan’s Memento (an obvious inspiration) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway, as well as more nominally straightforward genre offerings like Pontypool and Bellflower, which each possessed rich veins of warped, unsettling jealousy and ominous vibes that come at viewers sideways.

Resolution is honest about the impulses of addiction (“I never enjoyed life before I did drugs” is a gut-punch line of dialogue, from Chris), but could stand to have its core interpersonal conflict sharpened up some without sacrificing any of its overall narrative ambiguity. Regardless, the movie invites at least a couple different interpretations, the heady guesswork of which makes for a rewarding experience for genre enthusiasts with an additional indie predilection. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 93 minutes)

An across-the-board comedic misfire that lamely tries to hitch its trailer to the $17-billion-a-year videogaming industry, Noobz trades entirely in familiar road movie and competitive-event flick clichés, and seems to regard its mere existence as a triumph that should be shared by all. A wearying stinker unredeemed by a handful of brave, game, small supporting turns (namely from Zelda Williams and Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jon Gries), multi-hyphenate Blake Freeman’s film is kind of like a cross between Road Trip, Empire Records, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the modern-day videogame comedy that Kevin Smith’s third cousin never got around to writing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Big Air Studios, R, 100 minutes)

Beware of Mr. Baker opens unlike any other documentary I can immediately recall, with its subject physically attacking its director. That the by turns sad and darkly comedic but never less than mesmerizing nonfiction tale manages to then still humanize Ginger Baker, virtuoso jazz and rock ‘n’ roll drummer of Cream and Blind Faith and generally certified madman, is a rather amazing accomplishment.



Renowned amongst contemporaries and celebrated by later generations of drummers as the “hammer of the Gods,” Baker was born in South London just before the outbreak of World War II, and lost his father to the war effort when he was but four years old. In a film that retraces his life in more or less chronological fashion, Baker comes across as an irascible junkie bully, given to capricious fits, serial irresponsible behavior (the second of his four wives was at the time of their nuptials the teenage sister of his daughter’s first boyfriend) and a generally nasty disposition. He more or less remains the same, even at 73 years old (“Go on with the interview, stop trying to be an intellectual dickhead,” he barks at one point).

The basic story arc here — sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — is the same one that informs virtually every episode of VH-1’s Behind the Music. And the movie, which garnered the Grand Jury prize at its South By Southwest Festival premiere last year, only scratches the surface of Baker’s scarred psychology (a sealed letter from his father that he opened at age 14 seems to have coincided with the onset of puberty and rebelliousness). So what gives Beware of Mr. Baker, which gets it title from a sign posted alongside the driveway of his gated South African estate, its pop, its connective resonance?

In a word, Baker himself — because a moving and morally conflicted portrait of a true questing spirit emerges. With footage of his drum-offs against Phil Seamen and the like, and interview footage with Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Steve Winwood and others, the film makes an easy case for Baker’s full-spectrum music knowledge — as an innate gift further honed by tunnel-vision obsession. And yet Baker also had three kids, was by all accounts a terrible father and husband (at one point he moved to Africa for five-plus years, telling his wife he was in prison), and his own worst enemy, professionally. All the contradictions (including his weird love of polo, for instance) make for a fascinating case study in self-destructiveness. Throughout his life, Baker has exhibited an intense aversion to being alone, combined with a habitual tendency to push away those closest to him.

With Baker’s (apparent, pre-attack) blessing, Bulger has access to plenty of amazing photos and private home video footage that give Beware of Mr. Baker its spine, but he also intersperses his movie with crude but captivating animated segments, a la The Kid Stays in the Picture. Of course, Baker himself is the main star, narrating his own story and lashing out at Bulger along the way. A couple years back, Anvil! The Story of Anvil told the story of a marginalized rock group beloved by other musicians. Baker achieved much more success and fame, of course, but his story echoes these two movies, along with a pinch of The Devil and Daniel Johnston and Werner Herzog’s nonfiction portrait of Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend. It’s a fascinating snapshot of artistic fitfulness, and a reminder that the flame of creativity can be unpleasant to experience up close. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (SnagFilms, unrated, 90 minutes)

A loving tribute to European silent films of the 1920s, writer-director Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves repurposes the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Snow White, telling the tale of an oppressed daughter of a great toreador who runs away with a circus to find her destiny. The Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award submission from Spain (its intertitles come in subtitled Spanish), Berger’s fetching film is a reminder that cinema need not be constrained by words — that there is a universality to images, and stories can just as readily be told via a skillful ordering of those.



