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SXSW Review: HONEYMOON

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“Honeymoon”
Directed by Leigh Janiak
Starring Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway, Ben Huber, Hanna Brown
Thriller, Horror, Sci-Fi
87 Mins
United States

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In 1954, Colliers Magazine published Jack Finney‘s sci-fi horror serial The Body Snatchers. Since then, this fire starter novella has led to a handful of direct film adaptations (the latest being Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s 2007 The Invasion starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman) and dozens of spinoffs (John Carpenter‘s The Thing for instance.) But even more importantly, Finney’s creation all but gave birth to a whole subsection of genre: the infamous body invasion flick. In the years since, many filmmakers have employed this humble little niche market as an elastic stage to claim veritable scares by peddling harrowing practical visual effects and unsettling character shifts (in the best of cases) or CG sight gags and the banal formula of a group’s numbers mysteriously thinning (in the worst of cases). Director and co-writer Leigh Janiak though sees the genre as a chance to explore change on a microscopic scale, to prod just how absolutely horrifying it would be to see the one you love most temporally drained from their own body. Let’s just say, it’s not nice.

With the very talented Rose Leslie (Ygritte from Game of Thrones) and Henry Callaway at her disposal, Janiak prohibits an immense talent for directing her actors into believable territory, even under such inconceivable circumstances. From the opening montage where we meet newlyweds Bea and Paul undergoing matrimonial traditions like cake fighting (even though they forewent a real cake for cinnamon buns) and recounting the events by which they met (bad Indian food, it’s always bad Indian food!) to Rose’s fleeting misguided attempts to protect her husband from her extraterrestrial transformation (“They’ll never find you down here”) and through all the bumping of uglies in between, Leslie and Callaway sell the show as genuine.

Even on the heels of the more outrageous elements, their steadfast performances point to a unshaken understanding of their character’s respective head spaces. For the genre, it’s an uncharacteristically committed pair of performances and with Janiak jamming her cameras right in the midst of their personal space, we feel like we’re right alongside them, an equal victim of some inexplicable emotional violation.  

That is really where the true horror of these kinds of body snatching stories lies. Worse yet than seeing someone shot by a laser beam or abducted by some ethereal blue beam, there’s something infinitely more jarring to standing witness to an individual’s personality being siphoned out of them. Janiak’s film engages this process in stages. After running into what seems like the only other two people living in a ten mile radius, couple Annie and Will (who Bea just so happened to share a summer love with in the way, way back of past childhood flirtations), Janiak presents a first taste of “off-ness”. Annie’s withdrawn, confuzzled and all around off. She’s stage one of a mental virus, the foreshadow of what’s to come.

Shortly after meeting them, Paul wakes in the middle of the night to find the spot in bed next to him abandoned and cold to the touch. With harebrained suspicions of infidelity, he charges from the house only to find Bea naked, disorientated and caked in mud. Upon bringing her inside, a patch of what appears to be bug bites around her crotchal region alarms him. It’s nothing to worry about, she pleads in unconvincing manner. Instead of slamming on the brakes and seeing whatever transformation to come take place overnight, Janiak picks at her plate like a sparrow to birdseed. Like a gas leak from the brainstem, Bea isn’t replaced outright so much as reborn one blink at a time, reinvented with each breathe drawn, re-imagined with every performance of normalcy.

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Watching Bea recite milestone events from her own life into the mirror mimics an earlier scene where she practices a speech to get out of engaging in post-marital carnal relations but in the space between, she’s become more drained – more a shell than the filling. She’s lost another chunk of “Bea.” It’s the hollow spaces between the words, the falsity of her gestures, the empty recitation of loving remarks that imbues Honeymoon with such an eerie tautness. Bea being such an unreliable character, we never know what’s coming next and right up to the very last moments, we never really get a grasp on how much “Bea” is left in Bea after all.

And though Honeymoon may take place at a cabin in the woods, the camp has been left at home. Janiak’s take is fatally humorless, devoutly sobering. Instead of harping on frights, she’s left us with a steamy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a butter knife and serve it at as a wedding cake. Even the hollowed out bride and groom toppers wouldn’t be missing.  

