The son of two doctors, Richard Raskind was a charismatic scholar-athlete and skirt-chaser at Yale who went on to graduate from medical school and continue his training as an ophthalmologist in the Navy. Raskind was also, however, an inveterate cross-dresser who for more than two decades grappled with confusion over issues of sexual identity. Later in life — after a five-year marriage and even the birth of a son — 41-year-old Raskind completed a sex change operation that he’d contemplated for years. Taking up the name Renée Richards and moving to California as part of the transformation, he (now she) went on to enter and win a handful of circuit-level tennis matches, and eventually enter into a protracted legal battle to win the right to play in the 1977 U.S. Open. Director Eric Drath’s Renée, which recently debuted at the Los Angeles Film Festival, tells the story of this transsexual trailblazer, shining a spotlight — whatever ones thinks of its subject — on a remarkable reservoir of personal perseverance.

Renée is fairly gripping, but chiefly just because of its subject matter, and the somewhat discombobulating sight of Richards, who is a weird blend of the skeletal and ethereal. Renée also benefits from its streamlined brevity; at a crisp, cool 78 minutes, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome. Still, one has to wonder about the subconscious motivations of a self-described “private person” who has a sex change operation, leaves behind a family and moves across the country, but then enters a high-profile tennis tournament knowing that any success will likely hoist them into the public arena. Richards’ hard-knock story and life is an amazing one, still laced with pockets of untapped mystery and intrigue. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (ESPN Films/Live Star Entertainment, unrated, 78 minutes)

A tapestral suspense drama about the intertwined romantic fates of a
quartet of Baton Rouge residents — each wounded in their own way, and
some more freshly than others — The Ledge exhibits a willingness
and desire to let its characters bat back and forth opposing
philosophies of life and faith more frequently found on display in
literature or off-Broadway theater. An interesting character study
only half-successfully masquerading as a kind of specifically plotted
romantic thriller, writer-director Matthew Chapman’s movie resembles
the smart and sensitive but still gangly teenager pushed out of the
door, wearing clothes they really don’t want to wear, to the party they
really don’t wish to attend.

The Ledge unfolds largely in flashback, with hotel manager Gavin Nichols (Charlie Hunnam) perched high atop a building, seemingly ready to plunge to his death. Detective Hollis Lucelli (Terrence Howard) is dispatched to try to talk him down, and Gavin feeds him a hell of a revelation — he has to stand there until noon, and then jump, or someone else will die. The bulk of the movie, then, is comprised of Gavin’s story to Hollis, though complicated by the fact that the latter has just found out that he is sterile, and therefore not the biological father of the two children he shares with his wife.

On the recommendation of an employee, Gavin hires Shana Harris (Liv Tyler, shifting her demure smile into overdrive), who as coincidence would have it has also just moved in down the hall from Gavin with her husband Joe (Patrick Wilson). A friendly get-together between the couple and Gavin and his gay roommate Chris (Chris Gorham) deteriorates when Joe’s religious fundamentalism is revealed. Slowly, Joe’s controlling and contrarian nature begins to chafe at Shana, and erode her gratefulness at saving her from a bad past. Gavin and Shana orbit around one another for a bit, but eventually succumb to physical temptation. This finally escalates into a battle of wills freighted with metaphorical import between believer and non-believer.

Writer-director Matthew Chapman’s ambition and intellectual leanings help drive and push The Ledge in interesting ways. The film’s dialogue is thoughtful throughout with respect to its character’s feelings, if sometimes a tad inorganic in its religious and philosophical debate. It’s rare, the movie that even tries to explore these different belief systems and the sorts of tensions they create, and The Ledge accomplishes this without shortchanging the honesty or emotional integrity of any of its characters. It’s also sincerely (if not primarily) romantic; Hunnam and Tyler have a nice chemistry, and the latter in particular captures how feminine vulnerability can sometimes slowly melt into attraction if met with the warmth of an honest and respectful embrace.

