Shared Darkness

A remake of Park Chan-wook’s wild, brooding 2004 South Korean import, Oldboy, directed by Spike Lee, arrives with its core, jaw-dropping twist intact. Like its predecessor, too, it’s part knuckle-bruising revenge thriller and part dark mystery, telling the story of a kidnapped man who, upon being freed, sets out to identify and destroy the stranger who imprisoned him in solitary confinement for 20 years. Grimy and involving early on — and benefiting from its decidedly out-there premsie, with native roots in a Japanese manga — Lee’s streamlined genre offering achieves a certain level of idiosyncratic hold without ever planting deeper roots of its own.



When viewers first meet Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin), he’s a self-sabotaging, alcoholic salesman whose disease and general loutishness cost him a much-needed sale. On the way home, already stumbling drunk, he’s turned away from another drink by his bar owner friend Chucky (Michael Imperioli). When Joe wakes up the next morning, he’s in what looks like a hotel room. Problem is, there’s no way out.

Food and grooming supplies arrive intermittently, and Joe remains there for the next two decades — not only learning of world events by television, but also reacting in horror to news reports that peg him as the on-the-lam prime suspect in the brutal murder of his ex-wife. Then, one day, Joe awakens in a field in a trunk. He begins searching for clues to try to explain his abduction, and also reunite with his obviously estranged, now-adult daughter, Mia (Elvy Yost), to whom he wants to deliver a mass of letters he has written her faithfully over the years.

He’s befriended and aided by a social worker, Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), who’s a bit of a wounded bird herself. Upon piecing together the location of his imprisonment, Joe extracts a measure of payback against his jailer (Samuel L. Jackson), and eventually comes into contact with Adrian Pryce (Sharlto Copley), the mastermind behind his captivity.

Lee’s stab at this sort of pulp fiction — billed in the possessive as a film in the opening credits, not his usual “joint” — is a curious thing, and certainly a band apart from his typical fare. The screenplay adaptation is by Mark Protosevich (The Cell, I Am Legend), and it pays homage to Park’s movie in a number of ways, in both words and visuals. Still, while it’s somewhat bracing to see Lee bring to bear his gifts on this unapologetic of a straight genre piece (the evocative framing that he and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt devise is most richly on display in flashback sequences in which Brolin shares the screen with a younger, prep school-age Joe), there’s also a nihilism which seems less rooted in character than merely impressed upon the narrative by template, or fiat.

Joe, during his long incarceration, gives up alcohol and dedicates himself to reshaping his mind and body so that he may one day try to make amends with Mia. But Lee seems put off or bored by this notion, hungry to get to the film’s action and torture, or any number of other baroque monstrosities that will surely bring to mind the name Scott Tenorman for South Park fans. After Joe gets loose, 35 or 40 minutes into the film, there’s not a true, integrated throughline of the unhinged madness — as captured so mesmerizingly by wild-eyed Choi Min-sik in the original film — that would result from being sealed off from all human contact for two decades. Yes, there’s the matter of revenge driving the plot, but this decidedly unordinary Joe could have been an even more compellingly imbalanced character.

A lot of what makes Oldboy unique or interesting (and is therefore integral to either one’s enjoyment or disdain for the film) is wrapped up in its third act twists, which are best left undiscussed, for those who haven’t seen Park’s 2004 film. Suffice to say that a good bit of Oldboy kind of washed over me. If Jackson is again basically just doing Jackson, and Copley’s ridiculous facial hair and equally theatrical line readings make his character seem like some weirdo out of an Alex Cox fever dream, Brolin and Olsen are dialed in and in tune with one another. They’re the film’s heart, and its rhythm when they are on screen, especially together, is mostly strong and steady.

