What happens when you throw together in a Winnebago a ragtag film crew, a born-again orthodox Jewish Elvis impersonator and an eccentric rabbi? Well, you get something called Schmelvis, a tangled road-trip documentary that purports to offer up insightful commentary on pop culture, personal identity and societal tolerance via an investigation into the King’s improbable Jewish lineage.
I was silently hoping for, if not necessarily expecting, some kitschy, Bubba Ho-Tep-style hijinks herein, but instead there is nothing but indulgent, self-aggrandizing navel-gazing, by the truckload. Written and directed by Max Wallace and co-directed by Lewis Cohen, Schmelvis uses as its putative launching point a 1998 Wall Street Journal article that identifies the late Elvis Aron Presley’s maternal great-great-grandmother as Jewish — a fact that would therefore make him Jewish too. After hiring a no-nonsense New York private eye, Steve Rambam, to suss out a few tantalizing morsels of air-quote fact, the creative team behind the film then balks at his asking price for a “full field investigation” (that would be $25,000), instead deciding to hit the road and get to the bottom of matters themselves.
Even with a running time of only 76 minutes, Schmelvis wears out its welcome rather quickly. It does this chiefly by featuring its set-up to an untoward degree; in addition to the bit with Rambam, we see producer Evan Beloff meet with and hire Wallace, hit up family as investors and talk about how they don’t know where to start in their quest. We get it, fellas — you’re occupational water-treaders who think it would be cool to be “filmmakers.” The fact that Schmelvis, which premiered at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival in 2002, has allegedly been shown at over 75 festivals around the world speaks chiefly to the proliferation of local and regional niche cinematic showcases rather than any universally embraceable qualities on the part of the movie itself. This is a yawner, through and through.
Housed in a regular Amray case, and presented in widescreen with a 5.1 surround sound audio track, Schmelvis comes with a feature-length audio commentary track from producer Beloff — the creative father of the film — and Rabbi Rueben Poupko. In true delusional fashion, the pair point up frequent comparisons to Seinfeld and “the Larry David show,” while also waxing philosophical about how they set out to find prejudice and preconceptions in middle America, only to discover that they were the most prejudicial. The only other supplemental extra consists of two scrollable pages of excerpts from the Schmelvis book. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D- (Movie) C (Disc)
It’s rather baffling to me, 20th Century Fox’s decision to move 27 Dresses, Katherine Heigl’s Knocked Up follow-up, off of its original release date of January 11, and directly into competition this weekend with Overture Films’ Mad Money, a movie starring Queen Latifah, Diane Keaton and Katie Holmes, and arguably pitched at somewhat the same demographic — 18-to-34-year-old women and their white-collar set mothers and older sisters. Probably because I can’t really get into the thrill of parsing advance tracking data, I still can’t decide whether or not that’s a sign of confidence or futile, hands-thrown-to-the-heavens sacrifice.
An exercise in guerrilla-style genre
filmmaking that reframes a classic monster movie conceit as a post-September 11
allegory of big city trepidation, new Internet sensation Cloverfield emerges from the cocoon of its pre-release hype as thrilling
piece of terror tailor-made for our times. Skillfully evoking more dread than
lasting cathartic release, the sensibly-budgeted film should make its mark as
the first hit of 2008, connecting strongly with the 18-34-year-old demographic
and other genre fans looking for comfortably familiar stories with exciting new
trappings.
Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which took advantage of nascent Internet
marketing to whip audience interest into a fervor, Cloverfield is an exercise in “found footage” subjectivity, unfolding
completely in handheld style, with often canted or shaky camerawork. Crucial to
whether Cloverfield commercially connects
anything at all like that film, which rang up $140 million domestically and
another $110 million internationally, is the question of whether mainstream audiences
unfamiliar with its pre-release branding buy tickets.
At the very least Cloverfield should easily outpace Snakes on a Plane — the last big pre-release, viral marketing sensation,
which ended up pulling in a disappointing $60 million worldwide. But while PG-13
films like 2005’s White Noise ($90
million worldwide), Boogeyman ($67
million internationally) and Hide and
Seek ($122 million worldwide) have proven there’s a January market for
supernatural-tinged thrillers, courting the portion of that core audience that
may be resistant to outright monster flicks will determine its final box office
tally. To its advantage, Cloverfield
arrives with a much bigger buzz, thanks to the participation of producer and Lost hit-maker J.J. Abrams, as well as
its unique style and framing device. These elements, plus its superb execution,
give the movie top-shelf ancillary value that will ensure both profitability and
potential spin-offs for other platforms and outlets.
