Movie Reviews: The A-Team, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, The Karate Kid and Killers

GANGSTER'S PARADISE: JERUSALEMA
Crudely modeled after Rio gang drama City of God and its superior Scorsese/De Palma forefathers, Gangster's Paradise charts a young crook's rise to Johannesburg slumlord with derivative flash and faux moralizing. Failing to secure a university scholarship in 1994, poverty-stricken Lucky Kunene (Rapulana Seiphemo) instead turns to carjacking and — after moving to the big, bad city — to real estate scams, all the while purporting to be a Robin Hood humanitarian combating his homeland's racist power structure. Writer/director Ralph Ziman bends over backward to stack the deck in Lucky's favor by making his light- and dark-skinned adversaries even scummier than he is. Nevertheless, given that the inspired-by-real-events story has its wannabe Scarface operate solely out of amoral self-interest, any rationalized glorification of its protagonist rings false. So, too, does Lucky's silent seething over a white woman confessing that "when you're rich, poverty seems glamorous," since the film wantonly exploits destitution and violence for genre thrills. Though South Africa's racial strife is frequently invoked, sociopolitical inquiry takes a backseat to creaky gangster-cinema tropes. Still, there's minor amusement in the suggestion that entrepreneurial criminality begins with a preference for Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal over the Bible. (Nick Schager) (Playhouse, Sunset 5)

HEY HEY IT'S ESTHER BLUEBURGER
"Are you there God?" For many people of a certain age, there is a natural second half to that question — "It's me, Margaret" — taken from the title of the eponymous Judy Blume young adult novel. When the title character of Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger poses that question (into a toilet bowl no less), it's tough not to feel that Australian first-time writer-director Cathy Randall is assuming viewers will want to fill in the rest as well. Her version of the gawky teenage outsider (Danielle Catanzariti) who finds herself only after falling in with a charismatic bad-girl from another school (Keisha Castle-Hughes), is wildly uneven but never boring, even as it tours the trappings of classic teen dramas. Randall does at times successfully combine a more genuinely reflective and emotionally resonant teen picture with trademark Down Under capital-Q quirk, but the filmmaker's overreliance on oddball characterizations and easy-bake kookiness often derails her seemingly loftier intentions. Likewise, just how to utilize Esther's Jewish identity, and how that sets her apart from others at her school, is something Randall never quite resolves. Toni Collette appears in a brief role as the mother of Castle-Hughes' character, but she is dispatched with the film's most melodramatic flourish. (Spoiler alert: Can it be anything but a portentously bad omen when someone rides off on motorcycle, without a helmet, while talking on a cell phone?) Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger is a debut of some middling promise and not much else. (Mark Olsen) (Sunset 5, Town Center)

THE KARATE KID
Like its predecessor, 2010's The Karate Kid begins with an uprooting. Young Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother are introduced in their Detroit apartment, now packed into boxes. Ralph Macchio shipped off to the Valley; Dre is going to China. A skate kid behind on his growth spurt, once he hits the mainland, Dre attracts horrible bullying from a jealous classmate and his cronies, all of whom are training together in a show-no-mercy fighting school. He is saved from crippling by the intervention of his building's super, Mr. Han (Jackie Chan). Seeing the boy's dilemma, Han agrees to teach him a title-defying lesson in kung fu self-defense. The first Karate Kid was a bit of a Frankenstein: a Charles Atlas ad premise (97-pound weakling trains to get his revenge) that sent geeks flocking to the dojo; a cross-cultural surrogate-fatherhood story; a fist-pumping aerobic workout montage. It's all still here, building toward the same showdown tournament, though the fighting is far more bone-crunching, FX-augmented — and impossible this time. If the original is fondly remembered, it's because the looseness of the actors and abject trash sound track relaxed an audience to where we could enjoy our favorite underdog clichés. Remake director Harald Zwart hasn't done anything that would threaten to make this a really new movie — a Karate Kid who stayed in Detroit, for example — and there is the impression, deadly to the sense of fun, that the talent here actually thought they were remaking a classic. (Nick Pinkerton) (Citywide)

JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK
Opening with a close-up of the crow's feet around its subject's eyes and expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary-portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable stand-up comic throughout the course of her 76th year — a typically hectic period during which Rivers lurched from disappointment to triumph and back. For all the frenzied activity, Joan Rivers is less informative dish than infomercializing cliché. It may be a revelation to see an entire wall in Rivers's Louis XIV–style apartment devoted to the card catalog in which she files all of her jokes. It's less illuminating to be told, repeatedly, that a performer craves attention. Nice to know that Joan is a real person (she comes across as a warm, unembarrassed egomaniac) but it's the character she invented and plays that makes her interesting. Stern and Sundberg don't provide much context, but they are not alone in their disinclination to ponder their subject's art; considering that Rivers is one of the few women capable of holding her own against the vicious shpritzmeisters of the Friars Club, she remains remarkably untheorized by culture critics. At one point, Joan's daughter, Melissa, addresses her rivalry with the entity she calls "The Career," as in her mother's. There's plenty of that in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, but I wouldn't have minded a bit more of Joan Rivers: The Text. (J. Hoberman) (ArcLight Hollywood, Landmark)