Julianne Moore in The English Teacher.

Julianne Moore, the non-stop queen of the low-budget indie-prod business, is back. She’s made so many movies I’ve lost track of them. (The Internet lists 71 entries in 28 years, five scheduled for 2013 alone.) Most of them are real dogs, but she’s always the best thing in them. Known for playing doomed, tortured or sexually twisted women in bombs that are best described as experimental cinematic lottery tickets, she rarely gets a chance to show her lighter side. This is a shame, because she has a delightful fizz just itching to uncork itself. The English Teacher is a sweeter entry in her versatile, overstuffed but checkered career. The cork pops at last.

She plays Ms. Linda Sinclair (note the Ms.), an unrequited over-40 spinster with high standards who lives a prim and lonely life of many disappointments and minimal prospects for romance—in other words, she’s a schoolteacher in a small-town Pennsylvania high school. Her thrills come from Jane Austen and other therapeutic literary obsessions few actual men of her acquaintance can live up to. Enter Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano), a former student who returns to town from a post-college spin as a failed writer in New York, knuckling under the pragmatic demands of a manipulative father (Greg Kinnear) who wants him to switch careers and go to law school. Jason has written a play, which he reluctantly shows to his old teacher after she mistakes him for a mugger and blinds him with pepper spray while filling up her car at the local gas station. Driving him home as an apology, she extracts a promise to let her read the play, called The Chrysalis. Naturally, she flips, calling it a masterpiece, and rushes it over to the school drama teacher, Carl Lapinas (Nathan Lane), a pretentious queen whose students call him “Mr. Penis.”

Sick of a school board that is forcing him to direct The Importance of Being Earnest for the fifth time, “Mr. Penis” insists on replacing it with Jason’s play, which he declares “timeless, relevant, universal in appeal,” and sets elaborate plans in motion for a production design that will be “new Edwardian post-expressionist Gestalt—only colorful and fun.” The two teachers’ passion and exuberance end at the door of the bewildered and addlepated principal, a discombobulated scarecrow named Trudie Slocum (a hilarious turn by Jessica Hecht), and her bombastic vice-principal, Phil Pelaski (the fabulous Broadway star Norbert Leo Butz), who prefers Our Town and remembers the debacle when Mr. Penis directed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! with masks, in traditional Japanese Noh style. This new play has dirty language, violence, sex, and ends with a teenage girl who hangs herself, and her father, who blows his brains out. While Mr. Penis feigns fainting spells to direct his ultimate dream production (“sensitive, dark and deeply depressing!”), Ms. Sinclair succeeds in getting the play on the stage and the playwright out of his pants. What happens from that point on is less than plausible but more than amusing, pleasurable and entertaining. Sometimes it’s just plain fall-down funny.

The English Teacher is best when it points out the naïve pretensions of academics who idolize the theater but think they know more about it than the professionals. Recalling his days as a struggling New York actor, Nathan Lane’s Mr. Penis regales his students with embellished stories of how Stephen Sondheim offered him three words of advice that changed his life: “Keep at it.” And working with Meryl Streep in Shakespeare in the Park when she uttered the immortal statement: “Speak up!” When his own students falter, he declares, “All great art comes from pain.” Meanwhile, the production soars over budget and Ms. Sinclair takes control, paying for smoke machines, strobe lights and costumes out of her own bank account, censoring the four-letter words and re-writing the ending to the author’s horror—finally landing in the hospital, in the arms of an attending doctor, who turns out to be the playwright’s overbearing father. Corny, but it grows on you.

 Under Craig Zisk’s frisky direction, the entire cast is superb and wrinkle-free. The screenplay, by husband-wife team Dan and Stacy Chariton, is thin as a poker chip but as clever as it is contrived. Julianne Moore gives her lightest, most endearing performance since Far From Heaven, and she has never been looser or lovelier. Even her silliest scenes are human and real, and watching her and Nathan Lane spin into butter is one of the year’s happier experiences. You’ll have to revel in the antics yourself to see how it all turns out in the wash, but Shakespeare’s phrase “all’s well that ends well” has never been truer. In The English Teacher, the charm oozes all over the place, and resistance is fruitless.

rreed@observer.com

THE ENGLISH TEACHER

Written by Dan Chariton and Stacy Chariton

Directed by Craig Zisk

Starring Julianne Moore, Michael Angarano and Greg Kinnear

Running time: 93 mins.

Rating: 3/4 Stars

Lake Bell, Katie Aselton and Kate Bosworth in Black Rock.

