***/****
starring Leslie Silva, Jason Olive, Tom Maden, Jennifer Jalene
written and directed by Mia Trachinger

by Alex Jackson The key image of Mia Trachinger’s Reversion, her follow-up to the eight-year-old, still-undistributed Bunny, is star Leslie Silva’s outrageously unkempt Afro and supermodel physique. Trachinger betrays nostalgia for the early-’90s nostalgia for the 1970s. Her cool is a grungy slacker cool, all heroin-chic and deadpan nihilism. She’s delightfully fifteen years behind the loop, making a hipster film for an audience that no longer exists. Almost everybody in Reversion looks and acts fashionably homeless. In an early scene, Silva’s character Eva even goes into a supermarket with her peers and eats the food right off the shelves! It turns out these people are mutants born without the “time gene.” The past, present, and future all co-exist for them in a nonlinear fashion. So you would think them philosophically deterministic like the space aliens in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, right? Well, sort of, but not quite. Trachinger focuses instead on their amorality. Having never learned to associate a cause with its resulting effect, they steal cars at gunpoint and of course eat out of grocery stores without paying.

*½/****
starring Summer Bishil, Peter Macdissi, Maria Bello, Aaron Eckhart
screenplay by Alan Ball, based on the novel by Alicia Erian
directed by Alan Ball

by Alex Jackson Based on the available evidence, it’s clear that American Beauty worked because Sam Mendes’s aesthetic provided a spiritual component that elevated writer Alan Ball’s reductive and rather misanthropic satire. If opinion on the film gets worse as time goes by, it may be because Ball’s screenplay comes to the fore. Ball’s feature directorial debut Towelhead is, to state the obvious, all Ball and no Mendes; it manages to be bad the very first time you see it. Jasira (Summer Bishil) is a half-Lebanese 13-year-old struggling to come to terms with her blossoming womanhood. Her mother (Maria Bello) kicks her out of the house after Jasira lets her would-be stepfather shave her pubic area. She relocates to Texas (the asshole of the United States in the Alan Ball universe), where she moves in with her Lebanese immigrant father Rifat (Peter Macdissi), who slaps her when she comes down for breakfast with her navel exposed and forbids her to use tampons when she has her period. Rifat gets her a job babysitting for next-door neighbour Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), a military reservist restlessly awaiting deployment to Iraq on the eve of the first Gulf War. Courtesy of the Vuoso son, Jasira inherits a stack of dirty magazines and discovers how to masturbate to orgasm. Once Mr. Vuoso learns of this, he begins to see her as some potential sexual relief from a loveless marriage.

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.