Movie Reviews: American Violet, Crank: High Voltage, Sleep Dealer

GIGANTIC I don’t remember ever wanting to just haul out and punch a movie before Gigantic. Interrupting every scene with a proud little fart of idiosyncrasy, Matt Aselton’s auteur debut provides another limpsy indie comedy for the heap. The screenplay’s per-page quota of “unexpected” tweaks leaves little room for much else. There Will Be Blood’s overgrown Child of the Corn, Paul Dano, plays Brian: 28 years old, timid, single, a mattress salesman, on the waiting list to adopt a Chinese baby — an apparently unexamined boyhood dream. Feeb Brian meets another homeschool-eccentric rich kid, one “Happy,” played by pellucid-eyed hipster desktop-pinup and chanteuse of naptime adult contemporary, Zooey Deschanel. Happy looks good in a shortie kimono and heels, and initiates intimacy with an abrupt “Do you have any interest in having sex with me?” — behavior probably learned from John Goodman’s voluminously inappropriate patriarch. Context clues suggest that the viewer is supposed to care if these nutty kids stay together. In my mind’s eye’s re-edit, the movie ends with a circa-1973 Joe Don Baker unexpectedly rolling into town and stomping the entire dramatis personae into jelly, but in actual fact, it wraps up with some blogrock and the “Hey, maybe there’s no such thing as ‘normal,’ and we’re all just screwed up and searching, y’know?” revelation. (Nuart) (Nick Pinkerton)

LYMELIFE There’s nothing new under the suburban sun (save for infectious ticks) in Derick Martini’s Lymelife, whose weighty allegorical title and fastidious 1970s accoutrements aim to do for beer-and-pretzels Long Island what Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm did for tony, key-party Connecticut. Dad (Alec Baldwin) is schtupping the secretary (Cynthia Nixon); mom (Jill Hennessy) pretends not to notice; eldest son Jimmy (Kieran Culkin) is about to ship out to the Falklands War (the movie’s handy Vietnam/Iraq surrogate); and 15-year-old Scott (Rory Culkin) feels his first pangs of lustful desire in the direction of the neighbor girl (Emma Roberts), whose father (Timothy Hutton) is suffering from the debilitating effects of Lyme disease. Adding insult to irony, Baldwin is a real estate developer, peddling picture-postcard views of the American dream while watching his own slowly implode, just as Hennessy discovers that all the bug spray and duct-taped pant legs in the world can’t ward off the bite of disillusionment and self-deception. Hutton, meanwhile — a bedraggled figure in pajamas and ever-present hunting rifle (at one point, he communes with a deer, à la Helen Mirren in The Queen) — seems to be transformed by illness into a truth-telling seer. Given how steeped it is in symbolic portent, Lymelife proves surprisingly watchable from moment to moment, thanks to the uniformly fine playing (particularly of the Culkin frères), evocative production design (by Kelly McGehee) and handsome widescreen photography (by Frank Godwin). If only its substantial craft and atmosphere were matched by an equally compelling reason for being. (The Landmark; Sunset 5; ArcLight Sherman Oaks; Playhouse 7; Fallbrook 7) (Scott Foundas)

SLEEP DEALER Science fiction easily lends itself to allegory, but while the dystopian near-future of co-writer/director Alex Rivera’s feature debut focuses, admirably, on how globalization affects the Third World, his ideas are as subtle as a light saber to the face. From a tiny Oaxacan village whose water supply is owned by a greedy multinational corp, amateur hacker Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) leaves his peasant family to make a better living in Tijuana, now a thriving metropolis. How? Well, since the U.S. has sealed itself off entirely from Mexico, south-of-the-border sweatshop workers with surgically implanted nodes jack into El Matrix and remotely control robots in America. Side plot: Unbeknownst to Memo, his new hottie journo friend (Leonor Varela) is preselling her downloadable memories to content buyers online, which, if you remove the eXistenZ bio-port nonsense, may be the single most prescient concept herein. Considering a Spanish-language film of this kind would never get a studio budget, its resourceful special effects actually aid the narrative. But from the imperialist villains and their humanitarian abuses to the laborers dying on their feet, what’s so clever about tricking out this worn-out tale of woe into a genre flick? (Sunset 5; Playhouse 7; AMC Burbank Town Center 8; Mann Plant 16; Pacific Glendale 18) (Aaron Hillis)mate in Japanese terms; “Merde,” the first Carax film of the 21st century, is a more confrontational riff on the most celebrated of Japanese monsters. Dubbed the “Creature From the Sewer” by deadpan newsreaders who link him to al-Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, and Siberian witchcraft, this chaotic eruption is shown to embody Japan’s historical repressed as well as Europe’s guilty conscience. As much a form of performance art as a movie, “Merde” offers the funniest urban rampage since Bong’s The Host. A love story (possibly involving a robot), it’s the anthology’s least flashy filmmaking, but the truest to its location—lugubrious, a bit sentimental, and hopeful that Japan will again emerge from its shell. (J.H.)