WaxBellaAmours Reviews

Pet Sematary (1989)

Condescending, useless adaptation of Stephen King novel

[5/10 · 1 February 2012]

It sounded like a great idea on paper. Stephen King adapting his own novel on screen? Since most of the film adaptations of his novels have been criticized for deviating from the source, it would seem like he would be the perfect one to get his own vast, peculiar imagination displayed best on screen. True, "Pet Semetary" is probably one of the more faithful movies based on a King novel, following the narrative flow much more closely than other adaptations have. Unfortunately, something sounding great on the page doesn't mean it looks good on the screen. And "Pet Semetary", for all it's fidelity to the Pet Semetary book, is a truly Awful movie.

Indeed, after reading "Pet Semetary", many of its ideas certainly we're great to toy around with inside the head. The book certainly highlighted a fascinating, universal idea (the ability to control death) and managed to make it truly terrifying, knowing the reader's own imagination would be the greatest catalyst for the book's greatest shocks, with King managing to effectively convey his musings on morality while allowing the reader to do their own coloring of much of the film's narrative action.

That in turns makes the whole movie seem pointless and, in the details, rather silly on the big screen, where all the imagining is already done for us. In fact, this adaptation is just downright ludicrous. Some of King's more mercurial creations (the ghost of a dead student the film's doctor protagonist couldn't save, a skeletal-looking mentally ill sister of the doctor's wife, and don't forget a demonic toddler!) just look ridiculous on the big screen. Indeed we're not sure if the director is meaning to be Ironic, but as on-screen bogeymen there just goofy and absurd, and not in a good way. This film shows far too much, becoming far too explicit and ends up just being extremely condescending to the audience, for whom nothing but silent or uttered laughter seems to be the only appropriate response. And while King certainly knows how to write a novel, writing a screenplay is a different monster, and there are some awkward scene transitions and lapses in thematic explanations that make certain plot points that we're clear on page seem rather preposterous on screen.

All in all, stick with the book. As condescending at that sounds, the silly film you're about to watch is going to do nothing but simply snigger at you while you do nothing but snigger back.

Nightmare (1981)

American and European styles make an awkward but interesting mix

[6/10 · 4 December 2011]

Trying to bring the Italian giallo genre into the then-popular American slasher genre, Nightmare is a half-clever attempt. Those two extremes don't seem like a good fit, with the typical slash-and-hack, one-by-one structure of the slasher genre mixing a bit awkwardly with the more flamboyant, open-ended and director-focused giallo film movement. "Nightmare" isn't particularly coherent and can feel a bit half-hearted at times, but it has enough startling moments and a truly twisted (and brutal) view of sexuality to at least be interesting beyond it's initial viewing.

Often considered a Grindhouse staple, it shares the qualities of many other films of that "genre": lousy dubbing, horrid acting, completely conspicious continuity blunders, a soundtrack and film print that makes the viewer feel like their head is being held under muddy water. It's also unusually bleak and morally ambiguous for an American film, a telling sign that this was directed by an European. There's also a sense of the American-slasher puritanism, as noticed by the Killer's view of promiscious adults around him, but it's not quite as black-and-white as many of the like-minded films at the time. Largely because we're asked to look at the film's largely unseen killer with a more subjective eye.

"Nightmare" may be poorly made, although a few cat-and-mouse sequences are well-staged and engaging enough, but it's far from useless. It's cross between American DIY ethos and lavish, fetishitistic European flavoring is uneven and sloppy but always weird and alluring enough to keep you watching. The film's modest cult following is understandable.

Like Crazy (2011)

Like Promise

[6/10 · 12 November 2011]

As the movie's title suggest, I truly wanted to fall in crazy love with "Like Crazy". By the end, I instead just gave it a pat on the shoulder and became more interested in what the stars and director would be doing after the movie than in the film that just screened. In a movie about the complications that ensue when an American guy named Jacob and a British girl named Anna meet in college, fall in love and then eventually are separated when the latter is denied entry back into the US after overstaying her visa, it's never as compelling as it very well should have been.

