8/16/15 (Part One): A Little Stake, A Lotta Whine

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Alex Karpovsky, Anna Margaret Hollyman, awkward films, bad boyfriends, cinema, commitment issues, Dakota Goldhor, dark comedies, Dustin Guy Defa, film reviews, filmed in New York, films, hipsters, horror-comedies, independent films, indie films, indie horror film, Jason Banker, Jason Selvig, Jerry Raik, Juliette Fairley, Max Heller, Melodie Sisk, Movies, obnoxious people, Onur Tukel, rom-com, romances, set in New York City, sex comedies, Summer of Blood, unlikable protagonist, vampires, Vanna Pilgrim, Woody Allen, writer-director-actor-editor

On paper, multi-hypenate filmmaker (he writes, directs, produces, edits and stars) Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood (2014) seems like a pretty winning idea: take the neurotic, relationship-based comedies of Woody Allen but insert a vampire protagonist. Et voila: instant horror-comedy goodness! There’s obviously a rich vein to be mined here: imagine one of Allen’s schlubby, lovable losers trying to navigate the choppy waters of not only a terrifying dating scene but also their newly acquired vampirism. If you think about it, the comedy almost writes itself.

In practice, however, Tukel’s Summer of Blood is actually quite a pain in the ass (or neck, if you prefer the punny version). This has less to do with the oftentimes awkward, amateurish performances from some of the cast than it does with the film’s one towering problem: not only is Tukel’s Erik a thoroughly obnoxious, odious jerk, he’s also a massively unlikable, irritating protagonist. As portrayed by S.O.B.’s resident auteur, Erik is a tone-deaf, ridiculously self-obsessed hipster nitwit, a constantly schticking human hemorrhoid who’s never funny, sympathetic or, for the most part, remotely interesting. While the film that surrounds him has its own issues, Tukel’s Erik is the super-massive black hole at the center that sucks the good stuff right into oblivion.

We first meet our hapless “hero” as he and long-suffering girlfriend, Jody (Anna Margaret Hollyman, much better than the film requires), are having one of their customarily awkward dinners at their favorite outdoor restaurant. Jody proposes to her schlubby, commitment-phobic beau only to be summarily rejected: not only is it “cliche” to propose at a restaurant, it’s too “post-feminist” for the woman to propose. Since this little routine has been going on for some time, Jody finally gets fed up and ends up leaving with an old friend, Jason (Jason Selvig). On their way out, Jason offers some pretty valuable advice: “Shave, button up your shirt and get a fucking job.” Well played, Jason…well played.

Turns out that Jason does have a job, although he applies himself as little as humanly possible. He works in an office of some kind where his one and only friend, Jamie (Alex Karpovsky, who’s always a breath of fresh air) tries to keep him on the right side of the boss, Carl (Max Heller). For the most part, Erik just uses his time in the office to hit on comely co-worker, Penelope (Dakota Goldhor, turning in a truly baffling performance). When she spurns his advances due to his age and “not being her type,” Erik swipes a photo from her desk and proceeds to jack off in the bathroom. If you thought romance was dead, you’d better think again, pardner.

After Jody breaks up with him, Erik goes on a trio of awkward, mostly unsuccessful blind dates (all at the same restaurant, natch), two of which end with him getting summarily rejected after saying some truly stupid things. He does manages to seal the deal with one young lady, however, although the thoroughly unspectacular sex (in the most bored way possible, she keeps imploring Erik to go “deeper,” “harder” and “faster,” none of which he’s capable of doing). She only does “great sex,” however, so our hero gets the heave-ho here, as well.

While wandering the streets of his hip, New York neighborhood (Bushwick, natch) one night, Erik happens to bump into the mysterious, debonair Gavin (Dustin Guy Defa). After another awkward, schtick-filled encounter, Gavin bites Erik on the neck, turning him into a child of the night. Rather than be overly concerned, however, Erik is actually kinda over-joyed: he feels great, he’s more confident, can hypnotize his stereotypical Jewish landlord into letting him stay for free and, most importantly, can now fuck like some kind of Roman god. Using his new “powers,” Erik returns to each of his previous “strike-outs” and proceeds to knock their socks off…and turn them into vampires, of course.

As Erik adjusts to his new lifestyle, a lifestyle that includes vampire threesomes, feasting on stoners in the park and being an even bigger jerk at work, he finds himself constantly nagged by one little issue: turns out he really, really misses Jody. In fact, he might actually be in love with her, after all. With only Jason standing between him and presumed happiness, Erik must use all of his vamp skills to try to win Jody back. Can a vampire ever find true love? Only in New York, baby…only in New York.

For the most part, Summer of Blood is a pretty typical, low-budget horror comedy: the film looks okay (the frequent blood-letting is well-done), the camera-work is decent (cinematographer Jason Banker is actually the writer/director behind Toad Road (2012), one of the very best, most ingenious films I’ve seen in the last several years, although his work on S.O.B. certainly isn’t revelatory) and the actual storyline is kind of intriguing. The acting ranges from pretty good (Hollyman and Karpovsky are definitely the best of this bunch) to much less impressive (Goldhor brings such a weird energy to Penelope that I could never figure out if she was disgusted by Erik’s frequent advances or actually flirting with him and the two hipsters that Erik runs into are the very definition of non-actors), with most performances falling in the “decent” spectrum.

As mentioned earlier, the single biggest, critical issue with Summer of Blood ends up being our protagonist, Erik: to put it bluntly, any scene he’s in is a chore to sit through, which becomes a bit of an issue when he’s in every single scene. Erik is never anything more than an intolerable shitheels, a whining, obnoxious jerk who’s endless self-awareness and constant schtick gets old by the three-minute mark and then just keeps going and going, like some kind of Hell-spawned Energizer Bunny.

