Latest Reviews: November 6, 2008

Ballast

Single mom Marlee (Tarra Riggs), a recovering crack addict, works as a janitor while trying to raise her troubled teenage son, James (Jimmyron Ross), himself drifting into a life of drugs. When James is beaten up by thugs, he and Marlee flee to the home Marlee used to share with her husband, who has recently killed himself. They form a grudgingly tender relationship with Lawrence, the dead husband’s twin brother, who is trying to cope with his own grief and is only gradually able to assist in his estranged family’s jaw-dropping financial and emotional need.

Lensed in the oppressively grey murk of a Mississippi Delta winter, and utilizing an ensemble of nonprofessional performers, writer-director Lance Hammer’s leisurely paced, character-driven drama is the perfect antidote for an audience weary from overindulgent, high-concept studio films. It’s also a movie boasting such a strong sense of melancholy that the sorrow is almost a character in its own right. Hammer’s plot doesn’t sound like much, but the performances are rich with psychological subtext, with a powerful organic quality that packs quite a punch – partially the result of the cast’s largely improvised acting. The emotions are incredibly close to the surface, which creates something like a mix of Greek tragedy and a secretly observed real-world incident. The Mississippi Delta backdrop is grubby and broodingly desolate, yet strangely beautiful – a more than appropriate location for the sad, desperate characters. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Adapted from John Boyne’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas unfolds through the eyes of eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who is unaware of the complicity of his Nazi commandant father (David Thewlis) in the grim prosecution of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. After his family settles into a large country house with a distant view of a commune-style barn where all the “farmers” wear strange undergarments, Bruno sneaks out through the back garden in search of adventure. He stumbles across Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a mousy Jewish boy from the nearby concentration camp, and a forbidden friendship develops between the pair. While his sister laps up the nationalistic propaganda of a Nazi tutor, Bruno struggles to square the bilious invective with his personal experience.

Smartly adapted and ably directed by Mark Herman (Little Voice), the film succeeds as an exercise in discrete storytelling – not trying to tell a bigger story than its resources allow. With wide angles and uncluttered frames from cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, it eschews the crushingly monochromatic design of many Holocaust tales, aiming for a more naturalistic palette, to underscore the movie’s humanistic tone. The performances are uniformly strong, but what helps most anchor the film, though, is the wide-eyed Butterfield, who conveys adolescent naivete while never tipping over into affected cuteness. (Brent Simon) (Pacific’s ArcLight, Landmark West Los Angeles)

Captain Abu Raed

See second Film feature.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

The most effective way to watch Kurt Kuenne’s wrenching documentary is to walk in knowing nothing beyond the following: Kuenne made the film for the infant son of childhood friend Andrew Bagby, who was murdered in Pennsylvania in 2001. But there is a devil in the heartbreaking details, and she is Shirley Turner, Bagby’s ex-girlfriend, who drove 1,600 miles to murder the 28-year-old when the pair broke up. After Bagby’s death, Turner hightailed it to Newfoundland, where a negligent justice system compounded the problem horribly. It fell to Bagby’s resilient parents, David and Kathleen, to bring Turner to justice. Then Turner announced she was pregnant with Andrew’s child.

What happens after that is so beyond the scope of what any surviving parent should have to endure, so heinous in its disregard for victims’ rights, that Canadian law may be changed as a result. If Kuenne’s film has any flaw, it’s the slight hint of emotional manipulation, since the story is horrifying enough without the sledgehammer. But his anger is justified; the film deserves to be seen as an intensely personal testament to human resiliency and how a greater good can come from any tragedy. Despite the swirling, deepening layers of true-crime melodrama that drive the narrative, we never forget Shirley Turner’s original crime – depriving the world of an apparently terrific guy. (Mark Keizer) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

Loins of Punjab Presents

See second Film feature.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

It’s not really an opera ... not that its fan base gives a damn. A solid hit on the L.A. small stage, Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunick’s musical makes for an amped-up – but no less theatrical – grinding rock slasher. In the future, everyone dresses like Elvira and purchases new organs whenever theirs fail. But if they can’t make their payments to GeneCo president Rotti (Paul Sorvino) and his goony children (Bill Mosely, Nivek Ogre, Paris Hilton), the fallout is worse than foreclosure: A repo man reclaims their livers and leaves them for dead.

