Movie Reviews: All About Steve, Loren Cass, Ink, Walt & El Grupo

GO  GAMER Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have slowly started garnering actual critical consideration for their Crank movies; with Gamer, they make another good case for taking them seriously. In the near future, overly enthusiastic gamers play first-person shooters by controlling real death-row convicts (via implanted gibberish nanotechnology). One of them — champion Kable (Gerard Butler) — Knows Too Much, and must be eliminated before he wins 30 games and his freedom. That Kable doesn’t particularly care about game mogul Ken Castle’s (Michael C. Hall) grand conspiracy — and never has a conscience-stricken change of heart — is one of many small tweaks on the genre that make this a notable cut above bargain-basement action. Neveldine and Taylor’s spazzy (but coherent) action scenes rely mostly on blood spurts instead of feats of badassery, but their dystopia is inventive and their visual schemes diverse: The fight scenes play like a buffering online video, with the transmission glitches warping our sense of time, while Castle’s home looks like a live-action Speed Racer, with Hall munching snacks against bizarre nature imagery in disorienting tableaux. Their sense of the grotesque can overshadow their targets — close-ups of a 500-pound guy to indict lazy media consumers aren’t exactly subtle, and are more of a distraction — but they’re as smart about the details as they are loyal to corporation-bashing. Oh, and there’s a dance number. (Citywide) (Vadim Rizov)

INK Jamin Winans’ screenplay for Ink has all the ambition of a Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet epic, but since none of the studios bit, the writer-director decided to make it himself with next-to-no money, a bold gambit a viewer can respect even while wishing the final project were remotely as grandiose as the auteur’s aspirations. Still, if annoying, cheap crap like Six-String Samurai can find a cult audience, Winans’ intricately mapped fantasy world should inspire more than a few. Switching back and forth between our world and the afterlife, Ink imagines a battle between Incubi — scary black-aproned geeks with LCD screens strapped to their faces — and Storytellers, clean-cut actorly types who look like they just stepped out of their own headshots. At stake are the dreams of mere mortals, but caught between forces is the title character, a hooded figure who resembles a Dark Crystal Mystic in human form, and who wants to trade the soul of a little girl (Quinn Hunchar) for acceptance into the ranks of the Incubi. Back on Earth, the girl’s estranged father (Chris Kelly) is busy losing his mind and seemingly coming unstuck in time. Despite being augmented with many postproduction enhancements, Jeff Pointer’s cinematography is sadly uninspired, and many in the cast feel more like auditioning actors than actual characters, though Kelly’s Michael Keaton–ish delivery is a standout, and Jeremy Make adds some much-needed humor as a smartass blind “Pathfinder.” Winans’ ideas served him better on the similar, less ambitious feature 11:59, but even if Ink doesn’t entirely succeed, it makes for one heckuva calling card. Someone give this man a budget to play with. (Sunset 5) (Luke Y. Thompson)

GO  LOREN CASS Chris Fuller’s powerfully unsettling debut — written in 1997 when the director was just 15 — is a starkly lyrical portrait of angry, disaffected teens in the racially tense wake of the 1996 St. Petersburg, Florida, riots. Igniting the fuse, a high school skinhead (Travis Maynard) and his mechanic pal (Fuller, under the pseudonym Lewis Brogan) fling a beer bottle at a black student’s van, leading to street skirmishes in which literally no punches are pulled: Rival gangs ruthlessly beat the crap out of each other oncamera. A fleeting romance develops between a slutty, late-shift waitress (Kayla Tabish) and Fuller’s grease monkey, and it soon becomes clear that the film’s rampant fucking/boozing/fighting is naturally born from boredom, confusion and dead-end despair. At face value, the story and themes have been done to death, but Fuller’s in-your-face artistic precision makes this a radical film. From the eccentric sound design that pipes in audio from Charles Bukowski, Dwarves’ frontman Blag Dahlia, and the rants of political activists over the otherwise sparse dialogue, to the unexpectedly still and striking 16mm framing, Loren Cass wants to blow your head off — which explains Fuller’s choice to include the still-shocking footage of Pennsylvania congressman Budd Dwyer’s televised suicide. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)

NO IMPACT MAN The bold environmental project Colin Beavan began in the fall of 2006 — to expunge his carbon footprint by giving up material consumption, electricity, nonlocal foods and basically all worldly pleasures in Manhattan for one full year — was always destined to have some naysayers crying “publicity stunt.” And to an extent, it is. Timed to coincide with the release of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s entertaining doc chronicle of Beavan’s year in self-righteous hell, his new eco-martyr memoir of the same name is subtitled “The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process,” which both doubles as a lofty plot synopsis and pre-emptively deflects critics with that “guilty liberal” confession. Unfolding mostly as real-time vérité, the film is less valuable for detailing Beavan’s expensive and punishing process to become greener than that jolly giant (he buys composting “worm boxes,” for God’s sake) than it is for showing his deeply hesitant wife, Michelle Conlin — who laments no more dining at Pastis or buying iced quad espressos — give in to this decidedly un-fun lifestyle. We could all do better, definitely (be sure to sneak in your reusable bottles instead of buying from the concession stand!), but how much can we possibly glean from a guy whose idealism can be measured with a calendar? (Royal) (Aaron Hillis)