He’s a singer-songwriter who not only can’t sing but can’t really play
his guitar, either. For most of his life, this performer has believed
that he’s Casper the Friendly Ghost, and he now lives with his elderly
parents because of extreme psychosis. Henry Darger–like, he’s made
hundreds of drawings on such themes as good vs. evil, including a
series of pictures of ducks that he refers to as “my armies in my
battle against Satan.”

You’d probably label this guy an outsider artist. But then, outsider
artists don’t usually end up on MTV, as Daniel Johnston did at the age
of 24, when his manic depression was in full swing.

“Yeah, even the New York Times, just a couple years ago, was writing
about Johnston as the poster child for outsider music,” says director
Jeff Feuerzeig, in Washington to promote his new documentary, The Devil
and Daniel Johnston. “Well, it’s really a pleasure [for me] that
recently the Times featured him on the cover of the Arts & Leisure
section because he was just selected by the Whitney Biennial,”
Feuerzeig continues. “Now they had to change their tune. Now he’s a
fine artist—which is what Daniel always was. He studied art. He went to
art school. Outsider artists don’t do this.”

But art is a secondary success in the 45-year-old Johnston’s career.
He’s been performing his music to packed houses for the past 20 years
or so, ever since he was profiled on MTV’s The Cutting Edge in 1985.
His songs have been covered by artists such as the Pastels, Beck,
Mercury Rev, Bright Eyes, and Wilco. In Feuerzeig’s film, you hear
people not only call Johnston a genius but also compare him to Bob
Dylan and Brian Wilson—even when he delivers lyrics such as “Don’t play
cards with Satan/He’ll deal you an awful hand.”

Feuerzeig, a 41-year-old commerical director and filmmaker currently
based in Los Angeles, was a college-radio DJ in New Jersey and
contributing to fanzines when he first heard of Johnston in the
mid-’80s. The international underground-music community Feuerzeig was
involved in—“a couple hundred people, like a mini-Internet”—had spread
word of a “talented young kid from Wild West Virginia.” Johnston had
wandered his way to Austin, Texas, after a five-month stint traveling
with a carnival. As a woman who’d seen Feuerzeig’s film pointed out to
him recently: “He’s, like, more Dylan than Dylan. Dylan said he was a
carny—Daniel really was a carny!”

“The way he showed up in Austin was so incredible, because it was an
accident,” Feuerzeig says. “So a lot of his career was predetermined,
and a lot of it was serendipity. When Daniel appeared in Austin, he
already had his body of work created. He recorded, I don’t know, I
think there were nine of those little cassettes he recorded in his
basement from 1981 to 1983. He recorded all that in a span of three
years. He was on fire. And like Dylan, who showed up in Greenwich
Village during the folk explosion in the ’60s and captured the
imagination of all these people in just a matter of weeks, Daniel did
the same thing in Austin.”

That was partly due to Johnston’s aggressive self-promotion. He
produced his first commercially distributed album, Hi, How Are You, on
a cheap tape recorder and handed out cassette copies—adorned with his
drawing of a googly-eyed frog—to everyone he could. “While he was
[working] at McDonald’s,” Feuerzeig says, “Daniel invented viral
marketing. If you were a pretty girl or a hip Austin musician, you’d
find a surprise in your hamburger-and-french-fries sack. He’d put a
cassette in. People loved that. Obviously, the tape wasn’t very good,
but they became enamored by him, and before you know it, he not only
made the scene—he was the scene.”

As Johnston’s fame grew, so did his illness—which made putting
together The Devil and Daniel Johnston an especially formidable
project. “He can’t really cooperate,” Feuerzeig says, “because he’s
medicated. So it was difficult.”

In fact, the film might have been impossible if it weren’t for the
fact that Johnston never stopped recording—audio, of course, but more
important, video. Like the subjects of 2003’s Capturing the Friedmans,
the members of the Johnston family have recorded in some fashion nearly
all of their days, whether good or bad, for posterity. In The Devil and
Daniel Johnston, you hear fights between Daniel and his mother. You
hear Daniel’s audio diary, including some phone calls. You even see a
picture, taken by a parent, of Daniel on a stretcher being wheeled into
a hospital.

After approaching “the gatekeeper,” Johnston manager Jeff Tartakov,
about getting access to this material, Feuerzeig took four-and-a-half
years to put the film together. “In all seriousness, one of the great
archeological finds in our lifetime is the archive of Daniel Johnston,”
the director says. “Now, was it [an official] archive? No. I went to
the house, and hundreds of tapes were found, like, in a Hefty bag. He
recorded his whole life. I always knew about that—I just didn’t know
there was hours of it. And like Darger, Daniel was an obsessive artist.
But it’s almost as if we walked in, in Chicago, into Darger’s room and
found him still alive.”

Johnston, Feuerzeig says, “contributed the best ways he could,
including helping to art-direct scenes that re-created some dramatic
moments”—such as when Johnston chased a woman out of her second-story
window to try to rid her of Satan. “His mom says in the film, ‘Dan
thought he was God’s man to save the world,’” Feuerzeig says. “Holy
shit! What can I tell you? It’s apocalyptic.”

That footage was supplemented by material from those who, like the
director, have followed Johnston’s career since nearly the beginning.
“People all over the world sent me their Daniel Johnston art materials
because they trusted [Tartakov], who’s always been known to have done
right by Daniel,” he says. “So that gave me access to people like Lee
Ranaldo and Sonic Youth, who shared with me because they in turn
trusted me.”

But a music-scene connection the film didn’t facilitate was
Feuerzeig’s personal one with Johnston. “Even when we were together, I
never felt I was in touch with him. I don’t feel like I know him any
better than the day I met him,” the director says. “I always knew him
through his art and his music. Even his dad says it in the film—‘The
only way to know what’s going on in Daniel’s head is to look over his
shoulder and read what he’s putting in the thought bubbles in the art.’
And if his dad can’t get to him, how can I?”