Apparently I’m not alone in my growing disgust with movies glorifying the physical and mental abuse of people in general and the butchering of women in particular. I had nightmares following the news of the three kidnapping victims in Cleveland who escaped unspeakable horrors after being imprisoned by a maniac for a decade. But I don’t want to see a movie about it. Nor do I envy anyone who suffers through a slash-and-dice thriller called Black Rock, about three hot babes camping out on a remote island off the Maine coast who are tracked, hunted, raped (and worse) by three demented hunters, veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan. In time, the girls take revenge by reversing the gender roles, giving the brutality a phony feminist slant. Despite the sight of so much cheesecake romping naked through the woods like the girls have never heard of poison ivy, it’s the usual disreputable grindhouse schlock.

Kate Bosworth, an appealing blonde who played Sandra Dee in the dismal Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea and Lois Lane in Superman Returns, plays Sarah, a can-do feminist who ropes two estranged gal pals into a trip to an uninhabited island for some quality time to mend bruised feelings over an old boyfriend. Lou (Lake Bell) and Abby (played by the film’s director, Katie Aselton) hold a grudge and scarcely speak. But they hike, open cans over a campfire and bicker about betrayal and jealousy caused when Abby slept with Lou’s ex-fiancé. Before you can say “Deliverance,” they are joined by three hunters who seem friendly enough, until Abby stupidly gets drunk and seduces one of the men, turning his predatory friends horny. Rage and resentment build. Let the violence begin.

Chased with guns, arrows, knives and whatever else turns gym-sculpted girls into candidates for a slab in the morgue, the women fight back using the same Hunger Games mentality as their pursuers. In Deliverance, the villains were inbred swamp cretins. In Black Rock, the psychos are war veterans entrusted with fighting for their country. If there is any point to this carnage, the message is, “Before girls go camping, they should pack their own weapons to protect themselves from demented war heroes.” (Except in this case, the bogus “heroes” were dishonorably discharged, a fact the girls ignore.) By the time 83 unbearable minutes finally end, you can’t tell the difference between good girls and bad guys because they’ve all turned into savages. In the clumsily filmed, blood-soaked finale, it’s a task to find any evidence of survival with a telescope. This shlockfest was written by Mark Duplass, the actor who loaned some ballast to the awful Hump Day and is married to Black Rock star and director Katie Aselton. The writing tanks while the actors try to stay above water, but nobody leaves a trace on the radar.

rreed@observer.com

BLACK ROCK

Written by Mark Duplass and Katie Aselton

Directed by Katie Aselton

Starring Katie Aselton, Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth

Running time: 83 mins.

Rating: 1/4 Stars

What Richard Did

What Richard Did, not to be confused with What Maisie Knew, is a tender, concisely written, sensitively acted and carefully directed film from Ireland about the devastating consequences of a senseless act of violence on the life of an otherwise gentle boy with a promising future. It doesn’t have big stars or an extravagant advertising budget, but it’s so much better than nine out of 10 other films you will see this year that you risk a big loss by overlooking it.

Richard, played by an incredibly impressive actor named Jack Reynor, is a carefree 18-year-old Dublin schoolboy enjoying one final carousing lark of a summer with his schoolmates before college begins in the fall. Richard is a born leader—handsome, funny, popular, a rugby team star, babe magnet and desirable friend to old mates and newcomers alike. This is the idyllic summer in the green lushness of Ireland when the splendor in the grass ends and the cruelty of adulthood begins. What Richard does first is fall for a smart, pretty girl named Lara (Roisin Murphy), whose continuing friendship with moody classmate and ex-boyfriend Conor (Sam Keeley) drives the usually easygoing golden boy into a jealousy he can’t control. One night at a crowded house party, Richard drinks too much after uneasily watching Lara’s show of guileless but annoying affection after uneasily watching Lara’s show of guileless but annoying affection for Conor, and a donnybrook breaks out unexpectedly, leaving an emotional scar that will change the lives of Richard and his friends forever.

The carefully calibrated screenplay by Malcolm Campbell, based on Kevin Power’s acclaimed novel Bad Day in Blackrock, subtly catalogs the aftermath of this reckless mistake of bad judgment with compassion and truth. The gifted, grounded and self-assured director Lenny Abrahamson juxtaposes the darkness of the soul with the torment of the heart as Richard goes through every anguished stage of guilt, remorse and conscience. Do the right thing, go to the authorities and risk destroying your future? Or form an alliance with your friends and allies that will result in an endless tangle of secrets, lies and sleepless nights? Meanwhile, the film also raises a provocative question about parenting, as Richard’s father (Lars Mikkelsen) faces his own dilemma. Can a parent continue to love a son unconditionally after losing all respect for him? Wrestling with the responsibility of giving the wrong advice to a child in trouble, he just walks away in despair.

