Swanberg’s Win It All

Is there a more destructive addiction than gambling? Instead of a mere hangover, compulsive gamblers can find themselves deeply in debt to leg-breakers. Eddie Garrett is exactly that sort of loser. In fact, his Gambling Anonymous sponsor tells him straight out he is addicted to losing. When Garrett really, really gets in over his head, he finally starts to clean up his act. However, just as he starts to appreciate the straight life an enormous karma bill come due in Joe Swanberg’s Win It All (trailer here), which debuts on Netflix this Friday.

Garrett is in debt to just about everyone, except Michael, the scary looking criminal waiting for him in his apartment. Instead of a painful collection, Michael is there to offer him an easy gig. While he is serving a short prison term, Garrett will babysit a mysterious duffle bag. As long as he resists temptation, he makes an easy ten grand when Michael returns.

Of course, the bag is stuffed with cash, as well as other rather ominous looking implements. It is just as certain Garrett will peak inside and start using the money to fund his losing streaks, despite his sponsor’s best efforts to talk some sense into him. Garrett will have one lucky night with the duffle bag money, so naturally he celebrates with his schlubby buddies. As fate would have it, he also meets Eva, an attractive RN, who should be way out of his league.

True to form, Garrett subsequently starts to lose Michael’s money, to the tune of $20K or so. The repercussions of this potential shortfall are sufficiently dire to scare him straight. He accepts a job at his brother’s landscaping company and finds he almost enjoys working like a responsible adult. Concurrently, he manages to develop a serious relationship with Eva. However, all his progress might be for naught when Garrett learn Michael Duffle Bag will be getting out of prison months early.

Even though WIA has an appealingly grungy, lived-in vibe, it is light years more polished than the early Mumblecore that initially made Swanberg’s name. Essentially, he and Jake Johnson, his recent co-writer and star of choice, have combined the rom-com with the gambling caper. Yet, unlike Rounders and scores of card-sharking films, they really see redemption in everyday, responsible life. Having a job and a girlfriend (especially a gorgeous one) are good things. They also shrewdly use the gritty streets and back alleys of Chicago as vivid backdrops.

Johnson is terrific as Garrett and he develops winning chemistry with all the major players. Mexican actress Aislinn Derbez is utterly charming, but completely grounded as Eva, the single-mother nurse he really doesn’t deserve. Johnson and Joe Lo Truglio bicker and kvetch together so convincingly, we can totally believe they are brothers with years of difficult shared history together. However, the funniest scenes focus on Garrett trying to fast-talk his undeluded sponsor, played with acerbic attitude and surprising gravitas by Keegan-Michael Key (in what might be his best dramatic performance to date).

Frankly, Win It All would work as well as most of Swanberg’s films on the big screen, if not better, but as a Netflix original feature it should generate word of mouth faster and more widely. Granted, Swanberg and Johnson incorporate many of the conventions of gambling movies, but they twist them around, upside down. The result is a hugely entertaining film both Swanberg fans and general audiences should embrace when Win It All starts streaming on Netflix this Friday (4/7).

Proxy: There is No Twelve Step Program for this Kind of Nuts

A grieving parents’ support group is about to get sinister. Fortunately, a formerly pregnant woman and her new fast friend have their own strange ways of processing loss. The hyper-sensitive are sure to be offended and nobody is likely to win mother-of-the-year awards, but some truly game-changing twists will come viewers’ way during Zack Parker’s Proxy (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center.

Walking home from her ultrasound, the very pregnant Esther Woodhouse is brutally attacked by a hooded figure deliberately targeting her baby. She survives the attack, but her unborn child does not. During her recuperation, the hospital staff is so alarmed by her emotional detachment, they require her to attend a grief counseling group session. It is there that she meets fellow member Melanie Michaels. Clearly Woodhouse feels some degree of sexual attraction, but Michaels seems to take exploitative emotional satisfaction from their encounters—none of which pleases Anika Barön, Woodhouse’s violently jealous ex-con lesbian lover.

Fate will ensnare all three women in a web of obsession and revenge, but a series of massive revelations will profoundly alter our perceptions of Woodhouse and Michaels. In contrast, Barön wears her insanity on her sleeve and never wavers from it. To give away any further details would be spoilery. It would also look ridiculously lurid spelled out in black and white.

