Triskaidekaphilia: '13' (2010)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

The very first movie I ever wrote about for this feature was Gela Babluani's 13 Tzameti, and at that point an American remake was already on the way. Although 13 Tzameti garnered a lot of buzz on the festival circuit, and the American version seemed poised to break Babluani into the mainstream, 13 ended up sitting on the shelf for more than a year before limping into a tiny theatrical release and then immediately onto DVD. It's interesting to see how some fairly minor changes (the plots of the two movies are nearly identical) serve to make 13 a rather laughable thriller, while 13 Tzameti is a fairly effective mood piece.

One of the big differences is that the nature of the underground event that the main character (played here by Sam Riley) has gotten involved with is kept mysterious for the first half of 13 Tzameti, while here the movie opens immediately with Riley's Vince and Ray Winstone's Ronald pointing guns at each other's heads. So that image hangs over everything that comes afterward, and instead of the vague foreboding of the original, there's a kind of trumped-up suspense that feels very forced. There's more back story here, both for Vince and for some of his fellow players in the secret Russian roulette event, all of it completely superfluous padding that just serves to justify the presence of recognizable actors like Winstone, Jason Statham and Mickey Rourke.

The minimalist style of Babluani's original helped carry it past the dopey plotting, but here the movie is so focused on the mechanics of the ridiculous tournament that there's nothing else to balance it. I don't know if Babluani was pressured by producers to direct in a more conventional style, or if it was his intention, but 13 ultimately emphasizes everything that was disappointing about the original (the actual details of the absurd competition) while losing everything that worked about it (the enigmatic narrative, the eerie atmosphere, the low-key style). The cast is filled with familiar faces whose talents (or lack thereof, in the case of Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) are wasted, and the anticlimactic final act feels even more useless when framed as an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Maybe now that the movie has failed, Babluani can get back to some low-budget ingenuity.

'Bomb Girls'

Both the Canadian TV industry and obscure U.S. cable network Reelz Channel would probably love the kind of reputation for quality drama that shows like Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire engender, and Bomb Girls, a Canadian import airing stateside on Reelz, has the air of something prestigious. It's set in Toronto during World War II, and it explores an underrepresented aspect of life during the time period with its focus on women who work in a munitions factory. The period detail is impressive and the cast is strong, but the actual plotting and dialogue fall a little short. Rather than exploring the dark and complex aspects of its time period, in the manner of the better shows it aspires to emulate, Bomb Girls is more like a well-produced history lesson, with lots of expository dialogue and characters that seem designed primarily to illustrate a particular historical aspect of society or culture.

The show's takes on sexism and racism are pretty simplistic, and the way that characters respond to situations is generally pretty predictable, and often heavily shaded in "we're so much more enlightened now" irony. But there are a few subtler aspects to the show's social commentary, including the slow-burning homoerotic tension between two of the female factory workers, as well as the troubled reaction to the war from a World War I veteran played by Peter Outerbridge. It's refreshing to see a show give so much attention to the female perspective on a historical period, and those moments of unexpected points of view, whether from a frustrated and repressed 1940s lesbian or a disabled veteran who doesn't see WWII as the universally regarded "good war," give Bomb Girls a bit more depth. The rest of the show is a little too superficial to be as rewarding as it aims to be.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on Reelz Channel.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'District 13: Ultimatum' (2009)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the original District 13, a French action-movie sensation that made a splash in the U.S. and led to director Pierre Morel getting Hollywood work on movies like Taken and From Paris With Love, and now I'm finally getting around to the sequel, District 13: Ultimatum, which came out five years later and wasn't nearly as much of a sensation. It's not hard to see why -- the story is much less exciting, the stunts are less novel, and the political commentary is confused at best. It's still fairly entertaining, and there are a few pretty impressive set pieces, especially a sequence early in the movie that finds the police captain played by Cyril Raffaelli fighting off a horde of bad guys while holding onto a priceless Van Gogh painting that he can't allow to be damaged.

Of course, that entire sequence has essentially nothing to do with the plot, and that's part of the problem with Ultimatum: A movie like this doesn't have to have a fascinating, complex story (in fact, it's often better if it doesn't), but when it takes nearly an hour of the movie just to figure out what the bad guys are trying to accomplish, that's a problem. The first movie had a pretty basic plot involving a crime lord threatening to set off a bomb that would destroy the titular section of near-future Paris. The main characters, a cop and a street criminal, had to disarm the bomb and rescue the criminal's sister. This time around, the two characters are apart for more than half the movie, and the plan they need to stop is a vague conspiracy about demolishing the slums so that a corrupt development company can swoop in and build upscale housing and retail. (The sister doesn't even appear in this installment.)

