Film Freak Central

A Man for All Seasons (1966) [Special Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, Robert Shaw, Paul Scofield
screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on his play
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Assessing A Man for All Seasons is no easy task. In its favour is the fact that it's quite sensitively directed: Fred Zinnemann lays on a level of melancholy largely unheard-of in the costume-movie sweepstakes, making the film plenty more affecting than the twilight-of-Old-Hollywood clunker it could very well have become. Alas, Robert Bolt's screenplay (and presumably his stage play) is resolutely impervious to directorial manipulation--and also completely full of crap. Bolt's hilariously over-the-top deification of Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and More's opposition to the divorce of Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) is so emptied of contemporary meaning that you can project anything you like onto it. Such care has been taken to shift the discussion away from political matters and towards "personal ethics" that an atheist like me can groove to More's rigid refusal to indulge Henry's transgression over God's law.

Crank (2007) [Widescreen] - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Dwight Yoakam
written and directed by Neveldine/Taylor

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment where French-fu schlockmeister Jason Statham marches through downtown traffic clad in a hospital smock, black socks, and boots while sporting a giant erection and ask yourself what more you could want from a dumb action movie called Crank. Seriously. A crotch-first fusion of Rudolph Maté's D.O.A. and "Grand Theft Auto", it defines that genre of video game-inspired non-sequitur mayhem indicated by epileptic edits, CGI-aided wire-fu, and John Woo gunplay by offering a high concept (hero is dying of a rare Chinese toxin that can be held in abeyance only with a steady infusion of adrenaline) as its narrative/excuse to exist.

Requiem (2006) - DVD

***½/**** Image B Sound A- (IFC) B+ (Mongrel)
starring Sandra Hüller, Burghart Klaussner, Imdgen Kogge, Anna Blomeier
screenplay by Bernd Lange
directed by Hans-Christian Schmid

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like most pop epics, The Exorcism of Emily Rose was all about being sure. One had to throw down for the concept of the physical manifestation of Satan--any human considerations were swept aside in the affirmation of God's merciless will. And if certain college girls were crushed to pulp (a sentiment which extends to the general expendability of humankind), so be it. Thank goodness, then, that there's a movie like Requiem, based on the same case that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose but comparatively merciful in its mission. It wants to salvage the blighted life of an epileptic tossed around from doctor to doctor--one who, once presented with the beginnings of psychosis, had only religion and a mistrust of medicinal practice to fall back on. She's a victim of other people's indecision rather than of the Devil himself.

The Number 23 (2007)

*/****
starring Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston
screenplay by Fernley Phillips
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw The wilted potential part of it reminding a great deal of Ramsey Campbell's The Count of Eleven, the new Jim Carrey vehicle The Number 23 finds professional hack Joel Schumacher returning to his Flatliners camp/schlock phase: a sort of supernatural thriller (sort of) that goes the Secret Window route towards absolute stunning mediocrity. Hardest to watch isn't Schumacher's umpteenth treatise on how to shine any project to a frictionless, dimwit, burlesque sheen, but rather Carrey's betrayal of himself by following Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a limp Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, a dreadful Fun with Dick and Jane, and now this. It suggests to me a lot of things, most of all the impression that Carrey, despite still wanting at least in part to be taken seriously as an actor, may have lost the critical facility first to avoid Schumacher projects and second to differentiate between high-concept dreck and Charlie Kaufman existential inspiration. Neither mysterious nor enthralling, The Number 23 is ridiculous, not for its complexity, but for its belief in its complexity--not for its Byzantine twists and turns, but for its utter self-delusion. It's READER'S DIGEST: the presumption that people who actually read would prefer to read this truncated, pandering, aggressively-neutered pap.

