Allah Made Me Funny

So these three guys walk into a comedy club – a Palestinian, an Indian, and a black Muslim... . And they call themselves the Allah Made Me Funny Tour, and their tour has been shot and edited into a feature by director Andrea Kalin. The show leads off with Mo (for Mohammed) Amer, a Palestinian-American raised in Houston, Texas (where, incidentally, they dance as good as they walk). The funnier two-thirds of his shtick involves either being raised in a Muslim family or dealing with his ethnicity in America; when he gets to generic “let me tell ya about my wife” material, he sounds like an inferior Ralph Kramden. Azhar Usman, a gigantic, longhaired, bearded Indian-American, amusingly describes the problems of getting on a plane when you look like him. And Preacher Moss tells us about his parents’ reaction to his conversion – no more drinking, no more chasing after women, just congregating with his male friends ... must be gay.

Each comic gets about 20-25 minutes onstage. In between the solid blocks of standup, Kalin shows brief documentary footage of the men on the road and visiting their parents, much like in Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show. The audience cutaways are sometimes awkward, overly tight closeups interspersed with crowd shots driving home the eclectic multicultural background of the crowd – young women in blue jeans and burqas yokking it up equally with white-bread middle Americans. The whole thing is like an HBO comedy special – Allah made these guys pretty funny – and it’s hard to see why it’s getting theatrical release. (Andy Klein) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

George Lopez, Andy Garcia, Cheech Marin, Paul Rodriguez, Placido Domingo, Luis Guzman, and Edward James Olmos – all from Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or California, with the exception of Sinaloa-born Rodriguez – lend their voices to director Raja Gosnell’s innocuous, inoffensive, insipid live-action kids’ flick that knows nada about Mexico or Beverly Hills, except that in one people like dog fights, and in the other they prefer doggie spas. A childless millionaire (Jamie Lee Curtis) dotes on her Chihuahua, Chloe (voiced nasally by Drew Barrymore). After she leaves spoiled niece Rachel (Piper Perabo) in charge of Chloe for a week, the two brats have a bitch-off that leaves Chloe storming out of their holiday rental in Baja, where she’s immediately dognapped by underground villain Vasquez (Jose Maria Yazpik) and made to brawl with a Doberman named Diablo (Olmos). Of course, just like Natalee Holloway, the disappearance of a white female dog in a foreign land becomes a cause celebre: Rachel, with the gardener (Manolo Cardona) and his four-legged friend Papi (Lopez), city-hop south of the border in a wildly improbable hunt to find a Chihuahua in a haystack. If all goes poorly with the elections in November, five years down the line, this flick as well as every reality show on MTV will seem as outmoded and incendiary as Marie Antoinette’s cakes. (Amy Nicholson) (Citywide)

Blindness

At an unremarkable intersection in an anonymous city in an unidentified country, the stoplight turns green, but one car doesn’t move. The man (Yusuke Iseya) flailing inside has suddenly gone blind, the world enveloped in a milky white fog. An opportunist offers to drive him home, but soon the thief (screenwriter Don McKellar), too, goes blind. As does the first blind man’s wife (Yoshino Kimura). And his doctor (Mark Ruffalo). And a man with a black eye patch (Danny Glover), a woman with dark glasses (Alice Braga), and a boy with a squint (Mitchell Nye), all of whom happen to be in the eye doctor’s office with him. Only the doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore) is immune to the white sickness. Only she can see civilization’s descent into chaos, where it wallows in its own piss and shit.

Under the stylish direction of Fernando Mereilles (City of God), few false notes mar this powerful parable based on Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s 1995 novel about the politics of natural disasters and our metaphoric inability to see. Although viewers witness what almost everyone in the film cannot, Mereilles and his crew use reflective surfaces, layers of image, and multiple frames to put us voyeurs visually on edge. In a close adaptation of the source material, what few alterations McKellar has made only heighten the human drama. (Annlee Ellingson) (Citywide)

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story

If you’re wondering how a country dealing with two separate half-decade-long wars and an economy teetering on the edge of total collapse could, a couple of weeks ago, find coverage of its impending election hijacked for two-plus days by talk about lipstick on a pig, you’ll find unnerving answers in this engrossing, timely, clear-eyed documentary about the late Lee Atwater, the godfather of modern political dirty tricks. A silver-tongued rogue known for his affinity for blues music as well as cutthroat, win-at-all-costs maneuvering, Atwater, more than any single politician, pioneered the art of hard-knuckle campaigning, gleefully turning elections into a series of empty tabloid moments and coded-language entreaties (e.g., Willie Horton) even as his personal charm largely anesthetized people to his tactics.

