How is it possible that a movie as violent as Alien Girl could be so boring? A blood-soaked contemporary Russian gangster movie that simultaneously romanticizes and puts down the crimeridden Kiev of the early 1990s, Alien Girl is a colossal waste. It has nothing to do with aliens or immigrants and is a wholly turgid and unconvincing thug romance between a young Ukrainian hood (Evgeni Tkachuk) and his hot hostage-cum-girlshaped baggage.

Alien Girl is neo-noir at its most brusque and empty-headed. The film’s title, taken from the source novel by Vladimir Nesterenko, refers to Ridley Scott’s Alien, but again: There is no extraterrestrial here, just a catty badass (Natalia Romanycheva). A gang of Ukrainian gangsters has kidnapped her and plans on using her to blackmail her brother. Unfortunately, her plans to turn her captors against themselves are not nearly as clever or arresting as either wetbehind-the-ears director Anton Bormatov or Nesterenko (who co-adapted the film’s script) seem to think.

The weirdest and most dispiriting thing about Alien Girl is that it’s supposed to be an impassioned movie about the futility of romance in the midst of tremendous urban upheaval. Syringes are used to spike drinks, crack is smoked and pimps named Robo exist, all in a narrative that kicks off with a drive-by shooting and a quick display of police brutality. Jelena (Tkachuk) fits right in: He’s a blond-haired, cherubic mug on ’roids. He looks like he should be tearing through set pieces with his bare hands.

Yet the bulk of the film revolves around Alien and her limpid machinations, which is why it’s so tedious. The narrative is as complex as a piece of dry white toast. Some kind of real sex appeal might’ve made the question of whether or not Alien is two-timing Jelena somewhat less obvious. But Romanycheva never gets the chance. She pouts half-assedly and makes vaguely threatening gestures. The one sex scene in the film between Alien and Jelena is laughably idiotic: They boff while a train car passes by, which causes a neon light to illuminate their barely visible naked skin, causing him to climax in time with the blare of the conductor’s horn. Love lies bleeding here but only after having been shot, stabbed, drugged and then pointlessly chastised.

>> Alien Girl Directed by Anton Bormatov, at The Village East Theater, Runtime: 100 min.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, co-writer/director Jalmari Helander’s feature debut, effectively ushers in the holiday season with a seemingly limitless cache of delightfully perverse variations on the innate fear of punishment at the heart of the Santa Claus myth. The film’s version of St. Nick is a demon, a primordial, nigh-Lovecraftian creation that lurks in the abyss of children’s minds and seeks to punish them for any infraction that they only think they’ve gotten away with over the course of the year. The central premise of Helander’s playful family adventure is that if people want to really bring Christmas back to its roots, they have to acknowledge the pagan nature of the holiday. There’s no Christ here to back nor any harsh polemics against the commercialization of the sacred day. No, Rare Exports is that rare, self-conscious genre film that not only knows its limitations but also knows exactly what it wants to say and how to say it.

Growing up in the middle of an iceblanketed nowhere village, Pietari (Onni Tommila) is continually overwhelmed by his environment’s pervasive violence and alienation. His gun-toting single father, Rauno (Jorma Tommila), arms him with a small rifle on Christmas Eve after setting up a camouflaged pit of make-shift wooden stakes, presumably for wandering reindeer, the main source of Rauno’s income. But for all Pietari knows, Rauno’s trying to protect him from something that will descend on the village the next morning, something unremittingly evil that left footprints outside his window two nights before Christmas.

One of the main joys of Rare Exports is watching Pietari’s dawning sense of recognition guide the film’s preposterous events. At first, Pietari is suspicious because everything going on around him doesn’t seem to add up: a flurry of activity erupts around an archeological dig that Pietari is convinced has uncovered the corpse of the real Santa. Then, after burrowing throw a small library of arcane books on Santa that appear to have all been edited by Aleister Crowley, Pietari understands that the famous fat man is not a benevolent sprite with a taste for gingerbread cookies, but rather a kidnapper with a cookie fetish who is monomaniacally compelled to torture children. If nothing else, Rare Exports’ Santa is the original serial killer.

If people want to really bring Christmas back to its roots, they have to acknowledge the pagan nature of the holiday.