In any given scene, at any given moment, Tukel’s verbal diarrhea is so overwhelming that it’s impossible to ever focus on the content of any particular scene or moment. He finds a guy dying in the street from a slashed throat, he does a stand-up routine. He runs into a couple of hipsters, he riffs on how he looks like Jerry Garcia. He has an orgy with his three vampire ladies, we get schtick about how he’s not a misogynist because he genuinely likes having sex with multiple women at the same time. To make it classier, however, he lets one of the vamps read from Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

The entire film becomes one massive, never-ending bit of (largely unfunny) schtick, some of it so moldy that it’s practically vaudevillian. It’s pretty obvious that Tukel modeled the film after Woody Allen’s oeuvre and, as stated earlier, there’s nothing wrong with that idea whatsoever. There’s no denying that Woody can be a bit of a “schtick-up” guy, himself: he’s also pretty well-known for portraying the kinds of neurotic asses that most people wouldn’t willingly associate with in the real world. For all that, however, Allen is still able to make his characters at least somewhat likable: he’s a schlub but he’s our schlub, dammit.

The problem with Tukel’s performance is that Erik begins the film as an off-putting creep and finishes that way: there’s no arc, no “dark night of the soul,” no sort of internal change, no notion that anything that transpires has any sort of effect on him whatsoever. Oh, sure, he talks about how he’s a “changed” man at the end but the revelation is immediately given the raspberry by the film’s ridiculously flippant final moment. I’m not sure if Tukel actually meant Erik to come across as a lovably shaggy rogue or if he actually meant to portray him as a hatefully obnoxious dickhead: whatever the intent, the end result is a character that wears out his welcome in three minutes and then sticks around for another 83. Talk about the guest from hell!

The real disappointment with Summer of Blood is that the film isn’t devoid of good ideas. In fact, the ultimate observation about vampirism and commitment issues (Erik doesn’t want to turn Jody into a vampire because then he’d be “stuck” with her for all of eternity, rather than just her lifetime) is a really sharp one and could have been spun into something much more thought-provoking, even within the context of a silly sex comedy. There are moments during the film, such as the great scene where a dejected Erik tries to “comfort” strangers on the subway, that are genuinely funny: the key here, for the most part, is that they’re the ones where Tukel gives his motormouth a rest and just lets his filmmaking do the talking.

I didn’t hate Summer of Blood, although I won’t lie and say that I particularly liked it, either: I’ve seen plenty of worst films, both micro and mega-budget. For the most part, the constant, unfunny schtick just wore me down, like being trapped with an incredibly tedious observational comic in a stuck elevator. I still think that the idea of mashing together Woody Allenesque comedy and vampires is a good one, even if Summer of Blood makes it seem as natural as mixing oil and water. No need to wear your garlic necklaces for this one, folks: Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood is all schtick, no bite.

8/8/15: Find Your Swan

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Alan Tudyk, awkward films, best films of the year, best friends, Best of 2015, borderline personality disorder, casinos, cinema, dark comedies, David Robbins, dramas, Eric Alan Edwards, favorite films, film reviews, films, independent films, indie comedies, indie dramas, indie films, instant millionaire, James Marsden, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Joan Cusack, Kristen Wiig, Linda Cardellini, Loretta Devine, lottery winner, mental illness, Mitch Silpa, Movies, narcissism, obsession, Oprah Winfrey, patient-psychiatrist relationship, psychiatric care, Shira Piven, talk shows, therapists, therapy, Thomas Mann, Tim Robbins, Welcome to Me, Wes Bentley

If there’s one unifying theme to this crazy, modern era that we live in, I’m willing to wager that it’s narcissism. Never before in the history of humanity has it been so easy to be as completely self-absorbed as it is now. Not only easy, mind you, but also immensely profitable: when average, normal, “every-day” people can clear millions of dollars in ad revenue via YouTube channels devoted to everything from watching them play video games to watching them taste-test sodas, well…it doesn’t really seem to get more “me”-oriented than that, does it? This isn’t even the same thing as watching celebrities shill products: this is watching your next-door-neighbor do the same thing with (presumably) none of the resulting name recognition.

Thanks to the continued explosion of social media, technological advancements, “reality TV” programs and “the 24-hour news cycle,” the unwashed masses now have as direct a pipeline to the cultural zeitgeist as the glitterati. One need not release the “next, great American novel” in order to vault to the top of the literary heap: one need only draw as many curious visitors as possible to their newest blog entry. Want to be a world-famous pop star? Forget paying your dues on the club circuit: start uploading as many videos as possible of you covering that Florence+the Machine song and wait for the offers to start rolling in. In the past, anyone who wanted to “break through” to mainstream fame had a much steeper uphill climb: nowadays, it’s never been easier to shout your opinions to the rafters and actually have someone pay attention. Warhol wanted to give everyone 15 minutes but, nowadays, is there anyone actually watching the clock?

Actor-turned-director Shira Piven tackles this particular phenomena head-on with her spectacular new film, Welcome to Me (2014), a bittersweet ode to wish-fulfillment, mental illness, friendship and self-interest that might just come to define this era in the same way that Easy Rider (1969) would come to define the transitional time between the ’60s and the ’70s. Across the span of 87 minutes, Piven and screenwriter Eliot Laurence put us through the wringer, moving from extreme pathos to extreme hilarity with such stop-on-a-dime dynamics that the whole film becomes a masterclass in how to move your audience. In the process, Piven, Laurence and comedic wunderkind Kristen Wiig present us with one of the greatest cinematic creations of the 2000s, a performance that all but assures Wiig a shot at some genuine award-season gold: Alice Klieg. To paraphrase that most inimitable of comic book possums: we have seen Alice and she is us.

Opening with a quote from French philosopher Michel de Montaigne that might be the best modern mission-statement ever (“I study myself more than any other subject. That is my physics. That is my metaphysics.”), Welcome to Me wastes no time in plunging us into the day-to-day routine of Wiig’s Alice. We see her obsessively arranged house, everything organized by color, shape and whatever random internal qualifiers make sense to her. We witness Alice’s obsession with swans of every size, shape, make and model, along with the seemingly endless rows of videotaped TV shows that seem to fill every available bookshelf in her patently crammed home.