"Like Crazy", a big hit at the Sundance film festival, is well-made and has some scenes of heartbreaking immediacy that give it considerable promise. Unfortunately it only shines through it's individual moments, but as a whole it lacks a certain emotional center as the main romantic pairing, played by Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, is just not convincing.

Not for lack of trying. Director Drake Doremus has certainly made a lovely film out of a very small budget, and again proves (after his first film Douchebag) that he has a way of coaxing some nuanced performances out of familiar character archetypes. It's refreshing to see a movie where people don't always know the perfect thing to say and end up saying what they actually feel, or feeling unable to say anything at all. And his understated mis-en-scene and on-the-cheap cinematography is quite impressive, bringing a very cinematic atmosphere to "Like Crazy" despite the film's modest means.

For the central pairing, Jones (a distinctly lovely actress with a remarkably subtle face and physical acting style) in particular brings a fascinating duality to her character of Anna: she can feel both warm and reserved, naive but very intelligent and observant. Jones slowly melds what could initially seem like a contradiction into a very real, imperfect human character that you can't quite understand but you can feel remarkably close to, and it's easy to see how someone could be very drawn to her. Anton Yelchin, as Jacob, has the much harder task: his Jacob has an almost too-passive interest in this love affair, but while the character on the page might be too much of a cipher, Yelchin has a clever acting style that suggests there's more to Jacob than meets the eye.

And there's no questioning that "Like Crazy" is a consistiently engaging and intriguing experience. There's just a big problem when the central romance in an in-and-out-of-love story is the weakest part of film. Their relationship ultimately feels completely tied to plot, with no real sense that it would exist off camera. We become interested in Jacob and Anna individually, but never as a couple.

Jacob seems rather unwilling to uproot his life to be with her, or even borrow money from her parents so he can stay the post-graduation summer in England, and it is a bit baffling to wonder how someone as smart (or supposedly smart) as Anna would be willing to overlook his slowly growing indifference and find out far too late that their romance is dying.

There's a bit of suspense later on, as both Jacob and Anna get romantically tempted by someone close to them (by Jennifer Lawerence and Charlie Bewley, respectively), but that plot devolpment ultimately feels as superficial and mechanical as the movie's main immigration predicament. It's more an affirtmation of Lawrence's considerable talents as an actress that she takes a role as contrived as this and ends up making the audience truly feel her heartbreak. Though it's a big problem when we're more torn up over the affair rather than the movie's main romance.

It's not that there isn't a sense of real care and affection between Jacob and Anna, but the movie just doesn't take enough time to let us figure out exactly what exists between the two. It seems like while Anna may be in crazy stupid love, Jacob seems to see it as a passionate summer fling but nothing to change his life for. You end up wishing they would just move on and live their lives rather than root for them to make it through their immigration-complicated struggle, as the feelings just do not seem to be reciprocated. The disintegration of their relationship feels more expected and, frankly, welcome than it is heartbreaking.

Perhaps what's hindering the central romance is that the movie is far too hurried and uneven that it doesn't really have time to show a substantive, organic growth of Anna and Jacob's relationship. The early scenes of Jacob and Anna's romance are far too brief (with an excessive fondness of montages and quick scene cuts) and far too much screen time is spent after Anna's banned from the US that "Crazy" never really has time to breathe. There's never any time to truly reveal what would make these two would-be romantics not only connect but fall passionately in love with each other. Surely it's more than a mutual love for Paul Simon's "Graceland" or rides in go-karts (yep, that's in the movie too).

Perhaps it's a compliment to say that the film should've been a bit longer, but it also means we're left needing more. The movie does have a potentially terrific ending, but too bad the charming but uncogent scenes before make it an afterthought rather than something more potent and emotional. That makes the whole experience just all the more tantalizing and disappointing. We haven't fallen in love with "Like Crazy", we're just enamored with what could've been.