Most of those revelations are expertly unpacked in the film’s crackerjack first 20 minutes. From then on, Helander unpretentiously takes his time in revealing his film’s world and its meaning. For the most part, the film feels like a crackedout Spielberg homage, complete with a distracted, though not quite absent, father figure and a child hero that knows infinitely more than pretty much everyone. Later, right after the naked killer elves start attacking, the film switches gears drastically to assume the pose of a Michael Bay actioner, complete with absurd macho quotes from Pietari and a swaggering helicopter chase scene that resolves with a nod to Armageddon. Helander’s shift to the relatively crass latter style is motivated by the knowledge that everything Santa stood for is a lie, a revelation crystallized when everyone lays eyes on the real Santa. In that sense, the film’s resolve to rehabilitate the spirit of Christmas is admirable, especially because Helander takes the most indirect and unsound route to get there.

>> Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale Directed by Jalmari Helander; at the IFC Center, Runtime: 80 min

Gareth Edwards, who wrote and directed the film, does knowingly grapple
with similar themes as Cloverfield
and District 9. But it never gets so
bad that Monsters’ shared interest in
shaky cameras, deformed squid-like creatures and canned racial politics becomes
overwhelmingly distracting. What Monsters
sorely wants is a convincing human element and a softer touch when it comes
to its incoherent and mostly pretentious depiction of the way the media
sensationalizes and in turn creates monsters. Edwards’s handheld digital
photography helps him kill both of those birds with one stone and that’s really where his ambitious
parable falls apart.

In a world where aliens have crash-landed and been barely
quarantined to half of the U.S. and much of Mexico, photographer Andrew Kaulder
(Scott McNairy) is the equivalent of a vulture. He takes a break from snapping
pics of dead glow-in-the-dark squid alien carcasses to help Samantha Wynden
(Whitney Able), his daughter’s boss, evacuate to safety. Andrew starts their
trip as a driven, impatient and unkind scavenger, sneering to Samantha that he
could potentially be paid “$50,000 for a picture of a dead child.” He ends the
film having reached a mystifying new understanding of his job via an overworked
encounter with two monsters copulating after one has sucked energy from a
nearby television showing footage of the military fighting squid creatures on a
CNN-type channel. His transition between those two state of minds is brutally
clumsy.

Edwards actively stifles the budding romance between Andrew
and Samantha, which is effectively what necessitates the key change from Andrew
the exploiter to Andrew the enlightened. His quick takes, chopped-up close-ups
and over-edited scenes of dialogue only give McNairy and Able enough time to
pose with fleeting pained looks when they really need to emote with their whole
bodies their frustrated ardor for one another.

The film’s over-protective aesthetic is however effective
when it comes to filming the film’s creatures. The actual monsters in Monsters thrive on suggestion and die
when cast into harsh light: if you show too much, we stop caring. Too bad that
concept directly clashes with the film’s central concern with the dangers of
using tawdry representations of traumatic events to stand in for them. In the
news, we have to see things to believe them while the opposite is true of
monster movies and simplistic allegories alike.

Brooklyn’s ReRun Theater has also put on a
considerable festive display this year. Earlier this month, programmer Aaron
Hillis screened JT Petty’s S&Man, an interesting though not wholly successful
fauxcumentary and chased it with Simon Rumley’s brutal revenge thriller Red,
White & Blue. For the weekend of Halloween, the ReRun will celebrate with a
Glass Eye Pix retrospective. Glass Eye is the brainchild of New York-based
filmmaker Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, The Last Winter) and has showcased
such talents as Glenn McQuaid, director of Hammer Studios and comic book
pastiche I Sell the Dead, and Ti West, whose ’80s slasher homage House of the
Devil
is probably the studio’s most famous title. Be sure to check out a West double
feature of House and The Roost, West’s worthy micro-budget creature feature.

Vaunted repertory theaters like the Film Forum
and the Walter Reade Theater have exciting offerings this year too. The former
just wrapped up a week-long run of Kuroneko, director Kaneto
Shindo’s period ghost story and will celebrate Halloween with Hitchcock’s Psycho, which turned 50
earlier this year.

