Helter Skelter is more compelling than this

KILLER: A JOURNAL OF MURDER (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Killer: A Journal of Murder" is a laborious, clear-studied case in excess: it is relentlessly overdone with bad acting, bad direction, and laughably pretentious dialogue to boot. All I could keep asking myself was: why did Oliver Stone serve as one of the executive producers of this junk?

The "killer" of the title is Leavenworth convict Carl Panzram (James Woods), a real-life murderer who killed every person or thing that crossed his path without hesitation. Carl is a thoroughly repellent, remorseless, amoral human being with no redeeming values or virtues whatsoever, except that he's a brilliant writer and an intellectual. Oh, really? Apparently, a Jewish prison guard (Robert Sean Leonard) takes an interest in this killer, and brings him writing supplies and a notepad so that Carl can write his life, er death, stories. Harold Gould plays the prison guard as an old man as he narrates the story of Carl, who in turn tells us his side of the story, the basis for the "journal," in amateurish flashbacks complete with badly edited newsreel footage.

Director Tim Metcalfe has no idea how to steer such unpleasant material so he takes the Peckinpah approach (with less of a lean edge): he throws everything up in the air without sorting any of the details or characters (Metcalfe dedicates the film to Sam Peckinpah). For instance, why would a Jewish prison guard be interested in a character like Carl? What about the other inmates? And why is Carl depicted as devoid of human feeling only to turn into a compassionate, saintly figure by the end of the film? And why is Lili Taylor's cameo so much more effective than anything else in the movie?

"Killer" is ambiguous, dull, and uninteresting; the narrative structure is so sloppily fragmented that it will give you a migraine. The actors give forced, listless performances, especially the unconvincing Robert Sean Leonard ("Dead Poets Society"). For a look at Woods's more subtle, less maniacal roles, check out "True Believer," "Cop" and "The Boost." Anything is better than this tripe.

Gremlins Goes to the Circus

KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE (1988)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Never has a title captured so fittingly the essence of a film. "Killer Klowns From Outer Space" is one of those midnight movies that looks like a home movie and should never have been given a rating by the MPAA. Well, let's scratch that idea. It should never have materialized from the written page. I do not think there was even a screenplay.

I have seen my share of bad movies. There are bad movies, good bad movies, and truly self-destructively bad movies. "Killer Klowns" falls under the latter category. It is what it is. There are aliens from outer space who look like grotesque clowns (or klowns, for that matter). They zap humans with laser guns that turn the human victims into cotton candy cocoons. Meanwhile, one teenage couple discovers that these clowns are up to some murderous business. They try to convince the police and a couple of ice cream truck drivers, known as the Terenzi brothers, that the clowns are aliens. Lo and behold, nobody believes them until it is too late.

I just found myself yawning throughout this junk. Think of "Gremlins Goes to the Circus" though not as appealing an idea as one might admit. The humor, characters, situations and overall camerawork and lighting are garden variety at best. Except for the occasionally funny shenanigans of Officer Mooney (John Vernon), nothing here offers the slightest hint of scares or black humor. I suppose this was meant to be an intentional comedy-horror film but the melding of the two genres is so haphazardly handled that a grade-school kid could write better dialogue than the writer-director Chiodo brothers team who are responsible for this travesty.

I suspect that if the Mystery Science Theatre group were watching this, they would crack jokes at the sheer badness of it every second. Come to think, that sounds like a good idea after all.

I Wanted to Become a Model and an Actress

ANNA NICOLE (2013)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Agnes Bruckner as Anna

 Anna Nicole Smith always struck me as a blonde Marilyn Monroe-type who never took herself too seriously. She seemed to always be acting, playing it up as an ex-Playboy bunny/wannabe actress who made it in Hollywood because of the size of her breasts. In the Lifetime movie, she is shown as nothing more a pill-popping boorish drunk who desired fame and fortune by sleeping her way to the top. I miss the effervescent smile, the act of pretending that all this glamour meant so much. This TV-movie (the second one since 2009) may respect her as an individual technically, but it is only fleetingly the portrait of the Anna Nicole we saw in the media.

The real Anna Nicole Smith

Agnes Bruckner plays the Southern Anna Nicole, from her days of having a child at a young age and ignored by her mother (played by an unrecognizable Virginia Madsen), to her days as a stripper who got boob enhancements to get bigger tips (36DD to be precise), to her short relationship and marriage to 80-year-old oil business mogul J. Howard Marshall II (Martin Landau, always excellent) who never judged her and found her "photogenic," to her Playboy days (which are given short-shrift), to being a model and semi-actress in movies like "Skyscraper," etc.

