2008
Un-rated
113 minutes

Three and a half stars

Loneliness is terrible. And sometimes it makes an otherwise good person do terrible things. That is the theme of “The Country Teacher” (“Venkovsky ucitel”). Bohdan Slama’s film centers on Peter, a homosexual science teacher who takes a job in the Czech countryside to escape the darkness of his life in the big city. Unfortunately for him and a mother and son he befriends, the darkness comes along.

“The Country Teacher,” which screened at this year’s Philadelphia Film Festival/Cinefest, is an interesting film on a provocative subject. It’s difficult to love a film about molestation but there are a lot of things to like about this one. For starters, life in the Czech countryside is beautifully captured on 35mm film. When Peter befriends a lady farmer and helps her with her chores, the audience is given real insight into what it’s like for these rural folks day to day. They love their land, they love to drink beer and dance, and occasionally, they have to hand-deliver calves by yanking them out of the mother cow by hand.

I also appreciate the way Slama handles Peter’s homosexuality. He makes sure to show, early on, that Peter has not been subject to external oppression for his sexuality. When he comes out to his mother (his father already knows), her response is simply “you shouldn’t be alone.” She only wants him to be happy. When his ex boyfriend (with amazing Judd Nelson hair and dark glasses) comes to town, he serves to represent Prague and its progressiveness. Any torment Peter feels is entirely self-inflicted. So when he develops an extremely unhealthy attachment to the teenage son of his farmer friend, we know they aren’t saying, “Gay people are pervs.” Just that “Peter has problems.”

Where “The Country Teacher” seems to fail is in its conviction. For a very long time, it’s not clear whether or not the boy in question is bi-curious himself. With his indie haircut and tight t-shirts, the boy certainly has that “Gus Van Sant extra” look to him. At one point he tells his girlfriend that he’s not sure they “fit together.” And how many times have you gone on sunset boat rides with your tutors? Not that, if he turned out to be gay, it would make Peter’s actions acceptable. But it would definitely change things.

I’m also not sure how I feel about the ending. I will try to keep things spoiler-free, but if you plan to see this film, you should be warned: loneliness is terrible. And sometimes it makes an otherwise sensible person do nonsensical things.

Originally posted on FilmThreat.com (now defunct).

May 4, 2009
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: filmthreat . Author: Baxter . Comments: 1 Comment

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

Originally Posted on FilmThreat.com (now defunct).

2007
Un-rated
85 minutes
1 Star

Writer/Director/”actor” Greg Lobb looks and sounds exactly like John Hodgman. Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities end. While Daily Show correspondent, satirist, and P.C. anti-spokesperson Hodgman has an intellectual buffoonish charm, Greg Lobb makes me want to “lobb”. I can’t believe I spent 85 minutes with him and his inane film.

“Life with Fiona” tells the story of a man named Steve who is unlucky in love. This seems to have a lot to do with the fact that the guy is a total loser. Not a lovable loser, mind you. He’s more like that unnerving dork who works in your office with whom you hate to get stuck in the break room because no matter what crappy small talk he makes, he’s obviously just staring at your boobs. Luckily, Steve works in some sort of alternate-dimension office (they sell golf pencils or something. I don’t know) wherein every employee is exactly like him. There are no women apart from an infantile secretary named Jessica (no relation) who plays with dolls and is inexplicably lusted after by everyone else in the office. I suppose when there is only one female in your office, your lusting options are kind of limited.

Anywho, Steve doesn’t need to worry about being rejected by Jessica for long because there are plenty of other bat-shit fish in the sea. One day Steve runs into an enchantingly nutso lady at his BFF’s apartment. Her name is Fiona and she’s enchanting because she answers the door naked and she’s just had a three-way with Steve’s BFF and wife of BFF. This means she’s super slutty and therefore, Steve, coincidentally the protagonist of this film, totally has a chance with her.

What follows is scene after scene of boring old Steve and crazy as the day-is-long Fiona (but god, isn’t she HAWT?!) having some sort of weird-ass relationship. She’s needy and he’s uncomfortable with that (even though she is without question, the best he can do). Then he’s needy and she’s slutty. This is followed by scenes wherein I guess we’re supposed to think they’re a happy, cute couple. Next she becomes bitchy and breaks up with him. He reacts by becoming needy and whiny which miraculously results in them getting back together. After that she’s paranoid about him cheating on her with Wife of BFF. He assures her she’s the only woman for him and then he promptly goes out and cheats on her with Wife of BFF. I may have the order a little wrong but trust me, it doesn’t really matter. Why we’re supposed to like any of these characters or care what happens next is really beyond me. And don’t even get me started on the story structure. It’s like ‘Ol Lobbo couldn’t decide between the options in the holy triumvirate of irritating narration styles (voice-over, titles, or the one wherein the main character stands in a black limbo and breaks the 4th wall) so they decided to go with all three.