Down in the Valley (2006) [Widescreen] - DVD

*/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C-
starring Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin
written and directed by David Jacobson

by Walter Chaw Almost worth it for a scene on the set of a western where our deranged fabulist hero Harlan (Edward Norton) finally finds a home, David Jacobson's Down in the Valley is otherwise so much pretentious hoohah waving its indie banner like a parasol. Rather than serve to illustrate a point about form and function à la Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, what Jacobson's film does is strain its affection for (affectation of?) Taxi Driver, to the point of re-enacting the sacred "You talkin' to me?" sequence--to the point of actually perverting Scorsese's satire into your typical avenging-father/straying-daughter intrigue. It's possible of course to boil Travis Bickle's odyssey down to that, but to call Down in the Valley "reductive" is too kind: this is Taxi Driver recast as a protect-your-children-from-bad-dates picture, one that turns its back on the dreamlife of a crocodile in favour of the restoration of familial strata. It fails the courage test--going so far as to subtly pose an anti-Second Amendment suggestion--after failing, more damnably, to rationalize its pilfering of perhaps the definitive yawp in modern American cinema. Shake Down in the Valley hard enough and out falls another produced-by vanity piece for Norton to exercise his blank (as in Miyazaki-forest-sprite blank), squinty-eyed Method for the approval of his rapidly-shrinking circle of admirers. As far as the Norton mystique goes, Ryan Gosling is cheaper and prettier.

My Name is Earl: Season One (2005-2006) - DVD

Image A Sound A- Extras B
"Pilot," "Quit Smoking," "Randy's Touchdown," "Faked My Own Death," "Teacher Earl," "Broke Joy's Fancy Figurine," "Stole Beer from a Golfer," "Joy's Wedding," "Cost Dad an Election," "White Lie Christmas," "Barn Burner," "O Karma, Where Art Thou?," "Stole P's HD Cart," "Monkeys in Space," "Something to Live For," "The Professor," "Didn't Pay Taxes," "Dad's Car," "Y2K," "Boogeyman," "Bounty Hunter," "Stole a Badge," "BB," "Number One"

by Ian Pugh I don't know a whole lot about the Buddhist concept of karma, but Earl Hickey knows even less, and I think that's the point. As "My Name is Earl" begins, the titular petty criminal and leech on society (Jason Lee) scratches a winning lotto ticket, whereupon he's immediately struck by a car. While a doped-up Earl convalesces, his cheating wife Joy (Jaime Pressly) seizes the opportunity to divorce him. Flipping through the TV channels from his hospital bed, Earl lands on Carson Daly, who attributes his own success to the most popular understanding of karma: "Do good things and good things happen to you. Do bad things and they come back to haunt you." In the show's first bit of hilarious commentary--one that guides the question of "doing the right thing" (which, in turn, dictates the series as a whole)--celebrity culture gives birth to self-serving pop religion. If Joe Sixpack is taking philosophical lessons from that guy whose primary function was to count down from the number ten...Lord, where did we go wrong?

Man of the Year (2006) [Widescreen] - DVD

½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, Laura Linney, Jeff Goldblum
written and directed by Barry Levinson

by Walter Chaw Notorious dullard Barry Levinson's second try at Wag the Dog, the Robin Williams vehicle Man of the Year is a limp wrist waved weakly at no more pathetic a target than new voting technology. The story, such as it is, involves a late-night political comedian/talk show pundit (in the Jon Stewart mold, I guess, if Jon Stewart were stupid, unfunny, and irritating) named Tom Dobbs (Williams) who carries his antiquated shtick all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue on the back of a faulty computerized voting system. Frail egghead techie Eleanor (Laura Linney, too good for this shit) discovers her company's HAL-like flaw (hardly godlike in her erudition, she puzzles out that the digital voting booths choose winners alphabetically), and then promptly goes on the lam after an inexplicable and out-of-tune assault hays her wires and inspires her to seek out the freshly-minted POTUS-elect to inform him of the error. Meanwhile, Dobbs keeps acting like that asshole Robin Williams, desperately in need of a strong hand at his reins lest he run roughshod over his co-stars, the script, sense, respectability, plausibility, and so on down the line.