The ending, though, is over-dialed by about two-thirds. In addition to a rather sigh-inducing literal explanation that exposes the shaky psychological reasoning of its villain, the movie opts for a different denouement that, no matter how broken its subject, still seems a bridge too far. It doesn’t completely negate Oldboy‘s bleak pleasures for those who have surfed their wave, but it seems like a flourish merely for the sake of a flourish — a strange and off-center stab at redemption where perhaps there is none to be found. (FilmDistrict, R, 103 minutes)

The timing would seem right, coming on the heels of the conclusion of zeitgeist-tapping television hit Breaking Bad, for a movie in which a self-sacrificing hero walks tall into a small town and takes steps to take down the meth trade. Alas, the punishingly witless action flick Homefront is more a movie from the 1980s than for these times. Starring in a script from Expendables mate Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham delivers all the expected scowls and growls, but there’s no originality, nuance or even dumb-fun catharsis to recommend this inept exercise in punch-’em-up justice. Full of empty, puffed-up talk of “backwoods reckoning,” the movie plays like a dumb-jock, steroidal riff on Walking Tall, or a cousin of the 1989 cult classic Road House, minus any of the latter’s fun or sense of self-awareness. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Open Road Films, R, 100 minutes)

Sarah Silverman has embraced edginess and shock throughout her career — from joking about hoping investigators find semen in her dead grandmother’s vagina (a comment about dying from natural causes) to courting controversy with a Conan O’Brien appearance satirizing the racist thought process and, last year, offering to scissor “through to completion” casino magnate and Mitt Romney financial backer Sheldon Adelson if he instead donated money to Barack Obama. The inimitable stamp of her dark, tart personality is again on rich display in her latest stand-up comedy offering, and somehow her first HBO special, Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles.



Directed by frequent collaborator Liam Lynch, the show was taped in front of an intimate audience of just over three dozen at Los Angeles music and comedy club Largo, and it includes a framing device wherein Silverman — poking about outside before going on — is mocked by a group of pot-smoking Hispanics for the show’s “intimate” nature. Truth be told, it feels odd to begin with, too; the nature of a good bit of Silverman’s humor, while not nakedly constructed to provoke, is inevitably designed to elicit groans as well as laughs, and there’s something special about the way she can seek out and exploit seams of unease within a larger crowd.

The free-association material of We Are Miracles, though, ultimately benefits from its almost homey setting. Variety TV critic Brian Lowry, whose recent dismissive review rooted in Silverman’s gender has already drawn a number of rebukes, mischaracterizes her humor as bawdy or dirty simply for the sake of bad-taste emotional cattle-prodding. Apart from a shrug-inducing, set-closing song built around the C-word (the show’s only musical number), most of We Are Miracles is actually pretty smart in its deployment of hot-button topics like religion, pornography, government and masturbation.

Silverman touches a bit on growing up nominally Jewish in 1970s Maine, but the show is hardly a trip down memory line any more than her normal material — despite the comedienne’s musings on her 19-year-old dog and a happy recollection of showering with her mother as child, and water “piking off her ’70s Jew bush,” creating the adolescent Silverman’s own special spigot. Mostly, We Are Miracles is a random (not in a bad way) grab-bag of ruminations, unburdened by constricted theme. Silverman pontificates on Scientology, but concludes it’s weird mostly just because it’s new. She notes that people who say “threw me under the bus” say it a lot. She pines over the fact that music is not attached to traumatic events in real life, and announces that she’s taking “What a country!” as her new catchphrase, noting that she knows Yakov Smirnoff used it in the 1980s, but that she’s “re-purposing it with a malaise.”

When Silverman turns to rape jokes (“No woman asks to be raped — I actually do think some women are asking to be motorboated”), she offers up a bit of a deconstruction, noting that comics like them because they make them seem edgy. As with a later sex joke, she here indulges in a bit of analysis to audience reaction to her jokes, but it’s never in the water-treading manner that many lesser comics engage in. When she observes a gender-split effects to a twist in one of her jokes, it adds an additional wry layer of commentary to the material. Silverman is plenty smart, and has an enjoyably warped perspective that includes shrewdly observed, amusingly idiosyncratic takes on a wide variety of topics. That her comedy connects or overlaps with a lot men shouldn’t for some reason be held against her. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films/Funny or Die/Black Gold Films, unrated, 56 minutes)

