Answers to Nothing is an unfortunately all-too-apt title for director Matthew Leutwyler’s sprawling thematic think piece, which focuses on the hard knocks and self-deception of a disparate group of Los Angelenos. The filmmakers seem to be reaching rather nakedly for early Paul Thomas Anderson territory here, but the copped moves come off less as artful homage and more as the nervous half-formed duplications of a mentee who’s left the nest too soon.
While Ryan (Dane Cook) and Kate (Elizabeth Mitchell) try to conceive a child, Ryan is also carrying on an affair with would-be singer Drew (Aja Volkman), as well as dealing his mother Marilyn (Barbara Hershey), who seemingly lives in a cocoon of denial over the fact that her long-away husband is somehow going to suddenly return home. Frankie (Julie Benz), a police detective investigating a missing child case, is at first convinced that the skeevy Beckworth (Greg Germann) is the guilty party, but runs up against a dead end. Teacher Carter (Mark Kelly) seems increasingly fraught by news coverage of said event, while rookie cop Jerry (Erik Palladino) floats through his days and nights lonely, and other characters come and go.
Many other movies, from Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia to Garden Party and even the Oscar-winning Crash, to name but a small handful, have delved into this melancholic “underworld” of the City of Angels, where so many dreams die hard. While Frankie and Kate are best friends, and other characters share some connections, though, there isn’t quite as much overlay as one might expect in Answers to Nothing, and subsequently the film leans on behavioral similarities and a couple late twists to drive home its point: that we each construct rationalizations and tell ourselves lies, whether big or small, to help frame, situate and create comfort with our own actions. This is all fine and good, but there’s not much “oomph” to the picture, given the varying degrees of emotional payoff.
To be sure, the characters aren’t wildly over-sketched, and Leutwyler admirably keeps the film’s collective temperature turned down, so that each story strand plays out on equal footing and the looming specter of the missing child doesn’t overwhelm the movie. The performances are of the same piece, tonally. But the result is a film without much of an electric charge or mystery — problematic though not necessarily damning except for the fact that so many of Answers to Nothing‘s moments of small observation also feel nipped or overly familiar rather than natively insightful. The movie unfolds dutifully, over the course of two hours. And then, just a short time later, all memories of it are gone as well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Roadside Attractions, R, 123 minutes)
All posts by Brent
Jeremy Piven Talks I Melt With You, New Miley Cyrus Movie
He can’t spill the beans on the in-the-works Entourage movie, but fans will still be seeing plenty of Jeremy Piven in the time it takes for his character, Ari Gold, to wind his way to the big screen. The actor’s latest film, available on VOD and hitting big screens this week, is Mark Pellington’s I Melt With You, the story of four wildly disillusioned old college friends (including Rob Lowe, Thomas Jane and Christian McKay) who reunite for an annual summer bacchanal, and start to entertain a suicide pact from their teenage years. Piven plays Ron, a financial services hotshot facing impending ruin stemming from corruption and fraud charges. I had a chance to sit down and talk to the actor one-on-one recently, about the film, his work methods, one of the things he thinks causes cancer, and his unlikely pairing with Miley Cyrus. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
The Tree
A tender, well sketched drama of familial reconnection and rebirth in the wake of tragedy, Julie Bertucelli’s The Tree, set in the rural environs of Australia, for the most part successfully balances the literal and metaphorical in its telling of coping with loss, and trying to move on after the death of a loved one. Engaging acting and some gorgeous and involving cinematography make this movie a treat for arthouse audiences.
When her truck-driver husband Peter (Aden Young) has a heart attack, Dawn O’Neil (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is devastated, but tries to put on a good face and provide a solid foundation for her four children, including teenager Tim (Christian Bayers), Lou (Tom Russell), and young Charlie (Gabriel Gotting), who stops talking entirely. It may be eight-year-old Simone (Morgana Davies, above left), however, who takes things the hardest. A daddy’s girl through and through, she becomes convinced that her father is whispering to her through the huge fig tree that towers over their house — an assertion fraught with significance given that it’s this tree into which Peter lightly crashed when he died. As months pass, Dawn doesn’t push or try to dissuade Simone of her belief, but when she eventually goes into the nearby town seeking employment, and meets store owner George Elrick (Marton Csokas), his increasing presence at family gatherings — along with the deteriorating condition of the tree — upsets Simone and rekindles all sorts of unsettled feelings.
Taken from Judy Pascoe’s novel Our Father Who Art in the Tree, Bertucelli’s movie passingly registers as a sort of gender-swap version of another Australian-set drama, The Boys Are Back, starring Clive Owen as a widowed working dad trying to repair relationships with his sons, and also navigate his way into a possible new relationship. Bertucelli, who worked as an assistant director under Bertrand Tavernier, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Otar Iosseliani, won numerous awards — including the Grand Jury Prize of the Critic’s Week at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Cesar for Best First Film — for her narrative feature debut, Since Otar Left. With The Tree, she segues into what may on the surface seem more conventionally dramatic territory, but for the most part with a deft avoidance of the sort of cliches that mark far more mawkish genre entries of this type.
