Centering on a group of young friends and deployed reservists from the shores of Lake Superior, on the northern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Where Soldiers Come From delivers unto viewers a slice of somewhat meandering but nonetheless quite affecting blue-collar heartbreak. After all, the subjects, none older than 22 at the time, joined the National Guard together on something of a lark, drawn in — even in wartime — chiefly by a devil-may-care sense of fraternity and the benefits of a $15,000 signing bonus and college tuition assistance. This understated, delicately anthropological real-life coming-of-age tale tracks the end of their Stateside training, a rough tour of duty in Afghanistan, and the disillusionment and troubles that follow upon their return home. It’s not for all tastes, but these stories, alas, are the new back stories of many individual American tragedies and triumphs yet to be written. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 91 minutes)
To frame it in the form of a simile that baseball fans will understand, Ryan Gosling right now is like Greg Maddux in 1994 and ’95, or Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000 — just absolutely crushing it, turning in casually dazzling performances in such a fashion that it will be virtually impossible for him to further forestall a People‘s “Sexiest Man Alive” magazine cover. Yes, in case there were any remaining doubts, after having danced around and avoided it for several years, not unlike Johnny Depp, Gosling is now taking the bullet train to stardom. His latest film, Drive, amply drives home that point.
The story finds the forthrightly named Driver (Gosling, oozing utterly unforced cool) a quiet loner who does movie stunt work during the day and serves as a for-hire criminal wheelman at night, falling under the spell of his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a vulnerable young mother. When Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) gets out of jail, it lights a fuse of danger. Driver agrees to do a job to wipe clean Standard’s prison debt, but things go sideways, resulting in the further, unwanted scrutiny of a syndicate of deadly criminals.
Working from an adaptation of James Sallis’ eponymous novel by Academy Award nominee Hossein Amini, director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson) delivers a movie that pulses with an unwavering, premium-unleaded sense of purpose, giving its no-frills story a sense of supremely heightened stakes. Eschewing freeways and landmarks, Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel turn L.A. into an at once intimate, mystical and menacing place. The performances are top notch, and Drive‘s score (by Cliff Martinez) and music selections, too, are hypnotic and of a piece — nervous, pulsing and desirous gems that give the movie a dreamlike hold. Yes, this is somewhat recombinant terrain, previously tilled by Michael Mann, William Friedkin and David Lynch. But when it’s this utterly mesmerizing, who in their right mind is complaining? (FilmDistrict, R, 100 minutes)
Somewhere, no doubt, adult film actor and shameless publicity whore Ron Jeremy is kicking himself over finding out that there exists a movie entitled The Hedgehog in which he is neither the star, nor the beneficiary of a large life-rights check. No, director Mona Achache’s movie is no hairy skin-flick biopic, but instead a darkly comedic broadside aimed at stuffy French elitism, a movie very loosely of a sort with Gosford Park and the forthcoming The Women on the 6th Floor, written and directed by Philippe Le Guay. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (NeoClassics Films, unrated, 100 minutes)
A nicely photographed and initially intriguing character study of a road trip gone awry, and a sibling pair of foreign travelers waylaid in a land foreign to them, Littlerock quickly fumbles away any sense of delicate engagement, and ends up a collection of posed and meandering down-tempo moments in search of an inciting incident or clarifying signifier. Pleased with itself more than it ought to be, the movie seems to believe or feel that dawdling for dawdling’s sake is in the end its own kind of precious artistic statement, a fact only underscored by a heavy-handed political statement finale.
Written and directed by Mike Ott, Littlerock is one of those indie films where the actors (non-professionals or neophytes, one assumes) all play characters with the same first names. Whether this was because the film is “real,” and rooted in actual experiences and their personalities or just so no one got confused on set, one can’t be certain. Regardless, the story centers on brother and sister Atsuko and Rintaro (Atsuko Okatsuka, above, and Rintaro Sawamoto), Japanese tourists whom we glean through a small handful of narrated postcards written back home, have a rocky relationship with their father. The pair gets stuck in the title town, a sleepy ex-urb of Los Angeles, when their car breaks down. Later that night, the duo happen upon a party at a nearby hotel, and make friends with Cory (Cory Zacharia), a kind of feckless loafer with loosely defined ambitions to be an actor or model.
Rintaro speaks a little English, and Atsuko none at all. The next day they “site-see” with Cory, meet some more people, and then head to another party. Despite the language barrier, Atsuko bonds more with the locals than her brother, and when he presses her to continue north as part of their agreed upon itinerary, she balks and stays behind. Staying with Cory (who lives with his father), Atsuko further tethers herself to her new surroundings, striking up a quasi-relationship with another boy, and taking a job at the Mexican restaurant where Cory works when he feels particularly gripped by the urge. Will Rintaro ever return? And what is bonding Atsuko to this place? Ah, these are the mysteries of Littlerock, where twentysomething kids ride bikes for fun when they’re not enjoying some beer and a smoke.
Somewhat (very loosely) like the recent Bellflower or the Polish brothers’ 2001 dramedy Jackpot, Littlerock aims to be a portrait of arrested place and curious ambition. It means to be a sort of dusty, Southern California thematic companion to Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia, in which characters drink, smoke pot and passive-aggressively hassle one another while figuring out what to do with their lives. (Instead of parking lots, though, we get empty, rundown state parks and dingy apartments and RVs.) The problem is that there is no substantive and sustained outside force acting upon Cory, or Atsuko and Rintaro. Everyone is drifting, like a tattered leaf caught in a lazy breeze. Even when Cory is hassled over money he mysteriously owes an acquaintance, the stakes ($200) and pressure (a verbal berating, a poured-out beer) never amount to much of anything.
