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Reviews
Vaiburêta (2003)
Remarkably Boring!
Vibrator is a movie I'd like to forget. A movie where the fake-outs and plot twists get faked-out and twisted-over so you're right back where you started. A movie that transfers, seamlessly, from grotesquely silent anal sex sequences to intricately technical discussions over the innermost workings of CB radio.
There are shots in this film that make you wonder if the projectionist accidentally spliced in thousands upon thousands of identical frames. Characters sit, silently eating soup, for up to and including ten minutes at a time. It's like watching paint dry, only at some point in the course of the first act, the paint is already dry, and you just sit around watching paint for two hours!
Vibrator is truly remarkable in its refusal to tell a story, to grab your attention, or event to through in a shred of music every now and then! For a movie with practically two speaking parts, you might figure it to be a characters study, but that would involve actually wiggling some effort in the way of character development.
Vibrator never surmounts to anything. The cinematography, flashy at best, is reminiscent of a Mitsubishi commercial, sans-techno. The main players do fine, but are given virtually no material to play to an audience with. Characters cry, and you just watch them. You don't feel them.
I walked out of the late-night screening of Vibrator from the LA Film Festival feeling drastically cheated.
Pizza (2005)
A slice of good IL' fashion teen comedy, done the right way.
Pizza was publicly screened for the first time at the Los Angeles Film Festival on the 21st.
It's no overstatement that this is a film I've been hoping for ever since I first sat down and watched "The Breakfast Club," all those years ago. Like master teen storyteller John Hughes himself, Pizza bring Teen cinema to a height that few are aware it can achieve. It's not a bunch of teens wandering around, pretending to cry, trying to have sex with each other. It's not an excuse to show off a pair of breasts.
It's just an honestly honest movie.
Pseudo-hunk Ethan Embry delivers with power I had no clue he had in him. Honestly, watching Ethan Embry in Sweet Home Alabama and watching Ethan Embry in Pizza, they look the same, but you get the feeling you're looking at the NOT evil twin. Newcomer Kylie Sparks (who was, very humbly, at the screening I attended) shines wonderfully as the overweight, mal-adjusted, teetering on the brink of adulthood lead, like Ricki Lake before her. Actually, I take that back, she's BETTER than Ricki Lake.
Pizza remains fresh and entertaining throughout. If perhaps it does fall into the "I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you" thing a little too much, it manages to tell a story of love and finding yourself without getting preachy, without copping out.
At the screening, writer/director Mark Christopher mentioned current plans to do a horror flick and a family/farm flick next, but if we're lucky, he'll come the way of teenybopper angst just one more time before he gives it up completely.
If it gets distribution, which it should, I'll definitely see it again.
9/10
Jersey Girl (2004)
A big step forward for Kevin Smith...
Let's get this one thing straight: I am a Kevin Smith fan. I loved Clerks for its characters, Mallrats for its cheap laughs, Chasing Amy for its honesty, Dogma for its message, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back for... Well, I love Jay and Silent Bob Strike back. I was more than a little bit worried going into this one. I'd been reading up on it for a year and a half, frequenting the View Askew (Kevin's production company) website. First, there was J. Lo. Everyone called him a sellout, but not I. Then the PG-13. Liv Tyler was next. Affleck. It was building up to something that didn't sound like a Kevin Smith movie to me. It wasn't. It was better. It had everything I liked from the previous flicks (great dialogue, good characters, honest emotions), plus a new level of maturity, both from Kevin's direction, and the script itself. You don't like Affleck? I don't like Affleck. He's pretty darned good in this one, though. He carries the film, and you can't even see him trembling under the weight. Walking out of Jersey Girl, I was touched, tickled, and ready to see it again.
Congratulations, Mr. Smith.