Reviews

Hollywood is not afraid of rebooting franchises, and this year's big reboot is A Nightmare on Elm Street with Jackie Earle Haley donning the knive-glove and striped sweater that made Robert Englund famous in the 1980s. But like most remakes, there's a lot lost in translation.

Director Samuel Bayer, whose background is in music videos, doesn't bring anything new to the table, but it's hard to tell with a script that plays bait-and-switch with its protagonist. It's not until Act Two that it's even apparent who the real protagonist is, with all the focus on Kris (Katie Cassidy). Screenwriters Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer may be following the basic structure of the original Wes Craven concept, but unlike most Craven stories, there isn't anything truly scary here. Sure, there are jump points, when you know you must be scared, but more often than not you're reacting because you know you're supposed to (often due to loud noises) versus being genuinely startled, let alone frightened.

Based on a true story, The Basketball Diaries (1995) chronicles the life-changing times of poet Jim Carroll's youth in the early 1960s. As a talented basketball player at a Manhattan Catholic school, Jim showed lots of promise for a professional career. However, his recreational activities with high-school buddies embroiled him in petty crime and hard drugs, including heroin. Now available on Blu-ray from Palm Pictures, The Basketball Diaries provides an interesting retrospective on Leonard DiCaprio's early acting career. After winning several awards for the 1993 critically acclaimed What's Eating Gilbert Grape, DiCaprio took on the intense dramatic role of Jim Carroll.

As much as Jim enjoys basketball and writing in his diary, he spends more time hanging out and causing trouble with his friends including Mickey (Mark Wahlberg), Pedro (James Madio), and Neutron (Patrick McGaw). His best friend Bobby (Michael Imperioli) fights a losing battle with leukemia, and Jim tries to bring some small pleasures to his dying friend. Don't be mistaken -- Jim's not a good boy gone bad, it's evident right away that he has no respect for authority and a penchant for drugs. His mother (Lorraine Bracco) can't understand what's wrong with her son, and after he spirals out of control she kicks him out of their home.

DiCaprio's portrayal of Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries is brutal and raw, often gut wrenching. As engrossing as a bad car accident, the film hooks viewers into watching as Jim sinks deeper and deeper into the seedy and frightening underworld of addiction. Mark Wahlberg delivers as the tough buddy who sticks with his friends until his drug-induced zealousness results in the death of a drug dealer. The late Bruno Kirby plays Jim's basketball coach who wants to get to know him better in a more intimate way. Although I'm not typically a fan of Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers), her small role as a dopehead who will do anything to score a fix is underrepresented. Ernie Hudson (Congo, Ghostbusters) as Reggie would also have been welcome with more screen time. Jim Carroll himself oddly appears in a cameo role true to his life of this era.

The movie that won Jeff Bridges a Best Actor Oscar, Crazy Heart, is now available on DVD and on Blu-ray. I saw the movie for the first time rather late in its theatrical run, discouraged by lukewarm reviews, and was very happily surprised. While the story may be very familiar, the characters and the very Texas music give it an extra kick. I wish the discs offered more special features, but the best "extra" of this film is probably the soundtrack, which you'll just have to buy separately.

Bridges's character, Bad Blake, could have stepped right out of Austin, although he lives in Houston and much of the movie is set in New Mexico (oh, those incentives ...). The aging singer-songwriter is endlessly touring to scrape together a living, and the alcohol he needs to get through the sleazy tours is taking his toll. While in New Mexico, he meets a lovely young journalist, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and like practically every other female journalist in film, she has no qualms about becoming personally involved with her interview subject. (Do you see Slackerwood reporters leaping into bed with Austin filmmakers? I think not. End of rant.) Jean has a little boy and a history of getting involved with exactly the wrong guy, but Bad Blake's buttermilk biscuits are irresistable. Well, we've all been there.

At the same time, Bad Blake is nursing a love-hate professional relationship with young musician Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), who sees the older musician as a mentor and inspiration, covers his songs, and even asks him to open for him on tour. But the movie takes pains not to make Tommy Sweet the bad guy of the movie, instead opting for something more complicated, realistic and interesting.

Adapted from the Vertigo comic by the same name, action flick The Losers is a tale of betrayal, deception and revenge. At the center of the plot is an elite black ops U.S. Special Forces team, which tackles search-and-destroy missions across the globe. Things get complicated when a mission into the Bolivian jungle becomes a double-cross, and the team is left stranded in the jungle, presumed dead. All this takes place in the opening credits, and the remaining 80-plus minutes of action, directed by Sylvain White, follow the team as they track down the enemy that betrayed them.

The central characters in The Losers are the Special Forces team members, including "Colonel" Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), tech guy Jensen (Chris Evans), tactical Roque (Idris Elba), driver Pooch (Columbus Short), and sharpshooter Cougar (Óscar Jaenada). The group must first focus their efforts on getting out of Bolivia and back into the U.S. to track down Max (Jason Patric), the ruthless rogue CIA agent who is intent on starting a high-tech global conflict.

Yet again, Hollywood thinks that it's cute to insult women and those who love romance by offering up films like The Back-up Plan, starring Jennifer Lopez (Gigli, Monster in Law) and Alex O'Loughlin (Moonlight, Oyster Farmer, Feed).

The opening credits warn the audience this is a two-dimensional fairy tale, with a vapid fashionsita walking around seeing everything turn into baby references. Then we get to meet Zoe (Lopez), who likes baby-doll dresses and nosebleed stilettos and while dressing like a model, just can't find The One. Zoe opts to go solo and have a baby on her own ... and then has an improbable "meet cute" in a cab with Stan (O'Loughlin), the guy of her dreams. You can imagine the rest.

