In the Red: Paper Heart & Gomorrah

Paper Heart is twee, but not so twee as to be unwatchable. Cute, but no so cute as to be lovable and clever, but not nearly as clever as it think it is. The film plays around with reality by having the film be a faux documentary; intermingling actual interview sections with Charlene Yi (who was less cloying and obnoxious then I thought she'd be), staged and improvised sections where Yi is starting up a reluctant romance with Michael Cera and finally staged paper doll retellings of love stories. It works but never really coheres. If you think you might find this adorable you probably will. I can't fathom why they attempted to try to make this seem real, what was the point? Why hire someone else to play the director? There's a lot of needless artifice here. I will admit though to laughing pretty hard when Yi was interviewing a bunch of young girl who volunteered that they were in love with Chris Brown (in hindsight that may have been a bad idea).
Gamorrah is Matteo Garrone's gritty, noisy, messy and uncompromising gangster drama set in Italy. We've come a LONG way from the attempts as civility and honor found in the Godfather.
Now would-be street kids quote the DePalma Scarface at each other unaware tha they're caught up in the game that's likely to get them all killed and little to no chance of ever reaching that level of wealth and excess. The film does a very through job of showing many different levels and rites of passage for young and old gangsters. From Don's to wannabes the film gives a sense of Wire-like depth to its world in its short (for a gangster epic) run-time. Its easy to get lost in this very busy world but attentive reviewers will be rewarded with fairly well developed characters and even the casual viewer will be struck by the powerful set-pieces (like a young boy's bullet test or testing out heavy weapons on the beach). Recommended for fans of more street level crime amongst the ruins as seen in City of God and La Haine.

In the Red: A Morning of Exploitation

Netflix served up a double helping of exploitation related material and like last time really dug one, didn't dig the other.
The Haunted World of Superbeasto: I'd long anticipated Rob Zombie's return to original material. I enjoyed The House of 1,000 Corpses though deemed it a bit too frenetic and reverential to prior films for its own good. I LOVED The Devil's Rejects in which Zombie compellingly followed the exploits of a gritty band of marauding murderers and shockingly made us care about them. Rejects shows a director with remarkable stylistic control who manages to shock and awe with brutality. Then the remake gigs came. Bad enough he should remake indisputable classic Halloween but to then do a sequel after specifically promising not to? For shame. The Haunted World of El Superbeasto though, an animated film following the adventures of an egotistical luchadore and hi sexy eye-patch wearing sidekick in a world of monsters, how could I resist? Unfortunately the film did not meet my expectations. The film starts off with an homage to an animated uncle Carl Laemmle appearing before the audience to warn them the following film may be too scary (as in the original Frankenstein). Off to a good start but then what follows is a series of John K. inspired gags that would've been tossed off after the first draft in the adult swim writer's room.

Want gratuitous nudity? The film starts with porno auditions. Want gross? A wave of rats are evacuated from a man's ass. Want violence? How about rows of nazi zombies being mowed down? Yep, plenty of it. Unfortunately there are no sympathetic or even fleshed out characters for the viewer to invest in. Each character is paper thin and the good gags are spaced so far apart its difficult to get into the sound and fury that's signifying nothing. I can see the fifteen year old version of me enjoying this, but it's entirely disposable. Not even game voice work from Paul Giamatti (as needy Dr. Satan) and Brian Posehn (as a horny robot) manage to bring life to the proceedings.

Not Quite Hollywood: The Story of Oz-ploitation makes for a really fun evening guaranteed to get you to fire up the netflix q or hit up amazon to find the titles on display. The doc runs down the history of genre cinema in Australia in a brisky hour and forty minutes, but I would've been content to watch hours more of this stuff. Aussie luminaries like George Miller and Brian Trenchard-Smith join "fan" Quentin Tarantino and a band of colorful rogues in this enticing exploration of a tragically unheralded area of cinema. The film gives you a bit of historical context and the need to for Aussie filmmakers to break the powerful grip of censors and then shows off a variety of great, fun looking films in various sub-genres. Among the areas explored are sex comedies, horror, cars and assorted other forms of action. Viewers get a chance to scope out Razorback (Jaws with a wild boar), Stone (an ultimate Aussie biker anti-hero), Patrick (a terrifying looking comatose psychic killer), Roadgames (a sort Rear Window/Duel hybrid) and Dead End Drive-In (a post-apocalyptic crazy car mash-em-up with a drive-in prison camp). Viewers will get all sorts of new names to admire and track down. Check out the trailer below.

In the Red: We're off on the Road to...

In this new feature I'll be writing short (well, relatively short) capsule reviews of what I've been wtaching on netflix. Todays films have two things in the common. One, they're both 2009 releases and the other is that they're both road trip films. From the charming adventures of Bing and Bob to the hopeless ambling of Fonda and Hopper, the road trip has long been a staple of the American cinema. Of these two new films only one really offers some new wrinkles into the genre while the other feels as spent and old as the road it travels. Ugh, its hackiness has worn off on me. So without further ado my look at Harold Ramis' Year One and Sam Mendes' Away We Go.
For a number of years Judd Apatow has ruled the comedy roost with nearly unmatched success. While even Apatow is subject to the periodic box office bomb, the films are at least compelling and funny (I'm thinking Funny People and Walk Hard in particular), but Year One is Apatow's first real out and out dud. The fim, which follows the exploits of slacker hunter/gathers Michael Cera and Jack Black is disjointed and poorly conceived. Sequences come and go with no rhyme and reason which COULD be excused if any of them were even remotely funny or creative. They aren't. Black and Cera's shtick works well against each other but at this point it has such a feel of been there done that. The rest of the cast barely overcomes the feeling of "earning a paycheck", even David Cross. Only Oliver Platt hits the glorious excess needed in a broad farce like this as a high priest for whom the phrase hedonist does not begin to describe. Even the unrated Blu-ray I watched didn't really yield any content that shocked or disturbed me. Ramis is just placing the camera and shooting giving none of the punch or keen eye for great comic moments thats shown up in earlier films. If I never think of this film again I won't be surprised. Save yourself the money and watch History of the World Part I.
The other film I saw was Sam Mendes Away We Go and it may be my favorite Mendes film. Its certainly his breeziest. I think this can be in part attributed to the airy, though not entirely weightless, script by real life couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. The film follows a young couple played by Maya Rudolph (who is something of a revelation in the film with a strong anchoring performance) and John Krasinski. Rudolph's character is pregnant and the film is in a place where they discover there's no reason for them to stay put (as his parents, the reason they moved, are going to be absent for their birth). It's a film that very adroitly captures the feeling of wanderlust and uncertainty that a couple that has hit a certain level of socio-economic comfort can face. In the couples odyssesy they come across a variety of family unit types in the form of relatives, friends and colleagues. The script reveals each family to be more than the broad types a lesser film would try to pigeon-hole them into being. Each sequence provides a good pair for our young, fun couple to play off of and Eggers and Vendela's script deserves kudos for sketching so many rich characters in such a short amount of time. For a quirky, but not too quirky, character piece about the challenges of finding your place in the world its well worth the rental.