Flightplan

"How lost could she be? We're in a tube."

It’s bad luck for director Robert Schwentke (Family Jewels) that his solid feature length Hollywood debut will end up as the second-best suspense film that takes place on an airplane this year. Wes Craven’s excellent Red Eye was a bit of no-frills suspense genius that makes the relatively minor problems of Flightplan more glaring than they probably should be. Working off a script from newcomer Peter A. Dowling and notorious hack Billy Ray, Schwentke puts together a compelling story of one woman’s struggle for something she’s sure is true in the face of omnipresent doubt.

Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is an engineer for a German aeronautics company. Her husband has just died leaving her to raise their daughter alone, a task she plans to complete back home in the United States. Her grief is compounded by confusion as she sees reminders of her husband everywhere. She and her daughter are the first two to board a new jumbo jet, partially of Kyle’s design, for the flight home. They fall asleep and when Kyle wakes up, her daughter is missing. Kyle begins to panic herself and others as she scours the plane for clues as to her daughter’s whereabouts. She finds herself rather alone in her quest with reluctant support coming only from Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), an air marshall and the Captain (Sean Bean). Her troubles are compounded when nobody else can recall seeing her daughter. She has to confront the possibility that her daughter was never aboard the plane and might possibly have died with her husband.

Perpetuating the Hollywood tradition that anybody can play an Arab because Americans can’t tell the difference, Flightplan has an Indian and a Mizrahi Jew as “Angry Passenger” and “Ahmed”. Nonetheless it’s a nice touch showing the ugliness of anti-Arab racism on the plane and that an out-of-control passenger is subdued by an Arab although the latter is perhaps a tad bit too obvious. As the plot moves forward it keeps the audience off-balance enough that one is never sure if it's is a suspense film or a family tragedy. When the answers come out they prove to be remarkably ingenious, if a bit too improbable.

There’s no problem with a little suspension of disbelief but this one might go just a tad too far. It doesn’t stop Flightplan from being an engaging, competent story, it just highlights the difference between good enough and great.



Roll Bounce

Putting the "Wow!" in Bow Wow

2004’s You Got Served was a unique film. It was terrible. Unbelievably bad. It ranks 35th on IMDB’s list of the bottom 100 films ever. Yet, the film is almost a must see. Not because it’s so bad that it’s good or anything like that. You Got Served, despite being nothing short of nausea-inducing, was almost completely redeemed by extraordinary dance sequences. The phenomenal choreography was amazing enough to cause viewers to ask, “What if there had been a story worth telling? What if the dialogue was actually written to be performed by humans?” For those who asked those questions, an answer has arrived in Roll Bounce, the winning new film directed by Malcolm Lee. Swapping out breakin’ for roller skating the film is a celebration of the power of dreams and determination.

Set in 1978 Chicago Roll Bounce finds Xavier (Bow Wow) and his friends as their regular South Side skating spot closes down. Faced with the choice of either not skating or heading up to the Sweetwater joint on the north side the group opts for the latter. There they find themselves in a situation they are most unfamiliar with, being second best. Sweetwater is ruled by the Sweetwater Rollers, a group of perfectly obnoxious fellows who happen to be pure dynamite on wheels. They are led by a mysterious God-on-skates called Sweetness (Wesley Jonathan). After being decidedly schooled by the home team, the Southsiders regroup in the hopes of winning a $500 prize in an end-of-summer skate off. In groups or solo, in competitions or free skates, when the actors are with wheels the film radiates a contagious excitement. Extraordinary choreography of jaw-dropping moves leaves little, if anything, to be desired from the most excellent action sequences. All of this is set to an all-star lineup of disco and funk that really bring 1978 back to life.

With skating so excellent it’s almost possible to overlook the fine story that takes over between skate scenes. Xavier has recently lost his mother and his father Curtis (Chi McBride) is an out-of-work engineer. The film introduces problems of race and class in unexpected ways. Xavier and his friends are victims of various taunts at Sweetwater being called “the Welfare Rollers” and “trash” from the South Side. In the context of the film the aren’t really any racial overtones to the insults despite them being made by mostly by white folks. There is a definite class-based prejudice shown and it works as an excellent example of how folks who aren’t racist may yet continue to persecute African Americans in situations of class difference. Curtis, the head of a middle class family, is looking for work and despite having advanced engineering degrees all he is is turned away at all jobs within his field of training. His eventual employment is in one of America’s more underappreciated jobs. In the context of the film, he’s clearly the victim of racism despite being employed by an African-American. In what is marketed as a flashy summer flic with little beyond roller skating, it’s a nice surprise to find these subtleties.

