Big Fan (2009)

Director: Robert D. Siegel                               Writer: Robert D. Siegel
Film Score: Philip Watts                                  Cinematography: Michael Simmonds
Starring: Patton Oswalt, Kevin Corrigan, Matt Servitto and Michael Rapaport

This is a film that tries to do a number of things and, unfortunately, fails at nearly all of them. On the surface, Big Fan seems to have a fascinating premise, which is why I took a chance on it. The idea of the rabid, modern day, sports fan has yet to be seriously explored in film, and the addition of Patton Oswalt as the protagonist made it that much more intriguing. But at the end of the day the central idea of the film, of obsession that leads to a cognitive break, has already been done in a much more powerful way in One Hour Photo starring Robin Williams. And in comparison, the sports film winds up being a pale imitation that disappoints in every way. Surprisingly, the choice of Oswalt as the protagonist turns out to be a poor choice. While he brings a certain comedic element that, again, would emulate the crossover of Williams going to drama, he doesn’t quite pull it off. While Williams exudes malevolence in his role, Oswalt as the schlub who still lives at home with his mother is more pathetic than anything else. In addition, writer-director Robert Siegel brings very little to his character study in the way of interest or to his story in terms of plot and before too long the film simply becomes boring.

Patton Oswalt plays a parking lot attendant who sits in his booth all evening collecting money and listening to sports radio. He is a dedicated New York Giants fan who is a regular caller to a local New York talk show hosted by Scott Ferrall. Oswalt spends his evening writing out what he wants to say when he gets on, and has a running feud with a caller from Philadelphia, Michael Rapaport. Oswalt’s best friend is Kevin Corrigan, another Giants fan who at least seems to have an apartment of his own. The two of them go to the home games on Sunday, but sit in the parking lot of Giants stadium and watch the game on TV. One night in their neighborhood on Staten Island they see the Giants’ star linebacker Jonathan Hamm filling up his SUV at a gas station and decide to follow him. The star’s first stop is at a drug house on the island, then he goes to a strip club in Manhattan. Oswalt and Corrigan follow him inside, buy a drink for him, then get up the nerve to approach him. When Oswalt lets it slip that they saw him buying drugs Hamm goes crazy and beats Oswalt severely enough that he has to go to the hospital. It takes several days for Oswalt to wake up after a brain operation and when he does he finds out the Giants have lost their last game because Hamm has been suspended during the investigation.

From this point on Oswalt gets nothing but pressure from everyone around him. Police detective Matt Servitto wants to know everything that happened that night, while Oswalt’s lawyer brother, Gino Cafarelli, wants to sue the football player for millions, and at the same time his mother becomes fed up with him living at home and wants him to pursue a real career and a life of his own. Add to that a losing streak by the Giants, which threatens to eliminate them from the playoffs, and it’s not long before Oswalt snaps. The focus of the piece is clearly on Oswalt, and director Siegel’s camera setups favor close-ups much of the time. What he’s trying for is a sense of the claustrophobia of Oswalt’s life, but before long the technique wears thin, especially as there is very little in the way of introspection that we get from the protagonist, even when he’s with his best friend. Had the ending gone a different way it might have saved the film, something on the order of Talk Radio, but in hewing so close to the idea of One Hour Photo the comparisons are decidedly to its disadvantage. There are other ideas the film could have explored, money, fame, family, and the role of sports in society, but they are never even touched upon, which ultimately makes the film that much more vacuous. As a result, Big Fan is just a big flop.

Lake Noir (2011)

Director: Jeffrey Schneider                              Writer: Abel Martinez Jr.
Film Score: Bentley Michaels                          Cinematography: Jeffrey Schneider
Starring: Geno Romo, Heather Wakehouse, Michael Gonzalez and Benjamin Farmer

Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t go anywhere near a film like Lake Noir. In fact, after reviewing Blood Creek early on in this blog, I decided to add low-budget, independent horror films to the list of things I wouldn’t review at all (a list that already included teen movies, stupid comedies starring Seth Rogen, Steve Carell or former Saturday Night Live cast members, superhero comic book movies, or action/martial arts films). That said, two of the most impressive films I have ever seen are The Falls and The Falls: Testament of Love by Jon Garcia, a writer/director working out of Portland, Oregon. One of the brilliant stars in those two films is Benjamin Farmer, and so in seeking out other things he has appeared in I wound up taking a look at this film by another Portland director, Jeffrey Schneider. For using a hand-held digital video camera the cinematography by Schneider is pretty good, but that’s about the only thing that is. The tagline for the film is, “Nothing good happens at this lake,” and that would include this movie.

The story, if you can even call it that, begins with Michael Gonzalez being beaten by Benjamin Farmer with a baseball bat and dumped into the lake while his girlfriend is raped by one of Farmer’s buddies. Flash forward and virgin Heather Wakehouse wants to go to the lake for the weekend with her boyfriend, Geno Romo, and some mutual friends. Her mom says no and so she lies and says she’s going to a girlfriend’s house, then jumps into Romo’s truck and they’re off to pick up their friends along the way. In another truck are four other late teens who stop off at a gas station to fill up and are told by crazy old man Bob Olin the story of Gonzalez, who enacted revenge on his abusers by killing them as well as everyone else who stays up at the lake at night. But the kids ignore the warning, pitch their tents in the woods near the lake and proceed to get drunk and have sex with each other. Everyone that is except Romo, who becomes increasingly frustrated with Wakehouse’s abstinence the more he drinks. Finally, as night falls, Gonzalez emerges from the swampy lake and begins working his way through the copulating couples just like every other slasher film you’ve ever seen.

