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

GO  PERESTROIKA On the evidence of his new movie, Slava Tsukerman, who made the 1982 cult movie Liquid Sky, would make a brilliantly entertaining dinner guest. The Russian writer-director, who thrives on confusion, has emptied the contents of his very busy head and heart into this crowded, talky but immensely likable movie about almost everything in a rapidly changing, uncertain postperestroika world. Tsukerman’s test case for this modest ontological inquiry is a post-Soviet alter ego named Sasha Greenberg, played strong and silent by Sam Robards, who returns in 1992 to his beloved Moscow from self-imposed exile to take in the shock of the new. An astrophysicist who left Russia a traitor and returns a hero, poor Sasha is torn between America and Russia, between science and morality, and between the four satellite women (Ally Sheedy, snippy as ever, plays his wife) who complicate his inner life. Adding to the overstuffed ambiance is a blithely experimental way with form that will keep you busy separating past from present, as Tsukerman ruefully notes the durability of Russian anti-Semitism with or without regime change. His aphoristic screenplay (“Sometimes the price of freedom is collapse”) may sometimes gild the lily, but the amused tenderness with which he treats his hero — if that’s the word for such a porous fellow — and every other blitzed soul in his orbit is completely beguiling. (Sunset 5)(Ella Taylor)

SIN NOMBRE Before setting pen to paper, Sin Nombre writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga purportedly rode the rails in the company of real illegal immigrants traveling from Mexico to the U.S. But from the looks of it, he spent even more time studying Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s slicked-up slum porn City of God: diminutive kids with guns — check; carefully lit and art-directed shantytowns — check; doomed teen romance — yep, that too. In fairness, Fukunaga’s film isn’t quite as ostentatiously vulgar as Meirelles’: Its loftier aspirations are obvious from the opening shot of El Casper (Edgar Flores), a young initiate in the fact-based Mara Salvatrucha gang, staring fixedly at a photo enlargement of a leafy wooded landscape — a signal flare (along with his teardrop tattoo) that he’s really a soulful poet-dreamer trapped in a violent existence. After his girlfriend is raped and murdered by the gang’s more elaborately tattooed leader, Casper makes a break for it, hopping the same U.S.-bound freight train on which Honduran teen Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and her father are heading to the promised land. Meanwhile, Casper’s best friend, Smiley (pint-sized Kristian Ferrer), is dispatched to track the fugitive down — hmmm, do you think these two amigos will find their personal loyalty tested by obeisance to La Mara? Lushly photographed and meticulously sound-designed, Sin Nombre is visceral without being vital, researched without ever seeming lived-in. The best that can be said is that it’s a more honest film on the subject of immigration than the recent Crossing Over — but then again, so is Beverly Hills Chihuahua. (ArcLight Hollywood; The Landmark; Monica 4-Plex) (Scott Foundas)

Perestroika

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SUPER CAPERS The geeks who came of age thrilling to blockbusters like the original Star Wars trilogy and Back to the Future are settling into contented adulthood and the joys of child-rearing. But just as George Lucas recently unleashed The Clone Wars as a way to lure his fans’ progeny into his lair, so too does writer-director Ray Griggs’ juvenile Super Capers target the next generation, hoping that kids will be interested in a witless send-up of pop-culture detritus like light sabers, Batmobiles and “Hasta la vista, baby.” The film concerns Ed Gruberman (Justin Whalin), a mild-mannered do-gooder with dreams of being a superhero despite his lack of any discernible powers, who befriends a group of burgeoning caped crusaders. In the revolting tradition of Superhero Movie and Fanboys, Super Capers isn’t so much a filmed entertainment as it is a patchwork of “Hey, remember this movie?” references separated by plot machinations so torturous you start to long for the mind-numbing familiarity of the parody sequences. Wielding dopey humor and a vaguely pro-Christian message, Griggs seeks to create a family-friendly kid’s film that pays homage to the comic-book and sci-fi movies of his childhood. But considering how moldy its satirical targets are, Super Capers will probably just convince young people that what their parents loved sucks. (AMC Broadway; Mann Chinese 6) (Tim Grierson)

GO  TOKYO! Does anyone remember Japan? The tri-part Tokyo! revisits the Land of the Lost Decade — or at least its largest city — courtesy of tourist filmmakers Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, plus South Korean neighbor Bong Joon-Ho. Mutants abound as each episode trips the light fantastic. Gondry’s opening “Interior Design” is a vaguely Jarmuschian hipster entertainment about an aspiring filmmaker and his slacker girlfriend, who arrive in Tokyo and immediately succumb to the inexplicable hassles of metropolitan life — with the girlfriend making the more radical adaptation. “Interior Design” evokes Gondry’s pet distinction between animate and inanimate in Japanese terms; “Merde,” the first Carax film of the 21st century, is a more confrontational riff on the most celebrated of Japanese monsters. Carax regular Denis Lavant emerges from a Tokyo manhole — barefoot and green-clad, with one milky eye and a crooked red beard — and, accompanied by a pastiche of Akira Ifukube’s Gojira score, staggers through the garish yet orderly Ginza, grabbing, eating, smoking, and licking, alarming pedestrians (when they’re not documenting his antics on their cell phones). Dubbed the “Creature From the Sewer” by deadpan newsreaders who link him to al Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, and Siberian witchcraft, this chaotic eruption is shown to embody Japan’s historical repressed, as well as Europe’s guilty conscience. The creature discovers a subterranean memorial to the Heroes of Nanking and launches an even more destructive attack; captured and put on trial, he’s defended by a French lawyer with a matching milky eye, who translates the creature’s squeaky-voice nattering about his god. As much a form of performance art as a movie, “Merde” offers the funniest urban rampage since Bong’s The Host. Bong’s own “Shaking Tokyo” is a quieter monster movie that addresses hikikomori, a specifically Japanese form of agoraphobia in which a young person retreats into his or her room, sometimes for years. A love story (possibly involving a robot), it’s the anthology’s least flashy filmmaking, but the truest to its location — lugubrious, a bit sentimental, and hopeful that Japan will again emerge from its shell. (Nuart) (J. Hoberman)