The laboriously quirky low-fi coming-of-age comedy Spork, from writer-director J. B. Ghuman, Jr., serves as a reminder that the words “original” and “good” are not necessarily interchangeable. Heck, this low-budget offering isn’t even all that original, in fact, just constructed of parts to bait one into the false feeling that it is so.

Spork centers around a frizzy-haired, small town junior high outcast (Savannah Stehlin) — so nicknamed because her absentee mother told her before splitting that she was a hermaphrodite — and her bangle-bracleted attempts to fit in, despite the bullying and antagonism of a mean-girls cabal inclusive of sneering, bouffant-haired tweens with names like Betsy Byotch (Rachel Fox, above center) and Loosie Goosie (Oana Gregory, above left). With the assistance of her trailer park neighbor, Tootsie Roll (the charismatic Sydney Park), and new, pint-sized pal Charlie (William Arnold), who has two gay dads, Spork decides to tackle a school dance contest, both for the cash prize and side benefits in self-esteem.

In both tone and style, Spork unfolds sort of like an ever so self-conscious mash-up of Napoleon Dynamite, Youth in Revolt and Dear Lemon Lima, another precious and colorful festival circuit staple from a couple years back that had the benefit of a smarter screenplay and much more engaging characterizations (as well as Beth Grant in a nearly identical role, as the school’s principal). In this regard, Ghuman manages to do something rather remarkable — take a uniquely canted personal story of self-actualization and uplift, studded with some nice production design, and make it boring and grating. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Underhill Entertainment/Neca Films, unrated, 86 minutes)

The angry, dirty and unforgiving streets of New York City have over the course of several generations taken on an almost mythical role in American independent cinema, fueling some artists, creatively bankrupting many more, and driving others into the arms of more lucrative, mainstream projects. An exhaustively comprehensive oral history of outsider cinema from the late 1970s and into the mid ’80s, Celine Danhier’s Blank City unfolds in all the hazy, erudite specificity of some breezy, memories-laden conversation between your parents and a bunch of their friends at some holiday party from your youth. Meaning, you ask? Meaning it’s kind of interesting in retrospect, or on a theoretical level, but also somewhat impenetrable, given everyone’s penchant for inside jokes and thorough (and thoroughly unedited) recollection.

Against the backdrop of economically bombed-out Lower East Side landscapes, powered by cheap dope and speed and inspired by the cinematic rules-breaking of the French New Wave, a certain DIY ethos took root in the latter days of the Ford Administration. A renegade collection of aspirant filmmakers, musicians, amateur actors and other artistically-minded misfits would, over the next dozen years or so, crank out all sorts of stark and provocative outsider films, in what would come to be known as the No Wave. Some filmmakers and performers (Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi) would go on to greater fame with more accessible work, while others (Deborah Harry) would almost reluctantly find success in other arenas. Most, however, found their potential careers (to the extend they regarded them as such, and anything more than a way to fill their time) eventually derailed by jealousies and recklessness. The quirky work they left behind, though — long on alienation, often short on production value, rich in deadpan humor, and blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction — holds some interesting lessons for would-be independent filmmakers of future generations.

Neophyte French director Danhier has an obvious passion for the material, but lacks the ability the form a cogent narrative spine from all of her interviews. As such, the movie unfolds in largely lurching fashion. Some of the anecdotes are amusing, and fascinating for the simplistic yet radical notions they hold at their core. Director James Naren talks about craftily arranging to see a property he had no intention of renting (or of course even the means to afford), then surreptitiously leaving the windows unlocked, coming back later that evening, climbing up the fire escape with his friends and cohorts, sneaking in, and shooting part of his avant-garde Rome 78. Later, Naren also talks about a lack of overt manipulation being of paramount importance to he and most of the rest of his filmmaking peers, and if bad acting or filmmaking was resultant from that, so be it, that was fine.

The widescale (at least within this group) embrace of this sort of seat-of-your-pants filmmaking makes for some interesting sidebar speculation amongst cineastes, especially if there had been more formalistically and narratively adventurous parties pushing back against some of their peers. But Danhier has trouble taking this microclimate — one interview participant describes the area between 14th Street and Houston, and Avenue B and Bowery as his entire world — and making it matter to the layperson, or connecting it in meaningful and convincing fashion to the cinema of today. Bolstered by film clips from literally dozens of No Wave offerings, Blank City proves itself several times over a vital document of this outsider movement, even if mainstream interest in such a trip down memory road is likely to remain at a significant remove. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Insurgent Media/Pure Fragment/Submarine Entertainment, unrated, 94 minutes)

In 2000, Bryan Singer‘s adaptation of the X-Men comic book series gave the modern superhero genre a kick in the pants, seeding action thrills with deeper ethical conflicts, and laying the groundwork for both the commercial success and some of the more artistic-minded noodling of a wide variety of genre followers. A prequel to the original films, and presumably the beginning of a story arc that could stretch out over a trilogy of its own, X-Men: First Class doesn’t quite touch the inspired blend of brain and brawn that the best of its predecessors had to offer, but neither does it embarrass itself. It’s a slick piece of pop entertainment marked by smarter than average characterizations and some solid performances, and it shows that mainstream studio films can indeed, with some effort, accommodate muddied heroic intentions.

