SXSW10-Mr. Nice (2010)/Elektra Luxx (2010)
Wipe that smile off your cock!
My ratio isn’t going up very much. Only two today…and one of them I probably shouldn’t even be reviewing because the digital projector fucked up about 10 minutes before the end.
More on that later, though.
MR. NICE
Directed by: Bernard Rose
Written by: Bernard Rose
Howard Marks (Rhys Ifans) was one of the most notorious drug dealers in England and one of the most famous people to ever come out of Wales. But he was such a nice guy that it was hard for anyone to really hate him. He was a family man, too. His wife, Judy (Chloe Sevigny) popped out babies like she was getting money for them.
What led to this life of crime? Fun. Not much more than that, from what Bernard Rose’s movie tells us. Howard was a straight A student and good boy until he started smoking pot. Then he started to find out how to import the drug. As long as he had fun doing it, he was going to do it.
I think the main problem with movies like this is Martin Scorsese. He’s pretty much perfected this genre. With Goodfellas, he created the perfect “fun gangster as family man” movie. He tried again with Casino, but even he couldn’t top himself.
Rose isn’t nearly as good of a filmmaker, so his Welsh version of Goodfellas just kind of falls flat. It runs everywhere and catches none of its goals.
This isn’t to say that it’s a bad movie. It’s just mediocre. Rhys Ifans puts in a good performance as the fun-loving, swingin’ drug lord. Chloe doesn’t have much at all to do as his ever-suffering wife. (In fact, we’re never quite sure if she hates his life or is indifferent to it.) The best performance is probably from David Thewlis as the true bad guy, Jim McCann. This guy not only deals drugs, but he’s a gunrunner. And he’s fucking insane.
One thing Rose did very well was capture the period on film. Not only did the film itself looks like it was shot in the 70s most of the time, but, instead of shooting new footage for outdoor shots and montages, he inserted the characters into stock footage from the 70s. They weren’t perfectly edited in, but it looked great.
Not a great film, but maybe worth seeing if you’re a fan of either of the male leads. Not so much if you’re a Chloe fan because she’s not given a damn thing to do.
Directed by: Sebastian Gutierrez
Written by:Sebastian Gutierrez
In this thrilling sequel to the Jennifer Garner actioner….
Um. No. Forget that. But this is a sequel, strangely enough.
Last year, Gutierrez brought Women In Trouble to South By Southwest. It nearly took the festival by storm (kinda), so he decided to do it again, this time focusing on (now former) porn star Elektra Luxx (Carla Gugino). She’s pregnant with a dead man’s baby, but she’s still super-hot and very sexual.
Elektra gets caught up with a young lady and her fiancee who are having some problems, a private eye looking for song lyrics (Timothy Olyphant), a couple who can’t seem to keep their hands off of other people and two girls who may or may not explore their sexuality together.
The movie is very episodic and doesn’t necessarily gel all that well, but there are some very funny moments and the characters are funny enough to keep us interested. It’s a silly little movie that’s not meant to be much more. I think it helps that the movie almost looks like a porn and that the actors are all putting on their best over-acting faces.
Gutierrez doesn’t show a lot of visual flair except in the dream sequences, which are mostly sexual fantasies. (The one with Emmanuelle Chriqui being the standout, although Carla Gugino is pretty much the perfect woman.) They’re not all that interesting as far as the style is concerned, but it’s a nice break as far as the story is concerned. It keeps up the kind of silly atmosphere that the movie is going for.
Really, though, the funniest parts were the parts with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a video blogger who is obsessed with porn. He talks fast and furiously about the great Elektra Luxx and her career. Then his sister gets involved.
About ten minutes from the end, though, the projector broke down, so I have no clue how the movie ends. I could make up my own ending, but I somehow don’t think that it would do Gutierrez or his characters justice.
Instead of the end of the movie, we got a Q&A from Gutierrez and his cast of lovely ladies. This is when I realized that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was just doing an impression of Sebastian Gutierrez. The guy talks really fast and is incredibly funny. He called out SXSW about 100 times for having a crappy projector (all in good fun, of course) and seemed to have as much fun as possible with the situation. No matter what I thought of the movie (and I did like it, just not as much as I had hoped), I want to see more of his stuff because he’s so freakin’ engaging.
They plan on showing the film again, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it to the screening. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch it on video or online when it gets released because I’m pretty interested to know what happens to all of the characters. Then again, I’ll still have to wait for the third in the trilogy, Women In Ecstasy.
