A deeply but pleasantly weird sort of Southern Gothic battle royale, The Baytown Outlaws is a boisterous, sweat-soaked mash-up of The Boondock Saints, Smokin’ Aces, Wild Things and Sucker Punch (minus the latter’s material excess). While stipulating that at its core it’s fairly slight — and also constructed of prefabricated parts and characters who, despite their colorful nature, are basically kind of hoary clichés — it’s also hard to deny that director Barry Battles’ zonked-out genre romp, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Eva Longoria and a couple lesser known faces, is an awful lot of fun.
The film reaches a certain point of diminishing return, particularly as it tries to pivot in its third act, and deliver a more reasoned, grounded moment of emotional growth for its titular brothers. The Baytown Outlaws is more successful when it’s just wheeling and dealing, in batshit-insane fashion, through oddball set-ups and gnarly, knotted retribution. Still, the originality on display makes this energetic crime comedy curio worth a look for fans of the actors, certainly, and low-budget genre enthusiasts to boot. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Phase 4 Films, R, 98 minutes)
All posts by Brent
The Good Doctor (Blu-ray)
A solidly constructed little character study of dark romantic bloom commingled with slipping knot mental instability, The Good Doctor finds producer-star Orlando Bloom once again attempting to strike out and proactively define a screen personality separate and distinct from the blockbuster pin-up status conferred upon him by the Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings movies. The scale and stakes are much smaller than in something like The Talented Mr. Ripley (and the behavioral urges somewhat different as well), but director Lance Daly (Kisses) capably pulls strings in a manner that elicits tension and also elucidates the impulses of obsession.
Bloom stars as Dr. Martin Blake, an ambitious but insecure young doctor in the early days of his residency. Already nervous about making a good impression on his supervisor and would-be mentor, Dr. Waylans (Rob Morrow), and concerned with the impact of a minor slip-up on his chances at an end-of-year fellowship, Martin lives each day with an electrical storm of anxiety and quiet contempt for others raging in his head. He looks down his nose at Jimmy (Michael Peña), an admittedly less-than-professional orderly, and takes disproportionate offense at the slights of Theresa (Taraji P. Henson), a nurse whom he feels doesn’t show him the proper deference and respect.
When a teenage patient, Diane (Riley Keough), is admitted with a relatively minor kidney infection, Martin gains self-esteem from aiding in her recovery, and strikes up a friendship with her. Martin’s interest soon becomes warped, however, and when Diane’s condition improves he begins tampering with her treatment in order to bring her back into his life. When Jimmy later discovers evidence of this, it further compromises Martin’s professional future.
The Good Doctor effectively threads the needle between intimate character study and psychological thriller. Working from a script by John Enbom, Daly delivers a spare portrait of howling neediness that unfolds in a world without a lot of extra flourishes in setting or scope. There’s a smart, compact focus to the movie (even the specific city in which it unfolds is meaningless, apart from a coastal connection) that puts an audience right alongside Martin, and believably in his head, while still allowing for slight modulations in tone. It’s a different animal from something like Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, but similar in that it is both at home with and achieves intrigue, dark comedy and a slowly escalating tension and uncertainty about how things will play out.
The precision of Daly and cinematographer Yaron Orbach’s wide frames abet the actors, allowing for a rich and subtle interplay of action and reaction. Morrow is excellent, Keough is radiant and enchanting, and Peña is amusing as a smarmy, weaselly clock-puncher looking to capitalize on his bit of informational leverage. Bloom’s performance is very occasionally a bit self-conscious (he seems an actor always aware of the camera’s position) but also restrained. He succeeds in tapping into Martin’s vulnerability and self-delusion in equal measure — no small task.
The fairly late introduction of an investigating detective (J.K. Simmons), while meant to ratchet up the stakes, feels a bit like a rushed gambit to bring closure and finality to the narrative. Still, The Good Doctor doesn’t opt for a pat conclusion or render a moral judgment writ large. Its open-endedness is an enchanting conversation-starter — and bound to conjure up speculation about the out-of-office lives of your own care providers during your next doctor’s appointment.
