Movie Reviews: Alien Trespass, Paris 36, Sugar

THAT GAME OF CHESS It’s unfair to write off every hopeless homemade movie that comes along as a vanity production. Any effort to put a heartfelt statement before the public involves an element of vanity, and only the projects that fall flat get slammed for it. Unfair, and yet, what else can one say when a guy takes six years to self-finance an autobiographical feature film — starring himself? At least Viresh Sinha, who wrote That Game of Chess and stars as Rahul, a computer whiz from Delhi driven to drunken self-destruction by the laissez-faire sexuality of a curvy American blonde (Melanie Malia), decided not to compound his mistake by also directing the picture. This chore he handed off to burly actor/director Raja Bundela (Sirf Romance: Love by Chance), who does his best work in a scene-stealing cliché role as a blowhard Punjabi convenience-store owner. Visually, the film displays no zest or inventiveness whatsoever, though the actors manage, most of the time, to read their dialog audibly. There is no justice in a case like this: For every person in Hollywood who has real talent and squanders it on crap, there are a dozen others who dream of redeeming the medium but who, in the end, simply are not moviemakers. Unfair? You bet. (Fallbrook 7; Naz 8) (David Chute)

12 ROUNDS Renny Harlin has an unjustly terrible reputation, but with the right material (Deep Blue Sea, Mindhunters), he’s very good at delivering stylish, knowingly ludicrous entertainment — that is, if he goes for hard R material, like the lurid deaths that fuel his best films. 12 Rounds is a wan PG-13 vehicle. WWE stalwart John Cena is pleasingly stolid as New Orleans cop Danny Fisher, facing off against crazed Miles Jackson (Aidan Gillen, The Wire’s Tommy Carcetti). Jackson — an international criminal with a broad résumé that covers everything from planting dirty bombs to shooting down international flights — is mad that a chase with Fisher inadvertently resulted in his girlfriend’s death, so he kidnaps Fisher’s girlfriend (Ashley Scott) and sends Fisher around the city to complete 12 games to win her back. Mayhem ensues, but at a flattened roar: This is the kind of amiable time-killer that belongs on a basic-cable weekend afternoon. (Only a brief death-by-elevator sequence gets Harlin’s juices going.) The New Orleans–location shooting lends a little atmosphere, but not as much as in Dejá Vu; the main image that sticks with you is Cena’s Nike firmly depressing the gas pedal on whatever vehicle he’s commandeered now. (Citywide) (Vadim Rizov)

VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR “I love beauty — it’s not my fault,” the perpetually orange, shellacked septuagenarian Valentino sniffs to reporters backstage at his spring prêt-à-porter show in February 2007. Filming the last year of the designer’s reign — Valentino retired in September 2007 after 45 years in haute couture — dedicated follower of fashion Matt Tyrnauer crafts the slick, superficial portrait you might expect from a Vanity Fair special correspondent. Structured to make us boo the evil corporations that took over the House of Valentino while fetishistically documenting the details of the designer’s three-day swan-song extravaganza in Rome, Valentino is an orgy of châteaus, villas, yachts, majordomos and Joan Collinses set to a Nino Rota score. Then again, perhaps the director really does believe nothing succeeds like excess. Compared with recent docs on two other design legends, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, Tyrnauer’s extols Valentino’s extreme lavishness as a kind of honorable, defiant stance (sneaking away to Gstaad as investment bankers take over his company) but demurs from searching for its subject’s gravitas. Instead, the film goes for cutesy laughs, frequently cutting to Valentino’s six pugs, on board their master’s private jet, having their teeth brushed, peeing during a photo shoot, or being adorned with diamond earrings. (Sunset 5) (Melissa Anderson)

GO  WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS? Pamela Boll’s documentary about five women who heeded their instinctual desire to make art over the fears and protests of their families is also a call to arms: Rise up, ladies, with those chisels and paintbrushes and pens! Varied in birthplaces and backgrounds, these woman all grapple with the same dilemmas: how to nurture others (husbands, children) without destroying the best part of themselves (otherwise known as: I’d rather be in the studio than the kitchen). The film could have been about any woman’s home/work struggle — it arrives in theaters on the heels of a published study that shows schools are loath to acknowledge and promote women with mathematic proficiency. But by limiting herself to an actor, a painter, sculptors and a printmaker, Boll gives herself plenty to work with; when the stories drag, and they occasionally do, the art’s there to inspire and uplift. (Music Hall) (Robert Wilonsky)