Director Stefan Forbes wisely eschews narration, instead intercutting archival footage and perspicacious interviews with friends, journalists, and party wonks of all political persuasions. The resulting portrait is pulse-quickening, wry, and frequently upsetting, but never less than unswervingly fair-minded, letting viewers sort out the many contradictions surrounding this small town South Carolina boy turned kingmaker. One thing, though, is certain. Despite being felled by a brain tumor at 40 years old – and allegedly renouncing many of his incendiary methods in his last days – the long shadow of Atwater’s influence can be seen in the uninterrupted chain of Republican string-pullers: Atwater, who got Bush 41 elected and described the current president as his “number one soulmate,” mentored Karl Rove, who in turn mentored current McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt. (Brent Simon) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

Flash of Genius

As Ralph Nader learned, it’s tough to make car-safety stimulating. Consider engineering professor and basement inventor Bob Kearns, who, after being blinded in his left eye in a honeymoon champagne cork fiasco, was inspired to invent the intermittent windshield wiper. Played here by Greg Kinnear – today’s go-to actor for men in cheap suits – Kearns was a dreamer who became a kicked dog. When he smiles during the early scenes of Marc Abraham’s biopic, we’re already dreading what we know will come next: His idea is stolen by Ford and Chrysler, his patents are trashed, and his quest to get the big guys to acknowledge his brilliance costs him his family, job, 26 years, and 10 million in legal fees (even though he represented himself). Philip Railsback’s script, based on a New Yorker article by John Seabrook, follows the formula – we can guess every plot point, but are left guessing about Kearns himself, who, as the years drag on, progresses from motivational to monomaniacal. When wife Phyllis (Lauren Graham) leaves, taking their brood of six, the truth of Kearns’s life registers as little more than a narrative obligation. Still, corporate conspiracists (myself included) have a high tolerance for films that take potshots at The Man, even if like this, it’s less a sock to the jaw than a fumbled graze. (Amy Nicholson) (Citywide)

The House of Adam

In writer-director Jorge Ameer’s maladroit gay romantic thriller, young Adam (Jared Caldwell) is an innocent queer boy, who works in the small town diner belonging to gruff but fatherly Albert (Thomas Michael Kappler). Suspecting Adam of pilfering cash from the register, Albert hires his son Anthony (John Shaw) to keep an eye on the diner. In spite of the fact that Anthony is engaged to be married, he and Adam commence what is likely to be one of the cinema’s least convincing and charismatic romances, which abruptly terminates (though not soon enough) when a trio of Bible-thumpers beat up Adam and chop off his head. Not to worry, though: While Anthony suffers a nervous breakdown, Adam “comes back,” haunting the happily married couple who move into his blood-spattered house.

It’s rare to find a film as poorly made as this one, which shoots the moon in terms of sheer awfulness: The acting is painfully stiff, the script consists of stilted drivel of the sort that six-year-olds write on Valentine’s Day cards, and Caldwell and Shaw have all the chemistry together of an income tax auditor and his hapless subject. A few of the scenes – such as an unintentionally hilarious sequence in which the new homeowner thinks his wife is giving him fellatio and the suckee actually turns out to the ghostly blood-vomiting Adam – suggest the film is intended as camp, but the majority of the work takes itself far too seriously to be much fun. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

London journalist Sidney Young (Simon Pegg) fancies himself an unfettered taboo-breaker, poking holes in the puffed-up celebrity culture. But when he moves to New York for a job at Sharp’s – a thinly veiled Vanity Fair, where Toby Young, author of the source material, worked – he is low man on the totem pole, assigned by once-crusading editor Clay Harding (Jeff Bridges) to work under slimy Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston), whose career is skyrocketing, thanks to being the owner’s son-in-law. Sidney comes on to fellow lowly worker Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst), who initially spurns him because – she realizes as quickly as we do – Sidney is, in fact, a complete asshole. Tactless, self-important, inept, and rude, Sidney eventually has to choose between success and his journalistic integrity.

Therein lies the central problem: For the first half of the film, Pegg and director Robert Weide (Curb Your Enthusiasm and the screenplay for Mother Night) make Sidney so loathsome that it’s hard not to share the contempt most of the other characters feel for him. By the end, Pegg has made Sidney more sympathetic ... by having him turn into someone we see no trace of earlier on. Despite this, the film is slickly constructed and frequently funny. (Sidney dismissively describes Lawrence as “the man with hidden shallows.”) In addition to Pegg, Dunst, Bridges, and Huston, the cast includes Bill Paterson, Megan Fox, Gillian Anderson, and Miriam Margolyes; the whole gang turns in letter-perfect work, with Paterson being a bit better than perfect. (Andy Klein) (Citywide)

Mentor

Director David Carl Lang’s melancholy drama tells the story of aspiring young author Carter (Matthew Davis), who, as a grad student, finds himself taken under the proverbial wing of Sanford Pollard (Rutger Hauer), a J.D. Salinger-like author of Great Books, with an enfant terrible reputation to boot. Pollard teaches an exclusive writing seminar, during which he delights in ripping apart the works of his students. During his off hours, the great author is boning his grad assistant, sexy, brilliant editor-in-training Julia (Dagmara Dominczyk). As Carter grows increasingly close to Pollard, Julia’s interest in the handsome grad student increases – right up until their awkward love triangle leads to unexpected tragedy.

