Dir. Lone Scherfig
(2009, PG-13, 95 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

I want to be Jenny when I grow up. Set in 1960s England, An Education is built on the character, who is only sixteen, and on the performance of her portrayer, Carey Mulligan, who is twenty-four. As written by Nick Hornby (based on Lynn Barber’s memoir), directed by Lone Scherfig, and acted by Mulligan, Jenny is a singular creation: confident but shy, worldly but naive, cosmopolitan but sheltered, yet she is never a contradiction in terms. She is a blossoming young woman, smart, who recognizes the perils of stepping into an unfamiliar world of adults, considers them, and undertakes them anyway, because she must do something that matters, instead of be churned through school and university and deposited into marriage or one of the limited career options available to women in that day and age.

Jenny is an early feminist, a modern voice in a world that doesn’t know what to do with her yet, and she asks questions no one is yet prepared to answer. She wonders about a woman’s future, finding that her devoted English teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) and the severe headmistress (Emma Thompson) are living contradictions to whatever hope they try to give her about toeing the line. Her father, Jack (Alfred Molina), is concerned with her financial security, and quite sincerely does not understand what other pleasure there can be in life; he pushes her hard to achieve so she can go to Oxford, but if she can marry well, there’s no point of schooling, is there?

An alluring older man comes into her life: David (Peter Sarsgaard), who appreciates music, visits France, knows glamorous people, and goes to classical concerts and jazz clubs. He is an all-access pass to everything she wants in life. Is he a creep for his unwholesome interest in a sixteen-year-old girl? Yes, we suspect, and that fact is not lost even on his friends Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), who share knowing glances. But their romance is not played as a victimization; that would be unfair to Jenny, who understands, better than her easily smitten parents, what she’s getting into, but abandons caution for the sake of love and discovery. Consider a scene in Paris where she regards lovemaking; she is no victim and no fool.

But she is still a girl, and she learns a lot of things the hard way. Yet she also has a lot to teach. For her befuddled family, teachers, and peers, she is a harbinger of the free-spirit generation that will shape the later ‘60s and ‘70s — a bohemian revolution of girls and boys who will discover that their schools and universities aren’t the only education they need.

Dir. Kevin Macdonald
(2009, PG-13, 128 min)
★ ★ ½

I have an affection for State of Play that makes me want to bump it up that extra half star, but nagging reservations that won’t let me. It starts as an intelligent, unpretentious, straight-ahead thriller about the kind of hard-boiled investigative journalist who Gets Too Close To The Story, and its gradually unraveling conspiracy is exciting, but over time it starts to give in to laziness, and its plot undergoes one back flip too many before I’ve just lost interest.

Russell Crowe, soft in the middle and bedraggled with long hair, stars as Cal McAffrey, an old-fashioned investigative reporter for The Washington Globe who has been using the same computer for eighteen years and driving the same car for just as long. He’s unkempt; in his opening scene he’s driving to the scene of a homicide, munching on Cheetos and tossing the wrapper into his rat’s nest of a backseat. He has a friendly/adversarial relationship with the detective on the scene, Donald Bell (Harry Lennix), and we can guess pretty well their roles in this story: Cal is the veteran journalist resisting the changing times, and Donald will complain that Cal is getting in the way of his case.

In much the same way, we can peg pretty much every character on screen, and that’s one of the film’s problems. There’s Rachel McAdams as Della Frye, who blogs for the newspaper but may as well be writing for Tiger Beat as far as Cal is concerned; she’s the young, ambitious, but lightweight cub who finally gets her hands dirty on real investigative work. There’s Helen Mirren as Cameron Lynne, the officious newspaper editor, who of course stands in Cal’s way at every turn and complains about deadlines and diminished circulation and beating other papers to the story even if it means crippling the story. And there’s Ben Affleck as crusading Congressman Stephen Collins; he has the most dimension of any character, but that just means he’s subject to the most plot twists.

