Ellie Parker & Pray

Two smaller new releases likely to get overlooked this week, in favor of more high-profile schlock like Fun With Dick and Jane. I can't say either of these two movies is an unmitigated success, but hey, it's a slow Tuesday for new releases so I won't let that stop me. And what else am I going to do with my time...Isometric exercize?

Ellie Parker

Just about every hopeful screenwriter I know started with a really self-indulgent, low-budget autobiographical indie as their first script. It's just the sort of thing you have to get out of your system. First, you write that story you've been burning to tell, about how the cruel, uncaring world of corporate power and a string of unsatisfying romances has stifled your precious creative genius.

I wrote a script like this. Everyone does. It's almost a rite of passage. And then, once you've told that story and decie that you'd like to write something that can actually be sold to studios for real money, you move on to thinking up wacky ideas for Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. (What if they operate competing taco stands? Or train seeing-eye dogs? Or magically transform into old black women?)

To his credit, actor/writer/director Scott Coffey just went ahead and filmed his navel-gazing, autobiographical first script. Well, okay, to be technical, in 2001, while working as a bit performer in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, he filmed a short about a struggling actress called Ellie Parker, featuring his co-star Naomi Watts.

And now, five years later, he has turned that short into a feature-length film. The good-natured but frustrated Ellie (Watts) has reached a crossroads. She's fed up with vying for stupid parts as hookers in badly-written low-budget features that will likely never be made. Her boyfriend Justin (Mulholland Drive vet (Mark Pelligrino) has been cheating on her with a low-level casting agent. And she's starting to feel that living in Los Angeles might be killing off her will to live. (If this sounds strange to you, I'd suggest that you've most likely never lived here, or seen photos.)

It has all the flaws you'd expect from a digitally-shot, extremely low-budget movie made by actors about the awful pain of being a professional actor. It is self-important in the extreme. (At one point, Ellie wonders aloud to her best friend, "What happens when you turn into the person you're pretending to be?" Ugh and double ugh.) It is whiny, in that Ellie doesn't seem to have any actual employment, is incredibly beautiful, has a lot of friends and seems poised on the brink of possible stardom, and yet she's constantly bawling to her friends and therapist about how she hates her life.

Not to mention that it features some of the most remarkably shallow "industry satire" you're likely to see. Among the film's startling observations about the film industry: many of its members are on drugs, how you look is far more important than how talented you are to Hollywood types and lots of people in Los Angeles are perverts. You don't say, Scott!



But this isn't the whole story about Ellie Parker. Yes, it's annoying and facile. But it's also pretty charming and occasionally quite funny. Naomi Watts has proven herself, between this the vaudeville bits in King Kong and her screwball turn in I Heart Huckabees adept at physical comedy, and she manages to take a fairly generic role like 'struggling actress' and turn out a nuanced, three-dimensional character. Ellie can get whiny at times, but her neuroses are always balanced out by an open playfulness that keeps the film light and nimble.

So, sure, a lot of the movie features Ellie darting around Los Angeles on a string of humiliating auditions, and then returning to her apartment for a good cry. But in between those scenes, you get idiosyncratic, well-observed little moments, like Ellie eating and then regurgitating blue-colored Baskin Robbins sherbert or watching apes cavort at the zoo for no explicable reason. And a sequence in which Ellie talks on the phone and changes costumes and does her make-up while speeding down the LA freeway is remarkable, and almost shocking, in its realism. Everyone in Los Angeles really behaves in this reprehensible fashion, adjusting their persons and conducting business while rocketing their vehicles through crowdded space at speeds upwards of 80 mph. I've just never seen anyone call us on it so blatantly.

Not just the lifestyle but also the appearance of LA is satisfactorily rendered. The DV cinematography, as expected, looks grainy a lot of the time, and many shots become unclear from overexposure. But Coffey does figure out how to make the format work for him at times. In particular, scenes shot inside a car or through a windshield work well for him. These scenes feel more natural than most movie-car scenes, which always feel like they were shot in front of a blue screen even when they weren't. There may be one or two too many random LA street montages with lilting indie rock playing on the soundtrack. Shots with random streets going by while we hear music playing always feels like filler to me, except in Lost in Translation, where it feels fairly vital to the story.

At a quick 90 minutes, Ellie Parker was over just before I really got tired of it. Some scenes really turned me off; A cameo appearance by Keanu Reeves' band Dogstar seems awkwardly inserted into the film and seriously affects the overall Hipness Quotient, a late cameo by Chevy Chase goes nowhere and isn't remotely funny, the scenes making fun of acting classes are cliche and ridiculous. But I watched it all the way through. And there's no denying that Naomi Watts in her underwear knocking herself half-unconscious with a garbage can lid is something you ought to see at least once before you die.

Pray

As MC Hammer once said, "We've got to pray just to make it today." That has absolutely nothing to do with this movie. In fact, I don't even know why this movie is called Pray. (The original Japanese title apparently translates as Prayer, but this title makes no more sense than Pray, so I'll just ignore that little tidbit). I just bring up the Hammer song because it's incredibly bad, and therefore amusing, whereas this film is just bad but not amusing at all. An important distinction.



It's a shame, too, because Pray starts with a terrific premise. A young couple (Tetsuji Tamayama and Asami Mizukawa) kidnap a young girl and hold her for 50 million yen ransom, hoping to buy drugs. Holed up in an abandoned school attended by the guy, Mitsuru, they call the girl's parents, who claim their daughter died exactly one year before.

So is the girl they kidnapped someone else's daughter? A ghost? Maybe even a spirit from Mitsuru or his girlfriend Maki's past?

The premise is intriguing, but damned if writer Tomoko Ogawa or director Yuichi Sato know what to do with it. The vast majority of the film finds Mitsuru, Maki and their miscreant friends wandering around the darkened corridors of the school, shouting one another's names and then getting spooked by doors slamming or ghostly apparitions. Once again, the Japanese fall back on a spooky little girl with long hair as a villain, a device so overused and trite that it has now officially turned into self-parody.

As if sensing that there isn't enough going on in Pray to sustain even a short movie, Sato throws in some obligatory double-crosses and jerky, color-saturated flashback sequences, filling in the details of a largely-inconsequential backstory. As well, there's an extra sub-plot about a missing teenager whose ghost may also be holed up in the school. The reveal of this story is kind of cool - we initially think the parents are talking about the young kidnapped girl being dead, before we find out they are talking about a completely unrelated case - but once that little bit of business is over, this whole story becomes pointless.

There's just nothing to Pray at all. It just sits there on screen, taking up your time without giving you anything in return. It's not scary. There's very little on-screen action, and even the gore feels muted and inconsequential. Everything after the first 10 minutes kind of feels like an afterthought. Once we get inside the school and the little girl runs off, it's time to go through the J-horror motions for 75 or so minutes.

Stop. Hammertime.