Nada de Nada

#24: The Paranoids

This Argentine entry into the slacker artist oeuvre is centered on Luciano, a marginally employed writer who wanders rather aimlessly through his miserable life without much interest in anything except indulging his paranoid tendencies. He pesters the STD hot line about his sexual risks, he ritualistically lights incense and hides his dope obsessively, he worries about what his landlord thinks about his friends. And he's very depressed. Immobile.

This is all mildly amusing in that early '90's independent film way but when Luciano's much more successful college friend returns from a successful stint as a television producer in Spain to re-create his most successful production, a series called The Paranoids, in South America, it becomes clear that Luciano is not a simple artist in an uncaring world. It turns out that he's the central character in The Paranoids television series about a miserable, aimless, depressed, and paranoid writer named Luciano.

That feeling one has when confronted with a version of oneself that seems to have taken all the right steps, moved down the right paths, lives the life one deserves for oneself, and it still kind of a condescending prick? Imagine that one those right turns was using your actual life as fodder for his success. Luckily, the friend has one chink in his armor: an unhappy, beautiful, and restless girlfriend. It would be too much to say that Luciano pursues her. It is more accurate to say they share a slacker valence that is befuddled by, and a little disdainful of, actual success.

The music in this film is great and it is well shot. But the film itself is only an adequate outing of an overdone genre. Being set in Buenos Aires is not enough to make it interesting.

Mirimax Sucked Before Disney, Too!

#23: The Burning

This 1981 film is the first film produced by Mirimax Films, was funded by Miriam Weinstein, mother of Bob and Harvey Weinstein and the Mir in Mirimax, and is the special effects sequel to Friday the 13th for gore auteur Tom Savini. As such, it is exactly what you might expect.

The plot line is standard maniac killer at oversexed summer camp. This one is based on the Cropsey stories that apparently terrorized campers throughout the 1970's and 1980's. The foundation of these stories is chronicled in the documentary Cropsey, screened at the 2009 DIFF.

In this telling, Cropsey was an abusive and alcoholic caretaker at a summer camp. The campers prank Cropsey but when the prank gets out of hand he is hideously burned. When he recovers, he decides to take his revenge on the next generation of campers and their councilors, one of whom was among the original group. And on an overnight canoeing trip... well, I'm sure you know the rest.

Aside from a fairly tolerant view of date rape, there is nothing noteworthy about this film. There is some dispute, apparently, about whether this film rips off the camper in peril theme from Friday the 13th or if the script was written before it was released. I honestly didn't care enough either way to try to figure it out.