Tag Archives: 2012

Capsules

CAPSULE: HARRY DEAN STANTON: PARTLY FICTION (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Sophie Huber

FEATURING: , , , Sam Shepard, ,

PLOT: An impressionistic pastiche covering the career of cult character actor Harry Dean Stanton, with terse interviews, conversations with collaborators, film clips, and lots of folksinging from the subject.

Still from Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Stanton is a weird dude. The fact that your subject is weird, however, doesn’t necessarily make your documentary weird. Also, the ratio of insight to folk singing here is unfavorable.

COMMENTS: Partly Fiction is a portrait of a man of few words who refuses to talk about certain topics, including, among other things, his relationship with his mother and father. His answers to the simplest questions can be frustratingly obtuse, and followed by awkward silences. “How would you describe yourself?” “As nothing. There is no self,” Stanton replies. “How would you like to be remembered?” “Doesn’t matter.” Now, while on a very refined and abstract level I have some agreement with Stanton’s philosophical outlook, the fact is his clipped, koan-like answers don’t make for a great interview. He adopts an approach that might be described as “enlightened-aggressive”; although he surely realizes that the audience is looking for insights into Stanton the actor, not Stanton the folksinging guru, the craggy-faced icon is insistent on forcibly edifying viewers and shoving wisdom down their throats. He is far more interested in serenading us than in talking about his career, delivering oddly phrased versions of “Blue Moon,” “Blue Bayou,” and “Everybody’s Talking at Me” in a weak, wavering voice. (He turns out to be a better harmonica player than a crooner). To be fair, he does open up a little bit more as the doc continues, but he seems always guarded, always intent on preserving his enigma—we only rarely sense we are peeking through cracks in his facade, and then only when he chats with old friends.

To fill up the time when Stanton isn’t talking or singing, director Sophie Huber provides numerous films clips, including many classics from his iconic role as a wounded amnesiac who wanders out of the desert in Paris, Texas and as an amped-up speed-snorting repossesser in Repo Man, along with smaller parts in bigger movies like Cool Hand Luke and Alien. Huber also follows Stanton as he cruises the night, smoking cigarettes in the back seat as the crew ferries him about L.A., tailing him to Dan Tana’s for cocktails (tequila and cranberry juice) and a smoke break with the bartender (whom Stanton obviously knows well). Tributes from Wim Winders, Sam Shephard (who recommended Stanton for his breakthrough role in Paris, Texas), and most importantly David Lynch, who visits for a cup of coffee and with whom Stanton lets down his guard, add some additional meat, but the documentary still has trouble filling out its meager 75-minute running time. The impressionistic pastiche survives solely on Stanton’s (not inconsiderable) charisma. There’s not much insight to be had here, but Harry Dean does magnify his image as a grizzled, mystical outsider, and fans of that persona should eat it up.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“You still leave impressed at the way Stanton fiercely protects the aura of mystery that makes him such an indelible onscreen presence.”–Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Crispian Mills, Chris Hopewell

FEATURING: , Alan Drake, Amara Karan, Paul Freeman

PLOT: A neurotic writer researching a book on serial killers develops a fear of everything (but especially of laundrettes); when he has an important meeting he decides to face his fear and wash his socks.

Still fro, A Fantastic Fear of Everything (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s a bit weird, sure, but in a random, disjointed way, as if the co-directors weren’t sure what to do with the material and kept spinning the film off in a new direction, hoping this next one would lead somewhere.

COMMENTS: As we begin Everything, Jack (the redoubtable Simon Pegg) is a shaggy-headed shut-in who carries a butcher knife everywhere with him to defend against imaginary murderers. A former children’s author, Jack decided to stretch his talents by writing a teleplay about Victorian serial killers; his obsessive research into the insidious poisoning techniques of the Hendon Ogre and his ilk shattered his naturally sensitive temperament and sent him into a seething pit of paranoia. If this sounds like tough subject matter to milk for comedy to you, you’d be right; although, utilizing a combination of superglue and dirty socks, the offbeat script does manage to dredge up some farce from the pit of despair. Two lip-sync dance numbers—a gangsta rap performed by Pegg and an ironic boombox version of Europe’s “The Final Countdown”—cut through the depressive gloom with welcome wackiness, but in general the movie struggles to find a comic tone. Although Pegg’s performance hits the right notes of hysteria, his Jack is so riddled by anxieties that it’s hard to laugh at him. Pegg also spends about a third of the movie in filthy underwear, which is more pathetic and upsetting than funny. Fortunately, there is a lot of extraneous stuff going on to distract us from the movie’s nerve-wracking protagonist—eyeball hallucinations, self-aware Psycho references, paper doll reenactments of famous murders, creepy anthropomorphic stop-animated children’s stories, guided meditation with a pirate psychologist—and thus Everything manages to remain watchable by keeping itself busy.

