Guru

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Michael Kang's lovely independent film The Motel is set in, yes, a motel run by a Chinese American family, but it's not a family film per se - it doesn't at all shy away from the seedy aspects of this place, with its hourly rates (and weekly rates - both with their own depressing qualities) nor from its protagonist's budding sexual curiosity.

The motel manager is a gruff woman who carries a baseball bat to bust her own place's doors down when a customer is late with hourly payment and slaps her son for the smallest transgression. She has two kids who help her out and the eldest, 13 year old son Ernest (Jeffrey Chyau, who would be right at home in an episode of Freaks and Geeks), is a pudgy bespectacled introvert - some might say, nerd - who longs for Christine, the girl who works as a waitress across the street, but is stuck scrubbing toilets for his hard-to-please mother.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

If you're into movies that really deal with the importance of family--and not in a feel-good, Disney-fied way--give Journey From the Fall a try. I would particularly recommend it to those, like most of us, who felt the Vietnam War was a waste and a mistake, and those who followed the history, who knew that honest elections ought to have been held in that country when they were first promised, no matter that Ho Chi Minh would have easily won. All this may have been true, but it will not prepare you for the degradations experienced by those South Vietnamese left behind to endure "re-education" by the North. The family that is sundered here--dad left behind in a re-education camp, while mom, son and grandma try their escape via boat--is shown with great dignity.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

From Tugboats to Polar Bears

Recommending experimental short films can be a tough business. As so much of liking a regular movie is about taste, it seems that with shorts it can even be more so. They're the pinncale of the vitamin movie in your queue - the one that's in there that you should watch because it's "good for you," even if the thought of watching it is grim business. Well, while Portland filmmaker Matt McCormick's From Tugboats to Polar Bears is indeed a compendium of short films, some of which did even making their debuts in art galleries, it could hardly be thought of as anything but fine, engaging entertainment, with only the bare minimum of vitamins.

The best known of the collection - and the finest of the lot - is definitely The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal: a funny, thought provoking short narrated by Miranda July, of Me and You and Everyone You Know fame. The short posits that the city employees that drive around painting over graffiti with paint-rollers are they themselves the unwitting, subconscious members next step of abstract expressionism. It's laugh-out-loud good, poking gentle fun at graffiti artists, well-meaning governmental types and art theorists as well as giving you something to think about later while you stare at the blocky mis-colored boxes painted over tags or stencils on overpasses or warehouse walls.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): *****

After the debate and controversy surrounding the recent Darjeeling Limited (did everyone just suddenly realize en masse Wes Anderson had racial issues?), Criterion's release of Gus Van Sant's directorial debut Mala Noche serves as a fine reminder that it is possible to make films about romantic relationships between people who are on unlevel playing fields without rendering one of the people (psst, the brown one) mute or a ridiculous caricature.

Based on the autobiographical novella by Walt Curtis, Walt (did I mention autobiographical?) is a cashier in a seedy liquor store obsessed with Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), one of the young Mexican immigrant rentboys who works the streets of downtown Portland. Johnny is uninterested but has fun hanging out and toying with Walt (played by Tim Streeter). Johnny endures the trials of his legal status with humor and good spirit, he's constantly hungry, getting evicted and being chased by the police. Walt offers him safe (albeit somewhat lecherously) harbor with no small amount of white- and class-guilt-induced smugness about the nature of his generosity. Walt isn't always an easy character to like but his youthful pretensions and ignorance are well-balanced out by his painfully earnest lust and his ability to laugh at himself when Johnny gets the better of him.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

At this year's Film Society of Lincoln Center Latinbeat Festival, a special sidebar was devoted to screenings of, as the FSLC put it, "Four Breakthroughs from Mexico's New Cinema": Amores Perros, Japón, Duck Season, and Violet Perfume: No One Is Listening. The first two, and to some extent the third, are well-known to most movie buffs, but the latter, outside of festivals, has hardly made a ripple in the USA. Now that Violet Perfume is here on DVD, audiences have the chance to see and understand why the film is indeed a breakthrough of sorts. It's also a mega-downer, which may account for its not finding theatrical release.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Spaces and places, their relationship to each other and to people who are in love: This rather odd subject matter seems to interest Danish writer/director Christoffer Boe to an extraordinary extent. Based on his 2003 Reconstruction and now Allegro (made in 2005 but released to DVD this past October), I'd say Boe is quite an unusual young filmmaker. His use of symbolism, too heavy for some, works just fine for me because he often twists his clichés, allowing them to surprise us by including more than what we initially expect. He also uses sci-fi/fantasy tropes less obviously than many current moviemakers.

