Stories We Tell (2012): Exorcising Demons on Screen (Documentary)

Stories We Tell (2012)

dir: Sarah Polley

The process of making a documentary is frequently personal and intimate. You discover a topic, you start interviewing the subjects, you edit the piece, you re-interview the subjects, you continue editing, and you get closer and closer to the piece of work.

But, Stories We Tell is personal straight out of the gate. This is a documentary by Sarah Polley about her own family. There's not much more intimate than you can get. But, the topic isn't just about her family, but about everybody's memory of the family, and more specifically, her long-deceased mother.

Sarah, in the process of making the film, all but excised herself from the topic at hand. She interviews all her siblings, her father, aunts, her mother's friends, and her mother's ex co-workers and lovers when she could. Her father also reads from a memoir, in which he details situations from the past. She gets specific and generic memories about her mother, all from different perspectives. Some remember her as a flirt, others say she was chaste. Some remember a vibrant lively personality, others remember somebody who was distant. Some say she was an open book, others say she had many secrets.

Such is the power of memory.

Polley, early in the film, tells one of the subjects that the interview is less an interview and more an interrogation. This is fitting because of the reliance on memory that this film uses. Interrogations are always about memory. In police work, and in this documentary. Memory is fallible, and Polley doesn't just recognize that, she examines that.

And, part of that is due to the shifting narrative of her life. She spent most of her life under the impression that her biological father was her mother's husband, and she was raised by him. Come to find out, her mother had an extensive affair with a guy in a different city, and she is his daughter. But, nobody knew. They suspected. There was even a game when she was a kid teasing her that she's from a different father, though nobody suspected that to be true.

What Polley is saying about humanity isn't straightforward. She never explicitly comes out and says "what I'm saying is..." Instead, Stories We Tell intelligently lets us draw our own conclusions about the drama in our lives, and how its seen from completely different points of view. Do we put on different faces for different people knowing that they know different things about us than other people? Or, do we see other people differently because of how they present themselves to us? How are all of our realities different from each other's realities when it's the same mass of humanity? Polley's story of the basic human search for love is filled with complex characters that aren't drawn into easy stereotypes, letting us all try to figure out what it means to our lives.

Stories We Tell is deeply personal to Sarah Polley. But, the issues she raises are universal to the human experience. And, they're questions we all should be asking ourselves.

Axed (2012): Half-thoughts on the economy

Axed (2012)
dir: Ryan Lee Driscoll

One of the dangers of shoehorning social commentary into your movie is that you might get tired of the commentary, or lose your way and finish your movie with a bunch of cliches. It's happened to directors good and bad, on all types of budget. You think you're going in for something entertaining, then you get asked to think about something, and then the movie never finishes its thought.

This is the problem with Axed, a British horror movie which seems like its going to attempt to be about the economic landscape and ends up being a slasher horror movie. By the end of Axed, it loses its way.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The central figure of Axed is Kurt Wendell, a married father of 2 who is fired in the opening scene before throwing a temper tantrum of despair in the parking garage. After being fired, he takes his family to the countryside in order to kill them.

This sounds promising. A man who could possibly be at the end of his financial ropes decides that it would be easier to kill his family than to try getting another job. It's happened in real life. It's a devastating reality that focuses on the everyday stress of regular working stiffs. The disappearing middle class.

But, Ryan Lee Driscoll tacks on a lot of extra baggage. Kurt Wendell is an overbearing abusive tyrant of a father and husband. He mocks his son for being bullied and beaten at school. He yells at his daughter for wearing a semi-revealing dress. He admonishes his wife for not teaching the children how to behave. And, that's all at the breakfast table. Kurt is an abusive man to begin with, and the whole family's behavior acknowledges this.

When Kurt unexpectedly takes the family on a countryside vacation that day, the day after he is fired, his family goes along with it to not make him mad, and they constantly walk on eggshells to try not to upset him. By the time we get to the country house, we can tell that Kurt was an asshole well before he got fired, and that he should have been ditched long ago.

Driscoll then adds on a lot of games to the movie. Kurt has already kidnapped and tied up his former boss, whom has been sleeping with Kurt's wife. He then plays cutesy abusive games with the family foretelling that the home life isn't so peachy keen after all. The financial burden of losing his job is just a final straw, and is barely mentioned outside of a couple conversations. The rest is just on a Funny Games esque scenario.

The biggest problem with Axed is namely follow-through. Driscoll has a dynamite concept about everyday finance that he abandons for family game playing that he abandons for slasher movie tropes that we've seen a million times. Even the small details of Axed lack follow-through. For example, Kurt collects everybody's cell phone, but the daughter has a spare for some reason, and uses it to call her boyfriend, but not the police. This lack of follow-through with a concept is just plain silly at best.

Another big problem is that the acting is pumped up to 11, though with the dialogue and scenario there's not much more that you can do to make it believable. Jonathon Hansler's Kurt Wendell is like a psychotic John Cleese, crying and falling apart constantly while storming around full of self-righteous anger. It's kind of fun watching him do it, but there is no ramp up. It starts at 11 and he has nowhere to go, really. Pretty much everybody stays on the same volume for the whole movie, and it's really just that nobody has much of an arc.

I do hope somebody remakes Axed. It's a concept that deserves far better treatment than this. It's not scary, it's been done before, and it isn't as fun as it thinks it is.

The Comedy (2012): The Absurdism of Irony

The Comedy (2012)
dir: Rick Alverson

At the center of The Comedy is a Williamsburg trust fund hipster who has no reason to be productive, and so his boredom with life is documented for examination. Directed and co-written by Rick Alverson, The Comedy takes a sharp incisive look at the emptiness of ironic provocation without purpose.

Swanson (Tim Heidecker) is a middle-aged rich white guy whose brother is in a psych ward and his father is on life support. His mother is presumably out of the picture. He doesn't need a job because his father made a fortune, and he lives either at home or on a boat, which he has anchored in the middle of the water. He passes his time by either hanging out with his friends trying to out-offend each other, or by placing himself in situations of people less fortunate than he in an ironic attempt to try experiencing something other than soulless boredom.

Swanson is an asshole, but only because he has nothing better to do. He isn't trying to better the world when he flirts with a girl at a party by telling her that Hitler had some really good ideas outside of that whole murdering thing. And, he's not trying to be anything but an empty provocateur when he pays a cab driver to let him drive the cab for 20 minutes, during which he provokes a woman by calling her a hooker, then running away leaving everybody else to clean up his mess.

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are actually subversive choices to act in The Comedy, since they're the creators of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, a surrealistic sketch show that deals heavily in irony and sarcasm. If you're annoyed or disgusted by the show, that's the joke. Alverson is exploring how that sense of humor can destroy your own sense of self.

Rick Alverson's look at the life is filmed and paced like an Albert Camus novel. His basic philosophy is that putting up a wall of self-defensive irony will not protect your soul, and instead destroy your ability to connect with the world except on the most superficial of levels. Swanson, has one or two moments where he is actually being vulnerable but quickly realizes what he did and puts up shields. When he is talking with his sister-in-law, he asks about his brother, genuinely. Before that, he was ranting off faux-offensively to put her on edge, and she asks if he's genuinely asking the question, to which he retreats and asks about conjugal visits in the padded cell. The irony being Swanson is that he's actually going through some hardcore crap in his life that he's basically trying very hard not to feel about, and thus he's trying to make everybody else feel like he does.

But, Swanson isn't the only participant in this charade. Eric Wareheim as Van Arman, one of Swanson's "friends," participates in the same faux-offensive behavior, but does it without the self-aware emotional shielding that pervades Swanson's story. Arman reinforces the acceptability of Swanson's detachment, and doesn't challenge the status quo. When a different cab driver doesn't have a working radio, Arman starts singing "You're gonna get a-no-no tip" while Swanson and another friend for the remainder of the ride, while the poor cab driver finishes his job.

What The Comedy and Rick Alverson does well is depict the non-upper class and capture their loathing of this group of entitled white hipsters. Both cab drivers, the probably illegal landscapers, the Catholics, the nurses at a hospital, the black guys at a bar in the ghetto during an act of "slumming," the in home nurse who cares for his dad - all of them are harassed or provoked by Swanson, but realize they would probably get shafted if they didn't give in to the rich guy who can pay to do what he wants.  These instances of class division reminded me of Cheap Thrills, where a rich guy pays poor guys to entertain him through dares and humiliation. But, Swanson isn't charismatic. And, Swanson's humiliation isn't with joy or friendliness.

While The Comedy does a great job of creating a case of soullessness for Swanson as the Williamsburg hipster, it introduces reinforcing friends without giving them reason to be so jaded with the world. This is The Comedy's main fault. It closely examines the behavior of a full culture, but it only focuses on one case and gives him easy excuses. Which, adds to the great absurdism of its philosophy. We're looking for meaning in things, but can't find it in the places we're looking.

