~ LATEST REVIEWS ~

Bamako

In the courtyard of a nondescript bar in the Malian capital of Bamako, a strange mock court has been convened, demanding that the IMF and the World Bank account for their alleged strangulation of Africa’s economic development. Not that anyone from either institution really gets to answer the charges: This is less about balanced debate than about presenting a largely ignored point of view, namely that of the third world people whose daily lives are directly affected by the enormity of first-world loan-lender gamesmanship.

Mauritanian-born director Abderrahmane Sissako’s latest isn’t quite up to the level of his previous Waiting for Happiness, as it sometimes seems to verge on low-rent theatricality, but the sociopolitical power of the subject matter, combined with Sissako’s unguarded passion for such a timely subject, makes it an irresistible conversation starter – provocative, intelligent, and compelling. (Wade Major) (Nuart)

Day Watch

Nearly everyone from last year’s Night Watch – which was Russia’s entry for the Foreign Language Oscar – returns for part two of Timur Bekmambetov’s high-octane adaptation of Sergei Lukyanenko’s fantasy trilogy. A brief opening recap sketchily brings newcomers up to speed: There are “Others” who walk among us. Our hero, Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) is a “Light Other” (that is, one of the Good Guys), who serves as part of the peacekeeping force known as the Night Watch. The Day Watch is made up of “Dark Others,” some or all whom also happen to be vampires. A tenuous ancient truce is about to splinter if Dark Other top dog Zavulon (Viktor Verzhbitsky) can force a confrontation between powerful but untrained Light Other Sveta (Mariya Poroshina) and her opposite number, Egor (Dima Martynov). The big complication is that Anton is love with Sveta, and Egor is Anton’s estranged son.

The first film flirted with many of the flaws that muck up big-budget Hollywood action fantasies – most notably a complicated set of “rules” that few can follow – but it also had style and a specifically Russian streak of dark angst. Day Watch continues in that tradition but adds one unexpected element – a weird sense of humor. For the middle third, the story becomes a variety of mistaken-identity romantic farce. Similarly, many of the scenes among the Dark Others are accompanied by almost cartoonish comic music, making the baddies seem more sympathetic, maybe even more human, than the Light Others. The story resolves the first film’s issues so completely that it’s hard to imagine what’s left for a third episode. But Dusk Watch is indeed already in the works. (Andy Klein) (Pacific ArcLight, The Landmark)

The Devil Came on Horseback

Despite a relatively low profile, the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world right now is not Iraq, but rather the Darfur region of Sudan, where a brutal, systematic genocide is in its fourth year. The Arab Muslim government continues to prosecute a policy of mass murder against the Black Muslim minority it regards as an ethnically inferior slave race. This chilling, masterfully crafted documentary by award-winning filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern looks at the criminal apathy of the world’s reaction. By framing their film around the experiences of former U.S. Marine Captain Brian Steidle – the one-time military observer whose subsequent civilian activism has been widely credited with helping put Darfur on the political radar – Sundberg and Stern have given the movie a human face and an indisputable credibility that will leave no viewer unshaken or undecided.

Steidle’s firsthand expertise in the conflict is second to none, and his nonpartisan, nonpolitical credentials give the film much-needed moral gravity, particularly when the political indictments start to flow. In the eyes of Steidle and the filmmakers, it’s a simple equation: If the accumulated lessons of previous genocides – Turkish, German, Japanese, Serbian, and Rwandan – are to have any meaning, then those who profess to believe in justice have no choice but to draw a line in the Sudanese sand or forever stand exposed as hypocrites, cowards, and traitors to their own principles. (Wade Major) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

Egoiste – Lotti Latrous

At Mother Teresa’s canonization trial, devil’s advocate Christopher Hitchens questioned if her over-the-top public piety was really a selfish route to international fame. Similarly, Ivory Coast aid worker Lotti

Latrous, Swiss Woman of the Year 2004 and a former Mother Teresa volunteer, dismisses her own exhausting experience – a decade apart from her wealthy family working at the hospice where she sees over 100 patients daily – as an act of soul-pumping egotism. Documentarian Stephan

Anspichler feigns examination of Latrous’s darker motivations, but it’s clear he’s agitating for her sainthood. He portrays the locals as greedy or passive and unsympathetically frames her husband and three kids’ tentative complaints about their relationship with their absentee mother. But Latrous is exponentially more complex; she’s a lioness, who’s become almost numb to misery. In the first scene, she coldly informs an HIV-infected woman that her blind daughter, like nearly half the country, also carries the virus and then chides her for visiting traditional healers. Anspichler’s troubling film leaves it for us to reconcile how that Lotti coexists with the Lotti who stays up all night cradling dying children. We see a tireless, resolute, and emotionally stripped fighter figuring out her priorities in the push-pull struggle of African aid. (Amy Nicholson) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

Gracie

After the tragic death of her soccer star brother, 15-year-old Gracie Bowen (Carly Schroeder) resolves to take his place on the high school varsity squad. Unfortunately, the team isn’t accepting girls, and Gracie’s super-coach dad (Dermot Mulroney) refuses to train her. All of which naturally makes her even more determined to prove them all wrong.

