Screengrab Review: "Lymelife"

Nick Schager — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In case you haven’t been listening to what prestige and art-house films have been blaring, the suburbs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The carefree contentment projected by all those white-picket-fence homes, and the smiling cheer of all those good-looking people in their nice clothes and fancy cars? It’s all lies, joyful facades that mask serious social dysfunction. Despite seeming like the place where happily-ever-afters come true, the suburbs are in reality hotbeds of familial discord, of tumultuous adolescent anger and misery, and of deception, greed, selfishness and alienation. If you thought that moving there from the vile, corrupting city was smart, think again. Relocating to a comfy home, and mingling with your undoubtedly Yuppie neighbors, will only warp you into a desolate conformist zombie like those seen in American Beauty, The Ice Storm and countless other likeminded dramas. And desperately running through the streets like Leonardo DiCaprio’s wretched Revolutionary Road hubby, or performing fatal makeshift abortions on yourself like Kate Winslet’s hopeless wife, are your only avenues of escape!

Excuse the sarcasm, but seriously – does anyone still find this gibberish relevant? Pulling the curtains back on picture-perfect suburbia is such a stale, clichéd modus operandi that it’s long ceased to be of any use. And one suspects that the reason so many recent films address this topic from the detached confines of an earlier era (anywhere from the ‘50s to ‘80s) is because only in the past would characters actually view as revelatory the fact that non-city-living isn’t a surefire blissful existence. Which brings us around to Lymelife, a late-‘70s-set tale about screwed-up Long Island high-schooler Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), whose crumbling family includes cold, philandering real-estate developer dad Mickey (Alec Baldwin), military brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin), and gloomy, quietly suffering mom Brenda (Jill Hennessy). His life a checklist of movie clichés about adolescence, Scott is picked on by the local bully, loves Star Wars, and pines for his pretty older neighbor Adrianna (Emma Roberts), who flirts with and teases him. Also in the mix are Adrianna’s crazy parents: mom Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is an adulteress sleeping with Mickey, and her dad Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is a mess of a man who, instead of looking for work, smokes pot in his basement, his deterioration ostensibly instigated by a case of lime disease.

I say ostensibly because Charlie – like everyone else in Derick Martini’s film (co-written with brother Steven) – is really suffering from suburbanitis, that stultifying malady in which moving to the ‘burbs not only doesn’t solve, but in fact amplifies, barely suppressed problems. Lymelife shows directorial restraint in depicting Scott’s confused headspace, and its performances are universally solid, with both Rory Culkin and Hennessey conveying a tempered soulfulness that helps prevent their characters from succumbing to cartoonishness. Yet the narrative they’re assigned to breathe life into is irrevocably moldy, a portrait of father-son and husband-wife strife, as well as of budding teenage sexuality and maturity, that’s defined by groaningly bittersweet, paradise-is-an-illusion shots of middle-class homes spied out of school bus windows. Apparently semi-autobiographical, Lymelife sporadically nails sharp (if familiar) details, for example a shirtless Scott rehearsing how to be cool and macho while staring into his mirror, or Scott and Adrianna’s awkward maiden sexual experiences. Too bad, then, that such authenticity is drowned out by an overarching don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover message that long ago lost its luster.

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Part Three)

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

Noon – 2 p.m. THE DARK HALF (1993)

I think we can all agree that writing has been very good to Stephen King, and it certainly seems to be something he enjoys doing for a living, given the fact that he still puts out approximately seventeen books a month. Yet a casual glance at the writer characters in his work reveals a certain, I dunno, ambiguity about the matter. There’s Jack Torrance, the frustrated novelist of The Shining, who tries to bludgeon his family to death. Paul Sheldon of Misery attempts to retire his most famous character and ends up the prisoner of an obsessed fan. And in George Romero’s adaptation of The Dark Half, we have Timothy Hutton as Thad Beaumont, an author of serious but poorly-selling literary fiction who achieves success with dark, violent novels published under the name George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to out Beaumont to the press, the author takes matters into his own hands, confessing his Stark-ness and staging a mock funeral for his alter ego. The matter seems resolved until George Stark comes to life and goes on a killing spree, for which Beaumont is the prime suspect. Romero’s film is one of the better received King adaptations, and Hutton does a respectable job in the dual role of weenie Thad and badass Stark (even if he can’t pronounce “Bangor” – it’s not “banger,” people!), but a more accurate title would have been Half-Baked. Romero doesn’t bother trying to wring much suspense out of whether Thad is actually doing Stark’s killing himself, and like much of King’s latter-day work, the whole thing degenerates into arbitrary hocus-pocus in lieu of a psychologically satisfying ending.

Odd (but not really that odd) fact: Michael Rooker plays Castle Rock sheriff Alan Pangborn, who is played by Ed Harris in Needful Things. Ed Harris is married to Amy Madigan, who plays Thad Beaumont’s wife Liz in The Dark Half. This must mean SOMETHING.

2 p.m. – 4 p.m. THINNER (1996)

Of course Stephen King had his own George Stark, although as far as we known the pseudonym Richard Bachman never came to life and started murdering people. King published five novels under Bachman’s name before being outed as the real author shortly after the publication of Thinner. In King’s case, however, it’s not like he was doing something completely different as Bachman; Thinner, in particular, is vintage King. It’s also a prime example of a story that works on the page, but not so much on film. Whilst driving and simultaneously receiving a blowjob from his wife, fat mob lawyer Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke) accidentally hits and kills an old gypsy woman. The gypsy’s even more ancient father puts a curse on Billy, who begins to lose weight at a rapid clip. This is great at first, especially since he can eat whatever he wants, but it soon becomes clear that the weight loss won’t end until there’s nothing left of him. With the help of a mobster client (Joe Mantegna), an emaciated Billy tries to get the gypsies to reverse the curse. Unfortunately, the fat suit technology is not sufficiently advanced to be anything other than a distraction; Mike Myers was more convincing as Fat Bastard. The “thinner” prosthetics are even worse, but I suppose it’s too much to ask for Burke to go on Christian Bale’s Machinist diet for a B-movie like this. There’s a nasty little twist ending (hint: it involves pie!), but again, it worked better on the page.

King’s cameo: He’s the pharmacist Mr. Bangor (not banger!)

4 p.m. – 6 p.m. THE NIGHT FLIER (1997)

One of the lesser known – perhaps even the least known – King adaptations, Night Flier is based on a short story from the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection. Miguel Ferrer is his usual acerbic self as sarcastic, ill-tempered tabloid Richard Dees, a reporter for the Weekly World News-esque Inside View. Dees and a rival cub reporter (Julie Entwisle) are investigating a series of murders at small airports. It seems “the Night Flier” swoops in at night in his black Cessna, emerges in a black-and-red Dracula cloak, and eviscerates the unlucky inhabitants. It’s a pretty flimsy premise for a feature-length film, and not much happens until the last fifteen minutes or so, when Dees finally catches up to the Night Flier in an airport full of slaughtered victims. There’s an eerie bathroom moment I’ve never seen before: a stream of blood emerging from an invisible wee-wee and splashing into a urinal. Hey, it creeped me out. As so often happens, however, the ultimate revelation of the baddie is a letdown – just another big critter carved out of latex.

King’s cameo: He doesn’t appear in person, but there’s a clever moment when the camera pans across a wall of framed Inside View covers, each of which takes its headline from a different King story.

The Final Chapter

The Screengrab : timothy hutton

Screengrab Review: "Lymelife"

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Part Three)