Balls of Fury
dir. Ben Garant
For those who found Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story too
intellectually challenging, here comes Balls of Fury, starring
the previously unknown (to me at least) schlub Dan Fogler as Randy
Daytona, a onetime Ping-Pong prodigy whose skills on the tabletop
propel him into a shadowy underworld of win-or-die pinball and
international gangsters of dubious sexuality.
Nineteen years after suffering a crushing defeat in the Olympics,
Randy is whoring his talents at a dim Reno casino when FBI agent Ernie
Rodriguez (George Lopez) approaches him with a ludicrous scheme: Join
an underground tournament being held by mysterious arch-villain Feng
(Christopher Walken), gather intel, and help topple the gangster’s
operation. Along the way love is found, gay panic is ignited (and
ignited and ignited), and many a ball is crushed—both in
games and in Randy’s shorts.
An obvious riff on Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, Balls
of Fury is a clusterfuck of wheezing gags, the vast majority of
which involve Fogler’s portly physique tumbling over any and all
obstacles placed conveniently in his way. As the villainous Feng,
Walken manages to have some fun, but the rest of the supporting cast
are reduced to mere setup men, their occasional inspired quips
hopelessly overcome by a deluge of lame slapstick, shrieking gay
courtesans (wocka-wocka-wocka!), and crushed gonads. Not even the
always-welcome sight of Maggie Q can rescue the movie. By the time
things limp to a close, your head will throb as much as Randy’s
oft-abused Scrabble bag. “A huge comedy with tiny balls” reads the
film’s tagline, and as it turns out it’s the funniest thing about the
entire enterprise. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Pierrot le Fou
dir. Jean-Luc Godard
As breezy as Breathless but with an undertow of poisonous
ennui, Pierrot le Fou is a rendition of the Bonnie and Clyde
story told à la française. The bourgeois TV
producer Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo, looking grizzly) has begun to
tire of a Paris house party where the guests speak in commercial
jingles for deodorant and automobiles—except for the director
Samuel Fuller, who appears in a cameo to expound on cinema: “A film is
a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death—in one word,
emotions.” Ferdinand leaves the party and finds his battleground at
home, where his ex-girlfriend Marianne (Anna Karina in a prim suit) is
idly caring for his children.
They sneak over to Marianne’s flat for a spot of hedonism, which
starts off deliciously. But when a mysteriously dead body threatens to
spoil their fun, Marianne and Ferdinand—whom Marianne insists on
calling Pierrot—hop in a car and pantomime driving to the coast.
And when I say “pantomime,” I mean, they’re sitting in the dark in a
car that obviously isn’t going anywhere. Multicolored lights sweep
across the windshield like wipers. It’s a road movie without the
road.
But there are gas stations and beaches and jukeboxes and parrots and
pop-music interludes and piles upon piles of books. Marianne manages to
look adorable even when they’re living off the land, but she can’t
manage to keep herself entertained. Forever complaining of boredom, she
buys 45s they can’t play and dreams of moving to Miami Beach.
Ferdinand, for his part, could read books all day. “You speak to me
with words,” the archetypal girl tells the consummate guy. “I look at
you with feelings.”
Though such a perpendicular love is doomed to crash hard (the end of
the movie is overly dramatic), the view along the way is so sweet and
despondent you’ll forgive the stereotypes. And really, who can resist
Anna Karina in a red dress? ANNIE WAGNER
Manhattan
dir. Woody Allen
All the disagreements in Manhattan can be reduced to one, a
debate between Woody Allen’s character, Isaac, and a socialite at a
swank party: Is it better to combat incoming Nazis from New Jersey with
bricks and bats or devastating satire in the Times?
Isaac, naturally, chooses the former. He is the down-to-earth,
basketball-dribbling TV comedy writer—the representative of the
masses—while the socialite, played by Diane Keaton, is an uptight
Radcliffe-educated overthinker continuously trailing irrelevant facts
and pretentious pronunciations (“van Goch”). She has a penis substitute
of a dachshund named Waffles, an analyst named Donny, and hair like
Rowlf the Muppet’s.
They’re the yin and yang of art appreciation, the populist and the
aesthete, the brick-thrower and the satirist. And they’re not, it turns
out, meant for each other. But the movie isn’t supposed to be a perfect
romance. It consciously dabbles in the perverse—Allen’s
character, left by his ex-wife (Meryl Streep) for another woman, turns
to a 17-year-old played by Mariel Hemingway; and Keaton’s character is
still belittled by an ex-husband (the comical specimen of Wallace
Shawn), whom she sees as her superior in every way.
