Movie Reviews: Badland, Divine Intervention, Forfeit, He Was a Quiet Man

HE WAS A QUIET MAN Imagine Marty if Marty had turned out to be the Unabomber and you’ll have the gist of writer-director Frank Cappello’s oddly compelling, pitch-black comedy, which takes its title from the news media’s de rigueur description for every unassuming clock-puncher who one day decides to mow down a few co-workers in a hail of bullets. Here, that “quiet man” appears to be one Bob Maconel (Christian Slater), a mid-level drone at a nondescript L.A. tech company who spends his days as a punching bag for the office’s golf-playing alpha males, his lunch breaks fantasizing about blowing the place to smithereens, and his lonely evenings engaging in philosophical chitchat with his pet goldfish (who, via some clever CGI animation, answers back). But when Bob uses the loaded gun in his desk to stop another deranged colleague in the midst of his own killing spree, everything changes. Soon, he’s moving on up to the executive suite, attracting the come-hither stares of women who’d never so much as look in his direction before, and entering into a hesitant courtship with the quadriplegic near-victim (Elisha Cuthbert) whose life he saved only to have her ask him to finish her off. Cappello, whose strange and varied résumé includes screenwriting credits on the early-’90s Hulk Hogan comedy Suburban Commando and the recent Keanu Reeves blockbuster Constantine, traffics in some of the same themes of emasculation and rage against the corporate machine already well-traversed by Falling Down, Fight Club, Office Space, et al. But He Was a Quiet Man casts its own perversely funny spell thanks in large part to Slater, whose wonderfully shifty, beaten-down performance is easily his best in the 17 years since he played Pump Up the Volume’s adolescent shock-jock. Indeed, he digs so far under Bob Maconel’s acne-prone skin that you leave the ­theater wondering if he can ever come back. (Fairfax) (Scott Foundas)

THE SASQUATCH GANG The feature directorial debut of Tim Skousen, Napoleon Dynamite’s first A.D., is full of, shall we say, homages to its roots, from the handful of nerdy characters who say “Gosh!” and “Crap!” too frequently to the familiar-sounding John Swihart score. Yet Skousen makes the material somewhat his own, with an overabundance of thoroughly un-Mormon shit jokes to a nonlinear, perception-based narrative structure that aspires to Rashomon levels at times. It’s unfortunate that he can’t pick a protagonist, wavering back and forth between uninteresting fantasy role-player Gavin (former Peter Pan Jeremy Sumpter, who tries but isn’t given much) and the awesomely dumb mullet-headed juvenile delinquent Zerk (Justin Long), who creates a Bigfoot hoax in order to pay off an overdue credit-card debt. Gavin’s story is typical teen-faces-bullies-and-gets-girl hokum, while Zerk is like a Mike Judge cartoon character come to life, with a revelatory slapstick performance from the often straight-laced Long. Oh, and Carl Weathers shows up doing a fake English accent. I’d say it must be seen to be believed, but really you ought to wait for TiVo on this one, so you can just skip to the good parts. (Fairfax) (Luke Y. Thompson)

THE SAVAGES See film feature

SEX AND BREAKFAST Writer-director Miles Brandman surely pitched this portrait of the sexual hang-ups of two 20-something couples with adjectives like “honest,” “unflinching” and “frank.” The camera eavesdrops on the bedroom skirmishes and awkward banter of Ellis and Renee (Kuno Becker and Eliza Dushku) and James and Heather (Macaulay Culkin and Eliza Dziena), relishing in the behavioral minutiae of four people whom Brandman finds far more fascinating and charming than they actually are. While the film puts a premium on the realism of its relationships, the characters’ lives are drawn from fantasy. Without mention of what — if anything — they do for a living, these Angelenos reside in spacious downtown lofts, take their meals at Silver Lake eateries and, perhaps most implausibly, travel by taxi to appointments with a high-profile therapist. Suffering from what could be called Garden State syndrome, Sex and Breakfast demands that we empathize with the anguish of straight, white, financially privileged young people and their significantly hot significant others. Through the endless, grating conversations, one becomes eager for the movie to make good on its implicit promise of softcore action — a plot twist that screams Skinemax, in which the couples allow their forward-thinking mutual shrink (Joanna Miles) to arrange a catalytic group-sex session. Unexpectedly, the film becomes bold at the exact place it should bottom out: Without relying on dialogue or frontal nudity, the eerily silent sex scene’s blend of burning excitement and paralyzing trepidation momentarily captures a truth about intimacy around which the rest of the movie only dances. (Sunset 5) (Sam Sweet)

 YIDDISH THEATER: A LOVE STORY It took seven years for Israeli filmmaker Dan Katzir to raise funds for a documentary about one week in the death of New York City’s last surviving regular Yiddish theater. Focused on the iconic Folksbiene troupe as it performs the legendary play Green Fields to great notices and next to no audience, Yiddish Theater: A Love Story offers a tribute to the perseverance of 84-year-old Zypora Spaisman, a Polish Holocaust survivor and all-around great dame who did more than most to keep the theater’s flame burning. Behind her story is a sadder tale of Jewish cultural decline and the limits of the vaunted Yiddish revival, as Spaisman and producer David Romeo strive quixotically to raise enough money to open a new theater on Broadway. Lively talking heads lay out the reasons for the decay of Yiddish culture — just as the Holocaust and Soviet anti-Semitism killed off seminal Yiddish writers, creeping secularism and Israeli ambivalence about cultural heritage replaced Yiddish with modern Hebrew. What’s missing from this gentle homage — perhaps for budgetary reasons — is a sense of the joyful heyday of Yiddish theater, and the richness it brought to the artistic life of Manhattan. A bissel Molly Picon couldn’t hurt, could it? (Grande 4-Plex; Fallbrook 7) (Ella Taylor)