"American" Excess

Last night's American Idol finale was an exercise in excess, with award-show posturing complete with faux awards presented by host Ryan Seacrest and superstar guest performances, including Fergie—who awkwardly warbled through her hit "Big Girls Don't Cry" before being joined by her fellow Black Eyed Peas for a performance of their latest single, "Boom Boom Pow," a song that does the exact opposite of epitomizing a singing competition—and a seemingly dazed and confused Rod Stewart. The only thing missing was a dry-ice-and-fire-filled group performance of Queen's "We Are the Champions." Oh, wait, there it is.

I stopped paying attention to the conveyor belt of alternately mediocre-but-smartly-packaged and quirky-but-completely-unmarketable talent that is Idol around the time that viewers gifted themselves with Taylor Hicks, but it's clear the show is close to buckling under the weight of its over-bloated surfeit. In many ways, the finale was perfectly married to the season's purported frontrunner, 27-year-old neo-glam rocker Adam Lambert—he of the man-polish, eyeliner, jet-black emo hairdo, and heavy-metal shriek. Lambert was joined on stage at one point by Kiss for an over-the-top spectacle of a duet that involved, yes, more dry ice and fire.

So it was poetic, perhaps even cosmically auto-corrective, when "dark horse" Kris Allen—he of the unthreatening, boy-next-door good looks and multi-instrumental skills—upset Lambert for the win. Allen's Idol journey ended just as it began, with an endearing modesty and accessibility (even his reaction to winning was restrained, a striking contrast to Lambert's theatrical bombast) and an understated performance style that's focused on the music itself. And yet he held his own alongside country superstar Keith Urban during the finale, displaying a down-home authenticity that will likely be a hell of a lot more bankable in the real world than Lambert's melodramatic, sexually ambiguous (at least to the tween girls who voted for him) glam show.

While there are some who are quick to point to the media's apparently "coded" characterizations of Lambert to explain Allen's "surprise" win (am I not allowed to use the word "theatrical" without fear of being labeled a homophobe?), 12-year-old girls are unlikely to be swayed by a bunch of bloggers…or Simon Cowell. If last night's finale is any indication, the producers of Idol had been grooming the admittedly talented Lambert for the win, but America clearly had other ideas. Maybe now the show will take a cue and tone down the, uh, theatrics and get back to basics.

Have Pelosi's Chickens Come Home to Roost?

Rush Limbaugh is calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's resignation. On his radio show last week, the right-wing lightning rod babbled something about glass ceilings and equality—the kind of pseudo-progressive logic conservatives like to employ when attempting to disguise their utter contempt for a minority or opposition group (in this case, it's both). In other words, if Pelosi truly wants to prove she's worthy of a man's job, then she ought to act like a man—you know, like Richard Nixon—and resign. It's enough to make me rush to the speaker's defense. But I refuse to take the bait, and I suspect few others will either.

The right has been waiting to take Pelosi down since the Democrats took control of the House in 2006. The Republican Party was quick to pounce on the Speaker's allegation Friday that she was misled by the CIA on the issue of torture, with House Minority Leader John Boehner admonishing his counterpart for questioning the CIA, telling CNN's John King that we ought to instead pat intelligence agents on the back for a "job well done," once again twisting a Democrat's criticism of Bush administration officials into a slandering of the "troops." Not to be outdone, on Meet the Press RNC Chairman Michael Steele attempted to conflate Pelosi's situation with that of the president: "The question for me is does the president support Nancy Pelosi's version of what happened or the CIA director's version of what happened?"

But Pelosi's downfall would just be an added bonus for them. Republicans are betting that Pelosi's—and thereby other Democrats in Congress's—apparent complicity in the Bush administration's torture program will cause Dems to further shy away from pushing for an inquiry into those crimes. At the very least, they want the attention deflected from what the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal today called "a spectacle of demagogic accusation and blame." But the right's gotcha strategy—calling Pelosi out on her apparent hypocrisy—is likely to backfire, the most obvious consequence of this finger-pointing being an even more fervent call by the public for a thorough investigation into who knew what and when.

