Film Reviews: Antarctica, The First Basket

FADED MEMORIES Okay, is somebody fucking with me here? One 16-year-old Anne-Sophie’s feature debut, Faded Memories is a Malibu-set Little Girl Lost soap operetta that seems to have cost a few bucks to make, and I simply cannot grasp how or why (was that a helicopter shot!?). If the resulting work fell anywhere between Rimbaud and the Shaggs on the ingrown-teenage-weirdness scale, I’d overlook my suspicions of mollycoddling parental underwriting, but Faded Memories is aNoBoDy UnDeRsTaNdZ indulgence reflecting an unexamined and seriously limited worldview. The director casts herself as a troubled teen hauled all over creation by a peripatetic slut aunt (white-trash burlesque — ever seen a drunk open a screw-off cap with their teeth?) After dallying with some ponytailed mong, our heroine spirals toward a breakdown as unconvincingly histrionic as any adolescent “suicide attempt” on Tylenol PM. Anne-Sophie’s MySpace lists her influences as “European cinema,” which may be why her dialogue reads like hastily translated subtitles. Some of the lovers’ babble, however, achieves a high-grade inanity (e.g., “I kind of wish I was a plane, but then I don’t, ’cuz then I wouldn’t be able to think”). If this was secretly intended as some kind of satire, it’s brilliant. (Town Center 5) (Nick Pinkerton)

 GO THE FIRST BASKET Though hardly the first testament to Jewish physicality, which is as old as Samson, David Vyorst’s clear-eyed, jaunty documentary briskly walks us through the history of American Jews in basketball, a sport many believe belonged to blacks and very tall white goyim. Along with boxing, the low-cost sport served as a major avenue of upward mobility and cultural assimilation for working-class Jewish immigrants, beginning with the Settlement House teams on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century and progressing through the professional leagues all the way to the NBA. Narrated by actor Peter Riegert, with period footage and testimony from sports historians and wonderful old gents in New York and Florida (including the late, irrepressibly belligerent Red Auerbach) who once played or coached, The First Basket is more than a triumphalist screw you to those who think Jews don’t play sports. Vyorst skirts neither the anti-Semitism that attended Jewish success in basketball (one journalist blithely concluded in print that it was the ideal sport for Jewish trickery and deceit) nor the culpability of Jews and blacks in the point-shaving scandals that rocked City College and other urban universities. With success and suburbanization, Jews drifted away from this quintessentially inner-city sport, and today, Jews play pro basketball mainly in Israel, where the sport is “huge.” But, as one commentator from within the tribe gleefully notes, basketball, like crime and entertainment, was one of the easiest ways for a Jew to become an American. (Music Hall; Town Center 5; Fallbrook 7) (Ella Taylor)

Antarctica

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More About

• Yair Hochner
• Eliza Dushku
• Jean-Claude Van Damme
• Gini Reticker
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

HOUSE A few months ago, Lionsgate issued for Saw V a trailer that tried to fake out viewers into thinking they were watching an ad for a Christian film. (Sample ad copy: “His gift is life.”) House is sorta like that, but in reverse; neither a reboot of the ’80s horror-comedy franchise nor a big-screen bow for Hugh Laurie’s dyspeptic doctor, it’s a Christian parable dressed up in horror trappings. Director Robby Henson (who previously made the serial-killer genre palatable to the faithful with Thr3e) here throws two dysfunctional couples into an old creepy house, where they confront not just a family of crazy Satanists but more importantly (and boringly, alas) their own emotional traumas. Henson cribs from the best with a scattershot approach that includes references to The Shining, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Dead Zone among many others, but the central problem here is one common to faith-based films: the heroes (Reynaldo Rosales and Heidi Dippold) are both overly bland and poorly cast. Thankfully, the villains include Michael Madsen, Lew Temple and former Devil’s Rejects Bill Moseley and Leslie Easterbrook, who keep things entertaining when they’re onscreen but too often take a back seat to tediously obvious flashback sequences. (Selected theaters) (Luke Y. Thompson)

JCVD JCVD wastes little time working itself into a pretzel. The action begins under the credits with Jean-Claude Van Damme working his way through a crazy urban battlefield accompanied by a Curtis Mayfield blaxploitation ballad. As funny as anything in Tropic Thunder, this exceedingly long take ends with a falling flat (the aging actor having missed his mark) and a tantrum thrown by the movie’s Chinese director. Van Damme is next seen in family court fighting for custody of his daughter as his wife’s attorney enters his DVDs as evidence against him. Suddenly, he’s back in his Belgian hometown, where it’s not long before he finds himself in a Jean-Claude Van Damme situation, held hostage in the local post office. Crowds of fans surge outside while the cops, who have set up a command center in the local video store, think that he’s the hostage-taker. JCVD is all about the hassle of being JCVD, but self-parody effectively precludes self-pity. In the most remarkable sequence, this hitherto limited actor launches into a lengthy soliloquy on his reasons for making this movie, explaining why he took up karate and recounting his feelings about celebrity (as well as America, women and drugs). It’s near risible, but who would dare laugh? Jean-Claude is really crying! What exactly is JCVD? Comedy? Confession? Confusion? No one will ever mistake these backstage shenanigans for Irma Vep. But as a self-regarding expression of masculine angst, it’s a Damme sight more fun than Synecdoche, New York. (Nuart) (J. Hoberman)