Movie Reviews: Pirate Radio, Love Hurts, Oh My God

THE BOX Compared to its madcap predecessors — the psychotic Holden Caulfield update Donnie Darko and the delirious welcome-to-the-21st-century extravaganza Southland Tales — the new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sack of coal for Christmas. A mysterious stranger offers a nice American couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) an unusual deal: They stand to make a million dollars if they’ll just push a button on a gizmo that will, they are told, instantly kill a total stranger somewhere in the world. Hugely expanded from Richard Matheson’s 1971 cautionary short story “Button, Button,” Kelly’s supernatural thriller is hardly irrelevant in its premise. The notion of remote-control murder is newly topical in the days of roadside bombs and drone warfare. The Box doesn’t lack for ideas — the maraca-bean rattle of extraterrestrial lightning-zap CIA zombie nosebleed conspiracy reaches a dull roar by the time it ends — and neither is the director’s first commercial project an impersonal piece of work. The problem is that here, unlike in Donnie Darko, Kelly never manages to invest crank theories and baroque genre trappings with anything deeper than long-standing obsession or autobiographical reference. Considering his movie’s outlandish paranormal subject matter, Kelly’s booga-booga is actually pretty subdued. The best thing about The Box is that its title keeps suggesting new self-reflexive metaphors — like the tightly wound filmmaker’s dogged attempt to think outside it. (Citywide) (J. Hoberman)

GO  COLLAPSE Chris Smith’s one-man doc on veteran doomsayer Michael C. Ruppert holds less interest as another sky-is-falling dispatch than as the filmmaker’s return to warts-and-all portraiture after 2008’s well-received fiction feature The Pool. Ten years ago, Smith’s art house–circuit hit American Movie was taken as a mockumentary of an amateur horror auteur, but it was also an unexpectedly touching look at a decent-hearted striver. Ruppert, an ex-cop whose eye bags betray that he hasn’t slept since a Carter-era dustup with the CIA, is another subject with overshare vulnerability and a desperately headlong worldview. Ruppert’s apocalyptic, oil-focused monologues, shot in bunker environs and edited to a rising pitch, take familiar Bush-era lefty positions on environmental and economic woes and add a chaser of survivalism. Smith lets Ruppert’s plainspoken autodidact skepticism grow gradually shriller until his arguments dissolve into tears of grief and frustration. There’s an element of Errol Morris in this film, which implicitly psychologizes its subject and watches as he talks himself deeper and deeper into the hole. Smith’s interest in the underdog also lends a reserved sense of sympathy: By faithfully documenting Ruppert’s long-simmering analysis, Smith lets us experience the feeling of a world gone to pot, whether or not the claims are factually accurate. That said, the hastily made film is inferior to American Movie (or Smith’s bleak American Job), and you would not want to be caught next to Ruppert on a transatlantic flight. (Sunset 5) (Nicolas Rapold)

DARE In the high school world of Dare, the theater-geek turns out to be kinky, the asshole cool kid reveals great reservoirs of sensitivity, and the maladjusted gay teen is, well, pretty much just a maladjusted gay teen. This last figure aside, unexpected character arcs are the order of the day in Adam Salky’s stilted drama, though the film’s tripartite structure, which fatally divvies up its already limited screen time between its central trio, ensures that these characters’ quick-change acts register as little more than the dramatically implausible contrivances they so clearly are. The least credible of these transformations finds prudish drama girl Alexa seducing her hunky Streetcar Named Desire co-star, Johnny, in an ultimate bit of Method preparation. From here, the film turns into a romantic roundelay, with Alexa and her childhood best bud, Ben, hot to fuck Johnny, who views both as just friends — surrogates (groan) for his absent family. Johnny’s confusion (unlike that of his lovers) is at least vaguely convincing, but Zach Gilford’s game performance is still no match for the film’s catalog of easy ironies, awkward framings and advice on how to play Blanche DuBois cribbed from Season 4, Episode 2 of The Simpsons. (Sunset 5) (Andrew Schenker)

GO  ENDGAME Since it already premiered on PBS as part of “Masterpiece Contemporary” on October 25 (and on British TV in May), the theatrical release of Endgame, about the covert negotiations in the ’80s that helped bring down apartheid, is puzzling. (Did someone think this would be an instructive prelude to Clint Eastwood’s upcoming Invictus?) Michael Young (Jonny Lee Miller), public-affairs director for a British gold-mining firm, secretly assembles talks between ANC representatives led by Thabo Mbeki (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and powerful Afrikaners like philosophy prof Will Esterhuyse (William Hurt); meanwhile, Niel Barnard (Mark Strong), South Africa’s reptilian head of intelligence, starts his own clandestine chats with Nelson Mandela (Clarke Peters) in the hopes of dividing and conquering ANC leadership. Written by U.K.-TV vet Paula Milne, Endgame has its share of grandstanding dialogue (“I cannot stand by and do nothing while my country is reduced to ashes,” booms Hurt) and a maddening tendency toward meth’d-out camera work. But the principals, especially Ejiofor, rise above the starchiness that often hampers portrayals of recent, monumental history. (Sunset 5) (Melissa Anderson)