Bent, Volume 3 (2003)

Posted on May 04, 2005 under Comedy, Fantasy, Horror |

Written and directed by Jason Santo (Aftermath written and co-directed by Pat Hines)
Starring
- Tina Krause
- Frank Parker
- Jason Santo
- Zach Lawrence
- Neil O’Callahan
Produced by Jason Santo and Sheri Carter
Executive produced by Roman Berman, Jay Sun, and Brian Costello

So. Let’s just skip the pseudo-obligatory ruminations on Jason Santo’s strengths, weaknesses, and prospects as a filmmaker, and leap right into the contents of the DVD, shall we? (Although if you really have a pressing need for such ruminations, you can find them here and here.)

As with the other volumes in the series, the connecting metaphor tying together the short films is that of water in all of its many forms and states. This time around, Santo’s gotten himself some stock footage to extend his collection of watery images, so thrill along with some helicopter shots and Pacific seascapes. (Yes, there’s a bit too much of it. Yes, I’ll point it out.)

The introduction our first film makes the point that water droplets on glass usually follow the path of least resistance, though the occasional drop will blaze a new path, making it easier for subsequent droplets to follow. And I have absolutely no idea what that has to do with…

Aftermath

We meet a group of high school friends of both genders (some of the males with suspiciously high foreheads) sitting around with beer and gab. The focus of the conversation, Nick (Eric Hallgren), is a football player who prides himself in his maltreatment of the freaks of the school, and over the objections of his girlfriend Brittany (Niki Sella), he regales his friends with the bathroom-cleaning story, which resulted from his detention after another weakling-baiting escapade.

Our next scene cuts to Brittany driven home from school, covered in spattered blood. In between the scenes (while the credits were rolling), a Columbine-style shooting took place, and the beleaguered geeks of the school took their revenge on Nick and eight of their other tormentors. (Extra points if you can suspend your disbelief that whatever law enforcement officials were there to take care of the survivors after the standoff ended wouldn’t have made some effort to clean Brittany’s boyfriends blood off her face.)

At least the blood matches the wallpaper.

Our other focal character is John (Justin Grace), the quietest of the late Nick’s circle of friends. We get to see him do such fascinating things as a) turn off the TV when schoolmates start talking about the victims as “the nicest kids ever,” and b) tie neckties. No, seriously, that’s at least 50% of his screentime, standing in front of his bedroom mirror, tying ties — once for the memorial service, once for the wake, once for the funeral. Look, if you’re going to be putting on ties so often, take a piece of advice from someone who wears one everyday: Flip your collar up, then tie it, then flip your collar down. Don’t try to tie it and have it slide up under your collar.

From here, the friends all “deal” with Nick’s death, by which I mean they all pick a stance or an attitude. George (Michael Stephens) simply wants to go out and beat the tar out of every nerd in a trenchcoat. Brittany dedicates her life to nominating Nick for sainthood (I guess if the Pope can be a former member of Hitler Youth, anything could happen). Al (Zach Lawrence) and Penelope (Sarah Ashton) try to get their friends to admit that Nick may have been a target for a reason, since he really didn’t live his life as Friend To Outcasts And Puppies. And John mostly looks at everyone else, when not mastering the intricacies of the full windsor.

Then after the funeral, Al talkes to John in the cemetery and tells him that he really needs to take a stand, have an opinion, etc.

And that’s the end.

Um? Look, I know it’s hard to carve out some real meaning and thoughtfulness on Columbine-style tragedies, but nobody held a gun to the head of Jason Santo (and writer/co-director Pat Hines) and said, “Make a movie dealing with Columbine!” You simply can’t start evoking echoes of things like that, things that raise deep questions about every level of our society, without having anything to contibute to the discussion. The best this film manages is to delineate several of the stances commentators took in analyzing Columbine (”I’m representing the downtrodden masses!” “I’m representing the panicky status quo!”), with varying levels of success in scriptwriting finesse and acting prowess. (The most successful portrayal is of George, mainly because “angry and violent” is a pretty easy role to play.)

“Around the tree, down the hole… Wait. Dammit.”

It’s a movie that adds nothing to such a tender discussion, and the clear implication that it’s the people who don’t rise up with a pithy judgment on the situation who need to wake up and make themselves heard… Well, there’s really little of value to be taken away from this one.

The next watery interlude pontificates on the life cycle of a water molecule — from a particle in a cloud, to a raindrop, to a puddle, to a river, to an ocean, back to a particle. Not particularly deep, but at least such musings relate to the theme of the next short:

Again

Newlyweds Jack (Frank Parker) and Lauren (Kathy Nestor) are off to visit Lauren’s old school chums, Anetra (Amy Martin) and Greg (Christian Cibotti), but on arrival Jack is afflicted by almost crippling deja vu — of the house, of Anita, of Greg, of the living room… He finds it hard to stop staring and starts making everyone uncomfortable. It doesn’t help any that he’s a self-described Andy-Kaufmanesque comedian, so nobody is sure if this is all the convoluted setup to a bizarre joke.

Jack gets worse as he realizes that he’s starting to remember things before they happen — the location of the ibuprofen in the bathroom, the wine that he quickly drinks because he knows the glass is about to be tipped over. And as he gets more edgy and panicky, well…

No, I don’t think I’m even going to try to describe the ending. But I’ll say this: It doesn’t work. It’s one of those clever shocker endings that satisfies for about half a second, until you say, “Wait — come again? How is THAT supposed to make sense?” The acting’s pretty good, especially Kathy Nestor’s performance as a newlywed getting progressively fed up with her husband. And Frank Parker is believable as a Kaufmanesque comedian (keeping in mind that I don’t appreciate Kaufman, which means that I find Parker believably unfunny). But on the whole… Nah.

