With its comfortably ramshackle plotting and character archetypes, director Daryl Wein’s offbeat romantic dramedy Lola Versus is on the one hand just another fairly sharp and sparkling showcase for a bit of solid joke-writing. But with a watchability that stems chiefly from a collection of nuanced observations about human frailty rather than any lip-nibbling, cutesy set-ups, the film exists and unfolds in a realistic miasma of bewilderment and late-twentysomething confusion. It’s a serially silly movie about the serious discombobulation of change in life — the shock and fear attached to it, and the swirl of ambivalence that rushes in to fill the void of old habits and routines. And though it didn’t find welcome reception in theaters earlier this year, Lola Versus should only grow in value and reputation with time, as wider mainstream audiences become more familiar with the rising star of Greta Gerwig.
The actress stars as the title character, a New York grad student working on a dissertation about society’s discomfort with silence. When her fiancé Luke (Joel Kinnaman), a painter, nervously dissolves their engagement just weeks before their destination wedding, Lola is devastated. Her parents (Bill Pullman and Debra Winger) swoop in to help bolster her spirits, and Lola also leans on her best friends — Alice (co-writer Zoe Lister-Jones, above left), a manic singleton, and Henry (Hamish Linklater), a sensitive indie rocker whose relationship with Lola extends back to their adolescence. Over the course of the next year, as Lola cycles through some bad decision-making and various love triangles form and dissipate both inside of her social circle and outside of it, Lola tries to locate her personal compass and get it situated upwards.
It’s true that the grander narrative arcs of Lola Versus eventually devolve into a collection of discrete bits: a pregnancy scare, a hypnotherapy appointment, and a couple bits involving Nick (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a one-time sexual coupling that Lola comes to regret. But there’s a funky energy here that helps the material transcend its navel-gazing roots, even if its final resting place of self-actualization is somewhat predetermined.
Lister-Jones and director Wein previously collaborated on 2009’s Breaking Upwards, a slyly autobiographical tale of a New York couple who, battling codependency, meticulously plot out their own separation. Their off-screen lives clearly also inform the backdrop and flavorings of Lola Versus, shot through with little bohemian asides and dialogue that crackles. Lola and Alice’s patter (“Is your Match.com log-in still let-me-be-your-hole?”) capture the easy rhythms of a friendship in which niceties are not paramount, while other bits score simply as one-liners. There are also some funny gags (like Alice confusing Oxycontin with Oxytocin) that are smoothly interwoven into the scenes surrounding them.
The acting, though, is what really elevates Lola Versus, trumping a fairly meandering narrative and making it such a treat. Zoe-Lister is quite fun, and gifted with an innate sense of comedic timing. And as Lola’s liberal-minded parents, Pullman and Winger are also delightful, beautifully filling in a backstory which is only hinted at. Then there’s Gerwig, whose expressive reactions and skillfully embodied vulnerability anchors the movie. Her choices are always interesting, conveying the choppy, at-odds inner cadences of a character who tries to argue her way out of a bad decision by exclaiming, “I’m slutty, but a good person!” She makes the film both funny and a bit heartrending.
Lola Versus lacks the adventurousness and certainly the stylishness of (500) Days of Summer, but it is a sort of more femme-centric version of that, crossed with Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture. One of those movies hit it big at the box office and the latter, like Lola Versus, disappeared with the tiny “plunk!” of a small pebble tossed off a pier into the ocean. But Dunham’s star rose again with HBO’s zeitgeist smash Girls, and the incandescence of Gerwig is such that it only remains a matter of time until her mainstream breakthrough.
The film’s Blu-ray bow features a 1080p treatment of the movie, in non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen with a DTS-HD master audio 5.1 track and optional French and Spanish language tracks. A fun audio commentary with Wein and Lister-Jones anchors a great slate of bonus materials, which also includes a polished little “Fox Movie Channel” featurette on Gerwig, and another featurette touting her charms. The disc’s other two featurettes focus on the filmmakers and the movie’s premiere, respectively. Rounding things out are a complement of deleted scenes and amusing outtakes, in which, yes, obscenities are amply showcased. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Tchoupitoulas
A lyrical nonfiction offering that could be viewed as a sort of companion piece to Beasts of the Southern Wild by way of Frederick Wiseman, Bill and Turner Ross’ Tchoupitoulas charts the journey of three young African-American brothers who head out onto the streets of New Orleans to experience the Big Easy‘s kaleidoscopic vibrancy. At once gorgeous and frustrating, alluring and tedious, the delicate movie is an undeniable example that, like physical beauty, the appeal of diffident, removed cinematic art is in the eye of the beholder.
Unfolding over the course of one night, Tchoupitoulas centers on William, Bryan and Kentrell Zanders, a trio of brothers who we first glimpse, pants slung low, bickering at home, in a manner familiar to all. Taking their dog out for a walk in the French quarter, the boys ruminate about Michael Jackson, hot dogs, heaven and their futures, drifting past strip clubs, bars and street proselytizers. After they miss a ferry back home, they knock about some more, exploring the night.
