Minimalist character study Francine opens tomorrow, October 24, in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7, and star Melissa Leo will appear for a special Q&A after Wednesday evening’s screening. For my earlier review, click here.
A Whisper to a Roar
A sort of voting rights companion piece to Steve York’s A Force More Powerful, which was a rangy nonfiction film about non-violent resistance movements around the world and spanning time, Ben Moses’ A Whisper to a Roar is a powerful documentary that ties together the heroic and ongoing efforts of democracy activists in five countries, and reaffirms the human spirit’s innate desire for freedom.
“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong,” Voltaire once wrote, and A Whisper to a Roar offers up ample evidence of this axiom, in the form of lethal pushback by dictators, autocrats and other corrupted power systems when faced with challenges to their authority. A striking segment focusing on the Ukraine opens with the story of kidnapped journalist Georgiy Gongadze, and then charts the rise of the country’s “Orange Revolution” of 2004, and the poisoning of reformist presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez’s distastefully violent rhetoric and overreach in closing radio and TV stations that offer dissent to his policies is examined. Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s slandering and incarceration is detailed, as are the brutal policies of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. And in perhaps the strongest narrative strand — or at least the one freshest and with the most direct implications for the United States — Egypt’s crackdown on democracy protesters and imprisonment of opposition leader Ayman Nour is cast into stark relief.
Shot over the course of three years, A Whisper to a Roar deftly intercuts back and forth between all of these narratives, which unfold at different times over the past 15 years. In doing so, it shows their commonality in “breaking down the barrier of apathy,” as one interviewee puts it. Social media and/or liberalized press have helped open new channels of communication amongst disaffected constituencies, and emboldened calls for democratic participation. The poor and otherwise marginalized see, by way of both other international examples and the skittish actions of their own authoritarian governments, the precarious and assailable nature of systemic corruption and oppression, through sustained public pressure.
The production package is fairly straightforward, but the range of interviewees runs the gamut from frontline demonstrators and participants to more intellectual members of the international commentariat, which give the movie a rooted sense of scope. Smartly, too, director Moses doesn’t tip the hands of his narrative in advance by fully identifying the occupations and standings of his subjects, leaving room for some suspense for those who don’t follow or recall international news. Emotionally engaging and impactful, A Whisper to a Roar is a well put together look at the yearning and universal nature of values we too frequently ascribe as uniquely American. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. A Whisper to a Roar opened this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. For more information, visit the movie’s website. (Appleseed Entertainment, unrated, 94 minutes)
Chained (Blu-ray)
Undone by one twist too many, Jennifer Lynch’s Chained nonetheless covers some transgressive and interesting terrain, telling the story of a boy imprisoned for a decade by a madman, and made to participate in his crimes (think Dexter by of Nell… sort of). In its chilliest, most unnerving moments, the film asks viewers to consider the nature/nurture breakdown of sociopathy, and how monsters are remade generation after generation.
The story centers on a nine-year-old, Tim (Evan Bird), who, while coming home from the movies with his mother (Julia Ormand), is kidnapped by a psychopathic cab driver and serial killer, Bob (a beefy Vincent D’Onofrio). After murdering his mother, Bob begins to shape Tim into his unwilling pupil, rechristening him Rabbit following a couple abortive escape attempts. He chains him to a bed in his secluded home, and breaks him down mentally. Years later, with Bob having groomed him for homicidal culling, the understandably wrought Tim/Rabbit (Eamon Farren) stands poised on the precipice of his own plunge into further darkness.
With Surveillance, Lynch crafted a work of spare desperation, where unchained menace seemed to blow in the wind. In Chained, she roots herself much more to character, and digs down deeper into warped psychological motivational systems, to satisfying effect. While no stranger to unsettling imagery and tonal manipulation (she’s the daughter of director David Lynch), Lynch here somewhat surprisingly takes a fairly straightforward tack with the story; this is delivered as a sordid father-son tale, which makes the grim violence mean something. The performances are great, too. D’Onofrio is dialed in and scary as Bob, but also realistically trigged; Farren, meanwhile, captures the shattered innocence and flickering malevolent potential of Rabbit.
The film’s great disappointment, then, is when — after some moments of truth that find Rabbit getting his first taste of blood, and then experiencing a night of freedom hunting for more victims with Bob — Chained pivots and attempts to grab surprise via a somewhat bizarre yet almost conventional “twist.” Lynch takes sole screenplay credit, though her script is actually based on another, previous script (more on that below). It’s not entirely clear where this idea came from from, but it doesn’t work — either on an emotional/cathartic level or as a very convincing ancillary argument about the disease and rot of generational violence.
Housed in a Blu-ray case, the movie’s Blu-ray/DVD combo pack release includes a 1080p 2.40:1 widescreen transfer, with a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 audio track on the former format, which also houses the bonus features. Under a motion menu screen with a dozen chapter-stop options, Chained features the movie’s trailer, a one-and-a-half-minute alternate murder sequence which allegedly garnered the film a NC-17 in its initial editorial pass with the MPAA, and the big other extra, an audio commentary track with Lynch and D’Onofrio.
