Father Geek here riding along with Paul Revere thru day #2 of the Boston Film Festival... I can hear his cry now...
Paul Revere with more from Day Two of the Boston Film Festival - two films that really should have been better than they were:
Zero Day
I can't help feeling that Zero Day should be a little more disturbing than it is. Told Blair Witch-style, as excerpts from a video diary made by the two main characters, it shows a pair of high school kids methodically planning and preparing for a Columbine-style shooting spree in their high school.
No doubt, people are going to have problems with this movie. It shows kids building a pipe bomb and explaining how it's done, it ends with the image of a burning cross, and throws in a bunch of other hot-button imagery. It's filled with black comedy, but doesn't quite hit the right note with it - I laughed without any accompanying guilt.
The two lead actors - Andre Keuck and Calvin Robertson - are very good; very unaffected. This is the first film for each (probably their first professional work) and, as they mentioned in the Q&A afterward, it doesn't really feel like acting for them or the audience. It's also worth noting that everybody character uses the actor's real first name, and Andre's and Calvin's families are played by their real families. It's very natural until the end.
SPOILERS
Unfortunately, the rampage at the end is a thoroughly mixed bag. It's really the first time we see these kids' dark sides completely unleashed, and as horrifying as that is, we see it all through the school's security cameras, with the soundtrack provided by a 911 call. It may have been better to go without the soundtrack, as it mainly repeats what we're seeing on screen. Also, the use of the security camera does have the effect of pulling away to all medium/long shots, whereas before we'd been right in the pair's faces.
END SPOILERS
In the Q&A afterward, director Ben Coccio (in between saying "no, I wasn't trying to rip such-and-such movie off") had a repeated theme of "this is supposed to be ambiguous". And, okay, I can see that, but at a certain point it just seems too much of the motivation is left to the imagination, and things that had been set up are not followed up on. It's not bad for a first feature, for anyone involved, but the pieces don't quite fit together well enough as a whole.
The Man From Elysian Fields
This is a sleek, well-made movie that really doesn't say a lot for the time it takes to say it. Andy Garcia plays a writer who, desperate for money (his first novel was critically praised but a commercial flop; the publisher has just refused his second), takes a job working for an escort service.
The big problem here is that it's hard to have much sympathy for Andy Garcia's Byron Tiller; he lies to his wife and has obviously rubbed many people the wrong way. He's also got the misfortune of having to play a bunch of scenes against Mick Jagger, cool and sardonic as the veteran gigolo who recruits him, and James Coburn, the dying Pullitzer Prize-winning writer who is his client's (Olivia Williams) husband. Coburn, despite looking more frail on-screen than I ever remember seeing him, supplies the languid production with most of its energy. He and Jagger get all the good lines, while Garcia gets to look pained. Faring worse is Julianna Margulies as Tiller's wife, a character who seemingly only exists to be made a fool of. Michael Des Barres and Angelica Houston round out the cast, as another escort and Jagger's longtime client.
This movie is just too detached; it never managed to grab the audience and make us care. Even a few good supporting performances can't help that.
