It’s time now for another edition of Did I Really See That?, the beloved blog feature in which I dip into the vast archive of reviews I wrote about movies I can no longer remember seeing. Not only do I have no memory of seeing these three movies, I’m not even convinced they actually exist. But surely no one paid me to write reviews of nonexistent movies, although that would be a great gig if I could get it. I’ll just have to assume these are real.

WHAT ALICE FOUND

96 min., R (strong sexuality, nudity and language)
Grade: C-

Alice (Emily Grace) is an 18-year-old girl feeling stifled in her small town life in New Hampshire. Swiping money from the cash register, she flees her minimum wage supermarket job and hits the highway, heading for Florida where her best friend now attends the University of Miami.

When her car breaks down on the first night, Alice is rescued by a kindly older couple in a mobile home _ Sandra (Judith Ivey) and Bill (Bill Raymond). They volunteer to take her to Florida, although they’re in no hurry to get there. Alice learns why one night in a rest area when she catches a trucker coming out of the back bedroom with Sandra. As the road trip continues, Alice finds herself pulled deeper into Sandra’s seedy world.

It’s always tempting to cut a low-budget labor of love some slack, but What Alice Found makes that temptation easy to resist. Filmmakers who shoot on digital video often justify it as a raw and gritty stylistic choice, but while that sometimes pays off, the result here is simply a cruddy-looking movie. Strong writing and acting can overcome flat visuals, but Alice is lacking in those areas as well. Judith Ivey has a few moments in which she manages to humanize a caricatured role, but newcomer Grace, while likable, is out of her depth as the title character. The script by writer/director A. Dean Bell traffics in class stereotypes and lacks credibility – it plays like a walk on the wild side dreamed up in a Starbuck’s.

WORLD TRAVELER

103 min., R (language and some sexuality)
** (out of ****)

Forget Billy Bob Thornton – actor Billy Crudup is the real man who wasn’t there. Despite being hyped as the next big thing on countless magazine covers, Crudup remains a vacant, forgettable presence in movie after movie. That hasn’t changed with the release of World Traveler, a pseudo-profound “sins of the father” parable that’s as silly as it is pointless.

Crudup stars as Cal, a successful New York architect with a wife and young son. One day Cal packs up his station wagon and hits the road without a word. He takes up lodging in a motel and gets a construction job where he meets Carl, a married recovering alcoholic. (The fact that the names “Cal” and “Carl” are separated by only one letter is but one of the banal observations the film presents as mystical revelation.) Cal proceeds to get Carl drunk and attempts to seduce his wife before hitting the road again.

As Cal’s travels continue, he encounters more characters who are dispatched almost before they’re introduced, including an old high school buddy and a sexy young hitchhiker. The only one who makes much of an impression is Dulcie (Julianne Moore), a troubled woman with a secret most viewers will figure out long before Cal does. At the end of the journey, a soggy encounter with the father who abandoned Cal as a child awaits.

Writer/director Bart Freundlich peppers the proceedings with frequent hallucinations and dream sequences in hopes of keeping things interesting, but this is one road movie that goes nowhere fast.

ZERO DAY

92 min., Unrated (violence and language)
Grade: A-

Inspired by the shootings at Columbine High School, Zero Day is now reaching theaters in the wake of Gus Van Sant’s similarly-themed Elephant. It would be a shame if this low-budget take on those events got lost in the shadow of Van Sant’s acclaimed film, because it deserves to find an audience as well.

Director Ben Coccio’s directorial debut is an extremely well-made mockumentary, believable in every respect and all the more chilling because of it. Andre Kriegman (Andre Keuck) and Calvin Gabriel (Calvin Robertson) are high school students who have dubbed themselves the Army of Two. They plan a series of “missions” _ pranks like egging the campus jock’s SUV _ leading up to Zero Day: the day they will carry out an armed assault on the school they hate.

Andre and Calvin document virtually every waking moment with a video camera, storing the tapes in a safe deposit box for the media to find after Zero Day. The conceit of Coccio’s film (like The Blair Witch Project before it) is that we are watching those tapes, edited together for maximum impact. It works beautifully, thanks to impressive naturalistic performances by the two leads (and their real-life family members, who co-star as the Kriegmans and the Gabriels).

Those looking for easy answers won’t find them here, as Andre and Calvin are quick to point out. They even burn their videogames, CDs and books so that people won’t be able to blame their actions on the culture they grew up in. As intimate a portrait as Zero Day is, by the end we still can’t begin to fathom Andre and Gabriel. In this case, that’s not a flaw; it’s just reality.

