The Carrying On of A Wayward Son

Every day Robert Saucedo shines a spotlight on a movie either so bad it’s good or just downright terrible. Today: He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

O Sarah Michelle Gellar, where art thou career?

A dedicated fan of all things Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I must admit to having a slight crush on the lovely SMG during the late ‘90s.

Riding the fame of her staring role in every geek’s favorite vampire slayer television show, SMG hopped from teen flick to teen flick — in the process building a steady resume during the late ‘90s and early part of the last decade. When she finally decided to leave Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2003, one of the reasons Gellar cited was a desire to branch out and try something new.

Low and behold, nearly a decade later and Gellar has yet to make a name for herself in anything but cheesy ghost movies — a good chunk of which are remakes of Japanese horror movies.

Possession, the latest in Gellar’s one-way ticket to career suicide, was completed in 2007. Three years later, it has finally seen release — in the island of misfit toys that is the straight-to-DVD horror film section of your friendly neighborhood video store.

In the film, a remake of the 2002 Japanese film Jungdok, Gellar play Jessica, the ungrateful wife of a tender husband played by Michael Landes.

Between beating herself up over her inability to match her artist husband’s affection ratio, the career-oriented Jessica fumes with hatred over the fact that her deadbeat brother-in-law — who was released from prison, has taken to staying in a spare room in the couple’s house.

When her constant glares cast at her brother-in-law Roman (played by Pushing Daises’ Lee Pace) finally drives the ex-con to storm out of the house, he winds up in a head-on collision with his own brother, Jessica’s husband.

The two brothers left in a coma, Jessica is a grieving mess of emotion — or at least as much emotion as the permanently puckered Gellar can muster. That changes, though, when Roman wakes up from the coma claiming to be Ryan. It seems that their souls have performed the old switcharoo while the two brothers were in La-La Land. Or did they?

Dun-Dun-Dunn!

Jessica, not sure what to think, is left torn between an intense hatred for her brother-in-law and the desire to believe that her husband has returned to her — if even in another person’s body.

Speaking of a want to believe, William B. Davis, otherwise known as the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files, makes a brief cameo as a hypnotist who attempts to prove who it is that really inhabits the body of Roman.

The movie, while dense in atmosphere and handedly acted by Pace and Gellar, never really lives up to its premise — much like another recently released movie that dealt with a similar, if somewhat more taboo, subject matter: The Secret.

In The Secret, David Duchovny played a man whose wife’s spirit possesses his daughter’s body after they are both in a car accident. Duchovny’s initial joy at having his wife back from the dead quickly turns to repulsion when he learns his wife wants to resume their physical relationship — even if she is now in the body of their child.

Unfortunately, both films eventually petered out in the end — The Secret over a lack of willingness to go all the way with its outside-the-box approach and Possession with its predictable attempt at a twist ending that ends up being as tired as it is rushed.

Possession’s director duo Joel Bergvall and Simon Sandquist were responsible for Den osynlige, the 2002 film that would eventually be remade by David S. Goyer as The Invisible. At least with Possession’s release, they can now join Goyer in the club for film director who turn a foreign film into a tepid American remake.

Robert Saucedo honestly doesn’t know what’s possessed him to watch so many bad movies . Follow him on Twitter @robsaucedo2500.

I have seen a lot of messed-up movies in my life.

As I kid, I was raised on a steady diet of horror films and have become relatively desensitized towards gratuitous sex and violence in my movies. I once saw a movie that featured a mouse in a werewolf costume crawl out of a woman’s vagina.

I have never, ever seen a movie like Srpski Film (otherwise known as Serbian Film).

Gratuitous does not even begin to describe the filth on parade during the film’s length. Watching the movie, I actually scanned the audience, checking for undercover police that might be waiting in the dark as part of a sting operation — lurking in the shadows until the exact moment where they would jump out from the back row and arrest all of the audience for what we were watching.

There is stuff shown in Serbian Film that you have never seen before — unless you have a predilection for canvassing the darker corners of the Internet — and there are things in the movie that you will never forget. No matter how much spray paint I may huff or television sets drop on my head, I will always remember the time I danced with darkness and exposed my soul to the evils of Serbian Film. I may develop Alzheimer’s and forget the identities of my friends and family but I will always remember the time I watched a full-grown man have sex with a newborn baby.

