Rubber

Just rollin’ along.

(2010) Horror Spoof (Magnet) Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Roxanne Mesquida, Ethan Cohn, Charlie Koontz, Daniel Quinn, Devin Brochu, Hayley Holmes, Haley Ramm, Cecilia Antoinette, David Bowe, Remy Thorne, Tara Jean O’Brien. Directed by Quentin Dupieux

 

Sometimes things happen for no reason. Never is that more evident than in the movies. Some things just occur because they need to for the plot to advance. If you think about it too much your brain explodes.

In the middle of a desert (I’ve heard tell it’s California) a group of people gather. They are waiting expectantly, for what we don’t know. Suddenly a car roars in, knocking over a bunch of chairs. From the trunk comes Lieutenant Chad (Spinella), ranting about the movies and why people don’t use the bathroom in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the answer? no reason). He then presents for the onlookers a kind of live movie which they watch with binoculars and comment regularly on the goings on.

A tire (named Robert in the credits) stirs to life, half-buried in the sand. It takes halting attempts to rise and roll, often ending with it back on its side but eventually it begins rolling. It discovers it can direct its own travels and then it also finds it can cause things to explode, starting with birds and scorpions and graduating to larger animals…and humans. In the case of humans, it’s the heads that go boom.

It finds its way to a motel where it rolls into bed, watching an exercise video. It watches a maid make up the room. It evades the cops. Why? I’m sure you can guess.

Think of a nihilistic “Seinfeld” with a Dada streak a mile long, only without the standup comedy. The humor here is far more subtle and black. The horror element is more in the gore than suspense or atmosphere. They don’t always mix well.

Dupieux, who also operates under the nom des artes of Mr. Oizo (an electro musician and performance artist) has a twisted vision which I have to give props for. It is unique and unlike any other movie which you’re ever likely to see. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it necessarily something you would want to see. The constant breaking of the fourth wall by the actors and the audience/chorus gets to be irritating after awhile, plus the constant nihilistic “let’s move the plot in unexpected directions for no reason” is often confusing and also gets annoying.

I don’t have any problem with nihilism. I don’t really have a problem for making a movie about the randomness of life. I do have a problem with stringing together a random sequence of events that takes off willy-nilly just because you can. Actions, believe it or not, have consequences. They don’t occur in a vacuum and the best movies understand that. While I appreciate the sense of silliness and the courage to try something completely different, at the end of the day I wound up not connecting to this and just kind of enduring it as it came to its end. I need a little bit more from my Art.

WHY RENT THIS: Clever idea.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Lacks in execution. The black comedy and horror elements don’t mesh well. At the end of the day more pretentious than outrageous.

FAMILY VALUES: There is a good deal of violence, plenty of foul language and some twisted situations that have an underlying sexuality.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Quinn, who plays one of the spectators here, also played a Scanner in Scanner Cop who was able to blow up people’s heads with the power of his mind as the tire does here.

NOTABLE HOME VIDEO EXTRAS: There is an interview with Dupieux conducted by a blow-up sex doll. Of course.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $100,370 on an unreported production budget; I think it might have made a profit but more likely broke even.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Howard the Duck (seriously, I couldn’t think of a single movie remotely like this).

FINAL RATING: 4/10

NEXT: Klown

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The Stone Angel

Ellen Burstyn is still a powerful actress, even in her sunset years.

(Vivendi) Ellen Burstyn, Ellen Page, Cole Hauser, Wings Hauser, Dylan Baker, Christine Horne, Kevin Zegers, Sheila McCarthy, Devon Bostick. Directed by Kari Skogland

Regret is a powerful thing. It can color your perceptions and order your actions. The longer you hold onto it, the stronger it can get until it completely takes you over.

Hagar Shipley (Burstyn) thinks she’s going for a Sunday drive with her son Marvin (Baker) and his wife Doris (McCarthy). However, it turns out that they are taking her to a nursing facility “just to see,” as Doris puts it. Hagar has been living with Marvin for some time and her needs and ailments are becoming too much for them to handle.