Friss levegö (2006)

Fresh air for effectively deadpan, slice-of-life dramedies

[8/10 · 17 July 2007]

Although set out as another deadpan, slice-of-life/inter-generational-malaise comedy that often inspires inquiries into tired Freudian insights, "Fresh Air", the welcomely modest film from novice Hungarian director Agnes Kocsis, manages to make a nicely acute look at the contemporary mother-daughter relationship and it's glaringly distant nature without drowning in it Oedipal cliques. Shooting in an amiably, if predictably, wry sensibility, she manages to stress the more casual, common-place observations of everyday life without over-reaching for an offbeat, hyper-zealous whimsy.

Set in modern-day Budapest, without the sparkle of a Rick Steves-eye-view of tourism-centered Europe (where Budapest has become a recent hot commodity), it focuses on two women: Viola (Julia Nyako), a nearing-middle-age single mother whose considerable beauty has not seem to worked out in her favor: she works as a restroom attendant in a city subway, though she treats her supposedly lowly position with an odd sense of efficient integrity and pride. Her daughter, Angela (Izabella Hegyi), doesn't feel the same way, as she aspires for higher ambitions to be a fashion designer and escape the remote monotony of her seemingly minimal teenage life.

Although they live in close quarters, communication between viola and Angela has almost completely lapsed: viola is too wrapped up in her own marginal routine (her personal life is a tidy disaster), for which Angela feels both shame and a condescending, unspoken empathy. The only time they ever enjoy being together is silently watching an unnamed, beloved television serial, whose hero provides a momentary (and, at least to the audience, enigmatic) solace from their dead-end existence.

And that's where the movie does find it's most insightful strength and solidity, in how well it portrays both the considerable emotional gap between the two ladies as well as mirroring their personalities as almost complete replicas. Rarely are they shown in the same frame together, but newcomer Hegyi and unsung veteran Nyako convey the doppelganger effect with a remarkable precision.

Angela can easily sigh at her mother's helplessly introverted personality (in the film's most facetious sequences, we see viola wander through a dating service as she haggardly dismisses her male suitor's fervent pursuits, and at an evangelical gathering where she refuses to play along) and scorn at her odd, obsessive habits (her penchant for using air freshner is borderline fetishistic), but the movie pressingly notes that she is almost completely alike.

While Viola may, unenthusiastically, have the need to 'belong' (wherever to, and why, is beyond her) for which her personality doesn't allow, Angela has the typical adolescent, angst-ridden' urge to break out, treating her surrounding enviorment with a similar sense of bored indifference. The people around her are viewed as unexciting (she treats her whiny 'best-friend' as Hollywood-issue, and acts wayward around her new, sort-of boyfriend (part physics-geek, part plebeian dream-boy) who, like viola's would-be suitors, pursues her with an aggressive animal attraction), and almost every get-together ends with a tedious anti-climax. In her mind, nobody should mess with her strict, habitual determination, which including strenuously hewing her latest sweatshop-style dress at school and dancing around magazine cutouts of chic apparel designs around the flat (as well as opening it's windows whenever viola comes home, since all the synthetic air freshener in the world can't shake Angela's interpretation that her mom stinks).

Late in the movie, there's a botched road trip, an altercation at the subway restroom and some taciturn female bonding subsequent to the accident to illicit some requisite dramatics, only quasi-necessary for what is otherwise an effectively anecdotal, quirky bit of slice-of-life deadpan that is happily content to be intelligently modest. And that's welcome for "Fresh Air's" very modern story of the dis-communication between parents and offspring and the occasionally disparate paths they take, though they are often followed in remarkably similar ways. With some sharp humor and sharper emphasis on the subtleties of the moods and tension between the seemingly hapless characters, it's a gratifying (if a bit slow-moving) dramedy debut that fans of Bent Hamner, Aki Kaurisamki and all other droll Scandinavian comedies should check out immediately.

Hostel (2005)

More misanthropic endeavors in this brutal, relentlessly dull gore-fest

[3/10 · 11 July 2007]

With the current stock of the torture-horror genre skyrocketing, it's brazen rise has given room for plenty of gleeful youth hipsters to stage their own relentless battle of who can shock you more. This week's so-called bad boy is the well-educated director Eli Roth, equal part frat-boy and film-geek, who follows up his clever if messy (in every sense of the word) "Cabin Fever" with the far more polished and grisly "Hostel", the latest excuse for mixing grim, one-dimensional scorn for the human race and tasteless violence to the most lurid degree possible.

