Film: Movie Review: Addicted To Fame

An army of parasites callously used Anna Nicole Smith over the course of a life that grew progressively less funny and more tragic. That didn’t end with Smith’s 2007 death, which if anything, exacerbated the problem. Addicted To Fame is a queasy new documentary that attempts to shed light on what director David Giancola implicitly seems to feel was the real tragedy of Smith’s death: that the funereal gloom over her high-profile tabloid passing completely fucked his ability to leverage her trash-culture notoriety for a big payday for Illegal Aliens, the low-budget science-fiction spoof that was to be Smith’s final film. Judging by the film’s alternately self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, and bitter tone, the schlock director is afflicted with a bizarre lack of self-consciousness to rival Smith’s own impregnable wall of self-delusion. Giancola complains about the media and Smith’s hangers-on using her without ever acknowledging his own complicity in her exploitation. In his mind, the media are a bunch of vultures out to take advantage of a weak woman’s decline and death, while he’s a plucky independent who was out to make his dream project, until he was screwed by a star thoughtless enough to die at the most inconvenient possible time.

Addicted To Fame chronicles the making, unmaking, and surreal afterlife of Illegal Aliens, a high-concept Charlie’s Angels spoof Giancola conceived as the ultimate tribute/homage to trashy B-movies. For his marquee attractions, Giancola picked a pair of infamous sexpots: WWE grappler Joanie “Chyna” Laurer (who, in spite of her reputation, was supposedly a dream to work with) and Smith, who put some of her own money into the project, receiving a producer credit and an associate-producer credit for her son Daniel. The production quickly went awry: Smith was possibly using drugs and was a nightmare collaborator. She forgot her lines, made constant demands, and generally behaved, as Giancola complains, like a 2- or 3-year-old. Then her son died, and she rapidly followed. 

Giancola understandably had a negative experience working with Smith, whose lack of professionalism was thorough and predictable. but it’s nevertheless troubling that he depicts her death almost exclusively through the prism of how it will affect his film’s commercial chances. Giancola, who narrated, directed, and edited Addicted To Fame, presents himself as a resourceful creator using his experience and ingenuity to make the best of an impossible situation, rather than merely the latest person to take advantage of a fragile, mentally ill woman and her train-wreck fame. Just like Illegal Aliens, Addicted To Love is an exploitation movie, albeit one without even the science-fiction spoof’s sunny, dumbass innocence.

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Film: Movie Review: Beware Of Mr. Baker

“Ginger Baker just hit me in the fuckin’ nose.” That’s how Jay Bulger’s documentary Beware Of Mr. Baker begins, with a frenzied solo by legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker on the soundtrack, and video footage of him arguing with Bulger, then rapping him in the face with a cane. Bulger first met Baker several years ago, while crashing at Baker’s South African compound to write an article for Rolling Stone. He returned two years later to expand the article into this documentary, knowing even before he began that for every spellbinding anecdote Baker would spin, Bulger might have to weather one of his subject’s rants. At one point, Baker’s sister talks about the family temper, and Beware Of Mr. Baker suggests that this is where his talent comes from: a pent-up rage that erupts through his sticks. Baker himself chalks it up to “a gift from God… natural time.”

Beware Of Mr. Baker is the life story of a man who’s led one hell of a fascinating life. Welcomed early into the fraternity of great jazz and blues drummers, Baker became a superstar while revolutionizing heavy rock music alongside Eric Clapton in Cream and Blind Faith, and became an iconic figure to boot, with his skeletal visage and demonic shock of red hair. But his problems with substance abuse and anger—coupled with his contempt for other rock ’n’ roll players who didn’t understand what he was doing—made him a difficult person to work with, long-term. So Baker became a hobbyist, taking the occasional gig in between obsessing over polo, African music, heroin, and young women. Meanwhile, he dealt with persistent money woes, because polo horses and drugs are expensive, and because Baker has mostly been paid as a sideman, not as an innovator just as responsible for his band’s best-known songs as their credited composers.

Bulger and editor Abhay Sofsky work wonders with the archival footage, giving Beware Of Mr. Baker its own jazzy rhythm, but they can’t do as much with the interviews, for which the arthritis-stricken Baker mostly sits immobile in his recliner. Some of the stories are illustrated with limited animation, which has become a visual cliché in modern documentaries, and Bulger seems to delight in aggravating Baker by stopping his reminiscences to ask that Baker clarify who he’s talking about, or by asking for more soul-searching than Baker is prone to. But then, that’s partly what Beware Of Mr. Baker is about. Bulger has the wizened, reflective likes of Clapton and Jack Bruce to play analyst. Baker is all about moving forward, enjoying the flow, and demanding that others keep up. Or as Baker himself snaps at Bulger, “Go on with the interview. Stop trying to be an intellectual dickhead.”

