Palo Alto

PALO ALTO               B                     

USA  (100 mi)  2013  d:  Gia Coppola 

Gia Coppola is the latest edition of the Coppola Film Factory, much like the exiled Makhmalbaf’s from Iran, currently living in Paris, or the infamous Barrymore family from the days of early Hollywood, all descended from cinema royalty.  Gia is the daughter of Gian-Carlo Coppola (who died in a speedboating accident at the age of 22), the oldest of Francis Ford Coppola’s three children, which makes Francis her grandfather, while Sofia Coppola is her aunt.  Stylewise, Gia graduated from Bard College with a fine arts degree in photography, where her moody visualization is much closer to Aunt Sofia, a mere 25-years old when it was shot, a year or two younger than Sofia when she shot her first feature, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999), painting her own impressionistic portrait of rich, overly indulgent high school kids by adapting James Franco’s Palo Alto:  Stories, a collection of 11 short stories taking place in his upscale Northern California hometown.  Like Robert Altman adapting nine Raymond Carver short stories (and a poem) into the ensemble piece SHORT CUTS (1993), Coppola also blends several of the stories into a composite whole, mostly centered on four main characters.  As Gia is herself a California child of privilege, it’s interesting to get her take on today’s youth, which is looking younger than ever, but still plagued by sex, social cliques, infatuations, getting stoned, drunken parties, and boredom.  Parents are largely absent or unseen, while kids have their own cars, and marijuana is the drug of choice for both teens and parents alike.  The casting is inspired, keeping it in an extended Hollywood movie family, where Emma Roberts (daughter of Eric, niece of Julia, and something of a stretch at age 23) plays April, a shy and sweet-natured girl caught up in the enveloping trouble surrounding her, reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis in HALLOWEEN (1978), though perhaps not as resilient, while Jack Kilmer, son of Val, who appears as April’s perpetually stoned stepfather in the film, is something of a revelation as Teddy, a stoner kid with artistic tendencies, looking very much the part of a River Phoenix reincarnation from a Gus van Sant film, like My Own Private Idaho (1991).  April and Teddy are drawn to one another, but they’re teenagers that don’t know how to express it, so instead we get a series of longing looks from afar, where they instantly cover up any hurt feelings by getting involved in some other mischief. 

The near plotless but largely entertaining film is a swirling choreography of kids making typical high school mistakes, where the most troubled kid is Teddy’s friend Fred (Natt Wolff), an obnoxious, overly aggressive jerk that spends most of his time putting everybody else down, making fun of the world around him, taking nothing seriously, getting high as often as he can, pretending he’s the life of the party, but in truth he’s the most hurt and alone.  Challenging him for low self-esteem is Emily, Zoe Levin from Beneath the Harvest Sky (2013), the girl who will have sex with anyone, thinking it will fill the emotional abyss she has to live with every day.  The delicacy she brings to the character is part of what makes this film matter, as we’ve seen all these kids before, perhaps in better movies, but their exquisite performances stand out in what is otherwise stereotypical territory.  It’s hard to care about rich kids that don’t care about themselves, who abuse their time on earth, economically privileged children who have it all, but despite their advantages, they’d rather toss their lives away, where we’ve already seen the spoiled and wasted kids in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) or Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012, which actually stars James Franco, by the way), where we can’t help but think—why should I care?  But then we get the painfully honest teen portrayals in The Spectacular Now (2013) or The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), where it’s hard not to share in the heartbreak of adolescent growing pains.  Coppola attempts to draw us into this disturbing teenage quagmire by reminding us how alienated kids are from themselves and one another, portraying them as collisions waiting to happen, where they have to continually pretend life doesn’t hurt, and nothing matters, while deep down they are wounded disaffected souls with no words to express their pain and anguish.  While we’ve all been there, hopefully most of us survived intact, but this film is a painful reminder of a time in our lives when we often could barely tell the difference between right and wrong, where often impaired judgment was held together by a slender thread of common sense and luck.  If one was not so fortunate, many adult lives have been ruined or destroyed by the regrettable actions of one’s youth.  While we’re watching the rebellious antics of so many needlessly discarded teenagers, who are treated like so many disposable parts, it’s hard not to think of how they might end up.