Is The Comedy an easy movie? No. But, it's not a hipster provocation either. Or, maybe it is? One could easily be forgiven for thinking the whole movie is actually being ironic in its intended purposes and is as empty as the characters it depicts. It's only fair for a movie about people dealing in emptiness for one to come back from The Comedy thinking it's actually empty.

But, the way I watched, and maybe I'm not in on the joke, it's about the emptiness of the lifestyle. The Comedy is a plea for humanity to let down its shields and actually feel what life hands them.

Bad Parents (2012): When Bad Intentions Aren't Enough

Bad Parents (2012)
dir: Caytha Jentis

Movie pitch: Soccer Moms are currently hot in pop culture. They're the butt of every easy joke you can ever find. So, how about this: There's a mom who suddenly finds herself thrown into this milieu, and goes a little crazy over it. She wasn't crazy to begin with, but suddenly the pressure goes to the mom's head and...bam, she kills the coach. Just to make sure the irony is hit home, we put in Janeane Garofalo in as the nutty soccer mom lead, and then we fill up the rest of the cast with a bunch of comedians and comediennes who may have hit some rough patches. We'll call it Bad Parents. Sure-fire hit!

Yeah, but no. This is a movie based on a play, It's All About The Kids, by Caytha Jentis who also adapted it for screen and directed the movie and produced it. To top it off, it is supposedly semi-autobiographical, based in her "insider knowledge" of soccer mom life. Let's just say that Ms Jentis is a bit too close to the subject matter to properly do it justice.

Janeane Garofalo plays a mother who puts her daughter on a soccer team, which has been split up into A and B teams, and her daughter ends up on the A team. But, she immediately starts feeling the pressure of whether her kid is good enough to be on the A team, or whether the coach is good enough to get wins. The coach has been murdered, it's revealed in the first couple minutes, but the mystery of why is not a mystery. And, the when isn't even that surprising. In fact, the murder sets up a level of dark expectation that is never really met.

Bad Parents is supposed to be about the the mania of soccer mom life, which is portrayed by Garofalo and is picked up and echoed through the various moms on the team...but it never really gets all that manic. In fact, the closest to manic is the ever reliably unhinged Cheri Oteri, who deserves so much better material than this. There is one scene that reflects the absurdity of it all, and that stars Oteri and a walk-on by hunky husband Ben Bailey. Ben Bailey calls as a president of some prestigious soccer academy and proceeds to have soccer mom phone sex with Cheri Oteri by talking about how good her kid is while she's making dinner. Oteri is glorious in it.

The rest of the movie constantly tries to live up to the dark absurdity of it all, but constantly fails miserably, and that's in part due to Garofalo sleepwalking through the role, Christopher Titus never fully embracing the assholishness of the character, and Jentis making a movie that feels amateurish. In fact, most of the proceedings seem like Jentis is treating the subject matter with kid's gloves, never fully committing to mocking or even making judgement calls on the culture. Instead, Garofalo has to make the half-hearted comments that point out the absurdity in a series of white room folding laundry asides.

Garofalo is a major part of why this movie fails, never finding either the heart of the character nor the wit of the movie. Unfortunately, Janeane Garofalo is a one-note actress/comedienne who is still amazingly brilliant when she turns in a cold-hearted cynical exhausted character (her walk-on in Broad City being an amazing recent example), but always flounders when she steps out of her comfort zone to try to find wit in the normal-ish characters. It also doesn't help her that she's surrounded by better actresses who grasp the ridiculousness a little more, and flounder less.

Unfortunately, the movie's budget probably went to the cast and not to anything else as the movie feels like it has the budget of a $100 student film. With shoddy camera work, and a dedication to that digital camera feel, Bad Parents is never really good. It's main problem is that it feels aloof but doesn't want to. Soccer Moms are way too easy of a target, but Bad Parents never even hits that target. It's never endearing toward soccer moms nor is it mocking of them. And, thus, Bad Parents becomes a completely unwatchable mess of a terrible movie.

That being said, movie producers...you need to make Cheri Oteri a star. In both this and Southland Tales, she's shown the ability to shine in weird material, and find the funny. Please, give her better roles.

Kiss of the Damned (2012): Sexy Vampire Women, updated

Kiss of the Damned (2012)
dir: Xan Cassavetes

From the 1960s and into the 1970s, there was a whole genre of erotic vampire movies, with a fair amount from Jess Franco, director of Venus in Furs and Female Vampire. They were lush, languid, filled with sexy bodies, and had plots that were largely inconsequential. With Kiss of the Damned, Xan Cassavetes is trying to recapture that feeling of the purposeless vampire movie without devolving into the maudlin vampire genre that was created in Twilight.

Kiss of the Damned focuses on the relationship of a Paolo, a screenwriter, who falls in love with a hot vampire woman, Djuna, and then is turned by her. Later, as they're nesting, Djuna's sister Mimi reappears from Amsterdam following a tumultuous whatever, and creates chaos simply by being present, and by not killing her victims and leaving them around to be resurrected.

Apparently, in the mythos of Kiss of the Damned, if a vampire doesn't decapitate their victims, the victims have a chance of randomly resurrecting. No blood exchange needed. Djuna's problem with Mimi is that she claims that Mimi doesn't properly protect her victims, whereas Mimi and Paolo always decapitate their victims.

Djuna also has a problem with Mimi's periodically wild party lifestyle. This is shown by a threesome with a random couple in the gigantic mansion Djuna has. Everybody snipes at each other, people die, and the movie ends.

What Cassavetes captures with Kiss of the Damned is the languid pacing that came with the arthouse erotic horror film, as well as the inconsequential plots. With all of the fancy camera work, however, Cassavetes somehow misses the completely lush gorgeous look that those old films actually captured. Maybe it was in color selection, fabrics and shapes that were en vogue, or just a general aesthetic of color choice, camera angles, lighting and film stock. But, Cassavetes misses the mark in a fully transformative experience.

Cassavetes also seems to be attempting to turn Twilight inside out by deconstructing a couple of the central ideas from the novel, but putting them into an erotic old-school movie genre. She includes the fight between Mimi and Djuna about Djuna's turning Paolo into a vampire. There is discussion of the morality of humans and vampires. There is discussion about the larger groupings of vampirism, with Djuna and Mimi being sisters from the same mother. Cassavetes is simultaneously exposing these discussions to be as silly and morally relative as they are.

Cassavetes also tones down the rampant, gratuitous, nudity that dominated the Jess Franco vampire movies. In some of his more notorious movies, like Vampyros Lesbos, Franco would essentially fill the movie wall to wall with beautiful naked vampire women, and the movies would be a classy excuse to see a blue movie because it was a Spanish movie, and therefore have more cultural currency. Cassavetes has little interest in keeping everybody naked, though does frequently indulge in shirtless displays of Milo Ventimiglia (Paolo).

The experiment that is Kiss of the Damned is, ultimately, a mild success. It does succeed in deconstructing and  mocking Twilight without being overt about its intentions. It only half succeeds in recreating the atmosphere of the original vampire erotic genre. And, it isn't nearly as over the top as it should be. It's entertaining in fits, but ultimately it is brought down by the lack of anything going on.

Passion (2012): The high risk culture of Advertising

Passion (2012)
dir: Brian DePalma

The title of this movie practically screams sex. There is plenty of sex in Passion. But, it's all so dispassionate, that Passion becomes an ironic title.

DePalma, one of the kings of the erotic thriller genre, returns to the erotic thriller after a decade away to create the very cold and distancing Passion, filled to the brim with polysexual ice queens and credulous imbeciles. And, while it is very much a DePalma film, he seems to be lost swimming in the modern modern milieu of corporate backstabbing and high-tech corruption.

Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams star as Isabelle and Christine, two a-list power players in the rough and tumble world of marketing who play the game of mentor/mentee while also besting each other. McAdams, as Christine, is the high-powered account executive who takes the somewhat bisexual Isabelle under her wing to leverage Isabelle's ideas for a new campaign to score a job in New York. When Christine takes charge, fucks Christine's boyfriend, and takes credit for her ideas, Isabelle declares war with the boyfriend haplessly being used as a football between the two.

The main difference that separates Passion from most of the other films of the ilk is that we largely take Isabelle's point of view, instead of the point of view of a male. Passion seems to be a response to the feminist assessment/complaints launched at movies like Fatal Attraction and Disclosure, where powerful women are largely the big scary man-eating criminal who victimizes men in order to move up the corporate ladder. Then, in those movies, the male character, with whom the audience is asked to identify, always defeats the evil intentions of the powerful women in order to restore the patriarchy.

Passion is the male response saying, "well, what if we replaced the man with a woman?" What does happen to the film?

*SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT* Well, the woman we're identifying with ends up as the killer, is the answer. It's never the man that's a killer. The men in Passion are too feckless to care about such trampy bitchy ongoings. But, the woman we're watching kills her mentor in an emotional fit of cold calculation. What does that say about the sexual politics of Passion? Well, the movie is still very much "bitches be crazy." Christine is seen as a cold soulless man-eater who even fucks Dirk, her boyfriend, with a strap-on while making him wear a mask which looks like her. Isabelle is a cold, calculating woman who kills her mentor. Isabelle's assistant is a lesbian who has a crush on Isabelle, and lets Isabelle kill Christine in order to blackmail Isabelle into being the assistant's lover.

The lesson of Passion is that most men who make the erotic thriller genre will still make demeaning movies that mark all women as crazy. Especially old, pervy men, like DePalma.

But, the main problem with Passion isn't its regressive sexual politics, in a misguided attempt to be progressive. That kind of comes part and parcel with the erotic thriller genre. The main problem with Passion is DePalma. DePalma has severe tonal shifts that are as jarring as they are terrible, he indulges in neo-noir style camerawork that frequently seems like a film student is imitating both DePalma and Verhoeven's Basic Instinct, and he spends a huge amount of time in the tense world of high-stakes marketing.

The first two acts of Passion are spent watching Christine and Isabelle try to one-up each other while also trying to survive the emotional devastation that they inflict on each other. It's not just dull, it's boring after awhile. The ludicrousness of some of the humiliation adds to how little we, the audience, actually care about the film. Add to it that little of it ultimately matters in the outcome, and that it seems to go on forever, Passion becomes passionless. All the no-nudity-claused Rachel McAdams in sexy outfits and dispassionate sexings, all the displays of kinky toys, and all the Noomi Rapace having awkward sex and in tight outfits, can't make the ongoings any more interesting.

Ultimately, Passion is a late-era DePalma failure. In an attempt to reclaim his former glory of Dressed to Kill or Sisters, while also very consciously trying to not imitate Hitchcock, DePalma created a brief slog of an erotic thriller. Is it terrible? No. There are far more inept films that exist. But, it's merely serviceable, and coming from the hands of somebody who can be as great as DePalma, that's a shame.

1313: Night of the Widow (2012): Shirts and a script!

See?  They have a wardrobe!!

1313: Night of the Widow (2012)
dir: David DeCoteau

Previously, I've assumed that 1313 was a weird experiment in homoerotic minimalism on the cheap. Like an Andy Warhol for the genre picture. But, then David DeCoteau has to throw a curveball like Night of the Widow into the mix.

DeCoteau starts out Night of the Widow with a shock. There isn't 10 minutes of establishing shots. Instead, we get right to the meat of the 1313 series: a hot guy wandering around the DeCoteau mansion in his underwear. Within a minute, we're already watching a hot guy sleeping in his white briefs, and then he wakes up and wanders around in his tighty whities. OK, this is the 1313 we're used to!  Eventually he finds his wife, dressed like a black widow already, who raises a butcher's knife and squeaks "I want a divorce" then TITLE!

Humor, and fast pacing? DeCoteau, who are you and what have you done with David?

In all reality, Night of the Widow feels like one of DeCoteau's pre-1313 movies, in which characters talk a lot, there's a script, confusion, fun, and blatant and hilarious homoeroticism.

In the next scene, we get the set up of Michael (the dead guy)'s friends showing up for his funeral. They used to be in a band or something, and abandoned him 5 years ago. No explanations are offered for their absence from his life, which we learn later is because they really haven't abandoned him. everybody plays a part.

The set up is that Michael is some sort of rich orphan (huh?!) who has hidden a key to his fortune somewhere in the house. And, whoever finds it gets the fortune and can split it however they want. Which, normally, would be a set up for everybody, one by one, to strip down to their underwear wander around half-assedly looking for a key, probably while calling out "KEY! Where are you, Key?!" and then getting murdered by the black widow.

But, DeCoteau is always a violator of our expectations. We get a talky history of Michael as seen by his friends as they look for the key. These history scenes give some semblance of motives for possibly murdering Michael. Or, not as his ashes actually go missing midway through the movie. One of the scenes is Michael playing football with a male friend, who is telling him to dump his wife, leave his fortune and run away with him to a foreign country...no homo. Or another is a guy having a lengthy shower scene in Michael's house, and then Michael coming home to find his wife in the bathroom as well (but not in the shower).

In the end, there are the usual twists that we can kind of see coming a mile away. Which is also unusual for a 1313 series film, which usually don't have enough plot to actually have twists!

1313: Night of the Widow is the most entertaining of the DeCoteau series, namely because it doesn't obey the endless repetition of a random guy wandering around, ends up in his underwear then dead. This is more of an Agatha Christie movie that has lots of homoerotic subtext thrown in, and a bunch of shirtless flashback shots. If you have been wanting DeCoteau to make an actual movie in the 1313 series, Night of the Widow is your best bet.

That being said, it isn't a GOOD movie. It's low-budget entertainment, and something that doesn't actually bore you. But, if you want homoerotic, cheesy-as-hell, sub-par Agatha Christie, then you'll want to watch Night of the Widow.

Keep The Lights On (2012): Cracked Relationship

Keep the Lights On (2012)
dir: Ira Sachs

In my review of Weekend, I lamented that I wanted more mature queer films that didn't reflect my life. I wated ones that told a story of somewhere I wouldn't go. Ostensibly, I was hoping for quality genre films, or other sorts of films that weren't just generic gay characters falling in love. In actuality, I love the type of movie that Keep the Lights On actually represents. The Leaving Las Vegas / Lifetime Original Movie obsessive relationship ruined by drugs genre romance that dictates the beginning, middle, and end of a relationship that exists, but that I would never actually be a part of.

When I say that the relationship actually exists, Keep the Lights On is the emotional braindump of Ira Sachs, who fictionalized his own relationship with Bill Clegg. And, to be fair, Clegg wrote about his own life in the memoir, Portrait of a Young Addict. For his part, Ira Sachs has faith and devotion to the relationship still, and it shows through his sensitivity to the subject matter at hand.

What Keep the Lights On focuses on is the creeping influences of drugs and infidelity to a multi-year homosexual relationship between Erik (the Ira Sachs character) and Paul (the Bill Clegg character). Paul and Erik meet over a NYC party line in 1998, where Paul is recreationally smoking dope and introducing Paul to drugs as well. Both being successful white gay men, they fall into a relationship.

By 2000, the edges are already starting to show. Paul disappears for long periods of time. Erik catches him on the party line again while he's out of town. Erik finds Paul passed out in the middle of the hall. They conduct an intervention. Paul goes to rehab.

But that isn't the end, and these two people keep orbiting each other. Obsession. Addiction. AIDS. Life. For another 6 years, they run in and out of each other's lives. Until the end.

Where Weekend felt like Generic Gay Life 101, Keep the Lights On is a very specific movie exploring what it means to actually love somebody who is possibly one of the worst possible people that you could be around, and that could be around you. Sachs is trying to explore, on screen, what it meant for him to love an addict and how hard it was to figure out what the right thing to do was, nevertheless to do those things.

My main concern with Keep the Lights On is that Erik isn't a saint. Sure, he's not the drug addict and the catalyst of all the bad actions in the film. But, Erik's possible enabling in the first two years is glossed over, heavily. Frequently, throughout the film, Erik is shown as the martyr for his love. Even when he's being humiliated in a hotel room, or taking revenge drugs, he is shown as nothing but compassionate.

Keep the Lights On actually does address a huge lifestyle problem in the gay community: crack and speed. While this is also called party and play, or pnp, this is currently seen as a major component in the current rise of HIV among gay youth in the population. But, Keep the Lights On doesn't turn into an after school special suggesting that the addict will spin into a hellish descent, a la Requiem for a Dream. Instead, Sachs keeps things melancholy, and creates a lament for a relationship that was ruined by a chemical.

With Keep the Lights On, a move towards mainstream filmmaking, as well as quality filmmaking, is still apparent, as with Weekend. But, what it presents is a move to reinclude the lost danger that queer cinema had when the LGBTQ community was on the edges in the 70s, 80s, and even into the 90s. The edginess of films like Taxi Zum Klo or The Living End or even Mala Noche have made way for more mainstream acceptability, and the community is finally coming back to be able to tell the stories that may not be acceptable in the hetero mainstream.

Still, Ira Sachs created a heady, romantic, lamenting for a relationship that he has been trying to get over. In doing so, he also created a siren call for the community at large. The drugs that have taken over several aspects of the community. But, largely, Keep the Lights On is a well-made relationship drama which laments the way that drugs affects people's lives.

The Devil's Carnival (2012): Aesop's Fables for Goths

The Devil's Carnival (2012)
dir: Darren Lynn Bousman

At a certain point in The Devil's Carnival, I thought "this would be awesome, if I were watching a community of amateurs doing this for free in a tent in the desert." Frequently, it seems like director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw 2-4) called his group together to say "Can you guys come help with this? It'll be fun! Not much money in it though. But, really, I won't take much of your time."