Coming to Blu-ray in a regular case, The Good Doctor comes to the format in a superb 1080p high definition transfer, with rich color consistency and no edge enhancement or artifacting issues. The soundtrack, a 5.1 DTS-HD master audio track, is nice and subtle, abetting the movie’s understated atmosphere. Apart from the obligatory chapter stops, the movie’s theatrical trailer and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, bonus features consist of two short behind-the-scenes featurettes — a 10-minute bit that intersperses clips and on-set interviews, and a five-minute, even more promotionally-oriented segment for AXS TV. A more in-depth interview with Daly would greatly benefit this disc. To purchase The Good Doctor Blu-ray via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Uprising
Simple, straightforward, first-person testimonials have been an integral part of nonfiction filmmaking for decades, lending voice to social issues and providing powerful personal contextualization for events whose scope can otherwise seem overwhelming. It’s just these sorts of powerful interviews which form the framework of the extraordinarily moving Uprising, which tells the remarkable story of the 2011 Egyptian revolution that toppled dictatorial President Hosni Mubarak from power. Augmented by equally amazing extant footage, this documentary is the authoritative behind-the-scenes snapshot of a watershed event in human history — the first digital age people’s revolution.
Directed by Fredrik Stanton, Uprising benefits from the sort of clean, well-framed narrative that typically only comes into focus years or in some cases decades after such a historical event. The film posits that four basic elements went into the Egyptian revolution. The first was the repression and unbridled corruption of Mubarak, who racked up a personal fortune worth an estimated $40-70 billion during his three decades of rule, which never repealed the martial law under which he assumed command after the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. Finally fed up with this, an activist youth movement turned to social media, and on April 6, 2008, formalized itself in protest.
Then, in June, 2010, the murder of Khaled Said, a young computer enthusiast who exposed police corruption sparked widespread outrage, fomenting further objections. The following January, the Tunisian revolution toppled the regime of brutal autocrat Ben Ali, just two weeks before a planned January 25 Egyptian protest. Spurred on by that example, students and other young people took to Facebook. They had no idea at the time, but the revolution would be televised, it turns out.
There were the expected jokes at the time, organizers admit: Is there a dress code? And what’s the couples policy — does one need a date for the revolution, or can they come stag? But thousands upon thousands turned out, including popular actor Amr Waked (interviewed here). Many men and older people felt empowered to join only after seeing so many young women take up the banner. (Indeed, one YouTube video even includes an uncoded appeal: “If you’re a man, come join us.”) After a day of peaceful marching and protest that filled Tahrir Square, the conflict became more pitched in following days. State media published newspaper pictures with captions claiming supporters were rallying for Mubarak, despite banners within the photos showing the opposite. Then, of course, things got bloody, exacerbated by statements from Mubarak that were by turns defiant and clueless. Seeded with secret police and hardline party loyalists, camel-riding thugs took to the streets, beating people. Bullets and tear gas followed, felling over 800 and leaving 6,000 more wounded. It wasn’t until the Egyptian army sided with the people that the tide finally turned.
Uprising doesn’t try to take the same big artistic bite out of the apple that Ali Samadi Ahadi’s The Green Wave, which documented the unprecedented protests that rocked Iran in June, 2009. That movie interweaved animated segments to dramatize events. Uprising has gripping cell phone camera and home video footage (some graphic). Like that film, however, Uprising is an impactful snapshot of the very basic human yearning for dignity and freedom — a fact about which interviewees speak eloquently, and is also glimpsed through their brave actions.
The democratic struggle in Egypt is still ongoing, of course, so the true, concluding chapters of Uprising are not yet really written. But this is a well-expressed movie. Powerfully told from the perspective of the Egyptian revolution’s leadership and key organizers, Stanton’s film is more than just a rough draft of history, it’s a gut-punch cri de coeur, and a reminder of the universal values and desires we all share, regardless of culture or ethnicity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Pasadena Playhouse 7, click here to visit its website.