If American animation has, in aggregate, been a bit underwhelming this year, a stirring reminder of the medium’s possibilities arrives in the striking Brazilian import Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury, a love story spanning six centuries. Directed by Luiz Bolognesi, the film — not unlike Cloud Atlas or The Fountain, to name but a couple recent high-profile films which touch upon themes of loss and reincarnation — marries a moody and evocative rumination on human frailty with animation possessing an uncommon lyricism and beauty. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Rio 2096 opens exclusively in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Playhouse 7, in Pasadena. To view the film’s trailer, click here. (Gullane Entretenimento SA, unrated, 75 minutes)

A big-hearted but overly fawning documentary about the impact of the popular newspaper comic strip of the same name, Dear Mr. Watterson: An Exploration of Calvin & Hobbes is a fans’ document that can’t see the forest for the trees. The success of first-time director Joel Allen Schroeder’s film — Kickstarted by more than 2,000 online benefactors — lies in the many other cartoonists he corrals to talk about the hermetic Bill Watterson. The problem is that Schroeder has nary an idea of how to structure his movie, or push beyond surface intrigue to more deeply examine the relationship between artist and art. The result is a curio that fans of the strip will still likely embrace, but in large part feels just like a wasted opportunity.



Calvin and Hobbes, for those in need of a refresher, debuted in November, 1985, centering around the adventures of a rambunctious, imaginative six-year-old and his pet tiger Hobbes — a stuffed animal in the eyes of the adults in his life, but a loyal, intrepid and very real companion to young Calvin. Contrasting his characters’ worldviews (their namesakes were Protestant reformer John Calvin and philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a nod to the cartoonist’s college political science degree) and illuminating the rich inner dialogue of adolescence, Watterson won fans across a broad spectrum of ages. His cartoon would become a staple of newspapers all across the country, and go on to be collected in 18 books in the United States that would sell more than 45 million copies. Then, at the end of 1995, Watterson decided to cap his pen and retire.

There’s a tension at the heart of Dear Mr. Watterson, and one that never quite dissipates, even if a viewer comes to accept some of its more base level, nagging shortcomings. The film, of course, rightly celebrates Watterson’s deft touch with playing adolescent fantasy against reality for humorous effect, as well as the skill of his brushwork in capturing water, trees and motion. Naturally, too, the movie traces the influences of Watterson’s work and writing — comic strips like Pogo, Krazy Kat and of course Peanuts. Yet it’s 25 minutes in before the strip’s philosophical bent is even mentioned, and Schroeder seems less interested throughout in this very real and important element than in gazing upon and pontificating about original strips in an archival library.

Thankfully, there are loads of smart people — from Seth Green, a fan, to other cartoonists like Berkeley Breathed — who sit as interview subjects, recounting the strip’s rise. Dear Mr. Watterson catches fire when digging into its subject’s views on licensing, about the fortune ($300-400 million, by some estimates) that he unarguably left on the table by refusing to sign over the rights to his characters for rendering unto T-shirts, lunch boxes, bed linens and stuffed animals. Film critic and cartoon historian Charles Solomon and Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis speak most eloquently and engagingly about this topic, and one can see how the weight of this ongoing, argumentative debate between Watterson and his publisher worked its way into the strip itself, with direct commentaries about the relationship between art and commercialism.

But the interesting nature of this portion of the film only points up the strange refusal on the part of Schroeder to draw the parallel most obvious to anyone with even a cursory familiarity with Watterson’s work — that of J.D. Salinger. Both artists had strong feelings about the adaptation or rendering of their work into other media; both essentially retired following the white-hot career heat that came with the creation of an enormously popular and influential work; and both staked out intensely private lives that invited much speculation as to their intellectual and professional endeavors after withdrawing fully from public view. As the film unspools, one keeps waiting for Schroeder to address this, but he never does.