As Bea and Paul’s deserted woodland homestead becomes an unwelcome chrysalis, we’re left with little more than the remains of an evaporating relationship. Like Bea’s special nightgown (though it’s more hoary than whory) that Paul finds in the woods after her disappearance, there’s chunks inexplicably missing, impossible to recover, chalked up to some pieceless puzzle. But even after everything, there’s still some inkling of connection left, some fleeting memory of what it means to care for each other.

Perhaps that’s her intent after all, to show us something beautiful only to take it away, leaving tatters and fragments of what it meant to be able to connect with someone, to tell them you love them and actually mean it. By the end, “Bea” is reduced to mumbling her twisted version of sweet nothings but I’m still not convinced that all is lost of the well-intending New York butterfly she once was. Even in her harrowing final act, there’s love or at least something masquerading as such.

B+

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SXSW Review: KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER

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“Kumiko the Treasure Hunter”
Directed by David Zellner
Starring Rinko Kikuchi, Nobuyuki Katsube, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, Shirley Venard
Drama
America

“Based on a true story” the title card blares, half-legible in crusty, bite-sized pixelations of a magnified television screen. One chunky word at a time, each letter pronounced, amplified, stuffed in our faces. Pulled straight from Fargo‘s opening sequence (the lauded Coen Bros film goes on to become a key character in the film) and scattered by tightrope zooms, this intriguing unveiling of Kumiko the Treasure Hunter immediately begs question about the veracity of what we’re going to witness. Read More

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SXSW Review: AMONG THE LIVING

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“Among the Living”
Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
Starring Beatrice Dalle, Anne Marivin, Nicolas Giraud, Francis, Renaud, Xacharie Chasseriaud, Damien Ferdel
Horror, Thriller
France

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Pitched as a crossroads between Stand By Me and Friday the 13th, Among the Living builds a beautifully unsettling landscape only to take a sledge hammer to it in its run-of-the-mill, slasher-standard third act. It’s a roller coaster of quality, ticking upwards in fitful bumps, building mood and anxiety in the gorgeously photographed, kaleidoscopic backwoods of rural France. Strapped in and nervous, we’re primed for the fall, ready to rocket around unexpected twists and turns, thrown for 360s, tossed into loops and amped to arrive at the end wide-eyed and breathless. When we do reach the precipice and look unto the other side though, the sinking feeling in our stomach is one born of disappointment, not terror. Instead of a winding track, heinous turns and caveats into foggy caves, it’s a one-track rail cruising straight to the end. On this straight and narrow pathway, there’s nothing new, little remarkable and hardly anything exceedingly effective. And while the build up may be right on the money, the climax feels more like a bag of change.

This kids-vs-killer horror works best when serving salty scoops of anticipation – when it’s table setting – and the first scene is absolutely dreadful proof of that fact. Planted mise-en-scène, we start the show scrambling to catch up with the chaos unfolding around us, trying to figure out why knifes are brandished and guns popping off. A man defends his child against his own wife and we know not why or what he did to deserve such a reaction but it prods both our panic center and curiosity hub. It’s the ideal cold open that leaves us questioning how the pieces will fit together.

At first glance, there’s no denying the scene is perfectly set for an unsettling and mentally distressing horror feature to unfold, one that would live up to the mantle of European filmmaking duo Julian Maury and Alexndre Bustillo. Bustillo and Maury have etched out a name as a sort of Crimson Underground of French new wave horror. Their cult favorites, Inside and Livid, too indie to nab a US release, their work is so off the beaten path that you’d be hard pressed to find them on DVD, save ever in an actual theater. So to say their handiwork is a rarity is an understatement, which made my initial anticipation for their latest film that much more.  

Even while I was at the screening, a stranger turned to me and outright asked, “So why are you here?” Like the other uninitiated, I was here on a hunch, attracted by the synopsis and one intriguing promo picture that I’d seen. The stranger gleefully informed me that I was in for a treat. Unlike the kind of “treat” I was expecting, Amongst the Living was more like a can of gummy worms that’d been dropped in the sand. Once the gambit is up, it’s not worth chewing your way through the remains.

Famous for their excessive gore and deadly somber tone, Maury and Bustillo earn an outpouring of deference from their fans but I have to wonder after a showing like this, how many will truly be satisfied. Seeing the thing transform from a genuine creeper into your humdrum slasher is like witnessing a mall parking lot flasher expose himself to you. The sad truth of the matter is in both cases, there’s often not a lot to show.