We see her recite every line from a taped episode of Oprah in the kind of off-hand manner that indicates she probably has every line from every Oprah episode memorized. We see her ask a complete stranger if there’s any “rape” in A Tale of Two Cities, a question which is as esoteric as it is mildly disturbing. We watch Alice as she goes about her lonely, oddly structured life, a ghost-like presence in a world that doesn’t quite make sense to her, a world that seems to have no more interest in her than it would any other roadside curiosity or “quirky” bag-lady. She doesn’t even seem to have any friends or casual acquaintances, aside from her mousy BFF, Gina (Freaks and Geeks’ Linda Cardellini). From our first glimpse of Alice, it’s painfully obvious that she has mental health issues, possibly more than one. She seems harmless, however, like so many others, so we just leave her alone to her own devices: what we don’t see can’t affect us, after all.

Alice, however, is destined for much grander things: in a modern era where everyone wants to be heard, why should she be any different? After winning a whopping $86 million lottery, Alice finally gets her chance: she’s going to make a difference in the biggest way possible, all while paying tribute to her greatest idol and influence, Oprah Winfrey. She approaches brothers/TV station owners Gabe (Wes Bentley) and Rich Ruskin (James Marsden) with a proposition: for $15 million, she’ll get her own TV talk show (100 two-hour episodes) and a chance to become as famous/watched/influential as Oprah. The subject? Why, Alice Klieg, of course, in all of her boundless glory.

From the jump, Alice’s show is as insane as expected. She’s wheeled out in a massive swan boat to a pre-recorded theme song that she, herself, croons. Her show features segments like the one where she cooks and consumes a meatloaf cake while the audience watches in confused silence or the numerous reenactments of various moments in her life (the one where she calls out old enemy Jordana Spangler ends with Alice bawling and screaming “Fuck you to death, Jordana!”as the crew frantically cuts to commercial). “Why doesn’t it look like Oprah,” Alice tearfully asks, only to be given the only sensible answer: “Because you ate a cake made out of meat and cried?”

The whole thing is a mess, obviously, the kind of talk show you might expect from someone who proudly discusses her borderline personality disorder as if it were a gluten allergy. It’s not like Alice isn’t seeking professional help, after all: she was happily seeing shrink Daryl Moffet (Tim Robbins) before she decided to quit her meds and regulate her moods with string cheese (always sound medical advice). Now that she’s finally getting what she most wants out of life, she’s happy enough to mitigate the need for mood stabilizers: living well, as always, is its own reward.

But the show is still a mess. Program director Dawn (Joan Cusack) thinks that Alice is a loose cannon waiting to go off, Rich thinks she’s the answer to all of his financial woes, Gabe isn’t quite sure what to make of her (but he kind of thinks he’s falling in love, at least a little bit) and Gina is almost super-humanly supportive, even as Alice seems openly dismissive of anything that doesn’t have to do with her. Hell, Gina even uproots her everyday routine in order to move into a reservation casino with Alice and several dogs…that’s friendship, ladies and gentlemen, no two ways about it!

In order to make her show “better,” Alice throws more and more money at it, all while Rich rubs his hands together and salivates like Scrooge McDuck at an estate sale. And then, of course, the expectedly unexpected happens: “Welcome to Me” starts to gain a following. Before she knows it, Alice has a full studio audience, her ratings are up and she even has her own super-fan, in the person of Rainer (Thomas Mann), an odd man-child who studies Alice in college and wants her show to air five times a week rather than once: he really hates to wait, after all.

And then, of course, the other shoe drops, like an airborne piano through a skylight: as Alice’s show gets bigger and she gets more of a platform, she becomes increasingly unstable and problems begin to crop up everywhere. Alice’s talk show becomes bigger, stranger and more controversial, as each and every whim from her extremely fertile imagination is given life, for better or worse (usually the latter), right through to her decision to spay and neuter dogs on-camera…with Alice actually performing the procedures.

As our erstwhile hero is battered about by any number of external (and internal) forces, Alice finds herself standing on the precipice of the most important, painful decision she’s ever made: embrace the anonymity of “normal” life and give up on her dreams or boldly forge her own path, disregarding the desires, wishes and feelings of all those around her in order to create a more complete version of herself. After all, as the lyrics from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Happy Song” inform us on the soundtrack, “if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?” Like all of us, Alice has a lot of dreams…will she have what it takes to make them come true?

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way: Welcome to Me is a helluva film, easily one of the year’s best (thus far, at least). Piven, who has only one other directorial effort in her background (2011’s Fully Loaded, which she also co-wrote) is a sure hand with the material, guiding the film (and audience) through its/our paces with an exceptional amount of subtlety and skill. There are plenty of big, laugh-out-loud moments in Eliot Laurence’s excellent screenplay, no doubt about it, but some of the most effective parts of the film are also the simplest, quietest and most subliminal: the powerful scene where we see Alice framed within the solitude (and virtual imprisonment) of her own home…the heartbreaking look on Gina’s face when she sees her secrets laid bare before a television audience…the impossibly beautiful, uplifting moment where we finally see how much faith the crew actually has in Alice…these would be genuinely impactful moments in any film but hit especially hard here.

Indeed, one of Welcome to Me’s greatest strengths is its ability to make us laugh like idiots one minute (the scene where Alice tries to push an ornery dog into a carrier is absolutely sublime) while ripping our hearts out the next (Alice’s “dark night of the soul” moment, in the casino, has to be one of the rawest, most painful and devastating scenes I’ve seen all year and that’s saying quite a lot). Like the very best films, Welcome to Me wants to entertain us but it also wants to make us think: think about the strangers we pass by every day, think about the world around us, think about our own hopes, fears, dreams and inadequacies. Piven isn’t interested in easy, dumb laughs, although there’s still kneeslappers aplenty here: she knows that you can’t have comedy without tragedy and Welcome to Me is tragic, in the very best way possible.

