"Clerks was definitely [an] influence. I think it's sort of the diatribe-type dialogue we have. All those films with guys just sitting around talking, that's when the light came on and we said we can probably do that too."
-Alive and Lubricated co-writer/producer Jason Butler

Though not everybody can do what Kevin Smith does, because Smith makes it look like they can, that's enough for me to condemn his contributions to the film world outright. Smith has a shitty formula, but it's the sort of shitty formula that any asshole with a camera can approximate. To follow this formula, you needn't creativity, intelligence, talent, or even a love of film. That last part is what gets me--Smith and his descendents don't particularly have any burning images they wish to share with the world. When they pick up a camera, the first thing they think is, "Hey, let's make a movie about me and my friends sitting around, drinking beer, and talking about shit."

Okay, fine, I like Clerks. In fact, I would passionately argue that Smith will never do anything remotely as good as Clerks again. Smith's characters basically serve as a mouthpiece for his views on things like relationships (the overrated Chasing Amy) and religion (the overrated Dogma). This is a major problem for three reasons. Firstly, Smith doesn't leave anything to instinct or a higher power and is giving us the punchline without asking us to do any real work. His films can therefore never rise beyond his domain of experience, and can be quickly outgrown. Secondly, a real artist codes these things into some sort of narrative and avoids over-identifying with his protagonist. Lastly, Kevin Smith is not a sociologist, psychologist, historian, anthropologist, or theologian; his opinions on these subjects are not necessarily brilliant or well-educated, which is especially frustrating in his aggressively politically-correct Dogma. (Where God is a woman, Jesus was black, it doesn't matter what religion you are, and Man created Hell because He's a guilt-ridden masochist. Yeah, whatever.)

Clerks worked as well as it did because Smith had very few resources and could only shoot in and around the convenience store where he worked. There was a sense in which it wasn't purely The Kevin Smith Show, as the milieu remained inextricable from the gab. In all honesty, I can't say I have ever seen a film that nails the feelings and textures of the state of New Jersey as effectively as Clerks does. The success of the film, I'm beginning to think, was borne either of pure luck or unusually good intuition.

Let it be known that the sibling creators of Alive and Lubricated, Jason and Brett Butler (no relation to the comedienne), do not have any such luck or intuition. They are Smithites--that is to say, non-artists who, rather than take the time to tell a story or create three-dimensional characters, use their subjects as mouthpieces to espouse their moronic "philosophies." But they are also on a shoestring budget and, unlike Smith, they have no idea how to make a low-budget movie. The whole film reeks of biting off more than they can chew--challenging themselves to more stunts, more locations, and more gags than they can possibly handle. Another Chasing Amy is a bad enough idea; another Chasing Amy on a Clerks-level budget is an even worse idea.

The worst Kevin Smith movie Kevin Smith never made is perhaps the best and most concise way to describe Alive and Lubricated. The film follows the adventures of Dickey, a video store clerk who just broke up with his girlfriend, and Ben (Craig Greenham), his incredibly misogynistic best friend. Dickey and Ben spend their days measuring how long they've gone without sex, when they'll finally get some, and how they're going to get it. After twenty minutes of this, you get to wishing they would discuss anything else. Politics, Star Wars...maybe they had an interesting bowel movement we could hear about. Alas, no dice.

The sex talk in Alive and Lubricated is monotonous in a way that Smith's never is. There's also a palpable sense of one-upmanship to it. The Butler Brothers are like those extreme horror filmmakers endeavouring to outdo each other in visceral depictions of sheer brutality, but instead of trying to show how jaded they are towards violence, they're trying to show how jaded they are towards sex and relationships. Before we see a single shot of the movie, we hear Ben muse in voiceover that "every bitch is born with a fucking whore gene." Later, he'll argue that having sex with your girlfriend is like masturbating (it only counts as "one lay") and will taunt Dickey about the fact that his only lay after breaking up with his girlfriend was a "fat peeler." ("Peeler," I've discovered through the wonders of Google, is Canadian slang for a stripper. Basically, one step up from the term "whore.")