Republican partisans like Limbaugh continue to make the erroneous assumption that Democrats think like them. Those who voiced outrage over the Bush administration's policies didn't do so because George W. Bush was a Republican, or even because of the nepotism or hanging chad that led him to power. The majority of Americans fundamentally disagree with those policies, and in fact, believe them to be violations of domestic and international law. The biggest miscalculation Republicans have made is that those in the Democratic Party who seek justice and accountability on the issue of torture will blindly defend Pelosi, and by extension the criminal policies for which they're seeking answers.

If Pelosi's claims that the CIA misled Congress on the issue of torture are false, then perhaps Limbaugh is right that she should step down. Simply declassifying the notes from the CIA briefing in question will provide the answer. The larger questions, however, were posed by none other than Karl Rove in the WSJ last week. "If Mrs. Pelosi considers the enhanced interrogation techniques to be torture, didn't she have a responsibility to complain at the time, introduce legislation to end the practices, or attempt to deny funding for the CIA's use of them?" he asked with all of the ersatz incredulity of a trial lawyer. "If she knew what was going on and did nothing, does that make her an accessory to a crime of torture, as many Democrats are calling enhanced interrogation?" Actually, most Democrats are calling it what it is: torture. More importantly, the answer to both of Rove's questions is, unequivocally, YES.

If Pelosi was aware of the program, the fact that she didn't publicly protest doesn't make the chief architects of that program, nor the attorneys who were hired to justify the legality of the program, nor the CIA operatives who carried out the program, nor any other official—Republican or Democrat—who knew about the program, but who didn't attempt to stop it, any less accountable. They should all be investigated for their collusive involvement, tacit or otherwise, in one of the most embarrassing, dangerous, and irresponsible programs in our nation's history. In other words, I say throw Pelosi to the wolves if it means getting to the truth.

Even if Attorney General Eric Holder appoints a special prosecutor to investigate torture, high-level prosecutions are unlikely, so an independent congressional council—i.e. a "truth commission"—would at least shine a light into the dark corners of the Bush administration and Congress, and provide an official record that the U.S. attempted to enforce the law and rectify wrongs. That's exactly the "spectacle" to which the WSJ referred and which the right fears; to them, the pursuit of truth and justice on the issue of torture is a "tempest," with the author of the op-ed describing such a commission as "hearings intended to be little more than bear-baitings of the defeated Bush Administration." Bush was shamed, discredited, and maligned, but defeated? This same piece praises Barack Obama for his "difficult decisions" on reinstating Bush's military tribunals and releasing photos of tortured detainees, an indication that many of the previous administration's policies are continuing.

By colluding with the administration on—or simply turning a blind eye to—a torture program that defied the country's international obligations, many elected officials were attempting to preserve their careers at a time when voicing dissent might have resulted in dire political consequences. During her circus-like press conference on Friday, Pelosi repeatedly and clearly enunciated the same point: that the only way she believed it was possible to change course on issues like terrorism and torture was to focus on regaining congressional majorities and electing a Democratic president—which, she reminded us, she helped achieve. But the consequences of Pelosi's failure to completely drain the swamp, which I detailed in these very pages last summer, are becoming increasingly evident. As Rove said, "Mrs. Pelosi is hip-deep in dangerous waters, and they are rapidly rising."

Breakfast of Progressives: Cheerios and Breast Milk

In 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services toned down an advertising campaign informing the public of the potential health risks of not breastfeeding babies. Naturally, the formula industry had a cow, and they lobbied hard against the ads and won. The campaign was watered down so as to have little impact on the breastfeeding rate in the United States, which, at 30%, lags behind Europe. The agency also decided not to promote a study which found that breastfeeding is, according to The Washington Post, "associated with fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome." (If this seems like an odd issue for a young, single male to be championing, the HHS has reported that children who aren't breastfed are 40% more likely to suffer from Type 1 diabetes, a disease that afflicts both of my sisters.)

