Dead in France (2012)

Director: Kris McManus
Stars: Celia Muir, Darren Bransford, Lee Cheney, Kate Loustau, Brian Levine and James Privett

I had a great time watching Dead in France, though I'm not sure precisely what Brian Levine and Kris McManus really wanted it to be. Levine produced, took the lead role and co-wrote, under the pseudonym of Jack Hillgate, with director McManus, who also shot and edited the picture. A quote on the poster suggests it's 'Tarantino meets Ritchie', but that's misleading as the similarities are superficial: sure, it's a story about hitmen, which introduces its disparate characters through title cards and spins them gradually together, but the tone is utterly different. Any Tarantino reference is limited to profanity and gore, as without bad language this would feel like an old Ealing comedy, underlined by the choice to shoot in black and white. There's also a lot of quiet here that suggests a Jacques Tati influence, emphasised by the opening credits, slow pace and its setting on the Côte d'Azur. Perhaps I'm impressed because these influences aren't remotely compatible but it works.

Levine plays Charles, a quiet and polite gentleman who wouldn't even kill a wasp. Except that he's a talented and experienced hitman, who's about to retire after his hundredth job. He's methodical, partly through clearly having OCD, and he looks the part, wearing the requisite Jason Statham lack of hair. For all his skills, though, none of them appear to be social. His superb first scene with Lisa, half confident experience and half social nerves, underlines that. We can't initially tell if he's hiring a prostitute or a mail order bride, but she turns out to be a cleaner, an outspoken Essex girl in a bikini to contrast her boss's relentless calm and traditional suit. Both of them contrast madly with her boyfriend, Denny, a wiry party animal with tattoos and a mohawk but no manners who shows up to do her in every conceivable position in every conceivable location in Charles's house and grounds. Some of these scenes are a little long, but they are at least shot imaginatively.

Gradually a number of stories come together. Charles is one, as he aims to follow up his century of hits with retirement, a large yacht and a girl with which to sail off into the sunset. Lisa and Denny are another, as they begin to spin scams of increasing idiocy while they have Charles's place to themselves. Burgess, a retired hitman whose wife is Charles's final job, becomes the third. This introduces a couple of million pounds into the equation to become the MacGuffin of the piece. A further hitman, or hitwoman, whatever the technical term is for a foul mouthed crazy bitch of a professional killer, makes four. She's Clancy, and she's unlike Charles in every way, except for her job, though she's as relentlessly as wild as he's in control. To make it a half dozen subplots we're gifted with Simon and Raymond, a con man and a thief respectively. They're a pair of brothers, small time crooks looking for that one big time score, and they might just have found it.

Naturally, all these characters intersect in inventive ways that keep us guessing as to where it's all going to end up, which turns out to be both believable and appropriate, yet not precisely what we might expect. That might sound like praise for a complex plot, but this film isn't really about plot, as steady and reliable as its storyline is. While Levine and McManus certainly borrowed from early Guy Ritchie movies, they only took the framework, that sort of jigsaw puzzle approach to scripting, but either couldn't or wouldn't cast the quantity of characters needed to obfuscate it substantially enough to keep us truly on our toes. There are a few smaller parts here and there and some of the actors who play them even have key reasons to be in the movie, but for the most part, it's the key folk from those six subplots interacting with each other through plot convenience. Going just from what you see in this film, you might be forgiven for believing that the Côte d'Azur is 95% British.

I get the impression that it started with the characters, and while a vaguely complicated plot was spun around them, it ended with the characters too. It's not that they're particularly deep, though a few have their depths, it's that they're all connected by being Brits abroad, while otherwise not having much in common at all. They're a very diverse and well delineated set of principals and all the actors cast got plenty of opportunity to flesh them out. Levine keeps the deepest character for himself, with the most screen time, but his quiet man routine ensures that most of his scenes are easily stolen out from under him. He gets few great lines and his deliberately subdued portrayal is so underdone that after his introductory scenes, he quickly becomes something of a background, not a background character but a background set, against which everyone else gets to strut their respective stuff. He's the straight man who everyone else bounces off.

If Charles, who we surely care about more than anyone else, for all that he's murdered a hundred people for money, is the most underacted character, his opposite is clearly Denny. Darren Bransford is so completely obnoxious as Denny that most audience members are likely to care about him the least, but he goes hog wild with the character so that we never want to ignore him. Certainly most of the magic little moments in the movie are focused around him: Denny and the door, Denny and the pool, Denny and the cat... It would be hilarious to find that he's really a mild mannered gentleman in real life, because it feels like the advice he was given here was to shove a six pack of Duracell up his jacksie and never stop moving, never stop swearing and never stop pissing off his girlfriend in every way possible. He's like the Energizer Bunny, if the Energizer Bunny grew up in the slums of Liverpool acutely allergic to social graces.

In between is everyone else. Celia Muir, who is technically top billed, is a delight as Lisa. She was one of many actors to return from Kris McManus's previous feature, 2011's Travellers, and it's not surprising to see a director want to keep her. She manages to play Lisa as a slapper of little brain, but somehow enough charm and substance to escape her Essex girl stereotype. Lee Cheney and James Privett are solid as the small time hucksters, utterly out of their depth throughout but blind to the possibility that they won't win out in the end. Only Simon's first scene with Charles is taken to absurd heights, so overdone that it feels like a comedy sketch. Kate Loustau finishes up the major cast as Clancy, an outrageously over the top portrayal almost as obnoxious as Bransford's Denny. However, Clancy has a talent underneath her foul mouthed exterior, one she's more than willing to use. For all her many faults, she's rarely a fool, while Denny is rarely anything else.

With all these colourful characters competiting for our attention, with Charles grounding them all, it can't have been rocket science to throw them memorable moments and lines to work with. Not all of them go to Bransford, including perhaps my favourite, which is gifted to a bit part character, played by Chris Manns, in a flashback. 'You got problems, Big Chris?' he's asked on an intercom, only to answer, 'Yeah, Ian's head just exploded.' While it's not important in the grand scheme of things, this scene ably highlights the very British black comedy which underpins the entire script, as well as the capable and extremely gory effects work, which would have given any horror movie a run for its money if only it hadn't been shot in black and white. Much of it is clearly gratuitous, not that I'm complaining, and the eventual death count would have the antagonist in any slasher movie reeling in envy.