This unfortunate outing focuses on tourists in Europe, two college-age Americans, Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) and one party-hungry Icelander Ollie (Eythor Gordsoon), as they look for ways to quench their typically hedonistic and lecherous appetites across the continent. While the somewhat timid, nerdy Josh would clearly like to be somewhere else, Paxton lets his bad manners roam free as he seems to enjoy causing endless raucous and spout juvenile bits of casual bigotry at the locals; he plays the Ugly American stereotype in capital letters. After missing curfew at their hotel after a fruitless venture into the Amsterdam nightlife, they are lured into the pad of a mysterious young man who promotes a Bratislava hostel he ensures (with a digital camera of naked photographs to prove it) that will undoubtedly give everything their lustful hearts desire.

And like all idiots in a horror movie, they head to this eastern-Europe slum (where apparently the dingy haunted houses and a group of bubble-gum hoodlums who seem like the Slovakian Children of the Corn apparently do nothing to warn them of the hell to come) and find exactly what they came for. Unfortunately, it comes with a fatal price, and if they do improbably escape, it surely won't be in one piece.

Plenty of the requisite gory violence involving various mutilations and ankle-splicing ensues, but that becomes far less shocking than the film's deplorable misanthropism that pervasively roams across the screen. One point Roth wants to justify the torture the main characters go through (apparently being a chauvinistic brat means you should get hacked to pieces), and then we're supposed to care about one of them in the final act as the film switches tones to an "Escape from Alcatraz"-style action movie. While also parading endless Xenaphobia (practically every European with more than one line is a strange sadist who wants to torture a tourist or assist in setting up a tourist to get tortured) and disturbingly puerile misogyny (with endlessly raunchy depictions of female carnality as well as taking glee in watching two evil prostitutes and a disfigured female tourist become village roadkill), "Hostel" presents just another snidely bleak view of human nature without any logic or texture to justify it's already dubious argument. And when looking at it squarely as a horror movie, it's just dull and repetitive in following it's rather formulaic routine.

With "Cabin Fever", Eli Roth did show some strong intuition to the horror genre with it's cleverly derivative teen-slasher-flick/zombie-paranoia storyline and it's vividly icky-sticky visual effects, even if it was completely unoriginal. As is "Hostel", which borrows the look and basic plot structure of a 70's exploitation gore-fest while lifting many of it's most violent scenes from the current, equally bloody Asian new wave (it's no surprise Takashii Miike, one of that genre's poster-boy, makes a cameo midway through). Even though those films also existed mostly for staging violence from every possible angle, they knew exactly what they wanted to achieve and never tried to over-reach their boundaries, creating lean and remarkably effective scarefests. Sadistic, sure, but they cut right to the bone whereas "Hostel" has many rusty tools that it has no idea how to use. Elaborate gore and torture certainly has usurped the boogeyman-in-the-closet theme as the chief scare tactic in film, but the latter would have shown a more effective path that the cold, confused and entirely unsuccessful "Hostel" doesn't have the common sense to follow.

Poseidon (2006)

Soggy, joyless remake has no high camp and all it's personality in the ship's elevators

[3/10 · 23 September 2006]

It's hard to believe we needed another trip to Poseidon, considering the 1972 original gave us everything in the most extraneous (and extraneously campy) mold. Everything from endless water-smothered shots of over-periled shipwreck survivors manically yelping and stumbling for what seemed like an eternity to one of the most fascinating battles of former Oscar-winners (in this case, Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine) doing their gallant, goliath-sized battle of menacing overacting that has become one of the most enjoyable and laughed-upon symbol of misguided performing on film. It gave us nothing we we're expecting and yet way more than we ever needed, both a model and a major black mark on the popularity of the high-concept disaster epics of the kitsch 70's Hollywood.

