Bad Fever

Dustin Guy Defa | 2010 | 77 min | USA

The ratio of shitty comedians to good comedians must be 1000:1, easy. But where's their story? The King of Comedy doesn't cut it. It's a daydream. And besides, Eddie, the aspiring comedian of Bad Fever, makes Rupert Pupkin look like Chris Rock.

Eddie is a loner trying to make a go of stand-up comedy. He spends most of his time recording, reviewing, and revising tapes of rambling routines made on a dictation machine. He is prolific, sure, but there is not a punchline to be found among his hours and hours of tape.

Eddie also suffers from a crippling nervousness, and when strange drifter Irene is willing to exchange a few words with him, Eddie quickly falls for her. In an effort to please and get close to her, Eddie is soon participating in bizarre "erotica" videos in an abandoned school which Irene mails to "a guy in Iowa" for income.

Shot over a winter in Salt Lake City, the grey setting is suffocating. Low clouds and mumbling strangers make it seem as thought Eddie and Irene live in a world where air can't penetrate and sound can't carry. Even attempts at small talk are usually stifled by chainsaws, clinking glasses, or cell phones. Eddie speaks as though he is simply unpracticed in commucating, and it's simple to understand his difficulty in having a relationship with anyone else.

Kentucker Audley's characterization of Eddie can feel like a guile-less Crispin Glover character, but with pure anxiety overcoming any canned eccentricities. Fortunately, Eddie doesn't feel mocking or over the top. Anything less than a sensitive, relateable portrayal would kill the film, and Audley steps up to the task.

The term "mumblecore" has been applied so broadly and so thoughtlessly that it lacks usefulness as a real descriptor. Many films that have tripped under the banner require tighter designation so audiences can have some sense of what they're getting into. Bad Fever is one of them. How about "No Light, No Hope, No Reason to Exist-core"? While Bad Fever isn't the choice to make for a pick-me-up, it is an absorbing case study of sex work and the economies of loneliness. If you have the fortitude, I highly recommend it.

Bad Fever will be screening with the short film Pioneer in Toronto on August 31, 2011, as part of the Refocus Film series. The program starts at 8:30 PM at Double Double Land, 219 Augusta, in Kensington. And as with all Refocus screenings, admission is FREE!

The trailer is posted after the jump.

Thief

Michael Mann | 1981 | 122 min | US

Thieves should really try to stop at the second-to-last big score, because that last big score always turns out terribly. James Caan's Frank is a perfect example. He's a safecracker doing every job quietly, cleanly, and professionally. He makes nary a ripple until his fencing middle man gets tossed out a window and Frank goes looking for his money. He finds his money in the hands of a syndicate that promises him everything he would need to finally get out of the game and lead a comfortable life in a comfortable family. But trying to get an honest deal out of Megacorp when you're running a local mom and pop isn't so easy.

It is impossible not to root for Caan's thief. He is a talented craftsman (a fact proven through intense, calculated robbery set pieces) and a likeable man. After too many years spent in the care of the state, Frank is trying to carve out his piece of the ol' American dream. His modest goals make him the least corrupt and corruptible man in a world of thieves. His courtship with Tuesday Weld, in which he tries to quickly explain the above through collage art, is one of the finer courtships on film.

The eclectic and remarkable supporting cast includes Weld, Willie Nelson, Robert Prosky, The Belush, and a host of easily recognizable character talent like Tom Signorelli, Dennis Farina, and William Petersen. The movie is stacked with talent from the Michael Mann Players. And while I am not a big fan of Tangerine Dream, this soundtrack sets the perfect mood, often sounding more like discordant Eno than the sonic wallpaper of Risky Business.

Best of all, Thief is not troubled by the interior decorator pretensions that I find bog down some of Mann's other films. But don't worry Mann-purists: Frank runs a Cadillac dealership, offering plenty of shots of light arrays reflected in triple-gloss paint. Thief is set in that New York City which exists exclusively in film, with permanently rain slick streets and street lights that barely illuminate anything. De rigueur for neo-noir, but I'm not complaining. Thief is the complete package, aesthetically, with the emotion and story to back it up.

Though it is a great one, Thief is only a crime procedural superficially; ultimately it is a lesson in capital, labour, corruption, and exploitation. The inevitable shootout ending isn't neatly topped with a True Romance bow. The moment before credits instead marks the beginning of a Man with No Name story, or perhaps a revised vision of The Jungle.

The Babysitters

When's the last time we had a movie review on this blog, hey?

I discovered this little gem on Netflix a couple of nights ago, and was shocked at how great it is, because I'd never even heard of it before. On its surface, the film isn't much different from any other naughty babysitter premise. Shirley babysits for young-ish couple. Cute dad Michael (John Leguizamo) drives her home one night, and they end up making out. When it happens again and they end up having sex, Michael feels guilty and gives her $200 instead of whatever her usual paltry babysitting fee might have been.

At this point, The Babysitters veers off the usual formula slightly, as Shirley (played beautifully by the gangly, long-faced Katherine Waterston, who towers a full head above Leguizamo) embraces her entrepreneurial side and makes a business of it, enlisting her friends to "babysit" for Michael's friends. Madam Shirley operates her brothel through cell phone calls and notes left in her school locker, taking 20% from her girls and maintaining a neat calendar of appointments on her computer. Obviously, this idyllic situation cannot last, and like any good mafia movie, The Babysitters sets Shirley up for a fall.