In Another Country
An intriguing little cross-cultural curio that plays like a woozy, jazz-improv riff on romantic futility and destiny, South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo’s In Another Country is a trifling cinematic doff of the cap to French New Wave cinema, but kind of beguiling nonetheless. It’s an arthouse bon-bon all the way, but one that fans of French actress Isabelle Huppert will surely not wish to miss.
In Another Country, which played in competition last year at the Cannes Film Festival, unfolds in three segments. In each, Huppert plays Anne, a French visitor to a small South Korean beach town named Mohang. In the first, though, she’s a filmmaker visiting a colleague (Kwon Hae-Hyo, above right) and his pregnant wife (Moon So-Ri), who is suspicious and jealous of their relationship. In the second, she’s the well-off wife of a traveling businessman who slips away to rekindle an affair with a Korean filmmaker (Moon Sung-Keun) in turn gripped by his own petty covetousness. In the final story, Anne is a lonelier divorcée traveling with her friend (Yoon Yeo-Jeong), a university instructor. Undercurrents of infidelity and spiritual and romantic settledness factor into each segment, as does a kind of goofy lifeguard (Yoo Jun-Sang) with whom Anne crosses paths.
Hong is considered one of the more established (and prolific) auteur filmmakers working in South Korea today, and with In Another Country he delivers another aesthetically bold work, a movie of watchwork-like moving parts in which characters feel can variously feel three-dimensional and entirely representational. Like many writer-directors, his work often plumbs some of the same themes (neuroses born of relationships) and unfolds in familiar settings (beaches are a favorite). In this regard, In Another Country sometimes feels like a whimsical repackaging of past material.
Huppert, however, gives the movie — Hong’s first work in predominantly English — a fresh and amusing spin. (A scene of her baying at goats is a left-field delight that keeps on giving.) Hong elicits engaging, naturalistic performances from his actors, and in sketching out these different possible lives of Anne he seems to be making a commentary on the ephemeral nature of romance, while also fetishistically indulging his love of the French New Wave. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, unrated, 89 minutes)
Gangster Squad
The very jokey forthrightness of its title, Gangster Squad, evokes a kind of disposable pop-art mash-up of The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential, but with the seriousness of an old Saturday morning serial, and that’s just what director Ruben Fleischer’s rendering of screenwriter Will Beall’s period piece crime drama achieves. No thunder-clap piece of cinema, this, but instead a square-jawed movie that more or less works to the degree that one watching it is wishing to be entertained at that very moment and only that moment in time, Gangster Squad is a good-looking showcase for a lot of actors who have in the past done and will do much more nuanced and interesting work down the line.
The story, rooted in some modicum of truth, unfolds in post-World War II Los Angeles, where a straight-arrow veteran, John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), finds himself recruited by Police Chief William Parker (Nick Nolte) to lead an off-the-books team of specialists tasked with taking down an ambitious and bloodthirsty ex-boxer turned gangster, Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), who has designs on opening a lucrative gambling wire service. Cohen has judges, some higher-up cops and other beneficial parties already all in his pocket and on the take, so O’Mara rounds up the rakish and cynical Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), sharpshooter Max Kennard (Robert Patrick), a brainy guy (Giovanni Ribisi) and the two requisite ethnic types (Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña, sorely underused), and starts busting down doors, making life difficult for Cohen’s operation. Fisticuffs, car chases and shootouts ensue, with things additionally complicated by Jerry’s burgeoning yet still secret relationship with Grace Faraday (Emma Stone), Mickey’s etiquette tutor (!) and not-very-committed girlfriend.
O’Mara isn’t much for tactical subtlety; his approach is all-frontal assault, all the time, which kind of mirrors the movie’s goofy, anything-goes-in-the-name-of-entertainment philosophy, where torrents of misplaced cover fire evoke flash-forward memories of 1980s actioners that give Gangster Squad a weird hybrid contextualization. It’s a period piece set in the 1940s but very much paying homage to ensemble buddy action flicks of a different era.
