(Author's note: This next review is longer than usual because I used to be buddies with the filmmaker in high school. I happened to like it a lot, and it deserves to have more people know about it. I think if you're up for a little bit of craziness and originality, you should go see it.)
#11 Bellflower
You may have noticed that as a "reviewer", I sometimes err towards giving a movie more props than I maybe should based upon originality. The Guard, for example, is like plenty of other crime capers, except that Brendan Gleeson's performance makes something formulaic seem completely new. Bridesmaids certainly isn't the funniest film I have ever seen, but the fact that it's a raucous and gross and over the top and performed as such by six women impressed me. That was an original concept. And though it is twisted, a little self-serving, and at times even sloppy, so is love, and I have not seen a movie or love story this year that is as bravely and outrageously original as Bellflower.
Writer/director/star/camera builder/flamethrower building/car assembler/walking leatherman Evan Glodell and I spent a couple years running in the same circles during high school--not best friends, but always friendly. I remember Evan being spastic, entertaining and talking about 35 miles a minute. Walking across a pit of hot coals was par for the course among he and his crew. In interviews leading up to and following the Sundance 2011 success of Bellflower, the fast-talking and excitable personality was on full display. The film--despite moments of batshit insanity--came across as pretty together.
So what the hell is Bellflower about, exactly? At its core, Woodrow (Glodell) and Aidan (Tyler Dawson) are best friends that have formed a gang called Mother Medusa, whose responsibilities include building flamethrowers (the flamethrowers are 100% real, 100% built by Glodell, and 100% ruling class), assembling firebreathing muscle cars, and readying themselves for the end of the world. Do they have jobs? Who cares? Who needs jobs when you're preparing for the apocalypse?
One night at some dingy L.A. (Bellflower is a street in Los Angeles) dive bar, Woodrow and Aidan are throwing back beers and getting into some light debauchery when Woodrow lays eyes on Millie (Jesse Wiseman). He's smitten. He'll do anything to have a chance with her, including eating a whole bunch of crickets in a cricket-eating competition; this ain't your average romantic comedy. Their attraction is immediate. To keep the unorthodox vibe alive, she asks to be taken to the filthiest restaurant that he can think of, and this restaurant happens to be in Texas. In the ensuing road trip (featuring a whiskey-dispenser on the dashboard), they fall in love.
Woodrow soon comes to realize that love is kind of a tricky thing. Just as his relationship with Millie hits a decline and his relationship with the Mother Medusa "gang" starts to become strained, he sustains a head injury (won't tell you how or why) and suddenly his world becomes more dark, more unforgiving. From there until the explosive (see what I did right there?) ending, the line gets hazy between friend and foe, and more importantly, between reality and imagination. Bright sunshine love story/bromance becomes black revenge tale, and with a flamethrower and a fire-spewing muscle car at Woodrow's disposal, it does so in a hurry.
With a budget of just under $20,000, Bellflower certainly had its imperfections. While Glodell did a great job portraying a character who was equal parts affable and breakable and Dawson, as his Mother Medusa sidekick, was also good especially in their plotting and building dialogues, the rest of the gang was just okay, including Wiseman, other auxiliary love interest Courtney (Rebekah Brandes), and seedy friend/neighbor Mike (producer and past collaborator Vincent Grashaw). One reviewer said the entire movie's dialogue felt like it was spoken in "air quotes", and while I do disagree, there were a couple moments in the script that seemed almost Juno-esque in their deliberate coolness. Finally, with how stunning of a film Bellflower was visually (more on that momentarily), the sound mixing, especially in the dialogue scenes, could not quite keep up. Though the movie's score was pretty cool.
Nit-picking aside, I again bring up the budget of just under $20,000. Bellflower was, all in all, damn impressive to me. When you're working with a budget constraint like that, you don't have a whole lot of leeway to mess up the stunts/explosions, or a whole lot of film to keep re-shooting rough dialogue takes. Michael Bay gets hundreds of millions to blow stuff up, and his movies don't come close to the powerful nature of this one. The thing that stuck out the most to me about Bellflower was how it looked. Glodell built his own cameras out of various components of multiple cameras, and along with cinematographer Joel Hodge, created a blurry, washed out, bright hungover Sunday aesthetic. There are plenty of shots in films that feature our main subject in focus and the things behind him/her looking softer, but the way these cameras are put together, the focus is sharper and the blurry is blurrier. The way it is shot thus helps the audience get into the confused, warped, dizziness of Woodrow's Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Bellflower is all at once funny, quirky, terrifying, nauseating, anxious, slowed-down, sped-up. For a while there, it gets really tense, like Black Swan tense. But that's okay, because to me, if a filmmaker can create such a vivid emotional response--even if it's a jarring one--then they are on the right track. If Glodell and company can do all this with so little, I can't wait to see what they can do with more.
#11 Crazy, Stupid, Love.
While Bellflower appeals to the machismo and cynicism in me, Crazy, Stupid, Love hits the sappy guy in me right in the nuts. Steve Carrell has made a career out of playing the kind-hearted but aloof guy who receives help, advice or circumstances that allow him to drop the nice guy act and become more badass. That's sort of Steve Carrell's thing.
In CSL, this situation manifests itself in Cal, a doting straight-and narrow husband who ends up dumped at a fancy dinner by his wife Emily (Julianne Moore), and later in the car, she drives the nail in further by telling him she has slept with somebody else. That somebody else? Her boss, David Lindhaagen (none other than Kevin Bacon). Not knowing how to deal with the news, he rolls out of a moving vehicle, gets back into the moving vehicle, tells the kids and the babysitter that mom wants a divorce, and then makes his way to a fancy hotel bar, where he proceeds to take down vodka cranberry after vodka cranberry and repeatedly slur and curse the name "David Lindhaagen". "I'm a cuckold," he shouts. "David Lindhaagen cuckolded me." The shouting draws the attention of local Lothario Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling), and out of charity mixed with a little bit of the constant opportunities to hear himself talk, decides to take Cal under his wing. Shortly after telling Cal that the straw he's using is too phallic (in so many words), he tells him "I'm going to help you rediscover your manhood," and then proceeds to walk out with a model-looking chick.
Throughout Cal's journey of trying to win back his wife, we spend time with his son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) who is in love with his babysitter Jessica (Annaleigh Tipton) who is turn in love with a much older man; Kate (Marisa Tomei), the first woman Cal picks up with the help of Jacob; and Hannah, a young law student who slowly gets into Jacob's head and makes him re-think his womanizing ways. The scenes between Gosling and Carrell are nothing short of stupendous, and the way their upping-the-status-quo montages characterize how different they are is one of the movie's best techniques. There are a couple of interesting and entertaining plot twists, not to mention some cool visual tricks; in the very beginning, the camera pans under the tables at the fancy restaurant to show sets of fancy shoes playing footsie before stopping on Cal and Emily's table, where Cal's New Balance sneakers rest a few feet apart from his wife's high heels. Why this one worked for me over a lot of other romantic comedies is because instead of being sappy and sentimental (okay, maybe a little) it was mostly just sincere.
No comments:
Post a Comment