Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania – Creepy

Posted in****/****, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Czech Republic, Film Festivals, Short Films, UK

Click here to visit the Worldwide Short Film Festival‘s official website.

by Bill Chambers Back in my early twenties, there was one summer job I had where I found myself doodling animals saying inexplicable–and, needless to say, often repulsive–things. It started out as an effort to break the ice with my only co-worker (we spent most of our time locked in a makeshift editing bay together), then escalated into a constant test of her boundaries. I happened across some of these drawings recently, and they are resolutely unfunny: a bunny threatening to kill your mother with an axe, a frog telling a fart joke; in retrospect, I wonder why said co-worker eventually invited me to her wedding. Stockholm Syndrome’s my best guess. Nevertheless, during the subterranean Looney Tune that is Everybody (animated; ds. Jessie Mott; 4 mins.; ½*/****), I began to feel grateful that there was no real public forum to display those cartoons back then, because all I’d really be doing is inviting some asshole on the Internet to dismiss it as adolescent shit. This is adolescent shit. Rendered in crude, impatient watercolours, various deer, bats, goats, etc. are anthropomorphized via cheaply cryptic remarks like “I’m too small in the necessary spaces,” and “You paralyze me with disgust. You’re spilling open like a gelatinous achin’ belly.” To which I reply, by way of Al Pacino in Heat, “Don’t waste my motherfuckin’ time!”

How I Did It: FFC Interviews Vincenzo Natali

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Interviews
Vnataliinterviewtitle
With Splice, director Vincenzo Natali’s career comes alive. ALIVE!

June 6, 2010|I had been invited to interview Vincenzo Natali, and although I immediately acquainted myself with his previous work, nothing could prepare me for the film he was coming to Boston to promote. Indeed, anyone who’s seen the trailers for Natali’s latest, the Frankenstein-ian family drama Splice, is certain to be surprised by what the final product has in store. You didn’t see that one comin’, did ya? I know I didn’t.

Splice (2010)

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Drama, France, Horror, Mexico, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, David Hewlett
screenplay by Vincenzo Natali & Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Ian Pugh Vincenzo Natali’s Splice unavoidably lives in the shadow of countless sci-fi/horror properties that came before it–stories that have already taught us, as Splice teaches us, that tragedies occur when Man dabbles in God’s domain. But dismiss the film as cliché at your own peril. While it provides numerous shocks to the system, the traumas themselves take a backseat to the horror of their implications and, moreover, what those tragedies say about the risks and ambitions of daily life. Indeed, while the movie consciously seeks to fashion a cautionary tale out of the stock phrase “What’s the worst that could happen?” its ultimate goal is to tell that tale as a domestic drama.

Pontypool (2009) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Canada, DVD, Horror, Thriller, Zombie

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly
screenplay by Tony Burgess, based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything
directed by Bruce McDonald

by Jefferson Robbins Few things give me the willies like the sublimation of self. The idea that my essential me-ness could someday drain away and be lost–to injury, dementia, what have you–makes me shudder. At the extreme, there’s the fear that some invading force, a me supplanted by a not-me, might subjugate my personality. Little wonder that Brian O’Blivion’s monologue in Videodrome about communicating with his own brain cancer, or almost any mind-control scenario scripted for comics by Grant Morrison, can set me cringing.

K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller, UK, War

*½/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Sam Spruell, Peter Stebbins
screenplay by Christopher Kyle
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a false alarm because drills are how all cookie-cutter closed-vehicle thrillers begin. Screenwriters free of the limiting bonds of imagination call it “foreshadowing”; critics forced to watch at least one film that begins this way per year prefer “tedious.” K-19: The Widowmaker (hereafter K-19) has a tedious narrative married to vein-swelling performances presented in that frank gracelessness indicative of director Kathryn Bigelow’s sledgehammer-chic since long about Point Break, brought together under the steady hand of a legendary editor (Walter Murch) that only just guides this behemoth of conflicting ideas and wet (and drunken) Russian submariners into the dry dock of coherence.

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

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Crime, France, Mystery, Thriller, Turkey

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.

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

Posted in2000s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

*/****
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.