Neither Curtis nor Xavier has really dealt with the loss of the Xavier’s mother. Curtis just wants to pretend that things can just be as they were and Xavier hasn’t really accepted that she’s never coming back. This leads to an eventual father-son confrontation that has an undeniable warmth. Meanwhile the new girl Tori (Jurnee Smollet) shows up with a mouthful of metal leading to some witty barbs about having braces, or not having them, with Tori giving back twice as good as she gets it. In any other film Tori would have probably become a rival to Naomi (Meagan Good) leading to confrontation and an eventual heartbreak or two. That Roll Bounce never moves in that direction isn’t exactly earth-shattering but it’s nice to see a teen romance that doesn’t follow a predictable formula.

The previous body of work from the director, writer and lead being uniformly inessential, the film is a surprising success. Roll Bounce never pretends that roller skating is going to lift the Garden Boys out of poverty but it shows how recreation can have a positive effect for those in need of something to hang on to. It provides a point where father and son, and boy and girl, can meet to move on to the future. Roller skating, who would of thought?



Dirty Love

"What do I look like? A comedian?" Nope.

Jenny McCarthy once drove a car into a friend of a friend of mine’s pool during high school. That incident has nothing to do with the tone taken in this review.

Writer and star of Dirty Love Jenny McCarthy and director John Mallory Asher are getting a divorce. It’s always sad when happiness inverts for a couple but sympathy for a family tragedy can turn to revulsion when the couple expresses a bitter hatred for each other and takes the feud public. While any public discourse around their separation has been civil and subdued, it’s clear that the reality of the situation is quite the opposite. Dirty Love represents the nadir of this battle with each obviously trying to destroy the other’s career. A stunning achievement of incompetence, this film might sweep the Razzies.

This awful tripe begins with Rebecca (McCarthy) finding her boyfriend Richard (Victor Webster) in bed with another woman. While her distress is a natural reaction, the form it takes is entirely alien. Shrieking hysterically and contorting her face into bizarre expressions, Rebecca’s reaction is less like a heartbroken lover than it is like the asshole who wants to be in the live television shot. “Hey! Hey! Look at me over here!” She proceeds to hook up with a series of random human-ish caricatures including a corny magician, a man with a penchant for using large fish as buttplugs and a lecherous Woody Allen impersonator. Could it be that she’s looking for love in all the wrong places? Is it possible that her true love is her good friend and all-American nice guy John (Eddie Kaye Thomas) who has been quietly waiting in the background? The use of the word “quietly” in the previous sentence was purposeful. A sign in an audition scene reads: Quite Please. The director is probably to blame for that one but the writer likely shoulders the blame for not knowing what the word "gratuitous" means. These errors could be purposeful attempts at humor but with the rest of the film existing a strictly enforced Comedy-Free Zone (CFZ) it seems depressingly unlikely.

Rebecca’s quest is made more unwatchable by the presence of her two friends Carrie (Kam Heskin) and Michelle (Carmen Electra). Carrie’s character is likely an undercover agent from another species that learned about the behavior of human women from “dumb blonde” jokes. Michelle is an white ebonics-spouting hair remover whose performance would probably be offensive if it wasn’t so incredibly bizarre. Somehow, these characters manage to take away credibility from a film that has none to give. One wonders if McCarthy knew this when she wrote the lines, “Just stop. I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”

Herr Asher’s blitzkrieg of shit includes plentiful unnecessary zooms and multiple blurry shots. A scene where McCarthy is dosed with “Ecstasy laced with acid” hints that despite being a young filmmaker and actor in Hollywood, he has never used any drug nor does he know anybody that has. Mr. Asher is clearly no longer in love with Ms. McCarthy and he wastes no opportunity to portray her in as poor a light as possible. He apparently is no longer in love with any of the other performers as well as they are all given the shaft. Speaking of shafts, abandoned mines would be an ideal place to store all copies of this film.