Instead, Feuerzeig relied on his own impressions of Johnston to
guide his filmmaking. “I just grabbed all the tapes myself, and I
assembled this internal monologue that you hear in the film,” he says.
He also consulted a book by psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched
With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, which
allowed him to consider Johnston’s case against those of van Gogh,
Byron, Virginia Woolf, and others who’ve shared the singer’s illness.
“All the great artists throughout history suffered from manic
depression,” Feuerzeig says.

The director says he was drawn to the project, which he partially
financed himself, because “I felt he chose me. Daniel’s art…has
touched me in such a deep way and has had a profound effect on my life.
And I saw so much in his humor. He’s a very funny guy, and he also did
a lot of comedy. I heard a lot of the same pop-culture influences from
the ’70s that I had gotten into my head—early Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis,
Andy Kaufman. I felt like he was a great vehicle to express myself
through, because I felt very connected to him.”

Regarding whether he believes Johnston is on a par with Dylan or
Wilson, Feuerzeig says, “Well, he’s singular, like they are. And he’s
created a great body of work that has affected and touched people and
brings tears to their eyes. So you tell me. It’s all subjective, isn’t
it?…When I heard Daniel Johnston’s voice, it was like a breath of
fresh air. I truly mean that—that’s what attracted me. I heard Billie
Holiday. I heard John Coltrane. The reaching to God—that’s what I hear
in that voice.

“Virtuosity is incredibly overrated in our world,” Feuerzeig adds.
“And raw, beautiful emotion and honesty is what really should be
cherished. Daniel [reflects] that. What I find off-putting is
overproduced garbage. I’ve never cried to a Coldplay song.”

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Do you think American Idol is
ridiculous? How about our president? American Dreamz is hoping that,
in its own words, both make you “want to projectile vomit.” Well,
maybe you don’t have to feel that strongly about the TV show. (And,
by the way, even if you believe AI is the epitome of the
cookie-cutter mediocrity our society seems to now embrace, it’s still
OK to admit you watch it. C’mon, it’s at least less embarrassing than
thinking the current administration is a model of fine leadership and
honesty – not that I’m editorializing.)

Writer-director Paul Weitz, creator of
2002’s About a Boy and 2004’s In Good Company, has proved to know his
way around wankery and thus does a fine job drawing up Martin Tweed
(Hugh Grant), a transparently Simon Cowell-ish television personality
with hints of Ryan Seacrest and Idol co-creator Simon Fuller thrown
in. Thus, after heartfelt performances, Tweed says things to Dreamz
contestants – many of whom mimic former AI players as well – such
as “Cindy, I’ve felt this way before. And it was just before I
wanted to kill myself.” And Weitz goes further to posit that the
judge is pretty much the same – straightforward, occasionally mean,
unapologetic about his what-are-these-human-emotions attitude –
when the cameras are off: When a girlfriend dumps Tweed at the
beginning of the movie, he tells her that she’s “amazing” but
also is relieved. “You make me feel like being a better person,”
he says. “And I’m not a better person.”

Grant, who is so much more fun as a
self-absorbed font of sarcasm than a gooey romantic lead, gets the
bulk of screen time and therefore humor here, though he’s matched in
Dennis Quaid’s subtle but dead-on take of W., er, President Stanton.
With an eerily Laura-cloned First Lady (Marcia Gay Harden) at his
side, Stanton, who’s been avoiding public appearances for a couple of
weeks, makes an unusual decision one day to read some newspapers
while he’s eating breakfast. (When his chief of staff, the otherwise
Cheney-disguised Willem Dafoe, comes in the room, he asks, “What’s
with the papers? New puppy?”) The prez takes a lot of hits here,
from becoming lost when an speech-feeding device pops out of his ear
to talking to his wife about her suggestion of “happy pills,” in
turn leading to a definition of what a placebo is when she admits
she’s stopped giving them to him. “Sometimes I think I’m a
placebo!” Quaid’s commander-in-chief ponders with a furrowed brow.

Seth Meyers also gets laughs as Chet, a
ruthless agent (as if there were any other kind) out to make a star
of Ohio dreamzer Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore). Reality-TV cynics will
just get affirmation here: The filming of Sally receiving news that
she was accepted on the show gets two takes because the first wasn’t
good enough, for example. And Chet manipulates the broken
relationship between Sally and William Williams (Chris Klein), the
guy she dumped who subsequently joined the Army and got immediately
sent to Iraq, to maximum audience-wooing effect. Weitz also pokes fun
at the typical American Idol contestants: A news report captures
Sally at her waitressing job surrounded by, as the caption notes,
“unemployed bar patrons,” and her opening song? “Mom, Don’t
Drink Me to Bed Tonight.”

Weitz works terrorism into the plot,
too, but despite the currency of its topics, American Dreamz never
feels like true satire, just a means of making jokes at the expense
of, well, our country. It doesn’t make you think, and it won’t make
you feel any smarter. But the entertaining script and humorous
performances are enough to leave you happy. Call it a placebo.

Turning to the family-unfriendly side
of the world, Charlie’s Party is about a New York woman who is
throwing a “cell phone” — i.e. partner-swapping – get-together
for her 30^th birthday. Sound like a ticket to sloppy
soft-core fun? On the contrary, it’s quite unlikely that there’s
another orgy movie out there that’s more boring or irritating.

