Shared Darkness

A polished technical package lends considerable emotional weight to Supremacy, a siege/hostage drama shot through with racial animus. Based on real events, director Deon Taylor’s movie connects largely on the strength of its solid acting and charged stakes, but suffers a bit from muddled plotting and a dramatically diffuse end game. For the full, original review of the Los Angeles Film Festival premiere, from ShockYa, click here. (Hidden Empire Film Group/Media House Capital, unrated, 106 minutes)

Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Kevin Kline and Morgan Freeman star as four lifelong friends who convene in Sin City to relive their glory days in advance of the nuptials of one of them in Last Vegas, a funny, sweet and poignant crowd-pleaser that doesn’t insult its audience’s intelligence. Far more than just the unmoored, geriatric version of The Hangover that its premise suggests, this seriocomedy roots down into its characters in a manner that throws a spotlight not merely on jocular fraternity, but also the duties of friendship, and the hard truths that sometimes only the best and closest of pals can offer up.

Director Jon Turteltaub provides a steady hand on the tiller, but much credit belongs to screenwriter Dan Fogelman, for fleshing out his original treatment in a manner that allows for the inclusion of substantive discord. Fogelman has penned a lot of animated films (including Bolt and Tangled), but Last Vegas most conjures up the same sort of bittersweet mix of first loves, lost loves and the swollen hope of new romantic possibility that also marked his Crazy Stupid Love. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (CBS Films, PG-13, 105 minutes)

Cop thrillers are ubiquitous, but it’s fairly rare to see a movie that takes as its primary focus other emergency responders. That novelty is but one of several factors that help distinguish and elevate The Call, an enjoyably nerve-racking thriller of imperilment that takes as its heroine a distraught 911 call center operator. Solid performances by Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin abet a rigorous, smart packaging from director Brad Anderson.

If much of the enjoyment of The Call is not necessarily in what happens so much as how it happens, the movie still imparts good, popcorn-level tension and thrills. Further adding to its differentiation, The Call also delivers a nice end twist that isn’t so much a wild revelation as just a little spiky add-on of moral ambiguity. This is pop Hollywood filmmaking done right — stirred cocktail of tension, with the ability to also actually spark a conversation. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, R, 94 minutes)

On the small screen, AMC’s Breaking Bad has shined a light on the production of methamphetamine, and wrung much drama from the heightened stakes of a seemingly regular family man’s descent into moral and criminal contravention. Writer-director David Pomes’ effectively grimy Cook County takes a look at the ravaging effects of the same drug from a user’s point-of-view, detailing the familial chaos surrounding three generations of addicts living in rural East Texas. A gritty, pungent drama with some nicely attuned performances, the film is well worth seeking out for fans of off-the-beaten-path independent fare.

At the movie’s center is Tommy, aka Bump (Anson Mount, above left), a perpetually strung-out addict and meth cook who lives with his girlfriend Lucy (Polly Cole) and a series of other burn-outs who seem to come and go. The ruination of his own life might not be so bad, but Bump’s six-year-old daughter Deandra (Makenna Fitzsimmons) is also caught up in the mix, and a continuous victim of his curious combination of obliviousness and over-protectiveness. Bump’s teenage nephew, Abe (Ryan Donowho), tries to look out for his younger cousin as best he can, but lives in constant fear of his uncle’s violent rages and irrational paranoia. He’s older, but no less stuck and a victim of his circumstances than Deandra.

An uptick of hope arrives when Bump’s older brother and Abe’s dad, Sonny (Xander Berkeley, above right), returns home after a two-and-a-half-year absence. He’s gone clean and sober, and unbeknownst to Bump has also done a stint in prison, and is thus required to check in with a parole officer. Abe at first welcomes his father back, but then old resentments come bubbling up. Trying to finally do right by his son, Sonny wonders if his brother is too far gone, and if so whether it’s too late to extricate the rest of his loved ones from the dark clutches of drugs.

The winner of the prestigious Audience Award at the SXSW Film Festival, Cook County is a solidly constructed little film that casts its lot with a group of game actors. If Mount — emaciated and sporting a scruffy beard that makes him look like a crazed gold rush ancestor of Daniel Day-Lewis — sometimes feels like he’s overdialing his accented impression of Matthew McConaughey, he certainly nails the flitting mindset of a drug addict, in which tangential thoughts collide and battle for mangled articulation. Donowho, who kind of recalls Lou Taylor Pucci, exudes a basic sympathetic nature. The underrated Berkeley, meanwhile, particularly shines as a fundamentally decent but in-over-his-head guy trying desperately to pay down the sins of his past. Crucially, there is humanity here in all these characters, regardless of their sins and shortcomings.

