Segel (above right) plays Peter Bretter, a guy who gets dumped by his TV star girlfriend, then finds his Hawaiian vacation of intended psychological escape rudely interrupted when it turns out he’s at the same resort as that of Bell’s Sarah and her new beau, bad boy singer Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). The trailer slyly evokes Caddyshack in nicely gentle fashion (courtesy of Kenny Loggins’ “I’m All Right”) and capably works in its bit players (Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader), all while not overselling the inevitable rebound relationship with Mila Kunis.
I appreciated, too, the fact that Brand’s work wasn’t (presented as, at least) flaming, over-the-top caricature; Jesus, to think what a younger Ben Stiller would have done with the role. And, downmarket demo-baiting appeal aside, the “pearl necklace” bit at the trailer’s conclusion is nicely underplayed — the bow on top being Segel’s guilty-as-charged shrug.
Hollywood, like
the Ivy League, is rooted in legacies, so it’s not surprising that certain
opportunities would present themselves to Colin Hanks, the now 30-year-old son
of Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks.At the same age, the older Hanks had under his belt a solid
commercial showing (to the tune of $70 million) with 1984’s Splash, a decent follow-up with that
summer’s Bachelor Party, and was
treading water in comedies like The Man
with One Red Shoe, Volunteers and The Money Pit. His niche, if
certainly not completely his future success, seemed somewhat determined.
For Colin Hanks, things are a bit different. But with a
mushrooming body of work (his latest film, The
Great Buck Howard, which includes his father playing his father, recently
unspooled at Sundance), a future once cloudy is coming into a bit sharper
focus. Heading into 2008, the younger Hanks has a number of high-profile
commercial gigs, along with some idiosyncratic-sounding indie fare.
First up is this week’s Internet thriller Untraceable. Hanks already has some
experience with unsettling depictions of voyeurism, in 2006’s
consigned-to-video Alone with Her,
opposite Ana Claudia Talancón and Jordana Spiro. In Untraceable, however, he’s on the other side of the law, playing a
young FBI agent opposite Diane Lane
as they attempt to take down a killer who’s broadcasting live, streaming video
of his ghastly crimes and using a complicit audiences’ viewership as a weapon.
At a Portland-set field office of the FBI, a special
subdivision of the bureau investigates cyber-crime, mostly tracking identity
predators and other white-collar-type crimes. Soon they get a grisly tip,
though. A tech-savvy predator is displaying graphic murders on his own website,
with the fate of each of his tormented captives left in the hands of the
public: the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. It starts with
a kitten stuck to a glue-trap — which helps special agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane)
and her partner, Griffin Dowd (Hanks), determine that the events are of a local
origin — but quickly the ante is upped with a series of kidnappings and more
rapidly unfolding deaths. With the assistance of a local homicide detective,
Eric Box (Billy Burke), single mother Marsh tries to unravel the mystery, even
as she herself becomes the target of the killer.
Like some bastard offspring of Fear Dotcom, The Net and the Saw films, Untraceable suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen; it wants to
be topical, or of-the-moment, but also cling to conventions for the sake of
narrative ease. To assuage worries about any lingering, lasting unpleasantness,
the movie’s scripters (it’s a cobbled together affair, written by Allison Burnett, Robert Fyvolent and Mark R. Brinker, with the latter two getting story
credit) ascribe a very specific motivation to the killer — there’s a reason for
his acts, as well as the selection of many of his victims.
This sort of directly air-quote competitive antagonism —
nipped from more assertively rooted serial killer flicks like Seven, Zodiac and the second Saw
film — is of course hogwash, utterly incongruous. It just doesn’t play. General implausibilities
aside, though, it’s matched by both a substandard execution that doesn’t measure
up to the best of the rest of director Gregory Hoblit’s work (Fallen, Primal Fear, Fracture),
as well as a third act steeplechase that includes a baffling direct
confrontation on a rainy bridge; a long, explanatory passage of revelation
about what we’ve seen, and the offscreen events that brought us there; and a
“ripcord ending” that wraps things up in faux-sober and thought-provoking
style.
Untraceable could
have been a much more interesting film — one to live up to its poster — if it had simply stayed closer to its wonkish
roots, Internet-flavored thriller. (Instead we get the one obligatory
e-takedown, showing how cyber-patrolling busts porn-loving gun-runners and
their deadbeat minor sons.) The melding of this new-fangled milieu with a more
tawdry narrative, however, just doesn’t work.
Whether it nominally succeeds or fails at the box office,
however, not much of Untraceable’s
failings should be able to be traced back to Hanks. His is a solid supporting
part unrelated to the movie’s shortcomings, and he does capable work that
doesn’t hurt himself — an analysis that might befit a lot of his steady upwards
trajectory. After getting his start on the small screen, playing Alex
Whitman on Roswell for parts of three
seasons, Hanks made his big screen leading man debut in Orange County, a second-generation comedy of college anxiety costarring
Schuyler Fisk (daughter of Jack Fisk and Sissy Spacek), and directed by Jake
Kasdan. Hanks then signed on for a tour of duty in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, whose long production in New
Zealand explains a little gap in his
filmography.
