Apparently chiefly inspired by the loads of money generated by robots smashing into one another in the Transformers films, executive producer Steven Spielberg helps orchestrate more metallic mayhem in Real Steel, in which a tremendous technical polish is brought to bear upon what is frequently a rather awkward grafting of family drama and overblown, futuristic boxing tale. The nature of its conceit all but obliges Real Steel end with estranged father holding son aloft in his arms, but it’s of course how viewers are taken to that point that matters. And while its stabs at emotionalism are sincere, director Shawn Levy’s movie never once shakes free of the feeling that it owes its entire existence to external market forces. Still, if one can shrug off the story flaws, the film’s undeniable gloss and special effects proficiency are what help keep it bobbing and weaving, allowing it to intermittently connect. The interplay between humans and robots is extraordinarily believable; scale is consistent, and never betrayed. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG-13, 127 minutes)
An inoffensive but hardly essential piece of occupational boosterism, American Teacher provides a look at the public education crisis in the United States through the eyes of those often lambasted or pilloried as somehow being a bigger part of the problem than of the solution. Helmed by Academy Award-winning director Vanessa Roth, the documentary spotlights the extraordinary personal sacrifices that a lot of instructors make by choosing to teach — as well as how qualified and otherwise passionate people are sometimes driven from the field by the rocky shoals of hard-knock financial reality. Many of the subjects here are inspiring, but, sadly, American Teacher comes off as more of a staid, herky-jerky stump speech than a fiery and clarifying call to action. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here. (First Run, unrated, 80 minutes)
A small pleasure, at least, that Sarah Palin‘s rise to national prominence has come about in this modern day and age, for were it much earlier the amount of ink spilled and trees razed would have had a much more measurable and even greater detrimental environmental impact. As is, the erstwhile Alaskan governor and 2008 Republican Vice Presidential nominee already seems to exert a death-grip on the nation’s psyche, even with her hazily defined motivations, ambiguous ambitions and well-practiced fence-sitting. Palin is many things to many people, and very few of them without much passion or depth of feeling.
For his new documentary, Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, then, Nick Broomfield decamps to her hometown of Wasilla, donning an Alaskan starter kit — red checkered jacket, boots and hat replete with ear-flaps — to go along with his mini-boom mic and genial investigatory noodling. (Co-director Joan Churchill, meanwhile, operates the camera, allowing the pair to function in guerilla-like fashion.) Showing much more of an inquisitive mindset about her, her upbringing and what makes her tick than Palin herself has seemingly ever shown about the world around her, Broomfield’s eye-opening film re-treads a lot of known ground about Palin, but also drags out into the full light of day the danger of her particular brand of sad, self-centered, desperate paranoia.
Wasilla is a guns-and-God town of little more than 8,000 people with (if Broomfield’s assertion is correct) a fairly astounding 77 churches. Early on, Broomfield’s quest to land an interview with Palin herself seems off on the right foot; he talks to Sarah’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, and the former shows him how he’s trained his dog to fetch antlers instead of bones or tennis balls. The more Broomfield chats with a small handful of detractors and digs into the Palins’ evangelist church, Assembly of God, though, the more constricted the flow of information and forthcoming opinion becomes. Apart from a very small handful, almost everyone in town is reluctant to speak about Palin, it seems; those with a potential axe to grind out of fear of retribution, and those who love her most because it would apparently be considered treasonous to speak to someone who allowed for the possibility of a viewpoint at odds with theirs.
While in large part a sort of on-the-ground travelogue of (largely unsuccessful) interview chasing, Broomfield and Churchill also tell in chronological fashion the story of Palin’s rise — how she quickly cast away her political mentor, former Wasilla mayor John Stein, and soon embarked on a firing spree of public officials who disagreed with her on even the smallest of issues. Through it all, she flogged hot-button social issues as relevant, and later, in 2006, she positioned herself in savvy fashion between two bickering fellow Republicans, to score a primary upset.
