Zoo

Release date: April 25, 2007 NY, May 4 LA

















Distributor: ThinkFilm
Cast: John Paulsen, Richard Carmen, CJ and the “Happy Horseman”
Director: Robinson Devor
Screenwriters: Robinson Devor and Charles Mudede
Producers: Peggy Case and Alex Ferris
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 75 min.

In our jaded times, it’s not fashionable to use terms like “decadent” to describe a creative work. But decadent is the perfect adjective for the alienated artsiness behind the documentary Zoo, perhaps the most boring movie on a sensationalistic topic ever made.

Zoo is the slang term used for self-description by the cabal of Seattle-area “zoophiliacs” whose existence was revealed in July of 2005 when one of its number died from a perforated colon after a mad dash to a rural hospital. The car that dropped the corpse off at the emergency room was traced, and a community of men united by their unconventionally physical love for Arabian stallions was revealed, alongside hundreds of hours of videotape constituting a veritable Kama Sutra of recipes for colon penetration.

The conventional word for this isn’t “zoophilia” but “bestiality,” a turn of phrase Zoo director Robinson Devor no doubt rejected as being too redolent of judgment for his rather archly sympathetic exploration of the horse-on-man lifestyle choice. Devor takes his stylistic cues from some of Errol Morris’ work (including Mr. Death and especially the over-valued Oscar-winner The Fog of War) by using lyrical cinematography and ersatz Philip Glass music to poeticize the reprehensible in the form of lengthy, dreamlike reenactments.

But, unlike Morris, Devor doesn’t take it for granted that the audience knows what the reprehensible is. The revulsion he anticipates in the watcher is consistently attacked as a limitation of audience viewpoint and then worked against, not only through Zoo’s numbing and wall-to-wall use of the cool, blue, slow-motion palette of Gap ad cinematography but via the endless and unchallenged special pleading the Zoo boys get to indulge in.

“It’s much like you love your wife and kids,” one zoophiliac says in voiceover, demonstrating a remarkable ignorance of human sexual anatomy. “Pretty much our purpose in being here is to procreate,” says another, “so that drive is always there,” the implication being that zoophiliacs are just doin’ what comes naturally in, um, an unnatural kind of way. When media attention and the odd squad car start to invade the idyllic zoo lifestyle, the affronted disbelief is audible in the commentary: “I was EVIL,” one man says, still shocked by the injustice of it all, “because I had a love for my animals more than most people do!” Animal lovers take note: The gauntlet of demonstrative affection between people and pets has been thrown down, no doubt alongside a few less mentionable things.

Despite Devor’s rigidly exercised message discipline, the voice of deviancy gets through ungarbled a time or two. “You’re not gonna be able to ask them about the latest Madonna album,” a zoophiliac says, describing his relationship with horses. “They’re not gonna know the difference between Tolstoy and Keats. It’s a very simple, plain kind of world, and for the moment you can kind of switch off.” “I don’t need a high level of interaction, whether it be human or otherwise,” says another horse-lover, not recognizing the sweeping and desperate psychological terrain mapped by that “otherwise.” Substitute humans for horses in these descriptions, and what becomes audible is the voice of the whoremonger and the child molester — the man who seeks unequal power relationships and an uncomplaining vessel for his perversions.

As an unintended parody of a plea for sexual tolerance, Zoo would no doubt reject the charge of perversion as hopelessly reactionary. But ultimately the most perverse thing about Zoo is that for all its presumptions of open-mindedness, this film is closed to any consideration of the biggest victims of all. Zoo is a documentary doomed to remain forever biased and incomplete until somebody figures out how to interview a horse. - Ray Greene -

Wind Chill

Release date: April 27, 2007







Distributor: Screen Gems
Cast: Emily Blunt, Ashton Holmes, Martin Donovan and Ned Bellamy
Director: Greg Jacobs
Screenwriters: Joe Gangemi & Steven Katz
Producer: Graham Broadbent and Peter Czernin
Genre: Rating: R for some violence and disturbing images

Director Gregory Jacobs infuses his stranded-car picture with a tone and look that aspires to more than its schlock-horror roots. Unlike the large share of horror/slasher flicks being churned and flung at us these days, Wind Chill isn't noisy, rushed or riddled with seizure-inducing editing. Jacobs keeps things low-key, so that the notes of unease register fully, little by little, as East Coast college student, or "girl" (Emily Blunt), as she's credited here, decides to ride-share her way home for the holidays. Jon Gangemi and Steven Katz's script plays on her (and our) suspicions toward the guy (Ashton Holmes) she's hitched a ride with: He seems troubled, nervous and dopey and knows things about her that only a stalker would. When he admits he's not from where he claims before veering off-course to take "a scenic shortcut," our collective alarm bells go off.

