Movie Reviews: Bottle Shock, Man on Wire, The Order of Myths

 HELL RIDE In the post–Pulp Fiction ’90s, one could randomly throw a rock and hit a two-bit Quentin Tarantino knockoff — all chatty gangsters with showy monikers doing the slo-mo “let’s go to work” swagger. Now, with this hypersexualized, spaghetti-westernized, vulgar homage to the cheapie biker movies he starred in as an AIP contract player decades ago, actor-turned-filmmaker Larry Bishop (Mad Dog Time) updates the useless Tarantino derivation for the post-Grindhouse ’00s. Adding two-tone credits, sun-bleached retro camerawork and a Morricone-goes-rockabilly score to the chatty, showy swagger, Bishop trudges through a perfunctory premise about familial revenge and rival gangs. Street cred can’t save the pic, not even with Dennis Hopper and David Carradine cameos, and QT himself exec-producing and initiating the project. Bishop’s jumbled, wholly unexciting throwback has little on its mind beyond mythologizing its own director-star as a badass biker named Pistolero. When he’s not leading the pack in far too many desert-road montages, trippin’ on peyote or spouting Zen-stupid puns, Bishop lives out fantasies of fucking his frequently full-frontal female cast, most of whom look like FHM sexbots. (Villainous Vinnie Jones shows up sporting a crossbow and tattoos based on the types of pussy he’s eaten: menstrual, crab-infested or dead — yes, it’s that kind of movie.) Maybe if we were given our own pleasures to indulge in, we’d be able to handle these boys getting theirs. (Selected theaters) (Aaron Hillis)

 GO  MAN ON WIRE Part–caper movie, part–real-life superhero saga and entirely engrossing, James Marsh’s Man on Wire recounts in Rififi-like detail how a Parisian street performer and wire walker named Philippe Petit dodged cops, fought the elements and defied seemingly impossible logistics to pull off a feat of death-defying frivolity: an illegal, hastily rigged tightrope walk on Aug. 7, 1974, across the 1,350-foot plunge between the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Still lithe and trim, with a mime’s precision of gesture, the now middle-aged Petit animates the movie with his impish presence, retelling the six years of struggle and the myriad complications en route to the fateful walk. The tale makes for gripping cinema: The visual medium conveys not only the terror and wonder of Petit’s feat but also its airy surrealism — a defiance of gravity made even more elating by its life-or-death consequences. Man on Wire is also haunted by the story it doesn’t tell: Although the movie relies on present-day interviews with its subjects, the date September 11 is never uttered. But that void turns Marsh’s film into a ghostly meditation on the transience of human accomplishment. All monuments, someday, end up tombstones. But for the duration of this exhilarating doc, the towers stand — and so, atop and between them, does Petit’s once-in-a-lifetime achievement. (Landmark; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Jim Ridley)

Man on Wire

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

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More About

• Randall Miller
• Bill Pullman
• Mobile (Alabama)
• Paul Weiland
• Ella Taylor

 THE NEIGHBOR In this English-language adaptation of the 2003 French film Mon voisin du dessus (My Upstairs Neighbor), Michèle Laroque reprises her role as an uptight businesswoman and landlord at loggerheads with her downstairs tenant (Matthew Modine), an architect and part-time painter, who refuses to relinquish his apartment. Laroque has starred in dozens of these featherweight comedies in France, but this material forces her to new grades of mildness. Even during shouting matches with Modine, her emotional pitch rarely exceeds a middling 25 MPH. Modine himself is woefully miscast as an unrepentant bohemian, pouring his soul into painting by night while holding down a high-paying job at an architectural firm by day. The only believable thing about the character are his scenes as a cool dad, although it’s problematic for any movie when the male lead has more sexual chemistry with the actress playing his precocious teenage daughter (the foxy Gina Mantegna, daughter of Joe) than with his even-aged female co-star. The Neighbor’s treatment of its setting says a lot. Although director Eddie O’Flaherty wants to show Los Angeles as a city of light every bit as enchanting as Paris, how romantic can a movie be if its favorite way to see the city is from the balcony of a remodeled condo? (Sunset 5) (Sam Sweet)

 GO  THE ORDER OF MYTHS “I think you’ll learn a lot of history,” says a grim-faced dressmaker (black) to Mardi Gras queen Helen Meaher (white) early in The Order of Myths. Mobile, Alabama, has two separate Mardi Gras carnivals — one white, one black — and if Meaher is aware that her ancestors brought in the very last American slave shipment to Mobile in 1859 (including her black Mardi Gras counterpart’s ancestors), she’s not letting on. No one in the film admits to learning anything they haven’t known for years; Margaret Brown’s documentary zeroes in on the ways words like culture and tradition can become poisonous euphemisms — to wit, the defense for Mobile’s last true bastion of segregation. But Brown hasn’t made agitprop or a heavy-handed exposé of the obvious (viz., Southern racism is alive and well, just more genteel and better disguised). Quietly shocking, The Order of Myths is a deft, engrossing cross section of Mobile life, heavy on local color and insight — from the old-fashioned debutante balls of the white Mardi Gras and the rowdier black dance, all the way down to the Mobile Mystics, a group of Larry the Cable Guy look-alikes whose idea of a proper greeting is throwing beer cans at their president. (Nuart) (Vadim Rizov)