Impact Point
(2008)
Kelly Reyes is a minor star on the women's beach volleyball circuit. She's
devoted all of her waking hours to volleyball, and she possesses the talent to
be a tournament winner, but a more experienced team dominates every
championship and stands in Kelly's way. Just as Kelly is wondering if she
should abandon her dreams of glory, two major developments thrust her into the
limelight. First, one of the girls on the more experienced team dies in an
accident, and Kelly is the chosen replacement. Second, a major sports reporter
decides to write about the new team, and he wants to focus his story on Kelly
rather than her storied partner.
There are a few bumps on her road to glory. After she and the reporter take
their relationship to a deeper level, the police show up on the beach the next
morning to question her. The police think that the death of the other
volleyball star might have been a homicide, and the only one who seems to have
benefited from the death is Kelly. As they check out her alibis and
explanations, they are flabbergasted by her claims to have spent time with a
reporter who disappeared some time earlier, and is presumed dead.
Impact Point is a by-the-numbers stalker film which was made for the video
market. In order to maintain some dramatic tension, the story relies almost
exclusively on plot twists involving the identity of the man who claims to be
the missing reporter. In the hands of a slick director working with a deft
script, that might have made a nice little grade-B mystery, but most of the
plot twists are spoiled by heavy-handedness. It might have been different. For
example, if the script had cut out the sequence in which the reporter
interviews, then seduces Kelly, the film would have taken on many additional
layers of mystery. In that case, we in the audience would wonder if Kelly
herself had killed the other volleyball player, and we would wonder along with
the detectives whether she had completely fabricated the supposed interview,
not knowing that the reporter was missing. None of that tension was allowed to
develop. Since we see Kelly being interviewed and seduced by the man who is
using the reporter's name, it is immediately apparent that the imposter must
have known that the real reporter was dead. Since that is a secret known only
to the police, the imposter must therefore have killed the reporter and
assumed his identity in order to get close to Kelly. Knowing that, we also
have to assume that the imposter also killed the other volleyball player
because of his obsession with Kelly.
The completely obvious nature of the mystery doesn't doom the film to
complete failure. There are still matters to resolve - who the imposter really
is, how he can track Kelly's every move, and whether he can get to Kelly at
the specific time and place he has chosen to murder her (the major volleyball
championship). Of course, there's also the matter of whether Kelly can pull
herself together enough to win the big match knowing that there is a killer
somewhere on the premises.
If all that sounds sort of tired, well, that's because it is. It's a
hackneyed sports movie nested inside a predictable stalker film. I would not
call it a poor film, but rather just a workmanlike, ordinary effort. The
director did get some pretty good mileage out of a $2 million budget, and she
elicited some pretty good performances out of a C-list cast, so it's not the
kind of film that will make you seek out gypsies to place a curse on everyone
involved in its creation. It's the kind that may be barely interesting enough
to get you to stick it out without the fast forward button on DVD, or changing
the channel on cable, but will later provoke some introspection when you
wonder why exactly you did that.
The woman who plays Kelly (Melissa Keller) has a very nice smile, a nice
figure, and delivers a competent performance. Unfortunately, all of the nudity
is restricted to two shower scenes shot from the rear, and even her pretty
butt is somewhat spoiled by the fact that many of the shots involve grainy
footage on a video camera planted in her apartment. Oh, well. There is a very
brief look at her breasts from the side, but that's a grainy-cam shot. There
is no clear look at her breasts, and no lower frontal action.
Here are the film clips of
Melissa Keller.
Savage Grace
(2007)
The Baekelands were a socially prominent American family throughout the
20th century. The patriarch of the clan was Leo Baekeland, a brilliant
Belgian-born scientist and inventor who emigrated to the United States when he
was in his mid-twenties and promptly came up with some patents that would make
him rich and important enough to merit a cover of Time Magazine. His most
important invention was Bakelite, the first truly useful plastic and, as such,
an ubiquitous and profitable product throughout the century.
Long after Leo had departed from our plane of existence, his great-grandson
Antony was incarcerated in England for stabbing his mother to death. After
serving nearly a decade in a mental institution, he moved to New York to live
with his grandmother whereupon, within a few days of his release, he stabbed
her as well. She survived; he went to Riker's Island, where he committed
suicide within a year.
Savage Grace traces the relationship between Antony and his parents, Brooks
and Barbara, from the time of his birth until the fatal knifing. The parents
are established as idle sybarites who seem to know everyone important in the
world, but cannot contribute anything worthwhile to society. Although Brooks
was widely regarded to be an extremely brilliant man, his career consisted of
spending his family's money and posturing as an unpublished writer. Barbara is
pictured as a woman lacking in the intellectual and social graces necessary to
move in the company she and her husband keep. She dotes excessively on her
son, and eventually relates to him incestuously.
As pictured here, Antony's childhood lacks any hint of normality. As a boy,
he is seducing other young boys, to his parents' dismay. (In real life his
mother tried to "cure" him by paying young women to please him, but the film
does not mention that, which is just as well because the scriptwriter already
had too much on his plate.) As a young man, Antony tests his sexuality in a
family environment inimical to experimentation. When Antony brings home a
beautiful Spanish girl, his father soon seduces the girlfriend and almost
immediately runs away with her. When Antony forms a gay relationship with his
mother's "walker," his mother seduces the boyfriend and they soon all end up
in bed together.
The entire film is like one of those Dominic Dunne pieces in Vanity Fair in
which the decadence of the very rich turns eventually into violence, thence
into a media circus trial. The script covers virtually every detail of the
Baekeland's anomie, self-loathing, suicide attempts, and sordid sexual
escapades, but there is no particular insight on display, nor even a point of
view. The film covers 25 years of Antony's life in only 90 minutes of real
running time and is spread so thin as to require great temporal leaps over
critical periods, yet at other times it seems to dwell at excessive length on
scenes which have only minimal relevance to the central thrust of the story.
The lead performers are extremely talented (Julianne Moore and Stephen Dillane),
and the exotic locales look magnificent, but the film seems to have no good
reason to exist other than to recite the details of the family's moral
bankruptcy in the manner of a docudrama.
It's not a pleasant film to watch. The characters are impossible to like
because they are immodest, pompous, rude, cold, utterly humorless, and have
absolutely no sense of their own fallibility. It's like watching a trailer for
a Jeremy Irons film festival. The film's real problem, however, is not that
the characters are nasty, because they are supposed to be, but that we don't
really know or understand why. When the film was over I felt no sympathy for
the murdered mother, nor compassion for the disturbed child, nor understanding
of the father. I could not understand how the mother and father could have
married in the first place, nor how they could have stayed together as long as
they did. Although it is possible to make assumptions about why Anthony became
disturbed and angry enough to kill his mother, I couldn't see the direct
connection. (The film implies it happened shortly after they had a consensual
sexual encounter. Apparently there were many previous violent incidents
between them which were not pictured.) When the film was over I felt that
there must have been more to the Baekelands than the one-dimensional
characters on display here, and that the script did them a great injustice by
not developing their characters and motivations more fully. I got the sense
that they were interesting enough to make a movie about, but that this was not
that movie.
Elena Anaya, as the son's
only girlfriend, later seduced by the father, supplies the female nudity: full
frontal and rear