There's still plenty of action, but there's very little suspense, and the ending is a weird anticlimax that essentially involves the good guys carrying out the exact same plan the bad guys were trying to implement, only with better intentions. Director Patrick Alessandrin follows in Morel's visually hyperactive footsteps, but he's not quite as creative or edgy. Raffaelli and co-star David Belle are still fun to watch, and their parkour stunts are still pretty dazzling, but the movie itself lacks a lot of the liveliness and momentum that made the original so enjoyable.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Storm Center' (1956)

In 1956, Storm Center was probably a bold political statement, coming out against the censorship of Communist literature and strongly criticizing witch hunts based on perceived Communist affiliation. It's an admirable stance for a movie to take in the midst of a period of great paranoia and political pressure, but viewed in hindsight more than 50 years later, it just comes off as preachy, simplistic and didactic.

It doesn't help that Bette Davis basically plays a flawless martyr, not exactly her strong suit. She stars as small-town librarian Mrs. Hull, who's beloved by seemingly everyone in the town, kind and helpful to children and dedicated to her job of promoting literature and learning. When the town council, led by an ambitious young member played by Brian Keith, insists that Mrs. Hull remove a pro-Communist book from the library shelves, she refuses on principle, and thus begins a campaign to not only fire but also discredit her, such that nearly the entire town eventually turns against this nice old lady.

The nice old lady who loves books versus the cynical political climber is a pretty lopsided contest, and it's not like director and co-writer Daniel Taradash makes much of an effort to give Keith's character any nuances or depth. Mrs. Hull, too, is pretty one-dimensional, although Davis mines a bit of pathos out of her despair as the whole town (including the little boy who used to idolize her) shuns her for being a supposed Commie. Taradash goes overboard in making his point, though, having that little boy, played by the supremely annoying Kevin Coughlin, turn into a sullen delinquent when he learns that his favorite librarian is a traitor to America, and resorting to setting the library on fire before the town comes around to re-embracing Mrs. Hull.

Storm Center likely provided a valuable service at the time, offering up a comparatively measured (aside from the library burning down) counterpoint to anti-Communist hysteria. But its careful didacticism is what makes it such a chore to watch today, and even Davis' occasional moments of fierce determination can't overcome the stodgy moralizing.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Friday the 13th: A New Beginning' (1985)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Completely undermining the claims of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, the fifth movie in the repetitive horror series, opened less than a year after its predecessor, promising, well, a new beginning for the aging franchise. It's the first sequel in the series not to open with an explicit recap of previous installments, and the first Friday the 13th not to take place at Crystal Lake. It opens instead with a dream sequence featuring The Final Chapter's Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), who imagines Jason rising up from his grave to kill again.

That, of course, is exactly what the audience expects as well, but director and co-writer Danny Steinmann confounds expectations by moving away from Jason and Crystal Lake and cutting ahead several years to the now-teenage Tommy (John Shepherd) on his way to a mental institution. Like many horror-movie protagonists before and after him (including Laurie Strode and Kirsty Cotton), Tommy has been so traumatized by his experience with a psychotic killer that he requires constant care and supervision. And although Tommy seems like he's going to be the main character of the movie, he actually barely speaks and disappears for long stretches in favor of the same standard group of horny delinquents as in every other installment.

The facility where Tommy is sent is sort of a progressive home for wayward teens, which provides plenty of fodder both for the requisite gratuitous nudity and for Jason to hack and slash his way through. But wait, is that really Jason doing the killing? Spoiler for 27-year-old movie: No, it's not, and the movie is set up like a murder mystery, with Steinmann providing several suspects for the faux Jason running around in a hockey mask and wielding a machete. As always, the characters are less than one-dimensional and essentially interchangeable, and the revelation of the killer's true identity is seriously anticlimactic since we've previously seen the character utter maybe two lines in two scenes.