In fact, while Schroeder does trip to his subject’s hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, the movie provides such scant biographical details as to render it almost completely ridiculous. There’s respecting a subject’s privacy (there’s obviously little chance Watterson was going to reverse decades of habit and submit to an interview here, having given only two since the cessation of Calvin and Hobbes) and then there’s going out of the way to even avoid even mentioning the elephant in the room, and it’s the latter that makes Dear Mr. Watterson feel like such a cop-out, and soggy toss-off. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Gravitas Ventures/Fingerprint Films, unrated, 89 minutes)

The enormous success of 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, both the highest-grossing British film in history at the time of its release, as well as a $245 million worldwide box office smash, made a star of its screenwriter, Richard Curtis. He was nominated for an Academy Award, among other plaudits, and went on to pen the scripts for Bean, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary. In 2003, with the kaleidoscopic ensemble comedy Love Actually, Curtis was pushed into directing as well as writing, resulting in another huge hit.

The British-set, time travel rom-com About Time, starring Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams, is his third film behind the camera, and it presents an amplified version of the triumphs and shortcomings most characteristic of Curtis’ work. There is abundant charm, as well as a genuinely sweet-spirited view of the world; it is also dependent on plot turns that don’t withstand much scrutiny. While studded with moments of amusement and delight, About Time feels very much like the mangled film adaptation of a much richer and more rewarding novel. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Universal, R, 123 minutes)

Familial dysfunction on the big screen is nothing new, of course, but it seems like a whole bumper crop of starry-eyed American indies — from Smart People to Jesus Henry Christ, and many more — have rushed to throw a light on fractured home life and assorted seriocomic neuroses in the wake of the Oscar-winning success of Little Miss Sunshine.

Into the breach enter yet another entry in that canon: Cold Turkey, written and directed by Will Slocombe. Previously titled Pasadena (for its upper-crust setting), this Thanksgiving-set ensemble black comedy about mixed siblings jockeying for attention and material bail-out from their dad will try to scare up some business rooted in knowing laughs in the weeks leading up to the real-life holiday, but its wound-up bickering is all show, devoid of any attachment to real characters, feelings or problems.



Cold Turkey centers on patriarch Poppy Turner (Peter Bogdanovich), an erstwhile Stanford professor who has two daughters from his first marriage and a son who is in law school, Jacob (Ashton Holmes), by his second wife, Deborah (Cheryl Hines, above left). In addition to Jacob and his girlfriend Missy (Amy Ferguson), Thanksgiving brings home oldest daughter Lindsay (Sonya Walger) and her husband TJ (Ross Partridge), plus their kids. For the first time in 15 years, meanwhile, youngest daughter Nina (Alicia Witt) also deigns to break bread with her hated stepmother, blowing into town late with her truck-driving boyfriend Hank (Wilson Bethel) in tow.

Immediately, and predictably, the wheels on this gathering come off. Free spirit Nina is a bundle of passive-aggressive fury excused away under the sobriquet of “straight talk.” This rankles Jacob and Lindsay, but neither seems able to directly or effectively call shenanigans on their sibling. One by one, then, Poppy’s children come to him seeking money. Jacob’s debt, at over $220,000, is the most serious, but each kid has what they feel is an urgent and compelling reason for favor. Unbeknownst to them, however, their father may not be in a position to financially support them any longer.

Small bits of Slocombe’s dialogue here and there have a pinch of engaging snap (“I’m the one that gets to be on the receiving end of all your shitty, failed trying, so I get to use whatever analogy I want,” rages Nina to her dad at one point), but it comes in the service of characterizations that across the board feel flat and colorless. Mostly, though, Cold Turkey just spins its wheels, uncertain of where to focus. A good start would be the jettisoning of all of the “significant other” characters, freeing up time and space to more believably root down into the fragile dynamics between the children and Deborah — whom the movie posits as some sort of lightning rod without ever really showing a convincing reason that is true.

