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!

TSADT Podcast Episode 02

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More news and reviews from the world of film brought to you by three know-it-all jerks. This episode we discuss Crank: High Voltage, the trailer for Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, and American Apparel versus Woody Allen. We are still in our first steps, so please leave a comment or email us. . . but be gentle. And yes, I am aware I called Statham's character "Chris Chelios" instead of "Chev Chelios," so you can keep it to yourself, Mister Smarty Alex.

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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.

TSADT Podcast Episode 01

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It's our first shot at this, so please bear with our stuttering, mistakes, and many technical shortcomings. This episode we discuss Dario Argento's Deep Red, the trailer for Sasha Baron Cohen's Bruno, and the curious controversy surrounding the leaked workprint of Wolverine. Please send us your feedback!

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Fast & Furious

Justin Lin | 2009 | 107 mins | USA

I am a totally unapologetic Vin Diesel completist, and I have to admit even I was fairly skeptical about the potential merits of the fourth film in the Fast/Furious franchise. What kind of desperation drives a studio to even consider a full original cast bring-back eight years after the fact, anyway? Perhaps my skepticism had more to do with the fact that I'm not all that interested in cars, and found the original Fast and the Furious to be the dullest of Vin Diesel's films. I even preferred The Pacifier. Y'know?

The film starts predictably enough, with a highway gas tanker hijacking by Dom (Diesel) and his crew. The story then quickly catches us up on the characters' lives - Dom and Letty (Michelle Rodrigues) are still runnin' from the law, O'Connor (Paul Walker) is still a bad boy FBI agent, and Dom's sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) is still mad at O'Connor for making her fall in love with him and tearing her family apart. The rest of the plot doesn't really matter. You're watching for Vin's silky voice and to imagine yourself curling up in his big arms in the front seat of a souped up Torino, right?

The screenwriters were obviously advised of the fact that the anticipated audience weren't gonna be too clever, so they take care to set up and explain every plot point slowly and methodically, lest you lose your way in the story's clever twists and turns. A couple of creative chase sequences in some underground tunnels stand out. Otherwise Fast & Furious is dumb, loud and fun, but not the extravaganza of high-octane awesomeness that I was hoping for from Vin's return to the series. If he'd asked me, I would have recommended he pass on this script in favour of xXx: Trinity*, but whatever.

Two facts that I learned from a quiz found in a copy of "Famous" magazine in the theatre lobby infinitely increased my enjoyment of the film. I'll share them with you. No spoilers, I promise:

1. Paul Walker starts each day with three hours of MMA training. This fact makes the one unexpected arm-bar he delivers in Fast & Furious all the more triumphant and hilarious.

2. Vin Diesel once wrote an introduction to a book about the history of Dungeons and Dragons. When you think about him as a nerd deep down inside, every line he delivers about 'engine grease' and 'throttle' is a genuine delight.

*xXx: Trinity is not a real thing, but wouldn't it be awesome if it was?

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.

Punisher: Warzone

Lexi Alexander | 2008 | 103 min | US

The latest incarnation of the Punisher franchise is absolutely shocking in the frequency and severity of its headsploding violence. From the opening scene on we are treated to blood spraying fountain-like from necks, stumps, et cetera. This is either the best or worst feature of this movie depending on how awesome you are.

And by "best or worst feature" I really mean the only feature. The story is kept paper thin due to it already having been hashed out in two prior films and countless comics. Even for those who missed all of those, things are easy enough to understand: Frank "Punisher" Castle's family was killed by bad men, so now he kills bad men. Punisher: Warzone is thankfully thin on exposition. The only background we are handed in Warzone comes by way of a little clumsy dialogue and a couple brief scenes were the Punisher gets all reflective and misty. In lieu of voice-overs about missing his family, we get right into watching the Punisher kick a chair leg into a dude's eye within the first five minutes of screen time (and about twenty kills in).

The heavy concentration on action scenes was a wise decision, but there is a strange pacing about them. The choreography often goes from frenetic to glacial within the same scene and several battles involve the villians waiting patiently and silently for the Punisher to go about his business rather than, you know, freaking out or shooting his face off. Obviously its silly to expect realism in a film like this, though it is still strange to see the director hop back and forth between gritty, violent drama and comic hero zaniness. Punisher has long been the most grounded of pop comics, so it is odd to see this film approach a Dick Tracy-level of stylization, complete with the same primary colour scheme.

Still, in embracing its trashy essence and doing away with the previous films' origin-heavy veneer of heroism, Punisher: Warzone is easily the best of the three Punisher films. Ray Stevenson deserves a lot of the credit for keeping his teeth clenched and growl-method acting the shit out of this one. No one would accuse Warzone of being a great film, but it is fun as hell and, considering the title's history, is probably better than anyone could have hoped for, let alone expected. But again, be warned: the gore in this movie is has more in common with extreme horror than any action movie outside of Rambo. If that's not for you, stay away.

