Movie Reviews: The City of Your Final Destination, Oceans, Five Easy Pieces

HANDMADE NATION Sometimes it's easy to forget that film culture does not exist in its own vacuum, and in fact many of the issues facing filmmakers and filmgoers — how to make things and get them out to the world, how to find products beyond what's mass-marketed — also exist in other realms. Though its excessive cheerleading is a major flaw, Faythe Levine's quietly uplifting Handmade Nation functions as an inspirational snapshot of current craft culture, a series of scenes from a scene more than a definitive document. Knitting, printmaking, bookbinding, jewelry, clothes, rug making, decorative items — anything that can be made by hand and sold by plucky retailers seems to fall under the aegis of this DIY offshoot. At one point someone calls crafting a "movement of young women;" though the only men around seem to be boyfriends and husbands, the way in which these activities connect to ideas in modern feminism are left unexamined. The historical aspects of indie-minded crafting, too, both in the origins of the contemporary practice and its deeper roots, are not deeply explored. Rather, Levine hops from expected hip hot spots such as Portland, Olympia, Austin, Brooklyn and Los Angeles to less likely places like Atlanta, Providence, Houston and Milwaukee. Unlike the art-scene doc Beautiful Losers — which shares a bill with the Los Angeles run of Handmade Nation — there isn't a single focal point on which to hang a narrative, and so the film ends up being a patchwork of loosely stitched–together vignettes rather than a singular story. (Mark Olsen) (Downtown Indie)

IN MY SLEEP Marcus (Philip Winchester) is a parasomniac: It looks like he's awake, but he's sleepwalking, a convenient excuse for, say, sleeping with your best friend's wife. And lo and behold, when she turns up dead, it's hard for Marcus to maintain his friendship with said friend, Justin (Tim Draxl). Sure, he didn't mean to kill anyone, but waking up with a bloody knife in your hand would make anyone suspect the worst. The biggest problem with Allen Wolf's thriller is that there are so few characters, it's immediately clear what's going on; there's simply no one to suspect besides the obvious. A slightly bigger problem is that the movie's risible. To kill time while Marcus figures out how that knife got in his hand, there's a Freudian subplot about the origins of Marcus' sleep disorder, with a repressed memory flashback that makes Hitchcock's Spellbound look like a paragon of convincing psychology, plus dream sequences straight out of Glen or Glenda. It's very much an L.A. movie, complete with an endless parade of heavily made-up club girls and two protagonists who work as masseuses; Wolf's camera is so enamored of their chiseled, shirtless bodies that the whole thing becomes unintentionally homoerotic. It may be worth seeing just for the sight of Lacey Chabert — ex–Party of Five kid as neighbor Becky — attempting to interpret Marcus' dreams based on what she once learned in night school. (Vadim Rizov) (Sunset 5)

GO  KENNY CHESNEY: SUMMER IN 3D It's as true of mega-platinum pop stars as it is of wild animals: If you really want to understand their ways, you must study them in their natural habitat. With that in mind, Kenny Chesney: Summer in 3D offers invaluable insight into the titular country sensation's massive commercial appeal. Filmed in stereoscopic 3-D during Chesney's 2009 American stadium tour, Kenny Chesney was overseen by 3ality Digital, the same company responsible for 2008's U2 3D, and both documentaries make superb use of that extra dimension to emphasize the sheer enormity and spectacle of arena shows. (After years of watching action-movie crowd scenes populated by CGI pixels, it's downright revelatory to experience Kenny Chesney's real, live swaying throngs of humanity.) Recurring feel-good voice-over musings from the now–42-year-old artiste slow the proceedings, but thankfully, director Joe Thomas mostly lets his protagonist stick to his strengths, which are running around a gigantic stage, connecting intimately with 70,000 fans, and singing his hopelessly hokey country-meets-pop-meets–Jimmy Buffett populist anthems. The knock on Chesney's music has been its total lack of subtlety or nuance. Unapologetically dopey and undeniably ingratiating, the supersized Kenny Chesney: Summer in 3D makes a surprisingly convincing argument for big, dumb likability. (Tim Grierson) (Citywide)

THE LOSERS Writer Andy Diggle dedicated his snappy DC comic books "The Losers" to '80s screenwriting superstar Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon series. But in adapting "The Losers" for film, director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and expensive action that Lethal Weapon pulled off so effortlessly with the help of its stellar cast. (In a remarkable example of an actor finding his ideal role, Gary Busey played LW's haywire, half-cocked villain.) What they've produced instead is a busy, unsatisfying comic thriller, poorly acted by a grab bag of new faces and franchise-movie refugees, and set to a hard-rock sound track. The Losers opens with its eponymous team of Special Forces ops staking out a drug lord's South American compound, preparing for attack. The inconveniently timed arrival of a busload of children provides both an opportunity for our heroes to show their nobility, and a herd of adorable sacrificial lambs to set the movie's plot shuddering ahead. One smoldering teddy bear later, the Losers are presumed dead — and loaded for revenge on the shadowy figure who tried to take them out. Who is that shadowy figure? Why, it's Max, played by Jason Patric, about whom it must be said: He's no Gary Busey. While that is a great comfort, I'm sure, to Patric's neighbors, it's little help to the movie, which is filled with stock characters, including Zoe Saldana's Aisha, a sexpot in red leather pants. (Dan Kois) (Citywide)