The movie, written by Joe Bateer and John Rice, races past many events in Anna Nicole's life without focusing on any of them in any intimate manner. Anna drinks and pops pills and vomits while her son, Daniel, tries to make her change her ways (and her lesbian love affairs in elevators to boot). Some of the scenes between Anna and her son are powerful (and I liked the cliche of her future self and her child-like self reflected in mirrors, one offering a future of glitz, and the other being more disapproving of where she ended up). Other times, there is a little too much focus on her drinking incessantly - I understand showing the negative with the positive but there is precious little shown that is positive.

Most of the cast does the best they can with thin, marginalized material. Martin Landau elevates his role with cherished moments of subtle grace and humor ("You make me feel like 75 all over again") but when his greedy son (Cary Elwes, who is an expertly bad actor) appears, he drags the movie down with a mannered, emotionless performance. Same with Adam Goldberg as Howard K. Stern, an eerie resemblance to be sure, but his character exists as some sort of impotent chum who hung on to Anna but we never quite figure out why (Blink and you'll miss the crucial character of Daniel Birkhead, who does nothing more than have sex with Anna and shoot her pic for no more than 3 minutes of screen time). Everyone exists as a pawn in Anna Nicole's life to be used and drained of all financial resources except for her cherished Daniel, who eventually succumbed to drugs and died before Anna did. If the movie had established a closer look at Anna and her son (especially the reality show they were in), in addition to revealing more insight into her lifestyle beyond drinking binges, it might have been more than a mediocre biography about any starlet (a shame considering the director is Mary Harron, who also helmed "American Psycho" and "Notorious Bettie Page"). The truth is Anna Nicole was more than an average starlet - she was Anna Nicole Smith!

'Marty' meets Ernest Hemingway

HEAVY (1995)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

(original review from 1996 screening)

"Heavy" is the most refreshingly unsentimental and most heartbreaking portrait of small-town life I have ever seen. Forget "Nobody's Fool" or the slew of feel-good movies patterned after it - this is the real article. At its center is the remarkably mute performance by Pruitt Taylor Vince - a performance you're not likely to forget. It's "Marty" meets Ernest Hemingway.

Pruitt Taylor Vince plays a balding, shy, reticent heavy-set man named Victor who works as a pizza cook at his mother's depressing tavern, Pete and Dolly's in Upstate New York. Shelley Winters plays the mother, Dolly, who owns the tavern, and dotes on her son for cooking breakfast for her every morning. Victor lives with his mother in an equally depressing house with cracked white walls and an insistent little mutt for a pet. Once in a while, a regular, inebriated customer (Joe Grifasi) sleeps over their house. Sometimes, a trashy waitress (Deborah Harry) takes him in. Nothing here is suggestive of an exciting life - it's time that Victor leave for a more comforting environment, but where?

Suddenly, a savior seems to come into town in the form of a bright angel named Callie (Liv Tyler) who becomes the new waitress at the tavern. Victor is immediately smitten, but is unable to vocalize his affections. He notices that Callie has a guitarist boyfriend (Evan Dando) who disapproves of her workplace and the people that inhabit it. However, she doesn't seem happy in her relationship or with drifting around from one small town to another. She does take comfort in Victor, and they take photographs of each other and play solitaire. Victor realizes he can't have her because of his weight, and becomes self-conscious.

We suspect from the beginning that Dolly doesn't want her son to consort with outsiders, much less someone like the voluptuous Callie. She tells her son, at one point, "You're not fat. You're husky. Well-built." The older, slutty waitress sees Callie as a threat and tries, in one beautiful scene at an airport, to kiss the reluctant Victor. But all Victor wants is to go to the local cooking college and stay with Callie.

"Heavy" is not a typical family drama, or a made-for-TV-movie about a shy man who learns to love life again and possibly end up with the girl at the end. "Heavy," as written and directed by first-time director James Mangold, has a stately, controlled pace with well-developed characters whom we see against a dreary, hopeless backdrop. There are no easy resolutions, or needlessly uncomplicated characters - the movie strives to make you see the world that surrounds Victor and all that he has left in it.

