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The Fractured Mirror

Created by Nathan Rabin

Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry

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The Fractured Mirror entry: Uncle Kent 2 (2016)
almost 2 years ago – Fri, Dec 02, 2022 at 10:46:59 AM

Uncle Kent 2 (2016) FM

It would be hard to imagine a movie less in need of a sequel than Joe Swanberg and Kent Osborne’s 2011 mumblecore comedy-drama Uncle Kent. That’s the sublime conceptual joke behind 2016’s marvelously meta Uncle Kent 2. As an archetypal autobiographical Mumblecore character study Uncle Kent barely exists . So the notion that the affable shrug of an independent movie would somehow become a mini-franchise represents an inspired goof.

Uncle Kent 2 opens on a gloriously post-modern note, with slacker stoner protagonist Kent Osborne, playing a fictionalized version of himself, pitching Uncle Kent director and towering Mumblecore titan Joe Swanberg on making a sequel to Uncle Kent in sequences rooted in the sub-genre’s low-key, defiantly non-commercial, navel-gazing naturalism. Swanberg, who directed the film’s first twelve minutes in addition to playing himself, demurs on the grounds that he hates sequels but gives Osborne his blessing to make a follow-up to Uncle Kent with another filmmaker.

At that point Swanberg is replaced in the director’s chair by oddball auteur Todd Rohal and the tone shifts accordingly. Realism gives way to surrealism as Osborne attends a pop culture convention in his role as a veteran SpongeBob Squarepants animator and he gradually loses his mind as he becomes more and more convinced that the singularity is upon us.

What follows is a wild ride through the warped mind of a true original involving copious amounts of marijuana, a fantastical creature from the Stan Winston folks, sex with multiple beautiful, eager women, a masturbation sequence of a duration seldom seen outside of pornography and extensive use of the Swing Out Sister 1986 hit “Breakout.” This is a very weird movie about the making of a very weird movie featuring a climactic appearance from “Weird Al” Yankovic. Like its similarly kooky, similarly unnecessary novelization, Uncle Kent 2 an inspired, gloriously brief (only 73 minutes) lark that never runs out of trippy, colorful surprises.

The Fractured Mirror entry: Ellie Parker (2005)
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Dec 01, 2022 at 11:18:53 AM

Ellie Parker (2005)

Just a few years after Naomi Watts played an actress in her 2001 breakthrough film Mulholland Falls she starred as the title character in 2005’s Ellie Parker, a lukewarm mess of a struggling thespian on the verge of giving up.

The scruffy labor of love is a micro-budget adaptation of a 2001 short film of the same name Watts made with her Mulholland Drive costar Scott Coffey, who also wrote, directed, acts in, and, for good measure shot Ellie Parker as well.

The project began life with a 2001 short film of the same name. Shot on digital video over a period of years for that trademark look of grubby amateurism, this deeply personal eyesore casts Watts as a self-absorbed wannabe who is an exhausting ham in audition rooms and what passes for her real life.

Ellie Parker follows Watts’ talent-impaired striver as she auditions unsuccessfully, is cheated on by her loser boyfriend, meets with her shrink and an agent played by Chevy Chase and generally endures the worst of what show-business and Los Angeles have to offer.

Coffey’s character study of someone not worth knowing gets unflatteringly close to its star in myriad ways. He shoves that awful digital camera so far into Watts’ endlessly expressive face that we can practically count her pores.

A protagonist doesn’t have to be likable but they need to be compelling and, for all of her talent, Watts here is an unfortunate, unpleasant combination of unlikable and uninteresting.

The Fractured Mirror entry: Orgazmo (1997)
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 03:05:05 PM

Orgazmo (1997)

Trey Parker’s sometimes inspired but frequently painful 1997 Mormon superhero pornography comedy Orgazmo is less a story its creator had to tell, or a film that he had to make, than puerile nonsense he had to get out of his system so he could move onto less juvenile endeavors.

Like far too many pornography-themed comedies, Orgazmo takes wobbly, misfiring comic aim at a version of the adult film world that does not currently exist and never has, one inexplicably reliant upon scripts and costumes and fight choreography and other matters unrelated to fucking.

In addition to writing and directing, Parker stars as Joe Young, an earnest Mormon missionary preaching salvation in the sinful Gomorrah of contemporary Los Angeles. The wholesome bible-thumper ends up falling backwards into the world of pornography when his theater background and unexpected fighting prowess lands him a role as the titular sex superhero in Orgazmo, an XXX-rated romp that transcends the ghetto of hardcore porn and becomes the third top grossing film of all time.

