Daily Archives: July 10, 2008

Homemade Hillbilly Jam

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

One of the great things about music is the manner in which it can transcend race, socioeconomic class and conflicting ideologies to
bring together disparate groups of people — whether it’s Public Enemy and NWA giving bristling new face to African-American anger, or John Mayer teaching people of all colors and creeds the danger behind letting their kids grow up to be mock-sensitive douchebags. Music is interwoven into the fabric and fiber of America’s being, from jazz and rock ‘n’ roll straight on through to hip-hop. It’s in that vein that one can most appreciate Homemade Hillbilly Jam. A beautifully shot, surprisingly entertaining 80-minute musical romp, director Rick Minnich’s film celebrates the tradition of Missouri’s Ozark
countryside with a handful of rascally, modern-day hillbillies.

In the 1800s, a scrappy group of Scotch-Irish immigrants settled in the Ozark Mountains of Southwestern Missouri. Stereotyped as poor, lawless degenerates, these isolated hill folk over time became the butt of countless jokes. The documentary Homemade Hillbilly Jam captures the rich, unique history of this particular brand of folk music by following three families of modern-day hillbillies back to the roots of their music-making heritage. Leading the pack is singer/songwriter Mark Bilyeu from the band Big Smith, who has for years delighted audiences around the world with his foot-stompin’ repertoire of songs — twisted but heartfelt tales of moonshine and adultery, as well as faith and life — many passed down through the generations.

Sumptuously shot on Super 16 film and embellished by old photos and archival footage, Homemade Hillbilly Jam is both a celebration of modern-day hill folk and a vivid reminder of their hellraising, bootlegging ancestors. It’s a movie about kinship and tradition, and the power and mooring we all draw from those elements. Director Minnich — who’s written and directed several narrative shorts in addition to three long-form documentaries, including the prize-winning Heaven on Earth, about the Missouri Bible Belt town of Branson — doesn’t have much an internal drive for grander, inside-out regional explication, and the movie sometimes suffers for that. You feel his affection for the subjects, but a lot of obvious questions go unasked. Instead, the music itself — from the aforementioned Bilyeu and his band Big Smith, as well as The Pine Ridge Singers and The Baldknobbers — is what carries the day here, so if you’re not a big music fan in general, and predisposed to burrow in and try to figure out how music moves folks differently, this won’t be the film to introduce and convert you in wide-eyed fashion to the hillbilly style.

Housed in an attractive, slimline, fold-out cardboard case, and presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo audio track, Homemade Hillbilly Jam comes with the following DVD bonus features: six minutes of outtakes, three extra music performances, a photo gallery, text biographies of the behind-scenes talent and previews for other First Run releases. There’s also a short film, On the Road, that includes regional audience reaction to some of the first screenings of the movie. For more information, click here, or visit Minnich’s eponymous web site. To purchase the disc via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Harold

Film Reviews

Stop me if you’ve heard the one about a 14-year-old (Spencer Breslin), suffering from early-onset male-pattern baldness and bunions, who moves to a new town with his single mom (Ally Sheedy) and older sister; befriends a strange janitor, Cromer (Cuba Gooding, Jr.); faces down a bullying nemesis and needlessly cruel gym teacher; gets arrested for buying high school kids beer; and enters a go-kart race for revenge, glory and the heart of a girl. Yes, teen movie boilerplate gets skewed plenty good in Harold, co-written and directed by T. Sean Shannon, a Saturday Night Live veteran who manages to even work in a fantasy sequence highlighting his longstanding predilection for bears.

It’s intriguing for a movie built around hair that one of its wig works so well (Breslin’s chrome dome is sleek and realistic) and one doesn’t (Gooding’s asymmetrical ‘fro renders him a most curious Chia Pet). No mind, though. An assortment of cameos (Chris Parnell, Rachel Dratch, Dave Attell, Fred Willard and Colin Quinn — the latter the funniest) ups the intrigue factor here, but it’s Breslin who really carries the day, showcasing crackerjack comic timing throughout. There isn’t a lot of explanation as to why Harold is a crotchety fan of Murder, She Wrote if, in fact, the small town in which he originally lives is so accepting of his condition, other than it makes for simple visual amusement — a kid reading a newspaper in a Barcalounger, and hassling other, younger kids about their baseballs in his yard, messing up his vegetables. There’s also the lingering question of audience — for most of its running time, Harold isn’t quite barbed enough to truly be a film about adolescence yet aimed mainly at adults, though several late plot twists and double entendres up the ante. Sometimes, though, strange is just good, and the players here are good enough to sell the premise and milk some easygoing laughs, even if Harold is just an elongated comedy sketch. For more information on the movie, click here. (City Lights Pictures, PG-13, 93 minutes)

Hellboy II’s Ensemble: A Handy Primer

Amusements, Interviews

It’s been said that no matter how crowded it gets, there’s always more room in hell. That may or may not be true, but the Hellboy movies sure have proven to be inclusive ensembles. Though sprung from the imagination of Mike Mignola‘s mid-1990s graphic novel series — about a giant red demon spawn rescued from occult Nazi forces during World War II, and raised as part of a clandestine, paranormal crime-fighting organization — the movies are of course largely the product of the expansive imagination of Guillermo del Toro, who has written and directed both feature films. Though he takes Hellboy, his pals and some other characters straight from Mignola’s work, others are tweaked mightily, and still more created from scratch. The result, especially in this week’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army, is a dizzily detailed world, crammed with creatures both gorgeous and grotesque. For a fun, handy primer on some of the movie’s major supporting players, from Reelz Channel, click here.

Garden Party

Film Reviews

Another sprawling ensemble tale about the hearty, equal portions of
hard knocks and moral nondiscrimination that Los Angeles dishes out, Garden Party centers on a bunch of dreamers and schemers looking for
their next fix — which is sometimes emotional, and sometimes illicit.
Among others, there’s 15-year-old runaway April (Willa Holland), who
poses nude for the Internet; sexy, pot-dealing realtor Sally (Vinessa Shaw, below right), and her dense, live-in assistant, Nathan (Alexander Cendese);
Todd (Richard Gunn, below left), a well-off, porn-addicted painter; and Sammy (Erik
Smith), a just-off-the-bus aspiring rocker who isn’t above trading his
way up to get his talents recognized. Naturally, their stories all
intertwine in kinky, twisted fashion.

Writer-director
Jason Freeland (who gave good crime in his last screen credit, a
little-seen, criminally under-regarded 1998 adaptation of James
Ellroy’s Brown’s Requiem) here seems to be reaching for early Paul Thomas Anderson by way of Tom DiCillo. Garden Party
never really strikes you as real, per se, and neither is it some
fantastically canted satire. The metaphorical perspicacity of the title
is a real stretch, to say the least, and there are plenty of moments
where one is laughing (albeit silently) for reasons probably
unintended. And yet, oddly, it doesn’t totally matter. Garden Party
may have the diverse colors and tonalities of a bank of wildflowers by
the side of the road (there’s an impromptu gay club dance-off here, a
ball-gagged home invasion there), but there are discrete pleasures to
be found, especially in Shaw’s wry, devilishly alluring performance.
She steals the film, in bewitching fashion — though one gets the feeling
she’d leave you saddled with a mortgage you couldn’t begin to afford. For more information on the film, click here. (Roadside Attractions, R, 89 minutes)