LYT at LAFF: Chillin' With Tanks

Monday was the day of the Lakers victory parade in L.A., and while I don’t know if that was the reason that the subway suddenly stopped displaying ETAs on the monitors, I choose to blame it regardless. Sounds like there was chaos for a while – my director friend Phil Leirness tweeted earlier in the day that someone had taken a shit on the floor of the 7^th street station. That’s just lame, considering how many free and accessible restrooms one can find in that area if one really tries...and one doesn’t look or smell homeless.

The parade was long over by the time I made it downtown, however, and now, in place of rabid Laker fans, we have rabid TWILIGHT fans camped out at L.A. Live for the premiere on Thursday. They are almost all female, so if any single guys are reading this, and can swallow all semblance of good taste, get thee downtown and get talking to some ladies!

I’m spoken for. TWILIGHT is stupid.

In news of stuff that isn’t stupid, the happy hours at the various L.A. Live venues are quite the deal. This area gets a bad rap for being overpriced, but I’m here to tell you that if you can manage an early pub crawl on a weekday, come on down! Rock’n Fish has $4 pints of Guinness, and appetizer specials that include oysters on the half-shell. But best of all for the broke is ESPN Zone, which, so long as you order a drink, lets you have All-U-Can-Eat nachos and egg rolls (combining both, as my uncle does in his Virginia restaurant, is the best. Fried batter in cheese sauce, yummmm). Now, these are not nachos or egg rolls you’d want to pay money for, but if you are broke, they are acceptably tasty and will fill you up. All for the price of one drink. Sadness, though: ESPN bartenders don’t know how to pour Guinness correctly (Rock’n Fish does, however).

Almost every other place has a happy hour of some kind. On nights that nothing free materializes, I will report back. Gotta give you readers something to make up for my lack of Fast Food Reviews this week.

First movie of the day was ORLY, which is the name of an airport in Paris, but could just as easily be read as the text-speak “O Rly?” As in, “Oh really? The whole movie’s gonna be like this?” As I walked out following the screening, an older critic asked, with obvious disdain, “What was that we just saw?”

I guess my best answer is that it was a bunch of conversations at an airport. That’s the substance of it, plot-wise. Thematically, it’s something of an antithesis to UP IN THE AIR; rather than using airports as a metaphor for a guy who can’t make a human connection, ORLY uses it to show how we all are connected in various ways.

Among the conversations:

-A man who young son has died comforts a woman he’s just met, whose coat has been stolen.

- A mother and son discuss their dead husband/father; son gets indignant over funeral details he didn’t previously know.

- A cab driver picks up a female passenger while taking his dog to the vet; he wouldn’t have picked up a male, he says, because a man would be more likely to report him.

-A German couple are charmed by a baby who’s exactly as many days old as the holiday they’ve just had.

These conversations aren’t ponderous with meaning, or especially earth shattering, but there’s something about the overall vibe that’s kind of appealing. I can’t quite articulate what it is that works, exactly...maybe, as a veteran of airports, I just liked seeing how different people could experience them.

The ending of the film sucks, though. I won’t mince words on that. Without spoiling – can you spoil a film with so little traditional “plot”? -- I’ll say that it includes voice over in deliberate contrast to the images we’re seeing, and the two conflicting narratives work against each other rather than augmenting.

Thanks also to all the dumbass people texting in the movie. I actually switched seats to get away from one, and found myself next to another. This isn’t an ACTUAL airport, folks.

Next film of the day, COLD WEATHER, was a total festival film, even though it is getting wider release. It’s the kind of thing I enjoy watching at a fest, but maybe wouldn’t want to pay for quite so much. A total “munblecore” type movie if ever there was one, COLD WEATHER does for the detective thriller genre what BAGHEAD did for slashers, which is to say talks it to death, takes forever to get to the point, achieves a solid level of suspense really briefly, then undercuts it all with a slight cop-out. All of which is mildly humorous, but not often LOL-inducing.

I will say I prefer BAGHEAD. But that could be because I prefer slashers to begin with.

Trieste Kelly Dunn, the geeky hottie who also stars in THE NEW YEAR (and holy crap, she was one of the passengers in UNITED 93 too, I just found out on imdb), also plays one of the main characters here, in part of a dual-pronged ascension to what appears to be pre-ordained Next Big Thing status. Her acting is more interesting in this one, as it requires her to play more absurd situations absolutely straight. They’re calling her the next Parker Posey, and I guess I see that a little bit here, though not so much from her Daria-like role in THE NEW YEAR. Whatevs. The lead is actually a guy named Cris Lankenau, who plays a college drop-out/former forensic science major named Douglas who’s moved to Portland with his sister (Dunn). He gets a job at an ice factory to pass the time, befriending a regular there named Carlos (Raul Castillo), whom he introduces to the joys of Sherlock Holmes novels.

And then an ex comes back into his life. Frail Rachel (Robyn Rikoon) seems to hit it off with Carlos – something Douglas has no problem with, since they can both go to STAR TREK conventions without him – only to suddenly disappear one evening. Using forensic skills and imitating the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes, can Douglas and Carlos find out what happened? Will it take them into a dark and twisted conspiracy?

Yes, and no.

Forty minutes go by in this movie without anything of any significance happening. Writer-director Aaron Katz likes long, silent takes of characters doing nothing while quirky indie music plays, and also quick scenes in which people say stuff that’s totally irrelevant. This is par for the course in a movie of this sort, but just be warned anyhow.

Once the story picks up, however, damned if Katz doesn’t create genuine suspense, even though the stakes are almost hilariously low. And Douglas’ insistence on smoking a pipe in order to duplicate Holmes – though not, he insists, the oversized goofy pipe that Basil Rathbone inaccurately smoked onscreen – is vaguely reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn’s ridiculous adherence to adventure novels when rescuing Jim.

So the moviegoing day was going quite well. It was about to get even better.

LEBANON, which has already been acquired by Sony Classics, is one of the best films of the year so far. Granted, this isn’t yet saying a whole lot in a year where my favorite movies so far have probably been KICK-ASS and THE A-TEAM, but keep an eye on this one, folks. It’s been described as DAS BOOT in a tank, and I might describe it as the second great film about the Israel-Lebanon war, after WALTZ WITH BASHIR. Not sure what it is about that particular conflict that is inspiring such creativity now, but maybe, as BASHIR suggests, it’s because the survivors are only now coming to grips with their traumas and remembering what actually happened. Because, like Ari Folman, director Samuel Maoz has made this film based on his own experiences.

The story is quite self-contained: it’s four guys in a tank the entire movie. And yet that isn’t quite as hellishly claustrophobic to watch as it might sound. They see the outside world constantly through their scopes, and other characters come in and out of the tank at various stages. Plus there is some room to move around inside, though it’s generally a greasy, dark, damp and uncomfortable place to be. We see them piss into a metal can multiple times, but are spared the possibilities of a number two necessity.

Given a mission by a hardass commanding officer that they are told will be “a walk in the park,” the four embark on a journey that is anything but, having not yet inured themselves to the reality of killing people. So the hard choices they have to make in matters of life and death are difficult enough, but then miscommunications land them deep in enemy territory, led by dubious allies and conflicting directions. Unlike in THE TILLMAN STORY, this truly is the fog of war.

One or two moments are a little too on the nose in the “Arabs are people too, just like us!” department, but the missteps are rare, and politics mostly absent. Haters of DAS BOOT may be intimidated, but then haters of DAS BOOT are objectively anti-cinema, and probably want terrorists to win, or something.

Luke Y. Thompson is an actor, writer, and film critic living in Hollywood.