C-

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SXSW Review: STARRY EYES

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“Starry Eyes”
Directed by Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Starring Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Shane Coffey, Natalie Castillo, Pat Healy, Nick Simmons, Maria Olsen, Louis Dezseran
Horror
United States

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At the risk of emasculating myself, I’ll admit that Starry Eyes was so scary that it made me cry. Not ooey, gooey gobs of terror tears so much as the lone, solitary drop leaking down my face as my jaw was busy sagging half-way to the floor. Still, a tear’s a tear and a tear did floweth. So if this film doesn’t at least creep you out, check your pulse because you’re probably not human or may have already sold your soul to the devil. It’s more likely though that you’ll be sitting in a pile of your own yuck after the screening, tired, sweaty, fearful and all the more afraid of the dark.

Like last year’s very frightening The Conjuring, few to no jump scares are employed as this isn’t the brand of chilling that seeks to sporadically startle you and lap up easy frights. No, director duo Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer‘s plans are far more sinister. They would rather crawl deep inside you, settling in the nook of your cerebral panic center, and plant a seed of horror that’ll grow throughout the movie until explodes into a full blown anxiety attack. And just when everything seems like it possibly couldn’t get any worse, you turn a corner into a whole new realm of terror. A maze of shudders, a labyrinth of gore, Starry Eyes triggers your instinctual fight or flight mode and dares you to stick it out.

Wringing all the best elements of a dark character study with the deeply unsettling nature of the body horror genre, Starry Eyes soars on the wings of star Alex Essoe. As Sarah, Essoe embodies the 20something wanna-be starlet who will go to any lengths in order to achieve her dreams of fame and fortune. Her bedroom walls plastered with the icons of 1940s celebrity, she wants the world, and she wants it now. When a role comes along that would be the perfect launching pad to become the next “it” girl, she goes to anything lengths necessary to land the role, even if that means losing herself.

Essoe’s performance is the bombastic center piece of the film – the gory bride on a red velvet wedding cake, the bouquet of rotting roses on some unmarked grave. Her positively brilliant turn as Sarah reminds us of Natalie Portman‘s Oscar-earning performance in Black Swan and Shelly Duvall‘s massively underrated embodiment of horror in The Shining. She’s at once totally in control and veering from the tracks of sanity. As she makes more and more conceits of character and body, Essoe’s arc becomes unforgettable, an indelible bookmark of Starry Eye’s staying power. Without Essoe’s incredible and unflinching performance, this would be a whole new beast entirely.

There’s one point where we feel like all of the build-up may be for naught, that this would tilt into a cautionary tale that peters rather than commits to its zany over-the-topisms but that’s not the case. Once the third act rounds the corner, it’s an unrelenting marathon of what we – and Sarah – can and will endure. It’s chilling, the stuff of nightmares, but it hurts so good.

The whole selling your soul to the devil thing has been done before and probably in more subtle ways but subtlety is not Kolsch and Widmyer’s game. Rather Starry Eyes is such a horrifying victory for them because of how far they’re willing to take us. This deep down the rabbit hole, everything is so pitch black that we can’t see even the faintest flicker of light and they, in this realm of deprivation, they mine the scares perfectly. It’s unrelenting darkness opens the flood gates, letting the horror flows from what’s onscreen and those other thoughts that exist in our imagination alone. It’s the perfect synthesize of shock, disgust and angst that’ll have audiences turning in their seats and watched through the crooks of hands shielding their faces.

Starry Eyes conjures up quick similarities to Black Swan and Rosemary’s Baby but finds a perfect footing between the two so any similarities feel incidental rather than essential. It may wheel in the same thematic ballpark but, if you can believe it, makes both of those features look like a walk in the park. Both Swan and Baby may leave you unsettled but Starry Eyes will leave you shaken. At any rate, it’s unique and visionary take will all but guarantee a long shelf life among horror buffs and is sure to earn a deserved overnight cult following.