The one interesting thing A New Beginning has going for it is Tommy's trauma, but given how little screen time he actually has, Shepherd doesn't have much to do except look sullen and/or tortured. The scarred final girl (or guy) from a slasher movie has become as much of a cliche as the slasher itself, and Steinmann fails to explore the concept in any kind of compelling way (for one of the most interesting looks at slasher PTSD, check out Rob Zombie's underrated Halloween II). The movie ends (spoiler again) with Tommy completely cracking and becoming the killer we've suspected him to be all along, but audiences were so insistent on Jason's return that the whole idea was abandoned in the next movie anyway.

'NY Med'

Producer Terence Wrong has made a career out of creating serious but accessible documentary series about urban hospitals and other big-city institutions. NY Med is his third hospital series for ABC, after Boston Med and Hopkins, and it doesn't mess with the formula, presenting a straightforward look at the practice of medicine in two different New York City hospitals, with minimal flash and no narration. Most of this material is inherently fascinating, and Wrong and his crew need only stand back and document the life-saving surgeries and emergency treatments the doctors perform.

But this is network TV, so NY Med isn't without its manipulative sentiment. There are plenty of sappy music cues and heartstring-tugging interviews with family members, and Wrong is good at drumming up suspense by cutting from, say, a potentially unsuitable liver being prepped for transplant to something like a drunk moron stumbling into the ER. Those smaller segments do a nice job of breaking up the heavy life-or-death stories, but it's sometimes frustrating to be watching doctors nervously anticipating a test result to find out if a tumor is cancerous and then have to wait through a superfluous segment about some nurse's dating life before finding out the answer.

Wrong does go astray with those segments that leave the hospitals to follow a young doctor as he returns to his old haunts in New Orleans (cue the theme song from Treme!) or a hottie nurse as she vacations in Miami with her meathead boyfriend. Those concessions to reality-TV conventions feel like cheap sell-out moments, as does the inclusion of the self-aggrandizing talk-show host Dr. Oz, who may still practice medicine but mostly offers up lame platitudes about how love is the most important element in recovering from heart surgery. Luckily, Wrong has plenty of other doctors and patients to focus on, and no single personality dominates the show. For fans of medical dramas who'd like to see how this stuff works in the real world (with the added element of things not always working out as scripted), NY Med is as close as you're going to get. 

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on ABC.

'Perception'

TNT's new procedural Perception belongs to the subgenre we might call "douchebag solves crimes," along with shows like Monk, Psych and The Mentalist. The main character is an insufferable, arrogant asshole who nearly single-handedly solves complex cases, no thanks to the incompetent rule-followers around him. His insensitivity and rudeness are excused not only by his crime-solving genius, but often also by some tragic personal flaw (mental disorder, murdered family member, etc.). It's an archetype going back to Sherlock Holmes, and it's not an inherently bad set-up for storytelling, although it's become awfully prevalent in TV crime procedurals.

The problem with this device in Perception is that it's executed so poorly, and the main character is so grating that he engenders no sympathy whatsoever. Eric McCormack plays neuroscience professor Daniel Pierce with a perpetual smirk and condescending air, and even his moments of vulnerability and compassion come off as arrogant. Not only is Daniel a brilliant academic/detective, but he also suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, which in the show's skewed world just makes him better at solving crimes (and more of an inconsiderate jerk). Sure, he hallucinates people who aren't there, but those people help him solve crimes!

The first episode features a schizophrenia-related twist that's probably meant to be mind-blowing but is just lazy and obvious, and the way that Daniel's delusions contribute to his crime-solving stretches believability the first time, let alone the third or fourth. The cases themselves are nothing special, and the show has to bend over backward to include some sort of neuroscience-related element in each one. As the FBI agent partnered with Daniel (and one of his former students), Rachael Leigh Cook is completely miscast; she comes off like a teenage girl playing dress-up. The whole enterprise is slapdash and annoying, scraping the bottom of the barrel of mental disorders and specialized expertise that could theoretically aid in solving crimes. If TV has to be filled with endless recycled crime procedurals, couldn't we at least lose the desperate gimmickry?

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on TNT.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Operator 13' (1934)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

It's sort of shocking to see this movie right now, just airing in the middle of some random weekday on TCM (it's also available on a Warner Archive DVD), with its extensive and prominent use of blackface that takes up almost the entire first half of the film. I'm used to the occasional use of blackface in a musical-comedy capacity in films like Holiday Inn, and even in those cases it's hard to take. But Operator 13 puts star Marion Davies in blackface as an integral part of the plot, an ostensibly serious story about Union spies during the Civil War, and then takes the opportunity to have her play a horrific caricature of an African-American woman. Offensiveness aside, the jarring tonal disconnect is just one of this terrible movie's many faults.

