by MARK SLUTSKY

Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey

This loving, even nostalgic ode to heavy metal music and culture comes courtesy of Canadian directors Scot McFadyen, Jessica Joy Wise and Sam Dunn, who serves as the movie’s narrator and central voice. Dunn is a lifelong metalhead, and the movie is structured along the lines of a personal journey, as he explores the many facets of this flamboyant culture. You have to remind yourself of the moral panic heavy metal created in the 1970s and ’80s, the hysterical diatribes, the Senate hearings and the furious debate over a musical genre that seems so innocently theatrical and romantic in retrospect.

Through interviews with dozens of metal luminaries and experts—Tony Iommi, Motörhead’s Lemmy, Ronnie James Dio, Alice Cooper, Dee Snider, Vince Neil and Slayer among them—the film takes us on a mini-tour of the metal demi-monde, the festivals, the concerts and the parking lots. A carefully organized overview, Dunn looks at subjects like sexuality, violence, fandom, metal genres, sub-genres and sub-subgenres, Norwegian church burnings... Metal really packs it in. While the movie’s “headbanger’s journey” angle isn’t particularly compelling, the sheer abundance of interesting trivia and often very funny footage keeps you drawn in.

Running Scared

Here’s some things you’ll bear witness to if you see Running Scared: a man being shot in the genitals, a woman’s beaten face being shoved into a pizza, repeated close-ups of a hockey puck to the kisser, a prostitute’s head being smashed into a car’s headlights, a child pornography video shoot. Yeah, that’s right, a child pornography video shoot rounds out the laundry list of grotesqueries in this very, very unpleasant action movie written and directed by Wayne Kramer (not the MC5 one, the one who wrote Mindhunters).

The film stars Paul Walker as low-level mobster Joey Gazelle (a strained departure from his usual surfer-dude persona), who has one crazy night after a drug deal goes bad and some crooked cops get killed. Then all sorts of hysterical hell ensues, involving Russian mobsters, pimps, more crooked cops, drug dealers, hookers with hearts of gold and cunnilingus. It’s a frenetic and pretty gross two hours shot in a hyper-flashy, post-Requiem for a Dream style—and it is not very fun to watch. Especially as Running Scared is completely, grimly humourless and self-serious. A vile, unwatchable movie.

The White Countess

Director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant’s last production is this would-be epic, made shortly before the latter died in 2005 after more than 40 years of Merchant Ivory Productions. Like most of their pictures, The White Countess was written by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, beautifully photographed by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle and boasts considerable talent (Ralph Fiennes, Lynn Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson).

The story is set in Shanghai in the late 1930s, a turbulent time in China, as Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang nationalists clashed with Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists and Japan prepared to invade. Against this movie-friendly dramatic backdrop, the awkward relationship between Richardson and Fiennes slowly gestates. She’s an aristocratic exile from the Soviet Union, working as a dancer and occasional prostitute in the city’s nightclubs to feed her unappreciative family. He’s a sad former diplomat, blinded in an explosion and looking to open a nightclub.

Shanghai in this period, and particularly its expat/exile community, no doubt makes for a fascinating milieu. But, sad to say, a milieu does not a movie make, and the slow-moving White Countess suffers from a lack of dramatic interest, as well as an unfortunate performance from Fiennes, who, like the movie itself, never seems quite there.

Spymate

It’s hard to think of any possible justification for the use of chimpanzees in espionage work. You can pretty much rule out any kind of undercover operations straight away, as there’s nothing more conspicuous in any given situation than a chimpanzee in human clothing. Forget about equipping the agent with any high-tech gadgets or communication devices; without opposable thumbs, they’re as good as useless.

And yet this is somehow the premise of Spymate, a new movie from the producers of the Most Valuable Primate franchise. Despite a title that makes it sound more like an erotic thriller than an animal romp, the movie indeed focuses on a retired chimpanzee secret agent, Minkey. We first see Minkey and partner Mike (Chris Potter) busting generic Arab terrorists, and then jump 10 years ahead, where the chimp is comfortably living out his retirement in a plush trailer in a travelling circus, which is a pretty inaccurate representation of circus life for animals, to say the least. Called out of retirement to help save his old partner’s daughter, Minkey bravely battles his way through a host of ethnic stereotypes and cheap sets in this trashy flick full of very wrong ideas. n

METAL: A HEADBANGER’S JOURNEY, RUNNING SCARED, THE WHITE COUNTESS AND SPYMATE OPEN FRIDAY, FEB. 24

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