Movie Reviews: Bee Movie, Darfur Now, Primo Levi's Journey

THE GOOD NIGHT Director Jake Paltrow’s feature debut has all the hallmarks of an earnest young man’s feature debut, and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, I can only imagine that it fit Sundance like a fingerless glove when it premiered there earlier this year. Paltrow, a veteran TV and film scriptwriter, has chosen the quirky relationship drama as his milieu and cast older sister Gwyneth as deathly drab Dora, the female half of the film’s rapidly staling couple. Martin Freeman, working the last five minutes out of that butter-knife pixie cut and its attendant charms, plays Gary, a failed musician and emotionally absent boyfriend slumming in the jingle racket to make ends meet. When a kohl-eyed, white-tuxedoed beauty played by Penelope Cruz begins visiting Gary in his dreams, bearing soothing tidings of well-being and the occasional morning hard-on, Gary retreats from the truly awful Dora into his good night. It’s unclear why either half of this interminable couple ever liked the other, and though Paltrow works up a vivid, sensual zetz for the dream sequences, the murky palette of Gary’s waking life gets oppressive in its intentional contrast. Not even the nice twist of a fantasy made unexpectedly, then expectation-crushingly, real can uncork the hermetically sealed — if largely inoffensive — fate of this boy-meets-compromise tale. (Beverly Center) (Michelle Orange)

GO JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UN­WRITTEN Julien Temple’s engrossing portrait of the late Clash front man uses snippets of everything from Raging Bull to an animated Animal Farm — along with archival scraps, performance clips and a mosaic of witness testimony — to show how Joe Strummer kept punk’s precepts alive. From Los Angeles to New York to Ireland, friends, family and fans assemble around campfires to remember Joe as the glow fades into dawn. It’s Strummer’s own voice — a radio-show track filled with warmth and optimism — that threads together the separate locales, along with snatches of favorite songs. Temple’s punk-bred refusal to identify (and thus privilege) any of his interview subjects onscreen can be maddening. (Scorsese, Bono and John Cusack I recognize; those two dozen middle-aged British guys, not so much.) But in the final shots of these makeshift gatherings silhouetted against the lightening sky, the individuals combine into a joyous, vibrant community larger than any one component. As a definition of punk, that probably would have worked for Joe Strummer. (Nuart) (Jim Ridley)

MARTIAN CHILD Martian Child certainly isn’t much fun, unless you were desperately awaiting K-PAX with a kid instead of Kevin Spacey. Not that there’s ever any question whether Dennis (Bobby Coleman) is actually a Martian, but the conceit’s more or less the same: The kid sports sunglasses, lest the sunlight melt his eyeballs; builds elaborate contraptions meant to connect him with his home planet; and spends his time conducting field research (which is to say, taking Polaroids) before the aliens return to spirit him back to Mars. And, like K-PAX , Martian Child equates mental instability and emotional detachment with the awwww-some cuteness of extraterrestrial life. This kid’s not troubled — naw, he just wants to be E.T. All he needs is a home to phone. And that’s provided by a man who knows nothing about being a father, John Cusack’s David Gordon, a sci-fi writer who adopts Dennis and believes his own experiences as a boyhood outsider will allow him to heal the wounded child. But Cusack and Coleman feel like they’re in two separate movies — Cusack in the one about the single dad trying to get his shit together, Coleman in the one about the strange boy who steals things and hangs upside down. Theirs is less a connection than a forced living arrangement brokered by agents and studio bosses. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

MEETING RESISTANCE Billed as an “intimate” portrait of Iraq’s insurgency, Meeting Resistance — the debut documentary from photojournalists-turned-filmmakers Steve Connors and Molly Bingham — does a remarkable job of being the opposite. Instead of individualizing the jihadists, the film shows a series of characters who are blurred, faceless, nameless and generalized nonpersonas, with monikers like “The Teacher,” “The Warrior” and “The Imam.” So much for “know thine enemy.” With the identities of their subjects obscured, the filmmakers rely on indiscriminate shots of Iraqi daily life to illustrate the resistance: Men talking in a café are implicated as conspirators planning an attack; it’s like using customers in an Italian restaurant to represent Mafia hit men. Still, the film manages to capture the palpable frustration on the ground — we hear one story of an Iraqi man who was so pissed off at being roughed up by a U.S. soldier that he bought an RPG — and everyone condemns the American “occupiers.” Ultimately, Meeting Resistance is just one more doc about the monumental screwup that is the U.S. campaign in Iraq. For every additional day the Americans stay, the film suggests, they are only breeding more hatred and digging themselves into a deeper hellhole. (Fairfax) (Anthony Kaufman)

GO PARK The place is a desolate patch of tumbleweed and picnic tables overlooking L.A.’s Baldwin Hills (oil derricks, routes to the airport). The time is lunch hour. A desperate depressive (Dagney Kerr) has come here to kill herself, though she’s so mechanically challenged (wrong bullets for the gun, no hose for the muffler) that she has to borrow things from the equally brokenhearted driver (David Fenner) of a pet-shampoo truck parked a short distance away. The woman he adores, his pretty Polish co-worker (Izabella Miko), has donned a maid’s costume and is using her lunch hour to fuck the lights out of a wealthy suitor (William Baldwin) in the ritzy SUV bouncing on its shocks a few paces down the incline. That two characters who think they’re in love actually hate each other, and vice versa, is the sort of classical reversal writer-director Kurt Voelker serves up with fresh energy in this masterfully conceived and executed modern farce, whose performers earn belly laughs by grace of their honesty. Ricki Lake and Cheri Oteri, as aggrieved pals seeking to avenge themselves on both Baldwin and his SUV, ground their slapstick in such sharply etched feelings for each other that their over-the-top actions serve as a gateway to real poignancy. That is a consistent virtue of Park — making the most of thrifty means to highly entertaining effect. (Music Hall) (F.X. Feeney)