Broomfield is part provocateur, part bumbling professor. He injects himself into the proceedings, but in a manner that lacks the blunt-force emotionalism of someone like Michael Moore. The distinctive quality of Broomfield’s voice — which conveys an occasional sarcasm but mostly an ever-present bemusement with his own stumbling, shrugging exploration — gives his movie a comfortable, lived-in feeling and sense of fair play, even though there’s undeniably something of a bent. While it’s edited into a cogent narrative, one feels that Broomfield mostly heads out each day of a shoot armed less with research, and more with an eager desire to see what sorts of reactions he can capture, no matter where the particular opinions fall.
When Broomfield touches, in passing, on Palin’s depression upon her return to the governorship of Alaska in the wake of the 2008 election, it’s hard not to feel at least a small pang of empathetic sorrow for the subject. Would that Broomfield were allowed to mine this seam more, through the participation of those close to and sympathetic to the Palins. Instead, what one sees manifested, time and again, is a pattern of emotional retrenchment and vindictive lashing out. In Sarah Palin’s world, nothing can be her fault; after all, she is chosen, she is anointed.
Her own former campaign managers and legislative directors paint a portrait of Palin as an air-quote leader who made decisions based on perceived threats and disrespect, wielding governmental power as a cudgel for score-settling of the sort given to a popular teenage girl’s flight-of-fancy. The sheltered and simplistic nature of this worldview is one thing, but Palin is forever mining for nuggets of victimization that can then be peddled into inflammatory and/or ridiculous rhetoric (“death panels,” “don’t retreat, reload,” “blood libel”), and then used as table scraps to further feed a narrative of persecution, and increase her cult of aggrieved identification. There is nothing in Palin’s world that is merely a misguided idea or a different way by which to achieve the same means of a greater good and fairer world — only evils to be fought and enemies to be vanquished. In the end, that is the true horror — not Palin herself. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Content Media/Channel 4 Films/Awakening Films, unrated, 91 minutes)
The latest in the grand tradition of studio keep-away, by the way? That would be Dream House, which opens this weekend, and isn’t screening for critics. Hey, at least those TV ads are pretty tight, and effective. Oh… right.
It’s hard to fathom today, but at the height of his career, chess master Bobby Fischer was by certain accounts better known than any other living person in the world — athlete, entertainer, politician or otherwise. His 1972 World Championship match against Russian Boris Spassky, with the allegorical heft of its East-versus-West implications, helped spark a worldwide surge in the interest in chess, while his hermetic personality rendered him a compelling if inscrutable public figure far outside the realm of his area of expertise. Bobby Fischer Against the World, a new documentary which frames itself against the backdrop of the aforementioned high-stakes match but also tackles the iconoclastic nature of its subject both personally and professionally, makes a persuasive, emotionally involving case for the dark, troubled flipside of genius.
Fischer has been the subject of numerous books and a couple nonfiction films, and remains an intriguing subject both because of the headstrong way he tackled his sport, upsetting many defenders of the status quo, and also the manner in which he sort of disappeared, “retiring” in his early 30s after refusing in 1975 to defend his title. Directed by Emmy Award winner Liz Garbus, Bobby Fischer Against the World is appropriately titled, on several levels. It first sketches out the many structural advantages granted Russian players — where chess was embraced as a means by which to prove the intellectual superiority of Communist orthodoxy — whereas the self-taught Fischer, on the other hand, was the lone son of a working poor single mother who threw himself into the study of chess with an obsession that proved effective yet also alienating, even to those few close to him. The movie’s title also serves to underscore the manner in which Fischer’s rise to prominence within the chess world took on the qualities of a strange surrogate battle in the Cold War; when Fischer balked at some of the conditions surrounding his best-of-24-match showdown with reigning champion Spassky, and seemed ready not to show up, none other than Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beseeched him in a phone call.
Garbus captures the full breadth and scope of this drama without ever sacrificing its human qualities. Interview subjects include not only chess masters who provide personal and professional insights, but also Fischer’s brother-in-law, public figures like Kissinger and talk show host Dick Cavett, and more. The use of news clips show the prominent placement afforded Fischer’s showdown with Spassky in relation to Watergate and other important national news, and Garbus’ smart, occasional deployment of slick, groove-laden contemporary tunes like T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong,” Gary Glitter’s “Rock & Roll, Parts 1 and 2” and the theme from Shaft give the movie an additional pop currency.
