Yet another dispatch from Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival. Check the trailer for Firecracker here, then read on for Mark Mann's review.
The film Firecracker by American director Steve Balderson, starring none other than Mike Patton (front man for Fantomas and Mr. Bungle), has been getting very friendly reviews. Rave reviews even. Trevor Erb from Decoy tells us that “'Firecracker' is without a doubt, the new standard in filmmaking, feeling, and human emotion." (The new standard in human emotion? What the hell?) I'll make my position clear from the beginning and say that all this positive feedback for this movie is completely inexplicable to me, as I thought it was pretty awful. Abysmal even.
The plot for the movie is apparently based on a true story of a small-town murder in Kansas. The talented but shy teen Jimmy (Jak Kendall) is emotionally suppressed by his abusive, alcoholic older brother David (Patton), and alienated by his fervently devout mother Eleanor (Karen Black), so he's pretty excited when the circus comes to town. The circus brings with it Sandra (Black again), La Oiseau de la Nuit, who sings in a nudie show, and Frank (Patton again), the demented circus director and tormentor of Sandra. Dreams are born and quickly quashed, escapes are attempted, brothers rape brothers (agh!), David disappears, and everyone is generally unhappy for the entire length of the movie.
There are some positive things that you can say about this movie, and they all revolve around the much-hyped visuals. Balderson uses color-saturation to create some extremely vibrant images. He operates with big blocks of color, almost like a suburban homemaker's flower garden (‘one square yard of pink pansies here, one square yard of yellow zinnias there'), and pieces together some stunning contrasts: woman in white dress stands in green field by a black tree strung with blue bottles; pale-skinned woman lies naked on yellow platform against a red wall; and so on and so forth. He's very selective in where he uses color, and much of the film is in black and white, further emphasizing the color-saturation where it appears.
Apart from a couple visual interludes, I can't remember a single moment in this movie that I enjoyed. I spent the first half trying to figure out if the abominable over-acting was part of the effect, like artistic somehow, and the second half just trying not to think at all. Kendall is appallingly bad, Patton is sometimes decent but should probably stick to music, and Black's delivery waffles between the obscene melodrama a broken vedette and flashes of genuinely moving acting. And the story, which should be interesting, turns out to be really boring and doesn't distract at all from the other innumerable deficiencies.
The other thing you should know about this movie is that is spectacularly disturbing at times. These moments of disgust are not ‘gritty', ‘raw', or ‘coldly realistic'; they're just pointless, and what's worse, particularly hard to deal with because I was already nauseous from the acting. The only reason to see this movie, as far as I can tell, is to inform oneself about the new standard in feeling and human emotion. But if I were you, I'd rather not know.
Review by Mark Mann.