Reel Life: THE 4:30 MOVIE

Filmmakers making films about loving film always show you a lot about themselves. Think of
Spielberg’s recent Fabelmans in which the young Steven character has a vision of himself filming a family argument. Here’s a boy who thinks with the camera, and who sees the world through cinema. It’ll make him a wunderkind. And it’ll make him use that skill to create joyously cinematic genre pictures that’ll, in part, interrogate family and how people make them and break them. It’s a whole career in an image—typical of the revealing nature of an auteur’s work, especially in a confident, relaxed Late Style. For Kevin Smith’s version we have The 4:30 Movie, in which the Smith stand-in is a dorky teenager in 1986 (Austin Zajur) who wants nothing more than to sneak into an R-rated movie for a first date with his crush (Siena Agudong). And so we get this: a pretty girl with a wide smile earnestly and affectionately telling a chubby nerd, “wow, you know a lot about movies and TV shows!” Smith, unlike Spielberg, has a pretty one-track mind—sex, weed, pop culture. That’s about it. The end credits of this movie include a long “Thanks” section that includes everything from Little Debbie and Little House on the Prairie to George Lucas and John Hughes. (It’s a succinct syllabus for Kevin Smith Studies.) His preoccupations made for a bit of Gen X freshness with his scrappy indie Clerks back in 1994, what with its minimum wage slackers chattering back and forth about movies or sex acts in amateur cheap-o black and white. But, aside from a few successful fluke attempts at developing a style and deepening his thematic concerns (apocalyptic Catholic fantasy comedy Dogma, sentimental single-father rom-com Jersey Girl, and grungy political horror Red State), Smith’s been stuck in a permanent adolescence ever since, both as a stylist—all flat coverage, bland lighting, and simple staging—and as a writer—all surface-level allusions and references. His previous picture, the dreary and sappy Clerks III, even indulges in recreations of scenes from the first, as its legacy sequel status has the characters in the movie making a movie about their lives, which is a kind of worse Clerks. 

As Smith became a more repetitive niche interest, he dug in deeper into his chatty nerds’ limited imaginations. (Even a couple weirder horror adjacent pitches the past decade play like shaggy podcast anecdotes.) He’s making hangout movies for himself, and his die-hard fans, and his chummy collaborators, keeping his work cheap and lowering expectations. But he enjoys himself and that's what still causes his movies to have little sparkles of idiosyncratic interest. That his latest is comfortably his best in nearly 15 years is a tribute to its breezy smallness that makes his newfound sentiment comfortably quaint. It finds our lead and his buddies hanging out all day at a three-screen movie theater in their hometown while awaiting his crush. We see clips of fake trailers—decent—and some fake movies—pretty sloppy. (There are also tons of jokes in which characters straight-faced say something like “There’ll never be more Star Wars” or “Bill Cosby will always be admired” with dopey historical irony.) Along the way is some silly banter, some stupid antics, and a few funny performers (Justin Long, Rachel Dratch, Sam Richardson, Ken Jeong, Adam Pally, Jason Lee) doing their best with some thin characters. But nothing too outrageous happens, and the lines are never more than passably amusing, and the people are all broad shtick. It’s a genial enough thing, a pleasant, undemanding sit, and sure to please, or at least intrigue, the micro-generation of like-minded nerds for whom Smith remains a figure of note. But it’s ultimately so low-stakes and lacking in narrative and emotional—let alone comedic—juice that it mostly evaporates on contact with dead air between the projector and the audience. It’s a movie for people whose greatest dream is for a pretty girl to admire them merely for their movie knowledge. Hey, we can dream.

Blubber Horror: TUSK

When Kevin Smith sets out to make a movie about a man who gets captured by an old eccentric with plans to turn him into a walrus, you can almost hear the glee he had in creating a concept so unusual. If you stick around through the end credits, you can actually hear it in an excerpt from the podcast on which he first thought up the idea. Now Tusk is a feature film playing at a theater near you and so very badly wants to be a new cult classic that every single strange detail feels included to fit that mold instead of bubbling up honestly out of a cracked vision pursued to illogical ends. It’s too calculating to be a passionate work of the macabre.

