Sundance ’07: Low and Behold

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

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.

Sundance ’07: Year of the Fish

Posted in2000s, 2007, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Romance, Sundance
**/**** 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…

Sundance ’07: The Go-Getter

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

**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

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*/**** 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…

Sundance ’07: VHS – Kahloucha

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, Tunisia
**/**** 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…

Sundance ’07: Chapter 27

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
****/**** 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…

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

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

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.

Sundance ’07: Hounddog

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Sundance

*/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Robin Wright Penn, David Morse, Piper Laurie
written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier

by Alex Jackson Deborah Kampmeier’s Hounddog is even worse than its pre-emptive objectors assume it is. The film is offensive in precisely the way you think it’s going to be but surprises you by becoming offensive on a whole new level. Everything in the film revolves around a scene where Dakota Fanning is raped, which, far from “gratuitous,” is the film’s entire raison d’être. Before The Rape, Hounddog plays like one big striptease leading up to it: in the very first scene, Fanning promises her playmate a kiss if he shows her his penis, and throughout the picture, Kampmeier has her prancing around in her panties, gyrating in her rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Hounddog,” and going swimming in an undershirt. Naysayers are calling the picture “a pedophile’s dream,” and though I maintain that you would have to be a pedophile of particularly low self-esteem to whack off to this, they do have a point. Up until The Rape, the film is just plain exploitive and cynical. It starts to seem like Kampmeier knows why we’re here and is going to draw out our dread/anticipation past the breaking point before delivering “the goods.” Then little Dakota gets popped. The scene is simultaneously cowardly, leering, and utterly tasteless: we see close-ups of her limbs flailing and her playmate staring on, fascinated and horrified. Her demonic rapist, who had been hiding in the shadows, grunts a couple of times, comes inside her, and very audibly zips up as she lies on the ground, bawling and defeated. The pre-rape portion of the film was sweating with sex, but all that heat dissipates during and after the rape.

Sundance ’07: We Are the Strange

Posted in2000s, 2007, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Sundance

½*/****
starring David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Halleh Seddighzadeh, M dot Strange
written and directed by M dot Strange

by Alex Jackson

“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
-Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park

While it is perfectly normal for a student filmmaker to be preoccupied with the “could” questions over the “should,” the “should” questions need asking and answering to at least some extent before one attempts to make something for display to a general audience. I suppose I could say that We Are the Strange is an exercise in style over substance, or that it breaks away from traditional forms of narrative, but that would imply that writer/producer/director/animator/composer M dot Strange had actually made choices with regards to substance, narrative, and the lack thereof. The film is an artistic failure on the most rudimentary level; it seems that Strange never got past the idea that it would be cool to make an animated feature. We Are the Strange has something to do with a beautiful woman named Blue who is kicked out of a brothel by her pimp for being “ugly.” She then meets the living Buddy doll Emmm, who asks her out for ice cream. Soon they discover that the ice cream shop has been taken over by “evil forces.” All of this is set in a video game or an alternate universe composed of video game graphics or something.

Sundance ’07: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Sundance, UK
***/**** directed by Julien Temple by Alex Jackson I worry that this film was wasted on me. I usually walk out of the Q&A sessions after festival screenings because I can't bear to hear the stupid questions the audience asks or, as in the case of M dot Strange, the filmmaker's stupid answers. This time, however, the questions were intelligent and thoughtful, and, it almost goes without saying, so were the replies. Watching Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, I was reminded a bit of those critics who said that The Passion of the Christ was made for hardcore Christians…

Sundance ’07: Crazy Love

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance

***½/****
directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens

by Alex Jackson Dan Klores’s Crazy Love is essentially just another talking-head documentary, but my goodness what talking heads they are! At first, it seems that Klores–to echo that oft-repeated charge against pop-doc filmmakers like Errol Morris, Michael Moore, and Chris Smith–is condescending to his subjects by laying their distinctly Jewish tackiness out to be skewered. But as the picture soldiers on, any emotional detachment dissolves away: these people aren’t tactless so much as they’re simply candid. They have absolutely nothing to hide, and that openness makes it extremely difficult to categorize anybody in the film as a monster or a victim. Burt Pugach was a prominent negligence lawyer in the East Bronx; in the fall of 1957, he spotted secretary Linda Riss, fell in love with her, and successfully seduced her. When he couldn’t divorce his wife, Riss left him and got engaged to somebody else. Enraged and deeply depressed, Pugach hired some goons to rough her up. They threw acid in her face, eventually blinding her. Pugach served a stint in prison, and when he got out he proposed to Riss. She accepted–the way she figures it, she’s blind and nobody wants her or is willing to be with her except Pugach, who was the one who blinded her in the first place, explicitly so that nobody else would want her. He “wins.”