One caveat: like so many films from Ireland, the thick accents and Gaelic slang are sometimes so hard to unknot that great sections of dialogue are rendered incomprehensible. But this is a film of such rare moral decency and emotional honesty that it would take more than a thick brogue to weaken its impact. This is due in no small part to the wonderful cast, especially Jack Reynor, born in America but raised and trained in Ireland. After the film premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, I predicted he would end up in Hollywood at the mercy of various agents, managers and makeover artists. Sure enough, he’s already working with Mark Wahlberg in Michael Bay’s fourth brainless Transformers epic. So catch him now, in What Richard Did, while he’s still unspoiled. As a boy whose only previous crisis was accidentally drowning a pet gerbil while trying to give it a bath, his Richard is suddenly plunged into a real tragedy no one his age should ever experience. In one of the most wrenching performances I have seen on the screen in some time, it’s thrilling to watch a young actor with passion and charisma explore so many avenues of damage control with so much depth, allowing the viewer to grapple with an unsettling variety of personal emotions. You may be shocked by your own reactions to “what Richard did,” but you won’t soon forget the movie in which he did them.

rreed@observer.com

WHAT RICHARD DID

WRITTEN BY Malcolm Campbell and Kevin Power

DIRECTED BY Lenny Abrahamson

STARRING Jack Reynor, Roisin Murphy and Sam Keeley

RUNNING TIME: 88 mins.

RATING: 3.5/4 Stars

Erased

This not-so-thrilling espionage thriller begins, like half the thrillers these days, with a bank robbery. The scene shifts from a safe deposit box in Belgium to the global affairs department at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It is never clear what one thing has to do with the other, and it is even foggier what Erased has to do with anything else.

In this daffy generic rip-off of the Jason Bourne franchise cross-pollinated with the daughter-in-peril plot from Taken, Aaron Eckhart plays Ben Logan, an ex-CIA agent who used to be a trained assassin, now starting a new life as an expatriate in Antwerp, working for a multinational corporation that specializes in high-tech security (don’t they all?). He is also saddled with an estranged 15-year-old daughter to raise. Precocious and sassy, Amy (Liana Liberato) has come to live with him. Oblivious to the demands of fatherhood and distracted by his job and his endless supply of technological toys, he barely has time to feed her anything but cookies, which send her to the hospital due to a peanut allergy. Then, with no advance warning, his company vanishes into thin air, the office disappears, the phone numbers are invalid, the bank accounts are closed and there is no record of his employment. At the morgue, he finds all of his co-workers in body bags. Meanwhile, Ben and his daughter Amy go on the lam, hunted down by the men who ran the fake company, which turns out to have been a cover-up for the shipment of American-made weapons of mass destruction to ... Mozambique.  Huh?  It gets dopier.

As long as Ben is the only member of the phony corporation still alive, the killers will stop at nothing to ice him. An ex-lover and rogue CIA operative named Anna (Olga Kurylenko, the catatonic wife in Terrence Malick’s valium overdose To The Wonder) arrives to inform Ben that the same people he used to work for in the CIA are tracking him too. Father and daughter, now fugitives, are chased through a hospital by a killer who pumps bullets into the patients in the intensive care unit. I never cease to be amazed how Americans who don’t speak the local language have no problem calling the U.S. using complicated telephone dialing codes on cellphones in foreign countries. But even though he has no job, no money, no country, no passport, and unless he thinks fast, no more daughter, he outsmarts everyone at every move, destroying most of Antwerp while maintaining a straight face through dialogue like “I’ll never forget the first day you showed up in Somalia—ready to set the world on fire.”

Nothing in Erased makes much sense. What do the gunrunners want? Why do they need to erase Ben? Why do they kidnap Amy? How can she avoid peanuts if she’s blindfolded? German music video director Philipp Stölzl and writer Arash Amel must have something in mind. “We’re cast from the same cloth—we know what we want and how to get it,” says one of the gunrunners. But nobody lets the rest of us in on it. We don’t know what anybody wants. All we know is that the only sure way to avoid the loss of any more I.Q. points in the world today is to stay away from movies like Erased.  

rreed@observer.com

 ERASED

WRITTEN BY Arash Amel

DIRECTED BY Philipp Stölzl

STARRING Aaron Eckhart, Liana Liberato and Olga Kurylenko

RUNNING TIME: 100 mins.

RATING: 1/4 Stars

Zhu Lin and Guy Pearce star in 33 Postcards.