In particular, McAvoy and Fassbender each deliver fine, captivating turns. The former ably communicates Charles Xavier’s goodheartedness with a bit less on the written page than one might like, while burgeoning talent Fassbender, showcasing an appealingly dangerous, quicksilver charm as the man who would become Magneto, forever settles the actor-versus-movie-star argument surrounding him: he’s both. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 132 minutes)

For all their amazing feats, athletes, even those of ferocious
competitiveness and incredible and finely honed individual skill,
sometimes evince a lack of joy, perhaps because their profession is
dictated to some degree by body shape and size, pedigree, or simply the
fact that it was drummed into their head long ago that their self-worth
was entirely tied to this game or that. For me, that’s why amateur
sports — particularly something like college basketball, where rivalries
often span generations — possess such a special allure. There’s an
innately human joy in bearing witness to someone doing something they
truly and deeply love, no matter the money, and also do it well — especially if they’re a youngster. And that joy is on ample display in
Make Believe: The Battle to Become the World’s Best Teen Magician, a
superlative new documentary that absolutely radiates a positive energy.

Of a piece with 2003’s Spellbound and 2007’s The Kong of King: A Fistful of Quarters (no surprise, since it’s executive produced by Seth Gordon, the man behind that hit documentary), Make Believe puts a death grip on one’s attention not because of any grand understanding about the allure of magic that it imparts, but because these are bright if somewhat differently focused kids with a depth of insight and a remarkable amount of self-awareness. Ergo, it’s rewarding to listen to them talk about their interest in magic, and how it makes them feel.

As with any number of other comfortable, more conventional teen narrative features, the dramatic arc here tracks a few months of practice leading up to a contest — in this case the teen-classification finals of the prestigious World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas, sponsored and endorsed by various organizational bodies and world-famous magician Lance Burton. Of the five subjects on which the film focuses (one is actually a pair, from South Africa), there’s not a rotten apple in the bunch, including 14-year-old Colorado native Derek McKee (above).

The winner of the Best Documentary Prize at last year’s Los Angeles Film Festival, Make
Believe could be more comprehensive and detailed with regards to its putative subject of inquiry, certainly. Still, watching the movie, one’s heart sings, caught up as it is in the dreams and aspirations of these talented kids. It’s a reminder, too — removed from the harsh glare of peer judgment — that all the kids with the quirkier interests and hobbies in high school were probably actually the coolest at the time, and stand a far better chance today of making their own unique way in the world as adults. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Level 22/Firefly, unrated, 91 minutes)

Base-line expectations, just as in real life, can sometimes be a
powerful determinant when it comes to movies. Given that the Twilight
craze has made all things vampire hot once more, one could certainly be
forgiven for settling into We Are the Night with a sleepy yawn, thinking it no
more than a hollow, hyped-up European genre exercise owing its entire
existence merely to a recent trend. On the contrary, German filmmaker
Dennis Gansel’s movie is an engaging, well sketched, punky romp that, in
telling the story of a hedonistic all-female vampire clan whose
delicate balance is upset when they add a new member to their cabal,
actually has some interesting things to say about feminine
competitiveness and relationships.

Not to be confused with We Own the Night, the New York-set crime film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Eva Mendes and Mark Wahlberg, Gansel’s film centers around Lena (Karoline Herfurth), a 20-year-old Berliner and petty thief who in a pinch could stand in for either of the protagonists of Run Lola Run or La Femme Nikita. When the audience first meets her, she’s fleeing a cop after pinching a wallet. When the police officer, Tom (Max Riemelt), finally catches her after she tries to change guises, she smashes him in the face and makes a daring leap to safety off of a bridge, flashing a victorious middle finger to add insult to injury.

Later that week, at an underground club, Lena meets the striking if vaguely Aryan Louise (Nina Hoss), who turns out to be a 250-year-old vampire. An unfortunate bathroom encounter leaves Lena bitten but alive, so she becomes one of them, later cautiously seeking out and joining up with Louise and her two other friends — wild child Nora (Anna Fischer, above left), who likes to collect fancy sports cars, and ex-silent film star Charlotte (Jennifer Ulrich, above right), who smokes cigarettes through a long-stemmed holder and seems to harbor a swallowed disdain for everyone around her. Louise lays out the particulars of their situation: the only vampires left, numbering around 40 in Europe and 100 worldwide, are females. The men were “too loud, or too stupid,” more easily hunted by humans and then finished off by the peeved lady vampires.

After a brutal training session acclimates her to her new reality, Lena for a short while basks in the unadulterated glow of consequence-free excess. Her tattoos melt away, and her short, closely cropped hair blossoms beautifully, as if from a shampoo commercial. Lena is also privately heartbroken, though, when her mother doesn’t seem to even notice that she’s been gone for two full days. And while Louise seems to think destiny has brought she and Lena together, Lena isn’t so sure. Things get more complicated when Tom locates Lena, and starts asking questions. After she and the rest of the girls are linked to a recent murder, a police dragnet threatens to rip the group apart — if not literally then certainly in terms of the bonds that keep them together.