Actually, that’s not quite right. Most other slasher films are at least somewhat inventive. Unfortunately Abel Martinez Jr.’s screenplay is absolutely pointless. The dialogue he has the actors speaking is the most inane I think I’ve ever heard in a film. I’m sure he was striving for something like “realism” but simply comes off as unimaginative in the extreme. And so are the killings. In most of them, you don’t even see anything happening. When Marzell Sampson is killed there is no blood at all, and the audience doesn’t even see what happens to the girl he’s having sex with. And when Calvin Morie McCarthy is beheaded it takes a few moments to realize that the mannequin head rolling in the dirt is supposed to be his. There’s not much gore to speak of, not much sex to speak of, and not much story to speak of. The acting, not surprisingly, is fairly poor as well. Geno Romo probably would have been the best of the lot had he had a decent script and some kind of direction. And while Benjamin Farmer is a brilliant actor, and the reason I watched the film in the first place, you wouldn’t know it as he is really wasted in a tiny role. Michael Gonzalez looks like a cross between Tor Johnson and Santo and, while he is fine as the killer, it probably would have been better to have someone else play the young boyfriend who is left for dead. Lake Noir is a bad movie, but then it was always going to be. So while it’s unfair to include it in a blog like this, I just can’t pass up the opportunity to promote Portland area talent like Jon Garcia and Benjamin Farmer.

The Raven (2012)

Director: James McTeigue                              Writers: Ben Livingston & Hannah Shakespeare
Film Score: Lucas Vidal                                  Cinematography: Danny Ruhlmann
Starring: John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve and Brendan Gleeson

Ever since the success of Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes films, filmmakers have been attempting to create their own spin on Victorian era detection in the hopes of emulating that success. In Britain, their new Sherlock Holmes television series Sherlock is set in the present day so they came up with Ripper Street, centered on the time and the place of the Jack the Ripper killings. That series stars the great Matthew McFadden as a police detective solving rather intricately planned murders. The Raven is an attempt to do the same thing in America, with Edgar Alan Poe as the detective. Unfortunately the filmmakers chose as their star John Cusack, who not only pales in comparison to Robert Downey Jr., but pales in comparison to Edgar Alan Poe. The film tries for the same type of humor and action, and isn’t bad in the later. The screenplay by TV writer Hannah Shakespeare is definitely helped by Hollywood veteran Ben Livingston and had some real potential, but the acting is really bad, so bad in fact that despite the writing the end result is a tired, clichéd film that goes nowhere and is incredibly disappointing.

The film begins with a shot of John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe sitting in the park. He leans his head back, shot from above, while a raven flies beneath the daytime moon. As the sky turns dark, a scream is heard and police race through the streets to an apartment building where two women are strangled and the killer has escaped the locked room. The scene then shifts to a bar where Cusack attempts to get a drink on the promise of a review of his to be published, but instead he winds up being forcibly ejected from the premises. When Baltimore homicide detective Luke Evans looks at the crime scene and realizes it’s exactly like the story “Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Poe, he calls Cusack in for questioning. It’s only when a second murder, of a critic of Poe no less, done in the style of “The Pit and the Pendulum” happens that Evans looks to Cusack for help rather than as a suspect. Meanwhile, Cusack has fallen in love with a young woman, Alice Eve, whose father, Brendan Gleeson, hates him. She wants him to announce their engagement at the costume ball her father is throwing for Baltimore society, but when the killer leaves a clue that the next murder will be done in the style of “The Masque of the Red Death” he thinks it may not be the right time. Evans fills the party with his men, but when a horse and rider enter the ballroom, Eve is kidnapped in the confusion and Cusack is forced to write more stories to keep her alive.

The screenplay probably looked very good. While not an original idea--a murderer being inspired by the macabre tales of a horror writer--the addition of Edgar Allan Poe as the writer and the nineteenth-century setting must have seemed like a great way to capitalize on the popularity of films like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And it should have worked. The major problem is with the acting, and it absolutely sinks the film. John Cusack is horribly miscast as the haunted writer. Most of the time he simply looks bored, which is how he plays in most of his films. Add to that the unbelievably bad acting of Alice Eve, a minor actor with an unimpressive resume of films, and the wooden stiffness of Luke Evans and there is no way for the film to recover. In their hands the lines become hollow and unbelievable and their actions perfunctory. The production design, by Roger Ford is by far the best thing the film has going for it. The settings are all equally impressive and while a similar blue tint as is used in the Sherlock Holmes films is used on the negative in places, the sepia tone of most of the interior scenes is a vast improvement over that film. Director James McTeigue, who helmed the first Matrix film, does what he can with what he’s given, but despite some terrific setups--the shot with Eve buried alive, for instance--the bad acting foils him at every turn. Being a huge fan of Poe, I wanted to like The Raven a lot, and had the production been able to afford a better cast I might have. As it stands, however, it is another example of a promising screenplay gone horribly wrong.