The big 1972 chess match itself, the film’s centerpiece, is plenty fascinating. It’s incredible to think that this was broadcast nationally on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, complete with commentary from chess experts and even a sketch artist assigned to track Fischer from his hotel and sit in the gallery during matches. From Fischer’s amateur-level mistake in the first game and various no-shows by the participants over the course of its weeks-long schedule to increasingly far-fetched and paranoid claims of radiation or electrical disturbances implanted in lights and chairs, there’s a great and engaging tension to be found in the intellectual and psychological grappling.
Every bit as remarkable, though, is the film’s portrait of Fischer, the boy and the man. This material — of an almost otherworldly focused Fischer — provides a revealing counterpoint to his later withdrawal from society. Swallowed by fear (perhaps to live up to his oft-stated goal of retaining the world championship for a couple decades) and beset by depression, Fischer gave up competitive chess, and grew to increasingly entertain various paranoid delusions of both individual persecution and vast, anti-Semitic conspiracy.
It’s been said, many times and ways, that the line between genius and madness is a thin one. Bobby Fischer Against the World shows the truth in that statement, without ever casting unduly harsh judgment upon its subject. That which would trouble and haunt Fischer for so much of his life is also what made him perhaps the greatest chess player of all time. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films/Moxie Firecracker, unrated, 93 minutes)
Rachel Nichols is an actress, a former model, a sports fan, a foodie, a frequent traveler and an avid Twitterer. She is not, however, a reporter for ESPN given to undue amounts of hand gesticulations while talking. Well… that’s Rachel Nichols, too, actually. But a different one. The real Rachel Nichols, though — genuinely easygoing, and possessing of the developed personality of someone much uglier — is more apt to have names for her hands, actually.
Her latest project is the independent-minded A Bird of the Air, in which she plays a free-spirited librarian, Fiona, who upends the life of a solitary loner, Lyman (Jackson Hurst), when she takes it upon herself to help him track down the past owners of a parrot that randomly flies into his trailer. Recently, I had the chance to speak with Nichols one-on-one, about the movie, the work she put in to get her role, changing hair colors, and exactly why she calls her car Darth. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the entirely pleasant read.
The glut of studies — seemingly released almost weekly — showing the slippage and relatively poor international ranking of American high school students in core academic subjects like math, science and history is troubling, certainly, and indicative of a need to redouble efforts in those areas. But as anyone who still has a honest connection to their adolescence will admit, the role of extracurriculars and artistic electives is often integral to a teenager’s sense of engagement and self-worth, and certainly the type of well-roundedness that helps produce open-minded individuals who can work well with others. Not everyone has the aptitude to be a professional musician, artist or athlete, after all, but studying and taking part in these disciplines, and working within the confines of a team or group, helps teach leadership and life lessons that are broadly applicable, and also gives one a healthy lens through which to view the world.
This moral is on rich display in Thunder Soul, a new documentary about the music director at a predominantly African-American high school who, beginning in the late 1960s, transformed a mediocre jazz band into a dynamic, full-fledged funk powerhouse, empowering a generation-plus of kids along the way. When Conrad Johnson, widely known as “Prof” to his students, took over Houston’s Kashmere High, band was an often awkward clash of old musical standards and lax devotion. Instilling a sense of take-no-mess discipline while also encouraging his students to embrace their own inimitable style, Johnson grew an admirable technical proficiency through demanding practices, and then indulged and cultivated his students’ exuberance and burgeoning sense of showmanship.
The result was something special. Johnson’s talents as a composer — he wrote more than 50 original compositions, ladling funk on top of a jazz base — led to his students recording a series of hit records under the moniker The Kashmere Stage Band, with tunes like “Thunder Soul” and “Head Wiggle” blowing away the competition at heretofore staid stage band contests. Importantly, the band’s success (and the community’s pride in it) also worked as a sort of positive viral infection; Kashmere’s ROTC, hoops, football and debate teams all fielded winning squads, and the school was awarded more student college scholarships than any other Houston high school.
