The five Lisbon sisters -- Mary, Therese, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecelia -- were a subject of endless fascination for the neighborhood boys. Carefully guarded by their stern, religious mother, they rarely left the house except to attend school. To the boys, they were beautiful and enigmatic, and their home, full of brassieres, tampons, and girls' clothes, was a treasure trove of feminine mysteries. During what came to be known known as The Year of the Suicides, the boys -- who fantasized about the girls and hoped to save them -- bore witness to the disintegration of the Lisbon family and the sisters' tragic deaths.
Although putting down a movie as weirdly good-intentioned as "Something is Killing Tate" incites guilt in me, the truth must be told, so here goes. This film, an unholy mix of earnesty, melodrama, and blaxploitation cheesiness, comes up with a hodge-podge of issues -- suicide, rape, child abuse, alcoholism, adultery, and childhood disabilities -- dials them up to the extreme, and expects to be taken seriously.
Tate (Jocko Sims) is dying inside... an unfortunate victim of childhood abuse by his father (Kevin Nichols, a cartoon caricature of larger-than-life proportions.) After a failed attempt to take his life, he is looked after by his fiance and friends. Tate's feeling of impending doom stops him from hopping into bed with his best friend's girl (Luz Beato, who sleazes and pouts her way through the movie, never once convincing us that she has a brain.)
Ben X, Belgian director Nic Balthazar's film debut, is an ambitious drama exploring the autistic mind and how far harassment can go before the victim loses control.
At the beginning, we are introduced to Ben (superbly played by Greg Timmermans), a teenage boy with Asperger's Syndrome who lives with his well-meaning mother and younger brother. Ben spends all his free time playing Archlord, a fantasy role-playing game where he becomes Ben X and plays alongside Scarlitte, a teenage girl who is impressed by his gaming skills. The game gives him a sense of purpose in a world that becomes increasingly out of control.
Ben's life at school, quite simply, is hell. He is relentlessly tormented by two repugnant teenage boys. His teachers try to help him but are ineffectual. The situation worsens when an embarrassing prank perpetrated on him is videotaped and posted all over the internet.
Feeling that he has no where to turn, he hides what happened from his family and teachers and becomes increasingly disturbed and suicidal.
Finally, close to breaking point, Ben decides to meet with Scarlitte, who is interested in visiting him in real life. Together with Scarlitte, his divorced father, and his desperate mother, he comes up with a bizarre plan to get back at his tormenters.
I waited a long time for this movie, and as it generally is in this case, was disappointed. Which isn't to say that Ben X is a bad film. On the contrary, it has many good qualities. The main thing that struck me was that this is one of the first times a character on the autistic spectrum takes center stage and is treated as a person, not a plot device. Often, the character with autism is used to evoke feelings from the other people in the movie or to teach them what is really important in life.
This film, without avoiding the family's perception of the situation, concentrates on Ben and his reactions to what's happening around him.
Secondly, the acting in Ben X is top-notch, especially from Greg Timmermans and Marijke Pinoy, as Ben's mother. Greg Timmermans has excellent facial expressions and mannerisms, and in his and the directors hands, the main character becomes a real person.
Many scenes and situations in Ben X, however, are very melodramatic and over-the-top, but the ending is its greatest weakness. Alternately bizarre and unrealistic, it detracts from an otherwise good movie. The director seems to think that neatly tying things up is more important than realism, and it shows.
The film builds up a great deal of suspense and a foreboding that something terrible will happen, but seems to wimp out toward the end. I don't enjoy depressing endings, but I felt that the conclusion wasn't believable at all.
I am bound to cut this film some slack, because there are so few movies about high-functioning autism and because I waited a long time to watch it. Although I think it was ultimately disappointing, it also did many things right and tried to do what most directors haven't done effectively before.
Within a span of a couple of years, two indie films with very similar premises hit festivals, their names being We Need to Talk About Kevin and Beautiful Boy. I have just seen the latter, a tremendously acted film that deals with the aftermath of rather than the build-up to a school shooting, and concentrates on the grieving parents of the shooter.
The tagline of this movie, "Everything seemed perfect... Everything would change" is grossly inaccurate, as the group in question is not a happy family. Katie and Bill (Maria Bello and Michael Sheen) are trapped in a failing marriage to the point of sleeping in separate beds, while college student Sam (Kyle Gallner) is suicidally depressed and can barely contain his tears as he talks to his parents by phone, as it turns out, for the last time.
Beautiful Boy's shooter does not seem to be a psychopath, as We Need to Talk About Kevin's promos show their angry young man to be. Rather, he seems to be a deeply unhappy person who irrationally not only wants to die, but wants to take some people with him.
Frankly, I don't agree with the film's statement that "it's nobody's fault." Except in some rare cases, people are to some degree responsible for their own actions. If you say it is in no way the shooter's fault, you're taking away his role as perpetrator. Should we say the same for rapists? Pedophiles? If you don't consider the kid a monster, fine (nor do I), but give me something here.
Paired with the son's seemingly average home life, this makes the film's act of violence rather puzzling.
What really stands out is the acting, Maria Bello, primarily, but also Michael Sheen, Kyle Gallner, and Alan Tudyk (from the great series Firefly) as the concerned brother. The peculiarly named Moon Bloodgood and Meat Loaf are decent too, though not notably so.
Some of Beautiful Boy reminded me of Todd Fields' In The Bedroom, the guilt, the blame-placing, and the grief, without the relentless grimness of Fields film.