In some ways, Searchers 2.0 resembles Three Businessmen, a relatively obscure Cox film I’m quite fond of. Both are low-budget, dialogue-heavy road pictures, primarily concentrating on two mismatched characters who find common ground along the way, but Three Businessmen is much more successful at channeling the surreal vibe and absurdist humor that made Repo Man one of my all-time rewatchables. Searchers 2.0 is at its best when Mel and Fred are talking movies, getting almost all the details wrong (they can’t even agree on the title of the western they both appeared in, and their Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood debate will never be reprinted in Cahiers du Cinema), but conveying a love of the medium nevertheless. When the dialogue turns political, the characters get fuzzier; it’s clear that they’ve become mouthpieces for Cox’s ideology, whether it fits them or not. The grand finale, a Sergio Leone-esque showdown in Monument Valley in which the ammunition is movie trivia rather than bullets, sort of won me over. But it was a close call.



No such luck with Repo Chick, easily the shoddiest, most cynical, and ultimately worthless film of Cox’s career. The title is the first clue that this radical filmmaker, who claims to have been blacklisted by Hollywood, is trying to cash in on his past success. For the record, I have no real problem with that; I don’t even care that Repo Chick is in no way a sequel to Repo Man, except in its exploitable title. If he’d managed to make an engaging film set in the same world as Repo Man, or even a movie that replicated the creative energy of its predecessor while having nothing at all to do with it in terms of plot, setting or character, I would have been absolutely fine with that. The timing was certainly perfect, as Repo Chick uses the recent economic crisis, and the mortgage meltdown in particular, as fodder for Cox’s return to the world of repo workers.

The protagonist this time is Pixie (Jonet again, but worse), a thinly-veiled Paris Hilton, disinherited by her wealthy family and forced to take a job repossessing cars, houses, trains, planes, hotels, and whatever else may have been defaulted upon when the bubble burst. Pixie and her posse of faux-punks in tattoo sleeves (all of whom would have gotten their asses kicked by the Repo Man punks, which I hope was the point) stumble onto a plot by a radical group to destroy Los Angeles unless the President becomes a vegan and bans golf. A funny idea, sure, but the movie itself is such a slipshod mess, and Cox heaps such sour contempt upon all the characters, it’s impossible to care at all. Shot entirely on green-screen sets for under $200,000, Repo Chick is an assault on the senses in all the wrong ways. The backdrops are hastily sketched comic-book drawings, chintzy video-toaster effects, and ridiculously obvious models – HO-scale trains, Matchbox cars, bars made out of shoeboxes.

No doubt Cox would defend the blatant artifice as a creative decision – a representation of the shallow chintziness of our dead-end consumer culture – but really, it just looks like he doesn’t give a shit. Seriously, if the script was witty, and if the acting wasn’t terrible, I might embrace the cheesy look of the movie and be able to justify it. That’s just not the case. The jokes are inane (“Show her the ropes!” “So where are they?” “What?” “The ropes! Where are they?”), the performance are one-take rejects littered with botched line readings, dropped accents, and mispronunciations, and the whole thing just looks like the worst public cable access show of 1992. Honestly, it seems like Cox decided the name Repo Chick on a DVD box would move enough units to justify its existence. And if that’s the case, he has more in common with the studios he holds in contempt than he realizes.

Related:

Alex Cox Interview Outtakes

Alex Cox, Emilio Estevez and Me

I reviewed hundreds of movies for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, most of which are no longer online, so it’s perhaps understandable that I have absolutely no memory of seeing some of them. In this new semi-regular feature (part of my latest desperate attempt to revive this blog), I will exhume some of these forgotten reviews from my archives, starting with three indies I don’t remember watching.

DIGGERS
87 min., R (sexual content, thematic elements and language)
Grade: B

It is the fall of 1976, but four clam diggers on the Long Island shore are in no mood to celebrate the Bicentennial. A large seafood corporation has moved into the area, bringing new restrictions to the surrounding waters. The time of independent clamming seems to be passing, a point underscored when a lifelong digger suddenly dies on his boat.

The children of the deceased, Hunt (Paul Rudd) and Gina (Maura Tierney), still live in the town where they grew up. Gina works the counter at the local diner, and Hunt carries on the family business, along with his buddies, stoner-intellectual Cons (Josh Hamilton), family man Lozo (Ken Marino, who also wrote the screenplay) and ladies’ man Jack (Ron Eldard). While Gina finds herself in an unlikely romance, Hunt toys with the idea of leaving town and starting over elsewhere.

There’s not much more to Diggers in terms of plot, but that’s okay; it’s more of a “hanging out” movie reminiscent of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero. The diggers shoot the breeze in bars, squabble amongst themselves, and put up a doomed united front against the corporate invaders. The ’70s atmosphere is evocative without being kitschy, and the characters are engaging and well-cast (although Lauren Ambrose’s role as Hunt’s summer crush is too sketchy and underdeveloped).

Enjoyable as it is, however, Diggers is never quite as sharp or funny or insightful as it could be. The movie gets by on sheer likeability, but fails to deliver the kind of unique sensibility that would distinguish it from the usual ensemble-indie crop.

EULOGY
91 min., R (language, sexual content and drug use)
Grade: B

The eulogy in question is the responsibility of Kate Collins (Zooey Deschanel), a college freshman who returns home for the funeral of her beloved grandfather. It’s a time-honored set-up for an ensemble comedy, although funerals are interchangeable with Thanksgiving in this context. The point is simply to drop a “normal” person into a gathering of wacky relatives and let the sparks fly.

