Movie Reviews: Dark Streets, Nothing Like the Holidays, Timecrimes

WAITING IN BEIJING It would be a mercy to avoid going into detail about this one, a vanity project by a Chinese businessman, the cinematic equivalent of a hopeless self-published novel. How do you review something that’s barely even a movie? We could do it, but like kicking a one-legged dog, it would make us hate ourselves. The setting is Beijing in the early 1990s (thinks SARS and the first Gulf war), a weirdly globalized and de-natured Beijing in which everyone speaks English and earns a New Beetle and Ikea lifestyle working for a giant American corporation. The characters are sealed off from the day-to-day life of the city. They live and work in what appear to be furniture showrooms, spotlessly clean and containing no personal possessions, with occasional day trips to familiar tourist locales. Most of these sharply dressed English speakers eventually make a beeline for the 66 Club, where George (Kelly Nyks), an inexpressive big lug of an American bartender, pines handsomely for his Iraqi fiancée, who has been called home to the war zone. Meanwhile, the Chinese woman George considers his best friend (Song Li Ching) is beginning to fall in love with him. This ancient storyline, the one about the mournful prince (of industry, in this case) living incognito among the commoners, harks back to the dawn of melodrama — a ploy that could have been tasty if served with a dash of irony, which but is rendered flat and flavorless by the painfully earnest approach of writer-producer-director Alan Zhang. The first-time auteur is described in the press material as “a successful Chinese entrepreneur [who] does not speak or write English.” Honestly, we never would have guessed. (Grande 4-Plex) (David Chute)

GO  WERE THE WORLD MINE Tom Gustafson’s queer-centric take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream teeters between banal conceptualizing and inspired execution. When high school homo and jock punching bag Timothy (Tanner Cohen) is cast as Puck in his all-boys school’s production of Midsummer, he stumbles upon a love potion that causes life to imitate art, creating a queer upheaval in his small town. Beneath a trite imagining of what would happen if raging homophobes suddenly turned gay (most, apparently, would become mincing stereotypes), the film articulates some age-old but still pressing truths about bigotry (Prop. 8, hello), social justice and romantic longing. Gustafson pulls uniformly wonderful performances from his cast, especially Cohen and Judy McLane, as the boy’s bewildered mom, struggling between her own homophobia and her love for her son. The musical numbers, filled with old-fashioned melodic singing, and choreography that wittily references classical Hollywood musicals, put the prefab High School Musical series to shame. When the film narrows its focus from big questions addressed through overly broad strokes and instead zooms in on one-on-one interactions and the emotional power of a well-made musical sequence, it taps into a winning sweetness and poignancy. (Sunset 5) (Ernest Hardy)

$9.99: Savings and loan crisis

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WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU Cuddly recidivism marked Mark Ruffalo’s first attention-getting role in You Can Count on Me, squirming within family ties and into our hearts. In the equally ill-titled What Doesn’t Kill You, he’s a backsliding Southie hood, passing his wife and angelic kids on the way out to petty shakedowns. Like his desperately zealous partner, Paulie (Ethan Hawke), Brian (Ruffalo) has outgrown his life but with nothing to replace it. Ex-tough Brian Goodman, who plays their local crime boss, directs his own screenplayed memories, double-timing through the duo’s gambits and their prison stint into Brian’s recovery trudge from coke. For a “before” stage of rhinolike oblivion, Ruffalo draws on his knack for summoning an incongruous brooding bulk from within, and the result almost sucks the air from Hawke’s rangy routine of nerves and sinewy smiles. In the straight-and-narrow struggle postclink, Ruffalo lacks rapport with Amanda Peet, as the long-suffering wife. (Donnie Wahlberg, who co-wrote the script, also drives by now and again as an on-to-you sergeant.) Goodman’s movie tends to limp along, but he naturally gets Boston in winter and steers clear of Gone Baby Gone grotesques: An opening helicopter shot centers on a resolutely boring apartment building. (Mann Chinese 6; Majestic Crest) (Nicolas Rapold)

GO  WHILE SHE WAS OUT The emotionally bruised air that’s frequently made Kim Basinger tabloid fodder is also a defining characteristic of her acting style. Writer-director Susan Montford, adapting Edward Bryant’s short story, exploits (in the best sense) Basinger’s wafting fragility and unleashes its latent fury, using the latter quality to drive this surprisingly enjoyable female revenge tale. Della (Basinger) is a doting, harried mom and an easy target for her abusive, faded-jock husband (Craig Sheffer) in their gated-community home. While doing last-minute Christmas shopping, Della unwittingly makes herself another target — this time for a laughably check-listed, multi-culti band of thugs (Asian? Here! Latino? Here! Afro-Am? Here!), led by the scruffy, deranged Chuckie (Lukas Haas). Making a series of the foolish choices upon which these types of movies hang, Della redeems herself, as she battles the miscreants in an isolated forest setting. Montford circumvents cliché by filling the film with witty asides, and expertly milks tension from such mundane moments as Della’s search for cigarettes in a glove compartment. The film, executive-produced by Guillermo del Toro, hinges on a first-rate performance by Basinger, who imbues Della with a fire that makes the film’s basic thesis — both the domestic sphere and the larger world are dangerous places for women — seem something more than boilerplate. (AMC Marina Marketplace; AMC Burbank Town Center) (Ernest Hardy)