The performances, too, fail to engage. Okatsuka has a certain watchable mysteriousness, but that chiefly owes to the fact that she doesn’t speak any English. Zacharia, meanwhile, cycles through a thoroughly unconvincing catalogue of babytalk-inflected mannerisms in his dealings with Atsuko, whom his character is supposed to have a crush on. He comes across as an open-mouthed trout; it’s an annoying turn that only becomes more irritating when the script requires him to repeatedly fail to pick up on any nonverbal indicators. (At one point late in the film, he even gets cross and says, out loud, that it’s like Atsuko can’t understand him. Ummm… yeah.)
Most damningly, though, despite the ambivalence of its characters, Littlerock has no headstrong, purposeful sense of its own identity. Ott constructs a cutesy, willfully modest and submissive cultural mash-up, and proclaims it profound, or art, merely by virtue of its construction. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s web site. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance, unrated, 83 minutes)
If one conducted a day-long survey of random persons from any given major metropolitan street, and asked them to name the biggest polluter in the country, it’s doubtful that the Department of Defense’s name would come up at all, and if it did then almost certainly one wouldn’t need a second hand to keep track of that tally. And yet that’s the central assertion of Semper Fi: Always Faithful, a damning new documentary about drinking water contaminants at a military training base spanning a period of 30 years. At once emotionally powerful and a little more under-sketched than one might like it to be, the film is a frustrating yet nonetheless engaging and heartrending entry in the all-too-swollen canon of social-justice nonfiction films.
A presentation at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, where it won an editing award and was runner-up in the Audience Award balloting, co-directors Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon’s movie tells the story of toxic cleaning chemicals that were improperly disposed of at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base, beginning in 1957 and stretching well into the 1980s. The result was that nearly one million Marines and their families were exposed to high levels of carcinogens through drinking water drawn from wells on the base, and when the Marine Corps eventually closed the toxic wells they compounded their sins by never making the contamination public. Using technology to connect, a group of committed ex-Marines — many of whom have lost children, and some of whom are now sick themselves — work together and try to bring about long-delayed justice.
Semper Fi undeniably has emotional punching power, largely courtesy of one of its chief subjects, Jerry Ensminger, a former Master Sergeant and drill instructor for nearly 25 years. When he recollects his dying daughter — who had for weeks resisted any pain medication — asking for a morphine shot to be shared with him, because she knew her dad was in pain too, it is absolutely devastating. If there are failings, it’s that Libert and Hardmon do not construct a particularly strong narrative backbone beyond the chronological one attached to the quest fronted by Ensminger, or, frankly, attempt to expand their story beyond the limits of an emotional cudgel.
Neither do they make a deeply persuasive case for the potential reasons (or, indeed, the existence) of widespread military environmental abuses, or broad misconduct and cover-up. Simply tossing up title cards that indicate there are “130 contaminated military sites” in the United States, and pointing out that one in 10 Americans lives within 10 miles of a military base does not do justice to the gravity of Semper Fi‘s central story. While it’s understandable that the narrative is partially impacted by the fact that the story is still ongoing and unfolding (a bill mandating that the DOD notify all those who stayed at Camp Lejeune during the impacted timeframe is awaiting a final Congressional vote, and has been since February 2010), Libert and Hardmon don’t dig quite deep enough.
They’re content to stay with the activists, and while their journeys are all engaging on a human level, the film’s basic failure to aggressively seek out the contrasting point-of-view means that a viewer leaves uncertain as to whether this is all part of a sinister, coordinated cover-up, mere bureaucratic incompetence unrelated to government, or actually part of a larger military-culture “code of silence” in which the notion of honest, greater-good whistle-blowing, or standing up to and reporting problems up the chain of command, is not merely frowned upon but beaten into submission. Semper Fi tells one hell of a story, but unfortunately it’s just not the complete one. For more information on the film and its subjects, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, meanwhile, click here. (Wider Film Projects/Chicken and Egg Pictures, unrated, 76 minutes)
French actress Isabelle Huppert, nominated for a record 13 Cesar Awards, has made a career out of playing nervy characters with all manner of sexual foibles or secrets. In Special Treatment, she’s a high-class prostitute with dormant issues fueling a desire for a career change. The eighth feature offering from cult filmmaker Jeanne Labrune, this generally well sketched and set-up drama cashes in its early intrigue, though, abandoning darker overtones for rather wan interpersonal revelations. Those seeking kinky erotic drama of the sort found in early David Cronenberg will be sorely disappointed.
The story centers on Alice Bergerac (Huppert, above right), a well-to-do fortysomething who serves up high-end sexual fantasies for her clientele, from schoolgirl submissiveness to S&M dominance. Neurotic psychologist Xavier Demestre (Bouli Lanners), meanwhile, is stuck in a marriage in which he and wife Helene (Valerie Dreville) can no longer conceal their distaste for one another, lobbing open attacks in front of mixed company at a party. When a friend recommends Alice to Xavier, he gives her a call, just on the heels of Alice suffering a nasty incident with another client. They meet, and she explains that she only offers bundled packages of a minimum of 10 sessions, and so they embark on a professional relationship in which Alice gamely tries to coax out of Xavier his preferences, and get to the root of his unhappiness. In doing so, each party learns a little something.
Special Treatment is at its best when it’s mapping out and concentrating on the parallels between psychoanalysis and prostitution — the discreet locations, the exchange of money, the promise of anonymity, the establishment of rules, and specific time limits. Never mind that its inciting incident for Alice’s occupational second-guessing feels relatively tame, and for a moment seems a part of her extended role play. Once it settles into a more standardized groove of interpersonal blossoming, maturation and desired occupational flight — no matter how elliptically sketched, in achingly European fashion — the movie is considerably less interesting, because its big-picture plot movements and character decisions all feel staked out and predetermined. Alice will feel increasing frustration with Xavier’s inability to articulate his sexual wants, and Xavier will recognize her latent unhappiness and eventually start taking steps to try to help Alice ease out of prostitution.
