Rebecca Thomas' ELECTRICK CHILDREN offers Mormons as human beings--& Las Vegans, too!

What makes ELECTRICK CHILDREN so special is the manner in which it subverts what you most expect. What an oddity is this little movie from first-time full-length writer/
director Rebecca Thomas (the filmmaker is shown just below). In its details, it seems quite realistic (cultist Mormons would know best about this), but as those details pile up, they begin to form not so much an image of the nasty, know-nothing (except the restrictions of their sect) people we often see in films that depict fundamentalist religions, but rather relatively decent folk doing what they must within their terribly proscribed life and their based-on-very-odd-hearsay beliefs.

As a writer, Ms Thomas must have an unusually benign view of our world and the people in it, for her movie offers us a tale of folk who actually try to do the right thing -- sometimes tardily, after first doing the wrong thing -- and not just the Utah Mormons we initially encounter but the resident of Las Vegas, a place not especially known for its benignity. That the filmmaker pulls this off, at the same time as she gives us a possible second-coming story and a love story (or two), is a feat in itself. Further, she does this sweetly and without undue arm-wrenching.

Basically, this is a fish-out-of-water tale about a young Mormon girl (the radiant but wonderfully real Julia Garner) -- who finds herself seemingly pregnant with no father in the picture (no sex having gone on, either) -- who journeys to Las Vegas to find the singer whose tape recording she has heard and has come to feel must have somehow fathered her child. (Weird, yes, but I swear Ms Thomas and Ms Garner make you at least understand where all this is coming from.)

Our girl's older brother (a funny, repressed Liam Aiken, above) unknowingly tags along for the ride, forever trying to convince his sister to return home. When the pair connects with a group of teenage skateboarding, would-be musicians and their girlfriends, sparks fly -- but in just about every way you wouldn't expect.

Most movies would use the sheltered Mormon girl in Las Vegas for either kidnapping/sexual thrills or cheap laughs. What happens here is so much stranger and more affecting: a lovely meeting of the religious and the secular in which everyone learns and grows. Is this a kind of religious parable for an age that desperately needs more humanity? Why not: We could use one. And what delight it is to view a movie in which people try to help each other. (Don't worry: There is still plenty of "conflict" to push the plot along.)

Into this mix come Rory Culkin (above, right, in the back seat) as -- eventually -- the most important of these Las Vegas teens, and then Bill Sage (front seat, behind those shades) as someone who should not be so very easy to find, but fortunately is. We buy this, I think, because of the filmmaker's ability to keep her little parable going. Both actors bring immense charm and even more sense of bizarre discovery to the movie.

Electrick Children is one of those films (there are more and more of them these days) that manage to barely open theatrically, get some very nice reviews, and then disappear under the grid. It's one more reason that Netflix streaming seems such a godsend to us movie-lovers who care about independent, foreign and documentary film. The film has only just appeared on the Netflix facility, so catch it while it's available.

Hélène Fillières' TIED goes after the entitled rich, their sexual quirks and especially how they 'love'

For her first try at directing and adapting (from the novel by Régis Jauffret) a full-length feature, the oft-seen French actress Hélène Fillières (below) has chosen a subject -- the S&M affair between a call girl and one of the world's wealthiest bankers -- that fairly reeks with timeliness and schadenfreude. That Ms Fillières then turns her film into a genuine and deeply "felt" character study is surprise enough. That she does it so briskly (it lasts but 80 minutes), yet does not seem to stint on particulars, is even more impressive.

The original French title of the not-so-hot-but-plenty-obvious American moniker, TIED, was Une histoire d'amour (or simply A Love Story). This is obviously a lot more ironic, but it is also more truthful and less S&M-ey. Ms. Fillières has given the film a kind of backward movement that begins almost at the end, then returns us to the beginning and leads us, via short scenes that alternate between present and past until the two are brought together quite strikingly and beautifully at an airport. (The novel may have done this, too; I haven't read it.) If you are someone who has not watched movies over the past couple of decades, you might find yourself flummoxed by the sharp transitions and constant movement from past to present and back. For those of us who see a lot of films, however, Tied is a fine example of how to tell a story with near-immaculate economy and style.