What helps distinguish Gangster Squad is its sense of humor. Beall, a former police officer turned debut but now in-demand screenwriter, writes winkingly self-conscious noir-style dialogue, in which redheaded gals are “tomatoes” and all the men talk about how they didn’t Come Back From The War to let their city turn into the sort of hell-hole Cohen is turning it into. There are a couple fun sequences involving a botched raid, a jailbreak and the planting of a bug device in Cohen’s home. So the movie eschews moral murkiness in favor of programmatic conflict and slick gamesmanship. What’s the big deal, right?
The issue is the characterizations are so thin and its main conflicts and resolutions so familiar, right down to the dialogue exchanges that doom various supporting characters, as to invite mental check-out. And when Gangster Squad has to pivot into meatier dramatic terrain, especially in its final act, that’s a problem. Most of the actors, then, lean back into tough-guy posturing and rawhide-chewing, almost like they’re doing a radio play. Notable exceptions are Mireille Enos, as O’Mara’s pregnant wife Connie, and Gosling, who locates layers of sardonic remove and bubbling-to-the-surface inner decency and conflict in Jerry.
Gangster Squad isn’t terrible, really. In fact, it’s quite watchable for most of its running time. Cinematographer Dion Beebe and production designer Mather Ahmad craft an appealing look for classic-era Los Angeles. The vehicle, however, isn’t a classic. A bit of a tonal mish-mash, it’s a lowered stock car in need of a tune-up and a couple fresh coats of paint. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 113 minutes)
$ellebrity
If, as Susan Sontag once opined, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is, then the fever-grip that the intimacy of celebrity tabloid photography exerts is, on a psychological level, an entirely understandable phenomenon. Still, in a society with broad freedoms of expression and the press, the junction of those liberties and personal privacy is a messy, complicated one. The documentary $ellebrity digs into that arguably symbiotic relationship between jostling, freelance photographers and their famous, sometimes unwitting subjects — examining celebrity culture, the increasingly bold intrusiveness of the paparazzi, and the jumbled intersection of authorized and unauthorized image management.
If it sounds empty and salacious, it’s not. And, of course, given the celebrity angle, it’s certainly not academic and boring, either. Directed with aplomb, the film is helmed by renowned rock ‘n’ roll and icon photographer Kevin Mazur, whose legitimacy and connections no doubt helped land the roster of famous actors and musicians who share their thoughts as interview subjects — a slate that includes Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sheryl Crow, Salma Hayek and Kid Rock. A smart, noteworthy socio-cultural snapshot, $ellebrity evinces a surprising depth, charting the history of paparazzi and how new media in particular has helped shape the landscape of entertainment journalism over the last 30 years. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the film’s website. (D&E Entertainment/Run Rampant Productions, unrated, 90 minutes)
Barbara
A superbly crafted low-boil drama about an East German doctor who must balance dedication to her patients with a potential escape to the West, Barbara represents the latest entry in a continuingly successful working relationship between actress Nina Hoss and director Christian Petzold. A smart, engaging story built on telling details, the film gets its hooks into you the old-fashioned way — through character — and highlights the difficulties and cost of living by principles.
Winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear Prize for Petzold, Barbara unfolds in 1980, in a small rural town in East Germany. Idealistic Barbara Wolff (Hoss) used to be a top doctor at a respected Berlin medical facility, but has been banished to a provincial pediatric hospital after applying for an exit visa out of the communist country. Tracking her movements is Klaus Schutz (Rainer Bock), a representative of the Stasi secret police who views Barbara with a personal contempt (“If she were six you’d say she’s sulky”) that seems to extend beyond his tasked surveillance of her.
