Movie Reviews: Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Iron Cross, The Young Victoria

IRON CROSS was not screened in advance of our publication deadline, but a review will appear here next week and can be found online at laweekly.com/movies. (Town Center 5)

THE LIGHTKEEPERS was not screened in advance of our publication deadline, but a review will appear here next week and can be found online at laweekly.com/movies. (Music Hall)

Jeff Bridges and his Crazy Heart

Under the Eightball

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More About

• Hugh Grant
• Waylon Jennings
• Thomas Cobb
• Timothy Grey
• Breanne Russell

GO  MY SON, MY SON WHAT HAVE YE DONE Although based on the true story of an unstable actor, who, cast as Orestes in Sophocles’ Electra, so identified with the role that he actually killed his mother, Werner Herzog’s wacky My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done plays as one long, shaggy jape. Local police are coping with a situation in suburban San Diego: A matricidal maniac, Brad McCullum (played with total conviction by a glowering Michael Shannon), is holed up in the family ranch house with a couple of hostages. Brad’s clueless fiancée, Ingrid (Chloë Sevigny), sits around sipping coffee and regaling an absurdly solicitous detective (Willem Dafoe) with tales of Brad’s lunacy. Flashbacks show him ragging on his late mother (pop-eyed Grace Zabriskie, a favorite creature of executive producer David Lynch) and making a scene at the local naval hospital, where the staff objects to his plan to comfort the afflicted with embroidered gift-shop pillows. From time to time, Ingrid is spelled as a raconteur by Brad’s erstwhile director (Herzog’s countryman Udo Kier, amusingly epicene in his mimed concern). Non sequiturs proliferate — particularly on the family ostrich farm run by Brad’s uncle (Brad Dourif). Everything about this berserk, essentially static procedural is just crazy enough to be true. In any case, Herzog has gone beyond Good and Evil to reinvent himself as a candidate for the wiggiest director of comedy in America today. (Downtown Independent) (J. Hoberman)

OCEAN OF PEARLS Just saying “No” to the injustices of the American health system leads directly to spiritual enlightenment in this heartfelt but simplistic drama from first-time director Sarab S. Neelam, a practicing physician who is also a Sikh. Neelam’s stand-in in Ocean of Pearls is Amrit Singh (Omid Abtahi), a brilliant doctor with lofty ethical standards, buff biceps and a turban that generates dirty looks from goons at airports and outdoor cafés. When Singh is lured from the civilized surroundings of Toronto to the big, bad U.S. of A., the hunky, sensitive surgeon immediately finds himself butting heads with incompetent doctors and greedy insurance companies. Worst of all are the corrupt hospital administrators, who strongly suggest that ditching the turban and cutting his religiously dictated shoulder-length hair is the best way to win friends and influence people in a post–9/11 world. Ocean of Pearls’ well-meaning but thoroughly predictable scenario asks a series of heavy-handed questions with easy answers. Will Dr. Singh shear his luxurious locks or hold his head high to the tune of a David Crosby anthem? Will Singh stick with the sexy American administrator with whom he’s been flirting or return to the nice Sikh girl back home? Will he succumb to the moral bankruptcy of a sick, soulless system or rediscover his roots, reconcile with his strong but silent Sikh dad and find true inner peace and happiness? Rest assured that all is resolved with a minimum of muss, fuss and imagination. (Sunset 5) (Lance Goldenberg)

PUNCTURED HOPE “Trokosi” translates as “brides of God,” but in cruel practice it means the ritual enslavement of young virgins in West Africa. Filmed on location in Ghana, Punctured Hope aims to both dramatize and denounce this horror, which thrives to this day. Director Bruno Pischiutta — known in Italy for his politically engaged, provocative theater work — uses nonprofessional actors to reenact the true story of Belinda Siamey, who plays herself. At age 13 (she is now 23), Siamey — a top student planning on a university education — was forcibly surrendered by her family as a virgin sacrifice extorted by local priests to settle an uncle’s debt, an ordeal (genital mutilation; relentless rape) carefully related here in words, not pictures. The acting, sad to say, is stagey and amateurish to the point of often painful distraction (despite our ready sympathy for what Siamey suffered), while the didactic dialogue — styled to make sure we’re never lost as to what this or that custom means — is further hampered by the actors having to speak it in English instead of their native Ewe. Despite such near-fatal drawbacks, Punctured Hope fulfills the stated ambitions of Pischiutta and producer Daria Trifu to teach and inspire discussion. The black-magic ceremonies we witness aren’t slick Hollywood numbers but the stuff as it is lived. The same is true of Siamey’s performance. Initially, when playing herself as “innocent,” she overacts, but as she undergoes catastrophe and (in a moving directorial choice) addresses us directly, what she lived through pierces the heart. (Monica 4-Plex) (F.X. Feeney)

GO  UNDER THE EIGHTBALL Angry passion and visual high energy define this extraordinary muckraking documentary. The anger and rage that ignite it stem from the puzzling illness that overtakes Lori Hall-Steele, sister of Timothy Grey, who co-directed the film with Breanne Russell. At first, the diagnosis would seem to be chronic fatigue, but the symptoms (muscle failure, paralysis) begin to wildly contradict each other, alternately suggesting lupus, Lou Gherig and Lyme disease. Hall-Steele’s doctors mask their cluelessness in smug tones; one even tells her, “Everybody dies.” More infuriating are the indifference and outright hostility of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality when Grey discovers a freakish outbreak of identical illness in the area, one that aligns with the high degree of toxins in the local well water. This would be powerful, galling stuff in itself, but instead of limiting Under the Eightball to one woman’s plight, Grey and Russell instead confront the history of Lyme disease and its origins in the U.S. government’s decades of medical experiments (using captured Nazi and Japanese scientists) to develop biological warfare. These experiments were practiced on all of us, Grey and Russell assert, and they make a persuasive case. What might have been dull charts and talking heads are instead clever reenactments and quick cuts, with key words and footnotes superimposed in well-chosen graphics. A wealth of information is thereby processed in kinetic leaps, yet we are never lost. Grey and his sister were born and raised in Flint, Michigan, which makes it tempting to reference Flint’s other native documentarian, Michael Moore, with whom they share a crusading ferocity. Such glib comparisons burn away fast, however: The heartbreak that informs the universal reach of Under the Eightball is uniquely personal. (Sunset 5)