THUMBSUCKER **/**** DVD - Image A- Sound B+ Extras B starring Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Keanu Reeves screenplay by Mike Mills, based on the novel by Walter Kirn directed by Mike Mills
by Walter Chaw With the brief reprieve offered the Sundance imprint by Junebug now smelling a lot more like "fluke" than "trend," find Mike Mills's underwhelming Thumbsucker, another Sundance sensation so familiar in its affected suburban quirk that its peculiarities seem like formula and its attacks on middle-class perversity and malaise seem all too comfortable. There simply isn't much heart left in this pursuit, this punching of holes into the façade of planned communities and their plastic citizenry--this central conceit of broken people leaning on psychic crutches as the apocalypse of the day-to-day cascades in on them in blue, stylized waves.
SUBURBICON *½/**** starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov directed by George Clooney
BODIED *½/**** starring Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Charlamagne Tha God, Anthony Michael Hall written by Joseph Kahn & Alex Larsen directed by Joseph Kahn
by Bill Chambers The best parts are obviously the Coens' and the worst parts are obviously director George Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov's. Trouble is, the best parts aren't that great and the worst parts...yikes. A period piece set in the Eisenhower era, Suburbicon centres around the eponymous suburban development (that the title isn't just a pun unto itself is the first red flag, to borrow one of the movie's pet phrases), which has controversially allowed a black family to breach this all-white neighbourhood. Next door, horn-rimmed patriarch Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) lives a pleasant life with his little-leaguer son (Noah Jupe), wheelchair-bound wife (Julianne Moore), and sister-in-law Margaret (also Moore). (One of them's blonde, like the other Elvis in Kissin' Cousins.) One night, while Jupe's Nicky is lying in bed listening to the radio, a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) breaks in and holds the family hostage. Everyone is chloroformed, but Mrs. Lodge's system can't handle it, and Gardner is left a widower. When the home-invaders are caught and put in a police line-up, Nicky can't figure out why his father won't positively ID them. They have very recognizable faces, after all. Using the Coen Brothers' casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, Clooney populates the frame with the sort of memorable oddballs you see in their films, actors who seem like they're always being looked at through a wide-angle lens.
ZERO STARS/**** starring Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Hong Chau, Christoph Waltz written by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor directed by Alexander Payne
by Walter Chaw Imagine if Tracy Flick, the energetic, demonic high-school overachiever in Alexander Payne's brilliant Election, were a Vietnamese exchange student, heavily and hilariously accented. That's one of the things wrong with Payne's excruciating downsizing, a film that takes his now-trademark twee misanthropy and mashes it up against this pretense of Swiftian social satire that sets the Sisyphus-like struggle of the bedraggled Everyman against a fatalistic backdrop of environmental apocalypse. It's a broad discourse on a lot of things: poverty and the failure of capitalism; the United States tearing itself apart along arbitrary class distinctions politicized into dramas of dominance and oppression. It's also about a filmmaker using science-fiction as a cudgel, swinging it about as disrespectfully as he does extreme racial caricaturing and destined to hold it up as a shield when whatever opposition comes rolling in to protest a film that mainstream publications out of Venice are already proclaiming some kind of contemporary masterpiece. It's like George Lucas all over again, but imagine if it were like Charlie Kaufman instead. For me, when you have an Asian character as problematic as Vietnamese refugee Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a figure set up as both an object of derision and a holy relic, everything else is drowned out in that noise.
**½/**** starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler screenplay by Steve Adams directed by Barry Levinson
by Walter Chaw Reminding a great deal of the masticated wonderlands of Joe Dante's The 'burbs and his own Toys, Barry Levinson's Envy operates within a carefully constructed artifice. It's a fantasy of suburbia filthy with arrested men-children and the dolls who love them, helplessly acting out music-box morality plays against a backdrop of outsized slapstick. At it's best, the film evokes the diorama lollapalooza of Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (indicated by its affection for the image of a snow globe), floating along on the undercurrent of meanness that defines Burton's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure like a twisted form beneath a multi-coloured blanket. Disturbingly unmoored monologues about the joy of running a pretzel stand and an invitation to catharsis as "let it tumble out like circus freaks" are made all the more peculiar by the delivery of Christopher Walken, playing a character named obliquely--after Kafka or Christ--J-Man. Redemption and oppression in one Camus parcel, Envy is the story of an everyman toiling under the yoke of the peculiarly American sickness of being completely average while nursing a sense of outrageous entitlement.