Dickey is no prize himself. The simple fact that he pals around with Ben much longer than any healthy human being would sufficiently blackens him in my eyes. He gets a strange rant at the videostore wherein he calls the candy bar industry man "the root to video store clerk chastity," as women unconsciously satisfy their sexual desires by eating chocolate when they could be acting on them with Dickey. In a particularly vile scene, he describes a customer pretending to look at the drama section before beelining for the pornos with a "who is he fooling" tone. As somebody who still believes that cinema--that art--can heal the world and evolve us intellectually and spiritually, this is a depressingly, needlessly cynical perspective to take.

It seems that the Butler Brothers can't decide whether they're satirizing these characters or sympathizing with them. Liner notes that came with our DVD describe the film as "an unsentimental portrait of guys interacting in their own environment, where one-upmanship is as common as thinking they have the answers." But Jason Butler has said elsewhere that the film is based a lot on his life and that he's trying to "keep it real," that he can't relate to those "gun-slinging action movies" like he can to movies like this. I think it would actually help greatly if we could see these characters having sex. Is the sex violent (condemning them as monsters)? Playful (giving the women back some dignity and lightening our outrage a little)? Mushy (showing that these guys are all talk and endearing us to them)? The absence of actual sex is possibly attributable to the low-budget (after watching a marginally-better low-budget Canadian picture called Deadend.com, I'm beginning to think that talking male actors into getting naked, without compensation, for a film directed by unknowns that may never see the light of day is a hell of a lot easier than talking female actors into the same), but it's equally likely that it was a stylistic choice. The Butler Brothers credit Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (?!) along with Clerks as one of their major influences. This suggests to me that: (1) Neither Butler Brother particularly understands Carnal Knowledge; and (2) They have seriously overestimated the power of their script. If they hate these characters, then they are incompetent filmmakers--and if they love these characters, well, lock up your daughters, North America, the Butler Brothers make Ted Bundy look like Gloria Steinem. Take your pick.

Alive and Lubricated is a badly-made film by any objective standard. The dialogue is extremely over-written and over-acted. Nobody in the history of mankind has ever talked like this. Director Jason likes using cutaways to hide his jump cuts; when I was a broadcast journalism major, we were told that this is what you're supposed to do, but I sort of wish that my professors would have followed up with the observation that this is often like using a band-aid to patch up a slit throat. Use them badly--and there is often no other way to use them--and you show your audience that you didn't properly prepare your shot list and had a shortage of coverage. The very first shot of the film is of Butler's two heroes sitting outside a convenience store waiting for it to open. He breaks it up with a title card saying "A couple of lays later," but it's obvious that no time has passed and Butler is trying to cover his ass. At another point, Butler recycles the exact same shot of the drama-aisle guy sneaking into the porno section. Very little is done with composition or camera movement. Butler thinks his film is minimalist, but really it's just dead.

I doubt Butler thinks much of his audience. I can only presume that this is a film for people who don't especially like or follow movies. The videos in Dickey's store are all circa 1998 and 1999 and so we can presume the film takes place in 1999. Fine. But later, plastered on the outside of the video store, we see a poster for Shanghai Noon, a spring 2000 release. Does that much time elapse over the course of Alive and Lubricated? I don't think so, as said liner notes indicate that the action unfolds over a single weekend. Considerably worse, in some dialogue that has obviously been overdubbed (as we don't see any of the actors' lips moving), Ben says that Dickey has his "Cusack look on," which prompts his other friend to lament "there goes Mr. High Fidelity" as Dickey leaves to meet up with his old girlfriend. A reference to High Fidelity, also a 2000 release, doesn't belong in a film set in 1999. Making the crack is a desperate attempt by the Butler Brothers to look hip, but due to it being a year ahead of its time, it comes off as glib and artificial.