Director Jeanne Labrune, working from a script co-written with Richard Debuisne, also does a fairly risible job of explaining the holes or conflict in Xavier and Helene’s marriage. If it were merely or only a matter of sexual incompatibility or stasis, the film could still exist fine as is, but the sheer glee with which Helene attacks Xavier in certain scenes raises all sorts of questions that go largely unanswered. As it moves toward its painfully French finale (it gives away nothing to say that the movie ends with a character staring off into the distance in reflection), awkward symbolism — in the form of an antique angel sculpture — is also visited upon the story, a sighing reality which seems remote in the quite solid opening act.
Through it all, Huppert has a sly technique, and an endlessly fascinating face. Ergo, Special Treatment never slips in holding one’s attention when she is on the screen. Unfortunately, the film’s intrigue unravels with each passing minute. There’s great promise in this premise — of a dissection of the value of arguably substitutive experiences, and how long they can or even should last — but this Treatment falls short, and delivers no special and lastingly memorable catharsis or insights. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run, R, 96 minutes)
Another unimaginatively plotted horror film which unfolds in a cursed house and pairs a young girl who thinks she sees monsters with parents who don’t believe her, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark arrives courtesy of co-writer/producer Guillermo Del Toro’s own childhood imaginations, and a 1973 teleplay that cast a chilly spell over him. Precious little of that menacing mood survives this technically proficient but rather yawning exercise in genre literalism, however — a disappointment considering the high-end creepiness and dark fantasia on display in some of Del Toro’s own films, like Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth. The general feeling that materializes is that something much more interesting could have been done with the concept. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. Mind the paywall, though. (FilmDistrict, R, 99 minutes)
A hit in its native Hong Kong, Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is getting a boutique release across the rest of the world, including major metropolitan areas of the United States. And why not, really? Screening in both 3-D and 2-D, the slickly produced film is a lurid, wild and weird attempt to reboot the 1990s’ Sex and Zensoftcore franchise, in which outlandish sex and borderline gnarly-cartoonish violence were commingled. The end product lives up to its title, that’s for certain. A demented, Faustian-infused Flash Gordon episode crossed with a Chinese costume dramedy and some sort of discarded “Masters of Horror” script, Sex and Zen is a memorable viewing experience, in however many dimensions one watches it.
The story centers around a Ming Dynasty scholar, Yangsheng (Hiro Hayama, above left), who marries Yuxiang (the beautiful Leni Lan, above right), but finds himself lacking as a lover and unable to please her. Obsessed with the smallness of his penis and seeking carnal knowledge, he visits the conniving Prince Ning (Tony Ho), who has a Tower of Rarity (you know, with a blood-sweating horse and stuff like that) and a Pavilion of Ultimate Bliss. Yangsheng eventually wins admittance to the latter, and Prince Ning sets him up with “sex healer” Ruihu (Vonnie Lui). Then he has an operation to replace his penis with that of a donkey. Yep… seriously. During this time Yuxiang takes a lover, but still misses her husband, so she sets out to retrieve him. Additional insanity ensues.
The film starts with and maintains as a sort of touchstone a generally goofy tone. When Yangsheng and Yuxiang honeymoon, he pronounces her breasts “so cool,” and when she worries about the pain associated with her first time having intercourse, he proclaims, “It will hurt, but it will be extremely awesome!” In its final third especially, as Prince Ning turns jealous and villainous, the movie’s wild violence spikes, though not enough to completely derail its carnival atmosphere, which comes across like an Oriental take on Werner Hedman’s Danish In the Sign of… 1970s sex comedies crossed with the aforementioned influences with maybe a little bit of Circle of Iron thrown in for good measure.
Sex and Zen is kind of bizarrely captivating, and not necessarily because of all the nudity and sex (though that certainly helps). It’s watchable chiefly because one never quite gets a firm grasp on where it’s headed. Part of this is no doubt a reflection of cultural differences, and part of it is undoubtedly just because it’s some disorienting combination of silly, poorly scripted and outright insane. So when Ruihu pops up and turns out to have another set of sexual running gear, and then starts flinging around and smashing massive wooden wheels with her firehose-length phallus, well… one just sort of shrugs and goes with it.
In the end, one can’t really recommend Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, at least not with a straight face. It starts to get into male and female sexual insecurities that cut across cultures and eras, but it’s too slapdash to emotionally connect, and while portions of it are certainly arousing, it doesn’t have, ahem, a lasting erotic charge. The degree to which one might feel truly cheated by a viewing, though, is dependent only on one’s company, level of alcoholic imbibement, and post-screening coital success level. For the full, original read, from ShockYa, click here. (China Lion/China 3-D Digital Entertainment, R, 113 minutes)
The idea of sexual swinging, or committed couples swapping partners, opens up all sorts of rich avenues for exploration of feeling, but the London-set comedy Swinging With the Finkels does so little of substance or sincerity with the subject that one starts to yearn for the comparative honesty of a lonely hearts drama with a forlorn guy swigging a beer and staring at a computer screen. In fact, the movie evinces no particular reason for existing other than to seemingly provide its pleasant but half-heartedly invested cast with paychecks, and perhaps serve as the answer for the trivia question of in which film Mandy Moore mock-masturbates with a cucumber.
Ellie (Moore) and Alvin (Martin Freeman) are a young, married white-collar couple seemingly suffering from a bit of the seven-year itch. Friends Peter (Jonathan Silverman) and Janet (Melissa George) are little help, the journey into parenthood having thrown something of a speed bump into their relationship. Seemingly because one attempt at “spicing it up” in the bedroom went awry (she wore sexy lingerie and lit mood candles, and he donned a fireman’s costume… ha!), Ellie and Alvin make the (entirely il)logical jump to swinging, eventually settling on a seemingly normal couple (Angus Deayton and Daisy Beaumont). After the Saturday night deed is done, things proceed but, magically, don’t get immediately better for Ellie and Alvin. What’s a committed but sexually frustrated couple to do?
