The year 2007 has already offered up some grade-A stinkers (I’m looking in your general direction, Premonition…), but some pals and I were recently perusing the summer slate, trying to suss out a few of the certain bombs-in-waiting amidst all those gaudy sequels and franchise pictures. One of my friends rightly seized on Element Films and MGM’s Mr. Brooks. To wit, he wrote:
“Okay, so here’s my pick for 2007’s WTF special: Kevin
Costner is a respectable businessman who has a secret life as a serial killer.
Demi Moore is the cop trying to bring him down. Already we’ve got that
delicious I Love the Early ’90s Halloween Reunion Special feel.
But! Add in William Hurt as the personification of Costner’s
murderous id that drives him to kill, script and direction by Bruce Evans (previous
writing credits: Cutthroat Island, Jungle 2 Jungle; only directing credit: Kuffs) and a June 1 release date, and
you start to see we really have something special here.”
And he’s right, you know. The trailer offers up some hilarious shorthand (why, he’s the Portland Chamber of Commerce man of the year!),
and very little to indicate a particularly deft or invigorating handling of the “personified id” element. Failing some sort of very fancy, purposefully convoluted hook (and I can only really think of two or three possibilities), this looks like a free money giveaway to a couple stars who maybe haven’t recently been offered quite as many cushy major studio flick paydays as in years past. (As for Hurt, well, I don’t begrudge him a mortgage payment or three, though it’ll be interesting to see if he conveys menace through trademark Whispery Solemn Hurt, or a slightly newfangled iteration of his zonked-out, Oscar-nominated crime boss in A History of Violence.)
Toss in the aforementioned talents of Evans and comedian Dane Cook as an amateur photographer with an apparent penchant for blackmail and yes, Mr. Brooks looks like it has some potential, all right. For a look at the film’s trailer, click here.
Aching sincerity in and of itself is not a problem. But Art of Passion is one of those movies. First off, it’s written and
directed by a guy named Arthur Bjorn Egeli (!), a guy who describes himself
without pause as “a visionary artist” in the complementary audio commentary
track on this new DVD release. (That he would then go on from this to make a movie
called Lap Dancer to me says otherwise;
it says he makes art chiefly to get laid.) But at any rate, Art of Passion is about an artist, with
a capital A; why, you can tell how good he is by how deadly serious he is.
Shot in 1994 under the title Unconditional Love, the movie stars Pablo Bryant as Steve Buchanan
(above left), a headstrong young landscape painter on the verge of discovery. While
Steve severs ties and acts out in the course of battling for the approval of
his stern, withholding mentor, Robert Hoffman (David Ellsworth, above right), three women in
turn vie for his attention. There’s Theresa (Jessica Brytn Flannery), a young,
sensual model who lives for the images Steve creates of her. Then there’s Melissa
(Swedish-born Isabelle Dahlin), a much more conventional fellow student who
worships the ideal that she believes Steve stands for. Finally, there’s impetuous
abstract painter Mary (Aleksandra Kaniak, probably the real looker of the
three), who is every bit the intellectual match for Steve.
If compliments must be given, it can be honestly said Art of Passion recreates a time and
space fairly convincingly; the movie is steeped in autobiographical detail, and
shot all around Provincetown, where
Egeli studied at the Cape School of Art and apparently continues to
occasionally retreat. The film also features, in easygoing fashion, a good bit
of natural nudity; it’s the type of movie that, if it existed back in the
mid-1980s, could slip through on some second-rate cable channel like Cinemax,
and make 12-year-olds feel vaguely funny in their pants. The problem is that the movie is enormously pretentious, extremely stilted and full of ridiculous problems
and dialogue. Bryant makes for a dour, unpersuasive lead, and the fact that so
many women are required to orbit him like satellites is unconvincing. Irritation overwhelms interest fairly quickly, making for a tedious 90 minutes.
If the product itself is of dubious value, Liberation
Entertainment’s special edition DVD release is a nice effort, at least. While
the full-frame transfer leaves much to be desired — studded with grain and
debris, it’s really quite bad, but reflective of the low regard in which the
presumably 16mm source material was held, I guess — Dolby digital 2.0 audio tracks in English
and Spanish capture the low-key aural demands of the movie in clear fashion. There’s also a spate of supplemental features, beginning with the
aforementioned audio commentary track from Egeli, in which he talks a lot about
the inspiration for the movie, and its many parallels to (and divergences from)
his own life.
Twelve-plus minutes of deleted scenes kick off the meatier
portion of extras, but the chief bonus feature is 22 minutes of new interviews,
with Bryant, Egeli, Kaniak, Ellsworth, Dahlin, Hal Streib and many more. All
sorts of revealing tidbits pop up here, and Kaniak is most forthcoming with the
gossip, though it’s not exactly that
tawdry. She talks about her nude scenes, and the panic she felt upon arriving
on set and finding out that there was no key make-up artist. Centerpiece Bryant,
meanwhile, is a yawn of an interview, leaving one not to wonder why his career didn’t advance far beyond this movie. Talent
files, the movie’s 90-second trailer, an expansive photo gallery (which includes
some images that can be zoomed in on), an essay by composer Michael Errington and
DVD-ROM screensavers and computer wallpaper round out the disc. Only the awful
video quality mars this presentation. D (Movie) B (Disc)
The interspersing of zombie and military flick tropes has a
rich history, dating all the way back, of course, to George Romero’s Day of the Dead and beyond. Dead and Deader, though, I’ll give
credit: it might be the first film in which I’ve gotten/had to deploy both the phrases
“marauding zombies” and “illegal Cambodian incursion” (Henry Kissinger would not
be amused, I guess), and that’s not even including the movie’s obvious nods to 2004’s Shaun of the Dead and Jim Carrey’s similarly
titled goof-fest.