Special attention should be paid to the Walter
Reade’s fourth annual “Scary Movies” program however as its programmers have
done an exceptional job of highlighting a number of exciting obscure titles,
like haunted house movie supreme The Legend of Hell House and Jack Cardiff’s Freaks-inspired The
Mutations, (starring Donald Pleasance). “Scary Movies 4” also highlights a
number of contemporary films, like festival favorites Stake Land, a new grizzly
vampires-as-fundamentalists chiller, and The Loved Ones, the Australian
answer to Prom Night. Severance director Christopher Smith also gets special
attention with screenings of his two most recent films, Triangle, also known as the “TimeCrimes on a boat” film and Black
Death,
or, “the Medieval Wicker Man.”

There are several other terrific options
available to adventurous fun-seekers around town. 92YTribeca will screen Dracula
Has Risen from the Grave on 35mm Oct. 30. Grave is the first of the
Hammer Dracula movies to be shot by regular Lynch cinematographer Freddie
Francis.

Francis also unofficially co-directed The
Day of the Triffids, screening at MoMA on Oct. 30 and 31. Shot in gorgeous
CinemaScope, Triffids is an adaptation of John Wyndham’s classic
man-versus-nature novel. Apart from writing several other striking stories,
like The Chrysalids, Wyndham also wrote the script for the original Village
of the Damned. Unless you really can’t bear to miss Frank Darabont’s pilot
episode of The Walking Dead, which is really good incidentally, you have
no reason to stay home this Sunday.

]]> http://nypress.com/the-big-scream/feed/ 0 http://nypress.com/things-we-look-at-in-the-dark/ http://nypress.com/things-we-look-at-in-the-dark/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Simon Abrams We begin our tour at the Southeast corner of West 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. Peter Chiarella, better known as porno historian and trench coat personality 42nd Street Pete, is my guide. He points out where the old Anco Theatre used to be—“A real nest of rotten eggs,” he says. “It was pretty much a haven for changesnatchers, junkies and career criminals.

Basically, what happened is if they ripped you off, they’d go out through the back. There was an alley built into the rest of the theaters that went all the way around the right side of the block here.”

The Times Square Chiarella describes to me is the Times Square people know from Taxi Driver: “Wild West City,” as Chiarella puts it. In fact, the old Hilton Theater, which was the exterior theater in the scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle takes a date to a Swedish porn movie, was just up the block. Chiarella tells me about how he was once stabbed in front of it with a screwdriver.

“I was hanging out with these two call girls,” Chiarella says. “We had struck up this symbiotic relationship: I was a smoker and I had the weed and they had the pussy so it all worked. I used to stay with them on-and-off on the Lower East Side and my deal was, if they had a client that they didn’t know before, I would walk ’em to the client, make sure he saw me, make sure he knew I’d be back in an hour.”

He continues, “This one chick, Lisa, was white, the other was Candy, she was Asian, and I was walking [Candy] back one night and this crazy fucker just came out of nowhere, swinging. And I jumped in front of her, hero that I am, and I got stabbed in the leg with a screwdriver. So I managed to get my little toy out and started swinging at him with my blade. I got a nice puncture wound, right near the femoral artery… I lived, like anything else.”

Chiarella now spends his time and money on trying to bring back a bygone era with a series of DVDs that historically contextualize porn, the least reputable of cinematic genres. Busty Bombshells of the Atom Age is his latest collection of 8-millimeter cheesecake loops that used to screen in booths at porn stores. His DVDs are color-corrected and provide a brief history of where each film screened and why it’s important in a booklet, as well as in video segments featured on the DVD itself. Chiarella’s preservation deserves much admiration, even if he is restoring things we only look at in the dark. (Watch the trailer here.)

Chiarella first started commuting into Manhattan from West Orange, N.J., in the mid-’60s. “I used to cut high school and come over,” Chiarella explains. “We used to go to the Village to go drinking but then one day I made that left turn instead of that right turn out of Port Authority, came down here and got hooked on the whole deal.”

With Vietnam on, few options seemed open to the young man. “There was actually no sense in my trying to pursue a normal life because too many of my buddies got thrown over there and came back in body bags. That’s part of the reason why I went over here, because when you think you have no future, which I didn’t at that point, you figure, ‘What the fuck? Might as well do it all.’” Chiarella worked for New York City Liquidators, a wholesale retail supply chain that used to provide pornography to local stores.