Swinging With the Finkels is supposedly rated R, but it’s quite possibly the tamest R in recent memory, especially for a film dealing with matters sexual. Director Jonathan Newman’s movie is definitely the “fem” version of a swingers’ tale, with relationship mechanics valued much more over any possible prurient interests. Problematically, though, it also exists chiefly as a collection of nipped sitcom contrivances, from Ellie’s theatrically gay coworker (who gives her the initial idea of partner-swapping) and a montage of “zany” bad fits who respond to Ellie and Alvin’s sex ad to a forced-uncomfortable sequence in which an old person (in this case Ellie’s grandfather, played by Jerry Stiller) dispenses sex advice. Wow, how novel.
The script digs into none of these scenes with great aplomb, and it additionally requires Ellie and Alvin’s friends to nonsensically implode their marriage by having Peter tell Janet about a one-off affair, merely so there is some minor element of introduced contrast to Ellie and Alvin’s plight. Two grossly overwritten office pals of Alvin also serve this function, and an extremely flat shooting style and hammy music cues additionally do the material no favors. The Finkels manages to make both stanch, devoted monogamy and quiet singlehood look attractive — no small (or purposeful) accomplishment for a movie about swinging and its churned-up feelings. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Freestyle, 86 minutes, R)
An unusually intimate peek behind the curtain of the Followill fraternity, Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon arrives at particularly bizarre time, coming as it does on the heels of the successful, Grammy Award-winning band’s cancellation of the entirety of its remaining U.S. fall tour dates after a disastrous show in Dallas in which lead singer Caleb Followill (below, second from right) suddenly left the stage. After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, the documentary bows on Showtime this evening, with repeat presentations scheduled over the next several weeks.
The sons of Betty Ann and Ivan Followill, a homemaker and traveling Pentecostal revivalist preacher, Caleb, Nathan and Jared joined forces with their cousin Matthew to peddle their own brand of Southern garage/roots rock, riding a couple well received albums to overseas touring success before truly punching through Stateside with 2008’s multi-platinum Only By the Night. Co-directed by Stephen C. Mitchell and Casey McGrath, the former of whom was a Nashville A&R rep who initially signed Nathan and Caleb to a record contract, Talihina Sky unfolds somewhere between fan document and tantalizing expose. Mitchell’s decade-plus-long relationship with the group gives him access to personal home videos, interviews and behind-the-scenes rehearsal and recording studio footage, not all of it flattering. And he and McGrath also make the decision to frame their film around the Followills’ return to one of their annual family reunions in rural Oklahoma, where various cousins, uncles, second cousins and uncles who might be second cousins provide — in their sometimes drunken ramblings — provide in cumulative a telling portrait of familial roots that implicitly if sympathetically offers up a psychological explanation of some of the Followill boys’ behavior and (latent) problems.
Still, even though Ivan and Betty Ann submit to interviews, and there’s a proper accounting of the circumstances that led in particular Nathan and Caleb from Jesus-praising hymnals to peddling “the devil’s music,” Talihina Sky unfolds at a bit of a remove, probably in large part because the band members are all producers on the project, and therefore reluctant to sign off on anything that lastingly portrays either them or their loved ones in too negative of a light. Caleb talks rather movingly about the shame of being poor as a child, and how that is definitely a motivating factor in his young adult life. And Ivan speculates about the impact that the divorce of he and his wife had on his kids. But every time Talihina Sky seems close to offering up penetrating insights — in regards to Ivan’s alcoholism, say, or any of the other Followills’ bouts with booze and marijuana — it pulls back, and throws in some old public access performance footage, or clips of a spirited game of horseshoes at the aforementioned reunion.
There’s a lot between the lines, in other words. In the sparse and seemingly free-association interview segments, Mitchell and McGrath obviously don’t press the Followills for a lot answers. So when Caleb ruminates about an A&R rep stopping by the recording studio and giving his opinion recording singles choices, and evocatively compares it to a smut film, there’s no clarifying follow-up. Similarly, some gripping tour bus footage in which one of the band members rips into Caleb for his drunken selfishness appears out of nowhere, and lacks any contextual placement.
Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon is a picture of a group of twentysomething guys in motion, and development. It lacks definition, and clarity. Still, that’s hardly a mortal sin, given the not-yet-cast maturity of its subjects. Both the sheer amount and quality of achingly personal footage here is easily worthy of a viewing by even casual fans of the group, or just those for whom modern music and the accompanying tour lifestyle holds interest. Just don’t expect firm answers about some of the problems that plague these guys. That speculation is left up to each individual viewer. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Phreak Creative, unrated, 86 minutes)
A pumped-up remake of the same-named 1984 vampire horror-comedy, director Craig Gillespie’s Fright Night (not to be confused with Fight Night) represents a well oiled machine of goosed senses that has no clearly defined motivating purposes, even within the genre confines of its own story. Fun and engaging performances from especially Colin Farrell, David Tennant and Anton Yelchin carry the film a great distance, but it eventually bogs down courtesy of loosely defined stakes and poorly incentivized action. Overall, the story feels beholden to a series of character choices and
actions that make no particular sense. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Touchstone/DreamWorks, R, 105 minutes)
When people talk about a movie being depressing, whether in a context either admiring or dismissive, they’re almost always talking about and assessing the dramatic heft of a down-tempo narrative film — how a writer, director and actors worked in concert to shine a light on various human frailties, turmoils and difficulties, and in doing so impacted a viewer’s mood in a manner that lingered with them long after the theater lights came up. Real life, however, is even more full of disease and death, moral injustice and underdogs being smacked down by the powers that be.
That may not always be what one wishes to see in a movie, but it can sometimes be bracing, in a good way, to be confronted by the ugliness of reality on its own terms, in broad daylight. And that’s the kind of beautiful, heart-rending melancholy on display in Battle For Brooklyn, a surprisingly touching documentary from husband-and-wife filmmakers Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley that details the struggle of a small group of Brooklynites as they try to prevent New York State from seizing 22 acres of land to hand off to a commercial real estate developer with grand designs on building a new arena for the NBA’s New Jersey Nets.
