MovieBabe Blog

 

By Tricia Olszewski 

 

Mean Creek exists in a strange time and place where tweens don’t carry cell phones and don’t spend their Saturdays in soccer practice. In this largely adult-free universe—specifically, a small town in Oregon—adolescence is unscheduled and unsupervised, and the result is a throwback: a population of baby faces who can take care of themselves but still believe in blood oaths, their innocence just barely trumped by a maturity that comes when one’s hand isn’t constantly held. The kids may or may not be all right, but they can figure it out for themselves.

And in writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes’ debut, that’s just what they do. Mean Creek doesn’t evoke nostalgia merely because of its unwired world or lazy-summer pacing. Its plot, about a handful of teens who set out to play a prank on the school bully, has elements of the iconic coming-of-age movies of the ’80s—The Outsiders, Stand by Me, and, most prominently, River’s Edge. You’ll likely know where the story is going shortly after it starts, but Estes loads his twist on the junior morality tale with enough atmosphere and realism to keep its telling mesmerizing.

The trouble begins when Sam (Rory Culkin), a meek slip of a boy, gets his lights punched out by chubby hothead George (Josh Peck) after he messes with George’s prized camcorder. Sam’s older brother, Rocky (Trevor Morgan, though with his apple-cheeked face and overgrown hair, his name might as well be Corey), wants revenge, and he hatches a plan in which he and friends Marty (Scott Mechlowicz) and Clyde (Ryan Kelley) will invite George on a canoeing excursion under the ruse of celebrating Sam’s birthday. Once safely out on the water, a game of Truth or Dare will coerce George to strip and jump in the river, at which point the gang will take off, leaving the big bad bully to find his way home naked and humiliated.

Leave it to a girl to mess things up: Also tagging along is Sam’s crush, the flaxen-haired Millie (Carly Schroeder), who’s by far the most compassionate and level-headed of the group. She hasn’t been told about the plan but is suspicious from the time George gets into Marty’s car, present in hand and smile on his face. When George proves to be nothing more than a friendly, if slightly weird, kid who’s clearly grateful for the invitation, Millie convinces Sam and Rocky to call off the prank. The combination of hot sun, cold beer, and a little weed eventually brings out everyone’s uglier side, however. It’s no surprise when, anchored in the middle of serene water—captured in all its sun-dappled glory by Israeli cinematographer Sharone Meir—the group members go all Lord of the Flies on each other.

Though the tension on the canoe reaches Das Boot levels, these are kids whom you don’t mind spending time with, even at their most misguided. Culkin is the most famous face, but he’s grown out of the family cuteness and portrays Sam as a thoughtful type who’s cool enough to hang out with the older guys but betrays a childlike uneasiness when things start to get rebellious. The rest of the characters, thanks to both Estes’ superb ear for teen dialogue and the cast’s anonymity, are equally natural Lost Boys, though Peck and Mechlowicz are standouts in roles that test your sympathy with alternating episodes of charm and jackassery.

By the end, the kids are traumatized, humbled, and hurried that much more into adulthood as they deal with a situation that was unimaginable when they pushed past their screen doors. Mean Creek isn’t so much about preaching what’s right or wrong as examining the dynamics of a group trying to determine which is which—a familiar scenario, to be sure, but one Estes makes worth retelling.

 

 

The main character in Danny Deckchair is all grown up, but it’s pretty clear he never suffered any Mean Creek–style trauma in his youth. Indeed, with his gangly limbs and unruly hair, he seems more of a senior Napoleon Dynamite, the kind of harmless oddball who won’t—or can’t—hide the fact that he’s a little strange.

Danny (Rhys Ifans) is misunderstood in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. At his job as a cement-truck driver, he faces questions such as “Is your head screwed on right?” and has to explain why he’s planning on flying somewhere just to go camping. At home, his twitty, social-climbing girlfriend, Trudy (Justine Clarke), is fed up with Danny’s lack of ambition and boredom-inspired projects, confiding to a friend, “Every night I come home, he’s doing something weird.” Trudy, a real-estate agent partial to fake, head-tossing bursts of laughter, is much more interested in wooing new client Sandy Upman (Rhys Muldoon), a popular broadcast journalist, than accompanying Danny on his stupid camping trip.

Trudy lies about not being able to go, and Danny not only finds out, but also catches her in a convertible with Sandy. At a barbecue the couple hosts shortly after, Danny thinks up a new escapist project: tying a flotilla of helium-filled balloons to a deck chair to see if he can get airborne. He does, without the shears he planned on taking to help make a gradual descent, and is soon caught up in a storm that sweeps him into nearby Clarence, where fireworks knock him down into the back yard of Glenda (Lord of the Rings’ Miranda Otto).