In its own malingering way, the film occasionally illuminates the magical thinking of adolescence (“I would be the first person to get my star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for flying,” says the youngest Zanders). But movies similar in tone and thematic exploration, like David Gordon Green’s George Washington and Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Position Among the Stars, all have cleaner through lines, stronger emotional engagement and more of a sense of honed purpose. Excepting its for the most part superlative technical rendering, Tchoupitoulas feels like a cinematic exercise grasping blindly for reason and statement — a beautifully crafted paragraph in search of a topic sentence. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 82 minutes)
This Is 40
After his 2005 smash hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow smartly diversified his holdings as a producer, but chose to center his next effort behind the camera around Freaks and Geeks alum and Virgin costar Seth Rogen. Knocked Up, about a one-night stand between two mismatched twentysomethings and the ensuing unplanned pregnancy, was a bawdy comedy with both hilarity and heart — a movie that was scathingly honest about the panic of early-onset (or even properly timed) adulthood.
Two of the supporting characters from that 2007 film — Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann’s married couple, meant to serve as the counterbalancing avatars of air-quote maturity to Rogen and Katherine Heigl‘s central, panicked parents-to-be — get their own spin-off in This Is 40, a mid-life-crisis dramedy being billed as “the sort-of sequel to Knocked Up.” It’s hugely disappointing, then, that Apatow’s woolly movie is such a mismanaged mess. It would be one thing if it was just a case of baited expectations unmet. Long of running time and short on laughs, though, This Is 40 doesn’t even have the discipline and focus to locate much by way of bittersweet truth attached to adult relationship drift.
Los Angelenos Pete (Rudd) and Debbie (Mann) are frazzled dad and mom to 13-year-old Sadie (Maude Apatow) and 8-year-old Charlotte (Iris Apatow). He’s the owner of a boutique record label endeavoring to break the latest album of Graham Parker; she owns a trendy boutique where she never really bothers to show up to work, even as her two employees (Charlyne Yi and Megan Fox) spin different tales about the shop’s missing $12,000. The movie at first seems to be about a long-term couple struggling to get along — Pete’s instinctive need to pull away for private time, versus Debbie’s highly emotional reactions — and the difficulties inherent in maintaining both individual personalities and a loving union when also having to juggle the still-present responsibilities of post-diaper-changing parenthood.
It slowly expands, though, incorporating Pete’s money-mooching father (Albert Brooks), himself the new-ish dad of a set of triplets, as well as Debbie’s mostly absent biological father (John Lithgow), who drifts into frame after a seven-year gap for reasons never really explained. Each of these parents contribute in some way to Pete and Debbie’s emotional hedges and dodges, as do normal sibling bickering and the challenges of locating family time amidst the ever-present tethering of electronic connection. When rising financial concerns throw things further into relief, Pete and Debbie’s very commitment is put to the test.
Apatow’s roomy sense of comedy is largely predicated on the law of averages — of simply winding up disparate characters, defining (sometimes loosely, sometimes more concretely) how they’re at odds, and then believing that his actors’ improvisational runs are going to bail him out more often than not. But in This Is 40 the outcome feels more disjointed than ever. Apatow tempers his high fidelity toward topical one-liners (a plus or minus, depending on one’s point-of-view, but certainly a tack that could allow for a more timeless offering), yet doesn’t replace it with much more than a pinch of inside-the-married-mind insight. He nails most readily the latent combination of petulant and whimsical masculine neediness (Pete and his best friend wax philosophical about their spouses passing away, since widowers are regarded as hot and sensitive types to be nurtured, preferably by way of oral sex), but Apatow’s take on Debbie remains frustratingly inscrutable, which is needless to say problematic.
The result overall feels less like a panoramic study of modern adult- and familyhood and more like a series of tasked self-reflections for which its creator doesn’t have the stomach. Time and time again, Apatow flinches as Pete and Debbie’s discord and disregard for one another edges up toward something truly nasty, in favor of discrete bits which allow for the movie’s many recognizable supporting players (including Jason Segal, Lena Dunham, Bridesmaids co-writer Annie Mumolo and two of the stars of that Apatow-produced hit, Chris O’Dowd and Melissa McCarthy) to show up and drop some outrageous, modestly curated freestyle.
Since Mann is Apatow’s real-life wife, and their two daughters also star in the movie, it’s fun if a bit unnerving to speculate how much of this stems from real-life angst and issues. But it matters not in terms of the broader picture, since This Is 40 builds so falsely to its shrug-inducing finale. Despite setting up a rich (and easy) opportunity for their appearance, there are no cameos here from Heigl or Rogen — nor ever even any mention of their characters. And it’s perhaps that small factoid that’s most emblematic of the film’s failings. In lieu of cameos that could interestingly and more substantively color and reflect its characters’ journeys, Apatow peppers This Is 40 with random throwaway bits that awkwardly abut familial recrimination which otherwise also lacks the biting observational truth of the best (or even second-best) of James Brooks or Cameron Crowe. Rent Funny People instead. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Universal, R, 134 minutes)
The Frozen
A low budget psychological thriller that makes good use of the resources it has, The Frozen avoids a lot of genre pitfalls in telling a deceptively simple story of strain, environment and the human condition.
