Cynical Cinema

In Season Three, Volume One of Perry Mason, out August 19th from Paramount Home Entertainment, Raymond Burr seems to really be hitting his stride. The 50th Anniversary Collection of Perry Mason came out a few months ago, a series of the “greatest episodes” of the series. And it was certainly a star-studded DVD collection - Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, and Bette Davis all make guest appearances. All of those episodes are good, but they are classic more because of the guest stars than because of the actual episodes themselves. For great Perry Mason episodes, look no further than this new DVD set.

Oh sure, there are standard TV-lawyer-drama set-ups in Season Three of Perry Mason. Like the case where Mason has to defend Paul Drake, his right-hand man. And the episodes that involve Mason defending models and beauty pageant winners. (”Beauty pageant” seems so quaint, doesn’t it? This WAS the 1950s, after all. Nowadays these clients would be high-class hookers and porn stars.) The one problem I have with this set is that it is only three discs. Assuming the second half of this season is of a similar length, then the entire third season of Perry Mason would be six discs. Why not put all six together? On one DVD set? I guess it’s just a money thing. But I want to watch more Perry Mason now!

Yes, The Love Boat has returned to DVD, on August 12th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Season One, Volume Two comes out on that day, and boy, was it worth the wait!  It turns out there are twelve episodes on Volume Two, on four discs.  And I know what you’re thinking - why not just throw the whole thing together into one glorious Season One Package?  Well, it turns out that if Paramount had done so, it would be too much Love Boat for just one person.  As it stands, there are many reasons to pick up Season One, Volume Two.  Here they are:

Kathy Bates
Leslie Nielsen
Pearl Bailey
Shelley Long
Monty Hall
Annette Funicello
Frankie Avalon
Pat Morita

I have chosen all those whose names I thought might be sought-after by completists.  Like, if you have every single movie Pat Morita has ever done, all the Karate Kids, Bloodsport III, Karate Dog and all the others, and you find out that Pat Morita appeared on the Pacific Princess Overtures episode of The Love Boat, then you would want to complete your collection, would you not?  You see, this is why I gave Season One Volume Two one more star than I did Season One Volume One.  Because I have a particular affinity for Kathy Bates.  For further guest stars, please check out the links at the bottom.  Oh - but be warned.  Annette and Frankie appear in separate episodes.

The Executioner’s Song was a book written by Norman Mailer that ranks with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in terms of true-crime novels. Both books are exhaustively researched novels about true-life criminal figures. Capote’s book was about Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, two lowlifes who slaughtered an entire family on a farm in Kansas. And Mailer’s book was about Gary Gilmore, a murderer who became famous in the late 1970s after he insisted upon being executed. He was the first person killed by the state in America after the re-instatement of the death penalty by the U.S. in 1976.

The film The Executioner’s Song, is a 1982 Lawrence Schiller made-for-TV true crime movie that ranks with Richard Brooks’ 1967 film In Cold Blood. And it’s being released on DVD for the first time Tuesday, August 5th, by Paramount Home Entertainment. Tommy Lee Jones plays Gilmore, and delivers a very good performance as a man who has no clue how to fit into society after being released from prison. He has spent 12 years in jail, and upon his release he goes to live with his cousin. He hooks up with a teenage divorcee, played by Rosanna Arquette, and makes a half-hearted attempt to go straight. But soon his inability to contain his natural tendency toward violence comes out, and he gets busted for murder and sent away.

The second half of the movie deals with Gilmore and his desire to be executed. Lawyers and family members carry on appeals on his behalf, against his wishes. And soon, we believe that perhaps he is right. He really does need to be put to death. His toxic, evil personality continues to do damage even while he is away in prison. The Executioner’s Song originally aired as a 157-minute two-part made for TV movie, and was later pared down to 97 minutes for a theatrical release. The version available on this DVD is somewhere in the middle. At 135 minutes, this “Director’s Cut” is just the right length. It’s more than long enough to create a powerful film experience, and Tommy Lee Jones is so good in the lead role that this movie is deservedly known as a classic.