One plus is the minimal use of music to make a point, which is always applied with buzz kill in mainstream American films. Beautiful Boy is an emotional film -- try to watch the scene where the parents receive the news without your lip a-quivering, and excellently acted, but a certain something from being an "unforgettable film."
It may be the sentimentality or naivete placed deep within the script or the fact that, although there are many characters to care about, there are none who blow you away. I'm interested to see what We Need to Talk About Kevin does with the subject matter, and whether it surpasses this in content or style.
Welcome to the life of Brit teen Hallam Foe (Jamie Bell), whose many odd habits include using his late mother's makeup as war paint and turning a pair of binoculars on women breastfeeding babies, sexual acts and whatever else he can find.
Ever since his mum, Sarah, was found at the bottom of the loch beside their home, Hallam has refused to consider the incident a suicide but instead blames dad's new wife Verity. Plus, he lusts after new mom despite his suspicions and writes about his fantasies up in the tree house where he has decided to live. Malajusted doesn't begin to cover it.
When a violent confrontation with step-mom turns disturbingly intimate, Hallam decides to bail from his family's large estate and flee the repercussions. He ends up in the city, sleeping in a derelict part of the hotel and making money working a grimy kitchen job.
When he meets a woman who resembles (who else?) dear dead mum, he turns his voyeuristic gaze toward her and becomes involved in a nasty sexual triangle of blackmail and adultery, all while trying to get Verity turned in for the murder he is convinced took place.
Jamie Bell, who has done quite a bit of growing since his role as a ballet-dancing youngster in Billy Elliot, turns in an excellent performance as a clearly disturbed young man who veers between creepy beyond redemption and pitifully sad.
I was surprised by a reviewer's claim that this film was inferior to the slightly silly Shia LeBeouf thriller Disturbia. While decently made, the latter film had a certain tackiness that made it hard to take seriously. The director treats the story of Mister Foe with a seriousness that helps the viewer buy into it.
If I had detected a smirk in the production, it would have sunk fast. Although this movie is ultimately has a riskier construction, is more disquieting, and has better-drawn characters than Disturbia, it was not without scenes of ridiculous implausibility. To prove my point, ladies, I present a scenario.
The Situation: An unbalanced young man grabs you by the throat and accuses you of murder. Your Reaction: a. Try to talk some sense into him. b. Fight your assailant by poking his eyes, pushing, or kicking him in the balls. c. Jerk away and scream for help. d. Consider his closeness liberation for your lust and grope him.
Only a die-hard masochist would pick d, so when the normally rational Verity uses the situation as a chance to cross forbidden boundaries, the originally disturbing situation becomes perversely silly. Do things like that happen outside of S&M soap operas?
I've always been a sucker for cinema that avoids formula, so I'll give the gaping problems in the film a break. I'd say the best thing about the whole movie was Bell, who is an actor worth watching. The director? We'll see.
By the end, the scarily intriguing character of Hallam avoids seemingly inevitable catastrophe, and the viewer thinks the story would have probably ended in a disaster similar to Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen. Like Ben X, Mister Foe takes the happy route, but since that it's unlikely to happen except through a director's mercy, it seems a hollow victory (Rated R)
Not your first pick for Mother's Day, The Living and the Dead is morbid and horrifying, and I mean that, strangely, as a compliment. It is a family drama, a psychological thriller, a tragedy, an art film, all these things at once, and and despite it's flaws, it doesn't overextend.
The film opens with Lord Donald Brocklebank (Roger Lloyd-Pack), a worn-down, silent shell of an old man, pushing an empty wheelchair through a quiet room. The image delivers the same feeling as a dark grey painting, lonely and despondent.
He watches, lip quivering, as an ambulance pulls into his massive estate. Cut back an undetermined amount of time. Donald stands straighter. He maintains a kind of pride that must come with being one of the British elite, but he is grieving. He has a lot to grieve about.
His wife, Lady Nancy Brocklebank, is terribly sick and probably won't be with him much longer. The bills are piling up, and they will soon lose their mansion. His son James (Leo Bill, in an over-the-top performance that works), dashes around the house with little clear purpose.
James is in his mid-to-late twenties. He is stuck in a kind of permanent childhood, the kind of childhood that is made up of nightmares, not whimsy. Although Simon Rumley, the director, describes him as "mentally challenged," I suspect paranoid schizophrenia.
James is by far my favorite character in the film. He is a complicated movie creation, and his emotional limitations do not hold back his complexity or ambiguity as a person.
Donald treats James with the casual cruelty that is most likely inflicted on the mentally ill more often than we think, condescending to him, forbidding him to use the phone or answer the door.
James is desperate to prove to his father that he is an independent adult and plans to do so by taking care of his mother.
His father understandably rejects the idea.
In an matter of days, James will have locked the door, shut out the nurse, skipped his pills, and may have destroyed the lives of those closest to him. Soon, as his lucidity deteriorates, the viewer begins to wonder if the past events were only in James' head.
This is a film for a patient audience -- it's a while before anything happens and the reality of the events is questionable.
The atmosphere is palpable, and the characters are well developed.
There are many plot holes and unanswered questions throughout the film, as the story itself seems on the edge of reality, with its Gothic features and abstract images.
People have had different opinions on whether James is "good" or "bad." He is a disturbing character, to be sure. He is not a sex maniac, mad slasher, or stony-faced killer, but an exceptionally childlike and deeply disturbed man.
This movie might make you feel differently about a crime, in the paper, in which mental illness was a factor. Despite naysayers, The Living and the Dead is an emotional bombshell and thought-provoking film.