Having embarked upon a perhaps inadvisable winter camping trip, Mike (Seth David Mitchell) and his girlfriend Emma (Brit Morgan, not to be confused with Brit Marling) suffer a snowmobile accident and get stranded in the deep woods. Emma reveals her pregnancy, and an argument ensues. When Mike disappears after trying to work on the snowmobile, a stressed-out Emma — who’s already seeing things that may not be there — is left to battle the elements and elude a mysterious man (Noah Segan) who’s seemingly tracked the pair through the forest.
Written and directed by Andrew Hyatt, The Frozen trends a bit more arthouse than a simpler rendering of its basic conceit might suggest. The grappling-with-a-stranger-in-wintry-elements set-up is of course ripe for genre stalking, but Hyatt has other plans. Along with cinematographer Max Gutierrez, he constructs an effectively muted palette for the movie that matches its emotional chilliness. The lingering problem, however? Some poor editing choices, courtesy of David Heinz. The end result, all in all — the smooth merging of story and environment — is not quite as skillfully executed as something like 2007’s Wind Chill, starring Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes, but neither does it quite need to be.
The reason for that lies chiefly in Morgan’s solid, attention-holding performance, and Hyatt’s smart instincts in not wildly overplaying things in an effort to drum up too many desultory scares. Partially about the wild, partially about slipping-knot sanity and partially about… something else, The Frozen is a comfortably unnerving genre treat — canted and alluring in ways that seemingly independent features of this sort only ever really get to be. It’s not perfect, by any means (one wishes it trusted itself a bit more), but hey, it’s better than Dream House.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, The Frozen comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Apart from the movie’s trailer, there are no supplemental features, which is a shame, since one figures Hyatt would have a good bit to say about both its production and conception. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)
The Guilt Trip
In her first starring role in more than 15 years, Barbara Streisand tweaks the cheeks of Seth Rogen, starring as his worrywart mother in The Guilt Trip, a good-natured road movie of pantomimed meddling and make-nice closure that doesn’t fully root down into its characters and pay off its revelations in truly substantive fashion. Small stakes and consistently tame inclinations mark screenwriter Dan Fogelman’s effort, which gives off an ambling vibe that would be more at home in an independent production. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, PG-13, 93 minutes)
The Girl
A well-meaning but rather inert borderland drama about a single Texas mother who, while in the process of trying to reunite with her son, becomes entangled with a young would-be illegal immigrant, The Girl is a decent showcase for the Australian-born Abbie Cornish, which explains its limited, awards-qualifying run in advance of its wider, March 2013 theatrical release. Still, the film is too limited in scope and too predictable to transcend its social-issue movie-of-the-week roots as a tear-jerker designed to play on the feelings of particularly maternal independent film fans. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Brainstorm Media, unrated, 94 minutes)
16 Acres
Ever wonder exactly how and why, more than a decade since the September 11 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York City, the site’s rebuilding hasn’t been completed, or in fact even come close? Enter director Richard Hankin’s 16 Acres, a vital and in certain ways even cathartic documentary overview of the sort of sharp-elbowed but slow-footed bureaucratic maneuvering that comes with city planning, most especially of a site this fraught with emotional baggage. At once fascinating and maddening, it’s a clear-eyed, fair-minded and exhaustively sourced look at the sort of story that national news organizations often have a hard time distilling and tracking through time.
Aside from the often under-reported staggering engineering challenges related to the river-adjacent tract of land, a major complicating factor in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is the massive number of parties involved. Real estate developers, insurance companies, architects, local residents, families of first responders and other 9/11 victims and of course politicians all lay claim to the area in various fashion, and have often had mutually exclusive feelings about what sort of rebuilding is appropriate. Just as a matter of sheer dramatic surface engagement, then, 16 Acres delivers an engrossing tale.
A few of the highlights: developer Larry Silverstein, the owner of the site who was left still paying $10 million a month in rent after the attacks, filed a lawsuit over whether the felling of the WTC Towers was one incident or two separate events, for the purpose of recouping as much insurance money as possible. After initial plans for a new WTC site were scrapped, an international open competition was held. Then, after two finalists were named, New York Governor George Pataki unilaterally reversed the decision of the commission charged with studying and choosing the winning design, even after word leaked in the press of the supposed winner.
Architect Daniel Libeskind was picked for his visionary master plan, but had no experience at all with skyscraper design. Silverstein, then, brought in yet another architect, David Childs. Naturally, their visions clashed — as did the feelings of some families of victims with Michael Arad’s widely praised design for a reflecting pool-type memorial. And lest one think good, old-fashioned snafus couldn’t be part of the mix, the final, meticulously arrived at building design then had to be scuttled due to security concerns somehow lost in transit between the Port Authority and the New York Police Department. “At some point the anger just gives way to depression,” says one interviewee, and you totally feel where he’s coming from.