I have no idea how well Dead in France is going to do, but I'm guessing that it won't do as well as it should. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I've watched it twice, but I tried it out with a couple of lads from the next generation and they didn't even finish it. I'm sure the pace is part of it, much slower than they would expect for an action movie. The odd mixture of subtle character building and dark comedy with outrageous profanity, violence and gore may not have sat well with them either. The many easy comparisons like the quote on the poster are valid but none of them give a fair idea of what the feature as a whole really feels like. Sure, there's a lot taken from Guy Ritchie, but it's far from a Guy Ritchie film. It's just as far from a Tarantino movie, an Ealing comedy or a Jacques Tati picture, but there are just as many elements from those here. Maybe: written by Tati from a story by Ritchie, directed by Charles Crichton and produced by Eli Roth. Yeah, it's that unconventional.

Black Gulch (2003)

Director: Michael Strode
Stars: Christopher Bradley, Stephen Taylor and Joshua Miller

Michael Strode has a full decade of credits to his name, but they're not generally in the roles you tend to see referenced in reviews like this. Instead he seems to have collected those colourful job descriptions that people who read long scrolling credits wonder about. You know the ones I mean: he's been the gaffer and the best boy and the key grip, all important technical positions within the electrical and lighting departments. Well, here's where he notched off some that we actually talk about, like writer, producer and director. Given how solid this short film is, it's only surprising that he hasn't reprised them more often, but this is his only film as a writer and director and he's only produced one other picture since, a post-apocalyptic vampire musical from 2005 called Sacrifice. Given that this little film is vastly superior to most of the horrendous movies getting churned out by the ton nowadays, I wonder why he hasn't made another short on his own terms.

Clearly he and his crew knew what they were doing because there's a notable amount of control from the very beginning. In quick succession we're shown where we are and who we're supposed to be watching, while we're introduced to other pertinent details through colourful dialogue. The where is a van speeding through the desert to the town of Black Gulch, while the who is Everett, the leader of a bunch of crooks who are about to take down the Savings & Loan. Strode sets it up superbly. While Randy rattles on nineteen to the dozen because he's nervous and his mouth runs faster than his brain, his uncle Everett stays icy cool until he's called on to throw out a quotable line. 'Relax, friend,' he tells him in a suitably deep voice, 'We got your back.' That's when Chase, the tough guy, and Tom, the thinking man, look at him as if in wonder because he's obviously as green as they aren't, a fourth wheel in a team of three, but it's just as obviously Everett's show.

And so they pile out of their fake plumber's van in Black Gulch and race into the Savings & Loan, to find the last thing they expected: absolutely nothing. The lights are on but nobody's home. It's their lucky day, you'd think, and sure, the tills are full of cash with nobody to stop them waltzing away with all of it, but if it was as simple as that we wouldn't have a movie. There is something in Black Gulch and, as they say, it ain't no man, so we watch Everett and his men hunt it down as it picks them off one by one. There's a lot here that you'll have seen before in other movies, but it's superbly handled by the cast and crew and there's a neat little twist coming that's telegraphed in little cues here and there if you're paying attention. The dialogue is full of eighties cool, especially when it comes to Everett but, frankly, the story rings true and clear even if we watch the entirety of it with the sound on mute. That's how textbook its construction is.

After debuting in a fun but routine slasher movie called The Initiation, Christopher Bradley built a great run in cult movies as the eighties ran into the nineties, films like Iron Eagle, Waxwork and a personal favourite of mine, Sonny Boy, but he was confined to smaller roles. Only in 1992 with an indie remake of Mad Dog Coll and its sequel did he find the lead, but this fifteen minute short film is enough to demonstrate that he could carry it. Sure, this isn't the most original characterisation in the book, Bradley borrowing as much from Tim Thomerson as from Kurt Russell, with moments of Bruce Campbell never hiding too far below the surface, but it's exactly what's called for. Black Gulch has a very eighties feel and so he plays Everett like an eighties lead, all macho loyalty and cool one liners. Word is that Strode made this with the aim of expanding it to feature length. If so, that's where Bradley's work could have really shone.

It's not entirely his film, as you might expect when he's co-starring with a 6'10" stuntman known as Big Dave with a wicked costume and some neat moves, and he's not the only one stealing our attention. I kept waiting for Stephen Taylor to trip over his own tongue as Randy with his mile a minute mouth, but he made it through intact. Joshua Miller, only eleven years old, is superb as a kid called Simon, the lone survivor of whatever took down the town. Of course Everett, the tough bank robber, takes him under his wing for he's not bad, he's just drawn that way. To me, Bradley's biggest competitor for our attention though was the film itself, as it stole mine with the way it was constructed. Other than a few clearly greenscreen scenes, it's technically spot on, with everything done for a demonstrable reason: every angle, every zoom, every pan, every cut, every camera movement. Watch on mute and learn the trade. If only all textbooks were this much fun.

The Story of Luke (2012)

Director: Alonso Mayo
Stars: Lou Taylor Pucci, Seth Green, Cary Elwes and Kristin Bauer

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

As the Special Jury Prize at the Phoenix Film Festival was being awarded to Lou Taylor Pucci, for his leading role in The Story of Luke, he was also starring in the number one movie in America, The Evil Dead. Nailing both indie and mainstream cinema at the same time is a pretty good sign that you've arrived, even if it took a decade of hard work. It has to be said though that this film is rather well titled: not only is it the well defined story of a character named Luke, it's not a heck of a lot else. There are capable actors backing up Pucci, but the stories of their characters are either completely ignored or ruthlessly severed just as we get interested. The Story of Luke is, well, it's the story of Luke and Luke is the sort of special character, a high functioning young autistic man, who either fails horribly or wins awards. Pucci is excellent enough for it to be the latter, though I doubt that the film will last in people's minds like some of its more Oscar-worthy equivalents.

We join Luke at a rather troubled time in his life. To be fair, his entire life has been troubled; his mother left when he was four because she couldn't deal with a special needs child and he has no idea who his dad is. He's been living with his grandparents ever since, but now Grandma Maggie, the most important person in his life, has died and his life is about to change completely. What's notable immediately is that as much as Luke is autistic and isolated from reality, he's also higher functioning than Grandpa Jonas, who's inappropriate and in dire need of care. The pair stay with Luke's Uncle Paul and Jonas wears out his welcome immediately: he grabs Aunt Cindy's ass and offers her a twenty, pees himself in her car and craps himself in a restroom because he forgot to pull down his trousers first. He also insults everyone deliberately; Luke only does it because he's honest and doesn't have the social skills needed to know when to keep quiet.

