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Family dysfunction is more loud than lurid in The Quiet.

The Quiet is a rarity, the kind of movie where the true revelations are motivations rather than actions and where one of the most exciting things about the experience of watching it is the frequently blossoming realization that you truly don’t know what the characters are about to do next.

When her father dies, Dot (Camilla Belle), a deaf and mute teenager, is taken into the home of her godparents — Paul (Martin Donovan) and Olivia (Edie Falco) Deer — and their daughter, Nina (Elisha Cuthbert). The movie starts a week after Dot has begun living with the family, and as Dot begins to discover secret dysfunction in the Deer family, she’s forced to face the truths of her life, past and present, and what it might mean for those truths to be known.

The Quiet is directed by Jamie Babbit, a TV vet (Gilmore Girls, Wonderfalls) who knows her way around the dynamics of female relationships, and written by Abdi Nazemian and Micah Schraft, who, in this script at least, prove the same. The screenplay gets mileage out of the passive-aggressive dynamics of the Deer family and makes astute character observations such as the use of crisis-dominated news as a way to disconnect from one’s own life troubles.

The film’s handling of Dot’s impairments is excellent. The filmmakers use editing to show the psychological results of Dot’s isolation rather than using the typical trick of showing the physical manifestations of being deaf; there’s blessedly no scene where the soundtrack is also deaf.

The Quiet is reminiscent of American Beauty: The Deers seem built on the Burnham family blueprint, though each family member has flaws that differ from their counterparts. Olivia Deer abuses prescription drugs and, having issues with what money can buy (like Carolyn Burnham), passes out nightly in a room that is being remodeled. (She’s so numb she doesn’t realize when she’s wearing heels in bed.) Nina and Dot each take on various aspects of American Beauty‘s teen girls, and Paul is a less charming, less pathetic, and less forgivable Lester Burnham.

But the changes to the American Beauty formula are interesting. The Quiet‘s subject matter is more explicit: The metaphorical naughtiness of American Beauty is made literal, and the earlier film’s smug universality is removed. American Beauty is gaudy from the word “go” and succeeds because of it, whereas The Quiet has a finale that is chilling and effective but made pedestrian by giving in to a similar luridness it had avoided for so long.

The Quiet ultimately isn’t as good as American Beauty, lacking its wit, ambition, and aesthetics. The Quiet works, though, primarily because of Belle’s performance. Dot is given a voice through narration, and when she says things such as, “One day we wake up, and we realize the world sucks, and we suck for being in it, and we run away,” you can’t help but hear and believe her.

The Quiet

Opening Friday, September 1st

Studio on the Square

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Film Features Film/TV

Smoke and Mirrors

The Illusionist, a costume drama-mystery about magic, long-lost love, and imperial politics that takes place in turn-of-the-century Vienna and stars Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, appears to offer an antidote to most typical summer fare with its careful craftsmanship and meaty performances. After closer inspection, however, the film actually emphasizes the gulf between the classical storytelling models inspiring it and the lackluster contemporary product it is.

Writer-director Neil Burger employs several beloved tricks of 19th-century English novelists — broad characters, improbable coincidences, forbidden romances, hints of the supernatural, a few zingers about social class — as he recounts the story of Eisenheim the Illusionist (Norton), a popular and gifted conjurer whose love for Duchess Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel) draws the attention of power-hungry Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) and doubtful Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti). The look of the film is careful to evoke the time frame as well; the gold and copper tones in the cinematography and the rounded edges of the frame recall D.W. Griffith’s great 1919 romance Broken Blossoms.

As Inspector Uhl, Giamatti gives a fine performance; he’s smug and imperious to his inferiors yet resigned and small in the face of power. He’s sympathetic as an audience surrogate and narrator, although he tries an indistinct Austro-Hungarian accent at times that leads to such Grand Teutonic line readings as “I vass ze son of a bootcha, Herr Eisenheim.” Norton’s Eisenheim is a canny, cagey pro who substitutes a gesture or a look for a word wherever possible. Rufus Sewell counters Norton’s reserve with a vein-popping, moustache-curling throwback villain performance as Prince Leopold; Sewell stomps around and bellows like a lacrosse player juiced to the eyeballs with steroids before the big match. Sewell and Norton cross swords in the film’s best sequence, when Leopold invites Eisenheim to the imperial palace for a private magic show and attempts to expose the magician as a fraud.

