Latest Reviews: August 14, 2008

The Exiles
Yvonne (Yvonne Williams) and Homer (Homer Kish) have a rundown apartment in Bunker Hill’s Native American ghetto, ca. 1960. Homer may otherwise be a nice guy, but he treats Yvonne, who is pregnant with his child, with casual disregard. During the one long night that Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 film shows us, Homer drops Yvonne at a movie theater and frolics till dawn with his buddies: He and Rico (Rico Rodriguez) head for a poker game, while Tommy (Tom Reynolds) and Cliff (Clifford Ray Sam) cruise neighborhood saloons and pick up chicks. After various activities – drunken speeding, bar brawls, dancing – the four all end up atop Hill X, where a bunch of other locals are partying and nostalgically singing their tribal chants.

Like Charles Burnett's 1977 Killer of Sheep – released last year to great acclaim after three decades on the shelf – Kent Mackenzie's 1961 The Exiles is a heretofore lost artifact of Los Angeles history, as well as an excellent film. Both received renewed attention after being included in Thom Andersen's 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself and were subsequently restored by the UCLA Archive and picked up for release by Milestone Films. Basing the characters’ voiceover narration on interviews with the actors, Mackenzie imposes no obvious attitude or mediating outsider's perspective on the material; he just presents it to us, a snapshot of an otherwise unknown culture, with details specific to its time and place. The cinematography is painstakingly worked out; only some bad looping gets in the way of the experience. (Andy Klein) (UCLA’s Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum) See full review online.

Falling
When freelance news videographer Eric Boyle (Richard Dutcher) happens upon a gang murder – with camera in hand – he appears to have hit journalistic pay dirt. But the repercussions of that moment, and his decision to capture the killing on tape, plunge both Eric and wife Davey (Virginia Reece) into an inescapable downward spiral that borders on the apocalyptic.

The religious inference here is not coincidental – writer/director/star Dutcher is best known for launching the Mormon independent film movement with his breakthrough 2000 movie God’s Army. Since that time, his relationship with both Hollywood and his own religion has been a tempestuous one, suggesting that his painfully Faustian new film may be considerably more autobiographical than it appears at first glance. Those looking for convenient answers and affirmation, artistically or religiously, will not find them here. Falling is a primal scream from an immensely talented artist, a begrudging recognition that the world does not play fair, that human beings are profoundly not in control of their own destinies, that some misdeeds cannot be redeemed. It’s a sobering hour-and-a-half at the movies – a pulverizing and unrelenting polemic that somehow never feels like a polemic, largely because Dutcher has the good sense to leave it open-ended. That’s little solace for the escapist crowd, but good news (not the biblical sort) for cinephiles. (Wade Major) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

Fly Me to the Moon
The second cartoon this summer to open with ape Ham I strapping into a space suit, Fly Me to the Moon has two advantages over rival Space Chimps: it’s marginally smarter and in 3-freaking-D. These are watery compliments for a pleasant, unassuming film. Aside from a few oh-yeah! dazzlers, dimensionalizing the story of three young houseflies – the hero, the geek, and the fatty – who slip aboard Apollo 11 doesn’t maximize its visual potential. There’s a nice swoosh-glide into their insect habitat past stubborn mushrooms and glass blades that seem to lash your cheeks. Later, chubby Scooter ping-pongs through weightless drops of Tang, and the three enjoy a gravity-free ballet that makes you ask, couldn’t they fly on earth? When Armstrong (one assumes: the humans are as indistinguishable as marshmallows) bounds across the lunar landscape, we’re treated to a fly’s-eye view from his helmet, staring down as the ground recedes under his feet and then pulls him back down with a puff of space dust. The plot – the usual be-a-hero stuff – is unessential; the science stops with “Wow! Look! The moon!” Back in their Houston swamps, we spend a little too much time with their families: three nervous moms nursing round pink maggots, and a daredevil Gramps still reminiscing about his old love Nadja, a Russian insect built like Charo, and his flight across the Atlantic with Amelia Earhart. Forming the killjoy truth committee are biologists in the audience compelled to note that the 41-year gap between Earhart and Armstrong would make Gramps as relatively ancient as King Tut, as well as Buzz Aldrin, who interrupts the credits to insist that at no time was the Apollo 11 infected with “contaminants.” (Amy Nicholson) (Selected theaters)

Henry Poole Is Here
His life in shambles, despondent Henry (Luke Wilson) buys a house in the same suburban Los Angeles neighborhood where he somewhat unhappily grew up. One of his new neighbors, Esperanza (Babel’s Adriana Barraza), sees a stain on his newly painted, outdoor stucco wall that she believes to be the face of Christ, and imbued with special powers. Henry wants nothing to do with the silliness, but more interactions with those around him – including divorcee Dawn (Radha Mitchell), whose eight-year-old daughter has stopped speaking since her parents’ breakup – slowly draw him out of his insular shell.