I can remember, to some degree, Beverly Hills 90210 from my childhood. I don’t think I ever watched the show, but I knew all about it because it was one of those pervasive pop culture phenomena the became a part of my young life regardless of any involvement I may personally have had in watching the show. I remember Kelly, and Brandon, and Dylan and Andrea and Brenda and Steve. I remember that Tori Spelling and Shannen Doherty and Luke Perry were the stars. And I remember that it was some kind of high-school related soap opera starring thirty-something actors passing for teenagers. And I attempted to revisit this phenomenon again when Paramount Home Entertainment released Season Five of Beverly Hills 90210 today, July 29th.

By season five, the stars of the show have already moved on to college, and now they look like they may well be college kids. Well, except for that girl who plays Andrea, who has a baby and a husband and looks like she could be forty. And Luke Perry, who is a drunken bad-boy this season and looks as though he could be forty-six. It’s almost hilarious to see him show up at a bar and be refused service because he’s underage. He’s clearly in his forties! Season Five is (I can only assume) better than Season Four, if only because Shannen Doherty has left the show (as explained in the first episode - Brenda has received some kind of scholarship to some school and will be staying in some European town and is not coming back). Taking her place is Valerie, played by Tiffany Amber Thiessen, (Kelly from Saved By The Bell), who is much hotter. So far so good.

Donna (Tori Spelling) is a rich little girl with rich old parents who buy her everything she wants. She is scheduled to make her “debut” later this season, because apparently this “debutante” crap still exists somewhere in the states. Her parents are nervous when she exhibits some behaviour unbecoming a young lady, like talking to a black man. But her friends are there for her. Her yes-man friends, who pat her on the head and tell her she’s special and that everyone loves her and she’ll be just fine. So, for all intents and purposes, she’s playing the real-life Tori Spelling. The only thing missing on this show is that her name is not “Tori”. I guess daddy bought her an acting career as well as all that plastic surgery.

Isn’t it amazing, thinking back on that cast now, that currently the most famous of all the cast members IS Tori Spelling? The only one who appears in tabloids and in the news and in the entertainment shows. Whatever happened to Ian Ziering? Or Jason Priestly? Or, more interestingly, Jennie Garth? Jennie Garth (who plays Kelly) was actually good. As an actress. Head and shoulders above the rest of the cast. Well, she’s often acting beside Tori Spelling, which doesn’t hurt. But not only was she the best actress on the show, she was also the hottest girl. So shouldn’t that have meant a bigger career for her after this show had run it’s course?

But the biggest mystery of all, for me, was the disappearance of Luke Perry following the end of Beverly Hills 90210. This guy, in season five, is a drunken, rebellious bad-boy. Compared to the rest of this (as Valerie says in episode 2) obnoxiously squeaky-clean bunch of L.A. dinks, he’s Satan. And the girls love his bad-assery. He’s the sex symbol. And the show never stops doing all it can to remind us of that. They play up his resemblance to James Dean every chance they get, filming him the same way Dean was filmed, posing him the same way Dean posed. And when they aren’t creating a James Dean for the 90s, they are shooting him like Brando! With that kind of exposure, how could he not have become the biggest star in movies? The bad-boy cool kid, the tough guy heart-throb? Perhaps it’s because he started doing all this cool-young-kid stuff when he was forty-one.

This show is amazingly dated. Not just because of the hair - and they all have hilarious 90s hair - but because it’s so much less risque than any similar show today. It’s like watching Biff and Judy splitting a malt down at the hamburger stand, only now it’s Brendan and Kelly at the Peach Pit. The scenes where they try to show how BAD Valerie is by having a close-up of her rolling a joint are almost precious when we see them today. The more dramatic a moment is supposed to be, the funnier it actually is. This show may well have been the biggest thing in the world in 1995, but it got real irrelevant, real fast by the year 2000.

Girlfriends is a TV sitcom that revolves around four African-American women who have relationship problems and job issues and talk woman talk. Think - Sex And The City, with a laugh track. I hate Sex and The City a lot, but the only thing I hate more is a laugh track. This show is not funny enough to be a good comedy, not interesting enough to be a good drama, and not sexy enough to be a good soap. So it just sort of meanders around. Occupying that middle ground between sitcom, soap opera, and dramatic show that was occupied successfully by Sex And the City for so many years, and never really replicated.

