Anthony Burns's Skateland honours the hoary conventions of the "summer-after-high-school" genre (notice I'm not even bothering to explain what the movie's about), plays everything by the book, and never takes you too far out of your comfort zone. I think the film's power lies in Burns's willingness to allow for a cliché or a saccharine moment so long as it is truthful. Skateland closes with the hero kissing the girl to the accompaniment of Modern English's ubiquitous "I Melt With You," and I felt as though I was seeing this ending for the very first time. Burns makes the smart move of establishing them as best friends at the beginning of the film and then having them transition into lovers. Because there has already been a great deal of intimacy between the two, their kiss stems organically from the material and the emotions it provokes are genuine. More inexplicable are the subtle nuances (in the performances? The writing? The direction?) that manage to depict teenage horniness without ever lapsing into sexism or misogyny. Perhaps it could be attributed to the fact that the guys here are as gorgeous as the girls, essentially levelling the playing field. (I'll admit to feeling somewhat alienated by all these beautiful people, but I adapted fairly easily.) Extra points for the scene where the hero finally assaults the archetypical bully and the results are not cathartic, but frankly a little scary. The violence is crudely explosive, and while the film minimizes the consequences of this attack, it does nothing to excuse or justify it. Although Skateland doesn't re-invent the genre, it does it well and believes in the material. And wouldn't you know? That's all the re-invention we really need.

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Taika Waititi's Boy has one thing to say and spends 87 minutes saying it. Its message is basically that best friends are poor substitutes for fathers. Eleven-year-old New Zealander Boy (James Rolleston) idealizes his absentee dad Alamein (writer-director Waititi), who has spent the past seven years in prison for robbery. Returning home to dig up the loot he buried before getting caught, Alamein casually re-establishes a relationship with Boy by feeding him beer and initiating him into the world of "men." In exchange, Boy helps him look for his money and gives him marijuana stolen from a classmate's illegal farm. There's admittedly something very slippery about Boy. It's cute and quirky and even fun. Waititi is too adventurous a filmmaker to make a boring movie. Among the many tricks and gimmicks he employs, I particularly liked a sequence where Alamein paints with light to entertain his son. But gradually, without any change to the tone of the film or the nature of the character (he never becomes abusive or cruel towards Boy), we go from seeing Alamein's immaturity as charmingly anarchic to seeing it as repulsively irresponsible. Boy never really proselytizes, but it doesn't develop or deepen, either. Waititi's strategy is to give us so much of the comically buffoonish man-child Alamein that we grow to kind of hate him. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First and foremost, perhaps, is that it renders Boy too superficial to be a satisfying filmgoing experience. Secondly, it overly minimizes the horror of adult irresponsibility. There's a shot late in the film where Boy sips on a beer and smokes a reefer, yet the movie effectively denies that Boy is being corrupted and losing his innocence in this moment by suggesting he's only copying his father, whose lifestyle he will ultimately find wanting. Finally, while I admire that Boy is attempting to dismantle the "cult of childhood" genre by taking it to its logical end, I think Waititi underestimates the awesome power of pop culture. Boy's hero is "Thriller"-era Michael Jackson and he often fantasizes his father dancing liking him--but Waititi fails to adequately evoke the irony of Boy idolizing a man with such a public Peter Pan complex. In the end, Boy doesn't challenge our love of pop culture so much as simply pander to it.

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What to make of the ending to Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love? It's not that it's inexplicable, exactly. I believe I understood what "happened" perfectly well. The issue, really, is with John Adams's score. It builds and builds and grows louder and louder until we half believe that wealthy Milan housewife Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton) will be dragged down to Hell by a gypsy curse. The audience I saw it with struggled to stifle giggles. They were emotionally manipulated to have a strong visceral response, but nothing within the film warranted it. It was an orgasm by prostate massage--pure meaningless reflex. What can you do but giggle? For years, Emma's existence has consisted of a quiet but comfortable series of rituals. Confronted with the knowledge that her daughter Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher) has fallen in love with another woman while away at college and is now a moderately radicalized lesbian, she realizes how empty her life has become. Her son, Eduardo Jr. (Gabriele Ferzetti), is having a similar crisis. He's being groomed to take over the family business, but he'd rather open a restaurant with his chef friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini). When Emma tries one of Antonio's creations, she finds herself sensually overwhelmed. The two begin an intense love affair, culminating in perhaps one of the most pretentious sex scenes ever committed to film. Early reviews of I Am Love place it in the tradition of Douglas Sirk. I see it as more Luis Buñuel masquerading as Ingmar Bergman. That's similar to Sirk, I suppose, but quite a bit more savage. It suggests tragedy elevated beyond melodrama into the realm of absurdist surrealism. I Am Love is filled with lingering shots of furniture, artworks, and food preparation. Guadagnino is establishing a world where our emotional connection to objects is more powerful than our connection to each other--and there's a thin line between that and the French landmark porn in Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty. Guadagnino keeps pushing us and pushing us until our identification with the Recchis completely runs out. These people are Martians. The trap they're in isn't tragic, it's ridiculous. Just as ridiculous, perhaps, is their hopelessly bourgeois escape from it: college lesbianism; the restaurant business; and sexual escapades with the working class. By the time Adams's score peaks, we can no longer pretend this is a serious film. Our alienation from the material has come to a head.

