Early in his documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money, filmmaker Alex Gibney shares an e-mail he received from super-corrupt superstar lobbyist Jack Abramoff: "You should make an action film." In a way, Gibney has: Casino Jack tells the weird, totally true tale of how Abramoff diverted millions of dollars in revenues from Indian casinos to the coffers of influential lawmakers and almost got away with it.
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Conceived as a kind of found object -- a tossed-off VHS tape courtesy of your local freak patrol -- Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers is a feature-length viral video, a modern concept mixed with retro raw material and then extended well beyond its means. Trash Humpers is aggressively formless and yet disingenuously reliant on certain structural effects to justify its 77 minutes, and Korine himself has admitted that is not quite a movie. The film's identity crisis opens up interesting questions about its natural habitat: For a while I thought it might be the first feature release optimally viewed on a grimy laptop, or even better, in the palm of your hand. By the end I was sure it would be most at home projected onto a white wall of the Whitney, a backdrop for white people sipping white wine, impressed with themselves for being impressed.
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Babies! Who doesn't love babies? Babies who mistake their own feet for foreign objects; babies who ride through the town like pashas in their armored strollers; babies who do baby yoga all by their witty bitty selves. Babies make the world go around, and everybody should have at least one. But if you don't, and you don't want to feel left out of the nonstop fun, Thomas Balmès' winsome documentary Babies can kit you out with not just one but four virtual babies, all of them extremely cute and, best of all, amazingly low-maintenance.
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A women's picture in a mold that's more and more idiosyncratically his own, with Mother and Child Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives) poses a number of intriguing questions about the nature of maternity, only to obscure them with a gloss that is equal parts sentiment and subtle but specious politics. That he pulls off an involving film anyway is largely a credit to his superb main cast, a trio of interlinked characters played by Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Kerry Washington. Each grapples in some way with her femininity and its connection to what her womb has either done or failed to do, and while all of these women are types, the actresses dignify them with the emotional force of their performances.
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For a movie about a guy in a metal suit, the first Iron Man moved with surprising grace and a minimum of clanking. Jon Favreau, who'd never directed a superhero action picture before, and Robert Downey Jr., who'd never starred in one, pulled off the rarest of feats: They made a seemingly effortless blockbuster, an exhilarating picture that never let us see it sweat. Downey's Tony Stark, a playboy kajillionaire who owed his good fortune to the military-industrial complex, was a charmer with an ego, and he wasn't about to apologize for it. Like all good superheroes, he had his vulnerable side too, but Downey presented Stark's contradictions as if they were all of a piece, instead of turning them on or off with the flick of a switch. He mapped the character's psychic pain by doing a soft-shoe around it -- hard to do in a futuristic metal jumpsuit, but then, that's Downey.
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Near the beginning of English director Daniel Barber's Harry Brown, a woman pushing a baby stroller is first terrorized, then shot dead, by a couple of cracked-out teenagers whizzing around on a too-small bicycle, like insane circus clowns out of your worst nightmare. We don't see who these kids are, but in the film's opening -- a snippet of grainy footage that looks to have been shot with a cell phone -- we see a brood of hooligans crunched together in small, enclosed space, getting high and brandishing weapons that we can't get a clear look at. This is just the beginning of the pileup of horrors Barber has in store for us as he spins out his aggressively sordid story of fear and ineffectual police protection in a South London council estate, and it's not for the faint of heart. There's just one problem: Stay away, and you'll miss Michael Caine.
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OK. Okay. Here's what's about to happen: I'm going to go into the living room, fire up the cable box, and order Human Centipede On Demand (it's not playing in Los Angeles yet, but Time Warner has generously made it available at the push of a button), and I'm going to liveblog it here, doing my absolute best not to faint, vomit or tear out my hair while screaming in anguish at my Maker about how He could allow something like this to exist.
Is this a stupid stunt? Of course it is. But I need to find out for myself -- and for you, the reader who has too much sense to subject him or herself to this cinematic abomination -- if this is, in fact, 2010's Most Barfiest Movie. Join me in this potentially soul-extinguishing exercise after the jump: (It should go without saying, but there will be many SPOILERS ahead.)
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Nicole Holofcener has made only four movies in the course of her approximate 15-year directing career, but that could be because each movie is really two in one: There's the picture right in front of you, the one you actually watch, which can often feel like a clutch of orphan vignettes wandering around in search of some organizing principle. And then there's the way that shambling mosaic reforms itself in your mind minutes, hours or days afterward.
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The key moment in A Nightmare on Elm Street occurs around the 40-minute mark, not long after Freddy Krueger's third victim meets his demise. It's really something, too: A gaggle of lights illuminate cell phone screens around you. Seats groan and bodies rise, silhouettes stalking toward the bathroom. The film's little-known interactive component has kicked in: A whole audience battles its urge to fall asleep.
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A grimly modern fable with a giveaway title, The Good Heart wears it modest narrative intentions -- along with just about everything else -- on its sleeve. A regulation tale of bittersweet uplift involving a saintly young homeless man and a villainous codger with no apparent heirs and a nasty heart attack habit, the film aims not to surprise but to soothe you with the pleasure of its company, its variations on a familiar theme. Despite its capable leads and sturdy framework, in his American debut Icelandic writer and director Dagur Kári relies too heavily on the fleeting rewards of situation for the film to come together as an involving story.
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In Furry Vengeance, a real-estate developer played by Brendan Fraser, faced with the unpleasant prospect of chopping down a protected forest just to keep his boss happy, finds himself attacked by a bevy of angry woodland denizens: A skunk sprays stink-juice directly onto his kisser; a wily nocturnal blackbird tries to gaslight him by beating a nonstop tattoo right outside his bedroom window; a raccoon flies at his crotch and bites him in the nuts. Not since Antichrist has a man suffered so greatly at the tiny, grabby hands of God's creatures. Nature is not our friend, kids, and it's not to be disrespected or underestimated.
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Like all films in the "blocked-up writer battles crippling dependency on superhero imaginary friend" genre, Paper Man requires a little more strenuous suspension of disbelief than other movies demand. But the rewards are worth it. Mostly.
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In the first 10 minutes of The Losers, a helicopter loaded with cheerful Bolivian children crashes in the jungle after being struck by a U.S. missile obviously bent on destruction. Previously used as mules by some heartless baddie, these cute little tykes have just been rescued by the members of a U.S. special forces unit; the men look on, aghast, as the chopper that ought to be carrying the kids to safety turns into a big fireball in the sky. The soldiers approach the wreckage with downcast eyes and heavy hearts, and the camera moves in on a smoking pile of twisted metal to show us the shredded remains of one kid's teddy bear therein. If you've started to wonder how low Hollywood entertainments can possibly stoop, The Losers brings the bar down a few notches: Nothing rapes the emotions like a smoldering teddy bear.
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The act of giving life to another human being is one of the great wonders of the human experience. Watching a movie that sucks the life out of you? Not so much.
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Assembled as a rough oral history of a brief but transitional moment in American entertainment, Behind the Burly Q is as determinedly upbeat as the consummate showgirls at its heart. Director Leslie Zemeckis (wife of Robert, who is listed as executive producer) focuses on some of the largely forgotten women who came up during the newly permissive Jazz Age, merged with the struggling vaudeville racket, and originated a vampy form of striptease called burlesque.
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