Other, forthcoming projects, however, shine a light on lessons
Hanks may have learned from his father, from choice costars to branching out
into life behind the camera. Out of Sundance comes word that Hanks will be
directing a documentary about the decline of the music industry over the past
decade and a half. Also, in writer-director George Gallo’s My Mom’s New Boyfriend, the younger Hanks will follow further in
his father’s footsteps, playing a federal agent tasked with spying on his
mother and her new beau, suspects in an art heist ring. The twist? Meg Ryan, a
frequent costar of his father, will play not his love interest, but said mother. Wow. Time flies… (Sony/Screen Gems, R, 100 minutes)For the full, slightly tweaked review, from FilmStew, click here.
The so-called first 10 minutes of All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, starring Amber Heard (below), is now online, courtesy of Yahoo’s UK site (it’s actually more like eight-and-a-half minutes, for the record), and the good advance buzz on the movie looks more and more justified. There’s a long, complicated and typically Weinstein-ian history to this film and its several delays, but things are now pointed in the right direction, insofar as The Weinstein Company has divested themselves of domestic releasing responsibilities — probably a good thing for all parties involved, given the shoddy treatment it would have received in the wake of “creative differences” squabbles, allegedly over gore, other trims and running time.
Given what’s on display, I think the Weinsteins may have been freaked out by how nice-looking a product they had on their hands. The film’s trailer proper is a thing of slow-building and highly evocative stalking terror — several wide shots conjure up recollections of genre touchstones like I Spit on Your Grave and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both the original and Marcus Nispel’s gorgeously shot re-imagining. And beyond the nicely restrained, impressionistic introductions, the film’s opening party scene — in which a bullied kid seemingly stuck in “friendship alley” uses his wits to coerce a jockish romantic rival for Mandy’s affections into taking a stupid risk — is its own nicely orchestrated chamber piece about teen egos and competitiveness. Most striking, though, is the self-conscious underwear posing by the bullied best friend, prior to a poolside sequence.
Not to gloss over debut screenwriter Jacob Forman’s contributions, but one can tell that music video director Jonathan Levine — who just had his second feature effort, The Wackness, premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — worked this thing out in his head. If the
rest of the movie is this well ordered and smart, no matter the familiarity of the plot trappings, I’ll be mightily impressed. Regardless, the trailer and this advance look has definitely aroused my interest. Mandy Lane opens next month in the United Kingdom, and is set for a March Stateside bow, from upstart Senator Entertainment.
For the further subset of cave dwellers who are looking to really maximize their theatrical movie-going dollars, a savvy tipster clued me in to the fact that AMC Theatres is running a special promotionby which one can see all five films nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award — that’s Michael Clayton, Juno, No Country for Old Men, Atonement and There Will Be Blood, for the record — for a cool $30. They’ll even throw in a free large popcorn, presumably because you’ll also want to eat something else, and be spending money on that. The rub? They’re doing it one day only — Saturday, February 23, the day before the (planned) Oscar ceremonies. The other rub? I have some quibbles with that running order. To check for a theater in your area, click here.
If, as the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s art, then surely the same thing is true of sexual proclivities, where the Internet has dragged out into the 21st century light of day sub-fetishes previously only whispered about, if discussed at all. Director Michael Ney’s Liberty in Restraint is a feature-length documentary that examines just this titillating intersection of the deviant and so-called normal sexual worlds. It’s not for all tastes, certainly, but if a more exhaustive and fair cataloguing of its subject matter exists, I’m certainly not aware of it.
As an aspiring photographer, the clandestine worlds of bondage, discipline, dominance-submission, sadomasochism and fetish fashion held a powerful attraction for Noel Graydon. For five years, he trained and worked as a BDSM “master” in the alt-sex trade, establishing friendships which enabled him to genuinely document this world as an insider looking out. Filmmaker Ney uses Graydon as a guide, peeking behind the scenes of his fetish portraiture to shine a spotlight on a curious roster of rope artists, lapsed Catholics, so-called “pain sluts,” adult babies and blood-play enthusiasts who approach absolution and sexuality like an advanced-level driving course.
Sitting for interviews are a litany of prima facie sources, from Graydon’s photographic mentor, John Elliott, to Sydney Hellfire Club’s Jackie McMillan, BDSM performance artist Zoo and a dominatrix named Mistress Synna. The title Liberty in Restraint works two ways, as ironic commentary on the very nature of fringe-dwelling excess, but also how these acts of extreme constraint give palpable release to folks who are into them. The electro-torture and blood-play stuff is a bit extreme for me — just flat out something I don’t want to see or experience, like chewing on aluminum foil — but it is interesting to hear from its purveyors and enthusiasts, if not always see it in practice. Much like David Schisgall’s suburban swinger documentary The Lifestyle, this movie gives voice to the psychology behind its practitioners, and not all of them are quite as outwardly damaged as you might expect.
Housed in a regular Amaray case and presented in 16×9 widescreen with 5.1 Dolby surround audio on a region-free disc, Liberty in Restraint comes with a small but potent slate of supplemental extras. Director Ney, film guide Puck, rope artist Mistress Felina and Barton Staggs sit for a rowdy audio commentary track, while five extra interviews and a half dozen deleted scenes point up the fact that there was plenty of material with which to work. Perhaps most interestingly, there’s also a brief featurette on the making of the DVD’s cover image — a first for any home video release that I can recall. For more information, visit the movie’s eponymous web site. B (Movie) B (Disc)