Davies plays actress Gail Loveless, who's recruited by the U.S. government and given the titular designation as a covert agent, sent to infiltrate a Confederate camp while posing as the black maid of another actress-turned-spy. Not only is Davies' performance a crude stereotype, but her makeup is also so unconvincing that it's hilarious to hear other characters dismiss her as a "colored girl" when she looks like a white woman covered in shoe polish. Davies affects a comically exaggerated "Negro" voice that clearly would fool no one, certainly not all the actual black people who take her on faith as one of their own.

That debacle occupies the first half of the movie, but when Gail's fellow agent gets her cover blown, Gail ends up on a new mission, this time as her normal Caucasian blonde self, posing as a Northern Confederate sympathizer taking refuge in the South. There she re-encounters a handsome Confederate officer played by Gary Cooper, and they of course fall instantly in love. The movie doesn't spend a whole lot of time on the star-crossed-lovers angle, though, and the two characters share virtually no romantic moments, instead just blandly declaring their love for each other before being forced to part ways. The movie ends with the abrupt and unexplained reconciliation of the lovers following the war, which is dispatched in a montage lasting about 30 seconds. Disjointed, unconvincing and frequently offensive, Operator 13 is barely even worthwhile as a historical curiosity.

'Bunheads'

Let's get this out of the way right off: Bunheads doesn't know the first thing about Las Vegas. Main character Michelle Simms (Broadway star Sutton Foster) is meant to be a Las Vegas showgirl, but creator Amy Sherman-Palladino's sense of Vegas shows is seriously outdated. The headdress-wearing showgirls are almost nonexistent in Vegas these days, and certainly aren't part of any show at Caesars Palace, where Michelle mentions working. The rest of the show's Vegas references (Michelle lives next door to a prostitute and gets married at a drive-through wedding chapel) are similarly lazy.

But Bunheads leaves Vegas behind 10 minutes into its first episode, and it isn't really a show about Vegas at all, so I'll forgive Sherman-Palladino her sloppy research. The Vegas stuff is really just a plot device to get Michelle at her career low point, so low that she impulsively agrees to marry a middle-aged admirer who showers her with gifts whenever he's in town. He whisks her away to his home in the whimsical small town of Stars Hollow, er, Paradise, which is basically the quaint setting of Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls transported to the California coast.

Bunheads' biggest strength and greatest shortcoming is its overwhelming similarity to Gilmore Girls, from the quirky small-town setting (full of characters with names like Boo and Truly) to the fast-talking, sharp-tongued lead character (Foster is definitely channeling Lauren Graham), even to Kelly Bishop as an imperious matriarch (in this case, Michelle's disapproving mother-in-law). After failing disastrously with the shrill sitcom The Return of Jezebel James a few years ago, Sherman-Palladino is back on familiar ground here, and that's a good thing. There's enough about Bunheads that's different from Gilmore Girls to make it feel relatively fresh, while the similarities allow Sherman-Palladino to confidently do what she does best.

Foster ably delivers the dense dialogue, and she has the same world-weary sass that Graham brought to Lorelai Gilmore. The Rory role is divided among the four teenage girls who are students at Michelle's mother-in-law's dance studio (actress Julia Goldani Telles even looks like a young Alexis Bledel), and they're a little more one-dimensional in the pilot than Michelle is, but they have potential to develop into distinctive characters as the show progresses. With the focus more varied than the intense Lorelai/Rory relationship of Gilmore Girls, there's opportunity to tell stories about a wider range of characters.

Still, Bunheads is very much about Sherman-Palladino working within her comfort zone, and anyone who didn't like Gilmore Girls or got tired of its style by the time Sherman-Palladino left may want to steer clear. To me, Gilmore Girls got tiresome the more it was weighted down by soapy relationship twists and angsty family squabbles, so a fresh start in the same style is very appealing, and I'm eager to see where Bunheads goes from here.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on ABC Family.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Ghosts' (1960)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

As I said when I wrote about his 13 Frightened Girls, William Castle's schlock-horror classic 13 Ghosts was pretty much an inevitable subject for this feature (as is the 2001 remake). As gimmicky as any of his other well-known films, 13 Ghosts also manages to be mildly creepy at times, thanks to some relatively contained performances (at least for a horror B-movie) and a simple, straightforward plot that focuses on scares rather than outlandish twists (well, for a little while, at least). It's your basic haunted-house setup, with a down-on-their-luck family mysteriously and serendipitously inheriting a creepy old house that, oh yeah, is also populated by the titular ghosts. (Actually, there are just 12 ghosts, because the 13th ghost will be ... one of the family members!)