The victory of Hankin’s film is its scope and open airing of all these contrasting opinions. Both Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg submit to interviews, as well as Silverstein, the aforementioned architects and many other less well known figures, including reporters who covered the story for the New York Times and other publications. The result doesn’t demonize anyone unfairly. It’s a story about ego and hubris, yes, but also the better angels of our nature. Maybe Winston Churchill was really on to something when he said, famously, that after every option has been exhausted, Americans can be counted on to do the right thing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. (Tanexis Productions, unrated, 92 minutes)
Any Day Now
A warmly captured, wonderfully sketched, 1970s period piece social-issue drama starring Alan Cumming and Garret Dillahunt, Any Day Now tells the story of a gay Los Angeles couple fighting to at first legalize and then establish the permanence of their adoption of a neglected teenager with Down Syndrome. Engaging performances and a beguiling, unfussy technique anchor this big-hearted tearjerker, which cycles through some familiar territory but also deftly and movingly sidesteps conventional wisdom about where this tale may end up. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Music Box Films, unrated, 97 minutes)
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
A very mannered but deadly dull period piece drama of partially upended, stuffy social customs in which things like, “Dolly, dearest Dolly!” are earnestly exclaimed, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is a ruinous vehicle for the incandescence of Felicity Jones. What could on the surface be something lively and spry, a la Oliver Wilde, is instead neither a spirited tale of romantic competition nor a hand-wringing story of fated love. It just lays there, at once familiar and inert.
The story centers around Dolly Thatcham (Jones), an English bride-to-be who spends a good bit of her wedding weekend holed upstairs in her family’s country mansion. This is the source of no small consternation to her tightly wound mother (Elizabeth McGovern), who knows nothing of Dolly’s dalliance the previous summer with the dashing Joseph Patten (Luke Treadaway, above right), who’s shown up to… well, it’s not yet quite clear what. While Kitty (Ellie Kendrick), Dolly’s younger sister, wanders about complaining about the lack of suitable suitors in her life, Joseph tries to make inroads into stealing a bit of private time with Dolly, to suss out whether she still might have feelings for him.
Director Donald Rice, working from a script co-written with Mary Henely Magill, adapts Julia Strachey’s 1932 novel of the same name with a slavish devotion to the literal that borders on suffocation. It certainly doesn’t help that Dolly’s betrothed, Owen (James Norton), is a complete nonentity, both as sketched and rendered; ergo, there’s no sense of proper balance or dramatic tension in Dolly’s affinity for these two men. But Rice and his technical crew also trade in the most obvious shorthand, crafting warm-hued flashbacks that stand in stark contrast to the chilly formalism of the movie’s setting proper.
The lead performances are okay — Jones has a quietly expressive face, and Treadaway a handsomeness that shades and elevates the motivations of an otherwise hopelessly mopey character — but the movie’s entire backdrop, in both its setting and supporting cast of characters, is fruitlessly bland. Some family members chirp and back-bite, others wander around in a haze. Viewers, meanwhile, might wish that the conversation turned to Cheerful Weather, if only so then there would be something interesting being talked about. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC, unrated, 97 minutes)
American Empire
A jumbled nonfiction jeremiad of raw-nerve feeling built around at once ominous and vague proclamations of “where we’re going” as a country, American Empire is like a vitamin B-boosted espresso shot for left-leaning paranoiacs. A whispery, overwritten voiceover of dread by someone who sounds a lot like a dinner theater Holly Hunter impersonator doesn’t much help matters, but director Patrea Patrick’s film chiefly suffers from a scattershot focus that finds it alighting on a variety of social and economic issues without ever really connecting the dots in grand fashion like it believes it’s doing.
After a meandering preamble, the movie settles into a brief history of the Federal Reserve Act, a sort of cartel agreement forged on Jekyll Island in 1910 by Frank Vanderlip, lieutenants of J.P. Morgan and other titans of finance. Before American Empire can fully devolve into a rage stimulus package for disaffected Ron Paul followers (“Audit the Fed!”), however, it spins off into issues of agriculture — including food security, genetic modification and independence from monoculture cropping — water safety and other environmental concerns, only to then double back to corporate tax avoidance and other issues of fiscal fairness and a level economic playing field.
There are a few arresting flashes of what passes for new (or at least very under-reported) news, like WikiLeaks revealing U.S. cables that the government drew up plans to retaliate against European nations who resisted GMO seed crops. But American Empire, in its slapdash construction and lazy attempts to appeal in back-patting fashion to its core constituency, never builds up a head of steam. Instead it merely lurches to and fro, passing off as incontestable the passionate opinions of its many interviewed authors, academics and activists. “I think the empire is revealing itself, in many respects — it’s becoming pretty obvious that dastardly deeds are being done,” says one interviewee; “Clearly there will be attempts to resist [change], and shoot people,” says another. Well… not really clearly.