Hagar’s suspicions about the place are not allayed by the petunias at the entrance, nor the sight of senior citizens playing canasta like the living dead. She realizes deep down that sooner or later she’s going to end up if not in that specific home, in one a lot like it. Impulsively, she decides to steal away on one last adventure and winds up in a broken down old beach house, there to reminisce about the events of her life.

The daughter (Horne, playing Hagar as a young woman) of a prosperous Manitoba merchant, she marries Bram Shipley (Cole Hauser), a farmer her father deems beneath their station. He expresses his disapproval by leaving her out of his will, instead leaving all his riches to the city to build a park named after him. She responds by snippishly trampling the petunias planted there.

However, she has inherited more of her father’s attitudes than you might think, and she tends to rub Bram’s face in her family’s superior breeding, which leads to marital difficulties which in turn leads to Bram’s drinking problem. She tries to instill her attitudes into her sons John (Zegers) and Marvin (Bostick) with varying degrees of success. John (her favorite) breaks her heart by falling in love with a wild girl (Page) and marrying her against Hagar’s wishes. Hagar’s fiercely independent nature will carry her through, but it will also cause her a lion’s share of heartache before her time is through.

This is based on a novel by Canadian writer Margaret Laurence and has been a staple of Canadian high schools for the past 40 years. It is set on the sprawling prairies of the beautiful province of Manitoba, and that’s exactly where they filmed it. There are those who wonder how a seemingly empty vista of endless prairie can inspire such devotion and love in the people who live there, but those who see this movie will get a good chance to see precisely why that is.

I will admit to having a great fondness for Manitoba. My mom is from there and I have many relatives and friends who live there and whom I look forward to seeing every time I venture up there, but that isn’t all of it. There is something about the windswept prairies, the city of Winnipeg  and the small towns on the outskirts, the great farms of wheat, sunflowers and other crops, the grain elevators and silos rising like silent sentinels…it just speaks to me, perhaps from a deep genetic place. You should know about that affection before reading the rest of this; my review is certainly colored by it.

One of the movie’s bigger successes is in the casting. Burstyn takes on the role of the feisty Hagar with a certain amount of panache. She’s a consummate actress, an Oscar winner who knows when to go over the top and when to reel it in. She brings Hagar to life as a Canadian icon, a woman who chafes at the strictures of her role in her time and ultimately becomes her own woman, defying the stereotypes of the era.

Horne is almost the spitting image of Burstyn, and on top of that she can act, too. She makes the young Hagar shine almost as brightly as Burstyn’s older Hagar. The two performances mesh nicely, as does the father and son acting team of Wings and Cole Hauser, playing the older and younger Bram respectively.

However, while the movie was written in the early 60s, more contemporary novels by authors like Nicholas Sparks that share a similar storytelling style especially regarding the conceit of an older woman telling the story of her life as a young, spirited girl. Some may find this movie suffering in comparison to movies like The Notebook.

Even so, there is a lot to recommend this movie. I’m not as familiar with the source material that is the novel, but I’m told it is a sprawling, magnificent work, along the lines of Giant and Gone with the Wind. For my money, any movie that tells a compelling story, particularly when it is set in a land that I love as much as Manitoba and its people, is worth recommending.

WHY RENT THIS: Beautifully photographed and well acted. The casting director not only got some top-notch talent for this film, he managed to get people who resemble each other to play the lead roles at different times of their lives.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: The movie suffers from Nicholas Sparks-itis; although the novel it is based on pre-dates Sparks, the presence of movies like The Notebook and Prince of Tides makes this one seem cliché.

FAMILY VALUES: There is some brief sexuality and a bit of rough language but otherwise suitable for any audience.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: While looking over the call sheet, Burstyn discovered a long-lost relative who was working on the film.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: None listed.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

TOMORROW: August