Let me back up.

Serbian Film is a horror movie directed by Srdjan Spasojevic, a Serbian filmmaker and man who I would never want to meet in a dark alley.

In the film, Srdjan Todorovic plays Milosh, a washed-up porn star that has given up the business for a quite life with his beautiful wife and lovely young son. When financial troubles begin to rear their ugly head, though, he decides to take a lucrative new job that is offered to him — one that will pay enough to keep him and his family comfortable for the extent of their lives.

Milosh is introduced to Vukmir, an intense businessman with a desire to make the ultimate in artistic pornographic expressions. He is putting together a porno film and he wants the best — specifically Milosh, a man renown for his ability to achieve long-lasting erections on demand.

From there, things go south fast.

I can’t, guilt free, go into any real detail about the content of Serbian Film. My conscious prevents me, for example, from talking about the scene in which a man hacks at a chained woman with a machete while he has sex with her. My purity also prevents me, for example, from talking about the movie’s use of a male’s penis as a deadly weapon. I would be absolutely remiss if I spent any real time talking about the cruelty to children captured in the film and the inappropriate use of a cattle sex stimulant to turn a man into a raving rapist. I won’t even touch on the film’s climatic twist — a scene that makes Oldboy seem like a Sesame Street sketch.

I should say, though, that Serbian Film is actually quite good. The film is shocking, yes, but the acting is solid and the plot well-paced. There is a quality script and the film does an excellent job building tension. It just so happens the tension’s pay-off is completely offensive.

Serbian Film is a movie that will never again be shown in theaters in the United States. Best Buy will never stock the film on their shelves. Netflix will never carry the movie in distribution. You will probably never get a chance to watch this movie.

This is probably a good thing.

God, I love South by Southwest.

Google Baby is a hard movie to watch.

Not because the film is poorly made — it is a well-crafted and engaging documentary about surrogate mothers in India. The film is hard to stomach because of the sometimes shocking, always questionable actions carried out by the film’s subjects.

Doron is an Israeli businessman with an idea for revolutionizing a relatively new procedure. After he receives his own child via an American-based surrogate mother, Doron brainstorms a way he can improve on the service — specifically in cutting costs. His idea? Outsourcing the surrogacy to India, a country known for its cheap labor.

A baby producer by trade, Doron harvests eggs from the more desirable mothers of America, mixes them with provided sperm and implants the baby-in-the-making into an Indian woman who, desperate for cash and with limited options, volunteers her womb.

An online business, the entire process can be undergone with a few mouse clicks — giving those who desire a child an easy opportunity to custom-create their own. Even Doron questions the way parents are ordering their children with little-to-know interaction with the actual process.

Suitability of parents is not a concern for Doron, though. At one point in the film he gladly discusses details with a 50+-year-old single woman and, when his medical partners discuss with him the idea of implanting two different embryos into two different women to increase the chance of birth, Doron jokes about selective abortion.

Filmmaker Zippi Brand Frank does an amazing job capturing the ins and outs of surrogacy as it grows and evolves in the new online world. Besides following Doron, Frank conducts interviews with the scientists who perform the procedure, the women who donate their eggs and the desperate surrogate mothers who risk death for a chance to earn a relatively small amount of money.

Google Baby may be a hard film to watch because of the subject matter but it is essential viewing nonetheless. As society continues to evolve alongside technology, morals will continue to be tested and lines crossed. Google Baby captures a snapshot in the growing landscape of a technology still trying to find its feet — preserving yet another step on humanity’s path towards damnation.

You can count the number of quality Saturday Night Live skit-inspired movies on the hand of a character from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

That’s why going into MacGruber I had the expectation to be underwhelmed and just a little disappointed.

Much like MacGruber, the SNL character who exists primarily as a parody of the classic television show MacGuyver, has a history of being blown away by bombs that his ineptitude prevents him from defusing, I was blown away by the skits’ feature-length film adaptation.

Will Forte stars as the title character, a former national hero who has inspired a legion of stories about his heroics — specifically his remarkable ability to rip a man’s throat out with his bare hands. Having faked his death after his wife’s murder at the hands of Dieter Von Cunth, a villainous arms dealer played by the deliciously diabolical Val Kilmer, MacGruber is content to live a solitary life at the monastery he adopted as his new home.

