Alluring surfaces enliven ‘Blink Twice’

 

  Actress Zoe Kravitz makes her directorial debut with Blink Twice, an energetic, often entertaining variation on a theme in which luxury-hungry women suddenly find themselves living lavishly on an island owned by a tech billionaire played by Channing Tatum.

  Kravitz, who co-wrote the screenplay with E.T. Feigenbaum, understands the need to seduce an audience before letting the other shoe drop. Kravitz optimizes the pleasure offered on a tropical island, where the point is to have a good time with fine food, carefully curated drugs, and no money worries.

   Blink Twice is about being captivated by surfaces that promise ease and pleasure, while ignoring indications that something sinister looms.

   Naomi Ackie, who gave a strong but overlooked performance in Whitney Houston: I Want To Dance With Somebody, plays Frida, an ambitious woman who works for a catering company that's running a fund-raising gala for Tatum's Slater King. 

   King says he's stepping down from his company to reflect. He also wants to atone for an offense that presumably went public but which the film never defines. 

    Laying on the soft-spoken charm, Tatum presents Slater as a model of newly acquired consideration and empathy that he attributes to a recent therapeutic epiphany.

    Posing as a partygoer rather than the help, Frida embarrasses herself when she stumbles. Slater puts her at ease.

     Before you can say "glitz," Frida and pal Jess (Alia Shawkat) are elevated from the ranks of servitude. They find themselves on Slater's private jet, living a fantasy of style and privilege.

      Ackie’s performance also suggests that Frida may have found someone who cares about her. If he owns an island, so much the better. It beats the hell out of gig work.

      Other women have been taken on the trip. Slater is also accompanied by a posse of fun-loving male loyalists, played by Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Christian Slater, and, later, Kyle MacLachlan.

       Geena Davis portrays Stacy, Slater's assistant, the woman who tends to the details that are supposed to make everyone happy while the women compete for Slater's attention. Stacy also makes sure to collect everyone's cell phone upon arrival on the island, where the women are given the same white outfits to wear. 

        Adria Arjona plays Sarah, a woman who begins to suspect that something terrible may be happening, particularly after Shawkat's Alia disappears. Several of the women can't even remember that Alia had been there. 

      Another sign that there's a dark side to paradise arrives in the form of a stern maid (Maria Elena Olivares), whose forbidding look makes it seem as if she might have dropped in from a horror movie. 

        In some sense, Blink Twice needs the audience to be ahead of its characters. We've been schooled to go along with such things as we wait for Slater's true intentions to emerge.

        Despite its upbeat tempo and sustained glamor, the film eventually must deliver what we know is coming -- a serving of horror that steers Blink Twice into the choppy waters of revenge.

        Kravitz could have done more to modulate the movie's propulsive rhythms, and she takes the movie's  opulence beyond the point of diminishing returns. A concluding coda seems as tricky as it is meaningful.

        Still, Kravitz’s increasingly nasty tropical shenanigans glide through a lively one hour and 42 minutes that suggest a career behind the camera may take Kravitz far beyond Blink Twice's island.

Kevin Smith gets his weird on

Director Kevin Smith's Tusk isn't much more than a stunt.

Watching Tusk, it's difficult not to think that Smith has crawled into the dark hole of Human Centipede territory. Supplementing gross-outs and physical mutilation with splashes of pseudo-philosophizing, Smith tells the story of Wallace Bryton (Justin Long), a podcaster who seems to delight in making fun of people.

Bryton and his on-air sidekick (Haley Joel Osment) call themselves members of the Not See party, a bad joke from a couple of guys who don't seem especially funny, but who consistently crack each other up.

Glib and self-satisfied, Bryton travels to Canada to interview a young man who sliced off his leg making a Kill Bill-style video that went viral on You Tube.

When Bryton arrives in Canada, he discovers that his Kill Bill subject has committed suicide. In the restroom of a bar, a dejected Bryton sees a letter tacked to a bulletin board, inviting all comers to visit a remote mansion to hear adventure stories.

Badly in need of a podcast subject, a curious Bryton answers the call.

The movie adopts horror movie overtones when Bryton meets Howard Howe (Michael Parks), an eloquent man who gives him drugged tea and employs surgical procedures to turn him into (wait for it) a walrus.

At first, it seems as if Howard is a self-appointed avenger for Bryton's cruelty. But that thread unravels, leaving us to wonder whether Smith has anything more in mind than shocks bolstered by occasional ramblings about whether humans are nothing more than sadistic animals.

Bryton's girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) and his partner (Osment) eventually begin a search for the vanished podcaster.

En route, they encounter an uncredited star, who plays a French-Canadian detective with a variable accent. (It's easy enough to figure out who's playing detective Guy Lapointe. Just search around a bit.)

Smith tries to temper the movie's macabre tendencies with a bit of humanizing end-of-picture emotion, but if you stick around for the final credits, you'll hear the director discussing a possible ending with a laughing colleague.*

They're both mightily amused in a smug way that undermines any emotion Smith might have achieved.

Say this, though: If Smith buckled down, he might have some serious horror chops.

*Smith reportedly conceived of Tusk after a podcast in which he and his producer Scott Mosier discussed an ad they'd seen in which a man offered free living space to anyone who'd agree to dress up as a walrus. Smith then asked his Twitter followers to vote on whether this crazy idea should be turned into a movie. The "yes" votes won. The ad evidently was a prank.