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Daniel (Pablo Pineda) is a 34-year-old man with Down Syndrome who has recently graduated from college and gotten a job as a social worker connecting persons with disabilities with home- and community-based services. (I served my internship at a state-run agency like this.) There he meets and grows infatuated with the blonde, slightly older, sexually provocative Laura (Lola Dueñas), who does not have Down Syndrome. They find themselves developing a strong friendship, with Daniel trying to push it towards something more and Laura wading very cautiously, worried about exploiting him. I'll grant you: Me Too is kind of a Down Syndrome version of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I didn't realize how bizarre that sounds until I typed it, which should indicate that the film serves some kind of legitimate, socially-redemptive purpose. The college-educated Daniel is an outlier, made as unthreatening as possible, and we're ambivalent as to whether or not he should be aspiring to join the ranks of "normal" people instead of just accepting himself for who he is. But to its credit, Me Too neither ignores nor dodges any of these complaints--though it's very gentle in the way it triggers and then assuages our liberal guilt. Following a point-of-view close-up of Laura's cleavage, I became terrified that Daniel was going to assault her. Of course he doesn't. The filmmakers seem to be telling me I was wrong for feeling that way, to relax and not get too embarrassed about it. Daniel treats people's assumptions about him with great patience and humour; he appears to believe that we all mean well. Complicating things wonderfully, the film sources Laura's promiscuity to childhood sexual abuse by her father. Her attraction to Daniel is then explained by the fact that she doesn't think of him sexually. Not only that, she has an additional vested interest in not sexually exploiting him. But as Laura's abuse has rendered her, in a very real and unironic way, possibly more retarded than Daniel, the line between who is exploiting whom becomes significantly blurred. Would he be attracted to her were she not excessively sexualized as a result of her past? Remembering that something like ninety percent of pregnancies with the diagnosis of Down Syndrome are terminated, I'll admit that my eyes watered a little when Daniel details that he's come as far as he has because his mother read and talked to him as a child and essentially treated him as a normal, perfectly intelligent person capable of understanding her. The simple, effortlessly humanist message of Me Too is that nurture matters more than nature. And nurture is something we can actually do something about.

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Those who loved Courtney Hunt's Frozen River are welcome to a second helping with Winter's Bone. I fear it might signal the start of a new genre: grass-and-granola cinema nobly detailing the plight of the working poor crossed with pulpy film noir. (Granola noir, perhaps?) The problem with these movies is that grass-and-granola and film noir just do not mix. The "plight of the working poor" is grossly oversimplified when narratively expressed in noir terms. The gangsters in Winter's Bone are meth dealers, but that's details--what really matters is that they're gangsters. Meth is reduced to a plot device, which does a great disservice to those whose families have actually been affected by the drug. And the "grass-and-granola" aesthetic grounds film noir in reality, neutralizing the dream-like abstraction endemic to the genre. Winter's Bone simply doesn't work in pop-movie terms. But it's not only that: combining "grass-and-granola" with film noir confuses the sociology of gender and class stratification with existential fatalism. Rhee Jessup (Jennifer Lawrence), the seventeen-year-old protagonist of Winter's Bone, is cast in the familiar role of Mom Who Will Do Anything For Her Children. With her own mother becoming increasingly senile and her father in prison for cooking meth, Rhee is forced to raise her younger brother and sister on her own. When Rhee discovers that her father has put up their house for bail money and skipped town, she risks her life by investigating his disappearance. Rhee is crudely idealized as a woman tough enough to go toe-to-toe with dangerous, wife-beating meth dealers and come out unscathed. While she's not a passive character, that isn't to say she has free agency. Rhee is forced to make these decisions out of love for her family and a desire to ensure they don't wind up homeless. Her actions are dictated by external forces. All Rhee wants to do is raise her kids. She has no sexual desire that we can ascertain, nor does she have any real drive to move up the social ladder. This is not film noir. In film noir, people are motivated by sex or greed and fate finds a way to fuck them over in the end. They can't change the outcome, but the genre is based on the notion that people have choices and are nonetheless too weak and fragile to make the right ones. Grass-and-granola is idealistic; film noir is cynical. They don't go together because they represent two fundamentally opposed worldviews.