Adapted by Bertucelli from a separately credited screenplay by Elizabeth Mars, The Tree doesn’t merely dote on Simone’s connection to her father. It invests in the other characters, illustrating in savvy fashion how everyone grieves in their own manner, and on their own timetable. (Teenager Tim, for instance, is sad, but matter-of-fact about his father’s passing, and tries to help his mother and family by getting a job to generate extra income.) As the tree becomes a sort of nuisance and hazard to match its beauty (a storm snaps off a dead branch that comes through the house’s roof, while its invasive roots, already above ground, wreak havoc on the house’s plumbing lines and foundation), Bertucelli doesn’t dramatically press down on the keys of metaphorical parallel, the way a less confident director might, or certainly an American studio version of this same story.
The film only really falters in its third act. A pivot point where George arrives, at Dawn’s request, to finally cut down the tree, only to encounter Simone staging a sort of protest sit-in, rings false in the manner in which it plays out. And the finale, involving another act of Mother Nature, also takes too long to play out, stretching out over 20 minutes and padding the movie’s running time to just over 100 minutes.
It’s not wildly original in the moves it makes, but still The Tree is an engaging drama of emotional regeneration that avoids pandering to the lowest-common-denominator in the mode of its telling. Nigel Bluck’s fine cinematography makes beautiful showcase of the movie’s location settings. And while Gainsbourg is known for her famous father, her singing and, most recently, her edgy work in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, it’s easy to forget her considerable facility with open-hearted normalcy; she delivers a fine, anchoring turn as Dawn. The young Davies, meanwhile, is also quite good — engaging and natural. She makes you feel sorry for young Simone without making her pitiable and one-dimensional. Together, they’re the strongest roots of Bertucelli’s Tree.
Housed in a regular, clear plastic Amaray case, The Tree comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 aspect ratio, with a Dolby 2.0 stereo audio track and optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired. In addition to the movie’s theatrical trailer, bonus features consist of a clutch of nine deleted scenes, as well as a 30-minute behind-the-scenes making-of documentary, replete with cast and crew interviews and on-set footage, which details the tangential inspiration of Italian novelist Italo Calvino and the filmmaker’s overwhelming desire to make a nature-focused drama. An insert booklet, meanwhile, also features a short Q&A with Bertuccelli. For more information, visit www.ZeitgeistFilms.com; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)
We Bought a Zoo
Cameron Crowe tries on something of a forcedly whimsical tone in We Bought a Zoo, a well-meaning and sentimental but lumbering family drama that never quite connects. Existing in a kind of wan emotional middle-ground, only occasionally punctuated and illuminated by Matt Damon‘s winning lead turn, the film is a search for familial rejuvenation and self-renewal in only the vaguest terms possible.
Based on a memoir by journalist Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo tracks closely in its massaged feeling to Marley & Me, which distributor 20th Century Fox had great success with in the same holiday frame in 2008, pushing to $240 million worldwide gross. But while character-driven, tonally commingled qualities have always been a hallmark of Crowe’s big screen efforts, this film exudes the feeling of an artist reaching more than halfway to make contact with an audience that market-parsers have told him should be right in his wheelhouse. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 124 minutes)
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
A sprawling tale of power, sleaze and ambition in the vein of City of God, The Departed, Infernal Affairs and The Wire, writer-director Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a howling, labyrinthine lament against the brawn and fraudulent self-protection of entrenched institutions that could and perhaps should well find a welcome audience amongst #OccupyWallStreet cineastes. Brazil’s official Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film submission, the movie — which is set in Rio de Janeiro and unfolds at the intersection of drugs, crime and high-level governmental corruption — is programmatic, and tipped heavily toward procedural rather than emotional payoffs, but nonetheless still packs an effective, gritty punch.
At the center of the movie is Rio’s Special Police Operations Battalion, or BOPE (so named for its native-language acronym). When a mission to bring an end to a jail riot ends in violence, it puts several men on a trajectory that will eventually result in unlikely new alliances. Andre Mathias (Andre Ramiro) willingly takes the fall for the raid, out of devotion to BOPE, but his superior, Beto Nascimento (Wagner Moura, quite good), fails upward, and finds himself installed as Sub-Secretary of Intelligence, where he oversees the city’s wire-tapping programs. Academic and social activist Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos, above), meanwhile, decides to enter politics, winning a position that puts him further at odds with a crooked mayor and the moneyed political-discourse entertainers who prop up their efforts with much on-camera bloviating.
Nascimento is no friend of Fraga’s either. He views him as a pain, and his irritation is exacerbated when Fraga takes up with his ex-wife, and starts influencing his son’s view of Nascimento’s work. Then there’s the fact that Nascimento comes to realize that by strengthening BOPE and bringing low the drug gangs that run the slums, he’s actually only made things easier for the corrupt cops and dirty politicians who are actually pulling the strings from above, including a particularly brutal police captain (Sandro Rocha) who has no qualms about flaunting his thuggishness.