There is one girlfriend who is a horrible egotist gold-digger who wants to leave her husband because he went broke buying her jewelry. There is another one who is a horrible lazy mooch who moves around between the houses of her friends. There is another friend who is a horrible self-centred bitter mother of two. Whose kids we never meet. Do they exist at all? Or are they merely a reference point? And the fourth girlfriend, who is basically the centre of the show, the Carrie Bradshaw of Girlfriends, if you will, is more emotionally stable than the other three. But she is still irritating and does a lot of stupid things.

Then there are the supporting characters. The flamboyantly gay office assistant who dishes and sits cross-legged and chats with the ladies, one girl-bonding moment after another. The one who uses the term “girlfriend” like he invented it, and who peppers his speech with an exaggerated lisp and references to famous designers. You know that character? The one who was still kinda new in Will and Grace but is now one of the most painful cliches in pop culture? Or how about the scene where the girl believes the guy is going to ask her to marry him, and so she does all kinds of crazy things, and misunderstands everything he says, which all is basically on millimeter short of “will you marry me” without actually saying it, and then there’s the moment when she finds out that wasn’t his plan at all, and all those things he said are explained differently and incredibly implausibly, and then she is embarrassed and has egg on her face? Seen it before? Seen it more than forty times? If so, you’re still in the majority.

The worst thing about Girlfriends is that it is a sit-com. And it has a laugh track. And that means that the writers try to shoe-horn jokes in when there should be no jokes. And they try to make jokes out of things that aren’t funny. And the laugh track starts when nothing funny has been said. It’s like they need a joke and a laugh every ninety seconds exactly. So they cram in ripped-off lines from elsewhere in pop culture - “Vegas baby, Vegas!” Is about the height of this comedic writing. Which is pretty lame. The drama portion of this show could be decent, but with the tacked-on jokes and the irritating characters, who would care? Who cared about this show at all? Well, enough people to get eight seasons out of it, I guess. Season Four of Girlfriends comes out today, July 29th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

There was a made-for-TV movie about the MIT students that took Vegas for millions of dollars at the blackjack tables a few years ago.  Try as I might, I can’t seem to find it now.  I believe it was Canadian.  It was being shown on the movie network this year, and it was pretty good.  It dealt with the same true story as 21, based on the book “Bringing Down the House”.  In fact, it was virtually the same movie as 21.  The only difference between the two movies is that 21 has better production values and a more well-known cast.  Kevin Spacey stars as the teacher at MIT who recruits a bunch of math geniuses to form a team that is ready to take Las Vegas for millions at the blackjack tables.

That team consists of Jim Sturgess, the smartest-of-the-smart, who is the last member recruited for the team.  Also Kate Bosworth, the hottest-girl-on-campus, and also Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts and Aaron Yoo.  While the story deals with such themes as gambling addiction, the corruptive influence of Las Vegas, the ego clashes between team members, the modernization of Vegas and the shunting aside of the old guard, the questionable relationship between a teacher and his students, and of course the concept of “who your true friends are”.  But it deals with each of these themes so superficially that you already know how every moment of this movie will play out.

Every character is so obvious that it becomes clear within their first two minutes of screen time exactly how they will turn out.  The story arc of Jim Sturgess as Ben, the smartest kid on the team, is the only one that really gets fleshed out in the movie, but every moment of it is totally conventional film.  He joins the team to make money so he can go to Harvard med school.  (Although why someone with this kind of math genius would want to become a doctor is never explained.  It’s like they just figure “doctor” is the smartest thing someone can be.)  He gets sucked in by the allure of Vegas and money, and leaves his true friends behind!  And eventually gets out of control and his world comes crashing down…and so on and so forth.  I think we’ve all seen this a thousand times before.

The only character with some mystery is that of Kate Bosworth, who is either a femme fatale, luring Ben into this world of fast money and fast women, or she’s an innocent ingenue who also becomes corrupted by the influence of Vegas, OR she’s the only character who maintains her moral centre throughout the film.  Even after the movie ended, I was still not sure which one of these characters she really was.  But in the end, that wasn’t because the film makers wanted to give her that sense of mystery, but rather it’s because her character is so badly written that she actually is all of these contradictory things.  Bosworth is OK as an actress, but she isn’t quite comfortable in a role where no one (including Bosworth) really knows where her character is going in the movie.

