Site Presented By
Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
"Pretty Persuasion": Greek tragedy at Ridgemont High
At first glance, and even at second, Marcos Siega's debut feature "Pretty Persuasion" belongs to one of the most familiar genres in American movies: the high-school comedy, in particular the kind that portrays California teenage girls as oversexed Machiavellian ice bitches plotting their own rise to supremacy and the downfall of everyone around them. I mean, that is what "Pretty Persuasion" is about -- 15-year-old Kimberly (Evan Rachel Wood) manipulates her two friends in a spurious sexual assault charge against an awkward English teacher (Ron Livingston) who's clearly got the hots for her.
But most such movies have to wind up with some kind of sweetness and redemption, or at the very least teach a useful social lesson. Skander Halim's screenplay has a far-reaching ruthlessness, along with a grand ambition to turn a movie that starts as dark satire into something approaching Greek tragedy. (Halim has said he thought the script was not producible.) If the resulting film doesn't work equally well at all levels, Wood (who starred in "Thirteen") gives an astonishing performance that pushes it most of the way there. Kimberly does terrible, unforgivable things, but she's not the misogynist-fantasy caricature found in so many movies like this. Instead, she's a complicated, selfish and wounded girl who has learned precisely the wrong lessons from the world around her.
People are going to notice "Pretty Persuasion," first and foremost, for its almost gleeful presentation of teen sexuality and other hot-button topics. Siega seems determined -- maybe a little too determined -- to get his movie banned in the Bible Belt. I don't know which will shock the shockable worst: the scene where Kimberly performs oral sex on a babealicious female TV reporter (Jane Krakowski) or the one where an earnest Muslim girl (Adi Schnall) in a hijab barfs up her just-eaten Twinkies at Kimberly's direction. That's without mentioning the anal-sex scene, the offensive joke about how Arab men get their wives pregnant, Kimberly's boorish dad (James Woods) with his anti-Semitic tirades and phone-sex addiction, or Kimberly's reenactments of sex acts between her tennis-bimbo stepmom (Jaime King) and a dog.
Some of this is pretty funny on a juvenile level, as is the movie's rather heavy-handed satire. "Oh my God, Troy is a poet!" moons Kimberly's dim-but-pretty best friend, Brittany (Elisabeth Harnois). "Everything that comes out of his mouth is an iambic pentagram!" Kimberly herself is dating a jocked-out dude who keeps trying to tell those old jokes about why beer is better than a woman, but can't remember the punch lines. (Beer can't talk; it's always wet, etc.) Apparently he's good at cunnilingus when he remembers to take his retainer out. (Kimberly always manages to avoid reciprocating.)
Wood manages to rise above this landscape of horror and delight, depending on your perspective. Kimberly's grand scheme for vengeance against Mr. Anderson (Ron Livingston) is out of all proportion to his creepiness -- though he is a creep -- but conforms to the soul-deadening, social-Darwinist landscape she sees around her. She's like Medea or Lady Macbeth, packed into a hot bod and a tight little skirt and parachuted into Beverly Hills.
Wood has the ramrod carriage and hauteur of a mighty heroine mixed with the heart-melting beauty of an ingenue. The obvious points of comparison for "Pretty Persuasion" are "Heathers" and "Election," and it's worth noting that both of those dark-hearted teen classics gave birth to stars. This one will too.
"Pretty Persuasion" opens Aug. 12 nationwide.
"The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till": New light on an American nightmare
It was shot on video for next to no money with no particular cinematic verve, but Keith A. Beauchamp's "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" is a vital documentary in the truest sense, with the emphasis on document. Revisiting the notorious case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago who was viciously tortured and killed by whites while visiting a rural Mississippi town in 1955 -- for the "crime" of wolf-whistling a white woman -- Beauchamp does more than bring this tragic and heroic story to a new generation.
After an eight-year investigation, Beauchamp actually found new witnesses, and at least one new suspect, in the massively publicized crime that shocked the nation and galvanized the civil rights movement. The outlines of the case have never been in doubt: J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant (the whistlee's husband) came to the house of Till's grandfather in Money, Miss., on Aug. 28, 1955, and kidnapped the boy at gunpoint. With the help of an uncertain number of others, they took Till to a nearby barn, where they beat and tortured him savagely, ending by shooting him through the head. Then they tied him to a 70-pound electric fan and threw him into the Tallahatchie River, where his body was found some days later.