On the technical side, Welcome to Me packs plenty of firepower behind the scenes. Veteran cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards’ resume reads like a virtual ‘who’s who’ of some of the most iconic films of the ’90s (My Own Private Idaho (1991), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), Kids (1995), Cop Land (1997) and Clay Pigeons (1998), to name but a few) and he presents some immaculately framed, beautifully composed shots here. There’s an almost fairy tale quality to the film’s narrative that’s handily echoed by Edward’s camerawork.

We also get an appropriately whimsical, well-utilized score by David Robbins, the composer behind films as far-flung as Bob Roberts (1992), Dead Man Walking (1995) and Cradle Will Rock (1999). The score is never obvious and manages to downplay clumsy emotional cues in favor of mood-setting that always feels organic, especially in regards to Alice’s wacky TV show. Between the narrative, cinematography and score, Welcome to Me has a complete singularity of vision that reminded me of another of my favorite films of the year, Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices (2014): both films utilize the lush visuals of someone like Wes Anderson, while tweaking them in some pretty impressive ways.

Then, of course, there’s that cast…I mean, seriously…get a load of this mob of unduly talented performers: Joan Cusack, Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Wes Bentley, Thomas Mann, Linda Cardellini, James Marsden, Alan Tudyk, Loretta Devine, Jack Wallace…that, friends and neighbors, is how you cast your film! Regardless of the amount of screen-time, each and every member of the cast comes together to form an absolutely unbeatable ensemble. I hate to pull out the “Wes Anderson” card, again, but there’s certainly a similarity between his high-octane casts and Welcome to Me’s featured players. Hell, Cusack and Cardellini turn in two of the year’s brightest performances and neither of them has a tenth of Wiig’s screen time.

The glittering, dazzling star on the top of this particular tree, however, is the one and only Kristen Wiig. While she’s been a reliably great comic presence since her formative years on SNL, Welcome to Me marks a huge leap forward as far as her dramatic performances go. To not put too fine a point on it, Wiig is absolutely flawless as Alice: this is the kind of organic, well-rounded and utterly human performance that deserves to be lauded by every awards organization under the sun. There are no seams, no notion of where the actor ends and the character begins: like Leland Orser and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the similarly amazing Faults (2014), Wiig isn’t playing Alice…she IS Alice, at least for the 90 minutes that we spend we her.

Whether she’s bawling uncontrollably, propositioning Rainer in the most awkward way possible, throwing a temper tantrum after she gets cut-off for mentioning “masturbation” on-air or sweetly making amends to everyone she’s wronged, Wiig’s Alice is the undisputed master of this particular universe, the sun around which everyone else orbits. Fitting, of course, since the film is all about the eternal struggle for self-validation and personal worth: this is a film about Alice and Wiig towers over the proceedings like the Colossus of Rhodes. Mark my words: Welcome to Me is where Wiig picks up the dramedy mantle dropped by the recently departed Robin Williams and it fits her like it was tailor-made.

Ultimately, the true mark of an unforgettable film is how hard it hits you: from the first minute to the last, Welcome to Me was like a never-ending barrage of body blows, albeit in the best way possible. I’m not ashamed to admit that the final 10 minutes turned me into a bit of a mess: the film’s payoff is undeniably bittersweet but there’s a life-affirming quality to it that’s anything but depressing. Throughout the film, Alice only really wants one thing: to be just like her idol, Oprah Winfrey. While she tries mightily (and fails wretchedly) to emulate her TV show, there is one aspect of her hero that Alice manages to internalize: in the same way that Winfrey derived joy from giving her audience things and helping them, so, too, does Alice learn that the real value of her platform is in her ability to make a difference in the lives of others. Alice’s show is called “Welcome to Me” but, in the end, it could just as easily be called “Welcome to Us.”

As we continue to find new and improved ways to make our own, personal impacts in an increasingly chaotic, cluttered world, it might help to keep one thing in mind: we may all have our own stories, our own triumphs, despairs, victories and losses but, in the end, they’re all part of the same autobiography…the story of humanity, in all its beautiful, terrible, wonderful and hideous forms. We may want to tell our own stories but, in the end, it’s all part of the same narrative. Like Alice, all we can do is strive for happiness and ride our swan boats into the horizon.

7/15/15 (Part One): Peachfuzz Still Loves You, Little Buckaroo

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awkward films, Best of 2015, cinema, co-writers, confessions, Creep, dark comedies, disturbing films, feature-film debut, Film, film reviews, found-footage, found-footage films, Funny Games, horror, horror films, insanity, isolated estates, lake house, Man Bites Dog, Mark Duplass, Movies, multiple writers, obsession, Patrick Brice, Peachfuzz, psychopaths, small cast, The Puffy Chair, trilogy, unsettling, videographer for hire, writer-director-actor

Suppose that you’re a freelance videographer and you’ve just stumbled upon one of those “too-good-to-be-true”-type Craigslist ads: you know, the ones that promise lots of money for what seems like a surprisingly small amount of work? In this case, the job offers a cool grand for just a few hour’s work…not too shabby, eh? When you get to the address, you find out that it’s in a really picturesque, isolated mountain town, at the top of a long, wending hill. Once there, you discover that your prospective employer is the dictionary definition of a meek, unassuming guy…basically, the kind of guy that no one would cross the street to avoid, although they might do so to steal his lunch money.

This guy, he seems like a nice enough dude but he has a few quirks: he really likes to hug, for one thing, and he has a rather unsettling propensity for jumping out from around corners and trying (and succeeding) to startle you. He also keeps a wolf Halloween mask in his closet, which he’s named “Peachfuzz” and written a jaunty tune about. No biggie, though: the guy’s house is really nice, modern, well-lit and comfy…no piles of bodies, bone chandeliers or Sawyer-approved home decor to be found here, doncha know! In every way, shape and form, this guy is the poster-boy for middle-of-the-road, plain-ol’-vanilla normalcy.

