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Review: As Above, So Below (Village Voice, LA Weekly)

 

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

As Above, So Below is sometimes creepy but mostly silly, which is too bad because the film's cramped subterranean setting is inherently unnerving. Fearless, beautiful Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is an English archaeologist desperate to fulfill her late father's dream of finding an ancient stone which is said to grant eternal life. Convinced that the stone rests in the vast catacombs that lie beneath Paris, Scarlett persuades her brainiac former beau (Ben Feldman) to help her, along with a wily young guide (François Civil) and his two friends, who don't do much except up the film's body count.

Writer-director John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine) and his brother, co-writer Drew Dowdle, are old-school — they still believe in the found-footage genre. Scarlett and company, which includes Benji the documentarian (Edwin Hodge), have cameras clipped to their headlamps, and when they twist and turn in panic -- which is often — the action becomes an indecipherable blur. The talented cast works wonders with material that's a confusing hybrid of The Descent and The DaVinci Code (hieroglyphs abound). As Above, So Below features a gate to Hell and darting demons, but its most memorably weird moment is a sound effect younger viewers may barely recognize -- the long, persistent ring of a rotary phone. (Chuck Wilson

OVE, SO BELOW

 

Review: THE PRINCE (from Village Voice/LA Weekly)

THE PRINCE

The action thriller The Prince is so bad that the most noteworthy thing about it is that the opening credits list 19 executive producers. Nineteen! Jason Patric stars as Paul, a hit man–turned–auto mechanic searching for his daughter, Beth (Gia Mantegna), who has disappeared from college. Paul turns to his daughter's flirty classmate (Jessica Lowndes), who reports that the heroin-addicted Beth went to New Orleans with her drug-lord boyfriend (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson), who in turn is under the thumb of a crime boss known as Omar (cameo slut Bruce Willis), who just happens to hate Paul for (accidentally) killing his wife and daughter back in the day.

Despite a cast that includes John Cusack as Paul's pal, and the charismatic Korean pop star Jung Ji-hoon as Omar's chief henchman, screenwriters Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore fail to conjure a single witty line. Nor is there any finesse to be found in director Brian A. Miller's inept staging of car chases and shoot-outs. If filmmakers were put on trial for hackery, a good prosecutor might ask director Miller why The Prince contains no discernible prince but does feature a closing-credit shout-out to "Prince Yoohanhwesa." That name stumped Google, but who knows? Maybe he's the generous uncle to those 19 executive producers. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: Are You Here (from Village Voice/LA Weekly)

ARE YOU HERE

Writer-director Matthew Weiner, creator of the magnificent Mad Men, has made a feature film — theoretically a comedy — that's just shy of terrible. Owen Wilson is Steve Dallas, a boozy Maryland TV weatherman who has no discernible life, and is proud of it. His lifelong friend, Ben (Zach Galifianakis), is a shut-in, and given to episodes of mania. Ben's father dies and leaves his vast Pennsylvania farm and fortune to his son, much to the dismay of his shrill, Daddy-loyal sister (Amy Poehler). Steve, who has prostitutes on speed dial, begins wooing Angela (Laura Ramsey), the free-spirited young wife of the dead father.

When she tells Steve that "I try to avoid things that keep me from feeling," you know that by movie's end, Steve is going to be feeling things like crazy. He'll feel all right, but he'll still be a shallow, misogynistic jerk, no matter how often Wilson tilts his head like a naughty puppy. (It's disturbing how persistently Weiner finds ways for women to bare their breasts to Steve.) Are You Here lurches awkwardly between the farm and the TV studio, with Weiner clearly failing to achieve the self-knowledge that Mad Men's Don Draper was born with: He's not a funny guy. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: Jersey Shore Massacre (from Village Voice/LA Weekly)

JERSEY SHORE MASSACRE

The exceedingly gruesome Jersey Shore Massacre is likely to amuse but then repulse those who once relished the whiny twang of the young Italian housemates on MTV's hit show Jersey Shore. Bypassing the beach altogether, writer-director Paul Tarnopol sends six bodacious Jersey girls on vacation to a remote (but swanky) house near the fabled Pine Barrens. There's a deformed killer in them thar woods, but since he doesn't truly wreak havoc until the film's final third, viewers have a full hour to decide who's more dim-witted — the six women, or the muscled hunks they bring home from a bar. Tarnopol opens nearly every scene with a shot of a bikini-clad woman adjusting her cleavage, but in the contest for who's dumber, the over-tanned guys win hands down. The send-up is sometimes funny but mostly boring (like the show itself). When the killer finally arrives, rusty tools in hand, the director makes an awkward shift into Friday the 13th mode. Even Jersey Shore haters aren't likely to grin when the killer takes a hatchet to one woman's breasts or uses an electric sander to de-tattoo one of the hunks. Watching the hopelessly vapid get taken out, one by one, has never been more depressing. (Chuck Wilson)

 

Great Graphs: Joan Didion on Los Angeles in the summer of Manson

“We put “Lay Lady Lay” on the record player, and “Suzanne.” We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos. There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the evening the smell of jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows. I made bouillabaisse for people who did not eat meat. I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going on around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation was the idea of “sin”—this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and vertical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

Joan Didion, “The White Album”