Monthly Archives: September 2008

The Garment Jungle

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Settling down with an old movie, one wouldn’t necessarily expect the over/under on Robert Loggia being called “a spic bum” to be set at two occurrences, but that’s totally true of 1957’s The Garment Jungle, a quite serviceable, black-and-white pro-union urban thriller from director Vincent Sherman.

Set on the mean streets of New York City’s garment district (“a teeming world of conflict, brutal competition and terror,” as the opening voiceover hard-sells us), the film centers around returning war veteran Alan Mitchell (Kerwin Matthews, a sort of cross between Fred MacMurray and Paul Rudd), an only son who discovers that the fabric and dress business owned by his father Walter (Lee J. Cobb) is being controlled by the mob. The movie opens with Walter, vehemently anti-union, having a heated argument with his pro-union designer and business partner, who then plunges 27 floors to his death in an elevator “accident.”

Walter isn’t explicitly aware of his partner’s erasure — he in fact is legitimately heartbroken — but he is in a way complicit in his death, having for years used Mafioso muscle, no questions asked, to crack heads and maintain the status quo. Times are changing, though, and Walter’s beginning to feel the squeeze of that change. Enter Alan, who wants to finally learn the ropes of his father’s built-from-scratch business. While he at first finds some of the charges hard to believe, Alan is at least willing to listen to labor leaders out to unionize the whole district, including headstrong organizer Tulio Renato (Loggia), whose fiery wife Theresa (Gia Scala) constantly worries for his safety. When bodies start turning up, Alan is even more apt to believe the worst about the puppet-masters controlling his father’s company. So he sets out to cleave them from the business, eventually enlisting the assistance of dress buyer Lee Hackett (Valerie French), an air-quote friend of the widowed Walter.

Written by Harry Kleiner, based on articles by Lester Velie, The Garment Jungle is fairly on-the-nose with respect to both dialogue and structure. There aren’t many surprises within the narrative, and those that do pop up are easily foreshadowed. In essence, this is a meat-and-potatoes urban issue drama, but director Sherman helps give it some pop, as do committed, intense performances by Loggia and Cobb. Matthews, for his part, is the perfect Everyman foil — a squeaky-clean guy discovering the world is a fucked-up place. The loss of innocence and subsequent discovery of steel-backed resolve may both be telegraphed, but it’s done in an engaging enough manner so as not to be a turn-off.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Garment Jungle comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with complementary English and French Dolby digital audio tracks, and optional subtitles in each language. Apart from the theatrical trailer and static scene selections, the only supplemental bonus feature is a “Martini Minute” segment (running 90 seconds, actually) entitled “How to Play the Leading Man.” This basically is a mash-up of clips from other leading male turns in other films in the “Martini Movies” series (Sony’s packaging strategy for a handful of catalogue titles), and has very little to do directly with The Garment Jungle. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)

Shia LaBeouf Has His (Eagle) Eye on Your Wallet, Girlfriend

Box Office

Shia LaBeouf will continue to make cheddar and mack on starlets, thank you very much. That’s what this weekend’s top gross of the very pedestrian thriller Eagle Eye confirmed. Following up on the $22.2 million debut of last spring’s Disturbia (we’re discounting the record-setting bows of Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, due to the influence of exploding robots and Harrison Ford), LaBeouf again made good as box office catnip, delivering $29.2 million for the DreamWorks/Paramount release, costarring Michelle Monaghan. Counter-programmed adult romance Nights in Rodanthe, starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, finished a distant second for the three-day frame, with $13.4 million.

Rounding out the top 10 were Samuel L. Jackson’s bad-neighbor drama Lakeview Terrace, with $7 million ($25.7 million overall); Kirk Cameron’s Fireproof, with a debut haul of $6.8 million; Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ follow-up to the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, with $6.2 million ($45.6 million overall); the animated Igor, with $5.4 million ($14.2 million overall); My Best Friend’s Girl, with $3.9 million ($14.6 million overall); Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s Righteous Kill, with $3.7 million ($34.7 million overall); Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, with $3.5 million in its debut frame; and Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys, with $3.1 million ($32.8 million overall).

Sliding out of the top 10 together in their 11th and second weeks of release, respectively, were Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight and David Koepp’s Ghost Town. In limited release, meanwhile, Fox Searchlight’s Choke grossed $1.3 million on 435 screens, while the Iraq-veterans-come-home road movie The Lucky Ones pulled in just over $183,000 in 10 less theaters.

