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Uptown Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News

March 27, 2008


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2008-03-27

Real-life nightmare

Stop-Loss serves as a reminder of who's really fighting the war in Iraq

(Stop-Loss, opens Friday)

Ever since I 'walked the hot sands' and saw 18-year-old American boy-soldiers tremble with their M-16s as they yelled at mobs of unemployed, war-ravaged Iraqi protestors in the streets of Baghdad, I've had a thing for Iraq.

But movie-going audiences entrenched in the recent surge of movies about the war - the effete Redacted, the overlooked In the Valley of Elah, and the doc Iraq in Fragments - haven't seemed as enchanted as I. The above-average mediocrity of war-themed cinematic output hasn't proved successful enough at the box office to herald a direct hit.

So, when I heard about this new entry into the teen movie genre - a film about teens who get fucked into never-ending military redeployments to 'the shit' - I wondered if them teen folk just might be the age demographic to stop caring so much about American Idol and a little bit more about their peers getting shot up in Mesopotamia.

In the first 20 minutes of Stop-Loss, director Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don't Cry) doesn't disappoint, ramping the new Iraq-veritÈ trope full of evil-doing I.E.D.s and explicative plot I.O.U.s.

Thrust into a checkpoint situation gone awry, we first meet our characters in the heat of battle: celebrity hunk Ryan Phillipe plays Sgt. Brandon King, who bravely leads his tight-knit troupe, which includes Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Steve (Channing Tatum), into an alley battle with insurgents. Things in Iraq don't look very easy for the boys, but they quickly prove less so once the story relocates Stateside.

There, in a nightmare as haunting as nighttime flashbacks, Brandon and his buddies face the prospect of their military contracts' fine print: "the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States." In other words, they get 'stop-loss-ed.'

During the remainder of the film, Brandon's quest to get out of his redeployment - with the help of Texas buddy Michelle (Abbie Cornish) - definitely drags on too long, as the two are on the lam from pretty much everyone: their buddy and military snitch Steve, Brandon's former employer, and even the anti-war Congressman they thought would help.

Despite Brandon's dragging personal drama and appendaged romantic fling, Stop-Loss deserves high marks for articulating the reality that it is kids who are fighting this war - a message perhaps most important when it's targeted at the soldiers' voting-age peers.
— Walter Forsberg

'It's, like, totally awesome...'

Michele O'Marah's Valley Girl: The Remake is a DIY, lo-fi update of the 1983 classic - and it works

(Valley Girl: The Remake, March 31-April 2, 9:30 p.m., Cinematheque)

A-

Martha Coolidge's 1983 movie phenomenon Valley Girl didn't only, like totally introduce the world to Nicholas Cage (formerly Coppola) with a sooo bitchin' soundtrack - it also made L.A.-slang mainstream.

The influence of the film on adolescent Michele O'Marah was all the more profound. In 2003, as a fully grown L.A. video artist, O'Marah decided to remake the entire film with her friends. The near two-hour result (the original ran 99 minutes) was intended principally for art gallery installation - "My project is totally illegal," says O'Marah - but it comes to the Cinematheque this week by way of Kier-La Janisse's underground programming.

The story of Valley Girl involves Valley teen Julie Richman and her clique-ish group of popular girls - Stacey, Loryn and Suzi. Julie's tired of her popular boy-hunk, Tommy, and one night at a party, locks looks with out-of-place Hollywood punk, Randy. Over the rest of the film, the two fall madly for each other even though all odds (and friendships) are against them.

A classic of the '80s teen flick genre, when Valley Girl is converted to lo-fi in O'Marah's The Remake, it comes across like a camp-plus-John Waters film shot on a Handicam. The 'OMG totally!' 'tude of the Valley-dwelling young girls bathes in irony here - even if the remaking was done in absolute earnest (which, according to interviews with O'Marah, it was).

Sloppy and poorly timed, the VCR-to-VCR editing style perfectly matches the dialogue cues and punchlines uttered by the mostly non-actor cast. Their thespian skills may be lacking and their performances unconvincing in the traditional sense, but the cast's palpable amateur enthusiasm for the original film and its characters is redeemingly fun and engaging. (So, too, are their own Valley girlish inflections.)

What emerges, when the authenticity of the early '80s L.A. caricature is toned down in favour of earnest, campy nostalgia, is the structural moral of the story: "It's what's on the inside that counts. not what other people think of you."

Even if you haven't seen the original, you know where the story is going and the DIY approach (especially those beautifully ragged, green-screen car scenes) makes the movie's moral actually resonate.

It's, like, totally a must-see.
— Walter Forsberg

'Isn't he supposed to be fat?'

David Schwimmer's Run, Fatboy, Run marred by a variety of problems

(Run, Fatboy, Run, opens Friday)

C+

Must finish review. must not let pathetically agreeable tastes of promo screening audience depress me. must win this one for devoted readers.

(This is the appropriately weak lead I mustered to starting-gun this review of our 'Friend' David Schwimmer's directorial outing - a British love-triangle rom-com which features an average bloke proving to his lady that he can finish a marathon.)

Run, Fatboy, Run tells the story of lingerie store security guard Dennis (Simon Pegg) and his regret over leaving his pregnant ex-fiancÈe, Libby (Thandie Newton), at the altar. So dead-ended is Dennis' existence that he perseveres in his woefully bachelor-ized life on the sole hope that he can somehow get Libby back, and raise their son Jake (Matthew Fenton) in an atomic family setting. But, to do that, he'll need to somehow show up Lib's man-love/running enthusiast, Whit (Hank Azaria) in the Nike River Run.

With Pegg as the lead in this film, it's clear that the common-man, base-humour, genre-laff stylings that worked well in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and less well in Hot Fuzz (2007), just aren't happening here with rookie Schwimmer at the helm. Pegg's most notable film work has always made throwaway romantic intrigues secondary to jokes, and it shouldn't be much of a surprise that Schwimmer's lack of experience means his skills at more-drama, less-humour fail to transfer over into romantic comedy.

Pegg's confused lead is augmented by the fact that he isn't really fat. I mean, when he finishes the marathon (am I really spoiling anything?) Schwimmer has very little in the script to build tension around, tension that, essentially, is the whole point of the movie.

One thing that is totally on-pace about this film is the presence of Azaria. Who knew that the man who gives us Moe and Apu and Chief Wiggum on The Simpsons was so buff? As the token American antagonist, Azaria is nauseatingly nice in just the right dose before cornily revealing his bitter, competitive, 'American' side during the race.
— Walter Forsberg

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