The family actually seems pretty sanguine about the whole haunting thing, especially after dad Cyrus (Donald Woods, very dad-like) gets trapped in a mysterious room with a bunch of flying fiery pinwheels, then just goes off to work the next day. The handsome young lawyer (Martin Milner) who informed the family of their inheritance seems rather keen on getting them to leave the house; could he possibly have a hidden agenda? Well, duh, of course he does, and the eventual reveal of the lawyer's motives leads to the most Scooby-Doo-like ending I've ever seen in a movie (there was actually a one-season Scooby-Doo cartoon series called The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo in 1985, although it has nothing to do with this movie; also, to be fair, Scooby-Doo didn't exist until 1969).

Before that, there's a Ouija board scene (of course), a seance (of course), lots of pseudo-scientific explanations of the supernatural, and some surprisingly effective ghosts, made all the more unsettling by Castle's trademark gimmickry, this time featuring a handheld viewer that could block out or intensify the images of the ghosts thanks to old-fashioned red-and-blue 3D technology. On DVD, the effect doesn't come across, but it does make the ghosts look immaterial and otherworldly, which is about as much as a low-budget horror movie from 1960 could do to freak out its audience. The supposed "ghost viewer" left behind by the owner of the house is a flimsy excuse for the gimmick, but it does the trick well enough. Add to that a performance by Margaret Hamilton (who played the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz) as the house's enigmatic, witch-like housekeeper, and you have a fun little B-movie that moves along nicely until its totally boneheaded, sitcom-style ending.

'Common Law'

USA's latest lighthearted crime procedural opens with a quote from Dr. Phil, and things don't really improve from there. Common Law supplements its by-the-numbers crime-solving with a silly gimmick about the main characters, bickering homicide detectives played by Michael Ealy and Warren Kole, attending couples counseling to heal their dysfunctional relationship. So there are cutesy jokes about how their partnership is like a marriage, and there is the exaggerated banter that's not much different from any other mismatched buddy-cop show or movie, only here it's placed front and center, so that solving the crime in the needlessly expanded pilot feels almost like an afterthought.

Ealy is a charismatic actor, but both of the main characters come off as smug and grating, thanks to the show's needs to play up their antagonistic (but ultimately loving) relationship. Kole, playing the more uptight character, fares worse, and it's hard to find anything appealing about his constant self-righteous nagging. As far as the crime-solving goes, it's entirely rote, which is to be expected from a show like this but is still tiresome to watch. The real appeal, as with almost all of USA's "blue sky" dramas, should be in spending time with the characters, but by halfway through the first episode I never wanted to see these guys again. 

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on USA.

'W.E.'

Madonna’s elegant ballad “Masterpiece” plays over the closing credits of W.E., and hearing it after watching the singer’s second effort at directing and co-writing a feature film (following 2008’s little-seen Filth and Wisdom) makes it quite clear where her talents lie. The Golden Globe-winning “Masterpiece,” which obliquely references the themes of the movie, would probably have made for a very stylish, impressionistic music video briefly exploring the story of Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII of England. The film about that same story, however, takes the superficiality of a three-minute music video and spreads it across an entire feature, focusing entirely on glossy surfaces while failing to provide any meaningful character development or interesting dialogue.

Madonna frames the story of Wallis (Andrea Riseborough) and Edward (James D’Arcy), whose marriage in 1937 was the impetus behind Edward abdicating the throne, with a modern-day story set in 1998, about unhappy housewife Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) and her very slow-moving romance with a Russian security guard (Oscar Isaac) who works at Sotheby’s auction house. That’s where many of Wallis and Edward’s possessions are being auctioned off, providing a chance for Wally to engage in reveries that flash back to moments in the couple’s turbulent courtship.

