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A killer thriller that spills into horror

Kevin B. Lee

“Kill List” is available on demand through select cable providers. Check IFC On Demand for availability in your area.

by Kevin B. Lee

Few things bring out the worst tendencies of Hollywood than the genre mash-up, as evidenced by two of last year’s worst films, “Cowboys vs. Aliens” and “Battle: Los Angeles” (aka “Independence Day” filmed as part Iraq War documentary, part video game). The “movie-x-meets-movie-y” mentality seems to inspire little more than z-level creativity in the land of big budgets and small minds. And yet, somehow the British have a better track record at bringing together disparate elements into a compelling whole. One of the best British crime movies, “The Lavender Hill Mob,” is also one of their best comedies. Their most famous horror movie, “The Wicker Man,” is actually a trifecta of horror, crime thriller and musical. And now there’s Ben Wheatley’s “Kill List,” which takes seemingly familiar genre elements and offsets them in ways that can be confounding, but leave an unforgettable impact. And by impact, I’m not just talking about a scene involving a tied-up librarian and a hammer.

Before we delve into that moment, some set-up: Jay (Neil Maskell) and Shel (MyAnna Buring) are an ex-military couple trying to play house in the Yorkshire suburbs. Judging by their opening screaming match they’re having a rough go of it: Jay’s been out of work for eight months, their savings drying up. All they can do to vent their frustrations is hold swordfights on the lawn with their son and host a rollercoaster of a dinner party with Jay’s war buddy-turned-hitman Gal (Michael Smiley), leading to smashed dishes in the dining room, plans for new contract killings discussed over beers in the basement, and Gal’s mysterious date carving a hex into the back of the bathroom mirror.

Bill Clinton: A sinner redeemed

Jeff Shannon

“Clinton” premieres in two parts: Monday, February 20th and Tuesday, February 21st on PBS’s “American Experience” (check local listings for showtimes) and will be available thereafter via PBS on demand. Also on DVD and iTunes.

by Jeff Shannon

I should probably state up front that I was, and always will be, a Clinton supporter. Like our 42nd president, I grew up in a home where John F. Kennedy had been revered as a young, dynamic force of change and hope for the future. When you admire a politician’s core conviction, it’s at least somewhat easier to overlook, if not forgive, their foibles and shortcomings. As a young quadriplegic in 1991, I saw candidate Clinton as an impressive-enough carrier of JFK’s torch, a protector of the disadvantaged who had inherited Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s concern for those who found the American dream elusive or entirely out of reach.

That concern was clearly demonstrated by the defining moment of Clinton’s presidential campaign. It’s one of many pivotal moments captured in the two-part, four-hour documentary “Clinton,” the 16th episode of PBS’s “American Experience” presidents series. At the second presidential debate in Virginia in 1992, a young African-American woman in the audience asked candidates Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, and incumbent president George H.W. Bush a question that was then on the minds of struggling Americans everywhere:

“How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives, and if it hasn’t, how can you honestly find a cure for the economic problems of the common people if you have no experience in what’s ailing them?”

That question could easily be recycled as a present-day jab at Mitt Romney, but let’s stick to history: Bush simply didn’t understand the question, and Clinton seized the opportunity to ensure his victory. Stepping toward the audience in a characteristic display of the sincerity that had propelled his fast-moving career, Clinton demonstrated a concise, compassionate grasp of the question’s meaning, and his answer (a reference to the poverty and middle-class struggle he witnessed while campaigning for Congress and Governor in his native Arkansas) left Bush with a classic expression of election-losing dismay.

More sex please, we’re French

Odie Henderson

“Sexual Chronicles of a French Family” (76 minutes) is available via IFC On Demand.

Let’s play a game. It’s 3 AM and you can’t sleep. A channel roulette session with the remote control stops your TV on a certain network synonymous with softcore erotica. Do you:

a) Roll your eyes and keep flipping the dial before falling asleep to some warped infomercial?

b) Realize you need something more substantial and order “Chicks Who Dig Odienator 29” off the Adult On Demand Channel?

c) Drop the remote and make a date with Rosy Palm and her Five Sisters?

If you answered a, Alex Trebek is here to say “OOH I’M SORRY!!” We’ve got some nice consolation prizes for you as you leave this blog. If you answered b, I thank for your $9.95, but you will also have to leave this blog. Today’s entry is most definitely not your speed. But if you answered c, have I got a movie for you. It’s called “Chroniques sexuelles d’une famille d’aujourd’hui” or “Sexual Chronicles of a French Family,” and you can watch it in the privacy of your own home. I won’t tell, and I certainly won’t cast aspersions. After all, I pitched this movie to review here at The Demanders. After discovering the title, and its French origins, my exact pitch to our editor was “Mmmm! FILTH!” So this sinner casts no stones.

