Latest Reviews: November 27, 2008

Australia
It is 1939 and persnickety Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) has arrived from England to take possession of Faraway Downs, a remote Australian ranch where her husband was recently murdered. To avoid losing the ranch to a local cattle baron (Bryan Brown), Sarah must drive 1500 head of livestock to the city of Darwin, where the Australian military will buy them. For this, she enlists the Drover (Hugh Jackman), a rugged and ripped cowboy. The two bicker constantly while crossing the desert, which can only mean they’ll be in love by the third reel.

Director Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited wannabe-masterpiece knowingly traffics in the cliches of old-Hollywood melodrama, yet still has the guts to confront Australia’s history of aboriginal mistreatment by having the tale narrated by half-caste Nullah (Brandon Walters). Later, Nullah’s journey becomes more prominent when the Japanese attack Darwin, not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Indeed, Luhrmann effortlessly incorporates chunks of the country’s history and identity; and Australia’s scenery is gorgeously shot by DP Mandy Walker. But the movie is clunky in spots and too self-consciously eager to be considered alongside its Golden Age inspirations. Although Luhrmann tempers his famously randy visual style, he can’t bend himself completely to the requirements of this material. He has tried to make a timeless epic worthy of Australia the continent. Instead, he has made a flawed epic worthy of Australia the country. (Mark Keizer) (Citywide)

Four Christmases
The secret to a happy, healthy relationship? For Brad and Kate (Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon) – both children of divorce – it means keeping marriage, kids, and extended families as far away as possible. But their annual Christmas dodge – a tropical vacation under guise of charity work – unravels when a fog bank grounds all flights and a news crew captures them on video. Suddenly, they’re faced with the obligation of not one, not two, not three – but four Christmases, one with each parent and whatever additional weirdos two credited writing teams saw fit to throw in.

Like all Christmas tales since A Christmas Carol, this is essentially a parable about people who learn the “real value” of Christmas and family via a miraculous, overnight holiday epiphany. Like all Christmas movies since It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s also a variation on a previously successful formula, namely Meet the Parents times four. If one set of wacky relatives is funny, four is even funnier!

Well, not really. Despite the best efforts of Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, and Mary Steenburgen – along with the supporting talents of a very funny Jon Favreau, Kristin Chenoweth, and country stars Tim McGraw and Dwight Yoakam – more turns out to be less, largely because it’s all so calculated and obvious. Then again, Christmas movies aren’t supposed to be nail-biters. Debut narrative director Seth Gordon, segueing from the documentary success of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, mostly plays it safe, while Vaughn and Witherspoon do their level best to make an otherwise low-grade picture feel modestly entertaining. (Wade Major) (Citywide)

Lake City
On the run from drug dealers trying to locate thieving, junkie girlfriend Hope (Drea de Matteo), Billy (Troy Garrity) grabs Hope’s son Clayton (Colin Ford) and heads for his small-town home where a strained reunion with his estranged mother Maggie (Sissy Spacek) promises to reopen decades-old family wounds.

First-time filmmakers Hunter Hill and Perry Moore seem to think they’re doing post-modern Tennessee Williams when, in fact, it’s more like backwater Ed McBain. Merging the two disparate story elements – crime thriller and family drama – never really works, which is a pity, given how good the family drama material is, whenever drug dealers and lowlifes aren’t popping in to spoil the moment. Cursory similarities to Peter Weir’s Witness, which pulls off a similar balancing act very successfully, only serve to magnify the problems. Fortunately, Spacek still has the weight to carry an otherwise average film and elevate just about everyone and everything around her. In a film this uneven, that makes all the difference in the world. (Wade Major) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

Milk
The facts are well known: In 1977, gay activist Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, making him the first openly gay candidate to win a major political post. A year later, he was assassinated (along with the mayor, George Moscone) by former supervisor Dan White. Less than a year after that, White received a lighter-than-expected sentence, thanks to the so-called “Twinkie defense.” This story – as well as Milk’s life in general – was extremely well told in Rob Epstein’s Oscar-winning 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk; and Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting), in his new fictionalization of the events, owes a tremendous debt to Epstein’s doc (which is emphatically acknowledged in the closing credits).

Van Sant opens with Milk (Sean Penn), dictating an audio tape to be played in the event of his assassination. This segues into both documentary footage (Dianne Feinstein announcing the killings) and flashbacks of Milk, on the cusp of his 40th birthday, meeting lover-to-be Scott (James Franco) and deciding to give up his closeted, white-collar lifestyle and move to San Francisco. There is some compression of time and conflation of minor events here, but the film cleaves extremely closely to the facts. (Perhaps the biggest omission is understandable: You’d never know from the movie that the killings occurred only days after the Jonestown Massacre had blanketed the Bay Area in a cloud of horror and shock; dealing with this might have distracted from the movie’s focus.)