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Leon Gast's Smash His Camera isn't much more than bubble gum: it's kind of sweet for a while and gives you something to chew on, but it has no nutritional value. A hagiography of paparazzo Ron Galella, the film is so deliriously meta in conception that it feels like some kind of joke at our expense. We're told by one of Galella's critics that his photographs are interesting simply because he photographs interesting people--we look at them for the subject, not for the artistry. That's all quite true, and perhaps even so obvious it could have gone without saying. But what does this mean when the subject of the Galella treatment is Galella himself? Gast is starfucking a starfucker. The film's saying that if you love celebrities enough, you will become a celebrity yourself and be subject to that same adoration. No surprise, then, that Galella was Andy Warhol's favourite photographer. I'm more alarmed by Roger Ebert's blog entry on this documentary. Ebert writes that he responds to Galella's "life force" and passion for his work and ends the entry by reminiscing about the era Galella inhabited and the stars they mutually worshipped. He drank the Kool-Aid, in other words. Ebert isn't showing the slightest shred of critical skepticism, though of course that's only part of the problem. The bigger issue is that he seems to identify with Galella and sees his particular strain of movie-love as something worth celebrating. Smash His Camera is easy to like, but I worry that liking it robs the cinema of the potential for being great art. When critics embrace a movie like Smash His Camera, they facilitate the shift from film criticism to entertainment reporting. They suggest that everything is pop and sensationalism and that nothing ever has any deeper meaning. Galella's pet subject was Jackie Onassis. He photographed her for years, even after she got a restraining order against him. Galella explains that he didn't have a girlfriend at the time and so Jackie became his girlfriend. No doubt this is an extremely revealing statement, yet Gast never follows it into darker territory. In establishing that he does very much the same thing as Galella, he's not going to paint Galella's obsessions as dysfunctional and risk indicting himself or his audience. Better to hide in a thick head of frothy inconsequence, I suppose.

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One Too Many Mornings is yet another semi-autobiographical romantic dramedy about two twentysomething males refusing to enter the adult world. It sounds a lot like the below-reviewed Bass Ackwards and Obselidia, but this one was made completely out-of-pocket and shot on the weekends over the course of two years. Considering the ultra-low budget, I'll admit there's a temptation to lower my standards. The filmmaking itself is stylish and inventive while essentially staying organic to the material--there's a fine action sequence involving an angry drunk, while the use of canted angles to convey a character's hangover works nicely, however elementary. I also liked a montage of light switches being turned off that's repeated a few times throughout the film and becomes something of a motif. (It's a successfully cinematic expression of tedium.) Director Michael Mohan is not content to just point-and-shoot, and on the other end of the spectrum, he's not going to play around with the medium unless it serves the characters or the story. One Too Many Mornings is not as bad as the Butler Brothers' 2000 atrocity Alive and Lubricated. It's not even in the same ballpark. Alive and Lubricated was made by amateurs; One Too Many Mornings was made by actual filmmakers. I guess it's pretty good for what it is, though it's still not good enough. Like a lot of these movies, the acting is broad and exaggerated in a way that keeps the performers from exposing too much of themselves. Similarly, the comic elements aren't sourced to a singular, overarching worldview, but are there so the proceedings don't get too serious and brooding. The saving grace of Clerks is that it has an authentic New Jersey flavour; I don't know or remember where One Too Many Mornings takes place--it seems that it could be anywhere. Similarly, the saving grace of Quentin Tarantino's unfinished My Best Friend's Birthday is that it's infused with Tarantino's voice and personality. There's nothing terribly unique or distinctive about One Too Many Mornings.