The whole genre of The Devil's Carnival fits Bousman's last film Repo! The Genetic Opera. Bousman's motley group consists of goth-industrial "singers," comic book artists, non-singing actors and actresses, and probably some array of actual burlesque and carnival folks. He had used many of this cast in Repo!, but had more success with the different singers at the focus of Repo!, including the now absent Sarah Brightman. But, without that powerhouse, we're left to listen to a bunch of non-singers warble their way through atonal circus-inspired carnival musical songs.

The Devil's Carnival is merely an excuse to string together three of Aesop's Fables. There is The Dog and His Reflection, The Scorpion and the Frog, and Grief and His Due. Since Aesop's Fables are generally short and to the point, we have to fill time with framing device.

In the real world, there are three characters who are about to die, and actually do die, each representing the three different stories. The first is a guy who locks himself in a bathroom, depressed, and then slits his wrists mourning his son. The second is a woman who is being chased by the cops. And, the third is a woman who is being beaten by her boyfriend. When they all die, they get transported to Hell, where they have to suffer through a short couple of songs based around their respective fables.

The woman being chased by the cops is a thief and always looking for material goods. Her story chases after bigger and bigger jewels, and when she sees a person in a mirror with a large amount of jewels, she dies. The woman being beaten goes from bad boy to bad boy, always trusting even though it doesn't benefit her. And the guy is looking for his dead son, but ultimately finds redemption.

Ultimately, in this movie, women are actually evil. Both women suffer through punishment for their transgressions. The greedy gold digger is also a liar. She doesn't escape. The habitually abused spouse is blamed because she trusts too easily, and her boyfriends are never punished for being bad boys (which, actually, goes against The Scorpion and the Frog, where the Scorpion stings the frog midway across the pond and they both die). But, the suicidal father is forgiven. So, no men are ever punished.

Besides the hideous streak of misogynistic patriarchal moralism, The Devil's Carnival is only passable in flashes. Sometimes, especially when Terrance Zdunich, Nivek Ogre, or Ivan L Moody are on screen, the carnival singing and music actually are sonically acceptable. They have a professional knowledge of tonality and atonality that the rest of the movie seems to not be able to reach with its non-professional singers. The sets are great for an amateur-style setup, creating more of a stagey feeling to it.

Which brings us to the question of "how much community feeling is acceptable?" In my review of Go Fish, I gave a lot of lee-way to the amateur community nature of Go Fish because it felt like a low-budget film that needed to be by a community. Sure actors flubbed lines, probably unintentionally, but it felt more home-style. Yet, for The Devil's Carnival, the amateur but we're trying nature grated on my nerves. Perhaps, it is because I enjoyed Repo! The Genetic Opera on an actual sonic level as well as on an entertainment level, thus my expectation levels were higher. Or, maybe the production levels of low-budget have gotten so professional looking that movies which would have previously looked like Go Fish (in black and white 16mm) now look pseudo-professional. Or, maybe its because I expect more from a director of 8 other films.

But, in any case, I can't get past that feeling like Bousman wants us to forgive the mistakes or off singing in order to really like this community film. It's a really high hurdle. Combine that with the misogyny of the film which condemns all females to hell, and you have a short film that is a bit toxic, and not in the good way.

Twixt (2012): Manipulating with Tragedy

Twixt (2012)
dir: Francis Ford Coppola

While I haven't seen every Francis Ford Coppola movie since Apocalypse Now, I still assert that Coppola lost his way after that movie. The film shoot caused him to sort of lose his mind, and he never made a movie deserving of the same level of accolades.

Twixt is no exception. Coppola has been seriously unbankable since his ill-timed The Rainmaker, which came after audiences had been burned by one-too-many terrible John Grisham movies, and also by Jack and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Since The Rainmaker in 1997, Coppola has made only 3 movies, all self-financed, low-budget, and completely self-indulgent.

Twixt is the latest of these trifles from Coppola. In Twixt, Coppola displays all of the skill of a low-budget first feature, with all of the passion of a dead fish. Twixt isn't just terrible. It's terribly mediocre. But, what's worse is that Coppola has decided to use his own personal tragedy as a dare to get anybody to say something bad about the movie. It feels emotionally manipulative and quite irritating.

The following review will concern spoilers in order to discuss the personal tragedy at hand, and show how manipulative it actually is.

Twixt concerns Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a novelist who is now flopping after a few best sellers. Early in the film, he's called a bargain basement Stephen King. Hall stops in to a town for a book signing, for some unknown reason, as they don't have a bookstore, and he apparently did not read that the name of his stop was a hardware store. Or, something. I guess hardware stores have signings of bargain basement authors?

Hall is now an alcoholic, following the death of his daughter in a boating accident. The nature of the accident is revealed in the climax, where the daughter couldn't rouse Hall after an evening of drinking. But, he allowed his daughter and her friend to go boating, though he claims he didn't know it was speedboating. During their boating adventure, the driver navigates between two slow boats, but notices there is a towline and is able to duck in time. But, the daughter is not so lucky and dies.

In reality, in 1986, Francis Ford Coppola lost his son Gian-Carlo Coppola in a similar accident. Except, Gian-Carlo was 22 at the time. The friend Gian-Carlo went boating with was Griffin O'Neal, son of Ryan O'Neal, and star of FFC's then-filming movie Gardens of Stone, where he was later replaced by D.B. Sweeney (who is most known as the hockey player in The Cutting Edge). Francis Ford Coppola could be saying he's an alcoholic, and he does have a winery with a massively ornate entrance in Napa.

This mourning and death is only the emotional static of the real movie, in which Hall Baltimore navigates a dual world of reality and dreamscape. In reality, the town is divided by a river. One group is made of good backwater Christians, and the second group is a bunch of gawths who could be vampires. The second group totally brings to mind the South Park episode "The Ungroundable" where you keep expecting the goths to shout "We're fucking goth. Not douchey vampires!"

Apparently, the Christians and the Vampgoths are at war for the souls of the abandoned children and runaways, because a town of like 100 people would have so many of them. And, it seems that they, at one point, had 13 children who were once under the care of a molesty priest. But, the children rebelled and decided that maybe goth was better, and so the priest killed them all before they could escape his grasp. Except one.

That one comes to Hall in his dreamscape and tells him the history of the town, and asks him to solve the mystery in public. Even though she knows the whole story. She introduces herself as V. Or, Virginia. Or, maybe Vampira. Yeah. I didn't make this up.

There's also the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe, who haunts the dreamscape because he once slept in a hotel where there was once a murder years after he slept there. And, maybe because Hall pours whiskey on the plaque proclaiming this bit of ridiculousness.

As a final touch, there's a clocktower with 7 faces, none of which tells the correct time. Because the devil is in the clocktower. The devil causes Hall to confront his own guilt towards his daughter's death.

Oh, and one can't forget the Skype calls from Hall's wife where she is trying to sell his copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass because he can't make any money from not writing anything. And, they need to pay bills.

In the end, the whole movie is actually the manuscript for Hall's next book, or something like that. Whether it is reality or fiction is left up in the air. But, it is the final revelation of stupidity.

There might have been a good movie about the bleed between dream worlds and reality somewhere in Twixt. Dual worlds are sources of good movies, and video games. But, this isn't a good movie, and makes an almost mediocre video game.

Which makes sense, as Twixt was originally supposed to be a grand experiment by FFC in real-time editing with <a href="http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/07/23/coppola-to-go-on-tour-with-twixt-film-different-every-night-edited-in-realtime/">Audience interaction</a>. In order for all the information to eventually be pieced out, and scenes to be pulled in and out, everything has to be kind of emotionally flat and generic, so that one scene doesn't affect the next scene too much. But, it doesn't have to be this deliberately cheap and terrible. Edgar Allen Poe's face as a moon, for example. Bad cinematography. The hoary Christians vs Goth cliche. The dead end of the devil in the clocktower (presumably a metaphor about losing track of time while an alcoholic).

But, then it is also a blatantly ugly film. Not ugly in the intentional sense, but amateurly ugly. It was also originally supposed to be a movie that was partially in 3D, though now its all been flattened to 2D. One of the ways that Coppola made it 3D was he filmed the background on one layer, but then filmed the actors on another. OK. But, the actors never felt like they were part of the same scene as the background. If you've ever watched the deliberately cheap movies, like The Room, where the actors are in front of a blue screen, and you can tell they are, then you know what I'm talking about. Nothing looks natural. And then Coppola manipulates the colors in the dream world in a manner that is like a blunt version of the red dress in Schindler's List.

