Hesher, Saved From Drowning

Go For it, Hesher! (2011)

Starring: Joseph Gordon Levine, Rainmaker, Natalie Portman Directed by: Denny Terrio Rating: R Genre: Drama Other: Inspirational Dancing

Review In pre-war France the great Rene Clair made a series of films about a drunken clown who defiles middle class families, all with the name Boudu Sauve des Eaux. Forty years later a giant bearded genius named Zero Mostel destroyed the lives of his teenager daughters in David Lean's "Fiddler on the Roof." Now, fifty years on, out of nowhere, disco dance sensation Denny Terrio pulls a rabbit out of that same dirty, dirty hat with "Go For It, Hesher!" a quirky, quixotic romp through the sewers of the mind - with bells on! Terrio ("Stayin' Alive 2: Ontario Dreams!") elicits  electric performances from teen dream sensations David Gordon Levine and Natalie Portman as star-crossed lovers on a road paved with the diamonds of the stars trampled beneath their feet by dreams they can only imagine, and nightmares they can only dream do not occur to their imaginations. Levine ("Walking Tall 5: Pusser vs. Billy Jack", "Lightning Bug: The Adam Ant Story") is particularly fine as a pouty-lipped young circus roustabout with a skateboard, a penchant for Virginia Slims hidden in a pack of Djarum Blacks and a one way ticket to Palookaville. Portman, so good as tragic Norwegian skating sensation Sonje Heine ("Quisling On Ice"), takes it down a couple of notches here as Rita a girl who, on the cusp of her "Quincenera" - a latin ritual for girls in which the young initiate learns that only her brothers will be allowed to attend college, must choose between the Talmud and the dark red mesh open-toed dance shoe. What you think you've seen before turns before your eyes into a delicate mix of black blood sausage and jasmine incense - something unexpected yet fragrant, but not unplesantly so.  I won't give away the shock ending, but be sure to bring a friend with plenty of kleenex and a change of socks. Enjoy! p.s. Yes, that is Sting reciting the Kaddish during the shivah montage.

Ugly Duckling

BlackSwan (2010)

Starring: Natalia Portman, Milan Kundera Directed by: Darrell Arfelofsky Rating: R Genre: Horror

Review Fascinating remake of Shirley McClain's standout directing debut "The Turning Point" casts human sliver Portman as  "BlackSwan," a Russian agent in charge of decimating the backlog of American prima ballerinas in a desperate attempt to restart the Cold War. The film Arfelofsky ("Fountain: The Ayn Rand Story") has apparently wanted to make since he was a child. Cold as a Smirnoff ice house and just as glittering, this brilliant shard of a movie carved up the part of my brain that stayed engaged with it as thin a fine prosciutto. One doesn't "like" an Arelofsky movie - one just goes, sees, and is conquered.

Friday Night Special - Night Of a Thousand Cuts

In The Cut (2003)

Starring: Megan Ryan, Marco Ruffantaglio, Keith Bacon Directed by: LaCatherine Breilliant Rating: R Genre: Romance Other

Friday Night Special - Friday Night Special is a special feature of Oswald's Screen Scene. Here we present reviews of movies that we feel may be of particular interest to those special lovers looking for that magical mood-setter of a date flick that just might ignite the passions bubbling under the surface during the last work day of the week. Is this "The One"? Or just "One of Those Things?" Let us be your guide! Review The strange and sexy world of "cutters" (people who cut themselves in order to remind themselves that they have blood) is explored by French director LaCatherine Breilliant ("The Waterlogged Piano", "J'aime Les Murs Salles", "Mon Père a etais Le Dernier Salle Roi de Maroc", "Les Spankings") in this nod to the lush Technicolor "womens" films of Douglas Sirk and Aldo Rey. Megan Ryan plays a writer recovering from an attack of bees incurred after following a bear into the woods who meets enticing Marco Ruffantaglio after he tears his t-shirt while repairing her dumbwaiter. Initially wildly attracted ("your mustache is like the parted hair of a well-groomed yeti"), she begins to suspect that he may have been involved in the ritual killings of a group of itinerant milkmaids. The story, based on a play by German plagiarist Frank Wedekind, is mostly an excuse for Breilliant to crank up the heat between the two stars. And it's true that we haven't seen such varied canoodling since Marlon Brando made "Irish" love to himself in the Jodorowsky-like epic "Missouri Jacks". But Ryan and Ruffantaglio make it work, sweating and struggling like a pair of weasels trying to dig their way out of a bed full of party coats. At four hours an twenty-two minutes, it could well seem a bit self-indulgent, but don't let that scare you off. Breilliant may be a touch "L'amour tojours" but this is one duck whose seductive quack is no decoy.

