Choke: C+

Choke is not a Chuck Palahniuk movie. It’s based on one of his books; but that’s the closest the film ever comes to touching, in an audiovisual format, the scabrous sort of satire that Palahniuk pioneered years ago. And worse, even with expert brow-wriggling and –mugging by Sam Rockwell, the complexity and unremitting pain of the original’s prose has all but been steamrolled—rib-tickled into a frenetic comedy of the absurd.

Take a step back, though: let’s pretend then that you hadn’t read the cult classic that inspired first-time writer-director Clark Gregg’s project. Now, re-watch the film; let’s argue, for the sake of argument, that the source material—of knowledge of the novel’s premier devastation—taints the movie adapted from it. And…Go.

Anything? Really? Nothing? Oh.

Turns outs that Choke isn’t lightweight because of the book; it just so happens that previous information can highlight how dark it could have been. After all, when you’re dealing with the self-help-self-destruct story of sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) who runs a restaurant con in which he “chokes” on food in order to be saved (the savior, accordingly feeling connected to Victor, continues to send him money thereafter) and help pay his demented mother’s (Anjelica Huston, looking for all that she tries like the wrong woman in the wrong part) medical bills, well, you’ve got some pretty dark stuff. Dark and riotous—at least in the hands of a skilled, fleet humorist: someone who isn’t afraid to push a joke into tragedy, to stun laughter back down into your throat. Chuck Palahniuk was such a man. And more, he could find—and went looking for—the mania at the root of Victor’s very very very twisted life. He didn’t always succeed, but he created an indelible satiric vision in the process. Gregg has no such luck.

Blame, perhaps, his lack of experience. The veteran actor has only made one movie: this one. And before its production, it’s reported that he worked on the script for six years. Six—you think somewhere in that time he may have grown a little nervous, taken a step back and restructured the uncomfortable into the tamely insane? That said, don’t mistake me; Choke is insane, a bit, and it’ll make you giggle with some of its more finely-crafted sequences (the best part of the whole movie, and its one, ironically, that was almost wholly intact from the source material, is the fake-rape), but it has no weight, no dimension, no darkness or heft. It’s the equivalent of cotton candy comedy: a tastefully sour delight wrapped around a barely-there chewy center. Call it Chuck Palahniuk Lite.

Subliminal Tapes: Product Review

We’ve all been there—you’ve got a problem, a bad habit, say, or a nagging character flaw that you just can’t fix. It could be anything: you’re just the tiniest bit overweight; you’ve still got that weird spider phobia; you feel like your soul-mate is out there, but that you just aren’t doing everything you can to find that person—like you’re being held back. There is a solution. Refreshingly, helpfully, someone has come forward with a product that doesn’t just help…it helps you help you. At www.subliminal-tapes-self-improvement, there are a wide variety of options available, and each of them produces results.

“It’s not magic. It’s not bunk. It’s simply mind over matter,” goes the bold claim on the first page that greets you when you click on over. The statement is bold, but refreshing in its truth. In every subliminal tape, there comes packaged with it the power to change your life. And, after use, change it you will. This stuff delivers.

Shopping is no hassle—the website is cleanly and helpfully organized and arrayed—and your tastes are all catered to. Want custom support? You’ve got it? Feel like this stuff is just for you…but don’t have anything but an iPod? That’s what subliminal mp3s are for. Most importantly: if you ever get hesitant—worried this can’t be true, that you’re too special, too you, to have the product work any magic—have no fear; along with their catalog and order information, the website also has links to their testimonials, words from people who made a conscious choice to get help in helping themselves. And they’re better for it.

One last thing: there’s a guarantee. That’s right. Even after all the customer-friendly stuff they’ve got at your fingertips, there’s still a guarantee. So it’s no risk to try it. Go ahead—what’s to lose? At the very least, the subliminal CDs do nothing more than lull you to sleep. But I’m willing to bet that doesn’t happen… In fact, I’d guarantee it.

The Nines: B+

The Nines has, in reality, little to do with math—save for the omnipresence of its titular number. It is, however, framed by an elegant geometric structure: the narrative being told by three successive short films, each unspooling and spilling into each other as if, instead, they were three concentric circles. This is a movie masquerading as a "tiny" drama with exponentially grand ambitions; a metaphysic puzzle that tickles your heart and brain the bigger, more complex, and more numerous the pieces get. Rarely does meta-filmmaking like this get more authentically, or more hypnotically, engrossing.

Drawing from TMZ, his own life, Lost, and his own life some more, writer-director John August creates a bold and confident cocktail of adrenaline and mystery—a 99-minute (get it: 99 minutes…ooh, creepy) drama about three different men played by one man, stuck between six different women, played by just two. The man is Ryan Reynolds (y'know: Van Wilder? No? Well, ok, but he's talented. Really) and he plays, one after the other, an actor under house arrest, a hot-shot young writer-producer, and a stranded videogame designer. The women are Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis and who they play never really strays—though, once, McCarthy does place herself…and it's as nifty as it sounds—Davis is always a manipulator with an agenda perfectly hidden by an even-more-perfectly manicured persona, while McCarthy is always Reynolds muse or rescuer or voice of reason. Sitting on his shoulders, metaphorically, the latter is the angel, and the former is the devil with blonde bangs.

