For all there is to admire about co-writer/director Jill Sprecher’s suspenseful black comedy (a la Sam Raimi’s “A Simple Plan)” third act disappointment rains on the parade. Snowy Kenosha, Wisconsin seems like a place tailor made for secretly disposing of corpses. Such tense criminal activity isn’t on the agenda of cheesy home insurance salesman Mickey Prohaska (Greg Kinnear). But Mickey isn’t above a little larceny when an opportunity presents itself in the guise of a $30,000 violin owned by Alan Arkin’s senile insurance client Gorvy. The poor old sod has no idea about the violin’s value. Still, Gorvy is smart enough to install an electronic security system in his rickety house before he takes off on vacation. Mickey persuades the home’s volatile alarm-system installer Randy (Billy Crudup) to let him in the house to trade out Gorvy’s violin with a much cheaper replacement. Randy reacts poorly when a neighbor pops by to visit Gorvy. Suddenly, Mickey is entangled deep with Randy. Selling the violin to settle his debts doesn’t seem like such a priority anymore.
Greg Kinnear is made for smarmy roles like this one. He has just the right amount of foxy charisma to make you root for him. Alan Arkin is believable as always. He gives Gorvy just the right amount of forgetfulness so that you go for Mickey’s idea to swindle the doddering old guy out of money he doesn’t know he has. The acting ensemble does everything right for the audience to invest in their idiosyncratic characters. Yet, just when everything seems about to gel the script shifts into a hyper-drive of artifice to tie up every loose thread in a grand-scale con scheme as contrived as the guy who pretended to send his young son up alone in a balloon. You’ll come out wanting to point fingers at the filmmakers rather than thanking them.
Rated R. 114 mins. (C) (Two Stars - out of five/no halves)
Co-writer/director Eli Craig deconstructs nearly every slasher horror movie cliché dating back to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" for a gross-out laugh fest that works better than it has any right to. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine play the film's hilarious title characters. Tucker and Dale are a couple of backwoods best friends who fit the description of every hillbilly psychopath from "Deliverance" to "Creature." And yet, these two overall-wearing goofs are just a couple of well-intentioned beer-lovers who want to enjoy the serenity of a rundown cabin on a quiet lake. Enter a group of hysterical college hipsters to stereotype our scruffy duo as serial killers from their worst nightmares. The kids can't help instigating a series of guffaw-inducing suicidal accidents that leave behind an explosion of gore. The filmmakers get a little too carried away in a sloppy third act, but "Tucker & Dale vs. Evil" is a refreshingly funny black comedy. In turning the tables on worn-out horror movie tropes, Eli Craig and co-writer Morgan Jurgenson create a cogent diatribe on slasher movie clichés. They have purged 40 years worth of hackneyed ideas that deserve to be put out to pasture. We always knew that snotty young urban interlopers (read as capitalist imperialists) were the real blight on out-of-the-way regional locales; now here's your proof. Oh the irony.
Rated R. 86 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)
John Landis's loving homage to the Vaudeville and Grand Guignol-based humor of Britain's Ealing Studios is a retrofitted black comedy filled with slapstick gags and wink-wink cameos by stalwart British actors. Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis show off their mastery of the Irish idiom as William Burke and William Hare, respectively. The two immigrant pals arrive in 1820s Edinburgh to ply their skills as conmen out to make their life’s fortune on whatever scheme will work. The local graverobbing trade has gone cold since the constable began patrolling the cemeteries at night. Dr. Knox (Tom Wilkinson), head of the Edinburgh Medical School, requires fresh corpses for his latest project to map the insides of the human body. The determined doctor will pay five quid for each cadaver delivered, no questions asked. An opportune death of a fellow lodger in their boarding house provides Burke and Hare with the funds to escape eviction. As logic and plot would have it, the two desperate men turn to speeding up the local mortality rate. Hare takes better to their new line of paid serial killing, until Burke finds financial motivation in the eyes of Ginny (Isla Fisher), an actress/prostitute with dreams of staging an all-women production of “Macbeth.” Burke steps up to finance Ginny’s play in the hopes of winning her slightly sullied heart. Cameo turns from the likes of Tim Curry and Christopher Lee add to the fun of this bawdy chamber piece of British cinema.