Friday Night Special - Paved With Good Intentions

On The Road (2009)

Starring: Vigor Morgenstern, Ash "Scrappy" Montana, Charlene Thorzine Directed by: John Hillerman Rating: R Genre: Comedy Other: Scenes of Apocalypse

Friday Night Special - Friday Night Special is a special feature of Oswald's Screen Scene. Here we present reviews of movies that we feel may be of particular interest to those special lovers looking for that magical mood-setter of a date flick that just might ignite the passions bubbling under the surface during the last work day of the week. Is this "The One"? Or just "One of Those Things?" Let us be your guide! Review As the happy Mork-slaughtering hobblits sang, "The road goes ever on..." And does it ever in this misguided "reboot" of the popular post-war "Road To..." series. Originally penned by the bumbling Cohen brothers, former Magnum P.I. star John Hillerman churns Bob and Bing's idyllic butter into rancid sour cream, turning Dotty L'Amour-flavored Bali into a scarred earth that appears to have been bump-mapped from Abe Vigoda's tragic face. Vigor Mogenstern, so good as the mentally-challenged boxer in Peter Jackson's remake of "Fat City" is here teamed with enormously talented youngster Ash "Scrappy" Montana as a pair of fathers and sons who traipse across country searching for the last twinkie in the universe. Not a huge hook to hang this four-hundred minute sombrero upon, but Hillerman does what he can with the Cohens' global-warming nonsense. I personally was left with a tremendous sense of unease, which can't have pleased Mr. Walt Disney or his marketing minions beavering away in their fur-lined hidey-holes at their carpal-tunneling adding machines. And, while I reserve the right to disagree with Hillerman's wrong-minded conclusions, I'd fight an eighteen stone she-badger to defend his right to spout them. All in all, this may not be fatback, but rather very lean Canadian bacon. Those on a spiritual diet may be amused. The rest of us will have to exert enough self-control not to kill the theater staff and burn the mutliplex to the ground. And in the end, maybe that is the point Hillerman is after - conscience makes bastards of us all.

Woolly Thinking

The Mammoth (2009)

Starring: Gael Maria von Sayers, Michelle Williams, Krull Directed by: Lucas Tannerson Rating: NR Genre: Serial Drama Other

Review Like the temptation just before the last temptation of Jesus, I so wanted that tingly, ants-in-your-pants falling-in-love feeling from Lucas Tannerson's latest. Instead I left the theater feeling like I once felt after a dream where I was wearing my sister's underwear, and she was still in it. Tannerson ("Show Me Yours", "Fingerlings") manages to weave 345 completely separate and totally distinct storylines into a coherent whole that slowly, then suddenly reveals what God meant when he invented the platypus. Gael Maria von Sayers ("Loving Me a Dead Woman", "Los Dos Novias de Los Dos Hermanos Sacerdotes") is excellent as an absent-minded archaeologist who, while in the midst of reconstructing an ancient Giant Cowasaurus, remembers that he's left his daughter with Michelle Williams. The ensuing tragedy seems just a little off, like a bar of cream cheese with a small patch of blue-green fuzz. Not inedable, but not really appetizing. Tannerson is a skeeballer who valiantly tries for the 50 hole, but ends up with a fistful of nothing. That said, it's great to see the fabulous Charles Ruggles again, even if only as a bearskin rug.