Lang’s intimate, psychologically nuanced drama starts out powerfully, with the depiction of the tense, mutually needy relationship between Carter and Pollard being fraught and engaging. Even as Carter requires a worldly father figure whose genius can inspire him, Pollard would clearly trade all he has for the younger man’s youth and energy. But, midway through, writer William Whitehurst’s stagy screenplay devolves into inert romance and clumsy, soapy melodrama, with a tepid finale, unintentionally suggesting that the true role of genius is to get out of the way and leave the car to the young and pretty. Hauer’s scenery-chewing, Peter O’Toole-esque performance as the great author is so boisterous, it essentially blows the other two actors off the screen whenever they strive to get within 20 feet of him, making their romance together seem pallid and lacking in chemistry. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Grande 4)

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Peter Sollett’s indie teen romance may star geek crush Michael Cera, but it’s the anti-Juno. Cera plays band member Nick, who is still crushing hard on his ex, Tris (Alexis Dziena), when his desperate mix CDs make their way from the trashcan to Norah (Kat Dennings). Lorene Scafaria’s screenplay, based on the novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, fancies itself a rom-com for the MySpace generation, with would-be lovers knowing each other’s top ten bands before the first date. But Nick and Norah share none of the bright chemistry or enjoyment for life of their namesakes – William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man. They’re New Jersey groupies posturing as Manhattan brats, and the night they meet cute, they spend searching for a secret show starring their, like, totally favorite band, Where’s Fluffy.

Music is the only thing they care about; Norah is the type of fictitious slacker we’ve seen a lot of lately: smart enough to get into Brown, but too lethargic to bother going. There’s no snap and snark, only the inarticulate disdain of self-conscious high schoolers – it’s a love story where the way to the heart isn’t through the mind but the iPod. It works best when capturing the feel of being young, restless, and drowning in options. But Sollett’s invested in ephemera, not people – never more so than when the couple gets busy in a recording studio and the camera chooses to pivot and pan sensuously across the synthesizer. (Amy Nicholson) (Citywide)

Obscene

It might be hard for under-40s (or even under-50s) to believe, but, despite the guarantees of the First Amendment, government censorship actually existed in the U.S. until the 1960s. We’re not talking about de facto censorship, but the real thing: local law enforcement – or even federal authorities – confiscating books and hauling the bookstore owners off to jail. This symptom of America’s embarrassingly provincial attitude was finally cured through uphill court battles instigated by Barney Rosset, legendary founder of the Grove Press and the Evergreen Review.

Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s documentary is a justified tribute to Rosset, who in his mid-80s is still feisty, with a refreshingly lighthearted attitude toward all he accomplished. They speak to John Waters, Ray Manzarek, Ed Sanders, Jim Carroll, and Julius Lester, who describe the impact Rosset had in breaking down the repressive conformism that characterized the postwar period. They also have gathered audio and video footage, documenting Rosset’s career, as he championed Samuel Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, and, most of all, Henry Miller. I was a precociously (maybe pretentiously) intellectual adolescent at the time, and Obscene took me back to those days when Rosset’s publications were among the most important cultural influences. (Andy Klein) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

Rachel Getting Married

Recovering addict/alcoholic Kym (Anne Hathaway) goes straight from rehab to her family home, where older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is only a day away from marrying Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe). Her arrival is not necessarily a joyous event, as she immediately gets into conflicts with Rachel’s best friend (Anisa George) and then Rachel herself. Dad (Bill Irwin) endlessly and ineffectually tries to smooth over all the problems, but the reassembling of the family inevitably dredges up the clan’s unhealable wound – a hideous tragedy from which no one has ever totally recovered.

Working from a perceptive script by Jenny Lumet, director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Caged Heat) perfectly calibrates the gradual revealing of the family and its dynamics. Unfortunately, along the way, he also inexplicably lingers on activities – personal testimonies at twelve-step groups and endless toasts at the wedding banquet – that are dull enough in real life, even if you know and love the participants, but are intolerably soporific on screen, among people you have no strong connection to. Hathaway is terrific; great clown Irwin is affecting in a very serious role; and Debra Winger delivers in a brief appearance as Kym and Rachel’s frosty, estranged mother. The whole will drag you through a gamut of strong emotions, but being dragged isn’t necessarily the most enjoyable experience in the world. (Andy Klein) (Pacific’s ArcLight, The Landmark West Los Angeles, Pacific’s ArcLight Sherman Oaks, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7)

Religulous

See Film feature.