W. Gets Taken for Spin By Talking Heads

Politics, Trailer Watch

The previous trailer and TV ads for Oliver Stone’s W., opening in a few weeks from Lionsgate, were wrongheaded things, a bit too centered around Shakespearean-level Bush family grappling, and cutesy introductions of all the made-up bit players. This new trailer, blending quick-cut news footage with footage from the film, and set to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” is a gem. Ignoring the fact that the same song was notably used as part of The Truman Show‘s advertising push, this qualifies as a top-notch sales job, because it both firmly establishes the film’s authorial point-of-view and advances the narrative itself, in miniature. The moments all fit together — beautiful wife, beautiful house — right down to the “how did I get here?” shrug and the dizzy scream of madness at the end — a placeholder for national opinion about the flaming wreckage of the Bush 43 presidency. It compels multiple viewings, this trailer. Nice adjusted tagline, too: “based on a true story.” The question, of course, is whether any of this translates into an iota of increased general audience interest in actually seeing this movie. With the economy so prodigiously in the crapper, I have to think not. For more information, click here.

Lord of the Ants

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Written, directed and produced by David Dugan and narrated by Harrison Ford, Lord of the Ants profiles E.O. Wilson, an emeritus professor at Harvard still going through his “little savage” phase of boyhood exploration of the natural world. This soft-spoken Southerner is an acclaimed advocate for ants, biological diversity and the controversial extension of Darwinian ideas to human society.

A gray-haired, crinkle-smiled 78-year-old who looks a pinch like a less irascible Ralph Nader, Wilson is renowned for two seemingly unrelated roles. First, as the “ant man,” his infectious enthusiasm for his scientific specialty has encouraged many house dwellers to reach for a magnifying glass instead of ant traps when faced with these tiny invaders. (One gets the feeling that David Lynch is especially a fan, for those who recall his experiment with a small head fashioned out of cheese and turkey.) Secondly, as a lightning rod in academic circles for his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Wilson put forth the notion that evolutionary principles could explain large swatches of social behavior throughout the animal kingdom — including in humans, an idea that many detractors found uncomfortably similar to those that fueled the eugenics movement.

Yet these two elements of Wilson’s work, ants and sociobiology, are intimately connected, as this engrossing, hour-long NOVA title ably showcases, since it was Wilson’s understanding of the social nature of ant society that gave rise to his ideas of sociobiology. An engaging portrait of a ceaselessly active scientist and eloquent writer who’s accumulated two Pulitzer Prizes among his many other honors, Lord of the Ants but skims the surface of its subject, it’s fairly true, but it does leave one with some interesting questions to ponder on their own time.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case, Lord of the Ants is presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen. Apart from closed captions and video descriptions for the visually impaired, the only special feature is a small bundle of downloadable materials for educators. To order this title or any DVD or VHS release from distributor WGBH Boston Video, including A Walk to Beautiful, The Secret Law of Attraction or Cracking the Maya Code, phone (800) 949-8670 or click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)

Eagle Eye

Film Reviews

A slickly packaged yet ultimately unpersuasive political action thriller, Eagle Eye collapses under the weight of various story incongruities, in large part because its sprawling, conspiratorial plot and mode of storytelling don’t ever quite fully align.

A re-teaming of Disturbia director D.J. Caruso and star Shia LaBeouf, the movie represents a crucial test of commercial leading man viability for the young actor. Set in and around Washington D.C., the story centers on a piecemeal terrorist plot, with different “cells” being activated against their will. Disaffected copy shop employee Jerry Shaw (LaBeouf) finds his life turned upside down when his twin brother mysteriously dies. Returning from the funeral, he discovers his apartment crammed with bomb-making supplies. A strange woman calls his cell phone and orders him to flee, but Jerry is captured, and questioned by FBI Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton).

Simultaneously, single mother Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) sends her 8-year-old son off on a school field trip, only to get a call from the same woman threatening to derail his train if Rachel doesn’t obey her orders. The voice on the phone is soon revealed to be a rogue, omnipotent government defense computer system, who brings together strangers Jerry and Rachel and parcels out instructions that unwittingly lead the pair into complicity in a scheme to eliminate most of the United States’ elected government. In pursuit of the on-the-lam duo, along with Morgan, is Air Force investigator Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson).