To boot, stock footage and edited news clips are choppily interspersed amidst interview tidbits, with little care for contextual elucidation. By the time the movie delves into “codex aliementarius,” endorsing fringe assertions that United Nations agreements are being imposed on top of American law, it comes off as truly black helicopter stuff — the unhinged, barely comprehensible rantings of a well-educated nutter, but a nutter nonetheless. There’s the well-meaning soul of a connected, socially conscious citizen here, it’s just that the manic, poorly made American Empire is a notably deficient vessel for its (many) messages. American Empire opens in Los Angeles this week at the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information about the movie, click here to visit its website. (Heartfelt Films, unrated, 95 minutes)
Jack Reacher
A surprisingly dark noir heart beats at the center of Jack Reacher, Tom Cruise‘s effort to establish a new franchise beachhead to complement the Mission: Impossible movies. Based on author Lee Child’s series, 18 novels and counting, about an off-the-grid former military investigator turned crusading antihero, director Christopher McQuarrie’s film is a confident, appealing genre piece built on a solid foundation of smartly modulated friction, blending old-fashioned fisticuffs with an engaging murder inquiry that reeks of mysterious frame-up. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, PG-13, 130 minutes)
Trashed
A vividly sketched documentary of environmental warning which deploys co-producer Jeremy Irons as its inquisitive guide, Trashed sets out to discover the full extent of the world’s waste management problem, and diagnose its dangerous and rapidly increasing consequences for humankind. Directed by Candida Brady, the movie serves as a compelling indictment of modern profligacy, and a call to action for both aggressive macro reforms and sensible but pointed overhauls in individual behavior.
Trashed opens in Lebanon, where Irons, serving as an interviewer/audience escort, not unlike Keanu Reeves in this year’s Side by Side, visits a seaside Beirut suburb where 80 tons of refuse per day are added to a huge garbage mountain. Sadly but predictably, this has had a huge impact on the Mediterranean Sea, where waste and run-off, swept up by currents, reaches as far as Italy. While it dips into the usual big-picture statistics, using them like a fighter’s jab, Trashed continues for most of its running time in much this fashion, offering up discrete, targeted snapshots of lingering and problematic garbage dumps and burn-off pollution. Driven by a rangy ambition, Brady cycles from a look at the North Pacific Gyre (whose unusually intense concentration of man-made debris startled scientists several years ago) to a town in France where dioxin emission levels are 13,000 times the allowable rate, and a special-needs orphanage and child care center in Vietnam where the effects of the rampant use of Agent Orange are still being felt decades later.
Its mode is sometimes a bit on the nose (composer Vangelis contributes a score that, especially early on, heartily depresses the buttons of ill-omened dread), but lest one think something like Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men was too fanciful, Trashed does a good job in connecting the dots between present-day marine animal problems and a rise in human infertility, as well as the chances for a future tipping point if nothing is done now.
Plastics in and of themselves aren’t the problem, Brady’s film argues; it’s the combination of their ubiquity along with the fact that we’ve accepted, nurtured (and even celebrated) a disposable consumer culture. Hundreds and even thousands of years ago, the earth could be counted on to reliably recycle the sum total waste of human existence, since it consisted chiefly of materials like wood, paper, copper and even iron, all of which would eventually decay. Plastics, however, break down at an exponentially slower rate, and also leach dangerous chemicals — especially in water — that are not found in nature.
While exhaustively researched and compellingly stitched together, Trashed doesn’t expend quite as much energy assaying governmental policies and perspectives on this looming problem, apart from highlighting the dispiriting degree to which big-money corporate lobbying helps set agendas and protect habitual polluters in the United Kingdom and other industrialized nations every bit as much as in the United States. Still, Brady’s film is an alarm that can’t be ignored; socially conscious cineastes would be wise to support it as much as they can.
Trashed opens this week in New York City at the Quad Cinema and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. At the latter venue, director Brady and Captain Charles Moore, an interviewee from the film, will be present for a special Q&A on opening night. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (First Pond Entertainment/Bleinheim Films, unrated, 97 minutes)
Collision Earth (Blu-ray)
Science fiction serials and films get a bad rap for a lot of reasons, and a lot of the more sophisticated offerings are often rated PG-13 or R, or relegated to international territories (as with Dr. Who) that come with their own set of stigmas or viewing challenges. So how are much younger kids — the sci-fi fans of the future — supposed to find suitable inroads into the genre?
Enter the SyFy Channel, which has made a mission out of peddling futuristic action dramas and apocalyptic doomsday fare to audiences of a younger demographic. The two meet in Collision Earth, a movie no one would necessarily mistake for high art, but one that nonetheless checks a lot of boxes of intrigue for less discerning viewers.
Penned by Ryan Landels and directed by Paul Ziller, the movie centers on a massive comet that strikes the sun and knocks Mercury out of its orbit, which has disastrous consequences for Earth. With the now-magnetized heavenly body drifting closer and unleashing all sorts of gravitational chaos, a disgraced scientist (Kirk Acevedo) and the lone surviving crew member on a crippled, distant space shuttle (Diane Farr) must work together to reactivate a top secret planetary defense system and try to avert this extinction-level event.