Tied is also quite psychologically astute. And -- wow -- is it well cast! The great and remarkably versatile Belgian actor Benoît Poelvoorde (above, right: see Coco Before Chanel, Romantics Anonymous, My Worst Nightmare and now this one for a taste of that versatility) plays the banker. He is superb at showing us the inability of this man, no matter how hard he tries, to connect with anything like real feeling for others. But, oh boy, does his narcissism and entitlement come through strong and clear. His need to be in the power position no matter what -- except when he engages in sex -- is fully exhibited. How he meets his new "girl" and immediately begins insulting her until she slaps him, and how the insults and slaps continue until it is clear what he wants and needs -- this is one amazing little scene that gives us "how this all began" without the usual (and in this case needless) exposition.

The role of the woman is played by an increasingly interesting actress, Laetitia Casta (Gainsbourg, War of the Buttons, Arbitrage), also versatile and quite beautiful. Ms Casta proves the perfect foil for the Poelvoorde's character: weak when he is strong but definitely in charge sexually. The past-to-present scenes that build the story also build her character until we understand and, in fact, know what she must do.

The "look" of the film is sleek and monied, as befits our wealthy banker, who has his own shooting range in his basement (above). The film has almost no subsidiary characters, save our heroine's combo friend/mentor/
maybe husband (the fine Richard Bohringer) who's got a nifty black cat on constant display; and a small but wonderful role, well played by Reda Kateb, as the man sitting in the girl's row on the airplane.

This airplane scene, which we see in tiny increments that build to something lovely and sad, is pivotal and so beautifully done -- showing us what might have been possible had her life taken a different direction.

Tied may seem like something not much different from what we've seen many times before. But I think it is. It's better than much else we've had on the subjects of the sexuality of the wealthy and the uses of S&M. It compares, interestingly enough, to one of the best S&M films ever: the great Mexican movie, Leap Year. There, the people and environs were as sadly lower-middle-class as those here are top-of-the-line. Yet both movies probe character and sexuality deeply, finally making us think and, yes, even care.

Unfortunately, Leap Year is no longer available to stream on Netflix, though you can rent the DVD. Tied -- distributed by IFC Midnight -- is available via streaming only, for now, but can be saved into your NF queue for the time, if and when, a DVD arrives.

Alex Gibney goes up against the 1 % -- in PARK AVENUE: Money, Power and the American Dream

Time tends to move very fast where political documen-taries are concerned. What only a year ago seemed super-hot and current, now can have us musing, "Well, we know all this already..." In the case of PARK AVENUE: Money, Power and the American Dream, the docu-mentary by the award-winning and hugely prolific Alex Gibney -- who in but the nine years since his breakout hit Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, has made some 21 further documentaries, including the much-heralded Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side -- we probably don't know all of this. Still, a good deal of it is indeed old news. However, in the case of how the income gap between the one percent and the rest of us continues to widen, this information cannot be stated -- or, hello, acted upon in some manner -- often enough.

So watching this film by Mr. Gibney, shown at left, is initially interesting in the way he contrasts New York's Park Avenue of Manhattan -- on which street live those who possess the most money of any citizens in the entire U.S.A. -- with the Park Avenue that continues up through Spanish Harlem (where TrustMovies lived for a time during the late 1980s) and across the bridge into the South Bronx, where the inhabitants are among the poorest in the nation. That there is something wrong here seems, well, under-stated in the extreme. Seeing the interiors of the Park Avenue apartments and what we used to refer to as "how the other half lives" (the other half? Things really have changed), is fun in a bizarre sort of way, as is the history of some of these buildings on the Avenue, such as 740 Park Avenue (aka 71 East 71st Street, shown below and further below) -- the edifice that, along with its super-wealthy occupants, receives the most attention here.

These "two" Park Avenues carry the theme of Gibney's doc, as the filmmaker asks if there's a snowball's chance in hell that folk from the upper end of that Avenue, under the system of government we now have, could ever hope to do more than work as doormen or cleaners for those on the Manhattan side. Doormen, in fact, figure prominently in the film. Gibney interviews one fellow who used to work at 740 Park Avenue (disguised in visage and voice, of course), and what we learn is unpleasant but rather expected, particularly in terms of what one of the uber-wealthy Koch brothers gives as a Christmas gratuity. Gee, it's the same as what my ex-wife and I (of the awfully middle-class) used to give, over 25 years ago, during the short time I lived in a doorman building.

