New York's Dishonest Car Dealer

SOLITARY MAN (2009)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Having recently rewatched "The China Syndrome" and seen "Solitary Man," my conclusion is that Michael Douglas is not as interesting or as charismatic as he once was. This is far from an ageist comment - Douglas simply can't carry himself playing an unlikable boor as he does in "Solitary Man" (the Douglas of the 70's and 80's might have). Maybe it is not in his nature to play such a character but, as written in this film, he is more ruthless and diabolical than human. Not even Gordon Gekko was this bad, and that character is one of the great, colorful characters of all time.

At the start of "Solitary Man," Douglas's character, Ben Kalmen, is told by his doctor he might have some sort of heart problem. Flash forward to several years later and we see a Ben who sleeps with women half his age (including his girlfriend's daughter!); is losing his profitable New York car dealership due to some illegal financial wheeling and dealing that not even Gordon Gekko would approve of; has money problems to the point that he works in a deli near the university where his girlfriend's daughter attends; is not punctual when it comes to his grandson's birthday; and is slowly losing touch with his impatient daughter (Jenna Fischer) whom he has the audacity to ask for money loans. Meanwhile, Ben sleeps with women, attends college parties where he tries to school a student (Jesse Eisenberg) on seducing women, and so on.

I grew tired by the fast-talking Ben because the character is simply a salesman no matter what he does - his addiction is not drugs but simply being able to lie and sneak his way into doing anything he wishes. I recall Harvey Keitel playing a smooth con-man in the little-seen and underappreciated "Imaginary Crimes," and in that film, we had some measure of sympathy because Keitel was playing a real person who loved his family and did what he could to provide and protect. Douglas essentially plays a con-man (not to suggest all salesmen are con-men) as a selfish, uncaring, irresponsible bastard who can't and won't care about anyone or anything except money. I admire Michael Douglas for playing such a risky part (and he has played his share) but he seems barely there - more like a mirage than a character and Douglas mostly alleviates the part with a low buzz. When you saw Douglas in "Wall Street" or in the slimy husband roles he played in heightened mediocre thrillers like "Fatal Attraction" or "Disclosure," he did it with brio and charisma and some measure of humanity (not to mention a leathery, reptilian voice) that you cheered for the man you love to hate. He wanted to be loved, and the audience knew it, despite his indiscretions. Douglas doesn't bring any of those qualities and the screenplay by Brian Koppelman and David Levien (both co-directed) doesn't allow for them either. Ben Kalmen is a one-dimensional cretin.

Douglas is, however, surrounded by an energetic and superb cast. Mary Louise Parker is absolutely brilliant as Douglas's rich, no-nonsense girlfriend - her scene in a car where she outlines how Ben needs to get out of her life is sublime. Danny DeVito is also at his restrained best as Ben's old pal who runs the university deli. Jesse Eisenberg easily steals the film from Douglas, giving us a character far more mature than Ben who sees through Ben and his ways. Kudos also go to Susan Sarandon in the brief and lively role of Ben's ex-wife.

"Solitary Man" is awkwardly paced and seems to take an eternity to get nowhere fast. The final shot of the film is purposely ambiguous but it left me cold and empty. Sometimes I like that feeling if the film carries weight, but Ben Kalmen is someone I'd rather not get that feeling from.

The World According to Ramona

RAMONA AND BEEZUS (2010)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I am still a sucker for a sweet, sentimental family film that aims to tug the heartstrings and show that normal, happy, functional families still exist. Well, not entirely - I'm not because many of them are as sappy and artificial as aspertame ("Bye Bye Love" comes to mind). But if it works, it is worth checking out and we shouldn't leave it entirely to Hallmark to make it a genre of its own. "Ramona and Beezus" is an exceptional treat that never gets too thickly syrupy or sweet to render one with diabetes. No, in fact, the film is a Splenda-sweetened and gentle ride that doesn't render everything on screen as hokey or sappy. Thanks goodness for that.