The Last Kiss (2006) [Widescreen] + Trust the Man (2006) - DVDs

THE LAST KISS
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras D
starring Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Casey Affleck, Tom Wilkinson
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on the screenplay for L'Ultimo Bacio by Gabriele Muccino
directed by Tony Goldwyn

TRUST THE MAN
½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras D
starring Billy Crudup, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore
written and directed by Bart Freundlich

by Walter Chaw Zach Braff's auto-elevation into the rarefied air of Ed Burnsian self-satisfaction has required a fraction of the smarmcoms, if a meaningful assist from an obscenely-popular TV show that's running on fumes at this point. Garden State is dreadful, of course, swarming with awkward, overwritten, creepy alt-folk montages and pocket epiphanies (just like "Scrubs", albeit with half the rage and exploitation of frailty), but team up former "The Facts of Life" scribe (and Oscar-winning screenwriter) Paul Haggis with instant-brand Braff--he's like sea monkeys: just add grease--for The Last Kiss and discover in the alchemy a more pungent, twice-as-stale vintage of a type of picture that used to be done with grace and wit by people like Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, cheapened by noxious voice-overs and skeezy dialogues obsessed with the female orgasm without having the honesty to actually show one. What we get instead is the idea that this shit sells to a privileged "indie"-craving hipster demographic oblivious to the fact that "indie" films are as homogenous a ghetto as any other now. (Independent of what? Alternative to what?) There's nothing genuine about these "relationshit" flicks (thanks to blogger John Landis for the term); they're a sloppily-baited hook dangling in a waitlisted stucco bistro.

The Devil's Rain (1975) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner
screenplay by James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, Gerald Hopman
directed by Robert Fuest

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Devil's Rain is like a bad song you can't get out of your head. It isn't a successful film, or even a particularly good one, but it's made with sincerity, verve, and an understanding of the horror genre's potential for kinetic filmmaking and potent allegory. Moreover, it isn't a cheat--this isn't just another cheap cash-in on the "Satan" craze of the 1970s. The last thing director Robert Fuest and screenwriters James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, and Gerald Hopman are looking to do is take your money and run. And though this is largely a trend of the mid-to-late-'80s onward, they aren't looking to vindicate their reputations by condescending to the material, either. I actually feel a little protective of The Devil's Rain; its failure is one more of incompetence than of cynicism, and that's really rather reinvigorating in an age where self-consciousness reigns supreme in horror films both good (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and bad (See No Evil).

Ginger & Fred (1986) - DVD

Ginger and Fred
Ginger e Fred
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina, Franco Fabrizi, Friedrich von Ledebur
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra and Tullio Pinelli
directed by Federico Fellini

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The idea of Fellini criticizing television for its vulgarity--as he does in Ginger and Fred--is indeed a bit rich: Federico Fellini complaining of vulgarity is rather like Roberto Rossellini complaining of neo-realism. But beneath the surface of this admittedly shallow lament lies the movie's real theme, which is the displacement of artists once their chosen form is rendered obsolete. It's not too hard to see Fellini himself, high-modernist art director that he was, in his music-hall dancer protagonists, who by 1985 have been completely snowed under by seismic shifts in technology and, by extension, entertainment. Slight as the film may be, you can't help feeling a twinge of regret for not only its leads, but also the increasingly-forgotten filmmaker who pulls their strings.

The Up Series [Five Disk Collector's Edition] - DVD

by Ian Pugh "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

So goes the Jesuit maxim, and, as it happens, so begins almost every review you'll find of Michael Apted's "Up" documentary series. Of course, you can't really fault someone for falling back on that warhorse (or this would be a very ironic paragraph indeed), because it's the concept that brought the original television production Seven Up! to life, intended as it was as "a glimpse into Britain's future." That is to say, into the lives of fourteen seven-year-olds, chosen from all walks of life (though mostly from polar opposites of the class divide) and asked about the world, their ambitions, and just generally how they're doing; they've been revisited for the same purpose every seven years hence.

Cry-Baby (1990) [Director's Cut] - DVD

***½/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop
written and directed by John Waters

by Walter Chaw Cry-Baby, John Waters's brilliant, ebullient satire of 1950s teensploitation, finds Johnny Depp and Amy Locane immaculately cast opposite one another as the ne plus ultra "He" and "She" of the Golden Age's doomed-youth pictures. One part Elvis musical calamity, one part queer camp exhibition, it's a cult classic for a reason: The second part of Waters's Hairspray nostalgia trip, Cry-Baby is a jubilant send-up of the lie of atomic-age perfection fixed broadly to the lie of modern sophistication that Waters would confront for the rest of his "legit" career. It's exactly what I imagine a David Lynch rockabilly rebel flick would be like--and indeed, when you get down to it, I don't know whether Lynch and Waters are really all that different.