While there are an awful lot of gaps in this conversation, D’Onofrio helps steer Lynch toward engagement, talking about the 15-day shoot, (for D’Onofrio, concurrent with his work on Fire with Fire, a straight-to-video flick with Bruce Willis and Rosario Dawson), his method acting and interest in playing a killer that didn’t function merely as a plot device in part of a bigger story. He also flashes some deadpan humor, joking when he appears on screen in boxers and a grungy T-shirt that, “One of the reasons I did this movie was so I could keep the wardrobe.” Apart from talking some about child abuse, Lynch chats less about the thematic broad strokes of the material than one might expect; she does, however, mention the only other person she says she thought of for the role of Bob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and sketches out the more “torture-porn-oriented” script, by Damian O’Donnell, that producers Lee Nelson and David Buelow, originally brought to her, seeking her opinion and input. All in all, it’s a slightly above average commentary track, though when Lynch talks about wanting a director’s cut you wish she went into a bit more detail about exactly what sort of additions/changes she’d most want to make. To purchase the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Sexy Baby
With the proliferation of online pornography, the advent of “sexting” and the ever-present synaptic connection of social media, sexual maturation and in particular notions of womanhood are changing for adolescents and twentysomethings. Sexy Baby, an inquisitive and engaging new documentary from Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, attempts to sift through this mass media assault and shifting mores, to determine the toll this seeming increase in titillation is taking on America. In addition to its iTunes and VOD availability, Sexy Baby opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, visit its website and/or Facebook page. (Area 23A, unrated, 83 minutes)
3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom
Provided one submits to its base level of intentional ridiculousness, there’s some wacky charm to be found in the low-budget, somewhat awkwardly titled 3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom, a comedy of fraternal bickering that hinges on scrambled efforts to squash a leaked sex tape. A bawdy conceit worthy of Judd Apatow gets a madcap spin by way of Get Shorty in writer-director Jordan Roberts’ self-financed affair, a choppy collection of character-based sketch ideas that’s elevated by a talented, game cast.
The Los Angeles-set film aims to wring laughs chiefly from putting its title character (Charlie Hunnam, of Sons of Anarchy) through the wringer. When his older brother Bruce (Chris O’Dowd, of Bridesmaids) graduates from rehab, their parents (Nora Dunn and Sam Anderson) guilt Frankie into coming home and seeing him for the first time in years. Frankie still stings from shame attached to years-ago Internet infamy, when would-be filmmaker Bruce posted a humiliating wedding video online. History repeats itself after Frankie hooks up with the recently jilted Lassie (the delightful Lizzy Caplan), but initially fails to achieve an erection. Bruce’s “artistic” ambitions get the most of him, and his surreptitiously recorded sex tape falls into the wrong hands. Escalating insanity ensues, as Frankie and Bruce turn to the latter’s prison pal Phil, now transsexual Phyllis (Ron Perlman), for assistance in removing the video from the Internet.
Roberts’ movie feels a bit less like a cogently plotted narrative and more like the product of an over-caffeinated bender following the injected enthusiasm of a gung-ho, DIY screenwriting class. It’s all about energy, and forward momentum; even the dialogue isn’t so much concerned with the traditional patter of set-ups and jokes as it is winding up its colorful characters and having them play off one another, their agitation stoking fires of shocked amusement. But Roberts’ cast tackles the material with gusto, and squeezes out from it a lot of fun. Perlman and Caplan are particularly lively and memorable, and Whitney Cummings and Chris Noth — the former as Bruce’s editor/jock-warmer, and the latter as Lassie’s deranged dad — also have some delicious scenes.
Most big screen comedies exist on either a laid track of genteel hamminess or cynical misanthropy, which Frankie Go Boom eschews. Everyone in this movie is a bit unhinged and damaged — even its putative protagonist, who can’t establish proper boundaries that would enable him to move on with his life. It’s not at all a naturalistic or even moralizing film, wherein capital-L lessons are learned, but in its own way Roberts’ movie makes the point that family relationships are often so uncomfortable and potentially toxic because they afford us the opportunity — and almost oblige us — to slip back into old roles and exhausted power dynamics, where bad habits and choices exist. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, unrated, 88 minutes)
The Flat
An earnest and deeply personal exhumation of proverbial skeletons in the family closet, director Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat is nonetheless deadly dull — a movie that churns up yards of speculation in delving into the intertwined history of a married Jewish couple and their strange, rekindled, post-World War II friendship with some German counterparts, but with increasingly diminishing returns.
When Goldfinger’s 98-year-old grandmother passes away, he and his family descend upon the Tel Aviv apartment she and her husband shared for decades, since immigrating from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Sifting through a dense collection of letters and bric-a-brac, Goldfinger begins to uncover clues that point to a much more complicated family history than he could have guessed. His grandparents, it seems, were friends with Leopold von Mildenstein, a man with connections to the SS prior to the war, and possibly even Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine later on. Seeking to understand how deep Mildenstein’s Nazi connections really ran — and how much of his history his grandparents and Mildenstein’s own family knew — Goldfinger delves into old letters and press archives, tracking down friends and colleagues of the aforementioned parties.