The movie goes again into Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan (what a hot pair!) and some of the other subjects that came up prior to the last Presidential election, and we view charts and graphs (as below) about that ever widening income gap. Notes one talking head: "The poor are not very well represented in our system of government." Why? asks the filmmaker. "Because of the decline and destruction of unions," comes the reply. On that note we see what governor Scott Walker has been doing in and to Wisconsin, and hear from, among others, a husband and wife team of teachers in that state.

We also see how the wealthy like to take hold of middle-class resentment and point it downward toward the poor, rather than upward toward themselves, where it should be placed. Even if you will already know much of what Mr. Gibney has assembled here, it's salutary to be reminded of it all over again. As is pointed out along the way, when you hear folk like the Koch brothers, Stephen A. Schwarzman (whom we see a lot of here), politicians like Michele Bachmann and Eric Cantor, and yes, especially New York's own "Democratic" senator Chuck Schumer (who has kept the "carried interest" loophole safe for the wealthy) talk about "freedom," what they manage to leave out is that this freedom is available mostly for our billionaires. Simply hearing the disgraced ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff (below) talk about how the collusion works between industry, the wealthy and our government is worth the price of admission.

You can view Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream (which was shown on PBS' Independent Lens) via Netflix's streaming service. It's worth a watch and runs only a short 71 minutes.

HOUSE OF BOYS: An odd and very moving -- if soapy -- saga about early AIDS in Amsterdam

Even after seeing recent and worthwhile documentaries about the AIDS crisis and its history -- We Were Here and How to Survive a Plague -- a movie like HOUSE OF BOYS still proves what a wallop can be delivered by a narrative film with a good grasp of character and event and a vital theme that you might call (pace A Chorus Line) "What I Did for Love."

Directed and co-written by a fellow of whom I'd never heard, Jean-Claude Schlim (shown at right), the movie certainly covers all the bases: The first few minutes are a riot of color (pinks and blue, of course), complete with some Disney-like Cinderella animation, a beautiful blond boy running through a gorgeous golden field of corn, disco dancing and more. Before the opening credits, in fact, we've had what looks like some sort of choreographed musical number, too. Finally though, the movie settles down to become a three-part saga, set in the 1980s, of a runaway teen named Frank (Layke Anderson, below), his finding a home at a rather special gay night club/bordello (that titular House of Boys) and finally discovering real, till-death-do-us-part love -- unfortunately just at the time of the burgeoning AIDS crisis.

The movie grows deeper and sadder as it progresses but because the first half has been so full of life, charm, color and sexy, loving characters, when the sadness starts, we're so wrapped up in these people that we would follow them just about anywhere. Which we do.

The boys that Frank moves in with include one kid who's abused by his father; another who looks like a muscular, macho punk; the very femme boy saving up for transgender surgery (Stephen Webb, above) and a calls-himself-straight kid, Jake, with a girlfriend who crawls in through his window at night. Jake is played by the very hot-because-he-withholds young actor, Benn Northover, shown below, left, with Stephen Fry, who plays the kindly doctor flummoxed by this new disease.

The man in charge of the kids is that terrifically fun and often funny actor Udo Keir (below, in drag) who serves as head entertainer, father confessor, and madam of this gay brothel in which the kids dance for the entertainment of the guests and then give them something extra in the back room. (Considering what goes on here, the movie is relatively restrained, going for the heartstrings rather than the penile muscles in most cases. For the record, there's no full-frontal on display.)

At times the writing is only so-so (fortunately never less than that); at other moments it rises to the beautiful and moving, as do the performances and the direction. The real helper and mother figure to the teenagers here (Madam, you see, never comes through in a pinch), is Emma, played by that wonderful actress Eleanor David (shown below, left, with Mr; Anderson), who brings great warmth and affection to every scene in which she appears. Emma loves these boys so much, for a reason we later learn, that this deep love helps bring us along with her.