Pruitt Taylor Vince, a journeyman character actor, is convincingly reticent as Victor, a man who doesn't say much and envisions himself as a savior and hero in his metaphoric rescue attempt to save Callie. The film becomes uncomfortable to watch after a while because of Victor's silence - it is like watching a silent movie about a repressed man. Shelley Winters is wonderfully restrained as the bright Dolly who misses her late husband Pete, a trucker. Deborah Harry brings depth to her waitress character without including the usual stereotypical tics; a woman who's been in the same place for far too long. The biggest flaw is Evan Dando as the boyfriend (a shallow man, too) - Dando is not an actor, just an annoyance, and I would have preferred a more charismatic actor for an essentially undefined role.

"Heavy" is not for all tastes, but it is an intelligent character study about a lonely man who can't communicate in a desperate lonely, uncommunicative town.

Wafer-thin neo-noir tale

PICTURE CLAIRE (2001)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

It is a shame that a pristinely photographed neo-noir picture like "Picture Claire" fails to enliven any interest. Here is a film with oodles of atmosphere and a mute performance by Juliette Lewis (herself a staple of neo-noir since the early 90's) and nothing else to offer. Ponderous pacing, cliched characters and the most remote plot thread of them all, it is the kind of film that gives neo-noir pictures a bad name.

Juliette Lewis plays a French-speaking woman named Claire who arrives in Toronto, Canada to see a photographer she met in a bar. She finds his address, breaks into his house, discovers pictures of herself and, alas, also sees that he is dating a different woman. Then we find Claire at his gallery showing where a huge black-and-white picture is framed, taken while she was asleep. Oh, but let's not forget that Claire was at a donut shop trying to find the location of the photographer's gallery. She accidentally spills her coffee all over herself, blames it on a paying customer named Eddie (Mickey Rourke), leaves in great haste until a murder takes place in the shop. It turns out that Eddie is some sort of low-level gangster/mobster/whatever who has a meeting with Lily (Gina Gershon), who has just brought a shipment of precious diamonds from abroad. Since Gershon plays a femme fatale-of-sorts, she kills Eddie in the first ten minutes of the movie. She splits until it seems that Claire could be blamed for the murder. Or so we think. The rest of the picture focuses on Claire destroying her portrait at the gallery, spying on the photographer with his new girlfriend, and desperately trying to get back to her home in Montreal (a home, which I might add, is burned to a crisp before the opening credits).

There is a good set-up for "Picture Claire" but it goes nowhere fast. Juliette Lewis is always an amazingly powerful presence on screen and, frankly, a movie where she mostly speaks French for only one-third of the picture is not a bad thing. It's just that director Bruce McDonald seems to have gotten lost in whatever story exists (reportedly the picture was taken away from his hands and extensively recut). Gina Gershon seems to be treading on the innocent bad-girl schtick she first played in films as early as 1988's "Red Heat" - she has matured since then and I am surprised by her one-note take on Lily. The photographer whom Claire has such an interest on is merely a pretty boy for young girls to ogle at - he seems to have stepped out of the latest issue of GQ. Same goes for the cardboard villains who kill anything in their path. At the very least, Mickey Rourke can be counted on for a performance of some dignity - a shame he disappears so soon.

"Picture Claire" offers plenty to see in visual terms, and the editing (involving split-screens and multi-screens) is quite an eyeful. But all this is in the service of a story that is threadbare and mediocre at best. The movie initially seems to coast on the idea that Lily and Claire are two halves of the same person (especially considering the title or maybe it is just me). At least that is what is insinuated, but I think the whole movie is an asinine insinuation.

Harrison Ford cast in Expendables 3

HARRISON FORD in EXPENDABLES 3?

By Jerry Saravia

Latest entertainment news regarding Harrison Ford is that he signed up for a role in "Expendables 3," the latest sequel in the testosteronian macho action flicks with Sylvester Stallone (Bruce Willis has optioned out of a role in the new film). Say what? Ford in a gory, blood-splattered action flick? Will he make any adjustments to the overall film not unlike Chuck Norris's request that no spoken obscenities be uttered in "Expendables 2"?  Who can say although it is an unusual and odd choice considering the old reliable action pros of the 1980's with their high body count masquerading as acts of heroism. To top it all off, Ford stated in an interview with the Telegraph about his growing need to reprise everyone's favorite archaeologist in a new Indiana Jones adventure. I am, of course, all for it but his claim that Indy will not kick as much ass may disappoint those who were already down in the dumps about the last Indy flick. Check out my video below for my insights into Harrison Ford's future roles.  

