Lessons of Darkness

Timecrimes (2008): B

A shot out of a moving car’s rear window, and the subsequent one of purchased goods forming a cluttered trail on the ground after falling out of the vehicle’s trunk, subtly presages the messy consequences that follow an ordinary man’s binocular-gazing in Timecrimes. Nacho Vigalondo’s swift head-spinner concerns Hector (Karra Elejalde), who while staying at a country home with wife Clara (Candela Fernández) spies a naked woman in the woods behind his residence. Curious, he investigates, only to be stabbed in the arm with scissors by a man whose head is wrapped in pink bandages, which compels him to take shelter first in a house and, soon afterwards, in a nearby silo where a stranger convinces him to hide in a giant time machine. When Hector exits, it’s an hour earlier, a disorienting situation that prompts not much of a reaction from the newly christened time-traveler, yet nonetheless instigates a story that – like the circular pendant worn around the nude beauty’s neck – quickly, convolutedly begins doubling back on itself. Vigalondo’s story doesn’t strenuously entertain profound notions about the past, time, memory, or predestination, instead largely content to simply tie itself in ever more intricate knots at breakneck speed. The film’s plentiful complications aren’t necessarily unique (at least for anyone familiar with Philip K. Dick), but they’re given corkscrew verve by taut plotting and correspondingly fleet, no-nonsense direction that – even when unable to keep the film’s domino-ing developments wholly surprising – place a premium on compact, clever, vigorous genre thrills.

Dear Zachary: A Letter To a Son About His Father (2008): A-

Kurt Kuenne’s documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter To a Son About His Father is many things – a tribute to a murdered friend, a historical record for the deceased’s child, a portrait of near-unfathomable love and devotion, and an evisceration of a country’s judicial and child protective services systems. It’s also a manipulative, tearjerking thriller that, functioning as a sustained, anguished primal scream, is as emotionally devastating as any film, fiction or non-, released this year. After the unexpected 2001 murder of his childhood best friend, 28-year-old doctor and gregarious Jack Black-lookalike Andrew Bagby, director Kuenne set out to interview Bagby’s friends, family and colleagues (of which there were many), as well as cull mountains of archival footage, with the aim of crafting a loving eulogy. Events, however, soon transformed the nature of his film – far from simply a heartfelt biography that captured the nuanced humanity of his subject, Kuenne found himself immersed in something of a horror story when it became clear that the woman Bagby had been unhappily dating while attending med school in St. John, Newfoundland, 40-year-old mother of three Dr. Shirley Turner, was a psychotic most likely responsible for the crime. Without revealing more, the ensuing saga, which would come to involve a stunning bombshell and an even more dreadful second tragedy, soon turns unbearably harrowing and upsetting. Breathlessly barreling forward, spastically jumping about between the past and present, and poignantly overlapping (and evocatively repeating) sound and image – such as via juxtapositions that reveal the natural and nurtured bonds shared by parents and children – the director’s hectic editorial structure results in a warp-speed, mixed-media, past-present collage that both reflects the complex breadth of Bagby’s life and expresses the overwhelming anxiety and grief of its creator. Kuenne’s concealment of his story’s later-act incidents is unquestionably an attempt to generate dramatic suspense from unspeakable tragedy. Yet his structure also, fundamentally, honors his traumatic in-the-moment experience making the film, as well as honestly seeks to provoke requisite outrage, sorrow and hope over a story at once gut-wrenchingly disturbing and – in the figures of Bagby’s tireless, courageous, selfless parents – astoundingly inspiring.

Child Abuse and Africa x 2

A quick threesome for this beautiful Sunday afternoon...

Out Now:

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (Slant magazine)

Pray the Devil Back to Hell (Slant magazine)

Gardens of the Night (Cinematical)

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008): D+

Making one long for his dreadful Saw II, III, and IV, director Darren Lynn Bousman’s Repo! The Genetic Opera rips off heavy metal and horror aesthetics to absolutely dismal effect. With junky comic book-paneled sequences, musical numbers marked by graceless, strident melodies and generic chunk-chunk guitars, and a goth style drenched in gore, Bousman’s rock-opera plays like a spastic, semi-incoherent extended music video for Type O Negative by way of Evanescence. It’s a faux-grim, pop-inflected mood piece with a legion of obvious influences (Moulin Rouge!, Rocky Horror, every other metal act from the last twenty years) and yet barely a coherent idea in its mushy head. Revolving around a future in which genetic manipulation is a designer fad, and repossessions of purchased organs are carried out by mega-corp GeneCo’s dreaded Repo Man (oooh, health care scariness!), Bousman’s script is almost as bumpy and inane as his cinematography is flashy-cruddy. Paris Hilton is well cast as a surgery-addicted heiress but, like castmates Paul Sorvino, Bill Mosley and Alexa Vega, she can’t sing, and any tongue-in-cheek energy to her performance is lost amidst the director’s messy staging and his plot’s inane machinations. On the other hand, Sarah Brightman, playing a singer with robot eyes, and Anthony Stewart Head, as the Repo Man, certainly can sing, but the lyrics stuffed into their mouths are of an embarrassing sort, thereby further emphasizing the fact that there’s no rhythm or spark to the front-and-center songs. Given its baroque Grand Guignol outlandishness, Repo! is clearly aiming for cheesy camp, but its across-the-board awfulness is, ultimately, just plain ol’ awful.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008): C+

Kevin Smith blatantly invades Judd Apatow territory with Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which not only blends the bawdy with the unabashedly sentimental (a vein Smith has himself, admittedly, tapped before in the superior Chasing Amy), but also borrows Apatow’s favorite everyman in portly, scruffy Seth Rogen. It’s not an altogether unsuccessful tack to take, and certainly results in more profanely amusing bits than were found in Smith’s recent clunkers. Yet the sweetness of his tale – about two lifelong friends’ attempts to avoid homelessness by making money through the production of a porn film – is of such an eye-rollingly corny, contrived variety that the enterprise is salvaged solely by the luminous, versatile Elizabeth Banks. As Miri, Banks charmingly embodies something akin to a geeky ideal, a drop-dead beauty who’s cool enough to be uncool, her magnetism coming not merely from her looks, self-deprecating sense of humor, or comfort with dirty talk, but also from her status as an unsuccessful babe who’d cohabitate with a schlep like Zack in a dilapidated apartment and agree to have sex on video to subsist. This, of course, makes her a complete and utter fantasy, and Smith’s film (poorly lit and shot, as usual) is best when it simply adores her as a pinnacle of dreamy desire, the type of unrealistic hottie who’s awkward, insecure, happy boozing it up in dingy dives, and at ease discussing anal sex. Naturally, however, there are conventions to be adhered to, and thus despite a few extremely lewd sequences, Zack and Miri – especially during a rote third act in which the best friends can’t just screw because, regardless of their supposed brother-sister rapport, they deep-down luuuuuuv each other – proves only a passably conventional rom-com squishfest decked out with Smith’s usual pop-culture references.

Halloween Hangover

Too. Much. Candy.

But on the brighter side of things, at least with regards to this latest batch of reviews, the positives outweigh the negatives...

Now Playing:

Splinter (Slant magazine)

The Haunting of Molly Hartley (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:

Role Models (Slant magazine)