Rated R. 91 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)
Talk about "unclear on the concept," director Ruben Fleisher and screenwriter Michael Diliberti cobble together a black comedy that is some of one and none of the other. Inspired by an actual 2003 event wherein pizza delivery man Brian Douglas Wells robbed a bank with a bomb locked around his neck which later exploded, the filmmakers fumble to make funny something intrinsically lacking in humor. The real-life Wells, who was in on the robbery attempt with a couple of other geniuses, is substituted here by Jesse Eisenberg's stoner Nick. Nick likes to speed around town high making pizza deliveries for minimum wage when he isn't trading insults with his not-so-loyal roommate Chet (Aziz Ansari). Nick has the hots for Chet’s twin sister Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria) as an excuse for one of the most inept use of subplots you’re likely to ever witness.
Trading insults is also a favorite pastime for poor little rich kid Dwayne (Danny McBride) and his best friend Travis (Nick Swardson). Dwayne dreams of killing his former Marine asshole father The Major (Fred Ward) to take over what's left of the old man's multi-million-dollar bank account--the reward from a lottery win. Dwayne wants to use the money to open a tanning salon that will be a front for a prostitution ring. Time spent with a local hooker named Juicy exposes Dwayne to the idea of hiring a hit man for a hundred-thousand bucks to bump off The Major. Raising the enormous sum calls for building a body-bomb and locking it onto the unsuspecting Nick. “Where’s the humor in that?” you might well ask yourself. Well, that’s the thing. There is none. Even if you aren’t yet tired of Jesse Eisenberg’s signature oh-so-quirky line deliver, you will be after suffering through his performance in this instantly forgettable movie.
The most interesting thing about “30 Minutes or Less” is that there isn’t much precedent for such an ill-conceived, poorly executed, comedy. This movie doesn’t just have a bomb strapped to it; it is a bomb.
Rated R. mins. (D-) (Zero Stars - out of five/no halves)
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover - Classic Film Pick
Peter Greenaway's reputation as Britain's most ferocious intellectual filmmaker reached its apex in 1989 with his sixth feature film. Although everything about this black comedy including its tongue-twisting title challenges audiences, "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" remains Greenaway's most successful effort. Methodically constructed in the Jacobean form of Elizabethan revenge tragedies, the movie is an unrestrained attack on Margaret Thatcher's version of Ronald Reagan-style capitalism that infected the globe.
Greenaway conceived his film as a play, "a performance," with which the audience is meant to engage. His strict adherence to formal laws of theatrical dramaturgy, including proscenium staging, is attenuated by a non-stop assault of physical and verbal violence from the film's loathsome antagonist Albert Spica. In the role of Albert, Michael Gambon embodies his boorish character with a virulent toxicity of epic scale.
Greenaway lets the audience know what it's in for during a tense opening sequence. Albert dislodges the owner of a haute cuisine restaurant named Le Hollandaise. The restaurant's proprietor "Roy"--note the allusion to a "king"--hasn't been keeping up on his protection payments to Albert, a mean-spirited mob boss with a taste for fine dishes he can barely pronounce. Peter Greenaway predicted a future he hoped wouldn't arrive. It did. The vicious way Albert tortures Roy and smears his nude body with feces reflects the same cruel brand of devastating psychological humiliation later committed by guards at Guantánamo prison.
Against Albert's orders his elegant wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) smokes cigarettes as a singular act of insubordination. Knowing her turn will come, she nevertheless tolerates Albert's brutish behavior toward others. Inside the grand restaurant Albert confers with his "employee," a veteran French chef named Richard (Richard Bohringer), about the menu. The dining room's red color scheme is watched over by Dutch painter Frans Hals's "Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Civic Guard Company"--another thematic poke by the filmmaker. Albert spews his cockney variety of verbal bile at a large rectangular table that allows for Greenaway's formal tableaux compositions to blossom. Challenging thematic ideas come in spades.
Striking costumes by Jean-Paul Gautier and a haunting musical score by Michael Nyman augment the film's purposefully artificial execution. Georgina strikes up an affair with Michael (Alan Howard), a solitary man who reads as he dines across from Albert's table of savages. Over the course of the next few nights the lovers retreat to the restaurant's bathroom and kitchen to make love between courses. Their trysts represent a desperate escape of independent thinkers from an oppressive outside world that would just as soon eat them alive, or dead.
"The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" is a masterpiece of British cinema built on several hundred years of literary tradition. The film must be viewed more than once to begin to digest its pungent and subtle layers of rope-thick satire.
Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer draws upon his theatrical experience working with marionettes in this darkly comic retelling of an ancient Czech fairy tale. Svankmajer brilliantly intermingles stop-motion animation with live-action to tell the tale of an infertile married couple obsessed with having a child.