"Ramona and Beezus" is based on the books by Beverly Cleary, which I've never read but, as a side note, my wife has read them and feels the film captures the flavor of the books nicely. So, back to the movie. Ramona (Joey King) is the imaginative and accident-prone 9-year-old heroine who lives in a house on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon with her 15-year-old sister, Beatrice (Selena Gomez) whom Ramona refers to as Beezus, and her parents, Robert (John Corbett) and Dorothy (Bridget Moynahan). Robert the Dad, who had artistic aspirations (before starting a family), has lost his job in management while construction for a new room is taking place in their home. Ramona wants to make Dad's life easier by earning money, but she delivers more mischief than cash. She helps to hose down the Range Rover of her best friend's Uncle Howie for, ahem, almost 100 dollars! It pays more than the lemonade stand. The problem arrives when the vehicle is accidentally drenched in vivid colors of paint! The uncle, Uncle Howie (Josh Duhamel), by the way, is Ramona's Aunt Bea's (Ginnifer Goodwin) ex-boyfriend. 

As I've said, the movie version of "Ramona and Beezus" is not uncomplicated about real issues we can identify with, such as losing your job and possibly your home. Ramona is klutzy but so kind-hearted and not too bratty, and by the end of the film, she has helped to save the day (SPOILER ALERT: all is forgiven in the finale). I do not dislike the picture and it is what it is...but something gnaws at me. Maybe it is because it romanticizes the idea of complications. Maybe it is hard to distinguish Ramona's fantasies from the real world. Or maybe I am not the intended audience for this movie. But I do enjoy films like this as long as the sentiment is not laid too thickly over the proceedings. 

"Ramona and Beezus" works and it is a charming, entertaining picture. The filmmakers could not have found a better Ramona than the bright and bouncy charm of Joey King. All the other actors snuggly fit into their roles. Perhaps there is that side of me that wishes the movie didn't end with such tidy resolutions. Still, I am not too critical without knowing that, yes, we may need more films like this. 

Blustering and wearying 'Informer'

THE INFORMER (1935)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Victor McLaglen plays one of the great boisterous drunks of all time in John Ford's "The Informer." Not only does Victor play a drunk, he is also an Irish drunk. And he is inebriated throughout this movie, and so much so that it grows tedious. Yep, too tedious to the point of not caring. As I said, he plays a great drunk but he also plays it too well, and the movie's final scenes will make you tear your hair out, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

Set in Dublin in the 1920's, an Irish rebel named Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford) is on the run. The Irish drunk and ex-IRA member, Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen), informs on his friend, Frankie, to the British Army. Frankie is located, gunned down, and now Gypo collects a reward, feels a smidgeon of guilt, gives himself away at Frankie's wake to some suspicious IRA members, and spends the rest of the movie drinking, spending most of his reward money and cavorting with other drunks and some prostitutes.

"The Informer" never quite addresses the insights into Gypo's guilt. As directed by John Ford (who has made some clunkers and some terrific pictures), the movie settles for the drunken stupor of Gypo to give us a grand, wicked caricature of a giant Irish drunk who can still punch with great velocity (in one scene, he knocks out a policeman). Gypo is guilty of being an informant and he knows it, yet he points to an innocent tailor (Donald Meek, in the most restrained performance in the movie) as the informant. Once the tailor is cleared, the ensnaring of Gypo becomes tighter but the movie never establishes enough tension to make it palatable. Frankly, I was hoping Gypo was going to be found guilty sooner than the story allows. Since we never get caught up in his misfortune and sense of guilt, it is hard to feel any remorse.

Victor plays it to the hilt, one-hundred percent (he won the Oscar for Best Actor), but there is not enough to draw empathy from his occasionally one-note performance. It is a shame and the ending, involving Una O'Connor (one of the great character actresses of her time) as Frankie's mother, feels tacked-on and inconsistent. "The Informer" lacks drive and passion yet it boasts some spectacular black-and-white photography by Joseph August, who purposely echoes German Expressionism in its foggy look (Max Steiner's haunting music score is also a plus and evokes dread). A minor failure by John Ford is more worthwile than most other films that do less, but I do not think Ford's heart was in the world of film noir or this half-hearted tale of snitching.

