Category Archives: Reviews

PETE SMALLS IS DEAD , Really

11 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Pete Smalls is Dead is the title of Alexandre Rockwell’s first movie since 2002’s little seen 13 Moons, a moniker that comes perilously close to describing this weak comedy. The story of one-time screenwriter lured back to Hollywood after his elderly dog is kidnapped by a loan shark is barely coherent and so chock-full of whimsy that it chokes on the stuff. It is tempting to say this is a movie purely for Rockwell completists (if such a thing exists), but it has one redeeming feature and that is star Peter Dinklage’s soulful performance, a glowing beacon in the midst of the wreckage.

K.C. Monk (Dinklage) long ago fled Tinseltown, a one-time screenwriter turned laundromat proprietor. The dog, Buddha, is more than a pet, it’s a connection to his late wife, so when he cannot repay a $10,000 debt and the dog is taken, he is willing to do anything to raise the ransom. That is the situation that make him so vulnerable to a completely harebrained scheme hatched by his old friend Jack Games (Mark Boone Jr.) who informs K.C. that their recently deceased friend, big deal director Pete Smalls (Tim Roth), stole one of K.C.’s scripts for his last, unfinished film. Jack has the idea of using K.C.’s claim on the screenplay to commandeer the film’s rights, which the pair will then sell back at a high price to producer Hal Lazar (Ritchie Coster).

Seymour Cassel shows up as a cheerful Armenian gangster. Steve Buscemi (in an awful Afro wig) and Michael Lerner are a couple of slimy, would-be producers. Rose Perez is Pete’s scornful widow. Newcomer Theresa Wayman plays Pete’s editor and K.C.’s wan love interest. There are multiple weak sight gags involving the enormous Jack and diminutive K.C. riding through L.A. on Jack’s ancient scooter. Guys dressed in panda suits pull a heist. The movie’s climactic scenes, set in Mexico, take place amidst a carnival-like atmosphere that is clearly meant to evoke Fellini, but only succeeds in being another loud, tone deaf scene in a movie that is rife with them.

Within the film is a glimpse at Pete’s movie, a martial arts action movie. It’s a wire work scene that goes awry and like so much else in Pete Smalls is Dead, it is a lame joke that falls flat. That is really not a surprise, but there is something a little pathetic about a bad movie trying to make fun of a different kind of bad movie. It is a testament to Dinklage’s talent that despite everything, K.C. emerges as a full-blown, empathetic character and someone to root for even as one is rooting for this mess of a movie to just hurry up and end – Pam Grady

Family SHOUTING SECRETS at American Indian Film Festival

09 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

A week before Gil Birmingham and Chaske Spencer once more take their places on the big screen as Billy Black and Sam Uley in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, they will appear together as father and son in an altogether more intimate drama, Korinna Sehringer’s Shouting Secrets. The tale of a fractured family brought together by tragedy makes its world premiere at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts on Thursday, November 10 at the 36th American Indian Film Festival. Nominated for six awards at the festival, including Best Film and a Best Actor nod for Spencer, it is a richly realized portrait of kin repairing bonds once thought irretrievably broken.

Cal (Birmingham) and June (Tantoo Cardinal) are getting ready for their 40th wedding anniversary party when June suffers a stroke. Eldest son Tushka (Tyler Christopher), drowning in a midlife crisis, is separated from his wife Annie (Molly Cookson) and living at home. Daughter Pinti (Q’orianka Kilcher) also lives nearby with her musician boyfriend Brody (Connor Fox). But younger son Wesley (Spencer) long ago left Arizona and the San Carlos Apache Reservation in his rear view mirror. A successful novelist who remains close to his mother but who alienated the rest of the family with his autobiographical bestseller, he had no intention of returning for the anniversary fete but now finds himself pulled back into the fold.

Coming home only underlines what a mess Wesley’s life has become, but he’s not alone in that. The entire clan is in flux in a story that is at once about the constancy and the fragility of love, as well as the importance of family. Screenwriters Mickey Blaine, Tvli Jacob, and Steven Judd have constructed a strong narrative that resonates and filled the tale with memorable and only too human characters. Performances are strong across the board, justifying the four AIFF acting nominations that – in addition to Spencer’s – include nods for Christopher (Best Supporting Actor), Kilcher (Best Supporting Actress), and Tonantzin Carmelo (Best Actress), who plays the old friend that Wesley regards as “the one who got away.”

