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

 GO  FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON The Red Balloon was the art-house E.T. of 1956. Flight of the Red Balloon is something far more baffling — a literal-minded movie with an amiably free-floating metaphor. Chinese grandmaster Hou Hsiao-hsien, who only screened The Red Balloon after he was commissioned to remake it by the Musée d’Orsay, has said the film shows the “cruel realities” of childhood. His own version begins as fantasy, as 7-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu) addresses the otherwise unnoticed scarlet sphere drifting overhead, and then casually naturalizes, tracking the boy over the roofs of Paris to contemplate the untidy existence he shares with his mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche). The movie is animated not only by the hide-and-seek antics of the red balloon but also by Binoche’s extravagant turn as a frazzled performance artist. Played with total self-absorption and a corresponding absence of vanity, Suzanne is a harried composition in frowsy blond-itude, filmy scarves and mad décolletage — the most dynamic female protagonist in the Hou oeuvre. Suzanne’s situation may be an emotional jumble, but untethered by mundane reality, the balloon is free to roam. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, Flight of the Red Balloon is a movie of genius. It is in a class by itself. (Royal) (J. Hoberman) 

Tsai cheng-tai

Flight of the Red Balloon

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THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM The plot is pure choose-your-own-adventure: A bullied wuxia fanboy from South Boston (Michael Angarano) is teleported back into a LARP fantasia of feudal China, where he’s singled out as the long-anticipated “Chosen One” prophesied to topple a despotic warlord. Our nominal hero then recedes behind the two Mr. Miyagis who adopt him: a Lisa Bonet–bewigged Jackie Chan and warrior-monk Jet Li (English line readings: 75 percent intelligible). This is the first collaboration between Kung Fu’s Astaire and Kelly, and, as that, it disappoints. Like so much in Rob Minkoff’s movie, the fight arrangements by choreographer Yuen Woo-ping aren’t so much bad as undistinguished: The camera placement is off, the tempo unvaried, and Chan’s movements are obscured by his piled-on robes. The cinematography lacks storybook indelibility; Collin Chou’s Jade Warlord is a stock archvillain (though Bingbing Li’s bullwhip-toting “white-haired demon,” announced with apocalyptic reverb, is lovely) ... and then there’s the scene where Li actually pisses in Chan’s face — a degradation that will seem familiar to viewers incensed by the demographic-outreach casting of white-dude Angarano. Taken as a whole, though, it’s an amiable lost and found of epic-adventure tropes. As I still illogically treasure Willow, many a 10-year-old who sees The Forbidden Kingdom will remember it fondly in spite of its flaws. (Citywide) (Nick Pinkerton)

GO  FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT Funky? Beyond. As for where the forest might be, to whom contact is made, and what might happen the second or third time around, beats me — over the head, repeatedly, with a blunt, slap-happy doofus stick. Written and directed by a trio of Japanese filmmakers (Katsuhito Ishii, Shunichiro Miki, Aniki), this epic J-pop WTF mashes sci-fi, sitcom, romcom, clowning, dreams, dancing and outlandish Croenenbergian fantasia in a dizzying kaleidoscope of brash non sequitur. We begin with the Mole Brothers, hosts of a white-on-white slapstick variety show being watched by a recumbent spaceman prior to launching his bioplastic pod into a miasma of intergalactic protozoa. From there we meet Little Mataru, a bored schoolgirl who daydreams herself into an inscrutable superhero contest with cutesy robots and spinning space blobs; Guitar Brother, a lovesick troubadour and eldest of the Unpopular With Women Brothers; Notti and Takefumi (too complicated to explain); and the Babbling Hot Springs Vixens, a clutch of voluble young salesgirls on holiday, who narrate tales of the Alien Piko-Riko, The Big Ginko Tree and Buck Naked and the Panda. And that’s just the first half. If there’s a theme to Funky Forest, it’s the transformative power of the imagination through dreams, music, performance and freewheeling pomo crazy time. Hug these trees! They hug back. (ImaginAsian Center) (Nathan Lee)

KISS THE BRIDE “Our obsession with marriage ... it’s masochistic,” says one queer character in C. Jay Cox’s Kiss the Bride, a “scrappy indie” that successfully manages to reproduce, on a shoestring, anonymously professional big-budget asininity. Matt (Philipp Karner), an out-and-proud staffer at Queery magazine, gets a surprise invitation to the straight wedding of the long-out-of-sight high school best buddy who, way back when, turned Matt on to the joys of banging dudes. Reunited in the “podunk town” of his youth with the perpetually shirt-free Ryan (James O’Shea), that shared secret prods Matt into an, “Is he or isn’t he?” investigation. Adding to the confusion is Ryan’s fiancée (played by vast-faced Tori Spelling, an unlikely siren to tempt men out of deeply entrenched sexual preference), with whom both men are taken. Along with a gallery of hastily sketched caricatures visiting for the nuptials, the comedy is heavily reliant on naughty double-entendres (e.g., an “I’m coming” gag that was stupid when it was in American Pie). In the film’s endless countdown to the exchange of vows, complete predictability is avoided only thanks to its openness to the fluidity of sexual identity — which isn’t enough to make this anything more than the most ignoble outing in bi-curious screen hijinks since France produced Poltergay. (Regent Showcase) (Nick Pinkerton)