In the end, Twixt is nothing more than self-indulgence at its worst. A cheap story told by an old storyteller who has lost track of his how stories were created. As well as the alcoholic story within the movie, and Coppola has made a terribly dull and unwatchable film that reveals how much contempt he has for his audience. His use of personal tragedy in such a manipulative manner dares the audience to say it was terrible. Or, if it was to be a tour, it would also be a form of masochism in reliving his son's death every night. Maybe that's why it felt so cheap. He couldn't deal with it. And, now he's asking us to watch how distanced he is.

Upside Down (2012): When good ideas go nowhere

Upside Down (2012)
dir: Juan Diego Solanas

Upside Down is the most innovative, dazzling, crazy, daring movie that is just so vapid, vacant and facile. This is a recipe for disaster of epic proportions.

I don't pull the Showgirls comparison often, but I think that Upside Down suffers from many of the same problems that Showgirls suffers from, and is actually almost as terrible because of it.

Juan Diego Solanas, the writer and director of Upside Down, had a lot of intelligent ideas that he wanted to cram into one epic easy-to-swallow allegory. He created a world of two planets in perpetual synchronization, about 60 stories from each other, or less. The planets each have their own gravity. One planet has developed into a richer, high-income, planet generally referred to as "Up There." The other planet has developed into a slum that is exploited by the businesses from "Up Above." The poor planet is generally called "Down Below."

This is all fine and dandy, being a full on easy allegory making a metaphor for right and wrong side of the tracks. Then, Solanas wanted to further the allegory about the immobility of people among socio-economic statuses. The poor can't become rich, and the rich can't become poor. The metaphor he uses comes in the form of the three rules of the dual planet. This is where it starts getting silly:

1. All matter and people are pulled from their planet of origin. So, a person born Up Above is beholden to the gravity of Up Above, even as they dally in the world of Down Below.
2. An object's weight can be offset by using matter of the opposite origin (inverse matter)
3. After a few hours of contact, matter in contact with inverse matter (and vice versa) burns.

The movie destroyed the laws of physics in order for Juan Diego Solanas to create an comically allegorical world. He wanted to create a world in which the rich do not communicate with the poor except as exploiter/exploited, or management/worker. In the process he also created a system of rules which lead to stunning visuals, such as the "0" floor of the Transworld tower, which bridges the two planets, which has desks on both the floor and the ceiling for their respective employees.

We're still in the world of Gulliver's Travels style allegory. Rules are actually thinly veiled pointed metaphors for socio-political realities. If we had stayed here, it may have been more sensible. But, Solanas wasn't satisfied yet. 

The story of Upside Down is two young romantic leads from either world trysting on two mountains where the worlds are only about 30 ft away. Adam is the poor boy from Down Below, and Eden is the rich girl from Up Above. But, due to the rules, the government and Transworld (the universe's corporation) won't let the two societies fraternize. Eden is injured during a raid, and Adam's aunt's house is burned down with his Aunt Becky killed in the raid for Adam's discretions.

Aunt Becky had been teaching Adam about a special powder/honey that is created by bees in the field near this mountain. This powder is developed by bees that don't really belong to either world, and use material from both worlds. So, the pink powder also belongs to both worlds, and can be used to create illegal tasty floating pancakes.

Yeah, you read that right. A plot point is actually floating pancakes.

As adults, Eden becomes a graphic designer executive for Transworld, while Adam is working to create a facelifting cream to eliminate aging made from the special powder of the floating pancakes. See, Aunt Becky knew what she was doing. Adam, seeing Eden on a television show which used a game show to hire a new graphic designer (making a metaphor of how big a role luck and timing can play in getting hired by big corporations), gets hired by Transworld, and then conspires to see Eden even though it is forbidden.

That's just Act 1. It's a mixture of highly intelligent and highly inane, but all in a dedicated batshit crazy manner. But, really, that's where all the intelligence stops. All of this highly intelligent metaphorical setup is mainly to create a world full of flashy visuals and grand ideas, such as the rich taking a cable car to a restaurant called Paradise built on Down Below, so they can drink from upside down glasses, and dance on the ceiling. Apparently fluids that originated on Down Below actually are pushed down the gullet by an Up Above person, even though one would think that the fluid would rise up in their throat. But, its still an amazing visual.

We're told at the beginning of the movie that through the romance of these two people, the dichotomy of the worlds is destroyed by the romance of Adam and Eden. And, the change from their romance to the equilibrious finale is extremely rushed, not to mention inane and completely idealistic. It doesn't stem from any sort of rioting or overthrow. Instead, its all about that powder. And, so, everybody becomes equal. Or, something. It's really bad.

Which brings us back to the Showgirls comparison. Both Verhoeven and Solanas believed that they were creating Important works that pointed out the harshest truths of society. And, both believed they were creating highly intelligent works. Both show a high level of dedication to their movie, and both have an amazing visual flair that is both stunning and daring. 

But both Showgirls and Upside Down ultimately fall flat in their intention of showing the world as it is. Both scripts suffer from a severe lack of point or intelligence. The acting is mediocre at best in both movies. And, they both strain credulity and believability. 

Unfortunately, Upside Down isn't nearly as offensive and quotable as Showgirls, lacking in verbal one liners to endlessly quote and guffaw at. But, the visuals are breathtaking, and practically their own one-liners. Such as a meeting between Adam and his new boss, where he sits in a solo chair that has to be extended from the ceiling to have an upside down meeting face to face. Or, an image of running with shoes on fire from the burning that happens due to inverse matter and matter contacting each other.

Upside Down is remarkably visual, with stunning special effects. It is breathtakingly original, and has a lot on its mind. Ultimately, however, it loses sight of its goal, and becomes an inane romance with little on its mind besides getting the couple to meet in the final reel. The final result is a singularly insane romance which is a definite social satire and allegory that does nothing with any of the story elements it creates. It's highly recommended simply due to unbelievability and ridiculousness. 

In the House (2012): Implicating the Consumer

In the House (2012)
dir: Francois Ozon

Implicating the consumer in the exploits on screen is nothing new. Michael Haneke did it with Funny Games. Oliver Stone did it in Natural Born Killers. Paddy Chyevsky was doing it a bit in Network. The Truman Show and EdTV both did it to certain degrees. Even Joss Whedon got in the game in 2012's masterful The Cabin in the Woods.

Even making the consumer a character in the show is nothing new, as Statler and Waldorf represented the audience and critic in The Muppet Show. In this light, there is little new in Francois Ozon's In the House, based on the Spanish play The Boy in the Last Row. Ozon manipulates the play to indict his audience of soap opera melodrama, as well as the writer of the melodrama.

In the House tells the story of a teenage student, Claude, who claims to be poor and without a mother figure. Claude writes a serial for his English teacher, Germain, about Claude infiltrating the middle-class home of a fellow student under the auspices of helping the fellow student with his math homework. While infiltrating, Claude makes observations on the family, and even falls in love with the mother of the house.

However, Ozon manipulates the movie to have it be told through the eyes of Germain, who reads the story and gets caught up in the serial to the point of stealing math tests for the student in order for him to seem successful in his tutoring and he can continue through the house. Really, if not for Germain as the audience, the story would not be written, and the infiltration might not be what it is.

The other issues that Ozon ostensibly raises are class issues, emotional issues between parents and children, and "what is art?" In fact, "what is art?" is given as much credence as implicating the audience as Mrs. Germain runs an unsuccessful art gallery that shows po-mo art such as clocks that have 13 numbers on it, or blow up dolls with faces of dictators pasted on.

In the House feels exactly like Ozon is answering his critics who may say he's just a dealer of dreaded soapy melodrama which could either be ironically condescending, perverse, absurdist, or purely observational. It's American brethren is Storytelling, the 2001 movie by Todd Solondz. But, instead of just having the critic/audience be a cameo by Franka Potente, Ozon makes the whole movie through the eyes of the critic/audience.

If not for the critic and audience, the story would not happen. In fact, the critic may even shape the story to a point. By critiquing the storyteller, the next chapter is thus influenced by the critic, even as it destroys the critic. Because the critic is a talentless hack who only knows how to critique, not how to create.

Ozon maintains his usual deft hand of being slyly ironic and sneakily witty in order to make one of his most compelling and subtle social satires in years. It's more developed and creative than Sitcom, and shares more of a tonality with Swimming Pool, where fiction and reality clashed in a schizophrenic murder mystery of fun and eroticism. In the House is actually his most successful film since Swimming Pool, and it feels more self-assured than Ozon has felt in years.

Stitches (2012): The Comedy of Violence

Stitches (2012)
dir: Conor McMahon

When one thinks of blackly comic clown movies, mostly the movies are bleak and full of loathing. Clowns in cinema have become symbols on which to hang ironic situations that destroy ones love of life and/or humanity. Shakes the Clown, and Vulgar, for instance, are two clown movies which are unrelentingly bleak and darkly funny through pessimistic means.

