Movie Reviews: The Great Buck Howard, Perestroika, Knowing, Sin Nombre

GO  EXPLICIT ILLS A tender ensemble slice of inner-city Philly life to wash out the foul taste of Crossing Over’s far more explicit ills, The Hottest State star Mark Webber’s directorial debut is also, not surprisingly, stronger than either of Ethan Hawke’s stints behind the camera. Having spent time squatting while being raised by a single mom, Webber has been an outspoken activist against urban poverty, thus his all-star indie cast tends to serve as collective mouthpiece for his lefty politics. The lived-in performances include Lou Taylor Pucci as the artist who has to sell pot to survive, Paul Dano as a struggling actor battling the melancholia of an unhelpful world, Rosario Dawson as the working-class mother of a young asthmatic (newcomer Francisco Burgos, a tad too precocious for his own good), and Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter as Jimmy Fallon’s new house-band emcee — but also, a vegan entrepreneur. Executive-produced by Jim Jarmusch and lensed with luminous saturation by Patrice Lucien Cochet, the film is confidently polished, and thankfully more sweet-tempered than preachy, given that every narrative thread has an underlying theme of social injustice. As it leads up to a neighborhood-wide rally that brings every character together, it’s a shame that Webber (in a marching cameo) has already surrendered his drama over to a last-act tragedy (poverty’s fault, of course). For that, I too protest. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)

Perestroika

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GO  THE GREAT BUCK HOWARD No one does raging unlovability quite like John Malkovich, who’s a total gas when he drops the bombast that often bogs down his more serious roles. Not that Buck Howard, the once-great mentalist now playing to half-empty theaters in Hicksville, lacks for pathos — or for glory. His lounge act is excruciating, his standup terrible, but his one gift, locating his paycheck in the clothing of an audience member, has never let him down — until now, it goes without saying. Based on a magician known to writer-director Sean McGinly, this loudly dressed, insecure blowhard with a pumping handshake and severe anger-management problems may also be an ambivalent tribute to Jerry Lewis. Either way, Malkovich swallows up the screen, and when he’s out of frame, the movie feels slack and slow. Hobbled by lack of definition, Buck’s assistant and McGinly’s alter ego, Troy (Colin Hanks), a law school dropout with dreams of writing, comes across as pallid and passionless, while the talents of Emily Blunt as a go-getting publicist and Steve Zahn as a small-town fan go wretchedly to waste. While it laments our decaying faith in magic and mystery, The Great Buck Howard is rarely mawkish. McGinly sheds no tears for this clown, and he makes a beguiling case for following your bliss all the way to Bakersfield, if that’s where it lies. (The Landmark; Sunset 5; Playhouse 7) (Ella Taylor)

KNOWING Carefully coded so as not to scare away secular audiences who just wanna see stuff blow up, this lugubrious thriller is still the closest Hollywood has come to addressing the question: What would a Christian Apocalypse movie look like with a big budget, a talented director, and star power of higher wattage than a discount Baldwin brother? Here comes the answer: like a glum hybrid of the Final Destination movies, an Irwin Allen disaster bash, and the kitschiest parts of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. Nicolas Cage plays a widowed scientist who discovers that the time capsule his kid brought home from school is actually a numerically coded map to 50 years of calamities — essentially prophecy from the Book of the Number 23. The template has changed little since the Mark IV Rapture shockers and Ron Ormond Christploitation epics that traumatized church youth groups in the 1970s: Disbelievers will get face time with Revelation, undergo a foxhole conversion, realize their pastor father was right all along, etc. — but by then, it’ll be too late. What has changed significantly is the expense of the scare tactics. I, Robot director Alex Proyas, helming a project once meant for Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly, withholds and deploys his show-stopping CG catastrophes with unseemly zeal: It’s hard to take the movie’s high-minded talk about determinism seriously with p.o.v. shots of human bugs splattering on a subway windshield. By the time winged messengers arrive from on high, one longs for the hardheaded heresy of Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)

MISS MARCH “That’s four years’ worth of poop,” a doctor remarks when Eugene (Zach Cregger) — who wakes up from a coma after his best friend, Tucker (Trevor Moore), wallops him with a baseball bat, only to discover that his virginal highschool sweetheart is now a Playboy centerfold — voids his bowels. Miss March, which Whitest Kids U’ Know Cregger and Moore also co-wrote and co-directed, sprays like an exploding colostomy bag for 89 minutes. Only a moron would expect a dude road-trip-sex comedy to be more than an aggressive expression of male sexual anxiety. But really, when did women become such vile creatures that they must be stabbed in the face with a fork after a botched blowjob, become near roadkill, and drink dog pee (and love it!)? To make assholes respect you, ladies, try this: Become a Bunny to pay your vegetable boyfriend’s medical bills while saving yourself to have sex with him, or a Slavic lesbian who ingeniously transforms a Perrier bottle into a dildo. Hugh Hefner shows up to give an addled lecture after Eugene and Tucker make it to the Playboy Mansion, and you think: Wasn’t it just last summer that he so sweetly played himself in The House Bunny? (Citywide) (Melissa Anderson)