Even though she ranges from cool to outright standoffish, Barbara’s supervising doctor, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), keeps making attempts to get to know and help her. A delicate dance ensues. Barbara is touched by Andre’s altruism, but suspects, not without good reason, that he’s also an informant charged with reporting on her movements and activities. As she dodges Klaus’ observation and puts up with unannounced, intrusive and humiliating searches, Barbara continues to plot an escape to West Germany with her lover, Jörg (Mark Waschke). Burgeoning, complicated feelings for Andre, however, throw into relief a looming, difficult decision about what sort of future she truly wants.
The performances here are precise and modulated, like a Swiss watch; small glances and moments of silence are pregnant with quiet meaning. Hoss, whose previous four collaborations with Petzold include the striking Yella and Jerichow, is an actress of uncommon intelligence as well as chameleonic beauty; when she puts up a stern front her inner light can seem utterly impenetrable, and when she drops it the vulnerability can be shattering.
The commingling of the personal and political (also a big part of Yella) on the part of Petzold is impressive. He doesn’t cram in a lot of chronological markers to continually reinforce and remind viewers that he’s telling a period piece story. Instead, he gives his movie a thin sheen of formality that both obscures and heightens a plot which could otherwise be construed as melodramatic, and lets an audience consider and arrive at the allegorical weight on their own terms. But Barbara is never hammy or overwrought. It plays out on an altogether human terrain, marked with recognizable uncertainty, heartbreak and other turmoil. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Adopt Films, PG-13, 105 minutes)
FrackNation
A nonfiction film about hydraulic fracturing aimed largely at debunking Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated Gasland, FrackNation is a slice of agitated environmental pushback, an impassioned but slapdash cinematic rebuttal masquerading as a legitimate investigative documentary.
Directed by right-leaning filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who’s previously taken antagonistic runs at Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and environmentalism more generally, FrackNation bills itself as an exploration for the truth about the petroleum and natural gas extraction method known widely by its shorthand nickname of fracking. In much the same fashion as Michael Moore in his earlier works, McAleer casts himself as a crusading journalist wading into the fray for answers, speaking truth to power and demanding accountability from bureaucracy.
Certainly FrackNation is interesting and valuable for the voice it lends to residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania (one of the chief settings of Gasland), who don’t feel any threat to their drinking water or health from mining. It shows, quite capably, the difference of opinion in this town. The problem is that McAleer fancies those espousing environmental concerns as “green extremists,” and by and large treats the fact that both local and national opinions of support for fracking exist as disproving evidence that anyone could have any issues with water potability or other health problems caused by fracking.
The movie makes the spurious leap of logic that the fact that there are some examples of methane present in drinking water dating back many decades as proof that no drinking water is so contaminated by fracking, and takes as gospel the word of mining companies in regard to the inviolability of their methods. FrackNation addresses the proprietary (read: secret) chemical additives pumped into the ground in massive amounts during fracking only by having a scientist say that the same thing could be true about coffee (!), and it does not address at all the crucially important issue of the storage and disposal of waste water run-off.
FrackNation is emblematic of some of the worst aspects of lazy social-activist filmmaking, both right and left (see also: Top Priority: The Terror Within, a documentary about Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Julia Davis), in that it throws out a bunch of tidbits of information and theories about adversaries’ motivations without much regard to a cogent macro argument. In McAleer’s case, this includes everything from a sourcing allegation about a specific insert shot in Gasland and a weak character assassination on a public official with adjudicating authority on a fracking bill to the assertion that American environmentalists are perhaps somehow in league with a Russian energy mafia determined to monopolize the future of natural gas shale drilling.
Most problematically, however, FrackNation peddles a false narrative. In striking minor nativist chords about how the generations-old livelihoods of rural Americans are at risk by environmental activists, McAleer completely ignores the many other difficult external economic realities facing small, family-owned farms being swallowed up by conglomerates. If a farmer absolutely requires the additional income of leasing his land for natural gas drilling in order to sustain his business, is the primary threat to that way of life those who seek transparency, tighter regulation and/or, yes, even a ban of hydraulic fracturing?