Though divided into three sections and sporting a running time of almost two hours, the movie is never boring. Mr. Anderson's performance carries us from joy and freedom on to love and sorrow. So if you're gay-friendly and haven't had a good cry in awhile, here's your ticket. You can view House of Boys -- a Luxembourg/German co-production from Breaking Glass Pictures and spoken in English, though with some odd accents throughout, consider-ing we're supposed to be in Amsterdam -- via Netflix streaming or on DVD.

Werewolf of the week: Alexander Yellen/Shane Van Dyke's silly/fun time-waster BATTLEDOGS

From yesterday's sublime Scapegoat, we move to today's ridiculous BATTLEDOGS. But, hey, ridiculous can also be fun. Further, it's been about a year since I tried an unknown werewolf movie -- Werewolf: The Beast Among Us -- via Netflix streaming, so when, all of a sudden, up cropped this more recent genre adventure, I jumped at it. The title Battledogs may remind you of Dog Soldiers, the wonderful Neil Marshall movie from 2002 and the best "werewolfer" since 1981. That, by the way, was the banner year for werewolves-on-film, as both The Howling and An American Werewolf in London hit theaters. No surprise: this new one ain't nearly as much frisky, scary fun as Dante's, Landis' or Marshall's movies.

In fact, Battledogs turns out to be a product of the SyFy Channel, and consequently suffers from a case of the "dumbs," as has every one of the channel's made-for movies I've so far encountered. That said, the film, as written by Shane Van Dyke and directed by Alexander Yellen (shown at left), is short, relatively swift, and has enough action, plot and special effects (the CGI werewolves are pretty well imagined and created) plus a decent B-movie cast to keep things jumping. By the point at which you're ready to toss in the towel, the end credits have already started rolling and you're up and clearing the dinner dishes and maybe thinking about bedtime....

The movie begins in an airport in New York (and goes back there for a few more visits later), where a woman (Ariana Richards, above right, with the movie's hero, played by Craig Sheffer) is clearly having some physical problems. She heads for the rest room, closes herself into the handicapped stall and -- oh-oh. Bad. This woman does indeed have a handicap, and within minutes the airport lobby looks like the shot below.

Soon the city is quarantined, and so are the wolves (who, in typical werewolf style, easily change back to human form), as our hero, our pretty Patient Zero, and a helpful doctor (Kate Vernon, below) race against time and the bad guys (no, they are not the werewolves) to prevent total annihilation.

Those bad guys are, as often happens in the movies and perhaps in life itself, military men, with their commander (Dennis Haysbert, below) intent on training these WWs to become American weapons. Yes, all this does not make really good sense, but you don't watch stuff like this for good sense.

On the other hand, it would be nice to have some sense, but as Battledogs battles along, this is mostly lost.  But then, on the third hand, which the special effects in some of these SyFy movies can easily give you, you've got these naughty man and woman wolves doing their thing -- marching out of isolation, through the subway system and into Central Park...

...occasionally being subdued via drugged-up darts or Mr. Sheffer's calming voice and hand (above). We also get one pretty good car chase and a few of the kind of special effects that go with it, as our good little group tries to find a quickie cure for these really unpleasant transitions from human to wolf -- and the carnage that goes along with them.

And then it's over. And you roll your eyes and think, "What did I just watch?" But, hell, you like werewolf movies, and you've certainly seen worse. So you chuckle to yourself as you realize guiltily, "Shit, I could have been reading Proust..."

Battledogs is currently available via Netflix streaming and probably elsewhere (like, whenever they show it again on SyFy, but with those pesky commercials to distract from the art).

A streaming must-see: Charles Sturridge's adaptation of duMaurier's THE SCAPEGOAT

British filmmaker Charles Sturridge (shown below in younger days) has had an interesting career, though not one to which most Americans will have given much thought. Best known, I should think, for the Brideshead Revisited TV mini-series from 1981, he has also made three movies very much worth seeing: A Handful of Dust (from 1988), Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991) and Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997). His successes have been in the classic, what we might call Masterpiece Theater mode, yet his choice of projects (or perhaps what have landed in his lap) tend to be quirky and not as easy to pigeon-hole as some critics or audiences might like. A Handful of Dust, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel, was for its time almost like a deliberate smack in the face of folk who love "classy" Brit TV and film; Where Angels Fear to Tread, in which a lovely, sexual Helen Mirren comes (and goes) with shocking brevity, also rocked (a bit gently, based as it was on an E.M. Forster novel) family, tradition, class and the meaning of decency; while A Fairy Tale, in its strange and delightful way, combined the likes of Harry Houdini with Arthur Conan Doyle, Peter Pan, photography and, yes, fairies.

