Movie Reviews: Casi Divas, Post Grad, Shorts

CASI DIVAS Casi Divas, a none-too-clever but hustling-to-please Mexican comedy, concerns a diverse citizenship drawn together across dividing lines — of race, class, sexuality, gender (re)assignment — by the embrace of pop monoculture. With predictable reservations, this seems a good thing to director Issa López, a pioneer in pumping American studio money into a bottomed-out Mexican film industry (though this time, she’s on Columbia’s dime, with Hans Zimmer imported to pluck out a score). A popular telenovela soap opera producer announces a nationwide search for a new leading lady to debut in an upcoming film adaptation. The Mexico City lights draw Catalina (Diana Garcia) from the factories of Ciudad Juárez, where disappearing co-workers join the city’s staggering figures of unsolved homicides. Francisca (Maya Zapata), a Zapotec Indian, represents rural Oaxaca, while local Yesenia (Daniela Schmidt) is, secretly, the most disenfranchised of all. An appealing cast smiles away through turbulent tone shifts, as López piles on social problems until the film resembles a landmark. Like a populist politician furiously pumping hands on the campaign trail, pandering to a gallery of representative stereotypes, you’ll admire the energy even while knowing better than to trust the everything-to-everyone gestures. (AMC Burbank Town Center 8, Mann Chinese 6) (Nick Pinkerton)

David Lee Sundance Selects

Passing Strange

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• Melissa Anderson
• Robert Stone
• Issa Lopez
• Stewart Brand
• Extreme Sports

GO  EARTH DAYS Veteran doc maker Robert Stone (Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, Oswald’s Ghost) assembles nine talking, graying heads to reminisce about the origins of the environmental movement in the U.S., which kicked off in earnest in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and blossomed with the first Earth Day in 1970. Stone’s nonet — which includes former secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, and “hippie astronaut” Rusty Schweickart — engagingly recount the sober realizations of the ’60s (back-to-the-landers “who tried to live in an egalitarian way but quickly got over it,” Brand chuckles) and acknowledge that green power was diluted when it became Washington-centric in the ’70s and ’80s. There’s great archival footage (those anti-pollution PSAs with Iron Eyes Cody from the ’70s remain quite powerful), including a snippet from Face the Nation during which former Village Voice columnist James Ridgeway asks whether environmentalism is deflecting attention away from far more polarizing, pressing issues like Vietnam, civil rights and women’s liberation. The question is never answered but remains just as salient in our post–Inconvenient Truth era, when many consider carrying an “I’m NOT a Plastic Bag” tote or sipping from a Klean Kanteen bottle a political act. (Sunset 5; Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Melissa Anderson)

GO  GOTTA DANCE Dori Berinstein’s documentary, which looks at a year in the lives of the 12 women and one chunky B-boy in the New Jersey Nets senior — as in older than 60 — hip-hop dance team, would be just another disposable, albeit touching, distraction if its subtext didn’t hint that growing old in this ageist society is a bitch. Sixty may be the new 45, but to their condescending young instructors recruited from the well-toned ranks of the real Nets dancers, the seniors are a frustration: sometimes cute, sometimes annoying — like children. Any viewers also in need of an attitude adjustment need only witness these lockin’ and poppin’ sages struggle without complaint to conquer creaky joints, impaired rhythmic instincts and complicated choreography. If that’s not enough to award proper respect to the team — which includes a pair of evergreen beauties, schoolteacher Betsy, who dances as her way bolder persona, Betty, and a tiny 83-year-old ray of grandmotherly sunshine — fascinating biographical snippets of the lives of all 13 members in their primes arrive midway to remind us that even the youngest and hippest among us grow old, if we’re lucky. (Music Hall; Town Center 5) (Elena Oumano)

MY ONE AND ONLY Your enjoyment of My One and Only will depend on how much the words “inspired by incidents in the life of actor and Hollywood icon George Hamilton” spark swoony memories. Star of Love at First Bite and Zorro, the Gay Blade, The Suntanned One executive-produced this benign coming-of-ager about the 1953 cross-country adventures of teenage George (Logan Lerman), his swish half-brother, Robbie (Mark Rendall), and their Blanche DuBois–like mother, Anne (Renée Zellweger), who leaves her philandering bandleader spouse (Kevin Bacon) in New York. Stops in Boston, Pittsburgh and St. Louis allow Anne to husband-hunt, as director Richard Loncraine ushers a series of TV actors (Steven Weber, Chris Noth, Eric McCormack) in and out as potential mates. Written by Charlie Peters, My One and Only allows Zellweger to fully commit to her bargain-basement Tennessee Williams character, if not a consistently Southern accent. Rendall does limp-wrist well; Lerman serves as an adequate vessel for Hamilton, exorcising adolescent struggles with Mom, whose biggest failing is not knowing that The Catcher in the Rye is his favorite book. Occasionally diverting but ultimately forgettable, My One and Only will become unforgivable if it inspires other former competitors from Dancing With the Stars to go in search of lost time. (The Landmark) (Melissa Anderson)