And so off goes Grandpa Jonas, his story running only a little longer than Grandma Maggie's and she died before the movie began. That's an unfortunate trend in this film; it's so strongly about Luke that we pay attention to anyone else at our own risk. Sure, it's his story and he's set up to be a fascinating character from moment one, walking to Maggie's funeral with a pair of mismatched shoes and a suitcase, only to stand up and scream during the service, but he's promptly shifted into a new world and tasked with finding his own way. Paul and Cindy are a dysfunctional couple with a pair of dysfunctional kids, Brad and Megan, so routinely dysfunctional that we expect the cliché: that all they each need to shake them out of their respective problems is the presence in their lives of someone special like Luke. It's the expected thing because that's what all the other films about special people do and, at least for a while, it's what this one does too.

First up is Aunt Cindy, who's scarily up tight. OK, Grandpa would have got on anyone's nerves but she gets on everyone else's nerves, to the degree that her manicurist fires her as a customer. It has to be said that Kristin Bauer does psycho bitchy better than perhaps anyone, so I don't have a single problem with her performance, but it apparently takes a single one sided conversation with Luke to turn her around. I don't buy that. It takes a similar amount of inaction or at least mild action on Luke's part for him to start to change every other member of the family too. You'd think they'd package him up in a bottle and sell him at the pharmacy. I wonder if all these scenes were writer/director Alonso Mayo's way of getting all the clichés out of the way so that Luke could move forward to experience an original story of his own. If so, it worked but it marginalised most of the stars in the process. Kristin Bauer and Cary Elwes? Forget 'em. This is the story of Luke.

Trying to find a life for himself outside this family while rigidly obeying all of Aunt Cindy's rules is where Luke's story is going and this is a lot more successful. As unintentionally annoying as Luke can be, Pucci succeeds in making him rather endearing. A great deal of it has to be the way he channels a young and nerdy Johnny Depp physically but Jim Parsons vocally. Partly it's his socially awkward honesty, which works like an inner voice that's usually kept silent. Certainly this is one key way that he shakes up the family he comes to live with, exposing that they're all hiding from reality and suggesting that all it takes to set them back on the road to recovery is to confront them with it. Partly it's his delightfully odd balance between constant unsurety and strong will. He simmers with a subdued panic but has the guts to confront his fears, routines and OCD, turning assumptions of how things have to change into absolutes, however absurd they happen to be.

One great example is Maria. She's a receptionist at the job agency he visits to look for work, the only way he'll be able to move into a place of his own. Prompted by his grandpa's inappropriate comments, he asks her out. She turns him down, but he equates that rejection with his lack of work so strongly that getting a job in his mind equates to her saying yes. It clearly isn't going to happen, but his delusion is so believable and so recognisable from reality that we find ourselves rooting for him nonetheless. However, we're soon about to be caught up in something else, the transition of the picture from comedic drama to dramatic comedy, with the arrival of Seth Green who says things like, 'Humanity is evil!' and, 'To the dungeon, halfwit!' He's Zack, the boss from Hell in an inappropriate way that's shocking to Luke, who's stuck interning for him, and hilarious to us. And it's not politically incorrect because Zack's obviously special too.

The Story of Luke is as its best when it's telling the story of Luke. The movie was released during National Autism Awareness month, appropriate because it gifts us with a believably autistic lead who is nonetheless the most endearing character in the film. He's special to us without that term having to hold a double meaning. I found the ways in which Mayo wrote the character and Pucci played him far more human and engaging than anything I saw in Rain Man, which won a brace of Academy Awards. Perhaps it's because Rain Man was never about Raymond Babbitt, the autistic savant, at all; it was always about his shallow brother, Charlie and how Raymond changed him. By comparison, The Story of Luke is all about the autistic Luke, who isn't a savant but whose autism is high functioning enough to allow him to interact with the world, albeit in a different way to the rest of us. It's the various Charlies in his life who we can happily ignore.

The only other character who really gets a fully painted story arc is Zack, who calls normal people NTs or 'neurological typicals' and studies their mating rituals. Seth Green is hilarious as Zack, who is so outrageous that he highlights how easily acceptable Luke's social faux pas are. The catch is that he's such a comedy character that it's hard to take his dramatic side seriously. Pucci is able to walk that fine line, but Green can't manage it. Everyone else is set up, used as a prop for Luke to build off and then callously discarded. While I was happy for this to extend past the expected, I also wanted to know more about the other characters in his life. Kristin Bauer is wasted as Cindy, even with a couple of strong scenes early on; Cary Elwes doesn't even get that much as Paul. The kids are shown to us in scenes that make us want to discover why they're like how they are, but none of that discovery ever shows up.

Really, this entire family is relegated to being a set of walking props, just as the characters who show up later in the story walk into Luke's life, establish something important and then disappear again. A few of them are massively important, but only in how they affect Luke. They're all either unimportant on their own merits or Mayo refuses to allow them to show why they have their own importance too. Of course, their one dimensionality is only highlighted by the superbly nuanced three dimensions that Luke is given. Throughout, the film felt like an animation of a beautiful and colourful painted character walking around in a black and white world. I could go out on a limb and wonder if that's the point, that Mayo is turning the tables and showing us how a withdrawn autistic character could see himself as black and white in a world of colour, or how we erroneously see that through prejudice, but I don't think so. I think this is just emphatically the story of Luke.

Waking (2013)

Director: Ben Shelton
Stars: Skyler Caleb and Meg Cionni

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Waking is one of those movies you leave with a warm feeling deep inside, as if part of the universe has just fallen back into natural alignment. It's not perfect, though it is a highly enjoyable picture. It's not always happy, though it makes up for it in the end. It's not even particularly ambitious, as it plays it straight throughout, ruthlessly refusing to follow up on hints at different, more complex, readings. But what it does, it does very well indeed, and standard descriptions are going to fail to do it justice. It's a romance, you see. With a light hearted tone, an element of fantasy and a sense of destiny. Now, be honest: how many guys reading this immediately tuned out? Well, you should all start paying attention again. This isn't a chick flick and it isn't an unrealistic romcom featuring someone who used to be in Friends. You don't have to see it on the Lifetime Channel with breaks for tampon commercials. You can actually sit down and enjoy it with your girlfriend. Honestly.