The Pentagon, though, has other plans for the hero after Cunth steals a nuclear bomb and MacGruber is the only man who can stop him.

Unfortunately, the years have been rough on MacGuber and the man who may or may not have been the world’s finest action hero has become shallow, absurdly stupid and a tad bit homophobic.

If MacGruber is going to get his shit together and stop Cunth from blowing Washington D.C. into smithereens, he’s going to need all the help he can get. Unfortunately, after blowing his team of highly-trained solders up in a car explosion, all he has is Vicki St. Elmo, a timid mouse of a sidekick played by Kristen Wiig and Lt. Dixon Piper, the film’s straight man and the only competent soldier, played by Ryan Phillippe. Unfortunately, MacGruber has a bad habit of putting St. Elmo into unnecessary danger and would rather punch Lt. Piper in the testicles then work with him.

Unlike some of the other SNL-inspired movies that exist as tepid exercises in mediocrity, MacGruber distinguishes itself by being very much a hard R-rated comedy. There are throats ripped, offers of oral sex between armed service men and threats to remove a man’s penis and shove it down his throat. There are two sweaty, noisy sex scenes in the film that are perhaps the funniest sex scenes I have seen in the last fifteen years. And that’s just the tame stuff.

MacGruber is silly and more then a bit self-conscious in its parody but it is unbelievably funny. Director Jorma Tacconne and writers John Solomon and Will Forte took the basic idea of a MacGruber SNL skit, rubbed it in Elmer’s Glue and rolled it around in the cheesy ‘80s action movie section of your neighborhood Blockbuster Video.

There is unexplained steam in factories, wet floors in warehouses and a shirtless guy playing the saxophone. In other words, MacGruber is the perfect throwback to those terrible action movies you grew up watching — but seen through the eyes of a borderline-retarded, television-obsessed man-child.

MacGruber is a great film. It’s funny, clever and just a little bit subversive. In other words, it’s a perfect return-to-form for the greatness that used to be Saturday Night Live films.

The countdown for MacGruber’s theatrical release starts now and the anticipation is officially at red-alert.

Joey Frisk is a stand-up comedian on the brink of success. And he needs it.

His relationships in tatters and his finances a wreck, Joey (played by Stephen McCole) is currently scraping at the bottom of his dignity bowl.

It’s at this low-point in Joey’s life that he meets Frank Archer, an intense man who claims to be a childhood friend. At first spurning Frank’s attempts to rekindle a relationship that Joey can’t even remember, the comedian turns the odd experience into an act for his routine. Their relationship changes when Joey is framed for grievous bodily harm against his landlord — a man he publically threatened during one of his comedy routines — and Frank is the only one willing to offer a hand to him.

Unfortunately, Frank’s motivations may not be entirely seeped in nostalgia. It soon becomes clear that Frank, a former Special Forces commando, has ulterior plans for his childhood friend and randomly reuniting with Joey wasn’t exactly so random.

Writer/director Justin Molotnikov developed the story behind Crying with Laughter through improvisation sessions with actors McCole and Malcolm Shields, the actor who plays Frank. This fact is made all the more impressive due to the fact that the movie is a tightly plotted thriller with some very clever uses of chronological experimentation. Unlike most movies based out of improv, Crying with Laughter plays like a top-notch mystery with a clear, intended path.

Professional in every way, Crying with Laughter is an extraordinary debut from a first-time feature filmmaker — beautifully shot and expertly acted.

While the story unfolds like a pretty standard suspense thriller, it’s the sharp dialogue and well-developed characters that help to create an intense, memorable ride. Audiences will forgive similarities to other films when they are sucked into the story because of an immediate bond they form with the film’s leads.

The film flat-out deserves mainstream recognition. Watching Crying With Laughter, audiences can rest easy in the knowledge that they are viewing the entrance of one of tomorrow’s best filmmakers.

The film is currently available on Video-on-Demand.

Documentary filmmaker Steve James is no stranger to sports. Rising to fame in 1994 with his critically hailed documentary Hoop Dreams, James has gone on to direct and produce a wide assortment of sports-related films — both features and documentaries.

His latest, No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, is part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series of documentaries celebrating the sports network’s 30th anniversary.