Unfolding in a romanticized Seville, Blancanieves opens on beloved and talented bullfighter Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho). When his career is cut short and his family upended, he remarries Encarna (Maribel Verdu), who slowly but surely cuts off his daughter from Antonio. Years later, the now-grown Carmen (Macarena Garcia, above) escapes and joins a motley troupe of traveling, bullfighting dwarves, where her latent talents and natural beauty attract attention and, eventually, bring her back into contact with her stepmother.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Blancanieves is destined to be dogged by comparisons to The Artist, nevermind that Berger’s film was scripted around eight years ago, not long after the completion of Torremolinos 73. In actuality, though, excepting the macro similarities, the two movies are actually stylistically quite different. There’s just a pinch of almost subliminal S&M kink to Berger’s vision, to go along with its cultural specificity.

Working with cinematographer Kiko de la Rica, whose black-and-white frames achieve a captivating luminosity, Berger has a clever and playful sense of visual storytelling — match cuts from a moon to a communion wafer, for example — that renders the lack of dialogue a moot point. Fernando Franco’s slick, smart editing additionally greatly benefits the picture, and Berger furthermore matches it a winning score from composer Alfonso de Vilallonga.

The performances, too, are engaging. Garcia, who sort of resembles a cross between Claire Forlani and Alanna Ubach, has a beautiful and naturally sympathetic visage, and Verdu shines as the sinister, scheming Encarna. This isn’t a movie for everyone, but arthouse cineastes and others who took a flier on The Artist last year should seek out the rich, rewarding Blancanieves as well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Required Viewing/Cohen Media Group, unrated, 90 minutes)

A solid, smartly wound little psychological drama that digs into some of the knotty qualities of mid-life adult relationships, when old acquaintances best left forgotten can drift into a life and bring unexpected turmoil, writer-director John Daschbach’s Brief Reunion is a spare but engaging examination of personal character, and the vacillating nature of right and wrong.



The ordered, rural New England existence of Internet entrepreneur Aaron (Joel de la Fuente, above left) and his wife, Leah (Alexie Gilmore), starts to unravel when an old college classmate, Teddy (Scott Shepherd), shows up. Prior to his arrival, Teddy has tried to befriend Leah and others online — a sign that prompts a couple of Aaron’s friends to advise a strict “zero tolerance” policy of non-engagement. Teddy is, it turns out, is a morally dubious and socially awkward hanger-on, the proverbial turd in the punch bowl.

But Teddy runs into Leah and worms his way into Aaron’s birthday party, where he brings along his girlfriend, Simone (Kristy Hasen). It doesn’t end with one uncomfortable evening, however. Soon Teddy is popping up at Aaron’s work, and posting online old photos that Aaron would rather he not. Hinting that he knows about a dark secret related to the success of Aaron’s initial web venture — something that Aaron himself is uncertain of — the resentful Teddy tries, in his own passive-aggressive way, to re-litigate the past and pry some money for an investment opportunity from his old acquaintance. Arguments and threats ensue, and a woman (Francie Swift) from Aaron’s past pops up as well.

Unlikely as it seems, Brief Reunion tangentially recalls Lawrence Kasdan, actually — The Big Chill by way of Dreamcatcher, maybe, minus any science-fiction. It’s on the surface quite different than those films, of course — more streamlined, and not as chatty. But its basic interest in the gap between hidden and stated feelings, and how that distance swells or contracts accordingly, based on company, is the same as Kasdan’s. Daschbach’s focus is more tightly trained on a single, collapsible dilemma, but he’s interested in the human condition. To go into much further detail would ruin some of the movie’s twists and turns, but when one character spits, “I’m not going to prison for that [person],” it reveals how often scruples are dependent on extra variables, and not some fixed absolute.

The low-budget Brief Reunion is spare but attractive in its construction. Daschbach and cinematographer Joe Foley settle on a muted color scheme and stark lack of extras that complement the movie’s slowly ratcheted up claustrophobia, while still finding some ways to give their movie some production-value pop. Daschbach’s cast also turns in solid performances; especially noteworthy is Shepherd, who captures the weasely nature of a guy whose misreadings of personal space and connection goes beyond confounding and into the realm of borderline pathological — to the point that dealing with him arrests and erodes one’s sanity.