Documentaries as personal histories are of course widespread. Plenty of movies, from Stevie and The Devil and Daniel Johnston to Capturing the Friedmans and even the recent Photographic Memory, have delved into painful and shocking pasts, or addressed at least tangentially the manner in which time and distance tend to cleave from one’s memory the more unpleasant aspects of some particular recollection. The Flat, though, feels curated by the most dispassionate theme park ride operator of all time. It’s devoid of catharsis, or indeed any real feeling at all; it’s perhaps aptly titled, in that regard. Though narrated by Goldfinger, it lacks much in the way of emotional response to any of its investigation.
Ergo, vague and scattered notions or even scraps of evidence remain crucially unconnected, contextually. There is an objectivity here, and a kind of scrupulous demonstrative remove that invites very intellectualized analysis of human denial (late in the film, there’s a too-brief interview with a psychologist that touches on this topic), but it robs the film of any sense of cresting momentum or investment. The Flat is damned by its own incuriosity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Sundance Selects, unrated, 97 minutes)
Photographic Memory
In David Lynch‘s trippy, 1997 neo-noir psychological thriller Lost Highway, Bill Pullman’s Fred Madison explains his aversion to video cameras thusly: “I like to remember things my own way.” When pressed for a further explanation, he offers, “How I remembered them — not necessarily the way they happened.” For documentary director Ross McElwee — whose films have almost always been reflexively autobiographical, delving into his familial relationships and ancestral connections — it’s almost the opposite. His memories have, for years, been filtered through first his photographs and writings, and then his ever-present camera lens, to the point that even he begins to question how real, or accurate, some of his memories actually are.
The vehicle for this reflection is the beguiling, homespun Photographic Memory, triggered by some early-onset empty nest syndrome and domestic struggles. Attempting to make peace with the surliness, technological addiction and emotional waywardness of his 20-year-old son, McElwee decides to retrace some of his own footsteps from when he was around the same age, and spent a year abroad in France. The result is a delicate, mesmeric rumination on family, memory, the necessary growing pains of young adulthood, and the sloping banks of generational chasm that will always exist.
We first glimpse Adrian McElwee as a youngster, cavorting about with his younger sister. McElwee frequently filmed his kids growing up, and they used to love it. Now, despite his interest in becoming a filmmaker and/or graphic artist, Adrian is tired of his father’s looming lens; he’d rather hang out with friends, blow off school, smoke a bit of pot and film himself doing extreme ski tricks. Narrating his frustration, McElwee tries to channel and focus his son’s energies, while also dolefully noting certain behavioral similarities to his own adolescent wanderings.
McElwee deftly intercuts this story — of all the poking, prodding, hoping and cajoling attached to his son — with his own journey back in time, and a set of conflicted emotions that arise. Traveling back to St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany, France, for the first time in almost four decades, the filmmaker tries to track down his first employer, a photographer named Maurice, as well as Maud, a woman with whom he had a brief but memorable romantic liaison.
On the surface Photographic Memory may sound simple, or irretrievably blinkered and personal, but McElwee has a self-awareness, sharp sense of observation and droll wit to boot that easily locates the universality of the material. McElwee’s film is honest about the sort of parenting mistakes born of trying to protect his son from himself, as well as wry articulations about the deep but tested roots of unconditional love (“Teenagers often don’t realize how protected they are from strangulation by the memories of smaller versions of themselves”).
If all that sounds a little too ethereal, Photographic Memory is also just a great little travelogue mystery, with the filmmaker subject’s twangy, Carolina-infused French, in his efforts to find Maurice and Maud, matching the uniquely accented sheer entertainment value of Werner Herzog’s nonfiction self-narration. So does McElwee locate these people from his past? Or are his memories of their time together, and reasons for parting, at all reliable? And what lessons might he learn from all of this travel in dealing with his son? McElwee makes movies to assay the human condition and try to sort things out for himself. This is another good one, full of both answers and questions, feelings and wonder. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (First Run, unrated, 87 minutes)
Grave Encounters 2
Using Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz’s found-footage horror flick Grave Encounters as a self-referential leaping-off point, Grave Encounters 2 gathers up a head of loose-limbed steam and bundles it up in a rather impressive technical package, but ultimately fumbles it away on a story that buckles under the weight of layered self-consciousness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 98 minutes)
Happy Birthday, Jean-Claude Van Damme
It’s a happy birthday to Jean-Claude Van Damme, who turns 52 today, but hopefully isn’t coerced into celebrating by doing 52 scissor-kick splits.