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Film: Movie Review: California Solo

It’s a nice touch that Marshall Lewy’s indie drama California Solo is set a couple of hours outside of Los Angeles, on a small organic farm, because the literal geography establishes the main character’s biographical geography. Robert Carlyle plays a former Scottish rock star who drives into the city once a week to sell the vegetables he helps grow, and every time he’s in the general vicinity of show business, he’s reminded of what he’s lost. Carlyle does keep a toe in the music world, via a podcast called Flameouts, in which he recounts the stories of famous musicians’ deaths. But even that is indicative of his situation: not on the radio or on TV, but consigned to the outskirts of the mass media. And it doesn’t help that Carlyle recently got busted for DUI, which—coupled with an old drug charge from his rocker days—is threatening to get him deported from the country he’s called home for the past dozen years.

California Solo doesn’t have much story. All of the details above are established in the first five minutes, then the movie becomes a character sketch, carried by its wealth of detail and a fantastic Carlyle performance. Visually, the film is unremarkable, and Lewy’s overall approach holds doggedly to the exhaustingly earnest Amerindie style, complete with moody soundtrack and quiet scenes of people parceling out their backstories. Lewy knows this character and his world well, though, and when Carlyle rants about Marc Bolan on his podcast, or tries to sell a guitar once owned by Paul Weller to people who’ve never heard of The Jam, it reinforces the idea that Carlyle has left behind a career where even the legends fade more with each generation. California Solo peaks with the scene where Carlyle records the Flameouts episode about his own band, describing his brother’s death in a rivetingly angry, self-pitying monologue. 

Eventually though, the lack of any real narrative drive catches up to California Solo, which in its last third stumbles through clichéd scenes of Carlyle going on drinking binges, while trying to make amends to and beg favors from the friends and family he’s disappointed during his decade in exile. It’s too bad Lewy (and Carlyle, who executive-produced the film) couldn’t find more to do with the hero. Even when he’s idling, there’s something touching about this self-described “moderately lazy Scot” who tries to keep his house in order, but finds that when he gets in trouble, his house is way too “wee.”

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Film: Movie Review: Dragon

Blending old-school kung-fu elements with a touch of noir and a plot that recalls A History Of Violence, Peter Chan’s Dragon is a drama about redemption masquerading as a martial-arts movie. This is mildly disappointing, since the film stars Donnie Yen (who also choreographed), and he can feel wasted onscreen whenever he isn’t engaging in impossible, wire-assisted action feats. Yen’s strengths have never been in his expressiveness, and Dragon plods when it centers on dramatic struggles, then leaps exhilaratingly to life whenever the fighting begins.

Yen plays a paper worker leading a quiet existence in a small village in 1917 China with his wife (Tang Wei) and two sons. He happens to be in the general store when two bandits attack it, and he takes them out with what initially appears to be luck and bravery. Sent to investigate, detective Takeshi Kaneshiro is able to divine from the scene that Yen actually knew exactly what he was doing, and discovers he’s a martial-arts expert and a former member of a bloodthirsty group called the 72 Demons, which continues to terrorize under the leadership of “the Master” (Jimmy Wang, whose The One Armed Swordsman is a major influence here). Yen’s act and Kaneshiro’s desire to bring him to justice draws the attention of the Demons, who soon come calling.

The choice to divide the film between its two superstar leads relieves the impassive Yen of some of the acting burdens, but makes for an uneasy balancing act between period crime drama and kung-fu flick, with Kaneshiro’s acupuncture expert offering up his own moody but less compelling backstory about tamping down his empathy to better serve the law. While the attempts at genre-bending and reworking classic tropes are admirable, the fight scenes provide all the high points, from a battle in a barn amid snorting water buffalo to an encounter that finds people chasing each other across the village rooftops. Wang’s arrival and the reveal of his ties to Yen lead up to the best showdown and the one that finally earns the film’s angst over identity and destiny. Dragon plays off and engages with the history of kung-fu films, but it only really sings when it’s content to be one itself.

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Film: Movie Review: King Kelly

It feels unfair to call King Kelly a found-footage movie—its title character, who frequently turns the camera on herself and preens in its gaze like it’s a mirror, has every intention of making everything she shoots publicly available online. A webcam girl fixated on the upcoming launch of her own site, Kelly (Louisa Krause) is the tireless star and most frequent DP of her own life-as-movie. She’s narcissistic, manipulative, and hooked on the immediate gratification of adoration from the fans who log on to get off on her streaming shows. Directed by Andrew Neel (Darkon), King Kelly is a broad indictment of the emptier side of self-documentation and a more nuanced one of the Internet as a source of affirmation. Its heroine looks to her fans for reinforcement about her desirability, her behavior, and the stardom she’s sure is coming for her, creating a narrow world in which she only needs to deal with people who adore her.