The next story starts beating you over the head before the preamble is done. Waterfalls — they’re both beautiful, and dangerous. (Okay, we get it.) Not unlike some people. (Okay, I’m with you. Move on.) Who lure victims in with their beauty, and then prove to be dangerous. (Thank you! Concept grasped! Next!)

Here Comes Your Man

Unfortunately, we’re not going to get any more subtle. While a lighthearted bar song of the same name plays, we get a collage of Michael (Gene Dante) seducing a dozen different women, shown so that the various stages of the seduction — kissing, unbuttoning, etc. — are edited together in parallel. This shows that, you know, to Michael they’re all the same and interchangeable. Intercut with this is shots of Michael poking holes in all of his condoms.

Yes, it’s pretty obvious what he’s doing, all the more so because of the single line description on the back of the DVD cover:

“In the disturbing, experimental picture Here Comes Your Man, a man maliciously spreads HIV to women he seduces.”

If you know Santo’s oeuvre, you know that he’s previously dealt with related material of sex, betrayal and disease (twice, in fact, if you count the original version of Marisa in Fade to Black, Episode 3 and the re-edited version in Bent, Volume One). This new treatment adds nothing; in fact, it shows itself to be almost the antithesis of the former film in terms of subtlety, artistry, and poignancy.

Attention, operators of web-filtering software: These nipples are male. Thank you.

In fact, this film seems to revel in its oblivious lack of redeeming value. After that opening sequence, which tells us really all there is to know about the story, it keeps plowing the same furrow: Michael, who bears a disturbing resemblance to Rowan Atkinson, picks up a girl in a bar by lying to her, takes her home, and has grunting, panting sex with her. The addition of bare breasts to the Mindscape canon is not welcome, if it means that scenes such as this, shot with all of the artistry (though fortunately more discretion) of your average camcorder porno, are going to start creeping into the films. And the scene of Michael in the bathroom, smugly squeezing “stuff” out of the holes in the end of the used condom before flushing it, heaps overkill upon overkill.

And it simply won’t stop. We get the flashback scene in which the doctor (Santo) tells Michael that he’s HIV-positive, and the dumbfounded Michael declares that he’s only been with one unnamed girl (flashback within a flashback, for the sole purpose of showcasing more breasts). And then the tale drags on, with Michael desperately trying to seduce even more women as revenge against the entire gender, even as his body becomes covered with livid lesions…

I was embarrassed to be watching this. I was embarrassed to see Jason Santo’s name proudly attached. I understand that Santo has been wanting to venture out into more “adult” (in the good sense of the word) themes and storylines, but an piece like this makes me want to take his camera away. Instead of dealing with anything mature, he’s ended up making an appalling attempt at exploitation — doubly appalling, because all of the prurient elements are presented in the context of a bastard purposely spreading AIDS.

Had this been the last short in this volume, it would have left an almost insurmountable bad impression on me. Fortunately, Santo makes a credible (though not nearly sufficient) stab at redemption with the last film. After footage of far too much tropical sealife, and an aphorism about there being a lot more to the ocean than can be seen on the surface, we get…

More Than Money’s Worth

Our story: A trio of collegiate Boston Preppies (Jason Santo, Zach Lawrence, Neil O’Callaghan) are consternated because the captain of their golf team, Jeremy (Frank Parker), has recently been dumped by his girlfriend, and has taken to sitting on the lakeshore in a T-shirt and shorts, throwing rocks and decidedly NOT practicing for the big tournament this Saturday. In desperation, they approach Gretchen (Tina Krause), a student out of her financial league and struggling with loan applications, with a questionable but not entirely tawdry offer: Romance him. Don’t “put out” necessarily, but pay attention to him, favor him with dazzling smiles, take his mind off his ex, and put the spring back into his step and the certainty back into his golf swing.

Look, it’s not as if I need a funny caption to justify an image of Tina Krause, okay?

Against her better judgment (where would cinema be without that phrase?) and convinced by the many 0s on the check they write, Gretchen starts pulling Jeremy out of his shell, and in the course of an afternoon, discovers that she’s honestly starting to like him. Unfortunately, he’s starting to like her even more. That’s unfortunate because, in an attempt to impress her, he ditches the Birkenstocks and tee he wore in his funk and instead arrays himself in his preppie best, assisted by his solicitous friends. Having seen a glimmer of the authentic and unadorned Jeremy, can Gretchen stomach the superficial and artificial creature he remakes himself as?

This short comes as a breath of fresh air, and not solely because of the abomination it follows. All three of the previous shorts in this collection take themselves so, so seriously. More Than Money’s Worth, by contrast, aims more at being light and charming. Sure, there’s some thematic meat, as both Jeremy and Gretchen are caught in a web of playing self-defeating roles, but the short’s success lies in sparing the trowel with which Import and Significance might otherwise have been piled on.

Chief of its virtues are the performances. Before I saw any of her movies, I knew Tina Krause only from pictures on the web, and truthfully, I didn’t think her very pretty. In motion, though, she’s adorable — vivacious and animated in a way that brightens a room. And our preppie trio nails a level of inflated parody that works perfectly in context, smugly secure in their unexamined and unearned status as social superiors.

Santo consults his muse.

So. We’ve now come to the end of the volume, and I suppose a summation is expected. I’ll be straight with you, it’s damned hard to give any kind of calm and unimpassioned assessment with Here Comes Your Man sitting in the middle of all this; it’s like trying to judge the quality of a custard while studiously ignoring the hug cat turd sitting in the middle of the bowl.

If there’s anything to be drawn from this, it’s a single fact: Jason Santo has done shorts. He’s plumbed the length and depth of the medium, and has started in on retreads. If that boy doesn’t move on to something feature-length soon, he’s going to end up cannibalizing his talent in a series of self-plagiarisms with clearly diminishing returns.