The Grand Guignol morality – with its innocents and demons, like a repo man (Anthony Head) who hides his job from his innocent daughter (Alexa Vega) – is more haunting than the music allows. A drum-crashing, guitar-thrashing, clumsy smashup, it makes Andrew Lloyd Webber – hell, even Evanescence – sound subtle. Freed from the constraints (or rather, imagination) of merely being able to pretend-kill victims on stage, Smith and Zdunick have unleashed Saw II, III, and IV director Darren Lynn Bousman to slick the screen in blood and organs. With its expressionistic sets and heavy, glossy black wigs, it’s more overpowering than worth remembering; it’s bad-good in the way The Rocky Horror Picture Show must have seemed to nuns, except without the shock, musicality, or Meat Loaf (though Hilton acquits herself fine). (Amy Nicholson) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7)

Role Models

Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) are two wastrels who host elementary school “anti-drug rallies,” which are really just fronts to get kiddies hooked on the energy drink Minotaur. After the pair crash the Minotaur mobile – a monster truck with a nose ring – the court orders them to spend 150 hours as “Bigs” (that is, overgrown children) mentoring Littles (precocious kids) for Sturdy Wings, a program founded by a brusque ex-addict (a hilarious Jane Lynch), who shoehorns her coke addiction into every sentence.

In this mediocre comedy – destined for cable purgatory as background noise to a hangover and a pizza – both characters are (like the script) half-baked: Rudd’s Danny is an inert grump, who could have been played by a rock; as Wheeler, Scott is stuck playing yet another horndog, the kind of character he tried to outgrow with the brilliant bleak comedy The Promotion. (Luckily, even exerting next to no effort, both are likable enough that the flick isn’t torture.) Five writers worked on the script; none bothered to create a plot or jokes. Director David Wain and the ensemble aren’t trying much harder – the film, like a certain lame-duck president, is content with a Gentleman’s C. Fortunately twelve-year-old actor Bobb’e J. Thompson is too young to pick up on the adults’ apathy: Playing a hostile, breast-obsessed kid who looks like an elementary schooler but cusses like a pimp, Thompson shames all the bigger names sleepwalking through the movie by giving it everything he’s got. (Amy Nicholson) (Citywide)

Soul Men

See first Film feature.

Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains

In October 1972, a plane carrying 45 members of the Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes. Twenty-five survived the initial crash; others died within hours; and eight more died in the avalanche that buried the wrecked plane, which they were using as shelter. Ultimately, the survivors were stranded for 72 freezing, inhospitable days and were rescued only after two of them hiked 44 miles until they found a Chilean shepherd, who recalls how “they smelled of the grave.” This amazing story has been told before, in print (Piers Paul Read’s bestseller Alive) and on screen (Frank Marshall’s 1993 adaptation of Read’s book, as well as Rene Cardona’s 1976 quickie, Survive!). But director Gonzalo Arijon creates the definitive account by having the survivors narrate the story in their own words.

Far from exploitative, Arijon’s documentary is somber and religiously reflective, all but concluding that the players were sent as close to Heaven as Earth will allow, so that God could test their endurance. What hangs over the film (and the survivors’ consciences) is their decision to eat the flesh of their deceased friends to avoid starvation. It dominates their memories of the ordeal, but Arijon shows unconditional understanding of those who ravaged the dead in order to live. Indeed, the great irony of this life-affirming film is that the rugby squad was called the Old Christians, which, thanks to the Communion-like sacrifice of their teammates, the survivors have now become. (Mark Keizer) (Nuart)

Also Opening This Week:

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. In this sequel to the 2005 animated hit, Alex the lion (Ben Stiller) and his friends “accidentally” go to Africa, where they meet their species-al relations. Directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath return, as do voice actors Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer, and Andy Richter; also along for the ride are Alec Baldwin, will.i.am, and the late Bernie Mac. (AK) (Citywide)

The World Unseen. In 1950s South Africa, a free-spirited Indian woman (Sheetal Sheth) not only breaks the new apartheid rules, but even goes on to fall for another woman (Lisa Ray). Shamim Sarif wrote and directed this British/South African coproduction about the dawn of apartheid. (AK) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)