Collision Earth‘s budgetary limitations definitely constrain the scope of its story, as well as its psychological hold. And the movie doesn’t fully escape the tendency that far too many sci-fi films have to bend and bow to action rather than work through their theories on a more intellectualized plane. But if one forgives it these shortcomings and some hammy dialogue, there’s an interesting story here, buoyed by invested lead performances and competent editing. And the scariness never becomes overwhelming, making this a nice little sci-fi introduction for the younger ones in your brood.
Housed in a regular Blu-ray case, Collision Earth comes to the format presented in a 1080p 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, with a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. As for bonus features… well, apart from a couple trailers on start-up, there are none. Nevertheless, to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)
Dragons: Riders of Berk
A spinoff to 2010’s wonderful How to Train Your Dragon, the animated Riders of Berk collects a quartet of small screen adventures continuing the story of Hiccup, Toothless and fearless friends.
The cinematography and scope of animation (especially in its 3-D presentation) was a huge part of what made How to Train Your Dragon so special, and in its whittled-down, less complicated form, some of the lack of that same level of visual flourish feels like a bummer. The stories here, which are very much of the self-contained variety, find young Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) again frequently clashing with his Viking father, but the fact that so many of the main voice cast — save Gerard Butler, Kristen Wiig and Jonah Hill, really — returns to this serial presentation helps mitigate the rather wan token antagonism, in the form of Mildew (voiced by Stephen Root). Well… at least for younger, less demanding audiences.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Dragons: Riders of Berk comes to DVD presented in a sharp, 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features are limited to a couple previews, including that of Rise of the Guardians and How to Train Your Dragon‘s live show, though it’s worth noting that a set of five collectible cards spotlighting different dragons is also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Crazy Eyes
A boozy exercise in cinematic self-indulgence that cross-pollinates Leaving Las Vegas, Bret Easton Ellis and the worst instincts of precious Hollywood navel-gazing, writer-director Adam Sherman’s Crazy Eyes at least gives mousy lead Lukas Haas a chance to live out the dream of playing a lothario, if nothing else.
Even though he’s divorced and has a five-year-old son, Zach (Haas) seems to enjoy his hard-partying, Los Angeles lifestyle, abetted by a trust fund that means he doesn’t really have to work. A functional alcoholic who mainly hangs around with his bartending pal Dan (Jake Busey) and juggles a seemingly endless rotation of temporary jock-warmers, Zach finds himself thrown for a loop when he comes across the flirty but withholding Rebecca (Madeline Zima), whom he dubs “Crazy Eyes.” Damaged and no less dependent on booze for escape, Rebecca starts spending a lot of time with Zach, but keeps him at bay, both physically and emotionally (“I might be in love with someone else, I should check…”).
Zach becomes even more obsessed. His parents (Ray Wise and Valerie Mahaffey) pop up for Thanksgiving, and then his dad suffers a stroke that lands him in the hospital. Still, Zach is mainly concerned with having Rebecca; he’s basically blind to everything else in life, even though neither he nor Rebecca completely stop seeing other folks on the side.
Sherman (Happiness Runs) underlines and highlights every point he wishes to make in Crazy Eyes (Zach is yearning for a deeper human connection, don’tcha know), and the tone here is meandering to the point of near-psychosis. Not all of the drunk-acting is bad, but neither Haas nor Zima is able to strongly convey a three-dimensional character. So many of the narrative tidbits herein seem arbitrary, and ergo the film fritters away any chance at making a viewer care about the plights of its damaged souls.
Presumably housed in a regular plastic Amaray case (this review was based on a screener copy), Crazy Eyes comes to DVD in anamorphic widescreen with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track. Its menu screen features a bit of flickering fluorescent lights in the bar sign rendering of its title (a nice touch), but apart from trailers of this and a couple other Strand titles there are no supplemental bonus features, which feels especially like a cheat on a movie so purportedly rooted in autobiography. D (Movie) D+ (Disc)
Playing for Keeps
A thoroughly unconvincing dramedy about an ex-soccer star juggling the demands of more involved fatherhood and suburban nookie, Playing for Keeps is tonal misfire that attempts to pivot into romantic reconciliation and tap into the same vein of awakened responsibility and maturation as People Like Us. It fails. Seemingly designed chiefly to lionize the irresistible masculinity of producer-star, Gerard Butler, the movie’s lack of commitment to consistent character traits results in an aggravating and wishy-washy combination of treacly sentimentality and male fantasy. What could have been a more complicated and contemporary suburban spin on Alfie feels like a lazy and anonymous daydream postcard of discord and resolution. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (FilmDistrict, 105 minutes, PG-13)
Who Bombed Judi Bari?
An Earth First! environmental activist who battled the logging industry’s clear-cutting of old forest redwoods in Northern California, Judi Bari was the victim of a 1990 car bomb that left her seriously injured. Then, she and her passenger found themselves under arrest, accused by the FBI and Oakland Police Department of being eco-terrorists who accidentally detonated their own bomb. Who Bombed Judi Bari?, then, is both a document of her eventual exoneration in the wake of a sham investigation and various false affidavits, but also a nonfiction tribute to the steel-spined spirit of Bari and other dedicated non-violent activists who, in standing up for their principles, coped as well with terrible and nefarious push-back from powerful governmental bureaucracy.
