Film
Drifter Donald Crowhurst
DEEP WATER In 1968—a year that seems surprisingly ancient when viewed through Deep Water’s faded, sleepy shots of English coastal towns—the Sunday Times (of London) sponsored a contest to see if a man could sail nonstop around the world, single-handedly. There were nine entrants, including the well-known yachtsman Bernard Moitessier and the astonishingly inexperienced electrical engineer Donald Crowhurst. Moitessier, a chiseled Superman, conquered the course easily—but just as he was about to glide into port and set a world speed record, he decided to renounce fame and fortune, turn around and circle the globe again. Crowhurst, on the other hand, was a world-class bumbler. Realizing early on that his practically homemade trimaran couldn’t survive the rough southern waters, he abandoned the race and spent several months drifting off the coast of Brazil, sending word to his sponsors that he was actually in the Indian Ocean. Things only got worse—much worse—from there. It would have been hard to squeeze a movie out of this Ayn Rand–ian fable were it not for Crowhurst’s own 16 mm footage of his voyage, which co-directors Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell found in a dusty BBC archive. His efforts to film himself look like something on Facebook, but they are haunting evidence of the toll that isolation and exertion can take on a relatively average guy from Somerset. —Julia Wallace (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)
This week in local theaters
MY KID COULD PAINT THAT A surefire conversation (and argument) starter, Amir Bar-Lev’s terrific documentary follows the rise of Marla Olmstead, a 4-year-old painter who became an art-world sensation when collectors began buying her works for thousands of dollars. With intrusive access to the Olmsteads’ home and life, the director accompanies her proud papa (an aspiring artist) and somewhat guarded mama as their daughter is feted by gallery owners and fawned over by buyers, who testify to the childlike innocence they say is obvious in the works. Then the story takes a jarring twist, captured on camera before our eyes—and Bar-Lev raises provocative questions about our fascination with prodigies, and even his own perhaps exploitative role as filmmaker. At issue is whether Marla painted the works herself—but that’s almost irrelevant beside the larger debate the movie stokes about artistic value. Are Marla’s collectors buying her splattery canvases for their intrinsic worth or for novelty’s sake? Does marketing trump aesthetics when there are no objective standards for the value of abstract art? (Once the story changes—and the public’s fickleness is a whole other issue—so does the paintings’ price, when of course they’re exactly the same pictures that people made grandiose claims for all along.) If nothing else, Bar-Lev’s fascinating film is a direct challenge to those who form their impression of a work of art from the signature. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at Green Hills)
AFTER DARK HORRORFEST 2007 The best offering of this second annual festival, which gathers eight independently produced horror films for a brief theatrical run, is director Dario Piana’s The Deaths of Ian Stone—the tale of a young hockey player (Mike Vogel) who stops to help someone lying in the road and is abruptly thrown in front of a train by some kind of shadow monster. He awakens in a new life as a successful businessman, but a few things are just a little off; before too long he’s killed again—only to wake up in yet another scenario. What’s afoot is something of a full-on horror remake of Monsters, Inc., with the monsters in question being Stan Winston creations called “harvesters,” with vaporous bodies and scimitar-like hands, who get high on human fear. In Mulberry Street, a mutant strain of bubonic plague spread by rats starts turning the inhabitants of New York into rat-faced zombies—well, not technically zombies, since they’re not, strictly speaking, undead. (They can also be taken out by a good punch to the head, which is pretty funny.) Less successful are Tooth & Nail—which also features the residents of a big-city building under siege, this time by cannibals including Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones—and Borderland, which offers a dose of Wolf Creek-style, true-story-inspired horror centered on a group of obnoxious college grads who unwisely head down to Mexico to get drunk and laid. The brutal orgy of torture and mutilation that follows makes the Hostel movies look like cartoons by comparison. —Luke Y. Thompson (Opens Friday)
P2 After getting KO’d in the parking garage of her Manhattan office building, workaholic executive Angela (Rachel Nichols) wakes to find herself chained to a table. It’s Christmas Eve, the building’s empty, and a sad-eyed security guard named Thomas (Wes Bentley) wants a little company. Angela quickly makes her escape, only to find herself trapped in the multi-level parking garage with her suddenly angry Lothario in hot pursuit. If it weren’t for two excessively violent deaths, P2 could be termed a refreshingly old-fashioned thriller, one dependent on hairbreadth escapes and the pluck of its heroine. Take out those unnecessary moments of gore and you’d have a silly (can’t Angela just pull the fire alarm?) but diverting little movie, one driven by a commanding performance from Nichols, a pale beauty whose resemblance to a young Sissy Spacek has been playfully accentuated by blood streaks and a Carrie-like cream dress. Regrettably, writer-director Franck Khalfoun (who wrote the script with High Tension director Alexandre Aja) appears to have neglected Bentley. The actor, who got his break as the son in American Beauty, doesn’t appear to have been told that a good cat-and-mouse thriller needs a villain who whispers menacingly, not stomps his foot and shouts hysterically. —Chuck Wilson (Opens Friday)
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