Let the Devil Wear Black: (1999. dir: Stacy Title) "We can so easily fall back from what we have struggled to attain, abruptly, into a life we never wanted, can find that we are caught as in a dream and die there without ever waking up. This can occur." It's from Rilke, it's a recurring coda throughout, and it's indicative of the note of poetic melancholy to which this movie keeps returning.
I knew three things about Devil when I got it: it's a modernized bowdlerization of Hamlet, the actor in the lead is best known for a stint on "Survivor", and the Ophelia character eats dog-food. Three strikes against it. My expectations were low.
It's surprisingly, refreshingly, strange. The script is strange and well-written, about 90% of it plays, and the cast is splendid. What was I just saying about vanity projects? Jonathan Penner co-wrote and starred in this, and it was directed by his wife, but I guess he left sufficient checks and balances in there that it all works out. (It doesn't hurt that his wife is a damn fine director.) Maury Chakin has a great supporting role, and Kevin West is fantastic in his one scene as a sugar-huffing night-pharmacist. Mary Louise Parker is absolutely Ophelia, she's great, exploring her incipient madness with childlike curiosity and wielding moments of clarity like weapons, calling the sexism so deeply imbedded in our relationships "neo-colonialism by proxy" and reprimanding her shouting father with, "I'm unbalanced, not deaf." Chris Sarandon as the Dead King is also perfect. There's a moment at the end, once justice has been done at terrible cost, where he ascends, and we see he is barefoot, as the young Hamlet is now wearing his shoes. Jonathan Banks, standing in for Horatio, and Tony Plana as a menacing cop also have small but excellent turns.
This director, Title, has vision. It all falls together in odd, unpredictable but unified fashion, held together against a groovy trip-hop score.
Reedus plays Brautigan, the Rosencrantz character, a thug, young and thick. The action takes place all in a single day and night, and much of the time Hamlet (Jack, played by Penner) spends driving around in the company of Brautigan and his cohort, Bradbury (Randall Batinkoff). They're good; they inhabit a decent plot twist; the time snakes inexorably towards death.
Rating: four stars
Reedus Factor: three stars
photo courtesy of fanzone50 http://www.fanzone50.com/Norman/Let.html
Hello, Herman: (2012. dir: Michelle Danner) Ill-written diatribe on the Columbine Aberration, all preaching and no insight. Reedus gives it a game effort but stumbles again. You know how directors like Gus Van Sant and Harmony Korine and Larry Clarke can put kids in front of the camera and they're, like, kids? The kids in this movie are like drama geeks, culled from Acting 101 university classes, who feel like they have to ACT like kids. (Albert Finney does this. He's an old man, but I think he doesn't believe it, so he's always trying to act like an old man would act.) It dulls an already dulled effort. Soapboxes so rarely work, unless they're sweetened with humor or, you know, written well.
Rating: one star
Reedus Factor: two and a half stars for lots of screen time
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