Sundance '07: Low and Behold

½*/****
starring Barlow Jacobs, Robert Longstreet, Eddie Rouse
screenplay by Zack Godshall & Barlow Jacobs
directed by Zack Godshall

by Alex Jackson I absolutely despise Zack Godshall's Low and Behold. If there is a just and loving God governing the cosmos it will be the worst movie I see all year; there should be a provision in the Patriot Act ensuring that these people never receive the funding to make another film. Turner Stull (co-writer Barlow Jacobs) has arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans to take a job as an insurance claims adjuster that his crude Uncle "Stully" has set up for him. Turner is reluctantly learning the ropes when he meets factory worker Nixon (Eddie Rouse, the uncle in George Washington). Seeing that Turner needs help checking the roofs, Nixon offers to trade his services for a ride around town to look for his daughters' lost dog. Essentially, the film is a comedy--a really terrible one. Godshall scores lots of easy points against the uncle's crassness and avarice: Stully is giddy about the fact that he has so many claims to process post-Katrina, he sees it as a big payday. Nevertheless, Godshall strains to satirize the callousness of the claims adjustment industry, apparently believing them to be soulless because they don't visit people who haven't filed a claim and won't authorize payouts on houses with minimal damage. Obviously, if they could they would, as that would mean they would earn a higher commission--something Turner even points out for us. How could a film about Hurricane Katrina be this politically impotent? Turner's naïveté is the secondary source of laffs. There are several scenes where his salt-of-the-earth clients chew his head off and threaten him with physical violence for not paying out their claims, as well as a particularly bizarre monologue in which he explains to Nixon how he was afraid of going to the bathroom as a kid and mastered a technique of holding in his bowel movement for up to three days. I think Turner's experiences with Nixon are supposed to soften his hardened heart and force him to see his clients as human beings, yet the film views Turner as a babe-in-the-woods innocent. (On his first claim, he expresses feelings of remorse to his uncle for not paying out.) And so the character doesn't fulfill his intended arc, does he? At this point, Low and Behold would appear to be your run-of-the-mill piece of shit--but then Godshall sinks to a whole new low. He's shot the film on location in New Orleans and included interviews with actual disaster victims conducted by Jacobs in character. At the end of the picture, we see Nixon's dilapidated house, and there is an unbelievable and disgustingly manipulative twist ending. The last couple of shots have a primitive power, but Godshall has not earned a right to them. He seems to be using Katrina as a means to flesh out his vapid material. I hesitate to call Godshall opportunistic; Low and Behold is so awful that it can only be borne out of ignorance. The filmmakers must not understand that documentary footage of a recent disaster area goes together with lowbrow satire like salmon and chocolate.

Sundance '07: Year of the Fish

**/****
starring Tsai Chin, Randall Duk Kim, Ken Leung, An Nguyen
written and directed by David Kaplan

by Alex Jackson I'm not quite sure why David Kaplan's Year of the Fish doesn't work, but I think it might have something to do with a fundamentally tainted central concept: the Cinderella story retold with a Chinese girl being sold into slavery in New York's Chinatown district. Cinderella is Ye Xian (An Nguyen), which was Cinderella's real name in the original Chinese folktale published a good 800 years before the better-known Perrault version. Xian must reimburse her benefactor for the cost of her room, board, and ticket by giving sensual massages at Mrs. Su's massage parlour. As Xian refuses, an enraged Su makes her do all the menial labour instead. Trapped and alone, Xian takes solace in a lucky goldfish bequeathed to her by ghostly crone Auntie Yaga and in the potential affections of the Chinese-American Johnny. (Virtually everybody besides Johnny and his immediate friends speaks in heavily-accented English, and possibly to help mask the potential racial caricaturing, the entire film is rendered in rotoscoped animation.) On a broad level, Year of the Fish is about the co-existence of the modern and the ancient, as if a film made completely in and about Chinatown would be about anything else. I suppose the ugly reality of indentured servitude is meant to be a function of this, but it overwhelms rather than complements the fantasy elements; the film feels a little too sad. And I'm not sure that Kaplan has completely thought out the ramifications of this material. Mrs. Su and her massage parlour are seen as corrupting Chinese culture: she's packaging and marketing Chinese femininity and carving out her chunk of the American dream with it. But Johnny seems to fall in love with Xian because, unlike his unfaithful Anglo girlfriend, this Asian damsel looks like she'll know how to be loving and obedient. I don't believe he values her heritage because it makes him feel closer to his own--he lives in Chinatown! So how different is he, really, from the guys who solicit a happy ending from a pretty Oriental girl? Isn't he buying the same thing in less direct terms? That's the problem with depicting fairytales in a real-world setting: all the psychology.