Stitches opens with the titular clown fucking a woman in a trailer, giving a nod to the common type of movie where clowns are put upon poor people who, through their desire to make people laugh, have lost all semblance of humanity in themselves. The next scene, a child's 10th birthday party, further emphasizes this type of reading, right up until Stitches is killed by the children on accident.

At this point, Stitches ceases with the typical bleakness of a clown's life, and becomes about guilt and redemption after a murder. 6 years later, the same child is having his 16th birthday party, and now it is time to pay the piper, as Stitches comes back to life seeking vengeance on those who murdered him.

The thing to remember when watching Stitches is that it seems to want people to think it is a horror movie, but it seems to be a complete and utter comedy, especially when Stitches is on screen. The killer clown scenes are filled with unbelievable levels of violence and gore, and it is when Stitches is around that the movie actually is kind of funny.

Despite Stitches' obvious low budget, McMahon actually crafted some spectacular and memorable kill scenes. Every now and then, Stitches even achieves the visceral reaction that makes somebody squirm pleasantly while watching the teenager be murdered. When it isn't attempting to be visceral, Stitches is aiming for spectacular. Frequently, McMahon shoots the blood splatter in slow-motion against stark black backgrounds, as if it was a special effect horror edition of Time Warp.

The movie doesn't hold enough actual interest in it to make it a good or great movie. There is little tension, and the wittiness is pretty much kept to Stitches and his murder scenes. Throughout the remainder of the movie, the wit is sorely lacking (e.g. Oh, look, the not-so-fat gay fat kid is gorging himself on cans of strawberries!  HAR HAR!!), but it's never quite dull enough to quit the movie.

Who will like Stitches? The gorehounds and the easily amused. It's not gory in a realistic sense, but there is enough blood to be quite fun. And the jokes are witty enough to give it a pass. If you fit into neither of these categories, and also were looking for something high tension, you might be bored silly. But, for those in these categories, there is probably a lot to love.

A Christmas Puppy (aka Christmas Spirit) (2012): There is no puppy

A Christmas Puppy (2012)
(aka Christmas Spirit)
dir: David Decoteau

The first Decoteau film I reviewed was 1313: Bigfoot Island. Which, was terrible in an incomprehensibly terrible way. In that review, I also mentioned that Decoteau also has a line of family movies, generally featuring holiday themed puppy stories or talking animals.

This wasn't a holiday puppy movie until it was renamed to lure more people in.

Originally, this movie was titled Christmas Spirit which may or may not have featured a dog. But, it probably didn't perform as well, especially since there were so many movies it could be. And, A Christmas Puppy just sounds so kid friendly, especially if you put a picture of a golden retriever puppy on the cover in an adorable santa hat.

Well, there is a dog. A dog. And it certainly isn't a golden retriever. I think its a Bichon Frise. The dog also appears for a whole two minutes of the 88 minute run time. This dog has a 30 second introduction. Then, he disappears for the majority of the movie, until he shows up again towards the end. Finally, the dog has a cameo finale where he gives the final voice over.

But, of course, this was originally Christmas Spirit, so of course it isn't about a puppy. Instead, it's about this hot asshole teenager, Riley, whose mother is getting fired right before Christmas. He's all "Fuck Christmas" when Vanessa Angel appears as the Christmas Spirit, Hope. Now, most of you might not remember Vanessa Angel, but she was the female lead in the Farrelly Brothers film Kingpin as the hot chick. Now she's in a Decoteau film. Sad.

But, what's also sad is the mom is Maureen McCormick.  Fucking Marcia Marcia Marcia! The kid is played by Aaron Jaeger, who has this snotty voice that sounds like he's trying to deepen it, and now the voice is coming from the back of his throat instead of his chest or being nasally.

Hope arrives to Riley in his dream, and the first words out of her mouth are "Have you read ALL of these books?"  As if reading is such a pissy thing to do. And, while some of us might be, "What an idiot. Go away" apparently we're supposed to think, "Riley is such a poindexter."  So, she convinces him that she's real by putting him in an elf outfit, which he doesn't even wear for the whole movie (would have been hot with the tights), and tells him he has to help a family regain their Christmas spirit.

So, on the advice of Hope, he trespasses on the Decoteau mansion, which is the staple set of all of Decoteau productions. The residents this time around include a mom who is a children's book author, a father (played by the hunky soap star Jason Brooks), and a teen daughter. The daughter wants grandma to come by for Christmas, but they can't afford it for some reason, and so the daughter is all pissy and bitchy. It's Riley's job to get everybody into the Christmas spirit.

His first act is to spruce up their tree by making it glow from the inside. That gets the mom's attention. The mom is the author of The Littlest Werewolf, which was his favorite book as a kid. And, they bond over that, which totally gets her in the Christmas spirit. Then, he bonds with the dad. Finally, Riley conspires with the daughter to fly grandma out to Malibu.  Oh, and there's a bit about the garage not working. And, something about the teenage daughter setting up Riley to make it look like he is a thief. But, really, it was the dog?  Or, maybe it was the dog setting up Riley. It really is weird that they'd think Riley would steal such important things like the remote to their television and a stress ball.

Anyways, the movie ends with grandma coming for dinner, and Riley's mom also coming for dinner. And everybody has a happy ending. Not that type of happy ending...

The thing with Decoteau's family movies is that everybody talks. They talk and they talk. They are the inverse of the 1313 movies. The dad goes out into the rain and says, "Daddy's getting moist here!" Or, when Hope is called by the family as the garage service lady tells them that they should be spending time as a family...in a fucked up German accent. Yeah, this movie is all words and no action. But, they're all so trite and meaningless.

Which lays out the debate of whether you want to have the shirtless boys of the 1313 series who walk around and say nothing, or the clothed assholes of his family movies (and everybody IS an asshole) who don't shut up but do nothing.

Branded (2012): Marketing is Brainwashing and other revolutionary ideas

Branded (2012)

dir: Jamie Bradshaw, Aleksandr Dulerayn

What. The. Fuck?!

This is a movie that opens with our main character being struck with a lightning bolt. The middle has a bloody ritual sacrifice. And it ends with a constellation cow.

I am completely sure that, based on those three scenes, my reader has no idea that this is actually about the damage that advertising does to society. Thus is the insanity of Branded.

Branded primarily intends to use existential absurdity as a primal scream against the cultural domination and omnipresence of marketing and advertising filling in every space that we look. Branded wants to be a crisis moment against the use advertising in EVERYTHING, like children's films as in yesterday's Foodfight!

On the other hand, Branded also frequently seems like a movie made by a paranoid schizophrenic. Or, at least that seems to be its intent. As a result, of this split personality, Branded is singularly batshit insane.

The first half of Branded is about a guy who had been struck by lightning to become a marketing executive. He is controlled by a council of high level people (including Max Von Sydow from The Virgin Spring) who want to make Fat People popular due to flagging interest in fast food. So, the marketing guru's show about extreme plastic surgery actually ends with a fat chick dying under the knife, sparking a reactionary fat phenomenon, and the guru goes into exile.

In exile, the guru crafts an ancient bloody sacrifice, which allows him to see the effects marketing has on people...by seeing the brands as large scary inflatable creatures growing out of people. Then, he makes a large business by creating stronger brands, and having real world Transformers-level fights between icons and brands, waiting for the last brand to survive. And, it has all been controlled by a giant constellation cow.

No, I am not hallucinating this. And, yeah, I'm actually removing some of the even crazier details of the movie to make it seem at least semi-sane. Where Foodfight! is a terrible misanthropic acid-trip nightmare of ugly nonsense, Branded is a crazy misanthropic acid-trip nightmare of well-rendered nonsense. Foodfight! wants to hook kids on branding and iconography. Branded is warning people about how they're being controlled. Foodfight! is aimed straight towards the people who are easily duped, and it fails miserably. Branded is warning anybody who will listen, and fails spectacularly.

Branded is required viewing in the world of insanity gone wild. And, it is also a star-studded affair. The main guy is Ed Stoppard, son of Tom Stoppard. It also stars Leelee Sobieski, Jeffrey Tambor, and Max Von Sydow. It has visual interest beyond most low-budget means. It is a product of love and determination, and it's goals are admirable. If only it wasn't so fucking crazy.

Also, I'm not saying "if only it weren't so fucking crazy" lightly. This movie is fucking batshit. It takes left turns every 5 minutes, and I didn't even add in the forbidden love story between Stoppard and Sobieski. It's just one left turn followed by another, and by the end, you're left holding your head just wondering what it all means.

In that sense, Branded fails at being a warning siren against marketing. It's too crazy to take seriously, though it is trying to have a serious point. I think. Maybe it is being a satire of people who say that marketing is a conspiracy theory. But, it doesn't work on that level as it seems almost earnest about it. Maybe it is trying to be an ironic Foodfight! by saying that anybody who thinks marketing is evil and controls the world is this fucking nuts.