The phrase “character study” gets bandied around a lot. Decades ago this movie might have been the type of major studio release new talent cut their teeth on before tackling some highbrow genre offering or literary adaptation. Now Brief Reunion, in its uncomplicated complicatedness, is the type of film Hollywood has mostly ceded to independent filmmakers. That is of course a fairly unfortunate thing on many levels. Daschbach, though, makes it seem not so bad, at least for an hour-and-a-half. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Striped Entertainment/Kagami Films/Triboro Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)

An effectively moody and atmospheric chiller about a pair of orphaned young girls who, after years of near-feral isolation in the woods, seem to bring back a spindly demoness with them when they’re reintegrated into society, Mama is a serviceable scary movie that never quite coheres into something special. In his feature directorial debut, Andy Muschietti’s film evinces the same mix of tony psychological horror and sinister fantasia present in some of executive producer Guillermo Del Toro’s own work, but gets tripped up clichés in the home stretch.

Both Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and the young Megan Charpentier are good, but Mama is a bigger lift for Jessica Chastain, and it reaffirms her talents as an actress while also minting her as a star. Apart from the mere different physical look, the film shows Chastain can credibly craft a character within a genre piece, which should go a long way toward keeping her in high demand with filmmakers. For the full, original review of Mama, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 100 minutes)

A tepid autumnal dramedy aimed at aging boomer fans of arthouse fare like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Mao’s Last Dancer and The Full Monty, Quartet represents Dustin Hoffman‘s directorial debut, but it’s shot through with so little in terms of conflict, stakes or even passion as to leave one questioning the very reason for its existence, let alone the legendary actor’s attachment to the material. Though rooted in a true story, the thinly sketched Quartet fails to ignite either much excitement of imagination or identification, resulting in an amiable bore.

The film unfolds at Beecham House, a special British retirement home exclusively for elderly musicians. Under the care of Dr. Lucy Cogan (Sheridan Smith), Cedric Livingstone (Michael Gambon, sporting a series of drapes with sleeves) holds court with his old, renowned colleagues, including genius composer/arranger Reggie Paget (Tom Courtenay), the rascally Wilfred Bond (Billy Connolly) and the ever-hospitable Cissy Robson (Pauline Collins). Their memories and bodies may be variously failing them by degrees, but they find solace in one another’s company. However, the arrival of superstar soprano soloist Jean Horton (Maggie Smith), Reggie’s ex-wife, throws their peaceful and ordered world into disarray. They try to recruit Jean into a staging of one of their more memorable works for a gala fundraising concert that will benefit Beecham House, but she remains stubbornly resistant until her old competitive instincts are finally re-awakened.

Adapted by Ronald Harwood from his own late-1990s stageplay, Quartet unfolds with a respectful and respectable, well-heeled polish, seeming to believe that its admittedly wonderful cast lends it an automatic sophistication which inoculates it against charges of tedium. Cinematographer John de Borman delivers warmly hued scenes that complement the on-screen bonds, and Hoffman’s location staging takes nice advantage of the grounds of Buckinghamshire’s Hedsor House.

The film, though, doesn’t offer much in even the way of programmatic uplift. Mannered to its core, Quartet is meant to be the cinematic equivalent of a refined, mid-afternoon snack of tea and biscuits (no small wonder, then, that Leonard Maltin dubbed it “as easy to take as a freshly baked scone with Devonshire cream”). But its characters are so direct in their emotional reactions, and of a piece in their articulations, that the film takes on the swift, no-nonsense narrative qualities of a small screen serial, absent any sort of life-and-death stakes. There’s some talk about the Beecham House needing money to stay in business, but there is no face of antagonistic opposition given to this loosely defined threat — and in short, no layered motivations or engaging subtleties at all. Quartet offers up a bunch of characters in service to an empty story. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Weinstein Company, PG-13, 97 minutes)

A deeply but pleasantly weird sort of Southern Gothic battle royale, The Baytown Outlaws is a boisterous, sweat-soaked mash-up of The Boondock Saints, Smokin’ Aces, Wild Things and Sucker Punch (minus the latter’s material excess). While stipulating that at its core it’s fairly slight — and also constructed of prefabricated parts and characters who, despite their colorful nature, are basically kind of hoary clichés — it’s also hard to deny that director Barry Battles’ zonked-out genre romp, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Eva Longoria and a couple lesser known faces, is an awful lot of fun.

The film reaches a certain point of diminishing return, particularly as it tries to pivot in its third act, and deliver a more reasoned, grounded moment of emotional growth for its titular brothers. The Baytown Outlaws is more successful when it’s just wheeling and dealing, in batshit-insane fashion, through oddball set-ups and gnarly, knotted retribution. Still, the originality on display makes this energetic crime comedy curio worth a look for fans of the actors, certainly, and low-budget genre enthusiasts to boot. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Phase 4 Films, R, 98 minutes)