The Rum Diary (Bruce Robinson, 2011)

Seeing Bruce Robinson attached to The Rum Diary made me want to see the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's novel far more than even Johnny Depp's return as the writer's stand-in. The writer-director made the greatest movie yet made about the bleak (and bleakly comic) effects of spiraling alcoholism, Withnail and I, making him theoretically perfect to bring the early days of Thompson to life. However, not five minutes passed before I instantly realized he was precisely the wrong person for this film, and the rest of the film only proved me right.

The Rum Diary, Thompson's fictionalized account of his time in Puerto Rico as a struggling writer, itself embodies a sense of emergence in the author. Imperfect as the book is, it shows Thompson on the cusp of finding himself, precisely through the substances that would later derail him. It is in Thompson's most booze-soaked, tongue-loosened moments that The Rum Diary foretells the man who would win infamy by spilling out his chemically rotted brain with each article. But Robinson's depiction of the cult hero's excess carries a sense of foreboding irony that would make him the perfect choice to survey the writer's late career, not the birth of his inspiration.

Drive Angry

Drive Angry resides in the No Man's Land between ignorant bliss and smug self-awareness, noxious tar pit that slowly sucks down fun premises into a black morass of lazy winking and absolving self-deprecation. However, it is also the first film in a while to successfully navigate its way back and forth through this trap-filled territory. Drive Angry certainly does not work as a subversive take on grindhouse in the vein of Tarantino's Death Proof; it is not even great trash. But it's damn fun, and as soon as I finished watching it the first time I admit I immediately planned a second trip to the theater.

Having managed to avoid nearly everything regarding the film save for its absurd title, I got to experience Drive Angry's slow mounting of story elements with a degree of unknown I never enjoy anymore, not in the age of total media saturation. The opening scene of the film depicts a CGI prison in a red-coated frame. For a second, I did not even recognize it as hell, though the presence of a muscle car tearing out of the place on a bridge also threw me off the trail. I don't recall Virgil mentioning that when he showed Dante the place.

The first 30 minutes of the film veer wildly out of control, jumping any fluid kind of editing with haphazard introductions for the movie's cast list weaving an unnecessarily ornate web for only a handful of characters. I saw the film two times and was still bewildered at the lack of context for the opening barrage of images, from Nicolas Cage chasing down some rednecks with pentagrams marked on their chests to a supremely tarted-up Amber Heard crushing the testicles of her lascivious, greasy diner boss. And just when you've settled down and accepted the absurdity of the situation, along comes William Fichtner in a suit calling himself the "Accountant," always asking if Cage has just come through the area knowing full-well the answer. Those left alive by the stranger's tears through town ask the Accountant who he is and what the man has done, but he deftly avoids any exposition.

By the time pieces start to fall in place and the character name John Milton drops a huge clue for those of us who remember senior-year English, Drive Angry has amassed such an impressive horde of contrivances, loose ends and overall questions about the physical properties of certain items and people that the whole shebang nearly collapses. Then, it acts as if nothing ever happened and finally gets down to the good stuff: blatant, unabashed fetishism of every body part and overcompensating gadget.

Drive Angry knows how dumb it is and occasionally shows its hand to the audience to let us in on its cheek, but the sincere, shameless ogling pervading the film makes for a far funnier and more entertaining ride than the occasional plodding moments of overt self-awareness. Cage, toned down from his most manic work, looks increasingly withdrawn in his roles, as if the weight of his recent manic episodes on-screen, be they good (Bad Lieutenant) or bad (almost all the rest). His rage here is amusingly insular given the wild insanity of his actions, a slow burn of resentment and self-loathing that grounds the film's nonsense in the sort of dramatic seriousness that only makes a film like this funnier. Then again, these days it is not always clear whether or not the self-loathing in a Cage character reflects its actor's own feelings.

However, he looks as if he had fun here, delivering his lines with a halting relish as if he wanted to savor every last morsel of such delicious lines as, "I never disrobe before a gunfight." Milton's story unfolds so ponderously that Cage's seriousness pales in comparison to the pseudo-pathos of his character, but Cage comes out of his gloom with enough dry humor to make the convoluted issue of his daughter being murdered by Satanists (led by a Chris Gaines/Garth Brooks-lookin' Cajun Jim Jones played by Billy Burke) and his granddaughter abducted for sacrifice not as cumbersome as the pile-on of narrative could be. Heard has scant to do save shout terrified or angry responses to Milton's dour carnage, and she does not appear to have put up a fight against the too-loving gaze of the camera, which always finds the time to scan over her rear and zoom in on her eye-shadowed face. It's harder to read what she thinks of her role, as she commits to the half-tough, half-damsel Piper but occasionally gives a glance that suggests she went back to her trailer to chew out her agent.

Even if she had a blast, though, she and Cage combined could not equal the unrelenting glee with which Fichtner, a super-solid character actor, plays his role. Delighting in the mysterious yet inevitable nature of his character's origins and purpose, Fichtner ignores everyone sharing the screen with him, walking around side characters asking the Accountant's repeated questions as he consumes every piece of scenery not nailed down, casually munching cud as the characters' bewilderment perhaps reflects the actors' own. Fichtner is one of my favorite "that guys," and to see him get to let loose in a role that does not so much take advantage of his skills as let the more subtle actor get his chance to mug shamelessly. If Cage hilariously meditates on his lines, Fichtner does not need to think before spewing out some ingenious, unmistakably sinister yet delightfully bizarre threat or insult. As a villain, he is not particularly frightening, but he does not want to be. The Accountant chases down his escaped quarry not out of a need for vengeance nor even a sense of duty (though he does need to "balance the numbers"): he's just having fun playing with Milton.