The debut feature effort of writer-director Jeff Balsmeyer, Danny Deckchair is pure confection, a life-affirming story about choosing your happiness and appreciating the little things in life. While Trudy uses the opportunity of Danny’s disappearance to become a 15-minute celebrity, small-town parking cop Glenda takes Danny in without question, soon becoming the subject of fast-moving gossip that she’s “got a bloke.” Danny so enjoys being a big fish, spied on by locals who are fascinated by his otherness, that he decides to craft a new life for himself.

Balsmeyer’s trifle is predictable and, touches of magic realism aside, at times rather difficult to believe. (How is it, for example, that the media frenzy accompanying Danny’s balloon-borne feat never included a picture of him, leaving the telly-glued residents of Clarence unaware of his identity?) But the film’s charm is difficult to resist, from the bucolic scenery of Glenda’s hillside home to the camera-courting glow coming off of Ifans and a fresh-scrubbed Otto as their characters demurely fall in love. Once Danny gets up in the air, waving to people at a sky-high restaurant even as he has no clue where he’s going, it’s clear that Danny isn’t as odd as he is, well, simply nice. The story of his blossoming in a town full of similarly genuine and friendly people may not have much bite, but sometimes it’s nice just to float away.

 

 

By Tricia Olszewski 

 

Surely there’s a special place in hell reserved for Brittany Murphy and her cheerleader-on-crack approach to comedy. While proving herself to be more than adept at playing crazy (Girl, Interrupted), slutty (8 Mile), or wonderfully silent (Don’t Say a Word), Murphy has also clearly demonstrated that she and screwball just don’t mix (Just Married, Uptown Girls). And her latest, Little Black Book, has screwball written all over it.

It’s something of a surprise, then, to find that not only is Murphy relatively subdued in her role as Stacy, an operatically paranoid girlfriend, but that the movie—though far from good—has a dark undercurrent to somewhat counter all the wackiness. Sure, nearly all the characters, played by respectable types such as Holly Hunter and Kathy Bates, turn out to be truly despicable specimens, but at least they’re not Ashton Kutcher.

Co-written by Sleepover scripter Elisa Bell and newbie Melissa Carter, Little Black Book suggests that PDAs offer the 21st century’s version of a swingin’ bachelor’s, duh, little black book. To justify Stacy’s unethical behavior of using her boyfriend’s Palm Pilot to check out his old girlfriends while he’s out of town, Bell and Carter present a scenario in which she just had to do it: Stacy, in voice-over, insists that she was once happy and secure in her relationship with Derek (an underused Ron Livingston). They were “in sync, inseparable, and in love.” But if love means never forgetting to mention that you used to sleep with a supermodel, Derek didn’t get the e-mail.

When Stacy gets a job as an assistant producer on Kippie Kann Do, a talk show that features segments such as “Grandma’s a Hooker, So Handle It” and is inexplicably billed a reality show—oh, OK, it’s not just another Jerry Springer parody—she brings home a tape of a bulimia episode to study production technique. Derek lets slip that he used to date the show’s guest model, Lulu (Josie Maran), and when he won’t discuss the matter further, Stacy, in a mild and still-cute tizzy, takes the information to the office.

Stacy’s undoing is prompted by her sassy co-worker, Barb (Hunter), who convinces her that “omission is lying” and that, because Derek also hasn’t yet introduced Stacy to his parents, he must be hiding an evil past. A glance into his Palm reveals a string of old girlfriends; Barb and her co-conspirator, Ira (Kevin Sussman), practically force Stacy to invite these women for interviews under the ruse of wanting them on the show.

Little Black Book certainly sings to the choir of the monumentally insecure. And its caricature of trailer-trash yakfests is beyond tired, with Kathy Bates completely wasted as host Kippie Kann. But the movie does eventually veer into a satire about the viciousness of media types that brings a bit of unexpected depth to the my-boyfriend’s-cheating! plot. (Without revealing too much, let’s just say that our heroine has another undoing ahead of her.) Little Black Book’s most sympathetic character, Derek’s ex-girlfriend Joyce (Julianne Nicholson, briefly on Ally McBeal), also adds a little something-something: Her sweet and, yes, mature post-breakup friendship with Derek reflects a genuine love and, after Stacy proves her dopiness, is the film’s best argument for a set-’em-free relationship policy.