That’s exactly what first time writer/director Michael Clancy has in mind. Upon her arrival at the old family homestead, Kate is greeted by her casually bitter grandmother (Piper Laurie), her father Daniel (Hank Azaria), once the child star of a popular television commercial and now an underemployed burnout, and an eccentric assortment of uncles, aunts and cousins.

Grandma gives Kate the task of memorializing her grandfather (played by Rip Torn in flashbacks), but her family provides little in the way of help. Lecherous Uncle Skip (Ray Romano) remembers only neglect, while strident Aunt Alice (Debra Winger) is too busy feuding with her free-spirited lesbian sister Lucy (Kelly Preston) to provide much assistance. Grandma’s periodic suicide attempts prove somewhat distracting as well.

Clancy has trouble maintaining a consistent tone while trying to keep all these balls in the air. Observational humor, black comedy and outright slapstick all jostle for dominance, but there is no clear winner. On the plus side, the cast is generally engaging and the variety of acting styles benefits the dysfunctional family theme. Deschanel is the best reason to see Eulogy; at once luminous and low-key, she’s the eye of this hurricane.

MANNA FROM HEAVEN
119 min., PG (language and some sexual references)
Grade: C+

Once upon a time, money literally fell from the sky outside the Buffalo home of a saintly young girl named Theresa and her extended family (which, a title card tells us, includes those related by blood and marriage as well as strays and freeloaders). Theresa proclaimed the windfall a gift from God intended to improve their lives and the lives of others, and each member of the clan took a share of the cash.

Thirty years later, Theresa (Ursula Burton), now a nun, calls her family together again to announce that the money must be returned. Since they don’t know where it came from or who it belonged to, this will be a difficult task, made no easier by the fact that none of them happen to have the $3300 each received when the loot was divvied up. They decide to organize a fundraiser comprised of a car raffle and a dance contest, and while most of the family members are reluctant to participate or hoping to exploit the event for their own gain, they eventually pull together and learn valuable life lessons from each other.

Produced by five sisters from Buffalo, Manna From Heaven is a homegrown family affair that’s deliberately old-fashioned and corny. The casting of long-forgotten TV faces like Shirley Jones of The Partridge Family and Frank Gorshin of Batman only adds to the quaint but somewhat musty vibe. Manna may be an independent film, but its heart is pure ’50s Hollywood – utterly inoffensive, except to viewers looking for something more substantial than a Hallmark card.

I reviewed a couple of new paranormal reality shows for The A.V. Club:

Haunted Collector

Finding Bigfoot

Hello! Boy, I sure have been neglecting this place of late. I’m gonna try to rectify that situation in the near future, but for now, here’s some of what I’ve been up to in the past few months:

TV CLUB

The Amazing Race (That’s my finale review, but I covered the whole season.)

Being Human (Ditto.)

Swamp Brothers

Frontline: Fighting for Bin Laden

Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe

Deadliest Catch

Top Shot

FILM

The AV Club’s Must-See SXSW Films

SXSW Opening Weekend

SXSW Film Day 4

SXSW Film Day 5

SXSW Film Day 6

SXSW Closing Weekend

Some belated sequels to check out and some to avoid

Screen pass: 10 movies capture heart, humor of game America loves

Five Questions with Jodie Foster

Why Woody Allen Should Direct Pirates of the Caribbean 5

A few more random offerings:

An Austinites’ guide to the Texas Rangers

On the possible demise of the Dobie Theater

Citizen Architect: A brainy doc from a Fort Worth-born producer

Fall movie preview

And you can always find my latest A.V. Club stuff here.

Yet another film festival I’m covering for The A.V. Club. Still ongoing, but so far:

Must-see movies and can’t-miss panels

Opening night

Opening weekend

Day 5

Day 6

I’m covering the low-rated Battlestar Galactica spinoff Caprica for The A.V. Club’s TV section. The season so far:

Unvanquished
Retribution
Things We Lock Away
False Labor

I’ve also written about these other shows:

The Kilborn File
Last Comic Standing
Confessions: Animal Hoarding
Hard Knocks

Fantastic Fest is a genre film festival here in Austin, TX. I covered it for The A.V. Club thusly:

Horror Remakes

Must-See Films Unleashed

Day One

Weekend Recap

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Day 8

And now, a series of posts in which I catch this blog up on stuff I’ve written in the past couple of months. First, the Nerve column once known as The Top One Movie of the Week, and then as The One Movie You Should See This Week, which was written by myself and Andrew Osborne, and will henceforth be written by each of us separately in alternating weeks. Did that make any sense? I thought not.

10/21: Paranormal Activity 2, Hereafter, Inhale

10/14: Jackass 3D, Red, Conviction

10/07: Life As We Know It, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Nowhere Boy

9/30: Let Me In, Freakonomics, The Social Network

9/23: Buried, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger

9/16: The Town, Catfish, Never Let Me Go