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.

Synedoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman | 2008 | 124 min | US

If you've been waiting for a longer, shittier version of eXistenZ, you're in luck!

The Challenge

John Frankenheimer | 1982 | 110 min | USA/Japan

Rick (Scott Glenn) is a down and out American boxer who makes his living as a sparring partner/human punching bag. He’s approached one day by Toshio, a Japanese man in a wheelchair and his sister, Akiko, to help them smuggle a very important sword into Japan for two thousand dollars. Having just been fired from his punching bag position for losing his temper and punching back a little too hard, he foolishly agrees to smuggle the sword.

Of course as soon as Rick lands in Japan and leaves the airport with his golf bag (where the sword is concealed amongst golf clubs), he’s thrown into a van and asked to hand over the bag. He soon finds out he’s been used as a decoy, and becomes entangled in an old family feud between two brothers, over a pair of samurai swords that have been passed on from generation to generation for centuries, called ‘The Equals’ (which was the original title of the script).

Toshio and Akiko are the son and daughter of Toru (played by the legendary, Toshiro Mifune, in one of his last roles), the elder of the two brothers, who continues to live according to ancient Japanese tradition. His brother, Yoshida, years ago stole one of the swords during the traditional passing down ceremony, and has become westernized; building a huge multinational company that has its hands in just about every thing.

After going to Toru to get the money he’s owed and suffering an embarrassing beating at the hands of one of the house’s young fighters, Rick’s offered thirteen thousand dollars by Yoshida’s men to go back and beg to be taken in as a student. The plan being that when the day comes when they trust him enough to leave him alone with the sword, he’ll steal it. He agrees, but slowly comes to respect Toru and the tradition he represents.

The Challenge is a strange mix of effective drama, some light comedy, and brutal violence that would be at home in a less respectable picture. It’s all balanced well though in the script, which was co-written by John Sayles. To add another layer to the film’s “HUH?” factor; its martial arts supervisor was a young Steven Seagal (credited as Steve Seagal).

Things get a little silly at the end during the big final showdown but it’s an incredibly fun kind of silly that doesn’t feel too out of place, and delivers enough that it’s still seems strange that Frankenheimer considers The Challenge one of his worst films. I understand that Scott Glenn using a stapler on a guy’s face in the middle of a sword fight isn’t the smoothest scene ever put to film, but it’s still pretty awesome.

This one isn’t on DVD for some reason, but it’s more than worth the effort to find a copy.

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.

The Killing Room

Jonathan Liebesman | 2009 | 90 mins | USA

Four random volunteers turn up at some kind of medical facility for what they believe is a paid research study. Within moments of their introduction to the coolly European sounding Dr. Phillips (Peter Stormare), one of them has been shot dead and left to bleed out in the room with them. The remaining three terrified civilians are locked in while military psychologist Ms. Reilly (Chloë Sevigny) watches from an observation chamber, emotionally conflicted about the classified experiment she is witnessing.

As it turns out, Dr. Phillips is trying to recruit Ms. Reilly to join his top secret team, to work on a macabre program that was thought to have been terminated over two decades before. Sevigny is ok in the role but she takes the "ambitious and unemotional" side of her character so seriously that her face may as well be made of wood for most of the film. Even as her veneer cracks (inevitably, as the experiment becomes more and more horrific to witness) she remains just a smidge too stoic.

Timothy Hutton and Nick Cannon (a savvy livin'-on-the-fringes skeptic and a scared kid, respectively) both really shine in their roles as pawns in the gruesome experiment. They (alongside Shea Whigham and Clea DuVall) are the four volunteers who quickly discover that they're unwilling participants in a deadly nightmare in which they are presented with a series of questions they they must answer in a finite period of time, knowing that one of them will be "eliminated" at the end of each round.

The film's basic premise is based on a real top-secret government psychological experiment called MK-ULTRA, which conducted mind control experiments on unsuspecting members of the public from the 1950s through the '70s. The CIA officially claims that the project has been abandoned for decades, and The Killing Room starts out as an imaginative exploration of what MK-ULTRA might look like in the present day.

The sinister cat and mouse game being played by the demented Dr. Phillips starts out intriguing as the captives become increasingly demented in their attempts to figure out what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, toward the end of the film, the once-promising story deteriorates into a reveal that is so implausible as to make the whole film seem like a big, silly waste of time.

The ending was obviously intended to be bone-chilling, but comes off as ill-conceived instead. Good setup, disappointing finish.