Written and directed by first-timer
Catherine Cahn, the 80-minute Charlie’s Party amounts to little more
than a spoiled brat trying to force her miserable, personality-free
friends to sleep with each other even though it seems none of them
want to participate. Charlie (Alissia Miller, who looks a good 35, 36
to me) is a former hotshot VJ who is now miserably selling
knickknacks on the Home Value Shopping Network. She’s throwing the
party not only to show how hip she still is, but to prove to her
boyfriend, Dylan (Chris Tardio), that she doesn’t care that he slept
with another former VJ, a Frederick’s of Hollywood-looking Zoe (Kim
Director), who’s now up for an Oscar. (So clearly, this is fiction.
And also, if this reason was actually articulated in the film instead
of the synopsis, I missed it.) Charlie even invites Zoe to the party,
along with Jane (Nancy Anne Ridder), a former college friend who’s
now a lesbian, Sarah (Sabrina Lloyd), an uptight writer and her
husband, Tom (Mark H. Dold), who apparently never have sex. A goofy,
insecure guy named Nick (Eron Octasek) is also asked to, um, come.

Even though everyone’s reluctant to go,
soon they’re practicing conversations in front of mirrors (really,
does anyone do this?) and – I am not making this up – practicing
kissing on a pillow. Soon they’re tarted up, headed to the
Connecticut home of someone’s mother, and drinking heavily – which
even a teetotaler would do when faced with Charlie, in horrible,
nearly circus-like makeup,  screeching “*I* am turning *30* and I’m
not going to let anyone FUCK THIS UP!” You’d question why this
woman even has friends, except that the rest of them are jerks, too.

Charlie’s Party gets momentarily
interesting when the group quits snapping at each other – they
still don’t want to go through with the sex – and talk about their
fantasies during dinner. And even though no one in the group, not
even the two couples, seem to have any chemistry with anyone else, a
few end up in a threesome and one pair apparently have a potentially
life-altering experience together (after the woman quits bitching
about her position on the bed). Laughably, there’s a song whose theme
is having someone to come home to during a montage of who’s doing
whom. Even more laughable is everyone’s solemn trip
back to New York, implicitly thinking deep thoughts in a movie that’s
dumber than all its nitwit characters combined.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Do you think American Idol is
ridiculous? How about our president? American Dreamz is hoping that,
in its own words, both make you “want to projectile vomit.” Well,
maybe you don’t have to feel that strongly about the TV show. (And,
by the way, even if you believe AI is the epitome of the
cookie-cutter mediocrity our society seems to now embrace, it’s still
OK to admit you watch it. C’mon, it’s at least less embarrassing than
thinking the current administration is a model of fine leadership and
honesty – not that I’m editorializing.)

Writer-director Paul Weitz, creator of
2002’s About a Boy and 2004’s In Good Company, has proved to know his
way around wankery and thus does a fine job drawing up Martin Tweed
(Hugh Grant), a transparently Simon Cowell-ish television personality
with hints of Ryan Seacrest and Idol co-creator Simon Fuller thrown
in. Thus, after heartfelt performances, Tweed says things to Dreamz
contestants – many of whom mimic former AI players as well – such
as “Cindy, I’ve felt this way before. And it was just before I
wanted to kill myself.” And Weitz goes further to posit that the
judge is pretty much the same – straightforward, occasionally mean,
unapologetic about his what-are-these-human-emotions attitude –
when the cameras are off: When a girlfriend dumps Tweed at the
beginning of the movie, he tells her that she’s “amazing” but
also is relieved. “You make me feel like being a better person,”
he says. “And I’m not a better person.”

Grant, who is so much more fun as a
self-absorbed font of sarcasm than a gooey romantic lead, gets the
bulk of screen time and therefore humor here, though he’s matched in
Dennis Quaid’s subtle but dead-on take of W., er, President Stanton.
With an eerily Laura-cloned First Lady (Marcia Gay Harden) at his
side, Stanton, who’s been avoiding public appearances for a couple of
weeks, makes an unusual decision one day to read some newspapers
while he’s eating breakfast. (When his chief of staff, the otherwise
Cheney-disguised Willem Dafoe, comes in the room, he asks, “What’s
with the papers? New puppy?”) The prez takes a lot of hits here,
from becoming lost when an speech-feeding device pops out of his ear
to talking to his wife about her suggestion of “happy pills,” in
turn leading to a definition of what a placebo is when she admits
she’s stopped giving them to him. “Sometimes I think I’m a
placebo!” Quaid’s commander-in-chief ponders with a furrowed brow.

Seth Meyers also gets laughs as Chet, a
ruthless agent (as if there were any other kind) out to make a star
of Ohio dreamzer Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore). Reality-TV cynics will
just get affirmation here: The filming of Sally receiving news that
she was accepted on the show gets two takes because the first wasn’t
good enough, for example. And Chet manipulates the broken
relationship between Sally and William Williams (Chris Klein), the
guy she dumped who subsequently joined the Army and got immediately
sent to Iraq, to maximum audience-wooing effect. Weitz also pokes fun
at the typical American Idol contestants: A news report captures
Sally at her waitressing job surrounded by, as the caption notes,
“unemployed bar patrons,” and her opening song? “Mom, Don’t
Drink Me to Bed Tonight.”

Weitz works terrorism into the plot,
too, but despite the currency of its topics, American Dreamz never
feels like true satire, just a means of making jokes at the expense
of, well, our country. It doesn’t make you think, and it won’t make
you feel any smarter. But the entertaining script and humorous
performances are enough to leave you happy. Call it a placebo.

Turning to the family-unfriendly side
of the world, Charlie’s Party is about a New York woman who is
throwing a “cell phone” — i.e. partner-swapping – get-together
for her 30^th birthday. Sound like a ticket to sloppy
soft-core fun? On the contrary, it’s quite unlikely that there’s
another orgy movie out there that’s more boring or irritating.