It helped, of course, that formula companies are part of the pharmaceutical industry, and that the administration in office at the time was the most amiable to Big Pharma in history—an administration that, it should be noted, took little to no measures to assist new mothers in its eight-year tenure. The Post described the formula industry's lobbying efforts as "a full-court press to reach top political appointees at HHS, using influential former government officials, now working for the industry, to act as go-betweens," including former chairman of the Republican National Committee Joseph A. Levitt. Political interference into public health and safety pales in comparison to the Bush administration's other known crimes, but the larger issue here sheds light on the right's ideological opposition to the new administration's desire to allow government to function as it was intended.

Right-wing loons like Michelle Malkin have been up in arms this week over the Food and Drug Administration's concerns over Cheerios's claims that it can lower cholesterol by four percent in six weeks, and that it can help fight against cancer. It's bad enough when foods claim to help reduce cholesterol because, as it usually states in tiny print, "a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease" (yes, eating healthy foods is healthy), but there's nothing special about Cheerios. It's like the sidewalk taking credit for the increased health of avid walkers. General Mills might as well encourage parents to serve Cheerios with breast milk and then say the cereal provides children with vital immune system benefits.

The FDA is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect consumers from misleading or unsubstantiated claims—something David Theroux of The Independent Institute calls one of Obama's "'progressive' (i.e., authoritarian) absurdities." In response to all the media coverage, General Mills has issued a statement saying that their claim that Cheerios can lower cholesterol by a certain percentage in a fixed period of time has been "featured on the box for more than two years," that "the science is not in question," and that the FDA is merely interested in how the information is presented. Critics of the FDA's move think it's silly, but how information is presented is key to good messaging—something the right has clearly forgotten.

Tribeca Film Festival: Don McKay

Clearly a quiet and lonely man, Don McKay (Thomas Haden Church) sluggishly scrubs the paint off a high school art class's floor, with a loser shrug affixed to his face. He's employed in janitorial services, and this being a not-too-stirring existence, he jumps at the chance to go back to his hometown after receiving a letter from a cancer-stricken first love, Sonny (Elisabeth Shue), who beckons his return. Upon arriving at her childhood home, Don is greeted by a suspiciously tidy, anal-retentive maid, Marie (Melissa Leo), who has been Sonny's caretaker since the cancer spread. When Don finally sees Sonny, still marvelously angelic, his eyes widen in glee as fond memories are recalled, but Don McKay is no glorious reunion story, as this town and girl he once knew belie a much deeper, far-reaching truth than the artificial welcoming party may let on.

Writer-director Jake Goldberger has lassoed a great cast to ham it up in this comical homage to Billy Wilder's classic noirs Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Church imbues his steamrolled schlub, so visibly defeated by past tragedy, with everyman wisdom, and he and Shue display great chemistry: As her femme-fatale acrobatics dance all over Church in the culminating scene that reveals her character's true nature, there's a slight glimpse at what could have been if this charade continued—that is, if she hadn't threatened to kill him. In a welcomed return to leading-role status, Shue exhibits devilish camp as a sickly gimp Sonny, and then switching to manipulative temptress when the tables are turned, while Leo gives another golden, meticulous performance as the double-dealer Marie, even if a noticeable departure from her Oscar-nominated, more serious work in Frozen River. The world Goldberger creates can be contrived at times, but it's also frenetically enthralling, and as such the few mangled twists are easily overlooked. And though it may wear its references on its sleeves, as sheer, thrilling entertainment, Don McKay deceives like the best of them.

Don McKay @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Shadow Billionaire

As one of the three founders of the worldwide mailing service DHL (he was the "H"), Larry Hillblom, labeled eccentrically brilliant from an early age, had a knack for business and the brain for innovation. He also had a peculiar, perverse attraction to adolescent, native girls from Saipan and the Philippines. First-time director Alexis Manya Spraic deftly explores both Hillblom's entrepreneurial genius and the lurid underbelly of his mischievous weekend trips to certain Filipino night clubs in her debut feature documentary Shadow Billionaire.

