Bailey-Hayes Prods.
Homophobe Green in Cock.
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COCK AND BULL STORY
Opens Fri., Nov. 7, at Varsity
Billy Hayes spent five years in a Turkish prison for drug smuggling, and his subsequent book became the basis for 1978's Midnight Express. Now that he's had a good quarter-century of freedom, he's made a homoerotic boxing film starring and executive produced by Beverly Hills 90210's Brian Austin Green. Any chance of planting some hash on Hayes and incarcerating him in Istanbul for another five years should be grabbed immediately.
Directing and adapting his own woeful script from some deservedly obscure play, Hayes is so uncertain in his handling of this material that it's anyone's guess which way it swings. With echoes of everything from Marty to Mean Streets, Hayes' heroes are two scruffy nobodies just tryin' to break out of their urban squalor. Travis (Bret Roberts) is a promising pugilist who may or may not be gay. Jacko (Green, saying "fuck" a lot and real proud of it) is the hair-trigger, no-goodnik buddy who may or may not care. The crux here, hinted at in slo-mo close-ups of embattled boxing shorts, is that Travis always pops a boner during clinches in the ring, a fact alternately treated as incredibly sensual and incitement to bloody violence. If Hayes had the skill to muck around in such gray areas of the male psyche, he might be on to something; he doesn't, and he's not.
He's even less capable of keeping a narrative under control. Among many other ill-defined characters simmering in this motley stew are a ubiquitous detective (Sam Scarber, understandably confused) and Travis' sometime girlfriend (Wendy Fowler, terrible), whom he allows the repellent Jacko to accost. A gay-bashing bit is embarrassingly mishandled, to say nothing of an inexplicable scene in which Green is strung up half-naked in a nightclub. And, no sports fans, there's nothing sexy on display here. It's all bull and no cock. (NR) STEVE WIECKING
ELEPHANT
Opens Fri., Nov. 7, at Uptown
After Columbine, Gus Van Sant wanted to direct a made-for-TV movie that would explore the motivation of the killer kids. Craven networks wouldn't bite, but HBO fearlessly gave Van Sant the nod, and he responded by tossing out the script and real-world specificity in favor of this disconcertingly dreamy fable, cast mostly with nonprofessional Portland high-school kids who can effortlessly get emotionally naked for the camera. (Long before, Van Sant scrapped his biopic about Harvey Milk because its scripts inevitably turned into a movie-star vehicle. He was right: In life-inspired pictures like Dog Day Afternoon, people aren't really cheering the character; they're cheering Al Pacino. The starlight distracts from tragedy.)
Here, Van Sant's kids perform shaped improvisations based on their own life stories, inserted into an ordinary school day invaded by the killers' fantasy. One killer is named Eric, not to echo Columbine killer Eric Harris, but because the actor is named Eric Deulen. The other killer, Alex, is played by Alex Frost, who was noodling a little Beethoven on the set one dayso Van Sant incorporated soothing Beethoven tunes into the plot and soundtrack. In this way, Elephant is like a blank Warhol documentary; as we simply observe these youngsters stroll down hallways toward their destiny, enacting classic rituals. A football hunk nuzzles his steady as envious girls watch. A nerd girl gets in trouble for refusing to wear gym clothes in gym. Three Heathers-ish biddies gossip in the lunchroom, then go bulimic in the bathrooma weirdly Clueless-toned comic scene.
Two-thirds of the movie comprises disconnected vignettes shown from various kids' perspectives in the 20 minutes before the shootings; the final third gives us the last day or so of the killers' lives. We see some of the same events from different points of view, but not in an attempt to triangulate what really happened, as in Reversal of Fortune. Van Sant isn't out to explain anything here; he just drops little hints: jocks tormenting Alex with a spitball, and the killers playing morbid video games, erotically bonding in the shower, and ordering guns on the Internet. Van Sant has fled reality into a gauzy fantasy subtly permeated by grief.
What the hell does he mean by this exercise in ducking all journalistic inquiry into cause and effect? He recently told Portland's new alterna-paper, Organ, that Elephant responds to Columbine not through documentary; it's "more of a song about it or a dirge or a poem about it." He compared the film to a "tincture," one of the substances homeopathic medicine uses to apply a tiny bit of a disease to stimulate healing: "[It's] like a remedy that you pour on something. It sort of works that way on your mind." Elephant does worknot in the sense of healing any actual wounds, but by casting an eerie spell. The violence is distanced, the characters made both naturalistic and abstract, kind of like the spectral last act of the Spalding Gray Our Town. It's not true, but it's beautiful. (R) TIM APPELO
ELF
Opens Fri., Nov. 7, at Metro and others
So Will Ferrell follows up Old School's Frank the Tank, the most memorably lewd, original comic powder keg since Vince Vaughn's Trent in Swingers, by stuffing himself into friggin' yellow elf tights and slumming with Bob Newhart and Jimmy Caan in a fish-out-of-water kid- flick "extolling" the Christmas spirit via run-amok product placement?! And Jon Favreau, the caustic brain behind Swingers and Made, is the director responsible for this feel-good PG treacle? IT BOGGLES THE GODDAMN MIND . . . that Elf ultimately almost doesn't suck.
