FrICTION
Director: Cullen Hoback
With: Amy Mathison, Jeremy Mathison, August Thompson, Cullen Hoback
Many films play with our perceptions of truth and fiction, but few of them do it with almost no budget ($100!) and unknown actors. And few of them do it this well.
FrICTION (sic) is a small film about an arts camp in New Hampshire run by Jeremy, who also teaches music, and his wife Amy. Only 7 students sign up, so that drama and music have to be combined. Director Hoback agrees to teach film if he can make a film at the same time. Each of the attendees plays a fictional version of her/himself in the film. FrICTION is a film about that making of that film. And here is where the confusion begins.
August is a 15-year-old with talent and some issues. He comes to the camp on scholarship and strikes up a tentative relationship with one of the girls, but it is clear that he has feelings for Amy, married, a mother and twice his age. The relationship is in the movie, but the lines become blurred, and buried tensions in the Mathison’s marriage are exacerbated by August’s crush. Jeremy becomes suspicious and mistrustful. Soon, the whole camp is involved in the effects that this problem is having on the Mathisons, and on the film within the film.
I saw the famous fight on live television between Andy Kauffman and Jack Burns, and to this day I have no idea how much was real, and how much the product of Kauffman’s twisted imagination. Hoback is far from being the subversive and provocateur that Kauffman was, but his film is no less baffling. By the time it is over, a quick 89 minutes, the line between documentary and fiction had been obliterated for me.
The film opens Saturday, 9/25, at the Hollywood Theater. The director will be in attendance. If you go, please let me know what you think at kboomovietalk@yahoo.com.
A-
Wall Street: Money never Sleeps
Director: Oliver Stone
With: Michael Douglas, Shia LeBeouf, Carey Mulligan, Josh Brolin, Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, etc.
In 1987, Oliver Stone directed Wall Street, which became a kind of cultural touchstone about the avaricious Reagan era. Gordon Gekko (Douglas) uttered the deathless line, “Greed, for want of a better word, is good.”
Now, after the bubble burst, we have Wall Street: Money never Sleeps, set in 2008. Gekko is out of jail, and has written a memoir of his rise and fall. He lectures and does book signings.
A young man named Jake Moore (Le Beouf) works at a Goldman-Sachs-type brokerage and is engaged to Winnie (the ubiquitous Mulligan), who happens to be Gekko’s daughter.
Winnie blames Gekko for the destruction of her family and the overdose death of her brother. Jake is fascinated with Gekko, and contrives to reunite father and daughter. He begins a clandestine friendship with the seemingly-reformed man. At the same time, Bretton James (Brolin), an old associate of Gekko’s, is plotting dirty deeds against Jake’s employers, and his mentor (Langella).
As the plot progresses, we find that as bad as Gekko was, everything has gotten that much worse, and that the big boys on Wall Street know that the whole thing will come crashing down, and that they will profit from it.
The problem with the movie, is that Stone doesn’t seem to know what he wants us to think about Gekko, or what he wants us to take away from the story. He is plenty pissed off at the Wall Street sharks, and at the system that allowed them to thrive, and that is the best part of the movie.
The family stuff tends to be sentimental and predictable. And Mulligan, adorable as she is, can’t quite sell her character. Her outrage works, not much else. And, LeBeouf lacks the presence to sell his. He isn’t menacing enough when he needs to be.
Douglas sails through this. He could play this character in his sleep, and he does the job here. Brolin is good and Langella terrific.
Also, the music is by David Byrne and Brian Eno. It is very good.
Not the killer sequel I would have wished, but it is a not-bad evening in the theater.
B-