Jacobs and company draw out our distrust of the guy, even after the travelers are stranded and snowbound in forest country. The duo tries to hail down wandering locals, but these prove neither friendly nor, for that matter, human. Worst of all is a foul-tempered trooper (Martin Donovan) who periodically appears in his phantom car to terrorize them.

Clues reveal that a horrific accident, perpetrated by the trooper, took place at that very site decades earlier, and, ever since, its victims and the since-dead priests who administered the last rites wander these grounds, doomed to live their agony over and over, while Donovan's trooper, also now undead, trolls the road for more victims. The guy and girl, meanwhile, find themselves stuck in the time-loop with them.

Why Wind Chill bothers at all with this elaborate back story or temporal gimmick is anyone's guess. We have no idea how to regard these creatures, or what perspective the back story serves to the present-time conundrum. Should we fear or pity the priests? The accident victims? They look spooky but aren’t. The time-loop is meant to instill dread, but it only distracts. The villain, apparently, is the trooper, but he bores more than frightens with his standard-issue mayhem.

More surprisingly, Jacobs' protagonists never discuss their situation in open, clear-cut terms: Their dialogue feels overzealously clipped, as if the writers wanted to avoid mention of zombies, ghosts, spooks or any supernatural terms for that matter, the stuff of which horror is made. The end results are that the characters' powers of inquiry and observation feel lobotomized, and the dialogue and direction feel disingenuous. What feels like the worst cop-out in Wind Chill is that it consumes crucial story-development time (and viewer energies) over the girl's struggles with whether or not to trust her companion.

In a good horror movie, atmospherics go a long way, and Jacobs does a creditable job of building tension and a sense of isolation. The movie's best scenes, in fact, are all build-up: Images of lonely landscapes and quiet interiors, twitchy with low-level radio static, evoke '60s art cinema about alienated couples.

Though the oblique and confused storytelling saps the heat out of Wind Chill, the picture still boasts a game performance from Emily Blunt (best-known for her feisty turn in The Devil Wears Prada). It's perhaps the sole reason, beside Jacobs' unusual style, to catch it. Blunt's surefire presence guides us through all Wind Chill's miscalculations, turning a nameless, nondescript coed into a vital, singular character. She has just won herself a new fan. - Jay Antani -

Triad Election

Release date: April 25, 2007 NY










Distributor: Tartan
Cast: Louis Koo, Simon Yam, Nick Cheung, Cheung Siu-fai, Lam Ka-tung and Tony Leung Ka-fai Director: Johnnie To
Screenwriters: Yau Nai-hoi and Yip Tin-shing
Producers: Dennis Law and Johnnie To
Genre: Dramatic thriller; Cantonese- and Mandarin-language, subtitled
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 101 min., 92 min.

Less two separate movies than one enticing epic split in half, Johnnie To’s Election and Election 2 blend in a political subtext that is nothing short of courageous. At first, the tapestry of Election seems like that of any Hong Kong gangster movie, as it follows two triad members, the calm deliberate Lok (Louis Koo) and the hair-trigger personality Big D (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who both covet the position of chief of the Wo Sing clan, a post that is decided by democratic elections every two years. Their respective campaigns are complicated when the symbol of the clan, the Dragon’s Head Baton, goes missing, a sign that the traditional ways are moving in an uncertain direction. Election 2 takes place two years later, but this time it’s businessman/gangaster Jimmy (Louis Koo) who wants to run the show. But there’s a new boss in China, and he’s the one who’s really pulling the strings.