Sundance ’10: 7 Days

Posted in2000s, 2010, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Thriller
Les 7 jours du talion**/****starring Rémy Girard, Claude Legault, Fanny Mallette, Martin Dubreuilscreenplay by Patrick Senecaldirected by Daniel Grou by Alex Jackson 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…

The Lovely Bones (2009) + The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Fantasy, France, Mystery, New Zealand, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE LOVELY BONES
½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Alice Sebold
directed by Peter Jackson

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS
½*/****
starring Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Tom Waits
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw It’s all a little too Puff, the Magic Dragon, isn’t it. The Lovely Bones finds Peter Jackson regressing into his worst instincts and a newfound squeamishness in a film about, ick, a fourteen-year-old girl’s rape and murder, leaving the most unsavoury details of Alice Sebold’s revered source novel to the golden-lit imagination. (Give this to Precious: it’s exploitation with the decency to titillate.) This isn’t to say the book is worth much of a shit, but to say that it at least has the courage to talk about a rape and a murder where the film only has the mustard to romanticize loss and suggest that 1973 was so long ago the freak next door didn’t raise any flags. It’s also to say that what began its existence as a study of the bonds that hold a family together through the caprice of living has been reduced in its film adaptation to a murder mystery without a mystery, and a supernatural thriller that at every turn reminds of how much better Jackson’s The Frighteners is in dealing with almost the exact same set of themes.

Orphan (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Orphan (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman, CCH Pounder
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan is a cheap, schlocky, shameless kid-peril flick with an unlikely–cowardly, even–twist and standard resolution. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t, despite all that, almost worth it just for its nastiness. Alas, in the end, it’s not nasty enough. Without a thought in its head, without much understanding of how to earn legitimate frights without maiming (or threatening to maim) adorable children, it joins this year’s similarly lost zombie girl-baby flick Grace among end-of-a-cycle, misogynistic shots at the Bad Seed genre. It’s the kind of film that’s more interesting for the fact of its relationship to other bad-seed flicks post-9/11 (e.g., Japanese redux The Ring and little-seen creeper Soft For Digging) than for anything it does itself. Interesting, too, that it’s a relatively big-budget, mainstream picture starring a couple of extremely appealing actors (Peter Sarsgaard as John and Vera Farmiga as his wife, erm, Kate) as the patsies who adopt the titular hellchild, a Russian immigrant named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), from one of those autumnal orphanages run by nuns like cuddly Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder). Unfortunately, it’s loaded with–there’s that word again–cheap jump scares that, at least half the time, are so self-aware as to be parodies of themselves. Post-modernism it ain’t, though–post-modernism is smart.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image N/A Sound N/A Extras C
starring Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T. Carpenter, Lauren London
screenplay by Larry Doyle, based on his novel
directed by Chris Columbus

by Jefferson Robbins I believe this is what it looks like when a veteran director throws in the towel. Morosely paced, edited with no ear for slapstick, perfectly mediocre in its staging, timing, scripting, and performances, I Love You, Beth Cooper (hereafter Beth Cooper) betrays benign neglect on the part of producer-director Chris Columbus. It’s as if he tossed together all the ingredients for a thoughtful but teen-friendly confection–a recipe inherited from his late mentor John Hughes–and took it on faith that the cake would bake itself. There’s even a weird invocation of the dead god of teen comedies: Columbus casts Alan Ruck, a.k.a. Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as the hero’s dad and supplies the sidekick with Cameron’s absent, oppressive shadow of a father. That’s not homage–that’s the desperate rubbing of a talisman, a prayer to recapture lightning that leaked out of the bottle long ago.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) – DVD + Wrong Turn (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) – DVD + Wrong Turn (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Germany, Horror, Thriller

THE HILLS HAVE EYES
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Susan Lanier, Robert Houston, Martin Speer, Dee Wallace-Stone
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Walter Chaw Released the same year as Star Wars, Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes boasts of its own Luke Skywalker in the character of a blue-eyed towhead named Bobby (Bobby Houston) who, at an unwelcome call to adventure, finds himself embarked against the forces of evil with a patchwork band of heroes out of their depth. Chewbacca subbed by a ridiculously Rin Tin Tin German Shepherd hermaphrodite (sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy, always a hero), The Hills Have Eyes is Craven’s zero-budget follow-up to his astonishingly unpleasant (and influential) exploitation version of The Virgin Spring, The Last House on the Left. A rough, raw, often amateurish take on the Sawney Beane cannibal family legend, the piece derives its power from the canny paralleling of its antagonistic families and its use of archetype and mythology in the telling of what is essentially a caste horror picture.