Lizzy Caplan on Acting Drunk and 3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom
From Mean Girls to Cloverfield, Lizzy Caplan delivered a string of sharp big screen performances over the last 10 years that rendered her recognizable and appreciated, if not quite an immediately known name and commodity to the average filmgoer. Equally well received episodic work on True Blood, Party Down and New Girl helped change that, by degrees. Now, just on the heels of the raucous Bachelorette, Caplan seems on the verge of shedding the label of “critics’ darling” and achieving a wider fame. In her new film, 3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom, she plays Lassie, a wound-up gal who becomes the unwitting partner of the equally unwitting title character (Charlie Hunnam) in a sex tape that goes viral, courtesy of Frankie’s manipulative, boundary-free brother (Chris O’Dowd). I recently had a chance to talk to Caplan one-on-one over an afternoon summer ale, about Frankie, auditioning, acting drunk, VOD, and her next film as well. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
Janeane From Des Moines
A quirky sociopolitical mockumentary experiment that plops down its title character as a sort of straightfaced, deep cultural embed amidst all the jockeying leading up to this election cycle’s Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus, Janeane From Des Moines is a movie of both hits and misses, but one that certainly never gets boring. If it could benefit from a more focused sense of purpose, director Grace Lee’s film also pulls off some undeniable coups, placing its fictional true believer in close proximity to all of the leading GOP contenders and by extension providing a snapshot of the reductive nature of national campaigning.
The movie centers around Janeane Wilson (Jane Edith Wilson, above left), a conservative housewife who works as a home health aide and keeps busy with gardening, her church’s Bible study group, and partisan political canvassing. With her college-age daughter showing few signs of returning home for the holidays, and her trucker husband (Michael Oosterom) becoming more and more distant in the wake of losing his job, Janeane throws herself into the Tea Party movement, convinced that gay marriage (“I don’t understand when it came to be that gay people own all the rainbows”), “Obamacare” and Planned Parenthood are destroying the country she loves. Traversing Iowa, she attends all sorts of rallies, speeches and events for Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney, asking them questions about their stances on issues and trying to figure out who best represents her values.
The film’s cinéma vérité material sometimes awkwardly abuts staged drama, and the personal tragedies Lee and Wilson (a co-writer) heap on Janeane feel over-stacked by maybe just one misfortune. There is certainly some dryly comedic gold found in the mining of these seams (fretting over dwindling money, Janeane attends a seminar of financial advisor Dave Ramsey, who preaches learning how to handle money “in a way that honors Christ”), but a twist involving Janeane’s husband lacks the necessary depth of a more nuanced set-up.
Borat this is not, in other words — at times to its detriment, since Wilson displays a real comfort with low-key improvisational interacting with real people. Lee’s insistence on a fuzzy emotional throughline also undercuts the film’s satirical punching power against some of the uninformed hypocrisy that helps animate in this case partisan cultural conservatives. Ergo, Janeane From Des Moines connects fitfully — as a sort of curated glimpse behind the utterly bizarre photo-op stagings of candidate appearances at ice cream parlors and the like.
The twin jewels of Janeane are its capturing of candidates unawares and Wilson’s finely calibrated performance, which is in its own strange way complementary to Meryl Streep’s turn in Hope Springs. They exist in markedly different stories, obviously, but both performances are similarly predicated upon an accumulated weight of heartache, frustration and regret finally reaching its tipping point. That happens most electrically when Janeane tearfully reconnects with Romney on the eve of the Iowa Caucus (an encounter that received national news coverage), but the film’s true, remarkable pièce de résistance is a coffeeshop sit-down with Bachmann and Iowa Congressman Steve King in which the former spins a personal question about getting kicked off health care rolls into a digressive monologue concluding with a pointed statement about what gas prices were when President Obama took office. It’s proof that retail presidential politics can be every bit as full of thick-headed, off-topic speechifying as air-game national message massage. Until there is sustained push-back against this, we get what we deserve, I suppose. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more on the film, meanwhile, and its iTunes/VOD availability, click here to visit its website. (Wilsilu Pictures, unrated, 78 minutes)
In Search of a Reliable Clone…
This, all over again. Where are the worker bots to help with tasks and all of life’s other errands? I was promised worker bots…
Fat Kid Rules the World
A sweet-natured and loose-limbed coming-of-age tale that delivers by way of its smart, sympathetic performances and an accumulation of telling details, actor Matthew Lillard’s directorial debut, Fat Kid Rules the World, tells a simple and familiar story, but one with not inconsiderable emotional purchase. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Outsider Pictures/Arc Entertainment, R, 94 minutes)
Head Games
There may not be a more important documentary released this year for the general health of especially sports-playing American kids than Head Games, director Steve James’ impactful look at the trauma inflicted by repeated concussions. Using Chris Nowinski’s November 2006 book of the same name as a leaping-off point, the film digs into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE) and its longterm links to memory loss, early-onset dementia, depression and even suicide.
Nowinski, a former Harvard football player and WWE wrestler, knows of what he writes and speaks. After his professional wrestling career was cut short from the lingering after-effects concussion, he went on to research and write his exhaustively footnoted book, and eventually co-found the Sports Legacy Institute with Dr. Robert Cantu, in reaction to a new crop of medical research showing brain trauma to be both a latent and booming public health crisis. Nowinski was at the forefront of some of this research, too, convincing the families of a handful of recently deceased athletes to donate their brains for scientific study.
Owing to the fact that the NFL is where the story broke and played out, after the 2006 suicide of ex-Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, Head Games devotes about the first half of its 91-minute running time to professional football before cycling through progressively less time devoted to NHL hockey and soccer — as funneled through the perspectives of former player Keith Primeau and Olympic medalist Cindy Parlow, respectively — and, essentially, a third act-as-closing argument. Nowinski shares his own experiences, as does his best friend and college teammate, while New York Times writer Alan Schwarz walks viewers through the unfolding story from his perspective.