Once one realizes that To’s movies are a bold attack on China’s political interference in post-1997 Hong Kong, after the territory was handed over to the mainland, what at first seemed rather superficial begins to take on a more complex hue. Big D, who comes across as an excessive cartoon in the first movie, can now be viewed as an effective representation of Hong Kong’s somewhat corrupt and messy democracy. By contrast, the more subtle Jimmy, hiding behind an “honest” capitalist facade in Election 2, is the apt puppet of the sinister Chinese state apparatus. Even the Hong Kong police, so ubiquitous a presence in Election, where they are determined to keep public order, have receded into the background in Election 2 as they recognize the new reality. Guided by To’s elegant camera moves, less visceral than most Hong Kong filmmakers, the Election movies put a fresh, intriguing spin on the usual cinematic gangster motifs. - Shlomo Schwartzberg -

The Invisible

Release date: April 27, 2007







Distributor: Buena Vista
Cast: Justin Chatwin, Margarita Levieva, Marcia Gay Harden and Chris Marquette
Director: David S. Goyer
Screenwriters: Mike Davis and Christine Roum
Producers: Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber, Jonathan Glickman, Neal Edelstein and Mike Macari
Genre: Supernatural thriller
Rating: PG-13 for violence, criminality, sensuality and language - all involving teen
Running time: 97 min.

It doesn’t bode well for a film when a plate of bacon and eggs is more expressive than the lead actor.

In the second scene of The Invisible, turgid teen Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin) reacts to his mother’s refusal to pay for him to attend an expensive writer’s course in London by turning the bacon-strip smile below the sunny-side-up peepers on his breakfast plate upside down. That’s a range of emotion that Chatwin, last seen onscreen in 2005’s War of the Worlds, could only aspire to.

Granted, his character spends most of the movie as a disembodied spirit stranded somewhere between life and death, but someone should seriously check this kid’s pulse. His reaction to realizing that he has a chance to live again by leading rescuers to his broken body before it’s too late? A monotone, “Shit, I’m alive.”

Think of The Invisible as It’s a Not-So-Wonderful Life: As in the Frank Capra classic, there’s no mystery as to who has gotten the protagonist into this mess. Basically, all he does is slouch around and see and hear—while unseen and unheard himself—what the people closest to him think about him.

Which isn’t much.

His mother (Marcia Gay Harden) can’t tell detectives “who son is, really.” His girlfriend (Tania Saulnier) dismisses the wannabe writer as “pretentious.” His best bud sells him out to the teenage thug (Margarita Levieva) who beat Nick into a coma, then cooperates in her cover-up to save his own ass.

In concept, all of this is supposed to be an on-the-nose metaphor for how teens feel, yes, Invisible—unseen and unheard, unable to affect anything around them. In execution, all it turns out to be is unspeakably boring.

A “thriller” with no mystery and no suspense whose doltish detective can’t even track down his own soon-to-be-dead body, the only award The Invisible is likely to contend for is Cheesiest Use of a Death Cab for Cutie Song in a Teen Movie. Even a casual fan of the Seattle-based band can guess which one and groan along:

Love of mine, some day you will die
But I’ll be close behind
I’ll follow you into the dark…
If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark.

The irony is that anyone who ventures into the dark of a theater to watch The Invisible is going to have a hard time convincing anyone to follow. - Chad Greene -

The Condemned

Release date: April 27, 2007







Distributor: Lionsgate
Cast: Steve Austin, Vinnie Jones, Robert Mammone and Victoria Mussett
Director: Scott Wiper
Screenwriters: Scott Wiper and Rob Hedden
Producer: Joel Simon
Genre: Action thriller
Rating: R for pervasive strong brutal violence, and for language
Running time: 113 min


While thousands of Romans filled the Colosseum to witness the glorious brutality of gladiatorial events, the idea of man hunting man classed itself up in the 20 century with the novel “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which a wealthy hunter invited a big-game hunter to his island for the ultimate hunting experience. After several screen incarnations, the basic storyline was given a shot of satirical extremism for 2003’s Battle Royale, which turned middle school students against each other with explosive neck collars for reality TV viewing pleasure. For the concept’s latest rendition, The Condemned doesn’t attempt to inject anything new into the story. In fact, it takes Battle Royale’s basic framework and strips it of its satirical strengths, making a dumbed down, manufactured movie product and bringing the spectacle back down to the level of gladiator barbarics.

Instead of a reality TV show, The Condemned is a reality show that is streamed over the internet by a multi-millionaire who contracts 10 death-row prisoners to fight to the death for their freedom. Instead of explosive neck collars, the contestants are rigged with explosive ankle collars that blow up if they are tampered with, someone pulls the red tag or 30 hours pass, whichever comes first. Mixed into this basic framework are several contrived subplots revolving around Jack Conrad (“Stone Cold” Steve Austin) that add nothing but length to the movie. The inmates are quickly dropped onto a remote island rigged with hundreds of cameras and the story proceeds as predicted – violence ensues, characters both liked and dislike die, and the end doesn’t come soon enough.

