Three quirky new movies playing at this year's Sundance Film Festival have little in common, except that they're all very original, very different, and each of them is looking for distribution despite being hard to categorize or draw comparisons to other movies.
In that sense, The Ten may be the easiest of the trio to sell, being a straight comedy from David Wain and Ken Marino of "The State" and Wet Hot American Summer fame, while The Nines and Slipstream are two highly ambitious experimental films, the first from screenwriter John August and the second from actor Anthony Hopkins.
Wet Hot American Summer, David Wain's spoof of '80s summer comedies, may have been one of the funniest movies ever made, but The Ten is a far more ambitious project from the former member of "The State" in that it's ten short stories, each loosely based on one of the ten commandments. It sounds simple enough, but it might take some to find the connections to the biblical laws in some of the segments, and it's a difficult film to review, because there are so many different ideas and ways that they connect that you almost need to experience it for yourself (preferably in a theatre with an audience).
Wain co-wrote the film with Ken Marino, another "State" alum who stars in the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" segment as a surgeon who kills patients "as a goof," then returns later in the "Coveting Thy Neighbor's Wife" segment along with Rob Corddry. (And to say more than that would definitely be giving away the joke.) The whole magillah was co-produced by actor Paul Rudd--also of Wet Hot American Summer--who assigns himself the plum role of narrator, introducing the ten segments while dealing with domestic problems, as his wife, played by Famke Janssen, has problems with him working so much on "that ten commandments project." He decides to find himself a girlfriend, played by Jessica Alba, who's even needier, in a storyline that carries through the framing sequences into Rudd's own segment. You guessed it, "Adultery."
Full of the outlandish humor we've come to know and love from "The State" and its splinter groups ("Reno 911!," "Stella"), the film is impressive for the number of characters and filmmaking styles used by Wain--there's even a very rude "Fritz the Cat" animated segment--as well as the actors not really known for madcap comedy, like Winona Ryder and Liev Schreiber, who stars in a very funny segment about "coveting thy neighbor's goods," getting into a ridiculous game of one-upmanship with his next door neighbor, played by Joe Lo Truglio.
Although there are plenty of former "State" members popping up in cameos throughout the movie, Marino and "Reno 911!" star Kerri Kenney-Silver are the only ones who have major roles. Instead, the stories feature the likes of Adam Brody, Oliver Platt and Gretchen Mol, who plays an ultra-religious virginal woman who goes down to Mexico and sleeps with a man she presumes to be Jesus Christ (played by Justin Theroux). It's the most solid segment with a joke that doesn't wear out its welcome as quickly as some of the others do, although each one has more than a few hilarious moments just from their sheerly outlandish nature. (Platt's Schwarzenegger impression is even funnier when put into its context.) The only problem is that many of the segments go on too long, so that the gags tend to wear out their welcome. The movie could have been much stronger with a few minutes trimmed from each section.
The only thing The Ten has in common with John August's The Nines, besides the numerical titles, is that they both are made up of multiple stories that are loosely tied together. John August is best known as the screenwriter of the Charlie's Angels movies and Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but for The Nines, his first feature film as a director, he gets as far away from them as humanly possible (and not only because there isn't a character named Charlie in it).
The movie is made up of three separate but related stories involving three characters, each played by Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy. The first story, "The Prisoner," has Reynolds playing a television actor who gets into trouble after breaking up with his girlfriend, so he's put under house arrest with McCarthy as his mother hen-like publicist and Davis as his neighbor. The second revolves around a reality show about the making of a new TV drama; this time Reynolds is the show's writer, Davis is a network exec and Melissa McCarthy essentially plays herself, as the star of the show. The last story is the most sublime as Reynolds plays a video game designer whose car breaks down in the woods.
August easily slips into Charlie Kaufman and Richard Kelly territory with an existentional film that often defies genre, starting very much like a quirky comedy but getting more serious and strange as it goes along. As a first-time director, August is certainly capable at getting decent performances out of his actors and keeping the film visually interesting.
Ryan Reynolds and Hope Davis are both solid in every scene, but the most impressive performance in the trio comes from Melissa McCarthy of "Gilmore Girls," whose bubbly to the point of annoyance publicist makes the first segment so much fun. Being a heavy-set actress herself, one might assume she's able to pull something from her own experiences for the second story, when Hope Davis wants to replace her in the television show's pilot.
The most interesting aspect of August's film is how things from one segment appear later in another and how he's able to pull everything together in the end. Reynolds, the actor, is being kept under house arrest in the home of the television writer, Reynolds again, while the scene in the woods might be a part of the latter's television show. It's the way that these seemingly unrelated stories tie together that makes this film so memorable, though there is something a bit off-putting about not always knowing what's going on.
The Nines has a number of things in common with Slipstream, such as the fact that it involves a writer, played by Anthony Hopkins, who is seeing characters from his fictional stories coming to life in the real world. Where Slipstream excels is that Hopkins at least goes all-out with his experimental approach to filmmaking, not trying to pretend to be accessible or mainstream with rapid-fire editing of images and found footage that won't always make sense. Although Hopkins was able to grab a few known actors like Christian Slater and Jeffrey Tambor to join his ride as a couple violent, wacked-out thugs, there are also more than a few new faces in his film.
In some ways, Slipstream is what David Lynch must have been trying to do with Inland Empire except that Hopkins' film is thoroughly entertaining and riveting, effortlessly slipping in and out of reality in a stream of consciousness narrative which might make it harder to follow than "The Nines." The movie blurs the lines between what is real and what is the writer's movie, though the production disasters suffered on the set of the latter makes for some of the movie's funniest moments, particularly John Turturro as a vicious Hollywood producer.
While the writing isn't always that great, Slipstream is a visual masterpiece, an amazing achievement in cinematography and editing to try to take what was in Hopkins' mind and put in on the screen. Sadly, some might find Hopkins' vision to be almost unwatchable, though there's some joy in knowing how many critics will be pissed off by how this film unpretentiously tries to avoid conventions. In that sense, it's very much the type of movie that has to be seen to be believed, since it's not an experience that's easily described. If while watching the movie, things go by too quickly, you'll have a chance to rewatch the entire film shown high-speed and in reverse over the end credits.
ComingSoon.net will have interviews with many of those involved with these three movies very soon.