A tonal mash-up of semi-successful execution if entirely
copped moves, Dead and Deader stars erstwhile
Superman Dean Cain at Lt. Bobby Quinn, a Special Forces commando who, during an
officially unauthorized reconnaissance mission deep into said country’s sweaty jungle
with his platoon, uncovers a secret experimental laboratory full of mutilated
dead bodies, an exceptional breed of life-extending scorpions and strange equipment.
Quinn also unfortunately gets killed… or so it seems.
When he wakes up Stateside after barely avoiding his own
autopsy, an only semi-zombified Quinn finds that, courtesy of said scorpion, he’s
been bestowed with certain powers that make him the ultimate fighter against a
growing band of fully infected, undead flesh-easters. Teaming up with military
cook Judson (Guy Torry), film geek waitress Holly (Susan Ward)
and others, Quinn tries to stop the plague before it infects the entire nation.
I remember flipping through Dead and Deader screenwriter Mark Altman’s 1991 behind-the-scenes
book on Twin Peaks, and being wowed…
by the number of typos and errors. Even for what was obviously a quickie
cash-in title, I thought, this was slung together in pretty haphazard fashion. The
same might be said for quite a lot of Altman’s hackishly referential writing
for the big screen, which includes Room 6,
starring Christine Taylor; The Darkroom; Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead (and its sequel);
and 1998’s Star Trek-inspired Free Enterprise. He’s a co-writer here, though,
with Steve Kriozere, and the collaboration seems to have worked; certainly
there are no groaning inconsistencies on par with the aforementioned book, and the tone is for the most part one of nicely balanced fun and splatter-driven schlock.
Its many genre in-jokes are frequently obvious and chatter
about other movies sometimes tedious, but Dead
and Deader’s characters are decently sketched out and given some fun lines,
and the cast (which includes Colleen Camp, Peter Greene, Dean Haglund and Armin
Shimerman) really helps elevate things beyond something like Devil’s Den,
which wants to be hip and fun but sinks under the weight of its own accumulated
inanity. By knowing what type of movie they’re making (and what kind they’re not), and all being on the same page,
along with director Patrick Dinhunt, Dead
and Deader actually earns a marginal recommendation for the hardcore horror
set who also found Shaun of the Dead such
a delicious, chocolate-and-peanut-butter-type flick.
The DVD for the movie comes in a nice cardboard O-ring (above) that spiffs
up what is otherwise a fairly drab cover, presenting a cut-out of a door that frames,
yes, a couple marauding zombies. The film is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen,
enhanced for 16×9 televisions, and comes with Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 English
language tracks, as well as an audio commentary track from writers Altman and Kriozere,
along with composer Joe Kraemer. The most tasty tidbit of the slate of extras is
a 35-minute making-of featurette, full of cast and crew interviews, as well as
some behind-the-scenes footage. A photo gallery and a DVD-ROM copy of the
script round out the bonus features. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
Forget, for a moment, television’s American Idol. We may have a new big screen pin-up, albeit one of a chatty, somewhat canted appeal. It was a good week indeed for Shia LaBeouf, who ensured that a lot more people will start to learn how to correctly spell his name, what with the strong opening of his Disturbia, a thriller which premiered to an estimated $23 million and change at just over 2,900 locations, good for tops at the box office. (Fellow wide-release opener Perfect Stranger, meanwhile, washed out with $11.5 million at 2,660 sites.) No mind that the movie was a slickly made but only moderately engaging, teen-inflected tweak on the central conceit of Rear Window, and that it ultimately ran out of things to say in the third act — the fact remains that LaBeouf put his stamp of personality on the film, and the under-25 set, leaning female within that group, made it a big hit.
LaBeouf’s hosting gig on Saturday Night Live was a further nice little showcase for him. It wasn’t a classic episode (a notion somewhat amusingly assayed in the show’s opener, where an enthusiastic LaBeouf was met with the shrugging reticence of cast members), but it did offer him a few nice moments. His impression of Tobey Maguire on The Prince Show was a push, but there were fun moments to be had in a public access-type Sofa King commercial (as in, “Our prices are Sofa King low!”) as well as a sketch in which an underage LaBeouf and Andy Samberg concocted a labyrinthine, unfolding scheme to purchase beer at a mini-mart. The best display of the sort of self-assurance that has helped catapult LaBeouf to the top of casting directors’ lists, though, came in the final moments of the show, in a throwaway meta-sketch in which Maya Rudolph aggressively hit on LaBeouf, apparently solely because their first names rhyme.
One of the worst kept secrets in Hollywood, meanwhile, finally was officially rolled out and confirmed — namely, LaBeouf’s casting in the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series, in a yet-to-be-determined capacity. LaBeouf has a friend in Steven Spielberg — he helped place the young actor in Michael Bay’s Transformers, on which he’s an executive producer — so more good things are on the horizon for LaBeouf, to be sure, even if my girlfriend still refers to him as “that little Project Greenlight movie kid.”