By far the most refreshing thing about The Babysitters is the fact that the cast of teenage girls looks extremely plausibly teenage. Their mostly make-up free faces, awkwardly developing bodies, ordinary clothes (Shirley seems to live in not-so-tight jeans and borderline-frumpy sweaters) make them seem so real, and so much more like actual children than hot fantasy babes, and this gives the entire film a truly creepy tone.

These girls are, on the one hand, totally in charge of their own mini empire. On the other hand, they are in entirely over their heads and embroiled in a self-destructive and downright depressing misadventure. As Shirley struggles to keep control of the business she's built (battling other girls' rival startups, and the like), Michael starts to have misgivings, feeling more and more guilt about the monster he helped to created. The film treats Michael's love for Shirley as real, but thankfully doesn't give him much sympathy for it - after all, what kind of moral high ground can a father of two who's fucking his teenage babysitter really have, regarding her lucrative prostitution business?

A funny and at times really disturbing plot is elevated to 'awesome status' by brilliantly realistic casting and a pull-no-punches approach to treating everyone as equally bad, guilty, and deserving of some kind of punishment. No one gets away easy in The Babysitters, which is as it should be.

The Runaways

Floria Sigismondi | 2010 | 109 min | US

A rough, all-girl rock group fronted by a blonde lolita. Money in the bank, right? The band's life was short, but a year after forming they were headlining shows with Cheap Trick and Van Halen as opening acts. A year after that they were on a world tour and recording a television special in Japan. They released three studio albums before breaking up in early 1979. The Runaways were a cultural milestone, not that you would know it from watching The Runaways (aside from its few "big in Japan" moments).

The Runaways focuses primarily on the relationship between guitarist/ singer Joan Jett and singer Cherie Currie from their first meeting until Currie eventually drops out of music when drugs take too great a toll. Currie's family life also has some screen time, and Jett is shown kissing different girls. I was surprised that Dakota Fanning not only turns in the first decent performance of her young career, but she does a terrific job as Cherie Currie. Kristen Stewart is also good, and slightly more involved as Joan Jett than her usual scowl-acting allows. Unfortunately, the talented Alia Shawkat plays "Robin," the composite bassist, but is left completely line-less due to legal threats.

The Runaways best functions as a Music Delivery System and Nostalgia Generator, which it performs to perfection. When in clubs, jam spaces, and on stage, the movie is thoroughly captivating. I say that with the exception of ham-fisted scenes of the band "jamming" out a hit tune in a couple minutes of riffs and lyrical free styling that turns out magically. I always find such scenes painful to watch. They are the laziest of shortcuts and you don't have to have a gold record to feel how false they ring.

Floria Sigismondi has shown that she has an inspired flare for visual storytelling. We see moments of it in The Runaways, but Sigismondi seems bored when the story is about something other than drug use or performance. The result is a collection of memorable music videos strung together by vague scenes of a band imploding. So much energy is expended presenting the band's drug use it comes at the expense of portraying the recording of their albums, which gets one short scene, or the reception of those albums. Since the movie covers such a small window of time it is ridiculous for it to glaze over huge events in their career. That disinterest extends to the character summaries at the end of the film. While Currie, Jett, and producer Kim Fowley are all given the "where are they now" treatment, Lita Ford, Sandy West, and the myriad bassists are ignored. That is silly and inexcusable.

All this complaining may create the impression that I hated The Runaways. I did not. I enjoyed watching it, though it left much to be desired even while I was watching it. At its essence it is little more than an improved take on Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. That may or may not be enough for you. The Runaways is good, but I wanted more than good.

However, if the music isn't really what you're after anyway, the superior youth debauchery vehicle starring the real Cherie Currie is Adrian Lyne's Foxes. I cannot recommend that movie enough.

Harry Brown

Daniel Barber | 2009 | 97 mins | UK

I don't really like to open with glib "it's like X meets Y but with more zazz!" descriptions in my reviews, but truly, Harry Brown is like Gran Torino, only it's Michael Caine, and he blows people's heads off. The film's understated badass-ness is obvious from the opening credits, which simply proclaim in small white letters on a black screen: Michael Caine (pause) is (pause) Harry Brown. Yeah he is. And if you mess with him, he will murder you in the face.

Harry is a widower living in a house near a rather rough apartment complex in London. He sees the thuggish kids who hang out at the nearby underpass, and he avoids them by taking the long route. People in the neighbourhood are harassed, fed up and on edge. Harry can feel the bad vibes building up around him but it's not until an old friend of his tries to defend himself and ends up dead that he realises that he can't just sit by and watch. Coincidentally, Harry happened to have been in the Marines as a young man. Those skills might come in handy.

Soon, Harry is on a mission to clean up the 'hood, while a well meaning but ineffectual cop (Emily Mortimer) who started out investigating his friend's death starts to suspect him of the recent spate of gang-member deaths.