The film chronicles James’ exploration into a dark moment in the history of his hometown — namely the February 14, 1993 bowling alley brawl that landed future basketball star Allen Iverson in jail and cast doubt on just how far racial tolerance had come in Hampton, Virginia.

Then 17 years old, Iverson found himself in the epicenter of a racial tsunami — where an unfair trial and unclear judicial motivations spawned nearly two decades of conspiracy theories — after a group of white and black teenagers got into a fight.

When punches were thrown and chairs began to fly across the bowling alley, a white girl was injured in the scuffle and Iverson and three of his friends faced criminal prosecution and jail time.

Using interviews with Hampton residents, archival footage of Iverson and James’ own socio-commentary, the filmmaker shines a light on the incident that still divides his childhood home.

While there are no fresh interviews with Iverson, the documentary does an excellent job of setting the stage for the story’s main conflict and showcasing just how much the almost twenty-year-old incident still affects the town.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a real big sports guy. I think the last time I saw a basketball game was in the movie Space Jam. Even still, I enjoyed the documentary and was fascinated by the racial division that was chiseled into a town’s legacy by a single fight.

While I could have possibly done with a little less of James’ need to insert himself into the story, I respect the man for wanting to make the documentary a personal tale — even if he wasn’t even living in Hampton during the time of the incident.

If you’re a fan of sports or just looking for a tightly constructed documentary, you could do worse then watching No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson.

Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee is the latest collaboration between filmmaker Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine (In America).

In the tradition of This is Spinal Tap, Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee is shot as a mockumentary about Le Donk, a washed up roadie with dreams of rock stardom, and his young protégé Scor-zay-zee, an overweight soft-spoken rapper with true talent.

Meadows, playing himself, is a filmmaker following the two around in the days leading up to a music festival — a catalyst that Le Donk hopes will launch his sidekick’s career. The only problem is they weren’t invited to perform.

Considine is pitch-perfect as a selfish slug that, because of his own callous nature, has been dumped by his pregnant girlfriend and, for all intents and purposes, been written out of her life. Throwing himself into his latest mission, he takes Scorz under his wing, promising the sky to the impressionable youth — as long as the kid is able to put up with Le Donk’s frequent verbal abuse.

When Scorz’s rapping is overheard by the British pop band Arctic Monkeys and the musician finally gets the break he was hoping for, Le Donk latches on for dear life — hoping to ride his sidekicks’ fame into his own pie-in-the-sky dreams of success.

While the film is certainly funny and the actors’ improvisation more often then not a riot, things never align quite right to create a masterpiece. In the end, the film is enjoyable while you are watching it but fails to leave an impression that will stick more then 24 hours later.

For a short film (the running time is a little over 70 minutes), quite a bit of the story is spent on musical performances — mostly from real-life rapper Scorz-zay-zee (real name Dean Palinczuk). When the rapper is not busting rhymes, the movie meanders slowly through the tad-underwhelming plot — never really striving for much in the story department.

The real focus of the movie — perhaps rightfully so — is the character created by Considine. The movie is a showcase for the actor’s improvisational ability and, with the help of Meadow’s script, Considine is able to affect some real character growth for Le Donk.

Scor-zay-zee is a bit of harmless fluff — something perfect to watch on a lazy afternoon or in between some of the weighty documentaries being shown at SXSW.

Filmmaker Jeff Deutchman has crafted the definitive documentary chronicling the hours leading up to and following the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. The only question is, is the film really necessary yet?

Less then a year after the date in question, the event is still fresh on the minds of most Americans. Do we really need a documentary like 11/4/08 that captures the mundane moments along with the momentous when we just finished experiencing the date ourselves? This documentary could find real legs in coming years. In the meantime, though, it just fills a bit unnecessary.

Using a tactic similar to the one the Beastie Boys utilized for their film Awesome, I Fuckin’ Shot That!, Deutchman asked his friends (including SXSW darling Joe Swanberg) for assistance in making his movie. Assembling the footage shot by filmmakers around the world, Deutchman edited together a chronological look at certain aspects of November 4, 2008’s historical undertaking.

