SMOTHER Noah (Dax Shepard) just got fired, faces pressure from his wife (Liv Tyler) to have a baby, and must contend with her socially inept cousin (Mike White), who wants to stay with them for a few days while he finishes his screenplay. That’s when Marilyn (Diane Keaton), Noah’s high-maintenance mother, announces she’s moving in, turning Noah’s bad day into a presumably hilarious and awful one. Directed and co-written by Vince Di Meglio, Smother aspires to an edgy style of non-sequitur humor where the situations aren’t particularly funny or original but do allow enough room for throwaway jokes and bizarre running gags. The problem with this flimsy narrative approach is that the film’s laugh quotient depends entirely on whatever the cast can bring to the tired setup. In that regard, Smother is fortunate — Shepard is dependably low-key, White goes a long way with his creepy-smile stare, and Keaton demonstrates boundless charm when she isn’t restrained by the clichés of her nagging, needy character. Still, with its mixture of high-profile talent and low-watt comic inspiration, Smother feels like the sort of misbegotten curiosity Comedy Central uses to fill its Sunday afternoon programming. And considering how quietly Smother’s distributor dumped it into theaters, expect to see it there soon. (AMC Burbank; One Colorado; Fallbrook 7) (Tim Grierson)
Blindness
Jia Zhangke’s Still Life: simply one of the best of the year — or any year that’s likely to come.
Related Content
More About
GO STILL LIFE More than two years after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, one year after a single local screening during UCLA’s annual showcase of new Chinese cinema, and nine months after opening commercially in New York, director Jia Zhangke’s Still Life finally receives a full week’s run at one Los Angeles cinema. Set and shot in Fengjie, a real Chinese town that was being dismantled and demolished as Jia was filming in 2006 to make way for the massive Three Gorges hydroelectric-dam project, Still Life is the story of two people in transit — a rural coal miner (Han Sanming) in search of the ex-wife and teenage daughter he hasn’t seen in a decade, and a woman (played by Jia’s frequent muse, the luminous Zhao Tao) looking for her estranged engineer husband. The two story lines parallel one another without ever intersecting, each of them affording Jia and his ace cinematographer, Yu Lik Wai (shooting once again in crisp, high-definition video), to commemorate the disappearing Fengjie landscape — and with it, a few thousand years of Chinese history — in all its decrepit, gutted-out majesty. Everywhere Jia looks, he sees the clash between China’s past and its rapidly accelerating present: Men in hazard uniforms with spray cans make their zombielike way through the ruins. A demolition team unearths artifacts dating from the Han dynasty. A gutted building literally blasts off into the stratosphere, like a rocket ship to the moon. I’ve said before in these pages that Jia (whose previous films include The World, Unknown Pleasures and Platform) is the greatest Chinese filmmaker of his generation. In Still Life, his great subject — that of a nation making “progress” faster than its own people can keep up with it — reaches its fullest and most painfully beautiful expression yet. Simply one of the best films of last year, this year, or any year likely to come. (Music Hall) (SF)
THE VIOLENT KIND In its attempt to convey the psychological unraveling of a soldier returning home from Iraq, The Violent Kind forgoes narrative structure in favor of hallucinatory malaise. The action revolves around a cabin in Montana, where Iraq veteran Terry Malloy (Kirk Harris) reunites with his Vietnam vet father (Jon Savage, of The Deer Hunter) and attractive young wife (Irina Bjorkland). The nondescript wilderness symbolizes the netherworld in which both father and son find themselves trapped, but over the course of the film the pattern of surreal and grotesque images — a carcass floating in gray stew; a musical performance by robed, white-faced phantoms — feels less like a haunting and more like mumbo jumbo. Director Geoffrey Pepos wants to show that posttraumatic stress causes combat veterans to destroy themselves and the people they love, but he has little interest in unpacking his characters’ war experiences beyond clichés. Terry Malloy (the allusion to On the Waterfront is both cheap and irrelevant) talks in voice-over about his experiences with “his boys” back in the platoon (“You gotta believe in the guy next to you ...”), while Dad brandishes guns at imaginary “gooks.” Both men exist only as war-movie figments, set adrift in a picture that confuses a chaotic psyche with what is simply chaotic filmmaking. (Grande 4-Plex) (Sam Sweet)