Initially the focus is on April’s secret crush for Teddy, but Fred continually gets in the way with his annoying behavior, claiming Teddy as his best buddy, usually plying him with dope or alcohol or bad ideas, where the two are seen as drifting knuckleheads with an air of indifference about the consequences of having no boundaries to speak of.  While Teddy would walk away from trouble under normal circumstances, exhibiting better sense, in Fred’s company he acts just as screwed up.  One of the highlights of their young lives is attending raging, out of control parties with absent parents, where the kids are free to do anything they want with no restrictions.  Coppola has a knack for creating a naturalistic setting, allowing her hand-held camera to wander in and out of rooms, shot by Autumn Cheyenne Durald, where it’s not unusual for characters to be seen puking in the bushes.  Teddy draws April’s attention, eventually disappearing and wandering off with another girl, where he’s too blitzed to drive, but that doesn’t stop him from getting into a car accident, compounded by leaving the scene of the crime.  With the police waiting for him by the time he gets home, he avoids worse punishment by involuntary community service in a sentence handed down by the court, where amusingly the dispassionate offscreen voice of the judge is unmistakably that of Francis Ford Coppola in full lecture mode.  James Franco plays Mr. B, a high school soccer coach for a rather lackadaisical girl’s team, where instead of winning he keeps his eye on the young girls, veering into the uncomfortable territory where adults take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the young, where his persuasive charm couldn’t be more revolting as he clearly has a thing for teenage girls, yet April is the regular babysitter for his young son Michael (Micah Nelson), making her an easy target.  It’s quite a mood swing to go from showing the obviously excited young kid something he’s not allowed to watch on TV, the legendary Phoebe Cates bathing suit sequence baring it all in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982), to Mr. B seducing April on the same couch.  Her guilt afterwards is punishingly acute, as she has absolutely no one she can share her thoughts with, as her patronizing and overly complacent mother (played amusingly enough by the director’s own mother, Jacqui Getty) is too wrapped up in her own self-help mindset to know or care.  The depiction of aimless and often confused teenagers is not the lurid sensationalism one has come to expect, but is instead a tender and often poetic introspection of the moods and anxieties that thrive within the teenage community.  Consider this the director’s LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) as she makes her way through the emotional minefields and marijuana haze of high school.   

Adult World

ADULT WORLD        C+                 

USA  (97 mi)  2013  d:  Scott Coffey

Another film about the Me Generation, the children of privilege, an entire generation that feels something is owed to them simply because they think they deserve it, not because they’ve done anything to earn it.  Here we see a whiny Emma Roberts as Amy, a fiercely driven young girl (there isn’t an ounce of grown up woman about her) just out of college who is so positive she has the makings of a poet that she invests everything she has, much to her parent’s dismay, in sending off packages of poems to publishers, and then feels disappointed when her parents can’t afford to subsidize her poetry career anymore.  In her eyes, it’s an investment in her future, while her parents think she ought to go out and get a real job.  A girl that sleeps with a poster of Sylvia Plath over her bed, in the opening scene, she replicates Plath’s suicide, plotting out exactly how she would asphyxiate herself from her gas oven, actually going through the motions, yet the tone of the film is an absurd comedy, so right off the bat we realize this is going for demented territory.  The film backtracks one year earlier when she’s in bed with a sleazeball about to have sex with a guy who’s obviously only interested in himself, yet tells her all the things he thinks a girl wants to hear, only to discover a film crew hiding in the closet shooting the whole thing, eventually running out of there in a state of undress and abject humiliation.  A closer inspection reveals Amy is a broken record, a walking advertisement for herself, continually spewing the same mantra of how it’s only a matter of time before she gets published, how she’s so close and on the verge, reminding everyone how her career is about to take off, yet at present, she has nothing to show for it.  Driven to desperation, she relies upon fate, and a Help Wanted sign in a window, where she walks in brimming with confidence and is all smiles until she realizes it’s an adult porn store, running out in a state of panic and hysteria, as if she’d been attacked by a swarm of killer bees.  Apparently, after the unpleasant incident, she still has a near psychotic aversion to sex.       

With her tail between her legs, she sheepishly returns back to the store, discovering it’s run by an old couple still madly in love (Cloris Leachman and John Cullum), where they’re not the least bit ashamed to use the names of sex toys and adult store vernacular in completed sentences, something she finds terrifying and revolting at the same time, so she’s a perfect fit for the store.  The store manager, Evan Peters as Alex (the real life fiancé of Emma Roberts), couldn’t be more friendly and helpful at every turn, yet he’s zeroville in her eyes, as she’s only slumming before the day of the big publishing event.  Roberts appears schooled in the Rosanna Arquette style of comedy, appearing to be one and the same at times, except she’s younger, more girlish, more of an airhead, despite her repeated claims that she was a straight A student, and much more aggravating.  While she’s cute and has a flair for humor, her wretched need to put herself first all the time in a continuous “look at me” syndrome reveals the surface level of superficiality where she operates, never having a reflective moment, which makes the premise of being a writer so absurdly ridiculous.  Yet she perseveres, butting to the front of the line of a book signing of her chosen poet du jour, Rat Billings (John Cusack), something of a washed up has been, a former punk poet who is in town to teach a course at the local university.  While he quickly escapes her outright stalking maneuvers, she finds out where he lives and plants herself on his doorstep, demanding that he read some of her poetry and offer criticism poet to poet.  Her credentials are that she “really feels a lot” and “wants to speak for all the people that suffer.”  Ingratiating herself to him, she’s willing to provide unpaid maid service while calling herself a protégé to her poet mentor.  While nobody really buys any of this, yet she continues to delude herself in a mad rush of youthful exhilaration that she identifies as budding genius. 