Now, Wolfgang Peterson's predictably high-priced remake at least seems like it wants to be taken seriously, and therein lays this "Poseidon's" inevitable disaster. A lack of high camp would have been forgivable if there was any sense of storytelling or personality, but most of all what makes this film just plain awful is that, despite the endless cash displayed on screen, there is really nothing here: the movie spends no time letting anything live or breathe (though you don't really need any oxygen when you're made out of cardboard), as all the characters, the numerous perilous ventures and the barrages of special effects all feel like window dressing hanging in thin air.

Where as the original "Poseidon" gave a shining (if perhaps unintentional) example of the Hollywood exec's congratulatory campy counter-programming to the auteur-driven artful 70's cinematic renaissance, this "Poseidon" is a model of Hollywood just wanting to get it's "product" finished and out on the market as soon as possible. "Poseidon" wastes absolutely no time getting to its central ploy, as we're only fifteen minutes in when the wave hits, and we're barely at the hour-and-a-half mark by the time the credits start rolling. Even that truly massive, curtain-like wave, where its appearance and immediate consequences is the reason most people will buy tickets, barely gets a minute of screen time.

Given, explaining the plot seems like trying to explain how to move spaces on a board game, only this is MUCH quicker. For the first few minutes, each of the major characters makes their as-quick-as-an-eclipse entrance: there's the firefighting hero/former mayor of New York (Kurt Russel), his teenage daughter and the film's token damsel-in-high-shrieking-distress (Emmy Rossum, who's also a poor victim of the filmmakers obsession with her cleavage), her boyfriend (Mike Vogel) a grimacing, resourceful mystery man (Josh Lucas) who becomes this disparate bunch's swift navigator, a pretty lower-class drifter (Mia Maestro), a handyman cook (Freddy Rodriguez), and, of course, a hot single mom (Jacinda Barret) and her son (Jimmy Bennet, the film's quite obligatory precocious-child-in-peril). And let's not forget Richard Dreyfuss, who has clearly thrown any hope of a decent post-scrip career out the window, playing a white-collar, soon-to-be-divorced sad duck whose contemplation of suicide makes him the first one to witness the dreaded "Rogue Wave", which instantly hits the titanic-sized Poseidon and sets the "story" in motion.

As soon as the wave turns the ship over and the few survivors start their perilous journey to make it to safe haven at the top of the ship (or, really, the bottom, as the ship of course is flipped over), the movie from then on just becomes a maze of different loops and tunnels that feels like a lot of strenuous work for no reason whatsoever. Various problems, "daunting" obstacles emerge and then are solved in a very precise manner, some of the major cast members get their emphatic death scenes (ones that truly do sink) and endless flushes of water pervasively engulf the camera. There's plenty of spectacle but not an iota of interest by anyone involved: it just seems like everybody wants to get done with it as soon as possible, and that perfunctory lack of engagement easily transfers to the audience.

Given, it's hard to blame the filmmakers (who here admittedly do a pretty earnest, workmanlike routine) when their working with what is easily one of the worst screenplays to be used in a long while. The only thing with personality is a ship elevator (one of the moodiest and most glamorously futuristic elevators to grace the silver screen in years), and all the scenes run in to each other with little relation to one another, as the characters just swoop from one area of the ship to the next till they find the film's hazy finish line. Teenage characters spin out lines like "Why don't you quit your consistently patronizing attitude!", a ship official's response to a massive and insuperable wave is "Something's off", people have names like Dylan Johns, and for some reason bent, broken stairways seem to provide the only obstacles (besides the water, of course) in almost every situation.

The ultimate downer, though, is that the film can't even be enjoyed for its failures, as it's both humorless on the intentional and unintentional side (today, these big-spectacle blockbusters usually find their chuckles from one aspect or the other). Perhaps the problem here is that, in a complete reversal of the original, the cast remarkably under-acts (nor can they provide any acting chops when they don't really have characters to play). The only sign of quasi-homage to "The Poseidon Adventure" lies in Kevin Dillon's performance as the sleazy, drunken jackass "Larry Lucky", who gets his inevitable just desserts, a sign that at least someone is having a little fun replaying the original, even if it doesn't ignite any Borgnine-level chuckles we are so thirsty for.

But all in all, by the time the film's mercifully brief running time ends, this soggy and joyless remake can't do anything but sink gracefully from our not-so-distant memory.