The AIFF’s sixth nomination went to Sehringer for Best Director. Shouting Secrets is an impressive directing debut, not just for the way she handles her actors and the demands of the story, but for the way she transforms the reservation into another character. Wesley jokes at the movie’s beginning that the rez ranks as one of Time magazine’s most desirable places to live. By the end of the film, the description no longer seems like such a joke, and not just because of the natural beauty of desert and mesas. – Pam Grady

The 36th American Indian Film Festival continues through Saturday, November 12. For tickets and further information, visit http://americanindianfilminstitute.com/.

Federal Bureau of Insinuation: J. EDGAR

09 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Billed as a biopic of the FBI’s first and most powerful director J. Edgar Hoover, Clint Eastwood’s latest, J. Edgar, is really something else: a bodice ripper where the hysterical Victorian maiden is none other than the famed G-man. A driven man who built the FBI into the potent agency that it remains to this day, but who also warped it to fit his own agenda, Hoover is a ripe subject for biography. It is just too bad that neither Eastwood, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black or star Leonardo DiCaprio have any real interest in Hoover’s actual story.

DiCaprio’s involvement is the real mystery here. After playing Howard Hughes in The Aviator, why would he want to portray another 20th-century icon who beneath the legend is a twisted, crabbed individual with no clue how to behave with other people? For what Black has seized on are the rumors about Hoover’s homosexuality and his relationship with FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). Rather than portray a love affair between two deeply conservative men at a time when the closet was not an option but a requirement, he opts for the notion of a deeply repressed Hoover in thrall to a domineering mother (Judi Dench) who warns her boy against becoming “a daffodil.” In this telling, Hoover is not just afraid of sex with men, he is terrified of women as well – he gets the vapors when Ginger Roger’s mother Lela (Lea Thompson) merely asks him to dance with her. He will primly hold hands with Clyde, but recoil at any other demonstration of affection, even verbal ones. These scenes are ridiculous, inviting unintentional laughs, but they also portray Hoover as pathetic when he was about as pitiful as your average rattlesnake.

Hoover’s life within the FBI gets the “lite” treatment. Much of it is told through the man’s eyes as he dictates an official history to a succession of agents sometime during the Kennedy administration, beginning with the post-World War I, anti-Communist Palmer Raids before the Bureau was even formed and continuing through the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and gangland raids during the Great Depression. In a kind of greatest hits approach, the film moves back and forth between that early era and that of the 1960s and early ’70s as Hoover’s power wanes (as witnessed when he clumsily tries to prevent Martin Luther King Jr. from accepting the Nobel Peace Prize) and Tolson’s health fails. The movie touches on Hoover’s confidential files that he wielded like a club, his penchant for wiretaps, and his contentious relationships with Presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Nixon. But it entirely skips the ’40s and ’50s and glosses over the fact that Hoover’s targets were not just the mighty who were in a position to defend themselves but also thousands of everyday Americans who were destroyed by the FBI’s often illegal activity.

J. Edgar fails at history and fizzles as a drama. Black’s screenplay is a tone-deaf mess and most of the characters lack substance. Hammer’s Clyde Tolson barely registers except as the pretty boy who caught Hoover’s eye. Naomi Watts as Hoover’s secretary Helen Gandy fares even worse – there was absolutely no reason to cast an A-list actress in this nothing role. DiCaprio is miscast, altogether too callow to persuade as the brilliant, vicious political animal that Hoover was at the office and unable to transcend the ridiculousness of Black’s script when it comes to his private life. Eastwood tries to spackle over the film’s deficiencies with a somber coat of pure gloss, but what ails J. Edgar cannot be cured with production value.

