Movie Reviews: Blood Into Wine, Bulletproof Salesman, The Girl on the Train, My Name Is Khan

GO  AJAMI A contemporary crime drama edged with Greek tragedy, Ajami is an untidy, despairing, oddly exhilarating joint venture by writer-directors Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Set on the tinderbox margins of a run-down quarter of the Tel Aviv–adjacent city of Jaffa, the movie’s multiple plots and unwieldy, mostly non-pro ensemble of Arabs and Jews might better lend themselves to a television series. Yet it teems with life, energized by fierce formal ambitions. Barely held together by chapter headings, the action — which opens smack in the middle of its converging story lines with a mistaken drive-by shooting — switches dizzyingly between time, place, and point of view, and the fact that you can’t tell one kind of Semite from another works its own sadly ironic magic. The bleak future Ajami projects for peace within and across Israel’s borders can be hard to bear, but this sympathetically humanist movie takes its place among a new generation of Middle Eastern films that measure the terrible toll of war not only in dead bodies, but also in the very fabric of everyday life, for Arabs as well as Jews. (Ella Taylor) (Monica 4-Plex, Sunset 5, Town Center)

BLOOD DONE SIGN MY NAME Based on Duke professor Timothy Tyson’s titular memoir/recounting of the 1970 murder of an African-American Vietnam vet by three white men in Oxford, North Carolina, Blood Done Sign My Name is an earnest, if inert, civil rights docudrama clearly shot on the cheap (many of the wigs appear to have been borrowed from the Black Dynamite set). The film opens with 10-year-old Tyson’s preacher dad, Vernon (Rick Schroder, pleasingly paternal), trying to integrate his lily-white parish. Across town, Ben Chavis (Nate Parker) returns to the Tar Heel state to teach high school English, impressing the kids when he says he knew Stokely Carmichael. The parallel stories are dutiful, dull recapitulations of the call to righteous leadership: Chavis (who would preside over the NAACP and organize the Million Man March in the ’90s) leads roughly 1,000 men, women and children from Oxford to Raleigh to protest the sham trial of the three cold-blooded killers. Director and fellow North Carolinian Jeb Stuart, who also adapted Tyson’s book (other writing credits: Die Hard, Another 48 Hrs.), tries to address thornier issues of violent versus nonviolent protest, but too often, the film props up caricatures and constructs in its superficial gloss on history. (Melissa Anderson) (AMC Magic Johnson, Beverly Center)

Scandar Copti

Ajami

BLOOD INTO WINE Early in Blood Into Wine, Tool front man and aspiring vintner Maynard James Keenan is asked why he thinks people like to drink wine. His deadpan response is to compare grapes to the Supreme Being as played by Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element, deeming the complexity of the finished product a testament to the divine potential of the seemingly humble grape. Wine documents Keenan’s quest to start a vineyard in the high desert of Arizona, one of the more unlikely locations for such a venture. Directors Ryan Page and Christopher Pomerenke detail the challenges faced by a beginning winemaker, who, in this case, happens to be a famous, enigmatic musician who fled the city to pursue a less frantic lifestyle. The film flits between serious insight into the history of vineyard cultivation and the intricacies of turning a passion for sustainable agriculture and wine into a functional business (provided by Eric Glomski, Keenan’s mentor and business partner), and self-mockery, via a fake talk-show interview with two hostile hosts (played by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric Awesome Show fame) lamenting being stuck with Keenan after Keanu Reeves abruptly canceled his appearance. Collaborators and fans of Keenan also weigh in, including comedian Patton Oswalt, Primus drummer Tim Alexander and Milla Jovovich, out of Supreme Being guise and fiddling nervously with her scarf. The film entreats the viewer to follow his passion, whatever it may be. Fitting, as enjoyment of Blood Into Wine will likely be determined by one’s passion for winemaking, or for Keenan himself. (Brendan Whalen) (Sunset 5)

GO  BULLETPROOF SALESMAN War is sell for Fidelis Cloer, a German salesman who travels to battle zones to peddle armored vehicles — or, as he puts it, “sell a good feeling” to contractors and civilians stuck in the middle of conflict. Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s documentary Bulletproof Salesman begins shortly after the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when Cloer and his team arrive in Baghdad just as “feelings” are beginning to turn bad. “The reason we went to Iraq is because we expected the situation to worsen pretty quickly,” Cloer says. “And it did.” The filmmakers ride along as Cloer makes cold calls around Baghdad, where it quickly becomes apparent that the German is cashing in on American incompetence. Cloer’s booming business is based on capitalizing on a worst-case scenario — an inevitability in war, he says — that the U.S. soldiers on the ground seem unable to predict and unprepared to prevent. Iraq has “desert, there’s blue sky, and it’s hot,” but otherwise Cloer initially sees it as just like Bosnia or any other war zone he’s entered. But five years later, when the filmmakers catch up with Cloer to record the talking-head monologue that structures the film, the war is not only still going on but the method of warfare has made the notion of a bulletproof vehicle obsolete. When the enemy’s main weapon is an exploding car, a product designed to protect one from guns seems quaint. Cloer’s Euro cool and sly charisma make it easy to forget that he’s the epitome of a war profiteer — and thus, in the conventional discourse on the Iraq War, A Bad Guy. As if heading off criticism that the film could be perceived as an infomercial, Epperlein and Tucker formally foreground Cloer’s talent, regularly branding the screen propaganda poster-style with Cloer’s sales slogans, such as “Chaos is an opportunity.” It’s a profile of a salesman, rendered in his own language. (Karina Longworth) (Downtown Independent)