Sundance ’07: Fido

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Sundance, Zombie
*/**** starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelson screenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie directed by Andrew Currie by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes, a grade-school teacher turns…

Sundance ’07: Teeth

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Thriller
*½/**** starring Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Appleman written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein by Alex Jackson I was very excited when I first stumbled upon the notion of the vagina dentata, as it provides for a distinctly female version of sexual aggression: Unlike the male rape drive, it's not about power, it's about taking power away from men--cannibalism and castration. I should have known that Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth would not be the film to really explore this notion as soon as I learned that it's literally about a teenage girl who discovers she has teeth in her…
See No Evil (2006) – DVD

See No Evil (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Kane, Christina Vidal, Luke Pegler, Samantha Noble
screenplay by Dan Madigan
directed by Gregory Dark

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gregory Dark started out directing adult films–I’ve been told that his award-winning Let Me Tell Ya ‘Bout White Chicks is a classic of the miscegenation genre–and had moved up to music videos when he was offered See No Evil, his first feature film (as well as the first film produced under the WWE banner). The idea that Dark sees this movie as his ticket to the big leagues is as good an explanation as any for its smarmy tone. Still embarrassed about making a slasher picture (and, by extension, his stigmatic beginnings), he distances himself from the material by condescending to it: If he’s better than B-movie claptrap, then that means he’s an A-list filmmaker, right? I have no idea where Dark wants to be near the end of his career, but the attitude he brings to See No Evil is that of a climber and not a serious artist who happens to be relegated to the periphery of the mainstream.

Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster (1965) – DVD

Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster (1965) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Marilyn Hanold, Jim Karen, Lou Cutell, Nancy Marshall
screenplay by R.H.W. Dillard, George Garrett and John Rodenbeck
directed by Robert Gaffney

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Now, I think we’re allowed to define these terms for ourselves (fans of exploitation movies being a friendly and decidedly unpretentious bunch), but the way I see it, there’s a sharp difference in style between B-movies and Z-movies. B-movies are your creature features. Their narratives are actually quite strongly defined and they tend to produce a rather primitive but potent and genuine emotional reaction from the audience. You can picture yourself seeing these films at a drive-in double feature or maybe a Saturday matinee. In contrast, Z-movies are all jumbled noise. The audience does not exactly have an emotional reaction to Z-movies, they just watch them in a sort of dissociated daze. You could never imagine seeing Z-movies at an actual movie theatre or drive-in. The only place where they could possibly play is on a local unaffiliated television station at three in the morning.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) + Shock Treatment (1981) [Bodice-Ripping Fabulous 3-Disc Set] – DVD

Posted in1970s, 1980s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Musical

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW 
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O’Brien
screenplay by Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien
directed by Jim Sharman

SHOCK TREATMENT
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Jessica Harper, Cliff De Young, Patricia Quinn, Richard O’Brien
screenplay by Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman
directed by Jim Sharman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I have never attended an actual theatrical showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and for the longest time, I doubted that I was completely receptive to every significant nuance and intricacy of the film, what with its name-dropping of Michael Rennie and the presence of a performer called “Little Nell” who wears Mickey Mouse ears during the “Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me” number. The picture’s esoteric quotient has always eluded my radar, preventing me from fully identifying with it, much less condescending to it. This idea of familiarity with extra-textual elements or training in a specific method of watching as essential in the evaluation process is a perennial issue in film criticism for me. My default position is that the two things don’t have that much to do with each other: Learning more about a film can deepen an appreciation that was already there, but the initial call of yea or nay is one that every king, scholar, and prole is equally qualified to make. Beautiful idea, I think–it helps me sleep at night and keeps me from being too scared to see and write about films outside my realm of experience. So why is it that I am so intimidated by this movie?