– Pam Grady

Twisted BRAINSTORM highlights Not Necessarily Noir II

04 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Reviews, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

If there is a lesson to be learned from William Conrad’s Brainstorm, screening on Saturday, November 5 at the San Francisco’s Roxie Theater as part of the Elliot Lavine-programmed Not Necessarily Noir II, it’s this: If you spy an unconscious beautiful woman locked in her car, and that car is parked on railroad tracks with a train approaching, don’t think about saving her life. Save your own and run far, far away. Rocket scientist Jim Grayam (Jeffrey Hunter) saves the pretty lady and pays a high price for his good deed in this twisted crime drama from 1965.

The woman Jim rescues is Lorrie Benson (Anne Francis) and she is the unhappy wife of Jim’s wealthy, jealous, and uber-vindicative boss Cort Benson (Dana Andrews). Greystone Mansion, the Beverly Hills estate that became a real-life crime scene in 1928 when oil heir Ned Doheny and his friend and assistant Hugh Plunkett died in a murder-suicide serves Brainstorm as the Benson’s home. The location with its dark history is appropriate as Jim – against his better judgment – falls for Lorrie. Her husband reacts with a frame job meant to portray the high-strung scientist as a a man losing his mind, which only inspires Jim to hatch an even more diabolical plot of his own. As Jim explains it to Lorrie and to comely psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Larstadt (Viveca Lindfors) he’s being crazy like a fox. But is he or is he a simply a deeply disturbed lunatic with a genius mind and homicidal tendencies?

As an actor, Conrad made his film debut in noir, portraying a gunsel in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) and he is probably most famous for his roles on TV’s Cannon and Jake and the Fatman. His directing career consisted mainly of episodic television and a handful of features. Brainstorm is the last of these and he retired from the field on a gloriously maniacal note. He sets a mood from that first scene of Lorrie in a deep sleep in the passenger seat of her car, catching a few winks while waiting for oblivion. Her world is off-kilter and so, soon enough, is Jim’s. That feeling only grows along with Jim’s paranoia as mad love pushes him beyond all reason. Hunter, who played Jesus in King of Kings, is better here playing an altogether different kind of martyr, sacrificing himself at the altar of his own madness.

There are other treats in store during the five-day Not Necessarily Noir II festival, including a double bill of Donald Siegel’s terrific 1964 remake of The Killers and Clint Eastwood’s tense, twisted 1971 directorial debut Play Misty for Me; a Joan Crawford double feature of Nicholas Ray’s flamboyant Western Johnny Guitar and the little-scene (and unavailable on DVD) 1955 melodrama Woman on the Beach; and an Edward D. Wood, Jr. triple bill hosted by Johnny Legend that will also include “Johnny Legend Presents WOODworld,” a special, 45-minute tribute to the grand master of irresistible schlock. – Pam Grady

Not Necessarily Noir II run Friday, November 4 through Tuesday, November 8 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater. For further info, visit http://www.roxie.com.

Better Than Something Celebrates Jay Reatard

16 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

When Better Than Something: Jay Reatard screens at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater on Wednesday, August 17, the theater will no doubt fill with fans of the late Memphis garage rocker and his music. People with little patience for raucous punk rock or who plain haven’t heard of him will stay away from the theater. That’s their loss, because Alex Hammond and Ian Markiewicz’s portrait of a talented musician and big personality is one of the best documentaries to come out this year.

It was Reatard himself who set the wheels for a feature-length doc in motion when he hired Hammond and Markiewicz to make Waiting for Something, a short about his life. When he died in his sleep four months shy of his 30th birthday, they already had a wealth of material at their disposal, not only in the extensive interviews they did with him for the earlier film, but also in his prodigious output. His career spanned half of his life and he was prolific, constantly recording (mostly on his own home equipment) and constantly touring, leaving behind a substantial audio and video record. Add to that a memorial show at South by Southwest shortly after Reatard’s death and the recollections of friends, family, and fans and the picture is complete.

One of the great thing about the documentary is that it is as accessible to someone coming cold to Jay Reatard as it is to his fans The music runs the gamut from his earliest angry teenage years to the gorgeous pop of his final LP 2009’s Watch Me Fall.  The video record is just as expansive, capturing the volatile performer at his most explosive and charismatic, whether throwing himself into his performance or its opposite, such as an instance where he angrily stomps off the stage and  afterwards throws things at his Lost Sounds band mate Alicja Trout during a show in Chicago. He could be a jerk, but he was a talented jerk – “He never pissed on my record collection,” laughs one of his friends – and he could also be charming and frequently is in the interviews recorded for the short.