The film focuses on Daniel Goldstein (above), a graphic designer turned reluctant but square-jawed activist whose apartment sits almost at what would be center court of said shimmering new arena, part of a polarizing Atlantic Yards project to overhaul the neighborhood of Prospect Heights and also erect a dozen-plus skyscrapers. When the plans were announced in 2004, it was a shock to those whose lives might be most impacted, since they had never heard of it, or been consulted. Developer Bruce Ratner owned a parcel of Brooklyn land easily big enough to house plans for the stadium, but basically wanted to keep that so he could build (and then of course make lots of money leasing) other commercial buildings. So Ratner’s plan called for the displacement of 800-plus residents, ranging in socioeconomic status from the very poor to the much better-off, part of a group of new townhome apartments. Forcing them to move would involve invoking the power of “eminent domain,” which is used when government is building something expressly for the good and benefit of the public — mostly with highways, and sometimes schools.
A very substantial public gift to a private developer, though, didn’t sit well with Goldstein and others, so they fought back. Pitted against them was an entourage of lawyers and public relations emissaries, as well as the entire local government, fans of the basketball team, and other residents excited by the lure of potential construction and/or concession jobs. Spanning years of this fight, Galinsky and Hawley’s film is an engrossing and sometimes even chilling portrait of the way underclasses can and will always be pitted and played off against one another, for veritable scraps off a table. Goldstein is an involving subject, and some of the case’s dark developments — including the revelation of air-quote community groups funded by Ratner to give the appearance of public embrace of the project — are worthy of a regular narrative thriller.
Battle For Brooklyn is in some ways reminiscent of Don Argott’s 2010 documentary The Art of the Steal, about a decades-long tug-of-war over the late Albert Barnes’ $30 billion art collection, and efforts to bring it to Philadelphia, which ran counter to his expressly indicated wishes. Movies like each of these both deftly illustrate the ravenous impulses of capitalism, which abhors unexploited value, and confirm the fact that the American legal system, as it pertains to non-criminal matters, is basically just a gamed system for moneyed and mighty interests to eventually win out. A powerful movie about an important and little-reflected-upon topic, Battle For Brooklyn is a telling snapshot of (offscreen) political maneuvering, and the tossed-around wrecking-ball weight of corporate might as it relates to individual rights. (Rumur Productions, unrated, 93 minutes)
If one has on their “bucket list” seeing a live-action, achingly precious ensemble drama in which a butterfly recites some of the lyrics to “I Want Candy,” then they should definitely see Cafe. Then, and only then. Actually… you know what? They may want to hold up and wait a bit longer, rolling the dice to see if some other enterprising would-be auteur works that left-field tidbit into their armchair-philosophizing cinematic treatise on paying it forward or embracing life or some such malarkey. A sincere and wildly self-serious film that seems to chiefly exist due to some pact/dare to do a hiatus-schedule movie together that erstwhile lovers Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jamie Kennedy forged on the set of The Ghost Whisperer, this Cafe should have its beverage license revoked, no matter the lack of alcohol.
The story unfolds entirely in a West Philadelphia coffee shop (insert The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air joke here), where Claire (Hewitt) works, an in-debt druggie (Garrett Lee Hendricks) falls under the dark sway of a dope-slinging former pal (Kennedy), and a nameless writer (Richard Short) observes a couple (Michaela McManus and Derek Cecil) enjoy some post-movie banter despite the fact that one of them is married. Other characters kind of drift in and out, and the film’s big putative shock/twist occurs when a girl (Madeline Carroll) pops up on the laptop of a dweeby guy (Hubbel Palmer) and tells him he’s an avatar, and that his entire world/life (and that of those around him) doesn’t exist. He resists her revelation, but engages in a series of tests and conversations, and eventually comes to believe her. But should the audience?
Writer-director Marc Erlbaum — who one has to assume is a recent film school graduate who wrote plenty of tortured poetry in high school — is clearly aiming for some grand metaphorical statement with Cafe, but his reach far exceeds his grasp. Nothing about the computer girl’s revelation (whether real or phony) particularly deepens or colors any of the action we see unfold (even after she directs her chubby confidant to tell Claire the same things she told him), and the movie’s insights consist of yawning bromides like, “There is no more brilliant light than that which follows darkness.” Wow, deep. The film’s ending, meanwhile, opts for both cheap melodrama and an additional twist, which hints at yet an additional layer of hokey artifice.
Stooping to the level of the material, Erlbaum’s cast does Cafe no great favors, apart from the young and talented Carroll, who radiates an unfussy trustworthiness and benevolence a cut or two above the cheap, college-level Philosophy 101 nonsense she’s pitching. Hewitt is lovely and flirty, which casts a bit of sunshine on a couple brief moments (not even entire scenes), but as her friend-zone-trapped coffee shop coworker Todd, Daniel Eric Gold telegraphs and overdials the bumbling nervousness, almost to the point that you want to reach into the screen and punch him. The single, cuts-both-ways bemusement of Cafe comes by way of Kennedy. Cast against type as a thug, he seems to be using the movie as some sort of low-fi acting exercise, so for a while it’s actually cool and kind of interesting to see him underplay things in several scenes. The problem is that he also mumbles all of his dialogue, apparently doing his impression on Fenster from The Usual Suspects, and that gets old rather quickly — kind of like all of Cafe‘s stale offerings, actually. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Maya Entertainment, PG-13, 101 minutes)
What would possess a person to stay and live in (or move to) a small, dusty town in the scorching Death Valley region of California, with a population of 35? That question is at the heart of Nick Brandestini’s Darwin: No Services Ahead, about a same-named, dried-up burgh at the end of a weathered road on the outskirts on a nearby mountain range where the government tests top-secret weapons. A unique and in some respects staggering work, Darwin is an involving portrait of people propelled from society by various tragic turns, and yet also curiously bound together by their estrangement.
