ADVENTURES OF POWER Adventures of Power, the jejune writing and directorial debut of Ari Gold, wants very badly to win you over — so badly that you’ll be surprised by the one or two instances when it does. Gold (and, in case you’re wondering, there’s no connection to the agent of the same name on Entourage) clearly had fun applying the underdog narrative rubric, repopularized by films like Napoleon Dynamite, Dodgeball and a host of geek competition docs, most notably Air Guitar Nation, to the story of an aging oddball with an air-drumming dream. Unfortunately, the visual joke of the titular lead character “Power” (played by Gold) has legs about as pale and spindly as their owner’s: the headband, the short shorts, the safety glasses — you know, and long ago ceased to be moved by, the rest. Gold’s performance as an air drummer from New Mexico, who finds his tribe in New Jersey, romances a deaf girl, and competes to save his father’s job at a copper mine, is as endearing as it could be, and Adrian Grenier (weird!) gives an extremely game performance as a country star (and actual drummer) who mocks air drummers for sadistic kicks, but the film — despite some successful goofs and a defiantly dorky Phil Collins tribute — can’t quite win for trying. (Sunset 5) (Michelle Orange)
BLACK DYNAMITE He’s a sex machine, righteous brother, and one bad mother: Who cares if the title character in Scott Sanders’ blaxploitation spoof looks more like a butched-up Isaac the bartender from The Love Boat than Richard Roundtree? Parodic homages to films that were essentially parodies the first go-round are either the joke that keeps on giving or dead-end mimesis (honky that I am, I couldn’t help but think of Susan Sontag’s distinction between naive versus deliberate camp). Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White, recently of Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?) sets out to avenge his brother’s death, vanquishing all jive turkeys and uncovering a diabolical plot by Whitey involving poisoned malt liquor that leads all the way to Tricky Dick. The attention to superficial detail, from lapel width to jittery zooms to wah-wah-heavy score, reveals a fetishist’s devotion: “I wanted it to look like we had a pristine print of an old movie,” explains Sanders, who co-wrote the script with White and Byron Minns (performing as fast-rhyming club owner Bullhorn). But no matter how many trips to Kung Fu Island our hero makes, nothing in Black Dynamite captures the exhilarating absurdity of Pam Grier hiding razors in her Afro in Coffy — or the loony genre experimentation in Pootie Tang. (Selected theaters) (Melissa Anderson)
GO BRONSON As the violent British felon turned award-winning poet and artist Charles Bronson (née Michael Gordon Peterson), actor Tom Hardy proves more than ready for his close-up, cackling, snarling and head-butting his way through Pusher director Nicolas Winding Refn’s mercifully unconventional biopic. With a grab bag of visual and sonic tricks borrowed from the likes of Kubrick and Peter Greenaway, Refn stages Bronson’s life as a kind of sociopathic vaudeville, with the character recounting his misadventures before an audience, while a series of abstract formalist flashbacks illustrate his violent journey from the crib to various other barred enclosures. The constant is Bronson’s art-making, which flourished behind bars but may, Refn and screenwriter Brock Norman Brock argue, have begun the first time he committed armed robbery — a stickup as an elaborate form of standup. (Sunset 5) (Scott Foundas)
CREATING KARMA There are bad movies that fall short of their ambition, and there are bad movies that simply don’t try, but every once in a while, along comes something so aggressively in-your-face awful that you start vehemently giving the screen the finger five minutes into it, and don’t stop till the end credits have mercifully brought the thing to a halt. Ironically, given its title, Creating Karma is such a generator of ill will. Wacky fashion editor Ivana (co-writer Carol Lee Sirugo), whose birth name is Karma and who is the product of a wacky Jewish-Indian union, gets fired from her job and goes to hang out with her wacky slut-hippie sister (director-co-writer Jill Wisoff), whereupon a wacky black dude (Rahad Coulter-Stevenson) with a wacky afro and a wacky puppet inspires her to write and perform wacky poetry at a wacky coffeehouse. Had Wisoff gone with “quirky” or “minimalist” as her tone instead, this would be just another indie-romance casualty, but instead every color is garish, and every actor obnoxiously mugging at all times. Making light of fashion magazines, poetry slams and the “funny” accents of South Asians and Hasidic Jews is normally something we’d deride as too easy ... yet Creating Karma somehow manages to miss even that (enormous) mark. The theme song, sung by a supporting character about two-thirds of the way through, is the only bright spot, though it’s not remotely “Bollywood style,” as the press notes would have it. (Grande 4-Plex) (Luke Y. Thompson)