Ultimately, it is those interviews – candid, smart, and self-aware –  that set Better Than Something: Jay Reatard apart from most other rock docs. In hindsight, Reatard’s desire to put  his life down on record seems prescient, but if he sensed that he wasn’t long for this world, it isn’t evident.  Whether he’s talking about his creative process or how he helped his mom raise his baby sister or taking Hammond and Markiewicz through a tour of his old neighborhood in Memphis, he is just so present. For a documentary about a dead guy, the film is very much alive. So many docs of this ilk, whether about the living or dead, tend to enshrine the subject. This one doesn’t do that. Instead, in letting Jay simply speak for himself what emerges is the farthest thing from obituary. This is a celebration. Jay’s body might have moved on, but his spirit still lives within Better Than Something: Jay Reatard. – Pam Grady  _________________________________________________________________
Better Than Something: Jay Reatard, a co-presentation of Noise Pop and the Roxie Theater, screens at 7:30 & 9:30pm on Wednesday, August 17. For tickets or further information, visit http://www.roxie.com.

Americathon: Made in 1979 for 2011

30 Saturday Jul 2011

Posted by in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Ah, a documentary!” laughs Jeremy at Lost Weekend Video when I bring Americathon, today’s selection, up to the counter.

Well, maybe not exactly, but yeah, with the debt limit ceiling about to crash on all our heads, it seems like a good time to revisit this broad political satire. Made in 1979 during the middle of an oil crisis, it was set in 1998 in a world where there was only enough energy left to power televisions. People live in their now immobile cars and the United States is flat broke. President Chet Roosevelt (a Three’s Company-era John Ritter) – a California-bred doofus descendant of Teddy and FDR who governs from a condo in Marina Del Rey – first tries to raise money with such schemes as auctioning a date with the Secretary of Agriculture and a National Marijuana Smoke-Off. When that doesn’t work, he borrows $400 billion from tycoon Sam Birdwater (Chief Dan George), who threatens to foreclose on the whole country when the loan isn’t paid back.

What’s a broke nation to do? Why hold a telethon, of course, hosted by  drug-guzzling, fading TV sitcom actor Monty Rushmore (Harvey Korman) who looks at the show as a comeback vehicle. But while marketing whiz Eric McMurkin (Peter Riegert, fresh from Animal House) diligently attempts to cobble together a winning show from an array of acts that is overly populated by ventriloquists, other forces are working to bring the country down.

That’s not so different when you think about it from what’s going on now, except there is nothing so entertaining as “Family In-Fighting” – a boxing match between Larry Miller a/k/a “Poopy Butt” (Jay Leno) and his mom – on the horizon and those that would bring this country to its knees are self-styled “patriots” not the United Hebrab Republic. (In the world of Americathon, the Israelis and the Arabs have joined together in a quest for world domination and England is the 57th state, complete with a theme park that occupies Buckingham Palace.)

When Americathon was released in August 1979, it was to dismal reviews. Roger Ebert gave it one star in the Chicago Sun-Times. The Chicago Reader‘s Dave Kehr thought the funniest thing about it was that it was financed by German tax shelter money. Janet Maslin in the New York Times was kinder. She thought buried within was a good 15-minute sketch.

Adapted from a play by the Firesign Theatre’s Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman and helmed by Tunnel Vision director Neil Israel, the movie is one of those sketch comedies that replaces plotting with a series of episodes. The cast that includes Ritter, Korman, Riegert, Leno, Fred Willard, Nancy Morgan, Zane Buzby, Howard Hesseman, Terry McGovern, then L.A. Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, and Meat Loaf (as well as Elvis Costello in a singing cameo) is game. There is a let’s-put-on-a-show cheesiness that’s charming and a shamelessness that’s appealing. A lot of the jokes didn’t work then and don’t work now, but there’s something disarming in the audacity of simply letting jokes fly hit or miss.

