Film Reviews: Diggers, Next and Banished
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AMERICAN CANNIBAL Even more desperate than reality TV these days might be the indie film, its audience thinned to near nonexistence by small-screen fare. Case in point: American Cannibal, a reality-style movie about the making of a reality show that was maybe almost aired. It follows two hungry young hustlers who pitch a porno financier on their virgin concept — kids competing not to get laid — but who instead take his money to concoct a sick Survivor wherein starving contestants are faced with the prospect of feeding on one another. For real? American Cannibal screened in the documentary category of last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and immediately drew skepticism. Co-directors Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro, whose collective résumé includes work in play writing, publicity, criticism, and screenwriting instruction, may or may not be documentarians, but they can at least be credited with provoking the question of whether cinema should continue being held to higher standards than television when it comes to delineating what’s real. Too bad their mock-doc equivalent of The Producers isn’t funnier. (Grande 4-Plex) (Rob Nelson)
BANISHED Banished, the debut of director Omid Shabkhiz (who also co-wrote, co-produced, co-starred, edited and served as cinematographer), is terribly made and poorly acted, but also so bizarrely off-kilter that you almost wonder if the whole thing is an elaborate put-on. Master assassin Charlie Vespa (Nariman Norouz) has left the business to start a family, but when crime boss Ohar Odette (AmirAli Barani) has Charlie’s wife and child whacked, it’s time for vengeance. In Banished, though, that vengeance apparently requires myriad mano-a-mano tough talk and occasional gunplay that results in bloody wounds that are comically way too large for the pistols the characters fire. Despite the frequent muffed dialogue and poorly choreographed fight scenes, the film has an admittedly dorky charm reminiscent of the slapped-together action movies 16-year-old boys make during their lonely weekends. Judging by his mise en scène, Shabkhiz, who recently turned 25, spent his youth mainlining Michael Mann’s oeuvre. But his baby-faced cast are so adorably clean-cut that their pseudo-weighty monologues unintentionally satirize the macho gravitas. Or is it unintentional? When co-writer Peter Banifaz shows up as Theodore, the unhinged hit man assigned to kill Charlie, his goofball demeanor practically owns up to the film’s straight-faced ludicrousness. Is Banished actually a sly send-up of artsy actioners? The Leonard Cohen songs, Gregorian hymns and Middle Eastern chanting on the soundtrack answer that question: Nope, this silly little flick is deadly serious. And seriously awful. (Town Center 5) (Tim Grierson)
THE CONDEMNED See film feature
PICK DIGGERS A death in the family forces Hunt (Paul Rudd), a Long Island clamdigger, to face up to his becalmed life and those of his three brawling mates in Katherine Dieckmann’s terrific movie about a dying way of life. The Ford-Carter debates simmer quietly in the background, but Dieckmann doesn’t snow it with ’70s symbolism. This very particular movie has a lyrical feel for place, period and the rhythms of a small-town community trying — and tragicomically failing — to run in place while the world around it opens its arms to the creeping corporatism that will compound the everyday hurts and losses suffered by this scruffy, messed-up group. Rudd is sweet and funny as the floundering Hunt; Ron Eldard and Josh Hamilton are great as the town’s aimless studmuffin and philosophizing pothead, respectively. But the movie belongs to Ken Marino, who is riotously funny as the family man whose anger-management problem at last finds a fitting target in the big businessmen who come to destroy his living. Marino also wrote the outstanding script, which traps the foulmouthed vitality of working-class speech in a bottle and makes it sing. Beautifully shot by Michael McDonough, Diggers is not a film you watch — it’s a movie you live in, and when time’s up you feel the same elegiac sense of loss as do those who realize they have no choice but to move on. (Nuart) (Ella Taylor)
FAKERS If you can’t count on a British con movie to deliver at least a few moments of entertaining color, well, then what can you count on? Director Richard James’ slight and wobbly Fakers comes close to shattering one’s faith in a just and orderly universe. Written by Paul Gerstenberger, the story turns on the recycled travails of smalltime hustler Nick (Matthew Rhys), who has five days to pay back £50,000 to a London loan shark or end up sleeping with the fishes and chips. Lo and behold, the day Nick gets his deadline is the same day that the blond bartender (Kate Ashfield) he’s been chatting up for months turns out to have a naive brother (Tom Chambers) adept at making perfect copies of rare art works. And so the con is on but not without a cascade of equally unbelievable coincidences, a streak of good fortune that would put any self-respecting con artist to shame for being so beholden to blind chance. Such artless inattention to the con man’s craft, however, might be overlooked if any of the characters or performers had the personality to pull one over on us, the audience. (Beverly Center, One Colorado) (Paul Malcolm)
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