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

THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES Riddled with high concept, this florid adaptation of Laura Kasischke’s 2002 novel is a horror picture of sorts that plays off a Columbine-style high school shooting from the victims’ point of view. For all I know, the author, who’s also a poet, took a delicate approach to this fraught conceit, but moviegoers may mistake The Life Before Her Eyes for an unduly long L’Oréal commercial featuring softly lit film stars moving languidly with swinging hair through overbearingly premonitory weather. All but derailed by director Vadim (House of Sand and Fog) Perelman’s fondness for the slow-motion sequence, The Life Before Her Eyes stars Evan Rachel Wood, shortchanging her considerable talent yet again, as Diana, a troubled small-town teen whose undisciplined appetites are tempered by her friendship with churchgoing good girl Maureen (Eva Amurri, giving her all to a thankless task). Fifteen years after the two friends are improbably commanded by the high school shooter to choose which of them should die, Diana, played by Uma Thurman in various attitudes of vague distress, is living a golden life edged with portents of Something Amiss. A twist that offers fertile potential for subtle meditation on growing up, conscience and roads not traveled ends up buried beneath insect metaphors, lurid flashbacks and a thunderstorm that creaks with the climax to come. (The Landmark; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Ella Taylor)

Tsai cheng-tai

Flight of the Red Balloon

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LOST IN BEIJING Two modern couples of distant social strata convene at crotch-level in Lost in Beijing. Lin Dong (Tony Leung Ka-fai) is the moneyed owner of a rubdown parlor, and Liu Ping Guo (Fan Bingbing), one of his masseuses, goes home to a cell of an apartment and her husband, An Kun (Tong Da Wei), a high-rise window cleaner. One evening she gets crocked and passes out at work, then comes to with the boss on top of her — and who should bear witness but hubby, squeegeeing outside. Pregnancy intensifies the crisis, but as Dong’s wife (Elaine Jin) is infertile, he submits an indecent proposal to purchase the baby. The selling point here is director Li Yu’s tangle with government censors over the movie — admirable — and maybe what I take for granted is something that mainland China needs to see. But we’re past the curious (Yellow) days that could call a tit revolutionary, or convince the pocket-pool crowd to brave subtitles. The prevalent shooting style is monotonous naturalism, as the camera buzzes between contentious actors and trolls after anything on the move. No performance registers quite so much as the capital city itself, a burgeoning-but-sepulchral range of skyscrapers receding into a Sheetrock-toned sky. (Grande 4-Plex) (Nick Pinkerton) 

 GO  NOTE BY NOTE: THE MAKING OF STEINWAY L1037 Given rapt attention and care in the framing, there is no more engrossing subject than man at work. The proof, yet again, is in director Ben Niles’ chronicle of the production of a single Steinway concert grand — a nine-foot beast that requires a plank the length of an anaconda, a year of assembly and a small army of blue-collar technicians whose skills are as minutely focused and compartmentalized as a safecracker’s. Niles gathers testimonials from a variety of pianists to describe and demonstrate the variances of sound inherent to each Steinway, among the last of the handcrafted pianos. But they’re distractions from the drama in Steinway’s Queens factory, where a single slip of a “pizza wheel” wire stretcher or an imbalance of a few thousandths of an inch could ruin a $25,000 instrument. Niles and cinematographer Ben Wolf scrutinize each step as if it were Rififi’s climactic heist, offering moments of fixated strangeness and wonder — as when a burly Croatian “belly man” installs perfect rows of teensy notches in the bridge, using a swift, unhesitating repetition that seems more magical than robotic. The movie may sell the Steinway supremacy a bit insistently — no wonder a film link turns up on the manufacturer’s Web site — but as a study of stubborn artisanal tradition in the Pro Tools age, Note by Note is a stirring symphony of specialized labor. (Music Hall) (Jim Ridley)

GO PATHOLOGY Crank creators Neveldine and Taylor — who apparently no longer require the luxury of first names — scripted this tale of deranged young doctors in the L.A. coroner’s office who test each other to come up with ever more elaborate murders in hopes of stumping their colleagues as to the cause of death. The duo bring their crazed, anything-goes sensibility to the table, but they aren’t a perfect match with German director Marc Schoelermann, who seems to like his horror more brooding and artsy. So while our main characters engage in plenty of gratuitous sex, violence, and combinations of both, Schoelermann will be damned if he lets the rather obviously named Dr. Grey (Milo Ventimiglia) look like he’s enjoying a second of it. As the new kid who gets swept up in all the madness, Ventimiglia is morose from the start, and not exactly the portrait of seduced innocence this story really needs. Nonetheless, when a movie opens with the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally as performed by cadavers, and later proceeds to sex scenes involving scalpels and needles, the actual plot is inconsequential. Fans of hard-R exploitation will love this; everyone else will likely be appalled. Screw ’em. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)