Movie Reviews: Land of the Lost, My Life in Ruins, Pressure Cooker

MY LIFE IN RUINS Substitute “career” for “life” in the title of this stillborn travelogue comedy, and you’ll have a succinct verdict on My Big Fat Greek Wedding writer-star Nia Vardalos, whose efforts to prove herself more than a one-megahit wonder have been greeted by audiences with an apathy previously reserved for the post–Crocodile Dundee oeuvre of Paul Hogan (see the short-lived 2003 sitcom My Big Fat Greek Life and the even shorter-lived 2004 drag-queen farce Connie and Carla). Here, in the opening salvo of her double-barreled 2009 comeback bid — the Vardalos-scripted and -directed I Hate Valentine’s Day is set to follow in July — the Greek-Canadian comedienne once more tries to parlay her Hellenic pride into box-office gold, starring as an unemployed history professor reduced to working as an Athenian tour guide. The result, written by The Simpsons alum Mike Reiss and directed (in a manner of speaking) by Grumpy Old Men’s Donald Petrie, is a strangely self-loathing affair that paints Vardalos’ tour group as a uniformly ill-mannered, culturally illiterate bunch, while rendering Greece itself as a badly plumbed Third World hellhole run by lazy, Zorba-dancing louts. The requisite ugly Americans are here, as well as the beer-guzzling Aussies and one wizened, Viagra-popping widower (Richard Dreyfuss, really slumming it). But then, what did you expect from a movie with characters named Poupi and Doudi Kakas? (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

GO  PRESSURE COOKER Wilma Stephenson runs her high school culinary-arts class like a Marine sergeant: She’s loud, cranky and prone to threatening bodily harm. Stephenson, a central figure in co-directors Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker’s likable, straightforward Pressure Cooker, is a slacker’s nightmare and a nerd’s masochistic dream. For her students at a northeastern Philadelphia school, she might also be their ticket out of stifling homes and a dead-end neighborhood. Pressure Cooker focuses on three seniors taking Stephenson’s class to prepare for the Culinary Institute of America’s scholarship competition: Fatoumata, a recent immigrant from Africa, who longs to escape her oppressive father; Tyree, a football player hoping to secure a future not only for himself but his single mom; and Erica, a young woman who, after a lifetime of caring for her blind sister, has decided to get hers. The intersection of food and identity is briefly explored, and the prep/exam sequences have a tension and charm that keeps the film moving toward its literally rewarding climax. Stephenson looms largest as a reminder of what the right teacher can mean to a kid looking for a way out; it takes a strong woman and a special grace to not only let her protégés go, year after year, but also to practically shove them out the door. (Sunset 5; Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7) (Michelle Orange)

SERAPHINE Martin Provost’s lyrical but bracing portrait of the early–20th-century French painter Séraphine Louis begins and ends with a quietly ecstatic shot of the artist nestling up to the rustling leaves of a majestic tree. In Provost’s vision, the dirt-poor country housekeeper’s elemental flower paintings, derided by her bourgeois neighbors, are powered by her love of nature, the direct line she believes she has to the Virgin Mary, and the support of Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German collector whose floors Séraphine scrubs with the same fervor she brings to collecting chicken blood to mix her own brand of red paint. If Séraphine’s untutored primitivism is a romance imposed by the filmmaker — in real life, she sat in on art classes for young ladies in Paris — it’s a compelling one that seduced an adoring French public and earned the movie seven Césars, including a well-deserved Best Actress award for Yolande Moreau. The actress brings a potent restraint to this beady-eyed, unkempt and all-but-feral outcast who seethes with inner struggle between strength and appalling vulnerability. Séraphine’s dependence on her patron — a cultivated but emotionally detached homosexual, who knew a fellow outsider when he saw one but came and went in her life without warning — is almost as unbearably moving as her inevitable unraveling, when money and fame cut the artist off from her creative wellsprings and drove her over the edge. (Landmark; Playhouse 7) (Ella Taylor)

THROW DOWN YOUR HEART It was The Beverly Hillbillies (or rather, bluegrass pioneer Earl Scruggs strumming its theme song) that first drew 11-time Grammy-winning banjo sensation Béla Fleck to his musical weapon of choice — which, contrary to what most believe, didn’t originate in the pig-squealing backwoods of Appalachia. On a heartfelt personal and cultural mission, Fleck financed a five-week trip to Uganda, Tanzania, the Gambia and Mali to revisit the banjo’s actual African roots and place those five strings back in a more historically accurate context. Along with his audio engineer, Dave Sinko, and his half-brother, Sascha Paladino, — who directs this concert doc-cum-travelogue — Fleck meets and collaborates with locals, from a Ugandan village’s only female thumb-piano player and blind multi-instrumentalist Anania Ngoliga to Malian superstar Oumou Sangaré. All the jams are fabulously stirring but not sappy, especially when Fleck duels with a Gambian man on a three-string akonting (forefather to the banjo), but there’s nothing more to the film, as if Paul Simon took us behind the scenes of recording Graceland. It’s refreshing to see a doc in Africa that’s not about the heartbreak of HIV and genocide, but setting the bar low means the film could also have been a whole lot shorter. (Music Hall) (Aaron Hillis)