Hatched several years ago by executive producer Steven Spielberg as a techno-phobic thriller, Eagle Eye shows the wear of much tinkering by many writers. The wildly preposterous plot hinges on governmental hyper-competence at a time when all evidence in the real world points to the contrary, and isn’t aided by brawny sequences that paint a colorful picture of the super-computer’s god-like abilities, which stand in stark contrast to the third-act messiness it spawns in trying to concoct a ruse that will eventually frame Jerry and Rachel.

Furthermore, there’s a baffling, poorly conceived scene mid-film — nakedly designed to pull the audience along, and distract from narrative potholes — in which the computer summons Jerry and Rachel to a consumer electronics store and reveals a portion of their mission. This would be akin to the Man Behind the Curtain outing himself halfway through The Wizard of Oz, just because.

Former television director Caruso has proven himself a stylish shooter of genre fare, and Eagle Eye is his biggest outing to date. From a technical point-of-view, the film is fairly well put together, though a first act car chase sequence is choppily edited, and lacks spatial clarity. Unfortunately, the method of conveyance doesn’t match the degree to which the story is steeped in paranoia and invasion of privacy. A grittier treatment or more futuristic setting would have been more in keeping with the story’s themes. Or a compelling case could be made for a tone of polished, heightened absurdity similar to this summer’s international hit Wanted. By spurning either of these more stylized visual approaches, Eagle Eye feels trapped between two worlds. (Paramount, PG-13, 117 minutes)

Ballast Trailer Flashes Filmmaker Artistry

Trailer Watch

It’s a nice, delicate thing, the trailer for Lance Hammer’s stirring directorial debut, the Sundance-minted Ballast, but it still doesn’t fully convey the top-shelf artistry with which this elegiac tale is told. So many films from freshmen filmmakers evince no cohesive visual scheme — or, failing that, are all nervous, jittery, look-at-me energy — but this movie is the exception to the rule. The story — about a young Mississippi boy, his mother, and the slow thaw of their fraught relationship with said boy’s uncle, the twin of his late father — is simple and slow to unfold, but Hammer’s emphasis on quiet emotional truth is impressive. His approach with the camera and eye for unfussy natural composition, meanwhile, summons to mind Terrence Malick, and David Gordon Green’s George Washington.

The film opens in New York City at the Film Forum on October 1, and then spreads its wings to an additional top 20 markets, including San Francisco on October 17, Boston and Chicago on October 31, Los Angeles on November 7, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. on November 14, Detroit on November 21, and St. Louis on November 28. A full review will follow later this coming week; for more information on the film, meanwhile, click here.

Sarah Silverman Targets Jewish Grandparent Swing Vote

Amusements, Politics

In her own inimitable style, Sarah Silverman has put together a short, very funny video for “The Great Schlep,” which aims to have Jewish grandchildren visit their grandparents in Florida and educate them about Barack Obama, therefore helping swing the vote in his favor in the potentially crucial state. It’s no joke, either. A spin-off of JewsVote.org, “The Great Schlep” is targeting Columbus Day weekend, October 11-13. Again, to visit the site, click here.

The Lucky Ones

Film Reviews

It was about 70 minutes into The Lucky Ones that I finally wrestled to the ground, in my mind, where the movie was going and what is was trying to say or accomplish. “In its own weird way, this wants to be the Sideways of Iraq coming-home tales,” I thought. There’s some of the same bittersweet clash of tonalities, and each movie, in large part, is about trading in self-defeatism and rueful doting for que sera deliverance, about locating the virtue of small victories and finding release in the fact that life is a journey and not a destination. (Heck, composer Rolfe Kent even provides the score for both films.)



All of this makes The Lucky Ones — mostly a humanistic dramedy, with a few pointed moments of flare-up — explosive for some very strange reasons. It’s a fascinating and in some ways slightly unnerving realization that we’ve seemingly reached a point in our collective national pop-cultural coping that allows for a movie like this, after having (broadly speaking) turned a blind eye on so many Iraq War dramas and documentaries, a handful quite superb.

Directed by Neil Burger, who made the interesting 2002 mockumentary Interview With the Assassin before transitioning into more streamlined narrative filmmaking with The Illusionist, the movie centers around three very different Iraq war veterans returning home from Landstuhl Air Force base in Germany, and the cracked road trip they share across the United States when their connecting flights out of New York City are canceled.