The Trouble with Terkel (2004)

Gleefully Naughty Danish cartoon puts a sunny, blithely jocular smile on a naturally dark story

[8/10 · 21 July 2006]

Commencing SIFF's "Midnight Adrenaline" program in 2006, "Terkel in Trouble" is Denmark's first CGI feature-length cartoon, and no doubt it's the kind that would make Pixar nervously clench their throat. A film that feels like a cross between a nerve-rackingly suspenseful after-school special and an R-rated Disney musical, it's tale of adolescent angst and suburban paranoia varies loosely between tones of high-energy recklessness, nerve-rattling tension and jocular naughtiness. It's a definite crowd-pleaser for only certain types of crowds.

Our teenage protagonist is the hapless Terkel, a gawky almost-teenager with peeled-back red hair and a canyon-wide half-smile (with lips that blithely remain divided at all times to show his lopsided teeth), his face seems etched in a permanent state of bemusement and tremulous vigilance. Being perpetually stalked by two well-dressed, bawdy schoolyard bullies (one, a verminous schoolboy that seems to be a blonde mop-topped Ratzo Rizzo mended into an uber-confident junior-high bad-boy; the other, a portly, none-too-bright sidekick that looks like a "Sopranos" castoff), he always has to keep checking over his shoulder to see when they're going to strike next.

Not that home-life provides much solace; inside the walls of his suburban pad, his family unit seems like a Monty Python sketch of mild domestic dysfunction. From a father who literally can only say "No", a mother that's basically a walking chimney as she always seems to be lighting a new cigarette in her mouth, and a sister who haplessly seems prone to endless pratfalls and accidents that continue to escalate into brutal absurdity. Let's not forget to mention the comically drunken, not-so-sane uncle (perpetually donning a sea captain outfit) who spews endless string of wildly inappropriate, booze-tingled comments (many of which I can't repeat here) to those he supposedly means to help.

His only pal seems to be Jason, a constantly profane, sullen, rap-obsessed confidant, who always carries an iron pipe in his backpack, because, well, you never know when you might need it in the 'burbs.

As Jason continues to grow distant, the schoolyard bullies ratchet up their torment and his family becomes increasingly unsympathetic and remote, Terkel's only chance at personal redemption seems to be through his new homeroom teacher, a joyful, often-crooning embodiment of the sunshine-liberal spirit that offers a much-needed ray of light to Terkel's otherwise unwelcoming world.

However, Terkel starts receiving anonymous death threats out of nowhere, something that increases our anti-hero's already tense plight through the dangerous halls of his suburban junior high.

And toss in a lot of remarkably upbeat and often very naughty musical numbers (including the most lewdly joyful and potty-mouthed romantic anthem ever captured in a cartoon, a dynamic Danish rap sequence and a nightmarish episode that cleverly riffs on Michael Jackson's "Thriller"), a lollipop-colored visual design with a few ornery sight gags, and plenty of very intense moments of rampant neurosis and paranoia for it's hapless anti-hero, and that gives you "Terkel in Trouble", one that will make you, if all things, glad you're no longer thirteen.

Suburban angst tales are hardly innovative territory for storytelling, but this one is an especially inspired and gaudy one: clearly the filmmakers want their audiences to both look in awe and squirm in their seats, overwhelmingly enjoying it and feeling uncomfortable for doing so at the same time, and they often succeed in both. Likely it will seem both odd and oddly familiar for the American viewer, as those weaned on "South Park" and "The Simpsons" will likely be confounded by its joyful idiosyncrasies as well as giddily amused by its array of jokingly miserable characters.

The setting of an anonymous western Suburb, populated with cruel, spoiled and unscrupulous beings that remain completely distant to those they view as friends and family but get belligerently compassion when protecting them from harm, forms a central identity that's both cynical and warmly ironic, a mixture American audiences have come to know very well. Yet the style is splashed in a colorful, consistent loopiness, balancing the murky, sordid traits that accompany the film's harsher moments with an often blithely facetious, bright-as-neon smile to many of the issues at hand. In short, it's portrayal of familiar themes could only be told with a distinctly Scandinavian-bad-boy personality.

