A fanciful teen travelogue with the requisite number of tall dark strangers, Monte Carlo charts a small town girl’s travels through Europe after high school graduation, where she ironically finds herself by assuming another person’s identity. More than a bit silly and contrived, but so agreeably cast and well executed as to certainly mitigate these shortcomings for its core audience, the film is a pleasant slice of re-worked, tween-targeted entertainment — diverging wildly from its source material, a novel by Jules
Bass, and starring Selena Gomez, Katie Cassidy (above) and Leighton Meester — that should find embrace from fans of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, as well as their younger siblings. Gorgeous production design and superb costuming and girlie accoutrements help float this improbably romantic adventure and lend it an airy grace, as does a score from composer Michael Giacchino that classily evokes swirling romance without hitting antecedent influences directly on the nose. (20th Century Fox, PG, 109 minutes)

A dramatic competition title at the Los Angeles Film Festival, writer-director Amber Sealey’s How To Cheat is a seriocomic depiction of the messiness of modern marriage, and the temptation of infidelity. On the surface, a minor sort of thematic companion piece might be something like Kate Aselton’s The Freebie, in which she starred with Dax Shepard as a married couple who, trying to liven up their stagnant sex life, agree to mutual one-night-only, no-strings-attached hall passes, only to find discord and regret in their decision. Sealey’s movie, however, is a bit more subjectively focused and channeled through the male perspective, while also glancingly recalling the sort of Silverlake “diorama-dramas” of multimedia artist Miranda July, though quite without the same precious handmade qualities found therein.

In short, How To Cheat is the story of a married Los Angeles couple, Mark (Kent Osborne) and Beth (Sealey), who seem stuck in a rut, even as they continue trying, unsuccessfully, to conceive a child. The invasive prying and cooing of some friends who are themselves newbie parents certainly doesn’t help matters, and Mark, a towncar driver driven to distraction by the stories of sexual conquest of his friend (Gabriel Diamond), turns to online dating. Upfront about his marriage, and desire for a strings-free extracurricular sexual relationship, Mark is met with mostly sneers and slaps. He finally finds a willing receptacle… err, partner, but after his fling with Louise (Amanda Street), Mark finds himself having to tend to that relationship in slightly unexpected fashion — which is in a manner reminiscent, though in far less of a madcap fashion, of the Rachel Boston-Noah Bean comedy The Pill, which recently debuted at the Dances With Films festival. The truth eventually outs, leading to tough choices for all those involved.

Sealey’s low-budget movie is shot in an engagingly raw style, and its performances — rewarded with a Best Ensemble Performance award at the Los Angeles Film Festival — are admirably free of vanity. As an actress, Sealey has a pinch of that same vulnerable charm of Catherine Keener, and a kind of atypical sexiness. Osborne, meanwhile, emanates an oddball sympathetic quality, even when he’s not doing much; he looks like Mark Duplass crossed with Ray Romano, and kind of acts like the same, with perhaps a pinch of Garry Shandling.

So why, then, does How To Cheat never really take sail? Part of the reason is that Sealey is caught up in indie posing. The film opens, with some floppy male nudity, in a manner that says this is fundamentally a comedy, so there’s no need to really take seriously any of its feelings or thematic underpinnings, or certainly Mark’s quasi-articulated fears of becoming invisible to Beth, just needed for fertilization to “complete” their family snapshot. Other cutesy touches unfurl, such as a woman presented to seem like a therapist (Paulette Osborne, Kent’s real-life mother) but that in short order turns out to be Mark’s mom. This bit is never particularly paid off, and when the movie pivots into more serious terrain, then, it just comes across as kind of off-key and false.

On a technical level, How To Cheat is a solidly enough realized indie film that one need not bear any lasting animosity toward. But it doesn’t possess any of the dark or snappish fun one might think its title augers, and neither does it connect or linger in an emotional way. It imparts no particular lessons, it just is. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Part Participation/Buffalo Moon Films, R, 87 minutes)

One of the interesting things about international genre cinema is witnessing how long and in what ways Hollywood and breakthrough American independent movies often trickle down and influence aspirant filmmakers. With the Sundance entry Trollhunter, Norwegian commercial helmer and debut writer-director André Ovredal delivers in fitful fashion on a simple premise that its title reflects quite literally.