The movie is built around deposition testimony from Bari (pronounced “berry”) in a 2002 civil suit, which gives it a nice framing device from which to flash back and forward in time. Darryl Cherney, the other victim of the bombing, is a producer on the project, so the movie obviously has an invested, canted point-of-view. But its evidence is so overwhelming and completely obvious (in addition to being backed up by a $4.4 million vindication in a jury trial in which six of seven law enforcement officers were essentially tabbed as having framed the victims) that dispassionate objectivity is not a tone required for this story.
Besides, Who Bombed Judi Bari? doesn’t aim for an arcing overview of Bari’s homebase organization, Earth First!, in the manner that the recent We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists offers up a fairly comprehensive history of the decentralized online collective Anonymous. It doesn’t have to. In focusing — as its title augurs — more specifically on the still unsolved act of violence perpetrated against Bari and Cherney, director Mary Liz Thomson’s movie tells a story with much more gripping immediacy, and then allows viewers to connect the dots of incompetence, malicious disregard or darker conspiracy in their mind however they might choose.
The most amazing thing is just how focused, articulate and utterly unflappable Bari (and Cherney) remain in the face of such enormous difficulties and pressure. Thomson’s film will make you think, and it will make you mad. It will also make you think about how Bari and Cherney didn’t merely succumb to pure anger, but instead focused and used that energy to work within the justice system and impact change. It’s a positive, important lesson that’s even bigger than the stirring environmental tale at its core. Who Bombed Judi Bari? opens exclusively in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7; Ed Begley and other personalities will join the filmmakers in attendance. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Hokey Pokey Productions, unrated, 93 minutes)
Waiting for Lightning
Another descendant of Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta’s influential 2001 documentary about the 1970s rise of popular skateboarding culture and the colorful characters who populated it, Waiting for Lightning details the life story of visionary skater, daredevil and X Games star Danny Way, building up to his 2005 attempt to jump the Great Wall of China. A slick technical package and a willingness to peer at least a bit into the difficult childhood and fractured psyche of its subject give this movie a leg up on a lot of its less inquisitive, like-minded, hagiographic stunt spectaculars, like Nitro Circus: The Movie. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, unrated, 96 minutes)
Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home
Narrated by Catherine Keener, Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home provides a poignant, illuminating look at the titular downtown Los Angeles area which serves as the residence to a large portion of the city’s indigent population. Far from just serving as an audio-visual grief mop — prodding viewers with images of despair — director Thomas Napper’s deeply humanistic movie throws a non-exploitative spotlight on people who have both found a way to make a life for themselves within this community of homelessness and also make themselves of greater service.
Skid Row, covering about one square mile, serves as home base for as many as 11,000 Los Angelenos, two-thirds of whom struggle with some form of mental illness, drug addiction or both. In uncompromising fashion, Lost Angels tells its story, funneled through eight inhabitants as well as a variety of advocates and volunteers who man various community outreach service programs. In doing so, the movie lays waste to certain misconceptions about both those who pass through Skid Row (meet Danny Harris, a scholarship track athlete and former Olympic medalist) and some of their reasons for being there, since single-dwelling units on a meager disability stipend are hardly affordable anywhere else (“We’re not here because we’re homeless — just less of home, maybe,” says one woman).
The film also shows the squeeze on the homeless on both sides — how the increased gentrification of the area has coincided with the tail end of changes in the mental health care system and the increased criminalization of behavior (loitering and the like) that is not as strictly policed elsewhere. The latter is sorted through the prism of Los Angeles’ controversial September 2006 “Safer Cities” initiative, a $6 million campaign launched under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William Bratton in which 50 new dedicated police officers were given new mandates for enforcement without the promised expansion of social services.
Both in its focus on those on the margins of society and its frequently artful blend of direct-address interviews and landscape footage, Lost Angels recalls Interview Project, a 2009 web series executive produced by David Lynch. Interviewees like UCLA law professor Gary Blasi and others provide an articulate (and much more traditional) academic assessment of the different causes of this social blight. However, it’s the Skid Row residents themselves — like transgendered, self-described freak Bam Bam, dedicated street sweeper OG, and stray cat lover Lee Anne and her protector and fiancé KK (above) — whose faces and stories will stick with you. Lost Angels opens this week in Los Angeles for an exclusive engagement at the ArcLight Hollywood. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Cinema Libre, unrated, 75 minutes)
What a Man
The idea of a wacky, modern German relationship comedy may seem at first unfeasible given the dour reputation of its homeland, but that’s just what multi-hyphenate Matthias Schweighöfer’s What a Man is. An unlikely and generally winning if utterly formulaic blend of male fretfulness and romantic bloom rooted in friendship, the film serves as further ample proof that some fairy tales of amorous connection have universal appeal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox International/Paladin, R, 95 minutes)
Buffalo Girls
An unflinching and unadorned look at Thailand’s underground world of children’s boxers — of which there are over 30,000, including many young females — Buffalo Girls is a nonfiction film tailormade for the scrunchy-faced, hand-wringing concern of the NPR set, a surprising and sad glimpse into a heretofore unknown subculture that will have any sensible first-worlder saying, “Hey… at least I don’t have it that bad.”