Penn looks so much like Milk that you wonder how the producers could have ever considered anyone else (like, at one point, Robin Williams); but on reflection you realize that he doesn’t innately look that much like Milk – which is a sign of how terrific his performance is. Josh Brolin is no less perfect as White, who is in many ways a more interesting subject for a film. In the end, the film is depressing, not as much for the likable hero’s absurd death as for its echoes of recent events: No one would deny that gay rights have come a huge distance in the last 30 years. So how come Prop. 8 just passed when its cousin, the Briggs Initiative – the fight over which dominates the final third of the movie – was handily defeated? (Andy Klein) (Pacific ArcLight, Pacific’s The Grove, The Landmark West Los Angeles, AMC Loews Broadway 4, Pacific ArcLight Sherman Oaks)

Otto; or Up with Dead People
With their hypnotic sexuality and ability to seduce even the most virtuous of women, vampires are frequently a metaphor for all sorts of lustful behavior. Not so much zombies, though, which is why writer-director Bruce LaBruce’s queer horror satire-cum-philosophical polemic about sexually ferocious gay zombies is an edgily bizarre pleasure – droll, yet ultimately sensitive and thought-provoking. Young Otto (Jey Crisfar) is a not only a gay twink – he’s also a zombie, who rises from the dead in a creepy, rotted hoodie and with bleary yellow eyes, and staggers around Berlin eating cats and picking up sexually promiscuous gentlemen … whose innards he later slurps on. When Otto shambles onto a movie set being run by subversive underground filmmaker Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus) – who just happens to be filming her own movie about zombie revolutionaries (it makes sense when you see it) – Otto appears to have found the role he was born to play. However, Otto starts suffering flashbacks to events from his own former life – including his love affair with the beautiful boy (Gio Black Peter) who drove him to become one of the undead – leading to several unexpected revelations.

Along with the wacky zombie plot, LaBruce’s film is peppered with the filmmaker’s stylistic signatures – hefty dollops of near-hardcore sex and longwinded political diatribes against conformism and capitalism. Yet, the film is also peppered with strikingly clever ironic humor, underscoring the director’s notion that the world regards gays as being zombie-like monsters – and hinting at the subversive notion that love is as all-consuming as a zombie’s barbecue feast. Crisfar’s German accent is sometimes difficult to penetrate, but he engrossingly balances zombie-like ghoulishness with a strange vulnerability. (Paul Birchall) (Opens Friday at Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

Special
“Most of us can’t be unique or important in a meaningful way,” concedes Les (Michael Rapaport), an L.A. parking enforcement officer, whose life is a spirit-crushing void of insults, microwave dinners, and emasculation from a boss who forces him to repeat the mantra “I am important and I keep the city running.” When Les enlists in a pharmaceutical trial for a pill that promises to erase self-doubt, he’s ecstatic at the side-effects – flight, telepathy, and teleportation, the perfect ingredients to upgrade from a zero to a crime-fighting hero. By reading minds, Les prevents robberies by preemptively tackling the perps; on camera (and to local newscasters and police) he looks like the aggressor, and we too tentatively come to suspect that our vigilante might in fact be insane.

Shot for pennies – a cash limitation that benefits the production’s creativity and credibility –- writer-directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore’s haunting film keeps shifting the ground under our feet as Les ricochets between two sets of brothers, the comic shop geeks (Josh Peck and Robert Baker) who are his closest thing to friends, and the moneyed corporate cretins (Paul Blackthorne and Ian Bohen) who want to keep Les from ruining their investment in the new wonder drug. Rapaport is great casting – 6’4” and wild-eyed, he’s so big, intense, and earnestly vulnerable that we’re never sure if the wary reactions to him spring from a belief in his powers or fear that he might just go nuts on them. When one of the bad guys tries to reduce Les to sniveling that he’s a nobody, like him, we ball up our fists. And later, when Les wrestles with the option of flushing his medicine, this memorable and smart noir suggests that a humble man’s real superpower is the ability to endure. (Amy Nicholson) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

Transporter 3
Thugs kidnap Valentina (Natalya Rudakova), the 20-ish daughter of the head of the Ukrainian EPA (Jeroen Krabbe), to force him to sign environmentally destructive contracts; they insist that transporter Frank Martin (Jason Statham, coming back for thirds) babysit her. They back up their request by outfitting both Frank and Valentina with explosive bracelets that will blow them to hellangone if they stray more than 100 feet from Frank’s car – or if they try to remove them, natch. In short, the latest from writer/producer Luc Besson combines the character from its two predecessors with a variation on the dilemma Statham faced in the unrelated Crank.

The basic plot idea is beyond inane – the minister won’t be able to renege on the contracts as soon as his daughter is released? Huh? – but this series left reality on a fast train before the opening credits of the 2002 original. Oliver Megaton – not his real name, I was relieved to learn – is the credited director, and Hong Kong whiz Cory Yuen returns to stage the action scenes, which are half the movie and all that’s memorable. For the most part, the fights and chases are as implausible as the story, but there’s an extraordinarily clever escape-from-certain-death bit about 20 minutes from the end that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. (Andy Klein) (Citywide)

Also Opening This Week:
The Beautiful Truth. Documentarian Steve Kroschel follows a 15-year-old Alaskan as he sets out to investigate the direct link between diet and disease, and Gerson Therapy, an alleged alternative-medicine treatment for cancer. (AK) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

Ben X. Ben (Greg Timmermans), who has Asperger’s Syndrome, spends much of his life in an on-line computer game, where he attempts to train for and block out the reality of his daily experiences. His on-line dream girl (Laura Verlinden) helps him devise a plan to get back at the bullies who torment him in real life. Writer/director Nic Balthazar’s debut film, based on a true story, is Belgium’s Academy Award Submission for Best Foreign Language Film. (AK) (Opens Friday at the Nuart)

Fix. Tao Ruspoli directed and cowrote (with Jeremy Fels) this story of a pair of documentary filmmakers (Shawn Andrews, Olivia Wilde) racing around L.A., trying to get the money that will put a friend in rehab and save him from three years in prison. (AK) (Opens Friday at the Downtown Independent)

The Matador. Stephen Higgins and Nina Gilden Seavey directed this documentary about David Fandila’s quest to become the world’s top-ranked bullfighter. (AK) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)