Wilmington on Movies: Bellflower
“Bellflower” (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Evan Glodell, 2011
Bellflower — a Sundance sensation reportedly shot for only $17,000 by first time writer-director-costar-co-editor Evan Glodell — introduces us to a couple of dudes, Woodrow from Wisconsin (first-timer Glodell) and Aiden from the neighborhood (first-timer Tyler Dawson) who live north of L. A. and are obsessed with Mad Max, the coming apocalypse, muscle cars, WMDs and two gals named Milly and Courtney (Jessie Wiseman and Rebekah Brandes). They all meet up at a barroom cricket-eating contest, where Milly wins. They dally awhile. Then Bellflower pulls us down into screaming ink-black, bloody macho-creepo pathology.
The movie fakes us out. At first it looks as if it’s going to be a funny-sad romantic comedy about twenty-somethings on the fringe, with a lot of bar scenes, four-letter talk and onscreen sex, and then it descends into the same road warrior-ish violent fantasies as those self-absorbed, fantasizing guys.
I didn’t like it all that much, or as much as a lot of other critics. I thought it was entertaining but a little light on real depth or truth or imagination, and often as obsessed with movie fantasies as its main dudes. Things began to strike me as odd, the moment that Milly, on their first date, said she wanted to be taken to a really grungy, dangerous eatery, and Woodrow suggested one in Texas, and she said sure, and they took off. I didn’t buy it, especially the way it played out.
Glodell and his cinematographer, Joel Hodge, get a really strong visual style; they shoot their Valley scenes with a custom-built (by Glodell and guys) digital camera that makes everything look smeary and hot and dirty. The actors simultaneously play their scenes sort of Cassavetes-real and B-Movie-overblown, and there’s a scary, edgy feel to it all, that makes you genuinely uneasy and uncomfortable.
In the first part of Bellflower (which is the name of a street where part of it the picture is set), the main story is a quadrangle, or a pentangle, surrounded by slackerisms. Woodrow loves Milly, who cheats on him and splits with Mike (co-editor Vincent Grashaw), and so the distraught Woodrow takes up with Courtney, who’s the big crush of Aiden.
Aiden meanwhile, seems to love Woodrow as much as his muscle car. He devotes himself to building and fine-tuning that custom baby for his best bud (a black hipmobile with “Medusa” slash-painted on the side) and also to exotic weaponry (including a flamethrower). Since Glodell and his company apparently rebuilt the custom cars and the custom cameras and maybe even the flamethrower, we can see why this movie is so hipped on outlaw technology — especially technology that has a hip movie source, like Mad Max.
The unease we feel though is not always pleasurable movie anxiety. Some of the last act of Bellflower is so bloody-violent and misogynistic that a number of Bellflowers’ partisans (the majority of the reviewers) and especially the ones hailing the film as a work of genius (Godard and Linklater crossed with the George Miller of Mad Max), have felt compelled to explain or excuse the gory, nutty-seeming climax by saying that it’s all a fantasy (a dream sequence brought on by trauma maybe, like the one in Du Barry was a Lady) and not really happening. Maybe. I hope so. I didn’t catch it.
Anyway, it occurs to me that a movie about a bunch of Valley guys making a low-budget indie movie like Bellflower, and with the writer-director-star maybe using that film as part-revenge for a bad relationship, might have been really interesting. Maybe that would have been the masterpiece. But I’m always glad when somebody makes an American indie breakthrough — or a foreign indie breakthrough for that matter. More power to Glodell and his gang. I’d be astonished if this movie doesn’t get him bigger chances and higher budgets, and he deserves them.
Of course it would be hard not to muster more of a budget than $17,000. Or to get more production value out of it than they do here. This movie’s credits list fourteen producers, four camera people (cinematographer Hodge, a camera operator, an assistant camera and a steadi-cam operator), a Foley artist, six mixers, a sound effects editor, a boom operator and a digital visual effects artist. All that, and more, and a cast, and the fixes on the camera and car, and maybe a little catering from Fatburger, for $17,000? Maybe they just meant the initial pre-post-production budget. Or the pre-production budget. Maybe Glodell is a genius. At any rate, he’s certainly a guy with a big future, maybe in chop-shops as well as in movies.
Thank YOU! I have read many reviews, good and bad, that hint that none of the end was real. While viewing it I didn’t pick up on any references to a fight club style ending and thought everything except the mushroom cloud shot was meant to be reality. feel good now that someone else is reviewing less as as that kind of movie and as the movie I thought I watched.
I personally loved this movie and its definitely my favorite so far this year however i can understand why some people don’t like it.