WALT & EL GRUPO In 1941, with financial woes mounting and an animators’ strike making his studio anything but the happiest place on Earth, Walt Disney took President Franklin D. Roosevelt up on the offer to be a cultural ambassador to Latin America. For the U.S., it was a chance to woo potential allies who were also being courted by the Nazis; for Disney, it was a chance to soak up new artistic inspiration while fleeing the turmoil in his own professional kingdom. As written and directed by Theodore Thomas, the documentary Walt & El Grupo, which tracks the five-country trek embarked upon by Disney and a handpicked team of his employees (“el grupo”), is both a gargantuan, multifamily home movie and a slight, if entertaining, curio that’ll be of most interest to hardcore Disney aficionados. Culled from the personal photos, letters and home films of the expedition’s descendants, as well as from behind-the-scenes footage from the Disney vaults, and punctuated with wonderful segments from the 42-minute 1942 film Saludos Amigos, which resulted from the trip, Walt is both humorous and moderately revealing about the backstage machinations of the Disney machine. Still, it flutters into the realm of hagiography, painting Disney as a baffled, almost saintlike victim of the ungrateful animators who demanded a larger piece of the pie. (Regent) (Ernest Hardy)
WHITE ON RICE A hapless fool only a family member could love, the Tokyo-born Hajime, a.k.a Jimmy (Hiroshi Watanabe), has a gift for offending women, as well as a tendency to lock himself out of the car and set the kitchen on fire. Newly divorced, Jimmy has come to America to live with his sister Aiko (Nae), her husband, Tak (Mio Takada, excellent), and their gifted but emotionally neglected young son, Bob (Justin Kwong). Having Jimmy in the house literally drives Tak crazy, and at its best, this uneven film by writer-director Dave Boyle suggests that going a bit nuts is a good thing for the rigid paterfamilias. Boyle and Watanabe may intend for Jimmy to be an innocent who inadvertently changes lives, á la Forrest Gump, but he’s often too creepy to care about, as when he begins stalking his beautiful cousin or leaves young Bob home alone on Halloween. As a writer, Boyle is on firmer ground when he concentrates on Tak and Bob, too nearly mute males acting out in all manner of amusing ways. When father and son finally make each other smile, White on Rice glows with warmth. (Sunset 5) (Chuck Wilson)
WHITEOUT In this earnest but muddled Antarctic thriller, a masked man kills research scientists who may have stumbled upon a valuable object hidden beneath the ice. Figuring out the murderer’s identity falls to U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), with help from the research station’s doctor (Tom Skerritt) and a shady U.N. investigator (Gabriel Macht). Carrie is a good detective tortured by memories of a Miami drug bust gone bad, and in a regrettable blunder, director Dominic Sena (Kalifornia, Gone in 60 Seconds) and his four credited screenwriters have chosen to stage that failed arrest in a series of hokey flashbacks that always end with Sena cutting back to a zoned-out Carrie, who literally shakes her head to clear away the bad vibes. One feels for Beckinsale, a B-movie action queen badly in need of a comedy and a script that doesn’t require, as this one does, her stripping down to her skivvies in the opening scene. It could be said that Whiteout is an honest attempt to set an old-fashioned whodunit in an exotic locale, but the mystery at the film’s core is so hopelessly dull that one begins to long for a third-act cameo by the Abominable Snowman. (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)