Still, Head Games isn’t just a jeremiad or hand-wringing assault on all physical activity, though. While the brutal collisions of football get the most attention, James (Hoop Dreams) uses the articulate Nowinski and others to sketch out a timeline of changing dynamics, and how research can hopefully be used to foster better concussion diagnosis, and perhaps even develop better equipment. Smartly, the director doesn’t overload his movie with voices; the doctors number no more than a half dozen, and this tightened focus benefits the material.
The first-person testimonials of the aforementioned ex-athletes carry a lot of significance as well, and give the movie sympathetic heft. Parlow talks about suffering from chronic headaches during her career, and even now always leaving on her car’s GPS guidance system, even on familiar streets. The grander importance of Head Games — what makes it a movie that isn’t just about a problem in professional sports — lies in how James also spotlights the competitive drive of various kids playing these sports, often with less equipment and certainly with less medically informed training and supervision than their sports idols. Late in the film, one doctor estimates that around 15 percent of even one-time concussion sufferers endure persistent cognitive dysfunction. Darkly, plenty of viewers might leave Head Games wondering if why they can’t find their car in the parking lot has some connection to all those Pop Warner football games years ago. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Variance Films, PG-13, 91 minutes)
The Princess Bride (Blu-ray)
Screenwriter William Goldman and director Rob Reiner’s beloved fairy tale adventure is one of those rare movies of whimsy that appeals across gender lines, and in near-equal fashion. Full of well-choreographed swashbuckling, lively character interplay and pithy, irreverent dialogue, it’s an adventurous treat, plain and simple. Satire can so frequently seem malicious and kind of jaded because there’s no appreciation of the genre(s) being aped, but 1987’s The Princess Bride, is lovingly framed as a rousing bedtime story, and wears its affection — and thus its emotional honesty — refreshingly on its sleeve.
The film’s story centers around the titular betrothed maiden, Buttercup (Robin Wright), who is kidnapped and held against her will to wed Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon). Her childhood beau, Westley (Cary Elwes), sets out to rescue her, journeying through and over shrieking eel-infested lagoons and, yes, the Cliffs of Insanity. Along the way he, variously, hooks up and crosses paths with Inigo Montoya (a winning Mandy Patinkin), Fezzik (Andre the Giant) and Count Tyrone Rugen (Christopher Guest).
Oscar winner Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men) brings his shrewd eye for detail and ear for whipsmart dialogue to bear on this eminently quotable (to this day, “Have fun storming the castle” ranks as my all-time favorite flippantly pleasant tiding of futility) adaptation of his own cult tome, but the movie is just as notable for its discernment in casting. Billy Crystal and Carol Kane are perfect as Miracle Max and Valerie, and Peter Falk anchors the movie’s wraparound segments as the kindly grandfather relating the story to his grandson (a wee Fred Savage).
Released in a new 25th anniversary edition Blu-ray, The Princess Bride is presented here in a gorgeous 1080p transfer in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, along with a DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track that is super-crisp and clear. As far as the hue balance, though, for those already owning the movie’s previous special edition release, the difference is negligible, with perhaps slightly more attention paid to color consistency in cinematographer Adrian Biddle’s backgrounds.
This Blu-ray imports all the previous, vintage featurettes and mini-documentaries from the movie’s prior home video releases (inclusive of DVD and Blu-ray), including fun, separate audio-commentary tracks from Goldman and Reiner. Also ported over to this release from its two-disc DVD special edition are a 10-minute mockumentary on the “real” Dread Pirate Roberts, with historian’s recollections and other edifying information; a make-up featurette that nicely showcases Crystal’s transformation via new footage and interview information; and a trivia game. New to this version are two retrospectives running about a combined half-hour. Interviews with Reiner, Elwes, Wright and more include plenty of anecdotes from the production, but it’s also nice to hear everyone speak to the film’s unique staying power, and their surprise and delight at how subsequent generations have come to discover the movie. Patinkin even goes so far as to speculate that The Princess Bride will make the first line of the obituary of every major player. And he may not be wrong. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. A (Movie) A (Disc)
Here Comes the Boom
If the key to girl-next-door romantic comedy appeal is said to lie in an actress’ aspirational qualities, then the same is true of another subset of comedy embodied by Kevin James, whose stocky physicality but surprising grace with it feed an affable, self-effacing demeanor that serves as a pleasantly embraceable stand-in for legions of weekend warriors with anecdotes of past athletic glory and romantic prowess. Conventionally plotted but bighearted, crowd-pleasing teacher-turned-fighter tale Here Comes the Boom serves as James’ most well-rounded starring vehicle to date. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, PG, 104 minutes)
Smiley
A thunderously stupid horror movie of slapdash construction and ping-pong tonalities, Smiley builds its narrative around the notion of a viral video serial killer who’s summoned by way of a specific web chat incantation. Impressive only for its ability to chase unlikeliness and viewer frustration down an ever-increasing rabbit hole of bewilderment, director Michael Gallagher’s motivation-free genre exercise is populated with characters who, when not busy exhibiting the decision-making and inner emotional landscapes of 12-year-olds, are pantomiming the same age group’s mindset of adults and scariness — all ideas which they’ve absorbed through cultural osmosis.