A spunky mash-up of vampire flick and police procedural, with just a dash of doomed romance courtesy of the burgeoning relationship between Lena and Tom, We Are the Night feels like it could be a Luc Besson genre movie; it’s smart, well photographed and thoughtful without being too serious. The plotting eventually succumbs somewhat to genre expectations, and a more direct conflict between Louise and Lena, but the acting is strong and consistent enough throughout to more than make up for the familiarity of the movie’s third act pivots. If there’s a big drawback, it’s that the film arrives Stateside in dubbed form. While this in theory may widen its potential audience, in reality it robs We Are the Night of a piece of its original voice — literally and metaphorically. Some things translate quite well universally, and vampires are one of those things. No need to switch the language. Note: in addition to its theatrical release, the film is also available nationwide on VOD. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC, unrated, 100 minutes)

One of the downsides of the digital revolution and shrinking production costs is that the removal of various financial and technical impediments to feature filmmaking makes every emboldened Tom, Jane and Harry think that their ideas truly need to be shared with the world, and that their genius is now only one festival screening away from being discovered, launching them into a stratosphere of artistic embrace and appreciation. This is often manifested in gimmicky dramatic conceits that fail to possess much in the way of intellectual examination. Witness State’s Exhibit A in this line of reasoning: The Abduction of Zack Butterfield. A woefully inept and entirely pointless air-quote psychological thriller which throws together two characters in a potentially hot-button narrative design and then does absolutely nothing of consequence with them, the movie is a wince-inducing, across-the-board collection of substandard elements.

After a bit of scene-setting teenagedom to sketch out 14-year-old Zack’s innate decency as compared to his hornball friends, the film, set in upstate New York, plays its abduction card and pivots, ostensibly, into a kidnapper-hostage drama, wherein the victim begins to (possibly) display signs of affinity for his captor. A former Army solider and Blackwater — excuse me, Dark Creek — independent contractor who served several tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as some hot-shit commando, April (Brett Helsham, above) nabs Zack because men are pigs and, as she puts it, “I figured those teachers you see on the news are on to something.” Putting a necklace rigged with explosives around his neck and locking Zack up in a room filled with a strangely substantial number of miniature sports balls, April proceeds to try to woo him in a naughty schoolgirl outfit, before finally proceeding to tell him all about her damaged childhood.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Butler (co-writer Stephen Ryder), ever the investigative genius, has a series of increasingly (unintentionally) hilarious conversations with Zack’s parents (Aaron Letrick and Lisa Gunn), and two FBI agents show up on the case and advise them to “move on.” Of course, Zack can only resist the power of his adolescent boner for so long, so he eventually yields to April’s amorous advances, which leads to one of those sex scenes where the camera stays locked on the bed’s edge for 90 seconds, while articles of clothing are tossed into frame. There’s also (seriously) a two-minute guitar sing-along, before things eventually culminate in a close-quarters “fight scene” that’s no more complex than the scuffle you and your seven-year-old brother once had over who ate the last piece of Black Forest cake.

The script here is terrible, in both dialogue and exploration of the basic conceit, and director Rick Lancaster reveals himself to be… well, a less than masterful stager. Oh, then there’s actually the acting, too. While Helsham and Plunkett are both novices with technique, and thus have trouble in some of the scenes requiring more emoting, it’s the wildly amateurish supporting acting in particular that dooms The Abduction of Zack Butterfield to depths of risible mockery from which it cannot escape. If there’s a fate worse than being kidnapped, one feels by the end of this movie’s running time, it’s being kidnapped by these filmmakers, and forced to participate in one of their low-fi cinematic parlor games, which never should have escaped the realm of the theoretical. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Thunder Hill/Metropolis Films, unrated, 91 minutes)

Director Andrew Lau takes a break from the crime thrillers and martial arts period pieces for which he is better known Stateside to tackle more tender affairs of the heart with A Beautiful Life, an uncommonly well sketched romantic drama about the tractor-beam allure that a certain type of wild, damaged women possess for a particular corresponding type of lonely men. Unfolding in present-day Beijing, the movie uses an appealing visual palette and solid performances from Shi Qi (above left) and Liu Ye to communicate and luxuriate in universal feelings about longing, love and connection. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion, unrated, 122 minutes)

Aging, if we’re lucky, is something that happens to all us. And yet, despite the many billions of industry and consumer dollars devoted annually to anti-wrinkle creams and everything else under the sun to stop the inexorable march of time, it’s a topic we’d at all costs rather avoid than have a honest societal discussion about — witness Sarah Palin‘s willfully gross distortion of end-of-life counseling services during the national health care debate, turning them into “death panels” coming to snatch your grandparents out of their homes and euthanize them in the street.