Smith’s an interesting case. He’s been making films for two decades now, largely on his own terms. He began, with Clerks and Chasing Amy, as a scrappy, raunchy indie director with some potential. With his dark Catholic fantasy comedy Dogma and sweetly dirty rom-coms like Jersey Girl and Zack and Miri, he seemed poised to grow as a filmmaker and activate that potential. Instead, he’s never grown. He’s always moving sideways, into dumb empty comedies, like Cop Out, or uncompromising overstuffed horror riffs, like Red State.

With Tusk, he’s striving for a midnight movie brand of queasy horror comedy. The results are filled with as much dead air and relentlessly unfunny banter as he’s ever created. It is a weird little movie that appears to have no reason to exist beyond proving Smith still has enough indie clout to get a small, strange, stupid thing on a lot of screens. Its attempts at humor do not add appreciably to the odd bit of body horror at the center. Instead, it seems to be apologizing for itself as it goes along. It shows something peculiar and grotesque, and then laughs it off. Only kidding, Smith says. Would that it be funnier, or creepier.

It stars Justin Long as an incredibly unlikable, caustic, sleazy, jerk podcaster who travels to Canada to interview a viral video star. When he arrives, his subject is, shall we say, suddenly permanently unavailable. Searching for a good replacement subject, he finds his way to a big creepy house in the middle of nowhere where an eccentric elderly man (Michael Parks) promises to tell his life story in exchange for company. The man’s a loon, and soon the podcaster is being fitted for a suit of walrus skin, ready to be sewn into his own epidermis. Meanwhile, Long’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) and co-host (Haley Joel Osmet) go looking for their missing friend, teaming up with a Québécois investigator (Johnny Depp, going uncredited under a layer of sloppy makeup and sloppier accent work).

I just don’t know about this. Smith has roped in talented people. Long’s so good at being so terrible that the walrus at first seems to be fitting karmic retribution, though I’m not sure he’s supposed to be as bad as he comes across. Parks commits to his character’s creepy eccentricities, howling and murmuring and gleefully preparing for the debut of his long-awaited walrus-man friend. “Oh, Mr. Tusk,” he moans, sizing up his rubbery creation. He’s apparently arriving from another, better, version of this film.

Everyone else flails around in endless scenes devoid of suspense or laughs. It’s just dead on arrival. Rodriguez commits so fiercely to an underwritten role that I felt a little uncomfortable watching all that emoting go to waste. Osmet’s a long way from his earlier, better, child performances in The Sixth Sense and A.I., but you can catch glimmers of the good actor still in there. Depp is simply embarrassing, delivering quite possibly the worst performance of his career. The truth is that even with two (two!) Oscar nominees in the cast, no amount of acting could save this movie from itself.

The best that can be said about Tusk is that it exists. The entirety of its imagination has been expended on the premise, and on naming the man-who-might-be-a-walrus Wallace. But it’s also a failure of execution. It often looks bad, overlit and poorly staged. It’s tonally sloppy. Its pacing is lumpy, scenes stretching on and on. Its writing is tediously self-satisfied. I sat there watching a film fall apart around my very eyes. I was mildly diverted by the unpredictability of it all, but it’s hardly a fruitful strangeness. Tusk is so desperate to laugh at its own oddities, it doesn’t seem weird at all. It’s an attempt to make good trash that flirts with good before deciding to consign itself to the dumpster. 

Dino Bores: WALKING WITH DINOSAURS

The instantly, blessedly forgettable Walking with Dinosaurs is an 87 minute film based loosely on the concept of the 1999 BBC documentary series that featured CGI dinosaurs in nature photography of our present-day world standing in for their prehistoric one. It was a nature documentary that tried to imagine the past, and was popular enough to spawn an “Arena Spectacular” full of animatronic creatures that toured the world. The new film has more in common with Disney’s Dinosaur, a 2000 feature that did the same trick – real footage with animated dinosaurs – but added a narrative, avoided narration, and let the dinosaurs talk to each other. Neither one of those projects were in any way perfect, but this new Walking with Dinosaurs is the worst of both smashed together in one nearly unbearable experience. It features nonstop babbling of grating docu-style narration, annoying modern colloquialisms, heaps of lame attempts at humor, and a story that features nothing worth thinking about or getting invested in.