The qualities that most benefit Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (it’s actually a sequel to Padilha’s 2007 feature debut, featuring several holdover characters) are also what make it slightly impenetrable at first — its density, and attention to detail. There’s also the matter of Nascimento’s overwritten narration, which serves as an effective hatchet through some of the bureaucratic bramble but also bleeds the movie of the chance for a more rooted emotional connection. Eventually, though, the movie’s pieces start to fit together, and somewhat disparate strands cross paths in interesting ways when old allies become enemies, and vice versa.
Padilha, who got his start in documentary filmmaking, has an obvious eye and ear for the sorts of information that makes this material seem snarlingly current. It’s a fictionalized tale, but one rooted in real scandal as it relates to both BOPE and Brazil’s government. The film is also properly awash in the shades of grey morality required to tackle a telling of such systemic indecency and corruption, which is quite separate from individual malice. “War is like medicine — it keeps the mind busy,” says Nascimento early on, who comes to realize the double-edged nature of that statement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, R, 115 minutes)
Crazy Wisdom
Crazy Wisdom focuses on a subject perhaps worthy of a documentary, but hopelessly obscured by fawning and myopia. Director Johanna Demetrakas sets her sights on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a personable and unique Tibetan monk who on foot escaped the 1959 Communist invasion of his homeland in quite unlikely fashion, studied and taught at Oxford University, and then shattered Westerner’s preconceptions of Buddhist enlightenment, renouncing his monastic vows, bedding students, drinking alcohol and eventually eloping with the 16-year-old daughter of an aristocrat. For more information on the film, click here; meanwhile, for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Crazy Wisdom Films, unrated, 89 minutes)
Lust for Vengeance
Its perfectly anonymous, sex-and-violence-tinged title is enough to mistake it for a Shannon Tweed thriller circa the early to mid-1990s, but writer-director Sean Weathers’ Lust for Vengeance is a whole different type of terrible, thank you very much.
Despite its claimed running time of 85 minutes, Lust for Vengeance actually runs 10 merciful minutes shorter than that. Also, despite a descriptive cover blurb touting it as some sort of inventive twist on the Italian giallo formula, the film is in reality nothing more than a loosely connected series of sex-soaked stalking set pieces. (For a much better genre homage, check out Belgian co-directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Amer, a woozy and unsettling fever dream.) True, giallo touchstones like straight-razor slashings and a motorcycle-helmet-clad killer do come into play, but there’s no artful tension here.
Long takes do little to mask the terrible acting, and awkward lines of dialogue are lifted from Chris Rock stand-up specials (“Men are basically as faithful as their options”) and delivered in stillborn, witless fashion as intellectually insightful. The cinematography, while inclusive of a couple interesting (in theory more than practice) overlays, achieves distinction mainly through the use of a variety pack of primary color camera and light-set filters, while also somehow managing to be shot through a used coffee filter. In short, this is a bad, bad film, despite its seeming inclusion of real sex and (perhaps) real drugs.
Housed in a regular white plastic Amaray case with a nice, deep-set spindle, Lust for Vengeance comes to DVD in what is billed as a “10th anniversary explicit edition,” tricked out with a surprisingly nice complement of supplemental material. Though divided into an unnecessarily dense 34 chapters, the film comes with outtakes and deleted scenes, as well as trivia, a host of trailers for some of Weathers’ other movies (Hookers in Revolt and House of the Damned) and abandoned projects, the first part of a podcast interview, and more. For more information on Weathers and his films, click here. To purchase the movie via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. F (Movie) B- (Disc)
Daniel Craig Slams the Kardashians
With his recent British GQ thrashing of Khloe Kardashian and her sisters, Daniel Craig has earned a man-hug and even more respect from me. Props, sir.
Tomboy
Humans are inherently social creatures, and the manner in which we each form a perception of our place in the world around us — and how our ego takes shape and form from our id — certainly relates as much to our interactions as any ingrained or telegraphed sense of social acceptance and duty. Capturing the fickle progress of that individual transformation, however, is a difficult task. A tender and perspicacious look at the toddling steps of adolescent character and personality, writer-director Celine’s Sciamma’s French import Tomboy assays the gender confusion and willful but not malicious deceit of a 10-year-old girl. Against a backdrop of overly programmed “issue dramas,” this movie is notable for its strong foundation in character and wholesale investment in psychology, rather than salacious plotting. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Rocket Releasing, unrated, 82 minutes)
The Lie
The directorial debut of Joshua Leonard, The Lie is an uncommonly assured and engaging portrait of post-millennial and particularly male uncertainty, and how the snowballing effects of impulsive dishonesty will eventually run you down from behind like a jackrabbit. Buoyed by strong performances, this meagerly budgeted but intelligently scaled and smartly told indie film deftly takes the pulse of anxious, arrested times.