Husband Karel Horák (Jan Hartl) finds inspiration in a tree root that he shapes into the body of a genetically correct branch-limbed baby boy. Karel's wife Božena Horáková (Veronika Žilková) is overjoyed with the result. She hatches a plan involving nine handmade pillows of sequential sizes to publicly account for a gestation period that will allow her to act as a mother to the lifeless piece of wood. Upon its "birth," Otik comes to life.
Alzbetka (Kristina Adamcova) is a precocious pre-teen girl obsessed with sex and babies who lives in the couple's apartment building. Her intense curiosity about Karel's and Božena's "baby" keeps the movie on track with the tale of "Otesánek" that Alzbetka reads in her book of fairy tales. Otik proves to be an insatiably hungry baby. The family cat is turned into a pile of bloody bones. Otik grows to an enormous size. The mailman also becomes a victim. Little Otik takes on a serial killer identity. Daddy wants to chop baby into splinters, but mommy won't let him.
Svankmajer creates a darkly comic satire about the gruesome reality of childbirth and the tremendous social pressures that come with the duties of parenting.
Božena's compulsory overprotection of a baby she can't allow her neighbors to see is point of high humor. She takes to putting a plastic toy baby in the pram she leaves outside while she shops. Božena, you see, is overprotective only to a point. Most striking is the bizarre baby itself. With its flat-top head, frayed branch appendages, and snout-like nose Otik makes a strong case for the ugliest infant you've ever seen. Still, in spite of its unsightly appearance and reprehensible behavior Božena can't help but adore her creepy child.
Fairy tales are cautionary stories written to teach children hard lessons most parents would rather not attempt to paraphrase. "Little Otik" is in a class all by itself. Jan Svankmajer is a mad genius of cinema.
With a pinch of "Trainspotting" irreverence and a dose of "Pulp Fiction" social satire, debut director John Michael McDonagh cobbles together this lilting black comedy set in the Gaelic region of County Galway. McDonagh also borrows from his filmmaking brother Martin McDonagh, who directed the rich atmospheric mood piece "In Bruges" for which Brendan Gleeson shared leading man honors. Here Gleeson plays Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a not-so-by-the-book member of the Galway police force. After a carload of drugged-out teenagers fatally loses control of their car, Sergeant Boyle searches one of the victims' pockets to extract a hit of acid. He takes it. Though we never see the effects of his trip, we understand Boyle to be a fearless mensch. He likes to spend time with his terminally ill mom (wonderfully played by Fionnula Flanagan) on his off days. He also likes private time with hookers--two at a time, with a smile.
Boyle and his latest recruit McBride (Rory Keenan) investigate a local murder. The staged homicide appears to be connected to rumors of an upcoming multi-million dollar drug deal due to take place on a fog-shrouded Galway dock. Some notorious gangsters lurk. The situation must be serious since it calls for the imported assistance of FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle). In Everett's presence Boyle comes across as more racially insensitive than racist, but comfortably awkward nonetheless.
"The Guard" is a wry piece of postmodern cinema that clearly lays out its parameters and stays within them. Characters freely express their prejudices and contempt for outside cultures, and yet it's somehow not offensive because we clearly see where and how they fit as individuals into the paradigm of regional existence in which they wander. Underhanded comic scenes between Gleeson and Cheadle crack with imploding silences as their characters earn each other's trust without resorting to artifice. "The Guard" isn't as developed as "In Bruges," but it is as nuanced.
Rated R. 96 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)
After reinventing American cinema with his thrilling first film "Reservoir Dogs," Quentin Tarantino delivered an even better one, "Pulp Fiction." It firmly establishes Tarantino's voice as a virtuoso auteur of scenario, structure, style, and dialogue, not to mention casting. With its time-flipping interconnecting stories "Pulp Fiction" showcases Tarantino's gift for planting seeds of budding exposition that spontaneously flower into lush noir gardens of spectacular narrative colors.
Most people come away from "Pulp Fiction" (1994) with a favorite scene. Christopher Walken's coarse monologue about the gold watch that gets passed down from the young Butch's great grandfather is one such example of pure theatrical expression. The musical muscularity of the language is transformative. The monologue explains the older Butch's obsessive drive to retrieve the watch in spite of the danger in which it puts him. Bruce Willis's Butch bites his tongue when his silly French girlfriend Fabienne tells him she left his watch behind. Butch holds his temper until he can let it out in the privacy of his car. Regardless of how offhand it seems on face value, everything connects to something else in the story.
