Movie Reviews: Zombie Strippers, Floating Life, Lost in Beijing

BEYOND THE CALL Attempting to portray its Good Samaritan subjects as just regular guys, Beyond the Call is that rare inspirational documentary that errs on the side of restraint, although it still doesn’t make for very gripping cinema. The film follows Ed Artis, James Laws and Walt Ratterman, three successful middle-aged Americans who decided in 1995 to form Knightsbridge International, a nonprofit organization “dedicated to providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief worldwide without regard to race, religion or national origin.” Director and cinematographer Adrian Belic positions his subjects as unconventional do-gooders. Rather than sanctimonious blowhards or weepy bleeding hearts, they’re a salty, alpha-male bunch with refreshingly unpretentious attitudes about the positive impact they’ve made in impoverished areas like the Philippines and Afghanistan. The downside is that the men remain honorable ciphers. The brief glimpses we get into their personal lives offer some interesting backstory — Artis was a juvenile delinquent and Laws is a Napoleon fanatic — but the film’s emphasis on their episodic, picturesque travels yields little in terms of character detail or insight into the altruistic mindset. You walk out of Beyond the Call admiring these humanitarians but not the movie about them — unless you like films with lots of hugging. (Grande 4-Plex) (Tim Grierson)

Tsai cheng-tai

Tsai cheng-tai

Flight of the Red Balloon

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Flight of the Red Balloon

DARK MATTER “Inspired by” the 1991 University of Iowa school shootings, Dark Matter gives a sympathetic picture of Liu Xing (Liu Ye), its doctoral candidate turned sociopath. Maladjusting to cultural amputation, the international student’s letters home become increasingly Travis Bickle–like in their remove from reality. The China he’s left behind is dreary, but at least it’s a comprehensible, straightforward wasteland — unlike the mirage of America, where we see freedom and opportunity extolled, but toadying and conformity rewarded. First-time filmmaker Shi-Zheng Chen shows little aptitude for accurately transcribing the textures of human interaction; there’s not a single credible performance here, including Meryl Streep as a faculty Sinophile, doing that thing where she grinds every line through a gauntlet of tremulous inflections. More surprising, considering Chen’s pedigree in directing operas, are his conspicuously inept mad scenes: Liu Xing’s final snap is dramatized in a disco-strobed student lounge. So what pushes him over the edge? That he can’t get laid? Indigestion from mixing wuxia with cowboy culture (the film implicitly perpetuates the think-piece insipidity that American gun violence has more to do with Zane Gray than lax handgun laws)? Who knows? Despite overtures toward evenhandedness, Dark Matter’s insights go no deeper than “chickens coming home to roost” banality. (Sunset 5; Playhouse 7) (Nick Pinkerton)

EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED Ben Stein became a minor cultural icon from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, almost making people forget that, from his early days as a Nixon speechwriter on, he’s been a rigid cultural conservative. Stein capitalizes on that goodwill with Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a propaganda “documentary” he cowrote and hosts. His thesis: “Teaching Darwinian evolution but ignoring intelligent design in America’s public schools and universities is the biggest threat to American freedom today — bigger, presumably, than Al Qaeda, Iraq and the recession combined.” A series of interviews with ID true believers has him playing Michael Moore dumb — no hard questions for the folks at the Discovery Center, whose infamous leaked 1993 “wedge memo” stated as one of its primary goals the propagation of the idea “that nature and human beings are created by God.” ID’ers protest that they’re simply interested in secular alternatives to Darwinian evolution; their scientific opponents, meanwhile, are potential communists and Nazis (Stein visits Dachau for an insulting, “it happened here” moment”). Using the powers of low-grade montage to compare the divide between evolutionary scientists and ID’s proponents to the Berlin Wall, Stein becomes, with his doc’s insistence that we tear down that wall, Ronald Reagan. Bizarre and hysterical. (AMC South Bay Galleria 16; Burbank Town Center 8; Regal The Avenue 13;UA Marina Del Rey 6) (Vadim Rizov)

GO  THE FIRST SATURDAY IN MAY Of the 40,000 thoroughbreds foaled in the U.S. annually, only 20 make the regal two-minute run that is the Kentucky Derby, a Mardi Gras–like spectacle that brings out bourbon-drinking gawkers and gamblers, crazy hats and Carson Cressley, apparently. Galloping toward the 2006 edition of this Holy Grail event, the Hennegan brothers’ zesty directorial debut trails the prep season of six diligent horse trainers, including an optimistic MS patient who works for the prime minister of Dubai, and a wheelchair-bound dad whose passions are undeterred by the irony that an equestrian accident caused his paralysis. Many of the subjects, we learn, are victorious year after year, but the Hennegans are deft enough editors to convince us of a six-way underdog competition, and the track sequences can be real nail biters. Of course, if you’re not already a fan, the multitude of stakes races — which comprises the film’s bulk — eventually gets tedious, and one wishes for more detail on the personal dramas, off-track hooks in plain sight (why introduce one trainer’s 71-year-old father, who wants to be the oldest winning jockey, in the final minutes?), and sport’s controversies (maybe codistributor Churchill Downs Inc. doesn’t know about PETA?). First Saturday isn’t exactly a winner, but it places — if you’re feeling it, go ahead and tear up your tickets and throw ’em on the theater floor. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)