21 is slick, polished and totally surface-deep.  Even the really interesting characters (like Laurence Fishburne as a casino security pro) get slicked-over, caricature treatment.  Which means that as far as brainless entertainment goes, 21 is pretty good.  It’s so smooth and polished that it gleams.  And many people who want to just sit back and enjoy a movie without thinking at all will enjoy that.  The problem I have with it is that this is a movie about the smartest math geniuses in the world, and an incredibly complex card-counting scheme, and yet the movie never makes an attempt to itself be smart.

Anton Yelchin is very good in Charlie Bartlett.  As the title character, and therefore star of the picture, he holds together a movie that really does not hold up on it’s own.  The movie opens with him being expelled from yet another private school, this time for laminating licenses illegally, and being taken home by his mom in a limo.  His family is fabulously wealthy, and he lives in a massive home with extremely fancy cars.  As Charlie says later, to his psychiatrist, “my family has a psychiatrist on call - how normal can I be?”  And that psychiatrist will figure prominently, albeit in a tangential way, throughout the rest of the movie.

Charlie is now forced to attend public school for the first time, and with his suit and tie and crest on his jacket, he immediately runs afoul of the school’s cartoon bully, played by Tyler Hilton.  However, he soon discovers that the medication his psychiatrist has prescribed for him, while it doesn’t do what it’s intended to do, is in high demand.  He figures he could hook up with this bully (the school drug dealer) in order to make some money and, by extension, some friends.  Clearly Charlie Bartlett doesn’t need money.  But he does need friends, and illegal enterprise has proven, we assume, thoughout his life, to provide him with those friends.

This is a venue that is never fully explored - how Charlie Bartlett is either a kid trying to make his way through the perils of “popularity” in high school, or perhaps he is a kid who is just smarter and wiser than all the other kids.  Toward the end of the film, that discrepancy is addressed, but in a fairly lame, conventional and unsatisfying way.  Robert Downey Jr. is underused as the school principal, who is a well-intentioned drunk whose life is falling apart.  He’s great in the role, his downward spiral coinciding almost exactly with Charlie Bartlett’s upward turn.  Which leads to, of course, a substantial confrontation between the two.  But again, Downey’s transformation is never fully explored, and is equally unsatisfying.

Really, this movie is very good until the midway point, as Charlie Bartlett becomes the coolest kid in school - providing psychiatric drugs and informal bathroom-stall counselling to his fellow high schoolers.  But the second half is so chaotic, and makes so little sense in spots, that it feels merely like a series of events that have little relation to each other.  And when the movie finally grinds to an end, the only word I can think of to use is “unsatisfying”.  The premise is good - the execution is flawed - and the finale is unsatisfying, at best.

Sleepwalking came out Tuesday the 15th from Alliance Films.  And while I want to like it, and I want to recommend it, I just can’t.  It’s a movie that almost gets there and almost succeeds, but in this case a near-miss is as good as a mile.  You know, horseshoes and hand grenades and so forth.  It’s the story of Tara Reedy, a young girl played by Annasophia Robb, whose mother Joleen (Charlize Theron) is a pretty awful mom.  After her boyfriend is arrested on drug charges, Joleen and Tara are evicted from their house and have no place to go.  They move in with Joleen’s brother James (Nick Stahl), but after a couple of days Joleen is gone.  She has taken off on her daughter, leaving her stuck with James, who has no idea what to do with a 12-year-old child.

The relationship between Stahl and Robb is a great one.  It is awkwardly sweet, tender yet clueless.  And while initially he is the one making all the sacrifices for her, and she’s kind of the twelve-year-old jerk, eventually she comes around and helps him as much as he helps her.  Stahl is terrific as the unstable, meek loser of an uncle, and Annasophia Robb is absolutely wonderful as the young girl.  (You might remember her from her terrific performance in Bridge To Terabithia.)  Theron is great as the absentee filthy neglectful possible-prostitute mother.  Which means the movie feels like it’s building toward something intense.  Something that reveals the whole story, that explains Joleen and James and why they now are the way they are.

