Film Reviews: Chalk, The Ex, 28 Weeks Later and Delta Farce

DOWNTOWN: A STREET TALE Angelo (Joey Dedio, who wrote the script), nicknamed “Kick,” is a 27-year-old New York petty thief and hustler with abandonment issues and a heart of gold. He’s the great hope of Aimee (Genevieve Bujold), who runs a rescue center for homeless youth, and counts on Kick to look after the half dozen vagabonds who crash with him in an abandoned factory. Dedio was reportedly raised in the Bronx, but scenes like the one in which Kick learns that his ex-girlfriend, Maria (a plaintive Flora Martinez), is using drugs again by finding track marks while passionately kissing her arm feel like the work of someone who learned everything he knows about the “street” from other movies, not the school of hard knocks. The more brutal truth is that Dedio shouldn’t be playing Kick — he’s a 42-year-old actor trying to pass for 27, and that’s not a pretty sight. Apparently realizing this, director Rafal Zielinski keeps the focus on Kick’s charges, an ethnically diverse group of hookers, drug addicts and potential suicides whose traumas are ­passionately acted, particularly by Chad Allen, who steals the movie as Maria’s louse of a boyfriend. There’s vibrancy too in Helge Gerull’s color-drenched cinematography. Clichéd though it may be, this movie was clearly made with love. (Sunset 5) (Chuck Wilson)

DUCK Despondent over the recent death of his wife, and still grieving the passing of his son years ago, an aging, penniless man named Arthur (Philip Baker Hall) is lying in the woods, about to swallow sleeping pills, when up waddles . . . a baby duck. Arthur takes the duckling home, names him Joe, and weeks later, after being evicted, the duo take to the streets of L.A. As a dramatist, writer-director Nic Bettauer has a 1950s sensibility that infuses situations with a kind of back-lot falseness, as if Duck were an old teleplay about innocents ­facing down the cruel city streets. Bettauer means for Arthur and Joe’s adventures to be a fable about empathy and hope, but her tone shifts awkwardly between silly and ponderous. The filmmaker is good with actors, and in Hall, she has a lead with such innate authority that you can’t take your eyes off him, even when he’s manhandling flapping waterfowl. There’s also fine work by Bill Cobbs and Bill Brochtrup as kindhearted homeless men, and in the film’s best-written scene, a lovely cameo by Amy Hill as an immigrant pedicurist who fills a basin with water and gives poor dried-out Joe a much-needed dunking. (Los Feliz 3) (Chuck Wilson)

THE EX When career slacker Tom (Zach Braff, keeping his “Look how cute I am” tics to a welcome minimum) gets fired from his latest job, he packs up his wife, Sofia (Amanda Peet), and their newborn kid and trades life in the Big Apple for the calming pleasures of small-town Ohio — Sherwood Anderson country. There, he takes up his sad-sack father-in-law (Charles Grodin) on the offer of an “assistant associate creative” position in a New Agey advertising company, only to find himself under the thumb of Sofia’s paraplegic former high school classmate (and possible ex-flame), Chip (Jason Bateman), a seemingly benevolent cripple who’s really a Machiavelli on wheels. That’s an inspired starting place for a farce, and director Jesse Peretz (working from a sometimes tasteless, often insidiously funny script by first-time screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman) has a knack for casting bright comic talents — Amy Adams, Donal Logue, Mia Farrow and Paul Rudd round out the ensemble — who basically just have to show up. At its best (which is at least half of the time), The Ex has the off-the-wall, go-for-broke zaniness of that great modern screwball comedy, Flirting With Disaster. The movie is Bateman’s to steal, however, which he does early and often, whether re-enacting an old high school cheerleading routine or trying to seduce Sofia by showing her the money shot from one of his favorite movies: Coming Home. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

GEORGIA RULE See film feature

THE HIP HOP PROJECT This is a story you’ve heard before: Inner-city kids falling to drugs/crime/pregnancy are saved by the power of music/dance/art. Don’t let that premise (or the credited producers Bruce Willis and Queen Latifah) dissuade you from checking out this documentary about a nonprofit hip-hop program in New York City founded by Chris “Kazi” Rolle, a quietly charismatic, formerly homeless teenager. The doc toggles between Kazi’s personal story (he grew up on the streets of the Bahamas and remains mostly estranged from his mother), the inner workings of the Hip Hop Project, and the home lives of Kazi’s protégés. From domestic strife to studio triumph, the most impressive accomplishment of the project is not the student-made album, but that when Kazi says cheesy things like “This is healing through hip-hop,” you actually believe him. (Magic Johnson Theatres; Sunset 5; Playhouse 7) (Jessica Grose)