College freshman Ashley Brooks (Caitlin Gerard, possessing a nice smile and beatific presence) is still recovering from the suicide of her mother just a year earlier, but becomes fast friends with Proxy (Melanie Papalia) when she moves into an off-campus house with her prior to her first semester. Proxy takes Ashley to a party where she introduces her to a bunch of anonymous users of a message board she frequents. These include alpha male Zane (Andrew James Allen, getting his “acting” on), who flirts seemingly by talking up his interest in “the intersection of the strange and the retarded,” as well as Binder (Shane Dawson), a meek kid bullied and kicked out of the party ostensibly for flagging inappropriate content like child pornography.
Against the ongoing backdrop of a reason and ethics class taught by Professor Clayton (Roger Bart, coming the closest to escaping this mess unscathed), Ashley and Proxy decide to test out the urban legend of Smiley by typing three times “I did it for the lulz,” which sounds like something a stoned, kitten-loving Limp Bizkit fan would have dreamed up circa 2000. They then witness a murder, and soon other members of their little group are felled as well. Fearing that her fragile sanity is unraveling, Ashley reaches out at various points to Proxy, Zane and Binder, trying to get to the bottom of this brutal killer.
The script for Smiley, by Gallagher and Glasgow Phillips, is a hodge-podge of clichés and nipped bits from many other horror movies, from The Ring and Bloody Mary to the Scream sequels. Its handling and portrayal of the average twentysomething’s relationship with technology is frequently silly, and its efforts to achieve notional topicality by way of basing its story around a Chat Roulette-type website already feel dated and lame. The movie tries to paper over all these deficiencies by way of spurious leaps in logic and some half-hearted mumbo-jumbo about the Internet achieving a greater consciousness (“From The Terminator, like Skynet — or like Neo!”). All other shortcomings (of which there are many) and red herrings are “solved” by a lazy, post-modern twist that feels cobbled together like a Mad-Lib.
Smiley is a movie of obviously limited budget and resources, but its failures run much deeper than that. The result leans on jump-scares and sound design in an attempt to summon some small modicum of dread or tension. On a purely visual level, the actual character of Smiley — with stitched shut eyes and a carved jack-o-lantern grin — is creepily effective, not unlike the striking slasher Chromeskull of a couple years ago, from Laid to Rest and its sequel. But everything about Smiley is nonsensical, derivative, or both — right down to an air-quote shocking ending that then tries to leave room for ambiguity or a sequel but only further undercuts the stupid narrative choices made by its makers. Leave this turd alone. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Fever Productions, R, 90 minutes)
Martin Landau on Tim Burton and Creating an Accent
Did I get a chance to craft a story about Martin Landau, his work with Tim Burton on Frankenweenie, and how he crafted his character’s accent? Yes, yes I did.
Simon and the Oaks
No, this is not the story of a crayon-obsessed kid and his plot to nourish and grow seedlings of Stubhub’s “Ticket Oak,” alas. A rangy coming-of-age drama based on Marianne Fredriksson’s Swedish book of the same name, Simon and the Oaks spans a couple decades in telling the story of an outcast adolescent of partial and secreted Jewish heritage growing up amidst the considerable political and social turmoil of World War II. Arthouse appreciation for this attractively photographed recipient of 13 Guldbagge nominations, Sweden’s Oscar equivalent, will depend on a given viewer’s tolerance for broad-strokes melodrama of intertwined fates that lacks the ambition and emotional complications of many similar screen works.
Simon and the Oaks is directed by Lisa Ohlin, and there’s no doubt that the film’s technical package is a solid one. The cinematography and score are both superlative, and the film never feels phony or even less than entirely authentic in its period piece detail and evocation of a bygone era. The acting, too, is solid, giving the movie a collection of many strong, self-contained scenes.
