***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, Jon Tenney
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Walter Chaw Five minutes into Kenneth Lonergan’s dialogue-driven You Can Count on Me, a pleasant-seeming middle-aged couple having a comfortably banal conversation on a night ride home gets smeared by a semi going the wrong way. The next moment, we meet up with the couple’s children as children, miserable at their parents’ funeral, and then flash forward several years to these same children as adults, miserable with the predictably decomposing orbits of their lives. In a film in which very little obvious happens, the most traumatic event of the piece, presented almost casually in its introduction, is easy to dismiss as a plot convenience, when the truth of it is that the death of the parents is the key to understanding the resonance of You Can Count on Me. For all its humour, You Can Count on Me is about dealing with grief and the excruciating difficulty of accepting the burden of maturity and its attendant responsibilities.

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A-
starring Dan Futterman, Alan Cumming, Matt Keeslar, Samuel Ball
screenplay by Daniel Reitz and Jon Shear
directed by Jon Shear

by Walter Chaw We are each of us an anthology of disparate tales, rumors, poems, and melodramatic novellas. Clive Barker once wryly observed that we are books of blood, “wherever we’re opened, we’re red,” and for as intentionally grotesque as that sounds, Barker has a metaphysical point. It is the same point that Jon Shear’s directorial debut Urbania makes again and again (and, unfortunately, again): that the stories we tell others become our reality through their manipulated perceptions. If we are what others see us as, then what we cause others to see us as becomes what we are–each of us is very literally an author of our own identity through the abuse of others’ faith in our stories. There are two areas that this kind of reality crafting/testing holds a specific currency: sexual identity, and urban legend–“don’t ask, don’t tell,” and “this really happened to a friend of mine,” invocations to a post-modernist muse and a deconstructed vocal tradition.

Harvest
*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C
starring James Van Der Beek, Jeffrey DeMunn, Mary McCormack, Fred Weller
screenplay by Jim Biederman, Stuart Burkin, David M. Korn
directed by Stuart Burkin

by Walter Chaw A micro-budget independent venture shot in twenty-six days, Stuart Burkin’s auteur debut Cash Crop (a.k.a. Harvest) is a pro-pot film (not to be confused with The Killing Fields, a Pol Pot film) that has as its headliner TIGER BEAT icon James Van Der Beek (Varsity Blues), who does indeed lend his Bert-browed visage to about five minutes at the beginning of the movie. The real stars of the show, however, are B-list veterans John Slattery (Traffic, Eraser) and the always excellent Mary McCormack (The Alarmist) as a rural Pennsylvania sheriff and a DEA agent, respectively. It is their performances alone which nearly rescue Cash Crop from its awkward plot progression, a handful of embarrassing subplots, and a few secondary turns that run the gamut from “torturous” to “unwatchable.” Slattery and McCormack don’t make Cash Crop a good movie, don’t get me wrong, they just make it a barely “not as terrible as it would otherwise have been” movie that I’ll forget, Lord willing, in a day or two.