Movie reviews: House, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Also, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

GO SOUL MEN In Soul Men, actor-comedian Bernie Mac, who passed away in August, plays Floyd Henderson, a present-day car-wash mogul who, back in the 1970s, was an R&B backup singer alongside a fellow named Louis Hinds (Samuel L. Jackson). One day, their front man, Marcus Hooks (John Legend), took off on his own, becoming a funk-soul god, leaving Floyd and Louis to part as bitter enemies. Twenty years later, Floyd bursts into Louis’s fleabag L.A. apartment with a plan for the two men to drive to New York and perform at a tribute show for Marcus, whose sudden death hasn’t exactly wrecked his former bandmates. “I’m cryin’ the tears of a motherfuckin’ clown,” Louis declares, and kicks Floyd out. But soon enough, the two are headed cross-country in an El Dorado convertible, bickering, getting stranded and eventually staging their old act in dive bars. While their singing voices are ragged, the old-school hand gestures and side-shuffle footwork is mighty fine. The film dulls out in the home stretch, as screenwriters Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone employ increasingly silly side turns to delay Floyd and Louis’s arrival in New York. It could be said, too, that the visual style of director Malcolm Lee (Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins) rarely matches the energy of his performers, but no matter: Mac and Jackson carry the show — particularly Mac, at his crackly, cranky best here. As swan songs go, Soul Men is pretty sweet. For the full version of this review, go to www.laweekly.com/movies. (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)

STRANDED: I’VE COME FROM A PLANE THAT CRASHED ON THE MOUNTAINSStranded is that rare movie — less complex and interesting than its press kit. In revisiting the story of the Uruguayan soccer team that crashed in the Andes in 1972 and survived via pragmatic cannibalism, director Gonzalo Arijon finds himself simultaneously profiling and valorizing many of his own childhood friends. Unfortunately, that makes for an overly sympathetic approach that allows people with a set narrative to reiterate key talking points. At a windy two-plus hours, most of Stranded deals with the broadest outlines of the horrific ordeal; much time is devoted to the survivors’ vague musings on what their microsociety says about civilization, fate, et al. Was their mountain commune really a lab experiment for rewriting the social contract? Probably not, but Arijon does a remarkably poor job of delving into the specifics. The film’s length may well be intended to mirror the 72-day ordeal, but it’s relentlessly wearing and lacking in nutritive fiber. You won’t find, for example, the grizzly tidbit about the survivors eating human flesh in front of the rescue team and press when their saviors themselves ran out of powdered soup. Arijon alternates between Kevin Macdonald re-creations on faux-grainy 16mm footage and interviews on the mountain; neither approach works especially well. (Nuart) (Vadim Rizov)

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• Lisa Ray
• Abu Raed
• Hollywood
• Bernie Mac
• Ryan Harper

THE TRUTH OF NANKING Japanese right-winger Satoru Mizushima’s propagandist clunker The Truth of Nanking can’t even get the facts straight about itself. Trumpeted as a debunking of the Axis power’s infamous 1937-38 atrocities, the two-and-half-hour film is actually dominated by a mawkish, stagy re-enactment of the final moments of seven convicted war criminals (Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and friends). Barrages of period footage interrupt at intervals to accompany spurious assertions that hundreds of thousands of civilians were not killed and/or raped after Japan’s invasion of China’s then-nationalist capital. (Sample caption: “Please note peaceful expressions on their faces.”) The film therefore pulls off the nasty double feat of denying horrific events and making the viewer party to a lengthy vigil alongside the high command ultimately responsible, who are respectfully and methodically dramatized reciting prayers and poems before their internationally sanctioned hangings. That is, of course, the point for Japanese nationalists smarting over perceived slights to war dead of any stripe. (On a related front, Li Ying’s recent documentary Yasukuni, about an embattled shrine, provides an antidote to the likes of Truth.) Though part of an announced series concocted to rebut last year’s Nanking, the film’s one-week, single-theater yowl will probably soon be forgotten amidst an assortment of Hollywood projects on the subject currently in development. (Grande 4-Plex) (Nicolas Rapold)

THE WORLD UNSEEN Hard to imagine a milder, more tension-free movie about apartheid South Africa than this picture-postcard lesbian almost-romance set in the East Indian immigrant community of Capetown in 1952. It’s especially disappointing, as there’s great promise in the casting. Some of the choked-off, conflicted line readings of Lisa Ray (Water), who plays an all-but-sequestered housewife both exhilarated and terrified by her unexpected responses to a local café owner, are uncannily precise. Ray’s Miriam has the physique and soft features of a pliant sex object, but she’s also tall and strong-looking, with flashes of stubbornness beneath the surface. For the forthright Amina (Sheetal Sheth), a feminist avant le temps, who wears “trousers” and manly floppy hats, Miriam is a femme fantasy figure, an imprisoned domestic goddess ripe for liberation. The issues are clearly defined. What’s missing is a sense of urgency, even in what should be the ultimate emotion-heightening pressure cooker — a society where every unsanctioned association could be a criminal offense. Writer-director Shamin Sarif, who adapted her own novel, may be so intimately aware of every intended nuance that she took them for granted, understated them to a fault. Everything in The World Unseen is discreetly muted: The images are picturesque and orderly, and composer Shigeru Umebayashi bathes them in Out of Africa syrup. Lisa Ray is a magnificent actress, but she’s still waiting for her first great role. (Music Hall) (David Chute)