Mark Wexler’s How to Live Forever, then, is a refreshing and entertaining documentary look at aging, because it embraces the natural anxiety and discomfort the subject engenders, and emerges as a richer rumination on life for it. Spurred on by the death of his mother and his own maturation, Wexler embarks on a worldwide travelogue to at first investigate the possibilities of scientific life-extension — including cryogenics and biotechnological advances which allow for certain genes to be added and others to be turned off, (theoretically) stopping and even reversing the process of physical aging. Along the way, though, his film morphs into a sort of souffle of comic poignance, exploring what it means to grow old through the borrowed eyes of a wide variety of colorful and intriguing characters.

The sheer variety of Wexler’s interview subjects makes How
to Live Forever an utter delight. There are a handful of well known figures, from 93-year-old comedienne Phyllis Diller to 96-year-old fitness evangelist Jack Lalanne, but they’re interspersed alongside “regular” folks like a 74-year-old Japanese porn star and Buster Martin (above), a 101-year-old unrepentant British chain smoker who still works washing vans, and swills beer while running marathons. The movie flits to and fro, intellectually, but never in a manner that becomes either boring or off-putting. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Variance, unrated, 93 minutes)

Home can be defined many ways. Is it your ancestral home? The place you were actually born? The place you spent most of your childhood? The place you left as a teenager, if your parents still live there? Or is merely the place you currently live, even if you move every 18 months or so? An ex-soldier in How to Fold a Flag, the gripping new documentary from co-directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, describes “home” in simple and eloquent fashion as merely a place of sound mind — in essence, a place of mooring which allows for a deeper connection with your friends and family. So when he says that, in the aftermath of multiple deployments to Iraq, he lost his sense of home, it’s a heartrendingly blunt and tragic assessment of the long, cold shadow of consequences that war casts, and how, no matter when we actually bring the last of our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ll still be paying a heavy price for these incursions for several generations to come.

Six years after the release of the searing Gunner Palace — one of the first wave of the embed war docs, and additionally notable for its MPAA ratings appeal victory, which lowered its classification to PG-13 despite the presence of more than three dozen variations of the F-word — filmmakers Tucker and Epperlein turn their focus toward home with this movie, tracking some of the same Gunner soldiers back in their hometowns, as they each in their own way struggle to define their wartime experience and figure out to what degree they’re able to share with those around them, in a country largely isolated from if not indifferent to their service.

Filmed over the course of 15 months from 2008 to 2009, How to Fold a Flag centers chiefly on four young men, a pair of which were 17 upon their initial enrollment. Colorado’s quirky Stuart Wilf (above), whose mother describes him as sort of like Forrest Gump, quits his convenience store job and enjoys playing music, as his younger brother prepares to ship off to war. In small town North Carolina, Javorn Drummond works at a hog-processing plant at night while trying to obtain his college degree via a dwindling GI Bill. In Texas, PTSD-riddled Michael Goss, with three kids to support and a questionable less-than-honorable discharge sullying his record and muddying his health care situation, attempts to exorcise his demons as a cage fighter. In upstate New York, meanwhile, former social studies teacher Jon Powers decides to make a run for U.S. Congress, challenging a gaggle of well-funded Democrats and Republican nominee Chris Lee (who would go on to fame as the “Craigslist Congressman“).

The circumstances and support networks of these men are fairly different, but they each bear an undeniable mark from their service. Goss is, on the surface, the most explicitly troubled; when he talks about being haunted by the spirits of “everybody that didn’t come back with us,” and curtly asserts that tattoos he has and a T-shirt listing all of his wounded comrades is not a tribute but instead a reminder “for those who’ve already forgotten,” it highlights with devastating poignancy the latent anger and separation he feels, but has understandable trouble communicating. An at times agonizing but very necessarily full-bodied portrait of the true cost of war, How to Fold a Flag shines a light on the human side of armed conflict. For more information on the movie, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Virgil Films, unrated, 85 minutes)

Note: In addition to playing in theaters, the movie is also available
across digital and VOD platforms this week, just in time for Memorial
Day, with a DVD release planned for later in the summer.

If, as the saying goes, humor can be a great revealer of and conduit into hard, unspoken truths, then surely a parallel axiom could also be valid — that a humorist might be able to provide an important and clarifying look at heretofore muddied and jumbled realities. Such a hypothesis is born out in the form of Harry Shearer’s feature documentary debut, The Big Uneasy. A look at the true root causes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, the movie, while a bit pedantic, nonetheless stands as an important correlative primary historical document, alongside Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Double Exposure, unrated, 98 minutes)

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and into the 1990s, few filmmakers captured New York City as lovingly as Woody Allen. The writer-director’s move across the pond to Europe, however, which began with 2005’s Match Point, has served him well, seemingly rejuvenating his creative spirits and resulting in a string of mostly engaging films. A charming, whimsical and beautifully shot romantic comedy, and a big rebound from last year’s muddled, disappointing You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Midnight in Paris is one of Allen’s top efforts of the new millennium, and a strong contender for an Academy Award Best Screenplay nod, which would be his 15th such nomination.