Written and directed by first-timer
Catherine Cahn, the 80-minute Charlie’s Party amounts to little more
than a spoiled brat trying to force her miserable, personality-free
friends to sleep with each other even though it seems none of them
want to participate. Charlie (Alissia Miller, who looks a good 35, 36
to me) is a former hotshot VJ who is now miserably selling
knickknacks on the Home Value Shopping Network. She’s throwing the
party not only to show how hip she still is, but to prove to her
boyfriend, Dylan (Chris Tardio), that she doesn’t care that he slept
with another former VJ, a Frederick’s of Hollywood-looking Zoe (Kim
Director), who’s now up for an Oscar. (So clearly, this is fiction.
And also, if this reason was actually articulated in the film instead
of the synopsis, I missed it.) Charlie even invites Zoe to the party,
along with Jane (Nancy Anne Ridder), a former college friend who’s
now a lesbian, Sarah (Sabrina Lloyd), an uptight writer and her
husband, Tom (Mark H. Dold), who apparently never have sex. A goofy,
insecure guy named Nick (Eron Octasek) is also asked to, um, come.

Even though everyone’s reluctant to go,
soon they’re practicing conversations in front of mirrors (really,
does anyone do this?) and – I am not making this up – practicing
kissing on a pillow. Soon they’re tarted up, headed to the
Connecticut home of someone’s mother, and drinking heavily – which
even a teetotaler would do when faced with Charlie, in horrible,
nearly circus-like makeup,  screeching “*I* am turning *30* and I’m
not going to let anyone FUCK THIS UP!” You’d question why this
woman even has friends, except that the rest of them are jerks, too.

Charlie’s Party gets momentarily
interesting when the group quits snapping at each other – they
still don’t want to go through with the sex – and talk about their
fantasies during dinner. And even though no one in the group, not
even the two couples, seem to have any chemistry with anyone else, a
few end up in a threesome and one pair apparently have a potentially
life-altering experience together (after the woman quits bitching
about her position on the bed). Laughably, there’s a song whose theme
is having someone to come home to during a montage of who’s doing
whom. Even more laughable is everyone’s solemn trip
back to New York, implicitly thinking deep thoughts in a movie that’s
dumber than all its nitwit characters combined.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

When your young daughter begins
sleepwalking every night and yelling, “Silent Hill! Silent Hill!”
when you try to wake her up, do you 1) take her to a sleep
specialist, 2) try giving her NyQuil instead of Ambien, or 3) take
her to this place of which she speaks, even though your research of
it results in a million Google hits that also happen to include the
words “ghost town.” Three, of course, is obviously the most
logical answer, and thus that’s how writer-director Christophe Gans’
Silent Hill begins.

By gamer standards – the movie’s yet another
based on a video game – Silent Hill is surely a step above
predecessors such as Ultraviolet or Alone in the Dark. Visually, for
one, the movie’s pretty damn cool. After Rose (Radha Mitchell) and
her daughter, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), reach their destination and
immediately crash – because, naturally, of that darn old she-wraith
who likes to stand in the middle of quiet back roads – Rose wakes
up the next day to find Sharon gone. So she wanders the town’s
deserted-but-lovely snow-dusted streets, barely visible between her
blond hair, khaki coat, and the thick fog. Every once in a while she
sees a running figure out of the corner of her eye – which is fun
the first couple of times, but Gans unfortunately chose to make
Rose’s “Sharon!”-screaming chases approximately an hourlong
activity. The town’s official story is that it burned up in the Great
Silent Hill Coal Mine Fire of the 70s, which results in Rose
searching beneath the city and meeting some vaguely humanish, truly
nightmarish ash-and-embers figures, squealing swarms of rat-beetles,
and apparently some formerly whorish zombies who remain skin-colored
and cleavaged. (It also leads to the  movie’s funniest moment, an
ancient jukebox kicking into “Ring of Fire” after some ash-freaks
disintegrate in front of Rose.)

The other plus to Silent Hill is that
it doesn’t get stupid for a while, but – let’s just say 
witchcraft also ends up having something to do with the evil, along
with seemingly still-living beings  who say things like “the elders
of my elders.” There are suddenly an incredibly head-smacking
number of times a character says “Everything’s going to be OK!”
when clearly everything’s not. Mitchell takes her role pretty
seriously and only occasionally sounds ridiculous (see above), and
Ferland, well, she’s probably good at track. But when a character
says, “Look at me…I’m burning!” you nearly hear movie
itself saying, “Look at me…I’m bombing!”

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

It all started, really, with a timid
suggestion: “You know, I could take this little old bathing suit
top off if you like.” At least that’s how it goes in The Notorious
Bettie Page, a film that could both teach one-handed typers what real
breasts look like and delight what-God-gave-ya fans sick of whacking
their way through old-tyme, silicone-free porn. The iconic 50s pinup
is played by Gretchen Mol, who seemed to have plummeted into
obscurity shortly after being anointed the next It girl of the late
90s. But with writer-director Mary Harron’s biopic falling solely on
Mol’s frequently naked shoulders – and boobs, and ass, and the
“something” peaking out that Bettie is always asked to hide due
to obscenity laws—she’s bound to claim a little of Page’s notoriety
herself.

With all the skin and implicit
objectification, it’s notable that the film was created by women.
Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner—the pair last collaborated on
2000’s violent American Psycho, another project one would
stereotypically assume would be taken on by men—don’t shy away from
Page’s happenstance path from impromptu beach model to bondage queen.
But the focus is on the  God-fearing Page’s  trusting naivete and
persistent innocence regarding her career, with its naughtiness
pushed to the perimeters. After all, she’d say, Adam and Eve were
naked in paradise. And when a photographer asks her what she believes
Jesus might think of what she’s doing, Page replies, “God gave me
this talent to pose for pictures, and they seem to make people happy”
– therefore it can’t be wrong. That defense, by the way, comes after
the S&M ball is removed from her mouth.