Going back to that question of whether or not the Butlers like or dislike these characters, there are a few things I want you to consider. There is a lot of music in the film--it seemed to be important to the brothers that they have a large soundtrack with lots of local artists. None of the songs are used terribly fruitfully, but they aurally and lyrically gel with the characters and reflect their general mindset. Once we compare how the film would play with less or no music, this subjectivity reads as an implicit plea to relate to the characters and to experience the film as an entertainment. One shot early in the film finds the two protagonists shutting the trunk of their car and walking towards the camera in slow-motion. Is this a sardonic evocation of Tarantino cool? Nothing doing: it wasn't successfully sardonic back when Doug Liman did it in Swingers. It's just plain Tarantino cool and a deification of these characters. Speaking of which, Butler pulls a lot of dumb "French New Wave" gags, like depicting a night of sexing with the gang of characters batting baseballs, having Ben abruptly relate a monologue to the audience in full-colour video, and superimposing the names of the characters as they are introduced, Trainspotting-/Mean Streets-style. All this "playfulness" works to accentuate the film's subjectivity and similarly deify our heroes; that subjectivity infers omnipotence and prevents us from observing the characters at cold right angles suggests that the Butlers do like their characters and are, moreover, complete assholes. Unless, of course, they didn't give much forethought to these techniques and just wanted the film to feel "cool." Don't know what else to say if that's the case, other than I can't think of a better reason to not see a film. Anybody who says that you should spend the money you would have spent on film school on your own movie has obviously never seen Alive and Lubricated.-Alex Jackson

Destricted is the first anthology film I've seen that can actually be thought of holistically. The only direction the seven participating filmmakers were given was to produce a work of pornography. That was apparently restrictive enough, as every segment in Destricted appears to make some kind of comment on the earlier ones, and ongoing themes emerge. Pornographer Gerard Damiano once said, "Sexual intercourse does not lend itself to cinematography," and the filmmakers have picked up on this. As we watch the actors copulate and masturbate onscreen, often in long, unbroken takes, we begin to realize how inherently repetitive and mechanical the sex act is. The reason for and end result of this process is an orgasm, which, endued as it is with associations of death (gunplay in Gaspar Noé's We Fuck Alone) and re-entrance into the womb (suspended sex with a 50-ton truck's driveshaft in Matthew Barney's Hoist; ejaculation into the ground for a good harvest in Marina Abramovic's Balkan Sex Epic), represents mankind's most pressing psychospiritual drive. To realize this need, we must become mechanized. To become mechanized ultimately means to lose one's sense of self--and could possibly mean becoming an aesthetic object. The self is the antithesis of the orgasm; one must literally be little more but a body in motion before the orgasm may occur.

There is a creepy nihilistic thread throughout the whole of Destricted. It's too thorough and deeply embedded to be read as fashionably downbeat (like Noé's segment might, were it screened out of context). I don't think the filmmakers have set out to celebrate this view of sex as mechanization, I think they think of it as a tragically foregone conclusion: the dehumanization associated with the sex act as unavoidable. In the words of Noé, "we fuck alone." The iconology of pornography is depicted throughout the film as inherently infantile. Richard Prince's House Call is a seventies-era porno version of "playing doctor," with foreplay including the doctor placing his stethoscope on his patient's abnormally large breasts. Gasper Noé's We Fuck Alone is a masturbation fantasy where the fantasy figure is a girl in pigtails masturbating behind a teddy bear. Larry Clark's segment Impaled is minor Clark, but it acts as a continuation of what my editor once brilliantly referred to as "'Hollywood' kiddie porno...almost functioning as the next step in Britney Spears." Impaled involves Clark auditioning a number of barely-legal young men to act in a porn scene with a hot starlet. The boy chosen--a shy, skinny kid who wants to try anal sex--then interviews the aspiring actresses, one of whom bears more than a passing resemblance to Ashlee Simpson. Taking the form of a series of socializing lessons in Balkan culture, Balkan Sex Epic is the lightest and most humorous segment--it has the effortlessly innocent absurdity of a Nickelodeon cartoon. Not to mention that snickering at sex is the least sophisticated and most juvenile way to tackle the subject. Now, what is the significance behind this infantile approach? Well, it serves to better illustrate how deeply primal the sex urge is. Associating sexuality with childhood essentially means associating sexuality with the uncivilized, unsocialized savage. If sexuality is rooted in childhood, that means it's repressed upon our entrance into polite adult society.