Fred Cheever (Tim Robbins), a married reservist with a teenage son almost ready for college, returns home to a wife who’s bluntly, emotionally moved on. This extends Cheever’s road trip with the cocky TK (Michael Peňa) and young, naïve Colee (Rachel McAdams). The latter is headed to Las Vegas, to deliver a guitar to the family of a slain pal. TK, meanwhile, is planning on a brief, headlong plunge into hedonism to make sure his sexual running gear, wounded by shrapnel, is in working order for his fiancée.

There’s a warm, easy rapport between the three actors, and while there are moments of flinty anger and edginess — Colee’s reaction to a put-down of her friend, plus a pointed political discussion at a house party in Kansas — these are momentary encroachments in an otherwise fairly lightweight, lighthearted film… maybe too lighthearted, actually. The movie is co-written by Burger and Dirk Wittenborn, who previously adapted his own novel Fierce People for the screen, and The Lucky Ones shares the aforementioned work’s sense of glancingly lacerating sociological observation, as when a Hummer salesman, after a mishap with the group’s first rental car, remarks that the Army vehicles they’re used to driving probably don’t have built-in cameras in the headrests like their commercial counterparts.

That keen sense of detail helps mitigate the lingering sense that this is all a bit too pat of a set-up, as do the movie’s fairly strong performances, particularly from McAdams. There’s certainly no disrespect intended by the filmmakers, but the tonal shifts here give off the sound and feel of a grinding gearshift; California wine country helps such bittersweet grappling go down much smoother than do battle-scarred veterans, it turns out. (Lionsgate/QED, R, 108 minutes)

Choke Gets Off a Great Rape Line

Amusements

Choke, multi-hyphenate Clark Gregg’s fun adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s freewheeling novel, has a lot of great lines and rejoinders in it, but the most outrageous and punch-to-the-gut-funny might come when Sam Rockwell’s sex addict hooks up with an anonymous ball-buster whose very specific fantasies about being overpowered (safety word: poodle!) and threatened with a knife give way to much hectoring, which leads Rockwell’s character to spit, “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up and let me rape you my way?” It’s proof to the contrary for anyone who thinks film has lost its capacity to shock merely through language. One assumes Deborah Kampmeier would almost assuredly not be amused.

John McCain Is a No Show on The Late Show

Amusements, Ephemera, Politics

John McCain was a no show on The Late Show with David Letterman last night, prompting first good-natured needling and then apparently sincere ire from the host. “This stinks, it really is starting to smell,” said Letterman of McCain’s excuse that he was bailing on the show to immediately return to Washington, D.C. to deal with the collapsing economic bail-out Congressional negotiations, only to then turn around and sit for an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

Filling McCain’s guest spot was MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann, no friendly McCain surrogate, that’s for sure, and his swallowed, squirmy glee was on full display in the second segment, during which Letterman cut to live (at the time) footage of McCain getting make-up applied in advance of his chat with Couric. “Look, it’s like we caught him getting a manicure,” said Letterman, then adding, “Hey Senator, do you need a ride to the airport?”

Miracle at St. Anna

Film Reviews

In 2006, Inside Man, and its $185 million worldwide gross, seemed to augur an occupational shift for director Spike Lee. Working within the loose confines of a tony yet straightforward genre piece seemed to suit him. Being freed from the shackles of more overt social commentary allowed Lee to craft his most cogent, confident narrative feature in years.

Lee’s new film puts the brakes on that career makeover. A clunky, overlong and all-around bizarrely plotted World War II melodrama, Miracle at St. Anna feels, above all things, like a fantastically unlikely yet still true memoir hewing too closely to its source material, out of some sense of solemn over-regard. Learning that author James McBride’s book, which he adapted for the screen himself, is in fact a work of historical fiction makes the film’s choices all the more perplexing.

The movie opens in 1983, with what seems like the murder of an innocent man at a Harlem post office. After an artifact from the oldest elliptical arch bridge in the world is discovered in the apartment of the arrested killer, the rest of the story winds back in time, detailing the travails of a small group of soldiers from the all-African-American 92nd division who get stuck behind enemy lines crossing a river in Tuscany, Italy in September, 1944.

