Movie Reviews: City of Ember, Quarantine, Rocknrolla

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 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 Withthe 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  ASHES OF TIME REDUX Cynics make the worst romantics; they should know better, they know they should know better, and they’d die if you knew better. Forced underground by heartbreak, a cynic’s romantic nature can flourish into a sort of private dementia. You can take my weary word for it, or you can take Wong Kar Wai’s, whose new/old film, Ashes of Time Redux, gorgeously sets up the paradox he has returned to throughout his career — romantic memory as both scourge and succor. Wong began shooting Ashes of Time in 1992; he made his breakthrough film, Chung King Express, while still wrestling Ashes to the ground in post-production. Ashes received only a smattering of distribution and has been little-seen in the U.S. That should change with Redux, a refurbishment of the original. Structured over five seasons taken from the Chinese almanac, Redux’s touchstone is Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), an assassin-for-hire who runs a drifter hotel in East Buddha Nowhere while refusing to pine for the woman (Maggie Cheung) who married his brother. “The root of man’s problems is memory,” Ouyang says, a theory taken up by various barefoot, blind, lovesick men and berserk, devoted, defeated women. In a move that would become his trademark, Wong rejects the happy ending for the almost ecstatically sad, making your heart soar even as he tells you, essentially, that it’s impossible, all of it — that it’ll never work. (ImaginAsian Center, Playhouse 7, Sunset 5) (Michelle Orange)

City of Ember

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More About

• David Zucker
• Talento de Barrio
• Hollywood
• Justin Dillon
• Hip-Hop and Rap

 
GO  BREAKFAST WITH SCOT Like a diva in training, 11-year-old Scot (Noah Bernett), spells his name with one “t,” wears a feather boa, and isn’t shy about kissing boys at school. None of this amuses his uptight new guardian, Eric (Tom Cavanagh), a professional hockey player turned sportscaster who’s gay but in the closet — despite having lived for years with a lawyer named Sam (Ben Shenkman) — and is the only relative who can take in the newly orphaned Scot. In this often quite funny adaptation of Michael Downing’s 1999 novel, screenwriter Sean Reycraft and director Laurie Lynd move the action from Massachusetts to Canada and accentuate Eric’s machismo, which gives his discomfort over Scot’s tendency to wear belts with puppy decals an added edge. Cavanagh, best known for the TV show Ed, is terrific, as is young Bernett, who steals the show without hogging it. The odd man out is Shenkman, whose character never gets a bonding scene of his own, and instead is made to stand dutifully by as his partner corners the kid’s love, even during the big let’s-be-a-family finale. Ignoring half of the parental unit is a disconcerting misstep in an otherwise sharp little movie. (Sunset 5) (Chuck Wilson)

 
CALL + RESPONSE Somebody’s got to pick up where Bono left off, right? A Bay Area musician and Live Aid baby, Justin Dillon recently discovered human trafficking, then decided to make a movie about it. Performance excerpts from the “Concert to End Slavery” (sure to be a companion music DVD) are annoyingly interspersed with Dillon’s earnest efforts at self-education. Madeleine Albright, The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof and other experts give him a tutorial on the millions of women and children who are pressed into service as prostitutes, child soldiers and agricultural workers. Cornel West (gah!) explains slavery and the blues. Onscreen graphics, palsied camera work and those damn music clips (Matisyahu, Moby, etc.) make this more MTV than Frontline, but Dillon knows his audience was weaned on basic cable. The result is like American Idol meets C.A.R.E. infomercial. Concerned celebrity-activists Ashley Judd, Daryl Hannah and Julia Ormond testify to the horrors of trafficking and even visit a few brothels in Thailand and India. If you don’t read the papers, this will be shocking and new. That the Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels was there first, and to better effect, doesn’t deter Dillon’s enthusiastic advocacy for “open-source activism.” His call is commendable if not compelling. “I don’t want to wear someone else’s despair,” Judd tells him about third-world garment manufacturing. Hey, we should put that on a T-shirt! Oh, wait ... (Sunset 5) (Brian Miller)