Executive-produced by Jamie Foxx, Thunder Soul is built around a 2008 reunion which finds more than 30 former stage band members spanning all sorts of different graduating classes — now all in their 50s, and many not having touched their instruments in decades — reuniting to play a special tribute concert for their beloved former teacher and mentor. An easygoing and heartwarming tale of emotional uplift, the movie is a bonafide crowd-pleaser, as evidenced by its Audience Award victories at the South By Southwest and Los Angeles Film Festivals, as well as a special “Crystal Heart Award” at the Heartland Film Festival and numerous other festival circuit plaudits.
Ninety-two years of age at the time of filming, Johnson is not necessarily in the condition to provide entirely accurate reminiscences, but director Mark Landsman does a good job of blending interview material that pays respect to his subject as both a unique musical talent and a man and teacher who knew how to get the most out of his students. If there’s a failing, it’s that while Thunder Soul is undeniably involving, Landsman also misses some key opportunities to tie in the Kashmere alumni to the school’s present day students, which could have proven quite interesting and added a whole other emotional level to the movie. That said, the film is still a compelling snapshot of how and why good teachers matter, as well as a case for the value of the continued study of the arts in high school curricula. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Roadside Attractions/Snootdocs, PG, 88 minutes)
Too many romantic comedies witlessly hone in on the differences between men and women to create a heightened-stakes backdrop in which every interaction with the opposite sex is imbued with some sort of grand, gender-statement significance, which is of course then supposed to be neatly resolved and tidily put away by the time a paired-off happy ending rolls around.
Co-written by Annie Mumolo and Saturday Night Live‘s Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids instead focuses a considerable amount of its energy on female friendships, yes, but also the things women want in relationships — love, security, availability — that are the same as men. The result is the best female-fronted Hollywood comedy in years, and a movie that just happens to almost incidentally be about women, if that makes sense. Yes, theirs is the lens or perspective through which the story is told, but it is not a pandering or cloying, exclusively pitched tale. In its savvy blend of the utterly silly and urbane, Bridesmaids reaches across aisle and grabs back the dignity of its nuptial-inspired moniker from seemingly a generation’s worth of mainstream studio pap like 27 Dresses and Bride Wars.
Wiig stars as Annie, a thirtysomething Milwaukee native who, after the failure of her bakery forces her into a jewelry store retail job for which she is ill-suited, finds herself stuck in a friends-with-benefits situation with a narcissistic jerk (Jon Hamm). Annie’s rough patch is additionally complicated when her longtime best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) announces her engagement. This seemingly highlights and underscores every perceived failing or emptiness in Annie’s life, and the passive-aggressive competitiveness of Helen (Rose Byrne), Lillian’s wealthy and newer friend, does little to bring about the best in Annie, even as a local cop, Nathan (Chris O’Dowd), tries his best to get to know her.
Its tone is a pinch exaggerated, true, but almost all of the movie’s set pieces are genuine howlers, and Bridesmaids belies the notion that femme-centric comedies have to be either toothless, gorgeously wardrobed fluff or vapid and completely over-the-top. Possessing distinctly drawn supporting characters, director Paul Feig’s film is honest about their different backgrounds and stations in life, and doesn’t sacrifice sensible motivation for a couple cheap scene-to-scene laughs. Wiig, meanwhile, elevates her game from mere top-notch sketch performer; as Annie, she’s so damn good at communicating the quiet and relatable sadness behind the smile and cackling, put-on-a-happy-face exterior. And that’s why Bridesmaids comedy connects so consistently, and forcefully — because it matters to the characters, who in turn are genuine and familiar.
