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PICK 51 BIRCH STREET Worms crawl slowly and gently out of the can in Doug Block’s marvelous home movie about the underground life of his parents’ 54-year Long Island marriage. A documentary filmmaker who — nice irony — also moonlights as a wedding photographer, Block had been capturing his family on camera for years, but 51 Birch Street only took shape when, shortly after his mother’s sudden death, his father upped and married the woman who had been his secretary 40 years ago. On the face of it, the question for Block and his stunned sisters, as they help their visibly happy father pack up their childhood home for the move to Florida, was how long this affair had been going on. But when Block, his loving son’s guilt productively at war with his curiosity, delves into his mother’s prolific diaries, the movie grows organically into scenes from a difficult marriage his father now reluctantly admits was more functional than loving. By any measure, Mina Block was high maintenance: Good-looking, endlessly introspective and needy. An ambivalent mother (Block was very close to the woman her daughters describe as remote), she was a deeply unfulfilled suburban matron who got little understanding from her practical, uncommunicative spouse and took refuge in pot and a painfully unrequited crush on her therapist. Open-minded, probing but never prurient, 51 Birch Street is much more than a portrait of suburban ennui. It’s a loving, painful map of the gulf between thought and word, between word and deed, that props up good marriages, and sends bad ones to hell. (Westside Pavilion) (Ella Taylor)
EL CORTEZ Lou Diamond Phillips does his best Anthony Perkins impersonation as Manfred, the bellboy at a seedy Nevada hotel who has a mild manner but a dark past and the capacity for serious violence if pushed too far. And pushing him is something everyone does, from the wheelchair-bound con man (Bruce Weitz) who sees him as an easy mark, to the local drug dealer (Glenn Plummer) whose ex-hooker girlfriend (Maria Bello wannabe Tracy Middendorf) seems to be coming on to Manfred, and, of course, the shady cop (NYPD Blue’s James McDaniel) who busted Manfred for a previous offense. Every “twist” is so telegraphed that there’s little suspense here. Phillips’ performance is an enjoyable change of pace, and the gratuitous sex scene with Middendorf is fairly hot, but the story’s just an aggravating wait for the inevitable double-crosses. For it to be a true lowbrow pleasure, more sex would be needed. (Music Hall) (Luke Y. Thompson)
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS See film feature
FLICKA It takes a pristine gift for mediocrity to ruin Mary O’Hara’s muscular children’s novel about a wild boy and his wild horse, but director Michael Mayer has brought off the massacre with aplomb. En route from the 1943 movie through the beloved 1956 television series into this sorry remake, the boy has become a Katy (played by Alison Lohman as well as anyone can of whom little is asked but to come on mournful and/or mutinous), and we can tell the kinship between girl and horse by the teased hair they both toss whenever adversity heaves into view. Mayer is primarily a theater guy, and his way with actors is stiff and awkward, though I can imagine country singer Tim McGraw (who plays Equally Stubborn Dad, a man who should be locked in a room with “Feelings” on the turntable) would pose a challenge to almost any director. The harsh, livid lighting gives the movie a distressed Ralph Lauren look, and the few scenes of genuine rodeo excitement are marred by the fact that Katy has dressed herself up to look like Johnny Depp, the pirate version. Rain falls, sad things happen, and as we left the theater, I could have sworn I could hear horsy girls all over America crying — with laughter. (Citywide) (Ella Taylor)
THE GRUDGE 2 The second Grudge movie is worlds better than The Ring 2, but it would seem that the trend toward American remakes of Japanese horror movies about pissed-off demon girls with long, stringy hair has run its course. In Tokyo, Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) has arrived from the U.S. to rescue her older sister (Sarah Michelle Gellar, in a brief cameo), who was terrorized in the first film by the angry ghost of a murdered woman and child. Ignoring some very sensible advice, Aubrey enters the dead people’s creepy house. Meanwhile, in Chicago, a young boy (Matthew Knight, superb) begins to suspect that there’s something evil lurking in the apartment next door. Generating gore-free unease through sound effects and scary faces is the specialty of director Takashi Shimizu, who helmed the original series (known in Japan as Ju-On). He creates some unsettling moments here, but the evil ghost itself is a predictable one-trick pony. The finale, in which the separate stories come together in America, isn’t an ending at all, but a setup, for a third film, which looks to be something along the lines of The Grudge Takes Manhattan. (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)
I LIKE KILLING FLIES “Postmodern pancakes” won’t go out of style anytime soon, and neither will this endearingly cockeyed portrait, albeit 4 years old, of Shopsin’s, the West Village greasy spoon cum fusion haven that for decades has been owned and operated by head chef/resident philosopher and world-class crank Kenny Shopsin. Shot in the summer after Calvin Trillin’s 4,000-word New Yorker ode brought a new set of customers for Shopsin to bully back to the curb, I Like Killing Flies does as much as any movie could to humanize the R. Crumb of restaurateurs. (“They have to prove it to me that they’re okay to feed,” he says of first-timers.) The doc follows Shopsin’s begrudging move from Bedford Street to Carmine Street, no more than a storefront or two from the gentry’s grip, and paints his resistance to every variety of bourgeois etiquette as heroism — even or especially when his food prep and fly killing are both done by hand. As directed in aptly unfussy fashion by music-video vet Matt Mahurin, the movie itself is a curiously tasty dish, one that could leave even a vegan with a burning desire to sample Shopsin’s lamb chops. (Grande 4-Plex, Town Center 5) (Rob Nelson)
