THE IDENTICAL

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"THE IDENTICAL"
CLASSIC CINEMA — JEAN-LUC GODARD'S "BREATHLESS"

Smart New Media Presents

ColeSmithey.com

 

Pro-Israel Propaganda: Elvis Style

A shoo-in for a spot on any worst movies of 2014 list, this poorly constructed slice of propaganda, courtesy of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America (MJAA), is so unintentionally campy you can’t help but laugh. Atrocious costume designs, anachronistic dialogue, wretched music, and tone-deaf performances are abundant.

It’s rare that a film as amateurish as this one gets a wide North American theatrical release, or that such a dubious project drags down two otherwise reliable Hollywood B-list actors with it. Remember Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd? How the nearly mighty have fallen. From the looks of it, you’d never guess that Ashley Judd (“Kiss the Girls”) and Ray Liotta (“Goodfellas”) were once hot commodities in Hollywood. Here, Ray Liotta gives such an unbearably hammy performance, in a make-up heavy role that spans roughly 35 years, that you wonder why he isn’t doing community theater — or community service — in Salinas. If Liotta’s aging process is embarrassing, Judd’s performance, as Liotta’s non-aging Southern wife with the IQ of a child, is plain bizarre.

Hopefully the MJAA compensated Liotta and Judd for decimating their future earnings potential.

Screenwriter Howard Klausner must have used a ghostwriter to pen his only previous script, the Clint Eastwood-directed film “Space Cowboys” (2000), because Klausner’s cliché-riddled screenplay for “The Identical” is something you’d expect from an underachieving high school student.

Watch as a slimy entertainment manager throws handfuls of cash into the air! Listen to the worst Southern accents you’ve ever heard! Marvel at a plotline so pretentious even a five-year-old wouldn’t buy it!

Debut director Dustin Marcellino was presumably given the gig by his Motown record-producing grandfather Jerry Marcellino, whose ludicrous attempts at writing original [partial] rock ‘n’ roll songs pepper the movie like so much aural dishwater (as sung by a very skilled Elvis impersonator). Cringe-worthy lyrics arrive at regular intervals during stage performance sequences that go on too long regardless of their strict 90-second abbreviated form.

“City lights keep on shining, remind me of the love we knew. City lights keep on shining, I see your smiling eyes of blue.”

Barf.

The film’s preachy religious and political narrative stretches back to the Great Depression. William and Helen Hemsley are a young unemployed Christian couple with more dumb lust than common sense. They follow the Bible’s teachings to “be fruitful and multiply” in spite of the fact that they can’t even feed themselves. The couple’s identical twin offspring present more economic strain than they can handle. A visit to a Bible-thumping sermon by Reverend Reece Wade (Liotta), an ostensibly Baptist minister with Jewish leanings, plants in William the idea that “it is better to give than to receive.” Reverend Wade underscores the oversimplified ethos of his rote sermon with the over-shared disclosure that he and his wife Louise (Judd) are unable to procreate.

The next day, William and Helen pay a visit to the Reeces with an offer to hand over one of their twin children to appease their dilemma. Oh the transgressive blessings at hand. The Hemsleys conceal their well-meaning deed by claiming the death of their child. They go through the motions of a minister-attended burial, complete with an empty shoebox coffin.

Years pass. Enter Elvis impersonator and real-life Elvis lookalike Blake Rayne (real name Ryan Pelton) in the dual role of the Hemsley’s separated-at-birth twins Ryan and Drexel. Although minister Reece tries to bring Ryan up to follow in his footsteps as a preacher, Ryan can’t resist the boogie-woogie calling of the devil’s honky-tonks on the outskirts of town. No one seems to notice that Ryan sings exactly like the King. This must be an alternate universe. Indeed, when papa Wade gives a ridiculously oversimplified sermon, praising Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, he goes so far as to bring out an inexplicable menorah for his Christian congregation to scratch their heads over.

Ryan and Drexel look and sound exactly alike, except that Drexel is a successful rock ‘n’ roll recording artist, and Ryan is a talented wannabe who fails to recognize his resemblance to Drexel as anything more than a weird coincidence. Ryan is content to sing along to his brother’s records and perform at local amateur night competitions. Forget about any willing suspension of disbelief; “The Identical” is all about blank naiveté. Even when Ryan and Drexel come (nearly) face to face, neither one calls out their obvious blood relation.

Presumably, the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America produced “The Identical” (under their City of Peace Films company) to intangibly drum up Christian support for Israel. There’s coincidence in the fact that the movie opens at a time when Israel is coming under fierce global criticism for its military actions against Palestine. This is a movie you can laugh at, but you won’t be able to enjoy.

Rated PG. 107 mins.