The dependable Australian actor Guy Pearce is always welcome, even in a well-meaning dud like 33 Postcards. Versatile and unpredictable, he’s played to perfection everything from a flamboyant drag queen in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to a tough Los Angeles homicide detective in L.A. Confidential. In the Chinese-Australian co-production 33 Postcards, he turns up as Dean Randall, a man who has sponsored an orphan named Mei Mei for 10 years, financing her education and feeding her fantasies of a life in music through a series of postcards that she keeps like valentines from a surrogate father whose kindness and generosity have given her a better life. The two have never met, but everything is about to change. Now a pretty and intelligent young lady of 16 and a talented singer in the Dong Ying Children’s Choir, Mei Mei (played by the charismatic young actress Zhu Lin) is invited to attend the Australian Choir Festival with her orphanage. At last she can thank her sponsor and his “perfect family.” The saga that unfolds next you couldn’t fit on a postcard.

With no money, only a perfunctory knowledge of English and the return address on one of his postcards, Mei Mei disobeys her school chaperone and looks up Mr. Randall in Sydney. Instead of an idyllic home, she finds a battered dwelling in a slum where his hostile and suspicious brother lives, and a friendly boy on a motorbike named Carl (Lincoln Lewis) takes her to find the man she’s looking for. Instead of the great white father of her dreams, her sponsor turns out to be an imprisoned convict. The wife and children she imagined to be her “family” were completely fictional. Worse still, the orphanage heads for the choir festival in Canberra without her. Stranded in Sydney, Mei Mei is befriended by Carl, who gets her a job washing cars in a garage that is a hotbed of criminal activity and the headquarters for a ring of car thieves run by Carl’s father and Dean’s brother. From his prison cell, Dean tries to arrange for a foster home to take care of Mei Mei and rescue her from the garage crooks.  But to get an early parole to face his new domestic responsibilities, he will have to testify against a brutal fellow endangering his life. Although their disparate lives have been connected only by mail, the ties between the Australian man and the Chinese girl grow stronger by the day. And the movie gets more preposterous by the minute.

It gets complicated, with too many characters and not enough credibility. The script by Martin Edmond and the direction by Pauline Chan bounce all over the place. The plight of the immigrant teenager who gets innocently involved in the stolen-car racket gets sidetracked by the violent stabbing that awaits the unlucky prisoner she adores—and oh, the agony of it all. Guy Pearce soldiers through the clichés with his usual easy control, but it’s an uphill climb. 33 Postcards explores themes of redemption and belonging to show how the pain of loneliness is universal, no matter what language you speak. But what it adds up to is good intentions at hard labor. Just when you think it can’t get any more sentimental or tack on any more plot detours, the film attempts a clumsy cultural détente as the Chinese children’s choir sings “Waltzing Matilda.” The prisoner, his lady parole officer and the boy on the motorcycle are all in the audience, grinning like Disney cows. But clearly, the only solution to their problems is more postcards.

rreed@observer.com

33 POSTCARDS

WRITTEN BY Pauline Chan, Philip Dalkin and Martin Edmond

DIRECTED BY Pauline Chan

STARRING Guy Pearce, Zhu Lin and Claudia Karvan

RUNNING TIME: 97 mins.

RATING: 2/4 Stars

Yanna Avis sings. (Stephen Sorokoff)

New York used to be a swinging town after dark. Now it’s just lonely. After dessert is served, the cafes close. After the boring, obligatory standing ovations that end every show in town whether it’s any good or not, the theaters empty and the audience heads home. Back in the day, you could head for a midnight show at any nightclub in Midtown. Now everyone is in bed by 11, watching the news and setting the alarm. New York gets more like L.A. every day, where, as the great Shirley Booth used to say, “No matter how boring it gets during the day ... there sure ain’t nothin’ to do at night.”

Good news! The swanky Café Carlyle, a k a “Bobby Short’s Room,” has launched a new late-night music show on Thursday and Friday nights, bringing excitement and joy to People Who Know Things, like jazz and show tunes and the restorative value of the time-honored nightcap. Things usually get started about 10:45, and it’s green lights ahead by 11. Last week, the svelte, undulating body and warm dulcimer larynx of Yanna Avis were the lure. She repeats the magic Thursday the 16th and Friday the 17th. Your lids might get heavy just taking in her curves and listening to her sultry voice, but you won’t fall asleep. She’s from Paris, so like any bona fide chanteuse, she sells “l’amour” in at least seven languages. And she’s the widow of rent-a-car czar Warren Avis, so she’s never late for work. You be on time, too. You don’t want to miss a thing.