Clearly it's a story that matters to Skyler Caleb; not only did he write it, sourced from a dream no less, but he also plays the lead role of Ben. No, that dream didn't play out for real the way that it does here, but then that's life; this is a movie, a 95 minute gift from the dream factory. It follows its own rules, ones that only Ben seems willing to believe in, and if that isn't a great definition for a love story, I don't know what is. You see, something fundamental isn't quite right in Ben's life, even though his girlfriend is moving back from Chicago to be with him. She's starting a new job; he already has one, working for her dad. These are stereotypical happy scenes, especially at the beginning of a movie, but they're deliberately just a little off. It isn't just that Ben is a little klutzy, it's that he isn't as enthused about it all as he should be and as he thinks he should be. He and Amy are good people but they don't appear to think on the same level. The chemistry isn't right.

The fact that Ben's mind isn't in the right place is underlined in bold red ink in the pivotal scene in the park. He's riding his bike to work because his car won't start, but work and everything else are promptly sucked out of his mind when he catches sight of a young lady who's sitting on the grass reading a book. He immediately crashes, both physically and mentally, but while he recovers his breath and his dignity soon enough in her charming company, the incident and especially the girl remain stuck in his mind. More importantly, they remain stuck in his dreams where they build the story and set Ben moving along a rollercoaster of a story arc to a date with destiny. Now, Park Girl is certainly a vision to behold, the ethereal Meg Cionni a shoe in to steal anyone's breath; but he's not only dreaming about her, he's dreaming about his childhood and the little girl he grew up with and played with all the time. You won't win a prize for guessing that they're one and the same.

I like these dreams because they follow dream logic. Director Ben Shelton refuses to give us the moments we're conditioned to expect, those clichéd moments where eyes close slowly so that we can be sure we're not in Kansas any more. Instead he throws us straight into Ben's dreams, which we only realise gradually because of how they unfold. For instance, during one conversation with Park Girl, she reveals that she moved to Sacramento, even though she's clearly talking to him in the very same park in which they just met. He must be dreaming and rationalising the disconnect away in that recognisable way that dreams mash up mutually exclusive events. By this point, we can't even be sure that the first meeting was real, though I presume it was, or if all those scenes with them as kids are real, though I presume they were really dreams. What we know is that Ben can't stop dreaming about Nadia, for that's her name, and he's been doing it for a very long time.

What makes this romantic instead of creepy is that we quickly discover that while Ben dreamed about Nadia, Nadia also dreamed about Ben. These aren't the dreams of either of them, they're the dreams of both. They grew up together in dreamland. That's the fantastic conclusion that we and Ben both reach when Nadia gives him her phone number in a dream, he rings it the next day and reaches her voicemail. Of course, we have a whole slew of questions at this point. Are we to take this as a straight romantic fantasy, or is something else going on? Is Ben exploring his doubts about his relationship and his future through therapy? After all, he works with Amy's dad, who is a therapist, sitting on his sessions. His mother is a therapist too. Is he regressing to his childhood under hypnosis? Is he even real, or merely a therapy session for Eddie, the patient we see? Is he schizophrenic? Is he clairvoyant, being visited by Nadia's ghost? Oh yes, I had questions.

I wonder how Waking would have played if Caleb's script was more interested in complexities like these. The neat way Shelton takes us in and out of dreams suggests that it could have become a delectable layer cake of different readings. I'm looking forward to watching it again with hindsight to see how many of those layers are there and whether those readings are viable, but my first run played out as a straight romantic fantasy rooted in a few simple but engaging ideas. Firstly, the girl of your dreams could be literally the girl of your dreams. Secondly, it could go both ways: you could be the boy of her dreams too. Thirdly, and most importantly for this story, what would you do if you realised for a fact that the girl of your dreams was real? What would you give up? How much would you give up? What if you have a girlfriend who cares about you? What if you just got engaged to her? What if you work with her dad and hope to take over his practice one day?

I liked Ben, as klutzy as he is. He's like a human tumbleweed, ending up wherever outside forces leave him, vaguely content with his lot but never really where he should be. Skyler Caleb ought to have understood what Ben needed to do, given that he created him and wrote his story, and it's his film throughout, whoever else he gets to share it with. Tara Erickson does a good job as Amy, an awkward part because she's tasked with being desirable but not too much; being a believable girlfriend for Ben but not enough to stop him retaining a girl of his dreams. I liked Steve Moulton too as Ben's best friend Mark. He's suitably large and brusque, just right as a straight man, voice of reason and sounding board all in one. He shares a couple of great scenes, albeit unimportant ones in the grand scheme of things, with Alison Haislip, who leapt into the public eye last month with her excellent reading of the infamous Delta Gamma sorority e-mail.

Best of all, Meg Cionni is utterly perfect as Nadia. As a small bundle of delight who clearly has fairy blood somewhere in her family tree, she's a believable dream girl, never an easy part to cast. She does a great job in the ways you might expect, but she also somehow does something immensely important in a way I still can't quite fathom. In most films, Nadia would be the point, the focus of our attention as well as Ben's. Do you remember the two nerds in Weird Science​? I don't; I never saw past Kelly LeBrock. Here though, we follow Ben as he follows Nadia. She flits in and out of his dreams and thus our story, but somehow she never lets us lose track that she's a destination and we have to follow Ben on that journey. I don't know how Nadia can be so magnetic but not steal every scene she's in. It can't come down to screen time; it has to tie to the way Cionni plays her, as if she's real but not real all at once. Whatever it is, she absolutely nails it.

Bizarrely, she's the only member of the top billed cast who I've seen before and I didn't remotely recognise her from an upcoming horror movie called Buck Wild. She's not remotely like this in that film, but I'll have to wait for its release so I can compare her work; either that or I'll torture myself with Supergator in the name of research. With a dozen films and a few TV episodes to her name, she's more experienced than most of the cast, though the therapists have her beat. Jean Smart, who plays Ben's mother, is on what seems like every TV show known to man and she has a trio of Emmys for her work, a pair of them for Frasier; in any other company, Tim Daly, who's Amy's dad, would be the most experienced TV actor on the cast list. He was only nominated for an Emmy, for his role in The Sopranos. At the end of the day, this is Skyler Caleb's film though. He's known as an actor more than a writer, but the latter is the more important role here. I hope he writes again.

