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Friday, August 19, 2011

MOVIE REVIEW
Bellflower

Fueling The Raging Flames Of Love's Apocalypse



Evan Glodell as Woodrow in "Bellflower".  Mr. Glodell wrote, edited, produced and directed the film. 
Oscilloscope Laboratories
  

by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Fri
day, August 19, 2011

Shakespearean, vividly alive with rage and power, Evan Glodell's "Bellflower" is an ultra-bright, lucid fantasy drama about the end of the world.  The film is a cautionary tale about love and the burning hole betrayal leaves behind.  "Love will hurt," warns a man's wailing voice early on.  Lord Humongous will strike, and strike hard.  A quote underlines this.  "Bellflower", also a city east of Los Angeles, refers to the avenue where much of this film plays out in Southern California.  This jolting film is making its way around the country.

Woodrow (Mr. Glodell) is awkward, a guy you'd expect to see in a romantic comedy.  Yet he's supremely confident and tough, as are all the characters, and well-acted.  "Bellflower" calculatingly withholds Woodrow's strengths.  Woodrow's gregarious best friend Aiden (Tyler Dawson) stirs dreams of a real apocalypse.  The duo wants their imaginary Mother Medusa gang, powered by their jet black muscle car, to ride through flames in a blaze of glory.  Woodrow and Aiden are flame-throwers.  They blast objects with enormous flames that illuminate the dark night sky.  These two are inviolable, almost inseparable, until a femme fatale type named Milly (Jessie Wiseman) comes along.  Milly has Courtney (Rebekah Brandes), a friend as close to her as Aiden is to Woodrow.  The women aren't as preoccupied with setting the world on fire.

"Bellflower" is jarring poetry.  Part-hallucinogen, part-reality, Mr. Glodell's film keeps you guessing as to what's real and what isn't.  The film evokes such escapist trips as "Two Lane Blacktop" and the apocalyptic thriller "Mad Max", which it references.  There's flourishes of Lynch and a nihilism that burns in places we've all been to or felt.  This film is about what boys do and what boys feel, and the two are kept separate until they merge and explode, in ways that thunder and roar as loudly and shrilly as Trent Reznor's song "Burn" does.

We see men hurt, physically and emotionally.  If hell hath no fury like a woman's scorn, then heaven help us when a man gets madder than Max.  There's an intricacy of machinery and construction that "Bellflower" builds so well: the mechanics of cars and their components, and the rhythms and mechanics of sex, touch and foreplay, shown in several scenes, sometimes as an explosive juxtaposition.  We observe what love does to sisterhoods, how it solidifies and disrupts them.

Mr. Glodell captures natural male bonding between his character and Mr. Dawson, who as Aiden is an appealing sidekick, someone who'd probably help you in distress or pour cold water on you to wake you up.  Their rapport is effortless.  Mr. Glodell's cinematographer's fish-eye, smoked glass lenses capture the incubators of feeling, memory and anger in six-titled vignettes that crackle and are often suspenseful.  "Bellflower", which has a bold voice and a strong sense of its atmosphere, penetrates, unsettles and portrays the look of love's anguish.  It's a fine approximation of security and commitment gone haywire, messy and violently desperate.

With: Vincent Grashaw, Zack Kraus, Keghan Hurst, Jon Huck.

"Bellflower" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association Of America for disturbing violence, some strong sexuality, nudity, pervasive language, and drug use.  The film's running time is one hour and 45 minutes.

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