It’s just that the sum is less than the whole of its parts, since the film continuously opts for narrative forward movement rather than a deeper exploration of motivations and feeling. Ohlin’s film is beautiful, but John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas — both its 2008 cinematic adaptation, and the original source material — remain stronger evocations of Jewish-rooted World War II drama, the early intrusion of “the dark hour of reason” upon adolescence, and the dramatic consequences thereof. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Simon and the Oaks opens this week in New York City at the Paris Theater and in Los Angeles at the Landmark, expanding nationally from there. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Film Arcade, unrated, 118 minutes)
Charlie Hunnam Talks 3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom, Internet Piracy
Charlie Hunnam is perhaps best known to American audiences as Jax Teller in FX’s rough-and-tumble Sons of Anarchy. In fact, he’s so convincing in that gritty biker serial that a lot of folks don’t even know that in real life he’s a considerably accented Brit. In his new film, however, Hunnam tosses another curveball — returning to comedy for the first time in many years, in writer-director Jordan Roberts’ 3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom. In it, Hunnam plays the perpetually beleaguered title character, whose newly sober, would-be filmmaker brother, Bruce (Chris O’Dowd, of Bridesmaids), throws his life into further disarray by posting online a sex tape of Frank’s with the lovely but complicated Lassie (Lizzy Caplan). I recently had the chance to talk to the amiable Hunnam one-on-one, about Frankie, Internet piracy, his gangster friends and sharing some decidedly wild scenes with his Anarchy co-star Ron Perlman. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
Ron Perlman on 3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom, Sex Tapes, Pacific Rim
There are plenty of actors who’ve made their living playing tough guys. But Ron Perlman is different than that. With his booming voice and imposing physicality, he simply has a larger-than-life quality that he’s sometimes put to use playing heavies and villains, but as often as not (Beauty and the Beast, the Hellboy movies) utilized against type in roles defined by their innate sensitivity. He does not, however, have what one might call feminine features. He exudes masculinity. So it’s more than a bit of a shock to see Perlman in his latest role, in writer-director Jordan Roberts’ 3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom, in which he plays Phyllis, a web-savvy, post-operative transsexual who assists the beleaguered title character (his Sons of Anarchy co-star Charlie Hunnam) in taking down a very private video his newly sober brother (Chris O’Dowd) has posted to the Internet. I had a chance recently to speak to the 62-year-old actor one-on-one, about Frankie, how he looks as a woman, sex tapes, and his thoughts on Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming, highly anticipated Pacific Rim. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
Middle of Nowhere
Middle of Nowhere may have a nondescript title, but the skill of its staging is anything but pedestrian. An intimate, confidently directed and superbly acted humanistic drama that is utterly at home in the subtle push-and-pull of long-standing family arguments and tensions, the Los Angeles-set film casts a long spell — not unlike the recent For Ellen — through its beguiling maintenance of melancholic mood.
Written and directed by publicist-turned-filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and released via a distributor, African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, that she helped co-found, Middle of Nowhere focuses on Ruby (the wonderful Emayatzy Corinealdi), a bright medical student who puts her dreams on hold and suspends her career when her husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) lands in prison — hopeful that he can be released early for good behavior, after five years of an eight-year sentence.
Four-plus years later, as an important parole hearing looms, Derek seems more than a little ambivalent about a return to domestic normalcy. Against the backdrop of a pair of complicated relationships — with her sister Rosie (Edwina Findley), a single mother, and their own mom Ruth (Lorraine Toussaint) — Ruby is forced to stare past some of the walls she constructed to convince herself of her marriage’s solidity. She also meets Brian (David Oyelowo), a bus driver who seemingly offers her a stability and presence that Derek cannot.
DuVernay picked up Best Director honors at the Sundance Film Festival for the movie, and it’s easy to see why. The film’s plotting is familiar, and a couple of its gambits tired (the moment where the phone call of a daughter is briefly mistaken for that of another love interest), but there’s a lyrical quality to the direction, and the movie doesn’t attempt to distill Ruby’s contradictory emotions into neatly parceled, clear and direct motivations.
Much of Middle of Nowhere, DuVernay’s second film, is naturalistic in its own way, but cinematographer Bradford Young shoots in a muted fashion that underscores the movie’s melancholic, deeply interior vibe while not calling attention to itself. The result is earnest without being cornpone, slight without being simple, and beautiful without being overly adorned.
Corinealdi’s performance, an utter revelation, has a lot to do with this connection. She headlines a cast who captures, in smart, affecting and concise strokes, the inner restlessness and not easily articulated regret of characters fumbling toward an emotional equilibrium. Middle of Nowhere is an honest and moving account of some of the tough decisions that face those left on the outside when a loved one goes to prison — and when the not-yet-extinguished dreams of a life they wanted are commingled with a sense of shame over what their life actually is. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (AAFRM, R, 104 minutes)
The Big Picture
A contemplative, puzzle-box anti-thriller of the sort that seemingly only the French now make (even though it’s adapted from an American novel by Douglas Kennedy), The Big Picture is an artful if overlong drama that connects chiefly as a compelling vehicle for star Romain Duris. To call it understated is its own special sort of understatement; this is a film-as-character-study, but also one that hovers drone-like over its subject rather than digging in for deep psychological insights. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (MPI Pictures, unrated, 114 minutes)
Where Do We Go Now? (Blu-ray)
Lebanon’s official Best Foreign Language Film selection for the 84th Academy Awards, Where Do We Go Now? juggles comic fantasy and politicized drama in telling a story of religious strife held at bay by the better angels of women’s nature. Its commingled tonalities don’t always quite mesh, but if one sticks with it there is some off-kilter delight herein that cuts against erroneous notions of foreign films tackling such big social issues as necessarily staid and stuffy affairs.
Directed by Caramel multi-hyphenate Nadine Labaki (above) and set in an indeterminate time, Where Do We Go Now? unfolds in a remote Lebanese village, virtually sealed off from its surroundings and accessible only via a thin bridge in severe disrepair. There, church and mosque stand side by side, and the women, whose friendships more naturally transcend the religious fault lines of their community, act as a collective leavening influence, managing and rerouting the testosterone-fueled energy and impulses of the men in their village.
