Los Angeles Film Festival: Reviews, A to Z

DEAR LEMON LIMA (USA) The lipstick traces of Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson are everywhere to be found in writer-director Suzi Yoonessi’s quirk-addled debut feature about a half-Eskimo Alaskan teen navigating the lower circles of the high school social inferno. Familiar lessons in self-empowerment abound as lonely Vanessa (appealing newcomer Savanah Wiltfong) pines for the affections of an arrogant, alpha-male jock while assembling a ragtag team of similar misfits to compete in their high school’s Survivor-style athletic competition. Despite the exotic setting and the attempt to say something meaningful about the tension between white and “native” culture, the movie is an Indiewood cliché through and through, complete with a third-act “twist” meant to seem irreverent that registers only as desperate. (Mann Festival, Sat., June 20, 7:15 p.m.; Landmark, Tues., June 23, 4:30 p.m.) (SF)

CRITIC’S PICK  EMBODIMENT OF EVIL (Brazil) When eccentric director José Mojica Marins set out in 1963 to make Brazil’s first designated horror film, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, he wound up changing national pop culture — and the world of global cult movies — forever. His character Zé do Caixão (internationally branded “Coffin Joe”), a nefarious gravedigger in search of the perfect woman to conceive a superior spawn, struck a chord with underprivileged Brazilian audiences: Anarchically challenging the hypocritical establishment, Zé also punished a timid society with contempt. He killed and tortured again in 1967’s equally contentious This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, but the horror in these hallucinogenic Arte Povera films had more to do with their philosophical ideas and the theater of cruelty than their proto-gore excesses. Censorship problems forestalled a third entry in the series, although Marins gained public notoriety (and success) by merging with his screen persona, adopting Zé’s trademark look — black top hat and cape, and especially those long, long fingernails, which stretch through a cell door’s window at the opening of Mojica Marins’ long-awaited, triumphant 2008 comeback, Embodiment of Evil, realized after several difficult decades as a director. Zé may be haunted by old ghosts but hasn’t lost his commanding powers: Upon being released from jail, he relocates to a favela basement, where his dedicated followers prepare for gross experiments involving prospective mothers of their master’s scion while battling violent oppressors (corrupt cops and pernicious priests). Embodiment of Evil looks slicker than its predecessors, but it’s an old school midnight-movie experience to savor: a surrealist mix of trash and poetry resulting in a series of surprisingly strong transgressive images (often conflating torture and ecstasy, as when Zé cuts open a dead pig from which a beautiful girl emerges for a bloody embrace) that may well constitute the greatest film of 2008. (Majestic Crest, Fri. June 19, 10:30 p.m.; Landmark, Sun., June 21, 10 p.m.) (Christoph Huber)

Extraordinary Stories

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CRITIC’S PICK  EXTRAORDINARY STORIES (Argentina) “Extraordinary” is by no means an immodest moniker for this incredibly audacious first dramatic feature by Argentine director Mariano Llinas, which suggests a telenovela co-scripted by Thomas Pynchon and Jorge Louis Borges, or what a true screen adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy might be like. The three primary story lines (though there are countless others) concern men known only as X, Z and H, respectively, each of them minor bureaucratic functionaries in nondescript Patagonian towns, who find themselves tossed by circumstance into unexpectedly complicated adventures. The first man witnesses a murder (before committing one himself); the second scours the countryside for clues about his predecessor, an international man of mystery with a possible sideline in illegal wildlife trafficking; the third travels up river in search of the large stone “monoliths” he has been hired to photograph. Each thread is a miniroad movie of a sort, although like the film’s whimsical (and questionably reliable) omniscient narrator, Llinas shows markedly greater interest in the journey than in the destination. Stories give way to other stories — some comic, some tragic, some romantic — which are themselves riddled with dreams and flashbacks, until we no longer care if we will ever reach the end, for so pleasurably intoxicating is the air of elaborate narrative gamesmanship. Don’t let the four-hour running time deter you: There is nary a dull moment here, or one devoid of visual or storytelling invention. This is a work of consistent astonishment. (Italian Cultural Institute, Sun., June 21, 7:30 p.m.; Landmark, Mon., June 22, 7 p.m.) (SF)

GO  HARMONY AND ME (USA) Writer-director Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me may feel like Andrew Bujalski–lite, but that doesn’t keep this slight anticomedy from being sufficiently funny. Justin Rice (from the indie-rock outfit Bishop Allen and star of Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation) plays Harmony, a self-pitying shrug of a guy who’s pining for his ex-girlfriend, Jessica (Kristen Tucker). Byington doesn’t show much interest in Jessica — or in any of his female characters, for that matter — and instead spends the film’s slender running time focusing on deadpan non sequiturs involving Harmony and his equally socially awkward buddies. The unremitting ironic tone can grate, but Pat Healy’s fantastic jerk-boss character is a consistent pleasure. (Regent, Mon., June 22, 4:30 p.m. & Fri., June 26, 7:15 p.m.) (TG)