A SERIOUS MAN ***½/**** starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
THE INVENTION OF LYING *½/**** starring Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Tina Fey written and directed by Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson
CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY **½/**** directed by Michael Moore
by Ian Pugh The appropriate, even inevitable capper to a loose nihilist trilogy following No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man is so utterly dark and dire that it almost plays like self-reflexive parody--an adaptation of Barton Fink's "beautiful" wrestling script, perhaps, or an honest-to-gosh realization of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? Preston Sturges imagined once upon a time. Even the title is sarcastic. This is a scenario whereby life-altering misfortunes fall with ridiculous timing and precision; the dismal tides and the coming storms are now damningly literal, such that it's nearly impossible to take it with any semblance of seriousness. In making time during the game to explain Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, our hapless Job, physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), offers, if you haven't surmised, a fairly concise metaphor for everything that happens in this film. Why are the Coens being so on-the-nose about themes they've lately approached with a legitimately intimidating brilliance? Maybe it's because their mordant philosophy has amassed unprecedented critical and commercial acceptance over their last two pictures. Maybe the idea that anyone could actually commiserate with them strikes the Coens as so terrifying that the time has come to cast such notions aside in the most punishing way possible.1 For now, anyway.
BATBABE: THE DARK NIGHTIE *½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C starring Darian Caine, Molly Heartbreaker, Jackie Stevens, Smoke Williams written and directed by John Bacchus
THE STEWARDESSES */**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A starring Michael Garrett, Christina Hart, William Basil written and directed by Al Silliman Jr.
by Ian Pugh It may seem ridiculous to call a softcore porno spoof of The Dark Knight a disappointment, but I've been aching to see any sort of comedic critical response to Christopher Nolan's masterpiece since it stole my heart last summer. We should always be willing to throw our sacred cows onto the fire to test their mettle, and we're woefully lacking in the right forums to do so: MAD MAGAZINE lost its currency a while back (or maybe I just turned 16) and Internet satire is too scattershot. Where else are we to turn for our defiant, independent parodies of the instant classics of modern culture? Porn, of course. Leave it to some clever guy in the adult industry to come up with the Jerker (Rob Mendara), a devious clown/agent of chaos/chronic masturbator out to prove that everyone is capable of descending to his level of depravity--by stealing all the precious pornography in Bacchum City! Meanwhile, strip-club owner/dancer Wendy Wane (Darian Caine) believes that Bacchum's new D.A. Henrietta Bent (Molly Heartbreaker) will afford her the opportunity to retire her Batbabe persona and settle down with old flame Rachel Balls (Jackie Stevens).
***/**** DVD - Image B Sound B Extras B- BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+ starring Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Danielle Von Zernick written and directed by Tom DiCillo
by Walter Chaw A film carefully structured in three parts, Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion demands tired adjectives like "offbeat" and "quirky" while dancing dangerously close to hyperbole along the lines of "brilliant" and "incisive." What it is, though, is its own beast--a meta-structure of dream sequences (the first two segments "are," the third is "about") concerning six takes of scene six--the devil's number applied to the trials of filmmaking, including technical accidents, the egos of the stars, and behind-the-scenes relationships that threaten professionalism. With those plates spinning, DiCillo layers in elements of fantasy bleeding into reality (the second section ends with the oft-repeated scene sloughing into "reality," then into dream), the final segment integrating spoof symbols (an apple, a little person) with a real symbol (the mother).
**½/**** DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A BLU-RAY - Image B+ Sound A Extras A starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Christine Taylor screenplay by Drake Sather & Ben Stiller and John Hamburg directed by Ben Stiller
by Walter Chaw Ben Stiller has a very particular genius for satirical imitation. When he says that he based Derek Zoolander on "some cross between Jason Priestly and Luke Perry," one can be sure that the offspring is an uncomfortably dead-on collection of insouciant pouts, long blank stares, and dim-witted pronouncements. We know that Stiller is good at destroying celebrity; the bigger question is can an extended sketch featuring one of his burlesques sustain interest and consistently inspire laughter? The answer is "fitfully," so, yes and no.
Image A+ Sound A Extras A "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," "Road to Rhode Island," "To Live and Die in Dixie," "I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar," "Lethal Weapons"
by Walter Chaw Possibly the most consistently appalling television show in the history of network television, Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" has a scary intelligence and a willingness to go places that most popular entertainment fears to tread. It's inspiring, is what I'm saying, and I put it on whenever I feel afraid to take my shots at the inexplicable sacred cow of the moment. I'm not sure how "Family Guy" survived for three seasons on Fox (actually, it sort of didn't: Bombarded with hate and diapers following the alleged series finale, the net allowed a selectively censored third season), but a precedent-setting fourth season, which will begin airing on Fox in May of this year, serves as a reminder that however many people have a conniption over Janet's tit, there are two million fewer of us who flinch at the moment of crisis, too, but in anticipation of the backlash instead of at the event itself. For what it's worth, "Family Guy" has picked up the baton from "The Simpsons" as the most relevant and daring adult entertainment. Take it with a healthy dose of "The Daily Show" and you're well on your way to developing pathos and irony.