Destricted is finally a post-feminist critique of the art of pornography. None--that is none--of the filmmakers seem particularly interested in exploring female sexuality--the women are basically there for the benefit of the men. And yet the males' sexuality revolves around their insecurity, indicating that men create these sex objects to reflect their self-hatred. Based on what they have seen in the movies, the boys in Impaled don't think they're big enough to please a porn star. In Sam Taylor-Wood's haunting Onan: Death Valley, a man masturbates in the desert, subverting a popular scenario in soft-core porn. (I remember watching a woman do this in the Skinemax pic Desert Passion.) He fails to reach climax, however, at which point he breaks down in tears. Of course, the ejaculation into the earth bit in Balkan Sex Epic plays the image of several gyrating male bums going to work on the earth for laughs. There's something to be said for the fact that Hoist was the hardest segment for me to watch. Here, the head of the truck-fucker's penis protrudes out of his foreskin, rubs against the driveshaft until it turns purple, and ejaculates. If any of you guys can watch that without crossing your legs, you're made of stronger stuff than I am.

And, of course, there's Noé's segment, which cleaned out the theatre at my screening. Not because of its content (Hoist is certainly raunchier than We Fuck Alone), but because Noé uses a primitive strobing effect throughout the twenty-plus-minute piece that gave everybody a headache. I couldn't move, though: it was painful to watch but completely hypnotizing. It would seem that Noé has at last achieved his goal of making a film that rapes the audience. Still, in a very real sense, Destricted beats Noé at his own game. By itself, we could describe "We Fuck Alone" as mechanical claptrap borne of the author's gross immaturity and insecurity. Yet as part of this portmanteau, it only proves Destricted's overall thesis.-Alex Jackson

Note to Alex Ferrari: when your script is as shallow and incoherent as a first-year university screenwriting project, it gets in the way of your empty-flashy visuals having any residual punch. You want to seem edgy, so you have a young woman kidnapped and strapped to a chair; you want to seem artsy, so you surround a talkative male villain with a bunch of henchmen--and women in outfits rescued from Le Chateau's joke pile. And as this is really just your masturbatory comic-book fantasy, you have the girl's boyfriend (that is, your idealized self) come in to shoot up the joint before a ludicrous, Caligari-style shock ending. Oh, you're all business when it comes to the camerawork and lighting, which is moody and purpley and David Fincher-esque. But though it ensures you a career in television and music videos, there's nothing in this under-twenty-minute bit of self-indulgence to entice anybody's sensibilities, much less please them. I realize this is a low-budget affair, but when your ambitions are as threadbare as your actors' pool, the scenery-chewing and slow...halting...delivery provoke only sighs of despair. You know how to make it all look sexy, Alex, but you don't have an idea in your pretty little head--so either hit the books or get a hold of Robert Towne. Please. Before you direct a feature.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover

The premise of Colleen Davie Janes' Stranger invites comparison to Martin Scorsese's "Amazing Stories" episode "Mirror, Mirror" while tethering itself to the same political landscape that has made e-paranoia thrillers from The Ring to Caché so timely. But alas, the neo-Harry Caul of the piece is a filmmaker (Alex Cranmer) menaced by some peculiarly voyeuristic coverage of his leading lady (Courtney Bahr), making Stranger all-too-easy to dismiss--however fairly--as a typically insular DIY project, and the film's navel-gazing aesthetic and Matryoshka doll of a punchline do little to help us overcome that prejudice.-Bill Chambers