2009 PHILADELPHIA FILM FESTIVAL/CINEFEST FEATURE!
Un-rated
91 minutes
Gargantuan Films

One and a half stars

“Sun Dogs,” which screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival/Cinefest and is written and directed by Jason Affolder, is another self-important movie about an underachieving 30-something who scrapes by on pseudo-philosophy. The protagonist is Michael (Matt Palumbo), a high school teacher on summer break. He makes money by donating plasma every 3 days and spends most of it on booze. In his spare time, he cavorts with, and dispenses advice to, a latchkey teenage boy. It takes a lot of chutzpah to write and direct movie like this. You have to be pretty confident that your dialogue is groundbreaking or, at the very least, realistic. If it isn’t, you’ll have a tedious mess on your hands. And that, my friends, is “Sun Dogs.”

When he’s not attached to a needle, swigging from a whiskey bottle on a park bench or selling contraband to teenagers, Michael likes a bit of karaoke. But he only does one song: “Cupid” by Sam Cooke. One evening, a girl named Ashley catches his performance and violently rips the mic away from him, before storming out. Thus begins their irritatingly complicated love affair. She doesn’t believe in love. He does. She doesn’t want a commitment. He does. She has secrets. He also has secrets. Will these secrets tear them apart?! Whatever!

Michael also spends a lot of time with a high school student named Andy, teaching him to drive and dispensing love advice. Andy is ignored by his single, working mother. You can tell she ignores him because they are out of cereal. In fact, this movie is full of hackneyed short-hand moments like that. Michael and Ashley are whimsical because they dance in the street when there’s no music! Chess is a metaphor for life! Puh-lease!

“Sun Dogs” is supposed to be about quirky, lonely people who say offbeat things that double as universal truths. It’s tries very hard to be “Me, You and Everyone We Know.” But Miranda July’s movie works because her story is full of humility. Her characters have real reactions to life as it happens to them. They take it one moment at a time. In “Sun Dogs,” the characters see everything as a metaphor for the big picture. Michael says things like “I’m watching the present become the past”, “You gotta pick the golden peanuts out of the shit pile” and “It’s an accidental world” and you can hear Affolder’s smugness in every line. There’s a desk calendar out there that could use his brand of wisdom. But in script format, it’s a bloated mess.

The dialog wouldn’t be so intolerable if the characters were at least somewhat interesting. But Affolder doesn’t give us any reason at all to care about them. So he’s a lonely teenager. So she’s a waitress who paints trees and doesn’t get along with her mother. So he’s a poor, alcoholic high school teacher. So what? Do they do or say anything we haven’t seen or heard before? The most interesting thing about Michael is that he has a beard. But then, at Ashley’s request, he shaves it. . . into a soul patch. He’s a soul patch kind of guy. How much do you want to bet that Jason Affolder also has a soul patch?

Originally posted on FilmThreat.com (now defunct).

April 15, 2009
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: filmthreat . Author: Baxter . Comments: 1 Comment

2008
Un-rated
90 minutes
Imagina

One Star

“Intrusos (en Manasés)” or “God’s Forgotten Town,” is an excruciatingly silly “horror” film from Spain starring the poor woman’s Penelope Cruz, Belén López. Lopez plays a paranormal journalist who takes a team to a ghost town to investigate the disappearance of its residents 60 years ago. It’s a silly, meandering movie with a little pretension thrown in for good measure. To call it a B movie would be an undeserved compliment.

As the film opens, Julia and Roberto, a young couple who also work together in some journalistic capacity, interview a woman who claims to be haunted by ghosts. Her daughter draws crude pictures of herself with the ghosts, so we know this woman is telling the truth. But Julia and Roberto don’t believe her (even though it’s their job to investigate ghost stories?!) and tell her to get physiological help. On their way out, Julia gets a weird feeling and decides to go back just in time to see the lady throw herself and her daughter off the balcony. Julia regrets not believing her and plunges into a deep depression.

Julia lays low for a few weeks and takes baths. (Yes, there are boobs. That may be the film’s only saving grace.) She comes out of hiding to go back to work with Roberto and explore a haunted town called Manases. In 1945, all of the town’s residents disappeared after a Nazi plane crashed there. The Nazis were after the “Scepter of Power,” an object that, like the Holy Grail or Ark of the Covenant, would have helped them win the war. Apparently the Nazis had no real strategy for WWII. They just kept hoping they’d find a magic object. It’s amazing they had any time at all to kill Jews.

