THE AMERICAN MEME

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Bert Marcus’s third documentary gives a brief window into the potentially self-destructive effects of social media celebrity culture as indivertibly birthed by poor little rich girl Paris Hilton. Marcus reminds audiences that Kim Kardashian started out as Hilton’s personal assistant before kicking off her own cult of celebrity with a leaked sex tape that arrived four years after Hilton’s sex tape.  

Social media is “like a drug; we don’t know what the side effects are going to be 20 years from now.” What we do know is that privacy is dead, along with every other great social institution Americans once took for granted. Millennials couldn’t care less.

What’s missing from this documentary is any historical context about how people such as Napster founders (Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker), and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, contributed to creating a bottom-of-the-barrel economy built on people willing to sell their souls for pennies on social media platforms such as Vine and YouTube.

Slavery to the corporate machine of social media platforms comes in many forms. America no longer has any legitimate media outlets because these companies all now cater to a clickbait formula that ignores editorial responsibility for their meager existence. Groupthink and popularity are all that matter. A dissection of the economics behind social media’s stranglehold on corporate media, and on the lives of thousands of YouTubers, would have been an appropriate addition to this film.  

Josh Ostrovsky (a.k.a. the fatjewish), Brittany Furlan, DJ Khaled, and Kirill (“Was Here”) Bichutsky are the other social media personalities that Marcus interviews and examines as examples of people who spend every waking minute seeking fame and fortune from the lowest common denominators of clickbait mentality. Creating endless scenes of topless girls receiving champagne facials at nightclubs is where it’s at for Kirill. The film’s “celebrities” share one thing in common, these are lonely people seeking approval and validation from a mob of fans who care only about themselves.

The Hilton Hotel granddaughter is arguably the least compelling of the bunch. We watch as Paris goes through her childhood doll collection with her mother Kathy, a woman whose arrested development roughly matches that of her daughter. If ever there was an example of vapid beauty, Paris Hilton is the poster-girl for it. We listen as Hilton prattles on about how her top was pulled down for “one-second” during a photo shoot for Vanity Fair that launched her famous-for-being-famous career that has led to her becoming a DJ, and launching an endless product line of merchandise. Paris Hilton overload sets in. Cute is, after all, a dime a dozen. Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame be damned.

Brittany Furlan’s tale of Vine success exemplifies a small town comic actress who rose to fame for making humorous six-second video clips before Twitter inexplicably shut the service down. The filmmakers shed no light on the fractious relationship between content creators and the concealed corporate machinations that hold these people’s fate in their hands. As many people have discovered the hard way, you can pour your entire life into creating a brand for a platform such as Vine only to have the rug pulled out from under you without notice.

Ironically, Furlan wins her escape from the clutches of the social media rabbit hole via rock drummer Tommy Lee whose own career received a significant boost from a notorious sex tape involving Pamela Anderson. There is something tragically fitting about Furlan taking up a romantic relationship with a wealthy musician 30 years her senior.  

In a bumbling manner “The American Meme” exposes the hollowness of social media platforms that chew up people’s lives in the interest of likes and follows. We get a glimpse of the collapse of social media that will take many lives with it in one way or another. The film poses a significant if silent question, what is left after you put your entire persona on display for the internet to comment on, critique, and masturbate over?

All the money in the world won’t help you; you have sold your soul to capitalism’s demons. There is no way you will ever get it back.  

Not Rated. 90 mins. 

 

THE LITTLE HOURS

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If you’re the kind of person who likes to nap through summer movies in the air conditioned comfort of your neighborhood cinema then “The Little Hours” presents an ideal opportunity for a 90 minute nap. As comically flat as a glass top table, writer/director Jeff Baena’s would-be comic take on Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” is nothing but a snooze from start to finish.

This filmmaker wouldn’t know slapstick from satire. Baena sets a mordant tempo for inert comic set pieces that never come together to form a coherent storyline. Talk about someone in need of binging on Mel Brooks and Sacha Baron Cohen movies for a year or two, Jeff Baena requires some serious immersion in humor because he hasn’t got a single funny bone in his body.

There isn't an inch of comic depth to be found. Even scenes that have obvious opportunities for layers of comic suspense and multiple pay-offs get a one-note treatment. It's as if there wasn't a director on the set.

The narrative setup of a bunch of horny bitchy nuns living in a medieval convent might sound like great comic fodder but you come away from “The Little Hours” scratching your head as to why anyone in their right mind thinks Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, or Kate Micucci has any gift for making people laugh.

Of course, if Baena had really wanted to liven up the humor factor of this snooze-fest he could have picked up the phone and called, wait for it, yes, the one and only Amy Sedaris. I can never understand why Amy Sedaris isn't in every comedy made since 1990. Sedaris is the funny sauce to any filmic Hamburger Helper. But I digress. Amy Sedaris, Amy Sedaris, Amy Sedaris! I feel better now. 