After a brief live action frame story about a paleontologist (Karl Urban) taking his niece and nephew with him looking for fossils, a time traveling bird (John Leguizamo) guides us through the story of a baby Pachyrhinosaurus named Patchi (Justin Long) who bumbles around the wilderness with his herd. One day, they all migrate south. After much literal plodding and a few moments of predator and prey jostling, Patchi gets separated from the herd, along with his bully older brother (Skyler Stone) and a girl Pachyrhinosaurus (Tiya Sircar) who is along to be in a love triangle that’s more like being traded between them as if property. After much more plodding around, their not so incredible journey leads them back. Then, just when I thought that was the end of the story, it cruelly continues for another twenty minutes or so. It’s not just that the plotting is simple and painfully predictable. It’s done without an ounce of imagination in sight, a clash of intentions, perhaps.

It’s obvious the movie is trying to serve two competing ideas of what it should be. It tries to be both something like an educational opportunity and a generic children’s movie and fails on both counts. It’s two kinds of terrible mixed together such that I could never get comfortable with what kind of mediocrity I was watching. Whenever we meet a new creature, the frame freezes, the name of the dinosaur pops up on the screen, and a child’s voice reads it to us, along with some accompanying facts. As if the story didn’t feel endless already. Then there’s the dinosaurs, who are something approaching photoreal in their animation. They stomp around, grunting and growling at each other through unexpressive snouts and beady little eyes. No big attempt is made to make these creatures into anything like actors in the movie. They just root around being big, blank animals. When they talk, their mouths don’t move. We hear the voices booming on the soundtrack but they’re just standing around blinking at each other.

Most of the dinosaurs remain silent, but for our three leads and the bird. I suppose that’s a blessing, but it makes for a confusingly silent soundscape. Combine that with the inscrutability of the scaly mugs, and it feels like someone dubbed in the voices at the last minute. Not that it would play any better without them, but it would’ve lessened my desire to be given a mute button. The storytelling proceeds in a terrible clash of insufferable narrators. Leguizamo’s bird is always distracting with off-hand self-aware comments like, upon looking at a nice forest, “Don’t get too attached. It’s going to be an oil field.” Long’s dino is a whiny simpleton with an obvious character arc, but he chimes in from time to time as well, talking back to Leguizamo’s narration.

Many moments revolve around the dumb little dino getting pooped on or talking about poop. Other moments involve him falling over or something and when he first meets the girl of his species of his dreams, Barry White enters the soundtrack. All that’s the comedy, I guess. Still other times, dinosaurs are stalked by bigger, scarier dinosaurs, sometimes escaping, many times not. The predators tear into their limp prey viciously. The movie features both poop jokes and teeth gnashing at greater than required levels. At one point, the awful humor and bloody circle of life collide, when Leguizamo says one kind of dinosaur has no natural predators right before it’s eaten before our eyes. “I think I jinxed him,” he says.

The co-directors are Barry Cook, who also co-directed Mulan, and Neil Nightingale, who has produced nature documentaries for the BBC and PBS. The screenplay, such as it is, was written by John Collee, who wrote Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Happy Feet. I don’t know what went wrong here, but they all clearly should know better. Walking with Dinosaurs is interminably irritating, trying desperately to be all things to all people – educators, small children, and dinosaur fans alike. And in the end, it’s much closer to nothing for nobody. The biggest joke of all is when we return to the frame story to find Urban’s aloof tween nephew has been so inspired by the story we just heard that he has a newfound love of paleontology. He stares off into the middle distance, smiling with wonder. Sheesh, if this dumb story is all it took, wait’ll he hears a good story.