Like The
Blair Witch Project, the film chronicles the plight of a group of young
people fighting for their lives trapped in an unforgiving outdoors, in this
case an urban jungle under siege by a gargantuan rampaging monster, and
hundreds of hostile smaller, scurrying creatures which pose every bit as much
of a threat.The film opens chillingly, with a silent
title card that stamps the subsequent video camera footage as a found audiovisual
document, from the U.S. military. The first portion of the tape reveals the tender morning
after a hook-up between long-time friends Rob (Michael David-Stahl) and Beth
(Odette Yustman). The videotape, and thus the movie, then leaps forward a
month, to the evening of a huge going-away party for Rob, who’s preparing to
move to Japan as part of a big promotion.
Tasked by his girlfriend Lily (Jessica
Lucas) with recording the event, Rob’s brother, Jason (Mike Vogel), passes off
the duty to friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who fruitlessly tries to engage Marlena
(Lizzy Caplan) in flirtatious small talk. The party takes a turn for the
awkward when Beth shows up with another guy. Rob’s suppressed feelings of affection
come bubbling to the surface, words are spoken in anger, and Beth leaves.
Suddenly, a massive jolt shakes the remaining
revelers, and the power goes out. As the group heads outside to see what
exactly has happened, fireballs explode on the horizon, and utter havoc is unleashed.
After one route of evacuation is sealed, Rob receives a distraught cell phone
message from Beth, and becomes determined to make his way to her apartment to
try to find her. Friends in tow, the group sets out, but when the destruction
and fighting on the streets between the creature and the National Guard gets
too intense, they seek shelter underground, and try to traverse subterranean subway
tracks.
Nicely balancing confusion and
interpersonal anxiety with these grander, under-siege segments, Drew Goddard’s
screenplay is a thing a pared down grace and lean, muscular virtuosity. It
starts by sketching out the underpinnings of character in fine fashion. After
18 brisk, well-plotted minutes of typically angsty young adult introduction, the
movie yields to mayhem — basically an hour-long dash through urban hell.
As with other apocalyptic and sci-fi
movies, Cloverfield squeezes some
bedazzlement out of the destruction of familiar, iconic buildings and
monuments. Here it’s the BrooklynBridge, in a grim obliteration that serves as the film’s first mass-scale,
panicky set piece. There’s also the beheaded Statue of Liberty, which arrives
early in the movie, and additionally serves as the perfect visual metaphor for America’s
still-lingering apprehension over the state of world events and its own
security. Yet director Matt Reeves (a co-creator of
TV’s Felicity, whose other feature
credit is 1996’s The Pallbearer) also
proves himself effective at simplistic evocative imagery, as with a coachman-less
horse-drawn carriage wandering through Central
Park.
Key to substantial gratification with Cloverfield are two bits of necessary surrender:
succumbing to its overall framing device, and accepting the notion that such
trauma unfolds against a PG-13 backdrop, which is only really a matter of
language, coming after movies like Superbad
and the Hostel films have made coarse exclamatory talk integral to their stamp of “realism” within their respective
genres. The action sequences here — including a bravura night-vision attack in the
subway tunnel — are so tensely effective as to eradicate any legitimate
quibbles with the rating for the rest of movie, a problem that arguably plagued Live Free or Die Hard last summer, at least in advance of its release.
Cineastes holding on steadfastly to the notion
that less is more may balk at the degree to which the film reveals its monster.
While it’s true that this does, if not undercut, at least muddy the water with
respect to the movie’s metaphorical associations, it’s interestingly handled
within the framework of the film, and seems a commercial tip of the cap as much
as anything. It’s undeniable that Cloverfield
is, at its core, a metaphor for the terror and uncertainty of the real world,
from its aforementioned iconic poster image and willfully vague tagline (“Some
thing has found us”), which makes no mention of a CGI monster on which millions
of dollars was spent, to specific dialogue of choking despondency (“I don’t
know why this is happening”). It’s incidentally a monster thriller. Like much
good cinema, Cloverfield works on multiple levels. For the full, slightly longer original review, from Screen International, click here.
At the recent press conference for the forthcoming Rambo, multi-hyphenate Sylvester Stallone was asked if he ever imagined having shot the original ending of the
book First Blood, which would have robbed him of one of his career franchise cornerstones. Says Stallone: “Yeah, I think about it all the time. I had that
debate with Quentin Tarantino, who thought I made a mistake. I said, ‘You
know, on an artistic level, you’re probably right.’ But at the time, I had
spent a lot of time doing research with veterans and it seemed like this
terrible, nihilistic ending that just reveled in complete despair. At that
time, we had almost a quarter of a million Vietnam
suicides. So I thought, do I want to just end it on that note? Or make him more
of a victim who has been created to do a job, does the job, comes home, and gets
[told], ‘You know what? You no longer fit in.’ It’s like you train a pit
bull, take this dog, turn him into a killer — now what do you do? You’ve got to put
him down. What happens if that pit bull gets loose? And you realize it’s not as
bad as you think. You can somehow redeem him. I thought that was more of an
interesting story. Again, as Kirk Douglas says, ‘Not artistic, but
commercial.'” For another blurb on Stallone and Rambo, which opens nationwide on January 25, click here.