The Notorious Bettie Page isn’t exactly
a film of substance. The Nashville-born model’s relationships, from
her implied-abusive father to her definitely abusive first husband,
Billy Neal (37-year-old Norman Reedus, fooling no one as a pomaded
youngster), are summed up in no more than a few scenes. Harron and
Turner do frame the story with the 1995 trial of siblings Irving and
Paula Klaw (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor), the money-grubbing
fetish-porn producers responsible for turning Page from a
fun-in-the-sun nude poser to a corseted, high-heeled
dominatrix/submissive in both photos and short movies. (The Klaws
were charged not only for distributing obscenity via U.S. mail, but
also contributing to a boy’s death because he seemed to have emulated
activities portrayed in their works—and their “crimes” are
pronounced more dangerous to the country than Communism.)

But mostly, the movie is Bettie,
Bettie, Bettie—and Mol, affecting an aw-shucks Southern accent, is
surprisingly up to the task. With a black, banged wig, altered
eyebrows, and an impressive body, Mol should placate fanboys who
cried that someone with more edge—Angelina Jolie, say, or Rose
McGowan—should have gotten the part. There’s no question that Mol
seems an out-of-nowhere choice, but the casting ended up being just
right: Bearing not only a physical resemblance to Page, Mol also has
the cutey-pie demeanor that allowed  her to easily re-create the
model’s frequently cheery and even goofy smiles. It’s the combination
of sunniness and sin that had the world drooling over Page; in the
film, even her “strict” S&M expressions smack of
playfulness—and it’s this attitude of dress-up fun that allegedly
kept Page from thinking there was anything objectionable about it.

Harron and Turner briefly portray this
as unsettling, such as when her boyfriend, Marvin (Jonathan
Woodward), is appalled when he finally sees her fetishistic photos
and pronounces them “disgusting.” But the script overall is
lighthearted (filled with bouncy jazz and 50s pop) and often funny (a
panting  autograph seeker asks if she’s sickened by fans—and
therefore wants to punish him). The filmmakers don’t bother delving
into the whys of Page’s choices, but simply follow her from pretty
schoolgirl to foxy pinup to lovely born-again Christian (a
contemplative walk along a shore cues the latter). What the movie
lacks in depth, however, it makes up for with style: Though shot
mostly in black and white, including grainy images of old New York,
splashes of color are used during Page’s trips to Florida, for
example, or in a nice montage of bright magazine covers with Page
actively posing on them. At 91 minutes, The Notorious Bettie Page is
as breezy as its subject’s smiles—but if it makes an audience
happy, who’s to say it’s wrong?

Nicole Holofcener’s Friends With Money,
however, doesn’t ignore the unpleasant underbelly of  humanity. The
writer-director, who also made 1996’s Walking and Talking and 2001’s
Lovely & Amazing, continues to toy with dysfunction here,
portraying three wealthy married couples and their single, poor
friend. Holofcener’s messages are realistically contradictory: If
money doesn’t buy happiness, living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t,
either. And dating may be hell, but as for long-term companionship,
well, there’s a reason the divorce rate is so high.

Friends With Money kicks off with
Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), a former teacher who’s now a maid because
she doesn’t know what else to do. She’s not above shuffling through
clients drawers—or even using a stranger’s vibrator—and she
carries a torch for a now-married ex, constantly calling his house
and hanging up like a high-schooler. Olivia is also, according to her
friends, a pothead, and she never bothers to work out. But when it
comes to setting her up, as her meddling friend Franny (Joan Cusack)
tries to do—Olivia is soooo great!

Perhaps Franny realizes that even if
Olivia isn’t a model citizen, she’s no more screwed up than the rest
of them. The friends are first shown together at a dinner, where
couples Christine and David (Catherine Keener and Jason Isaacs) and
Jane and Aaron (Frances McDormand and Simon McBurney) bicker among
themselves; Franny, wife of Matt (Greg Germann), announces that
they’re donating $2 million to her daughter’s school; and the
immediately disgusted Jane suggested that Franny donate some dough to
Olivia, who’s naturally mortified. When Aaron leaves the table after
mentioning that there’s a designer sample sale the next day,
Christine says, “He’s so gay.”

The film follows the friends as they
gossip about each other and deal with their issues at home. Olivia,
actually, is the most sympathetic one, as she has little choice but
to struggle with her moroseness inwardly while, as Aniston adroitly
shows, alternating between self-flagellation and can’t-help-it-ness
regarding her humiliation over her work and sorry love life.
Christine and David are screenwriting partners who clash while
working and are passive-aggressive toward each other the rest of the
time. McDormand is given the showiest role as the constantly furious
Jane, a typical road-rager and service complainer whose behavior goes
from funny to disturbingly out of control. Effeminate Aaron,
meanwhile, not only has his inner circle questioning his sexuality,
he gets hit on by guys as well.

As in her previous movies, Holofcener
proves to be an ace at dialogue and a most attentive observer of
human behavior, relationships in particular. No one’s problems are
overwhelming here, but instead small, ever-mounting conflicts that
can sneakily add up to big-time unhappiness. Though Holofcener
includes three couples in this mix, the focus is on the women, and
the superb actresses naturally portray the humor and heartbreak of
each of their characters. Nothing’s tidy in the film’s last chapters:
It’s suggested that some issues are going to be resolved happily,
some will end in sorrow, some will remain the same. And at a mere 88
minutes, Friends With Money also comes to an abrupt conclusion—but
in a film about everyday trials, this open-endedness turns out to be
its most realistic aspect. 

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Horace P. McTitties. The name is no
“Shirley,” and Scary Movie 4 is no Airplane! But damn if doesn’t
come close. Director David Zucker and longtime collaborator Jim
Abrahams, who co-wrote SM4  with SC3 scripter Craig Mazin, have
accomplished the seemingly impossible: not only making the fourth
installment of a series also the best, but resurrecting a genre that
the recent Date Movie appeared to put a final nail in.