In any of the ways to watch this movie, Branded is pure mind-bending semi-irony awesome. 

Foodfight! (2012): $65m down the drain

Foodfight! (2012)
dir: Larry Kassenoff

Sometimes there are no words to describe a movie. Sometimes there are too many. Sometimes I'm not sure if there are too many or too few, and all of the words want to come out at once while also staying in my brain.

Foodfight! is my new favorite awful, awful, terrible movie where everything that could ever go wrong does in every possible way. This is a movie that cost 65 million dollars. This is an animated movie that has Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria, Hillary Duff, and Wayne Brady as the lead voices. This is a movie that took 9 years to make. Foodfight! is a movie that is border incomprehensible, is ugly beyond words, inappropriate beyond measure, and is only appropriate for watching while drinking with your jaw agog and your eyes bulging out as you get a headache from the visuals that look like a acid-induced nightmare. And, I think that sentence is being polite.

Foodfight! wants to ride the coattails of Toy Story, but instead of animating beloved toys, it would animate the marketing icons everybody tolerates into a heroic story against the generic brands, while also reminding you that prunes are icky. But, Foodfight! fails in every way shape and form. All of the real world brands are delegated to background characters, while incomprehensible original icons are given the jucier roles. The new icons are some cereal-selling dog that looks like McGruff the Crime Dog, a chocolate-hawking squirrel that is suffering from some disease that makes its cheeks look like testicles, and some raisin saleschick who is also part cat who looks like she's straight out of Yiffy porn. These characters are voiced by Charlie Sheen, Wayne Brady and Hillary Duff, respectively.

Sunshine Goodness, the yiffy kitty is introduced as the interspecies love interest of McGruff, who is the crime-fighting detective of this grocery store icon subworld. Just as McGruff is about to propose to the kitty, she disappears. 6 months later a generic Brand X is introduced into the supermarket by a stupidly distorted madman voiced by Christopher Lloyd. Brand X, despite being generic with a black box, has a blisteringly hot female spokeswoman icon for some reason I haven't figured out. This woman spends her time dressing like Britney Spears or Jessica Rabbit with the intent of seducing a dog and a squirrel.

Of course, Brand X just wants to be the only brand on the shelf, and is slowly killing all of the other icons, who are also the lifesource of their products. In walks the Nazi iconography and even more inappropriate sexual imagery (see above). Since this is a family film, McGruff and pals figure out Brand X's plan, and foils it with a...terrible foodfight.  But, the twist is that the hot Brand X spokeswoman is actually an ugly fat spokeswoman for prunes which had been discontinued for not selling well. After the rejection, the ugly fat spokeswoman went to Brazil for plastic surgery and is now out for revenge. And, the audience goes...HUH?!

No, really...there was a brand of prunes which had been cancelled that had a zit-covered fat lady as their spokeswoman. Who went to Brazil to become a spokeswoman for Brand X.  Huh?

Obviously, this plot is already on notice for being so fucking brain damaged that it hurts. But, that's only the beginning.

The movie, for costing $65m, at times looks like it was made for the Sega Saturn. Or, maybe just the Genesis. Look at the frightening image to the right. If that rendering of an average shopper doesn't scare the living shit out of you and haunt your nightmares, I don't know what frightens you. But, if you manage to look closely, you will probably notice that the modeling is generic and boxy, with repetitive texturing and nightmarish skin tones. This is a basic lack of talent. This displays that the director didn't know the capabilities of his employees, nor how the software functioned. Of course, rendering humans is notoriously hard, especially since there is that hideous uncanny valley. Looking at the photo, I think I can easily call this the uncanny pit of hell between too close to real and not close at all. The use of what looks like a fish eye lens sure doesn't help things much. These are new depths to that uncanny valley. And, this is just one example of the terrible animation.

Take a look at this incomprehensible image. A wallpaper of noses in a segment of the movie featuring an ally that is a giant doctor nose. This weird repetition gives the whole scene a weirdly surreal depth that feels like a hypnotic acid nightmare.

When the movie isn't being brashly, obnoxiously ugly, it is being brazenly offensively inappropriate. An example is the first screencap that combines The Graduate's sexiest come on image with Nazi imagery with planes coming out of her crotch. It's not just visuals that are inappropriate either. At one point, Gruff tells the hot chick "I'm not the one who's going to be puppy-whipped, you cold-farted itch." No, I did not typo anything in that line of dialogue.  To top it off, the climax is a chick fight between the hot nazi chick and the yiffy kitty.

Then, there's the actual brands that got used...which are supposed to be the movie's raison d'etre. Mr Clean gets shat on by a fucked-up looking frog in the opening scene. No, I'm not joking. He's also apparently great at stickball. The California Raisins do play in a band. And, um...there was Charlie the Tuna and the Twinkie guy. But, they do nothing much. The only icon to get used appropriately is Mrs. Butterworth attacking people with pancakes (because she's a syrup! Get it?). Every other icon is sort of there. And, it's just lame as hell. There's also some shirtless spokesman with giant muscle tits and a thong. And, the Brawny dude. I don't even know.

This movie's complete and utter density of failure, combined with its reprehensible ambition to fill a kids movie with as much advertising as one could possibly condense into a movie makes this the perfect movie to hate watch. Sure, you're laughing at Larry Kassenoff's dreams go down the drain. But, his dream was completely offensive in trying to get kids hooked on marketing while they were growing up and impressionable. It isn't merely good that he failed, it's great that he failed with such a miserable goal.

Required Viewing. It must be seen to be believed.

V/H/S (2012): Misogyny on Film

V/H/S (2012)
dir: Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and Radio Silence (aka Chad, Matt and Rob)

The found footage genre is having a renaissance ever since 2007 when REC and Paranormal Activity came bursting on the scene.  The genre's lo-fi aesthetics make it ripe for the cheap and dirty easy buck that horror has always been happy to use.  Thus, it was only natural that found footage would naturally find a home in the lauded and hated Horror Anthology genre.

V/H/S takes 6 directors, most working in lo-fi horror, and forces them to use some sort of found footage aesthetic to make up a short (or the framing device).  There were no rules, no connecting story or theme, and no communication between groups.  What came back was a wide collection of misogynistic horror in a tight 6 story film, thus cementing the belief that creating horror is a boy's club.

The wrap around segment is perhaps the most troubling, as it concerns a group of criminals who go around assaulting women in parking lots and selling it as reality porn.  The main problem is that this is all from the assaulter's point of view, and they're having a shitton of fun.  As we've discussed, point of view makes a hell of a lot of difference, and the first person perspective makes it that much easier to get into the fun of the criminals being all rapey.

SPOILERS HEREIN
David Bruckner's segment, which is the third best, concerns a succubus who comes home with a bunch of drunk idiot frat boys and makes them all suffer. Ti West's segment, the second worst, is some honeymoon video where the wife married the guy so she and her lesbian lover could kill him. Glenn McQuaid made the most dull slasher movie ever. Joe Swanberg, the second best, made a movie about a girl who is dating a guy who is using her as an alien incubator. And, Radio Silence made the best segment ever about a poltergeist that could only be tamed by the killing of a girl.
END OF SPOILERS

Seriously.

When Ti West gave interviews, he acknowledged that the movie is indeed a compendium of misogyny, and it was all by chance. What makes it worse, however, is the credits where one of the female's assault in the wraparound is used for a skipping repeated enjoyment.  How lulz.

But, is the movie good? You know, outside of all the lecture-y feminism that this film totally inspires and deserves (and, it has deserved and received far more than I have put in here).  Well, it may depend on your nausea index.

One of the dangers of the found footage genre is the ability to give you motion sickness. The Blair Witch Project, when seen on the big screen, caused me to look away for much of the film because I was getting physically nauseous. V/H/S has that ability in spades, especially in Adam Winguard's wraparound. In some of the more nauseating parts, the camera is hyperkinetic, glitchy, and jumpy. It has all the ability to make you dizzy.

And, outside of that, two of the segments (2 and 3) suffer from boredom. Ti West seems to be addicted to the slow burn then something kind of happens.  He did the same in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. And, Glenn McQuaid was just inept.

However, Joe Swanberg's use of Skype was impeccable. And, more than that, Radio Silence's movie was pure haunted house joy from first frame to last. So, you have 2 winners, 2 losers, 1 meh, and a wraparound segment that is better than its nausea. Which, for a horror anthology film, is a decent percentage.  Especially on rewatches, you can just skip ahead to the good stories.

1313: Bigfoot Island (2012): Twinks in a Forest is now a genre.

1313: Bigfoot Island (2012)
dir: David DeCoteau

As a gay lover of the B-picture (and Z-picture), David DeCoteau's career has fascinated me.  When I was a wee tyke, I fell in love with a mildly craptacular movie titled Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama. It's a old 80s horror movie with Linnea Quigley about a magical imp chasing around girls in a closed bowling alley.  It's really amazing and terrible.