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Asked by a student why he left Cuba despite supporting and believing in his country's socialist principles, Latin-American studies professor Sergio responds that not being able to write what he wanted to write was simply unbearable. Now that he's in the United States, he's free to say whatever he wants--and nobody cares. It's a relatively minor moment in an aggressively polemic film, but it's an extremely important one just the same. Throughout Memories of Overdevelopment, Sergio makes photo collages out of pornography and religious iconography. This is the ultimate art-world cliché, though I think the movie recognizes it as such. It's saying that obscenity and sacrilege have become so commonplace that they no longer have any currency. While in Cuba, Sergio wrote that Americans have Superman and Cubans have Che. He meant that their hero is flesh-and-blood while ours is a cartoon character, but his editor tells him that the analogy could easily be misconstrued (i.e., dangerous). There's virtually nothing "dangerous" Sergio could say in the U.S. and this frustrates him to no end. He takes it to mean that we have no ideals or values worth protecting. Writer-director Miguel Coyula initially appears to be an aggressively shitty filmmaker, indulging in a lot of goofy rotoscoping and cut-out animation, particularly early on in the film. Compounding the amateurish feeling of the entire production, he shoots in cruddy digital video. The film also goes on far too long. It feels repetitive and self-indulgent, to put it mildly. It's one of those movies you can guarantee people will walk out of, even when they've paid fifteen dollars for a ticket. But as Memories of Overdevelopment is an externalization of Sergio's subjective state, where all communication has been rendered empty noise and even anti-consumerism has become a product to be consumed, this shittiness seems entirely justified. A well-made, conventionally attractive film would not capture this mindset nearly as successfully. That isn't to say I don't kind of hate Memories of Overdevelopment. Late in the picture, Sergio bemoans religion, politics, and consumerism as his three greatest enemies. But if you don't have religion, you don't have politics, and you don't have consumerism. You don't really have much of anything; what's the use of disillusionment if it never leads to anything better? All this drifting around is depressing and nihilistic. Sergio's rut is certainly an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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It took me a while to have any reaction whatsoever to Linas Phillips' Bass Ackwards. I guess I ultimately settled on mild affection, but this is not a film that's going to divide people. Phillips plays a Seattle-area wedding videographer named, yes, Linas. He's living with a young married couple and having an affair with the wife thereof (Davie-Blue). She's not willing to develop the relationship any farther and her husband kicks Linas out of their house. With no home and no girl, Linas picks up a '76 Volkswagen bus and decides to drive to the east coast to stay with his parents. Yeah, so it's a road-trip movie. Phillips is essentially playing himself and the film seems to be based on personal experience. Accordingly, as a writer, director, and actor, he is generously self-effacing and willing to look foolish--but he's never particularly critical of the Linas "character." Until the movie was over, I was only about seventy-five percent sure that Linas was having an affair. (The other twenty-five percent of me believed that his girlfriend and the wife were actually two different people who happened to look alike.) Even though I don't think this is an "emotional affair," nobody ever has sex. They just talk to one another with a familiarity more suited to lovers than to friends; the entire thing is left for us to infer. It seems that anything more explicit would render Linas unsympathetic--a loser-loser instead of a lovable one--and Phillips couldn't stand us seeing his alter ego that way. He appears to have had a rather conventional "quirky" road comedy in mind when conceptualizing Bass Ackwards and maybe the film would have turned out that way had he never met cinematographer Sean Porter. Imagine Little Miss Sunshine directed by Terrence Malick and you might get some idea of what you're in for. Porter's photography is incredible on an aesthetic level, and it's genuinely shocking to learn that the finished film (after post-production) cost a mere $90,000. Bass Ackwards would no doubt be worse without him. But I found all that beauty problematically tasteful, especially when combined with Phillips' softball treatment of "Linas." How about this? Anybody who hates Bass Ackwards is doing so for reasons unrelated to the quality of the movie itself; anybody who loves it has given up on asking for films that demand anything of them.

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Mark (Michael Blackman Beck) is working on an encyclopedia of obsolete things. He writes on a typewriter, wears a fedora, and films interviews for his book with an outdated camcorder. One of the things he considers obsolete is love. This belief is tested when he meets Sophie (Gaynor Howe), a projectionist of silent movies who nonetheless loves life too much to be stuck in the past. Diane Bell's Obselidia is gorgeous to look at and very well-acted. If the description I just gave made it sound like something you might want to see, then you will probably enjoy it. Still, I found the film to be transparently manipulative. It seems we're meant to envy Mark's cocoon-like isolation while feeling inspired by how Sophie breaks him out of it. Realizing there is only so much tension that can develop between Mark and Sophie, Bell artificially shoehorns in a road trip to provide the film some kind of narrative drive. It's an acknowledgment on her part that she's reluctant to give either character any depth and thus risk neutralizing the quirky romantic escapism Obselidia has been consciously cultivating. There came a point where I wondered to myself if Mark has an entry for minstrel shows in his encyclopedia, which got me thinking how much better a film is Ghost World. Ghost World empathizes with its characters, but it also keeps pushing until the romance of being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl or the sadsack loser whose life she redeems loses its sheen; it has too much respect for the complexity of identity formation and romantic relationships to give us the easy pay-offs of Obselidia. In addition to all that, Obselidia annoyingly panders to an arthouse audience. Sophie bemoans that her boyfriend thinks Star Wars is the greatest movie ever made when he refuses to even watch Au hasard Balthazar because it's in black-and-white with subtitles. What's the use of preferring Au hasard Balthazar if you think Obselidia is worthwhile filmmaking?