Like an amateur magician’s stage patter, though, such entertaining distractions hide larger structural and imaginative shortcomings. The romantic connection between Norton and Biel (whose sensual gifts and intelligence are absent here) that should energize the film is tepid and threadbare, replacing emotional nuance and romance for two stock expository scenes and some gauzy sex. The inadequacy of such scenes shows how much imagination and sensitivity moviemakers have lost: Broken Blossoms, with nary a kiss (or spoken word) between the two leads, was much more efficient, effective, and enlightening in conveying passion and longing.

The central plot complication midway through the film is never credible, and Burger’s stock musings on empire and power feel like unsuccessful attempts to misdirect the audience and cover up narrative holes that remain open until the very end, when an alleged resolution emerges. Such ambiguity is fine if it leads to wisdom about character or society, but the last act of The Illusionist is mediocre storytelling capped by a “twist” from the M. Night Shyamalan/Bryan Singer school.

It is fair to compare contemporary films with past models, especially when Burger draws from so much prior popular entertainment to inspire his own work. It is also fair and right to demand more of a summer film than a thin, overly clever, horse-drawn version of The Usual Suspects.

The Illusionist

Opening Friday, September 1st

Paradiso, Cordova, Studio on the Square

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Reptile Style

Snakes on a Plane begins with a Hawaiian montage of beautiful white, sunny beaches, gnarly, ripped-ab surfers, and leggy gals strutting in bikinis. The movie’s soundtrack plays “Lovely Day” by Donavon Frakenreiter, a pop song so light it makes Dave Matthews sound threatening.

After a few moments, the action focuses on a biker riding his Kawasaki on a dirt road through lush greenery. The man starts popping wheelies and doing jumps, and though absolutely no context is given for the dirt-bike stunts, the editing and directing of the sequence are filled with enough slow-mo and close-ups that clearly we’re supposed to be impressed with what we’re seeing — this world where the girls run hot and the motorcycles hotter. As the biker slides through a sharp turn, he sends a cloud of dust into the camera, and, perfectly cued, the credit “Directed by David R. Ellis” appears onscreen.

It’s easily one of the worst openings in recent film history. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie can’t consistently keep pace with that level of badness.

The premise of Snakes on a Plane is, well, titular. But those snakes don’t just appear on that plane by magic. In fact, they’re put there by the henchmen of Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson), a vaguely Asiatic gangster (he can do martial arts and he has an accent — no more character development is attempted) who is infamous not just to Hawaiian natives but also to those visiting the islands on vacation. When X-treme motorcyclist Sean (Nathan Phillips) stops for a swig of his label-visible Red Bull, he spies Kim killing a man. Sean races off, and Kim’s goons follow.

Sean is saved by FBI agent Nelville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) and placed in protective custody. Sean and Flynn board a plane bound for Los Angeles, where Sean will testify against Kim for the murder. With his back against the wall — and because he’s “exhausted every option” — Kim puts poisonous snakes on Sean’s plane to silence him forever.

In the airport terminal, we’re introduced to the supporting cast of characters who we know will each either die in a horrible fashion or just barely escape. The passenger manifest includes the obvious — the newlyweds on the way back home from their honeymoon (bonus points for the use of a double cliché: the groom is a nervous flier), two little boys who are flying for the first time without their dad (bonus points for heartstring-pulling cheese: Papa is a decorated Navy officer), and a mother and swaddled infant (bonus points for the inexplicable: English isn’t her first language, but later in the movie she screams in perfect English, “My baby! My baby!”). Also on board is Flex Alexander as germophobic rapper 3-Gs, Kenan Thompson as his video-game-obsessed assistant/bodyguard, and Rachel Blanchard as the Paris Hilton-esque Mercedes, complete with a little annoying dog (named Mary Kate) in her purse. Julianna Margulies as a flight attendant and David Koechner as the doomed plane’s co-pilot round out the cast.