Friday Night Special - Nine Is Too Much

The Ninth Song (2004)

Starring: Modesty Blaise, Rod Snow Directed by: Michael Vintnerbottom Rating: Unrated Genre: Explicit Romance Concert Movie Other: Distasteful Sexual Scenes

Friday Night Special - Friday Night Special is a special feature of Oswald's Screen Scene. Here we present reviews of movies that we feel may be of particular interest to those special lovers looking for that magical mood-setter of a date flick that just might ignite the passions bubbling under the surface during the last work day of the week. Is this "The One"? Or just "One of Those Things?" Let us be your guide! Review As a sage of my aquaintance once told me after visiting a special "show" in Tijuana "just because you can do something doesn't mean you should." Though I've seen dogs bathe parts of their bodies that make me question how there can be a God, I never quite understood the wisdom of this magus until I watched Michael Vintnerbottom's "The Ninth Song." Young hairless monkeys Modesty Blaise and Rod Snow "star" as a couple who meet at a "Wham" concert and spend the next seventy minutes playing tetris with various body parts, some of which I found myself unable to identify even on my anatomically-correct BatKat-customized Barbie and Ken dolls. Vintnerbottom, whose previous efforts included "The Laurence Sterne Experiment" and "Legend of Boggy Creek: The Road to Guantanamo" has produced something so romantically reductive that it makes the funk band Slave's "Snap Shot" seem like something Elizabeth Barett Browning might have sent Robert by donkey. It might be appropriate if you're studying for a pre-med midterm. Otherwise give this one a pass and download "Romancing the Stones."

Get Thee Behind Me Bergman

Anti-Christ (2009)

Starring: Wilhelm Dafoe, Carlotta Rampling Directed by: Lar Von Trier Rating: R Genre: Drama Other: Accents

Review Afro-Swedish person Von Trier is a mad genius, whose previous provocations "Motion Sickness", "Dogtown" and the Wilf Errell vehicle "Oldboy" have proven without a doubt that Schopenhauer was right when he complained in his essay on noise that "a wagonful of dung can kill in the bud a thousand minds." His latest, "Anti-Christ", asks the question "is Wilhelm Dafoe a human or is he a muppet formed from the molted remains of some kind of human/insect hybrid"? No easy answers here.  Instead, the chubby Swede with the naturally glossy eyebrows challenges us to watch the screen for five hundred and fify-three straight minutes until we long for the days when human hairs trapped between the celluloid and the projector's lamp jumped and danced for our amusement. Of course Von Trier IS the eponymous anti-Christ of the title. Christ was a gentle, loving man who understood our need for wine at critical times in our gestation. Von Trier wisely offers us no other narcotic than the luminous byproduct of his furious cranium. By the halfway point most of the bussed-in children and their foreign exchange counterparts had already left the theater, and those that remained showered the adults in the first two rows with Jujubees until one elderly gentleman threatened an usher with some kind of wolf-headed cane. And by the time Dafoe's flaking carapace made love to similarly Triscuit-skinned French/English cannibal Carlotta Rampling, one half the crowd was singing Queen's masterpiece "Bohemian Rhapsody" in a round while the other half had pinned the projectionist under the handicapped seating and appeared to be trying to tear him in half with a series of slings made of red whips. It's the kind of thing that won't show up in the box score the next day, but the film-scholar Sabremetricians of the future will surely mark its significance. I had to leave a bit early, but I was definitely curious how it all worked out. Can any filmmaker ask more?