Allegro tracks a world-class concert pianist who loves, loses, and must break through into a parallel world to find… well, all sorts of things. Boe keeps his movies short, which is wise; I don't think they could stand up to much increased length. He also appears to shoot (in Super-16 and DV, blown up to 35mm) rather quickly, which adds to the sense of immediacy and urgency (the cinematography is by Manuel Alberto Claro). Here, Boe combines some simple animation with his mostly live-action story to set things up and propel them along. This works, too.

In the lead role, Boe has cast one of Denmark's best and most oft-seen actors Ulrich Thomsen (The Celebration, Brothers, Mostly Martha), with attractive model Helena Christensen as his love interest. But the movie belongs to Thomsen--who brings a fine combination of gravity and confusion to the proceedings--and to Boe's bizarre but consistently interesting take on life and love. Some lovely classical selections, plus original music by Thomas Knak, help keep the film airborne.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

School's out and unlike the fantasies of liberation depicted in Dazed and Confused, Fast Times, et al, the kids in Richard Wong's Colma: The Musical are in paralysis. With no ambition to leave, no community to build an identity with and not even a car to get out of town (it's set in a suburb south of San Francisco famous for having many more dead people than living), these three friends are left with nothing but time to weigh upon their own turgid angst.

And it's this middling stage of life that lends itself so well to indulgences of their imagination: the dull commute to your deadening mall job is vastly improved with a dancebeat; a boring party is livened up with a sassy proclamation of how lame everyone else is; scoring a fake ID leads to a beerhall shanty; and a lonely walk through one of town's many cemeteries becomes a waltz with memories of the dead.

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***

The Criterion Collection recently released a double-disc special edition set of the 1984 John Huston film Under the Volcano, starring Albert Finney as an alcoholic ex-British consul named Geoffrey Firmin. Firmin loses his official post in Mexico and is drowning himself in alcohol as he laments the loss of his straying wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset), who suddenly reappears before him at a Mexican cafe to witness what will be his last day--on the Day of the Dead, no less. Finney was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of writer Malcolm Lowry's tragic figure (the film is based on Lowry's novel of the same title), and legendary director Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre) remarked of Finney here, "I think it's the finest performance I've ever witnessed, let alone directed."

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Seeing The Man of My Life a second time within the year (it was originally part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2007) has made me appreciate even more its richness, intelligence and subtlety, while also alerting me to some flaws in its structure. First time out, I was so blown away by the film's beauty of conception and place (it is brilliantly edited and set during a vacation in the Provence countryside), not to mention its relevance to my own life (a marriage sundered by one mate's sudden attraction to a new acquaintance), that I was more than willingly drawn along by the situation and the spectacularly persuasive performances of Charles Berling, Bernard Campan and Léa Drucker.

Reviewer: Henry Leineweber
Rating (out of 5): **½

So Goes the Nation takes a look at the grassroots mobilization of voters during the hotly contested 2004 Presidential election. Documentary filmmakers Adam Del Deo and James Stern (who's had a more successful career as a producer) follow rival bands of political volunteers for the Kerry and Bush Ohio campaigns, in an examination interspersed with interviews with more well-known national political and media figures.

Although the film is an interesting look at the campaign strategy of the 2004 election, sadly it also already feels a little dated as we gear up for the next Presidential race. Folks that are interested in politics will regard much of the subject material as old news and other viewers might be turned off by the wonk-ish nature of a film that examines the nuts and bolts of campaign strategy.

But for newcomers to the political scene, So Goes the Nation provides a worthy refresher course on the 2004 election. The director commentary provides some added insight into the making of the documentary and more background on the personalities interviewed.

Overall So Goes the Nation is a solid, admirably fair-minded film, but most people will probably be more interested in 2008, than 2004.

See also: Unprecedented: 2000 Election ; Bush's Brain

Reviewer: Henry Leineweber
Rating (out of 5): ****

The Road to Guantanamo is not what I expected. In a market flush with post-9-11 documentaries, I was expecting more of the same: interviews with experts, former government officials, a brief history lesson, some stock footage, a few classic rock songs, and maybe a stunt or two thrown in to spice things up.

Instead, The Road to Guantanamo presents us with the firsthand accounts of three former detainees from Tipton, England. Asif, Shafiq and Ruhel, along with their cousin, are arrested in war-torn Afghanistan after haphazardly deciding to become fighters. Using reenacted scenes and interviews with the three young men, filmmakers Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom present the viewer with a savage and suspenseful tale of mistaken identity. The film is still timely, too - the three men are tortured (in brutal re-enactments) by American and British intelligence trying to get a false confession out of them.