The set-up of the film is fine, fun, and plenty bad enough. But it’s when the plane is in the air and the snakes slither free from their cages that the movie underwhelms.

One of the fundamental mistakes of the reptile portion of the show is its schizophrenic identity: It doesn’t know if it wants to be truly awful or if it should be memorable for its scares. Snakes on a Plane leans toward the latter, only occasionally reveling in the ridiculous (relatively speaking, of course).

Snakes on a Plane is violent enough for a movie of its ilk, including snake strikes on a woman’s bare breast, a man’s penis, and a couple eyeballs (admonishment for our voyeurism, I suppose), and a snake pleasures a woman before, you know, killing her.

There is some inventiveness at work, such as when a snake zips out of a barf bag right as a passenger is about to be sick. And people foaming at the mouth from snake poison has never been funnier. But a lot of the action is just generic, blurry, hissing mayhem.

Another main problem is the look of the snakes: By my reckoning, only about 30 percent of them are real, with the rest computer-generated. The eye can’t easily be fooled, and it’s not scary to see a clearly animated snake threaten somebody. The filmmakers should either have used more real snakes (if they wanted to make the movie more thrilling) or obviously fake, rubber snakes (if they wanted it to be funnier).

Into this lurching miasma of sometimes bad, sometimes not bad enough histrionics, Sam Jackson is thrust.

When snakes attack

Jackson easily could have saved the movie even from its inherent flaws. But Jackson isn’t given enough fun things to do or funny things to say. The first thing Jackson does to a snake menacing a passenger is to grab it by the neck and fling it aside, as if impervious to the danger. It’s hilarious and in perfect keeping with Jackson’s persona, carefully cultivated throughout his career, as the baddest MF’er onscreen. But Snakes on a Plane abandons its greatest asset, sidelining him for long stretches of time in favor of cheap, traditional airplane-disaster-movie thrills.

Jackson does have two of the more notable lines in the movie. One, much publicized on the Internet, has Jackson proclaiming, “I have had it with these muthafuckin’ snakes on this muthafuckin’ plane!” The other is of regional interest: a passenger complains how hot it is on the plane, to which Jackson responds, “I’m from Tennessee. I hadn’t noticed.”

Ultimately, what keeps Snakes on the ground is its own preciousness. Based on its title and the involvement of Jackson, the movie was an Internet phenomenon and cultural reference point before production even ended, and the filmmakers seem to have bought into the worthiness of their product without having properly invested in it. But they didn’t get that it was never about the snakes or the plane. It’s the badness, stupid.

Snakes on a Plane

Now playing

Multiple locations

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Accepted

The curriculum for the filmmakers of the new high school-to-college comedy Accepted includes the venerable “Great Films” of the genre — Animal House, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Risky Business, along with newer models such as Rushmore and Old School. Those films are all successful comedies, and, in mimicking them, Accepted is funny too. But Accepted distills the formula of the earlier films to such a degree that it isn’t much more than the Cliff’s Notes version of the classics.

The plot is high-concept for the lowest common denominator: When a group of graduating high school seniors don’t get accepted to college, they form their own and pawn it off as the real thing to avoid their parents’ wrath. When hundreds of other underachievers apply and are accepted (automatically, via a technical snafu), a real, albeit nontraditional, school is born.

Justin Long stars as the brains behind the plan, Bartleby Gaines. Long’s comedic turn in Accepted emulates Vince Vaughn — right down to Vaughn’s patented wink and smile — to such an extent that it would make Rich Little blush. Long also occasionally throws in a dash of Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller, but Gaines isn’t as cool or charming as Bueller or any of Vaughn’s memorable roles. His overall, fundamental lack of popularity doesn’t make him endearing so much as pathetic.