A filmmaker with a deep music video catalogue, director Mark Pellington has always been a master of atmosphere and mood, most notably in The Mothman Prophecies. Here, though, he rolls the dice on a much more personal story and succeeds in crafting an affecting movie about emotional waywardness and quiet reflection. The target is smaller, but Pellington’s extraordinary skill at marrying artful image and emotional content help Henry Poole avoid a lot of treacly downward drag, elevating the emotional punch of debut screenwriter Albert Torres’s script, which is enough of a blank canvas to allow one to project onto it their own feelings of forlornness. The only nagging demerit? There’s a plummy, surface quality to Wilson’s moroseness and sullenness; one thinks about the deeper reservoirs of swallowed sadness that someone like Ryan Gosling could have conveyed with this role. (Brent Simon) (Citywide)

Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
Plumber by day and student by night, Jack Brooks (Trevor Matthews) is an angry, wound-up guy. He has a girlfriend he doesn’t really seem to like, a therapist whose advice he can’t fully embrace, and a scarred past that leaves him prone to irrational outbursts. When his community college professor (Robert Englund) becomes overtaken by an awakened ancient evil and is reanimated in belching, vomiting, meat-craving form, Jack finally realizes he can’t run from his Batman-esque back story (the brutal murder of his parents, via a nasty beast), so he grabs his socket wrench and decides to kick a little monster ass.

Lean, thinly sketched, and, as the title aptly indicates, unapologetically populist in tone, Jack Brooks channels Slither and early Sam Raimi, all by way of Tales From the Crypt. There isn’t much in the way of frills or production design, but director Jon Knautz makes up for it by keeping things moving fairly briskly. If there’s a problem, it’s that the script withholds its protagonist’s transformation for too long and could use a bit of an upgrade in swaggering archness. Otherwise, though, grading on a curve, it’s easy to glimpse the potential franchise cult appeal here; all that awaits is the hearty blurb of endorsement from Bruce Campbell. (Brent Simon) (Laemmle Sunset 5) 

Re-Cycle
After a trilogy of successful romances, novelist Ting-yin (Angelica Lee Sin-je) decides to write a supernatural thriller called Re-Cycle. But her concentration is disturbed by the return of her ex-love and a series of strange occurrences. One day, she walks out of her nice apartment building into a burned-out, crumbling street that she’s never seen before. She discovers that she’s fallen into the world where all her discarded pages, ideas, and characters end up – essentially the contents of her computer’s Recycle Bin. Soon she’s racing through one bizarre, threatening environment after another, helped only by an old man (Lau Siu-Ming) and a little girl (Zeng Qi Qi).

Right ahead of the release of their own Hollywood remake of their 2000 Thai hit Bangkok Dangerous comes this 2006 import from the Pang Brothers, Oxide and Danny. Lee was terrific in her breakthrough role in the Pangs’ The Eye (later badly remade with Jessica Alba), but she has less to work with here. The plot is intriguing – it took me some time to really figure out what the ending meant – but the execution is too much like Silent Hill, i.e., like a video game. The same notion seems to occur to the heroine: Late in the story, she asks, “How many further levels do we have to go through?” There are lots of dazzling, imaginative visuals, but there are also unconvincing zombies and a few less successful effects. N.B.: While the visual impact is worthy of seeing on the big screen, the film is already showing as a free Video on Demand selection through the Sundance Channel. (Andy Klein) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5, ImaginAsian Theatre, 251 S. Main St., 213-617-1033, Theimaginasian.com/la.)

Stealing America: Vote by Vote
Peter Coyote narrates this look at various methods of cheating employed – almost entirely by Republicans – in the elections of the last decade or two: fraudulent scrubbing of legitimate voters from the rolls, misallocation of voting machines to discourage African-Americans, and jamming Get Out the Vote phone lines. Those examples are a matter of record and have been covered in 2002’s Unprecedented and other docs. But director Dorothy Fadiman takes a broader approach, trying to build a case that electronic voting machines have been hacked and votes “flipped.” The use of electronic machines with no paper trail is indeed an invitation to mischief, but the case that this mischief occurred in 2004 and 2006 remains circumstantial. I find it believable, since there’s nothing I would put past the present day Republican Party, but Fadiman’s argument relies too heavily on the reliability of exit polls. Still, there is enough here and elsewhere to merit a real investigation. (I’m not holding my breath waiting for the limp Democratic Congressional majority to undertake one, even though it would be undeniably to their benefit in the long run.)

