CHICAGO 10 Thirteen months after Hubert Humphrey was nominated for president in a hall ringed with barbed wire and surrounded by National Guardsmen, amid four days of violent clashes between Chicago police and antiwar protesters, the government charged eight political activists with crossing state lines as part of a conspiracy to incite riot. Their carnivalesque trial resulted in five convictions (later overturned) and citations of contempt that included two defense lawyers — hence writer-director Brett Morgen's Chicago 10. Arguably the greatest media spectacle of the high '60s, the convention telecast included ample street violence. But if the convention was a tragedy, the trial was a farce. Revisiting events at once overly familiar and impossible to imagine, Morgen's impure mix of documentary footage and rotoscopic computer animation has a deliberate and irritating absence of context, and however authentically chaotic, Chicago 10 is insufficiently frenzied. According to the trades, Morgen's deliberately ahistorical treatment is a dry run for Steven Spielberg's planned Trial of the Chicago 7 — to be scripted by Aaron Sorkin, with Sacha Baron Cohen and possibly Will Smith as Abbie and Bobby. Schindler's List gave the Holocaust a happy ending, and Saving Private Ryan reduced World War II to a single mission, so why not recast the inexplicable convulsions of the late '60s in terms of personality? From bloody tragedy to savage farce to starstruck myth. (Nuart) (J. Hoberman)
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Summer Palace
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Summer Palace
CITY OF MEN City of God, Fernando Meirelles' 2002 film about Rio's shantytowns, was spun off into a hit TV series (something like the Brazilian equivalent of The Wire) featuring two of the movie's youngest stars, favela-bred Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha. Now the boys are grown, and the series is being respun off into another film. After so many years in character, the actors disappear easily into their roles, Ace (Silva) and Wallace (Cunha), best friends who grew up together in the shadow of Pool Hall Hill, where Wallace's drug-dealer cousin reigns supreme. This is an all-male world — presumably because the town's women are off not being stupid, not getting themselves killed and not abandoning their kids — and themes of fatherhood and brotherhood are particularly resonant in Elena Soarez's script. Neither Ace nor Wallace knew his father while growing up (although a tragic-verging-on-maudlin series of flashbacks reveals that their fathers did know each other), and after a misguided quest to discover their roots and avenge the past, they turn to the future, recognizing that they are each other's best chance to escape the entrancing violence of gang warfare. The film works best in its anthropological mode, showing us rotting schools and clueless policemen, and carefully laying out the shifting alliances and frantic social maneuvering of the shantytown's residents. Fleeting moments of compassion and connection are punctuated with bursts of death, and teenage boys swap Kalashnikovs as if they're baseball cards. Still, Soarez is a bit too insistent on Ace's and Wallace's fundamental goodness and innocence, without bothering to explain where they came by these qualities; hints of a back story will only frustrate viewers unfamiliar with the TV show. Paulo Morelli directs capably, with a heavy dash of MTV-generation flair: hypersaturated colors, close-ups of skin glittering with sweat, and a constant patter of gunfire that undergirds the soundtrack like a steady heartbeat. (ArcLight Hollywood; The Landmark; Playhouse 7) (Julia Wallace)
THE LOST A vile addition to the River's Edge /Out of the Blue sick-soul-of-suburbia video shelf, this punishing 2005 feature by writer-producer-director Chris Sivertson starts out as an ambitious, above-average, no-budget psycho-noir, only to nosedive into showboating sadism. Adapted from a novel by transgressive horror idol Jack Ketchum (who appears as a bartender), Sivertson's portrait of a preening small-town sociopath sets its tone with a ghastly double murder, then leaps forward four years to find the teenage friends involved now suffering to various degrees. Except, that is, for the ringleader, Ray Pye (Marc Senter), an effete greaser and nascent serial killer, who alternately browbeats and sweet-talks his traumatized girlfriend (Shay Astar) while stoking his short fuse with coke. Sivertson, who made the unjustly panned Lindsay Lohan vehicle I Know Who Killed Me, threads a dense, intriguing web of diseased community around his hateful protagonist, and peoples it with keen supporting players, including Michael Bowen and Ed Lauter as grizzled detectives and Dee Wallace-Stone in one harrowing scene as a dead girl's blotto mom. But Senter's smarmy badass posturing in the lead — an entrance exam for the Crispin Glover School of Thespian Understatement — only brings out the movie's crap nihilism. It ends in a drearily inevitable bloodbath, the kind of juvenile edgier-than-thou endurance test that will toss a pregnant nobody in harm's way just to indulge some kicky references to Sharon Tate. (Sunset 5) (Jim Ridley)
NOAH'S ARK "How much can you take?" asks a sinister voice over helicopter shots of Budapest at night; cut to an old man (Dezso Garas) in bed, awakened by the sounds of a near-biblical downpour. "It's the end of the world," he croaks with something like resignation. It's a dislocating opening, and it hints that Noah's Ark, the first feature in 20 years by the veteran Hungarian filmmaker Sándor Pál, will have an apocalyptic follow-through. Those feelings are dispelled roughly 30 seconds later, when the action devolves into cacophonous comedy by introducing the eccentric, ethnically diverse residents of an apartment complex as they cope with the effects of the downpour. This mostly involves them screaming and hurling racist invective at one another. Eventually, our focus returns to the duffer glimpsed in the first scene — a pensioner named Stock, who lives with his teenage granddaughter (Angéla Stefanovics). Their relationship doesn't seem to be particularly close — she has a screaming fit when he comes into her bedroom to wake her — but that doesn't stop Stock, a crafty curmudgeon whose apparent lifelong ambition is to own a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, from applying for a bizarre reality-TV contest to anoint "Hungary's Best Grandfather." The rest of the film details the pair's preparations for the event and the way their fractious neighbors attempt to help out under the pretense that they'll each get a share of the prize money. Pal's affection for his human menagerie keeps them from becoming grotesques, and he's not out to skewer their greed either: Noah's Ark may be scattered and tonally inconsistent — it's at once crass and wistful, direct and allusive, despairing and carnivalesque — but it's finally nothing if not good-spirited. (Grande 4-Plex) (Adam Nayman)
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