The primary villain in the film is traditional college academics, and Accepted scores some hits, primarily during spitting diatribes from the fake college’s fake dean, played by stand-up comedian Lewis Black. Black’s inclusion inches the film toward being worthy of its genre predecessors. But the filmmakers can’t resist rip-off, and they show themselves ignorant of one of the things their hated traditional colleges teach in Economics 101: the law of diminishing marginal utility.

Opens Friday, August 18th, multiple locations

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Conflict of Interest

The single biggest buzz item out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the ensemble comedy Little Miss Sunshine is, at its worst, like an unintentional parody of American “indie” film.

The movie opens like a junior version of a Paul Thomas Anderson epic, pop music swelling in the background as characters are introduced in quick strokes: Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a would-be motivational speaker touting his nine-step “refuse to lose” program to a handful of sad sacks in a dingy classroom. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), is an overwhelmed Everymom. Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is spending his retirement snorting heroin. Teen son Dwayne (Paul Dano) pumps iron beneath a giant Nietsche poster, while, in the next room, his little sister Olive (Abigail Breslin), a cutie pie in tight pigtails and too-big glasses, stares awestruck at a televised beauty pageant. Finally, there’s Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), who looks grimly out a hospital window after a failed suicide attempt. As the camera settles on Frank, looking forlorn and defeated, the movie’s title is splashed across the screen with thudding irony: Little Miss Sunshine.

This sequence is very tidy in laying out the film’s characters and capturing their essence — too tidy. It works precisely because these characters aren’t recognizable human beings but screenwriting devices. Every character can be captured in colorful shorthand: suicidal gay Proust scholar (Carell); potty-mouthed, druggie Grandpa (Arkin); angry, wounded teenager (Dano), etc. And, even at their most developed, the characters can’t break out of these little categories.

What first-time filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (working from a debut script by Michael Arndt) have conceived here is basically a shabby little indie answer to the self-consciously quirky family malaise of American Beauty, albeit with considerably more optimism. Appropriately, for a film that’s as much a comedy on America’s fear of failure as Talladega Nights, Dayton and Faris transpose the conceit to a more lower-middle-class setting. But the filmmakers are entirely too impressed by the low-rent, middle-American milieu they’ve brought to the screen, lingering over a dinner of fast-food chicken and Sprite consumed from mismatched glasses and cups.

It’s over this family dinner that the plot is set in motion. Via a screenwriting convenience, pageant addict Olive is invited to participate in the “Little Miss Sunshine” contest in California’s Redondo Beach. But there isn’t enough money to fly Sheryl and Olive from the family’s Albuquerque home, so they have to drive. And since neither druggie Grandpa, suicidal Frank, or mopey teen Dwayne can be trusted without supervision, it becomes a whole family trip, including Richard, because Sheryl can’t drive the stick on the family van.

This is an awful lot of heavy lifting to get these six caricatures — um, characters — into a lemon-yellow VW van for a family road trip, where close quarters put already strained family dynamics on a full boil. Richard’s clueless insistence on his hapless motivational program is an affront to the rest of the family, all self-identified “losers” in one way or another. Well, except for little miss sunshine herself, who embraces every word Daddy says for fear of disappointing him.

Little Miss Sunshine wants us to identify and sympathize with these characters but undercuts any potential empathy by making them so inhuman, even stooping so low for cheap laughs that the movie suddenly morphs into Weekend at Bernie’s for a few scenes.

If it sounds like I hated Little Miss Sunshine, well, in theory I did. But it kept winning me over in the small moments. The script is a bundle of contrivances, clichés, and mean-spiritedness masquerading as up-with-losers solidarity. It gives indie cinema, and maybe liberalism itself, a bad name. But somehow this cast keeps taking that VW lemon and making lemonade.

Arkin goes through the tired old-man-behaving-badly routine with dutiful gusto, but when he finally gets a moment to communicate with his granddaughter like an actual human being, he seizes it. Breslin is charming without trying too hard. She never looks like she’s striving for her character’s cheerful obliviousness to family dysfunction. Collette has proven an able, humanizing straight woman to more colorful characters before (see her playing off Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLaine in the underrated In Her Shoes) and never allows her roughly sketched character to become a mere cliché.