Bad Romance: THE SWITCH and GOING THE DISTANCE

If I had to pick just one genre that has had the worst 2010 thus far, I would look no further than the romantic comedy. The bar has been considerably lowered by the likes of The Bounty Hunter, The Back-Up Plan, Killers, She’s Out of My League, Valentine’s Day, Leap Year, and When in Rome. I got frustrated and disappointed just typing that list and I’m sure I’m forgetting some. Until now, I’ve overlooked The Switch and Going the Distance, two recent rom-coms that are fading fast at the box office. But, being who I am, I’ve caught up with them. After all, the genre’s downward trend has to break sometime.

Directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck follow up their middling Will Ferrell figure-skating comedy Blades of Glory with The Switch, a romantic comedy that hinges on Jason Bateman putting his ingredients in Jennifer Aniston’s sperm donor sample cup. It’s not as bad as it sounds. See, Bateman carries a torch for his platonic best friend Aniston, so when he gets drunk at her artificial insemination party, already jealous that she turned down his sample on account of his “neuroses,” he knocks over the sample provided by the athletic and confident Patrick Wilson. And really, does Bateman have another choice? Or, at least, is there another choice that a drunken jealous guy could think up?

Yes, the concept’s kind of icky and could easily go very wrong. Indeed, the first several minutes of the film, which sets up the will-they-won’t-they chemistry between Bateman and Aniston and then sets up the central concept, are definitely worrisome. The film seems to be treading towards an uncomfortable place (and not in a funny way), especially when the single-mom-to-be decides to move away. But then, a small miracle happens. The film skips forward seven years and gets good. Aniston moves back with a seven-year-old boy in tow, a precocious, neurotic, hypochondriac of a child. It’s clear right away who the real father is, but the movie doesn’t press the plot into hysterics or wild avoidance maneuvers. Instead, this becomes as calm and character-based as a standard high-concept studio comedy is allowed to be.

The film is slight without ever feeling disposable, amusing without ever becoming hilarious. Bateman and Aniston have a lovely chemistry and it’s their warmth and camaraderie that keep the plot from feeling uncomfortable. Why, they are as believable as you could imagine two oblivious soul mates that need a sperm-related mix-up and seven years apart to realize their true love. What is uncomfortable in the abstract becomes gentle and likable in the specifics on the strength of the cast (especially Jeff Goldblum, who brings some of his trademarked spacey syncopation to line readings) and the solidness of Allan Loeb’s writing. (Though Loeb does step wrong in forcing Bateman to recite some very terrible narration as a framing device).

But perhaps even more than the strength of the leads, the film works because of the great performance from Thomas Robinson as the little boy. Because the film is more about the boy and not his conception, it allows for a deeper resonance in the emotions. Robinson’s interactions with Bateman are charming where most cute-kid plots turn cloying. This isn’t just a romance between two friends who slowly realize their friendship runs deeper. This is also a romance about parenthood, about a father who grows to love his child. And that’s what sets it apart, making this otherwise airy, awkward film so enjoyable.

Going the Distance, however, is not a good example of the romantic comedy, continuing the year’s dispiriting trend. In fact, this is a movie that slowly, methodically drove me nuts with a torturous drip of underwhelming scenes. It’s about how a recently dumped record-company employee (Justin Long) and a struggling reporter (Drew Barrymore) meet cute at a bar’s arcade game, start a whirlwind romance montage, and then spend most of the rest of the movie in a long-distance relationship. The pieces are there for a good movie that doesn’t materialize. It’s never bad in any spectacular or notable ways. There’s just a dull ache of missed opportunities that curdles into a desire for a fast-forward button.

The movie dies a death of a thousand mediocrities. By the time, much to my relief, the credits showed up, I realized I could count the number of times I smiled on one hand. Most of the fleeting enjoyment came care of Christina Applegate, Jim Gaffigan, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, and Ron Livingston, who are each given just one note to play. Documentarian Nanette Burstein makes her fiction-feature debut here. She should stick to documentaries if she can’t get a better script than this. Geoff LaTulippe’s screenplay is thoroughly unimaginative, falling back on standard rom-com moments (Long actually runs through an airport!). From time to time we get lucky and the script falls back on bad dialogue, bland raunchy discussions, or montages instead. There’s still hope for the rom-com genre, but none to be found here.