ZERO STARS

THE UNKNOWN KNOWN

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Smart New Media Presents

ColeSmithey.com

 

Errol Morris meets his match in Donald Rumsfeld. The notoriously contentious documentarian, whose interviews with 1960s secretary of defense Robert McNamara form the finest political documentary ever made (“The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara” - 2003), runs aground against McNamara's eventual successor, the Bush administration’s Donald Rumsfeld’s thousand-mile-wide and thousand-mile-high wall of bullshit.

The film, however, is likely the closest the public will come to witnessing the war criminal questioned for his crimes.

Rumsfeld’s clinically devised responses are less than satisfying, to say the least. Rumsfeld, a vacuous careerist politician, has mastered the art of obfuscation so thoroughly that he doesn’t even recognize the stench of his own rotten mind. The man is such a soulless, wrongheaded, inveterate manipulator of words that he comes across as an idiot savant in love with the sound of his own voice. It would be hard to imagine any other human being speaking so much, yet saying so little.

The politician’s consistently false and evasive answers to Morris’s direct questions about events such as the migration of illegal torture techniques from Abu Ghraib to other U.S. prisons, as well as Guantánamo, leave the audience infuriated beyond belief. The fact that Rumsfeld was, and is, wrong about how and why America went into a series of wars in which it is still engaged, is part and parcel to the discussion Morris pursues with his usual tenacity.

Still, Morris gets nowhere. Rumsfeld’s maddening rationalization for the death and destruction he helped foster around the world is that “stuff happens.” His classic, glib reply reflects the American government’s deeply cynical yet cunning attitude that continues to choose stupidity over wisdom for every single piece of domestic and foreign policy it administers.

Drawing parallels to "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Morris has called “The Unknown Known,” a “horror movie about history from the inside out.” I take his point. The U.S. government is filled with career politicians like Donald Rumsfeld who value only their personal ability to disengage from any responsibility for the global horrors they actively create on a minute-to-minute basis.

“The Unknown Known” is a valuable window inside the warped mind of an irrational sociopath who, like those around him during his time in Office — Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, etc. — acted with unfathomable incompetence that they were able to disguise with the complicity of corporate news media.

On display is Errol Morris’s knack for utilizing stock footage, news clips, and beautifully layered imagery, along with evocative music, to bring resonance where there would otherwise be none — considering the vacuum bubble that is Donald Rumsfeld’s pathetic mind. Have a stiff drink before you see “The Unknown Known” — you’ll need it — but don’t miss this essential look at the abysmal state of a country known as “The United States of America.”

Rated PG-13. 96 mins.

WHITE HOUSE DOWN

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The DC Crime Ring Eats Its Own
Hollywood Can’t Help Taking Notice

Copycat redundancies to the recent “Olympus Has Fallen” aside, “White House Down” is an unintentionally laughable action movie that wallows in involuntary cynicism about how America — or screenwriter James Vanderbilt at least — views the White House as the world’s biggest crime ring.

Buried in a shallow grave just beneath its veneer of absurdly cheesy Americana platitudes lays mocking subtext, twitching with spastic gestures and pointing awkwardly at a corrupt political system eating itself from the inside out.

U.S. President Jack William Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) can’t wait to explain his occupational predicament to the first pair of ears that comes along. “The first term is all about getting reelected,” he tells an upstart Secret Service agent before explaining that now, during his second term, he is finally ready to do something that will make a difference. Sound familiar? You’d think he was petitioning for single-term-limits for the Presidential office.

Interestingly, the ever-buff Channing Tatum dons the Edward Snowden mantle as John Cale [no, not the Welsh composer and musician of Velvet Underground fame, although that would have been interesting]. Like Snowden, Cale has a history of not finishing things — e.g., school. But our would-be Secret Service agent bodyguard has friends [mainly female] in high places. He went to college with White House Secret Service official Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), one of President Sawyer’s right-hand agents.

Still, when Cale arrives at the White House for a job interview with Agent Finnerty, with his 12-year-old daughter Emily (Joey King) in tow, she quickly gives him the thumbs-down — so much for friends in high places. Cale is a perfect outlier, ready to pounce for the true cause of liberty when he gets a chance.

On this particular day a crew of generic baddies sneak into the White House to hack into its computers, take hostages, and see how far down the line of presidential succession they can move the title of Commander-In-Chief. Naturally, Cale’s daughter falls into the hostage category while our able-bodied hero takes personal responsibility for getting the President out alive while all hell breaks out around them.

You can’t help but transpose Barak Obama into Foxx’s character during goofy action sequences, as when Cale and President Sawyer climb up through an elevator shaft. The effect is mildly comical if only because it’s so hard to imagine Obama doing anything so remotely athletic and risky.

Although its plot gymnastics are idiotic to the point of parody, “White House Down” makes a smart point about how vicious, cunning, and vengeful America’s power-hungry politicians are. They all want to be king for a day, and don’t give a damn about how many civilians get crushed, punished, or put out of work and home in the process. The best thing this cinematic assault-on-the-senses has going for it is its title. Like Edward Snowden, America is on its own and there are very few places to hide.

Rated PG-13. 137 mins.