Film Reviews: Semi-Pro, Summer Palace, A Walk to Beautiful

 
THE URN For fans of Jewish humor craving Z-grade Neil Simon shtick, The Urn contains plenty of "toches" jokes, an Ivy League-­educated son who returns home as a Hasid, a blind grandfather (Emmy winner Fyvush Finkel) who had "Bubbeh" cremated but still carries her ashes around in the titular container, and an ex-con cousin who needs a liver transplant. All of this befalls Joseph (Stanley Kamel), a Westside schlemiel who's going through a midlife crisis — and dealing with the return of his shiksa ex-wife with her llama-dislodged clitoris. (Don't ask.) Writer-director Skip Usen's concept may sound zany, but as a film, it's labored and earns almost no laughs. The script feels like a play that was turned down by the Santa Monica Community Jewish Theater — and translating it to the big screen does The Urn no favors. The music is corny, the lighting amateurish, and the actors look awkward and pained as they recite wince-inducing punch lines like, "What kind of world is it when a youngster can't attend the execution of his own mother?" Oy veh. (Regency Fairfax) (James C. Taylor)

 
VIVERE 'Tis the eve of Christmas, festival of light, but three more or less German women — two young half-Italian sisters (Esther Zimmering and Kim Schnitzer) and a much older stranger played by veteran actress Hannelore Elsner — spend it in the darkness of their own pain and losses while bumping into one another at points across the new Europe, whose porous borders have inspired a whole new style of fractured filmmaking and identity crisis. The night's action keeps looping back on itself to tie the women's stories together and shift perspective from one to the other, though truthfully only by a little. I like writer-director Angelina Maccarone's ambition, but her technical ingenuity exceeds her grasp of potentially complex emotions, which get stuck in a groove of mawkish self-pity. There is pregnancy, and lesbian longing, and guilt and rebellion and retirement panic, some of which is handled with sensitivity. But the overarching theme of abandonment is hammered into the ground with lugubrious intensity, followed by a lurch into optimism wherein the plot ties itself into a shiny bow of insight labeled "Chin up, be nice, watch the stars, go home — wherever that is." (Sunset 5) (Ella Taylor)

Palm Pictures

Summer Palace

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GO  A WALK TO BEAUTIFUL Five women, isolated in their own corners of the Ethiopian hinterland, undertake a pilgrimage to a free hospital in Addis Ababa. All of them have long suffered from obstetric fistulas — tissue tears from pregnancy trauma leading to an unceasing drip of incontinence. In the context of village life, this means ostracism (a clinician: "These are the modern-day lepers"). The women, five among tens of thousands suffering the same, offer a terrible privilege in opening up their private abjection — a more complete shame would be difficult to imagine. That confidence isn't betrayed. Aside from a few casual digs at the loutishness of the rural Ethiopian male, documentarians Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher feel no need to overlay this health-care calamity with pious outrage; any editorializing is implied in the immutable facts from overworked gynecologists and the camera's testament. (What could be more eloquent than a pan across one room to reveal four reparative operations under way simultaneously? It's like battlefield surgery.) A Walk to Beautiful is emotionally arduous stuff, which doesn't mean anything by itself; the world lacks for neither pain nor camera crews. But there's something quite rarefied here, in the experience of commiseration these refugees find with their fellow patients: "Everyone here is sick. I thought it was only me." (Sunset 5) (Nick Pinkerton)

 
WITLESS PROTECTION One knows, or ought to know, what to expect in a movie featuring Dan Whitney's "Larry the Cable Guy" character: much bodily-function humor, including several scenes in which a nearly naked Whitney revels in his own physical grotesqueness; mild jokes at the expense of foreigners and liberals; and copious country-music references. Unfortunately, what you can't count on is the enthusiasm of his standup act — Whitney exerts more energy in his segment of Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie than in Health Inspector, Delta Farce and Witless Protection combined. Barely written and directed by TV helmer Charles Robert Carner, Witless Protection is a riff on Midnight Run ... so much so that Yaphet Kotto actually reprises his role from that film as FBI Agent Alonzo Mosely, who this time is a villain on the take, which is why Larry kidnaps rich bitch Madeleine (Ivana Milicevic) away from the feds who are supposedly her witness protection. Whitney remains affable throughout, but there are few belly laughs. Still, it's hard to despise the movie, especially when Peter Stormare shows up over-enunciating the most brilliantly awful English accent of all time. It should be noted, though, that at no point does Larry say his catch phrase, "Git-r-done!" It's one thing if Whitney wants to expand his range, but if you're gonna be in Skynyrd, you gots to play "Free Bird." KnowhutImean, Vern? (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)