Lovers of unintentional camp, rejoice! RUSSIAN DOLL (A Thriller) hits DVD

The box art for RUSSIAN DOLL explains (or maybe proclaims) the movie to be, via its subtitle description, (A Thriller) -- in parentheses, yet, in case, I guess, we might want to consider this as parenthetical. Indeed there is not a single thrill to be found here. There is, however, a whole lot of genuine laughs, most of these completely unintentional, I fear.

Which means that this movie takes its place among those hallowed few films that rise, completely of their own accord, into the realm of unintentional camp.

As written and directed by Ed Gaffney (shown at right, whose earlier work as screenwriter, The Perfect Wedding, this reviewer thoroughly enjoyed), Russian Doll begins and ends with a genuine surprise. The first of these turns what has initially looked just slightly off-kilter into something that makes perfect sense. The final surprise has to do with identity, and I admit that I did not at all expect it. So I applaud. Very good, Mr. Gaffney!

The problem, however, is that between these two surprises, almost everything else seems bat-shit crazy, including the performances of much of the cast, especially our leading lady, Melanie Brockmann Gaffney (I suspect she is the filmmaker's wife), who, whatever other talents she possesses, acting is not among them, and Jason T. Gaffney (the filmmaker's son?), who was so very good in his rom-com role in The Perfect Wedding, but here plays a villain (shown below with his victim, played by Aly Trasher) who keeps making us laugh. Unintentionally, I admit. But that's not what villains are supposed to do.

The plot has to do with a theatrical play, the authorship of which may have been stolen; a sudden kidnapping (that actually makes very little sense overall); and a theatrical production of said play (named Russian Doll) that is occurring simultaneously with the kidnapping and a budding romance between our heroine, a police detective (Ms Gaffney, at left on poster, top) and a very pretty, sexy young woman with whom the detective's mom (Kristine Sutherland, below) has set her up.

All comes together in as clunky a manner as the above description sounds, with the kidnapper and his kidnapee especially hilarious, as the latter keeps escaping and the former keeps telling her that he's going to kill her if she keeps this up. She does, of course, and he doesn't. Somewhere along the way, the filmmaker inserts a song, the lyrics of which prove as awful (and as funny) as everything else on display. (We happened to have the English subtitles on as we watched and so got a double dose, aural and visual.)

At one point or another, my spouse and I began laughing aloud at the increasingly silly goings-on and, as can happen with this kind of laughter, it simply grew and grew until we were actually having a pretty good time. Add to this the automatic corrective that a truly awful movie can provide to just about everything else you've seen, mediocre on downward. Russian Doll managed this, and I am grateful. Now I truly understand what bad looks like. (That's the other leading lady, played by Marem Hassler, above, right, and Sarah Hollis, below, right, as our heroine's police partner, who tries to be smart and sassy but is defeated at every turn by the script.)

Distributed by Wolfe Video and running at least a short 82 minutes, the movie hits the street on DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, April 17 -- for purchase and/or maybe rental. To all of you -- performers, filmmakers, audiences -- good luck!

Short take: Scott Cooper's endlessly annoying HOSTILES proves this year's favored "fart" film

Or maybe last year's, as HOSTILES, the new movie from Scott Cooper, was released in limited fashion on December 22, in the rather ridiculous hopes of becoming an Oscar contender. "Fart" film, for those new to this site, is TrustMovies' special name for a failed art film, and few I've sat through in the past 12, maybe 24, months, have failed on the level that this one does. Oh, its themes and intentions are all good -- pointing up unfairness of the treatment of our Native Americans, while allowing that, yes, some of them, did some pretty nasty things to those white settlers.

Unfortunately, filmmaker Cooper (shown at right), who both wrote and directed the film (after giving us, also in the writer-director category, Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace), is a fellow who insists on making certain we get the point. Every single last lick of it. Over and over. And as slowly as possible so that it has to SINK IN. Lasting two hours fourteen minutes, Hostiles may seem to you, as it did to me (and others in our audience) about as slow-paced a movie as you'll have so far seen. At one point in the theater, a patron near me asked, and very loudly, "When it something gonna happen here?!" This was followed by several voices adding, "Yeah!" and "Right!" I tend to keep quiet most of the time in movie theaters, but I must say I could not blame them. Though in all fairness, the movie does begin with an action scene, as a family of white settlers is summarily massacred by a group of wild Indians, with only the wife (the always excellent Rosamund Pike, shown below) barely surviving.

