Movie Reviews: Earth, The Garden, Obsessed

GO  IN A DREAM “I’m fascinated by giganticness,” reveals Santa-bearded mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar, whose compulsive, nearly half-century-long mission to create candy-colored mazes of fractured tiles, mirror shards, paint and bric-a-brac has covered tens of thousands of Philadelphia’s square feet, including the home Zagar shares with wife, Julia. An inwardly distressed, self-absorbed eccentric who is unafraid to expose himself, both physically and emotionally, Isaiah bluntly admits that he was molested as a boy and attempted suicide in his 20s, and, midway through the film’s production, tells Julia on-camera that he’s been sleeping with his assistant. Where most documentarians would rest on the laurels of a great subject and riveting present-tense drama, director Jeremiah Zagar has observed too much of his father’s creative logic to cheat us with artless hagiography. In dreamily paced tracking shots, macro close-ups, time-lapse glimpses of Isaiah’s processes (the raking together of paint and cement is especially satisfying), archival footage, and animation, In a Dream exhibits as much beauty and sensuality as Isaiah’s work, while the unabashedly personal nature of the filmmaker-subject dynamic is as candid about familial madness as Tarnation, and captures more insight than those Friedmans did. (Music Hall) (Aaron Hillis)

THE INFORMERS The kids are most definitely not all right in The Informers, directed by Gregor Jordan from Bret Easton Ellis’s 1994 novel and set in haute Los Angeles during the early years of the Reagan era. With its crass, sleek brand of alienation, the movie might have been shot back then as well. The Informers is mainly a spectacle of privileged, pretty young people (and youthful actors) acting badly. Nights of omnisexual anomie, days of robotic synth-music videos, druggy excess, teenage orgies, and (as this is an ’80s allegory) a virulent mystery infection: Are these kids truly depraved or just fucked up? Bad parents? Too much television? A toxic environment? Playing a tragically married couple of Tinseltown aristos, Billy Bob Thornton and Kim Basinger bring a weary measure of taut musculature and grown-up professionalism to the movie. Basinger’s erstwhile ’80s co-star Mickey Rourke is on hand as a dissolute prince of darkness; most lizardly in a leather porkpie hat, an orange tan, and some scraggly facial shrubbery, Rourke elevates the movie’s sleaze count even as he deflects his scenes toward narcoleptic comedy. Winona Ryder provides another odd flashback, in the role of Thornton’s newsgal mistress. In this lurid trash compactor, there’s plenty of incident, but not much plot. (Selected theaters) (J. Hoberman)

LIFELINES The poster for Lifelines slavishly imitates the Daniel Clowes drawing used for Happiness, accurately telegraphing its tabloid-level density of dysfunction (maybe not the wisest marketing move, given Todd Solondz’s bankrupt rep). Though both films feature punching-bag favorite Jane Adams, tyro filmmaker Rob Margolies at least aims for redemption rather than post–p.c. button-pushing in this taxing foray into psychopathological bookkeeping. A Saturday pile-on of therapy sessions for the Bernstein family provides the bleeding heart of the film, as well as its numbing formula of root causes for its characters’ mental makeup. Dad (Josh Pais) shuffles out of the closet, teen Meghan (Dreama Walker) verbally disembowels Mom (Adams) whenever possible, and stuttering eldest Michael (Robbie Sublett) recounts witnessing his smart-mouthed kid brother, Spencer (Jacob Kogan, a.k.a. Joshua), endure the sine qua non experience of suburban-set indies. Despite the switch-off response that this litany may trigger, Pais and Sublett wrestle down a couple of the impossible-to-deliver monologues, and there’s something to the flat, even bored exhaustion behind the traumas. But in addition to the opaque mother character (whose individual session with overwhelmed shrink Joe Morton goes unseen), the film’s befuddling direction and tone, queasy HD interiors and tin-eared, often preposterous screenplay prove disastrous. (Sunset 5) (Nicolas Rapold)

THE MUTANT CHRONICLES Scottish-born director Simon Hunter isn’t obviously related to his postapocalyptic indie actioner’s barrel-chested sergeant Mitch Hunter, though the latter certainly speaks for both of them when he growls: “I’m not paid to believe. I’m paid to fuck shit up.” Thomas Jane self-seriously zings more cheeseball one-liners as the aforementioned protagonist in this ultra-ultraviolent, faux-spiritual adaptation of a popular pen-and-paper role-playing game. (How idea-starved is the movie biz? Candy Land is currently in the works.) At the end of an Ice Age, the year 2707 sucks, as mankind is now ruled by four warring corporations. Amidst the feud — an overeager production designer’s World War I–meets-steampunk hell of grimy noir hues and candy-apple CGI plasma splatters — a long-buried seal is accidentally broken, releasing a near-infallible horde of Necromutants, former humans with bone scimitars for arms and a zombielike bloodlust. If I followed correctly, though a film this monotonous can make you zone out, Mitch and a motley crew of mercenaries (Ron Perlman as a badass monk, Anna Walton as a sword-wielding badass mute, et al.) must destroy “the Machine” to advance to the next video-game level. Our heroes are offed one by one, some shit definitely gets fucked up, and I dearly hope John Malkovich got paid handsomely for his two days of embarrassment on set. (Mann Chinese 6) (Aaron Hillis)