Itty Bitty Bang Bang (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Amber Michelle, Travis Mills and Jonathan Medina

A new month means a new Travis Mills review. I've already reviewed the one that screened at this year's Phoenix Film Festival, The Memory Ride, and actually in a better version than played there; the version available online omits the completely unnecessary ending that really lessens the film. I'm also running out of titles that have IMDb pages, though there are plenty more without to work through. So here's Itty Bitty Bang Bang, not the burlesque dancer from Seattle, but a slightly less risqué short film created for the 48 Hour Challenge at A3F, the Almost Famous Film Festival. It's not deep but it's lively enough to please and it certainly pleased the A3F judges, who listed it among their 20 top films for 2013 (of 47 submissions), highlighted Amber Michelle's acting and ranked it first for its use of two of the three required guidelines: a prop (a ring that had to be put on or taken off during the film) and a required line of dialogue ('I can't believe it worked').

The concept is incredibly simple, even for a short film that clocks in under four minutes including credits. A young couple played by Amber Michelle and Mills himself are having trouble with their relationship but find a surprising solution. They love each other, as she tells her flamboyantly gay friend Freddy, but the passion has gone. Freddy knows the answer, he says, and gives her a box that will make all the difference. 'This little thing will solve all of your problems,' he tells her and, of course, he's absolutely right. We see what's hidden in the box at the same time as our young couple, but we recognise it for the cockring that it is. They haven't a clue, so they spend as much time as has elapsed thus far in a variety of attempts to figure it out. To underline how simple the approach is, this whole section unfolds as a set of vignettes without either dialogue or sound, but with the backing of a suitably bouncy instrumental by the Lovelost.

And that's that. It feels so inherently simple that it's easy to dismiss on the grounds of being well constructed fluff, though there is a neat depth to the fact that while the ring itself may indeed be the solution to this couple's problems, it isn't necessarily only through its intended purpose; they pretty much solve them by accident merely trying to figure out what it's supposed to do. Beyond Michelle's acting and Mills's bookshelf (I can never avoid trying to figure out what's on shelves in movies), as well as Jonathan Medina's delightfully hammy turn at the beginning, this one wins out by just being bouncy. It's the sort of film you throw into the middle of a set of more serious shorts to wake everyone back up again. The only things serious here are Mills's beard and the book he's reading. He has his nose in Jean-Paul Sartre while she's getting a cucumber facial with a gay BFF; I do believe I can see what went wrong here! Well, now we know how it gets right again.

Itty Bitty Bang Bang can be viewed for free at YouTube or Vimeo.

The Retrieval (2013)

Director: Chris Eska
Stars: Ashton Sanders, Tishuan Scott, Keston John, Christine Horn, Alfonso Freeman and Bill Oberst Jr

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

I have to admit that I had some doubts going into The Retrieval. Maybe my biggest worry was that I'd made it to into a theater at the Scottsdale 101 before I'd normally get up in the morning for the third day running, after two full fifteen hour days at the Phoenix Film Festival, so I was waiting for the tiredness to hit. It seemed like a period western might become the right time, especially as it quickly became obvious that its pace is deliberately measured. I had real concerns too though. I'd noted beforehand that it appeared to be a film about black characters but which was written and directed by a white man. These days that mix either bodes really well or really badly. I also noted that one of the three leads, Ashton Sanders, is a child actor making his debut on screen. That also tends to bode really well or really badly. There aren't many discoveries like Quvenzhané Wallis to be found, but then there are some or we wouldn't know her name.

What I found was that the tiredness didn't hit, kept firmly at bay by acting of a tremendous calibre and a script that was engaging and refreshing in a host of ways. It wasn't remotely like a story I'd seen before, for a start. It's a period piece set in 1864 during the American Civil War that cleverly unshackles itself of whatever baggage the audience brought in with the opening scene. We're set up to interpret the black kid walking across the fields to a house in a sort of Schindler's List way. He's apparently in need and an elderly white woman puts him in the barn with some other black folk that she's hiding. Maybe it's just for shelter, as the wind is already howling, or maybe she's a way out for runaway slaves. When the storm arrives in the more deadly form of men with torches on horseback, we automatically feel for the kid, but we soon discover that he's a rat. He's working for a bounty hunter called Burrell who has come not to burn but to retrieve.

Burrell is the first major character we meet who we expect to be a major character. Prolific actor Bill Oberst Jr commands our attention from moment one, even before he further confounds our expectation by being without prejudice. He shoots one of his own men in the shoulder to stop him picking a fight with a shackled slave, not for moral reasons but merely because it's lost property which he needs to return in good condition. It's about value. As he tells his own man, 'The nigger is worth $600. You ain't.' So we have a white bounty hunter who's pragmatic not prejudiced, with a black kid on his payroll who rats out his own. This isn't turning out to be the race film we might have expected, and that's really the key. While this film has a clear grounding in history, which means a clear grounding in racism, it doesn't aim to demonise one colour and beatify the other, either way around. It simply tells its story and lets us build the undertones in our minds.

The kid is Will, who's gifted with a peach of a story arc. At the beginning, he's working for Burrell, along with his uncle Marcus, and the bounty hunter sends the pair of them on a four day walk to retrieve one particularly dangerous nigger called Nate. I should highlight here that the N word is used a lot, by Burrell and Marcus. It isn't overdone, like Tarantino overdid it in Django Unchained, or for that matter, Pulp Fiction, but it's there nonetheless and it carries whatever connotation the speaker chooses it to carry in the context of the scene. Sometimes it's clearly derogatory, other times it's just a synonym for 'African American', but what's really interesting is who uses it and how. Oberst plays Burrell like Lance Henriksen would play him, a complex and dangerous man who sees things surprisingly simply. He uses the word in a matter of fact way, just like any other, but Will's Uncle Marcus uses it in many different ways, as befits his nature.

Neither Burrell nor Marcus are characters to like, but it's impossible not to like what the actors bring to them. In fact Burrell is so obviously deep a character that it's a good thing that he fades away into the background for a while like a bogeyman, because Oberst would have stolen scenes and that wouldn't have helped the picture. As strong and fascinating as Burrell is, this isn't about him, it's about Will and initially that means it's all about Marcus, as his most obvious role model, the only family he has, his immediate figure of authority. Unfortunately Marcus is utterly not the sort of person who needs to be influencing anybody, as is obvious from the fact that he has Will ratting out slaves for pay. Will's story arc kicks in when they reach that dangerous nigger they're tasked with leading back into a trap on an emotional pretext. He's Nate, a completely different character to Marcus, which of course is precisely the point. Will can't help but compare.

