Justin Kelly's KING COBRA explores the gay porn industry via some real-life characters

Sometimes it seems like just about every second movie is "based on true events." Yesterday's film certainly was; so is today's, though this one deals with a milieu that's a good deal shadier. KING COBRA tackles the tale of one, Sean Paul Lockhart, aka Brent Corrigan and later Fox Ryder, a just-under-age gay kid who leaves his California home to come east and begin making movies and having sex with his mentor/director, the owner of a successful pornography company called Cobra Video. Ambition, jealousy and murder follow.

Earlier this month we covered Seed Money, a documentary about another, even more successful, gay porn operator and his thriving business, though that film -- much more encompassing of time periods, fashions, tastes and trends -- offered nothing so sleazy and blood-splattered as this. Written and directed by Justin Kelly, shown at left, King Cobra proves interesting, of course (what film dealing with all this would not?). It also proves a little too safe.

For a film to want to give us a look at the hardcore porn industry and then completely avoids any full-frontal shots (not even soft: This is a Hollywood product, after all) seems a bit odd, don't you think? Granted, Mr. Kelly and his starry cast are more interested in probing "character" than mere sex play, and he and his actors indeed do a pretty good job of bringing to life these highly troubled strivers.

The four male leads include Christian Slater (above left), as the head of Cobra; Garrett Clayton (center left, above), as the naive twinkie, Lockhart/Corrigan; and James Franco (above, right), as a would-be wealthy fellow who wants to keep his younger, porn-actor lover (Keegan Allen, center, right, and below) in the accustomed style.

Two high-profile actresses -- Molly Ringwald as the Cobra owner's sister, and Alicia Silverstone, as Lockhart's mom -- complete the major cast, but the women's roles are so cursorily conceived and written that these two characters could have been left out of the film entirely with little damage done. No, this movie belong to the guys, as you might expect in a film that deals so heavily with the gay porn industry.

Because three of the four males we meet here are extremely troubled people (Lockhart seems the least so, but then the movie also seems based more on his version of events than on anything else), we're almost constantly confronted with jealousy, ambition run amok, some very bizarre stabs at love (and then some very bizarre stabs), and of course the hot sex. And while the performers are more than up to these tasks, by the finale, despite the obvious strangeness of it all, it somehow seems like a little too much of the same old/same old.

Think of King Cobra as noir gone gay. Or maybe a treatise on the evils of the pornography business (that ends up showing how "good" porn can be made). Or perhaps just a movie that's simultaneously dark and silly. And, in its peculiar way, offers a certain amount of odd, bleak fun.

From IFC Midnight and running 91 minutes, the film opens this Friday, October 21, in limited theatrical release, while hitting VOD the same day.

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American independent cinema, Cobra Video, gay pornography, GLBT movies, Justin Kelly, KING COBRA, real-life crime films, Sean Paul Lockhart,

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Lee Kirk's ORDINARY WORLD provides a not-so-hot showcase for Billie Joe Armstrong

Character stupidity is a tricky thing. It can be used -- usually is -- for humor in movies, but it's a double-edged sword. A little goes a very long way. Too much stupidity can produce impatience then outright weariness in an audience, and when a character proves inordinately stupid, identification and caring go out the window for good. So it is with ORDINARY WORLD and its main character, a complete idiot named Perry, in the new movie originally known as Geezer from writer/director Lee Kirk (the filmmaker is shown below).

Clearly conceived to be a kind of showcase for the talents of singer/ songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong (shown on poster, above, and often below), the movie presents its hero, Perry, as someone goofy, sweet, appealing -- and one of the all-out stupidest characters to hit the screen in a long, long while. The movie begins well, with a musical evening that takes place some 20 years ago and features a nice opening song (by Armstrong). It ends well, too, with the expected feel-good finale we've been waiting for. In between, however, Perry's behavior regarding his wife, his kids, his brother, his home and his work is near-totally irresponsible and reprehensible in the extreme. All this makes the movie's "happy ending" seem completely unearned.

Perry is having a mid-life crisis, it appears, having given up the musical career he so much wanted to settle down with wife and family. But how he handles all this is beyond the pale.