Married Los Angelenos Lonnie (Leonard) and Clover Leonard (Jess Weixler, above right) were once upon a time go-it-their-own-way idealists. Now, faced with raising a two-year-old daughter, they’ve come to also face some of the material realities of adulthood, and aren’t sure they like what they see. As Clover wraps up her final year of graduate school, she receives an appealing job offer from a pharmaceutical company — the sort of place she wouldn’t have ever considered working years earlier.
Lonnie, on the other hand, is barely scraping by at a commercial editing job, where he’s reached his maximum capacity for pretending to care, thanks in large part to a screaming boss (Gerry Bednob, of The 40-Year-Old Virgin) who rides him like a rented pack-animal. Not much helping matters is Lonnie and Clover’s friend, Tank (Mark Webber), who lives in a van down by the beach and provides an ever-present reflection of all the carefree, guileless nonchalance of their younger years. Lonnie doesn’t lust for other women, but he is put off by the offhand, public manner in which Clover reveals her job offer. A bit emasculated, and a bit jumbled and confused, he starts skipping work and then retreats back into occupational fantasies of music, where he pens a not-very-thinly-veiled screed against workaday responsibility called “Soulcrusher.”
Lonnie also tells a lie. Pressed by his boss, he impetuously says that his daughter has died. This gets Lonnie off the hook for a few days and gives him space to breathe, and recoup his energy and focus. Naturally, though, it is a respite of invisible constraints and limited duration. When sympathetic co-workers start bringing over casseroles, and then even take up a financial collection, it seems only a matter of time before Clover finds out about Lonnie’s galling dishonesty.
Throughout, The Lie captures in convincing fashion the deeply held ambivalence of a generation that grew up in peacetime but then saw the world change momentously with the events of September 11, two wars and a near-worldwide financial collapse. A less manifestly bleak adaptation of a T.C. Boyle short story, The Lie is not explicitly about any of those events, but it is about feeling out of place and under-equipped to handle the challenges of modern-day adult life, which is very tied to those occurrences.
Notably, Leonard’s film also bears a passing thematic and tonal resemblance to Sam Mendes’ Away We Go. Whereas the young parents-to-be in that film hit the road and grappled with feelings about not being ready to be caregivers and not having the answers or knowledge that they felt they would and should have as adults, the characters in The Lie are already parents, and rooted in one place. They are, however, no less shot through with uncertainty. Leonard, too, has an intuitive understanding of his (and his cast’s) ability to convey nuanced specificity, and doesn’t dive headlong into cheap drama. The Lie could take the same concept and go places that are bigger, and have more outlandish or starkly defined stakes. Instead, it keeps things intimate, and ergo feels unerringly honest about its characters’ motivations, as well as their reactions.
Its endgame is somewhat preordained, but still handled with a sensitivity that makes it feel special. There’s also a unique combination of enervated fretfulness and sanguine hopefulness in The Lie, giving voice to the contradictory impulses inside each of us. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here. (Screen Media, R, 82 minutes)
ShockYa DVD Column, November 24
For my latest Blu-ray/DVD column, over at ShockYa, I assay how Samuel L. Jackson’s narration weighs down the otherwise engaging nature documentary African Cats, plus take a gander at tween fairy tale Monte Carlo, and give thanks for a documentary hosted by Last Comic Standing winner Iliza Shlesinger, as well as a clutch of horror films, including one featuring a talking killer turkey. Its title? Thankskilling, naturally. For the full, fun read, over at ShockYa, click here.
Bellflower Marks DVD Release With New Trailer
The folks over at Coatwolf Productions have posted an old-as-new trailer for the superlative Bellflower, which may seem an odd thing to do for a movie making its DVD debut this week. As director Evan Glodell explains, though, it’s also kind of an appropriate time to finally loose this version, the narration of which was written before the entire screenplay was even finished, upon the world. Also, for those rich and interested, you can purchase your own custom-made Medusa from the collective creative team for a pretty penny. Huzzah!
Salt and Silicone
As the push for Oscar short film short-list consideration has progressed throughout the fall, one movie stirring up some attention is multi-hyphenate Warren Pereira’s Salt and Silicone, a purported dark comedy offering up split perspectives of the same event — a public conversation about breast implants.
Vex (Pereira) is conflicted about the fact that his girlfriend Keira (Katie O’Grady) is scheduled to get breast augmentation. Out for a drive, they spot an acquaintance who has had the procedure, Jamie (Rachel Myers, above right), and stop to get her perspective. They head into a furniture store, where Vex fumblingly asks about her enhancement and the store’s worker, Jerome (Ethan Atkinson), insinuates his way into the conversation. Two more episodes offer up different takes on this chat.
