Movie Reviews: Choke, August Evening, Eagle Eye, Nights in Rodanthe

THE AMAZING TRUTH ABOUT QUEEN RAQUELA The amazing truth about Queen Raquela is that she’s constructed from clichés, infected by media-borne dictates of insipid faggotry that have, unfortunately, circled the globe and made near-insufferable creatures out of too many queers. The not-quite-amazing truth about this “documentary” is that it’s actually mildly engrossing, building to a final-act clash between First and Third worlds that is riveting and highly uncomfortable to watch. The quotation marks around “documentary” are because writer-director Olaf de Fleur Johannesson employs dramatic re-creations and staged moments in the telling of the real-life story of his subject, Raquela, a Filipina lady-boy who, playing herself in the film, pines for Europe, a white knight and real womanhood. Anyone who’s seen any of the endless documentaries on Third World trannys can tick off the checklist of items found here: hooking to make a living; repeated cycles of disappointment at the hands of “real” men who ply fantasies then flee payoff; vapid bitchiness passed off as queer wit; really bad plastic surgery. It’s a bleak, often grim, fairy tale. But there are powerful moments of insight, too, as when, explaining in voice-over why she prefers unsafe sex, Raquela states that the feel of the unsheathed dick inside her is “one way to make us feel like women.” (Regent Showcase) (Ernest Hardy)

GO  AUGUST EVENING There are stories that depict how resilient family bonds are in times of duress, and those that reject such rosy ideals in order to show how tenuous even blood relationships can be, First-timer Chris Eska’s Spanish-language drama (and Independent Spirit Award winner for Best Feature Under $500,000) quietly and bittersweetly validates both notions. In the rural southern Texas of some long-lost Terrence Malick film (where it’s always magic hour!), graying paterfamilias and illegal farm worker Jaime (Pedro Castaneda) loses his wife, then his job, provoking him to hop a bus with his widowed daughter-in-law, Lupe (Veronica Loren), to see his surviving kids in San Antonio. Passed off between the proud, working-class son who never told him about his grandchild and the annoyed, suburban daughter who hooked up with a white man, Jaime’s only security is Lupe, a guarded introvert who feels overly pressured to remarry by a family she’s not even related to. Perhaps Eska didn’t have to write all of his characters into overlapping crossroads of crisis, but he’s more nuanced than overt, and his cast (especially Loren and the nonprofessional Castaneda) sells it. We see exactly how the older and younger generations let each other down as their time together ticks slowly away — and boy, does it ever: Eska’s visual digressions are lyrical in the moment (think early David Gordon Green) but ultimately indulgent at more than two hours. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)

 
BATTLE IN SEATTLE Written and directed by Stuart Townsend, Battle in Seattle reanimates the recent past — namely the late-1999 street actions that, as the largest organized protest of the Clinton era, successfully shut down the World Trade Organization’s “Millennium” round of negotiations. While the rest of the developed world quaked in fear of the dreaded Y2K “virus,” tens of thousands of costumed demonstrators danced in the streets of downtown Seattle. Billed the “Battle in Seattle” before it even happened, this was the first Internet protest in history, as someone explains in the movie with reference to the demonstrators’ uncanny ability to coordinate blockage of the city’s pressure points. For his part, Townsend is rather more labored in orchestrating the ensemble. His protagonists are taken from all sides of the event, including glamorous demonstrators of various persuasions (notably OutKast’s André Benjamin), a police officer (Woody Harrelson) and his pregnant wife (Charlize Theron), a feisty TV-news reporter (Connie Nielsen), and Seattle’s beleaguered mayor (Ray Liotta). Their intentions, like Townsend’s, are mostly good, but Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed to achieve pure tabloid hysteria. In that sense, it’s true to the actual event. The impression the movie leaves is less what the French activist Yves Frémion termed an “orgasm of history” than a hiccup. The world held its breath and moved on. (The Landmark) (J. Hoberman)

 
CALLBACK: THE UNMAKING OF BLOODSTAIN Whoever came up with the phrase “write what you know” probably never realized just how many aspiring actors would take it way too much to heart, resulting in an unending stream of low-budget movies in which relatively unknown actors play really annoying unknown actors looking for work. Thankfully, in Callback, some of them end up dead or severely injured, which goes a long way toward winning back some audience goodwill. Peter (Johnny Moreno) is a pretentious would-be star who likes to overdo it on the warm-up exercises, questions about his motivation, and so forth; Carl (Michael DeGood) is a ­pathetic excuse for a criminal whose producer uncle gives him the chance to become an equally pathetic excuse for a thespian; and Tony (Jeff Parise) is a recently released mental patient who’s like Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor in reverse — once he goes off his meds, he quits being a sad schlub and becomes a handsome devil with a dark streak (and a fake Latino accent). All three awkwardly cross paths before being cast in the same film, and once they figure out the connections, things get dangerous. Director Eric M. Wolfson handles the tension of the climactic sequences deftly and manages some earlier nonlinear bits effectively too ... it’s just that the story itself isn’t that interesting, and the cast looks way too clean and made-up to be living in their sleazy surroundings. (Sunset 5) (Luke Y. Thompson)