Film Reviews

THE MOSTLY UNFABULOUS SOCIAL LIFE OF ETHAN GREEN While comic book aficionados furiously argue whether or not the X-Men, Superman and Batman have been well-served by their leaps onto the big screen, the movie version of the long-running queer comic strip “The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green” leaves little room for debate. It’s a dud. To be fair, the source material (to which the film is unfortunately faithful) is itself a wan assemblage of creaky one-liners, overly familiar gay ghetto types and sitcom-inspired shenanigans. Ethan is a generically attractive, narcissistic man-child with a string of failed relationships under his designer belt. Surrounded by a coterie of queer-culture stereotypes and fantasy figures — the flamboyant, cross-dressing Hat Sisters; a black female best friend (who happens to be a lesbian); and a bawdy, unconditionally loving mom — Ethan stumbles through the wreckage of his latest failed affair (with a former pro baseball player) while he tries to woo back yet another ex. From that setup, the film spins off into tangents (lesbian rebound love; rote Dubya bashing) that might play well enough in comic strip panels, but seem disjointed and hollow onscreen. As the mom, Meredith Baxter is given doggerel dialogue, but she looks fantastic — which, in Ethan’s world, is all that really matters. (Regent Showcase) (Ernest Hardy)

NACHO LIBRE Like the abominable Napoleon Dynamite, director Jared Hess’ second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film’s aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy. Hess (who also co-wrote the script with his wife, Jerusha, and School of Rock’s Mike White) still can’t fully suppress his contempt for the obese, the poorly coifed and the orthodontically challenged, but the exuberant sweetness of Jack Black’s performance, as a Oaxaca monastery cook who moonlights as a masked Lucha Libre wrestler, provides a powerful corrective. Black’s quixotic Nacho isn’t as deep or fully drawn as was his inspired schoolteacher character in Rock, consisting more of a series of surface affectations — a mustache, a come-and-go Mexican accent, a flatulence problem — but even Black in a minor key is something to get excited about in today’s movie-comedy wasteland. The sharpest scenes, rendered by Hess with a fair amount of local color, have Nacho, attired in turquoise tights and red tablecloth cape, taking to the ring and taking on an array of eccentric opponents (including a pair of shrieking midget gnomes) with the aid of his rail-thin, atheistic partner (a scene-stealing Hector Jimenez). But too often, Nacho Libre expects us to be tickled by the mere sight of Black shirtless, or going to the toilet, and well before the end, the movie’s one-joke premise — that sometimes a loser can be more endearing to audiences than a winner — has been stretched as thin as a tortilla chip. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

STATES OF GRACE Writer-director Richard Dutcher’s follow-up to his surprise 2000 hit, God’s Army, finds a new group of Mormon missionaries pounding the Los Angeles pavement in search of willing converts. But the gentle, up-with-people tone of the first film has been replaced by an agonized, soul-searching sensibility more reminiscent of Dutcher’s violent 2001 thriller, Brigham City. The film focuses on the weary and cynical Elder Lozano (Argentine actor Ignacio Sericchio), whose heroic rescue of an African-American gang member (Lamont Stephens) from a near-fatal drive-by shooting dredges up unwanted memories of Lozano’s own wayward past and touches off crises of faith in the lives of both men. Their dilemmas play out in compelling and unpredictable ways, strongly aided by Sericchio’s commanding performance (in his feature-film debut) and Dutcher’s continued skill at making a non-Mormon audience understand the moral weights his characters feel hanging over their heads. Too often, though, States of Grace gets bogged down by heavy speechifying and by an ambitious multicharacter narrative structure (including subplots about a homeless street preacher and a young missionary’s infatuation with the comely girl next door) that ultimately detracts from the strong central conflict. (Sunset 5) (Scott Foundas)

 GO THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT Manna from gearhead heaven, the third and most guiltily pleasurable Furious emits the crude thrills of a 1950s drag-racing cheapie, only with souped-up Toyotas and Nissans in place of gas-guzzling hot rods, and slinky Asian temptresses substituted for poodle-skirted teenyboppers. But the real star is the titular “drift,” a specialized form of street racing in which drivers steer and brake their way around hairpin turns, at nearly full speed, in an elegant gliding motion. Round and round they go, down perilous mountain roads or up the narrow ramps of crowded parking garages, while crowds of camera-phone-accessorized onlookers scramble to keep up. The Taiwanese-American director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow) is clearly infatuated, and his racing scenes have a zigzaggy splendor. Filmed from high above, their revving engines and screeching tires reduced to a hush, his speeding cars are like ace ice skaters moving balletically across the rink. The plot, so to speak, is that old saw about a Western “gaijin” — here, a cocky but reckless California high schooler (Lucas Black) sent to live with his estranged father in Tokyo — who runs afoul of the locals, in particular the grinningly sadistic nephew (Brian Tee) of a powerful yakuza boss (Sonny Chiba). Naturally, they settle the score not with fists but with cars. And for what do they race? Why, a girl — what else? Somewhere, in that great drive-in movie theater in the sky, Samuel Z. Arkoff is smiling. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)