Led by Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), the group stumbles across a wounded young Italian boy (Matteo Sciabordi), who latches onto Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), a lumbering simpleton who carries with him a statue head that he believes renders him invisible. As the unit holes up and awaits word from their commanders, they also come across a variety of townspeople and Italian resistance fighters, some helpful and some clearly concealing secrets.

With both the awkward present day framing device and the back story of the little boy, Lee and McBride obviously want to evoke parallel mysteries, yet there’s no there’s involving hold to these yarns, mystical or otherwise. Lee’s penchant for never letting a point lay softly is also on ripe display in a few speechifying flashbacks-within-flashbacks, during which the movie completely grinds to a halt.

Miracle at St. Anna aims to be at once a mystery, a lyrical war drama, and a mystical, Cinema Paradiso-style tale of cross-cultural connection. Despite a few effective passages, it succeeds in sum at none of these endeavors, and is instead stuck in this weird state of limbo — not pulling off the magical realism that a director like Guillermo del Toro might have more success in conveying, and not really connecting as a war drama either. Miracle at St. Anna possesses many of the component parts of an idiosyncratic, air-quote important work, but it never gels into anything other than a casserole of jarring, jangly, disparate tones. Strangely, and perhaps a bit sadly, the film makes one yearn for the return of Spike Lee, hired commercial hand. (Touchstone, R, 147 minutes)

Hire Anjelica Huston, She Brings Her Own Wig

Interviews

Multi-hyphenate Clark Gregg didn’t have a lot of money for his adaptation of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, opening this week, but that’s OK — his cast was more than game to throw themselves into the somewhat spartan, briskly paced shoot.

“I’ve been able — once in a while, quite thankfully — to go do a big Disney movie and make some dosh, but then you’re faced with something like this, which is interesting and a little warped and strange,” says Anjelica Huston, who plays Sam Rockwell’s memory-stricken, institutionalized mother, Ida, in the movie. “And I brought my own wig to this show, a wig that I wore in a thing called Family Pictures, over 20 years ago. So I brought that wig into the mix for the older character, but we didn’t have any money to go out and have wigs made. My hairdresser on the movie had this wig that she was going to use on my stunt double for some of the younger stuff with my character, but we had no look for me as a younger person. Ida is kind of a mistress of disguise, so I slapped on the stunt girl’s wig, which was some vinyl thing that was bought on a corner in New Jersey, and it was like, ‘Yeah, that kind of works.’ It’s weird, you’re not quite sure if that’s her hair. But for me it kind of works for the part. We weren’t spending thousands of dollars, as one usually does in these movies, but… you don’t necessarily have to have a lot of money to throw at something in order for it to be good or convincing. And I always like scrapping things together a little bit.” For more information on the film, click here.

Made of Honor

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Most of what one needs to know about Made of Honor can be gleaned by looking at its DVD cover art, which was the same as the film’s theatrical release poster. Patrick Dempsey gazes straight at the viewer, with a wry, welcoming smile. Michelle Monaghan looks longingly at him, lips pursed. And both are air-brushed to a creamy monotone. It’s the perfect metaphor for a movie that has obviously had plenty of the spiky edges of its original conception smoothed down, polished to an agreeable, mass-market tone. It’s not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, it just is what it is — a sign of how Hollywood unfailingly attempts to create, both in actuality and impression, blandly similar product.

Directed by Paul Weiland (a fact that lost me about four or five
minutes, wondering how different the film would have been if directed
by ex-Stone Temple Pilot frontman Scott Weiland), Made of Honor opens with a screwy college meeting of Tom (Dempsey) and Hannah (Monaghan); the former is dressed in a Bill Clinton mask and looking for sexual escapades, the latter gets mistaken for her roommate. A perfume macing ensues, but flash forward 10 years and the pair are best friends. They even have a little every-Sunday routine of dim sum, trolling for antiques at the local market and stopping off for a spot of shared dessert, where they play cutesy games over what will be ordered. Tom still has commitment issues, in no small part because of his father (Sydney Pollack), who’s seen entering into his sixth marriage with a gal (Kelly Carlson) with whom he has his lawyer negotiate bi-monthly blowjobs as part of a clause in their pre-nuptial arrangement.