Pereira’s film, even in its reticent first incarnation, has a certain cocksure verve throughout. But there is no substance to it, nothing really said about either how men regard women with boob jobs, or how women in turn feel about both their decisions in that regard and the reaction(s) of men to their decisions. Its depth is pantomimed, and imaginary — all bristling energy, as if the tonal differentiation in and of itself somehow makes for profound commentary. The dialogue is trite, which in turn certainly doesn’t help the performances.
On a technical level, the film is largely fine — it’s attractively shot (by Jeff Streich), with a few effectively subtle variations in style to draw attention to its changes in personality — but composer Daniel Reynolds’ music doesn’t match the moments, throughout. Faced with the choice of salt or silicone, viewers might instead be looking for a third box to check — neither of the above. For more information, click here. (W Films, unrated, 25 minutes)
Incendiary: The Willingham Case
A murder mystery, forensic investigation and political drama rolled into one, Incendiary: The Willingham Case shines a spotlight on the circumstances surrounding Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man convicted in the arson deaths of his three young children. Enjoying particular currency given the alleged manipulation of a post-mortem state forensics commission stacked by current Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, this documentary, flatly told but engaging throughout, will appeal to both newsmagazine junkies and those impassioned by the death penalty debate. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here. (Truly Indie, unrated, 104 minutes)
Under Fire: Journalists in Combat
The drums of war, whatever the specific conflicts, almost always create an opportunity for much in the way of collateral damage. Director Martyn Burke’s Under Fire: Journalists in Combat takes the psychological temperature of those who would devote their lives to taking the sort of extraordinary risks that modern day war reportage entails. It’s an involving documentary look at a razor’s-edge occupation, as well as the coping mechanisms of the human brain under stress. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
More hormonal catnip arrives in the form of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1, the fourth film in the mega-successful, teen-friendly, modern day vampire love story franchise, and a workmanlike effort that sets the table for series wrap-up next year. An emotionally fraught, dramatically leaden tale, the movie again proves the experiential sweet spot of the franchise — that of surging adolescent feeling trumping rational thought, and in this case lucid plotting.
Scribe Melissa Rosenberg, a veteran of the entire series, does a decent job of distilling some of the main conflicts from the 750-page novel that serves as the source material for the final two films. But dialogue howlers and largely soapy, melodramatic performances abound, and director Bill Condon’s staging is inert. Somewhat dispiritingly, but not surprisingly, the movie leans inordinately upon composer Carter Burwell’s goosing music cues, but also a litany of modern rock songs. Breaking Dawn isn’t the first teen movie to try to move some soundtrack CDs, but the sales success of previous iterations does seem to have informed in circuitous fashion some of the creative choices herein, where songs are used as spackle for incomplete scenes. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit, PG-13, 117 minutes)
Robert Hall Chats Chromeskull: Laid to Rest 2
I was doing some e-cleaning recently, and stumbled across an old interview I did with Robert Hall, the co-writer and director of horror flick (in case the title didn’t tip the fact) Chromeskull: Laid to Rest 2. Well… sort of. The main reason I never got around to posting the thing was because Hall was apparently completing some sort of decathlon whilst chatting with me, and so the sound quality was shitty to the point of near-indecipherable. Oh, and we also got cut off five times in the span of 15-plus minutes. My over-under on such shenanigans is typically four, but since I’d already transcribed a portion of it, here are a couple questions and answers, I guess, courtesy of my compulsion for pointless over-extension and completion:
Brent Simon: With a lot of the most memorable horror villains, there’s a visually iconographic element to them — be it Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees or Pinhead from Hellraiser. Chromeskull certainly has that; he’s visually arresting. What was the inspiration?
Robert Hall: I wanted him to represent technology without being super-gadgety or super Saw-like. I designed it in a heavy metal-influenced kind of way, which is ironic because [the character] wouldn’t be listening to heavy metal, he’d be listening to pretentious jazz or something. I knew that he would be set against this backdrop of decay. I thought that would be a nice juxtaposition. It’s been a long process. I spent a really long time designing the look of Chromeskull, and it changed so much from the first film to the second.
BS: On the DVD you give away some of the secrets [of certain shots], which blend practical and prosthetic effects with digital work. Does that combination immediately come to mind in writing some of these kill sequences, or do you say, “Here’s an idea, and I’ll worry about we achieve it later”?
RH: That’s usually how I work — I try to think of something that would be difficult first. I sort of work backwards, trying to think of something outrageous and incredible.
BS: You also talk about writing parts with specific actors in mind.
RH: Yeah, Brian [Austin Green] and I were friends, and had talked before. He came to the premiere of the first movie, kind of jokingly said if I ever did a sequel he’d be game for it, and I then thought some about how I could use him. It became obvious to me that he could be the impetus or catalyst that would bring the whole thing together and make the whole thing gel and work. In a lot of ways he’s the man behind the scenes who’s just no more than a simple clean-up guy who gets a taste of the work Chromeskull does and then thinks that he can [get involved]. His… [past work] didn’t matter to me. Even myself, I’m pigeon-holed all the time.
