Cinequest: KILL THE HABIT

Writer-director Laura Neri's first feature opens with a phone call in which protagonist Galia is curtly brushed off by a boy she likes. It is awkwardly comic and poignant, and it is the only believable moment in the entire movie. Neri is a competent, even engaging director, whose energetic style suggests a promising career to come…as long as she stops writing her own scripts.

Galia, a suburban lightweight junkie, makes a purchase from her dealer. After a disagreement about recompense, she ends up whacking him on the head with the nearest heavy object, ostensibly killing him, only to find herself trapped in his apartment by a group of young men loitering outside. Not wanting them to see her leaving and later identify her, she calls her friend Soti to come and provide a distraction. Soti is reluctant, and, as if things weren't bad enough, the dealer's passed-out girlfriend is slowly coming to in the back bedroom.

The plot holes and logic flaws begin with the crime and keep coming. Despite her fear of discovery, Galia talks about the murder on her cell phone with Soti, right next to the door where the boys outside could easily overhear her. She raises her voice as she argues with Soti, practically begging to awaken the sleeping girlfriend. When the dealer's customers come to the door, she dispenses his products to them, even telling them her real name. After a brief flurry of panicked wiping of surfaces, she leaves her fingerprints on damn near every surface in the apartment. Once Soti arrives, and they hit upon a way of disposing of the body, it just gets worse.

The girls, assisted by the revived and surprisingly accommodating dealer's girlfriend, ferry the disguised body around L.A., stopping off en route to fulfill several unrelated and considerably less important obligations and leaving a trail of utter implausibility in their wake. Add some ham-handed dialogue, a tacked-on romance, and a preposterous "twist" at the end, and one begins to sense that, as a writer, Neri thinks insultingly little of her audience's intelligence.

Lili Mirojnick delivers an adequate Galia, and Maria-Elena Laas as the dealer's girlfriend both steals and saves every scene she's in--this actress should get more work!--but the rest of the performances are indifferent. Katerina Moutsatsou is particularly flat and tiresome as the dour Soti.

A lack of feedback at the conceptual/script phase of projects seems to be one of the biggest problems plaguing today's low-budget auteurs. Kill the Habit could have been a fun, if somewhat derivative (why are young writer-directors still trying to be Tarantino?) cinematic romp. Neri's visual style is competent and controlled, her energy enviable. If only someone had brought out the red pen in time.

Cinequest: FERRARI DINO GIRL (HOLKA HARRARI DINO)

In 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Prominent Czech New Wave filmmaker Jan Němec filmed the invasion, then smuggled the footage over the border into Austria. Forty-one years later, he released this narrated account, in which the footage shot that day is intercut with modern recreations of the journey, with actors portraying Němec himself as well as sidekicks Enrico, an Italian journalist, and Jana, the titular Ferrari Dino Girl.

Beautiful and compelling at times, the film ultimately works neither as a documentary nor as a narrative. The '68 footage captures little of the much-stated violence of the invasion. Němec seems to arrive at each scene just after something dramatic has occurred, so all we see is the aftermath--people standing around, an occasional injury or burning vehicle, bullet holes in buildings and windows.

It would be ridiculous to critique such things or demand greater excitement from a straight documentary, of course, and the footage Němec captured is certainly valuable as a historical document. Indeed, it was undoubtedly even more valuable at the time, as it was almost the only footage of the invasion that made it to the world outside of Czechoslovakia. However, in seeking to elevate his story from documentary to some sort of entertaining, romantic narrative-doc hybrid, Němec both compromises the documentary nature of the piece and invites criticism.

He further undermines himself with the casting of Jana. Although it is never made entirely explicit in the film, the real Jana was a popular actress who had been described as the sexiest woman in Czechoslovakia. Tammy Sundquist, who portrays her, is a lovely girl, but that's all. She capers charmingly, mugs in Enrico's hat, looks about seventeen, and utterly fails to live up to Jana's legacy or communicate what it was that compelled Němec to love her so much that he would rather see her safe across the border with another man--the film's vague and slippery romantic subtext--than keep her with him. Her extreme youth next to Němec-the-character's fortyish appearance proves a further distraction, as does all of the characters' modern attire.

Where the film triumphs is as a paean to the Czech New Wave, which, although it had been waning for some time before, the August 1968 Soviet invasion effectively ended. The elegiac quality of the modern footage and the voice-over narration can be understood even better in that light and perhaps even forgiven for its occasionally maudlin quality.