Aiding Julia and Roberto on their assignment are Syra, a stoner camerawoman, and Ruben, a super straight-edge grip. Ruben wears a t-shirt with Xs on it and constantly tells Syra not to smoke pot. She rolls her eyes at him and tells him to lighten up. What foils these two are! Can they ever make it work?

Of course, once in Manases, they encounter scary ghost business in the form of, well, everything. In addition to straight-up ghosts, there is also flying pottery, mirrors that smash themselves, ghostly voices, mysterious footprints, ghosts in mirrors, ghosts on video camera night vision, first person ghost-vision and possession. It’s like a ghost story checklist. And it’s all ridiculous.

Eventually, a little ghost girl shows Julia what happened in the town and how to save her and stop the evil ghost Nazi from activating the Scepter of Power. It’s at this point where the whole thing goes from stupid to redonkulous. They also decide to explain everything in nauseating detail. The ghost girl’s flashback goes on forever. Then later, there’s another flashback to explain what happened during the first flashback. And then there’s the ending. I won’t spoil it for you even though you have no business watching this movie. But I will tell you that it’s one of the maiziest (Spanish for corn!) things I have ever seen in a movie pretending to be a horror film.

But, at least there are boobs. Twice!

Originally Posted on FilmThreat.com (now defunct).

April 11, 2009
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: filmthreat . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

2008
Un-rated
105 minutes
Go Code Productions

Two Stars

“My Suicide” is the title of both the movie and the movie-within-a-movie, in which an alienated, pop-culture-obsessed teenage boy named Archie decides to film his suicide for his film class project. But his plans are complicated when the announcement of said project finally wins the attention of the popular girl Archie has had his eye on.

The premise sounds promising to be sure. But the execution (no pun intended) is excruciating. My issues with this film were so numerous that it’s difficult to know where to begin.

I’ll start with the clichés. My god, the clichés! Why does Archie want to kill himself? Well, his parents ignore him. They let him live in the pool house and leave him be edit his movies. (I would have killed for that kind of freedom when I was 16.) Also, ignoring him is the girl of his dreams. A beautiful, blonde, popular rich girl named Sierra who seems to have the perfect life. But guess what? Even the beautiful people have problems! Never saw that coming.

Archie is a product of the information age. He speaks almost entirely in movie quotes, many of them non-sequiturs. He’s constantly doing impressions. He blames his mother for taping him as a child, but he has chosen to perpetuate his life on camera. He is an anti-social narcissist. And he’s very annoying. I couldn’t wait for him to stop doing Brando and get around to killing himself.

The day Archie announces his big project to the class is the day he enters the radar of his peers. His announcement results in his arrest in front of the entire school. Sierra is impressed and decides she wants to interview him. (Does every teenager own and operate a video camera these days?) After a duel-action invasive interview, camera-to-camera, they become inseparable. They’ve entered into a suicide pact. At that moment, I realized Archie is probably not going to kill himself. Redemption is sure to come in some form or another. Because this movie is a cliché so only clichéd things can happen. Damn.

The good news is that the acting wasn’t that bad. It helped that they used actual teenagers to play the characters instead of twenty-something name actors. Too bad about the dialog. (Or rather, what little dialog there was, not pilfered from superior films.) Also, David Carradine was somewhat entertaining as the grizzled documentarion whom Archie idolizes.

Perhaps the core problem with the film is the fact that director David Lee Miller is an older man. I’m not good at the guess-my-age game, but it’s likely that someone with gray hair would not have the freshest recollection of his teens. Even if he did, the 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s were vastly different eras than the one we’re in. Hell, I didn’t even have the internet in my house until high school. The notion of a video editing suite and green screen in my room was a pipe dream at best. So maybe that’s why nearly every note in this film rang false.

Then again, his directorial debut, “Breakfast of Aliens,” was just horrible in every imaginable way, from the acting to the story. So perhaps David Lee Miller is actually just a crappy filmmaker. Either way, sitting through “My Suicide” made me contemplate my own.

Originally Posted on FilmThreat.com (now defunct).

April 1, 2009
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: filmthreat . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment