Month: May 2014

Trying to swim through the haze of food warnings these days can be trying. In the documentary Fed Up a convincing case is made that we are often lost in the thicket of corporate advertising, ill-advised government subsidies, political posturing, and shoulder shrugging at all levels. Though it’s emotionally a lot harder for many of us to view sugar in the same light as tobacco, Fed Up argues exactly that. Our country’s huge increase in its ingestion of sugar and processed foods, the film claims, needs to get the same regulatory attention tobacco gradually received in the 1960s and 70s.

Even Michelle Obama’s proclamation that her own focus on healthier eating and exericise wasn’t meant to “demonize” the food industry, is called on the carpet here. The first lady’s tone shift to focusing more on exercise than diet came right at the time her foundation partnered with many of the companies deemed villainous here. She misses the point, the film’s experts agree, in that no amount of exercise can offset the damage done by such high caloric intake. The experts further espouse that a calorie isn’t merely a calorie, but that the empty, fiber-free calories from sugars go straight to the liver and create metabolic havoc (Type-II diabetes, previously unheard of in children just a few years ago, is on the increase). The difference between consuming an orange and orange juice, for instance, is huge.

It’s an uphill battle when 80 percent of all supermarket products in our country contain added sugar, and when 80 per cent of schools no longer make their own lunches but commission the giant food companies to provide essentially fast food. High fructose corn syrup is so cheap due to the government subsidizing of the corn industry, that it essentially creates a budget class of crappy food, priced far below that of fruits and vegetables. Of course, with education, it is still possible to put together a low-cost healthy meal but the will needs to be there.

America’ political cosiness with the food industry is typified in the film by a 2003 Bush administration pissing match with The World Health Organization. Set to publish guidelines for sugar consumption at no more than 10 percent of the overall diet, the WHO faced pressure from the Bush boys to eliminate the Unjted States’ funding of the organization unless they removed the guideline. It was left out….Additionally, to this day, there is no figure present next to sugar on ingredients labels’ percentage of daily recommendations. Instead, it’s left blank.

Fed Up, directed by Stephanie Soechtig, and narrated and executive produced by Katie Couric, focuses on a few families who wish to act on changing their obese children’s eating habits. They meet with mixed success but provide the film with the tender, human counterpart to all the statistics and doomsday scolding of its admittedly convincing experts. Even Bill Clinton stops by to say he didn’t do enough in his administration but he recognizes the problem now. It’s a shame other politicians, including Minnesota’s Democrat senator Amy Klobuchar, are shown kowtowing to their state’s food industry lobbyists. Klobuchar defends a controversial decision to allow tomato paste to be considered a vegetable for the purpose of school lunch quotas. Schwann Food Co. Is located in her home state–they, the largest purveyor of school-lunch pizza in America. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin is a voice of reason, lambasting attorneys from the food industry for making ostensibly scientific claims that there is no proof of harm from sugar (“they’re lying through their teeth”). Harkin retires next year. Meanwhile, at children’s birthday parties throughout the country, millions of parents still feel obliged to serve a cake AND soda course.

4 Having Your Cake and Dying From It Too (out of 5 stars)

Learning devastating truths can be daunting. Experiencing the unnerving discovery of post-war realities in as spare yet vivid a manner as presented in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida verges on breathtaking. Pawlikowski shoots in black-and-white, uses an almost square screen format, has long stretches without dialogue, and forces the viewer to focus intently on the micro reactions of his two main characters. Watching lead actress Agata Trzebuchowksa is like listening to a Terry Riley minimalist music piece–the heightened sameness almost seems redundant until–wait!, there’s a change. Ida’s face often appears locked into a certain expression. Look closer….The smallest change is magnified by the austere setting of her introspective stillness. There is more going on in Trzebuchowska’s countenance (she’s previously a completely untrained actress) than in a score of over-emoting professionals.

Anna is a novitiate nun near Lodz, Poland, ready to take her lifetime vows. Her mother superior suggests she first pay a visit to her lone surviving relative, an estranged aunt, Wanda. Wanda (veteran Polish actress Agata Kulesza) seems cold to Anna at first. Jaded, resolute, cynical–she’s ostensibly hardly a neutral role model for Anna’s probable last glimpse into the outside world. As a judge by profession, she does, however, possess a gutsy persistence and proves to be the effective guide in Anna finding out her parents’ fate in the war. Anna, you see, is not Anna at all, Wanda informs her. She’s Ida Lebenstein and she’s Jewish.

Guilt, pain, transformation, survival, loss–they’re all here. The melancholy yet luminous casting of these themes in miniature gives the film a quiet, spiritual economy that will likely stick with you long after viewing it. Its use of Mozart and Coltrane as musical bookshelves provides further contrast in what is essentially a yin and yang character study. Wanda not only chain smokes, regularly swigs vodka, and seeks the company of men–professionally she is know as the former prosecutor, “Red Wanda,” who sent enemies of the Polish communist state to their death. Yet the complexity of her familial duty shows an almost offhand compassion.

Ida will go on to meet a gentler, kinder representative of the secular world but not before uncovering the secrets of her family’s past. Her voyage may be a simple one, as lean and sublime as this film itself. It stuns with simplicity, resounds with eternal questions. Pawlikowski weaves a magical, deeply meditative spell. Trzebuchowksa is purely magnificent.

5 A Nun Prepares To Take Vows in 1960s Poland; A Small Masterpiece Emerges (out of 5 stars)

Substituting a plethora of fart jokes and sudden bull-goring for actual brains, the screenplay for A Million Ways To Die In The West runs the gamut from raunchy to silly. Though not as frequent as in Seth McFarlane’s previous film, Ted, the laughs here spew forth despite the film’s fits and starts. You may need a shower afterward, though.

McFarlane, who directed, co-wrote, and plays the lead, goes for a contemporary Blazing Saddles. Of course Mel Brooks never meandered with comedic loose ends and repetitive one-jokes like this. For every good laugh there soon follows a flat scene that dangles in mid-air. A running gag parodies prostitute Sarah Silverman and her milquetoast fiancé Giivanni Ribisi. They’re waiting until marriage to have sex–what a riot! Their mutually glib pronouncements of the situation are matched by McFarlane’s increased ramping up of the body fluids in what seems like an overboard repetition of basically the same scene.

McFarlane plays Albert, a sheep farmer who lives with his parents. His father, a total grinch, is another one of those one-joke ad nauseum characters. It’s almost worth waiting for a flashback scene where the old man scatalogically pranks his son with a tooth fairy/pillow stunt but by then I was totally sick of the guy. Then there is the mustache riff–personified by Neil Patrick Harris, who runs a mustache shop (who knew?) and runs off with McFarlane’s girl (Amanda Seyfried). An excuse is even found for Harris to do a song and dance number to–yes, Stephen Foster’s “The Moustache Song.”

An excellent Charlize Theron (you owe it to yourself to catch her performance in 2012’s Young Adult) shows up in time to save not only Albert but, it might be said, the film as well. Here she shows chops for comedy, playing Anna, the wife of tough gunfighter Clinch (Liam Neeson). For reasons that make little sense she is in town for awhile without her husband. Her male chaperone gets thrown in jail for shooting a cowpoke in a bar fight and Anna gets to latch onto a nice guy (Albert) for a change. Her actual identity as a gunslinger moll is unknown to Albert.

A male/female buddy movie moves along nicely until the inevitable return of Clinch–but not before Albert has a run-in with Native Americans and accidentally ingests too much of a psychedelic. It is then that we are given a glimpse of what this movie might have been. A brief phantasia scene temporarily erases the Elmer Bernstein-esque musical homages, John Ford-style vistas, and cheesy send-ups of The Wild West that preceded. Here’s hoping if there’s a sequel, it won’t be as solidly rooted in the same grimy reality as this landlocked spoof–as spinelessly exaggerated as it is exuberantly slimy.

3 Gunslingers Slinging Occasionally Funny Schlock (out of 5 stars)

Even a strong performance from the estimable Marion Cotillard and a fairly good one from the always irascible Joaquin Phoenix fail to ignite the stodgy, humdrum The Immigrant. Supporting characters are uniformly stock, the story stretches plausibility, and Ellis Island seems like Alcatraz one day, a Barnum Bailey circus the next.

Jeremy Renner as a magician and nemesis to his cousin Phoenix provides a counterpart to the rest of the overtly serious characters. He tries to rescue the penniless Cotillard, a Polish refugee forced by the duplicitous Phoenix into doing burlesque and prostitution in order to save her from deportation and to garner enough money to aid her quarantined tubercular sister, who is in immigration limbo. Posing as a representative from Traveler’s Aid, Phoenix manipulates Cotillard into stripping at The Bandit’s Roost Bar. Trouble is, although Renner can do neat tricks like levitation in his stage act, he can do little to take his head out of the clouds. Then before he can whisk off Cotillard to the promiseland of California, he must deal with the rage-prone Phoenix.

Phoenix here won’t make your recall his excellent turns in The Master and Her but it is fun to watch him get angry and put his Marlon Brando on. Alternatively moody and sophomorically reflective, Phoenix justifies his exploitation of women with the wretched logic that he is saving them from a worse fate. When at one point he blurts out that he loves Cotillard, it is as if he we are suddenly in another movie. His guilt over exploiting Coltillard seems forced. When he and Renner finally duke it out, the film seems more like a vintage cartoon where the heroine shrugs her shoulders at the silliness and makes an impromptu escape while the two rivals beat each other’s heads in.

The Immigrant has skillful production values and the Oscar-winning Cotillard, who could do a TV commercial and still make me cry. Even her acting chops and considerable beauty can’t save this James Gray (check out his 2008 Two Lovers, also with Phoenix) exercise in an upside down Promised Land. Neither immigration woes nor stifled American Dreams have any business being this non-descript.

2 1/2 River Goes Nuts And The Film Barely Moves (out of 5 stars)

The downright vapidness of the character of Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg in one of dual roles) is best summarized in a nursing home scene with his aged mother. After she remarks that her favorite song is now playing, he coldly replies, “There is no song; and you hate music.” Simon will go on to frustratingly plod through a nondescript job and an even more bleak life. Then one day his doppelgänger, James Simon (Eisenberg) shows up as a new hire at work. He is everything Simon is not: charming, slick with both his boss and the ladies, and ruthless in his ambition. He makes every attempt to steal Simon’s ideas and present them as his own. Even Simon’s object of affection (Mia Wasikowska), thus far unmoved by Simon’s paltry advances, is fair game for James.

Eisenberg gives a tour de force performance as he slides back and forth from the meek and frustrated to the confidant and the bold. Simon’s amusing boss (Wallace Shawn) keeps forgetting who Simon actually is and when he remembers is quick to scold him for underperforming. The security guard at the entrance to his building repeatedly claims he never saw him before and makes him scan his ID when he enters.

The Double is a lot of fun for awhile, and in no small part due to the uncanny touches of art direction and set design provided by director Richard Ayoade. You can’t really tell where the film is taking place but it seems like the near future, yet it has many props of the past–not anachronisms but weird hybrids of what feels like a drab Eastern Europe or Russia vaulted into an oppressive-feeling future. Ayoade, a former stand-up comic and actor, instills a dark humor throughout. His mysterious use of a primarily Japanese soundtrack mostly works, especially when the early 1960s pop hit “Sukiyaki” bursts forth.

Yet Ayoade ultimately falls in love with the idea of a mystery within a riddle within a conundrum. The film seems too intricate by half, which is a shame given its earlier strengths. Eisenberg acts up a storm and Ayoade is definitely a talent, as he proved with his first film, Submarine, but for this viewer, there’s too much Terry Gilliam’s Brazil going on here. Thankfully, The Double also contains a heavy dose of David Lynch.

Don’t get the film confused with the current release The Enemy, also about a double. That film, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is a far more serious, suspenseful Twilight Zone meets David Cronenberg affair. It too, let down at the film’s conclusion, but you could do a lot worse, given the year-to-date crop of films, than these two flawed but challenging odes to the doppelgänger phenomenon. The question of whether the double actually represents a character’s projection of his unfulfilled wishes for himself, is as old as the hills but strikes a chord in both films. While Simon’s plight in The Double may be as equally terrifying as Gyllenhaal’s, it doesn’t feel nearly as scary since The Double spends a lot of time draping Simon’s dilemma in quirky, fun Wes Anderson-isms. The juxtaposition of the serious and the tongue-in-cheek only works to a point here. Come payoff time my perception found itself transformed from engagingly bemused to emotionally detached.

The Double is loosely based on a Dostoyevsky novella; the Enemy, on an out-of-print novel by the Nobel-prize winning author, Jose Saramago. I wonder what market forces give when an award-winning author not only doesn’t receive a glittery “movie tie-in” reissue edition of his work, but actually goes ignored upon the release of a film adaptation

3.5 Oh Jesse, You Almost Pulled Off Another Great Film (out of 5 stars)

You don’t have to be a food and restaurant aficionado to get a gratifying kick out of Chef but it certainly will heighten your sensual pleasure from this crowd-pleaser by Jon Favreau. Favreau stars in the film as Carl Caspar, an acclaimed Los Angeles chef who’s talented, hard-working, street-wise, and stone technologically-deficient.

Taking a break from directing his big studio projects (Iron Man, Iron Man 2), Favreau goes right back to his roots, when as a 29-year-old he wrote and starred in Swingers, one of the best films of the 90s. Only here he directs and writes a small, independent film and still gets to rely on the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert Downey Jr. to play key supporting roles. With John Leguizamo and Sofia Vergara as co-stars and additional supporting roles played by Bobby Cannavale, Oliver Platt, and Amy Sedaris, it would seem pretty hard for this film to go wrong. In Favreau’s hands, it goes remarkably right.

Favreau captures the camaraderie of the tightly-knit kitchen staff, the momentousness of the visit of an influential critic (Platt), and the tension surrounding a cautious restaurant owner (Hoffman) curtailing the creativity of a chef who has gumption to spare and a new menu to try out. Caspar’s job becomes in jeopardy when Hoffman forces him to “play your hits.” A feud with the critic goes viral due to Carl’s ineptness on Twitter and his worshipful 10-year-old son, Percy (Emjay Anthony), lessens his troubles by beginning to educate Dad on the wiles of the Internet. Percy helps Dad turn the corner onto a new enterprise. Their strained bond (Caspar, like most great chefs, works incessantly) builds momentum on a road trip in Caspar’s shiny new Cuban food truck and this subplot eventually becomes the main plot. Fast-talking Martin (Leguizamo) is in tow, the truck hits Miami, New Orleans, and Austin on the way back to L. A.

Prominent in the film like shiny jewelry are wonderful food scenes including the construction of a perfect Cuban sandwich. The culinary money shots continue throughout the film right to the closing credits, where a film consultant demonstrates to Favreau the art of the grilled-cheese. The whole thing has a rollicking, good-timey feel that isn’t betrayed but actually heightened by its more serious scenes of non-custody father/son relationship building. Vergara going off her usual overload, has a chance to actually act here as Caspar’s ex-wife, an eye-candy stunner never without designer clothes. However, when it comes to supporting roles, she’s up against a terrific, crazed Downey Jr., who has only one scene and it’s a great one; a solidly convincing Hoffman; and an intriguing Johansson. Cannavale continues to impress, playing an even grittier version of his character in Blue Jasmine.

Sure, the screenplay takes a few shortcuts and raises an eyebrow here and there with plot jumps but Favreau is smooth enough to have you hardly notice it. You get the sense this is really how the fast-paced restaurant world operates–there’s an inescapably realistic bent to the early scenes. And although the food-truck scenes seem somewhat more forced, you’ll have much fun here. You may rush to the exit and make a beeline for the nearest Cuban sandwich. Or hit up Austin, Texas for a visit to Franklin Barbecue, featured in Chef as just another stop on the way to a down-and-out chef’s self-realization

Make another indy film, Favreau. Please.

4.5 Cuban Sandwiches and Favreau’s Most Enjoyable Film Since 2001’s Made (out of 5 stars)

Varnished to a fault, the wildly uneven Million Dollar Arm throws one too many gopher balls yet enjoys an admirable relief effort from Jon Hamm, and a terrific save from Lake Bell. The based-on-a-true-story yarn of the recruitment of two novice pitchers from India, the film unabashedly gives an intentional walk to baseball details in favor of cutesy Disneyisms. Hamm overcomes the paint-by-numbers set-up: channel surfing between Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent and an Indian cricket match, sports agent JB Bernstein (Hamm) achieves a satori moment and goes running off to India to recruit cricket players for a reality show whose winners will receive a baseball contract.

No sooner does Bernstein arrive in India that we find ourselves knee-deep in broad stereotypes. Indians apparently are hostile to contracts and prefer a handshake and a back-door deal. Protective parents scoff at their offspring’s wish for fame and fortune. Indian food gets crushed, its poverty snickered at. Initial jokes about Indians’ love of cricket (“it looks like an insane asylum opened up and all the inmates were allowed to start their own sport,” JB says) subside after it is realized the two prized recruits care as little about the game as Bernstein. Alan Arkin shows up as a retired scout. Known for playing grumpy characters, Arkin here is encouraged to go overboard with the surliness. He spends his first several scenes with his eyes closed, including when he’s at work analyzing pitches. It’s OK, he assures JB, he can tell whether the pitch is any good by the sound of it hitting the catcher’s mitt. In a way, there’s a parallel to the film here. You probably wouldn’t be missing too much if you rested your eyes through much of this.

You would, however, miss Lake Bell (director and star of the excellent In A World) and she’s the best thing in the movie. Playing Brenda, a medical student tenant of Bernstein’s who the playboy JB at first ignores, Bell is sharp and witty. She gives “nice” lessons to JB when she notices he ignores the emotional health of his vulnerable recruits, who are not only new to America but naive to much of the nuances and gizmos of modern culture. Hamm and Bell may not exactly be Tracy and Hepburn but it’s pretty close. They manage to sidestep the brushback pitches director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Thomas McCarthy throw their way.

Million Dollar Arm wallows in the relationship between the patsy-like Amit (Pitobash) and the two boys. The never-stops-smiling Amit seems to arrive in India like a Rule 5 ringer–he wants no pay and just wants to work for JB so he can fulfill his dream of cracking into baseball. As the interpreter, he occupies a lot of space in the film and much of it feels redundant. Arkin, for all his moxie as an actor, seems tired here (was all the eye-closing his improvisation once he read the script?) The boys are played by Madhur Mittal from Slumdog Millionaire and Suraj Sharma from Life of Pi. The Daily Show regular Aasif Mandvi earns his pay as Bernstein’s easily distracted sidekick, as does the very good Bill Paxton as a wiser-than-wise pitching coach.

By the way, one of these real-life guys was cut from the Pittsburgh Pirates; the other will resume his minor league career once he gets off the DL. It’s now seven years since Bernstein’s trip. The road to the majors for major recruits in baseball is always a less assured guarantee than any other sport. With Million Dollar Arm we are asked to celebrate the groundbreaking signing of the first two prospects from India. They won’t make you forget Yao Ming, the first Chinese superstar in the NBA. Nor will Million Dollar Arm make you forget either Jerry Maguire or Slumdog Millionaire, its two obvious inspirations.

2 1/2 Intentional Walks to Baseball Details In Favor Of Cutesy Disneyisms (out of 5 stars)

Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson could probably save a popsicle from melting on a hot day. While saving the film Belle from disaster may not be as big a challenge, the duo manage to camouflage the movie’s weaknesses and provide a buffer against this somewhat whitewashed story of race, class and gender.

Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a biracial daughter of an admiral and a former slave from Africa, comes to live with her father’s uncle, Lord Mansfield (Wilkinson), Great Britain’s Chief Justice, and his wife, Lady Mansfield (Watson). Dido can’t dine with her family nor with the servants because she is stuck in a limbo devised by Mansfield in accordance with the protocol of the day. At issue in his day job is a little matter of British slave traders tossing their sick slaves overboard in order to collect an insurance payout (the 1781 Zong massacre). It will take a whole movie for him to render a verdict. Most of the time the crusty, grumpy, yet authoritative barrister is defending the status quo. Yet Wilkinson’s eyes and body language increasingly suggest he may be having second thoughts. Seems his adopted daughter is getting increasingly rambunctious once she discovers the abolitionist viewpoint on the case. She’s given the eye opener by social lowball John Davinier (Sam Reid), a pastor’s son and aspiring legal apprentice who lives and breathes the slave issue.

Dido at first demonstrates no such boldness regarding her personal life once she agrees to a marriage with a clueless yet condescending suitable suitor. Her looming inheritance precludes her from marrying into a lower station (e. g, out of passion or affection). Shame the windfall couldn’t get her a seat at her family’s dining table…Adding further to the intrigue, Dido, bosom buddies with her blond bombshell cousin, Elizabeth (Sara Gadon), innocently provokes a change in their relationship once Elizabeth discovers nothing but dead ends in trying to find a husband herself. With no dowry of her own even her stop-you-in-its-tracks attractiveness comes up an empty lure.

Sure we’re dealing with Jane Austen/ Masterpiece Theater territory here. The question is, does the film delve into Dido’s psyche enough? Does it handle her thinking process and emotional evolving brought on by the racial slurs, subtle and otherwise, sprinkled throughout the film? Not so much. It’s more about the white people here, a legitimate angle considering the change necessary in their thinking before any social change is possible. Yet it still feels funny that Dido herself seems like a wooden character here. Must be that Wilkinson and Watson factor. When Watson’s Lady Mansfield, at first demure as a timid kitten, tells Wilkinson how she really feels, the scene reminds of her status as one of the premier film actresses of our time. And the film ratchets up its resonance, leaping from from cozy yet questionable historical lesson to instant crowd pleaser.

3.5 For Whom The Belle Trolls (out of 5 stars)

Neighbors isn’t nearly original enough or nasty enough. Or funny enough. Lactation jokes, air bag gags, innumerable marijuana cracks–what else have you got, director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which was equally forgettable as this one)?

Any frat comedy starring Zac Ephron already has two strikes against it. The presence of Seth Rogen might be expected to mitigate matters but this film has about as much in common with Rogen’s 2013 gem This Is The End as the Delta Psi Beta brothers have in common with Rogen and wife Rose Byrne. When the boys move in next to the couple and their infant daughter Rogen and Byrne initially fawn over the opportunity to hang with the boys. After they start realizing the kid stuff next door is meddlesome, noisy, and offensive (unless you enjoy a bunch of yahoos staring at you through your window while you’re having sex), sparks should start flying. Instead a lot of potential comedy in the conflict goes as flat as all the stale beer laying around in the aftermath of one of Ephron and sidekick Dave Franco’s numerous bashes.

Unless your idea of funny is a frat trying to sell molds of their own jimmies as sex toys, you may be better off watching This Is The End again and save your time here. As a Rogen completist, I felt compelled to watch. He has some moments and so does the talented Byrne but they seem to be winging it, straining to get through the seamy, tired script. By the time Ephron is sitting in college dean Lisa Kudrow’s office facing discipline, I was looking at my watch to see how much time was left in this flick. I could go on and spoil every non-funny joke here, but better to forget this scattershot train wreck quickly.

Oh yeah, roughly three quarters of film critics out there currently give Neighbors a thumbs up. I enjoy funny comedies–really!

2.0 Watch Out For Flying Beer Cans and Flabby Jokes (out of 5 stars)

Breaking the mold of the revenge thriller, director Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin avoids numbing caricatures and limp cliches. Its edge-of-your-seat suspense is earned through sharp editing and tight composition yet what propels its intriguing storyline more than anything is its nervous, apologetic main character, Dwight Evans (Macon Blair). A train wreck of a human being, Dwight grabs the viewer’s attention from the film’s outset, when we figure him for a homeless man.

Soon we learn the man who is responsible for Dwight’s life having fallen apart is prematurely getting out of prison. Dwight wastes no time settling the score; Saulnier wastes no scenes on fanciful filler. Then, his appearance drastically changed, Dwight enters the dangerous world of damage control. Protecting his sister and her children from a violent family that means business as far as retaliation, Dwight’s David has no trouble gaining our full sympathy as he goes up against the Goliath of a family deep in personnel and deeper in loutishness.

Saulnier, who won a critics’ award at Cannes for the film, shows superb control and packs more than a few surprises along with nicely timed witticisms. Dwight comes off like a refuge from a chess convention who suddenly woke up and found a gun in his hands. It’s a truly impressive performance. A common flaw of thrillers is their denouement often deflates the rest of the film’s buildup. Although Blue Ruin starts off with a genuine bang, it manages to maintain its momentum, and even if its ending isn’t its strong point, the film avoids getting its backbone ripped out. Sitting through this darkly original low-budget film likely will rip a few hairs off your head, though.

4.0 Crazed Nerd Freakishly Misbehaves (out of 5)