Manhattan may be, though, the most integrated of Allen’s
films. It’s intellectual and goofy, heartbreaking and philosophical,
modern and nostalgic, shot in loving black and white that makes the
lights and shapes of the still-gritty city sparkle like diamonds in
coal.
Manhattan is not about a city, however; it’s about a space
defined by culture, art, writing, music, and film. When Isaac takes his
final, bittersweet stab at romance, he is spurred on not by true love,
but by imagining the second movement of Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony,
Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Potatohead Blues,” Swedish movies,
“Sentimental Education” by Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, and
“those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne”—in that order.
Anyone who can’t live without the arts shouldn’t live without seeing
this movie. JEN GRAVES
Self-Medicated
dir. Monty Lapica
Clomping across the screen like an especially gritty movie of the
week, Self-Medicated tells the story of Andrew, a troubled
17-year-old living on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Left reeling by the
death of his father, Andrew devotes himself to self-destruction,
indulging in drink and drugs and random violence until his mother
(who’s battling a painkiller addiction of her own) ships him off to
draconian rehab facility. “As Andrew is subjected to the secret
physical and emotional abuses of the program, something inside him is
reawakened,” reads the film’s press release. “He must somehow get free
to save what’s left of his life, but to do that, he knows he must first
face his own demons head on.”
Self-Medicated was written and directed by Monty Lapica, a
formerly troubled 17-year-old whose mother sent him to a draconian
rehab facility after the death of his father. Lapica, now in his
mid-20s, also stars as Andrew, and his obvious distance from his teen
years is one of his film’s lesser problems. Stylistically,
Self-Medicated strives for a fearless, gritty naturalism, and
Lapica found a cast that’s up to the challenge—most notably Diane
Venora as Andrew’s complicated mom. Unfortunately, Lapica’s would-be
gritty naturalism is deployed in the service of a script that races
from cliché to cliché, with an obliviousness that’s
almost miraculous. “No, YOU don’t understand!” screeches
Andrew in one of the film’s early confrontations; both the screeching
and soap-quality dialogue continues for the next 90 minutes. By the
time Andrew’s led to his climactic emotional epiphany by a wise black
hobo (seriously), I wasn’t the only audience member laughing at the
screen.
“But that’s exactly how it happened!” I can hear a defensive Lapica
crowing. Maybe so. But interested parties can find more truth and
better art in any episode of A&E’s Intervention. DAVID
SCHMADER
A Day at the Beach
dir. Simon Hesera
Little about the movie A Day at the Beach is ordinary.
Let’s begin with its source. It’s based on novel by Heere Heeresma, a Dutch author and poet, which was published in 1968, and has so far has been made into two movies—one by the Dutch director Theo van Gogh
in 1984, and the other by the Polish-born director Roman Polanski in
1970. The fate of Theo van Gogh is world famous: He was assassinated by
a Muslim fundamentalist in 2004. The fate of Polanski is not yet known,
as he is still alive and making movies. Polanski, however, did not
direct his version of Beach, though he was supposed
to—it was directed by Simon Hesera, a man who has had close to no
impact on the history of movie making. But Beach is still a
Polanski movie because he wrote its script and produced it. In fact,
while Beach was being edited, Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon
Tate, was murdered by Charles Mason and his gang.
Some of this badness, this evil, marks the mood of the movie. At
every moment, you fear that something sinister is going to hurt or kill
the main characters—an alcoholic uncle, played by Mark Burns, and
his crippled niece, Beatie Edney. The niece is too innocent, the uncle
is too absurd, and the beach they are visiting for the day is hardly a
happy place. It’s deserted, cold, shadowed by low rain clouds, and
bordered by tourist shops that are run by freaks and madmen. In one
scene, the niece gets caught in some fishing nets and you think the
worst is about happen. But somehow she gets untangled and finds her
uncle by some beach chairs, drinking beer he bought from shop managed
two clownish gay men—one of whom is Peter Sellers.
The editing of Beach is choppy, the dialogue jumps from
place to place, and the story seems to head nowhere. Though set in
England (or Denmark—it’s hard to tell), there is something
Russian, or Dostoevskian, about the uncle. He is a volatile confusion
of emotional states—now he laughs, now he cries, now he shouts,
demands, threatens, mocks, and so on. Few films are as genuinely as
strange as Beach. CHARLES MUDEDE
