Village Voice June 20, 2012 : Page 34
villagevoice.com The Apocalypse Drag from p27 to obliterate the thing), and the world— or at least Southern California sub-bing for suburban New Jersey—copes, or doesn’t, with imminent demise. Insurance salesman Dodge Pe-tersen (Carell at his most downcast) continues to slog to the office and gym; Elsa (Tonita Castro), his housekeeper, keeps showing up to clean; his married friends (Rob Corddry and Connie Brit-ton) throw dinner parties that have all the end-of-the-world abandon of an aborted swingers confab circa 1982; and so on. The odd high-rise jumper and traffic snarl aside, things go on pretty much as normal. Dodge, whose wife has had the good sense to run off into the night, meets perky neighbor Penny (a seriously unwound Keira Knight-ley) just as riots break out, and the pair flees—along with a charming terrier unloaded on Dodge by a stranger—to track down his first love and a pos-sible charter flight to the U.K., so Penny can spend doomsday with the folks. Tracking Shots The Invisible War Directed by Kirby Dick Cinedigm Opens June 22, AMC Loews Village 7 I n The Invisible War , Kirby Dick lays bare the scandalous epidemic of rape in the U.S. armed forces—the war on women who fight wars. Told through an array of talking heads—including servicewomen (and a few servicemen) who recount their attacks, military psychiatrists, NCIS agents, attorneys, journalists, and obtuse Department of Defense employees—and intertitles revealing ap-palling facts (20 percent of female veterans have been sexually assaulted while serving; 25 percent of women in the military don’t report rape because a middle-class Indian-American from New Jersey, transforms a faltering doc project debunking bogus gurus (a couple of whom make it into the final cut, to their everlasting detriment) into an immersive lark when he assumes the movie’s titular persona. A shaggy baba complete with gob-smacked gaze, impenetrable accent, and questionable underwear, Kumaré attracts a following among the New Age– curious in southern Arizona despite an arsenal of idiotic fake-yoga moves and half-gibberish koans, as well as frequent and open admissions of his fraudu-lence. Incredibly, Gandhi forms a genuine, mutually enriching bond with these apostles, which serves his thesis—that no single person or belief system has a lock on the cosmic and that we’re all seekers in our own way—rather than exposes it as Michael Moore–style overstatement or smug posturing à la Bill Maher’s hateful Religulous . It helps that Kumaré’s U.S. Air Force VOICE CHOICES crowd the narrative (all cleanly on point about the dark-versus-light theme), but director Thaddeus O’Sullivan puts it over with a gentle hand, and most importantly, establishes an appropriately ruminative tone for Sheen’s embattled, bottled intensity. One of the most shamefully underused talents Hollywood has ever produced, Sheen gets a rare shot at captaining a film here, and he turns this wee cozy yarn into something significantly felt. Behind a mask of unsettled benevolence, and through those fierce Sheen eyes, his inescapably lonely priest glares at the world with an apt mix of fervor and disgust, hope and despair. ERIC HYNES Men on the Bridge Directed by Asli Özge Endorphine Production Opens June 20, MOMA, Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters | | R The reckonings and realizations fly once Seeking a Friend hits the road, and for all the absurdity of its characters achieving clear-eyed, perfectly articu-lated peace with their past demons in this stretch of the movie (I’m guessing pants-shitting panic would be more the norm), it’s a relief after the excruciat-ingly unfunny first act. Scafaria, who also wrote the film, floats the notion that sticking to routine in the presence of overwhelming chaos is a way of giving life meaning. That’s fair, but she conveys this with so little irony or insight that Dodge’s workmates, domestic servant, and the gaggle of randy, dedicated T.G.I. Friday’s–esque waitstaff he and Penny encounter on their journey come off more as morons than heroes. (Never mind the weird class contempt that’s at-tached to these characters.) This is banal, flinch-inducing stuff, so by the time Mar-tin Sheen turns up down the highway as Dodge’s long-lost dad, it’s a breath of fresh air in spite of his speechifying. This is unfortunate, because as Sca-faria captures one-on-one intimacy with frankness and finesse, she manages to draw something real and touching from Knightley, who otherwise can’t stop mugging, and even the largely unearned poignancy of the movie’s climactic scene packs a punch. (On the other hand, Sca-faria seems indifferent to visual innova-tion.) What’s missing from the story is the one element any apocalypse narrative suffocates without: a sense of urgency. By putting so much effort into straddling the lines between darkness and whimsy and profundity and absurdity, Seeking a Friend achieves the colorless tedium of a safe, dozy dream of catastrophe 34 instead of anything like the real deal. BARS | EATS | MUSIC | FILM | | BOOKS Missing is the element an apocalypse narrative suffocates without: urgency. the person to notify in War : Combating their chain of command is rape in the ranks the rapist), Dick’s film un-veils an environment that is, in the words of one Army shrink, “target rich for predators.” A septet of women details their rapes and the gross indifference and victim-blaming displayed by their superiors after they reported the crimes. Tiny, wiry Kori Cioca, whose assailant broke her jaw when she was attacked in 2005 while serving in the Coast Guard, reveals the dozens