Everything writer/director Crispian Mills is better known as a musician; he brought in music video specialist and animator Chris Hopewell to help out as a co-director. The uncommonly literary script (full of self-deprecating jokes about the foibles of writers and their similarity to serial killers) is an adaptation of a novella. Pegg seems to have been drawn into the project as part of a push by Pinewood studios to promote low-budget British filmmaking. The hodge-podge of talents and influences here never really coheres, nor is it incoherent in a particularly fascinating way. The movie gets by on bursts of creativity, but never develops the consistently crazy energy it needs. Simon Pegg’s personal draw aside, Everything isn’t much of anything: it’s too strange to be a mainstream success, but not eccentric enough to work as a weird film. It’s a misfit even among would-be cult films.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a singularly bizarre new horror comedy, both exhilarating and frustrating: it allows for Pegg to stretch as an actor, going to some pretty whacked out places, but the film itself ultimately stalls out, leaving a great performance at the heart of a movie most won’t particularly care for.”–Drew Taylor, Indiewire (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE END OF TIME (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Peter Mettler

FEATURING: Peter Mettler (narration)

PLOT: Documentarian Peter Mettler interviews people from various walks of life about their thoughts on time, using poetic footage of lava flows, particle accelerators, and digital mandalas as visual backgrounds.

Still from The End of Time (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While The End of Time is way, way outside the average filmgoer’s wheelhouse, despite a few acid flashback moments, it’s not really weird per se. It is also somewhat overshadowed by similar visionary non-narrative documentaries like Samsara and the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy, more expensive productions that achieve more spectacular vistas.

COMMENTS: The subjects of The End of Time include a 1960 record-setting skydiving free-fall from over 100,000 above the earth, lava flows on a volcanic island, and a squadron of ants bearing away a grasshopper’s corpse. None of this has much to do in particular with time, and yet it all does, because time is inescapable (despite the documentary’s occasional implication that time is an illusion). Rather than talking about time per se, the narration begins with the words “in the beginning there were no names,” and as the movie slowly flows and curls about like magma it returns periodically to what appears to be that central point: ultimate reality is inexpressible, and language (and abstract concepts like “time”) are our feeble (and possibly counterproductive) attempts to freeze and analyze the endless flux of reality. At least, that’s my view of Mettler’s position; the documentary is ostensibly time-neutral, giving equal weight to all experiences. Speakers are never identified by name or credentialed, and so the doc gives the same weight to the particle physicist’s opinions as those of the guru, the hermit, the artist colony potter, and a woman I’m guessing is the director’s grandma. Some of the earnestly proffered opinions, particularly the New Age-y ruminations from the granola crowd, are easy to mock, but please resist the urge. It is so rare for people to actually discuss grand, abstract concepts in movies in an irony-free way that it’s incredibly refreshing, and I’d hate to discourage future explorers from setting out towards similar territory.

Philosophy aside, the cinematography (by Mettler, Camille Budin, and Nick de Pencier) makes End of Time worth your time. Mettler draws visual parallels between the circular construction of particle accelerators and Hindu mandalas, between a corpse carried on a funeral bier and a meal carried away by ants. In between monologues Mettler throws in pastoral passages of eye poetry: stars dissolve into snowflakes, and we see a cat in a field quietly perceiving time in his own way, then camera draws back to show the same footage on a big screen television in an editing studio. The most remarkable scenes are the mesmerizing flows of magma from an active volcano; it’s amazing how quickly the outside edges cool to a black crust while the inside still glows red hot, and the entire mass creeps along, knocking down trees and incinerating the ferns that grew up since the earth’s mantle last leaked to the surface. The final act is a lysergic digital freakout presumably representing “the end of time,” beginning with the extinction of the sun, which turns into a bunch of glowing green mandalas and segues into a cosmic Malickian montage. The overall result—abstract and meandering, sometimes deep, sometimes pretentious, beautiful but frequently slow as molasses—is definitely not for all tastes. At times the movie gets a little too trippy-hippy-dippy for its own good, leaning too far to the “far out, man” end of the profundity spectrum. But you have to give Mettler much credit for his courage in thinking big and tackling deep questions that would terrify less ambitious filmmakers.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a touch of the acid mindset here, certainly: towards the end, many of Mettler’s images come together in an abstract montaged freak-out that might have made a very effective credits sequence, but feels too trippily ‘heyy-wowww’ when incorporated into the main body of the film. At moments, The End of Time come perilously close to a tone of nebulous new-age amazement, a touch too Koyaanisqatsian for comfort.”–Johnathan Romney, Film Comment