Widowed Christian café owner Amal (Labaki) and Muslim handyman Rabih (Julian Farhat) nurse a bit of a mutual crush, but news of religious violence from the outside world darkens the town’s mood. A series of accidents and misunderstandings ensue, and when a terrible accident befalls one of the children who serve as an errand boy, the village is pushed closer to getting caught up in a sectarian bloodbath. The mayor’s headstrong wife, Yvonne (Yvonne Maalouf), feigns a miracle connection and chat with God, and the women turn to increasingly fanciful ploys, eventually landing upon distracting belly dancing and pot-infused pastries, the former by way of a busload of mock-stranded Ukrainian strippers the women pay to vacation in their town.
While it doesn’t deal in abstractions, Where Do We Go Now? works best if one accepts it as the working draft of a kind of cinematic treatise, or a flavored, chewable children’s vitamin. A sort of cheeky moralizing is its aim, so it takes a while to get into, and additionally lags some in the middle, suffering from ill-conceived scenes that pull viewers away from the crux of the story.
While it cycles through plenty of entertaining schemes of distraction hatched by the women, Labaki and her screenwriting collaborators aren’t interested in digging much down into the lasting consequences of these acts. And the film mixes in non-professionals alongside working actors, with mixed results; when they do work, though, these performances help give Where Do We Go Now? a charged sense of spontaneity and energy. So the film takes on the feeling of a cutesy serial, punctuated by some serious rage. The ideas and effort often trump Ladaki’s big picture execution, in other words. Likewise, the movie’s gender politics is necessarily broad, in order to support the conceit, which puts a twist on the classic comedy Lysistrata.
Presented on Blu-ray in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with a Dolby TrueHD surround sound audio track, Where Do We Go Now? comes with a pair of solid bonus features. First up is a feature-length audio commentary track with Labaki and composer Khaled Mouzanar, who is her offscreen partner as well. There’s also a post-screening Q&A conversation with Labaki, Mouzanar and producer Anne-Dominique Toussaint. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
As the United States stands on the precipice of another presidential election, with one major party committed to striking down legislation that provided the most reform on the issue in many generations, health care is again in the headlines — if frequently only tangentially, as Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama tangle over claims over what the Affordable Care Act will and will not provide when it goes fully into effect. A new documentary, however, rather persuasively suggests a collective societal myopia on the subject — that a more accurate diagnosis of what ails the country can be found in a fee-for-service system which rewards doctors based not on patient outcomes or improvement but rather simply the number of patients they see.
Co-directed by Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke, Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and picked up the Social Issue Award at Silverdocs. Its title — as explicated by Dr. Don Berwick, the head of Medicare and Medicaid from 2010-11, who years ago gave a speech later published under the same name — relates to the story of a group of Montana smokejumpers battling a particularly brutal forest fire in the 1940s. Trapped at the bottom of a steep ridge by the rapidly rising blaze, the foreman struck a match, set fire to the patch of grass in front of him and then took shelter in the newly burnt area, calling for his crew to join him. Clinging to old ideas and means of safety, they ran on. The fire spread quickly up the hill and overtook the crew, killing 13 men and destroying over 3,200 acres. The foreman survived, nearly unharmed.
The American health care system finds itself in a similar quandary, asserts Berwick, and Escape Fire offers up ample evidence in support of this point-of-view — that we’re looking past smart and effective solutions to problems, clinging to outdated models. The United States of course has enormous technological resources, and lots of people in the health care sector doing their jobs relatively well, the film argues, but it’s simply that the jobs were designed with a misplaced focus. Ergo, whereas other developed countries spend around $3,000 per person annually on health care, the average in America amounts to around $8,000. It’s a profitable (and explicitly for-profit) “disease care” system that wants you neither to die or really get better, but instead keep coming back for the treatment of chronic and largely preventable illnesses.
The film has the requisite array of expert-in-field talking heads, along with statistics of gut-punch effectiveness: the United States spends more than $300 billion a year on pharmaceuticals, almost as much as the rest of the world combined; and if other prices had risen at the same rate as health care costs since 1945, a dozen eggs would cost $45 and a gallon of milk would be $48. Yet its greatest strength lies in some of its normal subjects, like a rural primary care physician who struggles with patient volume and decides to leave for another opportunity, and a PTSD-addled soldier strung out on a cocktail of nearly three dozen pharmaceuticals. Other interviewees — including Dr. Andrew Weil, a pioneer in “integrative medicine,” and Dr. Dean Ornish, the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute — are more famous, but these figures help create an enormously sympathetic pull.
If there’s a qualm, it’s that Escape Fire suffers a bit from a jumbled focus, and hiccups in editing. Still, its core message comes through — we live in a high-tech world, but if we’re serious about societal betterment we need to transform our medical care into a “high-touch” operation, to give patients and doctors more time to spend with one another, preventing disease rather than just managing its symptoms. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, which is also available on iTunes and across VOD platforms, visit its website. (Roadside Attractions, PG-13, 100 minutes)