When, in the spring of 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was captured on audiotape making comments about small towns whose jobs had dried up and vanished, and were thus characterized by a populace with antipathy toward outsiders or those different than them, and clinging to guns and religion, he was in theory speaking about rural Rust Belt voters, but there are certainly significant overlaps with some of the denizens of Darwin. The remarkable thing about Brandestini’s humanizing movie, though — which also recalls David Lynch’s web-produced Interview Project, co-directed by his son Austin — is that it doesn’t sit in superior judgment of them, even as it slowly reveals some of their cracked and warped thinking.
Monty Brannigan, a salty ex-miner who’s lived in the town for almost 60 years and is old enough to remember its wild(er) roots (after several openings and closings, the mine shuttered for good in 1977), lives in as much of an unexamined cocoon as he can with his second wife, Nancy, estranged from his two adult children. Hank and Connie Jones, a couple with seven previous marriages between them, give occasional town tours, and take care of Connie’s transsexual “son,” Ryal, and his partner, who are contemplating a move. Susan Pimentel holds the town’s one real job, as postmaster. (Michael Laemmle, meanwhile, the grand-nephew of Universal Studios co-founder Carl Laemmle, oversees the 55,000-gallon water tank and single-pipe, gravity-fed waterline that descends from the mountains and serves as Darwin’s literal lifeline.) These and other interesting characters serve as a reminder that certain pockets of America are not for the hearty and hale, but for people — consciously or not — looking to avoid or run away from something.
Brandestini doesn’t load up his movie with fancy directorial gimmickry, or even prod his interview subjects with a seemingly specific agenda, instead leaning on an ethereal Southwestern-inflected score from composer Michael Brook for mood and just letting them talk. The skillfully edited result is fairly remarkable. A history of the town emerges first; its namesake was Dr. Erasmus Darwin French, a U.S. Army deserter who headed west during the Gold Rush and spent years (unsuccessfully) mining in the area. When silver was discovered nearby in 1874, the town briefly boomed, achieving its peak population of 3,500 in 1877. Then, in a roundabout way, colorful unseen supporting characters are illuminated through survivor’s memories. One Darwin dweller who passed in 2003, Greville Healey, lived in a hollowed-out metal water tank, having been “banned” from living in a home (trailer) after burning two of them down while falling asleep with lit cigarettes.
Finally, of course, the characters themselves come into crisper focus — with edifying details and sometimes shocking stories about their pasts, and ruminations (spoken and sometimes editorially implied) on what’s drawn them to and/or kept them in Darwin. There are few explicitly religious zealots in the mix (fistfights or the threat thereof seem more likely to broker peace than the blessed holy scripture), but more than a handful of Darwin residents confess a belief in apocalyptic, doomsday scenarios. To that end, one gentleman leaves a variety of loaded handguns, rifles and shotguns scattered around his home; another, for reasons unclear, has buried his guns outside of his trailer, in the desert. It’s fascinating and more than a little moving to contemplate the histories and dilemmas of all these people. They are by degrees damaged souls, yes, but in their basic needs not so different from you or I. (Nick Brandestini Productions, unrated, 86 minutes)
The latest big screen iteration in a character that has held a grip on fan imagination for almost eight decades, Conan the Barbarian is a full-bodied piece of throwback sword-and-sorcery entertainment that dutifully meets its target-demographic quotients for nudity and violence, but otherwise inspires little in the way of crossover thrill or appeal. A convincing backdrop can’t completely save a narrative stuck somewhere between unapologetic pureblood retribution and something a bit more ambitious, just as neither can Jason Momoa — who has a certain snarling charisma that, combined with his well honed physique, nicely matches the needs of the part — or the wasted presence of Rachel Nichols. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 112 minutes)
In a world where religion and politics often divide folks quite nastily, sports — and of course in particular sports heroes — can serve to unite and uplift people, especially if their field of competition is international, and therefore allows for a degree of nationalistic fervor to creep into play. Such was certainly the case with Ayrton Senna, a fiery and hard-charging Formula One racing star who rose to prominence and a certain level of domination in the sport in the 1980s and early ’90s, serving as a rare beacon of pride and hope for his homeland of Brazil. A new documentary bearing his name — and the not undeserving stamp of Audience Award prizes at both the Sundance and Los Angeles Film Festivals — tells his story, in a unique and interesting way that doesn’t necessitate an abiding occupational interest in racing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Universal/ESPN Films, PG-13, 104 minutes)
A cinematic smart-bomb of heavily processed yet still not entirely inescapable sunny uplift, Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie mixes almost two dozen energetically pitched musical numbers from the hit FOX series’ recent spate of concert dates with laudatory audience testimonials and footage of three different teenage fans for whom the show’s embrace of diversity and individualism has made a difference. The movie is chiefly just a cash-grab hymnal to the choir, but briskly paced enough to still remain inoffensive to those outside of its prescribed demographic. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 83 minutes)
Coming off the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, author Ken Kesey in 1964 set off on a road trip across the United States with a bunch of like-minded friends — a renegade group of counter-culture truth-seekers known as the Merry Pranksters. The ostensible target or end-point destination of their journey was the World’s Fair in New York City, but in truth this, ahem, trip was as much about the hedonistic experience of the open road as it ever was about getting to the other side of the country. Poised somewhere between the beatnik and hippie generations, Kesey and his clan — including Neal Cassady, the central figure immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road — intended to make a documentary about their expedition. Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place is a rangy, messy sort of snapshot memoir of that unfinished work, pieced together under a spate of new and collected interviews by filmmakers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood.
A presentation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Magic Trip is most notable as a historic document, since as a stand-alone movie it mainly succeeds in just making one never want to do drugs. At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in what would later be revealed to be a CIA-funded study of psychoactive medications at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. He would trip through LSD, Psilocybin, mescaline and alpha-Methyltryptamines, among other substances, and some of the reel-to-reel audio recordings of those post-dosage discussion sessions (including one in which Kesey pontificates about the tape recorder’s reel serving as its brain) make for a trippy, slurry delight. The build-up to the road trip, too, is interesting, as Kesey and his pals purchase a big school bus, name it “Further,” remodel the interior, deck it out in wild colors, and even retrofit it with an exterior storage appendage and a sort of turret.