Chiarella blames the marked decline of the area on the AIDS crisis and the influx of drugs that he says started to become rampant around 1985. This is what gave politicians, like Mayor Giuliani, the leverage they later needed to clean up the area.

Giuliani’s aggressive crackdown on the area in the ’90s was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but Chiarella says the change was necessary: “People were still hanging on into the ’90s but it was basically guys dealing drugs out of boarded-up storefronts. It just turned more dangerous than ever. It was bad in the ’70s but people could deal with it. But once the crack and the AIDS shit came in, and people were drugged out and mugging people—fuck it, it wasn’t even safe.”

Chiarella doesn’t romanticize the perils that plagued Times Square, but he does have a soft spot for the movie theaters that used to pepper the streets. He tells me of 10-foot-tall standees of Lee Van Cleef and double bills of Make Them Die Slowly and Savage Man, Savage Beast, and looking up hungrily at marquees as if they were “smorgasbords.” It’s a lived history of film that’s fast disappearing, Chiarella laments. Horror movies especially seem to be the genre whose rise and fall most closely emulates the area’s. He credits transgressive independent films from the mid- to late- ’60s, like Blood Feast and Night of the Living Dead, giving the latter film’s director, George Romero, credit for being “the first guy to cast a black lead as a hero; that guy had a vision.”

Chiarella then compares that with the predominance of “shock value” in today’s horror. “The envelope’s already been pushed,” Chiarella says. “Mondo Cane in ’63 started it; you’ve killed people in every way possible… so why not go back to scaring people?

“You used to have all these genres of exploitation,” he elaborates. “The biker films, the sexploitation, the drug films, the gang films, spaghetti westerns, blaxtaploitation, horror, sci-fi, gore. That was the era. It’s generic now. Nobody gives a shit.”

Directed by Robert Schwentke

Runtime:111 min.

The acknowledged limits of comic book adaptations dictate
that a movie based on a comic book is a property first, then, maybe, a
self-sustained work of art. Within that sadly conciliatory realm of
expectations, the new adaptation of Red,
a wisp of a three-issue mini-series by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, is
surprisingly sharp, though curiously sleepy. Director Robert Schwentke has no
eye for spectacle: while many of the film’s action scenes are sufficiently
cocky and well assembled, none of them are memorably explosive.

Red succeeds, however, in ways that many comic book movies usually don’t.
Miraculously, what has survived on the screen of screenwriters Erich and Jon
Hoeber’s (the half-cocked but fitfully satisfying recent White-Out adaptation) script appears to be mostly
compromise-free. It is as wholly invested in its vision of older CIA assassins
as it can be (meaning it’s fairly sober when it comes to typically scatological
geriatric humor and hence thankfully devoid of horny, rapping or pot-smoking
grannies and fogies). As a character-driven action comedy, the Hoebers give
priority to banter instead of plot. And thankfully, the film’s assembly of
comedic talent is considerable enough to make that atypical emphasis work. If
anything, Red works better as a
comedy than as an action film, which automatically makes it better than most of
its peers. If only that meant it was worth remembering in six months’ time.

Red’s plot is
knowingly insubstantial: Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) ends his retirement from
black ops assignments after a group of killers invade his home and tries to
murder him. This also puts Sarah (Mary-Louse Parker), Frank’s dream girl and
the office drone that handles his pension, at risk as Frank’s phone calls have
been monitored. So Frank goes out of his way to abduct Sarah and bring her on a
nation-wide trip to gather together his old posse—horny but trustworthy Joe
(Morgan Freeman); psychotic, drug-addled Marvin (John Malkovich); and the
stiff-upper-lip British lady killer Victoria (Helen Mirren)—to save their necks
and clear their names.

Considering how badly butchered something like Mark
Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s script for Jonah Hex was when filmed, viewers should be grateful that the only noticeably
unsatisfactory thing about Red is how visually unremarkable it is. True, within the film’s “I’m too old for
this shit” logic, there should be a level of ordinariness to the film’s
violence. But certainly not to the point that a scene where Malkovich lobs a
grenade back to its sender using his gun as a tennis racket is completely
over-shadowed by a later one in which he manically chases after a group of armed
men with only a makeshift bomb strapped to his chest and a crazed look
plastered on his face.

