The Screengrab : wellness

The Halfway House: Von Doviak’s Unwatchables of 2008 (So Far)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

My, my, my, isn’t this a lovely thing! The sun is shining, the birdies are singing, and my fellow Screengrabbers are raving about their favorite movies from the first half of 2008. So far, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark and Leonard Pierce have all weighed in with their rainbows and pretty, pretty ponies, so I guess it’s up to me to poop in the punchbowl.

Don’t get wrong – it’s not that this year’s first half has been completely worthless as far as cinema is concerned. I enjoyed Wall-E as much as the next guy – I’m not made of stone, you know! (Not entirely, anyway.) Iron Man was about as good as it gets with the superhero genre, which still makes it a movie that ends with one guy in a big metal suit beating the crap out of another guy in an even bigger metal suit, but an awful lot of fun up until that point. Like Mr. Pierce, I’ll go to bat for the terrifying first hour of The Strangers, as well as most of Baghead, the offbeat indie Wellness (screened at SXSW) and the documentaries Crawford and The Unforeseen. But let’s be honest – so far 2008 has been overflowing with crap, and as the resident movie janitor, it’s my job to dig through it. Without further ado, here are the five least watchable movies I’ve seen this year.

1. The Love Guru. Everything you’ve heard is true. This isn’t a case of mass hypnosis or the critical brotherhood sticking together – it really is that bad. Mike Myers described this comedy about a self-help guru’s attempts to help a hockey player win a championship as “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas.” Actually, it’s a delivery system for dick jokes, each one dumber than the last.

2. First Sunday. So bad that I’ve already covered it here as part of the Unwatchable series. Nuff said.

3. Step Up 2 The Streets. A movie that raises many questions, not least of which is: “There was a Step Up 1?” A teenage street dancer (Briana Evigan, the next Demi Moore, if we needed one) is forced to enroll in an upscale school for the performing arts, leaving her old crew to accuse her of NOT KEEPING IT REELZ. This can only be settled with a dance-off! A thoroughly unconvincing dance-off that looks like an outtake from Night of the Living Dead: The Musical.

4. The Ruins. Reviewed here at the time of its release. At least, it was in theaters when I started writing the review; I think it had been pulled by the time I posted it. A gripping, intense read becomes a dead teenager movie with laughable CG effects.

5. Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show. You loved The Original Kings of Comedy! You tolerated The Blue Collar Comedy Tour! Now run and hide, because Vince Vaughn’s Indistiguishable Frat Dudes of Comedy are coming to town! Vaughn’s brainstorm was to bring unknown comics from L.A. to heartland cities where folks apparently never get the opportunity to laugh in person at jokes about bumper stickers and apple martinis. And we wonder why middle America hates Hollywood.

Related:
SXSW Review: Wellness
Screengrab Review: The Unforeseen

In Other Blogs: SXSW Roundup

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Once again it’s that time of the week for us to acknowledge, however grudgingly, that there may occasionally be a reason or two to check out film blogs that aren’t the Screengrab. While our SXSW coverage continues, we must admit we can’t be everywhere every day, so here are a few of our imaginary Internet friends who are picking up the slack:

Cinematical has a wide assortment of coverage, from tales of misplaced luggage and other airline horror, to a plethora of reviews, including some we missed (Super High Me), some we disagree on (Wellness) and some we’ll write about soon (Second Skin).

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir runs down his SXSW discoveries, including Yeast, Living with the Tudors and Nerdcore Rising. "There's no point even bothering to attend the South by Southwest Film Festival if you're not open to discovering movies you haven't heard about — and may never get the chance to see again," he writes. "Sure, I was plenty glad to see Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay a month before the rest of the world, but that's not what I'm talking about. Despite the Indiewood premieres, the ever-larger hordes of attendees and the expanding media presence, SXSW still feels like a showcase (and trade show) aimed at people who love movies more than the movie business, and whose definition of 'independent film' still includes some elements of anti-Hollywood subversion and rebellion."

GreenCine Daily has podcasts for your listening pleasure. Here is a chat with Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker about their documentary about the "changing sexual landscape of America," Bi the Way, and here is "a frank and honest discussion with Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg about their frank and honest film, Nights and Weekends."

Indiewire’s On the Scene blog runs down the best in documentaries, from Audience and Grand Jury winner They Killed Sister Dorothy to We Are Wizards, "about several so-called 'wizard rock' bands — groups that write and play music that's in some way related to the world of Harry Potter." There truly is something for everyone at SXSW.

SXSW Review: Wellness

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

This year’s Grand Jury Prize winner for best narrative feature proves (if it needed to be proved again) that it’s possible to create a fully-realized movie world on a minimal budget. Wellness brings us into a salesman’s bleak reality of crappy motel rooms, slush-covered sidewalks and 99-cent gas station hot dogs. By the end, that world has become so vivid and all-consuming, it may take hours to fully recalibrate to your own reality. That’s a compliment, by the way, to director Jake Mahaffy and his star Jeff Clark.

Clark plays Thomas Lindsey, a hard-luck sad sack who thinks he has found redemption through Wellness, a new health product that is short on particulars and long on marketing lingo. It is being prepared for a global release, but for now there is a media blackout and Lindsey is having a hard time getting his product samples shipped from the main office. Lindsey has invested all of his own money to become a regional distributor, and he must now recruit additional distributors in order to get his big payoff.

Of course it’s a scam, a pyramid scheme perpetuated by Lindsey’s supervisor Paul (Paul Mahaffy), a gruff Laurence Tierney type who isn’t impressed with Lindsey’s sales acumen. Indeed, as we watch him make his rounds from cramped living rooms to harshly-lit offices, it seems very possible that Lindsey is the worst salesman who ever lived. He fumbles and bumbles his way through his pitches with no real grasp of what sort of product or service he’s selling – which is because, as we know and he doesn’t, Wellness doesn’t exist.

Mostly improvised, with non-actors in supporting roles, the verite-style Wellness gets its biggest boost from its central performance. Clark generates enormous empathy and quite a bit of uneasy humor, as when Lindsey practices weaving a story about his hobby of collecting hornet’s nests into his sales pitch. It’s heartbreaking to watch him spray cheese whiz onto crackers in a sad little conference room, sparsely populated by potential clients. With Wellness, Jake Mahaffy has created a world well worth visiting, although you sure wouldn’t want to live there.

SXSW Film Awards Roundup

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The SXSW Film Festival Awards were handed out last night. I’d love to tell you how worthy all of the winners are, but as fate would have it, I have yet to see any of them. While I try to rectify that situation, here are the big winners:

The Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature went to Wellness, Jake Mahaffy’s independent feature “about a man trying to succeed in a business that doesn't exist.” (There’s a lot of that going around Austin this week.) Two Special Jury Awards were also given out, one for Cinematography (Explicit Ills) and one for Best Ensemble Cast (Up With Me).

In the Documentary category, the Grand Jury Award went to They Killed Sister Dorothy, about the murder of a Catholic nun in the Amazon and the subsequent trial of her killers. The Special Jury Award went to Full Battle Rattle, a look at urban warfare simulations in a “virtual Iraq” built in the Mojave Desert.

Mark Webber’s Explicit Ills, in which “young love, drugs and poverty collide in the city of Philadelphia,” won the Audience Award for Narrative Feature. The audience agreed with the jury when it came to documentaries, bestowing their award on They Killed Sister Dorothy.

Look for reviews of some of these award winners later in the week.