Mr. Armstrong would appear to be a talented performer with a charming screen presence. And Kirk surrounds him with with class talent on all sides -- Selma Blair (shown above, right), as his wife; Judy Greer as an old girl-friend who suddenly appears in his life; and Fred Armisen and Kevin Corrigan as his band-mates/best friends -- none of  whom possess anything more than cardboard characters.

In fact, the one character who comes across as the most interesting and believable is the highly put-upon hotel concierge (Brian Baumgartner, above, left) from whom our idiot hero rents the poshest suite in the hotel then goes on to behave about as stupidly as possible. Armstrong's Perry literally does not make a single correct decision for the film's entire running time -- until those last ten or fifteen minutes.

Armstrong deserves a better showcase, as do the rest of the fine cast (that includes the always excellent Chris Messina), and audiences deserve a better movie (such as Mr. Kirk's previous one, The Giant Mechanical Man). If you can tolerate Ordinary World for more than the three or four decent songs it offers, well, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

The movie opens today in New York City at the Village East Cinema and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle's Monica Film Center and simultaneously via VOD on all major platforms.

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"family" films, American independent cinema, bad-parenting movies, Billie Joe Armstrong, Lee Kirk, midlife crisis, movies about music, ORDINARY WORLD,

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With CHRISTINE, Campos, Shilowich and Hall offer a genuine, deeply-felt and honorable memorial to a talented, troubled young woman

Coming as it does on the heels of a documentary -- Kate Plays Christine -- that seemed to prove above all else how difficult and sometime pointless documentary film-making can be, the new narrative movie CHRISTINE succeeds beautifully in bringing to life a life that most of us (if we'd heard of Christine Chubbuck at all) knew only for the single act that "put her on the map."

In that regard, this movie is not unlike another excellent film that opened earlier this year, The Witness, that managed, at long last, to give us a look at Kitty Genovese in a manner that opened up her life into something much richer than the mere victim she'd seemed to have been down the decades since her murder. Rather than exploiting, both films honor their subject.

As directed by Antonio Campos (shown at left), written by Craig Shilowich (shown below) and

starring an actress who's currently as good as anyone performing in movies and TV -- Rebecca Hall (shown on poster, top, and further below) -- in what is, so far, the role of her career, Christine succeeds in creating a time (the mid-1970s), a place (a local TV station in Florida), and people (workers, friends, family, interviewees) that come together to form the kind of spot-on reality that narrative movies rarely get near.

This is the first attempt at screenwriting for Mr. Shilowich (shown at right), and as such it is not simply good, it's rather phenomenal.

The writer has packed in so much, and all of it germane, fascinating, and very warts-and-all in terms of not only Christine herself but of those around her. This allows us to see the positives and negatives clearly and to come surprisingly close to understanding who Christine was and how her surroundings worked with her personality to determine what happened.

Over the course of the film we learn so much about Christine -- everything from her virginity status to her relationships with her mother, boss, co-workers and especially the co-worker for whom she feels more than the normal attachment (played with his usual skill and subtlety by that fine actor, Michael C. Hall, below).

Via all of this, we come to understand Chubbuck as a terribly troubled yet talented young woman with rather heavily under-developed social skills. And so very good is Ms Hall is delineating all this that we quickly and hugely feel the embarrassment and naivete of this woman as she tries to work her way around and through various situations. Hall handles all of this so skillfully than not a moment registers as false or overdone. She keep us in her corner, even as she allows us to understand how that corner is so thoroughly fencing her in.

Hall has a large and often glowing face, but here she keeps the muscles in that face tightly coiled. Only when she is putting on the charming social-service puppet shows for the children she works with does she relax into those "puppet" roles to leave her constrained self behind. What a joy it is to see her suddenly liven and embrace! (Christine is not the kind of movie our "Oscar" Academy usually embraces, but I dearly hope its members gird up their loins and take a look, because quite a number of people involved with it deserve nominations.)

Around halfway along this two-hour film, my spouse noted aloud, "This does not seem like a movie." (More and more often these days, Spousie uses the word movie to double for the word fake. After we've watched something or other, he'll shrug and exclaim, "Yeah -- it's a movie.") Regarding Christine, he is so right. This is about as real as it gets. Mr. Campos, a director whose past work (AfterSchool and Simon Killer) I've enjoyed, does wonders here, using a documentary style abetted by what seems like a near-perfect production design, including period costumes, hair styles and sets.