In a couple of places the movie is spookily prescient. Maybe Vietnam has not evolved into an alternative to the French Riviera, but Westerners do enjoy vacationing there. And, as a matter of fact, China has emerged as an economic powerhouse. Then again, North Dakota is not the country’s first all-gay state. Also, we don’t all live in our cars, just in houses with underwater mortgages.

As I write this, members of Congress seems hellbent on continuing with their scheme to bring this country to its knees as they play a game of chicken with the debt ceiling. We can all panic about it or mourn the country that once was or simply hide under the covers until the crisis passes (we might be cowering there for a long time). Or we can laugh. Americathon is not a work of genius, but it is suddenly topical and good for a few giggles. – Pam Grady

________________________________________________________________

Americathon is part of the Warner Bros. Home Archive Collection. It can be purchased from wbshop.com or Amazon or rented from independent video stores such as San Francisco’s Lost Weekend. Don’t even bother looking for it on Netflix or iTunes. You won’t find it.

Alienating Cowboys

29 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by in Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When did Harrison Ford – the once and always Han Solo and Indiana Jones – morph into Walter Brennan? True, he never takes out his teeth in Cowboys & Aliens and he never once says, “Dagnabit!” But his cranky cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde is not only cut from the same old coot cloth of many of Brennan’s characters, he also could be a cousin of Brennan’s My Darling Clementine villain Old Man Clanton – that is until the third act when Dolarhyde turns warmer and fuzzier. An actor who needs to be liked is a terrible thing.

In casting, at least, Cowboys & Aliens, feels very traditional. Daniel Craig makes a nice substitute for Steve McQueen. Sam Rockwell is a serviceable Jimmy Stewart type. One can easily imagine Justified‘s Walton Goggins, here seen in the supporting role of sniveling black hat Hunt, making a career out of similar parts back in the day when oaters were a cinematic staple. Cowboys & Aliens‘ Sheriff John Taggart Keith Carradine has toiled in Westerns off and on for 40 years, with credits that include guest stints on TV’s Bonanza and high-profile parts in The Long Riders, Wild Bill, and Deadwood. Paul Dano, playing Dolarhyde’s spoiled son Percy, is an inspired choice, with a face that would not be out of place among the collection of 19th -century photos in Wisconsin Death Trip.

It is unfortunate that the fine roster of talent that director  Jon Favreau assembled is in the service of this weak movie, the latest graphic novel to make the transition to screen. The tale of a community’s fight against the gold-mining space aliens that are bent on laying waste to humanity is neither offbeat nor witty enough, at least in comparison to, say, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. and its golden orb, the mortally wounded William Blake wandering the wilderness in Dead Man, the homoerotic subtext and weirdly placed rock bands in Zachariah, or just about any episode of the old Wild Wild West TV series. And despite being from an apparently advanced civilization, the aliens seem barely more sentient than the ravenous monster earthworms from Tremors (a movie that Cowboys & Aliens resembles in some aspects, or would if it had a sense of humor).

The movie is replete with Western archetypes. Craig as amnesiac outlaw Jake Lonergan is the antihero whose brains, courage, and propensity for violence make him a natural leader. Rockwell, playing barkeep Doc, is the tenderfoot who rises to the occasion. Adam Beach’s Nat Colorado is the Native American raised among whites who is not entirely at home in either society. Ford and Dano represent the moneyed classes. Goggins’ gang would be the villains in any other movie. There is also a whole American Indian tribe. And while it is to be expected that they are all going to have to set aside their differences to fight their common enemy, the rough edges of conflict and any genuine tension are washed away as Cowboys & Aliens shifts into a kind of ‘Kumbayah” moment. It all begins to feel like one of those kids’ T-ball games where everyone gets a trophy.

Matthew Libatique’s cinematography is gorgeous and Henry Gregson-Williams contributes an appropriately evocative score. Craig is terrific. He really is the heir apparent to McQueen. He’s got the look, the charisma, and the coolness. Rockwell and Goggins also standout among the large ensemble. These are all reasons to see a film that is otherwise a waste, satisfying neither as a Western nor as science fiction. – Pam Grady