Film Freak Central

The Spider Woman|The Voice of Terror [Sherlock Holmes Double Feature] - DVD

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)
***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Evelyn Ankers, Reginald Denny
screenplay by Lynn Riggs & John Bright, based upon the story "His Last Bow" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
directed by John Rawlins

THE SPIDER WOMAN (1944)
**/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Gale Sondergaard, Dennis Hoey
screenplay by Bertram Millhauser, based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
directed by Roy William Neill

by Ian Pugh My introduction to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes came courtesy of MPI's recent double-feature DVD, and as introductions go, one could certainly do worse. Plucking the detective from Fox's Victorian backdrop and throwing him unceremoniously into World War II, Universal's take on the Holmes series comes across as hell-bent on forging its own continuity and, moreover, its own sense of context. The first entry in this new cycle, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, begins with a title card explaining why the film makes such a dramatic departure from the previous two:

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) - DVD

***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins I've wondered for a long time why I love the Hammer Film takes on the Universal monsters. I discovered them in my youth, so there's the nostalgia thing; and they typically involve stuff a young man loves: disfigurement, cleavage, viscera, cleavage, death. But the communion is somehow deeper than that. Guillermo del Toro describes his youthful exposure to creature features in the language of a Catholic embracing Jesus: "At a certain age, I accepted monsters in my heart." Yeah.

Maid in Manhattan (2002) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Kevin Wade
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw Less another version of the Cinderella story than a remake of the dreadful Ever After, Wayne Wang's Maid in Manhattan (why Wang is trying to make the same kind of magical Manhattan love tripe as Nora Ephron is only the first of the film's head-scratchers) manages ill-advisedly to remind of the Ally Sheedy vehicle Maid to Order whilst degenerating into the sort of dead-eyed quasi-political femi-bullshit tailor-made for divas in decline looking for a reason for their existence other than as subject of the next blaring headline. Ironic, then, that the central issues of the picture are resolved through snapshots of fake magazine covers.

Whiteout (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Columbus Short, Tom Skerritt
screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Eric Hoeber and Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by Dominic Sena

by Walter Chaw The first thing you notice about Whiteout is that it looks like shit. Though it was shot on location in Manitoba (subbing for Antarctica), they could've saved everyone the trouble and shot it in a green warehouse for all that anything in the film resembles anywhere outside. Not unreal, merely artificial. Take the moment, for example, when unbelievably-hot U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) and cohort Dr. John Fury (Tom Skerritt, well into the Kris Kristofferson portion of his career) discover the body that will be the centre of their stupid investigation into the film's stupid mystery. The middle of an ice canyon, it looks more like something out of a Quatermass flick, sixty years old on a shoestring, and it only gets worse when we come to sepia-toned flashbacks trying to explain why Stetko is damaged goods and, therefore, hiding from herself at the bottom of the world. Everything seems to have been manufactured in a mainframe--even the performances. It's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and, brother, that ain't good for something trying hard at edgy realism.

The Box (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn
screenplay by Richard Kelly, based on the short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson
directed by Richard Kelly

by Walter Chaw As if to dispel any whisper of a doubt after Richard Kelly's Southland Tales that whatever ephemeral magic was captured in his Donnie Darko was completely accidental, along comes Kelly's third film as writer-director, The Box. I don't know yet whether it's the worst film of the year, but I will say that next to it Alex Proyas' similar disaster Knowing seems like a goddamn masterpiece. It's excruciatingly written, for starters, with the all-timer coming when vanilla paterfamilias Arthur (James Marsden), fresh from a 2001 light tunnel, says to vanilla materfamilias Norma (Cameron Diaz) first that "it's beyond words," then, a few dozen words later, that it's "neither here, nor there...but somewhere in between" and that it's a place "where despair is not the governor of the human soul." It was around this time that I bore down like a Civil War soldier getting a limb sawed off and watched as The Box magically made its 115-minute running time feel like a day spent undergoing oral surgery. It's that bad. Badly edited, too, as the awful script (based on a pretty good Richard Matheson short story)--which already jumps around haphazardly between cheap, moronic comparisons of itself to Sartre's No Exit and egregious exposition that makes M. Night Shyamalan's leisurely verbal masturbations look like Mamet by comparison--is matched by bizarre jump-cuts and senseless, arrhythmic pacing. Despite how long it feels, it's over before it really begins.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