From there we go to a military fort, where an officer (the also always excellent Christian Bale, below, center, surrounded by his men) who has a multitude of reasons for hating the "red man" is given the assignment of bringing an Indian chief and his family (the Chief is played by Wes Studi, at left, two photos down), who had formerly slaughtered a number this officer's friends and has now been imprisoned for years, to an out-of-state Indian burial ground, where the Chief, who has been graced with terminal cancer, will surely die.

If you maybe feel that this rather oddball situation smacks of heavy-handed manipulation -- does it ever! -- just wait. Along the journey, Bale and his crew discover Pike, in mourning for her own family, and of course they must bring her with them. Their journey is fraught with a couple more Indian attacks, but mostly it is burdened with a whole bunch of angst on Bale's part. And while this actor is often particularly good with angst, here the stuff is piled on so hot and heavy that it drags the film consistently downwards. The screenplay, dialog and the visuals are as heavy-handed as the themes, and this tends to make even those few scenes that resonate emotionally hit you over the head so hard you'll want to run for cover.

At least half the film's "moments" last far too long, as well, so that you're muttering throughout, "We get it, we get it." Robert Aldrich and Alan Sharp, in their excellent Ulzana's Raid from 1972, managed much of these same ideas so much better and stronger. Plus, their movie is a half-hour shorter. If you know that film, it will make sitting through this one all the more difficult. Finally, it is Hostiles' undue length, resulting in a kind of constant, overweening pomposity, that most thoroughly does it in.

Yes, indeed, as the poster at top declares, We are all... HOSTILES, in yet another example of "we-insist-that-you-fully-understand-this-idea" mode. And the movie does finally bring whites and redskins together at last (while killing most of them in the process). But if, considering all that has now been done to the Native American population, you can actually buy the sweet/sad finale without wincing, you're a better man I am, Gunga Din.

From Entertainment Studios Motions Pictures, the movie has now opened in a number of cities around the country. Click here to find the theater(s) nearest you.

Streaming non-recommendation: Netflix's crappy German time-travel series, DARK

Yes, I know that conventional wisdom  has long insisted that Germans (and German movies) have no sense of humor. But Look Who's Back, to use just one recent example, disproves that theory entirely. Unfortunately, the idea bounced back into my mind while viewing the dismal new Netflix-produced German series entitled DARK, which is now available pretty much worldwide via the cable behemoth. There's not a moment of levity, lightness or anything approaching humor anywhere to be seen in these ten tiresome, derivative and annoying 50-minute episodes.

This is one of those series chock full of pseudo-science, pseudo-religion, pseudo-philosophy, and pseudo-entertainment that keep promising some kind of coalescence that never arrives. Worse, it consistently trips over its own ideas. All about time travel, supposedly made possible every 33 years via our not-quite reliable calendar, it posits a bunch of kidnapped children used in some experiment (above) to facilitate this time travel who keep turning up dead (the experiments evidently continually fail).

And yet, as we see throughout the series, time travel in this sodden little German town is not just possible but is increasingly discovered by a number of its citizens (the one above, for instance), who simply open a couple of doors in a cave beneath the earth (see poster, top) and find themselves either backward or forward in time by those 33 years.

Yet the movement of those citizens is certainly well known to the "experimenter," so what's the point of keeping up the experiments on that rather silly-looking machine? This piece of nonsense is only the worst example of stupid plotting that relies completely on the viewer's inability to stop and "think" for a moment or two. There's so little logic in so much that happens here (the dead come back to life, along with other nonsensical dreck) that you might as well place your brain on hold as you watch.

Yes, the series offers its titular "noir-ish" themes, cinematography, ugliness and gloom. All this is offered up with the kind of expert professionalism we now expect out of Netflix. But then it merely keeps repeating the stuff, over and over, until one has to ask (to quote Peggy Lee), Is that all there is?

Nuclear energy is also on view here, and is part and parcel of the town's problems, as are other things like lust and love (unrequited, of course). The characters are as sullen and sodden a bunch as you will have ever seen in any TV or cable series. The only humor finally arises mostly from how utterly lacking in any the series actually is. It almost becomes something of an inside joke. You can image the producers, writers and directors watching the day's shoot and suddenly saying, "Oh, my god -- that actor just smiled. Delete that moment immediately!"