King Kelly was shot on iPhones and consumer-grade cameras standing in for iPhones, but that’s less horrifying than it sounds. Like Paranormal Activity 4, it makes use of framing that technology has made into common visual language; when Krause holds her camera up at arm’s length and offers a duck face, she’s recreating a shot used by thousands of other people catering to an exaggerated, web-driven idea of what it means to be sexy. And in spite of her convictions to the contrary, there’s nothing notable about her except her embrace of her own awfulness. She acts like a starlet on a binge, not the would-be proprietor of her own porn business—she gets furious when someone deems her a slut, but blithely confesses to dating someone only because he’s helping her code her website.

Taking place on July 4, King Kelly involves a stash of drugs that are essentially a McGuffin, and a night of partying, sex, and violence that spirals into something dark and dreadful, though Krause makes a chipper attempt to frame everything as a wacky adventure. And while the outsized obliviousness of the film’s protagonist can get grating and hard to believe, the side characters drawn into her orbit balance out her relentless self-absorption. Roderick Hill plays a state trooper who’s Krause’s biggest fan, and whose fixation quickly reveals a frightening side, while Libby Woodbridge is a tragic standout as Krause’s much-abused peon of a best friend and the only figure in her real life who buys into her persona as a celebrity in the making.

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Film: Movie Review: The Collection

Delivered with the efficiency of a fast-food value meal, The Collection—a sequel to the largely forgotten 2009 horror film The Collector, and like its predecessor, the work of the writing-directing team behind some of the later Saw sequels—doesn’t waste much time. Clocking in at a swift 82 minutes, counting the languorous opening and closing credits, the film almost immediately starts setting up its plot by letting a TV news broadcast recount the horrific efforts of a seemingly unstoppable killer. Then it sends its pixieish heroine (Emma Fitzpatrick) out into the night in search of a party, which she finds in the form of an underground dance club that’s secretly run by the killer himself. An athletic-looking figure wearing a black mask, he’s rigged the place with booby traps, including a thresher that, in the film’s most audacious sequence, mows down the dancers like so many stalks of wheat. Then Fitzpatrick gets kidnapped while Josh Stewart, The Collector’s hard-case hero, escapes, and a paramilitary group hired by Fitzpatrick’s father (Christopher McDonald) springs Stewart from the hospital to find the killer’s secret lair. These events unfold with the reckless momentum of downhill skiing.

The killer’s secret lair is the old, abandoned Hotel Argento, which provides one clue about the influences at play in The Collection. Another comes from the villain’s mask, which resembles that of the Italian pulp anti-hero Diabolik, memorably brought to the screen by Mario Bava. But the nods to classic Italian giallo are largely just that: nods. Mostly The Collection plays like a throwback to a more recent, but fast-fading into memory, horror-film era set into motion by Saw, one in which elaborate contraptions clank into action in ways designed to impale and dismember, no room is complete without unsavory-looking stains on the wall, and no door can be opened or closed without threatening to blow out the low-end of even the most state-of-the-art multiplex sound systems. In the Hotel Argento, every room is a death trap, and there’s always something squishy on the floor.

But even if it’s delivering the last gasp of its particular subgenre, The Collection still finds ways to make itself heard. That thresher sequence isn’t soon forgotten, nor are some of the images scared up by the film’s go-for-it attitude toward its thrift-store-goth production design, which includes everything from terrifying dolls to vats of fluid filled with bones assembled to resemble the skeletons of creatures that never walked the Earth. It also has enough nutty energy and oddball touches—The Wire’s Andre Royo shows up as a gun-toting, faux-hawk-sporting badass—that it’s never boring. Dumb, gross, gratuitous, and overly familiar, sure. But never boring.

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Film: Newswire: Colin Trevorrow is working on a Flight Of The Navigator remake, not Star Wars

Variety has confirmed that the Safety Not Guaranteed team of Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly has been hired to rewrite Disney's long-developing remake of Flight Of The Navigator, the 1986 sci-fi film that argues that child abduction can be fun for everyone, so long as it's committed by a Beach Boys-loving robot alien who sort of sounds like Pee-wee Herman. Disney has been working out how to sell that premise to a more modern, touchier audience since 2009, and now it's up to Trevorrow and Connolly—whose Sundance favorite also dealt with a time-travel-based premise, albeit not one that involved a 12-year-old boy disappearing for eight years, but it's okay because this funny robot sounds like Pee-wee Herman and likes the Beach Boys.

Anyway, this clears up those recent remarks made by Trevorrow (who counts Navigator as a childhood favorite), wherein he denied working on the new Star Wars by saying he was tackling another property with a much-loved "mythology." It turns out he was, in fact, talking about the fiercely protected "mythology" of Flight Of The Navigator, which—like every mythology—has its roots in Joseph Campbell's monomyth theory of the hero who ventures forth from the common into the supernatural, and it's okay that he was abducted so an alien could experiment on him and that his parents thought he was dead for eight years, because hey, the alien is a loveable goofball.

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