There's not much to this film other than Michael Caine's amazing acting chops and some clever action sequences, but that's totally good enough to make it 97 minutes of awesome. Caine is a much more three dimensional and frail vigilante than Eastwood's Kowalski. There's depth to his old-guy-badass, and it makes for some great action. Of particular note is an extended gun purchasing scene in which the tension is so drawn out that when it finally breaks, it's hard not to let out a cheer.

The Wild Hunt

Alexandre Franchi | 2009 | 96 mins | Canada

For the first hour, this strange drama about LARPing is kind of funny. Erik (Ricky Mabe) has just been left by his brooding, hot-and-gothy girlfriend Evelyn (Tiio Horn). Instead of moping in his apartment (which he shares with his senile dad), Erik decides to follow her and get some answers about the ambiguous I need space-ish dumping. As it turns out, Evelyn's gone off to participate in a weekend long live action role playing event, invited by Erik's kooky brother, Bjorn (Mark Antony Krupa, who also co-wrote the screenplay).

In the LARPiverse, Bjorn is a mighty Viking warrior, Evelyn is the Viking princess, and they are poised to fight some Celts. When Erik arrives at the game's site, he quickly learns that he will get nowhere near Evelyn without donning a costume and playing along. Erik soon discovers that the Viking princess has been kidnapped by the evil Shaman Murtagh (Trevor Hayes), who intends to "kill her" in order to begin the Wild Hunt - a rampage throughout the camp that will lead to the weekend's final, crucial battle.

Erik's meddling inevitably messes up the well laid plans of the LARPers and causes significant rifts in the make-believe world. As the wild hunt draws near, the game turns terrifyingly real for some of the players. It is here, in the final act of the film, that The Wild Hunt threatens to become really interesting - but doesn't quite get there. Men who take their fantasy life all too seriously are forced to confront the realities of their choices, the harsh juxtaposition between real and imagined allegiances. The tone drops and a harsh and sobering finale is marred only by the otherwise somewhat ludicrous and contrived plot twists.

The Wild Hunt is Alexandre Franchi's first feature, and while the script wasn't stellar, the director's sense of story and pacing is not bad. A film about LARPing could have been a lot funnier than this, but Franchi tries to provide laughs without mocking the players or the game. Unfortunately, when the film gets serious, Franchi & co start taking themselves a bit too seriously as well.

Chloe

Atom Egoyan | 2009 | 99 mins | USA / Canada / France

Atom Egoyan's latest foray into the murky world of sexual intrigue, real and imagined betrayal, desire, longing and jealousy is a great, slow-burn thriller, up to a point. That point comes toward the end, and while the final act doesn't completely ruin the film, it certainly does make it a bit of a mess.

Chloe is really Julianne Moore's film. Her performance and the complexity of her character far outshine everyone else, though Amanda Seyfried's titular Chloe is also pretty compelling.

Moore plays Catherine, a rather prim gynecologist who's married to charming and flirtatious university professor David (Liam Neeson). Their luxuriously comfortable lives are busy with lecture tours and nights at the opera, their teenage son Michael (Max Theriot) has started tuning them out, and when David fails to turn up for his own surprise birthday party due to a missed flight, Catherine begins to suspect he's been unfaithful.

Catherine is beautiful, poised, perfectly put together, but obviously struggling with the fact that her husband gets handsomer with every wrinkle, while she feels herself fading into the background, no longer an object of anyone's desire.

Catherine's "woman of a certain age" is perfectly juxtaposed with Chloe, the very young high-priced escort who works out of a hotel near Catherine's Yorkville office. When Catherine decides to hire Chloe to try to seduce her husband, in order to prove to herself that her suspicions about him have been right all along, it's easy to see that things are not going to work out well for anyone involved. As Chloe and Catherine's relationship becomes more tense (sexually and otherwise), Seyfried's character flits between giggly teenhood and seductive womanhood all with the unhinged undertone of Fatal Attraction-esque obsession. Chloe needs love, and she wants it from Catherine, whether the other woman is aware of this fact or not. Egoyan is a master of twisted desire and disturbed sexuality, and Chloe delivers on the red-hot intrigue. Unfortunately, in the final act, the film's tone of simmering suspense turns a bit absurdly over the top.

Major bonus points for Egoyan's insistence on revising the originally San Francisco based script in order to give Toronto a chance to play itself (for once). It's both delightful and a bit strange to see locations like Cafe Diplomatico, the Rivoli, and Queen Street's streetcars not masquerading as someplace else. That works, even if the plot doesn't always.

Franklyn

Gerald McMorrow | 2008 | 98 mins | UK / France

I'm a bit late posting about my Toronto After Dark experiences this year, but one of the films that really stuck with me was Franklyn, the debut feature of UK filmmaker Gerald McMorrow, a neat little puzzle of a movie that takes place partially in the real world, and partially in the dark corners of Meanwhile City, a strange place full of religious cults, fervent believers, and a masked vigilante (Ryan Phillippe).