It would be cheap and unfair to suggest the characters initially fit stereotypes, but it's easy to see who would be typecast in these roles if Hollywood ever remade this on a big budget. Nate is very much an older Denzel Washington role, with moments of Morgan Freeman, while Marcus is more like a role for a young Samuel L Jackson. However, it might highlight how unstereotypical they are really by suggesting that Marcus is like Jackson playing a John Pyper-Ferguson character. In other words, he's more like a stereotypical cheap white villain who happens to be black. While it's easy to see those cheap resemblances, these characters refuse easy categorisation because they grow well in shades of grey. Of course Will grows more than anyone, because it's his story, but it's the way the other two build, especially on the journey back together as their strengths and flaws show up at particularly crucial moments, that shapes how his character builds.

It's not difficult to figure out the thrust of that character growth, because Nate is clearly an older, wiser character than anyone Will has ever met, with more experience, more strength and more of an edge. Marcus is more emotional and more rebellious, but less principled, a loudmouth with a streak of yellow. Throw these two adults onto the same road together, that's dangerous because of the war, because of their colour and because of the secrets Will and Marcus carry, and clearly we're set for Nate to become a father figure to the young man who doesn't have one of his own. Perhaps the biggest reason that this film succeeds is that even though we see all this early on, it never becomes predictable. There are points of serious tension throughout as we guess at which way writer/director Chris Eska is going to take his characters in a host of different situations. The ending makes sense but it's only one of many and we don't know which it'll be until we get there.

Ashton Sanders does a solid job as Will, especially given that he was a fifteen year old acting in his first film. It's easy to see that he carries his lines well but, more importantly, he carries his entire body well. Will is a downtrodden young man, stuck doing things that don't feel quite right but with nobody to give him guidance on why. Sanders never smiles, never loses that dropping head that reminds of a whipped dog. The only reason that people aren't raving about his performance is that he's only one of a number of actors who give rave-worthy performances in a powerful ensemble cast. Nate is a gift of a character for Tishuan Scott, who picks it up and runs with it. It wouldn't be difficult to throw a whole slew of superlatives his way for a truly outstanding performance of quiet emphasis, as he ensures that Nate is believably deep but never flawless. However, Keston John plays Marcus just as well; he's just stuck with a more loathsome character to bring to life.

Eska gave himself a difficult task here. He wrote a story rooted in simplicity that warranted simple sets, simple costumes, simple and sparse dialogue, but which carried with it substantial depth. He set all the most important scenes inside Will's head, as this thirteen year old boy comes of age at a particularly dangerous time in his country's history, discovering his conscience during a tortuous mental struggle between what he's been told to do and what he gradually realises is right. Yet all this turmoil takes place in emptiness. There's a lot of quiet here, with only three characters taking up most of the screen time and spending much of it attempting to keep the civil war that's raging around them from noticing that they exist. One particularly memorable scene has it literally ride into their campsite like a flood of horses and guns, but this movie isn't about the storm, it's about the calm at its centre, which is to say Will's quiet struggle with himself.

Technically it's very capable, but it's based more in good composition of frame and clever use of the countryside than anything flash or attention grabbing. The editing is most successful because we don't notice it, the soundtrack too. What remains stuck in my mind is the quietness, albeit a dangerous quietness, against which the story slowly but surely makes itself known. I'm no expert on the historical timeframe, but this seems to be well researched and phrased very differently to the usual civil war story. During the Q&A at the Phoenix Film Festival, Tishuan Scott talked about the reading he'd done as research and how it had deeply troubled him. It's far from a pretty time in this nation's past, but perhaps we don't realise how dark the reality was. Setting this coming of age story against that background, rather than focus on the brutality, actually brings it home all the more because we're looking at the thoughts and reactions more than actions themselves.

Eska deserves high praise for what he did here. He's hardly a prolific filmmaker, writing five films over ten years and directing three of them, but if his earlier work is anything like this, he made his time count. I'm very interested in his previous feature, August Evening, and a long short he shot in Japan in 2003 called Doki-Doki. This wouldn't have been the success it was if he didn't have a trio of outstanding lead actors, so the casting deserves credit too. Scott is the standout, but John and young Sanders do excellent work as well. Most of the rest of the cast are civil war reenactors who worked for barbecue and beer, but they do exactly what they're tasked with doing. No film won more than one award at this year's Phoenix Film Festival except this one, which won three: Best Ensemble, Best Director and the Audience Award. It wasn't as enjoyable as Down and Dangerous, as much fun as Waking or as delicious as Favor, but it was the best film I saw all festival.

All American Zombie Drugs (2010)

Director: Alex Ballar
Stars: Beau Nelson, Wolfgang Weber, Susan Graham, Natalie Irby, Alex Ballar and Bobby Burkey

Unlike Wild Girl Waltz, a drug movie that really has nothing to do with drugs at all, All American Zombie Drugs revolves around them so completely that it's a rare scene that isn't laced with half a dozen different narcotics at least. As the narration points out as we begin, run of the mill drugs like weed and alcohol hardly got our lead characters, Sebastian and Vinny, through high school. Now they're grown up, at least in terms of age, their only regret is that it's harder to get quality drugs any more. They've done everything there is to do, to the degree that they even enjoy the crap that gets cut into the real stuff; they're both quietly partial to Drano. Yet the narrator also elevates them to a mythic level. They're 'modern day Van Goghs', he enthuses to us. They'll be remembered as heroes. Surely this is where the zombie side of the title comes into play. Either that or this is going to take a left turn into Hunter S Thompson territory. Neither happens.

Sebastian is an obvious and engaging lead. He begins the film stuck in a dream where he's an outrageously attired pimp daddy who can recover from an orgy for a threesome in ten minutes. He's so out of it that he humps everything in sight: pillows, couches, the guy sitting next to him. He only comes out of it when his long suffering girlfriend Kara pours dirty fishtank water into his mouth and even then we're not entirely sure. They don't have a particularly stable relationship, not least because she's continually pissed at him for having sex with other women in his dreams. Their own sex is terrible; either his narcolepsy kicks in at exactly the wrong moment or she gets weepy on acid, though she much prefers mushrooms. It's only the drugs that seem to hold them together. Through all this, Vinny is doing hits from his neverending bong on the couch. He lives with them, apparently, perhaps because he wandered in one day from school and never left.

