RECOMMENDED

Opening on more than 200 screens this week, Anurag Basu’s “Kites” is gaudy, multiculti desi masala, an unpredictable, tonally gaga fable of fate in the form of a couple-on-the-run love story between two dancers, the Indian J. (Hrithik Roshan) and Mexican immigrant Linda (Bárbara Mori Ochoa), who longs to marry a rich American. J., a dancing instructor in Vegas, has a sideline in green-card marriages. But this time… he’s fallen in love. Unfortunately, he’s engaged to a fabulously rich woman whose violent father owns a Las Vegas casino, and whose brother is engaged to “Natasha”—his green-card ex under a new name. (The family estate is vast, making any spread in Architectural Digest seem insufficiently vulgar and nouveau; Dad, or “Bob,” is shown as a top-dog bad guy with a bit of “Reservoir Dogs”-style lobe slicing.) Plot synopsis would baffle more than the story’s unfolding, even in its fractured, post-Tarantino style, and while it’s overstuffed after the fashion of Indian pop movies, it’s still a glory of delirium. “Destiny” is repeatedly invoked, but the greatest virtue of “Kites” is that unlike an overly developed or workshopped screenplay, anything can, and does, happen. I long for an Amer-indie movie with the same lunatic verve. Exuberant diaspora kitsch ensues. It’s the most fun I had at the movies all Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Tano Da Morire) Roberta Torre’s 1997 molto kitschy musical, “To Die For Tano,” recounts the life of Tano Guarassi, a Palermo butcher and small-time Mafia enforcer who gets hit by the Corleone crime family. For the first few reels, the bizarre musical results of his four sisters and characters drawn from the real-life neighborhood are fascinating, but the Neapolitan nonsense and the mad, motley score by Nino D’Angelo aren’t likely to convince every moviegoer his rise and fall were worth the recounting. While it was a hit on its home turf and an award-winner way back at the end of the twentieth century, think of this “trash musical” as extremely uncomfortable karaoke, and you have a small notion of the in-your-face experience. It’s a surreal provocation even when you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Plus mullets. Lots of mullets. With Ciccio Guarino, Enzo Paglino. (Sample “Tano’s Rap” below.) 75m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)

“To Die For Tano” opens Friday at Facets. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“These bitches suck” was Creem magazine’s timeless takedown of The Runaways when the teenage girl band bobbed to the surface of the 1970s.

In Floria Sigismondi’s writing-directing debut, the making-of-the-band, life-on-the-road, taking-of-the-drugs telling of 1970s teen rockers who made it right to the middle (despite mostly sucking, musically) has the right attitude if not a fully fleshed story. It satisfies in bursts, like an erratically track-sequenced album. Based on Cherie Currie’s slim memoir, “Neon Angel,” “The Runaways” is episodic, and Currie’s decline isn’t as interesting as 15-year-old Dakota Fanning’s embodiment of her rapid slip-slide into neurasthenia and diva-dom. (Fanning’s turn-on-a-dime from sullen to sneering as the band assembles the song “Cherry Bomb” is one of her best moments: “Ch. Ch. Ch. CHERRY BOMB!”) Joan Jett’s survival instincts are more indicated than dramatized, and Kristen Stewart, while as watchable as ever, brings more spark than fire. Michael Shannon, playing oddball Svengali Kim Fowley, is bright and funny as a leering loon, but he’s a man we ought to be fearful of as much as mesmerized by. (Shannon’s memorably theatrical styling of lines like “I am the luckiest dogfucker in space!” are more Walkenesque than truly loony.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a follow-up to “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” Jonathan Demme shoots Young rocking two nights three years ago in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. On this Chrome Dreams II tour, Young and his band had played two nights at the Chicago Theater the month before. Demme skips the interviews and backstage footage found in his 2006 concert documentary, shot over two nights in Nashville. Country and bluegrass artists don’t share Young’s stage in “Trunk Show,” nor are there the polished tracking shots DP Ellen Kuras crafted for “Heart of Gold.” Cinematographer Declan Quinn, along with Demme and five other shooters, wield digital camcorders for mostly handheld coverage. There’s some Super-8 and a few nine-screen grids, but this is more concert than film from the distributors of “The Singing Revolution,” “We Live in Public” and “Incident at Loch Ness.” Stage design is limited to remnants of an old-time theater marquee with random letters, a red telephone and a pirate flag fluttering by a fan. There is no giant microphone wrangled by hooded druid-like roadies with flashlights for eyes, as in the 1978 San Francisco concert Young turned into the film “Rust Never Sleeps.” In “Trunk Show” he performs an alternately rousing and reflective set, sometimes playing piano and banjo. The 64-year-old Canadian stomps on stage like a shaggy workhorse. Hunched over, he brandishes his electric guitar like a farm tool. His gruff-honey voice has the timbre of hardwood bark. His elderly bandmates come off as seasoned artisans, not burnout longhairs in denial, as one extended instrumental with his bassist and rhythm guitarist proves. 82m. (Bill Stamets)

“Neil Young Trunk Show” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Damani Baker and Alex Vlack’s sweet and inevitably bittersweet “Still Bill” is an understated portrait of Bill Withers, the musician behind memorable pop like 1971′s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us.” The avalanche of music documentaries are a long way from simple records of performances in front of an audience, and the best dig into the quirks of personality that provide inspiration for the mystery that is tune and song. Intimacy is key. Bill Withers walked away from a career that didn’t begin until he was grown, not owning a guitar until he was 32. Why the silence since his last music release in 1985? The filmmakers shot over 300 hours of footage across two years as Withers approaches his seventieth year. A trip back to his childhood home in the worn coal town of Slab Fork, West Virginia inspires Withers’ rich reminiscence. (There’s a present-day detour as Withers records a song with his daughter in his home studio.) Withers is also prone to aphorism: “I think I’m kind of like pennies. You have ‘em in your pocket but you don’t remember they’re there”; and “It’s okay to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful? You’re gonna have to pass through ‘all right.’ And when you get to ‘all right’, take a good look around and get used to it, ‘cos that may be as far as you’re gonna go.” “Still Bill” passes through all right. Talking heads include Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Jim James from My Morning Jacket, Angelique Kidjo and, erm, Sting. 78m. (Ray Pride)