Cusack channels Bill Murray in his downbeat sarcasm, underplaying every scene, hoping for a moment of sanity in the enveloping madness, with Alex continually gushing that his work “speaks to an entire generation,” to which he can only answer “No, no it doesn’t.  That doesn’t mean anything.”  While initially he playfully and somewhat scornfully calls her “Suburbia,” by the end he’s describing her as “this generation’s Black Plague,” where he’s forced to  remind her “not everyone is talented.”  In a movie like this, the focus would have to be on a character named Rat, where Cusack does all he can with the role, much of which seems to resemble himself, as if he’s used to fending off the adulation of complete strangers who are positively bonkers in their outright expressed enthusiasm.  The film throws in handfuls of secondary characters, mostly for comic relief, but all of them are mere stops on the road of her meandering journey to success and fame.  While much of this resembles the more impressive work of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001) or David Chase’s Not Fade Away (2012), this film doesn’t belong in the same category, as it’s more of a cheap, comedic imitator, a pretender to something it’s not, which is social relevancy.  Other than the obvious, where the film attempts to comment upon the privileged and the entitled, the film shows little insight, where writers like Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011) or Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) have their pulse on middle class disillusionment, using more realistic characters to reflect the unique problems dealing with the emptiness and boredom.  This film has a few laughs and a few comic barbs, but Emma Roberts is such a loathsome, self-centered character that it’s easier to laugh at her rather than identify with her and the culture she represents, suggesting that tonally the director has mostly missed the mark, unless he simply wanted to make a goofy movie that will ultimately be forgettable.      

Scream 4

SCREAM 4                               B                     

USA  (111 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Wes Craven 

In keeping with the theme of the original, SCREAM 4 parodies all horror films, but in particular the initial SCREAM (1996), following the same format, opening with a telephone call, the familiar voice of the demented teen stalker, and before you know it, a handful of teenagers sitting around watching horror movies are dead before the opening credits, where one in particular, an especially brief appearance by Anna Paquin, is drop dead hilarious.  Part of the humor throughout the film is listening to teenagers wise crack about how much they know about horror films, how they would never be so easily fooled.  What Craven does especially well is create set ups for potential victims, where the audience can foresee murders before they happen, causing Craven to bypass convention and move in another direction, attempting to keep the audience off balance while always delivering the goods, where the teen deaths are usually as amusing as they are bloody.   Ace tabloid reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) is now married to Deputy Dewey (real life husband David Arquette), who has now become the town’s Sheriff.  But the sleepy California town of Woodsboro has been quiet since the murder rampage exactly one decade ago.  Weathers’career is dead, having documented the grisly murders, but has since hit a dry spell, striking out in her attempt to write fiction.  Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott is back in town promoting her own book, where upon her return, what greets her but light posts that have appropriately been decorated by Ghost Face masks, apparently a prank from ghoulish teenagers.    

With the familiar core cast reunited, Dewey is called away from the flirtatious advances of the new Deputy Judy Hicks (Marley Shelton) to investigate the new murders.  The ten year anniversary of the only event the town is known for is being celebrated with a new bloodbath.  More havoc ensues, especially the introduction of a new cast of teen characters who are just as clueless about their future, yet brag continuously with that know-it-all bravado that will surely lead to some untimely deaths.  Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) is part of the rat pack of girls, and is taken under the police protection provided for Sidney, which doesn’t stop one of their pack, the pretty girl next door with the large breasts, from getting toyed with and attacked right in front of their helpless eyes.  Despite this gruesome sight, Jill finds continued solitary confinement a form of police harassment, as it is unthinkable for teenagers to spend any time alone away from other teenagers.  It’s simply written that way.  It’s all part of the teen formula where they stick together.  Weathers learns a few new tricks from the high school cinema geeks, one of whom (Justin Michael Brandt as film geek) runs a live webcam on the headset he wears, which documents on the Internet whatever their feeble lives experience, which obviously isn’t much, but this explains how the new stalker would have to update their murders with the latest technology, where the murders would have to be caught live in order to register a pulse with the high school population. 

Of course, following the format of the original SCREAM, this all leads to another giant drinking and party sequence where the murderer is on the loose, another synchronized orgy of blood and death that defines the genre.  For the occasion, the cinema geeks are running their annual Stab-a-thon film fest, movies based on the Gale Weathers books, all in commemoration of the original murders.  Craven, again relishing the movie within a movie concept, has plenty of fun re-enacting some of the original scenes, using Heather Graham in Drew Barrymore’s opening sequence, where an attempted murder takes place in real life while the same thing is happening onscreen.  A town without pity that has been afflicted with murder and mayhem, spawning more twisted and demented teens who are the offspring of the original murder spree, shows a callous disregard for anything real, where life is just a continuing joke, and kids remain fuckups from generation to generation.  This gripping finale matches the original while offering some social insight into the overpowering need to be needed by today’s teens, afflicted with shortsightedness and their ferocious desire to display their lives on the Internet for all the world to see, thinking this somehow makes their world rock.  Not quite as wild or original as the first, which introduced this smart-assed stalker formula to the world, both written by Kevin Williamson, this is nonetheless a well-made and thoroughly enjoyable horror film that ratchets up the tension with equal amounts of wry, satiric commentary.  While it remains a bloodbath, this offers blood and gore with a different kind of relish and overt glee rarely exhibited in horror flicks.  The common denominator, however, is that teens continue to be clueless about the world around them, easy pickings for the town stalker.