Capsules

CAPSULE: CRAVE (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Charles de Lauzirika

FEATURING: Josh Lawson, Emma Lung, ,

PLOT: A freelance crime-scene photographer romances a younger woman in his apartment building, while suffering delusions and fantasizing about becoming a vigilante.

Still from Crave (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This movie is trying so hard to be like its big brother Taxi Driver that it’s embarrassing to watch at times; it has a certain grotty charm and good performances, but needs a huge wallop of subtlety. Its hallucinations are so clearly marked off as fantasies that they never threaten to swallow up the viewer, leaving its weird effect highly attenuated.

COMMENTS: An internal monologue of a disaffected white guy who’s convinced that humanity is rotten. The antihero drives aimlessly through the city at night, searching for scenes of depravity to reinforce his misanthropic vision. He awkwardly romances a beautiful woman who’s out of his league. He plans a crime, practices the exact words he will say to his victim. The delusional self-appointed vigilante eventually wreaks a gruesome vengeance on an absuer of women. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Taxi Driver was the deconstructed, arthouse revision of puerile crime-anxiety thrillers like Death Wish; Crave is an unneeded, on-the-nose reconstruction of Taxi Driver for the modern age. Crave‘s chief problem, for a movie whose promotional material promises that its photographer protagonist Aiden will be a hero whose “dark imagination starts to leak into reality,” is that the line between fantasy and reality isn’t blurry for the viewer—when redheads tear off their blouses and fall to their knees and Bill Gates shows up offering Aiden bags of cash, it’s fantasy. The clarity of that line and the lack of a radical subjective perspective removes a lot of potential tension that might result if we are wondering if what is happening is really inside Aiden’s head. Nor is Aiden delusional enough to create suspense via the gap between the dangers the audience recognizes and what our protagonist comprehends; he not only realizes his grip on his emotional throttle is slipping, he agonizes about it endlessly in voiceovers and heart-to-hearts with his tough-but-wise stereotype cop buddy. And some of the stuff that clearly is intended to happen in reality doesn’t make a lot of sense, like his hot neighbor’s spur-of-the-moment decision to screw Aiden senseless one afternoon just because he’s not terrible-looking and not obviously a psychopath. That’s bad writing, though, not dark imagination.

The script’s lack of originality and subtlety is a shame, because there is a lot of talent here. Josh Lawson is not bad as Aiden, although he lacks the scruffy anti-charisma necessary to take the role over the top. The supporting players fare better. Adorable Emma Lung somehow comes across as a real person, despite the fact that the only character trait the script gives her to work with is a baffling bad taste in men. Edward Furlong, who we last saw in the miserable This Is Not a Movie, redeems himself here as a hipster cad who nonetheless doesn’t deserve his torturous fate. Ron Perlman’s square mug is, as always, a welcome sight; inhabiting his character with ease, he lends instant credibility to any project. The movie’s technical qualities are pro throughout. The neon-noir vistas of Chicago streets at night are memorable, as is the shot of spinning pinwheels reflected in Aiden’s eye. De Lauzirika, who has previously specialized in directing special features for major DVD releases (including Alien, Blade Runner, and three of the extras on the “Twin Peaks” Gold Box set), is a talented director who shoots a good-looking film and elicits fine performances from his actors. But, he may better serve his career in the future by directing scripts written by someone else.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[The performances are] undermined by not just the clichéd story but director/co-writer Charles de Lauzirika’s misguided tone, which veers from straight-up impotent fury to a clunky humor that’s just not funny in the story’s overall context.”–Maitland McDonagh, Film Journal International (contemporaneous)