Culture Surfing

THE HORSE BOY: Rupert Isaacson (from left), Rowan and Ghoste in Mongolia

Medical narratives often depict ordinary people who turn to alternative healing methods when traditional Western health care fails. Seldom can you find families that go to the lengths of Rupert Isaacson and Kristen Neff, who traveled from Austin, Texas, to the steppes of Mongolia with the hopes of improving their son Rowan’s autistic condition.

Narrating the documentary The Horse Boy, Isaacson justifies the trip early in the film. At his worst, 5-year-old Rowan’s cognitive problems make him the equivalent of “a giant 18-month-old” with poor social skills, incomplete toilet training, and seemingly endless, inexplicable tantrums. Isaacson’s research into shamanism and Rowan’s affinity for animals, especially horses, inspire the father to see if the two in combination could have therapeutic value. He discovers that Mongolia combines shamanic traditions with horsemanship, so he, Neff and Rowan embark on a journey a world away.

Continue reading “Family goes to extremes to alleviate autism in The Horse Boy” »

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The “Dexter” Season 4 episode reviews have been shrink-wrapped to an autopsy table in an unknown location, and will have to be postponed indefinitely. Let’s kill time before the rescue with the new hardback Dexter By Design (Doubleday, $25) and consider how Michael C. Hall’s secret serial killer resembles the original creation of writer Jeff Lindsay.

The author introduced the perfectly-assimilated predatory sociopath in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Published in 2004, the award-winning mystery served, rather loosely, as the basis for the 12 episodes of the Showtime series’ first season. Since then, the show’s continuity has diverged dramatically from the books. Sgt. Doakes, Dexter’s Javert-like police nemesis, was killed in the show’s second season but still lives on the page, if in a horribly maimed fashion. From Dexter’s perspective as the first-person narrator, his homicidal impulses, nicknamed “The Dark Passenger” manifests more like a secondary personality who keeps watch on Dexter’s consciousness.

The fourth book, like the show’s fourth season, begins with Dexter married to Rita, only Dexter by Design first finds the couple as newlyweds in Paris, not as sleep-deprived parents of a new infant. Dexter by Design sees our antihero thoroughly pwned by a pranksterish nutjob with a grisly artistic bent. Miami’s latest human butcher puts dead bodies on display in ghastly parody of South Florida tourist behavior. (Lindsay makes a passing nod to Carl Hiassen’s Tourist Season, which features a home-grown terrorist cell with similar anti-tourist motivations.) Staying one step ahead, the killer discovers Dexter’s true identity and targets his loved ones.

Continue reading “‘Dexter’ vs. Dexter” »

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THE PAINS OF BEING RAW AT HEART: Willem Dafoe as He (from left) and Charlotte Gainsbourg as She in Antichrist

I can’t truly say I enjoyed watching a man nail his penis to a wooden board in the 1997 documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. I can’t even truly say I saw more than brief glimpses before I averted my eyes, as if confronted by a solar eclipse. Nevertheless, the close-up atrocity summed up the obsessions and life experiences of a self-punishing performance artist with a fatal case of cystic fibrosis and a surprisingly tender marriage.

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist eventually reveals how unguarded genitalia hold up against carpentry utensils, but without the justification of Sick’s humanism or thematic clarity. An instantly notorious award-winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Antichrist proves to be an alternately draggy, repellant and opaque cinematic experience, while clearly representing devoted efforts from several master screen artists. Were Antichrist a piece of hackwork, so to speak, it’d be easy to dismiss.

Continue Reading “Antichrist canonizes genital mutilation”

(Photo Courtesy Trust Nordisk ApS/An IFC Films release)

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John Lithgow as "Trinity" (second from right): Killer knows best

A side effect of the Trinity plot on this season of “Dexter” is that it makes the new remake of The Stepfather, starring Dylan Walsh, seem even more superfluous than it already was. The original Stepfather offered a dark satire of suburbia and the 1980s cult of family values, with a terrific performance by Terry O’Quinn (these days zipping between life and death on “Lost”) as a Ward Cleaver-wannabe who butchers his families whenever they, inevitably, reveal human flaws.

The PG-13 remake of The Stepfather seems to be vanishing with barely a trace, while John Lithgow’s Trinity killer, a.k.a. Arthur Mitchell, offers a vivid, fresh portrayal of an upstanding, all-American middle-aged male who happens to be a homicidal monster. This week’s episode, “If I Had a Hammer,” fills in the outline of Trinity’s life (I’ll call him “Trinity” for convenience sake) as husband, father of two, high school teacher, deacon at “Sacred Fellowship” church and organizer of the community home-building project called “Four Walls, One Heart.” “If I Had a Hammer” opens not with the Pete Seeger/Lee Hays protest song of the same name but the hymn “Are You Washed in the Blood?” The blood symbolism isn’t exactly subtle, but the song gives Lithgow a chance to zestfully sing an old-school church song.

Continue reading “‘Dexter’: Season 4, Episode 6″ »

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"I'm getting a lot of use out of my stalkin' shirt."

This week’s episode has the title “Dirty Harry,” which probably does not mean that baby Harrison is overdue for a diaper change. Series regular (and Lance Henricksen look-alike) James Remar gives a particularly angry, wrathful performance this week as Dexter’s imaginary/ghostly stepfather Harry in the wake of Deb and Agent Lundy’s shooting.

“Dexter” has grown increasingly skeptical about Harry over the seasons. At first, he came across, in flashbacks, as a positive influence on his young adopted son. Perceiving at an early age that his adopted son has sociopathic tendencies and a fascination with death, he channeled Dexter’s homicidal instincts in a “positive” direction, “The Code of Harry,” so he only preys on murderers and takes enormous precautions to cover his tracks. Early on, Dexter’s flashbacks and imaginary conversations have portrayed Harry as a combination of guardian angel and nurturing parent, albeit one who offers advice on the best places to dispose of chopped-up bodies.

Continue reading “‘Dexter:’ Season 4, Episode 5″ »

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The most frightening moments in live theater don’t always come where advertised. Mystery chestnuts like Sleuth or Deathtrap come across like suspenseful parlor games, while old-fashioned ghost stories like Conor McPherson’s The Weir, however atmospheric, seldom provide anything to lose sleep over. On the other hand, more high-brow examples of the modern “Theater of Menace,” like Harold Pinter’s enigmatic, paranoia-inducing The Birthday Party, Martin McDonagh’s totalitarian fable The Pillowman and Caryl Churchill’s apocalyptic fantasy Far Away all generate dread that lingers long after the curtain calls.

A spine-tingling, straight-up Gothic exception to rule, however, is The Woman in Black, currently creaking the boards at Theatre in the Square. The late Stephen Mallatratt wrote the play in 1987 to fill a playhouse’s Christmas slot while keeping the number of actors and props to a minimum. Mallatratt promptly scared the knickers off England, and The Woman in Black has subsequently played in London’s West End for 20 years and countless other theaters elsewhere. As a theatrical ghost story, it comes second only in popularity to Hamlet, I guess.

The ingenious quality of The Woman in Black is the way it taps the mood-creating powers of oral-tradition storytelling and the chilling power of live stage effects. T-Square’s production team take to the latter like kids playing a spooky prank on their parents. The begins when aging lawyer Arthur Kipps (David Milford) engages an theatrical impresario identified as “The Actor” (Gil Brady) to help him tell a story he’s desperate to get off his chest. The Actor suggests a theatrical experience rather than a dry, five-hour recitation, and sets up a funny contrast between Kipp’s rushed, amateurish delivery and the younger man’s ability to set a scene. The initial tension of how to tell the story soon gives over to its compelling content.

Continue reading “13 Days of Halloween: The scariest stage play” »

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PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: Katie (Katie Featherstone, from left) and Micha (Micha Sloat) could use some exorcise.

A decade after filling America with pants-wetting fear, The Blair Witch Project still haunts Hollywood. Filmmakers emulate its faux-documentary, first-person narrative style, while studios seek the next no-budget horror flick that can become a $100 million word-of-mouth hit. Paramount Pictures bets that Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity will similarly set pulses and bladders racing.

Tapping into the power of “Web 2.0,” Paramount has used social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well as fan voting via Eventful.com to gin up interest in Paranormal. The movie’s currently playing in Atlanta but expands to 2,000 screens nationwide Fri., Oct. 23 to compete with Saw VI’s torture porn. The Paranormal hype feels slightly more manufactured than Blair Witch’s sleeper-hit status (which wasn’t exactly free of marketing calculation, either). Fortunately, Paranormal’s lo-fi haunted house tale elicits enough delicious dread to justify the 21st-century ballyhoo.

Continue reading “Paranormal Activity projects Blair Witch-style chills”

(Image courtesy Paramount Pictures)

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Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman

As a general rule, films are supposed to compress time. If a woman buys a bag of brown potatoes at the store and later scoops a few soft, white potatoes out of a pot of water, it will be understood that in between those two shots she peeled and boiled potatoes. What makes Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles classic is that it doesn’t compress time, at least not in the way we’ve come to expect. Jeanne peels that bag of potatoes one strip at a time, taking care to cut out the eyes, soak them in water, and light the stove. It’s a technique that can elicit boredom and frustration, which happens to be what Jeanne feels, too.

Continue reading “Jeanne Dielman slowly peels away at patriarchy in 23 Quai du Commerce“

(Image courtesy Paradise Films)

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During a tumultuous downer of a decade, it’s been awfully decent of the British to deliver up so many great comedy teams to distract us from out troubles. Like Abbott and Costellos or Laurel and Hardys for the 21st century, double acts emerging from the U.K. include Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of “Spaced” and Shaun of the Dead, along with “Extras’” Ricky Gervais and Stephan Merchant (who co-created a little show called “The Office” with Gervais). Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding of “The Mighty Boosh” master the same deadpan banter of their contemporaries, but routinely bend space-time to enter hitherto unknown comedic dimensions.

A new boxed set, released Oct. 13, traces the various incarnations of the “Boosh” and how Barratt and Fielding’s bizarre flights of fancy spring from the interplay of their alter egos. Originating with stage shows and then radio plays before the three seasons of the TV series, “The Mighty Boosh” follows two mismatched chums: Howard Moon (Barratt), a mild-mannered yet pompous intellectual with a weedy mustache, and Vince Noir (Fielding) a happy-go-lucky fashionista obsessed with retro clothes and his haircut. Their typical interplay finds Vince taking the piss out of Howard’s self-importance, as shown in the introductory scene of “The Mighty Boosh’s” first episode:

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SOMERS TOWN: Tomo (Thomas Turgoose, from left) and Marek (Piotr Jagiello) horse around in Somers Town.

The titular neighborhood of Shane Meadows’ new film, Somers Town, is a small, working-class ward near the dead center of London. Bordered by a trio of railway stations, trains have been intersecting, running through, and stopping in Somers Town since the invention of the steam engine. Charles Dickens, that bard of English orphans, lived here as a child until his family was evicted and sent away. When lonely teenage runaway Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) steps off the train here at the beginning of Somers Town, he connects with a history as old as Dickens himself.

Played by the brilliant, young Turgoose, Tomo bears little resemblance to those pathetically sad orphans of 19th-century London, or even the cinematic hoodlums of Hollywood. He mumbles about his parents in between bites of a sandwich, “They’re just people that I know, useless wastes of space like me.” No melodramatic soundtrack bursts in at this moment, nor does Tomo well up in tears or find a building to vandalize. He just keeps eating his sandwich.

Continue reading “London calls to Shane Meadows in Somers Town“

(Image by Dean Rogers)

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HOT SEAT: Chris Rock in Good Hair

I learned more from Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair than I did from all the other films and plays I’ve seen about African-American beauty parlors and barbershops put together. As a white guy with straight hair (and seemingly less of it every day), subjects like weaves and relaxers tend to be terra incognita. Even black audiences might view African-American hairstyle issues to be a narrow, niche subject for a full-length nonfiction film. Neverthless, narrator Chris Rock provides cutting commentary that reveals some surprisingly deep sociological roots.

Rock explains that his interest in hair issues originated with his two young daughters, particularly when one asked him, “Why don’t I have good hair?” “Good hair” turns out to be a loaded expression, referring in this context to straight “European” hair rather than kinky “black” hair, deemed as unmanageable in salons and unfashionable on magazine covers. Rock’s frequently snarky commentary suggests that African-Americans sacrifice too much of their time, money and well-being in the attempt to live up to a white ideal.

Continue reading “Good Hair gets to roots of black community’s image issues”

(Image courtesy Roadside Attractions)

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WAVE OF THE FUTURE: Agnès Varda In The Beaches of Agnès

William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” History and memory never stop affecting us — the past is as much a part of the present as we are.

Agnès Varda, who modeled the alternating structure of her first film, 1954’s La Pointe Courte, after Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, plays with this Faulknerian notion of time and memory in her latest movie, the memoir-ish documentary The Beaches of Agnès. The film opens with Varda walking cautiously backward across a beach at dusk, while she narrates, “I’m playing the part of the little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story.”

In Beaches, Varda, now 81, is walking backward through her life and work, reconsidering her films and loves, and, as always, unable to play by the typical rules of form. She begins her recollections with a riff about her childhood beach vacations in Belgium, looking at old photographs in the sand and arranging mirrors about herself. When the film digresses into a re-enactment of a childhood memory — two young girls building sandcastles — she walks into the scene and interrupts it. “I don’t know what it means to re-create a scene like this,” she says. “Do we relive the moment? To me it’s cinema, it’s a game.”

Continue reading “Memories wash up on The Beaches of Agnès“

(Image courtesy the Cinema Guild)

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TWIST AND SHOUT: Michael Moore declares the New York Stock Exchange a crime scene.

For about a year, the word “socialist” has served as an all-purpose political epithet capable of equating the most modest U.S. government program with the worst of Soviet Russia. Don’t expect a cool, collected rebuttal from Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. With Moore on one side and the Glenn Becks on the other, America’s national debate on economic systems resembles two factions shouting past each other.

In Capitalism, Moore pushes his anti-corporate views further than ever and asserts that America’s free enterprise system isn’t just flawed or easily corrupted, but evil with a capital E. Priests even call the profit motive a sin. Moore doesn’t have to look far to find evidence of capitalist abuses and the misfortunes of the have-nots: Capitalism’s many powerful scenes involve homegrown economic exploitation.

Continue reading “Capitalism: A Love Story points finger but offers no solutions”

(Image © 2009 Front Street Productions, LLC.)

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NATURAL BORN KILLERS: Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, from left) and Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson)

GENRE: Ultraviolent zombie comedy

THE PITCH: In zombie-ravaged America, four mismatched survivors nicknamed Columbus (Adventureland’s Jesse Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Superbad’s Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin) try to get along while killing the undead and road-tripping to a California amusement park. By the way, it’s a comedy.

MONEY SHOTS: The spectacular opening credits show slow-motion zombie attacks in incongruous places like a three-legged race. Little girl zombies in princess outfits swarm a soccer mom, who drives off, crashes her car and flies through the windshield — so buckle up! Our heroes enjoy the catharsis of trashing a gift shop of Native American knick-knacks. Amusement park rides like rollercoasters and tilt-a-whirls facilitate elaborate “kills” in the final action sequence.

BEST LINE: “I may seem an unlikely survivor, with all my phobias and irritable bowel syndrome,” says meek Columbus before enumerating his obsessive but hilarious rules of survival.

BEST BAD LINE: “Time to nut up or shut up” is pretty much the “It’s my way or the highway” of 2009.

Continue reading “Hollywood Product: Zombieland“

(Image © 2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.)

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