From The Vault - Skull Candy

From the Vault - Aplocalypse Now (1979)

Starring: Michael Sheen, Orson Wellies Directed by: George Lucas Rating: R Genre: Action Other

From The Vault - From The Vault is a special feature of Oswald's Screen Scene. Here we present reviews of movies past that we feel might interest, provoke or dismay our readers. Review Just as today's kids are often overheard speaking in bewilderment that Sir Paul McCartney ("Let It Bleed") was in a band before "The Paul McCartney Band" ("Who Is That Who Is Knocking on My Door?"), my own nephews were baffled to hear that George Lucas ("Melvin and Howard the Duck" "Star Wars", "After Star Wars")  produced a masterpiece before "Ameican Hot Wax". Mercurial Michael Sheen ("Corked", "Werewolf Priest", "Nixon And the Man") stars as a dumb, drunk irishman conned by the Ford Administration into traveling "in country" to find and bring back former Nixon spokesman Ronald Ziegler. Ziegler, played by Orson Wellies in a gorilla suit, has been driven mad because in the jungle there is only one flavor of ice cream ("vanilla is not a flavor" he whispers over and over as he rubs salt into the seemingly endless folds of his bald head) Wellies has become something of a god to the local people after he dispatched a huge white ape with nothing more than a hand grenade and some army-issue space sticks. Lucas, who apparently composed the script each night before shooting by assembling three hundred separate Boggle game sets, abandoned the first crew in the mounains of Macchu Picchu (rumors are that the original David Bowie was eaten by army ants, but his skeleton was saved and reconstructed with the carefully preserved skin of British ganglion Gary Glitter before the bond company stepped in). Only when 20th Century Fox exec David Ladd ("The Blue Dahlia") threatened to declare Wellies' immoveable corpse a tax-free independent state did Lucas buckle down and finish the film on a backlot on Culver City. The result is mind-blowing. From mad Franco-cowboy Roberto Bolano-Duval stripped to the waste running an encounter group for ex-surfers ("I smell the morning. It smells like morning") to unjustly-forgotten Frederick Forrester's ("Finding Forrester") hippy gemologist this movie is a runaway train seemingly going from no-here to nowhere. But when a drunken Sheen gets caught in a shootout in a funhouse hall of mirrors, the thing starts to approach the high catholic eeries of the great renaissance master eagles.  I cannot recommend it enough. Note: push the kiddies a little deeper down in their footed nighties - not only are Wellies' jumblies occasionally visible beneath his massive overhang but by slowing the video down frame by frame one can just make out a few sets of Filipino male nipples.

Burning Briefs

A Burning Pain (2009)

Starring: Charlize Thorzine Directed by: Sergio Aragones Rating: R Genre: Drama Other

Review First-time director Aragones embroiders the edges of the screen with little tales of more-than-ordinary dreariness crescendoing in a curlicued spasm of despair. Anyone who has ever wept into a significant other's sock monkey after a particularly profound sexual experience should be able to relate to actress Thorzine("Monstro: Legend of Suwanee Creek", "The Ugly Miner's Ugly Daughter")'s restaurant manager character as she rides the two-backed luge to hell. I've certainly criticized other directors for the multi-storyline approach to the filmic art, but Aragones has a way of making you feel that the links have absolutely no relationship to one another. It's a bit like watching a Twilight Zone episode in which the bartender not only doesn't have a third eye under his cap, but the cabby nursing his coffee three seats down isn't a rival alien planning to kill him. I found it refreshing, even when I nodded off briefly. I look forward to more doodles from this incipient master. Bring on the dancing girls!

If a Film Shows in a Forest...