To purchase the Chromeskull: Laid to Rest 2 DVD via Amazon, click here.
Scream 4 (Blu-ray)
Coming more than a decade since the last franchise entry, Scream 4 again mixes murder, mystery and self-awareness, to adequate if not exceptional effect. A meta horror entry which re-teams writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven, the film introduces a fresh crop of victims and suspects, blending them together with old characters and past grudges, and succeeds on its own carefully prescribed terms as a piece of diversionary puzzlebox entertainment, but doesn’t pack the wallop of the best moments of its forebears.
Years after the traumatic events of her past, tangled up in a web of multiple murders, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) has finally achieved a measure of peace, and turned her terrible experiences into the basis for a self-help book. When she returns to her tiny hometown of Woodsboro on the last stop in her book tour, she reconnects with Sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and tabloid-reporter-turned-novelist Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), who are now married.
Unfortunately, Sidney’s arrival also elicits the return of a costume-clad, knife-wielding Ghostface, who again heralds his acts of violence by first terrorising her, and others, over the phone. Soon Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts, above) finds herself in the killer’s crosshairs, along with her boyfriend Trevor (Nico Tortorella), her best friend Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), and two A/V club geeks, Robbie (Erik Knudsen) and Charlie (Rory Culkin), who use webcams to live-stream their entire high school experience.
For all of the original film’s referential genre bits, from Psycho to Halloween, Scream 4 doesn’t really strongly attempt to echo or comment upon the plot turns of any recent horror franchises, like Saw or Paranormal Activity, instead investing more generically in advances in technology and social media over the last decade.
It’s undeniable that Scream 4, despite some grim and bloody set pieces and squirm-inducing stalking from Ghostface, doesn’t really work or hold together, in the conventional sense, as a scary movie. Audiences need not have seen the earlier films recently, but must have some sort of trace memory and rooting investment in the shared plight of the older characters. Apart from a multi-layered genre deconstruction that opens the film, Scream 4 is thematically most similar to the original 1996 movie, in much the same way that Rocky and 2006’s Rocky Balboa could be viewed as satisfying bookends, divorced from the rest of the series.
While a hallmark of Scream franchise has been its nimbleness and narrative cleverness, there here seems a missed opportunity to delve deeper into notions of celebrity victimhood, and the strange complicity of the town of Woodsboro, for which the apparently annual marking of the murders remains a bizarre sort of cottage industry. The reasoning and motivations behind this most recent set of murders come tumbling awkwardly forth in the last act, but since they are deployed chiefly in the service of twists, their exploration thus comes across as a bit disappointingly shallow.
Working again with cinematographer Peter Deming, series helmer Craven frames much the violence in widescreen, which runs counter to the gory close-ups of a certain subset of horror films. Given both the perfunctory nature of large chunks of dialogue and the large degree to which Scream 4 is a type of cinematic exercise in pulled levers, there is not much opportunity for performers to shine, though Roberts and Brie make the most notable impacts amongst the newcomers.
Housed in a regular Blu-ray case, the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack of Scream 4 comes to the format of advanced choice in a beautiful 1080p AVC encoded high definition transfer with deep, consistent blacks, and no edge enhancement or digital scrubbing. Audio arrives by way of a 5.1 DTS-HD master audio track with a nice mixture of levels across the board, and optional subtitles. The supplemental package on this release, unfortunately, doesn’t rise to the level of the audio-visual presentation. Craven, Panettiere and Roberts sit together for a feature-length audio commentary track, and Campbell phones in (literally) for about 45 minutes, but perhaps owing to Craven’s naturally droll, laid back personality and the relative youth of the aforementioned pair, this isn’t exactly a dynamic listen by any stretch of the imagination.
The release’s other elements are OK, but hardly superlative. A making-of featurette only clocks in at 10 minutes, which seems like (and is) an inadequate amount of time to get into a franchise this intricate, and attempts to rekindle interest in it. Of the more than 25 minutes of deleted and extended material (which is heavy on the latter classification, really), the only things that really stand out are an alternate opening and ending. Trailers, a brief gag reel, and a promotional piece for a Scream videogame round things out, while, nicely a digital copy of the movie is also included. The multi-format options are the big selling point here, but Scream 4 honestly still doesn’t rise past the level of rental, even for hardcore fans of the series. Nevertheless, to purchase the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)
Happy Feet 2
A moralizing musical that feels the lesser of its Oscar-winning animated predecessor in every imaginable way, Happy Feet 2 dances as fast as it can but can’t kick up any level of engagement beyond only occasional raucous diversion. Director George Miller again blends motion-capture-assisted penguin dance choreography with exuberant contemporary songs, but the stabs at ecstatic celebration feel laboriously pantomimed rather than revived, so weighed down by bromides and frantic, look-at-me antics is the film. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG, 99 minutes)
Freerunner (Blu-ray)
What if Death Race were cross-pollinated with a Mountain Dew commercial and 30 Minutes Or Less, and then vacuumed free of any of the inherent comedy? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Freerunner, a parkour-themed direct-to-video actioner from director Lawrence Silverstein.