Carell and Dano make their mutual respect and hostage-mentality camaraderie instantly credible, and Carell — whose The 40-Year-Old Virgin has been on cable constantly in recent weeks and just gets more impressive over time — is a comic wonder in the moments of physical comedy the script grants him. Kinnear is given the least to work with — his character is a clueless, one-note buffoon for much of the movie — but keeps his head above water enough that we’re able to buy in when Richard finally comes to his senses.

Little Miss Sunshine‘s poor conception and winning execution are all there in the big finish. When the family finally gets to the beauty contest, the segment is initially repulsive. The film decides to attack the pageant people as a means of elevating the film’s protagonists, zeroing in on the spray tans, teased hair, and caked-on makeup to make Olive’s competitors objects of ridicule. There’s a trite “life is one big beauty contest” message here, but the result is unnecessarily mean-spirited.

But then Olive comes out for her contest routine, an ostensibly inappropriate performance that ends up being subversively, if unintentionally, appropriate. And the rest of the family joins in. It’s silly, unbelievable, and — worse — a transparently desperate attempt for an audience-rousing climax. The actors sell it so well that it actually works.

Little Miss Sunshine

Opens Friday, August 18th

Studio on the Square

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Doc examines an enviro-friendly future that wasn’t.

In a 1993 sketch on the short-lived The Ben Stiller Show entitled “30-Second Conspiracy Theory,” Bob Odenkirk sat on a park bench and muttered, “John F. Kennedy was assassinated for one reason only: because he was obsessed with the dream of mass producing an electric car. When the heads of the corporations of this country found out about his dream, they sent a lone gunman to Dallas. He drove there without stopping for gas because he was driving … an electric car.”

Questionable alliances between state politics and big business is indeed one reason for the rise and fall of the electric car in the 1990s, but the truth is less fantastic. As the competent and decent film Who Killed the Electric Car? argues, the only thing killed was the belief that a company always knows what is best for all of its consumers.

With the support of General Motors CEO Roger Smith, electric cars — called EV1s — were manufactured in the mid-1990s and leased to several consumers, particularly in California, where the state’s emission standards once required 10 percent of cars be zero-emission vehicles. The standards were never put into effect, however, and every EV1 was repossessed and either destroyed or hidden away in industrial back lots.

Chelsea Sexton, a former member of the EV1 design team, spends much of the film puncturing the GM representatives’ statements about the EV1’s poor sales and lack of consumer appeal. Actor Peter Horton was the last California resident whose EV1 was recalled. His face is a mask of steely disappointment as the car is toted away.

I wish the film had explored in greater detail this strong connection most people forge with their cars. The film begins with a mock funeral where the EV1 is praised as a “special friend,” an ironic statement that becomes more sincere as the film progresses and aerial photographs of rows of crushed EV1s linger like footage of military cemeteries. While Tom Hanks is joking in a clip when he tells David Letterman that he’s “saving the world” by driving an EV1, there is a palpable sense that conscientious consumerism is now one of the only ways left to express liberal principles.

The masterful counterstrike of the car companies, then, was to market the electric car as a harbinger of post-automotive doom. The film’s most revealing segment deals with these curious marketing strategies. One EV1 magazine ad features ghostly silhouettes against an abandoned playground blacktop, evoking creeping urban paranoia and social collapse. The images would have been more effective as photo supplements for The Grapes of Wrath instead of two-page inserts in Sports Illustrated. The unwillingness of GM and others to abandon the massive profits of gasoline and the internal combustion engine is apparent. Such ads clearly played a role in making the EV1 “unpopular,” and thus short-circuiting a laudable transportation alternative. As the optimistic finale points out, though, improved technology and consumer demand may resurrect a similar vehicle soon. So the electric car, like The Ben Stiller Show, may find an appreciative audience after all.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Opens Friday, August 11th

Studio on the Square

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Strangers With Candy is offbeat comedy gold.