Although there is no doubt that The Condemned is a dumb as dirt action movie with fight sequences that were apparently filmed by a zoom-happy, five-year old with Tourette’s, there is a sliver of a satirical undercurrent. As the millionaire goes about airing brutality on the internet, he defends the project (also named “The Condemned”) by saying it's manufactured entertainment created to meet a demand. Meanwhile, a moralistic journalist confesses that it’s not the show’s producer that saddens and angers her, but the tens of millions who paid to watch “The Condemned” (*wink*). Perhaps the writers are smarter than we give them credit for. It’s a bold move to tell your audience that you are taking their money and showing them crap.

By all accounts, the movie is right -- don’t waste your time or money on trash. Don’t support movies that are nothing more than a cash cow. The Condemned makes it crystal clear that WWE Films is in it for the money; to find another way to package its soap operatic violence and sell it to the masses. See No Evil (starring Kane) and The Marine (starring John Cena) proved there is an audience clamoring for insulting movies that glorify violence, and The Condemned capitalizes on it. Despite the in-film warning, there will still be laughs when Steve Austin calls another man “sweetheart” and there will still be people eager to get a seat in The Condemned’s crowded theater on opening night. -Jason Morgan-

Something to Cheer About

Release date: April 27 ltd

Distributor: Truly Indie, Lantern Lane Entertainment
Director/Screenwriter: Betsy Blankenbaker
Producers: Betsy Blankenbaker, Willie Merriweather and Oscar Robertson
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unated
Running time: 64 min.

The 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking professional baseball’s color barrier is fresh on the minds of sports fans, and moviegoers won’t have forgotten last year’s college basketball integration flick Glory Road. So it’s a good time to release this modest yet important movie, made in 2002, about African-Americans who made a landmark contribution to racial sanity in sports on the high-school level.

The story begins in 1927 when the city of Indianapolis, under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan, established an all-black high school in order to keep blacks and whites apart and the former subjugated. Crispus Attucks High School (named after the first person killed during the Revolutionary War) was a tool of segregation that seemed to thrive. In 1950, Ray Crowe, an African-American coach with a painfully ironic surname, took over the school’s basketball program and encouraged kids from the city’s poorest neighborhoods—accustomed to playing street ball—to join the team and get an education.

Crowe was first and foremost interested in the development of the whole person, but he was also committed to winning. The success bred by his philosophy and the team’s innovative playing style made white and mixed-race teams from around Indiana eager to play a team with no home court of its own. The Attucks Tigers became the first all-black high-school hoops team in the country to win a state championship in 1955. Overcoming endemic prejudice as well as biased officiating, the squad headlined by Oscar “Big O” Robertson—considered among the best all-around basketball players ever—went undefeated the next season and repeated.

The movie is a straightforward chronicle built on player testimonials and interviews with Crowe, who passed away shortly after it was completed. Filmmaker Betsy Blankenbaker, whose father was a friend of Crowe’s, sold her house to finance the project, and it deserves to be cheered by a wide audience. - John P. McCarthy -

Snow Cake

Release date: April 27, 2007 ltd








Distributor: IFC First Take
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman and Carrie-Anne Moss
Director: Marc Evans
Screenwriter: Angela Pell
Producers: Andrew Eaton, Niv Fichman, Gina Carter and Jessica Daniel
Genre: Drama
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 112 min.

In this drama about two relative outsiders who become friends after a horrible tragedy, director Marc Evans mixes both sincerity and quirkiness in equal measures in a vain attempt to help us understand our common differences. The story involves a withdrawn, remorseful man (Alan Rickman) who is just free from prison. As he drive through Northern Ontario, Canada, he gets involved in an accident that brings him into contact with an autistic woman (Sigourney Weaver) in a small town. As the two grow closer, they both learn to find ways to come out of their respective shells.

Weaver's work here is so mannered that she falls into the same trap that both Sean Penn (I Am Sam) and Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man) did in similar roles. Rather than playing a character who has a disability, she plays the disability as the character itself. Rickman is a little more agreeable, but the role itself is largely dull and unadorned. Snow Cake is so self-consciously decent that it melts away any tension that could have made it interesting. - Kevin Courrier -