Wally herself is dealing with an unhappy marriage to a cruel doctor (Richard Coyle), but the reason for her strong feeling of connection to Wallis and Edward is never quite clear. All of the main characters are little more than beautifully dressed pawns to maneuver around the admittedly lovely sets and locations. Madonna relies on showy, distracting camera work and an overbearing score to distract from the terrible, exposition-heavy screenplay (which she co-wrote with Truth or Dare director Alek Keshishian), and the result resembles a magazine fashion spread more than a movie. That could be the perfect approach for a pop music video, but it doesn’t do justice to the sweeping story Madonna’s trying to tell.

Available on DVD May 1.

'The L.A. Complex'

Summertime generally means two things on broadcast networks: reality shows and Canadian imports. The CW is getting a bit of an early start on the season with tonight's premiere of The L.A. Complex, a Canadian drama about aspiring entertainers who live together in a rundown apartment complex in Los Angeles. Yes, the network went all the way to Canada to find a show about Hollywood, although to be fair at least a portion of it was actually shot in L.A. And really, the level of realism on a show like this is not very important anyway. Chances are most decrepit pay-by-the-week apartments in L.A. aren't populated exclusively by young pretty people and don't have kick-ass pool parties every weekend.

So this is essentially a watered-down version of the recent Melrose Place reboot, except all of the characters are in show business in some way. At least they aren't all actors -- we get a comedian, a hip-hop producer, a dancer and a pair of screenwriters alongside the female lead (Cassie Steele), a fresh-faced aspiring actress, and her occasional love interest (Jonathan Patrick Moore), a hunk who's just landed a lead role on a medical drama. There's also the "older" actress (Jewel Staite of Firefly) who's washed up at 30.

That character is an example of how creator Martin Gero does attempt to tackle some thorny Hollywood issues, although he generally does it in a cheesy, obvious way, and it's usually drowned out by the bland, soapy plotting. There's a scene with Staite's character going to an audition only to find out they've changed the character to a black woman, and her rant about the tokenism of creating a "black best friend" character is spot-on (of course Complex has its own token black character, who is also the token gay character). I also liked that the comedian character really and truly is unfunny -- one of the best moments in the first episode involves cameo-ing Paul F. Tompkins and Mary Lynn Rajskub giving him a harsh dressing-down -- and that the main hunky actor guy is Australian and does an American accent in his TV role.

Gero understands the TV world very well, but anything to do with aspiring hip-hop producer Tariq (Benjamin Charles Watson) is painful to watch, especially after he starts working with a stereotypical gangsta rapper who has an obvious secret. Since it aired on cable in Canada (on MTV clone MuchMusic), there's a bit of edginess (it has one of the few TV strip clubs where dancers actually take their tops off, even if we only get to see it from behind) and some haphazard bleeping ("faggot" is okay but "tits" is not, apparently), which can be distracting. Mostly the show is about hooking up and cutting loose, so it should probably fit perfectly on The CW, marking time until the network's original hot-people-hooking-up shows return in the fall. 

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on The CW.

'Pariah'

Although it was a big sensation at Sundance in 2011 (where it won an award for cinematography), Dee Rees' drama Pariah kind of fizzled out by the time it made it to theaters, never expanding beyond a limited release (it never played in here in Las Vegas) and failing to garner any major awards attention. Reviews were positive but relatively muted, and Pariah is a movie that may have suffered from inflated expectations. It's a simple, small-scale story that doesn't break much new ground, although it does set its familiar narrative in a community that isn't often seen in movies, and that proves more compelling than the fairly predictable plot.

It's a coming-out/coming-of-age story, with Adepero Oduye as Alike, an African-American teenager in New York City struggling with her sexual identity. At home, her parents think of her as a tomboy and try to get her to act more feminine, and they don't approve of her extremely butch best friend Laura (Pernell Walker). Laura, in turn, takes Alike out to lesbian nightclubs and tries to pressure her to pick up women. But the shy Alike doesn't fit either of those molds, and finally feels comfortable when she meets the perky Bina (Aasha Davis), who seems completely at ease with her own attraction to women.

Alike's relationship with her disapproving parents (Kim Wayans, Charles Parnell) and tentative romance with Bina follow fairly predictable patterns, and the movie can seem maddeningly slow as it builds up to what is obviously coming next. But writer-director Rees also takes time to develop other characters, giving Laura a subplot of her own and exploring the social isolation that Alike's mother feels at work (without excusing her intolerant behavior). Rees also provides a valuable look at the underrepresented African-American middle class and how it deals with homosexuality. Stories like this have been told before, but not with these kinds of characters, and that intersection is where Pariah succeeds.

