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

GO SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO Whether it’s score-settling culture theft, a fever dream of interlinked Wild West mythology, or simply a company casserole of way-cool cinema, this delirious spaghetti Eastern could only have come from the boiling brain of Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese auteur whose spectacularly uneven films account for the lion’s share of the past decade’s most utterly bat-shit movie moments. His quota increases exponentially with this Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars riff about an ace gunslinger (Hideaki Ito) caught between color-coded clans in a suspiciously Nipponese Nevada town, where samurai swords and postapocalyptic costumes vie for dominance with Gatling guns and cowboy suits. Delivered entirely in phonetic English for unnecessary additional derangement, the garbled, woozily re-created dialogue adds another layer of movie fetishism to the whirling duster coats, blazing sixguns, and Mexican standoffs cribbed from Sergios Leone and Corbucci. The director also borrows favorite tropes from sources as far-ranging as Rambo and Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead, enlisting no less a fellow magpie than Quentin Tarantino in the Pai Mei role of special-guest gunfighter. (Pointing that can-opener jaw and speaking in tongues, he sounds like Elvis on an udon binge.) And yet the absurdist bloodshed, anime-to-painted-backdrop stylization and jarring tone shifts belong to no other director, as do the stretches of tedium between outrages. Still, the widescreen framing and saturated color make this one of Miike’s most visually impressive features. (Nuart) (Jim Ridley)

SURFER, DUDE Shot on a shoestring in less than 30 days, S.R. Bindler’s crushingly unfunny comedy is rife with the rough edges of quick shoots but without even the saving grace of a little nervous energy. A shapeless slog with virtually no tale to chase, Surfer, Dude (the coma foreshadows what passes here for clever) amounts to little more than another showcase for the buff, bronzed torso of Matthew McConaughey, who spends the entire movie shirtless (and occasionally pantsless) as surfing legend Steve Addington, an old-school Malibu stoner being pressured to compromise his vaguely defined values by participating in a reality TV show. Woody Harrelson, Willie Nelson and Scott Glenn drift through the proceedings on clouds of billowing cannabis smoke. Weed and waves are the broadly sketched characters’ main topics of conversation. Gratuitous shots of beach bimbos comparing breast implants abound. But there are also, inexplicably, clumsy suggestions that the filmmakers might actually think they have something meaningful to say about So-Cal surf culture. The super 16mm camerawork self-consciously recalls the glory days of Bruce Brown, but there’s not much fun in watching anyone ride the wild surf here, and as Addington morphs into a bland, bargain-basement Siddhartha during a long, pointless breakdown, even the reality TV angle (a road previously traveled by McConaughey and Harrelson to marginally better effect in EDtv) is all but forgotten. Lacking even the train-wreck appeal of a brainless stoner comedy like Half-Baked, Surfer, Dude is a numbing experience at just 89 minutes. (Selected theaters) (Lance Goldenberg)

Strand Releasing

A Secret

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More About

• Nathaniel Kahn
• Andrew Neel
• Alan Ball
• Table Tennis
• Movie Comedies

GO TIRED OF KISSING FROGS From the style and energy of its first images, in which the heroine raids her own refrigerator at high speed, in order to feed the party guests in her Mexico City flat, Tired of Kissing Frogs competes, enjoyably, with the pop-tune rhythms and pratfall-sexiness of many Hollywood romantic comedies. When designer Martha (Ana Serradilla), spying à la Lucille Ball with the help of her psychotherapist friend Andi (Anna Layevska), catches her suave lover cheating on her, she decides to become a systematic “man-izer” the way her ex was a womanizer. She consults an internet dating service, “tired-of-kissing-frogs.com,” then makes the slapstick rounds of every local male who happens to be good-looking and available, all the while ignoring the cute, bumbling daydreamer (Jose Maria de Tavira) who serves coffee at her uncle’s café and may prove to be her True Love if only she comes to her senses in time — tick-tock, tick-tock. Suspense in any romantic comedy is less about “what happens next?” than about “how unpredictably will it happen?” Writer Joaquin Bissner and director Jorge Colon conjure laughs and surprises, despite the fact that mostly everything moves to such a familiar beat. They also seem to have a phobia about letting the audience catch its breath, even in the interest of allowing us to know the characters more — still, better this than dullness. Scene for scene, Tired of Kissing Frogs benefits from an extremely charming cast, a lived-in, satiric sense of the international culture of Self-Help, and the travelogue novelty of two settings (Mexico City and Barcelona) which, in this hyperkinetic context, feel like exotic twins of New York and Los Angeles. (Citywalk Stadium 19; Monica 4-Plex; Mann Plant 16; Playhouse 7) (F.X. Feeney)

TOWELHEAD American Beauty scribe Alan Ball makes his dreaded feature-directing debut with another tale of suburban purgatory, featuring yet another erotically stifled military man (though pederasty is the forbidden fruit here). Unfolding around the events of the first Gulf War, Towelhead — cringe — follows Jasira (Summer Bishil), a pubescent half-Lebanese girl relocated to live with her father (Peter Macdissi) in Texas sprawl country. Through parental neglect and her own extreme introversion, Jasira’s been left to piece together the sex-ed basics; as the film’s moronic title broadcasts, her journey will be a “provocative” one — and so Ball, who can’t conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that’s his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation. Hemmed in by her father’s Old World patriarchal prohibitions, her own porn-induced body-loathing, and her touchy-feely G.I. neighbor (Aaron Eckhart), Jasira finds shelter with an “earthy” young Edie Brickell–listening couple (presumably Dukakis voters). Intellectual slackness breeds pictorial indifference in endless gray, underlit rooms strafed with hot splotches of “sunlight” suggesting a perpetual supernova outdoors. That our heroine’s first menstruation is announced by a low-angle shot through the gore-sullied panties will tell you everything you need to know about that famous Alan Ball touch. (ArcLight Hollywood; The Landmark) (Nick Pinkerton)