"Pulp Fiction" has a refreshing modern quality in the way it incorporates the realities of such underground activities as drug use and BDSM. No explanation is given. The audience is simply thrown into the deep end and expected to grapple with the most outlandish situations for what's at stake for the characters involved. There's none of Hollywood's audience spoon-feeding going on. Like Cassavetes before him, Tarantino trusts the sophistication of his audience. He doesn't hold back; he edits. The characters reveal their identities in pressurized situations that demand action or at least some very fast talking, and talk they do. The vulgarity that turns some audiences off to "Pulp Fiction" is the same quality that allows the catharsis that Samuel L. Jackson's character experiences during an attempted robbery in a diner. Every character in the story transforms.
Robert Hamer's 1949 film is an impeccable premiere example of Black Comedy. "Kind hearts are more than coronets/And simple faith than Norman blood." The title is a couplet from the Tennyson poem "Lady Clara Vere di Vere that announces the state of Noblesse Oblige carried by the film's main character, a wily familial assassin of royal ancestry. Dennis Price gives a composed performance as Louis Mazzini, an exquisitely mannered mother's boy who carries out her demurely expressed wish that eight members of her royal lineage perish for refusing to admit Louis as a member of the D'Ascoyne family. Louis is ninth in line to be the Duke of Chalfont. The current Duke's refusal to grant Louis's mother's dying wish, to be buried at Chalfont in the D'Ascoyne family crypt, is the final insult that sends Louis on an efficient mission of murdering his royal rivals. Screenwriters Robert Hamer and John Dighton adapt Roy Horniman's 1907 novel "Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal" with an ear for Edwardian tactical use of speech that operates on a virtuosic level of sophistication. A love triangle develops between Louis and the relationships he carries on with Edith D'Ascoyne, the widow of his second victim, and Sibella (played with shrewish authority by Joan Greenwood) a childhood soul-mate who is every bit as cunning as Louis. Alec Guinness's irreproachable performance as each of Louis's victims adds an additional masterstroke to a ruthlessly pitched satire about British imperialism backfiring on itself. It's not just a saucy comedy of language and manners, it's take-no-prisoners comedy of death.
More a black comedy than the intended "neo-noir" that newbie auteur Jake Goldberger aspires to, "Don McKay" is a droll little independent flick for audiences with dark tastes. Thomas Haden Church is commanding as the poker faced title character who takes time away from his job as a high school janitor to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart Sonny (Elizabeth Shue) in their hometown. Sonny is allegedly dying of cancer when Don shows up at her rural home where Sonny's strict nurse Marie (Melissa Leo) keeps a close eye on Don. With a femme fatale glint in her eye Sonny wants to marry Don before she expires, but Sonny's doctor (James Rebhorn) doesn't cotton much to the couple's intimate acquaintance. One sudden murder leads to an unraveling of lies and promises that almost come together in one neatly packaged puzzle. The performances rise above the material in this roughly hewn debut experiment by a filmmaker who still needs to master the form of his chosen genre before he steps behind the camera again.
(Image Entertainment) Rated R. 87 mins. (C) (Two Stars - out of five/no halves)
In 1996 the Coen Brothers took black comedy mainstream with the idea that "Fargo" was "a true story." With the buzz of Tarantino's cinema of blood-guns-and-irony penetrating every nostril of filmmakers and audiences alike, the timing couldn't have been better for an unconventional crime story set in the unknowable snow-covered landscapes of Minnesota and North Dakota. William H. Macy gives the understated comic performance of his career as Jerry Lundegaard, a weaselly car salesman with big money troubles. Jerry sets tragedy in motion when he hires two hit men (wonderfully played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrurd) in order to get a huge ransom from her wealthy dad (Harve Presnell). The Coens embellish their pressure-cooker plot with the area's regional accent and speech patterns to tweak the comic tone lurking beneath the drama. Frances McDormand is the film's secret weapon. As the Brainerd, Minnesota chief of police, Marge Olmstead-Gunderson, McDormand is one cool detective whose provincial and humane charm disguises a keen nose for details. From its meticulous use of contextualizing camera angles and suspense-building sequences, "Fargo" is the kind of black comedy you can rediscover over and over again. The laughs and shocks never fade. "There's more to life than a little money you know. Don't you know that?"
