Movie Reviews: Bustin' Down the Door, Love Comes Lately
Also, A Man Named Pearl, CSNY: Deja Vu and more
ASIAN STORIES (BOOK 3) Dumped by his fiancée two weeks before their wedding, sorrowful, strait-laced Jim (Heroes’ James Kyson Lee) does the only rational thing: he asks his best friend, Alex (Kirt Kishita), who happens to be a hit man, to kill him. As part of their agreement, the two pals drive to the mountains outside Los Angeles for a male-bonding trip with an itinerary that includes Alex offing his buddy at some undetermined time. At this point, one can’t help but ask, “How soon will Jim meet-cute with a pretty girl who will make him regret his hasty suicide plan?” Well, Asian Stories (Book 3) doesn’t disappoint, as annoyingly feisty waitress Amanda (Kathy Uyên) quickly arrives on the scene to turn Jim’s frown upside-down. As its title suggests, this minuscule-budgeted comedy-drama directed by Ronald Oda and Kris Chin believes its Asian-American characters give voice to a section of the filmgoing audience whose culture usually gets ignored by mainstream cinema. But while the filmmakers have a point, surely there are hundreds of undiscovered Asian-American directors with more to say than Oda and Chin, whose creatively bankrupt film is so indifferently acted and meagerly executed that you wonder if Asian Stories could be sued for cultural misrepresentation. (ImaginAsian Center) (Tim Grierson)
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Love Comes Lately
GO BUSTIN’ DOWN THE DOOR The title of director Jeremy Gosch’s engaging, elegantly made surf documentary describes the often brash methods employed by a pack of scrappy foreigners — Australians Ian Cairns, Mark Richards, Peter Townend and Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew, plus South Africans Shaun and Michael Tomson — to make names for themselves at a time (the mid-1970s) when surfing was still more of a local (i.e., Hawaiian) pastime than a global professional sport. And get noticed they did, shredding every wave they could, from perfectly formed pipeline barrels to gnarlier-than-thou Waimea Bay closeouts, effectively creating the look and ethos of modern pro surfing in their wake. Occasionally, the sextet’s daredevil brio got the better of them — and earned the ire of more than a few North Shore locals — but it’s humility and gratitude that characterize these wave-riding éminences grises today as they look back on their youthful selves (via some spectacular Super-8 and 16mm archival footage) and marvel at the evolution of the surf lifestyle into a multibillion-dollar industry. Although it can’t help hitting some familiar beats — chiefly the tension between surfing’s “pure” roots and its eventual commercialization — Bustin’ Down the Door always favors the personal anecdote over the historical generalization, and, more than any movie of its kind since Dana Brown’s 2003 Step Into Liquid, will leave surf junkies and novices alike longing to get their feet wet. (Monica 4-Plex) (Scott Foundas)
GO CSNY: DÉJÀ VU Neil Young wanted to tour the country that re-elected George W. Bush, dole out some demerits, light some fires and maybe even sell a few copies of his 2006 album, Living With War. So he convinced his former bandmates, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, to join him, and brought journalist Mike Cerre and Iraq and Vietnam war vets to canvas the crowds about the ongoing battle. Directed by Young (credited as Bernard Shakey), CSNY: Déjà Vu presents the foursome’s summer of dove (though the hatchets buried between them seem to have shallow graves), as part-tour documentary, part-polemic for-and-by-the-people. Initially erring a little too far on the side of the former, the film’s mishmash of news footage and concert reviews threatens to devolve into a CSNY wank-fest, but when the tour hits Georgia — and Georgia hits back — the power of a brazen anthem puts the focus squarely on the audience. The crowd stampeding for the doors in a hail of red-faced bird-flipping (apparently “Let’s Impeach the President” is not a local favorite) isn’t the kind of march Young had in mind. But the house band for countless Vietnam protests sees an equal problem in preaching to the choir: Exchanging righteous vibes makes for a nice evening out, but, as Nash points out, ain’t no thing until the choir gets off its ass. (The Landmark) (Michelle Orange)
EIGHT MILES HIGH Groupie Uschi (“ooh-she”) Obermaier has a name that’s fun to say and a youth that reads like it was even more fun to live, but Eight Miles High, Achim Bornhak’s exasperating biopic, is the biggest buzz kill that could possibly come of so much raw material. Raw is how Bornhak likes his heroine, and actress Natalia Avelon obliges; the opening shot, in which her bare, buoyant breasts get as much real estate as her studiously jutted pout, is as close as this film gets to a thesis statement. Uschi, a gorgeous German woman of little discernible talent or personality, leaves home at 22 and ends up in a pseudoradical commune in 1968 Munich. Item A on the commune’s hairy overlord’s agenda is convincing the lost lambs who wander in that they aren’t liberated until they nail him — and then watch him nail someone else. From there, Uschi follows several men (including Keith Richards and German adventurer Dieter Bockhorn) around the world, her spectacular rack and middling modeling career in tow. But the vitality of the time, and often Uschi’s own experiences, gets lost somewhere in Avelon’s towering headdress of hair. Stoned on the story’s ’60s sex-bomb potential, Bornhak piles on the sex and forgets the bomb; the result is unaffecting filmmaking, as slack-jawed and superficial as its subject. (Sunset 5) (Michelle Orange)
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