There’s also some nonsense involving an outed affair with a neighbor, obliging Victoria Tennant to pop in for the movie’s anticipated, dinner-gone-wrong centerpiece scene. The layered arguments in this sequence (wherein magically one character knows the business of all of the others, presumably from eavesdropping) are numbingly stupid, as if Slocombe thinks overlapping dialogue in and of itself indicates dramatic tension. But the film really jumps the shark or nukes the fridge or swallows the lead pill of stupidity — however you want to say it — with a scene-capping act of mock-outrageous violence that serves as a cathartic response to… a years-old act of disrespect never seen, or previously mentioned.

It’s at that point that Cold Turkey stops being just shrug-inducingly “meh,” and in fact outright irritating, and the type of movie you want to punch in the balls. In an effort to underscore the movie’s “Suburban Tension” while still keeping things kind of light, Slocombe uses twinkly, ironic music that in reality serves to only further call attention to his film’s dramatic inadequacies. Flexing her musical chops over the end credits in a tune with Ben Folds entitled “You Can Go Home Again,” Witt delivers an airy song that the previous 80-plus minutes have served to contradict. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Cold Turkey is also available across VOD platforms. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (FilmBuff/Midway Films, unrated, 83 minutes)

A well-meaning documentary of environmental compassion, Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey details the joint trek across hundreds of miles of the Himalayas by a group of several hundred people endeavoring to spread a message of social commitment as it relates to recycling and other measures to combat climate change. While definitely not without a good number of moments of breathtaking natural beauty, this film — less call to action than bleeding-heart eco-postcard — otherwise suffers from too scattershot a focus and too stodgy a tone to sustain interest over even its concise running time.

The debut feature of director Wendy J.N. Lee, Pad Yatra opens in Ladakh, India (also known as “Little Tibet”), in the aftermath of a cloudburst which deposited more than two inches of rain in just 60 seconds, decimating the area with flash floods and mudslides. Loosely taking Buddhist spiritual leader Gyalwang Drukpa as its central figure, the movie focuses on a 450-mile walk from village to village by his monk-and-nun followers, as well as a number of foreign tag-alongs, collecting trash (including some 800 pounds of plastic) and culminating in the planting of 50,000 trees. Their mission is to save the planet’s so-called “third pole,” a glacial region already experiencing damaging effects of climate change.

Lee unfortunately evinces no great or native editorial instincts for blending her interview material with footage from the trek itself, and neither does she provide enough contextual information to root one’s understanding of the Drukpa lineage or tradition. Pad Yatra evokes awe in relation to the undertaken journey at its core, certainly, but, as yawningly narrated by Daryl Hannah, it doesn’t cohere in a meaningful way. Lee can’t see the forest for the trees, and with such an ineffective guide a viewer’s interest founders. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Jelly Bean Films, unrated, 72 minutes)

American fiction feature filmmaking, even of the independent variety, by and large trades on story — on events small and large, and how they impact the lives and attitudes of their characters. The Motel Life, starring Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff as a pair of deeply bonded, down-and-out brothers, has both a tragic accident at its core, as well as the sort of cover-up that usually augurs more disaster and heartbreak. But, intriguingly, this bruised, purple plum of a drama mostly connects just as a mood piece about the muddy rut of low self-esteem, and the belief that life offers no better circumstances and opportunities beyond just day-to-day subsistence.



Frank (Hirsch) and Jerry Lee Flannigan (Dorff), the latter of whom as a kid lost the lower half of one of his legs in a train accident, have been inseparable ever since their single mother died when they were teenagers. Together, they live on the margins in Reno, Nevada, working odd jobs for money that fuels their boozy, flop-house lifestyle. When Jerry Lee, driving home during a snowstorm, accidentally clips and kills a teenage boy, he’s overcome with grief and guilt. The brothers at first flee the state, but after a drunken Jerry Lee shoots himself in the leg in a measure of self-punishment, Frank sneaks him out of the hospital and the pair wind their way back to Nevada.