Parker’s adorably doe-like hero does pornography to raise money for his upcoming wedding to a similarly devoted true believer but also to keep his friend G-Fresh (Masao Maki) from losing his sushi business when he’s terrorized by thugs. Despite being an elderly Asian man, G-Fresh speaks in a cartoonish approximation of Hip Hop slang, a comic target every bit as exhausted and exhausting as superheroes and porn. The trope of a white or Asian man speaking enthusiastic Ebonics has never been funny but it’s seldom been as punishing as it is here. It would be impossible for a comic genius like Parker to make a movie that’s entirely unfunny and wholly devoid of laughs. But Orgazmo comes awfully close.

Today is the last day of the week-long Black Friday sale at my site!
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 09:48:02 AM

Hey you beautiful people,

Today marks the final day of the week-long Black Friday sale on my site. It's your last chances to get CRAZY deals like 12 dollars for a signed copy of the preposterously entertaining The Joy of Trash (just 22.50 for two books, a deal literally no one has taken me up on), 23 dollars for three signed copies of the 120 page extended version of me and Felipe Sobreiro's "Weird Al" Yankovic-themed coloring book, The Weird A-Coloring to Al, shipping and taxes included +free colored pencils and the signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 270 copies) full-color, hardcover The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition, which comes with one of 10 cards signed by Felipe and myself, each numbered to 27, and a ten percent chance of getting an autographed card signed by "Weird Al" Yankovic.

And I'll throw in some random cool stuff into packages as well, as is my habit.

Oh, and there's also a brand spanking new version of The Weird Accordion to Al with a new chapter on Weird: The Al Yankovic Story that will set you back a mere 20 smackers despite running a hefty 516 pages. Shipping + taxes included, domestic only. Get in on the action over at

https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Christmas is less than a month away! Get all your shopping done today!

The Fractured Mirror entry: Paris When It Sizzles (1964)
almost 2 years ago – Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 12:27:18 PM

Paris When it Sizzles (1962) (FM)

A decade after triumphing in 1954’s Sabrina, William Holden and Audrey Hepburn reunited for the effervescent 1964 goof Paris When it Sizzles. Hepburn does not seem to have aged a day between the two films while the famously hard-living Holden seems to have aged several unusually bleak decades. When Holden’s character mentions that he’s forty-three it’s jarring because he seems at least fifteen years older.

The film’s gleefully meta-textual script was adapted by hotshot scribe George Axelrod from the 1952 French film Holiday for Henrietta. The Manchurian Candidate and Breakfast at Tiffany’s postmodern flourishes include several references to Axelrod’s previous collaboration with Hepburn, as well as My Fair Lady along with myriad other in-jokes and fourth wall shattering cameos from Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra’s voice.

A consummate movie-movie that never stops reminding audiences that it is a dizzy, fizzy, ebullient fiction, Paris When It Sizzles typecasts Holden as Richard Benson, a superstar screenwriter who is supposed to be writing a movie for powerful producer Alexander Meyerheim (Noel Coward). Instead the libertine lush has been squandering his money and his prodigious talent on a continental spending spree.

With only a few days to finish the script, the cynical, sharp-witted scribe hires aspiring writer Gabrielle Simpson (Hepburn) to act as an assistant, secretary and catalyst. Holden and Hepburn do double-duty here as the protagonists of both the film and the film-within-a-film they’re working on, a heist film of staggering, intentional stupidity and ridiculousness called The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower.

This bifurcated structure affords Axelrod an opportunity to satirize everything from the French New Wave to method acting through the character of a earthy ham played by Tony Curtis in a role that falls somewhere between a cameo and a meaty supporting turn.

In Paris When it Sizzles work is foreplay and boozy sexual harassment is posited as sexy flirtation. Holden and Hepburn’s easy charm and mega-watt chemistry sell a premise that would be deeply problematic in lesser hands and with less appealing leads. Hepburn’s eager protege is not quite the aggressor here. She’s not a seductress but she is awfully eager to be seduced and it’s easy to see why she would be attracted to such a brilliant, troubled, charismatic soul. Paris When It Sizzles is twenty minutes too long and entirely too silly, if such a thing is even possible, but its perfectly cast stars and Axelrod’s witty script make it an amusing trifle that sags at times but also sparkles.