When young free-runner Ryan (Sean Faris) tries to break free from mobster Reese (Tamer Hassen), he ends up with an exploding collar locked around his neck, and — along with his girlfriend Chelsea (Rebecca Da Costa) — has to make it across town in a hour, all for the amusement of the slimy Mr. Frank (Danny Dyer), and a betting organization who enables high-stakes gamblers to place bids on who will live and who will die. Yawning action hijinks ensue. World champion free-runner Ryan Doyle, still-alive Seymour Cassel and model/speaker-of-words Casey Durkin all also appear, but the latter is not nearly in the state of undress for which one might hope.
The idea here is of course nothing particularly new or special, but nothing about the execution “upscales” this slice of slapstick genre junk. The characters are cardboard-thin, the dialogue terrible, and the acting not much better, especially in the secondary and supporting roles. Also, part of the appeal of parkour — and the reason both Luc Besson has had fun with it and it’s been folded into big, mainstream Hollywood productions — is that it’s inherently low-fi, and a kind of antidote to big, overblown, overly slick special effects. By this movie’s logic, though, a 40-foot jump from a bridge onto a moving boat is no big deal, and doesn’t even require a flex of the knees upon landing. By perverting the realities of parkour and its basic premise so much, Freerunner fumbles away any chance at even being a stupid little guilty pleasure. It’s just bad, period.
Housed in a regular Blu-ray case, Freerunner comes to the format presented in 1080p high-definition, in a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with a DTS-HD master audio 5.1 audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. If the movie itself is lacking then at least the special bonus features are quantitatively ample, including a behind-the-scenes featurette, outtakes and bloopers, a separate featurette on parkour and free-running, a look at the movie’s fights and stunt work, trailers, and more. No free pair of athletic shoes, though. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B (Disc)
Father of Invention (Blu-ray)
If one could entirely banish certain ideas for scenes from the minds of all screenwriters, then surely on the top 10 list for such cinematic excommunication would be press conference confessionals, which at some point must have seemed really bold and original but by now almost without fail come across as lazy and pat — an entirely synthetic way to give an audience the feeling of a character-awakening conclusion without any of the heavy lifting that accompanies honest reflection. Such is the dispiriting end point for Father of Invention, a weird and fitfully fresh comedy with a name-heavy cast that almost methodically fumbles away a viewer’s engagement, leaving them instead with thoughts of what could have been.
Robert Axle (Kevin Spacey) is an ego-driven infomercial guru who made his fortune fabricating mash-up inventions that maximized “the atomic and molecular potential” of purchasers (think a pepper spray-camera hybrid, so that one could snap photos of their attacker). A class action lawsuit related to one of his products landed him in jail, though, and when he gets out eight years later his wife Lorraine (Virginia Madsen) is remarried to Jerry (Craig Robinson). Robert lands a retail job working at a wholesale discount store under the high-strung Troy Coangelo (Johnny Knoxville), and soon after his semi-estranged daughter Claire (Camilla Belle), now 22, grants him a place to live. Almost immediately, though, Robert butts heads with one of Claire’s roommates, lesbian gym teacher Phoebe (Heather Graham). Robert’s big dream is get back into business, however, so he starts hitting the pavement and trying to come up with partners and financial backers for a new idea. Will a return to some of his old habits, however, land him back in trouble?
Spacey sly and slightly oily charismatic touch is custom-built for a guy like Axle — half heart, and half ambitious huckster — and he anchors Father of Invention with aplomb. The other performances, though, don’t always feel like they’re from the same movie, even though some decent joke-writing gives the actors piecemeal opportunities to shine. Director Trent Cooper cycles through lots of set-ups (somewhat refreshingly, the movie isn’t afraid to haul in a new character or setting for a joke), but after a while the narrative just seems manic and unfocused.
There are so many elements to serve — from father/daughter reconciliation and Jerry and Lorraine’s pending bankruptcy to an eventual thawing and flirtation between Robert and Phoebe and even the parental divorce of Claire’s other roommate — that Father of Invention takes on the quality of a high school term paper thrown together at the last minute, all unconnected facts and half-baked assertions. Does the movie desire to be a wacky ensemble comedy? Does it want to be a comedic-leaning tale of familial redemption? Or is it more expressly about Robert’s professional journey? The filmmakers can’t decide, ultimately, so a viewer mostly stops caring.