The humour here isn't sophisticated, as you'd expect for a druggie film, but it is frequently funny with much of the joy lying in the performances. Beau Nelson plays Seb as a livewire, who spends more time humping things in this movie than most pornstars get to do. If he managed to avoid a slipped disc during filming, he's going to be very popular with the ladies who see the result of his work. As Vinny, Wolfgang Weber initially appears to be little more than a straight man for him to bounce off, but he soon acquires his own character moments. As Kara, Susan Graham is a punky hot girlfriend with a Debbie Harry feel who initially seems to be slumming it with Seb but quickly turns out to be a good match for him. These guys do acid like M&Ms; they subsist on such a wide range of drugs that their bodies must be toxic cocktails. It's amazing how little this life reflects in their looks but the three actors bounce very well off each other.

We do wonder where it's all going but a few seemingly disparate moments slowly coalesce into a story within this drug fuelled haze. Seb and Vinny are getting bored with it all, or at least with the drugs they've been doing lately. Everything is 'either an instant headache or death.' Seb's dream morphs into a commercial for a drug distribution company, the largest in America; gradually that idea seeps out into reality as the solution to the quality problems in their supply. However while Seb is dreaming, Vinny is hallucinating the ghost of someone who warns him against it. It doesn't help that when he drops acid at work he sees his unwilling boss, Kara's cousin, as a zombie, and his ghost joins those dots by highlighting that he's doing nothing in his life except the drugs, and thus is becoming a zombie himself. These subconscious hints tell us not only where the story is going to go but also how successful it's likely to be.

The final piece to the puzzle shows up after half an hour: a rich girl goth chick called Melissa who anchors the story thus far; Natalie Irby plays her with a professional Shannen Doherty vibe. She knew Kara briefly in school, bonded through drugs of course, and recently lost both her wealthy parents in a car accident. Kara sees their rekindled acquaintance as an opportunity for Melissa's inheritance to fund their new venture. She initially appears to be all business but she still snorts oxycodone and brings a surprising spiritual angle to the film. Vinny is on acid when she shows up and sees her as an angel, but when she does acid herself she thinks she's a demon. After some exploration of past baggage, she attempts a spiritual clearing on him and here's where we begin to discover the story behind Vinny's ghost. The writing appears to be slipshod and occasionally it is but there's structure here that keeps us moving forward, however many holes it has.

The biggest success of the film is the casting as there's a lot of chemistry between the characters. Yeah, I went there. Beau Nelson is a riot here. He's out there enough for it to not be surprising that he was in a Ross Patterson movie, Darnell Dawkins: Mouth Guitar Legend. It's more surprising that he was in both The Artist and Empress Vampire, two movies that couldn't be any more different if they tried. He's the only actor here who I've previously seen in a credited role, though I'm likely to see Bobby Burkey again soon in a local Arizona film that features a whole bunch of people I know. I was also impressed by Susan Graham and am now intrigued by a long short film she's just made called Quiet. Both she and Nelson are clearly people to watch. Rounding out the key cast, Natalie Irby easily appears the most confident actor on screen and Wolfgang Weber lives up to a part that ends up with a lot more substance than it initially seems to have.

Its biggest problem is that it's never quite sure if it wants to be a comedy or a serious picture. It does a lot better with the comedy, though it's never quite consistent there: it builds through its characters and their dialogue, then progresses to surreality and situation comedy, reaching farce by the finalé. I was surprised to find that the lead characters never lost my interest even though they're the precise sort of characters who usually do and there are many others in support with moments of their own to highlight. I especially found Bobby Burkey an underplayed joy as Spider, a small time dealer. Roughly speaking, the picture unfolds in three acts. The first is solid on the humour but short on the direction, the middle sees the direction arrive but the humour drop off, and the final act ratchets up the humour to ludicrous level in a whole bunch of different directions all at once. It's as if it decided to finally take the restraints off and live up to its title.

For all that it's mostly a comedy, I have a feeling that the real point of the film is its serious side, which arrives with a vengeance at the end. This ending doesn't quite appear out of nowhere, if you've been paying attention, but it still feels like it belongs in a different movie. The first time I saw this, it played like an anti-drug film that masquerades as a pro-drug film for 95 minutes of its 99 minute running time. Revisiting it a month later, it felt a little more consistent in its approach but the last couple of minutes still felt extraneous. I wonder what writer/director Alex Ballar, who not coincidentally plays a key supporting character, really thought he'd achieve with this film. If he was trying to send a message, it's likely to have been lost in the drug fuelled mix that he built so well. It would be a cruel irony if someone designed a drinking game for this picture but it's so well within the bounds of possibility that it would probably include more drugs than mere alcohol.

I wonder if the apparently conflicting messages, the underlying one from Ballar and the opposite one preached throughout by the characters he created, are the reason why it took so long to find a release. It was shot in 2010 in an impressively short ten days, then titled merely Zombie Drugs, but didn't get released on DVD until yesterday under its new title. Given that Amazon only have five left in stock, it seems to have found an audience but I don't know which one. The title alone would be enticing to a couple of audiences, who are likely to love 95 minutes but hate the last 4. I'm intrigued to see what feedback they leave at IMDb. It's possibile that druggies may love it in spite of the ending, but I'm guessing it will do better with indie film fans who aren't part of the drug scene. However they're less likely to see it because of the title and they're more likely to be as confused by the ending as I am. Only time will tell.

Wild Girl Waltz (2012)

Director: Mark Lewis
Stars: Christina Sharp, Samantha Steinmetz and Jared Stern

Strangely, Wild Girl Waltz was at once exactly what its simple synopsis and its quirky trailer claim it to be and something utterly different again. It's clearly the extrapolated product of a single idea but it's less clear how deliberately extrapolated it is. It often feels as if that idea had merely been let loose into the air so the filmmakers, both in front of and behind the camera, could collaborate on its evolution. Director Mark Lewis is also credited as the writer, but I wonder how much here is really his writing and how much it's his ideas improvised on by the three leads as they went. One of the successes of the film, perhaps the most important one, is how real everything feels. I have no idea if Christina Shipp and Samantha Steinmetz knew each other before shooting this film, but it feels like they grew up together as inseparable friends because their chemistry is strong indeed. Jared Stern is the straight man to this pair, but he makes for a comfortable third wheel.

