NEW RELEASES FOR JULY 8, 2008

PICK OF THE WEEK:

The Ruins (Dir. Carter Smith)

While on vacation in Mexico, six perfectly likable young men & women are quarantined atop an ancient Mayan temple by villagers who fear the spread of the flesh-eating plants that virtually carpet the ruins. Considering his prior vocation as a fashion photographer, Carter Smith's film is far from superficial. The Ruins is a horror film where everybody has their reasons, characters function intelligently in three dimensions & the gore is effective because we care about the victims, not because we care about the special effects wizard.

In the Valley of Elah's Jonathan Tucker, Saved! & Into the Wild's Jena Malone, Lords of Dogtown's Laura Ramsey & X-Men's Shawn Ashmore are the main couples & it's refreshing as hell that they're not typically annoying teenage types, Ugly Americans on a sex, booze & drugs bender. Instead they're just out of college & on the verge of functional adult lives. This isn't Spring Break for them, simply a respite before they become professionals, marry & have children. Although there are still remnants of immaturity tugging them down -- Malone's whiny & a little slutty, Ashmore can be a hothead -- for the most part they're well-adjusted & seem to actually like or love one another in a sane, modulated manner. I know one shouldn't have to sound so grateful for such simple blessings in a horror film, but if you watch as many of them as I do, such decent behavior from victims & would-be victims is downright revolutionary. Laura Ramsey, who'd be the vacuous sexpot blonde in any other movie, is actually the most personable & perceptive character AND it never appears to be a stretch for her. As you might expect, watching these altogether agreeable folk be torn limb from limb by what appears to be poppy-flowered indica marijuana plants notches up the fear & empathy levels substantially.

That said, how's about the horror goods? Well, torn flesh, bodily ooze & surprising, believable gore gets its due & it's mostly perpetrated by the victims upon themselves or as a way of halting the onslaught of the deadly, sentient jungle vines, making it even more excruciating to watch. In a good way, of course. Once these plants start sadistically mimicking the desperate whimpers of their victims or "singing" cell phone tones in unison like a deranged chorus of flowers from an old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoon...well, The Ruins achieves the kind of demented delirium unseen since Evil Dead 2.  Highly recommended.

Chop Shop (Dir. Ramin Bahrani)

In this rusted-out Horatio Alger tale, Alejandro Polanco (an absolute natural, in his first movie role) plays Ale, a 12-year-old Latino money-making dervish who as good as manages a Queens, New York chop-shop when he's not hustling DVDs on the streets, candy on the subways & wheel rims among the labyrinth of barbed wire & warehouses that barely contain the squalid sprawl of his world. Saving for a brokedown food truck that will be he & his older sister Isamar's ticket to the middle class, Ale seems to have life pretty much dicked. At the very least he's got focus & drive to spare & a tin can full of money to prove it. But when he finds out his sister is hooking on the side, Ale begins to melt down, alienating his friends, engaging in increasingly criminal enterprises & becoming deeply paranoid. It's never explained why Isamar feels she has to prostitute herself with such a devoted bread-winner looking out for her, but one can imagine that's she's grown weary of counting on her little brother for everything & just doesn't have his disciplined eye for the prize.

Director Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart) never strikes a false note, visually or narratively in Chop-Shop. His Queens is populated with authentic faces merged with gritty locations & the story never preaches or reaches for easy sympathy. Watching Ale "parent" Isamar, with all the psychological pitfalls inherent in that, is, by turns, funny & heart-breaking. Bahrani never spoonfeeds the viewer emotional cues & often Ale's strategies are a little mysterious, illuminating the character entirely through his actions & shrewd, gradual shifts in his behavior. Chop-Shop demands a little more attention than most American movies & its neo-realist sensibilities make it seem a little squalid at times, but it's refreshing to watch such a fine story arc develop so naturalistically in something that actually, for once, mirrors the unmediated America in which real people strive to make a buck. Highly Recommended.  
 

