KITES Indian-made and trilingual in Hindi, Spanish, and English, Kites is set and was mostly shot in the American Southwest—although in its backlit visual overkill, complete with neon reflected in rain-drenched streets, it more closely resembles some of the most overwrought Hong Kong gangster romances of the late 1980s. Jay (Hrithik Roshan, one of Hindi cinema’s most engaging leading men) rolls off a freight train with a gaping bullet wound and a lot of backstory to unload. A con artist, not as amoral he thinks he is, Jay makes the mistake of falling hard for Natasha (Bárbara Mori), the fiancée of a spoiled young Sin City prince of crime, setting up an impossibly-beautiful-lovers-on-the-run-scenario that director Anurag Basu shoots like a series of windswept fashion videos. Even with the lights of the Vegas Strip forming a gauzy halo behind his tousled head, Roshan is a master at low-keying his enormous charm and shrugging off his blinding handsomeness. Mori, a Mexican telenovela star, is almost a match for him: She's a dead ringer for Megan Fox, but warmer and less calculating in her sexiness. Not even the incoherent mish-mash of the plot (mostly faux–Sergio Leone by way of Tarantino and Rodriguez, with periodic car-flipping chase sequences) can entirely dim the appeal of this match-up between a blue-eyed Punjabi and a blue-eyed Mexican of almost equal comeliness. Kites will be released Stateside both in this original 130-minute, subtitled version and in a shorter, dubbed “remix” prepared by noted Bollywood aficionado Brett Ratner. You have been warned. (David Chute) (Beverly Center, Culver Plaza, Fallbrook)
THE LIVING WAKE Fatally eccentric, Sol Tryon's The Living Wake recounts the odyssey of outlandish weirdo K. Roth Binew (Mike O'Connell) as he delivers invitations to his going-away (from life) party via a bicycle rickshaw driven by devoted friend and minion Mills (Jesse Eisenberg). Resident of a bizarre forest fantasyland seemingly sprung from his own warped consciousness, Binew shouts, boozes and breaks into song over his failure as an author and artist. No mere morose buffoon, however, O'Connell's bearded, well-dressed oddball mixes misery with manic glee as he spars with a ham steak–throwing rival, takes counsel with a psychic, and steals a goat for a romantic picnic with his elderly nanny. Binew's condition is rooted in his attempt to learn the meaning of life, a quest for knowledge that laces his journey with blunt, existential overtones. The piece's sheer peculiarity is its prime calling card, and in O'Connell, it has a grandiose ringmaster for the carnivalesque craziness. Yet from an opening newsreel biography to a climactic Viking funeral ceremony, the film's absurdity proves oppressive, its linguistic cartwheels so mirthless, and its meticulous Wes Anderson–indebted set design and visual compositions so self-conscious, that the ridiculousness feels petrified. (Nick Schager) (Sunset 5)
GO THE OATHA garrulous cabdriver who was Osama bin Laden's bodyguard in Afghanistan lets loose a possibly revisionist history in this outstanding documentary from Laura Poitras (My Country, My Country). Abu Jandal reminisces about his journeys across the porous national borders that tolerate or shelter radical Islamists, his imprisonment by the Yemenis, his apparent rehabilitation, and his guilt over the betrayal that landed his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, in Guantánamo prison, where he became famous for suing Donald Rumsfeld. Today, Abu Jandal moonlights as a (possibly self-appointed) recruiter of young Yemenis to jihad, which he defines so variously that your head hurts. He's a devout Muslim and a loving father, who coaches his adorable son to hate America, declares his opposition to the 9/11 attacks one day, then retracts the next. Who is Abu Jandal, and why is he spilling the beans to an American filmmaker? The Oath is a film about a man who is an enigma — and about the confusion, not the clarity, that is the aftermath of 9/11. Genuinely comfortable with complexity, Poitras is a patiently astute observer of telling contradictions, but she doesn't lack for point of view. The second in a projected trilogy of films plumbing the legacy of 9/11, this usefully meandering documentary lays bare the enduring stain of Guantánamo on American democracy and its ambiguous fallout for radical Islam. Are these two men symbols of al Qaeda's resilience, or its final irrelevance? Poitras doesn't answer this question — and, indeed, who could? (Ella Taylor) (Sunset 5)
GO THE PHILOSOPHER KINGS There's a tendency among well-meaning liberals to romanticize the people most of us look past as we race through our day — the homeless, the working poor — as founts of uncommon common sense and great spiritual insight. Director Patrick Shen comes close to doing just that in his documentary The Philosopher Kings but mercifully falls short of such a noble misfire. Instead he's crafted a hypnotic, moving paean to the complex lives of his subjects, a half-dozen custodians at institutions of higher learning all across the country. Shen treks coast to coast — and even to Haiti — to get the backstories on the folks (Vietnam vets, survivors of domestic abuse, immigrants) who clean toilets and offices and perform sundry other duties at some of our most prestigious colleges and universities. One man works days as a custodian and nights as a cabdriver to support both his massive extended family and his village in Haiti; another is a fledgling political artist, who studies the work created by students at Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts so he can better create his own agitprop. The visuals are crisp, and Shen's seamless editing creates conversation between his various subjects, as the spoken musing of one plays over the images of another. Kings arcs hard toward its uplifting ending, but it also completely earns it. (Ernest Hardy) (Downtown Independent)