But, sigh, there are also dog-gas and gynecologist jokes and that embarrassing moment when Barb puts a vibrating Palm down her pants. And despite one or two incisive, funny lines—such as Ira’s call to Lulu that ends, “Excellent. We’ll do lunch—and then we’ll throw up!”—the script mostly offers howlers such as “I hate doubt!” and “In my search for truth, I became the lie.” In other words, this isn’t quite Bringing Up Baby. In fact, it isn’t quite Down With Love, either.

And then there’s Murphy. Subdued or not, she probably could have been reined in a little more. She gets to belt out Carly Simon as an act of catharsis and dance around in her underwear at a rather curious time, to a rather undanceable song. And her preference for outsized, never-changing expressions remains, even if her face here is more often frowny-sad than her usual stoned-happy. By the time she bug-eyes her way through all of Little Black Book’s 97 minutes, you’ll sympathize with her plea to Derek’s guilt-inducing dog: “Can you just not look at me like that, please? It’s making me uncomfortable.”

 

 

Touch of Pink isn’t a touch of anything—its gimmick is fully ridiculous, its plot is completely unbelievable, and its characters are totally irritating. Closeted gay Indian-Canadian Muslims might initially be thrilled to find out that they’re finally—finally!—being represented on the big screen, though when they see their ambassador here, they’ll likely beg to return to obscurity.

The Guru’s Jimi Mistry stars as Alim, an—say it again—Indian-Canadian Muslim currently living in London with his boyfriend, Giles (Kristen Holden-Reid). As the couple celebrate their anniversary, Alim’s mother, Nuru (Suleka Mathew), helps her shallow sister plan her own son’s lavish wedding back home. As Nuru mopes and cries over the apparently unattached Alim, she seems a genuinely heartsick mother. But when she decides to visit Alim, who she doesn’t know is gay, and tells her sister by announcing, “It’s my turn to win,” you get a hint of the sort of values that Touch of Pink bestows on its minority characters.

Nuru’s tears dry by the time she gets to London and proves to be an intolerant, domineering jackass. Her intention is to encourage Alim to marry soon and marry well, so she can brag and host a big expensive wedding, too. And charm ain’t her strategy: She criticizes Alim’s lovely condo because he doesn’t own a whole house, and when the white Giles apologizes for eating some of the breakfast she made for her son, saying he thought it was “for everybody,” she responds, “You people always do! Eggs, India, Africa, the Middle East...”

Imagine how Nuru would react if she learned that Giles is more than just a roommate! Ho-ho.

Alim protests to her bluster mildly, but mostly he just furrows his brow and takes it, telling more lies along the way to cover up his lifestyle. But neither Nuru’s bitchiness, nor Alim’s lack of spine, nor writer-director Ian Iqbal Rashid’s nearly wholesale theft of the plot of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet is the worst offense here: That honor would go to Kyle MacLachlan, who plays Alim’s imaginary friend. MacLachlan embodying Cary Grant watches movies with Alim, gives his “Little Samosa” bad advice, and frequently suggests that the two of them vacation in exotic places. Though MacLachlan’s impersonation is pretty good and occasionally funny, Alim’s dependence on a fake friend doesn’t exactly make our already cowardly hero more sympathetic.

Touch of Pink insists to the not-so-bitter end that it’s a feel-good comedy, so turnarounds are obviously in the offing. But just because the characters become less hateful doesn’t mean the movie does, too.

 

 

By Tricia Olszewski 

 

To Andrew Largeman, a 26-year-old New Jersey native who hasn’t been home in nine years, his mother’s death is less consequential than seeing that his old buddies still think nothing of smoking dope for breakfast and writing “BALLS” on someone’s face. Not that Large, as he’s called, is coming from such a high place himself: In his barely furnished apartment in Los Angeles, the struggling actor sleeps through his father’s phone calls and self-medicates from a cabinet full of prescription pills, then shows up late and barely reactive to his day job at a snooty Vietnamese restaurant. Large’s stupor follows him east for his mom’s funeral, though he leaves the pills behind, hoping for once to feel something other than numb.

Jersey pall, postgraduate angst, a death that spurs a new look on life—Garden State, written and directed by Scrubs actor Zach Braff, sounds as tired as its blank protagonist. But although Braff, who also stars, treads familiar territory in his filmmaking debut, Garden State is an exercise in restraint and honesty that manages to keep its coming-of-age story fresh.