After talking to this friendly, unassuming fella, he makes a pretty good case for needing your services: turns out that he’s been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and he wants you to make a “My Life (1993)-esque” video document for his unborn son. He may not be around to raise him, but this dedicated soon-to-be-dad wants to leave his child with as much of his wisdom and attention as he can: get the life lessons out of the way right now, while he’s still around to give them, and leave his son a legacy for the future.

All well and good, no alarm bells whatsoever…if anything, this guy might be in the running for “Father of the Year,” unborn child or not. After paying you upfront (talk about a totally upstanding dude!), your humble host decides that it’s time to get down to business: you were paid to film, so film you will. The first thing on the agenda? This totally normal, average guy wants to walk his son through the mechanics of “tubby time,” so he strips naked and jumps in the bathtub, all while you keep filming. And then things get really weird.

This, in a nutshell, is Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass’ intensely awkward, genuinely disturbing Creep (2014), a two-person, found-footage examination of obsession, insanity, loneliness and the often terrifying “real faces” that supposedly normal folks hide from the world at large. Despite the inherent simplicity of the set-up and format (Brice and Duplass co-write the film, as well as starring in it, while Brice also served as the director…at no point do we ever get another actor on-screen aside from these two), Creep is endlessly engaging and so tightly plotted that it’s almost seamless. Creep is not only a first-rate found-footage film, it’s also one of the best, most unsettling films of the year.

The secret weapon here, as in many other indie productions, is wunderkind Mark Duplass. Although perhaps best known for his pioneering work in mumblecore and for his role on the relentlessly hilarious TV show The League, Duplass and his brother, Jay, have been involved with an almost dizzying variety of projects, either as writer, director, actor or all three: The Puffy Chair (2005), Baghead (2008), Cyrus (2010), Greenberg (2010), Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011), Your Sister’s Sister (2011), Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Mercy (2014), to name but a few.

In this case, Duplass has teamed with Patrick Brice, whose follow-up to Creep, The Overnight (2015), made big waves at various film festivals this year. Described as the first in a trilogy, Creep is as low-budget and bare-bones as it gets: in essence, the entire film consists of Duplass’ Josef creeping out Brice’s Aaron in every way imaginable, with the tension slowly ratcheting up until the entire film threatens to explode like a busted water heater. To make things even odder and more uncomfortable, Creep is also full of pitch-black, deadpan humor, much of which walks an incredibly thin line between making one burst out laughing (Josef’s “Charlie Day-worthy” Peachfuzz song is an easy highlight) and making one cringe down in their seat, attempting vainly to become invisible.

Perhaps the greatest triumph, here, above and beyond the masterfully economic production (“anyone” can do this…provided, of course, that they’re as talented as Brice and Duplass) is the way that the film sinks its hooks into us and refuses to let go. Unless you’re a complete horror neophyte, you’ll probably be able to predict where the film eventually ends up. The route to get there, however, is a particularly thorny one, full of red herrings, dead ends, misplaced assumptions and cinematic slight of hand: at one point, we seem to be witnessing the natural progression of what we assume will happen, only to have it be revealed as recorded footage from earlier. Brice and Duplass don’t engage in the same sort of meta-mind-fuckery that Haneke did in Funny Games (1997) but they’ve managed to set up show just one door down, which is a pretty neat trick all by itself.

Creep is a strange film, no two ways about it. It’s a surprisingly complex narrative for such a short, deceptively simple film: Brice and Duplass seem to be telling a pretty straight-forward genre story about a creepy guy (think Psycho (1960) stripped down to a two-person drama) but constantly throw in allusions, asides and nods to much bigger, darker things happening in the background. The film could be about the hidden dangers lurking behind any potentially smiling face but it could also be about the very nature of truth and perception, sort of a Schrodinger test to see if “absolute truth” exists outside of our individual understandings. It could be about loneliness and mental illness but it could also be about the horrifying randomness of the universe, the howlingly unknowable cosmic coin toss that puts some folks on the road to happiness while others end up mulch.

There are moments in the film (the harrowing bit involving Josef’s ringing cell phone, that amazing final long shot) that are as classically “horror” as the genre gets, while other scenes (tubby time, the unpleasant Peachfuzz story, the visit to the healing spring) would be odd fits in any film, regardless of the generic focus. Creep is such an amazing piece of work because it somehow makes all these disparate elements fit together in a wholly organic way: Brice and Duplass’ film could be about any or all of these things or it could be about none of them.

While Brice has a few off moments, acting-wise (some of his close-up asides to the camera feel more like delivering lines than just “being”), Duplass has such a singular focus that it’s difficult to see where the actor stops and the character begins. At times, I was reminded of Duplass’ archly awesome asshole from The League, a totally cool dude who fucks with people just to watch their reactions. At other times, however, that odd combo of sweetly goofy happiness and reptilian, dispassionate reserve would chill me straight to my blood cells: it’s always difficult to get under a lifelong horror fanatic’s skin, especially where more modern horrors are concerned…Creep makes it seem distressingly easy.

As the first film in a proposed trilogy, I’m deathly curious to see where Brice and Duplass go from here: while the film ends in a way that seems to “pan back” and give us a wider overview of the evil we’ve witnessed, I’d hate to think that Brice and Duplass might get lazy and just give us more of the same in future installments. As it stands, Creep was one of the most uncomfortable, unpleasant, powerful and astounding little films I managed to see this year: I’d love to be able to say the same thing about the next two, whenever Brice and Duplass decide to unleash them upon the world.

For now, however, I’m going to double-down on my long-standing paranoia regarding other people: the world might be full of totally nice, cool individuals, but as long as there are Josefs out there, I think I’ll be a little more comfortable behind my locked door, thank you very much. As for answering Craigslist ads? Fuggedaboudit.

 

6/11/15: Don’t Forget About the Power Glove!