The manner in which Campos and Shilowich and their actors capture the little TV station and its workings (above) may but you oddly in mind of its polar opposite, that glossily entertaining cable series, The Newsroom. (Or even better, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is used quite cannily and sadly here.) Campos' entire cast -- which include Tracy Letts (below, right) as Christine's adversarial boss, J. Smith-Cameron as her alternately helpful and trying mom, Maria Dizzia as her best friend who has her own necessary ambitions, and John Cullum, as the TV station's money man -- is first rate. There are no villains here, and no heroes, either. Just people living and working as best they can -- and doing a pretty good job of it, considering the circumstances.

In yesterday's New York Times there a fine article about Rebecca Hall and the making of the film, in which it comes out that Christine's brother refuses to see it because he feels that it is exploiting his sister. I wish he would reconsider, for this film is anything but exploitative. Christine is a movie that, during and after viewing, makes you look at things differently and understand them better. That's a tall order and it is served up here with intelligence, kindness and caring -- as expertly as you could wish.

The movie, from The Orchard and running 119 minutes, opens this Friday, October 14, in New York City exclusively at Film Forum. Elsewhere? Sure hope so, and as soon as further playdates becomes available, I'll post them here.

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American independent cinema, Antonio Campos, CHRISTINE, Craig Shilowich, fact-based films, Florida on film, journalism, life being lived, newsrooms, Rebecca Hall,

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Quincy Rose's anti-rom-com, FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS, arrives on VOD

Directed with a certain in-your-face style but written with dialog that sounds like something midway between a so-so self-help manual and the babblings of some not-very-bright, early-middle-aged characters who should know better, FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS (a terrible title -- too long and unnecessarily euphemistic -- I will herewith refer to it as FeFeF) is the latest film from one, Quincy Rose, shown below.

Mr. Rose, the press release tells us, is the godson of Woody Allen and the son of comic writer, Mickey Rose. On the basis of this, the only film of his that TrustMovies has seen, I would have to say that the apple has not only fallen far from the tree, it had landed on another continent.

After listening to the really tiresome banter the movie's five characters indulge in scene after scene, I found myself wondering, Is this supposed to be satire? If so, of what and by whom?

Yes, yes, I know: We are all of us fallible hypocrites. But these people are so clueless in so many ways that their tiresome talk does not produce laughs or warmth or sadness or much of anything except a kind of burgeoning impatience.

The characters -- given to playing musical beds: a twosome here, a threesome there -- talk and talk and talk about it all, but without much wit and certainly no perspicacity. The most annoying character, Jacob (because he revels in giving advice and appearing sage), is portrayed by Tyler Dawson (of Bellflower), shown below, who does a good job playing a bad guy.

His BFF, however, is played by Graham Skipper -- yes, the same actor (shown below, left) who has graced a couple of recent horror items: Almost Human and The Mind's Eye. Mr. Skipper can put his hyper/bug-eyed acting style to pretty fair use in those scary movies, but it does not translate all that well to comedy or romance -- both of which I suspect Mr. Rose is trying to achieve here.

The three female cast members, all much more physically and facially attractive that the two males on view, include Christina Gooding (below and bottom, left), Vanessa Dubasso (below, second from right), and Jillian Leigh (below, right). All are very pretty and do as well as these highly circumscribed roles allow. Truth be told, we don't much like any of these people. But is this really the filmmaker's intention?

On one hand Rose would seem to be making a plea for more honesty and open relationships. On the other, his movie reads like a treatise against all this. In any case these are among the most annoying characters you will have met in a movie in this new millennium. Is there really nothing new -- or intelligent or entertaining -- to say or show about sex and love and relationships and three-ways? On the basis of FeFeF, it would seem not.

From Gravitas Ventures and running a thankfully brief 77 minutes, the movie hits VOD this coming Tuesday, October 11.

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American independent cinema, FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS EFFING FRIENDS, Quincy Rose, relationship movies, would-be love stories, would-be rom-coms,

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Kevin Pollack directs his first -- and pretty funny -- narrative film, THE LATE BLOOMER

An actor TrustMovies has enjoyed quite regularly down the decades, Kevin Pollack (a fellow with 126 IMDB acting credits to his name), has now directed his first narrative movie -- not surprisingly a comedy, given this guy's background -- and it is one that, while sometimes crass, is always pretty funny, too. Titled THE LATE BLOOMER, it details the story, said to be "almost" true, of a young man who, due to an un-diagnosed medical problem, has never experienced puberty and therefore no sex nor even sexual desire.