Combo-pack versions are also available, but Bridesmaids comes to DVD presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks in English, Spanish and French. Housed in a complementary cardboard slipcover, this version includes both the (R-rated) theatrical version of the movie and a longer unrated version, with an additional six minutes of material — much of it foul-mouthed riffing. An audio commentary track with Feig, Mumulo, Wiig and other cast members proves a lively, enjoyable listen, anchoring the bonus material. Other supplemental extras include 12-plus minutes of very funny improvised and alternate line readings, and a four-minute gag reel in which breasts are touched (accidentally and otherwise), car alarms go off in the distance, and the late Jill Clayburgh engages in some salty sex talk, including an explanation of the act of “bird-bathing.” There are also a number of extended and alternate scenes, a fake commercial for Annie’s jewelry store employer, and three entirely excised sequences — the big one being a five-minute blind date scene featuring Wiig’s character with Paul Rudd, who experiences a character-revealing ice skating accident. Whatever your format of choice, this release is a home video collection keeper, for sure. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Fewer recent documentary films evince a bigger gap between potential level of intrigue and delivered interest than Programming the Nation, a shaggy look at the history of subliminal messaging in the United States that leaves one wanting for the pruning of a sensible editor. Flitting back and forth from 1950s and ’60s cinema and advertising to the alleged usage of subliminal tactics in everything from anti-theft devices, political propaganda, military psychological operations and advanced weapons development, Warrick’s film is interesting in pieces and patches, but ultimately done in by its own manic desire to cram in as much anecdotal detail as possible, no matter its big-picture relevance. It’s the nonfiction equivalent of an excited teenager relating to a parent the story of an important event in their world, and what it individually means for all of their friends. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 105 minutes)
At 72 years old, Clarence Reid could be your cranky neighbor or arthritic uncle — until, that is, he slips on a homemade superhero costume and starts spitting out raunchy rhymes that would make 2 Live Crew proud. At once a sort of niche canonization along the lines of The Devil and Daniel Johnston and a more generalized travelogue documentary about the third-tier touring life for marginal and nostalgia musical acts, The Weird World of Blowfly, so named for Reid’s funky alter ego, is a nonfiction curio that gets by on the personality of its subject, and little more.
By day, Reid was a hit producer in the Miami soul scene of the 1960s and ’70s, co-writing Gwen McRae’s “Rockin’ Chair” and Betty Wright’s “Clean Up Woman” (the latter of which was ironically later sampled by Ghetto Boy Willie D in his take on the song, “Clean Up Man”), among many other tunes. By night, however, and on into the ’70s, he was a rapper — maybe even the first rapper — who was as at home and skilled at dropping refashioned, dirty lyrics over existent songs as he was coming up with his own naughty, tongue-in-cheek tunes of sexual prowess and destruction. To that end, the film deploys, in not always convincing scatter-shot fashion, a litany of industry and genre talking heads like Ice-T, Chuck D, author Jamie Lowe and others, to give props to Reid and his largely under-touted, overlooked legacy.
In general, The Weird World of Blowfly charts Reid through a couple tours and performances — one Stateside, comprised of about 10 dates in smaller clubs, and the other opening in front of festival and arena crowds as big as 13,000, for a German nu-metal group who were perhaps somewhat unlikely fans of his in their youth. The thing that the movie most has going for it is Reid himself, who remains this rather inscrutable but still magnetic and watchable figure. In that regard, the movie is not unlike an otherwise mediocre sports team being willed to the playoffs, and perhaps beyond, by the anchoring presence of one lone superstar.
The list of things wrong with the movie is significant. Well… not wrong, exactly. Just curious and incomplete is more like it. Jonathan Furmanski, a director of photography making his directorial debut, evinces no great sense of style, nor inquisitiveness; in fact, at times he seems more scared of his subject rather than in awe. It’s around the 75-minute mark that the audience first meets Reid’s mother, which would seem an interesting place to start given his stories of how he began singing dirty, made-up lyrics to popular tunes in an effort to antagonize the white, land-owning bosses at the family farm of his youth.