The film is based on a six-hour British miniseries from 2003. I haven’t seen it. Perhaps in that amount of time these characters would have had room to grow beyond their respective archetypes, but compressed into a 128-minute feature, they stay mostly confined to their boxes.

Stephen was college roommates with Cal, which strikes me as odd because Crowe is eight years older than Affleck and looks it; Stephen must have skipped some grades. The congressman is married to Anne (Robin Wright Penn); there is an underdeveloped love triangle between them and Cal that stretches back to their college days and contributes nothing to the story; trimming it from the screenplay might have left room to expand some of those hurried investigative montages — knocking on doors, making phone calls, hitting dead ends — into actual scenes.

Stephen comes under scrutiny when his top aide, Sonia Baker, winds up dead; the details of the investigation are slick and paranoid and cool. Were they having an affair? Did she commit suicide? Did it have something to do with a committee investigation Stephen was spearheading? The story leads us to PointCorp, a private defense contractor that may have greater ambitions than just hiring out for foreign conflicts. A few fragments of investigations that seem unrelated at the outset (though of course we know they’re not) start to dovetail, and I liked the accumulation of evidence that suggests deeper and deeper and deeper corruption. But the details are many, and they come fast in a narrative that often feels overly truncated. It holds interest up until that last wonky twist, which I suppose is as plausible as all the other ones but feels like a twist for twist’s sake. Maybe it would feel less so if the characters felt like characters and not just extensions of the plot.

If there’s one thing Christians, Muslims, and orthodox Jews agree on, it’s that gays aren’t welcome. Of course, each group believes the other two are eternally rejected by God too, so what are you gonna do? … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

Dir. Sam Raimi
(2009, PG-13, 99 min)
★ ★ ★

What I like about pulp genre specialists like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez is how true they are to their roots. When they make B-movies, they do it with A-grade skill, but instead of holding themselves above their references with detached superiority, they embrace them fully and give in to all the giddy, gaudy, ridiculous pleasures that, I imagine, made them fall in love with the movies in the first place. In films such as Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Rodriguez’s Sin City, and the Grindhouse double feature they released together, they evoke for my generation an era of drive-thru and midnight movies that no longer exists.

Sam Raimi, by reputation, can be added to the list, though I am sad to say I have not seen the Evil Dead films that won him such a rabid cult following. I think, however, that Drag Me to Hell gives me some idea. I don’t think it’s as good as Kill Bill, Sin City, or the Grindhouse films, but it’s certainly giddy, gaudy, and ridiculous … I kinda liked it.

It’s ostensibly a horror movie, but it plays like a comedy. Raimi takes gruesome imagery past the point of terror to a place of abject silliness, in the hopes of achieving a sublime absurdity, and a lot of it works. It stars Alison Lohman, the actress from White Oleander and Matchstick Men who deserves to be a bigger star than she is, as a bank loan officer named Christine Brown, who spends a lot of time being knocked around, crawling through mud, and periodically losing chunks of her hair to angry gypsy spirits. There’s a bit with an anvil too, but see it for yourself.

You see, Christine is up for a promotion at work and wants to prove herself by playing hardball with an old woman about to lose her home; the bank will make money if it seizes the house. But this is the wrong old woman to mess with. She’s a wheezing old gypsy with a one good eye and an apparent mucus problem. Humiliated, she puts a curse on Christine: for three days, she will be tormented by a demonic creature called Lamia, and then she will be, as per the title, dragged to hell.

She has a loving but incredulous boyfriend, psychologist Clay Dalton (Justin Long), who pooh-poohs all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo but is less condescending than most such characters in the movies. There’s a wide-eyed psychic, Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), an exposition repository who makes dire proclamations about the curse. Adriana Barraza (Oscar nominee for Babel) has a fun, scenery-chewing cameo as a mystic who holds a seance.

I was entertained by Raimi’s audacity. He is so broadly, joyfully over-the-top that his film is old-fashioned in an endearing kind of way. Drag Me to Hell is an unpretentious, irony-free freak show that revels in the ingenuity of its creep-out effects (eyeballs! blood! staples!) so much that even though I wasn’t particularly scared by the film, I was happy to go along for the gonzo ride.