When a six-week business trip to Scotland nets Hannah a suitor and proposal from the dashing Colin (Kevin McKidd), she asks Tom to be her maid of honor and, advised by a friend (Kadeem Hardison, who if he’s in a movie really should be sporting flip-up glasses) that it’ll be easier to bring down the whole relationship from the inside rather than the outside, Tom accepts. Frou-frou shenanigans follow, with Tom getting heaps of crap from a bridesmaid (Busy Phillips) that hates him, and finding out that Colin is a more formidable romantic rival than he first figured.

A lot of the scenarios, story choices and accompanying production flourishes in Made of Honor
feel lazily nipped from other films — right down to the inclusion of Tomoyasu
Hotei’s “Battle Without Honor or Humanity,” used widely elsewhere, including in the
trailers for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, in a slow-motion scene that introduces the
bridesmaids. The banter is slightly above average, but what helps give the movie a small amount of lift is mostly Dempsey, who
brings a nice, light touch to a character who could otherwise easily come across
as too much of a have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too lothario. Ergo, as the saying goes, those who like this sort of thing will find much in this thing to like.

Made of Honor comes housed in a regular plastic Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover. Its dual-layer disc offers up viewers a choice of 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen or 1.33:1 full screen presentations. An audio commentary track from Weiland serves as the only bonus feature on the disc. On it, he talks up the production’s shifts to various locales (both England and Los Angeles at times substitute for New York), and points out his son in the background of multiple shots. Weiland also mock-apologizes to a test-audience screening member for a scene in which Tom leaves a pair of sunglasses in an open convertible in New York, one of but several scenes in which there’s a sloppy disregard for prop detail. One of my pet peeves also receives more filmic ammunition when Tom carries a pair of very obviously empty coffee cops to his car. Still, who cares, right? After all, these are beautiful people! For a clip from the movie, click here; to purchase the DVD, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) D (Disc)

BAFTA/LA To Honor Sean Penn

Ephemera

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts/Los Angeles will honor actor and
director Sean Penn with its most prestigious film award, the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film, at the 2008 BAFTA/LA Britannia Awards on Thursday, November 6, at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel, it was announced today. “As a celebrated actor, director and producer, Sean has become a film icon over the past three decades,” said BAFTA/LA Chairman Peter Morris in a statement. “The roles and subject matter he chooses to tackle as a filmmaker are both challenging and inspiring to audiences worldwide.”

Penn, who has been nominated four times for the Academy Award as Best Actor, and won the
Oscar in 2003 for his searing performance as a grieving father in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic
River, will next portray gay rights icon Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s biographical drama Milk, which is slated for a November release from Focus Features.

The Life of a Doorman

Film Reviews, Interviews, Musings

  
Scripted hour-long American television famously gives the impression that there are maybe two dozen occupations in the entire country, with doctors being investigated by forensic specialists, lawyers suing fashion magazine employees (and perhaps one another), and cops chasing crooked psychologists while desperate housewives sip on spiked coffee behind their picket fences.

Both independent film and their low-budget documentary brethren, however, often offer all sorts of opportunities to explore the great, untilled territory of more off-the-beaten-path jobs. In the past year and a half alone, there have been spotlights thrown on such atypical vocations as topiary gardening, commercial fishing, vacuum cleaner repair and library work, to name a few.

Debut feature director Wayne Price’s The Doorman (Gigantic Pictures, unrated, 73 minutes) spawns similar intrigue as to the make-up and routines of its subject subset. It was, after all, a doorman at the Beverly Hilton Hotel who recently helped rescue former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards from a bathroom and, at 2 a.m., escort him past tabloid reporters seeking corroborative photographic evidence of his presence at the hotel at the same time as his now-confirmed mistress, Rielle Hunter. At trendy clubs, bars and hotels alike, doormen are the first face of the establishment and the image it wants to project — demi-gods, and arbiters of cool who, in certain situations, decide who ends up gaining admittance and who is destined to spend an hour or more standing in line outside.

A New York-set mockumentary about a smooth-talking, high-end gatekeeper, The Doorman follows a film crew who set out to make an insider’s guide to the legendary New York City club scene, using as their host and guide Trevor (Lucas Akoskin), an Argentinian who looks like a cross between Andy Samberg and Aaron Eckhart. Trevor has the power; he knows people. But more importantly (as Trevor frequently points out), he knows people who know him.