*/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Sean Bean
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Chris Columbus

by Walter Chaw You don't have to have read Ovid to enjoy Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (hereafter The Lightning Thief), because, hell, no one involved in the production appears to have read him. In fact, having a cursory knowledge of Greek mythology will mostly serve to irritate you, as the picture runs roughshod over a whole other religion whilst merging many of its images with Christian myth in an attempt to somehow justify itself to an imaginary audience of affronted, I don't know, Protestants? What other reason could there be to bastardize the Greek conception of the underworld by mixing it with Milton's? Actually, in conception, the movie's Hades (Steve Coogan) owes a lot more to Peter Jackson's Balrog than to Blake's illuminations, and suddenly director Chris Columbus's motivations come into sharper focus. Not having any familiarity with Rick Riordan's popular tween novels, the first of which is adapted for this film, I can only comment that I also didn't appreciate a Stepin Fetchit character, Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), who fulfills a threefer function as talking animal/pet (he's a satyr), token black guy comic relief, and uncomfortable throwback to the bad old days of sideshow coon. No better way to inject levity than to have a hilarious black guy crack wise, widen his eyes, and declare his everlasting fealty to massah. Maybe he exists under the same rationale as Jar Jar Binks and the Na'vi: that fictional creatures can't be racist caricatures and, besides, this venomous stereotyping is in a children's film, so we should all just relax. Regardless, The Lightning Thief could play on a double bill with The Blind Side for a cozy trip back to the '30s in American cinema.

Lost: The Complete First Season (2004-2005) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
"Pilot," "Tabula Rasa," "Walkabout," "White Rabbit," "House of the Rising Sun," "The Moth," "Confidence Man," "Solitary," "Raised by Another," "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues," "Whatever the Case May Be," "Hearts and Minds," "Special," "Homecoming," "Outlaws," "...In Translation," "Numbers," "Deus Ex Machina," "Do No Harm," "The Greater Good," "Born to Run," "Exodus"

by Walter Chaw From the two-part pilot, I gotta tell you, I don't trust it. I like the gore, I like the United Colors of Benetton centrefold models as castaway chic, I love Terry O'Quinn and invisible dinosaurs... What I don't like so much is this sinking feeling that "Lost" is a throw-it-all-at-the-wall creation cashing in on post-9/11 discomfort and zeitgeist Ludditism that was genuinely surprised to be asked to hang around for six years. Meaning I have my doubts that any of this cool-ass shit has been remotely plotted out to provide for a commensurately cool-ass resolution--especially since it's not on HBO and therefore not privy to HBO's seemingly bottomless roster of brilliant short-form, long-term dramatists.

It Might Get Loud (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
directed by Davis Guggenheim

by Bryant Frazer In the U2 concert film Rattle and Hum, Bono finishes speechifying about Apartheid in the middle of the song "Silver and Gold" by growling an acid faux-apology: "Am I buggin' ya? Don't mean to bug ya." Then he says, "OK, Edge--play the blues," and The Edge holds up his guitar and goes WEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE! Watching the movie with friends in college, I always savoured the absurdity of that moment. We imagined Bono scrunching up his face in a grimace and scolding The Edge for reverting to his ordinary clamour. "Aw, Edge," he might say, "that ain't the blues. That's the same shit you always play." And I'd collapse in helpless laughter.

Mystic River (2003) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

**½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B
BD - Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lahane
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Opening like a Stephen King story of a group of friends falling from innocence into experience, Clint Eastwood's latest elegy for the myth of man strains at the edge of hysterical, offering up a testosterone-rich soup of In the Bedroom parental melodrama that compels for its pervasive doom, but disappoints for its didactic simplicity. Still, there's something to the tribal primitivism of the picture, the idea that man at his essence is composed of balanced portions of nobility and violence and that our society, perhaps, is no different: the past the muddy headwaters of the titular mystic river. The picture is a rhyme of Eastwood's A Perfect World, complete with spiralling shots of the sky through branches--the evocation of a Naturalism at war with any illusion of moral spirituality or humanism, with its heroes criminals shaded equally by the instinct to violence and the instinct to nurture.