Admired and respected by many, Hillblom became a millionaire by his late 20s, finding a niche in the package-delivery industry as one of the first to exploit an early model of globalism with his international parcel service DHL Express. Not one to hold his eggs in one basket, Hillblom began investing his millions, eventually gaining billionaire status. But as his money grew, so did his penchant for adventure and travel overseas, which landed him on the island of Saipan, where Hillblom, in his 40s, settled and expanded his business model to the East and gained the respect of locals. But after a deadly plane crash (his second accident piloting a plane), several Saipan and Filipino women came out of the woodwork, claiming to have birthed heirs to his still-growing fortunes, and as the legal suits piled up, the true nature of Hillblom's sexual activities on Saipan soil and abroad became apparent.

Spraic leaves no stone unturned in her exposé of Hillblom. With her extensive breadth of interview subjects, from Hillblom's old colleagues to his family friends, she documents a vivid tale of deceitful, sexual obsession—and even racial prejudice. Often painted as slumming, sly gold-diggers by the lawyers of Hillblom's estate, the indigenous, poverty-stricken women of Saipan and the Philippines—including some prostitutes—account for "the little guy" in this David-versus-Goliath struggle for the truth. Shadow Billionaire distinguishes itself as a fine example of investigative journalism, both in sprawling, revelatory scope and penetrating consequence, proving the unspoken few may have something to say after all.

Shadow Billionaire @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Love the Beast

You never forget your first love, which in the case of Eric Bana was a 1974 Ford XB Falcon Couple nicknamed "the Beast." In the auto-romantic Love the Beast, Bana documents his lifelong amour for his ride, a model which first entranced him while watching Australia's famed Bathurst race in 1977, and again two years later by its appearance in Mad Max. As a teen, Bana convinced his father to buy him one, instigating an affair that soon also ensnared his mates as well, as the actor recounts how working on the car became their collective adolescent pastime and turned his parents' garage into their de facto clubhouse. Three decades and three overhauls later, Bana and his beloved auto enter Tasmania's renowned five-day off-track Targa rally (which he had completed years prior), though Beast isn't after the drama of Bana's race performance, but, instead, the way in which his participation proves a further extension of his deep affinity for the car.

Through narration, interviews, and cinematographic fawning over their chassis, classic American cars are celebrated for their imperfect character, which makes them seem vibrantly alive. Similarly, the act of working under the hood is depicted as an act of spiritual bonding that for Bana feels akin to a committed relationship—unlike aficionado Jay Leno, who adores his cars while they're being restored only to leave them in his warehouse so he can move on to the next project. Shots from the tires, hood, bumper, and cab of the speeding Falcon Coupe stirringly complement Bana's thoughts about the thrill and freedom that he experiences behind the wheel, and address his passion far more evocatively than his conversations with Dr. Phil, whose obvious observations drive the sentimental proceedings to the brink of squishiness. Still, archival photos and clips of a teenage Bana with the Beast, as well as the film's portrait of the car's role in maintaining his connection to childhood friends (who continually reunite to work on the vehicle) and his father (who boasts his own half-century-long affair with a T-Bird) affectionately express the potent allure that classic American muscle cars had, and continue to have, on the male imagination and heart.

Love the Beast @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

Even those with a soft spot for The Dancing Outlaw, the 1991 cult PBS documentary about tap-dancing West Virginian Jesco White, will likely have a hard time warming up to The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, a feature-length portrait of a year in the life of Jesco's regionally notorious clan. The enduring comedy and charm of Dancing Outlaw stems largely from the borderline-surrealism of its deranged mountain-man subject, the son of local dancing legend D. Ray White, and a loon whose boogieing skills, opinions on marriage and madness, and bizarre obsession with Elvis make him seem like a fancifully strange fictional caricature come to real life.

While Jesco also appears in Wild and Wonderful (executive produced by Johnny Knoxville), director Julien Nitzberg expands his purview to include the rest of the hell-raising, live-free-and-die-young family, celebrated by Hank Williams III as "the true rebels of the South" for living an unrepentant existence of partying, crime, and mischief. As far as people-behaving-badly docs go, the disreputable film has its mild pleasures, with the sheer brazenness of the White clan's actions—decried by local public defenders, prosecutors, and sheriffs, and typified by Jesco and burly sister Mamie turning their mother's 85th birthday party into a coke and pot-fueled bash—casting the plot-less proceedings as a breakneck, amusing R-rated Jerry Springer nightmare.