“Nine” is one of those rare movies that remind you why a word like “agog” was confected. I was agog. That is not a good thing. Moment to moment, with no sense of rhythm  or pacing, adapting unmemorable songs with uninspired lyrics, Rob Marshall’s film plays out like a music video for the desire for Oscar nominations. Drawn from the 1983 musical by Maury Yeston, Arthur L. Kopit , Mario Fratti, “Nine” lacks one collaborator: director Tommy Tune. Yet an amateur production in Kalamazoo or Tucumcari would likely carry more heft, goose more oomph. Ironically, in making a movie musical of the material drawn from Fellini’s immortal, and apparently, inimitable “8 ½,” Marshall and his collaborators have made the material more claustrophobic than it could ever have been onstage. I’d consult my notes from the screening to chronicle my astonishment at this debacle, but it would take hours to decipher the full book of mad scrawl. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Guido as a cipher of a compulsive liar, fascinatingly inward but ultimately a loner who would not have the women striking the onstage poses—mother Sophia Loren, creative amanuensis Judi Dench, wife Marion Cottilard, Vogue journalist Kate Hudson, beach wench Fergie, icy muse Nicole Kidman, no match for any of Fellini’s buxom demiurges—hanging every instant over his proclaimed yet never demonstrated genius. Cotillard, who has two numbers, seems to have been helicoptered in from another movie, one with a vision or perhaps just a director. The things that woman does with those eyes, that face! Her final scene in “Public Enemies” may be the heartbreaker of 2009, but a bigger one is that waste of her electric turn in this dim array. She can’t win the war: Rob Marshall sunk that battleship. 110m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Tom Quinn’s genial, four-years-in-the-making “The New Year Parade,” winner of a Slamdance jury prize, is a study of the effects of divorce on the members of one South Philadelphia family across the course of a single year. Set in the world of Mummers, or competitive marching bands, Quinn’s great stroke beyond marshaling the time scheme of the film is getting the motions (and emotion) of hundreds of musicians on screen in such lucid fashion. The seemingly improvised performances have a sweet, ragged edge, and the music swells. Nothing musical on film has touched me the way the first viewing of “Once” did, but “The New Year Parade” is a song in the heart. With Greg Lyons, Jennifer Welsh, Andrew Conway, MaryAnn McDonald, Irene Longshore, Tobias Segal, Paul Blackway, The South Philadelphia String Band.  90m. (Ray Pride)

“The New Year Parade” opens Friday at Facets.

By Ray Pride

Richard Curtis is happy even if you’re not.

“I’m a great believer in happiness,” says the 53-year-old writer of “Blackadder” and “Notting Hill” and writer-director of “Love Actually” and “Pirate Radio” on a Monday stopover in Chicago the day after his birthday. “And, if like me, you’ve had a happy life and you can try and portray it and send people out of the cinema joyful, that’s a great thing. And I don’t think at all that happiness is sentimental, or unrealistic. All over the world, there are people who are having fun with their friends, falling in love, having a good time, loving rock ‘n’ roll, and only about two places in the world are there serial killers planning to murder single mothers in apartment blocks. For some reason or other, when you have these absolutely gruesome things, they’re called searingly realistic, but they happen only once a decade. Whereas if you make a movie about friends falling around and people losing their virginity, that’s called unrealistic. Whereas, it’s happening millions of times in every city around the world. I’m interested in talking about that stuff.”

Curtis’ latest confection, “Pirate Radio,” (called “The Boat That Rocks” in its twenty-minute-longer British release) celebrates an era in the 1960s when British pop music was breaking out while broadcast radio remained staid and stuck-up. Entrepreneurs imported Australian and American deejays and moored them offshore, with pirate stations beaming the latest sounds to a grateful nation. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Some movies sound deadly, and it’s amazing when that’s all to the good because then the film can take you by glorious surprise.

That’s the case with Lee Daniels’ “Precious, Based Upon the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire.” Set in Harlem in the mid-1980s, it follows Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), an overweight teenager with a Down Syndrome child who’s been repeatedly abused sexually by the boyfriend of her resentful mother (Mo’Nique). At first, as Precious is thwarted in her attempts to educate herself out of agony, the film’s stylistic choices seem as eccentric and naïve as its protagonist, yet “Precious” grows in assurance and its gestures of character growth toward demonstrating how a generational cycle of abuse can be cut moves toward an ending that can only be called earned. Read the rest of this entry »

Is “This Is It” all there is? A dog’s breakfast of scraps from on-the-fly, sloppily shot rehearsal footage of his not-to-be final tour, “Michael Jackson’s This is It” has excited some first reviewers enough to suggest the movie’s good enough to be nominated for Best Picture. Unless you really, really care about Michael Jackson, it’s not much of anything: it’s hushed hagiography as sandpapered as Jackson’s own nose, less documentary than séance. It’s also debt warmed over: On the verge of losing his many possessions after decades of incautious spending, Jackson had to do something as creditors circled. A tour, with multimillion-dollar advances from mammoth tour promoter AEG, was the choice. Interest must be paid. But the final evidence of that choice, compiled by director and “co-creator” Kenny Ortega, with the furious assistance of editors Don Brochu, Brandon Key, Tim Patterson and Kevin Stitt, “MJTII” would surely embarrass the late ditherer. Read the rest of this entry »