[This week’s "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the history-rewriting presidential actioner Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.]

Political satire is nothing new to the horror genre, and on more than a few occasions—for example, William Lustig and Larry Cohen's Uncle Sam, or Joe Dante's Masters of Horror episode "Homecoming"—it's managed to find a suitable equilibrium with nasty carnage. Such a balance, alas, is nowhere to be found in The Tripper, the feature directorial debut of actor David Arquette, about a bunch of twentysomething friends who find themselves coping with all manner of clichéd slasher-madness circumstances, none more deadly than being pursued by an axe-wielding maniac in a Ronald Reagan mask. If you’re immediately wondering whether the Gipper—who's stalking victims at a drugged-out hippie-dippie Free Love music festival at Redwoods National Forest—eventually finds a way to carve "Just Say No" into his victims’ bodies, you're already one step ahead of this leaden effort. Arquette and co-screenwriter Joe Harris (Darkness Falls) intend for their material to be an everyone's-a-target lampoon in which no one is safe from being literally and figuratively picked apart. The problem here, however, is that by taking aim at all types across the political spectrum, the film plays less like a nihilistic equal-opportunity censure than a confused mess.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: The Tripper (2006)...

Given the bestselling success of Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice with Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, film adaptations were only a matter of time. The latter's premise is fundamentally offensive, trivializing both sides of the Mason-Dixon line: the South becomes the province of vampiric misdirection, with no messy lingering racial repercussions anywhere. Director Timur Bekmambetov's primary task is to deliver a product that's outrageous rather than merely ill-advised. Through sheer bombast and relentlessness, he succeeds.

As he demonstrated in his Russian blockbusters Night Watch/Day Watch and Hollywood debut Wanted, Bekmambetov's instincts are more American than most Americans. Scorning pro forma scenes of heroes agonizing over the right thing or any form of dramatic nuance, Bekmambetov prefers relentless speed and has notable contempt for the laws of physics. A car drove across a building's facade perpendicular to the ground in Day Watch, a plunging train provided the staging ground for a weightless fight in Wanted, and here vampires' super-strength gives Bekmambetov all the excuse he needs for more anti-gravity absurdity. This is only movie you'll see all year—possibly ever—in which a horse is thrown at someone else… in the middle of a stampede.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter...

To say that Rosemarie DeWitt is so good you don't notice her isn't meant as a slight. It's probably the highest compliment you can give to an actor. Few contemporary screen performers flow into character, story and scene as seamlessly as the 37-year-old Jersey gal, who began her career on the Off-Broadway stage before racking up plenty of notable credits on TV (Don Draper's bohemian femme fatale on Mad Men, Toni Collette's sister on The United States of Tara) and tons of indie cred in everything from Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married to the 2011 critics fave Margaret. DeWitt is having a very busy summer. She co-stars with Emily Blunt and Mark Duplass in Lynn Shelton's shaggy-dog sibling comedy, Your Sister's Sister, and also has a part in the gutter-mouthed alien invasion farce The Watch (with Jonah Hill, Vince Vaughn, et al). This fall, she has a key role in Nobody Walks, the third film from indie writer-director Ry Russo-Young, in which she plays a Silver Lake psychiatrist whose sound designer husband (John Krasinski) gets a little too involved with their houseguest, a 20-something filmmaker (Olivia Thirlby) who's experimenting with more than the sound mix on her movie.

DeWitt visited New York in April for Sister's East Coast premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, and took an hour to chat over coffee in the upstairs lounge at the Soho Grand Hotel. She was as warm and outgoing a conversationalist as anyone could ask for. My only regret was that it was too early too offer her some tequila, which goes over very well in the movie—as one may surmise from reading Vadim Rizov's review. But we are professionals here, after all.

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Rosemarie DeWitt...

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the hair metal-loving '80s-era musical Rock of Ages.]

"When The Pick of Destiny was released, it was a bomb / And all the critics said that The D was done," croons Jack Black at the outset of his and partner Kyle Gass' new Tenacious D album Rize of the Fenix—a jokey admission of failure that's at once accurate (the film tanked at the box office) and yet sells the D's sole cinematic offering more than a bit short. Hitting theaters in 2006 thanks largely to Black's emergence as a big-screen star, Liam Lynch's musical odyssey neither fully satisfied the faithful nor roped in new loyalists, in part due to a script (by Black, Gass and Lynch) that was light on memorable one-liners and an original soundtrack that wasn't as consistently catchy as the group's superior self-titled 2001 debut album. In hindsight, however, the fate of this adaptation of Black and Gass' short-lived HBO comedy series—which amounted to three vignette-filled episodes of blistering acoustic-rock bravado and wacko-stoner surrealism—was undeserved. Rocking much harder than it has any right to, as well as both embracing and goofily screwing around with the clichés of rock-'n-roll, musicals, coming-of-age stories, road-trip adventures, and mythic journeys, the film grooves with a larger-than-life grinning-idiot verve that's indicative of both Tenacious D's tunes and the '70s and '80s arena metal to which it pays tribute.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (2006)...

In writer-director Lynn Shelton's Humpday, Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard talk themselves into a dare requiring endless verbal finesse and hedging to back out of. Shelton's Your Sister's Sister reverses the structure: first comes the act, then the discussions. Sent to recover from a year of mourning for his late brother at best friend Iris' (Emily Blunt) isolated family house, Jack (Duplass again) finds Iris' lesbian half-sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) already there for a solitary retreat to work through the recent end of a seven-year relationship. A late-night tequila session leads to an ill-advised hook-up, whose ramifications at first seem within the boundaries of the merely temporarily uncomfortable. Surprisingly and satisfyingly plotty, Your Sister's Sister slowly introduces information creating a thornier dilemma whose not-to-be-spoiled implications threaten Jack and Iris' friendship and—more seriously—the two women's ability to ever talk again.

Shelton's setpieces alternate playful conversational evasions and ineloquent emotional explosions. The verbose fumbling shares a lot in common with Andrew Bujalski's work, notably Mutual Appreciation, which also ends with a group hug. That finale was overly satirical (the ritualized reconciliation clearly solved nothing), but Sister's "open-ended" final embrace lets everyone off the hook. Dramatically, this film follows Humpday's two protagonists' lead in backing away from potentially scarring follow-through.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Your Sister's Sister...