The story centers on a present-day American couple visiting Paris. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a hack Hollywood screenwriter who still harbors a wish that he’d given honest literature more of a try, and so is working on a novel. His fianceé is Inez (Rachel McAdams), and before a return to their Stateside wedding they’re enjoying some time relaxing with Inez’s parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy). The couple-to-be also meet up with a pedantic visiting professor and old friend of Inez’s, Paul (Michael Sheen), and while that duo reconnect a distracted Gil walks the streets of the City of Lights one night, where he improbably finds himself sucked back into 1920s Paris. There, he meets and drinks with a variety of his literary idols, including Ernest Hemingway (a captivating Corey Stoll) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), and falls sway to Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a muse seemingly passed from famous artist to famous artist.

Bewildered and enthralled, Gil tries to take Inez back to the identical spot the next evening, but the same opportunity doesn’t present itself with her around. Later, when it does, Gil learns the loose, stroke-of-midnight rule of this location-specific portal, and continues going back night after night, seeking advice on his novel and possibly falling for Adriana. Back in the present day, meanwhile, Gil’s absentmindedness exacerbates tensions with Inez, who also seems to be more and more enjoying the company of Paul. Against this backdrop, Allen sketches out a roundelay that tackles with warmth and a playful intelligence the gulf between heart and head in matters of nostalgia and love.

One must submit to relaxed rhythms of Midnight in Paris, which definitely echoes back some to Allen’s own The Purple Rose of Cairo, but that’s not at all a difficult task. Cinematographer Darius Khondji’s butterscotch hues wrap viewers in a warm embrace, and Allen highlights Paris’ beauty without turning his film into a gaudy travelogue. Most winning of all, however, is the movie’s special, psychologically intoxicating blend of amusing, speculative cultural asides (aided by some delicious supporting character work) with playful, more universal ruminations on time, space, yearning and human feeling. Allen makes audiences’ hearts sing for other eras, while also being thankful they still live in their own. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 94 minutes)

Wherever Tom Arnold goes in the afterlife he will have to answer for many embarrassments, but the unlikely response to what might be his biggest arrives in the form of Hard Breakers, a jaw-droppingly inane collection of half-sketched scenes masquerading as some sort of exercise in girl-power. Actually, that’s a cheap shot… Arnold’s role here is only a small one, but it’s still an undeniable stain on what has evolved into a surprisingly nice little career. The chief blameworthy party is first-time feature director Leah Sturgis, who, using Sophie Monk (above right) and Cameron Richardson as the instruments of her celluloid crime, ostensibly tries to craft a gender-reversal of all those romantic comedies where a young guy with a wandering eye eventually learns the benefits of intimacy and monogamy. Instead, Sturgis unleashes something woefully inept and stupendously unfunny — a movie that slots into that special sub-category of terrible, the one that calls out for alcohol and friends with an appreciation for barbed derision. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Freestyle Releasing, R, 98 minutes)

One needn’t have necessarily grown up with a dog who becomes uneasy prior to the arrival of a big thunderstorm to know that environmental occurrences and problems are often foretold by subtle shifts in behavior in the animal kingdom. Such is the working hypothesis in this investigative nonfiction mystery, which examines the baffling and sudden disappearance of honeybees from their hives, a disturbingly increasing phenomenon. The first of two new documentaries on the subject, the forthrightly titled Vanishing of the Bees, narrated by Oscar nominee Ellen Page, shines a light on a fascinating and important subject, but in the end analysis suffers a bit from some comparatively lax filmmaking, failing to provide the sort of detail which would more robustly engage the typical layperson viewer.

Part of the problem is that the film basically solves its central mystery at a certain point, and then leaves a bunch of correlative natural questions frustratingly unaddressed. That said, Vanishing of the Bees is still fairly interesting for casual foodies and the environmentally conscious alike, including as it does compelling subjects and thoughtful chats with Food, Inc.‘s Michael Pollan and Beyond Pesticides director Jay Feldman, among other interviewees. Like the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, it provides a remarkable glimpse at an uncommon profession, as well as sounding another cautionary note about the delicate relationship between humankind and Mother Earth. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the trailer and information on tickets to the L.A. premiere, click here. (Hive Mentality Films, unrated, 87 minutes)

With its just-so production design, characterized chiefly by rust, and a gallery of weathered and otherwise stunted characters fumbling toward some vaguely defined senses of purpose or peace, Bloodworth, based on William Gay’s novel Provinces of Night, slots comfortably in the cinematic canon of Southern Gothic, wherein everything and everyone is dadgum country-fied, and, well, ain’t that interesting and grand? This isn’t to say that the film, a drama about the long shadows of alcoholism, familial neglect and demons unaddressed, is a terrible or hokey thing, just that its dramatic payoffs come across as relatively meager, and second fiddle to the sense of frozen-in-time place it seems chiefly concerned with conveying.