My Blueberry Nights (Dir. Wong Kar Wai)

Maverick Chinese director Wong Kar Wai's (Fallen Angels, Chungking Express, 2046) first film in English, My Blueberry Nights feels a lot like the recent work of Wim Wenders, especially Million Dollar Hotel & The End of Violence, though it's not as amorphous & stylistically off-putting as those movies. A series of intertwining vignettes -- each unfolding like finely-honed short stories about various forms of addiction - are grafted together by Jude Law as the cheerfully lonely owner of an upscale NYC diner & Norah Jones (likable, but bordering on vacuous) as the love-battered sadsack he tends to, emotionally & gastronomically, in the wee, wee neon-smeared hours between midnight & six. The movie tries for an overly-stylized, jazzy, nocturnal feel, often veering into the kind of shorthand noir you'd likely find in a music video attempting to mimic genre tropes with a few glib gestures. It does add some much-needed grit that hard-boiled mystery novelist Lawrence Block, an expert on alcoholic fringe-dwellers, co-wrote the script, however & his tonal authority often gets the blood flowing in these often predictable tales.

Trying to get over an unfaithful lover, Jones' Elizabeth spends several curative nights consuming blueberry pie & beer at the diner before finally hitting the road to find herself & lick her wounds. I've never been a big fan of food as a metaphor for the human condition, so I was relieved to find all the nights in the film were not blueberry. On her odyssey she encounters alcoholic cop David Strathaim (a Lawrence Block character if ever there was one), drinking off estranged wife Rachel Weisz, brassy poker shark Natalie Portman (with alarming beauty-shop hair & equally alarming cleavage) & a colorful stratum of hustlers, insomniacs & walking wounded. Meanwhile Law collects her postcards back at the diner & tries in vain to contact her as she meanders her way south by southwest. And boy does My Blueberry Nights meander. Unlike the quickly & brashly sketched vignettes that often comprise Wai's Asian films, the various threads of this seem overlong by half & often the pat outcome of the stories make their unbridled length pretty infuriating. This, paired with the often trite & stagey artifice of the visuals (the film cries out for Wai's usual cinematographer, Christopher Doyle), can make the movie a chore. Still, there are moments of genuine poetry here & the performances are uniformly interesting, if not always stellar. Considering that Wai's past films have been nearly revolutionary however, it would be difficult to count My Blueberry Nights as anything but a disappointment, or at least another odd breakdown in East/West communication.

Pleasure Factory (Dir. Ekachai Uekrongtham)

Though filed under documentaries at the store, this Singaporean/Thai import is most definitely a fictional narrative. Filmed, with documentary realism, in Geylang, the infamous red-light district of the city & cast with mostly non-professionals, there's certainly a verite feel to Pleasure Factory & the open-endedness of the intertwining plots definitely subvert ordinary storytelling in favor of arrhythmic slices-of-life. The form of the film most closely resembles Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery, a strange curio from 1957 in which a few real actors enact a thin, simple plot while engaging the Bowery & its unkempt populace on its own terms. The "real" actors in Pleasure Factory -- Taiwanese actress Yang Kuei-mei from Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, Asian horror regular Ananda Everingham -- catalyze the sketches & the non-professionals just do what they, um, do in reality -- give & receive pleasure in the whore houses of Singapore.

Considering the stories don't really amount to more than a cursory outline, the movie is pretty engaging & erotic without in any way glorifying the lifestyles up for exhibit. In one, a virgin & his army buddy seek the proper working girl for his all-important first time & in another a teenage virgin is summoned to a hotel room where an older prostitute & a fat man attempt to negotiate a deflowering. The set-ups are simple as can be, but the exotic atmosphere, the interesting takes on race & gender, the psychological coping mechanisms of the prostitutes & johns & the unobtrusive fly-on-the-wall perspective lend Pleasure Factory an utterly unique momentum. 

Turtle-Eyed.

Sleepwalking (Dir. Bill Maher)

Unless you count unrelentingly dismal misfortune as a special effect, visual effects coordinator Bill Maher's (Chumscrubber, X-Men, X2, Batman & Robin) directorial debut is a real change of pace for the man & it makes you wish with all your heart that depression, poverty, unemployment & child abuse could be animated with CGI just to add a little color & energy to this pointless exercise in downer cinema. I suppose there's something to be said for transposing a standard Dickens plot to the run-down trailer courts & truckstops of mid-America, but even Dickens knew how to inject a bit of humor or a few lively characters into his stories. Here, Charlize Theron once again uglies down to play a more benign variation on her Aileen Wuornos character from Monster, a trampy, desperate loser who sleeps with truckers & abandons her turtle-eyed little girl (AnnaSophia Robb...turtle-eyed) to her even more lackluster little brother (an inchoate Nick Stahl). Stahl (Bully, Sin City) proceeds to lose his job because he's such a pushover & can't seem to say no to the turtle-eyed child's every preposterous whim & then loses the girl to foster care because he doesn't have a job. Stahl is evicted & moves in with his retarded friend Woody Harrelson & his shrieking shrew of a wife, who give him a deflated air mattress downstairs between the washer & dryer in which to sleep & yell at him for using their phone.