Father of Invention comes to Blu-ray presented in a 2.40:1 non-anamorphic widescreen presentation in 1080p, with a Dolby TrueHD audio track that more than adequately handles the fairly straightforward and meager aural requirements of the title. Apart from the requisite chapter stops, its sole supplemental feature is a brief making-of featurette that doesn’t dig much deeper than a thumbnail’s scratch into the making of the movie. Nevertheless, to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)
AFI Fest: Light of Mine
An in-competition entry in the recent and ongoing AFI Fest’s “Breakthrough” section, which spotlights movies located solely through the festival’s cold submission process, director Brett Eichenberger’s Light of Mine is a reflective, strikingly photographed little relationship drama about a man grappling with impending blindness, and the notion of how to forge a path for a future he won’t be able to see. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the movie’s trailer, meanwhile, click here. (Resonance, unrated, 78 minutes)
Haywire
Steven Soderbergh is an interesting throwback to directors of yore, in that he is far less precious with his career than many of his contemporaries, and seems to regard the medium of film as inherently a place to explore, and play around. This means not only that he’s rather astonishingly prolific, but also engages in willful genre experiments (the Ocean’s trilogy, certainly, as well as something like Solaris, and even Contagion), plus low-fi adventures like Full Frontal, Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience. Rather than own one genre or mood, Soderbergh lets them intermittently possess him, all while putting his own stamp of personality on narrative material.
His latest film, Haywire, is more of the mindset of the former, but also exhibits some of the seat-of-the-pants inclinations of some of the latter, aforementioned DIY productions. Built around MMA fighter Gina Carano, it’s an action movie, at once lithe and bruising, but also a sort of character piece chess game, in which the personalities of the participants and the stylishness of its telling matter more than its junky, familiar, high-calorie revenge plot. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Relativity, R, 93 minutes)
So, Michael Jackson’s Death Bed Is Up For Sale?
I got an email from a friend that pointed out first we had President Obama’s half-eaten pancakes and eggs up put for Internet auction. Then we had Shia LaBeouf‘s tracked-up and sweat-grungy bikini briefs from a studio’s wardrobe department, followed by Scarlett Johansson‘s used Kleenex from The Tonight Show. And now bids will be taken on Michael Jackson’s queen-size, hospital-adjustable death bed from his Bel-Air compound. Asked what this says about civilization, I have but one reply: clearly I should start selling “bottled air” from junkets and other interview opportunities.
Being Elmo
If the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs spotlights some fascinating occupations that many of us wouldn’t necessarily rush to embrace as our own, then Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey tells the tale of a job every bit as quirky and atypical, and seemingly a lot more fun, and better smelling. More specifically, it tells the life story of Kevin Clash, an African-American kid who grew up in the 1970s in Baltimore, and eventually would find fortune, if not fame, as the voice of Elmo, a breakout Sesame Street character that became a full-fledged zeitgeist phenomenon, spreading from the preschool and adolescent set into the broader culture at large.
Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it was awarded with a special jury prize. Mixing archival footage, sit-down interviews and other material from the present day, filmmaker Constance Marks delivers a tapestral, feel-good tale of outside-of-the-box self-actualization, replete with loads of rare, behind-the-scenes glimpses at Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo and other pieces of Jim Henson’s legacy. For those who ever had dreams outside the mainstream, Being Elmo tickles those fanciful reminiscences, in a heartening way.
Sensitive and candid, Clash is an engaging subject, if also sometimes unable to fully articulate the experiential depths of his teenage obsession with puppets, and how it made him feel. Chronicling the scissored destruction of his father’s coat is one thing, and certainly amusing. But movies like Make Believe, about teenage magicians, and even the Scottish dance documentary Jig, in every other respect a much lesser film than Being Elmo, each spent at least a bit of time reflecting inward and addressing the subjects’ feelings about their interests and finely honed talents. Marks’ film does not.
What else Being Elmo misses are a few small but telling things. Viewers see Clash in Paris, instructing puppeteers on hand movements and other techniques for an upcoming live stage show. And there’s nice material on the Henson workshop where Elmo, Bert, Ernie and other characters are constructed from drawers full of elements, and reams of felt, fur and the like. But the movie doesn’t really address how, if at all, puppeteers see and refine their own work. And neither does it really address the scripting process, which seems strange. While Clash — who took over the physical puppet of Elmo from a colleague who determined he’d hit a creative dead end — talks about the creation of the character, and the breakthrough of building it around the defining characteristic of Elmo’s love of hugs, and bodily contact, Marks’ movie makes it almost seem like huge portions of Sesame Street are improvised, which surely can’t be the case.
These quibbles aside, Being Elmo still has a certain warmth, and emotional resonance. The reason for the character’s popularity seems clear — Elmo expresses unconditional love, and support. In many ways, he’s a little, red, furry manifestation of the support that Clash’s parents provided him, when he had this crazy dream so outside the boundaries of their socioeconomically depressed, lower-middle-class experience. For some little kids, that feeling is, sadly, virtually unknown in their home lives. For every child, though, that embrace — both literal and figurative — is important. Elmo is a giver, and Clash’s story one bound to put a soft smile on your face. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Submarine Deluxe, unrated, 78 minutes)