Or maybe not. As the film wears on, Trevor seems much less a player and more of a hanger-on. He mysteriously loses his job, struggles to keep up appearances in front of the camera, and gets caught in various lies that undermine his boastful self-presentation. Director Price (also playing himself on camera) becomes more and more exasperated, finally forcing the issue on Trevor, who admits to not being all that he seems.

Despite the fact that it features dozens of cameos by real-life boldface names — including Peter Bogdanovich, Thom Filicia, Denise Quinones, Amy Sacco, members of the band 311 and even lingering background footage of Paris Hilton — the film itself is a mess. If one takes honestly the notion that an outward face is super-important for glamorous, high-end nightclubs, then it makes no sense, I’m sorry, to have as your entrée into this world a smarmy braggart who pronounces Las Vegas as “Bay-gus.” Forgetting for a moment that the reality of Trevor’s grifter-type existence is completely at odds with all the interstitial talking head interviews that tout him as a global sensation (!), the satire here is simply nowhere near sharp enough. The concept is golden, worthy of a Borat-style treatment that skewers club owners and patrons in equal measure. The Doorman, though, comes off as a lazy execution of its distilled, single-sentence pitch line, in every way, shape and form.

Still, I left the movie intrigued. I wondered what kind of interesting glimpses into the lifestyles of privilege, and all the illicitness and rich-bitch fits that might theoretically entail, such occupational proximity would afford. So over the course of a couple weeks, I discreetly approached a couple real-life doormen at various Los Angeles hotels — people that I didn’t know by name, but a couple of whom I’d seen certainly dozens of times after more than a decade of conducting press junket interviews at such locations. Interesting stories about pre-“Brangelina” Brad Pitt and John Travolta ensued, as well as anecdotal bird’s-eye views of infidelity, something few other occupations offer. For the full, original piece, from FilmStew, click here.

Tyra Banks Hearts Laurence Fishburne

Amusements, Ephemera

Proving herself a user of words, Tyra Banks has dedicated a very special episode of America’s Next Top Model to Laurence Fishburne, for reasons she makes clear in this posting on the show’s micro-site, housed on The CW’s main web site. It’s hard to say what’s best — the part where she talks about being blown away by Fishburne’s “fine-ness,” or when she realizes she actually did a movie with him, John Singleton’s Higher Learning.

Regardless, I think it’s safe to say that Banks is perhaps best seen and not heard, bless her soul.

Constantine’s Sword

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Constantine’s Sword, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Oren Jacoby’s fascinating and exceedingly relevant to these times documentary, explores some of the massive amount of violence and ill done in God’s name throughout history
— a skipped-stone journey of remembrance and reckoning. Starting with
the story of conservative Christian ideology being peddled at the Air
Force Academy in Colorado Springs (where fliers for Mel Gibson’s The Passion
were handed out, and Ted Haggard’s New Life ministries touted) and
winding back in time, the movie follows author and former Roman
Catholic priest James Carroll as he interweaves his own family history
with a grander inquisition into faith, and in particular the nasty, tangled intersection between Christianity and Judaism.

Neither naked provocation nor burrowing analysis is a part of Jacoby’s
agenda here. In fact, as soon as the film alights on some engrossing
historical nugget — Roman general Constantine’s 310 A.D. conversion,
which ushered in the iconography of the cross — it’s just as quickly
off to something else. This occasionally makes for some minor
frustration, since one wants a deeper probe and massage of certain
topics. Carroll, though, is a fantastic and articulate guide, and this exceedingly contemplative and engrossing work
is both topically important — warning of what happens when military
might and religious fervor are mixed — and intellectually stimulating
as all get out. Film needn’t always be pat in scope and definitive in conclusion, as this enthralling film-as-theological-conversation ably demonstrates.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Constantine’s Sword comes to DVD in anamorphic widescreen. A very personal 90-second introduction by Gabriel Byrne toplines the list of supplemental extras, with the Irish actor (unaffiliated with the project) talking about how much it moved him. Also included are a single extended scene, running nine-plus minutes, and an outtake/deleted scene, running seven-plus minutes. Textual, scrollable director’s notes and biographies of Jacoby and Carroll round out the bonus features, along with a small gallery of trailers for Michael Apted’s 49 Up and other First Run Features releases. To purchase the movie on DVD, click here. A (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Hounddog’s “Feminist Ad” Rankles

Irritations, Musings

So Deborah Kampmeier’s cornpone Southern gothic Hounddog — which rather outrageously has its wanly sketched Mystical Negro character advance the novel concept that, “It’s how people treat you that makes you a nigger!” — is banking on a rather unusual advertising strategy, after the whole Dakota-Fanning-rape-movie buzz didn’t really catch on the first go-round. Print ads this past weekend now feature an exhortation from no less than Gloria Steinem, reading, “Women especially should see this important, unforgettable film.”