George Clooney's intentionally ambiguous character Ryan Bingham is a poster boy for America's lack of ethical direction in this thought-provoking satire about the nation's unemployment epidemic. Unfortunately, this film fails to swing its hammer of simmering revolution hard enough. Smarmy Ryan loves his city-hopping lifestyle--he loves collecting frequent flyer miles--doing paid gigs as a motivational speaker with a cynical message. He also works as the number-one hatchet man for an outsourcing company that fires employees for big companies. Wanting neither marriage, kids, nor commitment, Ryan happily slips into a low-key affair with Alex (Vera Farmiga), a flight attendant who shares Ryan's shallow worldview--at least on the surface. A big snag appears in the form of upstart corporate spitfire Natalie (Anna Kendrick), whose attempt at making Ryan's job obsolete with the use of video conferencingtransforms the ambitious-but-callow Natalie into Ryan's personal traveling trainee. Based on Walter Kirn's novel, the reliably humorous script is co-authored by Sheldon Turner and director Jason Reitman. After making "Thank You for Smoking" and "Juno," Reitman attacks socio-economic satire with a combination of verité sequences, light slapstick, and earthy sex appeal. The movie finds its level whenever Reitman's camera depicts the outspoken responses of people being fired from jobs where they've toiled for years. The film seems to say, "It's okay that we're all losing our jobs, because it will invariably lead us to our own individual bliss." Rated R. 98 mins. (B) (Three Stars)
Misogynist, anti-capitalist, and class-conscious, novelist Chuck
Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” takes a "Trainspotting" brand of glee in
dismissing lifestyle mores and materialist limitations of American
social existence. It plays like a boys-only video game where male
audience members are players encouraged to kick over the machine that
ate their quarters at the end of the game. For all of the controversy
surrounding the movie for fear that young males will begin setting up
fight clubs of their own all around the world, the theory is countered
directly in the movie as Ed Norton’s nameless character comes to view
his dimwitted, class-conscious Fight Club cohorts as complete morons —
who, in Lou Reed's words, follow the first thing that comes along that
allows them the right to be. Indeed the Fight Club cult that Norton
sets up under the tutelage of his brutal disenfranchised alter
ego/evil-twin, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), digresses into a flesh-chewing
tombstone that gets dumped on the floor like so much brain matter. "Fight Club" is Fincher's cinematic Hail-Mary pass that the audience desperately wants to catch.
Life During Wartime (at the 47th New York Film Festival)
Todd Solandz is back yet another time to beat his convoluted dead horse themes of schmaltzy pedophilia. A bookend to his 1998 feel-bad effort "Happiness," "Life During Wartime" repeatedly reminds us that indeed America is still enduring two wars that it would rather forget, or at least redirect the billions being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan on economic problems in the U. S. of A. The title is misleading because war is incidental to a gumball rally of "pervs," their victims, and not-so-innocent bystanders. Ciaran Hinds takes over the Bill Mablewood role that Dylan Baker played in "Happiness." Bill is on the brink of being released from prison as his ex-wife Trish (Allison Janney) is getting on her long belated romantic footing with a new guy, Harvey (Michael Lerner). Trish's youngest son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) looks forward to his bar mitzvah, and is devastated to learn that the father he had been told was dead, is in fact a convicted pedophile. An uncomfortable reunion between Bill and Timmy's college-aged brother Billy (Chris Marquette) that Bill used to molest, is enough to curdle milk in your stomach. Solandz has worn out his welcome as an enfant terrible. He's too old for that pose. Todd Solandz specializes in capturing creepy scenarios between adults and children. A fumbled attempt at creating a thematic statement about forgetting but not forgiving, backfires on a film that elicits that very reaction from its audience. Not Rated. 98 mins. (D) (One Star)
Bronson The casual physical brutality of "Britain's most notorious criminal," Michael Petersen a.k.a. "Charles Bronson," is depicted with unreserved commitment by impressive actor Tom Hardy. His performance is on par with Eric Bana's fantastic transformation in "Chopper" (2000). Hardy embodies the post-"Silence of the Lambs" archetype of the psychologically deranged prisoner--capable of writing poetry, painting, and facing his captors only with extreme violence. Director Nicolas Winding Refn wallows in fetishistic glee as he shows off the bodies of his male subjects engaged in the mano a mano battle rituals Bronson consistently instigates--even though (perhaps because) he loses every time. Stylistically, "Bronson" sustains a masochistic tone against a Sisyphian diary of this serious criminal badass obsessed with hurting his guards. Flashbacks reveal Bronson's troubled childhood and the crimes that landed him in the big house. The movie never comes together as much of a biopic, but does work as a darkly comic celebration of a dubious anti-hero. A sort of second cousin to Paolo Sorrentino's "Il Divo" (2008), "Bronson" shares that film's mechanical sense of ambivalent regard for its subject. This may be first true "video nasty" of the year. Rated R. 92 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)