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Adam J. Minnick, Alan Longstreet, Animal Trilogy, anti-authority, anti-establishment, anti-hero, Ape, awkward films, Buzzard, cinema, con artists, Cool Hand Luke, Coyote, dark comedies, experimental film, film reviews, films, Freddy Krueger, Harmony Korine, indie films, Jason Roth, Joe Anderson, Joel Potrykus, Joshua Burge, Katie Call, long shots, Marty Jackitansky, Michael Cunningham, millenial angst, Movies, Nintendo Power Glove, odd movies, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Quentin Dupieux, Richard Linklater, slackers, stylish films, surreal, Teri Ann Nelson, writer-director-actor-editor, youthful angst, youthful rebeliion

When Marlon Brando uttered the immortal rejoinder “Whadda ya got?” all the way back in 1953, it’s highly unlikely that he had Marty Jackitansky in mind. 60 years later, however, here he is, ready or not: the heir apparent to Johnny Strabler, Holden Caulfield and “Cool Hand” Luke Jackson, Marty is the anti-establishment anti-hero that our era needs (and deserves), the kind of cynical, self-serving smart-ass who flies the middle finger by default, in the same way that some folks slip on plastic smiles before punching the daily clock. He might never be anyone’s idea of a conventional hero but for any poor sucker caught in the clutches of the modern working malaise, he just might be the only hero we’re gonna get.

Marty and the rest of the colorful oddballs that orbit around him are all residents of multi-hyphenate madman Joel Potrykus’ ingeniously warped Buzzard (2014). Not only does Potrykus write, direct and edit the film (the third part in a trilogy that also includes Coyote (2010) and Ape (2012)), he also has a prominent role as Marty’s delightfully obnoxious, uber-nerdy co-worker. It’s a lot to bite off for any filmmaker but Potrykus, with only his second feature film, makes the whole thing look ridiculously easy. The result? One of the quirkiest, coolest, funniest and just plain out-there films I’ve had the pleasure of seeing all year. At this rate, Potrykus runs the risk of joining such vaunted company as Quentin Dupieux, Harmony Korine and György Pálfi as a first-rate purveyor of outsider cinema.

By day, our humble “hero,” Marty (brilliantly played by Potrykus mainstay Joshua Burge), toils away in the kind of anonymous, homogeneous cubicle graveyard that seems more minimum-security prison than place of work. Well…”toil” is really a relative term: you see, Marty is the kind of fella who internalized the “work smarter, not harder” maxim more than most, turning it into the kind of do-or-die statement of purpose that characterizes the most successful con artists. In fact, virtually every waking second of Marty’s existence is given over to scams of one sort or the other: he orders expensive office supplies from work, “returns” them at a nearby office supply store and pockets the cash…he eats nothing but frozen food, most of which he receives for free after constantly complaining about the “quality,” usually after he already finished licking the pizza sauce off his fingers…he rescues discarded food from a McDonald’s dumpster and returns it to the counter for a “fresh” replacement. Marty isn’t running a game: his entire existence IS a game, one that he seems to be handily winning.

When he’s not constantly scamming, Marty appears to only have three other interests: pounding metal music of any and every variety (Norwegian black metal seems to be a particular favorite), anything horror-related and video games. In other words, Marty is the very picture of arrested adolescence: with his Doritos-and-pizza-sandwiches, constant Nintendo playing and brain-rattling thrash, Marty is every loner who ever lived on their friend’s couch, every “twenty-something-teenager” who ever tried to shuffle their way through this mixed-up world of ours. Hell, Marty has such laser-focus that his prize personal project is a glove that combines the old Nintendo Power Glove with horror icon Freddy Krueger’s razor-bladed weapon-of-choice.

As he yawns his way through a workday that holds absolutely no interest for him whatsoever (Marty’s a temp at a bank, which easily stands as one of the most anonymous, thankless jobs out there), he gets a “golden parachute” dropped into his lap, so to speak: Carol (Teri Ann Nelson), his supervisor, hands Marty a small mountain of returned customer refunds to process. Marty’s job is fairly simple (he just has to call the customers and/or look up their current addresses) but he gives it the same expert touch he applies to any work project: he half-asses it before finally giving up. After a mix-up with the birthday check that his mother mails him, however, Marty is introduced to the joys of signing checks over to himself.

In no time, Marty is supplementing his other (ill-gotten) income by depositing the customer refunds into his own account. After his supremely geeky co-worker, Derek (Potrykus), uncovers the scheme, however, Marty’s paranoia begins to kick in. Once Carol casually drops the bomb that she, personally, monitors the account that the refunds are drawn from, however, Marty’s whole world begins to collapse. Despite the lack of any sort of organized investigation, Marty goes on the lam, convinced that his scams have finally caught up with him. Armed with only a pocketful of stolen checks, a combo Power Glove/blade weapon and a sneer that could wrap around the planet twice, Marty is bound and determined to make it out, on his own terms. He’s gonna have to stay sharp, though: in a world full of idiots, phonies, squares and drones, any nail that sticks out is guaranteed to hit hammered down.

As a bit of disclaimer, I’ll begin by saying that I have a particular fondness for anything where a clever, roguish anti-hero sticks it to our modern shit-storm of a society: blame it on too many viewings of Cool Hand Luke (1967), Caddyshack (1980) and Stripes (1981) during my formative years but I always back the rebel, regardless of the situation. In this regard, Buzzard hits the bull’s-eye dead-center, presenting me with one of those unforgettable shit-disturbers that I prize so highly.

Marty Jackitansky, to cut to the chase, is a great character, one of those literary/cinematic creations that is so instrumental in helping us make sense of the world we live in. Like many presumed drones, Marty is as deeply mired in the system as his peers: the major difference, of course, is that they’re merely marking time, whereas he’s trying to carve out his own bit of reality. In many ways, Marty is the very best kind of role-model one could have: he, literally, spends every waking moment of his life indulging in all of the things that he loves, without giving much thought to the stuff that doesn’t matter.