He Gives Love a Bad Name: YOUTH IN REVOLT

The amount of enjoyment you get out of director Miguel Arteta’s Youth in Revolt, based on the cult novel by C.D. Payne, may hinge on how tired you are of Michael Cera. After all, this is yet another one of his stammering-teen performances like the ones he’s given in Arrested Development, Superbad, Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Year One. There are, however, slight variations in his screen persona from character to character, and I, for one, am not yet tired of his way of delivering jokes by sometimes shyly slipping lines past or throwing lines away, muttering them under his breath, and then other times, asserting lines with painfully earnest intent but deeply strange delivery. I still have to smile when I think of Paulie Bleaker telling Juno that she’d “be the meanest wife ever.” He’s funny precisely because he doesn’t seem to be.

In Youth in Revolt, Cera is given yet another funny character in Nick Twisp, a mopey teen who lives with his mom (Jean Smart) and her live-in boyfriend (Zach Galifianakis). He’s repulsed by them, but an escape to see his dad (Steve Buscemi) and his dad’s much-younger girlfriend (Ari Graynor) doesn’t do much to relieve his constant state of self-pity. He’s surrounded by people in love, or something like it, and yet is cursed to remain vaguely lovesick. That is, at least until that vagueness is sharpened and focused on one girl he meets over the summer while vacationing in a trailer park. That girl is Sheeni Saunders, a cute and funny young woman whose capacity for affected anomie matches only Twisp’s. Saunders is played by relative newcomer Portia Doubleday, a great find and a fine match for Cera. They make a relaxed and cutesy couple. Doubleday shares with Cera a sly way of delivering punchlines without seeming to realize how funny she is.

After leaving the trailer park containing his mother’s boyfriend’s summer home, Twisp creates what he calls a “supplementary persona” in the form of the mustache-wearing, cigarette-smoking, bad boy Francois Dillinger. A revoltingly suave youth, Dillinger will occasionally appear and give Twisp very bad advice. Of course, he’s only in Twisp’s mind, but he gives him the courage to act (sort of) wild in an attempt to be sent away to be closer to Sheeni. He takes to spitting, tipping bowls of cereal, and, naturally, starting a massive fire. Cera has fun with this dual role; if he’s mostly unconvincing - he is - I suppose that could be the mildly clever point.

It’s a good thing that most of the humor arises out of the chemistry between Cera and Doubleday (and between Cera and Cera), though, because the movie feels awfully raggedy. Good performers like Fred Willard, Ray Liotta and Justin Long (in addition to Smart, Galifianakis, and Buscemi) are tragically underused in extremely underdeveloped supporting roles. Subplots start nowhere and then never get going while the plot itself starts strong, hitting a few funny notes, and then consists of nothing more than slight, and slightly worse, variations on those same few notes. It’s lumpy and episodic with a snarky tone that gets wearying, especially when it asks us to care more deeply about its characters. That said, this is a gently crude, yet still hard-R, teen comedy that’s kind of enjoyable, in a scrappy sort of way. Cera and Doubleday make it worthwhile.

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Drag Me to Hell is director Sam Raimi’s return to his horror-comedy roots. In the late 80s, he found success with his super-low budget Evil Dead and a sequel, two grungy, spooky, ghoulishly giggly movies, not entirely effective, but grounded in a superbly goofy performance from Bruce Campbell. After those movies, Raimi moved on to bigger studio pictures (including a third Evil Dead) before landing at the center of the Spider-man series, with which he has made one good, one great, and one crummy movie, in that order. In Drag Me to Hell, Raimi directs with a sense of energy and fun. The movie’s devilishly clever, howlingly funny, and hysterically creepy. This is genre filmmaking at its finest, a perfect B-movie gem that allows Raimi (from a script co-written with his brother Ivan) to play with all aspects of filmmaking to get a response out of his audience.

