Dogstar

Jan/31/2012 20:27
★★

One of the most important factors in the success of any movie is how interesting the characters are.  The more interesting and memorable the characters are, the more likely we are to enjoy the picture.  Every once in a while, however, a screenwriter goes overboard and creates characters that are so out there, so riddled with idiosyncrasies that they no longer seem like real people we can believe might actually exist.  This is the problem with Dogstar.
 


 
The movie begins with a young boy fascinated by his father's descriptions of the universe.  He takes the name Dogstar from Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.  Later we learn he has a cruel brother named Astro.  Are these real names, or just nicknames?  It's never explained.  Also unexplained is why Dogstar is a recluse, virtually never leaving his house, and indeed rarely leaving his bedroom.
 
Despite his seclusion, Dogstar meets a young woman named Gabrielle, who quickly falls in love with him.  Why she would go head over heels for such a weirdo is yet another thing the movie leaves to our imaginations.
 
It goes on like this.  Things happen, but who knows why?  Nothing makes any sense until shortly before the end credits begin to roll, and by then, I had lost interest.  And even after it was all over, many basic questions remained.  Why was Dogstar so afraid to leave his room?  Why was Gabrielle attracted to him?  Why was Astro such a jerk?
 
If a movie is going to take the trouble to present oddball characters like these, it should have the decency to suggest some answers as to why they are what they are.  Otherwise, it all seems pretentious, and it gets really boring really fast.

The Invisibles

Dec/31/2011 09:25
1/2★

Jude is a rock star touring Paris. Strung out on drugs, his bandmates drop him off at a rehab center, where he meets a beautiful model named Joy, who literally drags him to her apartment. There, they spend days (weeks?) together trying to detoxify themselves. Of course, they fall in love.



This is a truly hideous movie. The screenplay (by writer-director Noah Stern) is utterly pretentious, the black & white cinematography looks awful, the music is annoying, and absolutely nothing happens — just two junkies in a ratty apartment, talking. If Jude & Joy’s conversations were intelligent or witty, maybe this films would be worth watching, but they’re not, and it isn’t. Imagine Before Sunrise, only if Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy had nothing interesting to say and spent all their time in one room rather than touring Vienna.

Nothing about it rings true. For people supposedly detoxing, neither Jude nor Joy seem particularly sick. They manage to eat for perhaps weeks on end thanks to a friendly pizza delivery man who’s willing to give them food in exchange for little collectibles (since they have no money to pay.) The pizza delivery man sounds like an American doing a bad French accent.

The one and only thing The Invisibles has going for it is that, for a $10,000 movie, it’s remarkably well cast. Michael A. Goorjian plays Jude and Portia de Rossi is Joy. They’re good. Why they agreed to be in this piece of garbage, however, I have no idea.

Blood Car

Dec/19/2011 19:26
★★1/2

It’s the near future, and the price of gasoline has shot up so high that hardly anyone can afford to drive anymore. So Archie Andrews (Mike Brune), a nerdy elementary school teacher and environmentalist, spends his spare time working on a way to convert wheat grass into fuel.



Instead, he accidentally invents an engine powered by blood. Naturally, this leads him on a quest to find the blood he needs to keep his car running. And when a sexy, slutty, carnivorous babe named Denise (Katie Rowlett) tells him she’ll do anything to ride in a car, any sense of ethics Archie had vanishes instantly.

Blood Car was produced for $25,000 and has won a number of film festival awards, including Best Narrative Feature Film at both the Underground Chicago Film Festival and the Underground Atlanta Film Festival in 2007. It’s an entertaining movie; it looks good, has excellent music (mostly well chosen classical stuff), and a plot that moves along briskly. The acting is generally good, too. Mike Brune isn’t great in the lead role, but he’s OK, and everyone else is better than that.

I would’ve given Blood Car three stars but for a weird moment toward the end of the movie where a child gets killed. The way it was shot was a bit too realistic for me. Nevertheless, fans of goofy movies with lots of violence, gore, and nudity should like this one.

Bikini Bloodbath Carwash

Dec/05/2011 20:45
★1/2

If you were looking for something to watch and happened to notice that Bikini Bloodbath Carwash was out there & available, you might be tempted to give it a look. The question you’d have to ask yourself is: how much stupidity and bad filmmaking are you willing to tolerate? And the answer, if you decide to watch this movie, had better be: a whole lot! ‘Cause this is one bad movie!



In it, Jenny (Rachael Robbins) and Sharon (Natalie Laspina), along with several other young women, are high school students who work after school at a car wash run by a vulgar lesbian named Miss Johnson (Debbie Rochon). Johnson invites the girls over to her house for a party which gets spoiled when an evil murderer known as Chef Death shows up and starts killing everyone.

This movie is the sequel to Bikini Bloodbath, which I suppose you’d have to watch in order to learn anything about Chef Death, because you won’t find out anything about him here. Rather than bothering with anything so mundane as a story, the filmmakers have filled their running time with lame jokes and dance montages, which leaves one sorely tempted to speed through most of the movie — pausing only, perhaps, for the nude scenes.

The chicks are hot, but everything else is not in this poor excuse for entertainment.