The main story
is a pretty smooth amalgam of The Ring, The Grudge, War of the
Worlds, and Saw, with series regular Anna Faris returning as the
Julie Hagerty-ish Cindy Campbell. Cindy is now an in-home hospice
worker, caring for a nearly comatose old lady in a house that’s
plagued by floating black spiderwebs and a ghost-faced Asian boy who
tells Cindy “Your Japanese” –consisting mostly of ‘herro,’
‘Buddha,’ and ’shitaki’–”offends my ears!” Luckily her neighbor
is Tom Ryan (the perfectly vacant-eyed Craig
Bierko), who falls in love with and helps protect Cindy when Earth is
attacked by a “triPod.” (Which is the worst playlist–”Awesome
80s” or “Destroy Humanity?” Discuss.) Naturally, there are
plenty of scenes of characters getting whipped around or smacked in
the face (most entertainingly the perpetually abused Dakota Fanning
stand-in Conchita Campbell), and the filmmakers disappointingly
include the apparently requisite toilet scene (though it is rather
funny when the screeching-halt of activity when the aliens first
attack includes a dude, pants around ankles, crying, “My
bowels…stopped moving!”).

There are, however, subtler jabs as
well, including an allusion to Shaquille O’Neill’s famed suckage at
free throws. And Bush bashers will love Leslie Nielsen’s scenes as
President Harris, one of which contains perhaps the only existing
non-stomach-turning 9/11 joke: Getting news of the triPod attack
during his visit to a classroom, Harris whispers, “That will have
to wait—right now I need to find out what happens to this duck!”
Both physically and verbally, there’s a lot of ace  Airplane!-esque
material here, and the jokes come at you with the speed of Tom
Cruise’s nose-diving reputation. The most egregious miss in SC4 is
its flat takeoff of  M. Night Shyamalan’s snoozer of a thriller, The
Village—proving that Zucker and Abrahams may be comic geniuses, but
they’re no miracle workers.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

You’d have to be a heartless bastard to
not get sucked into a story of a kid being pried away from his loving
foster parents, the only family he’s even known. And worse: being
handed over to a lipstick-smeared, Courtney Love-wreck of a woman,
who’s waving a stuffed bunny furiously in front of her son’s face
just before he’s loaded into the Social Services van, off to his new
home.

This is the powerful first scene of
writer-director Asia Argento’s The Heart Is Deceitful Above All
Things, co-adapted by first-timer Alessandro Magania from a
collection of “loosely autobiographical” short stories from one
then-21-year-old J.T. LeRoy. Turns out, though, that LeRoy “loosely”
existed, allegedly not merely the pen name for 40-year-old author
Laura Albert, but also a wig-and-sunglasses-disguised trannie who
made appearances and granted interviews after the writings of his
childhood traumas became sensations. It’s now known that this public
figure was played by the half-sister of Albert’s husband. As
for his/her three books, well, call them memoirs.

Argento, daughter of Italian horror
master Dario, keeps the grimy narrative compelling for a while. The
director also plays Sarah, the monumental mess who got pregnant as a
teenager and was forced to give Jeremiah (played by at various ages
by Jimmy Bennett, Cole Sprouse, and Dylan Sprouse) up for adoption by
her evangelical parents. The film begins seven years later, when –
God knows how – Sarah regains custody of her son. She brings
Jeremiah to a sparsely furnished apartment in the projects, tells him
that his foster parents never loved him, and later, when he runs
away, says that he’ll either be shot or crucified if he tries it
again. And then she shares her drugs with him.

The Heart Is Deceitful is heartbreaking
as the platinum-haired Sarah proceeds to neglect Jeremiah, leaving
him in a car while she gets drunk with a boyfriend-du-jour, making
him eat out of trash cans, and even abandoning him for a couple of
days as she and her new, presumably recently met husband, Emerson
(Jeremy Renner), go off to Atlantic City for a honeymoon. Left alone
with only potato chips and some slices of American cheese-food,
Jeremiah wanders around the guy’s apartment – Sarah left hers,
trash bags in tow, shortly after getting custody – in his
tightie-whities, bored and digging through Emerson’s stuff until he
begins flat-out destroying the place. Accompanied all the while by an
atonal, increasingly menacing Sonic Youth instrumental, Jeremiah
takes to drawing giant stick figures on the walls. When Emerson comes
back – alone – Jeremiah stands by with a belt, waiting to be
beaten. Emerson is too distraught at being hoodwinked by Sarah to
punish him, but what he does later that night is much worse.

It’s around this point – if not, for
the more easily disturbed, sooner – that the movie stops being a
raw but sympathetic portrait of a boy’s traumatic upbringing and
becomes simply excremental. There’s no hope for redemption here: The
cycle of Jeremiah’s physical abuse, molestation, and drugging and
drinking just keeps repeating. A photo montage of Sarah’s multiple
sex partners show how many  daddies Jeremiah ends up having, as his
mom goes from stripper to hooker to complete waste case. Even when
Jeremiah – who ends up in a hospital after an episode of abuse,
looking as haggard as a longtime junkie – is “saved” by his
grandmother (Ornella Muti), the stately household she brings him to
is just as bad as the lifestyle he left, run by his tyrannical zealot
of a grandfather (Peter Fonda) who corporally punishes in the name of
the Lord.

There are few redeemable aspects of
Argento’s film. Its performances are fine if extreme – this
portrait of sewer-dwelling trash always feels real, and the three
boys who play Jeremiah make him pitiable and mesmerizing. Argento
also adeptly shrouds her movie with a ink-black punk-rock tone, even
including a few fantasy sequences, such as the blood-red birds that
Jeremiah imagines whenever his life gets especially unbearable. One
piece of advice Jeremiah gets is to “keep your eyes open and your
thoughts clear.” But unless you’re one for sadism, better to turn
that line on its head – prepare to occasionally hide behind your
hands, and maybe focus on that cuddly bunny from the opening scene.

