ADAM’S APPLES
STARRING Ulrich Thomsen and Mads Mikkelsen
DIRECTED BY Anders Thomas Jensen

The quest to bake an apple cake doesn’t seem like a particularly strong subject for a movie. Granted, that’s a pretty glib distillation of the plot of Adam’s Apples, from writer and director Anders Thomas Jensen (the Danish director behind cult favourite The Green Butchers), but it’s not an inaccurate one. Adam Pederson (Ulrich Thomsen) is a neo-Nazi sentenced to community service at a remote church before he can reintegrate into society. Pederson doesn’t seem particularly reformed — he replaces the crucifix in his room with a photo of Hitler, for one — but that doesn’t seem to faze Ivan, the priest charged with his reform. In fact, Ivan only asks that Pederson set himself one goal and reach it by the end of his stay. Hence, the cake.
What follows, though, is a darkly comic meditation on the power of faith, not to mention a battle between the forces of good and evil. Jensen, who also wrote the script, isn’t bound by the normal laws of plausibility and rationality. In the world he’s created, criminals are more quirky than threatening, smuggling weapons is a breeze and Satan himself is more than happy to meddle in one man’s baking plans. It’s absurd, to say the least, but played with a deadpan sensibility that suits it perfectly. When, at one point late in the film, the church’s doctor quits due to reality’s continuous refusal to make sense, it’s easy to understand his frustration — but impossible to agree with his decision to leave.
PETER HEMMINGER


FRANK & CINDY
DIRECTED BY G.J. Echternkamp

In 1983, Frank Garcia was a bassist with the band OXO. They had a hit song, “Whirly Girl,” and Frank had Cindy, the ultimate blond bombshell trophy wife. Twenty-two years later, with no other hit songs, Frank and Cindy are aging, on the verge of bankruptcy and far from the glamorous rock-star life they dreamed of.
In the hopes of another hit, Cindy builds an in-house studio and encourages Frank to start working. It doesn’t go well. Cindy banishes him to the basement where he spends his days drinking, recording awful music and using a coffee can as a de facto bathroom. Cindy’s son G.J., an aspiring filmmaker, is convinced that his parents are “cinematic gold.” He begins recording their lives.
Vicious sniping (“I think you should be killed!” yells Cindy at one point), periods of drugged-out delusion (“I’ve been taking heavy-duty sedatives since you started filming this,” says Cindy) and moments of stunning stupidity make it clear Frank and Cindy are poorly equipped to deal with their alarmingly dysfunctional lives. Filmed over the course of a year, Frank & Cindy looks and sounds like a home movie, but is absorbing and, at 73 minutes, succinct. Frank and Cindy have over-the-top personas that at times seem exaggerated for the camera, but nonetheless make for an interesting watch and will make you thankful that you didn’t grow up with parents like these.
ANEKA RAO


FROWNLAND
STARRING Dore Mann, Mary Wall, Paul Grimstad and David Sandholm
DIRECTED BY Ronald Bronstein

Frownland is a tedious, unpleasant exercise in which a snivelling, inarticulate protagonist (Dore Mann as “Keith”) lurches desperately from scene to scene, trying and failing to connect with other characters, each of whom finds him unbearable. Unfortunately for the film, he is equally unbearable to the audience. There is no story, just a succession of scenes in which Keith attempts to communicate with various neighbours, acquaintances and co-workers who can't wait for him to shut up and leave. This film is a series of rejections. We get the point very early on, yet the movie persists.
Why should we be interested in this? Despite his wounded-puppy demeanour and desperate need for human contact, Keith is not endearing. We identify more with the people who slam doors in his face. After 100 wearisome minutes of this, the music and lighting seem to indicate that some kind of climax is imminent — but it's a bluff. The film just ends.
Frownland isn't nearly as original as it thinks it is. Jim Jarmusch's early films Stranger than Paradise (1984) and Down by Law (1986) presented us with inarticulate characters unable to change their event-free lives, yet each did so in a way that seemed exhilarating. Based on past experience, we know that a slow-paced, plotless movie about the impossibility of communication can work.
JOHN TEBBUTT



WHAT WE DO IS SECRET
STARRING Shane West, Bijou Phillips, Rick Gonzalez
DIRECTED BY Rodger Goodman

Director Rodger Goodman apparently spent the better part of a decade working on this biopic of Darby Crash, punk-rock hero and lead singer of The Germs, but this film is anything but overcooked. In fact, with What We Do Is Secret, Goodman has managed to make a film that is fresh and intriguing — a feat that other recent music bios (Walk the Line, Ray) have made seem impossible.
Even stranger than Goodman’s ability to tell Crash’s relatively simple tale (difficult childhood; too smart for his own good; punk rock glory; heroin addiction; suicide at age 22), is his choice of lead actor. Shane West, known for heart-throb roles in ER and A Walk To Remember, so encompasses Crash’s punk rock soul both onstage and in the dramatic bits that the real-life Germs invited him to front the band on their reunion tour. West’s work, coupled with cracker-jack performances by Bijou Phillips and Rick Gonzalez as bandmates Lorna Doom and Pat Smear, make What We Do Is Secret an unusually informative, spirited and heartfelt biopic.
ELIZABETH CHORNEY-BOOTH