After abandoning his wife Julia (Frances Conroy) and three sons decades earlier, E.F. Bloodworth (Kris Kristofferson) returns to his dusty, rural Tennessee hometown, where his only real solace comes in the form of a relationship with the grandson he’s never met, Fleming (Reece Thompson, of Rocket Science). Warren (Val Kilmer), a drunken, philandering traveler in the mold of his father, is more open to reconciliation, but Boyd (Dwight Yoakam) and Brady (W. Earl Brown) are full of anger, and continually lash out at those around them. E.F. sets up shop in a trailer at the edge of his estranged wife’s property, and Fleming keeps occasional company with him, while also striking up a relationship with Raven (Hilary Duff), the daughter of a troubled party girl (Hilarie Burton). As the summer wears on and Fleming makes plans to leave town, tension mounts all around, and a few bad things eventually happen.

A lot of actor-screenwriter Brown’s adaptation is nicely restrained, but there are a couple false notes here and there (including Raven commenting on Fleming’s embarrassment with his beat-up car as a positive thing, something no teenage girl has ever done), and the movie’s solemn voiceover narration also overreaches at times. Additionally, Bloodworth ostensibly unfolds in the 1950s, but the director, Shane Dax Taylor, and other filmmakers seem intent on obscuring any degree of greater specificity that might inform the story, as if they’re trying (too hard) to lend Bloodworth a parabolic weight and significance that is beyond the grasp of its narrative. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 105 minutes)

Documentaries are great, in that they can shine a light on all sorts of niche subjects heretofore unexplored, but they can also be a major drag or bore, especially when their makers become too convinced of the grand, sweeping importance and inherent interest level of their subject matter. Case in point: L’Amour Fou, a hagiography of haute couture legend Yves Saint Laurent that played at last year’s Toronto Film Festival and this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Solemn to the point of utter suffocation, director Pierre Thoretton’s wildly tedious exploration of the French-Algerian designer– who studied at the feet of Christian Dior, and following his death briefly stood in line for ascension at his company, as artistic director — unfolds through the eyes of his business partner and mostly life-long lover, Pierre Berge (above right), but provides a maddeningly circumspect and vague portrait of the man in question. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC/Sundance Select, unrated, 104 minutes)

An unusual sort of prequel to the influential 1978 Hong Kong martial arts comedy Drunken Master, starring Jackie Chan and Simon Yuen, Chinese import True Legend, from respected fight choreographer and filmmaker Yuen Woo-Ping, arrives Stateside following a fairly disappointing theatrical run in Eastern territories, and it’s fairly easy to understand why. A bloated period piece epic that features a generally nice blend of CGI-assisted blood-letting and fantastical, Matrix-y punches in which people fly through support beams and stone fixtures, the movie never gets past or over the limits of its wooden, stilted set-up, and then, finally and damningly, wears out its welcome with a plodding and entirely unnecessary final act that offers none of the catharsis its makers seem to imagine it does.

If True Legend was trim and less possessing of a grim self-seriousness, it would work a lot better. But if, as it seems, part of the main intent or purpose of True Legend was really to explain why its protagonist turns to drinking in the first place (and hence is the “Drunken Master”), there are much better and faster ways to arrive at that conclusion than screenwriter Christine To concocts. After a fairly engaging and streamlined opening 75-80 minutes, the film winds on in excruciating fashion, charting his downward spiral — the sort of thing which would be compressed into a montage or pair of scenes in a more conventional American action movie — over the course of 35-plus more minutes. This allows for plenty of time for the movie’s endangered little kid to cry out “Father, stand up!” roughly 45 times, and said dad to eventually dispatch a goon squad of ‘roided-out Caucasian wrestler-types in his characteristic drunken/breakdance-style, all while the late David Carradine pops up in a pointless cameo, and yells things like, “Finish this Chinaman, once and for all!” None of this adds one iota of emotional heft or significance to the film.

A poor excuse for a legend explained, and too swollen and narratively unfocused to qualify as a martial arts treat outside of the most devoted and hardcore Eastern action genre demographic, True Legend proves that some backstories are perhaps best left untold and unexplored. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Indomina, R, 114 minutes)

Off-screen, Mel Gibson may or may not be a deplorable human being — and I tend to think on a certain level, in certain relationships, he kind of is, with the caveat that I additionally understand he’s also very much a guy in deep, deep pain — but the fact remains that he and his new movie, The Beaver, are uniquely suited for one another.



When Gibson, after a string of disastrous incidents in his personal life, mounted a comeback with last year’s Edge of Darkness, his first starring role in almost eight years, box office reception was notably muted ($43 million domestically, and only a grand worldwide total of $81 million), even though it was a revenge tale right in his crazy-eyed commercial wheelhouse. Later, he got very publicly booted from a cameo in The Hangover Part II. His bashing of women (both metaphorical and literal), and slurring of Jews, African-Americans and other minority groups seemed to have reached a boiling-over point; Gibson was toxic, persona non grata in Hollywood, at least on screen. Until an old friend came calling.