The performers are mostly good-looking and get the job done, but as we keep moving from 2019 back to 1986 and then (in the last three episodes) 1953 and piecing together exactly who is the grandfather of this one or the mother of that one, not only our interest but any chance to care much about these people dissipates. Also, the series lasts twice as long as it needs to, thanks to its very slow pacing and the camera constantly stopping to focus on a character's angst for maybe two to three times as long as necessary to get the point across. (Were the filmmakers worried that we might miss the abject "seriousness" of all their fine work?)

The finale helps in no way whatsoever, except to begin a whole new section in what I imagine is the year 2052. The series keeps promising some closure, none of which ever arrives. Dark exists to simply string us along. Perhaps that's its point, but if so, then it's mostly for folk who enjoy being diddled without ever reaching a climax. (Think of it as the television equivalent of Tantra Yoga.)

Netflix has just announced that it is renewing Dark for a second season. Good luck -- but count me out. These eight hours-plus have now taken their place as my biggest waste of time this year.

The blind are leading the blind once again in Ido Fluk's film about faith, THE TICKET

Down the decades we've seen a number of films that track the journey of a person from the world of the sighted into that of the blind (the most recent would probably be the documentary, Notes on Blindness, while one of the best narrative versions would have to be Eskil Vogt's amazing Blind). In THE TICKET, the new movie written and directed by Ido Fluk (shown below), however, we go in exactly the opposite direction, as a blind man suddenly and rather miraculously wakes up one morning with his sight completely intact.

Once the change occurs, the big questions that soon arise are whether or not our "hero" -- played by Dan Stevens, shown above and below, the most ubiquitous actor currently around, with two films opening just this week (the other is Colossal) plus another huge hit already in theaters and a hit TV show currently unspooling) -- will change and grow or simply become even more of the the prick he most definitely seems to already be.

The answer that filmmaker Fluk gives us is "yes" to both, as well as to several other questions raised by this earnest and all-too-obvious film.

These further questions involve why the miracle man's wife (Malin Akerman, below left) chose this guy with whom to make a life. There were other blind folk at the center she visited. Was he simply a "project" for her?  And what about his blind best friend and work mate, played by Oliver Platt (below, right)? Is this guy jealous of our hero's new eyesight, not to mention his wife and son? Yes, and yes again. But so what? All this is not really Mr. Fluk's point. No, his movie is all about faith, and what the lack of it can do, as is apparent from the story/joke told about god, prayer, and a lottery ticket, which is handed to us as the film opens, is repeated again midway and then once again -- just in case we didn't get the point.

You can pray all you want but you can't win the prize if you don't have enough faith to first purchase the ticket. There is undoubtedly a way to make this lesson apply and adhere to a fictional story, but Fluk has not found it. The characterizations of everyone -- hero on down -- are paltry and the movie is glacially paced. The performances are part and parcel with the characterizations: only as good as the enormous lack of detail that the filmmaker provides. This includes those of Kerry Bishé (as the "other woman") and Skylar Gaertner (below, left) as the protagonist's young son. Worse, we have no clue what kind of guy our protag was before he got his sight. In terms of real characterization, this movie comes as close to running on empty as any I've recently seen.

Mr. Stevens is a very committed actor, and he is always as good as the role he is given. This is true here, too, though he's been handed the most embarrassing "breakdown" scene on film since poor Ewen Leslie's in The Daughter. As Stevens cries and moans and writhes and blubbers, you just want to scream, "Cut -- for Christ's sake, Cut!" If this movie is indeed about faith, it is so poorly conceived and executed that, by its end, audiences will find whatever faith they possess sorely tested -- if not knocked for a complete loop.

From Shout! Factory and running a too-long 100 minutes, The Ticket opens this Friday, April 7, in New York City at the Cinema Village and simultaneously On Demand most everywhere else.

Terrence Malick's TO THE WONDER opens; the "spiritual" among us may ooh and aah

In the spirit of our late and much lamented comrade Roger Ebert (whom yours truly only learned to appreciate later in Ebert's career, once that TV show had been laid to rest), I am going to approach TO THE WONDER, the new movie from Terrence Malick, in the manner in which I believe Ebert often did: by trying first to determine what the movie-maker was attempting to achieve with the film. I tend to do that automatically; it's always been part of my approach to viewing a film. I don't read the press material before seeing a movie because I find that this obfuscates as often as it makes clear, and sometimes it greatly effects what one imagines that one is seeing. When you are told what something means in advance, it's doubly difficult to un-understand it. So the tabula rasa is by far a better option.

