FLICKERS

review: The Damned United

THE DAMNED UNTIED

We call it soccer, but for the Brits it’s football, and it’s damn serious business. From 1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) a manager/coach from the tiny town of Derby, and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into division champs. That success wasn’t nearly as sweet as getting to take over Leeds United, a top-tier team previously managed by Clough’s archenemy, Don Revie (Colm Meaney). In this terrific film, screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and television director Tom Hooper (John Adams), making his feature debut, use a series of elegantly staged flashbacks to trace Clough’s and Taylor’s rapid rise to fame, and the hubris that led Clough to stumble badly when he got to Leeds, while also wounding his lifelong friendship with Taylor. A movie about soccer that doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field, The Damned United, like everything Morgan writes, is an intimate character study, one that’s enriched by a stellar ensemble of British pros, including Jim Broadbent as Derby’s team owner. These actors are good at what they do—like those players who dodge and weave with effortless grace. (Chuck Wilson)   

review: Paranormal Activity

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

For Katie (Katie Featherston), a San Diego college student, things have been going bump in the night since she was 8-years-old and a ghost attached itself to her. The unseen being that has been benignly haunting her for years thrills Katie’s loving but skeptical boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), who sets up a video camera to capture any supernatural goings-on. For his debut feature, reportedly shot in seven days at a cost of 15 grand, writer-director Oren Peli works wonders with stationary camera footage of the sleeping couple: the bedroom door moves, slightly, lights in the hallway go on and off, a shadow passes the bed. As the nights go by, the presence, seemingly annoyed at being recorded, begins upping the ante, and soon it appears that poor Katie is on the verge of channeling her inner Linda Blair. Grounded by strong performances by newcomers Featherston and Sloat, who pretty much have the movie to themselves, Paranormal Activity, which demands to be seen in a crowded theatre, is refreshingly blood-free; the fact that its old-school scares caused seemingly jaded twenty-somethings at a recent midnight screening to squirm in their seats suggests that there’s hope for the world after all. (Chuck Wilson)

review: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH HIDEOUS MEN

"Everything I write ends up being about loneliness," said the late writer David Foster Wallace in a 1999 interview on the radio show "Bookworm." In that conversation, Wallace was trying to get at the core of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a four-part short story he wrote as a series of monologues, which, in turn, are presented as a transcription of interviews that an unnamed woman conducted with dozens of men. In a dizzying whirl of language, Wallace's fictional men explain how they feel about the women they've loved or, more often than not, have failed to love.

The 29-year-old actor John Krasinski reports that participating in a staged reading of Wallace's story while a Brown University student inspired him to pursue acting as a profession. In the years since, as he rose to fame in The Office, he has been developing the stories as a feature, which he would write and direct. The resulting film has clearly been made with a deep reverence for Wallace, who was surely the most gifted writer of his generation, and who took his own life one year ago this month, at age 46. All of which makes it even more painful to say that, as a film, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a disaster.

In his crazily ambitious adaptation, Krasinski has brought to life the female interviewer, who is invisible in Wallace's stories. On-screen, she has become Sara (Julianne Nicholson), a New York grad student who asks the men around her to speak about their relationships with women. At first, the talks take place in a bunker-like room, with the men sitting at a table in front of an ugly concrete wall. Krasinski begins with Subject #14 (Ben Shenkman), who has a goofy sexual problem. He is followed by one other (a funny Michael Cerveris as a blue-collar worker with performance issues), and then, as if he can't stand the idea of staring at that bleak gray wall for the length of a film (an 80-minute one, at that), Krasinski sends Sara out into the world, where men at restaurants, parties, and theaters begin telling their stories, sometimes to her face, sometimes not.

The effect is distractingly theatrical—and confusing. Sara leaves her apartment and passes a man (Will Arnett) in the hallway, who is delivering a monologue about abandonment through the closed door of his girlfriend's apartment. That's a clever enough idea on paper, perhaps, but the setup ends up undercutting the message—his words don't land. Later, in a coffeehouse, Sara listens from two tables away as a businessman (Christopher Meloni) tells his friend (Denis O'Hare) about an odd, Cheever-esque encounter he had with a newly jilted, hysterically crying woman in an airport. Ever in search of a way to open up the film, Krasinski cuts away to a poorly executed flashback of the encounter, set to Meloni's voiceover. Again, excess staging overwhelms content, and all is lost.