The impression we get from watching this schlock is that McCarthy and Asher would not only do anything for a laugh, but would do anything for considerably less than a laugh. It’s an exercise in nauseating embarrassment that’s worst part is somehow not a scene where people slip and fall in a remarkably large puddle of menstrual blood. One character asks, “What do I look like? A comedian?” How one wishes someone had responded when that line was written.



Everything is Illuminated

"She is deranged but so so playful."

If a list of books that would be difficult to film was made, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated would rank fairly high. The book is the history of a Ukrainian shtetl mixed with the search of one “Jonathan Safran Foer” to discover how his grandfather escaped from the Nazis. The telling from the point of view of Foer’s Ukrainian guide is as important to the success of the book as the story with his rendering of English that is as wonderful as it is incorrect. Liev Schreiber’s new film Everything is Illuminated essentially gets rid of the history and strips the story down to part of Foer’s journey to find the shtetl. The grandfather is a completely different character and his motivation in this film bears little resemblance to his counterpart in the novel. A poor adaptation though, can still make for a good film in its own right. There is a phrase repeated in chapter heading and in dialogue about Jonathan’s “very rigid search”. This unfortunately, would be a fair description for the aesthetic of the film as well.

Elijah Wood is Jonathan Safran Foer, a young Jewish American that habitually collects things. He carries around a seemingly endless supply of ziploc bags to place objects in as he adds them to his collection, a collection that includes things like underwear, dentures and dollar bills. His reserved mania we’re told, is done as he’s sometimes afraid he’ll forget. This fits just about perfectly with the general theme that “everything is illuminated in the light of the past.” That’s really about all there is to him though. Well, that and an oversized set of spectacles. Instead of elevating the props to the level of a character it seems that the character has been made more a prop, a detached object to help move the scene along. The film follows Jonathan through his trip to the Ukraine to find information about the woman that saved his grandfather.

Much better are the characters Alex and his grandfather Alex Sr who act as tour guides for Jonathan. Alex (an excellent Eugene Hutz) is a young urban Ukrainian immersed in classic b-boy culture complete with jumpsuit, chains and daydreams of killer breakin’. Like in the book, Alex continually mangles English but often, unlike the book, his errors seem to be comedic props that would not seem out of place coming from the exchange student in American Pie. Nonetheless he’s a genuinely likable character and his warmth is a welcome counterpart to Wood’s rigidity. Alex Sr. (Boris Leskin) is a grouchy old man with disposable eccentricities. He finds that Jews have “shit between their brains” as they leave New York for some reason to come find dead relatives in the Ukraine. His apparent anti-Semitism leaves him a bit unable to believe Jonathan’s assertion that Sammy Davis Jr., after whom his dog Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. is named, is Jewish. There are questions about his motivations that are answered as the film goes on but they bring about an ending that doesn’t particularly make sense.

Everything is Illuminated is not really a bad film so much as it is an expected disappointment. The film is not without strong moments as in some of the interaction between Alex Sr. and Lista (Laryssa Lauret). On the whole though the positive isn’t enough to make the film a success. The book presents formidable problems for any adapter and Schreiber largely could not illuminate the answers.



Thumbsucker

"What's your power animal?"

Coming-of-age movies come in all different shades, types and styles. The best of the genre remind us of the intense ups and downs of adolescence while the worst make teens seem essentially alien. Often, stupid and alien. The symbolic rite of passage can be a senior prom, a first sexual experience, a voyage into the wilderness, a period of detention or any number of happenings. What’s important is that the protagonist by the end have completed a passage of some type that in theory, has better prepared them for adulthood. The problem with many of these movies though is that the post-rite teens are portrayed as being more or less prepared for what may come. B’nai Mitzvah, Rus, Hanblecheyapi and high school graduation are all symbolic rites upheld by the community that signify that the community is ready for you, not that you are ready for the community. What the more effective of these films, like Thumbsucker, do is show that these symbolic rituals are little more than that and that life will, or should, always be a process of imperfect growth. That is the greatest discovery of Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci).