Wild and Wonderful is smitten with the redneck brood, but its nonjudgmental stance leads to a sobering warts-and-all depiction of their rampant "fun," exemplified by husband-slashing Kirk White snorting lines of crushed prescription pills in a hospital room mere moments after putting her newborn daughter to sleep. Kirk's decision to head to rehab after the state confiscates her baby, as well as the story of a younger White awaiting sentencing for repeatedly shooting his uncle in the face and then engaging in an armed standoff with the police, are merely two examples of the dark side to the family's hell-raising lifestyles.

The argument is advanced that their misconduct stems from the coal-mining industry's exploitation of their ancestors, as well as the hazardous profession itself, which is so dangerous that one's mortality is thrown into sharp relief and, in turn, engenders a reckless, devil-may-care attitude. No doubt such analysis holds a bit of water, but it nonetheless falls far short of affording an exculpatory explanation. As a result, it's nearly impossible to feel empathy for, or remain amused by, the Whites—living on the dole thanks to D. Ray's shrewd decision to have them all classified as legally insane—and the destructive, entitled irresponsibility which they proudly pass down to their kids. A mixture of pity and disgust, however, is elicited just fine.

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Original

A twee Danish comedy that alternates trite New Age psychological moves with outbursts of cartoonish violence, Original has for a hero Henry (Sverrir Gudnason), a doe-eyed, high-cheekboned man-boy whose middle-class, unexamined life veers into reconstruction mode when he suddenly becomes jobless and single. Mugging sweetly without ever being particularly funny or compelling, he enters upon a Peter Pan identity crisis with preachy self-awareness ("Life should be lived," he waxes in Buelleresque narration). Burdened with an institutionalized, delusional mother (after his father's demise in a grotesquely unfunny hunting accident), he does his best to prop up her fantasy image of him as a successful military officer by shooting faux home videos in IKEA. Determined to spring Mom from the clutches of a callous clinical hypnotist, he's aided by a tracksuited gourmet (David Dencik) who spins a grand scheme of the two of them opening a restaurant in Spain, and a fiercely feminist performance artist (Tuva Novotny) whose heart Henry melts with a seductive swap of cooking tips. If this sounds like writer-directors Alexander Brøndsted and Antonio Tublén have a severe case of the cutes, they do, and while their visuals possess a hint of Aki Kaurismaki's grainy Scandinavian absurdism, their more desperate antic passages more closely resemble wacky beer commercials. Novotny scores with a strip-club act, sneering, "You fuck! You suck!," while costumed as Rosie the Riveter, but her character softens too quickly; Dejan Cukic draws a few laughs as her moronic drug-dealing manager. Alas, Henry's mom-saving crusade is as heavy-handed and lugubrious as Sam Rockwell's in last year's Choke, and then the filmmakers pull an 11th-hour gimmick that compares badly with one from Fight Club. Henry may aspire to be "a brilliant original and not a pale copy," but Original plays like a weak Chuck Palahniuk plot stuffed with coyness.

Original @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: An Englishman in New York

In Richard Laxton's An Englishman in New York, Quentin Crisp (John Hurt)—the notable makeup-wearing gay activist who was raised in the brutal, prejudice-filled streets of Sutton, England and brought over, at the tender age of 70, to the slightly more welcoming boroughs of New York City—is filled with generous, perceptive philosophies regarding the nature of human beings and relationships, gay and straight. After the success of the made-for-British-TV movie The Naked Civil Servant, which was based on his memoir, Crisp is commissioned by a small theater in Manhattan's Bowery to perform a one-man show; word-of-mouth spreads about his unfiltered wit and shrewd observations about the gay community and cultural zeitgeist at large, which lands him gigs on late-night TV chat shows via his newly acquired agent (Swoosie Kurtz). His cult-like status grows, but when he calls the impending AIDS epidemic "a fad" in an off-the-cuff moment during one of his performances, he turns a faction of the gay community sour.