Or perhaps a
refreshing dip in the sea. British director Gaby Dellal’s On a Clear
Day, one of those inspirational stories about working-class sods who
cure their doldrums by undertaking a quirky challenge — in this
case, swimming the English Channel — may be derivative as hell.
(Let’s play a game: I’ll give you The World’s Fastest Indian,
Calendar Girls, and The Full Monty. How many can you add to the
list?) But when you’re mired in muck – cinematic or otherwise –
or just would like to  enjoy a bit of pleasantness, On a Clear Day
fits the bill just fine.

First-time writer Alex Rose fills the
movie with just enough humor and heartbreak to keep its feel-goodness
from making you gag. The story focuses on Frank (Peter Mullan), a
55-year-old shipbuilder in Glasgow who has just been laid off. He’s
lost without the job, miserable about the uncertainty of his future,
and too proud to even fill out an application when he finally visits
an employment agency. Frank has also had a difficult relationship
with his grown son, Rob (Jamie Sives), since the drowning of Rob’s
younger brother when both were children. Therefore, Frank’s wife,
Joan (the wonderful Brenda Blethyn), takes care to buy gifts for
Rob’s twin boys and shower her son and grandchildren with attention.
Yet she’s a little down herself, unable to connect with her unhappy
husband and having little to do but putter around the house. Both
Frank and Joan finally find projects to occupy their time; Joan wants
to become a bus driver; Frank’s gonna cross the Channel via body
boat — and I don’t mean a kayak. Neither tell one other their plans.

There aren’t any surprises in On a
Clear Day, and in a few cases the filmmakers launch their messages
like bricks: In a library, for a example, Frank runs into the owner
of a grease joint (Benedict Wong), who asks him, “What are you
looking for?” The answer, of course, is, “I don’t know, but
whatever it is, it’s not in here.” And in addition to the distant
husband, worried wife, and estranged son, there are the requisite
ragtag pals: Impish Danny (appropriately played by The Lord of the
Rings’ Billy Boyd), the nearly phobic Norman (Ron Cook), and Eddie
(Sean McGinley), the group’s cynical voice of reason. On the plus
side, the characters interact like normal people instead of
constantly cracking wise, which makes the little jokes they do make
even more enjoyable. (When they’re told that the only local with an
available boat to help with the swim is named Mad Bob, Eddie dryly
comments, “He doesn’t sound normal.” Then Danny chimes in: “He
sounds fuckin’ nuts!”)

The performances, too, are worth going
along for the ride. Blethyn is the more comedic of the couple,
whether her Joan is amusingly whoopsing her way to an empty seat when
she’s late for a driver orientation or giving increasingly quizzical
looks as she opens the door to one after another of Frank’s friends,
there to plan the event she still doesn’t know about. But Mullan, a
rather reputable actor across the pond who was last seen here in
2004’s Criminal, is this movie’s rock. Mullan’s Frank doesn’t speak
much, but his face – quivering at the employment office, stoic when
he runs into his son, an ever-so-slight smile of awe when he watches
a crippled child joyfully swim without assistance – is a marvel of
expression. Resilience, obviously, ends up being the big message of
On a Clear Day. It’s fluffy and neat, and if anyone’s looking for
more cynical realism, well, they won’t find it in here.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Starla Grant, Slither’s purdy queen bee
in a podunk town, is having not-tonight-I-have-a-headache troubles
with her husband, Grant Grant. But when he can’t take no more and
fatefully runs off for a  potential tryst in the woods, Starla is
later eager to reconcile. “Marriage is a sacred bond, right baby?”
she purrs. To which Grant lovingly responds, “Arwahgahgrg!”

For-better-or-worse-vows get seriously tested in writer-director
James Gunn’s Slither, a gleeful throwback to cheesy B-horror movies
of yesteryear minus the cheesy B-horror special effects. But just
because Grant (Michael Rooker) doesn’t look like some dude in a cheap
monster suit – rather, slugs-from-space turn him into this
blob-shaped, Thing-faced creature, with  tentacles, lesions, and
teeth that go halfway up his head – doesn’t take away from the
movie’s just-right ridiculousness.

If you think Slither’s trailers
are gross, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  After a giant, slimy maggot
shoots a baby maggot into Grant’s body, it morphs him into a
ravenous, squid-ish kind of zombie whose hunger for “Meat!”
quickly surpasses a cow’s worth of choice grocery cuts to, well, cows
themselves – and dogs, and deer, and whatever other poor thing is
close by. And when Grant gets his tentacles into other humans, they
not only share his appetite, they share his brain: Once fed, their
only thought is making up with Starla (Elizabeth Banks), and their
destination is to goo themselves into Grant’s growing form. As the
local authorities, led by Starla-loving cop Bill  (Serenity’s deadpan
Nathan Fillion) and the town’s filter-free, easily angered mayor
(Gregg Henry), attempt to do…something, more guts, blood, and slime
are spilled than in Alexandre Aja’s squirmiest dreams.

But there’s
one element that makes Slither’s stomach-turning highlights – a
woman, for instance, growing like a Violet Beauregarde blueberry only
to burst into millions of mouth-seeking grubs – more palatable than
Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes gore: humor. Gunn, who wrote 2004’s
entertaining Dawn of the Dead, knows that sometimes jokes are as
important in horror as gags. So we get a parade of undead crying
“Starla!” like Marlon Brando. And a zombie mom’s growl to her
uninfected daughter that she better open up the car, because it’s
“Family Fun Day,” goddammit. Ultimately, Slither’s more Dawn of-
than Shaun of-, though, so you’re still going to have to hold tight
to your popcorn – and leave the gummi worms at the concession
stand.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

All right, filmmakers, we get it:
Dancing can change lives. They’re not talking about any old slapdash,
booze-fueled booty-shakin’, though, people. No, the kind of movement
that’s apparently better than therapy requires an instructor, good
posture, and some initially unwilling students – at least according
to the documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, the recent one-can-love-again
weepy Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, and this
week’s Take the Lead.