I would file Drive Angry under "guilty pleasure" but it does something I've been begging dumb movies to do for some time now: it never undercuts its thick-headedness with too many winks, never tries to forgive its exposition (and my GOD is the exposition in this movie ridiculous). Because it does not attempt to pass off its bad moments as knowing jokes, they actually work as comedy, and when the actual madness kicks in, Drive Angry has inventiveness to spare. A shootout featuring Milton still inside a bar waitress is one of the most outlandish sequences in years, and the use of slow-motion for the entire sequence is cleverer than anything in a Zack Snyder movie. I continue to prefer 3D in films that use it for the kitsch gimmick it is, and the flying limbs and slow-motion bullets flying at the audience make for as good a time as the schlock of Piranha 3D. I expected to go into this film to feed my ironic love affair with the bad Nic Cage (I have a completely sincere adoration for the man when he's on his game), and instead I got a perfectly delightful bit of screwball amorality. But I have a soft-spoken for chicken-fried crap; I am, after all, from the South. Also, can we get a buddy cop film starring Nic Cage and Bill Fichtner, please?

The Informers

The only reason I'm bothering to write about the latest, and worst, Bret Easton Ellis adaptation, The Informers, is because I've pledged to review every film released in 2009 that I see, and considering how I've been lagging lately in getting to the cinema, I felt extra pressure to document my experience. Whatever I have to say about The Informers is likely redundant in the face of overwhelmingly negative response when it stumbled through its extremely limited release; really, the only question is how Rotten Tomatoes lists 14% of the reviews, or even 8% when you consider only the most noteworthy print and online critics, as positive write-ups.

Ellis' stock and trade of course is the soulless, well-dressed wave of yuppie trash who grew up on a diet of wealth and drugs in the '80s and wound up ruining just about everything when they finally severed the umbilical and flew into the business world. The Informers is an adaptation of his 1994 collection of short stories already outdated in their depiction of synth-pop squalor; now, this film seems almost a period piece, a trek through the vile waste of Reaganomics theoretically timed to capitalize on the system breakdown it ultimately caused. In execution, however, Ellis' winding vignettes, suited for an Altman-esque exploration of Los Angeles' seedy late '80s underground of disaffected super-rich (poor things), is an interminably plodding drudge through episodic banality.

The various characters of The Informers all run in the same social circle: following the death of a young lad in a car accident, Graham (Jon Foster) attends the funeral with his girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard) and their buddies, including Graham's best pal Martin (Austin Nichols). No one seems to care about Bruce's death, except for the one kid whom Bruce hated (though poor Raymond didn't know it). No, it's Ellis' world, which means all the kids are on zonked out on Quaaludes and their own sense of smugness.

Quickly, the story moves beyond the slightest hint of plausibility, not so much a problem in its literary format, in which actual vampires roamed about the city, but fatal here because the writing turns to such cheap and exploitative measures to grab us. Christie sleeps around with pretty much all of Graham's friends, but he's well aware of it. He loves her, though, but when he confronts Christie about sleeping with Martin, she fires back that he does too. Later, a TV plays a news clip about a mysterious new virus that's proving incurable, and almost immediately Christie complains of illness and starts sporting lesions.

It only gets worse as we branch out into the other clusters of characters. Billy Bob Thornton plays Graham's father, a media mogul long separated from his wife. Thornton looks too thin and acts with the same ennui as the kids, even though the character is trapped between needing to maintain his relationship with his wife (Kim Basinger) for social reasons and pursuing a newscaster (Winona Ryder) whom he at least says he loves passionately; who could possibly tell amidst all this too-stoic acting? If the teenagers all act like jaded, adult junkies, I suppose it's up to Thornton to act like a child, but it just doesn't work when he tries to balance the flat and lifeless readings he and everyone else seems to interpret as an interesting expression of disillusionment with pure melodrama.

I shouldn't rag on Thornton too hard, though, as no one else puts in a decent performance in this thing. Brad Renfro, in his final role -- I believe the phrase here is "adding insult to injury" -- plays a wannabe actor and hotel doorman who finds himself put-upon by his uncle Pete (Mickey Rourke, obviously in his pre-Wrestler "paycheck" mode), a lowlife who kidnaps a kid and forces his nephew to house them. Rourke sleepwalks through the movie, though his innate charisma is the only positive aspect of the film, and there's a certain tragedy that he's without question the only reason this film, made in 2007 and long-delayed, got a release can be traced to The Wrestler's success.

At times, seemingly by pure chance, The Informers and its director Gregor Jordan stumble upon a mood of moral and spiritual emptiness that feels genuine, but it is quickly buried under yet another story that goes nowhere or ruined when someone speaks. Jordan's visual style seeks to blend the sleek look of an '80s music video with the dank and gritty vision of David Fincher (who of course directed Fight Club, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk, who basically took Ellis' style and actually put it toward a point, at least until the turn of the decade), but it ends up diluting everything under sick fluorescence that only emphasizes the aimlessness of the script: an addled rock star moves through groupies without regard to age or gender, Graham's mom sleeps with his friend, a kid goes to Hawaii with the dad he hates, and none it ever resolves in a satisfactory way, if at all. To distract from all of this, Amber Heard spends most of the film naked, which is well and good, but it's a sad day when even breasts can't coax any extra attention.