Soon we’re off, and on the road. Well… sort of. Kesey and company, totaling about 14 or 15 in all, run out of gas at the end of his property, which is perhaps an inauspicious and somewhat telling opening to their voyage. They finally get going, though, and the 16mm footage of their progress is often wild and weird. Since no one on the trip really knew how to use the camera (or the sound equipment, which was a big obstacle and the chief reason that their planned documentary never happened), there’s a decided lack of stuffy formalism or composition to the captured footage; it’s wildly subjective, but offers sometimes quickening glimpses into the mindsets (and maybe even souls) of those operating the camera at any given moment — zooming in on a fellow traveler’s ample bosom (presaging the “free love” movement, there was plenty of partner-swapping along the way), a befuddled gas station attendant, or the swirling detritus in a pool of water.
Possessing a handful of these sorts of unique moments, Magic Trip connects intermittently as a fascinating piece of captured history, a sort of “prima facie” document of the cresting impulses that would eventually take take form in the hippie movement of later in the 1960s and ’70s. Overall, though, it’s just a self-indulgent and kind of boring mess. Gibney and Ellwood don’t show their interview subjects, and while this tack sometimes works to the benefit of the material — most recently in Senna, for instance — here it has a distancing affect. Since so many culled interviews are from participants we see on screen in the captured footage, failing to show them robs the movie of a chance to carve out more discrete personalities. As a slice of Americana, there’s some measure of value to Magic Trip, but mostly it’s just another artifact of boomer self-obsession, and a reminder of their heavy hand in our current national predicaments. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia/History Films, R, 107 minutes)
Anselm Kiefer and the notion of the venerated artist more generally is celebrated in Sophie Fiennes’ documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, a kind of ethereal, meandering nonfiction look at the aforementioned German painter and sculptor. Attempting to mine greater meaning out of the minutiae of artistic production, this glacially paced film will hypnotize some with its often beautiful compositions and mesmeric rhythms, but mostly confound general audiences, and those desiring a pinch more of a conventional biographical hook upon which to hang the hat of their captured interest.
Kiefer isn’t necessarily what you’d call a widely known commercial or pop artist, but casual art world viewers expecting a lot of insight or contextual explanation of Kiefer’s work will be sorely disappointed. Narrated by Klaus Dermutz, Fiennes’ film is an almost oppressively removed and arty thing in and of itself. Save for a mid-film segment in which Kiefer submits to queries from an art historian, the movie is otherwise composed largely of shots and sequences that track around its subject’s work.
Fiennes’ movie is supposed to kind of ironically showcase the gritty and often mundane processes required to transform elements into art, into something grander than their mere parts, and in doing so at such an emotional remove (perhaps?) serve as a parallel commentary on cinematic creation. But the sad fact remains that this is just a brutally unengaging forced expedition. Some of the images themselves are quite attractive to look at, but when people attack the ivory-tower elitism of academic treatises, it’s works like Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow about which they are speaking. One leaves with the rather remarkable but unpleasant feeling of simultaneously having not learned much, and yet also having contempt for what they have gleaned. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, unrated, 105 minutes)
When critics use the shorthand phrase “festival film,” in either praise or derision, they essentially mean movies like writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green’s feature debut, Gun Hill Road. From its evocative title and kind of self-consciously gritty style to its blowout emotional moments and hook-y social issue conceit transposed to a working-class familial setting, the film seems constructed in moralizing fashion to pull dramatic levers and kick-start off-screen dialogues, so it’s no particular surprise that it played in dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Its failure to land a top-tier indie distributor, however, speaks to the movie’s familiar qualities and the unfortunate fact that — despite some engaging performances — its narrative just doesn’t have enough oomph to leave a lasting impact. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Motion Film Group, R, 87 minutes)
The differences between French cinema and Hollywood studio offerings are various and sundry, but perhaps best illustrated by something like Rapt, a sprawling and inventive kidnap drama which doesn’t so much deliver an adrenaline shot of nervy thrills as steadily ooze disquieting tension over the course of its two-hour running time. Watching this superb high-wire balancing act unfold, one is struck by the myriad ways American thrillers typically angle for car chases and other jolts of immediacy, even if it doesn’t always make sense within the confines of the narrative. So when word of a planned English-language remake of Rapt broke not long before its slotting at the City of Lights City of Angels (COLCOA) Festival in 2010, it elicited both tingles of anticipation (it’s rich material) and knowing sighs of all the misguided compromises and tweaks that would almost certainly distill the grim effectiveness of writer-director Lucas Belvaux’s morally grey film.
Nominated for four Cesar Awards in its native France, including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Film, Rapt was inspired in part by the real-life 1978 kidnapping and rescue of businessman Edouard-Jean Empain. Its story centers around Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal, above), a wealthy, powerful and politically connected industrialist/CEO with a couple dark secrets (a mistress, an affinity for gambling) that a group of criminals may have used as leverage in their plot. On the eve of a trip abroad with the French president, Graff is kidnapped in a brilliantly executed snatch-and-grab on a city street. His kidnappers want cash, and lots of it, so they promptly cut off his middle finger to show the police and Graff’s wife Francoise (Anne Consigny) that they mean business.
While the particulars of the ransom are being hashed out, the man charged with overseeing Graff’s corporation in his absence, Andre Peyrac (Andre Marcon), tries to walk a tightrope between legitimate concern and the protection of broader, multi-national business assests. As tabloids threaten to get hold of some of the less than flattering particulars of Graff’s personal life, Peyrac worries about how it will impact the value and worth of the company. The police, meanwhile, often seemed more concerned with merely apprehending the kidnappers and holding them up as a public example than actually ensuring Graff’s physical well-being.
