Movie Reviews: An American Carol, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Flash of Genius

ALLAH MADE ME FUNNY For the three Muslim-American standup comics showcased in Andrea Kalin’s concert film Allah Made Me Funny, terror is something more than stage fright. Mohammed “Mo” Amer and Azhar Usman make fun of themselves — their wife and mother jokes are universal; much of their ethnic shtick could be Jewish or Italian — and their situation. Amer bounds onstage expressing incredulity: “This is a lot of room for a Palestinian!” The heavily bearded Usman starts immediately with bin Laden jokes. Usman is less cautious than Amer — a good vaudevillian, he rags on Jews and Catholics, as well as South Asians — but he still stops well short of any irreverence. And Allah Made Me Funny is a relative concept: It’s obvious that Amer and Usman labor under the burden of making humor at once insider-cool and outsider-friendly. And it’s hard to finesse “offensive” from a defensive crouch. The most skilled comic of the three is the nation of Islam convert Bryant “Preacher” Moss, who not only evokes Saddam Hussein but goes on to imagine him as a black man in court, arguing with the judge. “The U.S. is scared by two things,” Moss riffs. “I got the best of both worlds.” He’s completely self-referential. Perhaps self-satirizing his faith will be next.(Sunset 5) (J. Hoberman)

Blindness

Jia Zhangke’s Still Life: simply one of the best of the year — or any year that’s likely to come.

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AN AMERICAN CAROL In this astonishingly inept alleged satire from director and co-writer David Zucker — an even more virulent, us-against-them jeremiad than Bill Maher’s Religulous — a bumbling trio of Islamic terrorists set off for America in search of a Hollywood director to help them make a recruitment video for suicide bombers. They find their white knight in slovenly Michigan-born documentary maker Michael Malone (get it?), whose credits include Die, You American Pigs and No Country for Anyone and who, in turn, finds his latent patriotic impulses stirred by visits from the ghosts of JFK, George S. Patton, and George Washington (played, I kid you not, by Jon Voight). The jokes, such as they are, come at the expense of people named “Mohammed” or “Hussein,” vegans, homosexuals and pretty much anyone who dares to question authority. In the most grotesque musical number this side of From Justin to Kelly, a chorus line of leering, pot-smoking academics conflates higher learning with liberal brainwashing, but it’s Zucker who is the real revisionist historian here: equating peace negotiations with Appeasement; likening Moore/Malone (Kevin Farley) to Leni Riefenstahl; invoking the Civil War as an argument against pacifism. There’s been one razor-sharp cultural lampoon at the movies this year — Adam Sandler’s Don’t Mess With the Zohan — although Zucker’s achievement may in fact be more remarkable. His movie’s level of political discourse makes Couric/Palin look like Frost/Nixon.  (Selected theaters) (Scott Foundas)

 
GO  BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA Undersized lapdogs make me grumpy even when they don’t talk, wear pink booties and shop Rodeo Drive. So I came to Beverly Hills Chihuahua with poison pen at the ready — only to be won over by the exuberant charms of Raja Gosnell’s comedy about a snobby, privileged Chihuahua named Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) and her similarly spoiled-rotten 90210 dog ­sitter (Piper Perabo). The twosome grow some backbone when they get lost in the bowels of Baja, where the pooch must be rescued from the clutches of Mexican dogfight wranglers. If the studios are finally going to make their mark on Latino audiences, they could do a lot worse than this wicked satire on Beverly Hills pet excess, with its sharp script, a fun performance by Jamie Lee Curtis as Chloe’s overindulgent owner, and a mostly Spanish-speaking cast that includes Andy Garcia as a clapped-out police dog, Cheech Marin as a cunning rat who’s after Chloe’s Harry Winston collar, and George Lopez as a Chihuahua from the wrong side of the tracks who loves Chloe. This being Disney, wholesome character-building messages abound, but for once they’re freshly spun as cautions against stereotyping both ethnic and canine. And if, having seen Beverly Hills Chihuahua, your children grow up without the desire to turn their pets into idiot fashion accessories or extensions of their own shopaholic fantasies, so much the better. (Citywide) (Ella Taylor)

GO  BLINDNESS The most recent example of bleak chic, Fernando Meirelles’ mostly harrowing adaptation of José Saramago’s international bestseller, Blindness, is unflinch­ing at best and treacly at worst. Set in a gray and metallic modern metropolis (actually São Paolo, mixed in with Montevideo and Toronto), the film, like the novel, opens with a man (Yusuke Iseya) in a car stopped at a traffic light who suddenly loses his vision. Another man (actor-screenwriter Don McKellar), who drives him home and later steals his car, also falls prey to the mysterious “white blindness,” as does the first victim’s doctor (Mark Ruffalo). Soon, the entire human population finds itself engulfed in a milky sightlessness save, inexplicably, one: the doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore). Meirelles, working with his Brazilian cinematographer, César Charlone, establishes the plague’s outbreak with visual flair, evoking the experience of the ivory blindness through blurry and brightly overexposed frames. Like Saramago, Meirelles doesn’t much care about the medical or psychological specifics of blindness, nor is he interested in the fate of any one human but rather humanity as a whole. (There’s obviously a grand metaphor here — people are “blind” — but it’s pretty simplistic.) Panned in Cannes, Blindness has since lost a reportedly ponderous voice-over spoken by Danny Glover, who appears as a sagely old man with a none-too-subtle eye-patch — undoubtedly a wise move. The movie is strongest when it’s not trying to say anything but instead conveying the sheer desperation of its characters. Blindness pulls the viewer into its nightmarish vision and dares us to watch how humankind — at the level of both governments and individuals — fails to cope in times of chaos. And considering the current headlines, maybe that’s insightful enough. (Citywide) (Anthony Kaufman)