The film’s chief demerit is that the framing device of its conceit is beyond silly; it ignores the fact that the deadline imposed upon Gavin is inarguably better spent explaining his situational ultimatum rather than telling Hollis his story. Also, all of the thematic parallelism with Hollis feels like an overreach, and falls flat. The Ledge would be a leaner, more effective piece of entertainment — and hardly any less intelligent — if it jettisoned its awkward cold opening, in which Hollis learns of his sterility, and instead just reoriented itself as mostly a flashback tale of infidelity gone awry, and its terrible consequences. Narrative strain is hardly the most egregious cinematic sin, however, especially in a world with so much cookie-cutter movie product. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films/Sundance Now, R, 100 minutes)

Amazing things happen every day, all the world over, but the perils of sticking too closely to chronological fact in the cinematic adaptation of what by most accounts is an interesting true story are amply demonstrated in The Chameleon, an emotionally opaque drama about a wayward European youngster who — with the help of a deeply dysfunctional family, each of whom perhaps has different reasons for wanting to believe — passes himself off as a missing Louisiana teen before finally being outed by federal investigators. A solidly sketched sense of place can’t elevate this torpid tale, which lurches awkwardly to and fro, seemingly most hamstrung by a case of protagonist hot potato.

Nicholas Randall went missing when he was 12 years old. Four years later, his fractured family receives word that he’s been located in France, suffering from localized amnesia but telling a most extraordinary and terrible story, of being kidnapped, raped and tortured for years on end. Sister Kathy (Lost‘s Emilie de Ravin, above right) physically identifies him and brings this young man (Marc-Andre Grondin, above left) home to his small Louisiana hometown. Nicholas’ mother, Kimberly Miller (Ellen Barkin, in a gritty performance), however, barely speaks to him, and his older, ex-junkie brother, Brendan (Nick Stahl), can scarcely seem to contain his violent impulses around him.

While “Nicholas” tries to fit in, FBI agents Jennifer Johnson (Famke Janssen) and Dan Price (Tory Kittles, doing a cut-rate Denzel Washington impression) sense something fishy about this news story, and pump their boss (Nick Chinlund) to let them dig further. When they figure out the young man is indeed an impostor, it sets off a chain reaction of assorted bizarre behavior by the aforementioned family members, raising questions about whether this Frenchman’s crimes and head games are the worst of this messy situation.

Taken from a French journalist’s nonfiction book of the same name, The Chameleon‘s screenplay, by director Jean-Paul Salome and Natalie Carter, is seemingly hewed to conform to as exact of a chronological replication of events as possible. The problem is that this robs the movie of any sense of audience identification, or a greater momentum. We know definitively by the 30-minute mark that Grondin’s character is not Nicholas, yet we crucially do not get into the impostor’s head, rendering later passages — an abortive cat-and-mouse sequence where he summons Jennifer to a dive bar, seemingly to establish the publicly verifiable impression of her stalking him — lame and impotent.

Repeatedly, The Chameleon‘s plotting works against its better interests. A straight investigatory approach would work fine, yet the full middle third of the movie unfolds after the FBI has established this Nicholas to be a fraud, but also after (in a laughably brief scene) he is taken back in by Kathy, “because he’s still a minor.” (Are minors perpetrating crimes not subject to detention?) Instead of plumbing deeper into the divisions within the family, however, Salome and his charges try to tease along a sense of ambiguity — which means none of the townspeople can say anything about or approach Nicholas, while other characters like Kathy’s husband (Brian Geraghty) are required to act with a thunderously stupid incuriousity, saying things like, “Nicholas, or not Nicholas — I don’t know anymore, and I don’t care!”

The Chameleon earns minor points for not devolving into empty, skulking menace, but then again I gather that was never part of the original story. The film’s strength, undeniably, is its rooted sense of place, and authentic location. Shooting in Baton Rouge, Salome, production designer Martina Buckley and the rest of his crew achieve an engaging sense of grimy, swampland authenticity on a budget that had to be fairly lean. Unfortunately, it’s in the service of a grifter’s tale that’s emotionally crippled, no matter how emotionally motivated its confused central figure supposed to be. Note: In addition to opening in theaters, The Chameleon is currently available on VOD. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (LLeju Productions, R, 93 minutes)

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)