The first non-documentary feature from Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) doesn’t break new ground – it’s basically Bend It Like Beckham fused with Rudy – but it’s been wrought with such heart and soul that it’s almost impossible to resist. That may largely owe to the fact that the project has been a longtime passion for Guggenheim’s wife, actress/producer Elizabeth Shue (who plays Gracie’s mom) and her brother, actor/producer Andrew Shue, whose own soccer-crazed family once experienced a tragedy similar to that of the Bowens. Thanks to solid work by screenwriters Lisa Marie Petersen and Karen Janszen (who are strangely ignored in the press notes), the film communicates a deep and abiding belief in the power of the human spirit without the kind of maudlin manipulation to which sports films so often resort. The great revelation here, however, is Schroeder, who comes on like a fireball and never lets up. And with soccer season just beginning and the 2007 Women’s World Cup mere months away, that’s precisely an attitude this film’s core audience will eagerly embrace. (Wade Major) (Citywide)

Knocked Up

Out one night celebrating her new promotion, on-air entertainment reporter Alison (Katherine Heigl) hooks up with Ben (Seth Rogen), an amiably oafish twenty-something with little ambition beyond some loose notion of starting a website that catalogues the big-screen nudity of celebrity starlets. The mismatched pair’s drunken coupling leads to a pregnancy, and Ben must cope with the encroachment of responsibility. Lacking married role models, the couple warily turns to Alison’s hectoring older sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and her henpecked husband Pete (Paul Rudd), whom Ben immediately adopts as his one true “adult” friend. Still, it’s a bumpy ride carrying any pregnancy to term, especially when the parents-to-be scarcely know each other.

Writer-director Judd Apatow scored a knockout success in 2005 with his feature debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Once again, he’s come up with an enjoyable movie of distinct personality – a heady cocktail of hilarity, heart, and light raunchiness. He never over-polishes his story’s premise; he merely establishes parameters around a theme, relying on smartly placed supporting players in bit parts (Harold Ramis, Joanna Kerns, and large chunks of the casts of Saturday Night Live and The Office) to bring individual scenes to a full boil. Despite Rogen’s enormously appealing lead performance, what most recommends Knocked Up is the manner in which, as in real life, all matter of random references (Munich, Murderball, and Robin Williams’s knuckles, for instance) work their way into characters’ musings and insults. (Brent Simon) (Citywide)

Paprika

A research lab has developed a device that allows access to a subject’s dreams. But, when an unbalanced researcher disappears with an unperfected prototype, strange and scary things begin to happen: people become trapped in the dreams of others, and the dream world begins to penetrate reality. Searching for the machine, police detective Konakawa (voice of Akio Ohtsuka) teams up with Dr. Chiba (Megumi Hayashibara), who in the inner world takes on the identity of superheroine Paprika. Will they recover it before the fabric of reality is irrevocably shredded?

This anime riff on Matrix-like themes represents a change of pace for director Satoshi Kon. In Tokyo Godfathers, Kon presented a more realistic, even socially conscious, approach. Here he seems gleefully liberated from reality, enjoying an excuse for surreal visual tricks. At the same time, his characters continue to be drawn in a more comical style than average. The blend makes for a distinctive experience. (Andy Klein) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5, The Landmark, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7)

Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman

Director Adrian Shergold’s drama is a character profile of Britain’s last and greatest public executioner, Albert Pierrepoint (Timothy Spall), who was the Man at the Gallows for something like 600 hangings in the 1930s and ’40s. What makes someone a hangman? Well, it seems analogous to why people become film critics: Someone’s got to do the gig, and, if one has the gift, it’s sort of a calling. Pierrepoint performs his duty for King and Country with alarming gusto; he is so efficient that he’s shipped off to Germany after the war to execute all the captured Nazis. Meanwhile, his increasingly guilt-wracked wife (Juliet Stevenson, in a vaguely delusional role that unexpectedly invokes Carmela Soprano) counts her husband’s blood money and uses it to open a pub.

Shergold’s movie seems intended as a polemic against capital punishment, but the screenplay by Jeff Pope and Bob Mills is so heavy-handed, it diminishes the efficacy of its argument. Spall gives a subtle, thought-provoking performance, one moment looking as though he is enduring the tortures of the damned, the next, tossing the switch with a ghoulish glint in his eye. However, the film’s surprising lack of even a hint of gallows humor, as well as the overly stagy atmosphere, ultimately leaves it feeling as inert as a body hanging from a rope. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5, Laemmle’s One Colorado)

Also Opening This Week:

Golden Door. Emanuele Crialese wrote and directed this fable about a family of Sicilian peasants emigrating to the U.S. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato, Vincent Schiavelli, and Aurora Quattrocchi star. (AK) (The Landmark)

ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway. Dori Berinstein’s documentary chronicles the 2003-2004 Broadway season, focusing on the casts of Wicked, Avenue Q, Taboo, and Caroline, or Change. Rosie O’Donnell, Alan Cumming, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Lithgow, and Cyndi Lauper are among the participants. (AK) (The Landmark)

Six Days. On the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, Ilan Ziv (The Junction, Human Weapon) examines the event and its aftermath from a fresh historical perspective. (AK) (Laemmle’s Grande 4)