The fact that that this is the case, however, confirms that Red, above all, belongs to its cast. In other words: One should forgive Schwentke for hanging back to frame his accomplished actors’
reactions more often than actually givign them things to react to.
Louise-Parker and Willis don’t have chemistry but Mirren and Malkovich
certainly do in one scene where Malkovich feeds her clips of bullets for one of
the several conspicuously large guns Mirren wields. Schwentke and the Hoebers have
done their cast due diligence, even if there really ought to be more to it than
there is.

His protagonist’s gob-smackingly massive vocabulary doesn’t really matter in and of itself nor even the lack of imagination Hausler display when it comes to visualizing their internal anguish (flashes of light and sped-up motion photography are especially groan-worthy). Instead, the director sinks or swims depending on how and if he turns his shortcomings into something tantalizing.

Nick Stahl stars in the film as Billy Klepack, one of a pair of rudderless post-grads left leering after their girlfriends have dumped them. Alice (Beau Garrett) quit Billy after he moved back home while Billy’s old best friend Stanley (Jonathan Jackson) is reminded of all the barely sublimated baggage his break-up with Ashley (Alona Tai) left him with. Stanley is therefore Billy’s foil rather than vice versa, a mirror of things to come and of the depths Billy may be capable of sinking to should he continue to obsess over Alice. Ashley is after all missing now and everybody assumes Stanley’s to blame.

Within that generic formula, the polysyllabic barbs that Stanley and Billy continually entangle themselves in start to look more their way of coping with a cruel world. But the fact that everyone, including local gossip Simge (Jill Latiano), can verbally joust so well is decidedly peculiar. But one shouldn’t dismiss that wanton floridness as overzealousness on Hausler’s part. He openly acknowledges his tendency to err on verbosity as a stylistic choice: Billy at one point is talking with his teenage sister Barbie (Sammi Hanratty), now about a decade his junior and marvels with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek: “You’ve got a bigger vocabulary than I do.”

We are so deeply invested in Billy’s head that even Billy doesn’t see it until this point. The film’s clunky but teasingly suggestive finale reminds us that what we’re looking at is an externalized emotional landscape, a memory whose patchiness is, to an extent, a product of a subjective mind. In covering his ass so thoroughly, Hausler’s created a surprisingly sturdy foundation for this otherwise rickety character study.

Kalamity, directed by James M. Hausler, at Village East Cinemas, Runtime: 100 min.

If you want to make films, you don’t always have to go the
studio, or even traditional indie movie route. Upon graduating from New York
University’s Tisch School of the Arts in May of 2009, Zac Amico has already
made strides in his DIY filmmaking career. A lover of Troma-Entertainment’s
unique brand of schlocky movies, Amico has already caught the eye of Troma
founder and spokesperson Lloyd Kaufman, and he now has a deal with them to
distribute his two “Schizoid Sluts from Planet Fucktard” short films online for $2 per film. He also shot, directed,
edited, wrote and scored Mickey Maniac,
an hour-long feature following a cartoon-obsessed serial killer, on a budget of
$1,200 (Amico took a cue from John Carpenter and scored Mickey Maniac and his other shorts mostly with synthesizers and a
Theremin). Although Amico and I met one another at NYU, I have yet to see any
of his films, so I was curious how he had accomplished so much as a fledgling
Troma filmmaker and someone that happily procured eye-candy for Kaufman.

New York Press: Where’d your interest in Troma films start?

Zac Amico: I had
a VHS of Toxic Avenger when I was 12
because I remembered the Toxic Avenger from the Saturday morning cartoon show Toxic Crusaders. That was right when I
started to get into horror movies. I was sort of mixing and matching, figuring
out what I was into. And when I saw Toxie, that was it: I knew what I wanted to
do. That was the day I decided I wanted to make horror movies. I watched it
twice in a row in the same night.

Then why Tisch? It
seems like a strange choice.

Personally, I wanted to go the best school I could. I wanted
to be in New York, and I thought it was important that even though I wanted to
do low-budget, trashy shit, I felt it was important to make a lot of contacts
with industry people. The more talented people I was around could only make me
more talented, just being around them, because I’m very competitive. That’s the
difference with me. I didn’t just want to make more of what I liked: I wanted
to improve it.

Tell me what shooting
and casting “Schizoid Sluts” was like.

The first one I made for me. It was school-related, in a
way: A friend of mine was having a Troma fundraiser, and she told me I should
make a movie for it. She gave me six months to get my act together. So I
brainstormed for a while and the term “Schizoid Sluts” just came to me. That
was not so much about acting and casting because I wrote parts for people I
knew and who I knew would be naked for my movies. And then I got a cameo from
my favorite band, an amazing death-rock band from Virgina called Bella Morte.
They’re real close friends of mine, and they cameoed in it. A lot of interest
in the film came from them being in it.

Tell me more about
the make-up work that you do. I know that working on a budget, it’s a source of
pride for you since you’ve got to do good work and you’ve got to do it on the
cheap.

That can really make or break movies like mine. My
girlfriend [Michelle Crouchelli] went to Tom Savini’s make-up school in
Pittsburgh, so I luckily have gotten a lot of experience just from working with
her. I write my make-up scenes around what I can afford, more or less. She’s
incredibly talented, and she knows how to work for me; we have a very good
working relationship. She knows what I can afford and what I can do time-wise.
That’s another pitfall of shooting on a budget, as you only have a very limited
amount of time to get stuff done. We pretty much do the make-up on the fly.

What’s the hardest
location you’ve had to shoot in?

The end of the second “Schizoid Sluts” is set in a bathroom
with four people, and we were stuck in there for a very long time. It was like
a Vietnam movie. I shot about 20 minutes of Mickey
Maniac all in one day because I only had all of those actors together for a
single day. I turned one room into four office locations. That was a hellish,
hellish day.

You told me that you
used to pretend to be the producer of your films to make it look like your
films were bigger productions than they were. How did that work?

I used to always make it out like I was part of a production
company so it made me sound a little more legit. But then when people talked to
me, they always realized that it was just me. It just sounded more
professional: I would write emails that mentioned “the team” or “the production
company.” Since I did the job of several people, I don’t think that’s too much
of a lie.

How did you track
down Lloyd Kaufman?

I tracked down his assistant’s email and then found his
schedule and found that he was going to be speaking at an NYU class I was not
enrolled in. Then I found the professor’s email for that class and asked if I
could come and I asked Lloyd’s assistant if I could borrow him for five minutes
and shoot him. He said that he wasn’t sure Lloyd would be there, but I could
ask him. He assumed I was going to ask him if he could come to a set, but I
just brought the camera with me. We shot a scene guerilla-style, I guess
illegally—because it was in the NYU building and that’s not allowed.

I brought an actress with me, and we shot a death scene for
Lloyd, which was actually a Troma tribute because it has the Bromo seltzer
puke, a Troma staple. Lloyd is a very friendly guy. He loves to support
independent film. I got him to cameo in my movie and from there I got a lot of
stuff look a lot more legit knowing that he was in it. I think he liked my
tenacity and that I was willing to just show up with a camera and have no shame
about it. From there I got to work with Robin Watkins, who was in Poultrygeist, their last movie. He’s in Mickey Maniac as well.

I’m sure having a
girl as bait helped too, right?

It certainly didn’t hurt. Lloyd appreciates beautiful women,
as do most filmmakers. When you bring one with you, especially more than one,
it’s a lot easier to get stuff done.

It was a dark time for Hong Kong martial arts films. Thai
actioners were saturating the market and domestic stars like Jackie Chan and
Jet Li had long been written off as relics of a time when using wires for kung
fu was inconceivable. The year was 2008 and director Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen,
the charisma-deficient Old Stone Face of Wing Chun fighting, had collaborated
on Ip Man, the first of what is so
far a three-film series about jingoism, self-reliance and ritualized violence.
The film won a dozen awards, including the Golden Horse Award (the Chinese
equivalent of the Oscars) for best action choreography. While Ip Man carries on in the tradition of
contextless historical fight films—like the wildly popular Once Upon a Time in China movies—it remains an inexplicable,
contextless bit of kung fu historicosploitation—albeit a very satisfying one.
Because of popular demand, it now screens in New York uncut, undubbed and in its
full Hong Kong version at Cinema Village.