Fadiman speaks to muckraker Greg Palast, pollster John Zogby, and many disaffected election officials, as well as including clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. My favorite is programmer-turned-politician Clint Curtis, who says that loathsome, amoral Florida politico Tom Feeney asked him to develop ways to hack the new machines. But, as the film progresses, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is not so much a documentary in the usual sense as a recruiting tool. We never hear anything from the other side; and the film ends with a fulsome patriotic call to action, accompanied by the kind of rousing music only a Republican could love. The music throughout is ham-fisted and irritating, ranging from Snidely Whiplash sinister to Bob Dornan bombastic. (Andy Klein) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

Tropic Thunder
An action star on the skids (Ben Stiller, who also directed and co-wrote), a “serious” Australian actor (Robert Downey Jr.), and a broad comic (Jack Black) are in the Vietnamese jungle, making the film version of the memoirs of a tough-to-the-point-of-psycho vet (Nick Nolte). The latter convinces the first-time director (Steve Coogan), under pressure from a thuggish studio boss (an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise), to take them without crew on a trek through the jungle to generate some real fear in their performances. Unfortunately, local drug wholesalers think they’re DEA agents, and the danger becomes real.

Consider this no more than half a review (if that): The projection at the last-minute screening I attended failed exactly halfway into the film, so I can say nothing definitive. As far as we got, it was downright hysterical, with Black playing (in essence) Chris Farley, and Downey’s character apparently a parody of Heath Ledger. (Oops.) Hollywood types love knocking Hollywood types, and they’re sure enjoying it here, with the fake film trailers and pretentious actor talk right on the button. I may have more to say next week after I get to see the rest of this, which I eagerly anticipate. There is no reason to think that the film suddenly turns to shit in the second half, but, as yet, I can’t guarantee that it doesn’t. (Andy Klein) (Citywide) 

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
See Film feature.

Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon
Director Jeff Schwarz’s charming documentary offers a thumbnail history of gay porn, as reflected through the prism of trailblazing former hardcore performer Jack Wrangler. Wrangler was the first bona fide Gay Porn Star: A chiseled, hyper-masculine hunk, who, with his tight glutes, firm jaw, and near-robotic erection, came across on screen as part Burt Lancaster, part Tom Selleck, and part remote-control jackhammer. He was also one of the first public figures who showed a man could be both contentedly gay and totally masculine. And, yet, Wrangler continued to defy sexual orientation expectations by switching mid-career to performing straight porn – and then, in middle age, falling in love (and marrying) Margaret Whiting, an elderly cabaret singer some 20 years his senior. The archival footage (including some of the thankfully less notorious scenes of Wrangler in action) provides a compelling sense of porn’s bygone bad old days. And, while we could wish that Schwarz had dug deeper into his psychologically complex subject, instead of merely recounting the chronology of Wrangler’s life, the film is an engrossing history of porn and of one of its most inscrutable performers. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5) 

XXY
During a vacation holiday with his parents to the coast of Uruguay, teenage boy Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky) falls in love with sweet beautiful Alex (Ines Efron), age 15. The problem is that she – or rather, he – is a hermaphrodite, with sex organs of both types. At his/her parents’ orders, Alex is on a constant diet of hormones to keep him/her in a state that is on the female side of the face. Yet, Alex, in a rebellious era of adolescence, spitefully quits taking her/his meds – with the result that Alex starts to realize some things about himself that shock him greatly. Argentinean writer-director Lucia Puenzo’s remarkably powerful drama skillfully takes the central intimate teen romance to haunting levels of angst and melancholy. Piroyansky’s tortured performance as the young man, who can hardly believe what he’s feeling, is brilliant – a scene towards the film’s end in which he pleads for his father’s love, which he lost years ago, is incredibly haunting and unexpectedly universal. (Paul Birchall) (Nuart)

Also Opening This Week:
Mirrors. A family is terrorized by a supernatural force that can enter their home through the mirrors. Alexandre Aja (High Tension, the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes) directed this retread of Kim Sung-ho’s 2003 Korean thriller, Into the Mirror. Both sound like swipes from Douglas Heyes’s memorable Thriller episode, “The Hungry Glass.” Kiefer Sutherland and Amy Smart star. (AK) (Citywide)

Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Animated Jedis and Siths do battle in the period between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Yawn. Dave Filoni directed this animated feature; Matt Lanter, Tom Kane, and James Arnold Taylor are among the voice artists. (AK) (Citywide)