Cobb is an Oregon high school senior with a crush on debate teammate Rebecca (Kelli Garner) and a very confused identity. His father Mike (Vincent D’Onofrio) is a would-have-been football star that barely hides his dissatisfaction with a life he thinks he has settled for. His mother Audrey (Tilda Swinton) is a distant parent that asks her son if he thinks a certain TV star would like the dress she’s wearing. He calls them Mike & Audrey so they won’t feel old and they can barely communicate with each other or Justin. They look a lot like people who’ve never completely learned the lesson that Justin will. His relations to people around him are based entirely on what they want him to be with only occasional attempts at self-direction, as when he applies to a school in NY instead of an Oregon university as his parents would prefer. One of his perceived problems is that nobody seems to be telling him what they want of him. He’s rather desperate for direction but can’t see which way the weathervane is pointing.

Recognizing that Justin seems to be continually on the verge of a breakdown the school psychiatrist recommends that he start taking Ritalin to help focus his energies. His debate teacher having well-schooled his charges with the belief that, “Speaking confidently wins minds,” Justin begins to win the minds of his coach and parents. His transformation seems at first remarkable as he succeeds in some areas but he really has only become more assertively confused. It’s a false confidence masking his slow recognition that the drug hasn’t actually changed him as he thought it would. This is most evident when he tells Audrey, “I’m happy,” then waits for her to confirm that. Through happiness, anger and heartbreak, Justin starts to get the impression that those around him might be just as screwed up as he is and he struggles to find out how they persevere.

Rounding out this story are Vince Vaughn, Keanu Reeves and Benjamin Bratt, all cast against type with fantastic results. With a group of excellent performances, sure-handed direction from Mike Mills and a terrific script, Thumbsucker is one of the better movies this year. Speaking confidently may indeed win minds but it doesn’t mean that one has the answer. As Reeves’ character says, “The trick is living without an answer.”



HellBent

"I want to see you shoot."

To hell with equal marriage rights! To hell with full citizenship and ending gay-bashing! To hell with all of it! What the male homosexual community needs is a gay softcore slasher flic with all the contrived trappings of a hetero softcore slasher flic and by Jove, deliverance has come! HellBent, judging by the title and the fact it’s some dude dressed as the devil killing gay guys, is probably meant to be a bit of a send-up of Christian fundamentalism as well as 80’s slasher films. Though not a bad effort, it doesn’t accomplish either of those very well. Instead the film, written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts, mostly plays like any other slasher movie with a young, good-looking cast.

Eddie (Dylan Fergus) is a hesitant fellow that really wants to go after this handsome guy (Bryan Kirkwood) he spies at the tattoo parlor. The guy, Jake, is a ruggedly handsome biker type and Eddie goes too ga-ga to form a coherent pickup line. Will they eventually get together? Check the formula. Eddie’s roommates fill out a gang of likely horror film victims quite well. If Stifler from American Pie was bi he’d be Chaz, the outgoing and a bit obnoxious guy. Tobey is an underwear model that decides to be a “Queen for Halloween”, looking like a really buff Pamela Anderson. Finally there’s Joey, a nerd who is quietly pining for this hot jock-type. In slasher movies there’s often a dearth of character development and this one is no different. Most opportunities for enriching the characters are given over to boy talk, sometimes amusing, sometimes not. As they group gets together to head out for the West Hollywood Halloween Carnival, Chaz takes drives them to a spot where two homosexuals were beheaded the night before by some maniac. As formula dictates this is where the evil is unleashed. As the crew make their way, and make out, through Carnival the devil-man stalks and begins to pick them off, one by one.

The other slasher convention that this film perpetuates is the naked chest. To the delight of 14-18-year-old hetero boys everywhere at some point during a slasher film an attractive woman will remove her shirt. In the more daring ones, the ones on Cinemax late at night, there might even be some poorly simulated sex! For 14-18-year-old homosexual boys that are as comfortable with their sexuality as hetero boys of the same age, meaning barely, HellBent may provide a few stolen moments of forbidden delight. For the rest of us, a nostalgic grin.

What all this adds up to is a slightly better than average knife-wielding maniac film. Even though the story comes apart quite badly towards the end it still has its moments of goofy fun and mindless gore, essentially all one needs to make a slasher film. For a movie that bills itself as “The first ever gay slasher film,” one would think there would be something in the film to reflect some aspect of homosexual identity in the US. There isn’t. That the characters are all gay or bi is a nice, novel and not unimportant twist but it would be better called, “The first ever slasher film with all gay characters.” As such this film should remind viewers of a one-line critique Timothy Leary offered of some feminists that is equally applicable here, “Women who strive to be equal to men lack imagination.”