Adapted by Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue from a 2006 debut novel by Willy Vlautin, author and lead singer of the Portland-based band Richmond Fontaine, The Motel Life surfs along on the wounded grace of its two lead performances. He’s not tall (only 5’7″), but Dorff here seems enormously pitiable, and even more shrunken than usual; there’s an authoritative brokenness to the physicality of his performance. Hirsch, meanwhile, conveys the warping effects of worried, wary protectiveness, having long ago had to “become” the older brother, the more responsible party. There’s a quiet but strong rapport between the two actors.

Directed by brothers Alan and Gabriel Polsky, the movie meanders to and fro, but in a way that is far more pleasing and interesting than ever confounding. The Motel Life is narratively a different animal and gives off a different vibe, but it also tracks somewhat along the same lines of bruised sad-sackery as Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler. Perhaps most notably, it never really succumbs to the movie you think it’s going to be.

Some strands — like the Flannigans’ friend Tommy (Joshua Leonard) convincing Frank to lay out money for a bet on the infamous Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas heavyweight title fight (yes, the film is set in 1990) — have a pinch of plebian metaphorical elegance that just rings right and true. More tenuous, however, is Frank’s unsettled relationship with his ex-girlfriend Annie (Dakota Fanning), who’s caught up in her own unpleasant circumstances.

The Motel Life is at its best when it’s not over-thinking things, and trying to connect story points A to B to C (which, thankfully, it is not most interested in). The Polskys fold animated bits into their film, to complement the fanciful stories Frank tells Jerry Lee, who is himself a not-untalented artist. It’s unique and striking moments like these — as well as advice from Frank’s boss (Kris Kristofferson), the closest thing that passes to a man in the Flannigans’ lives — that give The Motel Life such an engaging, silver thread of clemency and hope amidst its griminess and grubbiness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, The Motel Life is also available via FilmBuff across VOD platforms, including iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play and more. (FilmBuff/Polsky Films, R, 85 minutes)

A measured but emotionally effective gut-punch lament for the death rattle of small town America as told through the prism of a hapless high school basketball team, coming-of-age documentary Medora examines what it means to struggle, fail and look disappointment in the eye. In the process, while not without its broken spirits, the movie casts a light on the sort of resolve and perseverance that have long been part of the American story. Like Nick Brandestini’s Darwin: No Services Ahead, co-directors Davy Rothbart and Andrew Cohn’s film establishes an affecting, deeply personal connection via a variety of memorably wounded and sympathetic characters — in this case, teenagers struggling to find a way forward in life in an economically crippled rural community whose best days seem in the rearview mirror.



Medora unfolds in the town of the same name in the basketball-crazy state of Indiana. With businesses shuttered and drug use rampant, the burgh’s once-thriving middle class has dried up, leaving a population of around 500. Most of Indiana’s public high schools have consolidated, but Medora has not, leaving its once-proud boys hoops team to battle much bigger schools. Coming off of an 0-22 season, first-year coach Justin Gilbert — also a police officer — tries to whip his young charges into shape, and secure a victory that might have grander relevance.

A premiere at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, Medora connects in large measure because of the guileless nature of both its characters and construction. Amongst the young players, there’s center Rusty Rogers, whose alcoholic mother is in rehab, forcing him to live with a friend; lanky power forward Logan Farmer, considering a future with the military; Dylan McSorley, who receives a Facebook friend request from the father he’s never met; and beefy Robby Armstrong, whose parents tell a technical school recruiter that he’s “not college material.”

One’s heart goes out to these kids and others at various points, yet the film isn’t showy or plaintive with its emotions. It doesn’t come across as an entreaty. It merely shows these kids’ lives, and lends a microphone to their natural voices, presenting their doubts and struggles in compressed chronological fashion. Any viewer with a still-beating heart can relate to those feelings, and the memories it elicits. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Beachside Films/Olive Productions, unrated, 82 minutes)