A

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SXSW Review: PING PONG SUMMER

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“Ping Pong Summer”
Directed by Michael Tully 
Starring Marcello Conte, Myles Massey, Emmi Shockley, Lea Thompson, Susan Sarandon, Amy Sedaris, John Hannah, Robert Longstreet
Comedy
United States

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The opening scene to Ping Pong Summer sees Rad – our very uncool, ironically named protagonist – trying to make a hardboiled egg. After getting a pot of water boiling, he eyes the microwave, opting for the easier route, hoping to satisfy his need for eggy goodness as quickly as possible. As that white egg spins in the hollows of a 1980s microwave, you could hear the audience groan with unease. “Is it gonna explode?” you could almost hear them fret. When Rad pops the now piping hot egg out thirty seconds later, peels it and chomps down, the yolk – now essentially a yellow sun of melty goo – explodes onto his face like yolked magma. Half of the hapless audience explodes with laughter. After digesting the contents of the remainder of this helplessly uncool flick though, one ought to see this dismal cold open as the perfect analogy for the film at large – an easy route to the finish line that just ends up exploding in its own face.

The most insurmountable problem of Ping Pong Summer is that it thinks it’s ironic but never does anything to convince us that they even know what the word means. Imitation is not art nor is it satire. Simply recreating the oddness of an epoch without actually trying to make some statement about it just goes to show the work of someone who doesn’t quite understand what irony means. A film about the 80s isn’t ironic because it’s about the 80s, there needs to be something more, something deeper. As it is here, you could measure the depth with a few clicks of pencil lead.

The characters are hammy archetypes, the plot essentially a familiar riff on the underdog sports flick – a tacky take on Rocky; the Out Cold of ping pong – and the acting is bottom shelf. If there’s one thing I learned at SXSW, it’s don’t drink too much of the cheap stuff. It may be tempting but you’ll end up paying for it later. It’s too bad that Ping Pong Summer didn’t learn that lesson as well.

Myles Massey as Rad’s snarky sidekick is the picture of everything Ping Pong gets wrong. As an actor, he’s an absolute nightmare. Every last phrase Massey cloyingly utters feels like it was read from the crook of his underarm. It’s recited like bad Shakespeare, spewed like a word burp, overblown and ham-fisted. I get it, he’s a kid but he’s exactly the reason why children actors get such a bad rap. This kid is bad. Not Michael Jackson bad, not “so bad he’s good” bad, just plain old, tried-and-true bad.

Heading up the show, Marcello Conte as Rad is surprisingly enough the best part of the film and is the only one who feels like a living breathing person. It seems like he was the solitary kid in this overblown production that actually took a few acting classes beforehand. Good on him. Even veteran Susan Saradon phones it in from a million miles away. Her halfhearted take on a Mrs. Miyazaki is downright dreadful, an abject failure from beginning to end. From the place-holder writing of her character to her tepid arc that fails to work on even the shallowest level, she is another symptom of director Michael Tully‘s essential misunderstanding of how to treat character. In one fell swoop, he’s proven he has no handle on how to direct his actors, even those that’ve been at the game for decades.

With the sporadic fits of laughter that Ping Pong pulled from the audience, I often wondered if I was just not in on the joke, if my lack of being a preteen in the mid-80s was what created the emotional distance I felt from everything going on onscreen. Upon further reflection though, whether that’s the case or not, it’s no excuse. Film is supposed to be transportative. A film about the 80s is supposed to make the audience feel a time and a place – to appreciate, or at least, understand it. To rely on nostalgia alone is never enough and results in something as uneven and pale as this. In the future, Tully ought use nostalgia as a tool, not a crutch.  Here though, he’s nostalgia crutching so hard that it’s no wonder the film can hardly stand on its own two feet.

D

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SXSW Review: THE RAID 2: BERANDAL

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“The Raid 2: Berandal”
Directed by Gareth Evans
Starring Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle, Yayan Ruhian, Donny Alamsyah, Oka Antara, Tio Pakusodewo, Arifin Putra
Action, Crime, Thriller
148 Mins
Indonesia
R

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To try to boil down what is so sublimely excellent about The Raid 2: Berandal is a futile exercise in tilting at windmills. It’s like boxing a griffin, outthinking a Sicilian, or KY-Jelly wrestling an anaconda. Instead of trying to describe the irrepressible satisfaction this balls-to-the-walls, smarter-than-your-dad actioner elicits, instead conjure up what it felt like to lose your virginity, if you lost your virginity in a ten-on-one man brawl in a pit of mud.