Eaten Alive (1977) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror

a.k.a.  Death Trap, Legend of the Bayou, Murder on the Bayou, Starlight Slaughter, Horror Hotel, Horror Hotel Massacre
**½/**** Image C+* Sound B Extras B+
starring Neville Brand, Mel Ferrer, Carolyn Jones, Marilyn Burns
screenplay by Alvin L. Fast, Kim Henkel and Mardi Rustam
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Alex Jackson The disparity between the reputation of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and that of everything he made thereafter had been eating away at me ever since I polished off his 1977 follow-up, Eaten Alive. You see, Eaten Alive seemed to me to be very much the same movie as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, only instead of a maniac with a chainsaw and a sledgehammer, it had a maniac with a sickle and a man-eating crocodile. Why exactly is it that critics and audiences alike consider The Texas Chain Saw Massacre canonical, a masterpiece of the genre, while Eaten Alive floundered in relative obscurity until being referenced in a Quentin Tarantino film?

Mildred Pierce (1945) – DVD

Posted in1940s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden
screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Alex Jackson The difference between Joan Crawford and her inextricably-linked contemporary Bette Davis is the difference between an icon and a mere actress. Davis was always acting and, in her lesser moments, downright hammy; Crawford simply was. A finished product, all she has to do is walk out and exude “Crawfordness.” If it’s not her best film, Mildred Pierce is certainly Crawford’s best-known film, and one of the fascinating things about it is how it illustrates her screen persona blending together with her personal one. I’m fascinated with the idea of transforming from an inferior being into a superior one–the leap from ape to Star Child in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to put it in its purest form. This is mankind’s most pressing drive, is it not–that is, to escape the banality of our mortal existence? Perhaps such philosophical musings are a function of my still living in young adulthood: I’m a year away from beginning a career in which I expect to spend the next forty years, and there is the persistent fear of this being “all there is.” That there’s nothing left; I’m going to spend the rest of my life attempting to maintain a constant state of security. The iconology of Crawford achieves such escape. She’s embraced the cinema in a way Davis never did. She’s drunk from the proverbial cup and is now immortal. Prick her, she doesn’t bleed; tickle her, she doesn’t laugh. She is beyond the flesh now, a creature of light and celluloid.

Harry and Tonto (1974) – DVD

Posted in1970s, 2006, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Road Movie, Romance

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Commentary B+
starring Art Carney, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Larry Hagman
screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Josh Greenfeld
directed by Paul Mazursky

by Alex Jackson I complain a lot about film criticism being reduced to archaeology, but I don't think I've ever seen anything quite as impenetrable along these lines as Paul Mazursky's 1974 sleeper Harry and Tonto. It never coheres, it never makes its point, and it never justifies its existence. You know Mr. Bernstein's anecdote about the girl in the white dress in Citizen Kane, or Marge Gunderson's drink with her old high school chum in Fargo–those nice little throwaway moments that haven't much to do with the actual movie? In Harry and Tonto, Mazursky gets rid of the "actual movie" and gives us nothing but throwaway moments. Yeah, it's that kind of film.

Porn King (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Blue Underground, Documentary, DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
directed by James Guardino

by Alex Jackson James Guardino’s Porn King is a sterling example of how not to make a documentary. It fails on every conceivable level–I seriously cannot imagine any possible way to justify this movie. Above all I feel a real anger towards Guardino: he’s wasting my time. He has nothing to say and no passion for the medium; he treats this film like a glorified lottery ticket to the big leagues. My beef with most documentaries is that they’re all steak and no sizzle. They have a subject but no particular opinion on it and have little desire to realize it cinematically. That’s considered a virtue in some corners. Many believe that information should be unaffected and vanilla–objective. The thing about objectivity, though, is that it subjugates the author, clouding him in anonymity and making him and his film invulnerable to critique. I end up writing the same thing about almost every documentary I review, because otherwise I would be forced to discuss the subject matter exclusively, and a film’s subject matter should never be the sole criterion by which to judge its quality.