Now comes what may be one of Sturridge's best films -- THE SCAPEGOAT -- which he has adapted from one of the lesser-known novels of Daphne du Maurier, and from which another movie was adapted back in 1959, which starred Alec Guinness and Bette Davis. (TrustMovies saw that film when he was in his late teens but barely remembers it now. Next time it plays TCM, he'll have to grab it.) In the novel a Britisher visiting France runs into his doppelganger/
double, and soon finds himself impersonating this Frenchman and infiltrating the man's family and business. Sturridge has -- more interestingly and a little more believably, too -- set the scene in England, in the early 1950s at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II.

The look-alikes here are played by Matthew Rhys (above), about whom differences of class and character are all. John Standing, at right, is a decent, if rather untested, school teacher, while Johnny Spence (at left) is a aristocratic cad, someone the Brits might call a "bounder." As the men meet almost at the film's beginning, we know but little about Standing (he has just been let go from his teaching job at a prestigious boy's school, below) but almost nothing about Spence.

What happens after this initial meeting, and from there onward in this fast-moving and often riveting combination thriller/family drama, is full of both the expected and the not-so. What is most surprising about this genuinely stirring movie is how it manages to subvert expectation to become a kind of lovely, moving thriller -- one that's charming and imaginative as it tosses us into someone else's world. Thrills, you see, can come in all kinds of packages, and Sturridge has once again chosen a work that offers him the opportunity to pull, but gently, the rug out from under the expectations of his audience.

The family into which Standing becomes a part is inhabited by some pretty caddish and unhappy sorts, including Johnny's mother, Lady Spence (Eileen Atkins, at right) who never seems to be able to rise from her bed...

...as well as a sister (the wonderful, as always, Jodhi May); a callow brother, played by Andrew Scott (at left, three photos below); a lovely, pliant wife (Alice Orr-Ewing), an ador-able, spirited daughter (Eloise Webb, at bottom, left), and a sexy conniving sister-in-law (Sheridan Smith, below, and lately of Hysteria) with whom Johnny has clearly been having an affair.

Around the periphery scurry other characters: the family's maid (a fine performane from Phoebe Nichols), its clergyman (Anton Lesser, below right), the take-charge chauffeur (Pip Torrens) and a young Frenchwoman (the great Sylvie Testud) who relocated to London during the war, it seems.

How John manages to take Johnny's place in the family members' minds and finally in their hearts provides the meat of the movie, and what a tasty, nourishing feast it does become. Ms du Maurier seldom wrote uninteresting plots, which is one reason so many of her evergreen works have been adapted into films -- Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel to Don't Look Now and The Birds, among many others.

This one proves so due to its doppelganger premise, which is always a good hook, even more so for what Sturridge does with it. His specific time period -- as Queen Elizabeth is about to be crowned and television is making its way into England -- proves just about perfect for the tale he tells. The movie begins with the arrival of this aristocratic family's first television and ends with the family watching the coronation on their new and oh-so-tiny set. Ms Nichols' final speech, about this event and how it applies to what's going on in the family, is a humdinger -- making beautifully clear the reason for the particular place, period, and doppelganger theme.

Midway to two-thirds' through the film, what must happen in these movies about "doubles" does occur. How the filmmaker handles this -- in an almost perfunctory fashion: it's the most typically thrilling but also least commanding part of the film -- indicates where his interest really lies: in character rather than event.

Who of all these characters figures out which man is which proves a large part of the exquisite fun here, while giving two of the performers in this crack ensemble cast the chance to really shine. The Scapegoat, first shown, I believe, on British television, is now available via Netflix streaming (you can add it to your NF queue, as well, then wait until the time, if and when, it becomes available here on DVD). This is such a wonderful, old-fashioned tale done so well that it qualifies as don't-miss entertainment.