Grossest and Nastiest Film of all time!

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia 

Baltimore native John Waters has helmed some of the most outrageous and disgusting films of the 20th century. He began in the 1970's spewing some underground cult films such as "Multiple Maniacs," "Mondo Trasho," "Female Trouble," and the notably perverse "Pink Flamingos." "Hairspray," a film from the late 80's and the last to star Divine, is comparably his most restrained film. 1997 marked the 25th anniversary of "Pink Flamingos" (and 2012 will mark the fortieth anniversary), a film of such execrable taste that I defy anyone to find a more repugnant film bearing the title "Grossest Film of All Time." This film is disgusting, shocking, nauseating, uneven, among many other things, but it is also funny in a demented sort of way. In other words, you must see it because you'll never see anything like it again.

The flamboyant, hilarious Divine plays herself (sort of), a 300-pound trailer park woman, alias Babs Johnson, who lives with her son Cracker (Danny Mills) who is obsessed with killing chickens while having sex. The other members of this household include Divine's equally obese mother (Edith Massey) who's obsessed with eggs, and an apparently normal blonde roommate named Ms. Cotton (Mary Vivian Pierce). Divine is ecstatic when she hears that she's the filthiest person alive as claimed by a tabloid paper called "Midnight." Divine is also a murderer, cannibal and a lesbian, and proud of it. 

A wacky couple, Connie and Raymond Marbles (Mink Stole and David Lochary with blue hair), are envious of Divine's filthy status and vow for revenge; they claim to be the filthiest people alive. Actually, they are not so much filthy as they are evil. For example, Connie runs an illegitimate adoption agency where her servant kidnaps women to have sex with so they can have babies to sell for adoption to lesbian couples!

"Pink Flamingos" benefits greatly from Divine's performance, and she is a real riot to watch. She's gracious, garish, flamboyant, and sheerly outrageous. She wears elongated black eyelashes and tight, multicolored skirts, and prances and preens to the camera with excessive mugging - it's a great, trashy performance that gives the cast of "Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" a run for their money. Except for Mink Stole, the rest of the cast is amateurish and uninteresting at best. Divine is clearly the star of the show. Her lines are delivered with a no-nonsense mentality. Here are some dialogue examples:

"Kill everyone. Filth is my life. Eat sh--"

"I find you guilty on all counts of first-degree stupidity."

What else can be said about this film? It is repulsive and idiotic but always entertaining to a degree. There's cannibalism, torture, numerous deaths, sexual innuendos bordering on pornography, butt-synching to "Surfin' Bird," and Divine performing all kinds of distasteful acts, including the famous shot of Divine eating dog excrement. Most of the film is cartoonish and unbelievable but the excrement sequence is definitely real making her, as the narrator puts it, the filthiest actress alive.

I'll simply say that the ads are true - this film is simply an exercise in bad taste. I did say back in 1997 that "Pink Flamingos" is not filmmaking and it is not art. Well, it is not art as in an Ingmar Bergman film or any of the other cinema gods we hold in high esteem, but it does qualify as gutter, trash art. John Waters wrote, directed and filmed this trash - thankfully, he acquired cinematographers later on because he has no clue how to hold a camera or compose a shot. There are jump cuts galore and much bad dubbing. None of this matters, though, because Waters had one thing in mind: to make a film as filthy and distasteful as possible. He has succeeded. Since 1972, no other director has come close, including Waters.

State of Hysteria in Montana

STATE OF MIND (1992)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

From the late night school of preternatural David Lynch weirdness, "State of Mind" is an abhorrent mess. It has little to recommend it, aside from featuring actors like Lisa Gaye (in a top-billing role for once), Fred Williamson, Jill Schoelen, among others. It's so jumbled, incoherent and maddeningly confused from one scene to the next that I am not sure there is much to make of it. The filmmakers themselves don't even like the film and find it just as confusing. What does that tell you?