And it seems like this moment is coming.  James has lost his job, has been evicted from his place, and has nowhere to go with young Tara, so he takes her on a road trip to see his dad (and Joleen’s) at his farm a few states over.  We know that this will lead to a watershed moment, either a reconciliation with a father that has been wronged, or a confrontation with a father that has wronged his kids.  We don’t really know until we get there.  And when we do get there, the final resolution is, in a way, even more intense that we would have expected.  And, in another way, much less intense.  You see, the father is played by Dennis Hopper.  And unfortunately, he portrays the father as a complete cartoon character. 

The entire film, up until that point, hinged on the father.  Every other character has deep issues and serious damage, all of which can be traced back to this father.  Stahl, Robb, and Theron have all turned in deeply nuanced, wonderfully emotional performances to this point.  Things are hinted at but never said.  And now here comes the big resolution where we find out for sure what has happened…and Hopper shows up as Dr. Evil from Austin Powers!  I don’t think this is his fault.  I think his character was written that way and that this is how the movie was supposed to go.  And when we get that major, watershed moment, it’s a far more over-the-top intense scene than we could ever have imagined.  And yet - the questions we have remain unanswered!

This is a movie that I think gives it’s audience an awful lot of credit.  Thinking that just hinting at certain things and creating damaged characters is enough for us to piece together, for ourselves, just what this father did.  And we probably can.  But the lack of a real resolution with acutal confirmation of our suspicions left me feeling ripped off.  The final scenes all of a sudden feel unnecessary, rather than a real climax.  And that means we sat through the rest of the movie for almost nothing.  With so many good performances and so much development leading up to this big final showdown, we needed more.  A lot more.

In every movie about soldiers returning from war, there has to be some kind of traumatic war event before they go home. That way, the fact that they’re all messed up makes more sense to us. There have been many amazing movies about soldiers returning from war, the best of which was The Deer Hunter. Of late, the war in Iraq has provided some great films about this, the best one being In The Valley of Elah. And now we get Stop-Loss, another film about soldiers being messed up and freaking out when they get home, and it’s almost as good. And it does start off with that traumatic event, one which we see in more and more flashbacks as the movie continues.

The practice of Stop-Loss is one that has affected almost 100,000 American soldiers since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. Basically, it’s (as Ryan Philippe says in the film) a back-door draft. Soldiers who have completed their tours of duty get stop-lossed, which means that just as they are about to get discharged from the military, they get yanked back in and sent back to the war, whether they want to go or not. In the film, Brandon (Ryan Philippe) is one of those soldiers. A fine sergeant, loved by his friends and his soldiers, respected in the military, he returns from Iraq to his home, a small town in middle-America. The soldiers that fought with him are all, apparently, from the same small town. These include his life-long best friend Steve (Channing Tatum), and their buddy Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Instantly, upon their return from the war, they show how messed up they are in ways we’ve all seen before. Tommy starts fights with everybody. Steve gets really drunk and believes he’s still in the war, and digs a big hole in his front yard. And Brandon still has a useful role, as the guy who keeps all his friends together and makes sure they stay alive and reasonably sane. (Think DeNiro in Deer Hunter.) Within days of the guys being back in the States, Tommy’s wife has left him and he’s drinking himself to death. Steve has beaten his girlfriend Michele (Abbie Cornish), and only Brandon’s intervention has saved any of them. And then Brandon gets stop-lossed.

Faced with the prospect of going back to Iraq, now he starts to lose it too. His resistance at first seems to be based entirely on principle. The practice of stop-lossing soldiers is cruel. Once their tour of duty is complete, they have done exactly what they’ve signed on to do. They’re done. To force them back into action really is nothing but a draft, and his decision to run is basically, at first, a protest against the draft. What they’re doing isn’t right, so he basically refuses to comply. We discover, as the movie goes on, that he has other reasons, of course. Like that Big Traumatic Event that we saw at the beginning of the film. He can’t go back because he can’t shoot people any more. He can’t stay home, because the army will simply arrest him and send him back anyway. So his only option is to go on the run, with some vague idea about how to get out of this.

And his idea, as he goes AWOL, really is vague. Steve’s girlfriend Michele accompanies him on his trip, because she believes in what he’s doing. Basically, however, the stop-loss laws mean that his flight can take him only one place - either Canada or Mexico. And once he goes, he’s basically in witness protection, because he can’t contact his family at all. He can’t ever return home. He will have to get a new identity and new papers, and start his life all over. Which is, of course, a tough decision to make. While he and Michele are on the run though, things at home are starting to turn bad. Steve has re-enlisted for another tour of duty. Like so many characters in these movies, he no longer feels comfortable anywhere but in Iraq, fighting.