Sundance '07: The Go-Getter

**½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Judy Greer
written and directed by Martin Hynes

by Alex Jackson Two columns of note recently circulated in the blogosphere. The first was Richard Corliss's "The Trouble with Sundance," in which Corliss complains that Sundance movies have become formulaic and predictable, effectively snuffing out the fresh, original voices the festival was supposed to be cultivating. The second article was a partial rebuttal by David Bordwell that sheds light on the phenomenon of what he calls "Indie Guignol": independent filmmakers trying to outdo one another in sensationalistic brutality. Compared to entries in the "Sundance genre," i.e., films typically involving dysfunctional families that strive to reconnect, oftentimes through road trips (the Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine would be considered prototypical), these pictures are not mainstream, but they're considered by critics to have more artistic merit. And yet, particularly because we can easily recognize the phenomenon, it's losing its legitimacy as art. "Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist," Bordwell writes. I thought about this while watching Martin Hynes's The Go-Getter, a film that subtly breaks away from Indie Guignol by embracing the possibly more passé Sundance genre. After Fido, Teeth, We Are The Strange, Hounddog, Strange Culture, and Low and Behold, all decidedly non-commercial films that take lots of chances and fail miserably, I have to admit I was happy to see something that gave me a few simple guiltless pleasures. Yes, Sundance films have become their own genre, but what the fuck is wrong with genre, anyway? Are you really a movie lover if you can't enjoy a solid but generic horror film, war film, noir, romantic comedy, western, and/or musical?

Sundance '07: Strange Culture

*/****
starring Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote
written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson

by Alex Jackson On May 11, 2004, artist and college professor Steve Kurtz called 911 to report the death of his wife Hope by heart failure. When medics arrived, they saw his art supplies and called the FBI: in preparing an installation that would let patrons test whether food had been genetically modified, Kurtz had ordered biological materials over the Internet. The feds detained Kurtz as a suspected terrorist and confiscated his equipment. After a grand jury rejected the charges of terrorism, Uncle Sam tried to nail him with "federal criminal mail and wire fraud." Those charges are still pending and Kurtz currently faces up to twenty years in prison. It's a chilling tale of injustice in the Patriot Act era, to be sure, but it's hard to feel much ire while seeing this story as realized by Lynn Hershman Leeson's Strange Culture. This is a film made for, by, and about smug liberal assholes; I can't imagine what it would be like to lose my wife and have bullshit federal charges pressed against me on the same day, but if it ever happens and I start referring to the event as "5/11," as Kurtz does here, please give me a nice swift punch in the nose. Leeson enlists Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan, and Peter Coyote to re-enact key events in the story for the non-reason that Kurtz is unable to discuss the case for legal reasons. (He of course does exactly that and with great frequency during the film). Her real motives for blurring the line between "fiction" and "reality" are considerably more suspect, since the decision enables her to artificially inflate the significance of Kurtz's case (if all these actors are playing out Kurtz's persecution and breaking out of character to discuss it, this must be some major political issue), ennoble and lionize Kurtz himself (Ryan, who plays Kurtz, is considerably more photogenic than the real deal--even in washed-out digital video, the fictional aspects of the film bring out elements of a traditional Hollywood biopic), and best of all alienate the plebes who aren't quick enough to play along with the self-deconstruction. To his credit, Kurtz indirectly calls Leeson on her nonsense, saying that the prosecution is creating a version of him as a terrorist that is every bit as inaccurate as the "hyperreality" of Ryan's performance. At the end of the film, he says that his friends demanded he be played by Steve Buscemi, who bears a much greater resemblance to him than Ryan does. The only possible reason Leeson could have for leaving these statements in the finished film is to rub our noses in her smug sense of superiority. Don't be fooled by Strange Culture's claims to artistic significance: this is facile Bush-bashing at its most callow.