Unlike Derek or the other temp, Stacy (Katie Call), Marty has no interest in “doing a good job” at work: this kind of work doesn’t matter, ultimately…it has no inherent value, beyond the meager paycheck, and brings no great worth to his life. Rather than pretend that worthless things like his office temp job actually matter, Marty treats them like the ridiculous jokes that they really are: it’s not so much that Marty is an eternal optimist as that he, literally, doesn’t sweat the small stuff (including all of the societal niceties like “hanging out” and making small talk).

The kicker, of course, is that Potrykus is much too clever a filmmaker to simply present us with a “lovable ruffian” (although, to be fair, nothing about Marty really says “lovable”) and take easy pot-shots at society. Rather, we get a no-holds-barred view of Marty’s process, which means that we get a front-row-seat to his inevitable paranoid breakdown. Potrykus (and Marty) know that you can only flip off life for so long before you get as good as you get: his downfall doesn’t have as much to do with his slippery moral slope as it does with the fact that, in the end, none of us can escape the machine. The film’s brilliant final image isn’t so much a marvelous bit of magical-realism as it is the realization that nothing is ever quite what it seems: you can break out of one “prison” only to find yourself right back in another.

While the filmmaking here is absolutely top-notch, there’s no denying that Burge shoulders an enormous amount of the burden. His portrayal of Marty is so perfect, so wonderfully insular, that he immediately vaults into the upper-echelon of cinematic outsiders like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s (1975) Randle McMurphy or the aforementioned Holden Caulfield. There’s not much margin for error, here, since Potrykus’ style leans heavily on extreme close-ups and awkwardly long takes: if Burge wasn’t always completely invested, if we couldn’t see the spark of Marty’s rebellion in every single smirk, squint and chortle, this would all get old ridiculously quick. Instead, we get brilliant scenes like the one where Marty shovels spaghetti into his face while wearing a pristine, white hotel bathrobe. In and of itself, the scene means nothing: when you factor in Burge’s complete mastery of his character, the scene becomes something much more…it becomes triumphant, the perfect synthesis of mania and joy, a “final meal” consumed at a crossroads that leads either to victory or oblivion.

Burge isn’t the only one to watch here, however, even if he’s undeniably the film’s focus. Just as great, for different reasons, is Potrykus’ performance as the unforgettable Derek. Quite frankly, Derek is an awesome character, sort of the unofficial patron saint of basement dwellers everywhere. Between his “party zone” (the sad-looking basement in his dad’s house plus one of those cheap colored-light things from Spencers), his self-important proclamations on everything under the sun and his Bugles/Hot Pockets/Mountain Dew diet, Derek is a gaming-culture Everyman. He’s the kind of person who tries to turn co-workers on to terrible pop music, takes every opportunity to show he’s not “gay” and forces his house-guests to watch him play video games. Derek is the kind of character who could have been unbelievably insufferable and hateful yet, thanks to Potrykus’ all-in performance, he becomes an integral part of the film. It also helps that the side-splitting scene where he munches Bugles in faster and faster succession is, without a doubt, the single funniest gag like this since Lucy tried to eat all those chocolates.

There are so many layers to Buzzard that it’s difficult to get everything on the first go through, despite the apparent simplicity of the film. While it’s tempting to view the movie as a series of Marty’s adventures, the contrast with the “real world” is just too cutting to ignore. This becomes especially true once Marty goes on the run and his actions become increasingly violent and more unpredictable. Similar to the moment when we first realize just how disturbed Travis Bickle really is, it takes a while before we “wake up” to the reality of what Marty’s done. It’s quite telling that the film’s finale can be read as either abject success or failure, depending on the individual sensibilities.

As should be quite apparent, I absolutely loved Buzzard. The film has a great look (even the extreme close-ups eventually won me over), is genuinely funny (Marty’s “White Russian” response to “Is your name Polish?” might be my favorite quip of the month) and carves out its own path with ruthless focus. In many ways, the film reminded me of Quentin Dupieux-lite (despite seeming like a negative, that’s actually quite the positive) or a slightly warmer, friendlier co-mingling of Richard Linklater and Harmony Korine. While there are some genuinely strange elements to the film, it never quite hits the surreal heights of something like Wrong Cops (2013) or Gummo (1997), although there are certainly elements of both to be found here.

What the film absolutely does not remind me of, however, is Rick Alverson’s odious The Comedy (2012), another recent odd to aimlessness in the modern youth. The reason for this, I think, is pretty basic: while The Comedy sought to portray a group of privileged, self-obsessed hipster assholes waging war on “polite society” through a series of pranks and un-PC jokes, Buzzard gives us a genuine, counter-culture irritant who seeks to realign the modern world to his favor. Marty Jackitansky may be rebelling against everything but he’s got a reason: when the whole world is full of shit, sometimes you just gotta make your own reality. While I can’t say I always (or almost ever) agreed with Marty’s methods, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t respect his goal. The most I could say for the assorted schlubs in The Comedy, however, is that I probably wouldn’t think about mowing them down with a steamroller.

Many of us were raised on the old maxim “an honest pay for an honest day’s work.” When the return isn’t “honest,” however, what does that say about the work? Marty Jackitansky knows that you can never get ahead playing someone else’s game, so he brings his own to the party. If that ain’t something worth celebrating, well, I don’t know what is.

4/1/15: Who You Callin’ Dummy, Dummy?

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Adrien Brody, Arrested Development, awkward films, best friends, brother-sister relationships, cinema, crazy fiancees, delayed adolescence, dramadies, Dummy, dysfunctional family, Edgar Bergen, film reviews, films, Greg Pritikin, Horacio Marquinez, Illeana Douglas, independent films, indie comedies, indie dramas, Jared Harris, Jessica Walter, loneliness, Milla Jovovich, Movies, outsiders, Paul Wallfisch, romances, Ron Leibman, stalkers, Todd Solondz, ventriloquist, ventriloquist dummies, Vera Farmiga, wedding planners, writer-director

Home, as they say, is where the heart is. It can also, of course, be the place where the freaks and losers come to roost, as we’ve seen in any number of dysfunctional family dramedies over the years. From the cringe-worthy misanthropes that populate Todd Solondz’s best films to the more likable, if no less fractured, outsiders who inhabit Wes Anderson’s candy-colored universe, odd, sparring relatives have been a staple in indie films for decades, now, and the trend shows no sign of declining anytime soon. Think of it as “Cops” syndrome: no matter how screwed up our own families might be, there’s always a more screwed up bunch of folks waiting for us on the silver screen.