Tommy has also tried to re-enlist for the same reason. Everyone hates him at home now, so he has nowhere else to turn. However, the reason they hate him is that he’s a jerk, he’s messed up, he beats people up all the time, and he gets drunk out of his mind before plowing his car into buildings and stores around town. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is developing into one of the great character actors in movies. He is the most magnetic and believable character in Stop-Loss, especially next to Channing Tatum, whose character feels re-hashed and obvious. Tommy could be as cliched as Steve, but Gordon-Levitt rises above. The main problem with the movie is that he isn’t given enough to do. As the most compelling character in the film, it would have been nice to see a lot more of his story, rather than jumping from one mess to another.

The big problem with Steve and Tommy, of course, is that Brandon is no longer around. Brandon’s gone AWOL, and without his calming influence to guide them, they begin to come apart at the seams. This is fairly indicative of their mindsets anyway. They are also two guys who can’t really function without taking orders any more. They have no real minds of their own, and unless their lives are structured for them and planned out, they can’t manage. Which is why Steve re-enlists and Tommy falls to pieces. When Tommy gets dishonourably discharged, and therefore is unable to go back to the war, he really loses it. (Which sort of begs the question - why doesn’t Phillippe do this too? Instead of going on the run, just get really drunk and do stupid stuff and get kicked out of the army!)

In the end, Stop-Loss asks a very tough question. If people are depending on you, and you take off on them for the right reasons, are you really doing the right thing? A political movie with a specific ambition, it resonates with some great performances, mostly from Ryan Philippe, Abbie Cornish, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s not on the level of In The Valley of Elah, but it’s very, very good. Stop-Loss will not end up being a classic, but it’s well worth a rental. It comes out July 8th, Tuesday, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The first five minutes of The Tracey Fragments are all over the place. Pictures in pictures, fragmented story, bizarre “fragmented” filming. And while you have no idea what’s going on, it makes you want to watch. What’s happening? All we really know is that Ellen Page is wearing only a shower curtain, at the back of a bus, searching for her missing younger brother, who thinks he’s a dog. Which all seems very interesting, and really made me excited for the rest of the movie, when it was going to turn into a traditional narrative and explain the story, and stop with this bizarre fragmented filming. And it does explain the story. But it doesn’t have a traditional narrative. And the fragmented editing does not stop. Ever. In the whole movie.

I don’t mind unconventional narrative. I don’t mind jumping through time, disjointed stories, or bizarre filming techniques. But this was too much. Too much weird, most of it seemingly for the sake of being weird. Her father is a jerk, her mother is a seemingly catatonic chain smoker, there is a creepy pimp, a hooker on a bus, a new hot boy in school who looks like Lou Reed, a bizarre transvestite psychiatrist, high school bullies, George Strombolopolous, a big fat clown at a birthday party, a crow, a lowlife named Lance from Toronto, a bar fight, a peeler bar, a crazy drunk who stands on his head, a strange sit-com intro out of nowhere, a rapist, and a ton of other weird things. All of this thrown at us in fragments, in picture-in-picture style, with overwhelming results. We have no idea what to focus on, which I suppose is the point.

But then we get to the end, which is incredibly sad and rotten and brutal, but it doesn’t carry the emotional resonance that it should, because we’re so offput by the strange filming style throughout the film that we really don’t have anything invested in any of the characters. Her little brother is cute, sure. And Lance is basically a good guy. And we like Ellen Page (Tracey) just because she’s Ellen Page and she’s always pretty awesome. But what should be a terribly devastating end to a movie just feels disconcerting and irritating. And I was kind of sorry I’d sat through the entire movie just to get there.

The movie isn’t terrible. It’s artsy and well-acted and ambitious. But it’s almost impossible to watch, and it’s almost impossible to connect with any characters. I think there’s a good movie in here, but Bruce McDonald, the director, is trying so hard to be artistic that he loses sight of what that good movie really is. McDonald has done some really good work in his Canadian career - Highway 61, Hard Core Logo, but here he is just reaching too far. The Tracey Fragments is ambitious and interesting, but it isn’t good. It comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films.