A solid cinematic chess match with legal thriller
trappings, Fracture centers around Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins), a well-to-do man who
kills his
cheating wife, and readily admits it to the responding police officer.
Crawford
has his eyes on a bigger game, though, and mitigating circumstances,
including
the lack of a matching weapon, give him several important trump cards
when he decides to represent himself in court against hotshot Los
Angeles assistant district attorney Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling, below left).

Rosamund Pike, above right) will be his immediate supervisor. Because of this and other factors, Willy underestimates Crawford, and gets sucked into a tangled circus trial that lets a man he knows is guilty walk free.

A very well made genre picture full of smartly modulated
friction, Fracture is predicated
on a few significant leaps in believability, certainly (a murder case going to
trial in under two weeks, for one), but director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear) knows his way
around the criminal justice system. Hopkins,
of course, is reliably steady, even if he’s just essentially tossing off a minor chord variation on Hannibal Lecter here. Gosling, meanwhile, gives a great, engrossing
performance as the slick, narcissistic Willy — a blithe egotist who finds his golden touch evaporating before his eyes. When he comes under
fire and suddenly finds an embarrassing blight on his near-perfect record, it
ignites in him a deep competitive instinct that Fracture, quite agreeably, never pawns off on a
reawakened idealism. Not so deep down, Willy’s a bit of a self-centered jerk, you see, but never less
than fascinatingly watchable.

Presented separately in either full-screen or anamorphic widescreen versions, Fracture comes housed in a regular Amray case with a promotional insert, and features a nice transfer and an animated menu screen that plays up the slickness of the film’s flawless design work. Apart from the theatrical trailer, the only bonus feature is a 34-minute collection of seven deleted or extended scenes. Actually, that tally is a bit misleading, since two of those bits are alternate endings (in convening for re-shoots, the filmmakers picked the right one) that run around 12 minutes apiece. An alternate opening provides an amusing introduction to Willy’s character, with him getting stuck in his apartment due to his landlady’s shabby parking job. But the joint highlight and disappointment has to come in the form of two included love scenes (slightly different edits), which showcase Pike… but only in a tasteful negligee, sorry. Interview inclusions from Gosling or at the very least Hoblit would have really given this disc extra value. As is, it’s a great movie with a bit less swagger than it should have on DVD. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

On the morning of June
28, 1993, 14 years after recording his first album, punk cult icon GG Allin
was found in a Lower East Side, New
York apartment, dead from a drug overdose following a
final, riot-inducing show. His sudden death surprised those who knew Allin, but
the irony that he would die alone was lost on few, following years of
threatening to actually take his own life on stage in mid-performance.

Road Trip and Old School director Todd Phillips’ senior film thesis project at
New York University, Hated was finished
just before Allin’s demise, and it chronicles his life in unflinching fashion,
never shying away from the on-or-off stage havoc Allin created to challenge what
he saw as a lazy, living-asleep nation of conformists and non-believers. So if
that means footage of Allin smearing his own feces on his face and flinging it
into the crowd, or getting urinated on by a girl at a party… well, then so be
it.

Allin — who once smashed out six of his own teeth and over the
course of his life was arrested over 50 times, on charges ranging from
disorderly conduct to exposing himself to minors — is an undeniably compelling
non-fiction subject, simply for all his outrageous behavior. While Phillips
doesn’t pretend to wear a cap of objectivity (he was responsible for booking the
spoken word performance at NYU where Allin stripped in front of the crowd,
inserted a banana in his ass and taunted the audience with threats and
obscenities, resulting in a stand-off), neither does he ask many tough
questions of Allin, save for one bleary hotel segment where Allin confesses he’ll
probably end up “in prison or a hospital.” This is mostly a rib-nudging,
along-for-the-wild-ass-ride piece of point-and-shoot entertainment, sans
psychological examination.

Clips from an Allin appearance on Geraldo Rivera’s talk show
are amusing in a time capsule sort of way, but it’s cynical former band mate “Chicken
John” actually offers up the most insightful analysis — not something you’d
necessarily expect from a guy with such a name, nor someone who smashes himself
in the face repeatedly during the movie’s concluding wrap-up, illustrating his
point that Allin was essentially a phony performance-artist nihilist, and that
such antics really don’t hurt that much. (Ummm… OK.) A counter-culture document
through and through, Hated isn’t particularly an extremely well made movie, but it by and large held my attention on the strength of its bizarre
subject. Featured songs include “Die When You Die,” “Gypsy Motherfuckers,” “Fuck
Authority,” “Suck My Ass It Smells” (seriously), “I Want To Kill You,” “Carmelita,”
“Bite It You Scum,” “When I Die,” “Highest Power,” “I Kill Everything I Fuck (The
AIDS Song)” and “Look Into My Eyes & Hate Me.”