It's easy to see why actors would be drawn to Wallace's Hideous Men monologues: They're funny, profane, often scarily intense, and, at all times, deeply emotional. Yet, Wallace was not writing a play. He was writing fiction. For the page. And so the plot specifics of each man's story—the who, what, and where—are secondary to the clutter of language with which the men surround their testimony. Wallace used language—often ornately academic—as a kind of protective padding for his interviewees, and the reader, at his own pace, must dig deep to find the essential truths.

Filmmakers, even great ones, are always battling the clock, a dilemma that left Krasinski little choice but to cut each monologue down to its core events. The stilted storytelling that results often rings false, and in the end, the monologues—delivered by some very good actors (Timothy Hutton, Bobby Cannavale, Josh Charles), who come across as first-year theater students acting out scenes from their favorite novels—don't add up to much. If Krasinski had an overarching theme in mind—be it the loneliness that Wallace spoke of, or something else—we're not getting it. And whatever it was about Hideous Men that so deeply affected Krasinski the college student has been lost in translation. (Chuck Wilson)

 

review: "Whiteout" (from LA Weekly/Village Voice)

WHITEOUT

In this earnest but muddled Antarctic thriller, a masked man kills research scientists who may have stumbled upon a valuable object hidden beneath the ice. Figuring out the murderer’s identity falls to U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), with help from the research station’s doctor (Tom Skerritt) and a shady U.N. investigator (Gabriel Macht). Carrie is a good detective tortured by memories of a Miami drug bust gone bad, and in a regrettable blunder, director Dominic Sena (Kalifornia, Gone in 60 Seconds) and his four credited screenwriters have chosen to stage that failed arrest in a series of hokey flashbacks that always end with Sena cutting back to a zoned-out Carrie, who literally shakes her head to clear away the bad vibes. One feels for Beckinsale, a B-movie action queen badly in need of a comedy and a script that doesn’t require, as this one does, that she strip down to her skivvies in the opening scene. It could be said that Whiteout is an honest attempt to set an old-fashioned whodunit in an exotic locale, but the mystery at the film’s core is so hopelessly dull that one begins to long for a third-act cameo by the Abominable Snowman. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (from Village Voice/LA Weekly)

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA

Credited as the first “action figure”, G.I. Joe came to life in 1964 as Hasbro’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie doll. There were actually four Joes—one for each branch of the armed forces—and in the imaginations of boys everywhere, they fought Nazis. Forty-odd years later, the Joes have evolved into an international band of soldiers seeking to bring down the evil Cobra Command. In the first of what’s likely to be a lucrative new film series, director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy series, Van Helsing) outfits actors Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans in “accelerator suits” that allow them to jump cars and busses in a single bound as they and their team attempt to retrieve a suitcase containing nano technology that a lunatic billionaire (Christopher Eccleston) plans to use for world domination. After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that in turn leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable. The script—by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett— is full of embarrassingly bad dialogue, but a recent midnight screening audience laughed benignly, as if to say that they hadn’t exactly been expecting profundity and wit from a summer season toy soldier flick. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: The Collector

THE COLLECTOR

In this gore-heavy, logic-free thriller, the talented Josh Stewart stars as Arkin, an ex-con turned handyman who breaks into the remote Victorian home of his latest clients, only to discover that the family isn’t on vacation, as planned, but are instead locked in the basement, where a masked serial killer (Juan Fernández) is slowly torturing them to death. Having written the last three Saw films, screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan are now certified experts in traps and torture, and so it is that the killer, for reasons that don’t make much sense, has rigged the house with sharp-edged booby traps, with a heavy emphasis on knives, nails and fishhooks, all of which Arkin must sidestep while trying to locate the family’s 8-year-old daughter. Making his directorial debut, Dunstan displays a knack for building suspense. And yet, weirdly, one senses, amidst all the requisite blood spray, a reluctance on the filmmaker’s part to linger lovingly over the pierced skins and protruding entrails of the killer’s various victims, a reticence that may prevent Dunstan from helming a Saw flick of his own someday but which earns him here an infinitesimal bit of respect. (Chuck Wilson)

review: Street Dreams (from LA Weekly)

