Milwaukee, Minnesota
US, 2002. Dir. Allan Mindel
6/14 9:30p Pacific Place
6/15 1:45p Egyptian

Winter’s white blankets Wisconsin. A twenty-something idiot-savant (Troy Garrity) lives at home with his brow-beating mother, earning large sums as an ice-fishing champion. A grifter thinks she has him on the line, but first one, then another man claims to be the boy’s father in the wake of his mother’s death. Twists drift like snowbanks in this taut film noir.

I giggled with delight and tension throughout the film. It delivered everything I want from a film noir, despite its’ happy ending. The film’s knowledgeable play with the rules of the genre extends even to the final fade – to white, not black.

While Garrity’s Adam Sandler impression mystifies, I readily adapted to it. The film’s well-cast and acted, and the hypersaturated, slightly blown-out look of the film both uses apparent natural light in homage to 1970’s thrillers and presents an artificial, pulpy green and yellow palette, implying age.

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Garrity, the lead actor, is the son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. The best known actors in the film are Randy Quaid, portraying a wonderfully reptilian “traveling salesman” (sporting a rust turtleneck, a splotchy bottle tan, and a wide-lapeled reddish-tan belted car-coat) and Bruce Dern, as an unkempt older copy shop owner.

I loved the production design of the film.

I make reference to Garrity’s Adam Sandler impersonation. He plays the ice-angler, literally, as if Adam Sandler were doing an impression of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (Jim Flanagan take note). It’s weird, and what mystifies about it is why the actor would chose to adopt such a derivative seeming mode for the performance. I can’t imagine that it wasn’t considered and then accepted as an aspect of the film that would be discussed upon release. Perhaps the filmmakers simply decided it wouldn’t detract from the rest of the film.

If that’s the case, it was a good call from my perspective. While the film doesn’t top Red Rock West for contemporary noir, it’s close, and this is something of an accomplishment when one considers the extent to which Red Rock relied on action sequences to get the adrenaline pumping – Milwaukee, Minnesota eschews action nearly entirely, relying on plot and dialog to work one up into that pleasurable tizzy.

(I find it interesting to note that both this film and – just maybe – Gordon’s King of the Ants employ brain dysfunction as a character element. Memento sure had an impact in funding choices, looks like.)

King Of The Ants
US, 2003. Dir. Stuart Gordon (WORLD PREMIERE)
6/13 9:30p Egyptian
6/15 11:30a Cinerama

Sean Crawley (Chris McKenna) is a likeable, callow fool drawn into a murder-for-hire scheme. When he attempts to collect his blood money, he’s held captive and tortured in a graphic second act, into which hallucinations and fantasies are intercut. Escaping, he seeks out his murder victim’s wife as his lover, fulfilling one of his fantasies. When she discovers who Crawley is, he accidentally kills her. He then seeks out the thugs he originally killed for and systematically kills them in a climactic confrontation.

This film is better than my summary implies. Unfortunately, I found it less intelligent than it wanted to be. You’re supposed to like Crawley; I thought he was an idiot. The closing scene’s reliance on the vengeance-bound heroism of the self-made man was not appealing to me, not a big Charles Bronson fan. Despite this, there’s serious filmmaking here, delineating an amoral, misanthropic existentialism with an unflinching eye.

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(originally posted June 10 on the Tablet SIFF Board)

I felt obligated to see and review this film after having seen Gordon’s fascinating, entertaining interview on the Onion A.V. Club web site. Gordon is the director of Re-Animator and other cult fare, as well as Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.

I went with a bit of trepidation, as I am not at all a gorehound or generically interested in horror or slasher flicks.

King of the Ants was adapted from the novel of the same name by Charlie Higson, a British TV comedy writer. Originally published in 1992, the few online encomiums for it I saw were uniformly celebratory; one suspects it belongs to the New British Novelists grouping around Trainspotting, but I found no direct link between them.

At any rate, the thrust of the narrative is similar: what happens if you take a poorly educated, callow young man and instead of thrusting him into the military, a job or family life, hook him up with thugs and torture him for several days? Higson’s answer: he grows an antisocial philosophical system. Fair enough. That’s the serious material the film grows from as well.

My disinterest in and discomfort with screen violence meant that I was was not entertained by the film. Again, that would appear to be a part of the film’s intent. So does the film succeed?

I don’t think it does. It’s brutal and in the end celebrates Crawley as a kind of Randian architect of house demolition. I personally have a bone to pick with Randian existentialism – it’s philosophy for adolescent idiots that seek isolation to confirm their egocentric fantasies of revenge and power – and this certainly colors my view of the film. What I’m uncertain of is whether the film intends to celebrate this worldview. The closing shot – Crawley strides purposefully toward the camera as the house explodes behind him – is such a cliche of the action film that it reads as both celebration and – just maybe – ironic commentary. If it’s supposed to be ironic, however, it’s overly dry and will not be noted as such by the great majority of viewers.

Westender
US, 2003, Dir. Brock Morse
6/13 – 9:30p Broadway
6/15 – 6:30p Broadway

Asbrey of Westender (Blake Stadel) is a medieval swordsman, trailing a crew of brigands in an attempt to reclaim his dead wife’s ring. Shot in verdant Oregon forests, the film’s first half is fairly pedestrian fantasy fare, dimwitted sidekick, flashing swords, rope-bound slave girls, and all. Stadel has an action-hero’s presence; however, a more judicious use of raging tantrums by the script might have been advisable.

The film veers off unexpectedly in the final 45 minutes to depict an arduous desert crossing by the troubled, angry warrior. The last section of the film is nearly wordless. The light and beauty of the landscape against which the character sheds his armor – literally and emotionally – were remarkable.

When at journey’s end, a climactic battle resolves the hero’s quests, the return to genre conventions is a letdown, reading as an appeal for consideration as a back-door pilot.

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(posted to the Tablet SIFF Board on June 10)

In writing for Cinescape, I became aware of the large numbers of downright kooky independent genre films being produced. I don’t mean so much films that are created with even the least possibility of being distributed in the conventional manner – I mean works whoch are created by obsessed individuals and their extended social networks.

For whatever reason, many of these films are genre works, probably because genre works thrive in the context of marginalized subcultures. People that don’t believe they have access to the center of the culture seek smaller-scale arenas in which to define themselves and their work. From these isolated environments, great works can emerge, and any lover of punk rock or the science-fiction short story will immediately understand my interest in zero-budget indie genre filmmaking.

In the case of Westender, I was disappointed in my hopes for an avatar of this concept of film. It’s relentlessly commercial in production values and displays the common accidental misogyny of a certain style of pulp fantasy writing. This misogyny is most notable in the “mercy killing” of a dying woman, apparently a rape victim – probably intended to convey the idea that the warrior’s code includes mercy, it effectively reiterates the rape, which otherwise would have remained offscreen. Rather than feeling I’d learned something about the character, I felt I’d learned a bit about the age and judgement of the filmmakers.

Despite these flaws, the desert segment of the film was successful on its’ own terms. Inevitable comparisons to Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars aside, the film’s most direct debt in this segment is to A Man Called Horse.