FrackNation is not a totally hackish work, but it does start from a bogus and willfully cordoned off point-of-view, and exhibits a desire to grind axes more than uncover truth. Promulgating the rather ludicrous claim that Big Media — that familiar right-wing boogeyman — has peddled fear-mongering about fracking, the movie wraps itself in a cloak of besieged indignity, content to scream “Fair and Balanced!” rather than engage in a more honest exchange of ideas. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Pasadena Playhouse 7, click here to visit its website. (Hard Boiled Films, unrated, 77 minutes)
The Point: Definitive Collector’s Edition
Narrated by Ringo Starr, animated and directed by Oscar-winner Fred Wolf, with songs written by Grammy-winner Harry Nilsson, 1971’s The Point is an unusual, enchanting little hippie-dippy holdover, a peacenik fable of multi-culturalism and make-good that connects chiefly as a slice of nostalgia.
Set in the Land of Point, where everyone is born with a pointed head and everything — from cars and houses to the trees — has the same sort of notch, The Point‘s story centers around the one notable outsider: Oblio, a round-headed boy who, with his trusted dog Arrow, is banished to the Pointless Forest because of how different he is. Musical-themed wackiness and wonderment ensues, including the psychedelic “P.O.V. Waltz.”
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a deep-seat spindle, The Point: Definitive Collector’s Edition comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, with seven chapter stops. In addition to a slate of previews, bonus features consist of a nice quartet of new behind-the-scenes featurettes, clocking in at under a half-hour cumulatively. It doesn’t quite translate over the generational chasm, but for the oldest amongst the Schoolhouse Rock! set, there’s a certain evocative reward to be found in The Point. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B (Disc)
Only the Young
One can certainly enjoy The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” David Bowie‘s “Young Americans” or even, to employ a more recent example, Fun’s “We Are Young” on their own musical terms, in more or less disposable fashion. But for anyone who’s ever felt a stronger kinship to those songs or others because of their sterling evocation of adolescent energy and possibility, nonfiction cinematic equivalent Only the Young is a film for you — a delicate coming-of-age snapshot which locates the unextinguished youth in all of us. The Audience Award winner at the AFI Film Festival, co-directors Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims’ film is swollen with sensitivity and sentiment, capturing in moving fashion some of the wobbly first steps of teenagedom.
Only the Young follows the intertwined stories of three Southern California teenagers who live in rundown canyon country. Garrison Saenz is an introspective and polite wallflower; Skye Elmore, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, lives with her grandparents since her father is in prison; and Garrison’s best friend Kevin Conaway, a glassy-eyed, socially awkward and frequently shirtless misfit, is a skateboarding fanatic who would be most at home in Dogtown and Z-Boys. Yet preconceived notions of these kids as aimless and empty-headed “troubled” teenagers evaporate almost immediately, upon first contact. Garrison and especially Skye are committed Christians, and Garrison and Kevin have a mentor/father figure in the form of a proselytizing skateboard benefactor. The film captures the rhythms and nuances of their friendships, and how things change both when Garrison gets a new girlfriend, Kristen Cheriegate, and it seems that first one and then two of the three might have to move away.
In both its dusty, Southwestern setting and objective telling, Only the Young recalls involving nonfiction offerings like Darwin: No Services Ahead and the engrossing web-doc series Interview Project, executive produced by David Lynch. Tippet and Mims, however, make superlative use of editorial cross-cutting to purposefully blur time. Direct-address interviews are blended with thoughtfully framed, gorgeously captured fly-on-the-wall scenes, and arranged in an order with more emotional than chronological fidelity.
Its subjects are engaging narrators of their own lives, and surprisingly perceptive in the manner that teenagers often are, just when one is ready to write them off as lacking any analytical prowess. The movie’s rawness and candor is its strongest selling point, but it’s often funny, too. (“Right, but rats are, like, a lot smarter than you guys,” says Skye, when urging Garrison not to leave food, no matter if it’s locked away in the pantry, in the abandoned house he and Kevin are intent are fixing up as their skate practice crash-pad.)