Dir. Steven Soderbergh
(2009, R, 77 min)
★ ★

To watch The Girlfriend Experience is to surrender to a malaise. Scenes drift from one to the next in director Steven Soderbergh’s loose, haphazard structure, and after watching with the commentary by Soderbergh and star Sasha Grey, I think of the late Gene Siskel’s standard for judging a film: Is it more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

The advent of DVD has made this criterion more than a witty abstraction. Commentary tracks are a lot like documentaries of the actors having lunch, except the actors — or writers, directors, cinematographers, etc. — are talking about the film and not ham sandwiches, unless of course they’re eating especially good ham sandwiches while recording the track. For this film, Soderbergh and Grey discuss their respective businesses: Soderbergh is the director of mainstream films — and sometimes experimental little indies like this one — and Grey is a performer in adult films. Both are articulate about their work, and Grey’s poise and intelligence suggest Soderbergh might have been better off directing a film about her.

Grey plays Chelsea, a self-employed New York City call girl who specializes in the titular routine, in which she not only has sex with her clients but enacts a scenario of familiar intimacy: dinner and a movie, discuss politics and the economy, sleep together, and then part ways until their next appointment. What is most interesting about her is that she has a boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), who not only knows what she does for a living but discusses it with her casually and tries to cheer her up when she has a bad day on the job. Something about Chris makes him willing to undertake such a complicated arrangement, and something about Chelsea — whose real name is Christine — makes her worth the effort. A film about this dynamic — their agreements, compromises, and conflicts — might have been fascinating, but in this story it’s an undernourished subplot.

We spend most of the time with Chelsea in the workplace, sitting in on her “dates.” The problem is that her clients are dull as dishwater. They talk about their jobs. They talk about family members hitting them up for money. They talk about ten-thousand-dollar bar tabs. They talk about the economy — a lot; the film takes place just before the 2008 presidential election, when the bottom fell out of the financial markets, but if that’s meant to provide any meaningful subtext it’s lost on me.

We don’t learn very much about these men, we don’t learn very much about Chelsea through them, and we don’t learn very much about the sex industry either, other than that it involves indulging the tedious stories of men with disposable income. The BBC and Showtime series Secret Diary of a Call Girl had a more compelling perspective on the trade. The commentary by Soderbergh and Grey yields insight into another kind of sex work. The film — not so much.

Making matters worse is the structure. The film was largely improvised and shot in chronological order, but the finished product suggests Soderbergh threw the scenes in the air and reassembled them in random order. What is gained by jumbling the narrative? The story is not made more impactful, and details are confused that needn’t be. Interspersed throughout are scenes of Chris trying to expand his business as a personal trainer and flying to Vegas; I don’t know why these scenes are in the film. I don’t know why a lot of the scenes are in the film. They float around for 77 minutes, absent a guiding purpose.

Away We Go is a touching, funny, and nearly perfect comedy about a young couple expecting their first child and trying to sort out their place in the world. Unfortunately, it’s interrupted at frequent intervals by annoying cartoon comedy routines detailing the lives of families in the US and Canada, whom the main characters encounter as tryouts to determine what kind of parents they want to be … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

Dir. Tom Gustafson
(2008, Not Rated, 92 min)
★ ★

It’s that old story: A young man sings, “Up and down and up and down, I will lead them up and down,” and then sprays juice from his magic flower that turns everyone gay.

Don’t worry, it’s Shakespeare … sort of.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to do with Were the World Mine. It starts as a very conventional gay coming-of-age drama populated mostly by stock characters: Tim (Tanner Cohen), a gay teen bullied at an all-boys school; Donna (Judy McClane), his disapproving mother who gradually learns acceptance; Frankie (Zelda Williams), his queer-friendly BFF; Coach Driskill (Christian Stolte), who would rather his players focus on rugby than on girly nonsense like Shakespeare; and of course Jonathon (Nathaniel David Becker), the possibly closeted jock on whom Tim hopelessly crushes. It’s all completely familiar, from the okay-to-be-gay affirmations to the generic bigotry of the students and townspeople. The story runs on autopilot. I longed for a spark of originality, but when the film goes off the deep end I kind of wished it were still going through the motions.