For the first part of DeCoteau's career, he directed a whole slew of crappy exploitation horror movies for straight audiences.  Nightmare Sisters, Beach Babes From Beyond, Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000, etc.  Most of these movies were under pseudonyms like Ellen Cabot.  In 1997, DeCoteau started coming out of the closet, and directed, under his own name, The Journey: Absolution, which is a terrible movie filled with naked women and wanton homoeroticism starring Mario Lopez, Richard Greico, and Jaime Pressley.  Oh yeah, you know you're curious now.

In 2000, he made the gay homoerotic movie that would be seen as the start of his own brand of homoerotic horror movies, Voodoo Academy.  After that, he started churning out a whole bunch of horror movies that featured hot men in speedos and terrible acting.  The Brotherhood, Wolves of Wall Street, Beastly BoyZ, and my favorite, Leeches!, among others.  And, soon after that well dried up, he started down a path of two styles.  One is the inept family friendly series that is either A [holiday] [animal], or !?!.  Such fine examples are A Talking Cat!?!, My Stepbrother is a Vampire!?!, and An Easter Bunny Puppy.  The second path is the 1313 series, which is a Warhol-esque ode to men in their underwear.

Now, none of this is actually any good.  The 1313 series is barely entertainment.  He's made 12 of them in the space of 2 years.  So, that should tell you something.  Now and then, DeCoteau is doing something interesting.  And, if you dig deep enough into Bigfoot Island, you might be able to find a kernel of something...until he kills it with a weird and misogynistic final scene.

The first hour of Bigfoot Island consists of twinks walking, running, canoeing, suntanning, and showering...frequently shirtless.  Now, that sounds like a lot of fun, usually.  But, we're talking about one-at-a-time walking, running, canoeing, suntanning, or showering.

Let's break the opening down.

The first four minutes of the movie are establishing shots, including a completely captivating shot of a car ferry deck.  No actors.  No dialogue.  3 title cards.  And all forest.

The next 4 minutes are of some shirtless twink walking.

Then we get a phone call with him saying he's early to...something.  And, he's going to help clean...once he's done with all this walking in the forest.

Then a brief shot of a girl stalking the guy and a flashback to him saying something about sugar to her.

Then back to him walking and being watched in the forest, with periodic growling.

So, now we're 13 minutes in and you're starting to wonder if this is some new fetish of a guy walking shirtless through the forest with people growling at him.  Actually...

Then you get a shot of a guy in a cheap Bigfoot suit dart past.

For another 3 minutes we get more twink walking in the forest.

So, now we're 16 minutes into a 72 minute movie.  And, it's been a twink walking, making a single phone call, a flashback about sugar, and a darting glimpse of Bigfoot.  And a lot of forest.

Finally, we get a chase sequence.

That

Lasts

For

2

More

Minutes.

And wham...Bigfoot bitchslaps the guy, and then we cut to a guy in a cabin.

18+ minutes of establishing shots and one twink walking around.  And then a bitchslap.  BAM!

And that's the summary of what you experience in 1313.  One guy takes a shower and THEN goes running with his shirt on (dude, you shower AFTER you go running).  Another guy goes canoeing (with a shirt on!), and then goes suntanning after removing his shirt.  He also gets killed by Canoe To The Head.  Then there's a bit of chase me chase me with the final two guys, the last one of which gets a little bit more off-screen mauling.  And that's the surface of the first hour.

Oh, and that girl I mentioned earlier?  She's the one summoning Bigfoot.  And, we're led to believe that this is a rape-revenge movie, without showing the original rape.  Yes, folks, this is a rape revenge movie that is included in a Bigfoot movie.

EXCEPT...

In the final scene, DeCoteau has the girl confront the shower guy, who is her friend.  And, she says that he saved her from being raped.  So, she was harassed pretty hardcore.  Apparently they were on top of her too.  And, then he rescued her.  I mean, being sexually assaulted is pretty bad, but is it Bigfoot bitchslap death to five guys bad?

And, then, to throw extra Bitches B Crazy fuel to this twist, the only way shower boy gets to live is if he stays on the island with her and abandons his school, friends, and family.  Otherwise, he'll get bitchslapped to death too.

And, that's the end.

Dread Central has a minute by minute account of the movie, and it's pretty hysterical.  Especially because I was texting with a friend while watching this, and my texts exactly mirrored his review.  "I wish this guy would die! He's kind of muscley but all he's been doing is walking for like 12 minutes."  "Oooo, we're changing it up a bit. The new guy is in a canoe now. And, he's not shirtless. He's a rebel." "Never mind. But, at least he's not walking. He's just suntanning."

Is this movie worth it?  No.  Is it saying anything?  A bit.

It may be trying to say that sexual assault is as traumatic as rape.  Or, that women are crazy.  But, is it worth it?  I dunno.  Do you like watching twinks hike silently in the woods with lush forestry?  If so, this is the movie for you!

Barrio Tales (2012): SNICK for adults

Barrio Tales (2012)
dir: Jarret Tarnol

For a certain subsection of my age group, especially those immediately younger than I am, there was a very defining and important Saturday night television block called SNICK.  While the line up changed, its influence stuck around. The first block was anchored with the continuation of Clarissa Explains it All and The Ren & Stimpy Show, both of which skewed slightly older than Nick, but younger than MTV.  In between was Roundhouse and the seeming inspiration for this movie, Are You Afraid of the Dark?  Snick was a ritual when you were 11 or under.  Even if you were having a party, you still watched it with friends because you shouldn't be out at night in the cold snow.

3 of the 4 SNICK shows had commitment to a certain tonality.  It was campy, winking, somewhat post-modern, and always light.  Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a kiddie version of Tales from the Crypt, as it was an anthology horror story series told by teenagers around a campfire.  It didn't feature themes of hardcore sex, drug use, or out and outright violence, but it did have campy creepy horror stories that were easy to laugh off the boogie monster.  Are You Afraid of the Dark? maintained the tonality of television that felt like it was made by kids for kids.  It wasn't a cheap look or feel, but always had that sort of ultra fake-y sense.

It seems fitting that it would inspire Barrio Tales, especially when you realize that one of the writers and producers of Barrio Tales, Brent Tarnol, had appeared as a guest on All That, a later SNICK show that ran concurrently with Are You Afraid of the Dark? And, if SNICK's tonality didn't inspire Barrio Tales, then Barrio Tales certain stole enough from the shows.

Barrio Tales plays like a racially motivated, and rather adult, version of Are You Afraid of the Dark?.  The framing device is 2 white kids from the suburbs are looking for drugs, and cross the Mexican border to score something.  They're looking for Pedro, but meet this Mexican dude who has them sit around a campfire to wait for Pedro, and tells them horror stories about racial inequalities.

The first story concerns a maid named Maria who was recently hired by a rich family to take care of the house, do the laundry, make sandwiches, whatever.  The son of the family comes home early to find his parents have gone to Turks & Caicos for vacation, so he invites three of his druggy friends over.  Three of the four characters are rich bitch caricatures and are assholes to the Maria, to the point of sexual harassment, while the fourth is nice and sympathetic.  As this is a horror movie, the play gets a little rough and there is much revenge to be had.

The second story concerns a taco truck where there is a secret ingredient that makes the tacos tastes so good.  I'm not giving you the spoiler alert because that's how the whole story is introduced before the title even gets put on screen.  The first thing that happens is that the kids wandering around the neighborhood realize there are a bunch of kidnappings and disappearances around the neighborhood. If this were a better movie, we would be fixated on the taco truck and how it's doing what it's doing.  But, instead, we're laden with the mystery crime solvers and their usual camp value.

The third is the most racially motivated of the three.  It concerns a group of rednecks who kidnap a bunch of migrant workers and torture, rape, and kill them. Until one guy escapes and then exacts bloody revenge on the rednecks.  It's totally steeped in stereotypes, as a SNICK venture would be, but it is also mildly gruesome, and has a lot of sex in it.

The main problem with the movie is that it is a SNICK movie for the people who outgrew SNICK.  It's campy, jovial, obvious, and silly.  But, on the other hand, there are drugs galore, brutal murders, rape, and excessively foul language that seem to belie its kiddie television nature.  I'd almost say that was a commentary on the state of the kids today.  Kids in the inner city are subjected to drugs and murder every day.  Just listen to the This American Life segment on a high school in inner city Chicago.  It's far more soul searing than watching a bunch of idiots go killing each other.

In light of that, Barrio Tales is a relatively light-hearted half-horror movie that is alternately gruesome and slightly brutal.  Barrio Tales is an after-school horror movie where the message is "treat other races well."  It has a very VERY select audience given its mixed tonality.  I didn't connect with it, but I can imagine that there might be some who would.  A very few some, but some nonetheless.: