Movie Review Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding (2008) 

Directed by Keith Samples

Written by Brian Strasmann

Starring Brian Geraghty, Christian Slater, Jenna Dewan, Tara Summers, Jacob Vargas 

Release Date January 15th, 2008

Published February 10th, 2008

From the director of Single White Female 2 and the writer of 2, yes 2 Walking Tall sequels starring Kevin Sorbo, comes the gritty indie flick Love Lies Bleeding. Greatly removed from the Elton John classic or the Michael Winterbottom fave, this Love Lies Bleeding is a pale imitation of gritty, mainstream action movies with the gloss of being low budget and 'independent'. It comes from Sony's direct to video line and to complete the ugly package, poor misguided Christian "What Happened To My Career" Slater doesn't star but instead plays an unfortunate bad guy.

No, even more unfortunately, the wan and forgettable Brian Geraghty stars in Love Lies Bleeding as Duke, an Iraq war veteran with trouble coping with his return to America. Engaged to be married to Amber (Step Up Jenna Dewan), Duke struggles to find work after he spent time in prison on an assault charge not long after his return. Our heroes are quite down on their luck when some gang bangers make things worse by robbing them. Angry, Duke trades his car for a gun and plans a confrontation. What he gets instead is a sack full of fat cash.

Turns out the bangers had run afoul of some crooked DEA agents lead by Agent Pollen (Slater). The Mexican standoff that ensued left all but Pollen dead when Duke arrived. Seeing the bag of money Duke doesn't hesitate. Unfortunately, Pollen isn't dead and is soon on the trail of Duke and Amber who think they have won the lottery. Now the crooked cops want their money back and Pollen wants revenge and to secure their silence.

The first act of Love Lies Bleeding is a torturous 40 minutes of bland dialogue and casual racism as our two Anglo heroes face off against ethnic gang members at every turn. The blandness of it all compounded by a repeated monologue about Lime-Aid and life lived in a hammock. Don't ask. The second act becomes surprisingly compelling as director Keith Samples works his way around the bland dialogue and his overmatched young actors to create a compelling chase scene set inside a casino. The compelling part ends when the chase does and we are thrust back into this couple's dull romance.

On the bright side, there is a more interesting movie trapped in the margins. About half way through Love Lies Bleeding we are introduced to our one good cop, detective Alice Sands played by Tara Summers. The Boston Legal regular brings a quirky energy to this underwritten role. With unexpected humor, Summers applies the kind of skills one could only learn while working with James Spader and William Shatner. Acting while acknowledging the ludicrousness of it all with the glint in her eyes, Summers steals the few scenes she gets and leaves us longing for more time with her and her bumbling partner played by Jacob Vargas.

It's a shame the movie couldn't have been about the two New Mexico cops stumbling on the clichéd lovers on the run story. They could have regarded the story from afar with a disbelieving air and played the whole thing for comedy. I imagine Alice as apoplectic at the thought of such a ludicrous plot as this while her partner fumbles his words and plays the fool. That is the movie I wish this were, but it's not. Love Lies Bleeding is yet another faux indie pretending to be gritty and poetic while its only achievement remains being written and filmed.

That said, I really love Tara Summers. I can't wait to see more of her.

Movie Review I Know Who Killed Me

I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

Directed by Chris Sivertson

Written by Jeff Hammond

Starring Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough, Brian Geraghty

Release Date July 27th, 2007

Published July 26th, 2007

It was the great John Waters, in a cameo on an episode of The Simpsons, that gave me my definition of camp. "It's Camp, the ludicrously tragic, the tragically ludicrous". It is that line that resonated deep within my mind as I watched the new Lindsey Lohan pseudo-thriller I Know Who Killed Me. There are few things in Hollywood at the moment more tragic than Ms. Lohan. And, there are few movies more ludicrous than I Know Who Killed Me, a wacky torture porn wannabe, too squeamish to commit to full on exploitation and too balls out goofy to be merely bad.

Aubrey Fleming  (Lindsay Lohan) has these really vivid dreams that she turns into stories for her creative writing class. They tell the story of a girl named Dakota whose life of crack houses and strip clubs provides a rich background for Aubrey's burgeoning storytelling talent. Aubrey's writing is taking her to Yale in the fall, or it would have; if not for one fateful night after a football game.

Aubrey was supposed to meet friends for a late night movie. When she didn't show, her friends got scared. They called the police; who called Aubrey's parents, Daniel (Neal McDonough) and Susan (Julia Ormond), who also did not know where she was. Weeks go by until a body is found along the highway, a leg and hand severed, but still alive.

The girl looks exactly like Aubrey but when she comes to, she claims to be Dakota. As the cops press her for information on who cut off her hand and leg, Dakota maintains that she is not Aubrey and spins a fantastic tale of how her hand and leg simply shriveled up and fell off. This as she sleeps with Aubrey's boyfriend (Brian Geraghty) and searches for the killer in her own unique ways.

That is the spoiler free version of the plot of I Know Who Killed Me and as often happens with movies this bizarrely bad, my description is far more concise than anything in the movie. It took me two showings of I Know Who Killed Me just to come up with that description. Watching the film for the first time, with a critic friend of mine, I could not stop laughing long enough to try and put the pieces of this ludicrous trash epic together.

Directed by Chris Sivertson, I Know Who Killed Me has delusions of grandeur as an art film, a torture porn ala Hostel with a dash of M. Night Shyamalan and just a hint of Brian De Palma at his most over the top. None of it ever approaches coherence but it's never boring. Imagine all of that crammed into one picture and then blended with a group of performances so off key you almost hear dogs barking and you get just a sense of how truly, brilliantly awful I Know Who Killed Me is.

It is so rare in modern Hollywood to find true camp or kitsch. Modern films are so self aware, so self consciously willing to wink at audiences that camp becomes manufactured or forced. Rarely do you get the earnest achievement of true awfulness. A group of actors and filmmakers who have truly deluded themselves into believing that what they are doing is working.

More often you get movies like Snakes On A Plane where the kitsch became the marketing hook, thus subverting the camp into simple bad filmmaking. Either that or you get a movie like Redline or Because I Said So, movies that are just so horrendous that you can't even take joy in the badness. There is no commitment on the part of the actors who are too bored or dull-witted to care whether the movie they are in is any good.

In I Know Who Killed Me however, you can see the grand delusions of all involved. You can see from the care taken to craft out their visuals and the attempts to create a color motif (blues and reds dominate the screen in a self conscious battle for control) that director Chris Sivertson and his team were convinced they really had something here.

Not unlike the work of the great Ed Wood who believed earnestly in his own talent, the creators of I Know Who Killed Me evince utter cluelessness as to how brilliantly awful this trash epic truly is. It is that joy of creation, that misguided judgment, that makes I Know Who Killed Me a truly wonderful bit of camp. That, and of course, the schadenfreude of watching star Lindsey Lohan hit bottom on the big screen as she hits bottom in real life.

You can see in Ms. Lohan's performance a level of commitment that says she truly believed the things her characters were saying. More important though, from a camp perspective, you can see how desperately out of her depth she is trying to give life to the goofiness she is trying to play as serious drama and mystery. And worse yet, you can see how her real life drug problem may have contributed to how truly awful her performance is.

On the one hand, I don't want to take pleasure in Ms. Lohan's problems. On the other hand, she is young, rich, privileged and not dead, so I don't feel too bad. Plus, her real life tabloid problems give trashy subtext to an already trashy movie and increase the camp pleasure of I Know Who Killed Me to a degree where I could actually recommend it in an ironic way.

Poor Ms. Lohan, she's not a bad actress, just one who doesn't make good decisions. Watching I Know Who Killed Me; one cannot escape the idea that the poor girl is being taken advantage of. Watch the stripping scenes, Dakota is a 'dancer', and you cannot help but be more embarrassed for Ms. Lohan as opposed to being titillated by her gyrations. She simply looks lost and sad on the stage and it's unclear whether those emotions are intentional or just a sad realization of how low her career has sunk.

I cannot recommend I Know Who Killed Me, from a typical movie standard. However, I can tell you that if you are looking for an ironic laugh, you might wait for this DVD to come out, gather some friends and have fun at this film and Ms. Lohan's expense. It sounds a little mean, but it's undeniably funny.

Movie Review The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker (2009) 

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow 

Written by Mark Boal 

Starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Evangeline Lilly, Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce 

Release Date June 26th, 2009 

Published June 25th, 2009 

The Hurt Locker is the most intense, breathtaking moviegoing experience of my critical career. I have had some movies really grind me into my seat but few do so as compellingly as The Hurt Locker, an Iraq war drama that avoids nearly all of the pitfalls of the myriad Iraq war movies of the past five years.

Lost in a sea of muddled agendas and fearful pandering, movies about the Iraq war have never taken hold within the culture the way movies like All Quiet On the Western Front or Patton did for World War 2 or Platoon and Full Metal Jacket did for Vietnam. Hell, even Rambo managed to be both an audience grabber and a commentary on Vietnam.

No such luck for movies like Jarhead or Stop-Loss. Each a well made, well intentioned movie, but movies at a loss to capture this elusive and ill-defined conflict in the middle east. Each attempts to be about soldiers and their real life struggles and each fails for lack of conviction and an inability to draw a line between anti-war agendizing and dramatizing the real struggles of their characters.

Now comes The Hurt Locker a film that sidesteps agendizing through the luck of timing and a smart specificity. The luck of timing comes in being released at a time when the conflict has receded from the headlines and is no longer the burning hot lightning rod it once was. The specificity comes from the focus on a set of very specific, very unique soldiers, the men in the business of bomb disposal.

Jeremy Renner stars in The Hurt Locker as Lt. Willam James. On his third tour, James claims to have disposed of more than 800 bombs and he keeps coming back for more. Whether he is addicted to adrenaline or has a serious death wish, William is the best at what he does and his seeming recklessness is arguably what has kept him alive. He makes decisions that others don't have the guts to make.

Joining William on this tour is Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) a bomb tech in duty only, he has yet to raise the nerve to don the protective suit and walk up to the bomb. And Specialist Owen Eldridge, a skittish youngster who remains tortured by all he's seen.

Together they are fighting through the last 100 days of what will hopefully, for Sanborn and Eldridge anyway, be a last tour. Each day brings a seemingly more dangerous and even larger bomb and the tension released at the end of the day is something akin to a constant stream of adrenalin that never shuts off.

Director Katherine Bigelow chooses a pseudo-documentary style of shooting that amps the tension even more. The digital cameras and limited angles draw the audience right into the danger. You will be surprised to learn that The Hurt Locker recorded more footage than even Coppola's epic Apocalypse Now and yet, what is onscreen is so tense and tight it seems of a moment, in the moment.

You have seen bombs and even bomb disposal in movies before and you have certainly seen the horrors of war before. But, there is something in the style of Director Bigelow and the intensity of Jeremy Renner's performance that sets it apart, and above so many other war movies.

Much of that comes from the scripting of Mark Boal who researched The Hurt Locker as an embedded journalist for Playboy Magazine. Traveling with and witnessing what bomb techs do in Iraq gave Boal a unique and thorough perspective on these very particular men and their job.

The Hurt Locker is a visceral, physical, filmgoing experience that will have you twisting in your seat, holding your breath and begging for the air to come back into the room. It is a fierce and ferocious film that will leave you spent by the end. The walk from the theater is likely to be a somber one, but with the reward being a movie experience like few others.

Moving, exciting, exhilarating and enthralling, The Hurt Locker is among the best movies of the year.