For one, the melodrama of the drowning of Large’s paraplegic mother and the issues that led to his estrangement is kept in the background, coming to the fore only in an occasional line about why he’s home—or, more frequently, in the weary look on his face. The script instead focuses on the series of awkward reunions that Large (Braff) experiences while back home, as well as his new friendship with Sam (Natalie Portman), a goofy, Shins-loving epileptic he meets in a waiting room.

Braff’s ideas of keeping it real are somewhat related to those of another young Jersey auteur, Kevin Smith, yet Braff’s imperfect universe feels much more genuine. Garden State’s characters are sad and weird and lost, but are never movie-quirky or too damn clever to be believed. Conversations unfold naturally, full of the squirmy pauses and ditzy tangents of the unscripted. Sam, who’s similar to Portman’s chatty Beautiful Girls character but with the screws loosened, is an especially likable love interest whose flaws are as readily apparent as her charms.

Also compelling is Large’s high-school friend Mark, portrayed by a dull-eyed Peter Sarsgaard as a patron saint of blue-collar desolation and quite possibly the loneliest guy in the world. Now a gravedigger still living with his haggard screw-up of a mother (Jean Smart), Mark responds to Mom’s nags about self-improvement—in the form of ordering a set of get-rich-quick-in-real-estate tapes—with, “I’m OK with being unimpressive. I sleep better” and a deep hit from his morning bong.

Braff’s weaknesses are his penchant for overstylization—do we really need a slo-mo walk through a seedy hotel lobby?—and his decision to at first underplay Large to the point of catatonia, with the character’s waking persona seemingly no different from the zoned-out version seen in an opening nightmare sequence. But Large eventually crawls out from under as he interacts with people who may be damaged but are ultimately decent, helping him move from alienation (represented by Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York”) to an understanding of love and family and life’s melancholic bliss.

Sure, the film’s existentialist message—not so subtly summarized in the line “Good luck exploring the infinite abyss”—might be faulted as being oh-so-20-something, but no matter what your age, Garden State’s unadulterated warmth is difficult to resist. Even better, Braff knows that some revelations are best writ small: His hero’s almost imperceptible turning point comes when Large positively responds to a doctor’s query if he’s all right. “Yeah, you’re all right,” the doc says. “You’re alive.”

 

 

The Inheritance also tackles life’s giant questions on a heartbreakingly intimate scale. But whereas Garden State merely teases its melodramatic subtext, this drama by Danish filmmaker Per Fly ruins its graceful portrait of marriage and family with a blood-and-thunder final act that feels like a resolution to a different movie—a sloppy American one, perhaps.

Christoffer (Ulrich Thomsen) is running a successful restaurant in Stockholm and happily married to his lovely wife, Maria (Lisa Werlinder), a stage actress who has just been offered a yearlong contract. Their domestic bliss is interrupted when Christoffer’s father, the founder of a steel firm, hangs himself. Christoffer travels home to Copenhagen to bury him, but is pressured by his businesslike mother, Annelise (Ghita Nørby), to take over the struggling company in accordance with his dad’s wishes. Christoffer got out of the family business years ago because it was making him ill, but he dutifully discusses the option with Maria, who persuades him that the move would be foolish.

While announcing his father’s death to a hard-hat sea of 900 employees, however, Christoffer impulsively changes his mind, to the horror of both Maria and his brother-in-law, Ulrik (Lars Brygmann), who believed he was being groomed for the top spot.

Co-written by Fly and a trio of scripters, The Inheritance is a mostly tense and absorbing story of a man torn between his chosen life and family obligation. The second of Fly’s intended trilogy about different classes in Denmark, the movie also explores the cold machinations of corporate culture, and its characters are representations of the various temperaments that will either thrive or die in such an environment: Annelise is the calculating left-brainer who thinks that if the company is advised to lay off 100 workers, 200 heads should actually roll; Maria is all heart, believing that relationships, happiness, and compassion should take precedence before business; and Christoffer is the crisis of conscience in between, agreeing to pink-slip certain employees yet fighting to save others in an effort to at least partially reward loyalty.

Such a reward, though, isn’t in the cards for our hero. The clearest theme here is sacrifice, as it applies to both the give-and-take of relationships as well as the business world, and the tiny tragedies that result from everyday choices such as working late versus having dinner with your wife are achingly drawn. Depicted with both delicacy and power by actor and director alike, each tortured position gains the viewer’s empathy even as it causes further division within Christoffer’s family. Fly’s only faltering step is The Inheritance’s nearly Shakespearean end, which dispenses with sympathetic realism and brings on the Drama in a most unfortunate way.