What’s most remarkable about Belvaux’s film is the way it habitually avoids pat judgments about its characters, while also coming up with interesting story twists and simultaneously burrowing deeper and deeper into its characters’ individual emotional states. No one gets off easy here. It spoils nothing, really, to say that Graff is separated from his kidnappers much earlier than the film’s final reel, leaving his family and others to grapple with the changes in their lives, and the fact that this act is not some discrete threat to be overcome and shelved away, but rather a stone thrown in the placid pond of their privileged existences, with ripples spreading farther and father after the fact, and in unknown directions.
Attal gives a superlative performance, morphing from cocksure captain of industry to an emaciated and ruminative victim of prey, and Marcon and the rest of the cast are similarly effective in projecting the interior monologues of their characters. It will be interesting to see who plays the role of Graff in Rapt‘s American remake, but it’s almost certain that the film will be injected with the sort of muscular, pop-out set pieces that chip away at the opportunity for the sort of unique nonverbal connection that Rapt affords. It may yet land in the right hands (witness the artful Swedish film Let the Right One In and its equally beautiful American counterpart, Let Me In), but Rapt should definitely be given a chance by American fans of quality arthouse cinema. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, R, 120 minutes)
A sprawling, Los Angeles-set, somewhat self-consciously multi-ethnic drama of struggling immigrants from writer-director Yong Mun Chee, Where the Road Meets the Sun is a movie which means well, in unspooling its story of hard-knock, off-the-grid America, and both the unique opportunities and special perils that presents for those with headstrong dispositions. Unfortunately, despite some relaxed, inviting performances — including from Luke Brandon Field and Laura Ramsey (above) — the film repeatedly identifies plausibility as an enemy, and never truly locates a compelling enough through-line to hook and pull an audience through from beginning to end. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Big Machine Films, R, 93 minutes)
A tonally heightened comedy of criminal hijinks, misunderstanding and male bonding/reconciliation, 30 Minutes Or Less is a manic yet middling comedy that elicits a few laughs but mainly exudes the impression that a better, more rigorous treatment of the same wild concept could have yielded something truly special. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, R, 83 minutes)
A powerhouse drama set against the backdrop of a very complicated and muddied story, The Whistleblower is one of those dramas that induce wearied sighs, furrowed brows and worried thoughts about the default state of human nature. Inspired by actual events, it’s both a crusading cop investigatory thriller and a sort of surrogate, gender-politic struggle-for-equality tale loosely in the vein of North Country.
The story centers around Kathy Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz), a tough and exceedingly competent Nebraskan police officer who — facing a divorce, denied a job transfer and wanting to scrape together enough money to move and still be close to her daughter — takes a part-time assignment working as a United Nations peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia, where ethnic strife has left a largely destitute population distrustful of both one another and outsiders. Kathy’s expectations of helping to rebuild a devastated country and mostly assist in procedural matters are upturned when she uncovers what she believes to be a forced prostitution ring operated at least partially for the benefit of a corrupt local police office. While she labors to first find and then flip a frightened girl she can use as a corroborating witness, Kathy takes her concerns to her new mentor and confidant, Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave), who eventually loops in a friend and Internal Affairs investigator, Peter Ward (David Strathairn). As Kathy comes by more evidence, though, the layers of complicity and corruption disturbingly seem to widen even further, including UN contractors and throwing into doubt who at all she is able to trust.
The script, co-written by director Larysa Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan, offers up some squarely righteous and on-the-nose dialogue plus a fairly pat ending, propped up by multiple explanatory codas both general and specific. But The Whistleblower ably summons the distrust that victims of crime (especially of a sexual nature) and war have towards a system that turns a blind eye to their suffering and pain. The film doesn’t come by this lightly, with overwritten monologues of angsty exposition. Instead, it shows, and not just tells; there’s an intense sexual assault scene in which the violence is inflicted merely for the point of showing a group of women what happens when someone cooperates with authorities. Handheld camerawork further communicates the palpable anxiety and despair of this and other scenes.
A small bit of familial material with Kathy — her calling home to check in on her daughter — is perfunctory, and The Whistleblower is better once it sheds its obligations to this thread, no matter how rooted in real-life events it might be. The story is better served by pivoting away from “mere” maternal anger (i.e., the patronizing notion that Kathy is so doggedly invested in the case and the lives of these young girls because she’s separated from her own daughter), and tapping into a deeper, more fundamental rage over this deplorable sex ring, and entire idea of human trafficking. That sense of indignation, along with a well-seeded sense of who-can-she-trust paranoia, help give The Whistleblower both a nice emotional pull and overall sense of engagement and investment.
Channeling all that anger is Weisz, of course, who packages it alongside a determination, unshowy intellect and heartrending vulnerability. In this foreign land, far away from home, Kathy is a character that exists independent of her sexuality, even as she experiences womanly wants and needs, and her gender informs the manner in which others interact with her, and accept her investigation. It’s a strong central role, yes — the sort upon which awards nominations are built, definitely — but neophyte director Kondracki also crafts a grim and gripping movie that asks tough questions about the boundaries and responsibilities of occupying, ostensible do-gooders, and one all the more stomach-churning for the fact that it’s based on a true story. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 118 minutes)
There’s an odd and easygoing charm to Superheroes, a colorful new documentary which enjoys its world broadcast premiere on HBO on Monday, August 8. While in the narrative realm James Gunn’s Super, Peter Stebbings’ Defendor and Matthew Vaughn’s ultra-stylized Kick-Ass, among others, have examined the warped worlds and worldviews of those who take on a superhero guise without any particular special powers, Superheroes is a nonfiction look at those who don self-made spandex costumes along with alter egos, patroling city streets at night to stop evildoers and protect the innocent. An engaging if ultimately intellectually lightweight subcultural safari, the movie offers up something for and ultimately connects about equally with clucking gawkers and admiring comic book fanboys alike. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 82 minutes)
