Movie Reviews: Ben X, Four Christmases, Special, Transporter 3

LAKE CITY Troy Garity has a rangy, lonesome-stranger body and pouchy eyes. He can boot a cigarette butt to the curb like a champ and fill a frame with the handsome, so-what lure of damaged goods; in a better world, and a better movie, he’d have the ladies sighing, the gentlemen nodding and all parties clamoring for more. Instead, Garity brings little more than moves to Billy, the troubled baby-daddy and narc-anon member he plays in Lake City; added to the general torpidity and twangy tropes of this Southern family drama is the discomfort of watching a natural actor force it. As Billy’s mother, Maggie, Sissy Spacek fares a little better, if only because she’s had more experience bravely telegraphing through even the roughest terrain. After a nasty run-in with a drug dealer (Dave Matthews), Billy seeks haven at his family’s Virginia homestead, with Clayton (Colin Ford), a surly young boy of uncertain provenance, in tow. Mother and son have an uneasy bond that should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a movie in which a child’s room has been preserved and locked tight. That bond is examined, tested and finally renewed following a violent denouement that bleeds any lingering patience you might have for this film right through your eyeballs. (Sunset 5) (Michelle Orange)

THE MATADOR David Fandila is bland and uni-browed — classic nerd material. But once he steps into the ring, this Spanish Clark Kent transforms into El Fandi, a preening, balls-out bullfighter determined to become one of the few matadors in history to complete 100 corridas in a single year. With a restless camera and quickly paced edits enhanced by a lush, flamenco-infused score, director Stephen Higgins and co-director Nina Gilden Seavey’s documentary tracks El Fandi’s quest for greatness over three years, chronicling setbacks (a twisted ankle that knocks him out of the 2003 season), as well as bloody triumphs (laying out six bulls in a single day, with a halftime break for surgery to repair a deep gore to his abdomen), which bring him to 97 dead toros for 2004. The filmmakers’ keen journalistic eye picks out the details that matter, those that speak of the love shared by the Fandila family and of how heavily their expectations weigh on the matador’s young shoulders. The Matador reserves judgment while raising the core issue concerning this traditional ritual: deep, poetic cultural expression or glorified animal cruelty? Then there’s the complex relationship between man and bull, at least from the human’s anthropomorphizing point of view, which casts the beast as a complicit, sometimes even noble opponent. (Music Hall) (Elena Oumano)

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OTTO; OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE Headier in synopsis than in its vain execution, the latest transgressive art-porno from Canadian queercore auteur Bruce LaBruce (The Raspberry Reich) is a gay zombie movie, an explicit blend of blood and blowjobs that might’ve seemed more acidic two decades ago, at the start of his no-budget career — or maybe Nick Zedd’s. Young, hoodie-clad Otto (Jey Crisfar) rises from the grave and skulks through a near-future Berlin — to a killer soundtrack — unable to remember his life before he turned undead. Was this consumer of (man-)flesh formerly a vegetarian or even gay, as he is now? Discovered by manifesto-preaching lesbian filmmaker Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus) and her underground consortium of showbiz queers (including a silent-screen siren, always seen in dusty, scratched black-and-white), Otto becomes the star of her political zombie skin-flick and the subject of a doc. Yet, it’s unclear if LaBruce is mocking Medea’s Eurotrash pomposity, or actually believes in her banal talking points on consumerist overabundance. (If it’s the latter, then it’s safe to say that Wall-E’s take on the same subject is more perversely confrontational.) LaBruce mixes metaphors as sloppily as the ingredients in a KFC Famous Bowl, his living dead alternately standing in for repression, persecution, sexual confusion, societal decay or even a so-called “gay plague” of mindless fuck-bots. Campy but not comical, reactionary but not very clever, LaBruce’s film is best saved for those tickled by the sight of homo-zombie orgies or the hardcore penetration of an open wound. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)

SPECIAL That superhero triumphalism continues to dominate Hollywood is a peculiar trend in our pop cultural history, but it makes the trickle down into character-driven, low-budget Sundance indies almost inevitable. In Special, a meek meter reader with fan-boy proclivities (Michael Rappaport) enrolls in a clinical trial for an experimental antidepressant, after which he develops powers, like levitation, ESP and the ability to pass through walls. With his newfound self-confidence, he dons a homemade costume and preemptively tackles evildoers while they’re still scheming in their heads, but could this cat simply be missing a couple marbles? In the first act alone, writer-directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore give up their “Is he or isn’t he?” game by showing us a sane observer’s point of view — yes, this pathetic nut is swimming on the floor, not hovering inches above. All that’s left then is a miserablist analogue to M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, a sad portrait of paranoid delusion with wipeout stunts played for the comic wincing of Jackass. Rappaport’s befuddled sincerity has never registered so poignantly, but given its singular premise, for the film to waste an easy opportunity to satirize vigilante do-goodery and pharmaceutical dependence is, well, villainous. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)