Director Gareth Evans is so incredibly tuned into what his audience wants that without hesitation, he’s responded to any and all of the problems of the first film, making this a sequel that’s far more resplendent in scope and, amazingly enough, emotionally involving throughout. While the first film felt like the best game of Mortal Kombat we’ve ever played, Berandal (which translates to ‘Thugs’) gets the video gaming, non-superpowered Neo on crack elements mixed up with the glory and grandiose of The Godfather. If The Raid: Redemption taught us that the martial arts techniques we learned from Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan are outdated, The Raid: Berendal makes them look fossilized. Berandal may not be the nonstop battle sequence that Redemption is but when affairs do heat up, they boil over faster than a knuckle sandwich to the shnoz.

Action junkies trying to recapture their high need not fret though. The close-quarters, hand-to-hand combat that prompted the wow factor outpouring from installment numero uno has been racketed up past 11, breaking the dial as it cycles beyond conventional bounds. Taking things to the next level in the best of ways, star and fight coordinator Iko Uwais‘ masterful choreography is a helicopter; whirling and seemingly chaotic, but something that can only be achieved with the measured precision of a scientist.  For the flurry of fists that appear to attack at random, each blow is executed with careful exactitude. It’s a ballet of fury, a symphony of violence. It’s righteous.

Baseball bats, hammers, seatbelts, anything can be used as a weapon in The Raid‘s world to incredible, bone-rending effect. There’s no limits, no boundaries and no frills to what Gareth will use and where he will go. The blood flows liberally, in poetic gobs and visceral streams. Viscus is Gareth’s crimson signature, his lascivious Joker grin, his coup-de-grace. From crunching skulls to snapping bones, there’s joyous awareness in his mortal destruction. We gasp, we laugh, we shutter. We can’t help ourselves. That furtive conflict guru has harnesses us like hogs and rides us up and down the spectrum of reactions. Like Clockwork Orange‘s Alex, we unblinkingly take in barbery as snuff.

As the second part in a planned trilogy, I feared Berandal might suffer middle-child syndrome, that it could feel incomplete in the context of a larger arc. The reality couldn’t be further from the fact. You can essentially go into this film blind and not struggle a second trying to keep up. Be that because The Raid: Redemption has about one page of exposition – more an excuse for Iko’s revelatory action than anything – or because Berandal catches you up in moments before delivering you to a conclusion that could easily serve as a bookend, it matters not. All that matters is The Raid 2 is an unforgettable ride and one I can’t wait to embark on again, and again, and again.

A

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SXSW Review: CESAR CHAVEZ

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“Cesar Chavez” 
Directed by Diego Luna
Starring Michael Pena, Rosario Dawson, John Malkovich, America Herrera, Kevin Dunn, Mark Moses, Michael Cudlitz
Biography
PG-13

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For a biopic about a man with steely resolve and an unflinching soul, Cesar Chavez lacks the laser focus and steadfast heartbeat of an exemplar, or even a worthy apprentice. It’s a soft-skinned take on a boulder of a man, a notebook sketch of a behemoth. Not fearless enough to nose the camera in the dramatic mire, like a soldier to the cause in a personal guerrilla war, Diego Luna‘s film beckons a paint-by-numbers summary of the man’s greatest achievements, the spark notes of a six-plus year period that glosses all with thin coats, rarely taking the opportunity to remain in the moment and settle in with the hard-won emotional beats of the characters.  

Chavez himself earned popularity and legitimacy in the thick of the issues, making those things he stood for inseparable from his own problems. The issues of his brothers were not theoretical troubles but matters to immerse himself in. Rather than stand idle in the soft florescence of an office, Chavez took to backbreaking labor working the fields in the blinding California sun. But instead of going out to the battlefield and working shoulder-to-shoulder like the eponymous character, Luna’s film takes the straight and narrow, delivering a softball pitch right over the plate. Like Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom before it, Cesar Chavez tries to take on too much without ever going deep enough in any particular plot of emotional soil. Trying to sow too many acres with too small a hoe, Luna’s spreads his seed thin. Accordingly, his efforts rarely solidify into the powerhouse moments they ought.

Playing it close to his chest and obviously passionate about the subject, Luna’s intentions are in the right place, he just so happens to make a dire mistake. He memorializes rather than understands. Chavez is a gentle obituary, not the scathing meditation that makes for good film. As this fact solidifies, Luna’s attempts to piece everything together feels like the King’s Men playing at Dumpty Humpty. Chavez, in truth, is a series of vignettes, cut with the themes of self-sacrifice and family but these elements are left dealt with in afterthought, never something tight and essential to the piece.