I am going to see Hotpants College 2

LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND (1998)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

John Hurt is one of our most underrated actors, partly because some of the

films he's appeared in. "Frankenstein Unbound" and "Even Cowgirls Get the 
Blues" have not enhanced his career in the same way as other British actors 
have such as Anthony Hopkins. Now comes one of his best leading roles since 
"The Elephant Man" as Giles De'Ath in the unusual, independent comedy-drama 
"Love and Death on Long Island."                                                

Hurt plays Giles De'Ath, an academic, isolated writer living in London who has no interest in the modern conventions of society, particularly televisions. One day, he's locked out of his house and wanders into a movie theater where they are showing the latest film adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel. He winds up in the wrong cinema screen where they are showing the Porky's-style comedy "Hotpants College 2." Instead of being mortified, however, Giles becomes transfixed and smitten by a particular actor named Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley from "Beverly Hills 90210"). He is so smitten and obsessed that he decides to fly out to the fictional Chesterton on Long Island, and locate the handsome actor.

While checking out the sights in Chesterton (actually Halifax, Nova Scotia), he stumbles upon Bostock's supermodel girlfriend, Audrey (Fiona Loewi) at the supermarket. They become friends and he convinces her that he's the kind of cultured intellectual who can offer Ronnie sound career advice. Eventually Giles gets to meet his young idol Ronnie, and he tells him that Ronnie's future as an actor is limited unless he makes more adventurous choices and plays more complex characters, like Laurence Olivier. "I'll devote myself to your career," says Giles. By this point, Ronnie has become transfixed and smitten as well.

"Love and Death on Long Island" may remind some viewers as a kind of low-note riff on "The King of Comedy" but its tone is closer to Thomas Mann's similar "Death in Venice." This film is not about the dangers of obsessive behavior, but about an obsessive search for beauty and finding it in the strangest of places. Giles finds that obsessive beauty in Ronnie, and his whole world suddenly brightens with his interest in American pop culture, teen magazines featuring pictures of Ronnie, VCR's and TV's, abysmal Ronnie videos such as "Tex Mex" and "Skid Marks," and so on.

If we didn't believe the relationship between Giles and Ronnie, then the film wouldn't work. Thus, it was an auspicious casting decision to have John Hurt and Jason Priestley cast as the unlikely twosome, and they have great chemistry together. Hurt is particularly understated and dryly humorous as the lovestruck author; his incredible performance embodies wit, naivete, reserve, great comic timing, pathos and humor. Hurt is already on my list of the best performances of 1998, and this is a performance that he handles with great relish. Priestley has come a long way from the soap opera origins of "Beverly Hills 90210," and he has a tricky role here: he's essentially playing himself as the actor with the pretty boy looks, and he has to convey that a hint of talent may be in his future ventures, even if he's set to appear in "Hotpants College 3." In a sense, Priestley may venture onto a real career himself after appearing in this film, and in the independent black comedy "Cold Blooded."

There are also some nicely underplayed supporting characters such as Maury Chaykin, from "The Sweet Hereafter," as a restaurant owner who describes everything as attractive, and Sheila Hancock, one of Britain's best-known actresses, as Giles's maid, Mrs. Barker. The one character that doesn't work as cohesively as the others is Audrey's, as played by Fiona Loewi: she's Ronnie's girlfriend, but her character is practically left on the sidelines when we could have seen what kind of effect Ronnie's career has on her life.

"Love and Death on Long Island" is fluidly written and directed by Richard Kwietniowski, his first full-length feature after having directed a slew of short films. The film is based on Gilbert Adair's cult novel of the same name which is composed entirely of Gile's first person narration, with no dialogue. He does a fine job of adapting the book by taking the subjective approach from Giles's point-of-view. I also liked Kwietniowski's accurate approach to the look of those 80's-style comedies Bostock is famous for - it is a far more evocative homage than the awfully uneven "The Wedding Singer."

At a breezy 93 minutes, "Love and Death on Long Island" is a smart, extremely funny and touching treatise on obsession, pop culture v.s. art, and the nature of celebrity. Its most telling and universal theme, though, is that love and beauty can be found in places you never thought of looking or least expected to find, like "Hotpants College 2."