Amy Sedaris is one of the funniest women around. But she’s a comic who hasn’t yet found a high-profile project that showcases her talents. The reason is one that probably won’t go away: Her comedy is miles from mainstream. Any notion that Strangers With Candy might be her breakout performance disappears within the first five minutes of the film. This is no star-making turn. This is as offbeat a comedy as is likely to show in Memphis this summer. And it’s hilariously odd.

Strangers With Candy is a prequel to the TV show of the same name that ran on Comedy Central for three seasons beginning in 1999. The good news for Strangers strangers is that you don’t have to know anything about the characters from the show to understand the plot. However, having an understanding of the type of humor in the TV show will certainly help you get in sync with the movie. The film jumps right into a quirky-to-the-extreme style of comedy, with no acclimation period. Soon enough you’ll know: You’re either on board or it’s not suited for you. Meanwhile, Strangers vets can feast on the gags and jokes that litter the background of many scenes.

The plot is like an after-school special on crack. Sedaris is Jerri Blank, a 46-year-old convict just released from the pen after serving a 32-year sentence. She decides to go to high school, wanting to pick up her life where she left off. Blank peppers her classmates with prison chatter and vulgar homo- and hetero-erotic come-ons that aren’t appropriate outside of Chained Heat. Coming from a woman with a nervous, gremlin overbite (Jerri was “born with a complete set of teeth”), it’s so strange it’s funny.

That Sedaris is quite lovely in real life and Blank so genuinely ugly is just one of Strangers‘ many successes. Sedaris’ Blank isn’t like one of Tracey Ullman’s creations, in which, with little effort, you can still see Ullman’s real face peeking out from under the makeup. Sedaris pulls it off without betraying herself beneath the mask.

The supporting cast is excellent too, led by Stephen Colbert — who also co-wrote the film with Sedaris and director Paul Dinello. Colbert plays a variation on the “character” he plays on his TV show The Colbert Report. In the film, he’s a Bible-verse-misquoting, misogynistic, closeted-homosexual married man — and Blank’s science-hating science teacher. Greg Hollimon exults in stereotype as the African-American principal named Onyx Blackman.

Time will tell if Sedaris will ever bother to break into leading roles in red-state-minded comedy projects. It might be interesting to see her try to subvert the mainstream from within. Until then, though, it’s enough to treasure her for the way she can spin gold out of weird straw.

Strangers With Candy

Opening Friday, July 14th

Studio on the Square

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Dazed and Drugged

In the opening scene of A Scanner Darkly, director Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel, a man wakes up covered in bugs. Scratching furiously and fruitlessly, he runs to the shower to wash them away. But just when he thinks he’s clear, the bugs re-emerge from his skull and cover his body again. Twitching and panicky, he grabs a can of insecticide and sprays it all over his body.

The bugs aren’t real. They’re a hallucination caused by a drug called Substance D, which the man is addicted to. The scene is gripping, but what makes it even more interesting is the far-from-accidental casting. Playing the drug-casualty Freck is Rory Cochrane, the actor who, 13 years earlier, was the happy-go-lucky stoner Slater in Linklater’s beloved Dazed and Confused.

This is a telling juxtaposition. Because as much as A Scanner Darkly explores the themes seemingly important to Dick (addiction, surveillance, identity), it also feels very personal for Linklater. In following a makeshift family of thirty- and fortysomething SoCal addicts, Linklater uses A Scanner Darkly to return to the dropout culture he chronicled in early-’90s classics Slacker and Dazed and Confused. And it isn’t a pretty picture. The gaggle of paranoid, pontificating druggies (which include, also crucially, Gen-X icons Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr.) stuck in crash-pad squalor feel like the kids from Dazed and Confused, still dazed and still confused more than a decade after they should have cleaned up. The result is poignant — Linklater’s feel for the milieu still provokes laughs but with an undercurrent of sadness this time.