Stahl kidnaps the turtle-eyed girl & asks her where she'd want to go if she could go anywhere in the world, not mentioning that he's only got $300 in the travel budget. Thankfully she has zero imagination & can't think of a destination. If she'd said "Paris," Stahl would've probably found a completely self-destructive way to get her there, like selling her to French white slavers or robbing an armoured car with a dirt clod. But our hero, also suffering from a lack of imagination, bee-lines through the winter bleakness (it just had to be winter, didn't it?) to his father's house. Of course his father is a psychotic played by Dennis Hopper who works the child until her hands are bloody & then beats her for wanting an apple. Or something. Basically things just get worse & worse until you feel like blinding yourself with a salad fork. A literary critic once accused author Thomas Hardy of unnecessary cruelty to his characters, saying something to the effect that Hardy will create a pregnant, unwed heroine standing on a train platform on the run from a cruel landlord, having spent her last shilling on a ticket to see a kind aunt she doesn't know is dead & to top it off, the train will be an hour late. Thomas Hardy has nothing on Bill Maher.

Dennis Hopper hates the turtle-eyed girl...
 

Stop-Loss (Dir. Kimberly Peirce)

The title of Boys Don't Cry (1999) director Kimberly Peirce's sophomore effort refers to the Bush Administration's current practice of ordering soldiers who've completed their contractual tours of duty back to Iraq for tours of unspecified duration. While this is certainly an important topic & worthy of intelligent discussion, I was glad to see that this policy was just a jumping-off point for the very gifted Peirce. As in Boys Don't Cry, she imbues her small-town characters with just a hint of the mythic, but keeps them all grounded by her eye for rural detail, both tangible & psychological.

Ryan Phillippe, who's finally matured into a commanding leading man, plays Sergeant Brandon King, who returns to Brazos, Texas with what's left of his platoon after a bloody ambush in Tikrit. His buddies, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Lookout, 3rd Rock From the Sun) & Channing Tatum (Coach Carter, Step Up) are neck-deep in post-traumatic stress disorder, shell-shocked into a hyper-masculine state of paranoid alert that detaches them almost completely from normally comforting concepts like "home" and "family." Once back in Brazos, they're so tightly wound that they're only able to relate to one another. They drink, pick fights with anyone who looks at them wrong, beat their wives or fiancees, show nothing but indifference to personal property (cars, furniture, houses) but protect the area around themselves as if it's a war zone. Even though they are ostensibly out of the service, they are all drawn back in, Phillippe by the stop-loss policy, Tatum by his inability to adapt to normal life.

In a sad journey across a visibly war-torn America (Peirce knows where to look for the evidence & doles it out subtly) with Tatum's fiancee, an AWOL Phillippe heads to Washington, D.C. in hopes a friendly congressman will help him fight the stop-loss. On the way, he stops at a V.A. hospital to visit a horribly disfigured member of his ambushed platoon, stays in a motel that's become a safe house for soldiers resisting the stop-loss & finally meets with a lawyer who can give him a new identity & safe transit to Canada. Stop-Loss never resorts to anti-war sermonizing, in fact it's the most pro-troops of the recent spate of Iraq war movies. The soldiers' comraderie & sense of honor is never questioned or debased. Flecked with fine, well-defined peripheral performances by Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood), Ciarin Hinds (Rome), Alex Frost (the blithe bully in Drillbit Taylor), Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne) & Josef Sommer (Dirty Harry, Stepford Wives, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Stop-Loss is a revelatory road movie, a chilling portrait of war's tragic afterburn & a gracefully subdued message movie. Recommended.

This Kiss (Dir. Kylie Eddy)

Incompetent, nearly unwatchable Australian lesbian film that seems to have been filmed on a 1985 home video camera, edited by Helen Wiggin & acted by local dinner theater thespians. I can't believe this was so widely distributed on DVD. Avoid at all costs.
 