…Except that August is a far trickier auteur than he lets on. In each of the short films (starting with "The Prisoner," and then "Reality Television," and then finally "Knowing") the director toys and tricks his audience with fleet ingenuity—imbuing his otherwise middle-of-the-road dialogue with a tone of creeping horror and revelation. Objectively, though, not each of the three slices of his larger head-scratching pie is created equal. "The Prisoner" is alluring but scattered; full of wacked-out images that aren't nearly as entrancing as one originally perceives. "Reality Television," though, is a 30-minute little kick of behind-the-stages fun. In telling of how Gavin (that'd be Reynolds, with Tina Fey-glasses) struggles and manipulates in an attempt to get his show on the air—the big issue is his star: Melissa McCarthy, playing Melissa McCarthy—The Nines gets a much-needed jolt of droll incisiveness, while still ending with a kicker of an image that haunts you all the way down to the third act.

"Knowing" is ostensibly the pilot Gavin made in the second act (and it feels, cleverly, like prime-time television all the way down to its high-class color palette), about a man who loses his family. At this point in the overall scheme, though, the perspective is flipped. No one really is who they seem—least of all our hero. And that sort of instability suits the movie in general, especially when August finally gets his big reveal…and earns his every gasp of shock and surprise. Let me just say: it goes big. I mean big. Like, cosmically big. But, pleasurably, too, can I say it's not a stretch. And it works.

Nothing this intimate could be this good without a great cast; and in most sense, Reynolds and his women (with, on occasion, Elle Fanning as a mute little girl. Who. Knows. Too. Much) are. McCarthy flips through the channels of her brain—bubbly, vulnerable, sincere, funny—with charming dexterity. And Davis gives characteristic shades of gray to a femme fatale who, in the end, is always who she seemed. Reynolds, though, is the real treat. On the surface, he's a National Lampoon's frat boy matured into an A-list hunk, but he exploits his charm to find a gritty callow desperation beneath it. As the maestro floating above them all, John August coolly pulls and tugs on their puppet strings—making for a thrilling show. Ultimately, the pleasure in The Nines bubbles down to its small-scale jabs and quicksilver changes, the beauty of its craft, whether than the occasional opaqueness of its presentation. This is one puzzle that's devilishly accessible—an exercise in illusion that gives way, time after time, to more illusion until, finally, the real thing. And, truly, it is.

Burn After Reading: B-

Satire (n): “The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.”

What the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—have done in their latest film, Burn After Reading, isn’t quite satire; but it looks so much like the real thing the illusion almost sticks. Almost. Together the filmmaking duo skewer a wide variety of comedic tropes (from silly Princeton graduates, to alcoholic ex-spies, to silly gym workers sporting even sillier pompadour haircuts) and arrange the jabs and zingers in such a way as to approximate the shape of a blistering satire, but not the feel of one. Look above—see that definition of “satire” there? In telling the story of how Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, amiably rocking an even more amiable, buffoonish, and entertaining persona) discover the misplaced notes of a former CIA-agent (John Malkovich, entering ever scene as if from a far better film), the Coens cram a lot of “funny business” (irony, sarcasm) on screen, but they also surround the audience in such a thick layer of smug ridicule as to render irrelevant anything pointed therein useful to be said.

Points to the pair, though, for still being able to score the biggest talent in town; at this point, they’re turning into the neo-hip-Woody Allen: scoring high-class talent for projects not even deserving half that caliber. In Reading you’ve got the aforementioned McDormand, Pitt, and Malkovich, plus George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who play a couple of married, harried, suburbanites engaged in a love affair devoid of pretty much any affection)—appropriately, the cast mug and shoot-off their lines with all necessary zest. In fact, you wouldn’t be mistaken in, after having finished your viewing experience, longing for the Coens to have constructed a higher quality project around their actors. Because it isn’t the cast (uniformly game, from the biggest role to the smallest, ironically played by even big names, like J.K. Simmons) or, really, the concept; it’s the presentation.

United, for the second time, Ethan and Joel now co-write and co-direct. Famously, last year, this new synergy brought them—rightfully—heaps of praise for No Country for Old Men. But whereas there, the brothers seemed to have found a soul mate in Cormac McCarthy (like, one imagines, a pair of sharks find a well-preserved antique saw to sharpen their teeth on), here they create from their purest of whimsies. Accordingly, throughout the entire 95-minutes, Burn After Reading is presented on the exterior as a straight-laced thriller, full of foreboding African drums and the like. But we know better—those sly Coen kids! We’re in on the joke; oh what fun! Except…not really. Seemingly over-satisfied with just the merest intimation of cleverness in making a caper that doubles back on itself as a farce of the highest-level of incompetence, the filmmakers leave the audience stumbling around in an over-sanitized comedy of manners—sans identifiable characters or intoxicatingly silly situations. They start going, but never quite go far enough; towing the ledge, but never even letting one toe slip over.