Also unexplained is the impetus behind Blowfly’s lucha libre-style costume, or why he keeps the fingernails on only one of his hands grown out several inches. Then there’s the matter of how Reid himself views his lifestyle, and various familial estrangements. By not getting Reid’s own take on his divorce and (seemingly) continued lack of a presence in the lives of his (now adult) children, Furmanski just kind of throws up his hands, and indicates none of this is worth exploring, which is of course malarkey. Instead, the film frames itself as a sort of unlikely “bromance” between Reid and Tom Bowker, a journalist turned drummer, and Reid’s manager and chief salesman to the outside world. Overall, The Weird World of Blowfly receives the slimmest of recommendations — for at least music fans, and those who enjoyed 2009’s similarly themed Anvil: The Story of Anvil — just because Reid is an interesting figure. For general audiences, though, the lapses in filmmaking judgment render this World more tragically unexplored than weird. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, unrated, 89 minutes)
Taylor Lautner makes a bid for junior action hero status with Abduction, a wildly implausible money-grab for teen film-going dollars that seems outright allergic to exploring the most interesting thing about its concept, and instead beholden to lame notions of air-quote thrills. A highly recognizable adult supporting cast (including Alfred Molina, Sigourney Weaver, Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs) indicates the behind-the-scenes mechanisms being deployed to try to ensure Lautner’s viability as a 21st century leading man, but this dreary, unexciting misfire shouldn’t be the vehicle to do it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 106 minutes)
Morgan Freeman, in an interview with Piers Morgan set to air this evening on CNN, has tabbed the stirred-up anti-Obama passions of the Tea Party as having an element of racism. He’s not incorrect, but it’s also interesting to ponder how these long-simmering resentments would have gone sideways if, say, Hillary Clinton had been elected president in 2008. Because that would have certainly happened as well, make no mistake. It’s no coincidence that so many of these folks, ahem, found Jesus during a Democratic administration. That’s the decades-long social conditioning of the right-wing media machine coming home to roost. So there’s a shrugging admission that maybe President Bush was a bit of a dissatisfaction (unnecessary war = whoops!), but everything else is still Obama’s fault. Fiscal facts (an unfunded prescription drug bill dwarfing any Obama administration stimulus spending) are, you know, just more opinionated science in sheep’s clothing.
In my latest DVD/Blu-ray column, over at ShockYa, I take a gander at what is undeniably one of the year’s best comedies, the Blu-ray bow of Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill, Julie Taymor’s sex-changed version of The Tempest, football documentary 4th & Goal, a French film you can use to shock and/or unnerve your significant other, and more. For the full, fun read, over at ShockYa and inclusive of pretty pictures, click here.
As the film industry has contracted, and the burden of financing shifted away from companies and more onto creative individuals themselves, American independent films of the past 10 years or so, whatever their genre, have been typically characterized by a certain eagerness to please. This isn’t entirely surprising. Like any other occupational venture in tougher economic times, there’s an element of self-preservation involved; emergent filmmakers have a desire to keep working, and so they craft stories, consciously or subconsciously, that often play to the whetted appetites of a particular audience or demographic.
Writer-director Spencer Susser‘s feature debut, Hesher, is not much concerned with such niceties. It’s not flat-out confrontational, per se, but it is warped, weird and given to neither easy explanation nor pat, sum-of-its-parts analysis. By various turns a shrewdly drawn coming-of-age drama and a full-tilt, gonzo exploration of the dirty, unfortunate reality that pain and disappointment visits everyone’s life, the movie — about a young kid (Devin Brochu) coping with the death of his mother, and the vaguely sociopathic loner who forces his way into his home, moving in with said kid’s father (Rainn Wilson) and grandmother (Piper Laurie) — cruises along solidly, for much of its running time, on the unlikely interplay of its two lead characters before finally losing its way a bit in the home stretch.
A colleague described Hesher, in less than flattering terms, as a knock-off of Chuck Palahniuk produced by people raised only on Sundance films, and that’s actually not a bad description, to whatever degree one is invested in or detested with the narrative. With his crudely drawn tattoos, stringy hair, facial scruff, penchant for elliptical aphorisms, and psychotic thousand-yard stare, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Hesher comes across as a sort of punk-rock Jesus or G.G. Allin disciple — or perhaps a Beavis & Butt-head acolyte who’s stepped down out of their cartoon suburban world into a slightly more grounded but equally scummy American suburbia. He’s an outsized character, at once original and representational, and to the extent one objects to dollops of ambiguity and abstraction liberally applied to a narrative of coming-of-age and familial reconciliation, they will find molehills or not outright mountains of frustration in Hesher. Hesher is real, yes, but it’s also somewhat best to think of him as a construct or a forceful change agent rather than attempt to make sense of all of his behavior.