Director McDonald (Degrassi: The Next Generation, Queer as Folk) is like a cokehead Brian DePalma & his approach can be exhausting, especially on the small screen. But there's bleak magic at work in the film & it really gets under your skin as the story unfolds. Like a ghost story without a ghost, a teen issue movie without an burning issue & magical realism so matter-of-fact you'd miss it if you blink, The Tracey Fragments is a challenging, haunting & mordantly funny jigsaw puzzle of a movie that actually benefits from stylistically placing the audience at arm's length. Recommended.
   

Triloquist (Dir. Mark Jones)

The problem with modern ventriloquist horror fare -- Magic, Dead Silence, Dummy -- is that the filmmakers don't trust how inherently spooky the standard-issue dummy is. There's no need to make the doll look like a monster. In fact, that ruins the effectiveness entirely. I mean, why would some old-school Catskills ventriloquist purchase or build an overtly terrifying doll for his comedy routine? For my money, Edgar Bergen's Charlie McCarthy doll is plenty creepy & the dummies in the ventriloquist horror classics Dead of Night, The Great Gabbo & Devil Doll were all subtly sinister. They aren't gargoyles after all. Aside from all the other problems with Mark Jones' (Leprechaun) no-budget waste of time -- busted comedy, crude attempts to mix multiple film stocks, cartoonish acting -- the dummy in the movie (cleverly named "Dummy") is basically an horrific Mardi Gras parade head, looking more like papier mache slathered over chicken wire than wood. The use of a cowboy motif in the production design & soundtrack borders on interesting but it's so repetitive & shoddily executed that it's hardly worth mentioning really...

SAME TIME, LAST YEAR 

The Astronaut Farmer (Dir. Michael Polish)

If you watch this out of one eye, you’ll see a naïf, well-mounted populist drama for young boys about the triumph of human individuality in an age of daunting ideological conformity, a whimsical tale of rocketeering hubris akin to Joe Johnston’s October Sky.  If you switch eyes, you’ll see contrails of the rather jaundiced, laconic surrealism found in prior Polish Brothers (Northfork, Jackpot, Twin Falls Idaho) works. This thematic parallax makes for an uneasy viewing experience here. Billy Bob Thornton plays Charles Farmer (get it?), once an almost-astronaut, forced to return home to save his family’s farm after his father’s suicide. Farmer is building a rocket, an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned NASA rocket out of spare parts. The whole town knows Farmer’s a genius, as does his wife (Virginia Madsen), her father (Bruce Dern), and Charles’ polite, relatively-untroubled young son Shepard (Max Thieriot). The world, of course, is at odds with Farmer’s dreams & the specter of 911 & the Department of Homeland Security hang over his idealistic enterprise like the Black Sox scandal over Barry Levinson’s The Natural. One nice exchange occurs mid-film, when an FBI heavy (the naturally phlegmatic J. K. Simmons) asks Farmer, “How do we know you’re not building a Weapon of Mass Destruction?” To which our hero quips, “Because you found it.” Bruce Willis steps onscreen for a moment or two to have a beer & represent more muscular cinematic derring-do, Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother Where Art Thou) & Jon Gries (Napoleon Dynamite, Men in Black) have unimpressive but surprisingly welcome cameos, and Thornton can play square-jawed cornpone better than any man alive. I haven’t yet decided whether the strange juxtaposition - Norman Rockwell tableaux with David Lynch pacing back & forth just over the broad Texas horizon - works, but it’s certainly the most interesting item in the New Releases this week, so it’s recommended.

Who Can Kill a Child? (Dir. Narciso Ibanez Serrador, 1976)

A great, nearly forgotten, entry into the Creepy Brood of Killer Children genre (The Brood, Devil Times Five, Village of the Damned, etc.), Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? is a methodically-paced stunner shot on an island off the coast of Spain. In it, a reasonably happy married couple, expecting their first child, vacation to an island the husband visited years before. There’s nothing at all remarkable about this couple except that they’re about to have a baby. The island seems to be deserted, but soon it becomes apparent that the children have murdered off most of the adults after realizing that looking darling will often keep them from being mowed down like the evil urchins they really are. Opportunistic bastards! The scene in which the husband is finally forced to shoot a child is as shocking & yet beautifully-filmed as any in the history of cinema. Very little motivation is given for the children’s behavior, unless you count the first ten minutes of the film, in which we are deluged with documentary footage of children abused in Nazi concentration camps, Biafra & Vietnam. A very spooky, stylistically unique horror film. Highly recommended.