of meds, some highly toxic when combined, the VA has prescribed for her PTSD and severe facial-nerve damage—surgery for which the agency repeat-edly denies her. Interview after interview, statistic after statistic, Dick’s advocacy project thoroughly incenses—and appears to be having results. Two days after Dick screened The Invisible War for Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on April 14, the DOD head announced plans requiring, as The New York Times reported, that all sexual-assault complaints be handled by more-senior officers, not unit commanders—a change that will hopefully lead to more prosecutions. MELISSA ANDERSON Kumaré Directed by Vikram Gandhi Kino Lorber Opens June 20, IFC Center The Invisible VILLAGE VOICE “teachings” are bolstered by Gandhi’s strict Hindu upbringing, obvious real-yoga expertise, and the memory of his devout grandmother. His refusal to make the yogi’s diverse adepts (including a stressed-out death row attorney and a lonely single mom) look foolish or pathetic shows uncommon, admirable restraint, too. Whether Kumaré ’s happy alignment of cinematic inspiration and philosophical awaken-ing is simply a feat of editing remains open, and the element of racial pandering in its teacher/student dynamic goes entirely unaddressed, but the white-knuckle climax, in which the newly shorn filmmaker reveals his inner Garden Stater to team Kumaré, is incredibly moving all the same. MARK HOLCOMB Stella Days Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan Tribeca Film Opens June 22, Quad Cinema aw yet respectful and tenderly observed, this feature-film/documentary hybrid from writer-director Asli Özge plops a trio of real-life Istanbulites into a fictionalized account of their lives to engage the maddening flux of present-day Turkey and, by extension, modernity itself. All three protago-nists—impoverished street peddler Fikret, unhap-pily married taxi driver Umut, and Murat, a lonely, low-level traffic cop—work near the Bosphorus Bridge, a looming and perpetually snarled symbol of the abundance promised but rarely delivered by the upward mobility each compulsively pursues. That makes Men on the Bridge sound stuffier than it is: For all of its big ideas, which Özge deploys with remarkable grace, it’s the film’s small moments that linger, including a pair of excruciating first dates for Murat (subbing for his real-life cop brother, who was unable to appear due to Turkish law) and a heartbreakingly near-comic attempt by Fikret to hold down a busboy job. The running argument between Umut and his grasping wife, Cemile, is downright troubling, genuine or not (the nonprofessional leads are so adept, it’s hard to tell) and suggests a tragedy unspecific to any single culture. Like cities and bridges, people who graze but never grasp their private dreams abound; capturing their lives with vision and compassion is a feat. MARK HOLCOMB The Last Ride Directed by Harry Thomason Mozark Productions Opens June 22, Cinema Village | ART | THEATER | DANCE C T P repare to have your assumptions pitched out the window by this tense, surprisingly prob-ing satirical documentary—not just about religious longing and “spirituality,” its ostensible subjects, either, but also about how deep the genre that gave us Borat and Morgan Spurlock’s spotty oeuvre can go. Kumaré is essentially the chronicle of a joke turned serious: Director-star Vikram Gandhi, hanks to its understated elegance and surpassing central performance, this mod-est, too-eagerly schematic period drama is more engrossing than it has a right to be. The latest gloss on the gently condescending retro-modernist missionary genre—in which an urbane hero preaches the good news of progress but runs flush up against a wall of reactionary rural backwardness— Stella Days takes place in 1956, when electrification was finally brought to the boggy Irish boonies. A Rome-educated, American-acculturated intellectual, Father Daniel Barry (Martin Sheen), tries to enlighten his parish in both literal and cultural ways—most brazenly via a passion plot to open a town cinematheque—but is opposed at every turn by Brendan (Stephen Rea), a fearmongering isolationist with political aspirations. Too many subplots and binary conflicts ountry music devotees will either love or hate this speculative account of the last three days in the life of Hank Williams, the substance-abusing singer-songwriter who died after a still-mysterious beating on a road trip at age 29. On one hand, The Last Ride, directed with cheap, TV-style efficiency by Harry Thomason of Designing Women fame, takes high-test liberties with the facts, most egregiously by changing the name and social class of the teen (Jesse James) hired to shuttle the music leg-end he fails to recognize (an absurd embellishment) to a pair of gigs. On the other, it portrays Williams (Henry Thomas) in a generally sympathetic light with-out whitewashing his vice-loving, belligerent ways or mythologizing them in a bid for postmortem psycho-analysis. It also posits a pretty reasonable explanation for that beating and gives Thomas—too fit for the role, but he’s got the dopey wolf’s grin down—a chance to leave E.T. ’s Elliott behind for good: The guy acts his guts out. The Last Ride ’s central, Scent of a Woman –like dynamic isn’t biopic bullshit on the surreal level of 1964’s Your Cheatin’ Heart (starring George Hamilton, for God’s sake), but a deeper, fresher perspective might have given The Last Ride a better shot at being, cinematically speaking, the last word on the troubled superstar. MARK HOLCOMB J une 20–J une 26 , 2012
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