Given, it's balance of bright light and darkness doesn't always succeed, as some scenes that seemingly want us to laugh at events involving teen suicide and child abuse just feel downright sour and snide, even by the standards of the film's often enduringly nasty charm. And the film occasionally gets a little too gruesome for it's own good, including Terkel's sisters increasingly bizarre series of brutal pratfalls, a previously mentioned teen suicide sequence and his uncle's drunken, brutal confrontation with Terkel's unforgiving bullies after Terkel ignites a failed beer bust, to name a few (and you can make sure that Jason's iron pipe doesn't go unused).

But with a film that naturally likes to bask in a motley, playful naughtiness, "Terkel in Trouble" is often brazenly splendid. With three directors and voiced completely (with an amusingly tongue-in-cheek and shape shifting poise) by stand-up comedian Anders Matthesson, "Terkel in Trouble" is an achievement, not only for being the landmark CGI-cartoon for it's native Denmark but also melding the idea of a "kids" movie to a straight-forward, non-condescending approach that happily lets them indulge in their joyfully vulgar pleasures rather than forcing them to endure aloof, stilted and often foolish preaching. It's a film for adults to let out the crude inner-child inside all of us, back when we gleefully embraced an immoral spirit rather than condemning it.

Fourteen (2006)

Brief, utterly disturbing American short has a potent sting

[9/10 · 31 May 2006]

The most haunting and effective of the "Film Femme" shorts at the Seattle International Film Festival, this disturbing tale starts out as a happy, benign tale of a young girl's fourteenth birthday. The jovial younger kids, longing in the mirror, the birthday "celebration", at first all seems normal. Without revealing the major, terrifying twist, this birthday is ultimately a "celebration" for our adolescent protagonist's that's bringing her into a grave lifetime commitment of a specific underground lifestyle in the supposed American heartland.

It's an unnerving, VERY audacious 7-minute film, an almost unbearable film at the end, but one that leave's an indelible, potent sting that points our faces to a lifestyle that we often like to pretend doesn't exist.

Bluebird (2004)

Dutch charmer is an appealingly earnest coming-of-age story

[8/10 · 29 April 2006]

Perhaps it was just my major penchant for European coming-of-age stories, but I was glad that at the pivotal third weekend at this year's SIFF I happened to come across the Dutch charmer "Bluebird", an affecting, agreeably minimalist chronicle of one girl's crucial step from childhood to adolescence, in a film skillful enough to distinguish genuine sweetness from saccharine condescension, thankfully sticking throughout to the former.

In "Bluebird", Merel (Elske Rotteveel) might just be the most charming 12-year-old in her city-wide junior high school, and yet she's ostensibly the school's most ambitious pariah. With few friends despite an ample dose of after-school activities, she's an ever zealous, extremely bright student whose naturally superlative work is often, at least to the teachers, inconspicuous. She's on the diving squad, sings in the class musical and consistently gets high marks in school, but yet it seems perhaps too natural for anyone to notice, a physical and emotional overload with no room for exultation.

Along with her busy schoolwork, she also has to embody an almost mother-infant relationship with her physically and mentally disabled younger brother, who's facing another possible stint at institutionalism.

Given, with little time to even stop and catch her breath and less time to be a kid, it's remarkable she still ends up being exuberantly individualistic, taking whatever time she has left to learn and discover something new, and it's this non-conformist and resourcefully intellectual sense of self that puts her at odds with the more vacuous, angrier "cool kids" in her class.

Whether it be her innocently but repeatedly upstaging them in practically every class, her equally graceful ignorance of their tauntingly unctuous invitations or her modest, tomboyish apparel, she becomes the center of their unreasonably cruel string of pranks and lunch-hour hazing. They verge from the more emotionally harming (sarcastic physical mockery and some rather vile name-calling) to the more violent intrusions of personal safety (locking her in the bathroom and eviscerating her treasured bike), all of which strike the earnest, usually attentive school officials and Merel's parents as alarmingly unforeseen.