The story, framed in a mock-documentary format, centers around three college kids who set out with a video camera to investigate mysterious occurrences in the nearby mountains and woods. After tracking down a grizzled bounty hunter, Hans (Otto Jespersen), a sort of Norwegian Van Helsing, they convince him to let them tag along, and learn of a sprawling governmental cover-up of the existence of trolls.

Trollhunter‘s special effects work is impressive, especially for a low-budget effort. And some of the scenes are incredibly imaginative in their quirky detail, as when a group of Polish subcontractors posing as painters start wrangling over the price of a bear carcass used to frame the aftereffects of an incident as a mauling, or when a veterinarian explains why some trolls explode and others turn to stone when exposed to light.

Still, for all its technical accomplishment and cultural specificity — including some natural scenic beauty, wonderfully captured by cinematographer and sole camera operator Hallvard Bræin — Trollhunter never really clicks on all cylinders. It’s mostly droll, but it doesn’t consistently foment either dread or delight, owing mainly to the need for sharper characterizations. Part of what made The Blair Witch Project so successful was a real sense of bickering divide and tension amongst the characters. That never develops here, and so the amusing moments aren’t quite steady enough and don’t gather enough downhill momentum to qualify the movie as anything more than a cultural curio. (Magnet, PG-13, 103 minutes)

A remarkable snapshot of underclass life, love, humor and despair, Position Among the Stars, which picked up the Special World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and recently played at the Los Angeles Film Festival, is an utterly absorbing and strikingly humane nonfiction film that, in non-judgmental nor holier-than-thou fashion, locates the universality of human struggle in charting the tumultuous ups and downs of an extended Indonesian family trying to work their way out of the slums.

Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich takes as his subjects the Shamsuddins, a Jakarta family whom he previously followed as their country shook off the three-decade rule of President Suharto (2001’s The Eye of the Day) and experienced a rise in Islamic power and influence (2004’s Shape of the Moon). While there’s obviously some overlap, one need not be at all familiar with those movies, as Position Among the Stars, after a bit of a slow start, digs into Indonesia’s fast-changing society and various sociocultural issues and problems in a very relatable manner. Grandmother Rumidjah (above right) is openly Christian, but her son Bakti (above left) converts to Islam, he confesses, because of peer pressure. Getting a government job processing welfare payments, Bakti tries to scrape together enough money to help put his niece, Tari, through college, but finds himself hiding “luxury items” (like a television) when fellow bureaucrats come to check on and process a similar claim for eldest son Dwi.

From scripted films like Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! and recent Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire to documentaries like Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa, there is of course a rich history of movies that seek to soak up as much grungy, grimy slum-land atmosphere as they can, frequently to illustrate just how much better Western audiences have it. Helmrich, though, neither luxuriates nor shies away from his setting. He simply presents it as it is. There’s the grotesque spectacle of roaches scattering to and fro, and a rat and cat squaring off, but Position Among the Stars is also often quite funny, as when Bakti and Tari conspire to have a joke at Rumidjah’s expense about Tari’s high school exams. The film shows that, issues of comfortability and living condition notwithstanding, family dynamics are remarkably the same the world over.

In the Shamsuddin family, Helmrich, who also serves as one of the movie’s two camera operators, has a group of subjects who are so completely at ease with his presence as to give Position Among the Stars the complete and total feeling of an exhaustively staged drama. There are no weepy, direct-address confessionals, nor sideways glances at the camera’s lens. Everything plays out in straightforward fashion. When Bakti physically loses it after his wife Sri kills the beta goldfish he was training to fight to use in street betting matches, or Rumidjah says to Bakti, “You failed in life, why should [Tari] have to fail too?” the audience experiences these not as contrived explosions, but the uneasy natural product of months of simmering tensions.

Abetting this is the film’s stunning visual style and editing. Its savvy, beautifully engaging cinematographic expression is best characterized as conforming to the single-shot methodology of the French New Wave, which means that dozens of real-life moments are pieced together to create a grander temporal reality. The deeper the film progresses, then, the more we know and feel about these characters. An intimate, achingly real and heartfelt portrait of some of the bonds and binds that we all share, Position Among the Stars is a first-rate third-world journey worth taking. For the film’s trailer, click here; for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Scarabee Films/HBO Films, unrated, 111 minutes)