A hot spec script commodity some years back, praised in various outlets as one of Hollywood’s top unproduced screenplays, Austinite Kyle Killen’s debut effort at one point had Steve Carell attached for its lead role, of a seriously depressed toy company executive who, after a failed suicide attempt, takes to communicating with his family and coworkers solely via a beaver hand puppet. When Jodie Foster took over as director, however, she tabbed former Maverick costar Gibson as her leading man. So when even more… well, stuff from Gibon’s personal life hit the fan last fall, it briefly seemed The Beaver might conceivably be consigned to a straight-to-video release — which would be a shame, actually, since this is an intriguing and thought-provoking movie that deserves a wider audience.

Walter Black (Gibson) has for years suffered from extreme depression and possibly mental illness, and endured all sorts of treatments, to little positive effect. He’s mentally checked out of his marriage and family, and is at the end of his rope. When he comes to after another night of drunken anguish and hopelessness, Walter is confronted by the tough-love advice of the titular puppet (“You’re sick, on that much we agree — the question is, Do you want to get better?”), which he also voices, in a thick Scottish brogue. Slipping the Beaver onto his hand, Walter, having recently been kicked out of his house, returns to home and work, where his wife Meredith (Foster) and long-suffering second-in-command (Cherry Jones) try to adjust to his new, eccentric interaction.

Everyone at first thinks it’s some sort of stunt or joke, of course, but Walter hands them a card advising that he is under the care of a licensed psychiatric professional, and they should conversationally address the Beaver. Slight upticks in sociability and functionality are soon registered, and the declining fortunes of Walter’s toy company are reversed by a new line of “Mr. Beaver Woodchopper Kits.” Even as Walter establishes a rapport with his younger son Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) through the puppet, though, his teenage son Porter (Anton Yelchin) — a smart but angry kid who keeps a list of Post-Its enumerating all the traits of his father of which he wishes to rid himself, and finds himself hired by valedictorian Norah (Jennifer Lawrence) to pen her forthcoming graduation commencement speech — remains aloof. Over time, too, the Beaver morphs into a less benign, more manipulative alter ego, impinging on Walter’s free will and already tenuous grasp on reality, and threatening to erase whatever newfound gains he’s made.

It’s difficult to think of a recent film that has the same sort of sociocultural import as The Beaver. Media cameos from figures like Matt Lauer and Jon Stewart help give the movie some scope and real-world mooring as Walter becomes an oddball media celebrity, and the outlandish meltdowns and wacky public behavior of Charlie Sheen doubtlessly also give The Beaver an element of popular currency. (“People love a trainwreck when it’s not them,” says one character.) Mainly, though, it’s Gibson’s aforementioned, publicly aired private failings that create this weird, super-channeled energy, and a sense that, watching him as Walter, you’re getting as close and as honest a look at some of the dark and desperate feelings of Gibson, the man, as you’re ever going to get. It’s a gutsy, captivating, highwire performance.

Tonally, The Beaver is an odd mixture of genres — it’s part dark comedy, part family drama and part social satire. Some of these strands are better developed than others, while others suffer from comparative neglect, or oversimplification. But the movie, in sum, works because it doesn’t short-change or soft-peddle its despair, and pivot into unearned sunny montages of a dancing and laughing reconciled family. It’s honest about depression, and mental illness. Its relatively dark ending, lined with a bit of bruised grace, feels appropriate, and oddly realistic, lending the film a sense of settledness. (Summit/Participant Media, PG-13, 91 minutes)

For a brief period of time, surrounding the 2004 festival premiere and commercial release of Garden State, his critically lauded writing and directing debut, it seemed as though Zach Braff’s career would be taking a hairpin turn, away from the manufactured, hyper-realized silliness of Scrubs and into the hinterlands of auteurdom. This pivot, and Braff’s second feature film behind the camera, was put on hold — at least for a while — by the life-support extension of the last two seasons of his hit sitcom, which came about late in the TV re-up cycle, and found Braff working a reduced load, handing off the baton to a younger generation of medical internists.

One of the movies he completed during this timeframe, however, provides an illuminating glimpse of the sort of subject matter that stirs and captures Braff’s interest. The High Cost of Living, from writer-director Deborah Chow, unfolds in French-speaking Montreal, where scruffy drug-peddler Henry (Braff), an American ex-pat living on an expired visa, leaves a party one night, makes a wrong turn and runs down pregnant Nathalie (Isabelle Blais). Panicked, and with his car full of all sorts of illegally obtained prescription pills, Henry drives off, and leaves her. He later returns, striking up a complicated relationship.

The High Cost of Living is vaguely reminiscent of Don Roos’ Bounce, another movie which addressed commingled grief and guilt, albeit in a slightly more pleasant or at least tempered fashion. While it avoids some of the big dramatic blowouts one might suspect given a logline synopsis of the story, Chow’s film is still fairly downbeat, and swollen with melancholy. If there’s a miscalculation, it lies a bit in the movie’s focus, which, had it been channeled more discretely through Nathalie’s eyes, could have proven more rewarding.