Released not even a year after Mad Hot,
first-time director Liz Friedlander’s Take the Lead is a
fictionalized version of that doc’s story. The children are now
high-schoolers and Pierre Dulaine, the co-founder of the American
Ballroom Theater Company that began New York City’s Dancing
Classrooms program in 1994, is now Antonio Banderas. Other than those
tweaks, scripter Dianne Houston, a Washington native, keeps the arc
of the two movies is pretty much the same: Take a handful of
inner-city kids from troubled households, add an optimistic and
persistent dance teacher, and soon the students get gooey over the
fox trot and, if Cupid strikes, even each other.

The fact that the program’s
pre-tweeners, at least as depicted in Mad Hot, were still mostly
existing in   cootie-county was probably no small influence in the
decision to shift Take the Lead into the world of raging hormones.
And attitudes: The handful of kids who get their old-fashioned groove
on here are the ones in an apparently longstanding detention at an
out-of-control public school. When Pierre sees Rock (Rob Brown),
vandalizing jaded principal Augustine James’ car the night before, he
goes to her to offer to help give a little attention to the at-risk
students who need it most. James, of course, laughs at him when he
says he wants to teach ballroom dancing, but she also doesn’t have
any teacher willing to proctor the detention class, so she lets
Pierre at ‘em – with a bet that he won’t be back the next day.

If you can’t guess exactly what’s
coming, you’ve obviously never seen a movie before. Despite its
predictability, though – well, Banderas is suave, the script is
sometimes funny, and the kids are good-lookin’. (Except, naturally,
for the token oddballs: In Hollywood, overweight teen + tiny partner
= big  laffs.) The film also handles some of its issues fairly well,
such as the tragedy that Lahrette (Yaya
DaCosta, a runner-up on America’s Next Top Model) and Rock are reminded of whenever they see each other in school, only
to go home to screwed-up parents and less-than-conducive studying
environments. [BTW, I have *no* idea why parts of sentences randomly go bold!]

And then there’s the dancing, which in
the end is all that really matters. Though it’s completely
unbelievable that the students become masters of, for example, the
tango in the undefined period in which Pierre instructs them,
choreographer JoAnn Fregalette Jansen (who also worked on Marilyn
Hotchkiss) and Friedlander (who unsurprisingly has worked as a
music-video director) make the kids’ movements thrilling, whether
they’re casually jamming in the modern style they know or showing off
their ballroom skills in competition. In the film’s one interesting
twist, the students creatively mash-up their favored hiphop (both
moves and music) with Pierre’s old-school torch songs, which results
in a rather steamy three-way tango in the final dance-off
before all the students take over the floor.  It’s also an
unrealistic allowance in a competition run and participated in by
monocled martini-drinkers, but if you’ve worked to suspend belief
this far, you might as well enjoy the party.

Originality also isn’t much of a
priority in Stoned, the directorial debut of longtime British film
producer Stephen Woolley. The movie is the Last Days version of Brian
Jones, the Rolling Stones founder who drowned in his swimming pool in
1969, at the age of 27. His death came just days after he was sacked
from the Stones and has been fodder for speculation ever since. Was
it murder? An accident? A suicide? A coroner deemed it “death by
misadventure.”

In 1993, though, someone stepped up to
take the blame, and this is the story that’s considered in Stoned.
Fans of the band expecting some portrayal of Jones’ musical life
before the tragedy should stay away: Not only do the naked breasts of
various women appear more frequently than Mick (Luke de Woolfson) and
Keith (Ben Whishaw), there’s not one original Stones song on the
soundtrack. Instead, Woolley gives us  Jefferson Airplane’s “White
Rabbit” during a montage of LSD-fueled bacchanalia. And “Ballad
of a Thin Man” — by Kula Shaker, not Bob Dylan — anchored by the
lyric “You know something is happening but you don’t know what it
is, do you, Mr. Jones?” when Jones’ firing, due to his increasing
drug use and declining work ethic, takes place. Subtle!

In fact, anyone who’s expecting a solid
telling of a talented man’s self-destruction should stay away, too.
We also know something’s happening but don’t know what it is; or,
rather, we don’t care. Scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade – the
duo responsible for 2003’s Johnny English (!) — draw Jones (Leo
Gregory, in a bad wig) as a personality-free caricature. He’s a dull
slop of a man in a dull slop of a story: Though Stoned primarily
takes place during the three months before Jones’ death, the film
occasionally jumps randomly in time from 1963, with flashbacks
containing ill-defined and not easily recognizable characters.
Sometimes they’re accompanied by Jones’ narration (“I was always my
own worst enemy!”) as he chats with his live-in
renovator/babysitter/potential murderer, Frank Thorogood (Paddy
Considine). More often, though, these snippets of the past are
presented as if they were self-explanatory. Their insertion would be
jarring, if only they had a smooth narrative to interrupt.

Stoned instead ends up being 102
minutes of Jones getting high. And drunk. And laid. Then the cycle
repeats, with the rock star’s cruelty to Thorogood – demanding he
redo a wall he just built, or promising Thorogood a romp with Jones’
girl if he dropped and gave them 50 — sometimes interrupting the
debauchery. The script hints that a broken relationship with Anita
Pallenberg (Monet Mazur) – who immediately became involved with
Richards – may have been a trigger to Jones’ downfall. But the
blonde Pallenberg here seems indistinguishable from Jones’
subsequent, more casual girlfriend, the blonde Anna Wohlin (Tuva
Novotny). Anna eventually leaves, too, telling Jones that  he “cahn’t
haahndle the drugs…you just fade away.” (And as if to
demonstrate, there too fades Novotny’s Swedish accent – weird,
considering she’s really Swedish.) Gregory is given little to do but
act loaded and pass out, which makes it difficult to care, at least
in this telling, how Jones did wind up at the bottom of that pool.
Death by misadventure, indeed.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com