The show is called In Love With Love, and when this cosmopolitan femme fatale climbs on top of the grand piano in a gown so tight it looks sprayed on, crooning seductive songs by Kurt Weill, Cole Porter, Michel Legrand, Cy Coleman and others, you know she’s not kidding around. Singing Frederick Hollander’s “Illusions,” which Marlene Dietrich introduced in the film A Foreign Affair, she brings back the essence of those louche Berlin cabaret cellars where drinks were delivered by girls on horseback. “Want to buy some illusions?” she sings in a throaty whisper, and brother, you better have your credit card handy, because she’s not giving anything away. On “Big Spender,” she sells sex with a wicked sense of humor. Acting as a tour guide through Paris, where, Oscar Wilde said, “good Americans go to die,” her romantic French medley of “Ca C’est l’Amour,” “C’est Magnifique” and “C’est Si Bon” is formidable.

Nobody else is carrying on the European tradition quite so well, and her fans find it all charming as hell. No phony intensity. No innocent ingénue. And no music hall coquette. She teases sex like Dietrich, with a wicked sense of humor. She’s sharp and soigné as Hildegard Knef. And sometimes she touches the heart like Piaf. Ms. Avis has a raw, unrefined talent, the determination to succeed against the odds (what kind of future is there in today’s ragamuffin cabaret world for a girl with curves, warm as cashmere, who sings immortal lyrics like “Ich Hab’Noch Einen Koffer in Berlin,” accompanied by an accordion?) and an admirable resolve to make time stand still.

rreed@observer.com

Aftershock

Two horror flicks open this week after making the film-festival rounds, both more horrible than horrifying. Enter at your own risk.

Aftershock is the latest shlockfest from cult actor-director-producer-writer Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever), directed by Chilean horror icon Nicolás López. It features an assault of grotesque tortures, atrocities and slaughters of sexy Latino women set against the 8.8-magnitude Chilean earthquake in 2010. Mr. Roth plays an American tourist from San Diego on vacation in Chile, nicknamed “Gringo,” who joins two local dudes and three smoking babes for a wild all-night dance party on a picturesque mountain in the coastal town of Valparaiso. All he wants is to get drunk and ravaged, but before he can get laid, nature turns violent, trapping them all in a flaming disco, snapping the cable car to the mountaintop and destroying the town below. During the aftershocks, a severed hand slides across the dance floor, tripping up the sweaty bodies of people trying to escape. A woman opens a manhole to the street and a car drives over her head, crushing her skull like a melon. The six injured, panic-stricken partygoers run for their lives, land in the sewers and, one by one, meet a series of unspeakable deaths just as the walls of the local prison collapse and the inmates go on a murderous rampage. The actual Chilean earthquake killed 300 people and turned thousands more homeless, but this movie distills everything for comic effect. Everyone gets robbed, raped, impaled, mutilated, decapitated or burned alive. But that’s not all. Crawling through the blood-drenched debris, here comes the tsunami!

Sightseers is a morose, unsettling blend of pathology for sport and murder for laughs. Offbeat British director Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace) guides two creepy actors, Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, through a quirky script they wrote for themselves as a pair of homicidal social misfits on a week’s holiday through England’s beautiful Lake District. Tina, a lonely, repressed introvert with a vicious, domineering mother, ignores the warnings and joins Chris, a would-be writer she hardly knows, in his claustrophobic caravan to escape from her dull life and help him research a book he’s planning. It soon becomes obvious that he’s into something more blood-curdling. In each campsite, something terrible happens. When Chris backs the trailer over a litterbug who drops an ice cream wrapper during a historic guided tour of the Tramway Museum of Crich, Tina scarcely feigns surprise. Next, she seems delighted when Chris kills an irritating neighbor in a caravan park and steals his dog. A hiker who complains when the dog soils a historic monument gets his head bashed in, and they snack on the supplies in his backpack.

Sightseers

Between the castles, abbeys and ruins of Yorkshire and Cumberland, a romantic holiday turns into a carefree murder spree, and Tina finds it an enthralling antidote to her dead-end life. After coming across a wedding party in a village inn, she even throws the bride off a cliff just to prove she’s a game sport herself. “I understand you,” she tells her traveling companion. “I get it. It’s about empowerment, isn’t it? It’s just expressing yourself and thinking outside the box. I’ve been in the box. I don’t want to go back in the box. I’d rather die.” Her turn might come, but not until the two unpredictable writer-actors (with the aid of Mr. Wheatley’s screenwriter wife, Amy Jump) make their point: even murder loses its allure without structure, organization and style.

Balancing improvisation with black comedy, Sightseers is Natural Born Killers viewed as a dark sitcom while Aftershock is merely lurid slice-and-dice junk put through a Cuisinart. Both films have twist endings in which only one cast member is still alive. No spoilers. It’s up to you to find out who the lone survivor is. This is not meant as a recommendation.

      rreed@observer.com

AFTERSHOCK

Written by Guillermo Amoedo, Nicolás López and Eli Roth

Directed by Nicolás López

Starring Eli Roth, Andrea Osvárt and Ariel Levy

Running Time: 90 mins.