From the opening notes of Christopher Young’s excellent score, I suspected I was going to like this movie. I didn’t think that I would love it as much as I did. Nor did I suspect that I would think it just might be my favorite Raimi film. After a brief prologue (with booming sound design and a great title card – I love the font and the way the title blasts onto the screen), we meet Alison Lohman who plays Christine Brown, the sweet, pretty, young loan officer, desperate to impress her boss to win a promotion and impress her boyfriend’s snooty parents to win their respect. She turns down an elderly woman’s request for yet another loan extension. The woman doesn’t take this well, to say the least, and, after attacking Christine after hours, curses her with a Gypsy curse that will subject the recipient to three days of torment before a demon will arrive to drag the person to hell. It’s certainly timely to have a movie center on torturing a banker (coincidence though, I hear), but it’s not self-damaging in tying itself to our particular time period. Besides, this isn’t one of those horror movies that mistakes leering at bodily harm for true fright.

So, Raimi has a ticking-clock scenario for urgency and three days of torment for plenty of scares. Once the curse takes effect, the sound design is pitched at a louder volume than expected. The wind whips, leaves rattle, pots clang, and footsteps boom through the surround sound with ferocious intent. At times it seems like a surround sound demo with clangs to the right, bangs to the left, clunks behind. Raimi will then toy with the audience by cutting back the sound, creating one of those lulls where it’s obvious that there will be a jump moment any second now. But then the lull will go on much longer than expected, stretched out to a squirmy length, until…BAM!

This is a movie that revels in making the audience jump, scream and squirm, not just with long lulls but with great gallons of goo for gross-out moments involving saliva, blood, formaldehyde, and undefined oozing, often landing in peoples' mouths. In fact, Lohman takes almost as much punishment in this movie as Campbell does in an Evil Dead picture. Well, not quite, but it’s heightened by her appearance of innocence. She’s constantly getting drenched in blood, mud, and bugs, not to mention slowly losing her mind to fear. Throughout the picture, she’s pushed to her limits. Her skeptic boyfriend (Justin Long) finds it odd that she wants to visit a psychic, but that’s just the first in a long line of boundary-pushing shifts that Lohman goes through. Animal sacrifice? (There are some funny jokes with this). Séance? (There is one, and it’s a great explosion of sound design and effects work. It’s funny and spooky, sometimes in the same instant). Who knows what she’ll decide to do to rid the curse? A great deal of the fun comes from seeing just how far she finds herself willing to go.

A great deal more of the fun comes from the comedy. Raimi shoots the film with a vivacious energy that launches the paranormal at the characters and the audience in a sly deadpan. Just look at the confidence and cool with which the movie ratchets up the ridiculous, like the matter-of-fact introduction of a goat, or the sudden appearance of a coffin while Lohman (and the camera and, by extension, we) are distracted. Look at the parking lot scuffle in which two characters engage, with the way a stapler, a ruler, and a pair of dentures becomes bizarre and intense weaponry. This is a movie that encourages you to laugh while you can because you never know when the sense of dread will be punctured again, if ever.

The thing that most elevates the movie above most other contemporary horror films, beyond the great, confident boldness of Raimi's craft, is the deep compassion that I felt for Lohman’s Christine. She’s not a perfect person – she’s not as entirely blameless as she might seem – but she’s wonderfully human, more than a pawn in a parable, grounded in an emotional reality that makes her an easy character with which to identify. Justin Long is equally human in his secondary role as the boyfriend. Together, they bring a real sense of tragedy to the proceedings. It’s one thing to fear for characters’ lives; it’s another to fear for their souls. Yet Raimi manages a tricky balancing act by allowing the film to be incredibly entertaining and very funny but also creepy and unsettling. The last scene of horror is especially frightening, and lingering. This is a great B-movie carnival ride with genuine chills and jumps, excellent tension, and fine jolts of comedy: fast and freaky funhouse perfection. I sure hope there’s a worthy sequel. Drag Me Back?