Sundance '10: Skateland

***/****
starring Shiloh Fernandez, Ashley Greene, Heath Freeman, Taylor Handley
written and directed by Anthony Burns

by Alex Jackson 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.

Sundance '10: Boy

**/****
starring Taika Waititi, James Rolleston, Te Aho Eketone-Whitu
written and directed by Taika Waititi

by Alex Jackson 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 like 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.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Western Adventures - DVD + Jeremiah Johnson (1972) - Blu-ray Disc

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates
screenplay by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah
directed by Sam Peckinpah

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton
directed by Robert Altman

THE TRAIN ROBBERS (1973)
1/2*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras F
starring John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Rod Taylor, Ricardo Montalban
written and directed by Burt Kennedy

JEREMIAH JOHNSON
*/****
DVD - Image D+ Sound C- Extras F
BD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert Redford, Will Geer, Allyn Ann McLerie, Delle Bolton
screenplay by John Milius and Edward Anhalt
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Walter Chaw From John Ford to Akira Kurosawa to Sergio Leone then back to the United States with Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, trace the odd, international lineage of the American western genre as the seeds of its own completion are sown by Ford, only to be harvested a few decades down the line with a singular bloodbath south of the proverbial border. You could say that the western was already nearing its completion in the postwar films noir set in the sunshine and bluffs of the Old West: homegrown oaters by Anthony Mann and Fritz Lang; William Wellman's Yellow Sky and Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon; Budd Boetticher's subversive Ranowns; Arthur Penn's glass darkly Billy the Kid pic The Left Handed Gun; Brando's filthy One-Eyed Jacks; and even Ford himself with terminal pieces like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers. But it's through Kurosawa's admiration and transfiguration of Ford's themes--then Sergio Leone's incandescent prism of dirt and blood that transfigured Kurosawa's (and Ford's) ideas about heroics and individualism into something poetically base--from which Peckinpah¹ took his cues.

Sundance '10: Me Too

Yo, también
***/****
starring Lola Dueñas, Pablo Pineda, Antonio Naharro, Isabel García Lorca
written and directed by Álvaro Pastor & Antonio Naharro

by Alex Jackson 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.

Sundance '10: I Am Love

***½/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Pippo Delbono, Alba Rohrwacher
written and directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Alex Jackson 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, artwork, 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.

Dear John (2010)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Henry Thomas, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Jamie Linden, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Ian Pugh Movies based on Nicholas Sparks novels--sentimental drivel, functionally identical--usually just bounce off my chest, but we all have our limits. Once more into the breach as Princess Prettygirl (Seyfried) falls head over heels for Johnny Bluecollar (Tatum) in a spectacularly awful Harlequin romance that juggles metaphors about coins and the size of the moon while boasting only the vaguest understanding of the English language. Dear John is little more than a rehash of The Notebook, a movie I found tedious but, again, ultimately innocuous. Yet there's a mysterious "x" factor at work in this one that attacked some vital nerve and reduced my brain to petroleum jelly. Could be that Lasse Hallström finally found the perfect vessels for the source author: Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum--actors, both, whose deadwood talents fail to stretch past sheer bewilderment. (I kind of hate Ryan Gosling as an actor, but he undoubtedly elevated The Notebook.) There's a point very early on where Seyfried remarks, "Wow, you made a fire," as her future beau demonstrates his ability to jumpstart a little kindling--and the complete lack of sarcasm (or really any emotion) in her voice led me to wonder if Tatum was going to club her over the head and drag her back to his cave. It's not an unreasonable conclusion: most of these movies forge conflict out of the idea that women are property, and Dear John is no different.

Sundance '10: Winter's Bone

**/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt
screenplay by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini
directed by Debra Granik

by Alex Jackson 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.

Sundance '10: Smash His Camera

**/****
directed by Leon Gast

by Alex Jackson 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.

Sundance '10: One Too Many Mornings

**½/****
starring Stephen Hale, Anthony Deptula, Tina Kapousis, Jonathan Shockley
screenplay by Anthony Deptula, Michael Mohan, Stephen Hale
directed by Michael Mohan

by Alex Jackson 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.