From volunteers canvassing their community in support of Obama to a snapshot of the optimism abroad, the film does an admirable job recording the famed hope that surrounded Obama’s election

What the film is missing, though, is balance. While Deutchman and pals admirably captured the struggles of the Democratic party to elect Obama, there was little footage from the other side of the aisle. This equilibrium could have added to the thoroughness of the documentary and provided some contrast to the seemingly unending optimism sprinkled throughout the film.

Deutchman is apparently not done with his film, though. The director is still requesting additional footage from the day. Hopefully he will consider putting in some documentation of the Republican side — if only to capture that party’s unresponsive struggle.

Stephin Merritt seems like a pretty intense guy. At least that’s the impression I have of the uber-talented musician after watching Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields.

The documentary, shot over the course of ten years by directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara, gives fans of the Magnetic Fields an inside glimpse at one of the most prolific (and talented) songwriters of today’s generation: Stephin Merritt.

Merritt is the frontman for the Magnetic Fields, among other bands. With a somber voice and lyrics marinated in the richest of romances, Merritt and his band have found themselves a devoted, if niche, following.

Strange Powers, with its captivating look at the sometimes sour, always passionate Merritt, should hopefully build the bands’ fanbase.

The documentary follows Merritt throughout the course of his nearly 20-year career — including the moments where he first began to develop the sound that would soon become his trademark.

The film follows the band as they record music, providing additional framework with interviews and archival footage.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the intense friendship between Merritt and his bandmate Claudia Gonson, a woman who sometimes acts like a wife to the gay songwriter.

As Merritt moves from New York to Los Angeles, the film captures the anxiousness of Gonson as she realizes that the relationship that has most defined her life and given her purpose over the last twenty years is being tested by a undeniable distance.

Interviews with friends and peers including authors Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler and musician Peter Gabriel help to paint a portrait of a man whose sometimes acerbic disposition makes him hard to approach — but whose soul contains the modern day reincarnation of Cole Porter.

Not just a video blowjob to a talented musician, though, the documentary chronicles some of the warts in Merritt’s career — including accusations of racism and an aloof detachment with his own bandmates.

The documentary is a must-see for any fans of the Magnetic Fields (and really, if you’ve had the opportunity to listen to the band’s music — you should be a fan) but is also highly recommended to Magnetic Field novices. A well-put together film, Strange Fields is a fascinating portrait of a truly talented man.

When it comes to online privacy, I’m either pretty confident or pretty stupid. I throw my online presence around like so much confetti — leaving a cyber trail like a slug through the Internet.

David Bond, though, is a lot more cautious — especially now that he knows just how easy it is to access the most private of details of one’s life with nothing more then an Internet connection and a lazy afternoon.

Shocked by how much of his personal life was left strewn about the Internet, Bond decided to put his privacy to the test. To whit, he hired two private investigators to track him down during his attempt to “drop off the grid” — effectively going into hiding for a month.

These investigators would use everything at their disposal to locate the British filmmaker — including rifling through his garbage, stalking his pregnant wife and cruising his Facebook page.

The end result is a documentary that plays more like a thriller on-the-go — with Bond jetting across Europe investigating the in’s and out’s of online privacy while his own personal pursuers attempt to track him down.

Erasing David is an interesting film that eventually looses steam — lost under the weight of what feels like far too much manufactured tension.

Bond treats the experiment like a life-or-death manhunt — with everything seemingly at stake as he attempts to stay one step ahead of the men he paid to chase him. This faux gravitas can be a bit overwhelming and, in the end, is the movie’s undoing.

There is plenty to like about Erasing David, though.

David Bond is a captivating man, charming and intense in his passions. He ably guides audiences along on a tour of the private information sector — exposing just how exposed we are as a culture.

Using interviews and personal exploration, he casts a light on Britain’s hard-on for the invasion of privacy — showing just how much the country has come towards transforming into the Big Brother of Orwell’s 1984.

Unfortunately, these golden nuggets of information are wedged between David’s wearying cat-and-mouse game he has put himself into.

When the stakes are no higher then eating a big bowl of crow, the audience has a hard time keeping interest as David purposely puts himself in danger of being caught only to hop on a train and jet off to some new out-of-the way grass hut before things get interesting.

In the end, the film is still recommended — just not as a priority. There is some real interesting stuff contained within but the good is lodged right alongside with the mediocre.