Englishman is a studied testament to the splintered state of the gay community: It understands how homosexuals may seem like a collective, parading around and screaming for inclusion, but how they can be oppressive within their very own community. During one fish-out-of-water moment when Quentin and his editor friend, Phillip Steele (Denis O'Hare), visit a gay bar filled with construction workers and buffed-up guys, they haltingly realize these men won't converse with them because the two are not cut from the same muscle-rippling mold. These "clones," as Quentin puts it, willfully draw lines down the center of the homosexual pack, and though he's perplexed by this immediate cruelty from his own clan, Quentin overcomes it, proceeding again through life in a jolly old fashion.

A BAFTA-winner for Naked Civil Servant, in which he played a much younger version of Crisp, Hurt is utterly spellbinding, sinking back into this colorful and iconic persona with rousing form. Laxton smartly frames the film around Hurt's dedicated performance, allowing Crisp to remain the cinematic focus as he was in his own world. This fresh look at the gay culture and its desired goals establishes profound insight into what it means to be a true-to-spirit man these days, no matter if he happens to wear a little lipstick and maybe a scarf or two.

An Englishman in New York @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: The Exploding Girl

Exasperating for its mundane narrative of youthful non-courtship camouflaged by Manhattan street-video naturalism, The Exploding Girl occasionally suggests mumblecore with less improvisation and heaps of undergrad preciousness in place of snarky irony. Zoe Kazan is Ivy, a Björkish-pigtailed college student home in New York for the summer, where she gives her displaced BFF Al (Mark Rendall), a gangly pothead and enthusiastic biology student, space on the couch. In between visits to her dance-teacher mother's class and largely unanswered phone calls to a neglectful, obviously exit-seeking boyfriend, Ivy encourages a compulsively lingering Al to party through the season without her, and assures her doctor that she's careful about managing her epilepsy, which results in a seizure only when she's "stressed out." Bradley Rust Gray's feature shares some themes with his wife So Yong Kim's winter portrait of a young couple at a crossroads, In Between Days, which he co-wrote and produced, but Exploding Girl is a less forceful variation on the earlier work's patterns, partly because Ivy and Al's passivity seems like a side effect of larger, unstated issues. (Or perhaps such pure fear and clumsiness in fledgling affairs of the heart is most compelling to 20-year-olds.) Ivy's regularly vibrating cell phone, over which she conducts a score of trivial negotiations with Al, marks her primarily as a buzzing girl at the core, but Gray's awkward title metaphor ensures that once Al stops dithering about evolutionary theory and asks to know where he stands, Ivy will physically manifest their dual stress before it can be cornily resolved at a rooftop bird coop and in a backseat. It's a ponderous inflation of a couple of cute white kids slacking around Gotham 'til September.

The Exploding Girl @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Vegas: Based on a True Story

Told with an unfussy minimalism that doesn't eclipse its metaphor's somewhat creaky obviousness, Vegas: Based on a True Story presents a microcosm of American greed and addiction via a family living on the dusty outskirts of Sin City. Eddie (Mark Greenfield) and Tracy (Nancy La Scala) are recovering gambling junkies whose lives, along with 12-year-old son Mitch (Zach Thomas), are tenuously stable, with Eddie's surreptitious plays on the slots—his face pressed close to the glittering screen—the only minor indiscretions in an otherwise routine working-class life. A visit from a Marine interested in buying their house leads to the revelation that a crime gang's suitcase full of $1 million may be buried on their property, which Tracy has diligently nurtured from a rectangle of dry desert into a green grassy yard. Smelling wealth, Eddie begins digging, which in turn leads to ruin in a manner that, after an opening act that gently and authentically establishes the characters, steers things into an overtly symbolic realm. The family's maniacal pursuit of a monetary pipe dream, and the destruction of their unity, security, and sanity, reverberates as a commentary on the country's insatiable avarice, whether that be the kind that drives people to Vegas—whose twinkling nighttime skyline, frequently seen in the distance across a stretch of barren soil, functions as a kind of entrancing bug zapper—or to gamble their futures on the market or in real estate. The game is fixed, but we're too blinded by gluttony to see it, warns Vegas. Director Amir Naderi, an Iranian who's spent the past 20 years making quasi-experimental films in the States, employs a discreet aesthetic full of long takes and no score to reinforce his argument, never more beautifully than in a shot from the back of a pickup truck that pans from the Vegas strip, to the vehicle's cabin, and then (after Eddie and Tracy have finished discussing their daily wagers and "recovery") to the arid nowhereland on the opposite side of the highway. Yet despite such graceful directorial gestures, the film's scenario unavoidably devolves into a treatise that, though timely, feels a tad too on the nose.