Tim, cast as Puck in the school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, discovers the recipe for “love-in-idleness,” a flower that produces an elixir to make people fall in love with whomever they look upon next. There’s a campy music video that plays like Baz Luhrmann-lite, and voila! You’ve got a magic flower. He uses it on Jonathon, but angry at his bigoted peers he sprays his love juice everywhere — okay, I’m done now — and creates a gay, free-love revolution in his small town.

From this point, the film stops working for me. The realism of the early scenes is replaced abruptly by total fantasy, with elements of screwball comedy mixed awkwardly with romantic melodrama — there is a montage of characters singing to themselves, “The course of true love never did run smooth”; a similar device was used to great effect in Magnolia and Donnie Darko, but here it just feels indulgent.

The whole film is indulgent. There’s little consistency or focus. The pieces don’t fit together. My thought: They should have dropped the up-front realism and made the whole thing a gay musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or else keep the realism and have the fantasy play out in his imagination as his method of coping with high school isolation. Either way, director and co-writer Tom Gustafson should have picked a path and stuck to it.

Co-writer/director Ramin Bahrani gets the plot out of the way in the first minute of Goodbye Solo. An elderly man, William (Red West), sits in the backseat of a taxicab in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He offers the young Senegalese driver, Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane), a thousand dollars to take him to Blowing Rock on October 20, where he will kill himself. Thus the story begins … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

Dir. Greg Mottola
(2009, R, 107 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

The director of Adventureland is Greg Mottola, who previously presided over Superbad, and thankfully he seems to have mellowed since that venture. The previous, Judd Apatow-produced film was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and this film Mottola wrote himself, inspired by his own experience working at a Long Island amusement park in his youth. It’s a warmer and more humane film. It doesn’t contain many belly laughs but isn’t aiming for them; it’s a low-key affair in muted, naturalistic tones. It surprises with its maturity.

Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale) stars as James Brennan, a recent college grad who takes romance so seriously that he tells people he got his heart broken after he’s dumped by a girl he’d been seeing for eleven days. When plans for a European vacation fall through, the under-qualified James — he majored in comparative literature and Renaissance studies — is forced to take a job at a local amusement park in Pittsburgh, where he meets Em Lewin, a girl more troubled than he thinks she is. Em is played by Kristen Stewart, most famous for Twilight but probably more notable for her strong work in The Cake Eaters and Into the Wild. She is so poised and natural on screen it’s hard to believe she’s only nineteen-years-old — seventeen when Adventureland was filmed. She’s on her way to becoming a major star.

There’s a love triangle of sorts with a cad named Connell, played by Ryan Reynolds. From the point of view of the park’s young employees, he’s a mysterious rock-god, a confident older man who oozes chick-magnet cool. He has a band! He played with Lou Reed (or so he claims)! Pull back from the insulated world of these star-struck kids and reality sets in; we realize he’s something much sadder: an emotionally stunted lech still working as an amusement park mechanic in his 30s and cheating on his wife with whichever teenage girls are naive enough — or damaged enough — to buy what he’s selling. Reynolds, usually cast as loveable goof-balls, acquits himself well as the smarmy Connell, capturing his low-rent suavity and revealing underneath the rudderless loser who would be nothing if he didn’t have these kids to impress. He’s having an affair with Em; that he romances her in his mother’s basement tells you all you need to know about him.

The film takes place in the 1980s and includes abundant period detail. I can’t judge the veracity of the specific details — I didn’t come of age until the ‘90s — but Mottola employs them with a sense of lived-in authenticity. The film feels like it’s of a time, and not just parodying the familiar conventions of an era. It makes us fondly remember times when music not only spoke to us but for us, which all of us have no matter which decade we grew up in. I’m twenty-five, only a few years older than the characters in this film, but still I thought of the good old days.

