Daily Archives: August 25, 2007

Right at Your Door

Film Reviews


Arrowhead reveals itself to be the official water of the apocalypse in Right at Your Door, a little low-fi thriller of containment that has topicality and an indefatigable sense of manic claustrophobic energy on its side, but also a movie that eventually plateaus and runs out of interesting things to say, especially given our low-grade empathy with the characters.

Writer-director Chris Gorak has an interesting background in production design and art direction, and to this end his debut feature achieves a certain lean, muscular uniformity, even if I could do without a lot of Tom Richmond’s affected, jittery cinematography, which comes across as a repetitive exercise in theatrical goosing. Gorak gets a lot of the small details of his conceit right, from the jumbled radio news reports (anchors and reporters stumbling over words, making misstatements and then correcting themselves) to the panicked uncertainty of Brad’s decision-making. Part of the problem, though, is that though the characters are ostensibly tethered to one another, one is also free to roam about, meaning that when Lexi does just that, and returns with outlandish tales of the scope of the situation, it pulls viewers out of this particular story.

Cochrane and McCormack are also an odd-duck pair, which is perhaps part of the point, given that he’s supposed to be a struggling musician who feels a bit emasculated by his professional wife going off to earn the proverbial bacon. Still, as constructed by Gorak, we don’t get a particularly good feel for the background of their relationship, and when a tearful exchange with some legitimate depth of feeling occurs late in the film, with one character asking the other whose version of their first meeting and personal love story will live on as officially established fact, it only serves to underline the fact that we don’t know a lot about these folks, or feel that passionately for them. A third-act, Twilight Zone-type reversal can’t erase the fact that Right at Your Door, its achievement of limited means notwithstanding, works its way into a corner and then spends a lot of time dancing madly in place, all at one pace. (Roadside Attractions, R, 93 minutes)

Lesbian Sex & Sexuality

Ephemera

Refreshingly uncensored and uninhibited, Lesbian Sex & Sexuality is one show
no woman should miss. A docu-series that first aired on the cable channel here!
in early 2007, this groundbreaking six-episode series covers areas of lesbian
sex that have heretofore been unexplored. “This film is made for women, by
women,” says award-winning filmmaker Katherine Linton (AIDS: A Pop Culture History). “It’s a new style and a new
approach.”

In a nation where homosexuality is still considered a
controversial topic, lesbian sex, lust and sexual representation are even more
marginalized. This title takes viewers on a provocative journey that reveals
everything from the porn industry to exotic dancing and erotica. By visiting
writers, academics and “sexperts,” and going inside sex shops, erotic dance
clubs and lesbian-owned pornography companies, Linton’s film goes beyond mass
appeal to find out what really turns on out-and-proud lesbians, as well as
perhaps any woman who has ever had a girl-on-girl fantasy. For more
information, view the trailer by clicking here. To purchase the title via Amazon, click here.

Screenwriter Talks Fame Remake

Ephemera, Interviews


Allison Burnett (who’s a dude, for the record) is busy, but maybe not quite as busy as it may seem. He’s the co-writer of the just-released Resurrecting the Champ, but that was a script of his from a decade back, polished by Michael Bortman and readied for release by director Rod Lurie. He’s got the nudity-laden Feast of Love forthcoming in late September, but is at the moment busy at work on the remake of Fame, with Andy Fickman (Reefer Madness) attached to direct.

According to Burnett, the movie, which would shoot early next year for an early fall release, won’t be saccharine sweet like the High School Musical films. “When you’re that age, your problems are the most important things — you can’t imagine anything more dire,” he says. “So we’re sticking to that; it’s not going to be Bring It On versus American Idol, it’s serious.” For the full interview tidbit, from New York Magazine’s Vulture site, click here. Oh, and another heads up: it’ll be serious… but PG-13, and not rated R.

The Dark Backward

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

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)

The Nanny Diaries

Film Reviews

The quote-unquote mainstream fictional feature debut of directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini — who made the superlative documentary Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s, as well as the docu-fictional curio American Splendor, the story of disgruntled comics writer Harvey Pekar — The Nanny Diaries is a pleasant enough movie of attractive half-measures.

Scarlett Johansson‘s New Jersey-born heroine negotiating the perils of the urban jungle of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It tells the story of the emotional and often humorous journey of Annie Braddock (Johansson), a young woman fresh out of college and struggling to find her place in the world. Through a serendipitous meeting one afternoon, Annie fields an offer to become a live-in babysitter for a wealthy family. Equating nannying with “ducking out of life for a year,” Annie shruggingly accepts the position, only to be introduced into a surreal world of stressed-out extremes.