Director of photography Brad Rushing and production designer James Fowler, meanwhile, abet Pomes in creating a movie with a grungy authenticity. Sweat pours off of almost every character in every scene (Mount probably never wears a shirt during the entire film), and the rank aroma of frantic hopelessness can almost be smelled coming off the screen. That things end badly is no great surprise, but there is hope in the pinched battle for redemption that unfolds in Cook County. This may not be a pleasant slice of Americana, but it is unfortunately part of our modern collective story. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Hannover House, R, 94 minutes)

Watching the new indie dramedy Stan, which just had its world premiere at the ongoing, 14th annual Dances With Films festival, one could be forgiven, if they were so inclined, for letting their mind wander and recall the title track of Ben Folds’ excellent Rockin’ the Suburbs, in which he bemoans being “all alone in [his] white boy pain.” It’s not, after all, that the movie has no dramatic stakes, it’s just that they seem so small and quaint and, well, adorably solvable. A low-key effort, Stan is more interested in eliciting smiles of knowing recognition than any real laughs, resulting in a movie of such willfully mild temperament as to sort of question its reason for existence.

The story centers on Stan (co-writer John F. Schaffer), a kindly, oafish guy who works at a small orchid greenhouse, occasionally visits a “happy endings” massage parlor, and then combats his metastasized guilt by making trips to a doctor to make sure his penis doesn’t bear any signs of herpetic infection. Mostly, though, Stan suffers the quiet indignities of being in “friendship alley” with Mary (Christina Diaz), a blonde babe who keeps him on standby while also dating jerky Nick (David Michie). When Ann (Gioia Marchese) shows up and gets a job at the greenhouse, she slowly draws Stan out of his shell a bit more, but remains inwardly frustrated with his dopey dedication to a girl not willing to give him any real romantic attention.

All of this could veer into more straightforward lonely-hearts dramatic territory, a la something like James Mangold’s Heavy, but for better or worse Shaffer and his co-writer, director Evald Johnson, eschew much heavy dramatic lifting. It’s quite nice that Stan doesn’t have any forward-leaning over-emoting by actors seemingly trying to get some material for their demo reel, but the characters’ motivations overall seem ill-defined. The filmmakers mostly step back from active engagement or tension, except for the awkward inclusion of a plot strand involving the pervy peeping Tom-ishness of Ann’s boss and boarder, Mr. Frankle (Todd Patrick Breaugh), which doesn’t seem to have a good reason for existing within this framework. There isn’t a deeper insight or emotional identification with Stan’s loneliness or self-loathing; he comes across merely as a guy kind of half-assing it through life.

To be fair, Schaffer’s amiable persona suits this tack of inquiry, which, as stated, is more interested in summoning forth recognition than drawing out laughs. With his quietly expressive eyes, unaffected yet halting speech pattern and propensity for socially sawing himself off at the knees, Schaffer’s Stan seems like a long-lost cousin of comedian Brian Posehn. And cinematographer Michael Off’s work abets this unfussy naturalism. After a while, though, you want to see this bear awake from his slumber, and release some pent-up aggression. After all, even Rockin’ the Suburbs had a song called “The Ascent of Stan.” For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (S17 Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)

Adapted from Wendy Orr’s same-named children’s novel, Nim’s Island tells the story of 11-year-old Nim (Abigail Breslin, Oscar-nominated for Little Miss Sunshine), a precocious girl who lives alone on a remote island in the South Pacific with her widowed, marine biologist father, Jack Rusoe (Gerard Butler, of 300). The lack of human companionship doesn’t bother them, though — Nim plays with and talks to her pet lizard and sea lion, and enthusiastically devours a once-a-month shipment of adventure novels featuring a swashbuckling, fedora-sporting character named Alex Rover.

But when a storm unexpectedly sweeps her father out to sea, Nim finds herself truly alone, and scared. A series of research email queries from the real-life author Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster), in actuality an agoraphobic recluse living in San Francisco, awakens, to degrees, adventurous and heroic impulses in both parties. As Nim looks to protect her island home from the intrusive tourism inroads of Buccaneer Cruise Lines — a company peddling virginal beach expeditions to their loud, gawking clientele — Alexandra faces up to her own considerable fears, packs a suitcase full of Progresso soup and Purell hand sanitizer, and embarks on a far-flung voyage to help her young fan.

More intimately scaled than a lot of other recent children’s book adaptations, the sweet-natured and light-hearted Nim’s Island nonetheless achieves a nice hold over its audience, courtesy in no small part to Barry Robison’s superb production design. Co-directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin (Little Manhattan), the movie is pitched just a little to the left of naturalistic but it’s never so outlandish as to come off as completely unrealistic, as long as one is prepared to make a few acquiescences — mostly with regards to the interacting-with-animals bits.

