It would be best to simply recommend "Baghead" without any description so its surprises could remain intact. Nevertheless . . .
The characters are struggling actors with relationship complications who decide to write a movie to showcase themselves. But wait! It's much better than it sounds. There's a scary guy with a bag on his head (or perhaps just the idea of such a guy), the excruciating awkwardness of failed seduction, resonant snapshots of different kinds of love and some genuinely startling moments. Seriously.
The movie was written and directed by the Duplass brothers, whose "The Puffy Chair" was an indie-circuit darling. So, naturally, "Baghead" starts off with a delicious buffeting of the navel-gazing $1,000-movie crowd from whence the filmmakers come. Where it goes from there is delightfully unpredictable.
The acting by all four principals is very strong. Particularly effective is the earthily alluring Greta Gerwig, quickly becoming a staple of just the sort of camcorder-auteur films "Baghead" affectionately lampoons. The filmmakers maintain a delicate balance that generates tension on multiple levels, including sexual. They giddily mix genres, but "Baghead," part meta-cinematic comedy, part relationship drama and part horror movie, remains rooted in reality.
-- Michael Ordona
"Baghead." MPAA rating: R, for language, some sexual content and nudity. Running time: 1 hour, 21 minutes. In selected theaters.
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Too bad it takes more than it gives
"Take" is called a thriller in its press notes, but it's really one of those tragedy-under-a-microscope slogs that assumes a surfeit of storytelling angles makes a harrowing incident automatically more interesting.
Writer-director Charles Oliver's parallel-tracks narrative gives us Ana (Minnie Driver), an economically straitjacketed wife and mother trying to do the best for her developmentally challenged son, and Saul (Jeremy Renner), a lowlife with lethal debt problems who grows increasingly desperate about his situation.
Guessing how these lives tragically intersect isn't terribly hard -- present-day scenes show us Saul on death row and Ana driving to witness his execution -- but it gives the movie an exploitatively creepy dramatic pall in which we're just waiting around for the voyeurism of a shattering moment of violence and someone's subsequent grief. Which is a shame, since both Driver and Renner are talented actors who can invest their individual scenes before that fateful meeting with a kind of everyday sympathy for downtroddenness. Oliver also has an admirable pictorial eye for widescreen compositions that suggest empty spaces resting uncomfortably next to people who have few options in filling the holes in their lives. But in the end, "Take" is too enamored of its time-shifting gimmick and cheap suspense to ultimately have much impact.
