Snow Angels
dir. David Gordon Green
In a snow-encrusted town, far from the muggy Southern byways where
North Carolina–
educated director David Gordon Green made his
reputation (starting with 2000’s George Washington), a woman
tries, half-heartedly, to distance herself from her sad fuck-up of her
husband, a former high-school sweetheart. Meanwhile, a high schooler
she used to babysit makes tentative, funny passes at a cute girl in
glasses. The moral wouldn’t be out of place in a country song, but it’s
heavy lifting for a drama starring Kate Beckinsale: Young love is sweet
as fresh-fallen fruit, but then it putrifies, liquefies, drains
away.
Beckinsale plays Annie, a young mother and waitress in a Chinese
restaurant run entirely by white people. She acts like she’s above it
all, and since she looks like Kate Beckinsale, we believe
her—even though she’s sleeping with the husband of her best
friend (Amy Sedaris). But her husband Glenn (the excellent Sam
Rockwell) is determined to keep her in his life, dragging her along as
he ricochets between alcoholic blackouts and equally selfish bursts of
Christian fervor. Their conversations are hard to watch: Glenn
earnestly believes he must express his affection to win his wife back;
Annie is patient with him, but she’s almost as turned off by his
desperation as his inability to hold on to a job. The future does not
look good for either parent—or their young daughter.
But every time this dismal story threatens to suffocate the movie,
Green shifts back to one of the freshest, most adorable teenage
seductions ever put to film. Two shockingly charismatic kids, Lila
(Olivia Thirlby, last wasted in Juno) and Arthur (Michael
Angarano), borrow pencils and compliment each other’s shoes and do
everything they can think of not to confess their
affections—until finally the excuses run out. The transitions
between Annie and Glenn’s rotten relationship and the teenagers’ dewy
infatuation can seem abrupt. But perhaps only jarring juxtapositions
can lead you to ponder the unthinkable: that once upon a time, Annie
and Glenn were as cute and young and excited to be in love as Lila and
Arthur are now. ANNIE WAGNER
Read Annie Wagner’s interview with David Gordon Green.
The Hammer
dir. Charles Herman-Wurmfeld
Consider Adam Carolla: that king of schlubs and goofballs, foil for
Dr. Drew, consort of Jimmy Kimmel, and cocreator of The Man
Show, where manhood is nothing more than a dumb oscillation
between boobies and beer. He’d be easy to dismiss if he weren’t so good
at dismissing himself first.
Most guy’s-guy comedians are braying jackasses who revel in their
idiocy: Dane Cook, Larry the Cable Guy. But Carolla is a thinking man’s
lout, a sweet, self-deprecating oaf who regrets his oafishness, more
Charlie Chaplin than Howard Stern.
Carolla has earned his sad-sack existentialism: The son of
working-class Philadelphians, young Carolla moved to North Hollywood,
attended high school with the rich and famous—he allegedly lost
his virginity to Beth Ringwald, Molly’s sister—and barely
graduated with a 1.75 GPA. For the next 12 years, he worked as a
laborer: carpenter, driving-school instructor, boxing coach. His
entrée to show business came in the form of Jimmy Kimmel, then a
Los Angeles DJ who was looking for a boxing instructor. Friendship
happened, then guest radio spots, then Loveline and The
Man Show, then the houses and sports cars.
So is it any surprise that The Hammer—which Carolla
cowrote, coproduced, and stars in—resembles Carolla’s accidental
American dream? Briefly: A washed-up boxer turned construction worker
gets another shot at the big time. His quick wit, sweet heart, and
Nicaraguan sidekick (played by Oswaldo Castillo, Carolla’s real-life
construction pal of 20 years) see him through. It’s
boilerplate—but it’s sweet, knowing boilerplate. The
Hammer, like Carolla, stoops to conquer. BRENDAN KILEY
Married Life
dir. Ira Sachs
A sometimes amusing but more often wooden film about postwar
adultery, Married Life succeeds only in reminding you that
Eliot Spitzer isn’t all bad. After all, he never tried to murder his
wife.
In a distinctly Hitchcockian 1949, Harry (Chris Cooper) is married
to Pat (Patricia Clarkson), but he’s sleeping with a young, impeccably
pretty widow named Kay (Rachel McAdams). Since Pat talks frankly about
sex and Kay is a ruby-lipped bottle blonde, our sympathies naturally
align with the wife. But Kay is mostly just lonely and Pat is behaving
badly, too, which evens out the field and makes what comes next feel
oddly abstract. Harry decides it would be mean to leave Pat, so he
takes the high road—he’ll poison her with photographic chemicals
instead.
The drama mounts as Harry plots the deed, but the
will-he-succeed-or-will-he-repent tension is pure formula, and without
characters that can make us care, the thrills are muted. ANNIE
WAGNER
Water
dir. Anastaysia Popova, Julia Perkul
Unlike What the Bleep Do We Know!?, the latest
pseudoscience dump from Bleep cocreator Betsy Chasse appears
not to be a recruitment tool for Ramtha’s School of
Enlightenment in Yelm, Washington. (Though it should be noted:
Water is opening exclusively in the top markets of Seattle,
L.A., Austin, Portland, and… Yelm.) As far as I can tell,
Water is instead being used to sell bottled “water with
intention” under the brand H2Om. The water is being advertised on the
film’s website; it has a stamp of approval from the film’s chief
expert, the Japanese “researcher” Masaru Emoto; and the film’s ticket
sales benefit the Love Planet Foundation, a project (under the umbrella
of a legitimate 501(c)3 in California) run by Lex Lang and Sandy
Fox—who happen to be the CEO and cofounders of H2Om.
As for the movie itself, it’s a mind-numbing mixture of hard facts
(water exists in three states, water is a limited resource that may
take on increased importance in the 21st century), total bullshit
(water has memory and consciousness, water can be “structurized” and
used to make fuel, water that is bombarded with evil thoughts makes
ugly crystals when frozen), and inspiring stories (Jesus turns water
into wine, a monk during the Inquisition makes dirty water pure with
his prayers, shipwrecked men survive on saltwater which they have
desalinated with their minds). It’s insulting. Don’t buy H2Om. ANNIE
WAGNER