The obvious touchstone here is Disney’s 1960 family adventure classic Swiss Family Robinson, a sick-day staple for many a kid courtesy of its theatrical reissue and subsequent VHS peddling in the 1980s. (There are a few brief allusions to that movie, and Nim and her father’s last name, Rusoe, is another nod of homage, to Daniel Defoe’s castaway tale Robinson Crusoe.) Many other movies, though — from Matilda and Zathura to Jumanji and even The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep — share the same sort of fantastical, flight-of-fancy imagination that powers this movie. While Nim’s Island is in the end far less explicitly effects-driven than some of those films, it does open and close with hand-crafted credit sequences that frames this tale as a metaphorical yarn as much as anything else.

As for the performances, Breslin is suitably bright-eyed, and energetic. Butler, meanwhile, has great fun portraying both Jack and the more rugged, roguish Alex, who appears both in Nim’s imagination during her reading and in several spirited arguments with Alexandra, who is the antithesis of the best-selling character of her own creation. The movie also benefits greatly from a pitch-perfect manic turn by Foster, who knows how to take formulaic bits of slapstick and uptight unease and make them ring amusingly true.

Nim’s Island isn’t without a few moments of over-familiarity, and in some ways it’s actually demure when compared to a lot of other movies aimed these days chiefly at kids — which may be a bit of a strike for those raised on the Harry Potter films and The Chronicles of Narnia. Its greatest success, though, is the manner in which it taps into the pleasurable feeling of awakened imagination that surges during adolescence. Rekindling fond memories of childhood is never a bad thing. For the full review, from Reelz, click here. (Fox Walden, PG, 94 minutes)

Perfect Stranger is one of those utterly anonymous film titles,
lightly evocative in its own way and yet suitable enough to be applied
to any number of situations or genres. It feels like a relic of the 1980s, an
indie flick title designed to conjure up an association with some
bigger hit.

Starring Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, and evincing a style that might best be described as deliciously retarded, Perfect Stranger is an overloaded, under-reasoned thriller that’s wholly engineered in reverse. It culminates in one of
those chunky scenes wherein a potential victim laboriously explains a
murderer’s entire convoluted plot directly to said person. Except in Perfect Stranger,
that scene is actually spread out over three different locations, and
includes the killer and deductive explicator snuggling up together on a
couch. Yes, seriously. A single graspable tone is the film’s greatest mystery; file this one under “comedy, unintentional.” For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

It would be the autobiographical novels Post Office, Women and Hollywood, along with, eventually, the 1987 movie Barfly — all searing portraits of a distinctly Southern California underclass — that would resonate worldwide and turn blue collar novelist and poet Charles Bukowski into a celebrated countercultural icon. The biographical drama Factotum, though, takes as its core Bukowski’s same-titled second tome, as well as excerpts from three other books, all centering around drunken roustabout Henry Chinaski, widely acknowledged to be the writer’s alter ego.



Directed by Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories) and released this month through IFC Films, the movie is a rambling, episodic mock-biography of Bukowski, anchored by a fine, square-jawed starring performance from Crash‘s Matt Dillon. Like his creator, Chinaski swings through a wide variety of low-paying, non-creative, menial jobs (working at a bike shop, a pickle factory, as an ice deliveryman and janitor) and a smaller handful of codependent, quasi-abusive monogamous relationships (embodied here by Marisa Tomei as a fling, and Lili Taylor as on-again/off-again girlfriend Janet). Truly playing the field, you see, would take too much effort — as well as time away from Chinaski’s favorite mistress, the bottle. Through it all Chinaski pens short stories and sends them off blindly to a magazine in New York, subsisting on jug-wine and pancakes, cigarettes and melancholy.

Hamer has a penchant for fade-ins and -outs that will strike some as too affected, and the “story” here is undeniably paced like a snail, and at times willfully crude. (One amusing segment finds Chinaski getting his testicles delicately taped up into a homemade diaper after he contracts crabs from Janet.) Dillon, though, has in his age settled into a more mature, relaxed and naturalistic delivery, and he here approximates Bukowski’s deep, rumbling and inflected timbre — part wizened yet intoxicated preacher’s cadence, part sonorous bullshitter — in a manner that really gives you a window into Chinaski’s inherent glumness, his death-grip hold on misery. You get a palpable sense of how Chinaski’s (and thus Bukowski’s) acting out stems from his racing, perpetually dissatisfied inner monologue, and how his general disagreeableness and bad attitude toward those around him is hardwired to an irreconcilable urgency to locate in both life and his art the same sort of forward-leaning insistence he feels in his soul.

For Bukowski, writing was living. An arthouse curio, Factotum isn’t for all tastes, but it’s studded with dark delights (Chinaski stalking one employer, trying to score a check for a half-day’s work), and it conveys with unflinching precision the life of a dinged, beaten-down spirit for whom creativity wasn’t just an impulse but rather a compulsion. (IFC Films, R, 94 minutes)