Sundance '07: VHS - Kahloucha

**/****
directed by Nejib Belkadhi

by Alex Jackson There may very well be a Pauline Kael review for every occasion. For VHS - Kahloucha, it's her dismissal of Francois Truffaut's Day for Night: "[It's] a movie for the movie-struck, the essentially naïve--those who would rather see a movie, any movie (a bad one, a stupid one, or an evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie like this one), than do anything else." Ayup, that about covers it. This documentary portrait of amateur Tunisian filmmaker Moncef Kahloucha never makes the mistake of condescending to its subject, but it never quite elucidates why Kahloucha's films are worthy of study, either. I can't evaluate the man's work as I haven't seen it and the excerpts herein are not substantial enough to facilitate a reasonably accurate assessment, but the film seems to celebrate art for art's sake. Director Nejib Belkadhi doesn't appear to have any critical capacity whatsoever; if you make moving pictures, he sees you as a filmmaker worthy of celebration. VHS - Kahloucha does do some good in showing that Tunisians aren't idiots--they know that their country does not have a national or truly commercial cinema and they see Kahloucha's films for exactly what they are: gonzo Z-movies shot in their home country by a cinematic outlaw. One viewer ecstatically points out a scene filmed on a judge's back lawn, exhilarated both by the fact that he recognized it and by the fact that Kahloucha had the balls to shoot there. But it's all rather dramatically inert, the kind of evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie Kael described. Part of the problem is clearly that Kahloucha is a local celebrity in Tunisia and among Tunisian immigrants. His films are very popular, lots of people enjoy them, and so they have value on some level; VHS - Kahloucha doesn't survive comparison with Chris Smith's American Movie, where amateur filmmakers are pretty hopeless indeed but press on because they know that without a dream they wouldn't have much of anything. That's poignant and heartbreaking. With VHS - Kahloucha, it's hard to disguise our apathy.

Because I Said So (2007)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore, Gabriel Macht, Stephen Collins
screenplay by Karen Leigh Hopkins & Jessie Nelson
directed by Michael Lehmann

by Walter Chaw From the guy who once upon a time made Heathers--a film that remains the pithiest commentary on school violence and the sea of troubles faced by adolescents lost in the blackboard jungle--comes a fearsome rampage against mankind and art, the excrescent Because I Said So. The best that can be said about this early contender for the worst film of 2007 is that it's properly keystone'd by Diane Keaton, who, between this and The Family Stone, cements her position as the most smug, insufferable, unwatchable persona in a long and tumescent line of such personae. She embodies the absolute worst of every single stereotype of the domineering mother: dotty, ditzy, Luddite, sexless/oversexed, cruel, racist, otherwise intolerant, and above all hysterical. Throw her psychotic mommy dearest from The Other Sister into the stew and it's hard to find a more stalwart movie monster in the last ten years than Keaton, who's gone from a charming neurotic to a cobwebbed, cell-phone-wielding vagina dentata.

Sundance '07: Chapter 27

****/****
starring Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan, Judah Friedlander, Ursula Abbott
written and directed by Jarrett Schaefer