The film’s third act isn’t quite as tightly drawn as it should be; rather than pull back and swing for a knockout blow, Susser seems to lose his nerve. He aims for a pay-off more in line with traditional settled-grief catharsis, which doesn’t quite fully connect, the way it’s constructed. Neither does the intimation of a potential relationship between Nicole (Natalie Portman) and Hesher make total sense. Reflecting back on this now, it’s hard to fully distill or explain these criticisms, except to simply say that, for me, the movie’s hold simply loosened considerably.
And yet, still, Hesher courses with a unique verve missing in many independent productions, hovering somewhere between outright success and “interesting failure.” An appreciation of feeling is what informs one’s affection for this movie, much more than a simple narrative engagement, and it taps into those raging, conflicted sensations of adolescence with considerable aplomb.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Hesher comes to DVD presented in 2.44:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 EX audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features include seven minutes of deleted scenes and an additional seven-minute making-of featurette. Much more interesting is a clutch of outtakes that runs almost a full half-hour, and features Wilson’s impression of Rush Limbaugh, plus all sorts of unwound improvisation run amok. There’s also a sketch gallery of Hesher’s tattoos and other movie art, plus around two minutes of outdoor footage being ruined by the sounds of airplanes passing overheard. If that sounds like a weird DVD extra, it surely seems a fitting tribute, in a way, to this movie’s out-there title character. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)
Filmmaker Gus Van Sant, even at 59 years old, looks like the sort of guy who should be wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie. In face, body language and spirit, he retains a certain boyishness — perhaps in some small way infused, throughout the years, by his thematic preoccupation with unconventional romance and coming-of-age stories, and the idea of surrogate family. Restless, his latest effort behind the camera, and the first since Sean Penn scored a Best Actor Oscar for Milk, treads this same familiar ground, but to mostly pleasurable if still rather fleeting effect. A tenderly stylistic evocation of young love wrapped inside a New Wave-esque bundle of wistfulness and nervous, under-the-surface energy, it’s a movie whose graceful direction doesn’t merely trump its plotting, but instead helps elevate it. A kind of arthouse mash-up of Sweet November, One Day and Love and Other Drugs, Restless is a well constructed little diorama, but one whose elicited feelings do not, alas, linger. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics/Imagine Entertainment, PG-13, 95 minutes)
If one were to ruminate on the equivalent of a Mother Teresa-type figure for the advocacy of natural animal research and wildlife conservation, it would likely be Dr. Jane Goodall, a world-famous icon known for her groundbreaking scientific field work accrued while living amongst chimpanzees in Africa. Directed by Lorenz Knauer, the documentary Jane’s Journey offers up a biographical snapshot of both the personal and professional Goodall. Inclusive of some compelling piecemeal details, it’s a film that’s hard to assail with much enthusiasm or gusto, but the truth is that it’s an awkward and generally unfocused mash-up of mixed perspectives and mission statements. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Note: in addition to regular theatrical engagements this week and next, on September 27, Goodall will appear live on hundreds of movie screens across the country for a rare event that will include a screening of the film, interaction with theater audiences and in-studio celebrity guests. For theater and ticket information regarding that event, click here. (First Run, unrated, 105 minutes)
Centering on a group of young friends and deployed reservists from the shores of Lake Superior, on the northern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Where Soldiers Come From delivers unto viewers a slice of somewhat meandering but nonetheless quite affecting blue-collar heartbreak. After all, the subjects, none older than 22 at the time, joined the National Guard together on something of a lark, drawn in — even in wartime — chiefly by a devil-may-care sense of fraternity and the benefits of a $15,000 signing bonus and college tuition assistance. This understated, delicately anthropological real-life coming-of-age tale tracks the end of their Stateside training, a rough tour of duty in Afghanistan, and the disillusionment and troubles that follow upon their return home. It’s not for all tastes, but these stories, alas, are the new back stories of many individual American tragedies and triumphs yet to be written. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 91 minutes)
Celluloid Dreams, headed by Hengameh Panahi, has acquired worldwide rights to the film Greetings From Tim Buckley, currently shooting in New York City, and starring Penn Badgley, Imogen Poots, Frank Wood, Norbert Leo Butz, Jessica Stone, Bill Sadler and Frank Bello. Dan Algrant is directing, from a script co-written with Emma Sheanshang and David Brendel.