Still, I laughed. Ok, let me be more specific: I giggled a lot. (Belly laughs are just not in the cards, folks.) Because beneath all the shallowness, once you can dig past the one-and-a-half dimensions of craft that are presented as three full ones, Burn After Reading can be a not-half-bad romp: full of intricate exchanges, structured engagingly, and—let’s just face it—filmed with the firmest of tongues-in-cheek. Maybe, then, the expectations are let down two-fold. Having seen what they can do with the bleakest of terrific cinematic dramas, as well as with the most finely-imagined of ingeniously witty murder-mysteries (Fargo, of course…speaking of, for anyone who wants to see Frances McDormand be really, really great in a Coen film, rent this), why then do we as an audience get this? Burn After Reading is a barrel of laughs that’s only half-full—a joke dipped in irony, wrapped-up in pretention, and then surrounded by air quotes.

Southland Tales: C

For some unknowable reason, two years ago, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales captured the cultural zeitgeist—or, rather, some form of it. It was the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and Kelly’s film was premiering there, for the first time. Ever. Plus, it was a hot ticket: the follow-up to his first film Donnie Darko—a movie that captured both critics and a cult following. Turns out that this second movie, though, got no such happy welcoming; it was, frankly, critically decimated and accordingly blew up a whole storm of negative media (which in its way has a sick fascination, now that the film is available to the masses on DVD). Each and every one of us can now go home and answer for ourselves the question: was it really all that bad?

The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.

At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.

In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)

It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.

House of Sand and Fog: B

There's a trap lying in wait once you start to watch House of Sand and Fog—and it has nothing to do with the way your sympathies keep being sliced up between the main characters. No, the real problem is that Vadim Perelman's adaptation of the Andre Dubus III novel hovers vaguely in that maddening cinematic gray area: it's a prestige picture that's firmly middlebrow. Everything works for most of the film, but the real surprise is how unpretentious the whole enterprise can be. Never has an "artful" film that feels so artless felt so engaging.

We open on a screen filled with the swirling fog of San Francisco—cut to an ambulance, a house in the background, and a woman who looks like an angel who threw herself from heaven (that'd be Jennifer Connelly, who's like the poor-man's Kate Winslet)—then cut back to who used to live in the house, and then who lived in it after them, and so on. Perelman takes a rote-thriller conceit (at least on paper)—save the homestead from the immigrants!—and structures it like a tragedy in domestic miniature.

Turns out that woman, named Kathy Nicolo, lived alone on a bungalow by the sea, her husband having left some months before, hiding from the family she no longer possesses the emotional strength to face. The house is less her place of rest than her cave in which she's perpetually hibernating. But the county evicts her on some obscure technicality that later proves to be false; but not before an Iranian family, headed by the ex-Col. Behrani (Ben Kingsley, his eyes wide as mirrors, fogged by years of toil), has scooped up the auctioned-off property. What a nightmare for Kathy, even more so because it seems Behrani is intent on selling off the house for quadruple what he paid for it.

Wait! This isn't right! Where's Steven Segal when you need him, to come crashing through the
living room window and drive away those damn terrorists?

Wait! This isn't right either! Much as the two titular substances shift and squirm, entrapping and entrancing in alternate measure, so does Perelman's film (which he directed, produced, and co-wrote). Turns out Behrani's been driven away by the new regime after the Shah was ousted, and he sees in the house both a gateway to more prosperity—there's a great moment early on when you realize ever since he moved to America, he's been slowly and irrevocably going broke—and a chance to reflect back on happier days when he himself owned a bungalow—this time on the Caspian Sea.

This is how House spirals out for more than two hours: two souls flitting around for a spot to rest, fighting over their mutual property. To complicate the formula is a lover of Kathy's—a damaged cop, ironically named Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard)—and the Colonel's wife, Nadereh (Shoreh Aghdashloo), both of whom add layers of tension and heartache. In its best moments, the family and the woman whose house they're living in play off of each other in a cleverly painful pattern of distrust and dislocation, but the overarching themes are a tad too obvious. Perelman fills the screen with beautiful images of light and movement, and his cast—especially Connelly—performs minor feats of miraculous achievement but in its final act, things start hitting the fan with a wet thwack. Looking up from the screen as the end credits roll, it hits you: what was grippingly small and prestige-less grew painfully large and "tragic," completely upsetting the delicate emotional balance that kept the audience so unbalanced to start with. In the end, this House crumbles.