Yen stars as Brother Man, a wealthy, happily married man who
leads a simple, though hardly demure, life. He has an idyllic nuclear family
supporting him and is secure in the knowledge that he is the best martial
artist in all of Fuoshan, a city known for its dojos. He’s unperturbed by the
changing times and, as a friend accuses, is only concerned with eating,
sleeping and training.

Man is the role Yen was made to play: a stoic tough guy that
everybody in the community knows is the best and hence everybody turns to for
protection, like a Chinese mafioso. By contrast, the only local cop in Ip Man is a trigger-happy hysteric that
Man handily disarms, putting the power of policing the neighborhood back into
the hands of the most qualified local in the neighborhood: him. Might doesn’t
always make right in kung fu films but in this case, there’s no doubt that it
does.

Ip Man is
bifurcated into two time periods: pre-WWII, when Man was free to strut his
stuff as Fuoshan’s defender, and wartime, when all the formerly independent
kung fu masters are forced to dig coal and fight against bloodthirsty Japanese
martial artists for an eighth full bag of rice. A local bandit like Jin Shan
Zhao (Siu-Wong Fan) is stopped from thriving in the first era but it takes the
war era, when fighters are shot when they best their oppressors, for Man to
realize that his neighbors’ cries to be trained by him can no longer be
ignored.

The self-fashioned tradition of built-in chauvinism in Ip Man is extraordinary. It’s a
knowingly more conservative period drama than even the early Shaw brothers
films from the 1960s that inspired Chan, then Li and finally Yen’s generation.
Man’s wife, for example, seems only to exist to demurely support Man: She bawls
before the film’s finale that she never supported his kung fu habit enough.

That final conflict between evil General Sanpo and Man—who
of course still has to fight the biggest bad guy since the locals are too
incompetent to even fight a group of disorganized bandits—is also curiously
ruthless. Sanpo is likened to Man’s coat rack-like training apparatus, making
the flurry of blows Man rains down on Sanpo’s head a vicious attack on a
dehumanized piece of furniture. It’s a fittingly abstract and totally brutal
finale to the biggest thing in Hong Kong martial arts today.

Ip Man, directed by
Wilson Yip, at Cinema Village, Runtime: 107 min.

The Romantics is
the kind of bland romantic melodrama that breeds resentment instead of sympathy
for its young protagonists. Based on a novel by the same name written by
director/writer Galt Niederhoffer, The
Romantics is a lusterless portrayal of unrequited love gone sour over time.
Filled with distracting, blousy pop songs and rote burnt-out character types
whose rowdy bad behavior defines their blasé poses and the defining lack of
romance in their lives, The Romantics
is basically Garden State by way of Margot at the Wedding.

The
Romantics turns out to be just
another contrived story about a 30-year-old white woman in crisis who gets her
voice back after years of allowing others to speak for her. Laura (Katie
Holmes) is that mojo-less cipher, and the event that will give her back the
right to throw a tantrum and enjoy a happy ending is the marriage of her
ex-boyfriend Tom (Josh Duhamel) and her ex-best friend Lila (Anna Paquin).

Unhappily married couples Tripler and Peter (Malin Akerman and Jeremy Strong)
and Weesie and Jake (Rebecca Lawrence and Adam Brody) and their creepy drunk
friend Chip (Elijah Wood) traipse about the periphery of Laura’s overplot but
are ultimately just foils for her discontent. Laura never got her Prince
Charming and, at the 11th hour, she must so that somebody in the film can go
home happy. Well, maybe somebody other than Candice Bergen, who sadly has an
overglorified walk-on role as Lila’s mom.

Niederhoffer fails to make his characters’ fear of being
drab and tired relatable, mostly because he considers strictly functional
expository dialogue to be an adequate expression of deep-seated discontent.
Paquin and Holmes both gag on climactic pseudo-Chayefyskian monologues that
sound nothing like real human speech. After balking about how significant
Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale once was
to Tom and herself, Laura desperately pouts, “You inspired me!”

Niederhoffer just doesn’t know what to do with the
considerable resources he has on hand, like when he prematurely cuts away from
a gorgeous overhead shot of the thirtysomethings as they come ashore after a
late-night swim, robbing the take of any potential meditative heft. Maybe if
Murphy Brown had more screentime, Niederhoffer would have something.