Based on the memoir by Ken Baker, originally published back in 2001, and screen-written by some five different scribes, Mr. Pollack's movie (the director is shown at right) has such an unusual, grab-you-by-the-throat story to tell that it very nearly works via its odd tale alone. It's that bizarre-but-believable. Well, it ought to be, as the medical condition explained here actually happened to Mr. Baker, as it has to others. It may be rare, but it is also there. And it must be dealt with.

While I have not read Baker's memoir, from what I've heard about it, the book is quite moving as it brings the reader into the feelings of this man-boy so utterly inexperienced in much that we consider vital in life.

The movie, not exactly unexpectedly, plays all of this for laughs. To its credit, it gets quite a lot of them, too. Star Johnny Simmons, above, with his sweet face and goofy-but-sexy quality, seems a very good choice for the lead role. He's believable and funny as a grown guy only just discovering what most of us found years ago. If he doesn't wrench your heartstrings, too, that simply does not seem to be required here.

Supporting Simmons are a bevy of good performers who fill their roles just fine but are, with a couple of exceptions, not required to do much more. These include Maria Bello and J.K. Simmons (shown above, left and right), as our boy's parents, and Brittany Snow (below) as the pretty (and very literal) girl-next-door.

Jane Lynch (below) portrays Simmon's mentor, while Kumail Nanjiani and Beck Bennett (two photos below, shown respectively at right and left) play his two best, though not very bright, friends,

with Paul Wesley (shown at left in photo at bottom) as the other, and not very nice, man in his would-be girlfriend's life.

While the movie concentrates most of its humor and events on things sexual, which are generally funny if sometimes a little too crassly perceived, when it takes off into other area of adolescent trauma -- everything from acne to vocal changes to tantrums towards one's parents (the latter is maybe the film's funniest scene, in which Mr. Simmons excels) -- it proves even more on-the-mark.

At times, and at its most enjoyable, The Late Bloomer almost seems like a more "real" version of one of those popular body-jumping fantasy movies like Freaky Friday, Big  or 13 Going on 30 -- in which our hero or heroine suddenly inhabits the body of someone of a very different age.

If the film skirts over feelings to land more laughs, well, that's what movies tend to do, right? And at least this one manages to garner an awful lot of those laughs. From Momentum Pictures and running around 90 minutes, The Late Bloomer opens tomorrow, Friday, October 7, in "select" theaters (for instance, twice daily at NYC's Cinema Village and at Laemmle's Music Hall 3 in L.A.) while simultaneously making its debut on VOD and digital HD.

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American independent cinema, Ken Baker, Kevin Pollack, late adolescence, late-coming-of-age movies, quirky rom-coms, THE LATE BLOOMER,

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Joel Potrykus & his loony-tune protagonists return with THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK

TrustMovies was a big fan of the movie Buzzard, bizarre as it was, and so he looked forward hugely to whatever its writer/director, Joel Potrykus might offer up next. Well, that "whatever" opens this week, and it is something quite else.

I have not viewed a movie this annoying and utterly unengaging in a very long time. In the couple of days since I watched it, I've been mulling over what made it such an negative experience for me. To that end I've come up with a theory or two.

In Buzzard, Mr. Potrykus (shown at left) had a perhaps equally crazy and unlikable protagonist. But there, we see much more of the guy's interaction with others. We also learn much more about him. In THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK, our sociopathic jerk protagonist (named Sean and played by Ty Hickson, shown below and further below) is someone we learn next to nothing about in the course of this 82-minute movie -- except that he is partial to devil worship and seems to be trying to conjur Belial all on his own. What Mr. Hickson is asked to do, he does just fine. Unfortunately, he is asked to do damned little.

The character of Sean begins crazy and only goes further down that same path. As a character, he's pretty nearly a cipher. As for interaction, he has a friend (played by Amari Cheatom) who visits and brings him supplies, but their interaction basically amounts to the rather tried-and-tired "Fuck you" "Fuck you, too" sort of thing.