Only the Young is also notable for what it doesn’t show, and how this shades and impacts its story. Technology is acknowledged but it isn’t omnipresent, which is partially owing to the socioeconomic conditions of its subjects but also clearly an editorial choice. School isn’t shown or even much touched upon, and while family life is discussed, it isn’t the focal point of the movie. Tippet and Mims understand that, almost regardless of individual situation, kids experience and process these variables as fixed givens — incidental details in the grander story of Themselves.
The filmmakers do not impress their own narrative agenda upon Only the Young, but instead allow the accumulated significance of certain anecdotal, throwaway tidbits (Kevin is a cutter) to more naturally color a viewer’s interpretation, understanding and acceptance of these characters. The unique result is a stirring portrait of the contradictory innocence and rebellion present in all adolescents, not just these “alt-minded” kids on the fringe. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more on the movie, which opens this week in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 73 minutes)
Swastika
For many people Adolf Hitler is the personification of evil, and someone incapable of being viewed on a human plane. Long before Oliver Hirschbiegal’s Downfall, however, the controversial 1973 documentary Swastika put an astounding and unnerving private face on the mastermind of the Holocaust, interweaving rare propaganda films with private home video footage shot by Eva Braun. When one talks about the banality of evil, it’s a work like Swastika which breathes life into the phenomenon of which they’re speaking.
Director Philippe Mora, in what is far and away his masterwork, applies a collagist’s instinct to his film, stitching together footage to provide a sort of impressionistic autobiography of Hitler’s rise and eventual fall, from the formation of the Nazi state through the end of World War II. It’s mostly wordless, apart from the audio attached to the archival footage itself, and simple translations of German speeches and personal exchanges.
Still, the movie builds and swells like a fine orchestration, and its astounding moments are many: footage of the Hindenburg disaster, Jesse Owens talking about his positive impression of Germany, and of course British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain touting his secured non-aggression promise from Hitler.
The most powerful footage, though, of course relates directly to Hitler and Braun, who is seen shelling peas, picking flowers, ice skating and practicing gymnastics. It was this material that most caused an uproar upon the movie’s release, and remains even today quite arresting. Some of it is strikingly mundane — Hitler commenting on the rise in popularity of color photography, and asking guests how a movie they screened the previous evening stacked up against Gone With the Wind, one of Braun’s favorites — while other bits are much more humanizing, like Hitler greeting grieving family members of slain German soldiers, or playing with and holding the hand of a walking toddler.
Of course, Hitler also regards puppies with distrust (“They don’t appreciate a friend”) and, in a jaw-dropping moment, holds forth on the inhumanity of hunting boar with a gun instead of a spear. Even today, a certain mythology surrounding Hitler and Nazi Germany endures; Swastika, though, shows the simple ingredients behind this madness — a man, a political machine, and a country swept up in the energetic presentation of blinkered nationalistic pride and, later, fear-mongering, war and bigotry. It’s an amazing historical document, but also a film that holds an important lesson.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Swastika comes to DVD via Kino Lorber, divided into a dozen chapters and presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with a motion menu and a considerable slate of bonus features. A two-minute introduction by professor Jonathan Petropoulos kicks things off, providing a good context for both the film’s debut and its use as a teaching tool. There are also tidbits on propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and the use of color film in Nazi Germany, as well as an interview with Nazi architect Albert Speer.
Far and away the most illuminating supplemental extra, however, is a 30-minute featurette which gathers Mora, writer Lutz Becker and producers Sanford Lieberson and David Puttnam for a conversation. In reliving their collaboration some three-and-a-half decades removed, they recount amazing stories about getting (9½mm) home movies from Speer, and other astonishing tales of exhaustive archival research victories. They revive the movie’s tumultuous response at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, as well as the subsequent controversy over who owned elements of the film (Braun’s surviving sister and others fought against its release, which required some unique legal maneuvering). As startling as Swastika is, some of these incredible stories of its inception and making are just as mind-boggling in their own right. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; if Half is your thing, meanwhile, click here. A (Movie) A- (Disc)
Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead
Its title is rather brilliant, in its own way; there can be little confusion about exactly what type of story Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead is aiming to tell. Unfortunately, there’s neither any imagination nor slickness of execution on display in writer-director Michael Hall’s terrible, micro-budgeted slasher flick.