*½/**** screenplay by Trey Parker & Matt Stone & Pam Brady directed by Trey Parker
by Walter Chaw The comedy bits that work in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police are the most vile, the most puerile. The now-notorious puppet sex scene is uproarious--the consumption of Hans Blix by a catfish and the attempts at having marionettes fight one another in hand-to-hand combat are pretty funny, too, and though it's a little oblique, I appreciated our intrepid band's endeavour to disguise one of their own as a gentle-puppet of Middle Eastern decent. But we reach a point during this experiment in neo-"Thunderbirds" cinema where it becomes clear that the satirical sharpness that defines the duo's at-times incandescently brilliant "South Park" has been shunted aside in favour of vomit gags and screaming homophobia. It's faint praise to say that Team America is sometimes as funny as Steve Oedekerk's "thumb" movies, but more often it's just protracted and uninspired.
The Babysitter Murders ****/**** (d. Ryan Spindell) For certain artists working in the short-film format, I don't have any idea how or why it is they haven't been called up to the big leagues yet. This speaks as much to my prejudice, obviously: there's nothing wrong with the short form. In literature, many of my favourite writers are best in the short form. In film, though, there's so little real opportunity for distribution that it seems a particular shame when guys like Ryan Spindell have only produced shorts. I'm not complaining (his work is excellent), merely hoping he has the means to continue. Spindell's latest, The Babysitter Murders, is so expertly composited that it would be kind of a shame to dissect it at all. Sufficed to say that it unearths a new place to take Wes Craven's Scream meta funhouse, and does it without a hint of smugness or show-off-y insecurity. It's beautifully paced, conceived, and executed. Look at a cooking scene early on, set to "Fast & Sweet" by Mondo Boys feat. Kestrin Pantera--the way it's shot and edited, the way Elie Smolkin's camera stalks and Eric Ekman cuts it all together. The movie's premise--a babysitter alone on a stormy night when a psycho escapes from an asylum--is as rote as they come, but Spindell, as he did with The Root of the Problem and dentists, finds something new to say. The performances are to a one pitch-perfect and the gore is appropriately horrifying; it's a film balanced in that space between hilarity for its excess and hilarity for its brilliance. I'm out of superlatives. Spindell is one of the finest voices working in genre right now, carving out a niche that's neither self-serious nor self-abnegating. He's full of joy, this one, and his movies are treasures.
A la recherche de l'Ultra-Sex ½*/**** directed by Nicolas Charlet & Bruno Lavaine
by Walter Chaw I saw a hacked anime once--pre-Adult Swim and projects of that ilk--that took place on a flying aircraft carrier and had been re-dubbed so that all the characters were offering different euphemisms for flatulence. My favourite was, "I can't seem to take a step without introducing Mr. Wetty." It lasted about four minutes and I enjoyed a good three-and-a-half of it. Nicholas Charlet and Bruno Lavaine's In Search of the Ultra-Sex is a full hour of R-rated excerpts from classic porn, dubbed to be a Plan 9 from Outer Space thing involving alien plots and the contagion that's made everyone on Earth randy as shit and humping helplessly. It's a way to address the arbitrary madness of porn set-ups, I guess--or it could be, but all the filmmakers do is act silly and hope that we'll want to indulge in that silliness with them. Even if it successfully skewered the arbitrary inanity of porn plots, I mean...to what end? There aren't a lot of fish more sluggish nor barrels much smaller. I went into it hoping for a "How's the Night Life on Cissalda?" and was disappointed but managed to enjoy a portion of it from a purely nostalgic perspective--the same nostalgia I could indulge with the right Google search, as it happens. To its credit, it isn't long. To its detriment, it's longer than three-and-a-half minutes.
*/**** starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken screenplay by Paul Rudnick, based on the novel by Ira Levin directed by Frank Oz
by Walter Chaw At one time Jim Henson's right hand, Frank Oz is the index finger that you close your book around when you get up to answer the door. An afterthought of a place-holder of a director, his cameo as the evidence officer in TheBlues Brothers ("One prophylactic...one soiled") is as succinct a statement as any of the man's non-Muppet contributions to the films he directs. His visual style flat, his rapport with non-plush actors non-existent, Oz instinctively arranges everything as he would puppets on a soundstage: sightlines clear, movement in straight lines, and coverage that establishes the marvel of place but no sense that living things exist there. He's not a bad choice at first glance, then, for the second adaptation of Ira Levin's paranoia classic The Stepford Wives (already a mediocre camp classic 1975 movie starring Katharine Ross), the saga of a lovely young woman who discovers, Rosemary's Baby-like (another Levin source), that her husband is kind of a pig and her exclusive suburban neighbourhood is populated by vacuous femme-bots imagined as ideal wife-replacements by their pigs of husbands. Like the first film, an impossibly lovely woman is cast as the empowered lead to lend the premise a little more ironic horror, but Nicole Kidman, unlike Ross, is already an automaton and has been cast as such in films like To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut. The greatest special effect in Kidman's career is her sometime ability to simulate warmth--something that's not required in The Stepford Wives, and so again it would seem as though her involvement in this project makes a great deal of sense. Because of this, it's sort of amazing how genuinely bad are the results.