The single idea from which this film begins is that Brian, already having a bad day, gets home to discover that Angie and Tara, his sister and his fiancé respectively, are starting to feel the buzz of some 'goofy pills' they took, as nothing more than an escape from boredom. He's thus tasked with babysitting them until they return to whatever passes for normality for these two, something that I wondered about more and more as the film ran on. They're stable people, not remotely like the seasoned explorers into pharmaceutical chemistry who populate most drug movies. In fact, this is really not a drug movie at all; we never find out the names of the mystery pills that the girls take, we're never told what effects they might have and we're never really sure when those effects run out. While this film could be seen as that rarity on screen, a positive drug experience, and clearly the pills are seen as real, it all works just as well if we pretend that they're merely placebos.

Really what matters here are the characters and on that front, this film is a huge success from the very first scene, which really sets the stage for what is to come. Angie is walking down Monument Road when a 'drive by redneck douchebag' pelts her in the face with a milkshake. There isn't any apparent malice or any reason for the event at all beyond that this is apparently the sort of thing that redneck douchebags do, but Angie's reactions are priceless. In most films, this would be the pivotal scene, to which everything would inevitably return, or at least it would provide a character with motivation to change. But those films tend to have plots, which this one refreshingly ignores. Yes, things move forward here and moments like this may be referenced later on, but it's quickly obvious that the events don't matter in themselves, it's all in the reactions. Angie's reaction here is what makes the scene and it combines with other reactions to build her character.

I was surprised to find that neither Christina Shipp nor Samantha Steinmetz appear to have much experience on film. Shipp has performed since she was young but only has two prior film credits on IMDb: a smaller role in a science fiction feature called Either Or and a slot in a short film back in 2008 as a deliberately 'unexceptional daughter'. In the cast notes for Either Or she's described as 'hip and flirty, with a rebellious edge'; the latter was put to excellent use here. Steinmetz's only other credit is for a short film, but she's been praised for her stage work off-Broadway. She looks like a country singer but should be acting in France; French cinema would surely give her a lot of opportunities. Certainly both have such strong but natural presences on screen that they deserve to appear on it more often. It isn't just what they do in the goofy scenes, it's even more apparent in what they do in the quieter ones when we're not really sure if they're still high or not.

Jared Stern appears to be the most experienced of the three, but he's the least enjoyable. Perhaps that's partly to do with his part, which is inevitably going to be the one we like least. After all, who cares about the sober guy in a room full of drunks? It's much easier to get drunk yourself and join the chorus. Brian becomes the babysitter, the designated driver, the sober guy, thus becomes the character who's tasked with reining in the girls and stopping them from having too much fun. As we're having fun watching them have fun, he inevitably reins us in too and so naturally we're not going to like him as much. Fortunately his buzzkill tendencies rapidly decrease as the girls' buzz decreases and the emotional parity of the characters is restored. It's counterintuitive but simply by being the same character throughout, while the girls soar away and return, he's the one who ends up with the most obvious story arc and it's a satisfying one. I still find that odd.

The characters are the first win here, bolstered by the acting of the three leads. The second win is the dialogue, which is written well and delivered well. As Tara picks Angie up from her milkshake incident, she tells her that it looks like she 'got a money shot from Frankenberry'. Angie says that she feels 'like the floor of a movie theatre'. Lines like these ones sparked a lot of laughter from my family and I and I appreciated them in a way I rarely do nowadays. Usually I laugh at well crafted humour, such as the biting wit of the Ealing comedies or the slapstick genius of the silent greats, while I'm less enthused by the modern approach of laughing at characters rather than with them. The writing here is clearly contemporary but it's infused throughout with an older, far more gentle humour that made me laugh with these characters in a natural and collaborative way, as if I was glowing there with them. In many ways I shared in their positive trip.

While the humour is a huge success, the serious moments don't always match up. Brian's first big scene after a quick demonstration of his chemistry with Tara is a serious one, as he attempts to persuade Ernie to pay back the money he's lent him. It's a jarring scene in my memory and would be in the film too if only it hadn't been got out of the way so early. I don't know why it's there; the drama doesn't sit well with the free spirited improvisational feel of the rest of the movie. Similarly moments that bring in other, sober characters tend to feel unwelcome, like attempts to wake us from a particularly enjoyable dream. Kim Gordon plays Mrs Wolverton exactly right, but we're so attuned to the girls at this point that she's merely a distraction, albeit one that allows for a truly outstanding out of the blue moment that almost made my better half spray her computer screen with soda. Only Gary, the bartender, really fits within the world these girls are inhabiting.

There are other problems too. The camerawork is annoyingly jerky at points throughout the film, though fortunately not too many. I was bemused at how agreeably stable it was when shooting from Brian's Dodge while in motion, a trick that many low budget filmmakers frustratingly can't seem to master, but how jerky it became in other non-mobile moments when the camera didn't even need to move at all. There are also periodic scenes where the sound is ratcheted down to nothing and an instrumental takes its place, so that we watch a continuation but from a greater emotional distance. These aren't just filler, but they're closer to it than they should be. At least they preserve the feel of the piece generally if not completely, like unimpressive flute solos in a folk song. I'd have preferred something more substantial in their stead. The framework the film has wouldn't have made that difficult at all though the $10,000 budget won't have helped.

The final flaw isn't a flaw at all but it's mostly going to be seen as one. While this goofy trip is set up clearly, with Angie and Tara taking a pill each and then waiting for effects to be felt, the other end of the journey not only isn't marked, it's ignored entirely. I initially felt disappointed that the movie petered out until the credits rolled, but afterwards I felt much happier about it. While Lewis aimed at the feel of nineties films like Clerks and Slacker, it took me back to the early seventies and the abstract approaches to narrative taken during that period of creative freedom. The gentle decline of what little story this has reminded me of Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, where the point gradually ceased to be until the film literally burned away on screen. The pastoral feel reminded me of Van Morrison's stream of consciousness Veedon Fleece in that it's immersive and elusive at the same time, like a dream. I liked it very much but I may like its memory even more.