Unfortunately, this sinner has issues with this “Chronicles of Labia,” the least of which is how to review a movie like this. I could take the high road, but if you’ve read this far, you are expecting me to traverse the lowest road possible. To review a comedy, one must admit if it inspired laughter. To review an erotic picture, one must more uncomfortably cop to whether it resulted in the upping of a body part that isn’t a thumb. In that regard, I respectfully submit that this film didn’t do it for me. I expected something a little less squeamish (read: dirtier) than what I got.

“Sexual Chronicles of A French Family” is Cinemax with subtitles, or “Le Çinemax.” It has the same frustrating “hide the good stuff” camera angles as your average straight-to-cable softcore knock-off, and the same repeated positions. In its defense, the film does not contain Cinemax’s ubiquitous bad boob jobs, the ones so dreadful that they turn breasts into triangles, squares and other shapes nature never intended for headlights. The boob job in this film looks fine. “Chronicles” also has a more intriguing plot than any sex film on cable at 3 AM, though this is somewhat squandered.

Phil Ochs: All the news that’s fit to sing

Steven Boone

“Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune” plays Monday, January 23, at 10 pm EST/PST on PBS American Masters. It will thereafter be available via PBS On Demand, and is currently on Netflix Instant and DVD.

“Mistakes are lodged like harpoons and fish hooks in an intelligent person’s soul,” says one friend of political folk singer Phil Ochsof the deep depression that eventually led him to suicide in 1976. Och’s friends are like that, eloquent and insightful. His mentor Pete Seeger, in particular, speaks like he sings, modulating his voice to give anecdotes a mythic luster and heartbreaking resonance. But after watching “Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune” take a measure of the man’s adult life, it seems that some friends put too much emphasis on generic therapist’s reasons for his downward spiral — schizophrenia, alcoholism, declining popularity. It seems that Phil Ochs’ fall was inevitable, given the fact that his singing career began when he was barely out of his teens, when JFK’s assassination was a couple years off, and crashed after every progressive movement for which his protest songs provided spiritual fuel was crushed.

This is not a standard pop star rise-and-fall story. Ochs was physically involved in the antiwar and social justice movements he sang along with. He headlined, organized and even spontaneously showed up at a staggering number of rallies for various causes. His investment was evident in his performances, presented here with shocking audiovisual fidelity. Even though it’s captured on a black-and-white kinescope, a performance of his song “When I’m Gone” feels as clear and urgent as a live event. So, too, is his strumming and crooning at the 1964 Newport Music Festival. (Simply amazing sound and image restoration here.) The sonorous voice and wide, earnest eyes could just as easily belong to a Wall Street occupier serenading Zuccoti Park.

“How to Die in Oregon”: It’s personal

Jeff Shannon

“How to Die in Oregon” plays on HBO on May 27, 29 and 31 and June 1 and 6.

Click here for HBO showtimes.

I’ve been encouraged to write autobiographically in this forum, so bear with me, dear reader. We’ve barely been introduced, and this time it’s personal. I’ll be sharing some thoughts about HBO’s extraordinary new documentary “How to Die in Oregon”, but first, allow me this indulgence:

When my father died four months ago at the age of 79, I sat beside him in my wheelchair as his death drew near. I couldn’t hold his hand and he couldn’t hold mine, so I gently touched the parchment-like skin of dad’s withered right arm while my older brother, standing on the other side of the bed, leaned over and quietly suggested to our father that this was “a good time to go.”

Dad must have agreed, because a few seconds later, he did.

He went gently and peacefully after many hours of slow, labored breathing. Only three weeks had passed since he’d been definitively diagnosed with bowel cancer. In a case of fortunate timing, we’d brought him home from the hospital about 30 hours earlier; we knew he preferred to die at home. Apart from the morphine drip we’d been trained to operate by compassionate hospice-care advisors, there were no lethal drugs or physicians involved.

(Above: Jerry and Jeff Shannon, 2009)

Raising Renee: Her sister’s keeper

Jana Monji

“Raising Renee” premieres on HBO2 Wednesday, February 22 and is available on-demand at HBO on Demand and HBO Go thereafter.

“Raising Renee” is an accommodating look at the relationship between an award-winning painter, Beverly McIver, and one of her two older sisters, Renee. Although Renee is in her forties, she has the mindset of a third-grader. After their mother dies, Renee goes to live with Beverly and Beverly spends about six years “Raising Renee.”

This is the third look at a family facing life-changing problems from the husband and wife filmmaking team Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher. Their first was the personal 1995 “Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern,” in which Jordan’s own family attempts to save their Iowa farm. Given the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance, it was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature.

Their second, “So Much So Fast,” looked at the then 29-year-old Stephen Heywood who discovered he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), a paralyzing neurodegenerative illness. Despite his diagnosis, Heywood gets married to Wendy; they have a child. Heywood died in 2006, but the self-taught architect inspired his brothers to co-found a website for ALS patients and an institute for research into treatment, the ALS Therapy Development Institute.