CHOPPER. Real-life criminal Mark “Chopper” Read enjoyed celebrity
status in his native Australia after a best-selling 1991 autobiography and
subsequent television exposure. This biopic by Andrew Dominic begins
with Read as a young man leading a charmed life as a kingpin in a maximum
security prison, and picks up years later as the somewhat worse-for-wear
parolee demonstrates his unfitness for civilian life in various unpleasant
ways. As portrayed by standup comedian Eric Dana, Read is a charismatic,
highly intelligent, exhibitionistic alpha male, alternately capable of gruesome
violence and warm fellow feeling, childlike loyalty and Machiavellian manipulation,
philosophical serenity and delusional mania. First-time writer-director Dominic
sets himself the difficult task of keeping all our different responses to
Read in simultaneous focus, and succeeds brilliantly: Chopper is at
the same time a very funny black comedy and a frightening portrait of pathology,
thanks to Dominic’s unerring control of tone.
KRAMPACK. Dani (Fernando Ramallo), an adolescent boy vacationing
on the Mediterranean coast with his family, invites his best friend Nico
(Jordi Vilches) to spend the summer with him. Dani and Nico are more
than ready to leave behind their mutual masturbation sessions and lose their
virginity, and their flirtations with two vacationing girls (Marieta Orozco
and Esther Nubiola) seem likely to be consummated. But both boys begin
to realize that Dani is more interested in spending time with Nico than in
pursuing women. Even before the plot kicks in, writer-director Cesc
Gay (adapting Jordi Sanchez’s play with co-writer Tomas Aragay) avoids most
of the pitfalls of the coming-of-age film, establishing a droll, deadpan
style of line delivery that imparts a faint flavor of absurdism to the boys’
clumsy courtships. And Krampack earns additional points for not shying
away from the polymorphous perversity of teenage sexuality, and for its honest,
unsentimental development of the boys’ dilemma. Not an immensely ambitions
film, but a satisfying one.
TO DIE (OR NOT). This playful omnibus film by Spanish director
Ventura Pons (Beloved/Friend) presents itself as a meditation on fate and
mortality, though its glee in permuting its crazy-quilt narrative is its
only real conviction. The film’s first half (titled To Die)
strings together a series of short comic episodes, related only by the demise
of a central character in each; the second half (titled Or Not) retells
the same stories, altering them so that the characters survive, and revealing
surprising connections among the episodes in the process. Pons is above
all an entertainer, and he takes care never to let our attention wander,
peppering us with comic flourishes and farcical plot twists. But showmanship
this total is reductive: one can’t imagine Pons sacrificing a laugh in order
to make a character more complex, or a theme sharper. The effect is
of a very elaborate sitcom.