Rating: 1/4 Stars

SIGHTSEERS

Written by Amy Jump, Alice Lowe and Steve Oram

Directed by Ben Wheatley

Starring Alice Lowe, Steve Oram and Eileen Davies

Running Time: 88 mins.

Rating: 1/4 Stars

As the new Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is hopeless, a little boy in his first After Six tuxedo.

Let’s face it. The Great Gatsby never has been—and probably won’t ever be—successfully turned into a great motion picture. Many have tried (four flop movies, not to mention various small-screen attempts, including a truncated but memorable Playhouse 90 with Robert Ryan and Jeanne Crain in the golden days when TV still knew what quality programming was). Robert Redford was a perfect Gatsby in the pretty but boring 1974 version by Jack Clayton, but the movie was dead on arrival. The best I’ve seen is still Elliott Nugent’s black-and-white 1949 version, with Alan Ladd at the top of his form as the screen’s most glamorous Gatsby to date, heading a cast that included Betty Field, Macdonald Carey, Ruth Hussey and Shelley Winters. Mired in mysterious litigation for six decades, it has never been released on home video, is never shown on any cable or network channel, and cannot be appreciated by the legions of F. Scott Fitzgerald fans who have never seen his work properly adapted to the screen. And so his literary masterwork remains nothing more—an elegant but elusive triumph of words over images, best savored on the written page.

You don’t realize just how much misguided damage can be done to a great novel until it is vaporized by a pretentious hack like boneheaded Australian director Baz Luhrmann. Some critics, through the years, have put forth the unpopular theory that Fitzgerald specialized in style over substance, but as any college English major knows, he was famous for pruning away the clutter. With the cinematic meat cleaver that Mr. Luhrmann wields in one bloated misfire after another (I still haven’t recovered from the nausea-inducing Moulin Rouge), style is all there is left, and in The Great Gatsby it looks alarmingly like clutter. Budgeted between 105 and 127 million dollars, depending on which Hollywood trade journal you read, with every inflated expense aimed at your eyeballs in awkward, totally unnecessary and stomach-churning 3-D, this is one of the most maddening examples of wasted money ever dumped on the screen. Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic figure in the excessive Roaring Twenties who came from poverty and devoted his life to becoming a self-made millionaire to win over a superficial girl named Daisy, buying an ostentatious mansion on Long Island across the lake from her rich husband Tom and infiltrating high society with lavish, loud and impossibly overproduced parties masquerading as social events. Racking up his 3-D budget to the credit-card limit, Mr. Luhrmann turns these dinner dances into drunken confetti-drenched orgies. The sumptuous, vulgar Gatsby estate, overflowing with gangsters, movie stars, flappers, wisecracking alcoholics, voluptuous tap dancers, people falling from trapezes, clowns, acrobats and an orchestra in the middle of a swimming pool full of inflatable rubber zebras, looks like a high-school costume party on prom night invaded by Cirque du Soleil.

Is it any wonder, in all the slobber and confusion, that the acting is so bad? With the phoniest set of performances this side of an Ed Wood flick, you might as well be watching Plan 9 From Outer Space. As the new Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is hopeless, a little boy in his first After Six tuxedo. Worse still, he is no longer the centerpiece of the story, a task that falls into the incapable hands of the incompetent, miscast Tobey Maguire as Jay Gatsby’s friend, neighbor and all-seeing matchmaker and Daisy’s cousin, Nick Carraway. He might suffice as a callow Spider-Man, but as the film’s narrator, saying campy things like “They were careless, Tom and Daisy ... they smash people and then retreat back into their vast world of money and carelessness ...” Even with these masterful lines from the book, he just sounds like he’s reading from a college yearbook. Mr. Maguire is supposed to be the camera through which the tragedy unfolds, but he is light years away from possessing the range, craftsmanship and experience required to play a Fitzgerald hero. Mr. DiCaprio has the experience, and we know he can act, but he’s not beyond the need for a director’s keen guidance. Without proficient direction, he comes off like he has no stamina to give the role of Gatsby the stature it demands. That kind of direction would imply the kind of wisdom and insight Baz Luhrmann lacks. He’s too busy directing the confetti.