When I heard that Michael Pena – a massively talented and massively underrated actor – would finally get a certifiable leading role, I was frankly delighted and my interest in this project spiked. But taking up the mantle of Chavez, it feels that Pena got too wrapped up in mimicry. Luna’s camera doesn’t help though, it’s too flighty for any of Pena’s dramatic gravitas to settle in. Bogged down in photocopying, impersonating Chavez’s choppy cadence, his signature blend of TexMex intonation and penguin-like gait, there isn’t room for honest emotional reflection. Even a dressed down Rosario Dawson, playing up the chameleonesque nature of her illusive roots, is robbed of a single moment worth remembering. Such is the nature of the performances here; they’re squashed, condensed and never given room to breathe. For all the opportunity Chavez ought to afford Pena to stand out in a harrowing and brilliant performance, he never really has much of a chance to shine. He’s a flashlight in midday, washed out by everything else, unnoticeable from twenty feet away. But Pena can’t truly be blamed for the pockets of problems Chavez runs into. The issues are inherent in a script this deferential.

Too often are biopics achieved as glossaries, skimping over events like a sleep-deprived college student licking their thumbs and skimming as hard as they can. The best film biographies though don’t worry about the events so much as the emotions behind them. They need characters, and if sometimes that means bending the rules, so be it. The reason The Social Network was so compelling was not because Jesse Eisenberg was a pitch perfect Xerox of Mark Zuckerberg but because we had a crystal clear notion of who he was, whether that was necessarily Zuckerberg or not. Watching Idris Elba do Mandela or Pena do Chavez means nothing if we never reach a greater sense of what makes these men tick. We know the history, now deliver the feelings.

C-

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SXSW Review: BAD WORDS

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“Bad Words”
Directed by Jason Bateman
Starring Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn, Rohan Chand, Philip Baker Hall, Allison Janney, Steve Witting
Comedy
88 Mins
R

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Jason Bateman‘s directorial debut, Bad Words, is aptly congruously to his post-Arrested Development career. That is, it’s no good. Like Identity Thief and The Change-Up before it, Bateman has proved that having his name on a movie’s billing is a blaring warning sign of slow and low-blow comedy to come, a notice of an impending La Brea-sized originality tar pit, a Bat-Signal in the shape of a crotch kick. While some of us may have suspected Bateman of being on the receiving end of some Les Grossman-level manhandling – a puppet maliciously directed into comic obscurity – as the proud director of this comedy clunker, Bateman has shown his wisecracker cards, revealing that he may not be playing with a full comic’s deck after all.

To call him a hack seems harsh but it’s the only description I can find fitting the dreck that he continuously churns out. The pedestrianly crafted Bad Words, for example, earns Bateman his gold standard R-rating with a string of unimaginative and unfunny curse words. Since R-rated comedies have turned into something of a marketable commodity since the first Hangover movie, we’ve seen more and more comedies (which once mostly existed within the PG-13 realm) turn to this “Restricted” hail sign. But rather than employ that R-rating to their artistic advantage, the folks behind the helm of Bad Words simply use it to check mark their way through George Carlin‘s seven dirty words like a record stuck on repeat. In essence, Batman has made the equivalent of a feature film version of the Blink-182 song so sophisticated titled “Shit Piss Fuck”. Charming.

Comedy being as sink or swim as it it, it’s a true tragedy that Bateman has relied on the life raft of obscenity to keep him afloat over the past five year. Subbing in swear words for jokes is a shortcut cohabiting the same hoary level of the time-honored fart. The first time history heard a squeak of gas passing through an actor’s anal cavity and into the light of day, it must have been an uproariously occasion. The first time the word ‘fuck’ was used in the film Ulysses (1967), I’m sure people were gasping “Well I never”s as they minted their juleps, pinkies upturned.

In 2014 though, we’re in a post-Three Stooges-era. Last year, we saw The Wolf of Wall Street drop the infamous f-bomb a total of 522 times. Though Wolf still probably wasn’t the easiest film for the more conservative film-goers to digest, it hardly elicited the “Off with their heads!” outrage that it would have in years past. So even though the crew behind this missed the message, us in the real world are aware of how humdrum and trite swear words in themselves have become. They’re not shocking, they’re not gasp-inducing, and when used as a fill in for comedy, they’re boring, inert and downright lazy. Now don’t get me wrong, I cuss like a sailor but it’s just part of my regular lexicon, not to be confused as a substitute for real comic goods. Batman and crew miss the distinction.