And as much as Dick’s and Linklater’s respective concerns merge easily in A Scanner Darkly, so does Linklater’s visual strategy with the film’s story. Linklater uses the same “rotoscope” animation that he used on 2001’s astonishing Waking Life. As deployed by head of animation Bob Sabiston and his crew of artists (I counted 42 animators credited for A Scanner Darkly), this rotoscoping allows digitally recorded footage to be painted over. The result is the best of both worlds — real personalities and performances along with the freedom of animation. In Waking Life, each character had his or her own animation style. In A Scanner Darkly, the look is more uniform, but the heightened expressions and shifting tableaus (the film’s frame moves like a living organism) add to the hallucinogenic quality of the story.

Set “seven years from now,” the central character in A Scanner Darkly is Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), an undercover narcotics officer who gets addicted to Substance D — a designer drug that’s ensnared 20 percent of the population — while trying to work his way up the supply chain. Arctor has ensconced himself in a druggy clique that, in addition to Freck, includes hyper-paranoid conspiracist Barris (Downey), completely fried surfer dude Luckman (Woody Harrelson), and dealer/quasi-girlfriend Donna (Ryder).

“There are no weekend warriors on the D,” Barris says. “You’re either on it or you haven’t tried it.” But as Arctor and his pals descend into a D-fueled haze (they sometimes call the drug “death”), you sense that there may be larger forces pulling the strings, from the surveillance-minded government agency Arctor ostensibly works for to the shadowy corporation New Path, which may be working both sides of the “death” divide.

Arctor wears identity-morphing “scramble suits” on the job, and, as Substance D takes over, this conceit rhymes with Arctor’s own internal shifts as different spheres of his brain battle for dominance. With Arctor’s sense of reality and identity crumbling — he’s so disjointed at one point he isn’t sure what woman he’s making love to — A Scanner Darkly can be hard to follow, although many of its questions are eventually answered.

But, ultimately, this confusion serves the film well. A Scanner Darkly takes you into the skittish, scorched-synapse world of its protagonists. Despite ostensible riffs on the drug war, surveillance society, corporate power, and suburban decay, it’s not a message movie. It’s too self-contained, too justifiably and rewardingly navel-gazing to make grand statements. It’s a woozy, paranoid pleasure that stays with you long after the credits roll, and it demands repeat viewings. And it’s further proof that Linklater — America’s most versatile director — can do pretty much anything.

A Scanner Darkly

Opening Friday, July 14th

Studio on the Square

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Nerd Paradise

In the best scene in Wordplay, crossword-puzzle constructor Merl Reagle sits alone at his dining-room table with a pencil and a piece of graph paper. Many of us try to solve crossword puzzles, those enticing but frustrating blocks of blackened squares and open spaces yearning to be filled. But most of us have probably never thought much about how they’re created. So Reagle, a regular contributor to The New York Times crossword, gives us a lesson.

First he shades in a few boxes, giving his puzzle some shape and symmetry. Then he writes in a few key words he wants to build the puzzle around. Then he goes about filling in the rest, negotiating tricky letter combinations, trying not to work himself into an irresolvable corner, coming up with combinations of letters that he thinks are words but needs to consult a dictionary to be sure about. As much fun as trying to solve a puzzle may be, Reagle makes us want to try to make one. Especially when we later see the delight of celebrity crossword addicts like Daily Show host Jon Stewart and former President Bill Clinton when they try to solve Reagle’s puzzle.

And that’s one of the great things about Wordplay, a charming, modest documentary about people who make crossword puzzles and the “solvers” who are their audience: It makes thinking itself fun, exciting, and suspenseful.

Wordplay, confidently and affectionately directed by first-timer Patrick Creadon, begins as a bio-doc of New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz, who took over editing duties in 1993, adding pop-culture answers and a looser framework to the venerable puzzle. But before he was at the paper of record, Shortz founded the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which is held every year in Stamford, Connecticut.

Wordplay‘s real subject, it turns out, is the 2005 tournament (the 28th) and some of its key competitors. Despite the presence so many celebrity puzzle fans (Clinton compares solving a crossword to grappling with global problems as president — you start with what you know and use that to figure out the rest), none of these notables is quite as interesting as the ordinary citizens who compete in Shortz’ tournament.