A terrifically affecting documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA) Running From Crazy details the long and frequently cold shadow of depression and other mental health issues, as filtered through the unique perspective of author and actress Mariel Hemingway. Receiving a theatrical release in advance of its debut on the Oprah Winfrey Network at a date to be determined early next year, this delicate, ruminative, openhearted work throws open the shutters and casts a light on a famously troubled family, making a powerful statement about some of the more forthcoming conversations we as a society should be having if we want to stem the most devastating effects of dark nights of the soul. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its ongoing and forthcoming theatrical engagements in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and San Rafael, Running From Crazy opens this week in Los Angeles at the Sundance Sunset Cinema and the Laemmle Pasadena. To watch the movie’s trailer, click here. (OWN/Cabin Creek Films, unrated, 100 minutes)

An adaptation of American literary icon Jack Kerouac’s 1962 autobiographical novel of the same name, Big Sur is amongst the latest big screen stabs at capturing some of the lilting, freewheeling qualities that defined the groundbreaking Beat Generation. Written and directed by Michael Polish, however, this frustrating, somnambulant, dramatically stillborn slog instead serves as an arty vehicle for little more than a rolling delivery service of smugness, hedonism, pretentiousness and self-destruction.



A premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Big Sur takes place after the huge commercial success of its central figure, an author, when he’s driven mad by the resultant fame and psychological clutter it brings. Unlike the novel, which uses pseudonyms for all its characters, Polish’s take directly embraces Kerouac’s identity (and all else upon whom characters are based, save one), giving the film, in theory at least, some measure of post-On the Road heft.

Gratefully taking up fellow Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Anthony Edwards) on his offer to use his Bixby Canyon cabin as a place of respite, an emotionally fraught Kerouac (Jean-Marc Barr) at first uses the opportunity to reconnect with nearby old pal Neal Cassady (Josh Lucas, above left) and his wife Carolyn (Radha Mitchell), among others. Crippled by alcoholism and put off by America’s narcotic slide into suburbanism, Kerouac slips into a relationship with Neal’s mistress, Billie (Kate Bosworth), but in short order finds himself unable to provide for her and her son, in any substantive shape or form.

Polish (Jackpot, The Astronaut Farmer) and cinematographer David Mullen capture the natural beauty of their on-location surroundings, and Big Sur, in brief snatches, fitfully evokes both pockets of woozy melancholy and more broadly an era gone by. But rather than actually dramatize events in the lives of its characters, Polish and his editors more frequently opt for little snatched ribbons of scenes. The tack is clearly meant to give the movie the slipstream feeling of a stream-of-consciousness connection, but it only drives a wedge between viewers and the material.

Naturally, since this is a Beat work, eloquently expressed moroseness looms large. And oh, do a torrent of words tumble forth. But when not offering up tense-mangling summations of things that could more artfully be expressed in a silent glance or two (“I could see in Neal’s eyes that he can see in my own eyes the regret we both feel that recently we haven’t had chances to talk like we used to do, driving across America”), Polish’s over-reliance on the inner turmoil of Kerouac’s text just as often comes across as generally intrusive.

The gnawing ambivalence and self-destructive swan dives of hard-drinking creative types need not automatically require a telling that seems to have its head up its own ass (Bent Hamer’s Factotum, studded with dark delights, comes to mind). But with first the tedious On the Road and now Big Sur — which offers up faux-deep ruminations about the character of a man based on how he chops wood, and knee-jerk melancholy triggered by a dead otter and mouse — Kerouac seems to be Kryptonite for filmmakers laboriously searching for a little profundity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Ketchup Entertainment, R, 81 minutes)

For a while he was “that kid from the Jeepers Creepers movies.” Over the years, however, Justin Long has crafted a winning slate of comedic characters, swooping in and sprinkling a just-left-of-center charm into the sorts of roles for which you get the sense Paul Rudd was deemed a little bit too old, a little bit too expensive, or both. And while he’s no bankable star, mostly finding solace in ensembles and animated voice work, Long can still reliably anchor a movie as a leading man, as he did in 2006’s underrated, pleasantly anarchic alt-college comedy Accepted. All of which laid the groundwork for a certain level of expectation with regard to Long’s screenwriting debut, A Case of You. Sadly, it’s more a case of disappointments. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (IFC Films, unrated, 92 minutes)