VIDEODRONE

By only

Monday April 30, 2007

NEW MOVIE MONDAYS
Alpha Dog
What’s up Nick Cassavettes? One minute you’re directing The Notebook, and then you’re directing a movie that feels like an embarrassing Larry Clark rip-off. Basically, if you want to see a “real life” portrayal of potty-mouthed white kids wearing pit-stained wifebeaters who kill a dude all-the-while rolling around in coke, guns, vaginas, and TEENAGE ANGST watch Bully instead. At least Bully opens with Brad Renfro saying “I want you to suck my cock” instead of Eva Cassidy singing “somewhere over the rainbow”. Highlights: The albino-underbite-ogre from Breaker High, Sharon Stone in a fatty suit, Emile Hirsch’s dirt cusstache, Justin Timberlake saying: fag, queer, pussy, kike, cocksucker, cunt (etc), and a dude taking a dump on the carpet. Lowlights: Everything else.


Dreamgirls
Some people looove their musicals. There’s great set design and the costumes…wow! Then there are the musical numbers, and they just keep going on and on and on with people singing about how they feel and dancing about and stuff. We get that that’s the point but this whole based-on-the-Supremes story is so sanitized that even the drug abuse, wife beating and unwanted pregnancy feels, well, too clean. Like everyone is sooo focused on the singing that they forgot about the acting. There’s even one scene where Jamie Fox looks so embarrassed to be singing along with the whole thing like he’s worried that because he won an Oscar for Ray, he’s going to be stuck singing and dancing in overblown Hollywood productions of real-life people’s stories told through never-ending-song forever.


Little Children
There’s a scene in Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse where the bad kid says to Dawn: “I’m gonna rape you…” which is about as dark and twisted as funny can get. Here there’s a scene where a sexual predator cuts off his own boys and says ” I’m not going to be bad anymore.” Little Children is kind of like that; it is what it is but always wants to be “not that”. It’s not bad or even truly disturbing, it’s just it sells itself out by having a narrator guide you through it and it can’t really figure out if it’s a comedy, a drama, melodrama or a precautionary tale. We suggest it’s pre-melodramedy and that way it gets to be everthing it wants to be all at once and still retain its ironic, self-reflexive title.