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GO PRAY THE DEVIL BACK TO HELL Some political documentaries suffer from overselling the urgency of their agenda, but director Gini Reticker’s Pray the Devil Back to Hell nicely underplays the significance of its subject — the 2003 nonviolent protest by thousands of Liberian women, which brought down warlord president Charles Taylor. Focusing on interviews with several of the movement’s leaders, Reticker mixes in archival footage while explaining how these women, of Christian and Muslim backgrounds, rallied to demand the end of the bloody civil war waged between Taylor’s regime (with its child armies) and the country’s rebel factions. On camera, the organizers are largely unremarkable, and Reticker smartly refrains from turning Devil into a canonization or (worse) a simplistic you-go-girl celebration of calm feminine strength trumping brutal masculine aggression. Instead, the film’s slightly dry detailing of the major incidents that led to Taylor’s eventual exile complements the protestors’ impassioned but unshowy resolve to build momentum for their examples of defiance. Reticker offers perhaps a too-narrow focus on this historical moment, but Pray the Devil Back to Hell remembers the golden rule of moviemaking — rather than tell, it shows, and what it shows is quietly affecting. (Music Hall) (Tim Grierson)
RYAN AND SEAN’S NOT SO EXCELLENT ADVENTURE Who are these idiots? Japanese-American teens Ryan Higa and Sean Fujiyoshi became YouTube sensations through a series of silly parody videos, which they have parlayed into an excruciatingly unfunny movie starring themselves, in which they venture from Hawaii to Hollywood trying to become the next big thing. Though directed by Richard Van Vleet and written by Brian Zemrak, Ryan and Sean’s Not So Excellent Adventure is really just a series of lazy, point-and-shoot vignettes, as our heroes fart around Tinseltown (literally), mocking every obvious El Lay archetype when they’re not making spoofed-to-death references to Brokeback Mountain and There Will Be Blood. As performers, Higa and Fujiyoshi’s only strength is their utter faith in their adorableness — no matter how many terrible jokes they make about poop or little people, they just keep grinning. Ryan and Sean’s could inspire a dissertation on the corroding effect that bite-sized Web entertainment has had on narrative cinema, especially comedies — but that would be putting more thought into the movie than the filmmakers did. After each Hollywood phony they meet, Ryan and Sean discuss whether they really want to become stars. That’s probably not a legitimate worry, fellas. (Downtown Independent) (Tim Grierson)