Dave Franco fares little better as Masseto, a servant whose cuckolding services send him on the run and into the clutches of a nunnery where he must pretend to be deaf and dumb if he is to survive dominatrix-inclined nuns such as Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza). Fernanda is into verbal humiliation, knife play, and witch rituals involving male sacrifice. Plaza's twisted character comes across as too sincerely mean to laugh at. Too bad Fernanda forgot to wear a strap-on under her habit; that could have been funny.

This R-rated lame duck doesn’t begin to go far enough in its ostensible bawdiness. For that divine pleasure you’ll have to revisit Pier Paolo Pasolini’s far superior 1971 adaptation (properly entitled “The Decameron”). Talk about bringing "Kool-Aid" to the grown-ups party; there isn't even one comic gross-out bit in the whole movie. Remember "There's Something About Mary"? Now, there was one guffaw-inducing comedy.

I chuckled once during “The Little Hours” in a cinema occupied by one other person. If only I could have let myself fall asleep like I wanted to.

Rated R. 90 mins.

ZERO STARS

 

A REAL YOUNG GIRL — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Catherine Breillat announced her status as a feminist enfant terrible at the age of 17 with her sex-filled debut novel l’Homme facile (“A Man for the Asking”).

The French government promptly banned the book for anyone under 18. Although it might seem tame by modern standards, "A Real Young Girl" was, and is, a brave transgressive film from a fearless woman filmmaker with a singular uncompromising vision for the coming of age story she wanted to tell.

By the time she made “A Real Young Girl” Breillat (pronounced Bray-yah) had acted in Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” and Edouard Molinaro’s “Dracula and Son” opposite Christopher Lee. Such practical experiences paved the way for a filmmaker whose furious first effort would be delayed for nearly a quarter century.

“A Real Young Girl” was made in 1976, but not released until 1999 due to the “shocking” nature of the work.

Criminal.

Based on her novel “Le soupirail,” this [ostensibly] autobiographical story is set in Breillat’s hometown of Niort, France. Alice Bonnard is a physically developed 14-year-old girl visiting her mom and dad while on summer vacation from boarding school. Charlotte Alexandra (“Immoral Tales”) was 20 when she played the role of Alice, but is credible and her performance is spectacular.

“A Real Young Girl” is a brave coming-of-age reverie expressed with unbridled honesty by a canny young author fascinated with every erotic detail of the substances that discharge from her body at regular intervals.

Alice is a prolific producer of runny earwax that she smears on the family tablecloth. Sexual thoughts consume her every waking minute.

Young girls get horny, who knew?

Our unreliable young protagonist narrates the film with intimate reflections about her parents, her intolerance of other people, and about her budding, albeit messy, sexuality.

Alice’s provincially minded folks (Rita Maiden and Bruno Balp) are as flawed versions of adults as you will find anywhere in the history of film.

The movie has a raw sensibility in keeping with the natural savagery of wanton libidos in close proximity to one another. A scene in which Alice probes her vagina with a spoon while her oblivious father sits next to her at the dinner table is unsettling, to say the least.

There is reason to suspect that Alice’s father might yet molest her if he hasn’t already.

Cinematographers Pierre Fattori and Patrick Godaert share camera duties in giving the picture its deceptively unpolished appearance. Sequences screech and roar with an unbearable lustful tension. Breillat’s jarring use of soundscape is masterful.

The rebel filmmaker’s insatiable desire for intimate truths, dips into the phantasmagoric. Graphically explicit sex-fantasy sequences are at once shocking and recognizable. During once such scene, Jim, a twentysomething stud (played by Hiram Keller) tears off pieces of an earthworm that he presses inside Alice’s wet vagina. Alice will not be tamed, but she must be sated. Finding a lover who can provide birth control pills might hold the key to Alice’s sexual liberation.

Alice says things like, “Disgust makes me lucid.” She enjoys vomiting on herself in bed for its sickly smell and the warmth it provides on her ample chest. She’s a country girl in touch with the everyday brutalities of such regular tasks as killing and cleaning a chicken, something she does with her mother before imagining herself crawling around on the ground (with feathers protruding from her anus) in front of Jim, who works for Alice’s father at a nearby sawmill.

While the film could be construed as pornographic in nature, the intention of the narrative function is clearly to examine the psyche and sexuality of a young girl within the political and social context of Niort, France circa 1963. A television newscast reports General de Gaulle’s dissolution of parliament. A local shopkeeper (played by Shirley Stoler) is none too pleased about Alice’s tempting ways and lets Alice’s mother know it.

Breillat’s magically real tale of sexual adventure owes a debit to Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and to J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” The character of Alice is after all a female archetype born of the same hunger for individuality and sexual expression as the teenage male protagonists of Roth and Salinger. “A Real Young Girl” retains a fresh sense of transgressing taboos. The melodramatic flourish that Breillat uses to end the story gives a knowing wink to say that this filmmaker knows exactly what she’s doing. Bravo.

Not Rated. 90 mins.