Writer-director Greg Pritikin’s Dummy (2002) is so well-ensconced within the “lovable outsider/screwed-up family” subgenre that an overriding sense of deja vu imbues every frame: you might not have seen this particular film before but it’ll probably feel like you have. This sense of familiarity ends up working both for and against the film: just like found-footage enthusiasts and zombie film aficionados have come to find, the “if you’ve seen one…” argument handily applies here. If quirky, combative families and sweetly “weird” loners are your thing, there’s plenty to tide you over until you get your next fix. If, however, you’re looking for a little more individuality from your films, I have a sneaking suspicion that Dummy will prove to be a largely forgettable experience, the cinematic equivalent of eating a three-course meal composed entirely of cotton candy.

In this particular instance, our awkward, outsider “hero” is Steven (Adrien Brody), a ventriloquism enthusiast who still lives at home, even as he inches ever closer to his third decade on the planet. His family is the kind of loud, brash, dysfunctional clan who should be immediately familiar to anyone who’s seen an indie drama-comedy in the past 15 years: mother, Fern (Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter), is a hyper-critical nitpicker; father, Lou (Ron Leibman), spends every minute of his begrudged retirement building model boats and ignoring his family and sister, Heidi (Illeana Douglas), is a wedding planner whose own romantic relationship could best be described as “hideous” and who takes more casual emotional abuse from her parents than Family Guy’s Meg.

When Steven loses his anonymous job at an equally anonymous electronics company, he ends up at the unemployment office, where he decides to pursue his “dream job”: he wants to be a master ventriloquist, just like his old hero, Edgar Bergen. The only problem, of course, is that Steven just isn’t very good: even his own dummy (which he never bothers to name) knows this beyond a shadow of a doubt. As Steven strikes up an awkward, tentative romance with Lorena (Vera Farmiga), the unassuming employment agent who tries to help him realize his life-long dream, he also has to deal with Fangora (Milla Jovovich), his obnoxious, brash, loud-mouthed best friend and Michael (Mad Men’s Jared Harris), his sister’s pathetic, unstable, stalkery ex-fiancee. It all culminates in a disastrous wedding where Steven must finally make the decision to come out from behind his dummy and actually live his life…or lose it!

Aside from the great cast, there’s little about Dummy that really differentiates it from any number of similar indie dramedies. Shy, unassuming but ultimately wise protagonist with a “weird” quirk? Check. Snarky, cynical sibling with a bad relationship? Yup. Bickering parents who micromanage their grown children’s’ lives? Goofball, antisocial best friend who causes chaos wherever they go? Double check. Every expected beat is present and accounted for, every necessary trope and cliché checked off the master list. There’s an overriding sense of awkward mortification that underscores everything, sure, but that’s not exactly revolutionary for this particular type of film.

If the story and writing behind Dummy is decidedly old hat and corny, the film features enough good performances to make it worth a watch, especially for fans of the cast. Adrien Brody is one of those chameleonic actors who always manages to shine, regardless of the production, and Dummy is no exception: there’s a tender vulnerability to his performance that makes us pull for Steven regardless of how pathetic he often seems. Vera Farmiga, currently turning heads as Norman’s overbearing mother on TV’s Bates Motel, is equally great (and under-stated) as his love interest and the couple have genuine chemistry that starts at “meet cute” but ends in territory closer to real life. Illeana Douglas nearly steals the whole show as Steven’s neurotic sister in a role that could easily come across as humiliating (see the aforementioned Meg Griffin reference) but manages to locate itself just south of “tortured nobility.” She’s always been a formidable presence, on-screen, but Dummy is easily one of very best, most self-assured performances: the scene where she, finally, smashes her dad’s stupid model boat is unbelievably satisfying.

We also get great turns from Jessica Walter (does anyone do “bitchy mom” better than Mrs. Bluth/Archer?) and Ron Leibman as the ‘rents and Jared Harris as the pathetic ex. Only Milla Jovovich ends up disappointing as Steven’s ridiculously high-maintenance best friend: blame it on the way the character is written or the actual performance but everything about Fangora is insufferable and obnoxious. Throughout the entire film, my one, overriding thought was “Why the hell doesn’t Steven play hide-and-go-seek” with her and run for the hills as soon as her eyes are closed?

I’m also happy to pour a healthy helping of derision on the ridiculously sappy “singer-songwriter”-esque songs that rear their ugly heads, from time to time. I’m not sure if the tunes are meant as subtle (or not so) commentary on the proceedings or are just impossibly on-the-nose but they never failed to pull me right out of the film. Self-referential songs can move a film forward (see Cat Ballou (1965) for a good example) or stop it cold in its tracks and it’s not difficult to judge which direction I felt Dummy erred on. Suffice to say that any element of a film that calls undue attention to itself is, ultimately, unsuccessful and Dummy’s silly score proves that by a country mile.

Ultimately, Dummy isn’t a terrible film but it is a terribly predictable one. There are enough good performances here (particularly Brody and Farmiga) to make this worth a watch on a lazy Sunday but nothing else really stands out. Most tellingly, Dummy is the kind of film that seems slavishly devoted to pleasing its audience, at the risk of any real tension or stakes: the overly sunny finale manages to snatch a traditionally happy ending from the clutches of a much braver (if still clichéd) possibility. Like Steven’s dummy, Pritikin’s Dummy is a largely inert force that manages to come to life, at times, but never really achieves the vitality that it deserves. Pinocchio might have become a real boy, in the end, but Dummy never quite becomes that animated.