Housed in a regular Amray case, this superlatively packaged special edition release
of Hated comes with a special poster
offer for a reproduction of serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s original portrait of
Allin (the pair struck up a pen-pal friendship); a set of temporary tattoos
designed after Allin’s own body art; an exclusive interview with brother Merle
Allin and drummer Dino Sex; an art gallery of submissions from the contest held
to select the release’s cover art; a rare, three-minute interview with Allin’s
mom; three music videos; and an engaging audio commentary track with Phillips
and the aforementioned Allin and Sex. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here.
C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Whatever you think of him, Adam Rifkin is a guy who has had
an interesting career. He’s made a living, I guess, penning mainstream,
kid-friendly fare like Small Soldiers,
Mouse Hunt, Zoom and, most recently, Underdog. As a director, meanwhile, he’s championed the thespian
abilities of Ron Jeremy,
shown audiences how to have sex while driving at high speeds (The Chase) and made perhaps both the
best and worst film ever made about four teenagers trying to scam their way
into a Kiss concert in 1978, Detroit Rock
City.

Rifkin cut his teeth on Never
on Tuesday, Tale of Two Sisters
and The Invisible Maniac (the latter
under his frequent nom de plume, Rif Coogan) before, in 1991, turning out the
bizarre cult hit The Dark Backward, a
movie about a Marty Malt (Judd Nelson), a garbage man who gives stand-up comedy
a try, fails, and then fortuitously grows a third arm on his back. “Wha…?” you ask.
Yes, seriously.

Marty lives a sad-sack, beaten-down existence in a rundown
town where seemingly everything is owned by the Blump Corporation. He fails
miserably because… he’s just not funny. After he finds a small lump on his
back, Marty goes to a doctor (James Caan), who provides a band-aid, quite
literally. Soon, though, that itchy nuisance is a full-fledged appendage. Marty
is flabbergasted, but his accordion-happy pal Gus (a wildly theatrical Bill
Paxton) figures out a way to use the new arm, and gets them signed with a
sleazy talent agent (Wayne Newton). Marty may be a freak, but now he’s in
demand. Just when success seems near, though, Marty’s waitress girlfriend, Rosarita
(Lara Flynn Boyle), leaves him. For Gus, who prefers his women plus-sized,
that’s not a big deal. Marty, though, is thrown for a loop, even though their
passion-less relationship was far from ideal.

Co-starring Rob Lowe, The
Dark Backward is about as canted as they come — a wild, unrehearsed
forehand smash volley across the net. If one prefers structure, cordiality and
some loose sense of rules and governance to their comedy, Rifkin’s riff-happy
flick won’t be for you. And honestly, far too much of the story here comes off
as arbitrary, lending the movie the feeling of an indulgent, film school
exercise. That said, there’s some loopy fun in the interstices. It may require a
slightly regressive mindset to appreciate it, however. For me, it wasn’t
happening.

This special edition DVD of The Dark Backward comes housed in a regular Amray case, and
presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo
audio track. A clear labor-of-love — both in its original production and here,
re-imagined and gussied up for the digital age — this disc comes loaded with
all-new bonus material, starting with a brief introduction to the movie from
Rifkin. A special, 40-minute Q&A session with Paxton, Nelson and Rifkin and
producer Brad Wyman, from 2006, proves interesting and amusing, as does an
engaging audio commentary track from the same quartet. A never-before-seen collection
of deleted and extended scenes runs about six minutes, and contains some flubs,
as well as longer versions of extant material, with only unnecessary headers
and footers trimmed. A solid little making-of featurette includes a nice array
of interview material with all the aforementioned parties, plus Newton,
editor Peter Schink and a few other behind-the-scenes figures. There’s also an
interesting assortment of promotional videos that Rifkin made to take to the
Cannes Film Festival to secure financial backing, and a gallery collection of assorted
trailers. For a “deep cut” niche catalogue title like this, one could scarcely
ask for a better DVD rendering with a straight face. C- (Movie) A (Disc)

So I need a specific reason to re-post this DVD review of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, from 2001? What, like you have some objection to another picture of Angelina Jolie or something? Whatever…

Angelina Jolie), the film is a big hunk of depressingly dumb summer programming, and so
the main question one feels hanging over any viewing of the movie or
exploration of its more than three hours of painstakingly culled extras is: all
this, in service of what?

Well, a film franchise, one certainly presumes. But Lara
Croft: Tomb Raider is an inauspicious bow. This is not to suggest that Jolie,
who flings her body about with grace, precision and a persuasive air of
authority, is at all at fault. If some of the videogame’s more overt sexual
elements are understandably sacrificed at the Canonized Altar of PG-13, Jolie
still manages to convey a kick-ass sexual liberation merely with her leonine
gait and the sly, timely displacement of one of her increasingly famous
eyebrows (note to studios: investigate possibility of buddy cop flick with The
Rock).

