Jacob Reynolds Movies
The debut feature by Chris Fuller, the hard-edged drama Loren Cass stars Travis Mynard as Jason, a skinhead who starts a racial conflagration after playing a prank on a Black man with the help of his friend Cale (played by the director and writer, but billed under the name Lewis Borgan). Cale asks out a young waitress (Kayle Tabish), but they end up having dinner at the diner where she works. Everyone in the film seems weighed down by hopelessness and racial tension. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kayla Tabish, Travis Maynard, (more)
Directed by collegiate Lee Toland Krieger at the tender age of 21, December Ends unfurls as a coming-of-age drama but grows increasingly taut and suspenseful as the narrative progresses. The picture follows Chris (Josh Janowicz, an adolescent Manhattanite whose world crumbles when he loses his mom to an early death. Chris makes the fateful decision to support his dad and himself by dropping out of school and working as many hours as possible, but in time, his dad succumbs to the throes of intoxication, and the dishwater dull bookstore job engenders a longing for something more thrilling. Chris finds it in the form of a job as a bicycle courier, running illegal drugs to posh clients in the city. Yet he fails to anticipate the inherent risks attached to working for the downward-spiraling (and increasingly irrational) addict Hayden (Justin Matthews) - or the explosive complications that will arise when Hayden's sexy girlfriend (Alex Thayer) begins to fall for him. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Josh Janowicz, Alex Thayer, (more)
- 1999
Premiering in the dramatic competition at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, Getting to Know You is director Lisanne Skyler's first narrative feature, following her 1995 Sundance Film Festival documentary No Loans Today. The film takes place in one afternoon at a bus depot where Judith (Welcome to the Dollhouse's Heather Matarazzo) and her brother Wesley wait for the bus. There Judith meets Jimmy (Michael Weston), a kid with a great imagination and nowhere to go. Jimmy tells Judith stories about the lonely people who are sitting at the depot, and his tall tales become flashbacks in the film. As the story progresses, Jimmy and Judith start falling in love and finally reveal the secrets of their own lives: Jimmy's father was a cop who was killed in a simple domestic disturbance call, and Judith lives with her aunt following a spousal argument that put Judith's father in prison and her mother (Bebe Neuwirth) in a mental institution. ~ Arthur Borman, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Heather Matarazzo, Zach Braff, (more)
In this elliptical ensemble piece, which marks the directorial debut of indie bad boy Harmony Korine, the teens of tornado-scarred Xenia, OH, kill cats, tape their boobies, arm-wrestle, bathe, cross-dress, huff glue, avoid perverts, pay to have sex with retarded girls, lift makeshift dumbbells to the strains of Madonna's "Like a Prayer," fight, cuss, shave their eyebrows, undergo cancer treatment, euthanize senior citizens, and pee on passing cars. A hallucinatory barrage of images and scenarios with little in the way of traditional plot, Gummo has been variously described as a surrealist joke, a visual poem, and a worm's-eye view of white-trash suffering. The main characters include Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), who sells cat carcasses to a middleman who procures them for use at a local Chinese restaurant; his mother (Linda Manz), who teaches him to tap dance while reminiscing about her dead husband; Tummler (Nick Sutton), a mullet-haired local sex symbol; a midget (Bryant L. Crenshaw); a pair of boy-crazy, bleach-blond sisters named Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Bara); a slut with a lump in her breast (Lara Tosh); a group of drunken louts; and Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell), who wanders the town enigmatically in a pair of long pink ears. In between scenes of these characters enacting their bizarre routines, Korine intersperses impressionistic and quasi-documentary scenes with voice-over narration that ranges from incest memoirs to arty dialogue along the lines of "He's got what it takes to be a legend: He's got a marvelous persona." Shot just outside Nashville, TN, Gummo includes costume designs by Korine's then-girlfriend, Chloe Sevigny, who also plays Dot and who previously starred in the Korine-scipted, Larry Clark-directed Kids. Jacob Reynolds would go on to appear in Getting to Know You, though few of the director's other discoveries have appeared on film since. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, (more)