Carey Mulligan is another artist who knows how to pop the cork on bottled emotion, but her Daisy Buchanan is so trite and myopic you wonder what Gatsby ever saw in her in the first place. Only the terrific Australian actor Joel Edgerton has the proper grip on the material as her handsome, shallow, two-timing husband Tom. It’s supposed to be a story about fate and irony, but the jealous garage mechanic Wilson and his sluttish wife Myrtle (so soundly and wrenchingly played by Shelley Winters in the 1949 version), who gets mowed down by Gatsby’s Duesenberg, have been all but relegated to bit players. This dilutes the dramatic impact that builds to the story’s feverish climax, rendering the big finale impotent. This version of The Great Gatsby has the narrative strength of tap water.

Like Orson Welles, Mr. Luhrmann chooses interesting material to shape into movies, but then his colossal ego does ridiculous things to doom it. This catastrophe has actors who roll their eyes and raise their eyebrows in perpetual uncertainty about what kind of literature they are supposed to be interpreting—a trashed-up revision of the original with the narrator now echoing the inner voice of Fitzgerald from an asylum where he is writing a book called ... The Great Gatsby? The jazz and big band swing of the ’20s has been replaced by hip-hop music supervised by Jay-Z and songs by Beyoncé and Fergie with the historical significance of a tuning fork, and there are so many close-ups that it sometimes looks like a movie about ears. I love the publicity quotes by Baz Luhrmann stating that his intention was to make an epic romantic vision that is enormous. Also: overwrought, asinine, exaggerated and boring. But in the end, about as romantic as a pet rock.

rreed@observer.com

THE GREAT GATSBY

Written by Baz Lurhmann and Craig Pearce

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joel Edgerton and Tobey Maguire

Running Time: 145 mins.

Rating: 1/4 Stars

The Kiss of the Damned.

Just what we need—another sophomoric, oversexed vampire movie. You can’t accuse writer-director Xan Cassevetes of lacking imagination. Well photographed, lurid enough to cause concern for the teen market it aims to captivate, and with enough blood to refurbish an abattoir, Kiss of the Damned creates an eerie, foreboding anxiety that comes uneasily close to terror. Too bad they seem to be making it up as they go along.

In a huge, dark, gloomy lake house that seems to be located on the surface of the moon (actually filmed in Connecticut!), Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume), a girl with piercing eyes and an incoherent accent who suffers from a rare skin disease that forces her to stay indoors all day away from the sun, gets through the tedium watching rented movies. Maybe it’s her taste in movies that is making her viral. On a routine trip to a video store that stays open until midnight to return Jennifer Jones in Indiscretion of an American Wife, she locks eyes with Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia), a handsome screenwriter, who follows her home. Before you can say “Bite me,” he gets so sexually turned on when she confesses she’s a Creature of the Night that he practically guides her fangs into his jugular, moaning his way to the first of many ecstatic orgasms. When he regains consciousness, she warns: “If you start to feel a pressure in your lower back, then that will turn into a hunger, and that hunger will grow until you feed.” Totally intrigued by the idea of living forever, Paolo submits unconditionally and unconvincingly, and in no time he’s eyeing deer in the woods with lust (never heard about Lyme disease, I guess). This irks Djuna. Why settle for Bambi when there are so many hot boys and nubile girls ripe for draining? On the plus side: they won’t age, they won’t get sick, and if they get hurt they will heal right away. The dangers: sunlight, decapitation, fire. “I can’t believe what I was missing,” sighs Paolo.

Suddenly the Veteran Vampire and the Newbie Vampire are invaded by the Bitchy Vampire, Djuna’s evil sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida), who arrives from Amsterdam looking for new blood. She throws a bisexual orgy and adds her nude guests to the menu, betrays her sister by sucking Paolo’s neck to see what all the fuss is about, and plots to drive them away so she can take control of the house by arranging for the owner, a lesbian stage star no less, to seduce and drain an 28-year-old autograph hunter—the vampire’s prize: a Virgin Vampire! There’s more, but do you care? The sicker it gets, the sillier it becomes. There is one really hair-raising scene for anyone looking for vampire humor: a cocktail party where synthetic blood is served in fine crystal wine glasses. “Don’t worry, it’s not human.” “What is it?” “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s kosher ... the beluga of politically correct plasma.”

The dialogue is positively Edwardian, but the action is contemporary (and awful). You learn that vampires cook, use the F-word and pick up their victims in discotheques. Except for Milo Ventimiglia, the only cast member with a trace of professionalism, the acting is uniformly dreadful and mumbled in enough distorted accents to be rendered incomprehensible. The intrusive music that drowns out some of offending lines is by Bach, Beethoven, Maria Callas and Ace Ventura. Xan Cassavetes is the daughter of John Cassavetes and the sublime Gena Rowlands. Too bad her parents weren’t around to offer advice on how to make a movie worth writing home about.

rreed@observer.com

KISS OF THE DAMNED

Written by Xan Cassavetes

Directed by Xan Cassavetes

Starring Joséphine de La Baume, Milo Ventimiglia and Roxane Mesquida

Running time: 95 minutes

Rating: 1/4 Stars

The Iceman charts the dual trajectory of a modern Jekyll and Hyde with growing horror.