by Alex Jackson Chapter 27 is creepy and possibly even unhealthy. I've been wondering for a couple of days now just how long writer-director Jarrett Schaefer stared into the Nietzsche abyss in researching and helming this aggressively subjective look into the mind of Beatle assassin Mark David Chapman. He purports to share Chapman's adoration of The Catcher in the Rye, The Beatles, and The Wizard of Oz and in person comes off as shy and somewhat withdrawn. What I find particularly disturbing is how he praised the Salt Lake screening I attended as being "where the real people are." When Hounddog auteur Deborah Kampmeier did the same, the compliment frankly dripped with condescension; from Schaefer's lips, especially in light of the Holden Caulfield-isms Chapman sprinkles throughout Chapter 27 concerning "phoniness," it seems to blur the distinction between filmmaker and subject. Maybe his hyping up of his similarities to Chapman is consciously designed to drum up publicity, but that only deepens the irony of a filmmaker coming virtually from nowhere to make his name with a film about a man who made his name by murdering a pop icon. Chapter 27 isn't smarmy or smartass in the least, but it's covered with meta layers and filled with post-modern games--in particular, it's heavily structured around the J.D. Salinger novel, sort of making it the long-awaited, if unofficial, film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye. The picture brings up some of the same feelings I felt when I first began reading said novel at age 16: knowing that some apparently normal people (such as Chapman) read it and eventually went insane, it became less like a novel and more like a tab of potentially bad acid. It's necessary to mention Jared Leto's performance as Chapman. Leto gained sixty pounds for the role, but he doesn't use the weight as a prop--the weight is a means to accentuate certain aspects of his screen persona. Said persona is, of course, that of a cookie-cutter pretty boy metrosexual; looking at his bit parts in American Psycho and Fight Club, we can more easily see how he fruitfully exploited these apparent weaknesses. Leto brings his anonymity, prettiness, and latent homoeroticism to the Chapman character and succeeds in developing a genuine counterpoint to De Niro's Travis Bickle. But where the violence in Taxi Driver was expressive, cathartic, and bluntly orgasmic, when Leto's Chapman executes John Lennon, he is, to borrow a phrase from Tyler Durden, as calm as a Hindu cow. What's so disturbing about the film is that there isn't any moral dimension or purpose to the violence: it's a foregone conclusion, conducted by an overgrown man-child who simply pointed a gun at the idol he felt let him down and pulled the trigger.

Sundance '07: It is Fine! Everything is Fine.

It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.
**/****
starring Margit Carstensen, Steven C. Stewart, Carrie Szlasa, Lauren German
screenplay by Steven C. Stewart
directed by David Brothers & Crispin Hellion Glover

by Alex Jackson An unlikely figurehead of Salt Lake's independent film scene, Crispin Glover shot portions of his directorial debut What is It? in the city and cast local native Steven C. Stewart in the role of "Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner ego" against his own "Duelling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner psyche." (A great deal of the affection the townies seem to harbour for Glover and his films apparently stems from foolish local pride.) Stewart, who suffered from severe cerebral palsy and died from a collapsed lung shortly before the release of What is It?, wrote and stars in It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.. The script was dictated almost thirty years ago to scenic artist and production designer David Brothers, who worked on several Utah-area productions such as The World's Fastest Indian. Brothers introduced Glover to Stewart's script and co-directed it with him; as with What is It?, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is a lot more interesting to hear about than it is to watch. The film is basically Stewart's sexual fantasies--which are certainly a bit on the sadistic/misogynistic side--realized onto celluloid. Women throw themselves at him, he has sex with them, and then he strangles them. Oftentimes they'll ask, as their dying wish, to be penetrated one last time. These fantasies come across as overcompensation for his disability, which has more than likely caused women to view him as asexual and unattractive. His idea of sex is to turn the tables on the gender that had rejected him; Glover and Brother's rationale for filming this material is to provide a voice to somebody who hasn't one, and, quite surprisingly, it's a sound justification. Seeing Stewart act out his sad fantasies reminds us on a very basic level that people with cerebral palsy have both sexual feelings and a working mind that interprets and recasts the world around them, and the "Make-a-Wish" backstory lends the film a peculiar pathos. Other than that, though, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is actually pretty useless, increasingly tedious, and even a little dull; Glover has traded off all the gonzo heat he generated with What is it? for something borderline conventional. Although he's become a director with a unique cinematic aesthetic, he was probably more interesting when he was a simple Hollywood eccentric jerking himself off. Without any screaming snails, soapbox puppets, or naked women in monkey masks, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. is unable to sustain itself on Glover's childish, if ambitious, anti-art agenda. Maybe it's me who's changed, but this is the first time that the image of a woman performing fellatio on a man with cerebral palsy actually felt passé.