There is one scene involving the wrong kind of cat food -- yes, there's a cat here (above, center), and also eventually an opossum (or phonetically/ ungrammatically, a possum) -- in which both actors are allowed to show us something that approaches actual "behavior." They do, and briefly the film comes to life. And then it's back to the basics of would-be scares and horror -- of which there are practically none. Unless you scare and get horrified very easily (for instance, if you imagine that The Conjuring was the least bit shiver-provoking).

I'm almost ready to suggest that Mr. Potryus is trying to update Blair Witch and conflate it with any number of other witchcraft and let's-go-into-the-woods-'cause-they're-scary movies that we've seen over the past decade or so. He manages a few scenes that hint at scares, but all this could also be going on only in our protagonist's mind. Either way, there is very little real content here, though the music is often deafeningly loud and ugly. For my taste, The Alchemist Cookbook is a distinct come-down from Buzzard. But maybe you'll have a different reaction. Good luck.

The movie is being distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, which is opening the film in an unusual manner this Friday, October 7, when The Alchemist Cookbook will be available worldwide for pay-what-you-wish via BitTorrent Now, before (or in one case, simultaneous with) its screening debut in (very) select theaters across the country. You can find those various theaters by clicking here and scrolling down.

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American independent cinema, Blair Witch rip-offs, devil stuff, Joel Potrykus, THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK, would-be horror,

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Alden Peters' COMING OUT: Leaving the closet, even as you're filming it for posterity

When TrustMovies first heard that COMING OUT, the new GLBT documentary from first-time filmmaker Alden Peters, was all about his "coming out" process as a gay man, and that he had simultaneously filmed the whole thing, my mind and heart sank a bit. It is all too easy to imagine how stupid and sappy something like this could be. The opportunities for narcissism, not to mention the difficulty of finding "truth" as you are filming everyone around you -- while remaining, of course, the center of attention -- seemed awfully obvious to me. And I couldn't help wondering why it didn't also seem so to the filmmaker. Well, maybe he's just very young.

Turns out he is very young -- but also rather charming and bright. All of the above, and lots more, seems to have occurred to Mr. Peters (shown above and below) before, during and probably long after his shoot -- in which, yes, he does come out to family, friends and now to the world at large. The experience of seeing/hearing this happen and what it means to Peters and those around him -- for this viewer, anyway -- proved a surprisingly enjoyable, thoughtful, funny and occasionally moving one.

The person to whom Alden initially spills the beans is his older brother, who claims not to have had a clue that his younger bro was gay, even though as a child Alden dressed up like one of the Spice Girls and filmed the whole thing! Other family members at least seem to have considered this possibility. His mom (above, left) asks him one humdinger of a question on camera, while Dad (below, left, and on poster, top, right), who seems a typically gruff and non-verbal example of American manhood, turns out to be pretty damn fine about it all.

The filmed conversation with his group of best friends is particularly buoyant and telling, opening up the subject of how Alden himself feels about being gay. This proves to be a rather dark grab bag of ideas and feelings,  A good-looking kid who, from certain angles, could pass for a very young Tom Cruise, Peters has already experienced gay sex a number of times, but has kept this, along with so much else, closeted. As he has discovered so far, there just doesn't seem to be a good role model for him to follow. Or maybe it's is just that there are so many different role models to choose from that he find this confusing. Many gays, young and old, may find themselves identifying with these feelings.

As the movie lengthens (it's lasts only 70 minutes), we meet other gays who have or are in the process of coming-out -- the beautiful transgender girl Janet Mock, a young black kid named Eric who comes out online to his dad, along with a sociologist, a journalist and a psychologist, all of whom add some thoughtful insight to the proceedings. Finally, though, we're left with Alden, who, while he is now "out," is still faced with a lot more living -- and decision-making -- to do. If we thought this documentary was going to be merely a silly, sappy endeavor, it turns out to be -- in the words of our favorite current TV character, My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (a show you really must see, if you haven't already: it's streamable via Netflix) -- "a lot more nuanced than that."

Coming Out, from Wolfe Video, arrives on DVD and VOD this coming Tuesday, October 4 -- for purchase and/or rental.

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Alden Peters, American independent cinema, COMING OUT, coming-of-age movies, GLBT documentaries, the closet,

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