That said, The High Cost of Living is a complex and well acted story about awakened integrity and the sometimes hard, concrete costs that come with honesty, rendered all the more interesting for the jumbled sociocultural backdrop against which it unfolds. The fact that Henry is American, Nathalie and her husband Michel (Patrick Labbe) are French-speaking immigrants, and another key character and his family are Asian gives the movie an almost subliminal, take-it-or-leave-it undercurrent of political allegory, if one wants to engage the material on that level. Cinematographer Claudine Sauve, meanwhile, trades in a muted color palette, awash in blues, greys and darker greens, that works in concert with the material to effect a depressive, melancholic tone, where the accumulated burdens of life leave their mark, even when the “right” decision is made. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 92 minutes)

As the film industry has contracted, and the burden of financing shifted
away from companies and more onto creative individuals themselves,
American independent films of the past 10 years or so, whatever their
genre, have been typically characterized by a certain eagerness to
please. This isn’t entirely surprising. Like any other occupational
venture in tougher economic times, there’s an element of
self-preservation involved. Emergent filmmakers have a desire to keep
working, and so they craft stories, consciously or subconsciously, that
often play to the whetted appetites of a particular audience or
demographic.

Spencer Susser‘s feature directorial debut, Hesher, is not much concerned with such niceties. It’s not flat-out confrontational, per se, but it is warped, weird and given to neither easy explanation nor pat, sum-of-its-parts analysis. By various turns a shrewdly drawn coming-of-age drama and a full-tilt, gonzo exploration of the dirty, unfortunate reality that pain and disappointment visits everyone’s life, the movie — about a young kid coping with the death of his mother, and the vaguely sociopathic loner who forces his way into his home, moving in with said kid’s father and grandmother — cruises along solidly, for much of its running time, on the unlikely interplay of its two lead characters before finally losing its way a bit in the home stretch.

A colleague described Hesher, in less than flattering terms, as a knock-off of Chuck Palahniuk produced by people raised only on Sundance films, and that’s actually not a bad description, to whatever degree one is invested in or detested with the narrative. With his crudely drawn tattoos, stringy hair, facial scruff, penchant for elliptical aphorisms, and psychotic thousand-yard stare, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Hesher comes across as a sort of punk-rock Jesus or G.G. Allin disciple — or perhaps a Beavis & Butt-head acolyte who’s stepped down out of their cartoon suburban world into a slightly more grounded but equally scummy American suburbia. He’s an outsized character, at once original and representational, and to the extent one objects to dollops of ambiguity and abstraction liberally applied to a narrative of coming-of-age and familial reconciliation, they will find molehills or not outright mountains of frustration in Hesher. Hesher is real, yes, but it’s also somewhat best to think of him as a construct or a forceful change agent rather than attempt to make sense of all of his behavior.

The film’s third act isn’t quite as tightly drawn as it should be; rather than pull back and swing for a knockout blow, Susser seems to lose his nerve. He aims for a pay-off more in line with traditional settled-grief catharsis, which doesn’t quite fully connect, the way it’s constructed. Neither does the intimation of a potential relationship between Nicole (Natalie Portman) and Hesher make total sense. Reflecting back on this now, it’s hard to fully distill or explain these criticisms, except to simply say that, for me, the movie’s hold simply loosened considerably.

And yet, still, Hesher courses with a unique verve missing in many independent productions, hovering somewhere between outright success and “interesting failure.” An appreciation of feeling is what informs one’s affection for this movie, much more than a simple narrative engagement, and it taps into those raging, conflicted sensations of adolescence with considerable aplomb. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For an interview with Susser, meanwhile, click here. (Newmarket/Wrekin Hill, R,102 minutes)

How will hardcore birthers (I’m looking in your direction Orly Taitz, though wincing to do so) read dark and sinister intent into the uplifting true story of The First Grader, given that it’s set in Kenya, contains the words “birth certificate” and even, in its closing, winkingly evokes the possibility of someone like Barack Obama, whose ancestors call the country home, rising to the presidency of the United States? Who knows, though I’m sure it may spawn a particularly warped conspiracy theory on some Internet message board somewhere. For the sane among us, however, the good news is that this solidly put together adult-education drama will be safely off the radars of most lunatic-fringe dwellers, arriving as it does in a low-key theatrical release from National Geographic Entertainment.

Despite its exotic setting, The First Grader, directed by Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl), is not too far out-of-field for American arthouse audiences — it’s chiefly a drama of heartening, make-do cooperation and uplift, a movie about not just the illumination of education, but the power to bestow dignity that it also possesses. Naomie Harris and Oliver Litondo (above) each deliver engaging, full-bodied performances, and Rob Hardy’s cinematography makes wonderful use of existent light and the natural Kenyan landscapes, creating a compelling physical tableau against which the human drama can more realistically unfold. The true story of The First Grader serves as an important reminder that education does not come by way of a piece of paper, nor is it a fixed-point destination. Instead, it’s a lifelong journey. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (National Geographic Entertainment, PG-13, 103 minutes)