Yet, that bite-me fearlessness is part of Proxy’s charm, so to speak. Parker synthesizes Cape Fear, Don’t Look Now, and half a dozen De Palma films, while the Newton Brothers’ score transparently evokes the Bernard Hermann music heard in the Hitchcock films the latter was riffing on, but he gives his themes and motifs a distinctive spin all his own. Parker does not merely dab a toe on the third rail of sexual orientation—he jumps on it with both feet. Frankly, this is the sort of gleefully bold erotically charged thriller we probably thought we would never see again—and it works for precisely that reason (even though Parker’s extreme budget constraints nearly undermine key third act sequences).

Alexia Rasmussen, Alexa Havins, and Kristina Klebe admirably go all in as the bat-scat crazy trio, each in their own way. As the formerly pregnant Woodhouse, Rasmussen might just take the honors as the most unsettling, but the competition is fierce. Yet, somehow horror film and mumblecore actor-director Joe Swanberg adds a messy but unexpectedly moving human dimension to the proceedings as Michaels’ in-for-it husband Patrick.

It is no hyperbole to say Proxy will surprise even old jaded genre hands. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Parker’s film is its distribution deal with IFC Midnight. Regardless, here it is. Recommended for those who appreciate dark psychological thrillers with a healthy disregard for polite conventions, Proxy opens this Friday (late night 4/18) at the IFC Center and also launches on VOD.

Sundance ’12: V/H/S

Pretty soon, VHS tapes will be nothing more than odd curios. A group of lowlife thugs is out to steal one that is particularly collectible. Supposedly, they will know it when they see it. If that sounds ominous, it should, because they are about to stumble across some deeply disturbing found videos in the anthology horror film V/H/S, which has generated monster viral buzz at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Adam Wingard’s framing device characters are an ugly lot, who enjoy videotaping their violent crimes. Upon breaking into their target home, they find the owner long dead amid a pile of sketchy looking VHS tapes. Each one they screen tells a twisted tale.

David Bruckner’s opening Amateur Night follows a trio of unenlightened young men as they set out the bed drunk women and record their conquests through the geeky one’s spy camera. They somehow bring two women back to their hotel room, but one promptly passes out and the other is a bit twitchy. While we have a good idea where this is headed from the outset, Hannah Fierman’s penetrating eyes are spooky as all get out. As the mystery woman, she is simultaneously alluring and unnerving.

It is road trip time in Ti (House of the Devil) West’s Second Honeymoon, duly documented by the vacationing couple on their camcorder. Unfortunately, they are having trouble shaking this strange vagrant woman. While it might be the most traditional in its approach, West’s contribution arguably boasts the film’s single freakiest scene.

However, the best chapter is easily Glenn McQuaid’s Tuesday the 17th, which gives the horny teens in the woods subgenre a wicked twist. Whatever it is out there stalking them, it has a distorting power over the camera, greatly affecting our perceptions of events, which makes what goes down quite nerve-racking. Within the horror genre, it is light-years away from McQuaid’s strangely underappreciated I Sell the Dead.

Perhaps the weakest link is Joe “Mumblecore” Swanberg’s The Strange Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger, which purports to be the recorded Skype chats between a woman with a haunted apartment and her long distance boyfriend—on a moldy old VHS tape. Really? Digital to analog, how did that work exactly? Maybe similar objections could be raised regarding Amateur Night’s spy glasses, but it is not so glaringly anachronistic. Still, there is definitely some weird stuff happening in the corner of the screen.

It is back to old fashioned camcorders for the youtube tag-team Radio Silence’s 10/31/98, a story of carousing youth looking for a Halloween party and finding a house full of evil instead. The quartet clearly understands how to milk tension out of empty hallways and unsettling knick-knacks, before letting loose complete chaos.

Regardless of the hype surrounding audience members passing out and getting nauseous during a screening at Sundance, this is a legitimately scary movie, exponentially more frightening than the Blair Witch Project. Frankly, shaky cams work better for horror than any other genre. It is always what we don’t see that scares us, so those what-the-hack-was-that moments are quite effective (whereas they are simply annoying in action films). However, the reliance on the hand-held found footage motif levels out the filmmakers’ differences of style, providing the film with a largely consistent look, aside from Swanberg’s internet ringer.

This is easily the scariest film in years. It can be bloody and it depicts some casual cruelty in the introduction that is not a lot of fun to watch, but once Bruckner’s story builds up some steam, V/H/S really buries its hooks into viewers. Recommended for bold genre fans not suffering from altitude sickness, it screens again this Saturday (1/28) during this year’s Sundance in Park City.