A strange, forlorn woman named Barbara (Manouk van der Meulen), a former nurse, is living in Montana in a house that looks more like a castle that Boris Karloff might have lived in. She takes in two survivors of a horrific car crash (Lisa Gaye and Don Hannah), keeps them drugged and practically comatose, lies to the inquiring police detectives with matching white turtlenecks (Fred Williamson and Jill Schoelen), and the whole situation triggers traumatic memories for Barbara, even some incestual ones. Why Barbara keeps them prisoner is not explained, though she may be just lonely and looking for company.

"State of Mind" has a story that I typically find intriguing (isolation and cabin fever hysteria) but it never develops its ideas into feature-length interest. Manouk carries a singular expression of sterile blankness; Lisa Gaye seems stoned throughout until the climactic twist; Don Hannah also seems stoned beyond recognition; the late Paul Naschy (the Spanish equivalent of Lon Chaney) appears in the opening sequence only to be killed off; and Jill Schoelen looks like a pallid robot with none of the charisma of her earlier roles. Fred Williamson seems to be in his element as he smokes his trademark cigar (he apparently never wears makeup when he is in front of the camera, according to the filmmakers) but he is needed on planet earth when the film dovetails back into that stoned house of horrors.

This Belgian-French-Dutch production almost took eight years before it saw any sort of distribution, courtesy of Troma productions. I don't know why anyone bothered because "State of Mind" is a curious misfire that is haphazardly directed, acted and edited by a crew who seem to have no idea how to make a suspense film. Belgium stands in for a very European-looking Montana, poor Don Hannah (Daryl's brother) is mostly wiggling while standing or writhing in pain and screaming when digging through holes or sealed-up crates (not one line of dialogue seems to have been written for him), and Lisa Gaye seems ready to break out of the doldrums to give it a lift yet, when she does, it is too damn late. I get a certain chill from seeing Lisa Gaye trying to strangle Jill Schoelen (and to be fair, there are one or two scenes that chill the bone), but that is not enough to visit this mangled dreck of mindless waste from David Lynch wannabes.

Toxie don't mean a thing if he ain't got that swing

THE TOXIC AVENGER PART II (1989)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I remember years ago canvassing for a Princeton, NJ environmental agency. The idea was to promote the negative effects of air pollution around certain neighborhoods door-to-door. One neighbor told us, "There is nothing but toxic waste everywhere." When I think of New Jersey, having lived there for a good ten years, I think of toxic waste (I also lived in New Mexico, not terribly far from Los Alamos where certain nuclear bomb tests were conducted years earlier). When it comes to toxic waste in a comic-book style, nothing beats "The Toxic Avenger," a cult classic from Troma productions that became a big enough hit to feature their own mascot for their company, Toxie himself. "Toxic Avenger Part II" is not nearly as much gory, clever fun as the original but it has enough toxicity in its humor and horror to give it a pass.

For the uninitiated, Toxie (Toxic Avenger) was originally Melvin (Ron Fazio), a 98-pound weakling who got thrown into a vat of toxic waste and emerged as a muscular crime fighter with a deformed head. His job was to keep Tromaville safe from bad guys. Any time a villain was within a few yards of his path, Toxie started to have convulsions and knew it was time to kick butt. As this sequel opens, Tromaville's residents are happily dancing on the streets, manufacturing orange juice and watching presumably "Troma" films. The Center for the Blind is where Toxie works (huh?) and he is in charge of the croquet games (double huh?). Meanwhile, Toxie's blonde blind girlfriend (Phoebe Legere) has the occasional romp in the hay with Toxie. Now Toxie is consistently drinking Drano and emits toxic ooze from his body so what kind of fluids are being exchanged between the sheets? Villainy doesn't stay away for long in Tromaville when Apocalypse, Inc. wants to turn the Center for the Blind into a toxic dump. Toxie won't allow it but his presence in this town doesn't allow for the bad guys to complete their dastardly plans so they have Toxie's psychiatrist fool him into going to Japan to find his long-lost father named, are you ready kids, Big Mac. Ha!