In Bateman and script writer Andrew Dodge‘s out-dated notion that everything needs to be racketed up to the next level, that bigger is indefinitely better, we come to see these bad words transform into snoozy strings of non-sequitors. Again though, it’s nothing more than lazy cliches playing dress up as comedy. If this is Bateman riffing, he needs to enroll in an improv course. If this junk was actually written down, Dodge shouldn’t quit his day job. With Bateman’s rump half-stuck down the farty, sweary rabbit hole, he’s stuck confusing racism, boobies and cussing for something truly funny. When he tells a 10-year old Indian kid to “shut his curry hole,” the writing is on the wall. And that’s only about 20 minutes in.

The premise itself is somewhat intriguing, if not at all profound: 40-odd-year old Guy Trilby (Bateman) enters spelling bee competitions after discovering a loophole that stipulates contestants must have have not yet finished the fourth grade. Being an elementary school dropout and gifted speller, there’s no regulations in place to keep him out of the contest that he’s become intent on winning. At the cost of becoming a national pariah and the target of scorn from hordes of maligned parents, Guy won’t reveal why he in enduring such derision. There’s a $50,000 prize at the end of the tunnel but we’re repeatedly told its about more than that. “Hmmm,” we think, “where could this all be going?” But after stringing us along for 88 minutes of watching Trilby be a flat out bad person, the ultimate payoff is unsatisfying and predictable. Another tired excuse for resolution, another narrative shrug.

No matter how adorable little Rohan Chand is as Guy’s unsuspecting sidekick, the chemistry to develop between the two feels like it was cooked up with all the artistry of a bowl of instant ramen. We’ve seen it before but, in the past, we’re at least lead to like the curmudgeonly protagonist by the end of it all. Here, it feels like we’re dealing with Holden Caulfield who’s bigged himself into Jason Bateman. Immature and unlikable throughout are not admirable traits in a main character. But in its attempts to be Bad Santa, its always more Bad Teacher. I guess if you find humor in being racist and borderline sexually abusive towards kids, you’ll probably get a kick out of Bad Words. Otherwise, it’s probably a good choice to avoid this one.

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SXSW Review: THE INFINITE MAN

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“The Infinite Man”
Directed by Hugh Sullivan
Starring Josh McConville, Hannah Marshall, Alex Dimitriades
Comedy, Sci-Fi
Australia

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Equal helpings cerebral sci-fi and deadpan comedy, The Infinite Man is independent cinema at its most rewarding. Chartering a high-strung scientist whose well-intentioned attempts to create the perfect anniversary weekend goes horribly awry, director Hugh Sullivan‘s film at first seems narratively minimalist but by the time we’re a few layers deep, it begins to gingerly unfold into something far more brainy and grand than we first imagined.

With only three actors and a shoestring budget, Sullivan weaves gold from flax. His wryly-wrung time-travel chronicle shrewedly packs enough twists and turns to keep the audience completely in the dark, never knowing what to expect next and yet chewing ourselves to the nail-bed in anticipation. Unpredictability is the magic potion of independent cinema and Sullivan uses that to significant advantage. Without the crutch of any brand named performers at his beck and call, Sullivan is able to use the anonymity of his cast to further play up our lack of expectation.

Josh McConville plays Dean like a meerkat on Percocet. When his lover Lana (Hannah Marshall) walks out on him, he scurries to come up with a solution to fix a pair of broken hearts with the magic of science. On his hopeless hunt for Lana, he’s always bobbing his little head, peaking around voyeuristically and waddling from lookout to lookout before eventually dipping into the shallows of melancholia. He’s a bona-fide blues man, tortured by his own brilliance and unable to admit a problem is greater than he. His persistence though is admirable. He’s a proven “Ain’t no mountain high, ain’t no valley low” kinda guy, but that’s likely because he has a time machine working in his favor.

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 Filmed in the remote desert of the Woomera Australian Outback, the bleached landscape adds a hazy texture to the film’s intellectual underpinnings. Caught out here in the stark isolation of an abandoned hotel and blasted with sharp rays of unrelenting light, everything has a dreamlike quality to it. The film reels themselves feel sun-stained and otherworldly. And here we are, right there in the moment, caught in limbo with Dean and Lana. Even though a premise so superfluously heady might be regularly taken with a grain of salt, Sullivan serves it up with a spoonful of sugar. It’s like The Shining meets Groundhog Day as a rom-com.