If anyone ever doubts the visionary significance of Terry Gilliam's once bright genius as a filmmaker of enormous depth and cynical humor, you need only to visit upon his career-topping 1985 masterpiece of surreal satire, "Brazil." Co-written by Gilliam with Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard, the story is an ingenious blend of sci-fi, political satire, and dystopic comedy. Jonathan Pryce gives his own career high performance as Sam Lowry, a kind of Peter Sellers surrogate searching for the woman of his sleeping dreams and working as a government bureaucrat drone at a soul-crushing job that resembles something out of George Orwell's 1984. There are plenty of other thematic and visual associations made to Orwell's all-too-accurate vision of a totalitarian society where a government error dooms an innocent man and an equally guiltless woman named Jill Layton (Kim Greist) who, although she's deemed a terrorist by a complicit government, is the woman of Sam Lowry's dreams. Sam's desperate attempts to liberate Jill from the government's labyrinthine clutches marks him also as a "terrorist." Gilliam called the film, "the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984," and it's telling that other working titles included "The Ministry" and "1984 ½." Gilliam sparks a fierce anti-consumerist flame with prescient pokes at things like plastic surgery and credit cards. However, the film's most incendiary theme is that the media-hyped concept of "terrorism," which went on to become an all-encompassing excuse for every form of war crime imaginable after 9/11, is merely a thought-control fear mechanism for governments to enact carte blanche policies via an invisible (read non-existent) enemy. By the standards of America's unwritten moral code circa 2009, "Brazil" is a dangerous film. Watch it.
Based on a screenplay by Zsofia Ruttkay, visionary Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi ("Hukkle") has created a grotesque satire that dissects Hungary's nationalist self identity with a pitch-black sense of humor and extended gross-out sequences centered around vomit and sliced flesh. The film is as thematically challenging as it is visually disturbing--perhaps more so for Western audiences. However there are rich layers of subtext for those with strong enough stomachs to discover. Divided into three sections, the story follows three generations of Hungarian men whose lineage, from low-ranking soldier to speed-eating champion to mad scientist/taxidermist, resonates with a certain Eastern European sensibility of twisted ambition tempered by war and social repression. Vendel (Csaba Czene--an actor with a decidedly pronounced hair-lip) is a young soldier stationed at a remote farm where he answers to his tyrannical superior officer Hadnagy (Istvan Gyuricza), when he isn't peeping on the women whom he ostensibly protects while masturbating with the aid of fire, of all things. Vendel impregnates Hadnagy's adulterous wife before meeting a brutal fate that nevertheless allows his male offspring, Kalman Balatonym (Gergo Bischoff), to redefine the sport of speed-eating and win the heart of a woman named Gizi (Adel Stanczel), who shares some of Kalman's prodigious eating skills. The couple's adult son Lajos (Marc Bischoff) is a taxidermist who looks after his now-enormous father since Gizi's departure. Like his father, Lajos harbors unconventional dreams of fame and immortality linked to his physical potential. The shocking climax may not be "life affirming" in any traditional sense of the concept, but it is the most virtuosic piece of Grand Guignol filmmaking you're likely to witness this year. Rated R. 92 mins. (B-)(Three Stars)
In the current rut of similarly titled films with aspirations of
altitude ("Up," "Away We Go"), "What Goes Up" is an especially
loathsome case of entropy. Mercifully, co-writer/director Jonathan
Glatzer makes his pretentious heart-on-sleeve aspirations known early
on when Steve Coogan's whiny New York newspaper journalist Campbell
Babbitt rolls into 1986 small-town New Hampshire to write a human
interest story about local school-teacher-turned-astronaut-heroine
Christa McAuliffe. Campbell's lack of interest in doing any actual
journalism is reinforced when he meets up with a group of high school
students favored by Campbell's recently deceased former college
roommate, who may have committed suicide over an affair with one of his
students. Under a false pretense of doing a story about this gang of
pre-adult misfits, Campbell falls under the Lolita charms of Hilary
Duff's oversexed Lucy, and the story digresses into a hodgepodge of
irresponsible behavior. Intended as "meditation" on our trumped-up need
to recognize "heroes," and about the finality of death, "What Goes Up"
refuses to address the fate of the Challenger Spacecraft even though
it's presented as the film's climax. This is what happens when
filmmakers set out to craft a "meditation" on anything. Rated R. 107 mins. (D) (Zero Stars)