"Toxic Avenger Part II" loses some steam in the Tokyo, Japan scenes, involving slapstick gags that incorporate smelly fish used as swords, nunchakus and everything else you can imagine. Sumo wrestlers also figure into the plot, including ninjas, but not really much inspiration. The Japanese folk react with horror to Toxie walking the streets with a broom as if he was Godzilla, but most of the shenanigans get a little tired (Toxie has a habit of literally cooking the bad guys into sushi specialties). Those who love watching full-frontal naked women, though, will not be disappointed.

But when the film returns to New Jersey in the climax, it feels revved up and actually comes closest to the manic inspiration of its opening thirty minutes. The villain who stands out is Lisa Gaye as Malfaire, who wears glittery costumes and hats that would be welcomed at Buckingham Palace! Her plans to destroy Tromaville and Toxie are delivered with ample malice and a hint of sexual tension (Gaye returned in "Toxic Avenger Part III," which was essentially left over footage from this sequel). Also worth noting is Rick Collins as the Apocalypse Inc. chairman who seethes with just enough comic timing to make one wish the film gave these actors more screen time.

"Toxic Avenger Part II" is average fare for Troma pictures and fittingly funny enough where it doesn't greatly disappoint (the David Mamet line is a howler). As they say in the film, if Tromaville had been destroyed, there would be no "Toxic Avenger Part 3." I say leave Toxie in New Jersey, our toxic waste capital where he belongs. It just doesn't have the same sting without that New Jersey swing.

Nuclear Leakage

CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH PART II - SUBHUMANOID MELTDOWN

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Some horror comedies get confused with tone. John Landis' "An American Werewolf in London" and "Innocent Blood" focused more on blood and gore than humor, and took the gore seriously which is a death knell in horror-comedies. "Class of Nuke 'Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown" isn't confused at all - it is equal parts tongue-in-cheek gory horror mixed with subversive humor. A good film of its type (and not nearly as horrendous as other critics have found it) - it is what it is, and either you are with it or you'll hate yourself afterwards.

After a brief recap of the original "Class of Nuke 'Em High" and a flashforward to a squirrel monster that must be seven stories high, we flashback to the start of this sequel set in a college (formerly Tromaville High) that is adjacent to a nuclear power plant. This is no ordinary campus since women run around in lacy underwear or wearing nothing at all, there are gang members who harass each and every student, and every single scene contains said students running around or beating each other to a pulp (oh, and it is next to a nuclear power plant that screams for the TV crew from "The China Syndrome" to be on sight). Roger (Brick Bronsky) is a buff and nerdy student with bad B.O. who works for the college newspaper, the kind that wants to report rumors, not truth. Something odd is happening on campus when selective students and faculty start projectile vomiting green mucus and then turn into a green pile of mush (sometimes a severed head that looks like Sesame Streets' Oscar the Grouch is all that remains). Meanwhile, Roger participates in a sexual experiment that unknowingly involves a subhumanoid woman named Victoria (Leesa Rowland) who has a second mouth in place of her belly button! We also have Professor Holt (Lisa Gaye, who relishes this role with aplomb) who runs the sexual experiments in addition to helping build these malfunctioning subhumanoids. Most pressing question: are all the students, including the unruly gang members, subhumanoids or is Roger the sole human, aside from Professor Holt?

"Class of Nuke 'E High Part II" is manic, unruly, unquestionably incoherent fun. Watching Lisa Gaye's Marge Simpson hairdo adds to the picture's anything-goes mentality (the film often reminds us directly it is a sequel - talk about postmodernist). Tromie, the giant squirrel, appears in the climax and gives the finger to the guards who attempt to take it down. Toxie, Troma films' own mascot, also appears. It is a messy, overindulgent, outrageous oddity, and it has its tongue firmly placed in all of its orifices.