In present-day London a young artist (Eva Green) feuds with the wealthy mother who just doesn’t understand her, working on an intimately confessional 'art project' that involves videotaped monthly suicide attempts, which seem to be connected to her difficult and tenuous family relationships. Meanwhile, a young man (Sam Reily) tries to cope with having been left at the altar - another in what is apparently a string o failed relationships that forces him to confront his lingering feelings for a girl from his childhood. While this is going on, the masked vigilante (the lone non-believer in Meanwhile City) is on the hunt for The Individual, the leader of a malevolent religious group. As he tries to evade capture by city and hospital officials, it becomes clear that his quest is connected to the disappearance and possible death of a little girl.

It takes a long time for the three stories to begin coming together, but the journey is great fun, and the performances are all pitch perfect. My only complaint Franklyn is that the futuristic Steampunk world of Meanwhile City is so slick, stylish, painstakingly detailed and gorgeously shot that it’s a shame more of the story doesn’t take place in it. By the midway point, the edges of the fantasy world begin to slowly crumble and we're pulled into reality as the pieces of the puzzle of intersecting relationships comes into focus. Watching McMorrow reconcile the two worlds of Franklyn is rewarding, and the film fits all the disparate pieces of its story together quite seamlessly. Still, I would have been happy to watch an entire film set in the fantasy world. Once you go to the trouble of creating a universe so complete (and so beautiful) it seems a shame to let it only comprise a third of your story.

Hunger

Steve McQueen | 2008 | 96 min | UK + Ireland

Steve McQueen won the Turner Prize for his photography at some ridiculous fucking age like twenty-seven and it most certainly shows in his feature film debut. Every frame looks like it could hang in a gallery. A good gallery, even. Yet Hunger still sticks as one of the most brutal films I have seen in a long time.

Bobby Sands was an inmate in Northern Ireland's notorious Maze Prison from 1977. This was a period in which IRA prisoners had been stripped of their recognition as political prisoners by the British government and the inmates were organizing themselves to carry out a series of increasingly disgusting protests. Hunger begins during the "dirty protest" in which prisoners refused to wash themselves and smeared their excrement of the walls of their cells. Following the fallout of that protest Bobby Sands assembled prisoners in a hunger strike. He began refusing food on March 1, 1981 and his health dramatically deteriorated until his death two months later.

This isn't a step by step accounting of events in that way that In The Name of the Father was, though. Events are told via visual cues, speeches, and archival sound clips of Margaret Thatcher denouncing the IRA. There is very little dialogue, aside from one outstanding scene, and the end result feels like a collage of emotions one travels through far more than it feels like a biopic.

The film's presentation is ruthless. It will likely cause you to involuntarily recoil a number of times. But for all of the brutality, Hunger is poetry of a kind you rarely get to see on screen. It is so slow and methodical that it earns comparisons to the Cremaster Cycle. That is a compliment, but also a warning. Hunger is a movie that one invests in, but it is as rewarding an experience as you are likely to find in theatres this year.

Wild Grass [Les herbes folles]

Alain Resnais | 2009 | 104 mins | France / Italy

When I was 16 years old, my father took me to the Ontario Cinematheque to watch Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad. I was so frustrated and infuriated by this (probably the first 'art film' I ever saw) that I left the theatre thinking I had disliked it. When, a month later, I hadn't stopped thinking about the film for a single day since that fateful screening, I realised the truth: L'année dernière à Marienbad had opened me up to the possibilities of cinema and changed the course of my life forever.

The opportunity to see Resnais' latest film (I admit that I was shocked to learn the 86 year old was still directing) on the big screen in Cannes was the opportunity of a lifetime, but I couldn't have prepared myself for how emotional the experience would be. The moment Resnais' walked into the 2,300 seat Lumière theatre, the fact that I was in the same room with him hit me pretty hard. I cried for ten minutes before the opening credits even rolled.

The film itself was quite charming - not a masterpiece, but it stands up to some of the more serious fare in competition this year. It starts with a woman (Sabine Azéma) who we are told by the surprisingly charming and funny narrator has unusual feet, which force her to shop for shoes in very specific places, which on this particular day resulted in her purse being stolen as she exited the shoe shop with a brand new pair of pumps.

Soon enough, the woman's wallet, if not the rest of her purse, is found by a certain Georges Palet (André Dussollier), a middle aged man who lives in a gorgeous house with his wife of 30 years, Suzanne (Anne Consigny). Georges examines the wallet in great detail, examining her appearance in one ID photo and then another, discovering that her name is Marguerite Muir, that she is a hobby pilot, and so forth.

Georges turns the wallet into the police but his preoccupation with Marguerite doesn't end. He begins writing her letters and leaving messages on the answering machine of her impossibly stylish apartment every day. His infatuation grows until she is forced to contact the police about his behaviour. Unfortunately, once Georges attentions are no longer focused on her, Marguerite realises that perhaps she misses him, and soon she is the one following Georges to the movies, calling his house repeatedly and missing work in order to visit his home.

Resnais artfully turns the narrative on its head, exploring both Georges' and Marguerite's loneliness, curiosity and longing for love. Wild Grass looks gorgeous, and long vividly coloured tracking shots of grass punctuate the surreal story. Events are inexplicable, characters' motivations mysterious, and the results of every action surprising beyond comprehension. Wild Grass was like a refreshing icy drink on a hot summer's day compared to the many bleak, violent and disturbing films that populated this year's competition. Plus, I have to say that it's incredibly refreshing that the central characters in this quirky love story are in their 50s and 60s. This fact might even make it more charming, sexy and romantic than it would be otherwise.

Antichrist

Lars von Trier | 2009 | 104 mins | Denmark / Germany / France / Sweden / Italy

Lars von Trier's amazingly bizarre and disturbing film was obviously designed to divide, outrage and offend audiences, and judging by the boos it received during the press screening in Cannes and the subsequent thunderous applause during the gala screening, he was pretty successful. No film came close to generating the amount of controversy or hype that Antichrist drummed up before more than a handful of people had even seen it.

The film stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as an unnamed married couple who in the gorgeously choreographed, slow motion, black and white prologue lose their only son in a tragic accident.

The body of the film is separated into four chapters - Grief, Chaos Reigns, Despair and The Three Beggars - as the couple slowly and painfully mourn their loss. Gainsbourg starts out doped up in a hospital, told by her doctor that her grief is 'atypical', until psychoanalyst Dafoe decides to take her out of the medical environment and treat her himself, through exposure therapy.

The couple retreat to 'Eden', a cabin in the woods where Gainsbourg had spent the previous summer with their son working on an academic thesis on Gynocide (witch hunts and similar abuses against women). In Eden, Gainsbourg becomes increasingly unhinged and sexually manic, desperately seeking the sexual release that calms her panic and grief symptoms, while Dafoe coldly rebuffs her or keeps her at bay with smarmy jokes about 'fucking the therapist'.

The film is heavy with invented symbolism. A triumvirate of animals (a fox, a black bird and a deer) follow the couple as they navigate the dark, ominous woods around them. A baby bird falls dead out of a nest, covered in ants. A deer in the midst of giving birth turns and runs into the woods, the fawn hanging out of it. A fox lies dead in the grass, eating its own entrails. A fictional constellation looms above. These images are powerful, beautifully composed and never adequately explained, so that they burrow into the mind and fester there. Gainsbourg's fear of the green grass and her sense that “nature causes people to do evil things to women” is set against beautifully composed images of bodies intertwined in the trees and rocks around them. All this is juxtaposed with Dafoe's infuriatingly detached attitude so effectively that her eventual retaliation against him (gruesome though it is) seems fairly well deserved.

Overwrought symbolic imagery lies side by side with raw, horrifying violence, and everything from the operatic opening to the obvious 'fuck you' of his closing dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky is obviously designed to frustrate and offend. Von Trier succeeds on several levels - he has created a profoundly disturbing film which pokes fun at pomposity of his highfalutin audience while simultaneously imbuing the film with enough substance that it can't be easily dismissed by them. In the end, the film's harshest critics will be the ones that turn it into the most talked about and significant cinematic event of the year.

Antichrist isn't exactly an enjoyable film to watch (rumours about the graphic nature of the film's violent scenes are not exaggerated) but it's one that I've had a hard time not thinking about every day since I saw it. My only real beef with the film is that it totally lacks any emotional core. What made von Trier's earlier efforts about abused women (Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark) so effective was the heart wrenching way he was able to make the audience feel the tragedy of his characters. Antichrist is so cold and calculated that by the end one hardly cares about what fate will befall either character. The film is good, but it's all brain and no heart.

The Misfortunates [De helaasheid der dingen]

Felix Van Groeningen | 2009 | 108 mins | Belgium

This utterly charming Belgian (and Flemish) entry in this year's Directors' Fortnight is among the best things I saw in Cannes. Adapted from a very successful autobiographical novel by Dimitri Verhulst,
the film follows Gunther Strobbe, a 13 year old boy in the late '70s / early '80s who lives in his grandmother's ramshackle house in a small town in Belgium with his alcoholic father (a postman with more bars on his route than any of his colleagues) and three alcoholic uncles. It's undeniable that life with the Strobbe clan is not merely a bit dysfunctional but truly damaging for the young boy, and yet the family is so full of genuine love that it's hard to fully condemn them.

Gunther tells the story from an adult perspective, and it's left quite beautifully ambiguous until the end whether he managed to transcend or escape his family heritage. Real life is more complex than just "getting out of the old neighbourhood", and The Misfortunates handles these realities with heart and humour.

The Strobbe men mean well, sort of. They just can't help fucking everything up, all the time. The film is full of raw, dirty, hilarious vignettes (such as the naked bicycle race through town, pictured above), vulgar humour, pathos and a bit of cynicism. The Strobbes enter drinking contests, piss themselves and end up in hospital, pick up women, break furniture, and invade a neighbour's house in order to watch their beloved Roy Orbison on television (theirs has been repossessed).

It might have been the tear-jerker hit of the year if Ken Loach had been given the script, but in the hands of Felix Van Groeningen, this film has the raw, dirty, Flemish edge that made 2007's Ex Drummer so memorable. The comparison with Ex Drummer is only one of a vaguely common "Flemish vibe", mind you. The Misfortunates is nowhere near as dark. Any film that features a smiling 12 year old girl drunk in a bar singing the 'pussy song' clearly has to be far more heartwarming than bleak.

