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. 

Let Your Geek Flag Fly: COMIC-CON EPISODE IV: A FAN'S HOPE

“I want to die and go to Comic-Con,” says a grey-haired comics dealer towards the end of Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, a new documentary with a terrible title. We’ve been following him through the course of the movie as he and his staff lament that what started in 1970 as a dedicated comic book convention has become something akin to a geek pilgrimage for all types of media, leaving the lowly comics under-acknowledged. This year, they’re worried that lugging their wares to San Diego may not turn out to be financially successful. And still, he expresses his heavenly analogy for this, the biggest pop culture fan convention of the year.

He’s not the only one for whom Comic-Con is so important, either. Not by a long shot. This documentary tells some of their stories. It follows two men – one a bartender, the other a soldier – who place the final touches on their sample drawings, pack up their portfolios and head off to try and get discovered at the convention. There’s also a guy who plans on proposing to his girlfriend at a panel with director Kevin Smith and a group of garage-based amateur costumers who plan to blow everyone away with their elaborately detailed costumes inspired by the video game Mass Effect. (They even have a full-sized costume of a creature, complete with a fully functional animatronic head. Most impressive.)

Director Morgan Spurlock’s films are generally confrontational, though when he’s at his best it’s an entertaining form of confrontational. His documentaries like Super Size Me (not bad) and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (irritating) are gimmicky constructs devoted to telling us some fairly obvious truths. Super Size Me wanted to tell us that fast food isn’t something to eat for every meal of every day. That’s not too hard to believe. But he went ahead and did it, underlining his obvious point with obvious showmanship. It’s the same thing with product placement in Greatest Movie Ever Sold, except the point is even more obvious, and the execution a grating gimmick. Not so with Comic-Con, a documentary in which he never appears. He doesn’t even snark from the sidelines; his voice is never heard and his graphics are strictly stylistic and informative.

Spurlock is not out to explore Comic-Con’s history or its pop culture position and he’s certainly not in gonzo muckraking mode. He’s here to show us the convention floor, what seems like miles of memorabilia, panels with the artists and celebrities discussing their works (and their own fandom), and the thousands of fans in various levels of costumes and geeky T-shirts. Between the handful of fan stories he tells and the footage of this particular Con (I think it’s 2010, but there’s some 2011 mixed in with what appears to be second-unit material), he cuts to talking-head interviews with other fans and, more often, prominent geek icons like writer-directors Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith, Ain’t it Cool News creator Harry Knowles, and legendary comic-book writer Stan Lee. I particularly liked seeing Lee out on the convention floor. A fan shouts, “You’re my favorite!” He replies, “I admire your taste.”

Now, I’ve never been to Comic-Con. I have no particular burning desire to go, but I’ve nothing against it. I certainly hear enough about it in the entertainment press as that time of the summer rolls around. So as someone with no first-hand experience with the convention, I would have liked a documentary that was a little less of a pat on the back for those who already hold it dear. It’s way more of a celebration than an exploration of this event, but I’m okay with that. The press coverage focuses on the big studio events, the reveals of footage and news about upcoming movies and TV shows. It’s nice to see the ground-level fans that swarm in and make it what it is. The documentary may be light, slight, and indulgent, but it nonetheless makes for a pleasant surface look at the fans who make Comic-Con tick, people Spurlock clearly loves. 

Pew Askew: RED STATE

With Kevin Smith’s films it’s always one step forward, two steps back. He’s an auteur utterly incapable of growth along any satisfying career trajectories. There’s a reason why he’s far more beloved for his speaking tours and podcast appearances than for his actual films at this point. Whatever charm he has live and in person – his skills as a conversationalist are considerable – is missing from his finished products. I’ve grown exasperated with him, turning up for each film and finding less and less of what I wish to see, namely a fully enjoyable experience. His 1994 debut feature Clerks, a simple, crude, and cheap black and white affair shows such promise without, you know, being a good movie, that its strange to see a director forever moving sideways.

His talent has curdled. An early sense of precociousness has become precious, self-satisfied, and over-written, one talky comedy following the next. Even films like Chasing Amy and Dogma, his relatively more ambitious attempts to brush up against his own emotional or religious truths, come burdened with dialogue that registers to my ears as utterly false. Smith commonly claims to be far better with dialogue than with visuals. There’s some truth there. His visual sense is strictly perfunctory, impersonal, where his writing drips with his personality. But at least his visuals are not as mannered and stylized as his dialogue which is so flatly similar across every character that to watch a Kevin Smith movie is to experience a cast of puppets all speaking in his voice.

With Red State, though, he shakes things up. He’s attempting to get back to the kind of scrappy indie potential that his filmmaking hasn’t shown in almost twenty years. This isn’t a talky comedy; it’s a talky horror thriller. Three teen guys (Michael Angarano, Nicholas Braun, and Kyle Gallner) drive out to a remote house in the woods where they think they are to find a woman (Melissa Leo) that they met online. In person, she’s older than they expected and her motives are darker than they think. She drugs them and hands them over to the leader of a cult, a creepy, charismatic preacher (Michael Parks). The film pauses to regard this lanky, grizzled man as he delivers to his congregation a lengthy homophobic sermon that culminates in his murdering a bound gay man on the altar while the three teens shiver in a cage nearby.

This is all adequate sloppy scariness, unsettling and squirmy. It’s not typical Smith, visually static and uninspired. I particularly liked a shot in which a church-basement’s gun closet slowly reveals its contents as a cross-shaped fluorescent light flickers to life overhead. Smith’s camera jumps and leaps with similarly disrupted editing. As the teens attempt to escape and get caught up in a bigger calamity, the story Smith tells takes wild, provocative leaps in tone and content. His characters speak in distinguishable dialogue, giving a chance for individual actors to stand out, like when John Goodman thunders onto the scene as an ATF agent who gets pulled in to investigate. Moving around the margins are less successful caricatures that are of little use for the film, like a buffoonish sheriff (Stephen Root) who seems to be only a pawn for Smith’s larger political aims, a satirical intent that never fully materializes.

Smith is trying so much new here. The film is as alive with promise as anything he’s ever done. And yet, and yet, this still isn’t a good movie. When it debuted at Sundance in the middle of a Smith-fueled media-circus, the critical condemnation was swift and furious. He called the film a game-changer, a film so good he felt ready to retire, but this haphazard mess is anything but a game-changer. It’s a radical departure in style and tone for Smith but it’s not any better a horror film than his other films are comedies. Its wild leaps feel schematic when they come to land; the twists are harsh, flippant rug pulling and mindless blood lust. The film’s potential slowly drains away so that by the end it feels like its been written, manipulated, into a corner from which only a shrug can escape. What makes Red State particularly disappointing is the way it’s so close to being Smith’s best film, and yet so terribly far away. It’s a film that sets out to skewer unquestioningly held beliefs that is ironically preachy and ultimately only satisfying for audiences already initiated into the cult of Kevin Smith.