Kids Go to the Woods centers on a group of kids who… OK, you get the picture. There’s characteristically virginal Casey (Leah Rudnick), her bookish younger brother Scott (Andrew Waffenschmidt), and five of Casey’s friends (Seth Stephens, Amanda Rising, Kristen Adele and the spunky Meghan Miller) as well as her boyfriend Derrick (Eric Carpenter). After the requisite run-in with a weird convenience store clerk (Kevin Shea) who warns of dark things, the kids repair to the cabin of a stoner uncle of one of them. Some drinking, make-out sessions and a spooky ouija board gathering ensue, until a masked killer starts his stalking.
Nevermind the wildly uneven acting or the fact that (once again) this is a movie which tries to pass off burly 25-year-olds as teenagers who can’t buy beer. Apart from a couple passably amusing throwaway lines of dialogue and one mildly entertaining kill scenario, this is a movie with no imagination. It’s poorly paced and flatly shot, in often terribly conceived single-shot style.
And when a movie is this bad, it usually further manifests in a variety of frustrating ways — things like having characters carry and toast with empty cups, and, in this instance, stand thisclose to a wall while using a stand-up urinal, and having characters rest their arms on top of it. Oh, there’s also a murder scene where blood appears on a pillow before anyone gets stabbed.
To additionally pad out his movie’s 85-minute running time, Hall concocts a wrap-around device with “horror host” Candy Adams (Carly Goodspeed), loosely in the vein of Rhonda Shear or Vampira, except by way of Swingers. This gimmick, along with occasional video interference and mock bits of taped-over commercials and home movies, is meant to conjure up warm VHS memories; it’s lame, and adds nothing to the proceedings. Yes, there’s some nudity here (three out of the four ladies get topless), for the Joe Bob Briggs set, but even that — which made the ’80s-era movies this knock-off seeks to emulate worthwhile for a certain audience — only illustrates how pointless and out of touch Hall’s Kids is.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead comes to DVD on a region-free disc, in 16×9 widescreen, with optional chapter stops. In addition to a trailer, its slate of bonus features includes three deleted scenes and a collection of four brief behind-the-scenes segments which spotlight the filming of different scenes. The high point, though, is a five-minute gag reel in which wiffeball accidents occur, a kitten wanders into frame, and virtually every cast member simulates fellatio; it’s Miller, though, who gets the ultimate win, for her energetic spit take. As far as DIY, low-budget indies, this is at least an admittedly decent packaging. F (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Blood Demands Blood, Gets Confusion
I’ve returned to Los Angeles to find, among other things, this bullet in the mail awaiting me. It’s a novelty USB drive, but neither its Quicktime file nor the touted website on the back of the accompanying card (“Blood demands blood,” reads its wooden keepsake box) works/loads — via Firefox, Internet Explorer, nada. After a bit of noodling around, it seems it might be the trailer for Dead Man Down (FilmDistrict, March 8), starring Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace. This would make some sense, given that the otherwise unmarked package did have FilmDistrict’s name on it in small letters. So it seems I’m a marked man. Marked for exactly what I’m not sure, however.
UPDATE, 1/2/2013: My instincts were spot-on. A placeholder page now exists for the website, and Dead Man Down‘s trailer is available here, with Kendra Morris’ enchanting cover version of Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” providing the mood underneath lots of gunfire and Terrence Howard‘s threats.
Brad Schreiber Shares His Top 10 Films of 2012
Lola Versus (Blu-ray)
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)
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)