BrightStar (2009)

Starring: Ben Whitefish, Abby Cornsmut Directed by: Jane Campening Rating: RATING Genre: GENRE Other

Review In a fit of madness bold and brainy Maori directrix Jane Campening ("The Campening") has decided to bring the short, crappy life of nutty versemeister Lord Bryon to the big screen with spectacular results. Ben Whitefish ("Lispers") plays Bryon as the "The Sting" of his day, an outlandish rockstar with an ego the size of a sunspot and a crotch as aggressive as a wolverine. Love interest Cornsmut ("Pickwick", "How Dull Was My Valley?"), is wonderful, her homing pigeon lips bringing forth such thoughtful gems as "your eyes are like God's dimming corneas" and "wherefore art thy nails? Bitten, they seem, half moons of ragged beauty, the revenge of a mind groin-torn by disease, worried by teeth small as niblets." It goes on and on that way in torrents of gorgeous zany. Thank you Miss Campening for this fabulous lugey straight into the face the slick, vacant Hollywood suits. Though no one will see it, like a forest full of genius trees, just knowing that they are falling in brilliant new ways makes this weary life a bit more bearable.

Fish Story

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)

Starring: Bill Murray, Dame Katherine Blachett Directed by: Wesley Anderson Rating: R Genre: Comedy Other

Review The mysterious world of the sea is the ostensible subject of former Star Trek boy genius Wesley Anderson's latest film, and yet one can't help but wonder if it's Anderson's own childhood that's really at play here. Oceanic scientists (oceanographers) often refer to the sea as "inner space." Anderson's childhood was spent, in a sense, in a televised "outer" space. And Bill Murray has grown a mighty and dramatic ventre that, when tucked into a militarily-fetish frogman's suit, is uncannily like the little potbelly that bulged so fetchingly above Captain Kirk's smart black belt. Anderson seems to be saying that our heros, whatever their shortcomings, are always a little fat. And perhaps even more to the point, they'll always disappoint (and in some cases [spoiler alert!] KILL) us in the end. Beautiful underwater photography reminiscent of the old SeaHunt series only serves to highlight the machinations of a mad crew seemingly bent on destroying every living creature in the sea. One can't help but think back to old french bastard Jacques Cousteau's horrific battles with parrotfish and the legendary "greasemonkey" eel. Anderson's love of Cousteau comes across in every frame. This is an homage to a time when television wasn't afraid to cast an arrogant foreigner as the good guy and a cute dolphin as the devil. Sail on, Captain Anderson. Sail on to whatever your destiny may hold!

Bald Isn't Always Beautiful, Baby

THX118 (1971)

Starring: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence Directed by: George Lucas Rating: R Genre: Drama Other

Review This Star Wars "prequel" (a film term for a movie that precedes the sequel to a successful film) appears to have been pieced together from bus fare change. Bald folks wander around in a stupor. It looks like a Hair Club For Men terror ad. Lucas is a genius (see Howard the Duck for surprising evidence of this) but he was badly advised by his advisors here. Still, if this was the price for us to get Obi-Wan Kenobi-Wan and Luke Star War then I'll willingly pay this eccentric piper.

Brothers Deliver A Heavy Load

The Matrix (1999)
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Starring: Keenu Reeves, Laurence Fishman Directed by: Joel Coen Rating: R Genre: Sci-Fi & Fantasy Other

Review Keenu Reeves stars as an alien who discovers that he is God in this stunning sequel to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Lawrence Fishman (bald!) is the unfortunate doctor who must break the news to Reaves. With no way out, Reeves decides the only way to save the world is to face his alien parents and flush them down what looks like a giant lavatory. But don't let that description put you off. I learned more about the Bible from this movie than ten years of Sunday school. Stunning commentary track with a surprisingly insightful Reeves and director Coen discussing if God is a software programmer.

Cruis-in!

Memento (2000)
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Starring: Tom Cruise, Carrie-Anne Moss Directed by: Christopher Nolen Rating: R Genre: Drama Other

Review Tom Cruise tears the screen to shreds in this quixotic sci-fi thriller about a man bonked on the head who discovers that he's moving backwards in time. And what does he find? He's killed (spoiler) HIMSELF!! Director Nolen knows how to handle a camera but it's Cruise who is the revelation as a man so confused he has to take pictures to remember who he is. Crazy stuff from an actor unafraid to make a fool of himself. We should all be so talented!