Mr. Malick, shown at left, begins To the Wonder in Paris (and not the dark, dank Paris of the recently reviewed Simon Killer) with its stars, Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko, taking us on a little travelog to some of the most beautiful places in and about France. The two play characters who are clearly in love, and Kurylenko looks soft and vulnerable, while Affleck has seldom seemed as relaxed or sexy. The two hold hands. They gambol. They cuddle. They neck. And there never seem to be any other people around them -- even at some of the most beautiful and, one-would-think, touristy spots. Well, they're in love, and doesn't love often make you feel as though there is nobody else in the world except you and your beloved. OK: let's agree to buy that interpretation.

This sort of smooch fest continues for maybe ten or twelve minutes, at which point, I suspect many viewers are going to say, OK: We get it. We then leave, along with the two lovebirds and her just pre-teen daughter for the plains of the Southwest -- which I suspect Mr. Malick thinks compares in beauty to the wonders of France. To each his own, but this looked looked more like a wasteland to me. (Coincidentally, Affleck's character appears to have some sort of job involving toxic waste and talking to citizens about their experiences with it. But we never learn more than this.)

On these southwestern plains, we get a lot more of Kurylenko gamboling, prancing, dancing and flitting -- and verbalizing her innermost thoughts. Here's one: "What is this love that loves us, that comes from nowhere, from all around?" Or maybe that popped out the innermost thoughts of a priest who's lost his faith -- an enormous waste of that fine actor Javier Bardem, below. (Wouldn't you say that any filmmaker who can render Bardem utterly non-specific and boring is in the wrong business?)

It doesn't really matter who says what in this film because all the verbiage is so dreadful. I won't use the word cliché because the narration never rises to even that level. Instead it more often sounds like the twaddle being recited by a three-year-old who has come to language skills only haltingly. At one point we're inundated with the word "love" spoken over and over until we're ready to talk back to the screen.

There is no plot to this mess -- only "situations." They're in love. They out of it. She and her daughter leave. He gets involved with a blond, played by Rachel McAdams (shown above and below, with Affleck), who is used here ever more poorly than is Bardem. She, too, is shown dancing, swaying, and running through the fields. And that's it for her. About that priest and his crisis of faith: Normally I'd welcome any movie that questions organized religion. But this one's questions are so standard and obvious, it's like the religious version of paint-by-numbers.

And who are these people? They have all this interior life, replete with imbecilic voice-over nonsense that they share with us while gamboling (Kurylenko) or getting down and solemn (Bardem), but they have zero exterior lives. No friends, no co-workers, no relatives, no nuttin'! Malick seems to have completely lost track of how to tell a story or create a character (ever heard of dialog, Mister?). And there aren't even --for Tree of Life lovers -- any dinosaurs. There are bison (two photos up), which is a helpful distraction, though I fear it leads to more dancing and prancing. (And not by the bison, which, in the manner of the musical Hair and its horses, would have been fun.)

Aside from smiling maybe once, Mr Affleck manages a single dour expression throughout almost the entire film: as though he is kind of miffed about something, perhaps that he signed on to this movie. Kurylenko grows nuttier until she's certifiable. If you are generous, you might call the film a meditation on existence, life, god and love. But there is so little to be learned or gained from its paltry array of "ideas" on verbal parade and even less from its "pretty" visuals, which, these days are a dime a dozen. And, yes, the movie ends with yet more prancing.

Who is the audience for this film, aside from absolute die-hard Malick fans?  I would guess, given its take-down of organized religion, together with its attempt at creating god out of twaddle and prance, it will appeal most to those people who fancy themselves spiritual -- as in "I'm a very 'spiritual' person." To which I usually reply, "Honey: That's for someone else to say -- not for you to say about yourself." (In my experience, people who imagine themselves very spiritual are often just raging narcissists.)

So, if Tree of Life did not cure you of Terrence Malick, To the Wonder surely will. It is perhaps the most offensive film I have ever had to sit through. No, it's not "dirty" or full of foul language or overt sexuality or any of the usual suspects. But it is full of itself -- and irredeemably stupid. Even for those of us who liked or loved Malick's earlier work, it is time to stop pretending and call a spade a spade. To do any less is to become, in a word, an enabler.

The movie, from Magnolia Pictures and running a seems-like-twice-as-long-as 112 minutes, opens this Friday, April 12, in 16 cities and then expands to another 24 next Friday, and from there outward until most of the USA is covered. You can find all currently scheduled playdates by clicking here.