Dir. Tony Piccirillo
(2004, R, 96 min)
★ ½

Writer-director Tony Piccirillo’s The 24th Day, adapted from his play, uses a lot of words, but doesn’t have much to say. It’s a claustrophobic little chamber piece where the two main characters talk and talk and talk and talk, and it’s all so very Important; they say things like, “Is that the truth-truth, or is that your truth?” “The truth is confusing,” one of them explains. When he tapes the other’s mouth shut we wish he’d tape his own as well, and then we wouldn’t have to listen to either of them.

Tom (Scott Speedman) is a shy, shaggy-haired young man who brings home Dan (James Marsden) from a bar. There’s some flirting, some small talk, followed by some not-so-small talk. It’s clear to us long before it’s clear to Dan that Tom is a weird creep and Dan should head for the exit, which is locked from the outside anyway, but still. Tom attacks Dan, ties him to a chair, and reveals that he is HIV-positive. He believes Dan infected him during an encounter five years prior that Dan doesn’t remember. He will test Dan’s blood and depending on the results decide whether or not to kill him.

We see Tom discretely hand off the blood and later get the results. Question: Who is the woman accepting this sample, and doesn’t it seem strange to her that she’s being handed a blood sample like it’s a drug deal? Maybe she’s complicit in the kidnapping. Maybe she helped him board up the windows of his Manhattan apartment, which apparently no one ever noticed him doing, not even his landlord.

Never mind.

Tom and Dan talk. They struggle. They talk some more. They trade pop culture references that are too old for either of them: Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Starsky & Hutch. I suppose men in their late twenties or early thirties might be generally familiar with those shows, but for both of them to rattle off trivia with such authority — and under such circumstances — suggests that these are Piccirillo’s references and not his characters’, and that, maybe, short on material, he popped in episodes of 1970s camp classics for inspiration.

Blah, blah, blah, I wanted to be an archaeologist. Blah, blah, blah, I liked sports in college. Blah, blah, blah, human beings are too complex for sexual labels. Enough already! These two are so insipid it’s a wonder anyone has ever agreed to sleep with them. The dialogue mostly lacks the pompous, self-consciously florid language of playwrights who like nothing more than the sound of their own words, so that’s some relief; a few of these getting-to-know-you scenes might actually have been good in a film unburdened by the ridiculous tied-to-a-chair premise.

Throughout we get some haphazardly edited and incoherent flashbacks from Tom’s point of view that are intended to tease out his background. He eventually tells us the whole story, and it doesn’t change much for us. He’s still a self-important nut-job who had sex with a drunk stranger he picked up at a bar and was sober enough to remember five years later what they were wearing and whether they kissed each other behind the ear but apparently too stupid to make sure the inebriated jerk wore a condom.

I imagine Piccirillo endeavored to make a dark meditation on sexual safety and responsibility, but it’s really a shallow whine-a-thon about a couple of punks who should spend less time pontificating and more time contacting each and every person they’ve slept with. We learn that recently, after finding out he had contracted HIV, Tom stalked Dan and watched him bring another young man to his place, presumably for sex. How noble of Tom to kidnap Dan and take him to task for his sexual irresponsibility! Not noble enough, however, to step in and prevent this poor kid from being exposed to the virus. If Tom and Dan end up killing each other, it would be a happy ending because it would take them both out of the dating pool.

Want to make a truly scary film about sexual responsibility? Forget all the kidnapping melodrama. Show us an irresponsible jerk with HIV and follow him for 90 minutes as he is forced to inform all the men and/or women he recklessly endangered. The reactions of the exposed parties — shock, terror, anger — would do far more to promote sexual safety than this silly, bondage-happy psychodrama.

To see this material done correctly, rent Hard Candy, a similarly staged drama about a young girl who turns the tables on a presumed sexual predator. That was an even darker film, more finely written, more tautly directed. It played for keeps. The 24th Day just plays.