The movie unfolds mostly in Rayong changwat — a low-lying coastal province in the south central area of the country, nestled against the Gulf of Thailand — and its title is a nod to the local derogatory term for the poor farmers that dot the region. It takes as its two subjects two eight-year-olds (yes, you read that right), Stam and Pet, who have taken up Muay Thai prizefighting to help provide for their families. As mentioned, this isn’t some exotic curiosity, but rather an entire industry. While there is a pinch of pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow self-betterment incentive involved, for many families this is viewed as something of an economic necessity.
So Stam (above) and Pet — the former a cheery little warrior who wears make-up in the ring, the latter a sometimes reticent survivor of a crippling childhood illness who sports a partially shaved head as part of her mother’s prayer deal for her health — train like any other athletes, lifting little weights and honing their roundhouse kicks. Eventually, they square off for the 44-pound championship title, with a cash prize that could forever change the lives of one family.
Director Todd Kellstein takes a largely hands-off approach to his subject matter, not unlike fellow documentarians Frederick Wiseman or Yung Chang, though with admittedly more of an emphasis on interview footage than either of those filmmakers. There is significant thematic overlap with the recent Girl Model, which focuses in large part on a pubescent Eastern European who gives modeling in Japan a crack in an effort to help her family, and also didn’t offer up easy, empty advocacy.
But Kellstein’s fly-on-the-wall tack, while fair, also eventually comes off as indifferent, or at least an intellectual dodge. There is a difference, after all, between passing judgment on a subject and subjecting it to honest questioning. When a bookie, Walee Niyom, talks about in-fight baht kickbacks or pledges that various bettors make to fighters, in an attempt to encourage greater effort, the film doesn’t fully dig into this. Nor is its explanation of the country’s kiddie-level fight scene infrastructure solid, in any particular way, shape or form.
Stam and Pet are engaging kids, and their situations make them sympathetic subjects. But Kellstein confuses an implicit and sidelong inquiry into the exploitative underbelly of this unusual subculture with a complete lack of mooring context. The result feels frustratingly aimless, even as one wonders about the futures of these and other little girls. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. Buffalo Girls opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. (Union Entertainment Group, unrated, 64 minutes)
Klitschko
Proving its subjects uncommon thinkers as well as uncommon fighters, documentary Klitschko is a surprisingly humanizing and informative look at the Ukrainian-born world champion boxing brothers of the same surname. Striking a nice balance between the personal and professional and for the most part avoiding the pitfalls of overly worshipful hagiography, the movie casts a spotlight on a deep, sincere and certainly much more well adjusted fraternal love than on display in last year’s Oscar-winning The Fighter.
Shot over the course of two years by director Sebastian Dehnhardt, Klitschko has an immediate currency, given the brothers’ collective lock on the five heavyweight championship boxing belts (and correlative promise to their mother not to fight one another). Few documentaries of this depth and considerable access come out this close to the apex of an athlete’s career. Still, Klitschko is mostly gripping or at the very least as interesting for what it gets into outside of the ring as what the insight it provides into professional boxing. The sons of a career military man, Vitali, six years older, and Wladimir (above right), the softer spoken of the two, translated the driven nature and communicated high expectations of their parents into success in both school (both would eventually earn post-graduate degrees) and boxing. Remarkably, though separated in age by a good bit, the two share an amazingly tight bond, and seemingly the same otherworldly focus required to hone their bodies into the physical specimens they are today.
Interviews with former combatants like Lennox Lewis, Lamon Brewster and Chris Byrd provide a nice outside perspective, and help underscore a largely unspoken but still ever-present current coursing through the film — that of the brothers as Cold War proxies, and therefore fighters whose talents (and, later, accomplishments) were not to be trusted, but instead denigrated. The Klitschkos’ mother and father share significant, shading family memories, but it’s the brothers themselves who are of course the main attraction. Dehnhardt allows the Klitschkos — who are each conversationally fluent in English — to speak mostly in their native tongues, allowing the amusing, idiosyncratic nuances of their recollections to more fully come through.
If it’s a bit overlong for some details to not be seemingly given their full due — like Vitali’s temporary retirement and foray into Ukrainian politics, in which he remains still active today — Klitschko at least showcases behemoth athletic champions who are worthy of role model status for reasons other than just their physical accomplishments. And the fact that its title is singular and not plural… well, that says something too.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Klitschko comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen, with Dolby 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround sound audio tracks and optional English subtitles. Bonus features consist of the movie’s theatrical trailer, plus previews for other Corinth titles, as well as a nice selection of deleted scenes. Given that the Klitschkos themselves provide such a voice for the movie, it would have been nice to hear a bit more from Dehnhardt in this arena, via a commentary track or something of the sort. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is still your thing, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)