Movie Reviews: American Violet, Crank: High Voltage, Sleep Dealer

CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE was not screened in advance of our publication deadline, but a review will appear here next week. (Citywide)

GO  DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION It serves you best to not know a damn thing about Akira Toriyama’s much-beloved Dragonball manga (or the TV series and video games it spawned); better to enjoy director James Wong’s loony live-action adaptation for the exquisite-corpse exercise that it is — its rules reinvented and subplots obfuscated with each new set piece. Under the wing of producer Stephen Chow — good-natured king of CGI-laden, martial-arts comedy — Evolution is far more entertaining than it deserves to be, unless you’re a 10-year-old boy, in which case it’s only the greatest movie ever made. Two thousand years after nearly destroying Earth, green-skinned demon Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) escapes captivity to hunt down seven of the titular orbs, except he never counted on facing high school hero Goku (Justin Chatwin), a bedheaded, wire-fu trainee who geekily pines for ass-kicking classmate Chi Chi (Jamie Chung). Arbitrarily aided by fellow dragonball seekers, including his grandfather’s mentor (Chow Yun-Fat, the only actor dedicated enough to play his role as if still animated), Goku defeats school bullies without touching them, learns to toss blue fireballs, shows up at a fighting tournament, makes stepping stones over lava out of dead goo monsters, becomes a werewolf, resurrects a friend and finds true love. As a cartoonish coming-of-ager, this one goes, well, balls out. (Citywide) (Aaron Hillis)

ENLIGHTEN UP! A number of tensions are at play in Kate Churchill’s Enlighten Up!, a documentary about the proliferation of yoga as both spiritual path and commercial workout culture, and the vigor with which the believers try to convert the skeptics. What’s frustrating about this otherwise friendly, lightweight look at the diverse world of yoga practitioners — which welcomes the earnest and the fatuous, the hippie and the hypocrite, with equally open, rippling arms — is that its director winds up focusing on the least interesting/most predictable tension of them all, that which arises between herself and her handpicked, inflexible star. Churchill, a lithe, centered believer, recruits Nick Rosen, a bland, atheistic young journalist, to help her prove the dubious but documentary-ready premise that yoga can “transform” anyone. Churchill creates a yoga tasting menu for Nick, guiding him through various schools and varying degrees of kook-dom, and touching (too lightly) on one of the phenomenon’s ironies: enlightenment for sale. The duo travels to India and, after several months, in a further American, results-oriented irony, Churchill grows impatient for her subject’s big breakthrough. When a modest version of that breakthrough arrives, you have the feeling the director wants to tell her Godless charge not to choke on it. (Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7) (Michelle Orange)

GO  EVERY LITTLE STEP In 1974, 18 years before MTV first assembled a group of comically mismatched 20-somethings and videotaped them being real, choreographer Michael Bennett gathered 22 Broadway dancers late one night, set a tape recorder running, and asked them to talk about their lives. They did, sharing moving tales of their career struggles, troubled childhoods and sexual awakenings. Those stories, shaped by Bennett and his collaborators, became A Chorus Line, which opened at the Public Theater the next year, was soon transferred to Broadway, and ran there for a then-unprecedented 15 years. James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo’s documentary Every Little Step juxtaposes the casting process for the 2006 revival, with the affecting story of A Chorus Line’s creation. Following several performers as they audition for the revival, the doc’s approach is designed, one presumes, to attract — in the era of reality entertainment — a wider audience. But while that goal meshes nicely with the arc of the musical itself — about dancers going through a grueling interview process to earn a spot on the line — we never learn enough about the individual subjects to care about their stories. For Chorus Line fans, though, the documentary — executive-produced, it’s worth noting, by theatrical superlawyer John Breglio, who also produced the revival and controls Bennett’s estate — is a singular sensation, filled with behind-the-scenes backstory and archival clips of Bennett himself dancing, gorgeously. Then there are those original interview tapes, kept under lock and key for 35 years, with the dancers speaking the words that, up until now, you’ve only known as lyrics. (ArcLight Hollywood; The Landmark; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Jesse Oxfeld)

IS ANYBODY THERE? Director John Crowley’s lighter follow-up to the anguished Boy A features a standard teaming of reluctant oldster and troubled youngster — both residents of a down-at-heels family-run rest home. Besides the blokeish star playing retired magician Clarence (Michael Caine, who could twinkly-tearily confide with bobbing accent in his sleep), one charming difference is that the ornery kid (Bill Milner) gets as tetchy and self-pitying as his curmudgeonly pal. Milner was the Calvin-and-Hobbesian fantasist in Son of Rambow, and he again displays a headlong sense of enterprise as the mouthy junior-ghost-hunter son of the home’s overworked owners (Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey). (The requisite gallery of eccentric pensioners, played by British TV and stage vets, are like furniture to him.) TV writer Peter Harness’ script finds a good, macabre turning point for “The Amazing” Clarence’s precipitous decline into senility, but even Crowley, who seems to have a knack for overloaded material, can’t quite bring the thing in for a safe landing in all the slush. Action is set in the ’80s, allowing for an insta-fade palette — and also apparently so that the young hero can still be bored. (ArcLight Hollywood; AMC Century City) (Nicolas Rapold)