Film Reviews: Surf's Up, Memories of Tomorrrow, Flanders

CRAZY LOVE As tabloid babies go, Burt Pugach and Linda Riss were a pretty conventional 1950s incompatible couple. Their pathologies, according to Dan Klores’ painstaking documentary, were fairly standard issue, with each trying to make up for childhood deficits (he was abandoned by his father and beaten by his mother, she was sent to live with relatives) by fetishizing the other. He saw only her beauty. She saw only his wealth and entertainment-industry connections. When things went sour, he turned wild-eyed stalker and hired someone to throw lye in her face, all but blinding her. But the real twist is that after he got out of jail, they reconnected and settled into a robustly co-dependent marriage you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. In the sense that everyone is interesting once their lives are sufficiently unpacked, Burt and Linda’s story is not boring — but beyond its tabloid sensationalism, it’s not especially significant either. Which means that no amount of gussying up with a theme-laden ’50s score, archival footage, and testimony from friends and relations can mask the fact that today, in extensive interviews separately and together, they come across as a peevish, quarrelsome and rather tiresome pair glued together by mutual need. If Crazy Love doesn’t offer much insight, maybe that’s because there’s not much to offer. (The Landmark; Playhouse 7; Sunset 5; Town Center 5) (Ella Taylor)

PICK ELECTION & ?TRIAD ELECTION Better late than never, Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s 2005 Actonian underworld thriller Election shows up for a week-long double-feature run together with its 2006 sequel, Triad Election (a.k.a. Election 2 ). Outside of Grindhouse, it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season. The premise of both movies is deceptively simple: Every two years, the oldest of Hong Kong’s various triads, Wo Shing Society, elects a new chairman from among its ranks. It’s a literal passing of the baton — a century-old carved wooden totem without which no chairman’s ascendancy is complete. And much like the electoral process in many a more civilized society, this one is fraught with corruption, voter intimidation, entrenched despots and conspiratorial underlings. In the first film, the cool, calculating Lok (Simon Yam) goes head to head with short-tempered rival Big D (Tony Leung Ka-fai) in an election-night nail biter as riveting as Bush vs. Gore. In the sequel, it’s Lok who will sooner risk intra-triad war than relinquish his title, as if that coveted baton of power had infected him with some eternal curse. The two films comprise a sprawling saga of tradition, shifting loyalties and internecine power struggles as rich as the Infernal Affairs trilogy (remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed), and they reveal To — whose films are less known in the U.S. than those of his contemporaries John Woo and Tsui Hark — as a master of lean, close-quarters action. To is a throwback, not to the wire-work stunts and flashy slow-mo shootouts of the 1980s Hong Kong new wave, but to 1950s Hollywood B-movie masters like Don Siegel and André de Toth in their prime. (NuWilshire) (Scott Foundas)

FLANDERS In the fourth feature film by philosophy professor turned cine-provocateur Bruno Dumont (L’Humanité, Twentynine Palms), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2006, a trio of young men from the titular Belgian farm town are drafted into an unnamed military action in some faraway place. “So, where’s the war you’re off to?” a friend asks of the hulking, soft-spoken Demester (Samuel Boidin) as he prepares to ship out. There comes no reply. It is through Demester’s heavy and inexpressive eyes that we witness the barbarity of the battlefield and the savage instincts of men (and women) under fire. While Flanders’ modern military technology, desert setting and dark-skinned insurgents will prompt many to see the film as an analogue for the war in Iraq, Dumont actually reduces everything (from location to character motivation) to an abstraction, so that we might just as well be in Afghanistan, Algeria or the African theater of World War II. The film arrives at a familiar conclusion — that war is hell — but the getting there is made uniquely unsettling by Dumont’s relentlessly anti-psychological disposition. In his best films, of which this is one, he views mankind the way some future civilization might: with great curiosity, from a cautious distance, and ultimately as one more species in the vast animal kingdom.(Nuart) (Scott Foundas)

HOSTEL: PART II was not screened in advance of our print deadline, but a review will appear here soon. For an interview with writer-director Eli Roth, click here. (Citywide)

LA VIE EN ROSESee film feature

THE LAST CONFEDERATE Making a brief appearance in theaters on its way to DVD, The Last Confederate tells the true story of Southern gentleman Robert Adams and his love affair with Northern belle Eveline McCord during the Civil War as produced for the screen by Adams’ great- and great-great-grandsons, executive producer Weston Adams and writer-director-star Julian Adams, respectively. That’s a lot of “greats” for a film that plays like warmed-over Cold Mountain. The lackluster action follows Adams (played by the great-great) as he trudges from the frontlines back to Eveline (Gwendolyn Edwards), the new wife he left behind, then back to the fighting, then home again. It was a long war, but between Adams’ onscreen toing-and-froing and his behind-the-camera penchant for slow-motion shots, long fades to black, cascading flashbacks, and ponderous voice-overs about the burden of battle and shared sacrifice, you’d think it went on for decades. It’s easy to keep blaming Ken Burns for this kind of softcore Civil War porn, but enough is enough: This is a vanity project of the most indulgent order. Though, at the very least, it kept all those re-enactors off the streets. (Sunset 5) (Paul Malcolm)