Why, precisely? Because in its 98-minute running time there is a 20-second rape scene? Or because the writer-director is female? Hounddog is neither important nor unforgettable — except as the latter relates to David Morse’s portrayal of a drooling simpleton who cuts his own bangs after he gets struck by lightning. The fuzzy logic of this direct gender appeal is somewhat lost on me, but maybe it’s a post-Sarah Palin thing, I don’t know. It’d be interesting to know when it was hatched. And can the diehard P.U.M.A. folks really be pried off the Internet and cattle-rustled to arthouses?

Sex Drive Revs Its Engine

Trailer Watch

Sex Drive is coming, and it’s not at all a bad thing.

As much as the play’s the thing, teen sex/road trip comedies live or die on the strength of their casting and chemistry, and in this regard this flick — with Josh Zuckerman, Clark Duke (above right) and Amanda Crew as its main three players, and James Marsden and Seth Green (above left) put to good use in supporting roles — easily delivers the goods. More soon on the movie, which releases October 17 from Summit Entertainment, but the red-band trailer smartly spotlights both some of the film’s quips and, via quick-cut montage, its surging energy, which is one of its strongest selling points. Nice use, too, of MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” for my money the true song of the year.

Good Dick Raises Brow, Half-Heartedly

Trailer Watch

The red-band trailer for Good Dick, an idiosyncratic, Los Angeles-set romance starring Jason Ritter and writer-director Marianna Palka which played earlier this year at Sundance, earns a cocked eyebrow or two, with its sullen leading lady’s assaultive use of the word penis. But it seems very much an achingly constructed indie “thing,” and suffers as well from Ritter’s bland anonymous face. All apologies to his late father, but Ritter is like Jason Behr or Ryan Merriman or one of those mop-haired Canadians that get cast in runaway productions lensing in Vancouver — guys that look conventionally attractive, at once familiar and utterly forgettable. You know, future Edward Burns-types. When I see them cast, I inwardly yawn.

AFI Fest Closes with Defiance

Screenings

Filling one of its tent-pole slots in customary fashion with a big studio film set for impending release, AFI Fest 2008 will screen Edward Zwick’s Defiance as its closing night selection on November 9, it was announced today. Starring Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell and Liev Schreiber, the movie tells the story of three Jewish brothers who struggle to stay alive during World War II, escaping Nazi-occupied Poland and joining Russian resistance fighters. The film is tentatively slated for release, via Paramount Vantage, on December 19.

Trafficked Religulous Thoughts

Musings

Ever a fickle mistress, Los Angeles traffic today cost me about the first 15 minutes of Bill Maher’s Religulous, which I’ll now be seeing again later for review, but it’s an effective, persuasive argument-cum-documentary snapshot of organized religion as an instrument by which large numbers of people are funneled to destructive means.

Helmed by Borat director Larry Charles (above left), the film is a loose-limbed investigatory piece, with Maher traipsing around the globe to interview priests, politicians, theologians, converted Evangelical homosexuals, theme park crucifixion re-enacters and all other manner of faith-peddlers, as well as a few fellow skeptics. There’s some slight over-interjection of text/media asides of snarky commentary (I’m surprised, too, that they got the rights to some of these audiovisual clips, like from Universal’s Scarface, say), but the film is an engaging, alive thing, no doubt. Talking loudly, at they are wont to do, the religious right of the United States will of course get their panties in a wad over the perceived attack on their moral mooring, but Maher goes to decent lengths to separate ethical behavior (not killing, or raping) from organized religion, and besides, (modern) Christian fundamentalism gets off a bit (emphasis on that word) easier than Islam, whose most violent passages from the Koran are raised with Muslim scholars but never quite satisfyingly addressed. More soon on the film, which opens in limited release October 3 from Lionsgate.