Available on DVD April 24.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Fashions of 1934' (1934)

Bette Davis is in bland glamour-girl mode in the amusing trifle Fashions of 1934, and while she rightly complained about being miscast and wasted in an insubstantial role, the movie itself has a certain charm. William Powell stars as Sherwood Nash, a dashing con artist who sets his sights on the fashion world after his latest investment scheme falls through. To that end he enlists Davis' Lynn Mason, an aspiring fashion designer with a knack for copying the latest couture designs from Paris. Nash starts out by selling knock-off designs to discount stores, and then incurs the wrath of high-end fashion retailers. So he gets them to hire him to spy on Paris couture, and the movie heads to Europe. But Nash's spying business quickly shifts into a scheme to put on a musical revue, which then shifts again to Nash opening up his own fashion house.

At one point Lynn complains that she wishes Nash would just stick to one scheme, and that's the movie's problem as well, constantly shifting focus so that it crams in several movies' worth of plot in its 78-minute running time. When Nash mounts his musical revue, the movie stops dead for several minutes to stage a lovely Busby Berkeley musical number that looks gorgeous but has essentially nothing to do with the rest of the film. Despite the choppy pacing, the movie is still fun to watch, thanks mostly to Powell's entertaining performance as the smooth-talking Nash, who charms his friends and enemies equally, and manages to balance several women while constantly stringing Lynn along.

Playing the ever-faithful girlfriend is not exactly Davis' strong suit, and she does solid but unremarkable work here. Verree Teasdale gets the juicier female part as a fellow con artist who's posing as a European aristocrat and has a very flirtatious relationship with Nash. Davis could have nailed that role (although Teasdale does fine), but instead she just bats her eyelashes and pouts. It's a throwaway part in a throwaway movie, but both the performance and the film are entertaining enough while they last.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter' (1984)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Released 28 years ago today, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was, of course, not the final chapter in the interminable horror franchise; the next movie came out less than a year later. It doesn't even make much of an effort to wrap up whatever meager ongoing storyline has been weaving through the previous three movies, essentially just recycling the same plot for the fourth time. Once again Jason is on the loose, despite having been killed at the end of the previous movie. And once again a bunch of dopey, horny young people are hanging out at Crystal Lake just waiting to get murdered. You'd think that the extraordinarily high body count would be bad for Crystal Lake's tourism industry, but apparently that's not the case.

This time around there's also a vacationing family that finds itself in Jason's path, including a cute youngster played by Corey Feldman. The other notable cast member in this movie is Crispin Glover, who plays one of the teenagers and is disappointingly normal, aside from performing a sudden spastic dance as the group listens to records in their rented vacation home (of death!). The teenagers and the family have minimal interaction and sometimes seem like they're starring in separate movies, although of course both involve being stalked and mutilated by Jason.

Director Joseph Zito and screenwriter Barney Cohen don't even bother trying to explain why Jason is still alive; he just sits up on his slab at the morgue, murders a doctor and a nurse and heads back to Crystal Lake. Unlike the last two movies, this one at least doesn't start out with the wholesale recycling of footage from the preceding movie, but it does feature clips of the previous three installments as an unnamed camp counselor (whom we never see again) explains what Jason's been up to, like a sort of "Previously on Friday the 13th ..." segment.

The death scenes are pretty unremarkable, and the characters are as interchangeable as always. Even a well-trained Jason-hunter, the brother of one of the victims from one of the previous movies, turns out to just be more boring fodder for Jason's machete. The Final Chapter improves on the last movie mainly just by not being crafted for 3D, so there are no more awkward shots of objects pointing at the camera. The characters are slightly less annoying, but certainly not interesting until the very end, when Feldman's Tommy, a fairly generic kid whose one personality trait is his affinity for monster masks, kind of goes off the deep end and mimics a young Jason in order to defeat him. For the alleged final chapter, the movie doesn't kill Jason any more thoroughly than the previous installments did, and it ends on an unresolved note suggesting that Tommy may have inherited Jason's propensity for serial killing. Luckily no one paid attention to the promise of ending the series, so the lack of closure turns out to be irrelevant, much like most of the rest of the movie.

'The Client List'

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.