Berman and Pulcini’s imaginative, flight-of-fancy touches are given nice visual showcase in a few bits, including a sequence of satirical museum dioramas that opens the movie and a recurrent leitmotif involving red umbrellas, the most obvious of a handful of allusions to Mary Poppins. But sentiment generally gets the better of shrewd satire here. And what the movie sorely lacks is much push-back or astute, in-the-moment analysis and frustrated reaction from Annie herself. We’re told (repeatedly, by Annie’s mother) how brilliant she is, but she’s also a bit rudderless. That’s legitimate, of course — youthful ambivalence is the new naïve stridency — but the movie confines Annie’s learned lessons largely to omniscient, after-the-fact narration, and this dents our identification with her. Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, Mary Poppins taught us. The Nanny Diaries has that, certainly. Just a bit more salt would have nicely balanced out this recipe, however. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

More Thoughts on Resurrecting the Champ

Film Reviews, Musings


A lot of times, studios will go out of their way to “oversell” a movie. By this I mean not just showcasing the funniest or brawniest bits in an effort to entice filmgoers into theaters, but featuring a certain out-of-left-field hook or mid-film twist (say, like Ransom’s televised upping of the ante by Mel Gibson) as a centerpiece of the movie’s promotional campaign.

Director Rod Lurie’s Resurrecting the Champ, on the other hand, is being sold in relatively straightforward fashion, and pleasantly so. Part of that might have to do with the fact that the movie is being distributed by Yari Film Group, a relatively upstart company that has experienced critical and to-scale commercial success with somewhat unlikely fare like the Oscar-winning Crash and Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, starring Edward Norton and Jessica Biel. The manner in which the subversion of expectation aids in and deepens one’s appreciation for Resurrecting the Champ is directly related to its television and print advertising, which reduces the story to the simple theme of uplift.

That’s legitimate enough. It’s not that the movie is being sold as something it’s not. It is a story about a forgotten old boxer living on the streets, and a struggling young journalist who tries to make his name by telling this man’s remarkable story. But it’s also a throwback film of sorts that, like the self-established parameters of life that everyday living reliably destroys, is about several things at once, and the manner in which our judgments and actions both reflect and belie us.

What Resurrecting the Champ most has going for it is a certain lived-in quality that strikes you as an antidote of sorts to all the saccharine and-or carefully prescribed plot tracks of many more conventional dramas. Like the recent Bourne films, actually, the drama in the movie flows from decisions made by its lead character(s), but also how others interpret and react to those choices. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

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)

Molly Shannon’s Rough Year

Interviews


Molly Shannon is of course best known for a variety of effusive, outrageous characters strewn across six seasons of Saturday Night Live, most notably socially awkward, physically clumsy, armpit-sniffing Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher, whom she debuted on the show and later took to the big screen with 1999’s Superstar. In real life, though, the surprise is just how adult and normal Shannon seems.

You wouldn’t mistake her for serene, per se; the quick speech still flows, leaving you reflecting about how familiar it sounds, without being overly characteristic. Still, it’s less to do with nerves — a staple of some of Shannon’s best characters — and more seemingly a case of simply getting ahead of a thought, and excited about sharing it.

Scary Movie 4, Talladega Nights) and a few television projects (Mike White’s Cracking Up, a guest-starring role on Scrubs) over the last several years.

Shannon was hoping that the one-two April 2007 punch of Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace and Year of the Dog (above), arriving next week on DVD, would herald a successful return to lead roles. Alas, neither film did much at the box office and, in fact, most people are probably not even aware the former was even released. Then there was the matter of the NBC TV pilot The Mastersons of Manhattan. Though well regarded, it was not picked up as a fall series.

Given the current mega-success of Will Ferrell, one can forget that the transition from Saturday Night Live to films can be a notoriously fickle one. For every Adam Sandler, there are three or four Jim Breuers. For female not-ready-for-prime-time-players, that changeover can present an even greater degree of difficulty.

Even at age 42, though, there’s still a feeling that Shannon has time to find her feature film stride. She recently wrapped a fall Lifetime TV movie, More of Me. A female-driven echo of Michael Keaton’s Multiplicity, it features Shannon as a stressed out housewife who morphs into three different versions of herself to handle the load. And no matter how that does in the ratings, Shannon will be just fine. “I don’t mind struggling because sometimes I feel like it can help you create something that you might not have thought of,” she says. “Usually, something comes out of that struggle. So that’s kind of the way I look at it. I try not to blame anyone.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.

Sean Connery Is the Man Now

Amusements, Birthdays
It’s a happy birthday to Sean Connery, who turns 77 today, and in my mind celebrates by wandering around and declaring himself the man now, dogg.

Hey, do you know that Connery wears his socks inside out? He once explained it to me thusly: “Well, there are those threads on the inside that always bother your feet and get tangled on your toes. So this is more comfortable. Really, who cares what it looks like.” Seriously, true story…

Surrender Dorothy

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

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)

On Hatchet’s Trailer, Web Campaign

Musings, Trailer Watch

Its trailer is only so-so — scream-stab shenanigans under a creepy narration from a little girl that lays out the movie’s back story — but the low-budget horror flick Hatchet, releasing September 7, has a pretty solid web site and an ingenious, parallel interactive recruitment site (“Join the Hatchet army!”), all of which could help it siphon off some business from horror aficionados who may or may not be disappointed by Rob Zombie’s reboot of the Halloween franchise. The film stars Joel David Moore (Dodgeball), Tamara Feldman, Deon Richmond, Joleigh Fioreavanti, Joshua Leonard and Kane Hodder, the latter of whom “stakes his reputation” on the fact that this is the best movie he’s been involved with. So… you know, there you have it — the reputation of Kane Hodder is on the table, suckers. Raise or fold?