There’s also a charismatic, guileful intelligence to match those
erotically hip-holstered hand cannons. If every other single character seems
flat and boring, thanks to Jolie we at least get a good sense of well-off
adventurer Lara Croft — of both her place within the film and why she’s such a
popular videogame character. The film’s putative plot revolves around a clock
and Lara retrieving two halves of a mysterious time travel device before the
sneeringly evil Manfred Powell (Iain Glenn) and his Illuminati, a group of
typically sinister-looking folks in typically sinister high-backed chairs, can
wreak world domination.

Yet on any level of sane judgment, the film fails. The
movie’s much-labored over script, on which six folks, including West himself,
share some form of credit, features dialogue so inescapably bland and
banal — actors sometimes just repeating other characters’ lines in the absence of
anything else to say — that entire exchanges can evaporate, like butter melting
between your ears, before you even know what the hell you’ve missed. Perhaps
most damning for an action movie, though, Tomb Raider just isn’t very exciting.
Apart from the frenetic opening sequence and an admittedly way-cool, bungee
cord-type shoot out in which Jolie is suspended on what for all intents and
purposes is a massive rubberband, Tomb Raider’s action is a dull pastiche of
loosely related jumps ’n’ stunts, the equivalent of preordained action dominoes falling
listlessly. We never for a moment feel peril — indeed, feel anything — and aside
from the gorgeous settings (the dense jungle of Cambodia,
the tundras and caves of Iceland),
Tomb Raider offers nothing of quality for its charismatic lead to plunder or
rescue.

Still, for those inclined, the Tomb Raider DVD does offer a lot of nice
extras, including an audio commentary track by West, a look at Jolie’s intense training for
the role, a production featurette, four deleted scenes (including one that
sheds crucial light on Croft’s relationship with part-friend/part-nemesis Alex,
and two more which achieve the dubious distinction of having even worse
dialogue than the film), an alternate title sequence and the unedited version
of U2’s “Elevation” video. The most compelling extra, however, comes in the
form of a brief set interview with Jolie and her father Jon Voight. While this
may be a questionable choice for their first screen teaming, it’s heartening to
see the two reconciled and happy together… for the moment. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B+ (Disc)

The archives here at Shared Darkness are in desperate need of being expanded, but a master plan of sorts is being delayed a bit while a laptop is repaired over the next few weeks. Still, there’s this DVD review blast from the past (not to be confused with Diane Keaton’s 2006 film of the same name), originally published in 2001 in a now-defunct Los Angeles weekly:

Multi-hyphenate Kevin Di Novis’ psychosexual drama bills itself as a “dark comedy of gender manipulation,” but that’s advertising a description it doesn’t completely earn. Festival-lauded (the film snagged prizes at Slamdance, and the official Underground gatherings in both New York and Chicago), Surrender Dorothy certainly has the off-kilter protagonist, wild narrative arc and shocking ending of a searing manifesto on psychosexual identity. It also posesses a certain lilting, collegial art rock ethos (several montages pad out the 87-minute running time), but its basic plotting is rather calamitous, with false drama (chiefly the narrative crutch of heroin use, but also specifically a brawl with some club punks and a faux-menacing drug dealer) lending the movie a feeling of contrivance rather than the downward-spiraling urgency no doubt intended.

Trevor (Peter Pryor, a sort of more menacing iteration of Kid in the Hall Kevin McDonald) is a reclusive restaurant busboy who we’re told repeatedly can’t make a connection with a female — never mind the fact that he can’t seem to make a connection with anyone. Trevor spends a good deal of time getting pushed around at work and masturbating in the bathroom with a pair of scissors jammed up to his nose. (Ummm, yeah…) Enter tinny-voiced smack addict Lahn (Di Novis), a moocher drifting through life and in need of a place to stay. Trevor lets Lahn move in with him, but their relationship soon degenerates into a loose jailer/captor scenario, with Trevor working out various interpersonal issues — and possibly subjugated homosexual urges — in increasingly distubring fashions.

The stark black-and-white cinematography of Jonathan Kovel is something to be admired here; it’s a lot more difficult than people realize to achieve this effect, especially on a budget. Yet overall Surrender Dorothy feels like a student short run amok — too much artifice and affect, not enough studied and skillful manipulation of reality. The DVD’s supplemental features include chapter selection, an audio commentary track with Di Novisa and the film’s producer, detailed production notes, cast and crew biographies and picture galleries. To order the film via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)