In turns out that her only sense of comfort is in an English-speaking train-stop acquaintance, whose perpetual smile earns her trust, but it's ultimately his soft-spoken wisdom and the universal lessons that casually nurture her through their brief but enriching encounters. A lesser director might have him blanket a nefarious agenda, but he is ultimately Merel's eye of the hurricane, one to bolster both her self-esteem as well as her mental ascension from a precarious childhood mind to a woman with a firm grasp of herself and the people around her (as well as giving her the film's title nickname)

Ultimately, Merel (and the movie) comes to her character's pivotal crossroad, if she succumbs to peer pressure and compromises her individuality, or if she rejects the school's inanely shallow bullies and strives to draw friends who respect her special, richly defined persona.

"Bluebird" is, inevitably, a very conventional movie (it was previously an after-school special in the Netherlands before going to the big screen), but it's neither a stale or cynical one, just resoundingly pure. It squarely focuses on Merel's point-of-view (she's in every scene), and while it gives the movie perhaps a lop-sided feel when it deals with her interactions with the school bullies (they remain malevolent, and often indistinguishable; perhaps a true statement on the nature of bullying itself, but without any of their viewpoints, this particular aspect of "Bluebird" has a noticeable lack of dimension), it doesn't damper a movie still rich with keen, non-condescending insight on the often anxious and terrifying time of moving from the innocence of childhood to the self-defining responsibility of being a young adult.

And it's all superbly carried by the young Rotteveel, who here radiates a seamlessly endearing mix of a precocious sense of original taste and dependability as well as a youthfully sensitive vulnerability, especially when her tribulations, during and corresponding to the harsher interpersonal situations, can't be easily handled. Most movies would only dare to focus on one aspect to swiftly move the story along, but here Rotteveel deftly adds layers to her beleaguered but exceptional character, peeling each one to show her character's burgeoning maturity with a natural, impressive ease. Even with all the trials and hardships that befall upon Merel, Rotteveel's instincts, just like the simple but lovingly resonant charms of "Bluebird", are resiliently sound.

Undressed (1999–2002)

The Young and the Horny

[6 July 2005]

The phrase "guilty pleasure" doesn't even begin to describe the late-night MTV show "Undressed", a horny and very kinky show about young, hot and very horny character's various sexual escapades. Given, as an American basic-cable program nothing got too explicit, but the show crammed in as many elaborate sexual situations and fresh young flesh that was permitted. (Some of that Young flesh included the O.C's Adam Brody, Brandon Routh from the ill-fated Superman reboot and, I'm not freakin' kidding about this, Mad Men's Christina Hendricks).

In some ways I can't say the show was bad. The glossy look showed technical professionalism, and it did have some unusually creative set-ups to it's strictly libido-minded agenda, if never at all believable. It was also more diverse than other like-minded shows, with some topics dealing with the modern homosexual plight and the troubles of inter-racial dating. Though not they really dealt with those issues in a honest or realistic fashion. "Lord of the Rings" was closer to real-life than this. For all it's mock seriousness, it was ultimately extremely exploitive and very juvenile, busy but one-dimensional. None of it's elaborate scenarios led to anything particularly insightful.

However, you can't say it didn't know it's target demographic well. the show was solely populated by people in the sixteen-to-twenty-five age range, all extremely nubile and with only one thing on the mind: sex, sex and more sex, in all it's various forms. Even the class geeks and mousy bookworms we're all very attractive and well-sexed. And it certainly bridged the gender gap by having both it's hunks and babes frequently strip down to their skivvies. Parents, tastemakers and homophobes could all be deeply offended.

Perhaps it would've worked better on the stage. Given the histronic (actually I would just call it monotone) delivery of the actors to the mostly sterile sets where the outside world ceased to exist, it all felt rather silly and a bit uncomfortable on screen. I kept waiting for the laugh track was going to kick in (and some moments definitely deserved one).

All in all, it was a pointless and exploitive experiment, essentially PG-13 porn/soap opera hybrid trying to play naught, but not surprisingly it was a remarkably addictive little pill of a show. You might have never gone out of your way to watch one of it's frequent marathons, but when you did come across it late one night you never changed the channel.