Greetings From Tim Buckley unfolds through the prism of Jeff Buckley‘s romance with a young woman, which helps him come to understand the father who abandoned him. This culminates in a cathartic performance of his father’s most famous songs at a 1991 tribute concert, helping to launch his own solo career. Poots was high on the movie and looking forward to shooting in a recent conversation, so here’s hoping it turns out well; given the players and lineage of its subjects, it’s hard to fathom that it wouldn’t get a theatrical release.
To frame it in the form of a simile that baseball fans will understand, Ryan Gosling right now is like Greg Maddux in 1994 and ’95, or Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000 — just absolutely crushing it, turning in casually dazzling performances in such a fashion that it will be virtually impossible for him to further forestall a People‘s “Sexiest Man Alive” magazine cover. Yes, in case there were any remaining doubts, after having danced around and avoided it for several years, not unlike Johnny Depp, Gosling is now taking the bullet train to stardom. His latest film, Drive, amply drives home that point.
The story finds the forthrightly named Driver (Gosling, oozing utterly unforced cool) a quiet loner who does movie stunt work during the day and serves as a for-hire criminal wheelman at night, falling under the spell of his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a vulnerable young mother. When Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) gets out of jail, it lights a fuse of danger. Driver agrees to do a job to wipe clean Standard’s prison debt, but things go sideways, resulting in the further, unwanted scrutiny of a syndicate of deadly criminals.
Working from an adaptation of James Sallis’ eponymous novel by Academy Award nominee Hossein Amini, director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson) delivers a movie that pulses with an unwavering, premium-unleaded sense of purpose, giving its no-frills story a sense of supremely heightened stakes. Eschewing freeways and landmarks, Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel turn L.A. into an at once intimate, mystical and menacing place. The performances are top notch, and Drive‘s score (by Cliff Martinez) and music selections, too, are hypnotic and of a piece — nervous, pulsing and desirous gems that give the movie a dreamlike hold. Yes, this is somewhat recombinant terrain, previously tilled by Michael Mann, William Friedkin and David Lynch. But when it’s this utterly mesmerizing, who in their right mind is complaining? (FilmDistrict, R, 100 minutes)
A Good Old Fashioned Orgy and Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil costar Tyler Labine has the physicality, wit and jester’s eyes that mark him as the latest garrulous inheritor to the comedy scepter wielded previously by the likes of John Belushi, Chris Farley, Jack Black and Dan Fogler — which is to say a big guy with a bigger personality. In person, however, the thoughtful, soft-spoken Labine hardly seems a performer, let alone the likes of one who’s already carved out an impressive comedic presence in a relatively short period of time. I recently had the opportunity to chat one-on-one with the actor and burgeoning producer, about Orgy, sexual swinging spanning the last several decades, the correct quotable line from his Zack and Miri Make a Porno cameo (notice an emerging theme here?), why Ben Roethlisberger apparently doesn’t like him, and also his new TV pilot with Ryan Reynolds. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.
Over at ShockYa, for my latest DVD/Blu-ray column, I take a look at X-Men: First Class and January Jones’ ample cleavage, full-season sets of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Glee, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the Blu-ray debut of the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, a documentary on the United States’ rather tortured relationship with Cuba, and more. Again, it’s over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.
Of all the major cast members for the new ensemble comedy A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, about a mixed-gender group of longtime friends who settle upon going out with a bang (literally) when the beach home that’s served as the setting for their legendary summer parties for more than a decade is forcibly put up for sale, Michelle Borth might have been the most comfortable with the subject matter. Or at least the filming of the movie’s titular third act, which spanned at least a week and required all sorts of pasties to go along with its nudity.
After all, Borth is probably best known for the short-lived HBO series Tell Me You Love Me, which revolved around three couples in therapy experiencing different types of intimacy problems, and drew notice for depictions of sex so realistic that rumors the scenes were real had to be shot down. I had the chance recently to sit down and chat with the engaging 33-year-old actress, about Orgy, speeding tickets, themed parties, college regrets and more. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here to check it out.
