Movie Reviews: The Edge of Heaven, The Foot Fist Way, The Strangers

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven wears current events on its sleeve, feeling out the state of German-Turkish relationships as the former Ottomans clean house for E.U. membership, and the demographic earthquake of 70 million Muslims waits at Europe’s door. Examining a Europe whose increasingly porous borders have drastically undermined a long-standing homogeneity is very much at the center of excellent recent work by such divergent sensibilities as Austria’s Ulrich Seidl (Import/Export) and Britain’s Shane Meadows (Somers Town). Both films still await a proper U.S. release date, while writer-director Akin once again secures distribution (as he did for his punk-posturing 2004 Head-On) with pseudoprovocations and a superficially deceptive simulacra of Art. Edge of Heaven ups the ambition: Its screenplay is a Dickensian network of happenstance, serving to intertwine six characters of different ages, nationalities and castes. Three parent-child sets fracture, then reconcile/recombine. This expression of growth-through-trauma mostly involves actors hugging and making wistful “older and wiser” expressions while looking into the middle distance. (Everyone gets along. That the Turks believe in a different God from the Germans, and actually believe at that, is apparently not a pressing concern.) If the united Europe aspires to compete with America globally, this is good news — they’ve found their own multiculti Paul Haggis! (Playhouse 7; Royal) (Nick Pinkerton)

Jon Higgin

Chop Shop

Courtesy Magnolia Pictures

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More About

• Christopher Bell
• Hollywood
• Michelle Orange
• MEMORY THIEF Lukas
• Arthur Dong

GO  THE FOOT FIST WAY Boorish tae kwon do instructor Fred Simmons (Danny McBride) is a strip-mall hero for whom demonstrating his cinder-block-breaking skills to parking-lot gawkers is “my fucking life.” Fred takes seriously — or at least talks seriously about — the tenets of his combat technique, while completely oblivious to what’s happening just outside his storefront kingdom. He considers himself a warrior; meanwhile, the world is kicking his ass. Director Jody Hill shot The Foot Fist Way mock-doc style; it’s probably best, since nothing much happens in the film, as it ambles from sketch to sketch. There’s only the loosest of plots, involving Fred’s bleached-blond wife (Mary Jane Bostic), who fucks around with her boss, sending Fred into a tailspin — and providing the punching bag with further reason to act like a douche bag. There’s something real about this guy — and something real nasty about him too, something that lingers after the movie’s choked a few laughs out of an audience that won’t know whether to pity Fred or punch him. Truthfully, The Foot Fist Way is no different than an episode of The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm: This is irritainment, something you snicker at while covering your eyes, praying this guy never gets loose in the real world, when, in fact, he’s your next-door neighbor. Or, God forbid, you. (ArcLight Hollywood) (Robert Wilonsky)

HOLLYWOOD CHINESE The most jarring thing about Hollywood Chinese, Arthur Dong’s survey of Chinese representation in American film from the silent era to the present, is its lack of fury — that and Ang Lee’s belief that he’s a subversive. Half of the running time is devoted to clips both expected (The Good Earth) and refreshing (Marion Wong’s undiscovered The Curse of Quon Gwon), the other to the musings of politely enraged talking heads. Dong spotlights Chinese stars throughout Hollywood’s history, suggesting at one point a parallel between the tragedy of Anna May Wong’s thwarted stardom and Joan Chen having to follow The Last Emperor with Salute to the Jugger. Luise Rainer and Christopher Lee appear to rationalize — if not exactly apologize for — their contributions to the legacy of yellow face, and though Hollywood’s racial insensitivity is largely written off as a product of its time, Stephen Gong, the obligatory university scholar, and actor B.D. Wong up the ante somewhat, the latter exploring the nexus of sexuality and race in his life and regretting having cashed in on the “Asian-American desexualized chip.” Dong never suggests that we need fewer middlebrow Chinese-American filmmakers like Lee and Wayne Wang, but at least he’s ballsy enough to spotlight one interviewee’s point that minorities shouldn’t rely on the majority to give accurate cinematic expression to their lives. (Music Hall; One Colorado) (Ed Gonzalez)

THE MEMORY THIEF Lukas (Mark Webber) is the worst tollbooth worker in all of California, chain-smoking and holding up traffic by rescuing stray dogs. One day, a passing driver inexplicably tosses a copy of Mein Kampf at him; so begins Lukas’s spiraling, Mark David Chapman–esque obsession with all things Holocaust. From volunteering to record survivor testimonies to buying lottery tickets off Auschwitz numbers, Lukas’ is a quick, frenzied descent into insanity. With a committedly unpleasant but spastic performance from Webber, The Memory Thief is the least sentimental “Holocaust film” on record. Writer-director Gil Kofman moves past “we must never forget” into weird and thorny territory, in which sympathy for the tragic becomes a masochistic form of emotional self-gratification. (Lukas’s frequent refrain: “Didn’t you hear? Auschwitz isn’t just for the Jews anymore.”) The film is (perhaps deliberately) as unbalanced as its protagonist, one whose fury ultimately seems directed either nowhere in particular or in too many directions at once — until things eventually devolve into a Taxi Driver riff. Kofman’s lack of textbook sanctimony is to be congratulated, but he could have used something like Ryan Gosling’s centrifugal performance in the similarly uncomfortable The Believer to get somewhere coherent. (Music Hall) (Vadim Rizov)