The Back-up Plan feels like a sitcom, and it's not surprising; writer Kate Angelo was a producer on Will & Grace. Director Alan Poul (Swingtown, Six Feet Under) may have some decent TV credits, but none of the brightness in his previous projects found their way into The Back-up Plan.

Imagine waking up one day and realizing you were the child star of the worst movie ever made.  That realization inspired the making of the documentary appropriately titled Best Worst Movie. 

In 1990, an exceptionally bad sequel was made in Utah, and it was terrible on every possible level, a perfect storm of ineptness. Eighteen years later, Troll 2 had become a cult classic. Little did Michael Stephenson realize that he starred in one of the most absurdly beloved films of the twentieth century that epitomizes the cult classic phenomenon.  

Stephenson, who was only 12 when he starred in Troll 2, quickly learned that it's not so much his story as that of the rest of the cast and the fans. Focusing on George Hardy, an Alabama dentist who auditioned on a lark and is absolutely thrilled with being in the worst movie ever made, Best Worst Movie introduces the audience to the film and the often outlandish cast of characters involved in the making of the film. Hardy is certainly a character in real life, but he's just one of many. The rest of the cast of characters is almost as strange as their characters in the movie, as Stephenson discovers during reunion interviews. 

Austin-shot indie Artois the Goat, which premiered at SXSW 2009 (with a live goat at the Ritz and everything) has finally made it to DVD after a long and successful film-fest tour. It's a sweet romantic comedy/foodie film from Cliff Bogart and Kyle Bogart (we sure do love our brother filmmaking teams in this town) that deserves more attention than it's received so far.

Virgil (Mark Scheibmeir) is a lanky slacker who spends his days working in a lab that creates artificial flavorings, and his spare time with the woman he loves, Angie (Sydney Andrews), often enjoying foreign goat cheeses procured (perhaps not entirely legally) by Virgil's mysterious and paranoiac friend Yens (Stephen Taylor Fry). Angie is unfortunately transferred to Detroit, however, and it could be a year before Virgil's company can place him in the department where he wants to work. Angie can't understand why Virgil won't take a job in a different department, creating horrible-tasting cough drops, and instead stays in Austin and increasingly becomes obsessed in making the perfect goat cheese.

Part of Virgil's inspiration comes from a book Yens has loaned him, written by Eva Verrane (Sarah Holland), a French woman in the 1940s who became a leading expert on goat cheeses. Her voiceover narration often alternates with Virgil's story in a way that now reminds me of Julie & Julia ... although that movie had not yet been released when I first saw Artois the Goat.

I've been a fan of mumblecore films since the genre arose in the early 2000s. While they are works of fiction, these low-budget, talky, relationship-centric films are often uncannily realistic. The charm of mumblecore is that the characters are everyday people who encounter everyday situations; they could be our friends and family members, and their stories could be our stories.

The 2009 film Beeswax, the third feature from filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, is an exceptional example of the genre. Now available on DVD, Beeswax is the antitheses of mainstream filmmaking. A slow-paced, narrowly focused, mostly plotless examination of human relationships, it has nary a Hollywood-glamorous character, formulaic romance or action sequence. Beeswax focuses on the ordinary -- but it does so with such skillful attention to detail that the film is in many ways extraordinary.

Bear with me while I describe what passes for the plot of Beeswax. The film follows two twentysomething twin sisters, Jeannie and Lauren, played by real-life twins Tilly and Maggie Hatcher. Jeannie, a paraplegic since childhood who uses a wheelchair, is co-owner of an Austin vintage clothing store, while Lauren is between jobs and considering teaching English overseas. Tensions mount between Jeannie and her business partner, Amanda (Anne Dodge), as their management styles conflict and communication problems cause repeated clashes between the two. When Amanda hints that the conflict may give rise to a lawsuit, a panicked Jeannie enlists help from her ex-boyfriend, Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), a recent law-school graduate who is studying for the bar exam. In true mumblecore fashion, the two reluctantly meet to discuss the lawsuit but end up in bed together, as if to avoid dealing with the problem for at least one night.

Neil La Bute's remake of Death at a Funeral is a reminder of the absurdity in remaking a good, accessible and recent film. 

In 2007, one of my favorite films was Death at a Funeral, Frank Oz's very dry, very British comedy (yes, he's a Brit).  When I heard that there was going to be a U.S. remake, I balked. Why remake a perfectly satisfying film in the same language?  It's hard enough to stomach a remake of a good film, but understandable when it's a foreign-language film, because Hollywood clearly thinks American audiences can't handle the subtitles (and in fairness, there is still prejudice against fully subtitled films). 

But Oz's Death at a Funeral, while stylistically classic Brit-com with bouts of rapid-fire dialogue and sometimes subtle humor, is not culturally specific or period specific. So what did the U.S. version do? Rehash the original script, replace a few moments with what certain American comics seem to think of as funny and overfill it with pop-culture references. What in the original was fresh and tightly delivered feels like a read-through by the 2010 U.S. cast.

There are superhero movies and there are anti-hero movies and rarely do the two mix so well as in Matthew Vaughn's aptly named adaptation of Kick-Ass, the comic book series by Mark Millar, and the ultimate homage to hero movies.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is an ordinary high school student who just wants to get the girl, and oh yeah, fit in.  He even goes so far as to try to make friends with Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), son of a reputed crime boss. Dave's obsession with superheroes inadvertently turns him into a YouTube superstar as the vigilante "Kick-Ass." When Kick-Ass lets it go to his head, he ends up encountering other masked heroes and things get pear-shaped.