Movie Reviews: Young People Fucking, A Secret, Ping Pong Playa

GO FLOW: FOR LOVE OF WATER One of those charming little documentaries that make you question whether the human race is really worth preserving, Irena Salina’s Flow: For Love of Water makes a fairly urgent three-point case. The first point is that much of the world has almost no access to clean water, yet impractical privatization schemes in Bolivia and South Africa, among other places, have deprived poor people of this vital necessity. Second, even when there’s water available, the bottled-water racket leads companies, like Nestlé, to package it and sell it back, causing lasting environmental damage to the places those companies are siphoning from. The last is the most frightening: We’re using up the planet’s water too fast, and soon, oil wars will be replaced by H20 battles. Salina’s argument trends alarmist — is it really necessary to call water “blue gold,” per activist/author Maude Barlow’s formulation? — but generally rings true. Vomit-inducing shots of blood-red rivers running downstream from slaughterhouses prepare you for the shock of raw-sewage rivers. Aesthetics take a back seat to interviews, footage of water riots (no, really), and protests. Salina concludes with a cry for activism and intervention, but the case she’s already built makes the battle seem unwinnable. (Sunset 5) (Vadim Rizov)

GO PING PONG PLAYA Documentary filmmaker Jessica Yu takes a breather from chronicling heavy-duty outsider artists (In the Realms of the Unreal) and extremists (Protagonist) to try her hand at a popcorn send-up of identity politics you can take the kids to — and it’s not half-bad. Burdened with a perfect older brother and marooned in disdain for his Ping pong–obsessed suburban Chinese-American family, Chris “C-Dub” Wang (a character worked up from a sportswear commercial by Ping Pong Playa’s production accountant/co-writer Jimmy Tsai, who also plays him with dumb-ass brio) succumbs to a severe case of homeboy envy, talking ghetto and shooting baskets with little kids while stewing in a dead-end job and blaming his failure to make the NBA on his short stature. Chris is a good, if rather too long-running, joke, and it’s fun that Yu and Tsai, who know their Asian-American bourgeoisie through and through, skewer the hypersensitivity of minorities with the same acuity that they take down white condescension. Frantically paced, littered with cute kids, and overstuffed with split screens and a rap score, Ping Pong Playa angles a little too hard for tween attention. But there’s no resisting the movie’s antic affability or its irreverence, even with Chris’s unavoidable progression toward the mature appreciation of his roots. (Mann Chinese 6; Mann Glendale Exchange) (Ella Taylor)

Strand Releasing

A Secret

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RIGHTEOUS KILL Where once the decline of Robert De Niro’s and Al Pacino’s prodigious talent inspired howls of anguish and impassioned critical essays, it’s a sad state of affairs when the best news about Righteous Kill, the cop thriller that stars them both, is that it isn’t awful. New York City tough-guy detectives Turk (De Niro) and Rooster (Pacino) are investigating a serial killer who’s bumping off heinous criminals acquitted by the judicial system, but suspicion soon turns to the detectives themselves. Screenwriter Russell Gewirtz’s first script was another New York crime drama, Spike Lee’s crackerjack Inside Man, which featured a slew of well-drawn characters as clever as the story’s twists. But Righteous Kill (directed by journeyman Jon Avnet) jettisons most of the wit for macho bluster and a surprise you can see coming down the turnpike. While there’s no point commenting that De Niro and Pacino are playing calcified versions of their once-great selves, at least Pacino is more reserved than usual — a welcome change. But between the film’s police-procedural minutiae and trite thematic concerns (the weight of Catholic guilt, the thin moral line between cop and crook), Righteous Kill isn’t so much bad as it is played out. No wonder the film’s faded stars seem to fit right in. (Citywide) (Tim Grierson)

GO A SECRET Based on the roman à clef by Philippe Grimbert, a French-Jewish psychoanalyst whose parents committed suicide when he was young, Claude Miller’s World War II domestic drama is unusually attentive to the way that the Holocaust disrupted lives that were messy enough to begin with. Not one but two dark family secrets stoke the hyperactive imagination of François (played by two child actors and Mathieu Amalric), the runty, sensitive son of athletic parents (Patrick Bruel and Cécile de France) whose obsession with the body beautiful weirdly echoes — and is warped by — Aryan ideals. Julie Depardieu is outstanding as the whistleblower who breaks the pregnant silence, revealing to the bewildered boy the cracks in his father’s first marriage, which would erupt into tragedy under the Nazi occupation. Deepened by its complex back-and-forth chronology, deft shifts in perspective, and a significantly counterintuitive color-coding of past and present, A Secret suggests that it’s not illicit passion but rather the crime of denial that has screwed up this family down the generations. The glibly Freudian conviction that the truth sets us free is less compelling than Miller’s evocation of those politically uncommitted Jews who believed that assimilation would save them. But the Germans didn’t give a damn, and neither, as the movie’s deceptively tranquil coda shows, did their Vichy collaborators. (Royal, Playhouse 7, Town Center 5) (Ella Taylor)