Trick ‘r Treat (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Trick ‘r Treat (2009) [Digital Copy Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Horror

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Dylan Baker, Rochelle Aytes, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox
written and directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw Less a portmanteau than a Tarantino time-shift/overlap, Trick ‘r Treat is a handsomely-mounted bit of fluff that dribbles out like the Cat’s Eye redux for which no one was clamouring, with more than a few images borrowed from other Stephen King errata such as Creepshow and Pet Sematary. Michael Dougherty’s hyphenate debut, it, a lot like co-writer-on-X2 Dan Harris’s own first feature, Imaginary Heroes, has a pedigree and the benefit of the doubt in its corner but washes out as something that needed to marinate longer to reach the full flower of any potential. The buzz surrounding Trick ‘r Treat, though, in particular the Internet outrage over the studio’s alleged mishandling of it, is peculiarly deafening and–as with most buzz around most projects falsely promised theatrical distribution–in large part hysterical and unjustified.

2009 TIFF Bytes #3: A Gun to the Head; Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, Thriller, TIFF

Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year’s TIFF:
A Gun to the Head (d. Blaine Thurier)
Those who, like me, missed Male Fantasy, the sophomore feature of Blaine Thurier, may find themselves at a loss to distinguish between Thurier’s growth as a filmmaker and advancements in digital video since his directorial debut, the better-in-retrospect Low Self Esteem Girl. Thurier’s latest, the Vancouver-lensed A Gun to the Head, is comparatively polished, yet the film, with its focus again on suburban drug culture, feels dismayingly unevolved coming from someone who leads a prolific life that includes a steady gig as the keyboardist for the indie-rock supergroup The New Pornographers–even as it cops to a certain anxiety about abandoning comfortable milieux via Trevor (Tygh Runyan), a newlywed struggling with the demands of marriage in the face of his old freedoms. Basically a bush-league Mikey and Nicky, the picture has Trevor ferrying paranoid cousin Darren (Paul Anthony) all over town on a drug run just to avoid the dinner party his wife (Marnie Robinson, the spitting image of Jordana Spiro) is throwing back home; eventually the two run afoul of Darren’s suppliers, who have already shown themselves capable of murder. I will say that Thurier is good with actors–this cast really brings it, with the suddenly-vivacious Sarah Lind a particular standout. (Revealing hidden comic chops, she plays a nasal-voiced bimbo who only picked up the word for “um” on her trip to Japan.) Lead baddie Hrothgar Mathews unfortunately bears a sometimes-striking resemblance to Glenn Gould the same year a documentary about the famous pianist plays alongside A Gun to the Head at the TIFF. Which leads me to… (**/4, by the way.)

9 (2009)

Posted in2000s, 2009, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Luxembourg, Mystery, Russia, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
screenplay by Pamela Pettler
directed by Shane Acker

by Walter Chaw There’s something missing from Shane Acker’s 9, and I’m having a hard time putting my finger on it. I think it’s that for as much as I like my nihilism, there’s a flavour to this year’s variety of Apocalypse that suggests to me the only thing left to win is the Wasteland. There’s no moral stake in scrambling for scraps, just this Pyrrhic duty to compete, lust fast-cooling on the proverbial sheets, damp and rumpled as they are from a lot of impotent thrusting. So 9 exists in an Industrial Revolution Steamboy alternate universe, ended when an evil fascist dictator creates, with the help of a scientist (Alan Oppenheimer–weird, non?), a sentient machine capable of building other machines to do its bidding. Imagined as a weapon of peace, no surprise that it turns on Man and apparently kills all living creatures, blots out the sun, and spends its time hunting down little burlap rag dolls animated with the scientist’s–wait for it–soul. It’s the second Terminator film of the summer, in other words, as well as the second to mention the idea of horcruxes after Harry Potter 6. Accordingly, it’s a pretty empty, if visually startling, picture. Based on a celebrated, Oscar-nominated short, 9 hasn’t made the transition to feature-length with much of an emotional, or intellectual, payload to justify its extended runtime. The best comparison is to Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, alas: the seed of something left fallow.

