Latest Reviews: July 24, 2008

American Teen

No matter how candy floss enjoyable Nanette Burstein’s documentary about four Midwestern high school seniors may be, our appetite for watching young people do silly, overly sincere, and sometimes brave things has been slaked by the glut of junk-food TV shows on the subject. Megan is the athletic mean girl whose friends suffer as outlets of her pressure to get in to Notre Dame; Jake seems comfortable dismissing himself as a “marching band supergeek,” but trembles with optimism when a girl might like him. Basketball jock Colin doesn’t say much; his dad, an Elvis impersonator, is louder in insisting he win a sports scholarship. And then there’s Hannah, who most hip city viewers will identify with. Quirkily pretty and independent, she fights for permission to move to San Francisco after graduation and be a filmmaker – qualities that seem to have caused Burstein to tie the film’s arc to her as she plummets into a depression, claws out of it in time to fall for a handsome jock, and then uses the fallout from the resulting clique warfare to help define herself.

With “reality” becoming increasingly fictionalized, we’re at once suspicious of the film’s truth and forgiving of its false moments – it’s just one more pleasant nothing. Though it’s the first cousin of a wholly disposable genre, the film aims for timelessness by avoiding topical issues. Being a little more specific, however, would at least have given it the distinction of a time capsule. Though the film crams together every tear and kiss, you can learn as much about the teens’ psyches by analyzing their MySpace pages. (Amy Nicholson) (Pacific’s ArcLight, AMC Century 15, Pacific’s Arclight Sherman Oaks)

Baghead

The actors are nobodies, the talky script is semi-improvised, and the budget would barely cover your popcorn and parking: But that’s “mumblecore,” the coolest movie genre you’ve never heard of – one whose films contain the most low-budget authenticity since John Cassavetes hauled his 16mm camera around Manhattan. The Duplass brothers are mumblecore’s torchbearers, and here they take the genre’s standard ingredients – aimless, post-college characters and DIY production values – and add a dash of horror.

In the brothers’ follow-up to mumblecore touchstone The Puffy Chair, four unemployed actors repair to a woodsy cabin to write a horror movie they can also star in. Matt (Ross Partridge) and Catherine (Elise Muller) are on-again, off-again lovers. Chad (Steve Zissis, casting directors take note) has a major crush on Michelle (Greta Gerwig). The foursome’s booze-enhanced, brainstorming weekend takes a dark turn when they’re threatened by a stranger with a bag over his head. Although the mystery wouldn’t escape the writer’s room at Scooby Doo, the brothers surely (or hopefully) know that. The lame ending is forgivable, because the performers underact with precision detail, naturalism, and a keen sense of interpersonal awkwardness. When Michelle tells the smitten Chad, “you’re like my best friend but also my brother,” Freddie Krueger himself couldn’t stick the knife in any deeper. (Mark Keizer) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5, Laemmle’s Monica 4, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7)

Boy A

After fourteen years in prison for a horrific crime committed during childhood, Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield) is getting a second chance. Identified in the Irish press at the time simply as “Boy A,” he now endeavors to piece together some semblance of normal daily living, maintaining a new identity while staying one step ahead of those who will never forgive. Dealing with otherwise simple aspects of life – job, friends, girls – is a challenge for the painfully shy young man, whose past is methodically revealed in flashbacks to that fateful day fourteen years earlier, as the film slowly pieces together a devastatingly tragic portrait of reverberating loss.

Adapted by Mark O’Rowe from the Jonathan Trigell novel, this tense, sensitive drama from director John Crowley (Intermission) is a profoundly magnificent achievement which, with proper handling, should see its fortunes rise once again during the year-end awards season. Shot and directed with uncanny confidence and visual economy, Crowley’s film also boasts some of the most agonizingly honest performances of the year, all contributing to a nearly flawless overall effort – proving, yet again, that the very best filmmaking needs neither money nor stars. (Wade Major) (Nuart)

Brideshead Revisited

See Film feature.

Bustin’ Down the Door

The success of 2001’s Dogtown and Z-Boys – about the rise of the 1970s skateboarding culture, and the colorful characters who populated it – kicked off a string of alt-sports documentaries that shone a spotlight on the new favorite pastimes of all those X-treme kids targeted in Mountain Dew commercials. Telling a bit more specifically focused story than the Oscar-shortlisted Riding Giants, debut director Jeremy Gosch’s engaging yet somewhat myopic film chronicles a half dozen golden-skinned kids, Aussies and South Africans, who in the mid-’70s crashed the North Shore of Oahu and, through headstrong force of will, dragged the laid-back surf culture toward the multibillion-dollar industry that it is today.

Narrated by Edward Norton, Bustin’ Down the Door features an abundance of prodigious wipeouts and other amazing footage from the era, with shimmering walls of wave backing up the legendary birth-of-a-sport stories from Wayne Bartholomew, Shaun Tomson, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards, and others. Gosch exhibits precious little skill at, or interest in, framing this story for outsiders – with references to “backsiders dropping into the temple going the wrong way.” Consequently the movie works more by slow seduction, with the personalities of the various subjects eventually winning you over. It’s not until two-thirds through that the movie catches its biggest wave, as it dives more explicitly into the tension, fisticuffs, and even death threats between some of the Aussies and the “Da Hui,” a native Hawaiian group that felt it had been dissed in cocky media interviews used to inflate the reputations of the outsiders. (Brent Simon) (Laemmle’s Monica 4)

Love Comes Lately

Director Jan Schütte’s ambitious melding of three short stories by Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer stars feisty Austrian Otto Tausig as Singer surrogate Max Kohn, an elderly author of moderate renown, whose lectures are hardly SRO affairs. In the narrative through-line (based on Singer’s “The Briefcase”), Max travels by train to some East Coast speaking engagements, carrying a new briefcase given to him to by jealous longtime girlfriend Reisel (Rhea Perlman). Like Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Max is still consumed with sex – past liaisons and future prospects. When he falls asleep on the train, he basically dreams the story “Alone” (featuring Elizabeth Peña as a sexually desirous Cuban housekeeper); and, later, when he loses the briefcase containing his lecture and has to write a new work, he creates the melancholy “Old Love.”

