‘Animal’ is tamed by big ideas
There’s an unquestionably confident artsy-ness to writer-director Matt D’elia’s debut feature “American Animal.”
D’elia stars as a terminally ill, hedonistic shut-in named Jimmy whose life philosophy amounts to sitting around, watching TV, getting high and play-acting. He shares a spacious, modern apartment with his best bud and fellow layabout James (Brendan Fletcher), and when two attractive female friends, both named Angela (Mircea Monroe and Angela Sarafyan), come over, there’s a lot of casual talk, sex, drug use and enduring Jimmy’s costume-changing, languagee-ccentricities.
At first “American Animal” has a mysterious unreality to it, a strange diorama about easy leisure’s emptiness. But when James admits he’s taken a job — upending the roomies’ slacker utopia — “American Animal” becomes a philosophically strident evening of speechifying local theater (topic: human evolution). Suddenly Jimmy isn’t a cartoony loon anymore, but a Big Idea in Monologue Form.
Until then, dynamo hyphenate D’elia’s shtick and over-the-top theatricality carried a kind of amateurish performance-art charm. Too bad D’elia felt the need to explain it all for us.
— Robert Abele “American Animal.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. At the Downtown Independent, Los Angeles.
Where’s the rhythm?
There’s likely an audience for the cloying and dizzying hip-hop dance flick “Battlefield America,” but even the most forgiving viewers may feel like they’ve been underestimated — and underserved.
Writer-producer-director Christopher B. Stokes (“You Got Served”) sledgehammers his way through his unconvincing, on-the-nose script involving Sean Lewis (actor-musician and “Served” alumnus Marques Houston), a slick, childloathing, L.A. marketing executive arrested for a DUI and forced into community service — in Long Beach — as a kids’ dance coach. Even by fantasyland standards, this setup is a stretch.
What follows is a hodgepodge of flimsy plotting, weak characterizations, unearned emotional shifts and forced sentiment as the talent-free Sean, with apparent help from a pro he brings on (“So You Think You Can Dance’s” Russell Ferguson), somehow leads his misfit young charges into battle for an underground dance competition.
En route, Sean ludicrously derails his fast-lane career, plays dad to one of the troubled boys (Tristen Carter), woos the community center’s comely director (Mekia Cox) and, of course, learns humility. It’s all edited within an inch of its life.
The dance sequences are energetic but largely indistinguishable, with no effort made to put them in any real social or artistic context. And, though the starring youngsters may know their footwork, as actors they’re fighting a losing battle.
— Gary Goldstein “Battlefield America.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for thematic elements involving some drug material, and for some language. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes. In general release.
Watching is punishment
Set in an East Texas work prison in 1976, the turgid indie “Cellmates” pairs an incarcerated Klan bigwig (Tom Sizemore) with a happy-go-lucky Mexican fieldworker (Hector Jimenez). The bigot endures the lectures of a potato-farmingobsessed warden (Stacy Keach, full throttle) and falls for a pretty Latina maid (Olga Segura).
Really, you can’t blame Sizemore for turning the simplest physical movement or line of dialogue into a hoedown of over-gesturing. Cowriter/director Jesse Baget’s incessantly talky mix of fauxCoens-style redneck grandiloquence and un-Coens-like visual flatness leaves the fidgety star trapped in garish close-up for most of the film.
Then there’s the ethnic queasiness of Jimenez stuck playing a dimwitted manchild and Segura having to melt at the thought of bonding with a sweaty, loudmouthed racist.
A near complete exercise in mirthlessness and atonal satire, “Cellmates” is a sentence, all right.
— Robert Abele “Cellmates.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1hour, 25 minutes. At Laemmle’s NoHo 7, North Hollywood.