District 9 (2009)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2009, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, South Africa, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sylvaine Strike
screenplay by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
directed by Neill Blomkamp

by Walter Chaw An unlikely marriage of Alien Nation and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Neill Blomkamp’s remarkable District 9 is that occasional genre picture that’s both topical and so good it made my stomach knot. Set in South Africa, it opens by rejecting the Eurocentrism of most science-fiction pictures. Here, the little green men don’t hover over the Lincoln Memorial or the Eiffel Tower, but rather Johannesburg, where the malnourished, crustacean-like denizens (they’re called, derogatorily, “prawns”) of a giant mothership are quickly relegated to a barbed-wire enclosed slum, the titular “District 9.” Its parallel to Alien Nation is obvious, down to that film’s equation of aliens with Chinese immigrants in San Francisco; these are the “bestial” blacks of Afrikaner nightmares: physically powerful, engaged in illicit activities, and blamed for every casualty outside their heavily-segregated “district.” But where Alien Nation identified the threat to that immigrant community as an insidious ghost of its traditional past (an opium allegory? How 18th-century), District 9 satirizes the numbing effect of cable news networks, as well as the dangers faced by any outcast culture trying to eke out subsistence existences on the fringes of majority society. In a very real way, District 9 is a film about not only the corrosive potential of grossly overfed public perception, but also the immigration debate that rages on worldwide.

Roxanne (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

Roxanne (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah, Shelley Duvall, Rick Rossovich
screenplay by Steve Martin, based on the play “Cyrano de Bergerac” by Edmond Rostand
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw After The Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith–both appearing in the middle of the Australian New Wave–the conventional wisdom was that Fred Schepisi was someone to watch. Then Hollywood called and he did what fellow ‘wavers Peter Weir and Phillip Noyce did, punching the timecard on shit like Patriot Games, Sliver, and Dead Poets Society. A re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmund Rostand’s play about a proboscis-challenged swordsman armed with the Blarney (in spades), Schepisi’s noxious Roxanne stars a downhill-sliding Steve Martin and a Daryl Hannah who didn’t yet know that Blade Runner and Splash would be the only things anyone would know her for until a career resurrection of sorts some 15 years later with Kill Bill. I used to love this film. Time has been unkind.

Easy Virtue (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, 2009, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Barnes
screenplay by Stephan Elliott & Sheridan Jobbins, based on the play by Noël Coward
directed by Stephan Elliott

by Walter Chaw At first glance, it would seem that Stephan Elliott’s pictures follow no conventional line. Start with 1993’s Frauds, starring Hugo Weaving and (yes, that) Phil Collins, then proceed to Elliott’s landmark The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Then it’s on to that film’s tonal antidote (think an Outback Woman in the Dunes with Rogers & Hammerstein interludes), Welcome to Woop Woop; a Hollywood sojourn (the criminally-underestimated serial killer/FBI procedural Eye of the Beholder); and finally, one near-fatal ski accident later, an oddly appropriate return to form in the Noël Coward adaptation Easy Virtue. These movies are almost Billy Wilder-ian in their variety–literally, in that Elliott seems above all keenly attuned to the comic opportunity–the Lubitsch, if you will–in relational dynamics, but also in that he begins with something like a thriller, goes to camp, goes to camp thriller, returns to thriller, and now does something almost entirely genre-peculiar. It’s a vertiginous enough trajectory that for the first half-hour of Easy Virtue, I’d forgotten I was watching a Stephan Elliott film–that the fact that Elliott directed it was indeed the only reason I was interested in seeing Jessica Biel spar with Kristin Scott Thomas on a sprawling English estate in the 1920s.

Seattle International Film Festival ’09: Nurse.Fighter.Boy

Posted in2000s, 2009, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals
***/****starring Clark Johnson, Karen LeBlanc, Daniel J. Gordonscreenplay by Charles Officer and Ingrid Veningerdirected by Charles Officer by Jefferson Robbins It's broad-strokes storytelling set in Toronto's Jamaican expatriate community, in which each character and situation is understood immediately, almost subconsciously. Night-shift nurse Jude (Karen LeBlanc) is herself a patient, suffering from a potentially fatal sickle-cell disorder. It's her son Ciel (Daniel J. Gordon) who keeps her going, both figuratively and metaphysically--he's a magical thinker, reaching back to Caribbean incantation and rootwork, crafting charms to preserve his mother's life. Then washed-up boxer Silence (Clark Johnson), a closed book, drifts into their…