One of the most versatile and magnetic actors on the screen today, Michael Shannon has established such a reputation for playing twisted, violent and unpredictable characters that it comes as no surprise to see him dominate the screen as real-life Jersey City serial killer and mob hit man Richard Kuklinski in The Iceman. It’s a role of chilling power in a carefully compiled must-see film of overwhelming intensity that raises the genre of old-school crime thriller to the inescapable urgency of docudrama.

Kuklinski led a double life—as both a cold-blooded killer and a loving father, husband and devoted family man. When he was finally arrested in 1986, his wife and daughters knew nothing of his criminal activities. He was so clever at concealing the causes and times of the deaths of his victims that he was called “the iceman” because of his skillful use of cold-storage lockers to freeze the corpses. When he died in 2006 while serving five consecutive life sentences, he admitted to killing more than 100 people, although estimates reach 250. The true extent of his crimes will never be known. But the film, directed by Ariel Vromen from a dark and gripping screenplay he wrote with Morgan Land, catalogs enough of Kuklinksi’s savagery to send ice cubes down the spine.

From his first date in 1964 with future wife Deborah (Winona Ryder), the film jumps around in episodic time frames like a tennis ball, as Richie Kuklinski lays the bricks and mortar of what appears to be a normal life, carefully constructed to conceal grim secrets. Deb naively thinks Richie goes off to work in the morning to dub Walt Disney movies when actually he’s focusing his talents as a film editor on porno flicks. Before they even tie the knot, he shows signs of a raging temper. One minute he charms her by taking her out to dinner in Jersey City and making her laugh, dangling a spoon on his nose. An hour later he’s in an alley, slashing the throat of a guy who made a rude remark. He’s an obvious maniac to everyone but the family he stashes away in an idyllic suburban ranch house on a quiet street with a big, shady lawn.

Soon, issues with the pornography bootleg business bring him to the attention of the Gambino crime family, run by mob boss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta), and he begins carrying out executions with such a variety of methods (guns, knives, explosives, strangling, poison) that the police can’t trace all the murders to a single suspect. The Iceman traces the development of Richie’s lucrative career from the 1960s through the mid-1980s, but as the 1970s near their close, personality conflicts arise between him and the mob’s crazy, ponytailed Jewish lieutenant Josh Rosenthal (a pudgy, moustached David Schwimmer) that turn him into a freelancer, partnering with a rival killer-for-hire, “Mister Freezy” Pronge (nicknamed after an ice cream truck and played by the usually dashing Chris Evans, who has turned from Captain America into a sleazy creep for the assignment). This act of defiance raises the ante on the mob’s growing impatience with Richie, leading to ghastly carnage. When the money rolls in, his wife thinks he’s mastered the stock market. The suspense mounts. You won’t doze off during this one.

There isn’t much humor involved, and director Mr. Vromen tends to pile on too many gangster-movie clichés, but enhanced by Kuklinski’s constantly changing hairstyles, trendy period clothes, cars and other details, and meticulously framed by ace cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, The Iceman charts the dual trajectory of a modern Jekyll and Hyde with growing horror. Michael Shannon plays the mood shifts in a complex character of dramatic polar opposites with riveting skill. As a tabloid psychopath, he has never looked more dangerous and unstable; one minute he’s heating the milk and feeding the baby, the next minute he’s fearlessly stealing half a million in cocaine from the Cuban drug cartels and killing the couriers. After sending his girls off to Catholic school, he drills several rounds of ammo into Demeo’s best friend (James Franco) without wincing. But he has ethics (“I don’t kill women and children”) and he’s ashamed of his brother Joey (another sterling performance by Stephen Dorff), who is serving a life sentence in prison for killing a girl, even though his own crimes are worse. Ironically, Richie meets his own fate in prison in a suspicious act of foul play when he is on the verge of testifying against the Gambino syndicate. Like Paul Muni in Scarface, Michael Shannon is so fascinating that I was honestly rooting for him to survive. The point of The Iceman is “Even monsters are human,” but it takes a great actor to make a dubious theme convincing.

rreed@observer.com

THE ICEMAN

Written by Morgan Land and Ariel Vromen

Directed by Ariel Vromen

Starring Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder and Chris Evans

Running time: 105 mins.

Rating: 3/4 Stars