The Soloist

Joe Wright | 2009 | 109 mins | USA

The Soloist is a mawkish, based on a true story, Oscar-baiting drama that stars Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayres, a Julliard educated musical genius who may be schizophrenic and lives on the streets of LA playing a two-stringed violin. He mumbles endlessly and is kind of endearing in the end, but he's no Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Robert Downey Jr. is Steve Lopez, the LA Times reporter who "discovers" the homeless virtuoso and decides to write a column about him, ultimately feeling compelled to get more deeply involved in Ayres' life in a well meaning but simplistic attempt to 'help' or 'fix' him. The odd couple's tentative bond becomes a real friendship with alternately sad and hilarious results.

Oh yeah, Catherine Keener also plays Lopez's ex-wife and editor and is mostly there to remind him to take responsibility for the shit he stirs up, which I guess he didn't do during their marriage?

The film is an awkward blend of styles, and it's five parts expository flashback to one part investigative journalism and hard-hitting issue-based drama (the issues are homelessness and mental health, fyi), which is an unfortunate imbalance, and one I hope the book it's based on doesn't suffer from, because the story is actually pretty interesting, it's just delivered in an overwrought, made-for-TV way. Plus, real life doesn't provide a lot of conveniently movie-ready endings, so the finale feels forced.

By far the most odd, surprising and perhaps awesome (I haven't decided yet) thing about the film is the lengthy montage of flashing coloured lights that we're subjected to during a musical recital. It's one of several impressionistic sequences (birds in flight, LA landscapes, etc) that are obviously intended to bring us into the mindset of the disturbed genius. It all feels out of place in the otherwise traditional narrative, but the coloured lights were so bizarre and Stan Brakhage-esque that I chuckled under my breath with glee instead of rolling my eyes.

Bonus fact: Joe Wright was apparently hell-bent on dousing Robert Downey Jr. in urine during this shoot. Look out for recurring pee gags!

Hounddog

Deborah Kampmeier | 2007 | 102 min | US

Hounddog takes place in the South during a blazing hot summer. It's the late fifties, Elvis Presley is king, and no one wears shoes. Dakota Fanning stars as Lewellen, a precocious girl who finds comfort and joy in Presley's music despite a deeply troubled home life. When she encounters even greater trauma it is Presley's music that helps her to recover.

If you have heard about this movie at all you've heard about its rape scene, and that is one of the film's major problems. Hounddog has been known for over a year as "the Dakota Fanning rape movie." This makes it impossible to watch without every moment being coloured by that knowledge. Any tension or surprise is erased while you look at every male character as a possible rapist and every scene as a possible rape scene. When the eventual rapist does appear on screen he telegraphs his intentions by doing everything short of licking his lips while wearing a "Registered Sex Offender" t-shirt.

As for the much discussed rape scene, though it does not come off as overly graphic, it certainly does come off as unnecessary. Director Deborah Kampmeier had to have known she would court serious controversy with the scene, and I expect that is the only reason why it was included. Without the controversy I can't imagine anyone finding a reason to speak about this film.

Not to put too fine a point on it, every aspect of the movie is obvious and stupid. Absolutely laughable dialogue, terrible plot "twists," and a generous helping of magical black men helping her to re-love Elvis. I will acknowledge that my numbers may be slightly off, but I counted eight separate scenes in which Fanning sings "Hounddog," plus an additional two or three other Elvis numbers. We get it: she loooooooves Elvis. It sure would be tragic is she encountered some Elvis-related despair, hey? Hounddog aims for the Southern Gothic feel that David Gordon Green perfected in Undertow, but it lands firmly in the stunted territory of high school plays instead.

Adrift in Tokyo

Satoshi Miki | 2007 | 101 mins | Japan

Takemura (Jô Odagiri) is a wild-haired slacker, drifting aimlessly through life, without plans, ambitions, and seemingly without even family or friends. He also owes 800,000 yen (that's about 10 grand Canadian, for the local readers), an unfortunate fact that brings a burly debt collector named Fukuhara (Tomokazu Miura) to his door. The debt collector wrestles him to the ground, stuffs a sock into his mouth and gives him a three day deadline.

Things look pretty bleak for Takemura until the debt collector returns two days later with an unusual proposition. All the young man has to do is take a walk with him, and he'll pay him enough money to erase the debt. The catch is, he's got to walk through Tokyo wherever and for as long as Fukuhara demands. Takemura is understandably leery, but really, even a too-good-to-be-true proposition is better than the unpleasant alternative (uh, more socks in the face?).

The rest of the story unfolds as a subtle love letter to Tokyo as the two men embark upon their long and fateful walk. Slowly, Fukuhara's motivations for the journey are revealed as the two men visit places in the city that hold memories and meanings for him. The unusual adventure slowly transforms the adversaries into friends as they literally drift through the busy city streets.

By placing his two quirky and compelling leads into unusual circumstances peppered with hilariously cliché movie moments (riding a rollercoaster like a teenage couple on a date, for example) and goofy digressions (a psychedelic jam on the sidewalk), Satoshi Miki gives Takemura and Fukuhara the breathing room they need to bloom as characters and deliver the emotional payload the film promises.