**/**** Image A- Sound A- starring Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards screenplay by Stephen Peters directed by John McNaughton
by Bill Chambers I shepherded myself through puberty on a steady diet of Cinemax and I've apologized for worse than this movie's sins on behalf of director John McNaughton, whose Mad Dog and Glory almost sires a new genre: misogyny uplift. So I've always considered my indifference towards Wild Things to be something of an anomaly. A continuation of a theme that ran subtly through McNaughton's powerful Normal Life, i.e., some inextricable link between carnal desire and pecuniary greed, Wild Things (originally titled Sex Crimes) opens with an aerial view of the 'Glades that cleverly juxtaposes alligator-infested swampland with the grounds of a nearby high school. The implication is clear, but then again it's too clear, and you can shut the movie off then and there without missing a beat.
½*/**** starring Chris Rock, Bernie Mac, Tamala Jones, Lynn Whitfield screenplay by Chris Rock & Ali LeRoi directed by Chris Rock
by Walter Chaw Chris Rock's directorial debut Head of State is a little like Weird Al Yankovic's UHF or Dana Carvey's Opportunity Knocks: a vehicle meant to showcase a sketch comedian's strengths but functioning more as an exposé on said comedian's weaknesses. It vacillates between a potentially interesting central plot and a couple of misogynistic and boring subplots, managing by the end to come off as shrill, cynical, and disjointed as well as overly cutesy and infatuated with its own cult of bling. Its one saving grace is that it seems to occasionally know what a satire is, conceiving of a "white folks can't dance" sequence that actually scores a couple of points in letting the poor Man dance well instead of mockingly (see Bringing Down the House), and in the identification of "God Bless America" as the hypocritical exclusionary bullshit that it is.
Mays Gilliam (Rock) is an alderman picked to run for president when the frontrunners in his party (we presume Democrat, we can't be sure) are killed in a plane crash. The right candidate at the right time (he can't win, he looks good for the party in trying), Gilliam bucks his spin doctors to be true to his own self and, in the process, wins the adoration of both sides of the aisle. Like another excrescent Carvey vehicle, Master of Disguise, Gilliam's running mate and big brother Mitch (Bernie Mac) ends most of his scenes by slapping someone in the face. As comic devices go, it falls somewhere between old white people speaking ghetto jargon and Robin Givens as a psychopathic ex-girlfriend who's constantly being tackled by security or running into parked cars.
Despite the whiff of entitlement inherent in any premise wherein outrage is the equal to competency (the old guard white media is made sport of for caring whether the vice presidential candidate knows anything about NATO), Head of State is less racist than puerile, repetitive, and tiresome. It falls in line with Rock's penchant for Prince and Pauper stories rewritten along race and class distinctions (Down to Earth, Bad Company)--urban fairy tales that aren't satirical jabs at white culture so much as slapstick fantasies with racial elements. Rock the director tends toward a sort of irreverent jumble that demonstrates too much faith in Rock the actor's ability to carry romantic scenes (the token love interest played by Tamala Jones) and too little faith in Rock the writer's gift for social commentary.
In toning it down for a PG-13 rating, Head of State attacks politicians, whites, and the media, leaving only lawyers off the list of easy targets that are beneath gifted comedians. Like Richard Pryor before him, Rock has proven himself a smart social observer as a stand-up comedian and, also like Pryor, Rock has demonstrated absolutely no potential for translating that acerbic genius for film. Blunted and neutered, Rock in Head of State is the very definition of nondescript: uncertain about what this film is about and unclear as to how to get to wherever it's going. It's not sure how to walk the line between insulting and moronic and settles for being a little of both--the big presidential debate (scored, like the rest of the film, in a schizophrenic slurry of hip-hop and Monday Night Football) highlights the confusion with its dense visual jokiness and rabble-rousing broadsides.
Urging parents to "knock your children out, it's good for them" is something that was funny when Pryor was saying it in the Seventies, less so when Murphy was repeating it in the Eighties, and less so again when Sinbad dredged it up in the Nineties. Head of State is at least the fourth generation of the same old shtick--its alleged shock has worn off with its relevancy (and why a bit about child-rearing in a political satire?). Rather than raising eyebrows, Head of State is just a sickly version of Bulworth (another film written/directed/produced by/and starring its lead), a movie that wasn't much in the final analysis but at least had the anger and edge to draw a little blood. Originally published: March 28, 2003.