Still Life

As the massive Seven Gorges Dam redevelopment project sweeps away soon-to-be-deluged villages and communities, two individuals search for spouses from whom they’ve been long separated. Sanming (Han Sanming) is a miner looking for the wife and daughter who left him 16 years ago. Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) seeks the husband who came to the region two years earlier in search of work. Precisely why the relationships broke up and why each now seeks some sort of rapprochement is revealed slowly and methodically in this typically meditative effort from rising Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke.

Like his previous work, particularly Platform and The World – both of which also featured Sanming in effectively the same part – Jia’s latest (which won the top prize at the 2006 Venice Film Festival) requires both patience and concentration. The two stories never arrive at any meaningful intersection and don’t really pan out in a conventionally satisfying way. But the blend of poetic realism and a few dollops of magical realism makes for an alluring odyssey that fans of more recent Sino-cinema (which has far more in common with Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien than Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige) should richly appreciate. (Wade Major) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

The Violent Kind

If, as the press notes suggest, writer-director Gregory Pepos’s previous film (Some Body) got some attention at the Sundance Festival, then this film is likely to be a shoo-in for the “gibberish” film festival. Disjointed in the extreme, with sloppy, murky camera work, and swirling, pretentious editing that is not recommended for viewing by epileptics, Pepos’s thriller centers on grim-faced, intense Terry (Kirk Harris), who has just returned from Iraq, where he’s shell-shocked after three tours of duty. Terry’s psychological damage creates a bond between him and his dad George (John Savage), who remains shell-shocked from his own years in Vietnam. For reasons that defy even the vauge parameters of movie logic, sexy beauty Jesika (Irina Bjorklund) has remained married to Terry and lives with him and George. Hoping to help Terry get over his Iraq flashbacks, the threesome repairs to George’s country farm in the woods near San Diego. This turns out not to be a brilliant idea, as young Terry’s craziness starts to get the better of him.

Or, at least, that’s what the plot seems to be: In reality, Pepos’s film is more of a kaleidoscopic concatenation of half-baked images, slapped together with an incomprehensible mortar. It’s hard to know whether we’re supposed to laugh or be awed by the endless scenes of George sealing himself off in his barn to play cards and of Jesika spending minutes at a time swabbing manure out of the farm’s stables. The director’s ambitions to craft a certain sort of glossy, superficially artful film ultimately gets in the way of the story – that is, if there’s a story mixed in the jumble in the first place. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Grande 4)

Vivre sa Vie

Jean-Luc Godard’s rather unsubtle 1962 social commentary (the title of which can be translated as either To Live Her Life or To Live One’s Life) doesn’t seem nearly as hard-hitting or technically daring today, particularly in the wake of “anything goes” reality television. But as historical artifact, the film retains some noteworthy flourishes and thematic indulgences. Starring the director’s then-wife and lady luck, Anna Karina, it details, in twelve distinct chapters, how a young Parisian narcissist manages to blow off her family in search of an acting career, only to end up a prostitute.

The already jarring structure is compounded by too-cool-for-the-room staccato editing and Godard’s determination to include some sort of reference or homage to every zeitgeistal inspiration that pops out of his id. All of this makes the film uniquely Godard and particularly Nouvelle Vague – which is to say that just like many other Godard films ... it deserves to be both reviled and admired. (Wade Major) (Nuart)

Also Opening This Week:

An American Carol. Michael Malone (Kevin P. Farley), a sloppily dressed, baseball-cap-wearing, overweight left-wing documentarian crusades to abolish the 4th of July, until he’s confronted by the ghosts of George Washington, George S. Patton, and John F. Kennedy, who show him the error of his ways. Even the premise suggests that writer/director David Zucker is so blinded by his post-9/11 right-wing awakening that he can’t see Michael Moore clearly enough to make an appropriate satire of that rabble-rouser’s many faults. Of course, if it’s really funny, I’ll take that all back, since funny trumps lousy politics every time; if it’s not funny, the resulting critical reaction will be dismissed as more proof of Hollywood’s left-wing bias. (The film was withheld from critics.) Zucker, of course, was part of the trio that made Airplane! and spawned a whole branch of American film comedy, so my fingers are crossed. The cast includes Kelsey Grammer, Trace Adkins, Leslie Nielsen, Dennis Hopper, James Woods, Robert Davi, and Jon Voight. (AK) (Citywide)