Schütte can’t be faulted for his unique approach to an author whose work is underrepresented in film. However, by stuffing three Singer stories into 86 minutes, he shortchanges all of them; the result is thin and dull. No one will quite believe that the seventysomething Max has enough remaining mojo to bed a long-ago student (Barbara Hershey). But in case anyone pities Max as his real and imagined sexual lives combine to form an armor of fear and regret, check the time: If you live long enough, it may happen to you, too. (Mark Keizer) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, Laemmle’s Town Center 5)

Mamma Mia!

See Film feature.

A Man Named Pearl

A wondrous, affecting snapshot of a most unlikely real-life Edward Scissorhands, this documentary centers around Pearl Fryar, a 66-year-old retired factory worker with no sculptural topiary training beyond a cursory three-minute demonstration. Filling his three-acre plot with plants cast off by a local nursery, and turning an abstract eye on them, Fryar has created a sprawling, personal garden that baffles plant pathologists and enthralls neighbors and art critics alike.

Co-directed by Brent Pierson and Scott Galloway, this simple tale of pay-it-forward positivism swells the heart without ever coming across as manipulative. The son of a hard-working sharecropper, Fryar oozes basic decency, and his work has had a transformative effect on the small, rural town of Bishopville, in dirt-poor Lee County, South Carolina. With a score featuring jazz-inflected compositions from Fred Story, this is an honest, feel-good tale of communal embrace and outwardly expanding ripples of goodwill. (Brent Simon) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, Laemmle’s One Colorado, Laemmle’s Town Center 5)

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

See second Film feature.

Step Brothers

When lusty middle-agers Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Nancy (Mary Steenburgen) decide to marry, each brings along a fortyish live-at-home son with an extreme case of arrested development. Robert’s son Dale (John C. Reilly) talks dirty, fancies himself a drummer, and collects classic porn. Nancy’s son Brennan (Will Ferrell) talks dirty, fancies himself a singer, and appreciates porn – classic or otherwise. Each also resents the other, firmly convinced that their parents’ marriage has destroyed what was a really good thing.

The ensuing rivalry and subsequent friendship – which is supposed to be funny only because it features grown men acting like children – will probably go over big with grown men who act like children, while boring the daylights out of most anyone else. Written by Ferrell and director Adam McKay from a story the two devised with Reilly, this is a very disappointing reunion for the Talladega Nights team, essentially a threadbare sketch idea, not unlike something Ferrell and McKay would have cooked up in their SNL days, stretched so far past the breaking point that the last half of the film feels like a giant, awkward scramble to try and formulate some kind of satisfactory conclusion. The film also adheres to the new Hollywood rule that all studio comedies must somewhere indicate the participation of Judd Apatow (here serving only as producer), who risks seeing his creative capital vanish just as quickly if he continues to put his name on stinkers like this. (Wade Major) (Citywide)

Take

Though they rarely interact, Ana (Minnie Driver) and Saul (Jeremy Renner) are fixated on each other. She lost her son Jesse (Bobby Coleman); Saul is the one responsible, and he is scheduled to die by lethal injection. Charles Oliver’s hushed melodrama cuts between crime day and execution day tracing the path to the pair’s mutual emptiness. Saul is a lunkhead, not a murderer; by framing the child’s death as snowballing missteps, Oliver earns Saul sympathy at the cost of depth and conflict. There are no shades of gray, only of beige; both Ana and Saul have plenty of close-ups, but no personalities other than “steely, blue-collar mom” and “hapless gambler.” As the doomed child, Coleman is realistically – not cloyingly – annoying and hyper. Driver and Renner are so restrained they’re practically nonexistent, though there’s some life in a scene where the convict chews out a priest for suggesting he trust in God’s will. A closing play for inner peace fades into a pitch for a correctional concept called Restorative Justice – a sensible program that encourages victims to confront perps so that purse snatcher and purse snatchee can humanize the other. (Amy Nicholson) (Laemmle’s Monica 4, Laemmle’s Town Center 5, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7)

Also Opening This Week:

Asian Stories. After his fiancée ditches him, a young Chinese-American man (James Kyson Lee) asks his best friend (Kirt Kishita) – who happens to be a professional killer – to put him out of his misery. Ronald Oda wrote and (with producer Kris Anthony Chin) co-directed. (AK) (ImaginAsian Theatre, 251 S. Main St., 213-617-1033, Theimaginasian.com/la)

CSNY: Déjà Vu. Bernard Shakey, a.k.a. Neil Young, directed this concert film that tracks Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young during the group’s 2006 Freedom of Speech tour. (AK) (The Landmark West Los Angeles)

Eight Miles High. Natalia Avelon portrays real-life Rolling Stones groupie/flower-child Uschi Obermaier, who, during the ’60s, scandalized the bourgeoisie. Achim Bornhak directed this German box office hit. (AK) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

No Regret. Leesong Hee-il wrote and directed this story of a young man (Lee Young-hoon), who leaves his orphanage home and goes to the big city, where he becomes involved with a man (Lee Han) from a rich background. When he finds out that his lover is planning on marrying a girl from his own social class, he responds with a risky criminal scheme. (AK) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Scully and Mulder, together again! Series creator Chris Carter directed from a script cowritten with Frank Spotnitz; the cast includes Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, Xzibit, and Callum Keith Rennie, in addition to, you know, those other two. (AK) (Citywide)