Veering down highways we can’t possibly expect, the further down the rabbit hole Sullivan takes us, the more the brilliances of the film crystallize. With this many webs within webs, The Infinite Man is like Inception‘s Australian cousin. Developed from a mere one-page conceptual treatment, Sullivan’s ability to keep all the parallel story lines in check really boggles the mind. He’s always one step ahead, waiting for you at the next junction. He’s prepared with an answer for every question, a counterpoint to every argument. And like all time travel films, you can get bogged down trying to untangle the logic, but then you’re really missing out on the point. But even if you’re not ready to jettison your suspicions, Sullivan’s bone-dry wit will distract you with jab after jab of side-splitting jest.

Rounding out this tactfully told piece of genre-blending cinema, Sullivan’s painstaking planning brings unwavering clarity to a dizzily complex web of movement throughout strands of time and emotion. And like an elegant piano concerto, there are so many pieces to this puzzle that each sound funky on their own but when laid atop each other, craft a harmonious refrain that’ll have you grinning from ear to ear. Like he’s born for the craft, Sullivan handles this fine-fingered balancing act with the gusto of a master.

B+

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Sundance Review: APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

by Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged , , , , ,

“Appropriate Behavior”
Directed by Desiree Akhavan
Starring Desiree Akhavan, Rebecca Henderson, Halley Feiffer, Scott Adsit, Anh Duong, Arian Moayed
82 minutes
U.S.A./United Kingdom

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Appropriate Behavior might be another entry in the growing ‘struggling NYC girl’ genre but it’s generously funny,  sexy (in a weird, gangly way) and has a great cultural bent to boot. I’ll admit that the synopsis, which tells us of her New York habitat, her wishy-washy sexual preferences and her strict Persian parents, is as much a turnoff as any Sundance unknown but pure chance and serendipitous scheduling got me in the theater and I’m certainly glad it did.

Writer, director and star Desiree Akhavan has broken out in a big way. She says that she’s been developing Appropriate Behavior since she was a mere 10 years old when she realized just how strangely unique her position as a bisexual, female, Iranian-American was. Caught between an Iranian family based in tradition, jolted by post-911 distrust of immigrants, and an America staggering towards a growing acceptance of the “other,” Akhavan sees herself as a bit of a mutt – a sometimes sinking perspective that rings out through her native. In Akhavan’s eyes, creating this kind of film was a therapy of sorts. A way for her to come to terms with her own  instinctual predilections. Trapped somewhere between the pull of tradition and self-discovery, her own identity is the crossroads of the stratification between the old world and new. Let’s just say that being a gay child of an immigrant ain’t always peaches and cream.

As Shirin, Akhavan is able to play a shade of herself, letting this semi-autobiographical tale spin a yarn at once both nonfictional and ethereally make believe. We’re left wondering exactly how much of the material comes from the playbook of Akhavan’s true life escapades but regardless of what is fact and what is fiction, her ethos is heartfelt, her emotional stake crystal clear and her intent never wavers. In a sort of coming out party, she lets Appropriate Behavior function like a celebration of her once hidden self exploding free. As such, her shaky voice shines through with purpose and unshuttered dignity.

Arkhavan’s freshly forthcoming perspective drives this deadpan narrative, allowing herself the creative liberty to spread wings in oft tread but nonetheless exciting directions. For a freshman effort, she shows a fine balance of caustic “could only be New York” humor, dreary but not-too-dreary dramatic overture and a topping of love story that actually allows the audience to dig our heels in. For all the well-intended love stories that grace the scene each year, it’s always appreciated to get one that feels earnest and real – an unfortunate rarity. Seeing Shirin’s often uncomfortable nesting ways against girlfriend Maxine’s (Rebecca Henderson) ‘girl who know’s what she wants’ brand of strength provides some genuine relationship moments and lays the groundwork for some nice, and not so nice, chemistry between the two.

Never too standoffish and not afraid to leave things unresolved, Arkhavan has done a fine job her first time out. With her stony guile and smart directorial hand, it’ll be interesting to see what territory she’ll foray into next. Now that she’s touched on those issues most important to her, we’re left to wonder what else is left beneath the hood.

B-

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