STREET DREAMS

The love child of skateboarding champ and reality star Rob Dyrdek (of MTV’s Rob & Big), Street Dreams is set in Chicago, where Derek (Paul Rodriguez), a 17-year-old Mexican-American, dreams of making it to the pro skateboarding circuit. Derek’s parents don’t approve, but his four best buddies believe in him although Troy (played by Dyrdek), the group’s unofficial leader, is growing increasingly jealous. On the road to an amateur contest in Tampa, where Derek and Troy will face off, first-time director Chris Zamoscianyk nicely captures the boozy, profane silliness of teenage boys on the loose, while drawing believable performances from a cast comprised largely of non-actors  (including the charismatic Rodriquez, who’s known in pro skating circles as P-Rod). What regrettably eludes the director is the mad beauty of boys speeding pell-mell down city streets, as well as the potential poetry in their airborne spins off curbs and handrails. Street Dreams is enjoyable enough, but it’s a shame that Zamoscianyk and Dyrdek (who also co-wrote the script) fail to suggest that some boarders — millions of them, no doubt — skate not for sponsored glory, but for the solace they find in an activity that allows them to conquer, however fleetingly, this rock hard world. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: "Newcastle"

NEWCASTLE

Hunky young men and their tan-lined butts fill the screen in this slightly overlong but visually striking (and not just for the butts) surfing drama from first time writer-director Dan Castle. After Jesse (Lachlan Buchanan), the rising surf star of the titular New South Wales beach town, screws up his chances to compete in a big tournament, he and his younger teen brother, Fergus (Xavier Samuel), head to a remote beach with their buddies and a couple of girls. These young characters and their problems would fit right in on one of those CW Network teen soaps, but Castle and his cast aren’t afraid to explore tough topics, including the awkwardness of sex (frankly staged) and the open homosexuality of Fergus. While it takes Castle too long to get Jesse and his crew to their private beach, their day of surfing leads to a long sequence that culminates in a rather riveting series of mishaps (the precision editing is by Rodrigo Balart). Teen angst aside, the aquatic photography, above and below the waterline, by cinematographer Richard Michalak and an ace camera crew, is so exquisite that it made this viewer wish, momentarily at least, that he was still young enough to not be afraid of risking the big wave. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: THE NEW TWENTY

THE NEW TWENTY

In his sleek and accomplished debut film, writer-director Chris Mason Johnson tracks the lives and loves of a cadre of 29-year-old Manhattan college friends who betray themselves and each other by abusing the Big Three—sex, money, and drugs. At the center is Andrew (Ryan Locke), a lean, blond alpha-dog investment banker whose beautiful Asian fiancée (Nicole Bilderback) may be his match in the world of business. Among those circling this golden couple are Ben (Colin Fickes), who's gay, overweight, and addicted to online sex sites (there's a great moment when a trick comes over to Ben's apartment and the two men reject each other on sight), as well as the drug-addicted Felix (Thomas Sadoski) and commitment-phobic Tony (Andrew Wei Lin). We have been here many times before (see 1966's The Group), but Johnson and co-writer Ishmael Chawla have a light touch that keeps things from turning overly melodramatic. (No vases get thrown.) Supported by veteran New York actors such as Terry Serpico and Bill Sage, the strong ensemble of young actors create fully defined personas, thanks in large part to their director's willingness to linger after a dramatic peak and observe the characters in private, take-a-breath moments. He's got something, this guy, and although I'm surely overpraising The New Twenty, I'd hate to see a movie this ethnically and sexually diverse fade away on today's dead-end gay release circuit. After all, for better or worse, every generation deserves its own St. Elmo's Fire. (Chuck Wilson)

review: EVERLASTING MOMENTS (opening this week)

Despite its Hallmark title, Everlasting Moments is a deeply involving family drama that marks a late-career triumph for 77-year-old Swedish director Jan Troell, whose two-part 1971-72 epic, The Emigrants and The New Land, was internationally beloved. As with those masterpieces (which are thrilling beyond measure), Troell is once again delineating the complexities of marriage, in this case that of Maria (Maria Heiskanen) and Sigfrid Larsson (Mikael Persbrandt) who wed in 1907 and soon have a houseful of children. A dockworker, alcoholic, and womanizer, Sigfrid leaves the worries of familial responsibility to Maria, who one day goes to hock an old camera that she won in a contest and never used. Encouraged by an obviously smitten camera shop owner (Jesper Christensen), Maria begins taking and later developing her own photographs, a process that is forever miraculous to her. Despite an obvious “gift for seeing”, this mother and beleaguered wife often sets aside her camera, but gradually, over the course of ten years, she finds a way to balance her art with her life, a feat, Troell suggests, that is as miraculous as the capturing of image to film. Despite some schematic plotting, Everlasting Moments is the work of a master, one who draws from Heiskanen, Persbrandt and Christensen performances that are marvelously subtle, in which the truth of a given character lies not in what is being said aloud but in what is being held within — as with one of Maria’s portraits, it’s all in the eyes. (Chuck Wilson)