Sixteen

Lawrence Dobkin | 1973 | 96 mins | USA

When I stumbled upon the poster and trailer for this film, I truly thought it would be a hilarious wild ride through the backwoods, featuring a Clampett-esque family's attempt to keep their sexy adolescent daughter in check as she comes to terms with her budding sexuality. I expected something between a trashy sex romp and a low budget coming of age drama. In reality, the short shorts and lush landscape are just a backdrop for a much stranger morality tale in which sex is secondary [and intrinsically linked] to a heavy-handed lesson about the dangerous influence of money.

"The modern world" is infringing on the Irtley family's rural southern idyll in the form of a highway that is slated to cross their land. The family resigns itself to this grim new reality and is paid handsomely by the developers, somewhere in the neighbourhood of $3,000. Ma Irtley (Mercedes McCambridge, who you might know as Linda Blair's demon voice in The Exorcist) understands immediately that this astronomically high sum will have a corrosive effect and bring nothing but trouble for the family. She tries to stem the tide of misfortune by burying the money in the yard, but alas, when innocence is taken away, it can never be regained again.

The Irtley family consists of Ma, Pa and three kids - a young boy and two teens - Simone Griffeth as the titular sixteen-year-old Naomi and John Lozier (a local who never acted before or after this film) as her older brother, Bruvver. They live a life of such extreme naiveté that it borders on the disturbing. Their simple, childlike relationship is set up as potentially incestuous during a skinny dipping scene early on in the film, but both seem so wide eyed that it's a bit like watching two five-year-olds unselfconsciously play naked in newfound teenage bodies. In other words: creepy.

Even though they're more than a little wary of the corruption money will bring, Ma and Pa decide to let loose a bit by taking the entire family to the State Fair, where their teenage children come face to face with the greed and opportunism of the 'real world' - Naomi falling prey to a sleazy stunt motorcyclist while Bruvver is snared in the golddigging web of a trashy exotic dancer. The night of sin and seduction threatens to tear the family apart, naturally, and they're forced to come to terms with the ways in which they've been irrevocably changed - not just by their own recent wealth, but by rapidly encroaching modernity.

Though I didn't recognize her at all in the film, I discovered later that Simone Griffeth went on to play navigator Annie Smith in Death Race 2000 just two years later. It's unfortunate that she went on to toil in television obscurity for years after such an auspicious start.

High-Ballin'

Peter Carter | 1978 | 97 mins | Canada / USA

I feel like I've been on a film review hiatus for a long time - it's not that I haven't been watching movies, it's just that I haven't been watching any that I really wanted to put up on the site. I mean, does anyone care to read yet another missive about Dr. Manhattan's dong?

I broke out of my rut last night when I popped in High-Ballin', a US-Canadian co-production from the late '70s about a group of big-rig highjackers terrorizing the highways of what looks like southern Ontario, and the plucky pair of truckers who try to put an end to their reign of terror.

Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed play Rane and Duke, the American imports in a cast otherwise comprised of mostly Canadian faces, including Helen Shaver as Fonda's tough-chick love interest (her name is Pickup, how adorable), Videodrome's Les Carlson, and Chris Wiggins, among many others. The trucker lingo is near-incomprehensible at times but it's fun to watch Shaver and Fonda flirt via CB radio nonetheless.

Filmed somewhere between the desolate landscapes of Milton and the snowy tundra of Toronto's waterfront, High-Ballin' starts out as a buddy movie, reuniting family man Duke with his roaming old pal Rane, a former trucker who's given up the life for a motorcycle and the open road. By the final third however, it becomes a sort of Canadian Convoy (which also came out in '78) with Fonda and Shaver in the Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw roles, uniting the truckers against a corrupt threat to their independence and way of life (though Shaver is undeniably tougher than McGraw). Some terrific chase sequences and highway shootouts ensue.

Incidentally, director Peter Carter was also responsible for the Canadian classic The Rowdyman, which was written by and stars a young Gordon Pinsent. A beautiful example of what was quite a popular genre in '60s-70s English Canadian cinema: the story of an outsider from the east coast trying to come to terms with his environment.

Foxes

Adrian Lyne | 1980 | 106 min | US

Adrian Lyne's second feature is ostensibly one more coming of age story about four high school girls in the San Fernando Valley. But even the film's ad copy ("a rock'n'roll-filled trip through the fast lane of teenage life!") fails to adequately convey how quickly this movie flies of the rails. Each of the girls enjoys a share of domestic strain, romantic struggle, and some measure of substance abuse, and Lyne dives straight into it. Much of the story revolves around three friends attempting to save the marginally most tragic of the gang, fifteen-year-old Annie, but none of them are in much of a position to offer life coaching or an escape route. A happy ending never seems like it is very close or even particularly happy. The closing moments of Foxes are a perversion of a fairy tale ending rather than the fantasy we are often treated to.

Not that Foxes isn't ultimately a fun guilty pleasure. I find Lyne is at his best when he is slowly sucking me into discomfort, and Foxes is splendid at causing my brow to furrow. Opening with slow pan close-ups of sleeping teenage bodies, thirteen-year-old Laura Dern (in her credited debut) waxing poetic about diaphragms, and Randy Quaid setting the screen on fire as an alluring, rock album designing pedophile. This movie has a little bit of something to render everyone queasy. It's like a Winston Smith collage of terrible high school decisions.