Vegas: Based on a True Story @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Stay Cool

Invoking every John Hughes movie under the sun, the Polish brothers' Stay Cool chronicles the return of a successful writer, Henry McCarthy (Michael Polish), to his hometown and high school, reunited with longtime friends and confronted with his past—and still clinging—inadequacies. Pulling up to the airport in a flamboyantly decorated mini cooper are Henry's two old high school buds, a supremely gay hairdresser (Sean Astin) and a rebellious tattoo artist (Josh Holloway); despite the 15-year leap forward, everyone appears frozen in a mundane, unchallenged existence, and when Henry reemerges he cleanly slips back into that role of nerdy son that everyone was used to, even with a bestselling novel on the shelves and an ever-expanding bank account. Flipping through an old yearbook, he comes across the photo of Scarlett Smith (Winona Ryder), the popular girl he once fawned after and who inspired his book How Lionel Got Me Laid. With his planned commencement speech coming up for his alma mater's graduating class, Henry now must make a decision: leave his hometown with dignity intact or reconnect with an unrequited old flame that more burned than lit ablaze.

Written by Mark Polish and directed by his brother Michael, this is thoroughly a family affair, but with their upcoming film Manure just around the corner, Stay Cool feels a bit rushed, suggesting nothing more than an homage to Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful. The saving graces are the cinematography and production design, as the style is nearly pitch-perfect, with bold, popping color filling up the frames, taking us back to a time and aesthetic we cinematically know oh-so-well. Polish and Ryder give soulful performances, but suited in rubbery, one-note caricatures, the supporting cast, mainly Astin and Holloway, come off a bit grating. This may be attributed to the thin direction: Virtually xeroxing past '80s films into his HDcam-shot frames, the filmmakers can't find any new twists on this proverbial tale of going back to your hometown and hoping someone is still waiting for you.

Stay Cool @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Dazzle

Dutch filmmaking provocateur Cyrus Frisch opens his new film Dazzle with a pixilated shot of a man walking down a sun-glistening beach, revealing the current world in a fractured state, but with slight glimmers of hope lingering in the background. Frisch's cinematic kaleidoscope presents a voyeuristic look at a city's many scattered, sidelined street dwellers from the view of a girl's apartment. The twentysomething girl is hardly seen, but her voice is overlaid on the disparate—essentially documentary—video recordings taken throughout Amsterdam as she feverishly rants on the phone with a doctor who initially calls to speak with her missing-in-action boyfriend Christian. Her disembodied voice proves a telling vehicle, almost God-like, and as she looks on from above, judging the desperate fools who sit on her block corner, guilt takes over her mind.

The film's images are supplied by everything from a camera phone to a consumer digital camera, and as he sporadically cuts to a starkly black, void-like frame, Frisch uses negative space to suggest a kind of sanctuary from the ugly dirge of street life, sufficiently establishing a dire mood wherever a city's lost souls congregate and their unclean bodies fester. The filmmaker melds together a myriad of archival footage and video effects, deftly exhibiting a gritty, grainy texture on the screen, which cements the dour tone of this compelling, experimental work.

In a half-hearted attempt to reconstruct his own version of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Frisch sees the well-meaning girl and doctor who converse over the phone as deeply concerned observers, sharing maddening descriptions of decay and, in effect, narrating the routine existence of the countless meandering, displaced vagabonds who deal drugs in the daytime and howl in the streets when the darkness settles. As abstract modes manifest a deluge of unearthly creatures and madness, Dazzle reveals the crack in the walls of humanity, delicately reflecting upon man's inability to survive when emotional burden becomes too much to handle.

Dazzle @ the Tribeca Film Festival