Wordplay‘s format is similar to the recent spelling-bee documentary Spellbound. We meet a few contestants in their home environments and learn about them, then follow as they all come together at the competition.

In this case, memorable competitors include Ellen Ripstein, a self-described “little nerd girl” who won the tournament in 2001 after many near misses. (Creadon includes archival footage of Ellen’s win, her frowning at the judges — “Are you sure? Are you sure?” — as applause erupts around her.) Ellen’s a mousy, nervous thing who likes to go baton twirling in the park and who remembers fighting back against an unkind ex-boyfriend who mocked her crossword obsession by asking, “What are you the best in the world at?” And then there’s Tyler Hinman, an astoundingly normal 20-year-old college student who constructs puzzles at his fraternity house and is trying to become the youngest winner ever.

Wordplay isn’t as emotionally engrossing as Spellbound. You don’t worry over these adults the way you do the kids. But it’s more inspiring. The tension and competition in Spellbound could be a little uncomfortable, and that movie never made you want to spell. In Wordplay, the solvers want to win, but the journey of solving the puzzle is more important. As is the fellowship with their crossword-addicted friends.

There’s something almost utopian about Wordplay‘s climactic gathering: In an increasingly dumbed-down and coarsened culture, here are dozens of smart, kind people enjoying each other and the literate, engaging puzzles they solve. Who knew nerd paradise was a hotel conference room in Connecticut?

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Film Features Film/TV

Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island

From Carnival of Souls to KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, amusement parks have been prime real estate for low-budget horror movies. That’s what local filmmaker Mark Jones had in mind when he was preparing to shoot his script Fraternity Massacre at the Haunted Amusement Park.

“The idea was just to make a schlocky horror movie,” says Jones, who made his mark on the Memphis film scene five years ago with his polished screwball comedy debut, Eli Parker Is Getting Married?. “And then from that I thought, of course, set it at Libertyland. I thought it would be a great location for a spooky horror movie. So I tried to work with Libertyland, but that didn’t work out like I’d hoped.”

Unable to secure the closed Midtown theme park as a location, Jones retooled his script for a new location: Mud Island. With help from the film commission, Jones secured the downtown park for a shoot last fall, and Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island was born.

A gay-themed horror-comedy spoof, Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island debuts Thursday, June 29th, at Studio on the Square.

Jones, who wrote and directed the film, reunites with his Eli Parker collaborator Ryan Parker, who serves as the editor and director of photography on the current film. The plot concerns a fraternity “hell night” staged at Hell Island, which had witnessed a multiple murder on the 4th of July 20 years earlier. Protagonist Jack (Tyler Farrell) is a gay pledge whose sexuality is known only to his also-closeted frat- brother boyfriend (Michael Gravois). On hell night, Jack not only has to worry about ghosts and fraternity hazing: There’s also a murderous clown on the loose, which has nothing on the perils of being in the closet while in the frat.

Because of the gay theme, Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island is able to spoof the sexualized atmosphere of both slasher movies and real-life fraternities. Jack is constantly dealing with (ostensibly) straight frat brothers undressing in front of him or regaling him with their sexual exploits.

“That happens a lot when you’re in the closet,” Jones, a onetime fraternity member at South Carolina’s Presbyterian College, says. “You don’t know who’s gay in the fraternity and who isn’t.”

Jones’ movie tackles these issues with a light comic touch that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Eli Parker Is Getting Married?. At the end, Jack’s frat has been turned upside down and now features a “token straight brother.”

Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island is also extremely light on bloodshed. Jones admits he isn’t much of a horror fan and is more interested in the comedy element of the film. But he also cites the diverse films made by favorite filmmakers such as Robert Wise and especially Billy Wilder as something to aspire to.

After screening this week, Jones will get ready to show his film at the North Carolina Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which will be held in Durham in August.

Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island screens at Studio on the Square Thursday, June 29th, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. At press time, the 7 p.m. screening was sold out, but there were tickets still available for the 9 p.m. showing. Tickets are $5 and are available in advance at Burke’s Book Store in Midtown.