None of this is by accident, of course. Foxes goes out of its way to be seedy and look dingy, often seeming to exist in an alternate California absent of artificial interior lighting.

Every member of the young cast does a terrific job. Even the smaller contributions are sharp, including those from a young Scott Baio, as well as Dern and Quaid, already mentioned. Jodie Foster is her creepy best leading the cast in her patented "stoic forty-year-old in a little girl's body" routine. Foster earns the spotlight, but most of the biggest whatthefucks come from Cherie Currie, the teenage lead singer of girl-group The Runaways, who plays Annie, the BURNED OUT fifteen-year-old runaway. That girl knows how to play "disaster whore" with shudder-inducing definition.

So, final verdict: fun, fucked, exploitive. Thus, big recommendation.

White Lightnin'

Dominic Murphy | 2008 | 84 mins | UK

White Lightnin' might be the very best film at Sundance this year. Based loosely on the story of Jesco "the Dancing Outlaw" White, the film uses the Appalachian step dancer's real life as a jumping off point to tell a surreal and lurid story of vengeance, heartbreak and murder.

The real Jesco White (played here by astonishing relative-newcomer Edward Hogg) has been the subject of two documentaries that followed his attempts to follow in his father's famous mountain dancin' footsteps, while battling his own depression, drug addiction and the brutal poverty that affects so much of rural Appalachia.

In White Lightnin', we meet Jesco when he's just a little boy, so wild that his daddy has to handcuff him to a cot in a shack on their rundown property to keep him from stealing lighter fluid from the general store in order to get high. In and out of reform schools and insane asylums for most of his youth, Jesco was headed down a dangerous and tragic path when his father D-Ray decided to teach him the art of mountain dancing, a frenzied tap style that's accompanied by wild banjo music.

When his father is murdered by a pair of drunken rednecks, young Jesco puts on his shoes and taps around the countryside, getting drunk, getting into bar fights and ultimately falling in love with a woman (Carrie Fisher) who he describes as being "twice his age and half his size". He finds the married stay at home mom so beautiful he nicknames her 'Cilla, after Pricilla Presley, the most beautiful woman in the world, naturally.

'Cilla leaves her family to be with Jesco, but of course his tortured heart can't reconcile itself with the fact that his daddy's killers are still out there somewhere roaming free, so after a brief attempt at settling down to family life, his demons begin to resurface, threatening to destroy his entire world. Jesco goes to blood curdling lengths to attain the revenge and redemption he needs to set himself free of the devils that run through his blood.

Be warned: mountain dancing and glue huffin' is all fun and games, but I cannot overstate how deeply disturbing and dark this film becomes in the final act. Shit gets seriously fucked up. An incredibly unsettling journey into the heart of darkness from a first time feature director. I look forward to much good work in the future from these young Brits.

Bonus: a soundtrack full of Hasil Adkins songs. Nothing could compliment this story better.

Spread

David Mackenzie | 2009 | 97 mins | USA

This lame duck of a comedy/drama is currently premiering at Sundance, and will likely be coming to theatres in the very near future. Let me save you $12. It's unfunny, and you will grow to hate every single character in it well before the halfway mark. Ashton Kutcher plays Nicki, a cocky hustler who cons rich women of a certain age into buying him expensive gifts and letting him stay with them until he moves on to a better conquest. A creepily thin Anne Heche plays Samantha, his latest mark on the merry path to wealth and success as a homeless but handsome gigolo.

Spread has already drawn comparisons to films like Shampoo (which had twice the humour) and American Gigolo (which had twice the dramatic tension) but the sad fact is that while Kutcher has the good looks, he's got nowhere near the charisma of a young Warren Beatty or even a young Richard Gere. The latter two succeed because they're likable and their seduction act is convincing enough that you think (even if only for a split second) "yeah, I'd fall for him". Kutcher is comparatively ludicrous in the role of a scheming charmer - nothing about his smarmy goofball demeanour makes it plausible that anyone would fall for his act for more than a single night.

I guess idiots like Samantha exist in the world, but letting a one night stand move in with you is such a stupid thing to do that it's very difficult to feel any sympathy for her when it becomes apparent that Nicki is just using her for her swanky digs.

Predictably, while he's living off Samantha, Nicki ends up falling in love with a pretty and seemingly innocent waitress, Heather (Margarita Levieva), only to discover that she's the same kind of scam artist as he is. The two begin a painful dance around each other that culminates in a stupid reckoning where everyone's supposed to come to terms with who and what they really are, and choose between love and money, and blah, blah, blah.

It's basically impossible to care about anyone in this film. Both Nicki and Heather are unlikable jerks and Samantha is a desperate, simpering ninny. What might have been a good sexually charged tale about two grifters that pits ambition and vanity against human decency and love is instead a lukewarm drama in which the sex isn't even hot. The stylish, hip, sun-drenched backdrop of a hustler's L.A. is actually the only good thing about Spread. The producers should have kept the cinematographer and fired everyone else!

If you're an Ashton Kutcher completist, I guess you should go see this. But while you're at the theatre, seriously question whether you even actually like movies.