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Perhaps one of the more overtly sadomasochistic entries in the torture-porn genre, French-Canadian Daniel Grou's 7 Days seems to be seething at the bit to get to the good stuff. When Jasmine (Rose-Marie Coallier), the eight-year-old daughter of surgeon Bruno Hamell (Claude Legault), is raped and murdered, he decides to kidnap, torture, and kill the man responsible and then turn himself in. Hamell catches the killer, a day labourer named Anthony Lemaire (Martin Dubreuil) who has been implicated through DNA evidence, ties him up, and strips off his clothes. Lemaire then spends the rest of the film completely naked. I hope it's not a function of a prudish American upbringing, but whenever this guy was on screen my eyes were immediately drawn to his exposed penis. Allegedly, the suspense is in whether or not the police will find and stop Hamell; in practice, the suspense is in when exactly Hamell will castrate Lemaire. Hamell smashes Lemaire's knee with a sledgehammer and we just think to ourselves, Well, thank God it was only his knee.  7 Days isn't about the horror of losing a daughter--it's about the horror of getting hit in the balls. I don't think Grou is a deliberate provocateur, per se. This is an utterly bleak and humourless movie, lacking the sensationalism and showmanship of a Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé, Eli Roth, or even Lars von Trier. Grou actually seems serious about this subject matter. But to quote Pauline Kael, that this film has impact doesn't make it art. Because we only see her body after the fact, Jasmine's rape and murder doesn't have the proportional weight of the resulting torture. It becomes an excuse to make a movie about a naked man being tortured. I also found the relationship between Hamell and Jasmine to be overly idyllic. I sense that anybody who would want to get revenge like this, who would have it in them to do these things to another human being, would already have a rather strained relationship with the person he's avenging. This isn't about Jasmine, it's all about Hamell, and we should get more of a sense of this egotism in his family life before the murder. 7 Days doesn't have a lot of insight into human behaviour, much less the ethics of vengeance or the emotional experience of mourning.

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Johan Gimonprez's Double Take imagines an instance where Alfred Hitchcock is interrupted from filming 1963's The Birds to talk to his "double." This doppelgänger is from 1980--the year, you may remember (or reasonably guess), that Hitchcock died--and not his "double" at all, but rather his wraith, a vision of himself on the eve of his death. Hitchcock asks him who wins the Cold War and the wraith dismisses the question as unimportant. He wants to talk about how television is destroying cinema. The bulk of Double Take is a montage of archival footage--host segments from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and television broadcasts of Hitchcock's films, commercial spots for Folger's Instant Coffee that border on misogynistic, and news coverage of the 1959 Nixon/Khrushchev "kitchen debate," the infamous 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate, the space race, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film calls to mind Jayne Loader and Kevin & Pierce Rafferty's 1982 curiosity The Atomic Cafe, in which the threat of nuclear holocaust is documented entirely through archival footage with no contextualizing narration or interviews. Gimonprez's digs at Richard Nixon (he match-cuts his twitchy eyes with those of a space monkey) and his facile but extremely powerful juxtaposition of The Supremes singing "Baby Love" and "Where Did Our Love Go" with footage of nuclear explosions and the escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States, to take the two most obvious examples, would have had more resonance 25 or 30 years ago, when condescension to the late-'50s/early-'60s was more fashionable and we were still under the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation. In 2010, Gimonprez's boogeyman isn't nuclear war, but television. He's suggesting that television makes everything it shows equally significant, until finally none of it matters. The Cold War is as pop as an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. But once we establish that, the film becomes somewhat self-cannibalizing. By putting criticism of television in the mouth of Hitchcock and the defense of it in the mouth of Nixon, and by holding Kennedy up as a manifestation of its denigrating effects (he seems more like a hologram than like a man), the film itself becomes subject to its own critique. If television has made it so that nothing is important, then that means Double Take itself is not important. I came out of Double Take feeling refreshed, as though I had just awoke from a beautiful dream, but something tells me I might have been even happier seeing three back-to-back episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", complete with vintage commercials.

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