I suppose this movie is supposed to be funny and sometimes, if the writing is strong, you can make up for a lack of sympathetic (or even multi-dimensional) characters and still have a pretty good comedy. (Alex Cox’s “Straight to Hell” and “State and Main” come to mind). This did not happen with “Life with Fiona.” At all. Greg, don’t quit your day Lobb.

February 22, 2008
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: filmthreat . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Originally Posted on FilmThreat.com (now defunct).

2007
Un-rated
18 minutes
3 Stars

It’s not an easy feat for a low-budget short film to succeed in transporting you to another time and place. Most often, the end result smacks of community theatre because that’s probably also where they borrowed their costumes from. That’s why Tran Quoc Bao’s “Bookie” stands out from minute one. Along with the slick cinematography and impressive fight choreography, the sultry night club acts in “Bookie” suck you in and fool you into believing that it really is 1963 Seattle.

“Bookie” tells the story of a bookie named Bookie (Ken Quitugua) who works for a thuggish, womanizing club owner named Jackson. It’s the night of the big fight and the odds are, naturally, with the champ. Bookie takes a bet for the underdog from Rogers (JT Jackson), a fast-talking cat with the most interesting dialog. (Incidentally, JT Jackson played “Cola” in the Bacardi and Cola ads. It’s true that he gets the job done.) While Bookie waits for people to get their bets in, he shyly woos Billie (Angela Adto), the beautiful barmaid who takes abuse from Jackson. But when Bookie chooses to skim off the top to help Billie, he’s looking at more than just a pink slip as penalty.

While it is certainly an impressive short film, “Bookie” isn’t perfect. The acting is a little uneven and, unfortunately, most of that blame belongs to the male and female leads. Nonetheless, expert look and feel of the film makes up for some slightly cliché dialog.

The most powerful shots in the film, however, are of the club singers. The stunning close-ups on their faces tell more of a story in a few seconds than in the whole of “Bookie.” Another noteworthy performance is that of the masterful old-timey voice acting by Chad Jennings as the fight announcer.

On the whole, “Bookie” makes a fine calling card for Tran Quoc Bao and cinematographer Shaun Mayor. I hope it leads to bigger things for this creative team.

February 22, 2008
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: filmthreat . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Originally Posted on FilmThreat.com (now defunct).

2007
Un-rated
83 minutes
2 Stars

“Last Stop for Paul” is yet another vanity indie film in which the writer, director and “star” is all one guy. One very uninteresting guy named Neil. I’ll start with saying something nice because I’m told if I don’t do that, I shouldn’t say anything at all. Technically, the film was fine. There was nothing annoying about the editing or the shots themselves. The concept was marginally original in that I’ve only seen it half a dozen times already. Grab a camera and set up scenes in each city to contribute to one big contrived documentary-style plot about two buddies taking the ashes of a third buddy on a trip around the world. The trouble is that the contrivances are so… contrived.

First, there are the Slanguage Lessons. Schlubby Guy #1 overhears a Jamaican man using the word “batty” and demands a definition for the benefit of himself and the audience. (It means ass). And then to prove he’s learning so much on his trip, he uses it in a sentence later! It doesn’t really make sense to call Schlubby Guy #2 a “batty face” after he gets ripped off by some Jamaican scam artists, but he does it anyway. In Slanguage Lesson # 2, the Schlubbs meet up with some Irish guys who go on and on about trying to find good “craic.” If you didn’t know that the word (pronounced “crack”) means “good times,” you might have found this misunderstanding hilarious (“Sorry dudes, we aren’t into drugs.”) but I doubt it.

Another irritating contrivance is all the “craaaaaazy shit” these guys get into. I do not believe that there is a bar in Santiago, Chile that is full of only women. Straight women. Who are just waiting for 4 white guys to come and show them a good time.

Contrivances aside, I just don’t care about these characters. I’ve met guys like this. They call themselves “travelers,” but they are deep as puddles and they are merely taking time off from their investment banker jobs to basically get drunk in different countries with other white people. Cultural differences sure are wacky and hey, doesn’t seeing all this old stuff really make you think? The whole thing is tied together with a voice over that actually contains lines like “I was lucky to be alive, but sad to say goodbye.” Seriously? No wonder we’re the most hated country in the world.

February 22, 2008
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: filmthreat . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment