Movie Reviews: Beautiful Islands, Kings of the Evening, Racing Dreams

GO  RACING DREAMS With a title designed to recall Steve James’ classic sports aspiration doc Hoop Dreams and a wealth of detail and an understanding of the human stakes of its characters’ endeavors to match, Marshall Curry’s Racing Dreams follows three preteen racers through a make-it-or-break-it year in their impending NASCAR careers. Alternating lucid, easy-to-follow footage of the five races that comprise the national karting championship (the kids are all at least a year away from racing stock cars) with scenes of the subjects’ home lives, Curry documents the enormous pressure placed on these children not only to succeed on the track but to raise the money needed to continue. While Annabeth comes from a relatively stable middle-class family that make the necessary sacrifices to advance her career, Brandon lacks the funds — and the charisma to attract them. Fundraising’s no problem for 12-year-old Josh, who eerily turns corporate shill, thanking the race’s sponsors after a victory in a bid to win some of his own. No less than for the black inner-city teens of Hoop Dreams, cash is the name of the game in Curry’s fascinating doc, even as the kids’ motivation remains a pure love of the sport. (Andrew Schenker) (Sunset 5, Playhouse, Town Center)

RAMONA AND BEEZUS Despite the presence of Mouse House starlet Selena Gomez, Ramona and Beezus is less Disney than Hallmark Channel, a loose adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s first novel in her beloved kid-lit series, which is wholesome to the point of dull. Without much in the way of a governing narrative structure, Elizabeth Allen’s innocuous film charts Ramona Quimby (Joey King) — her age advanced here from 4 to a more precocious 9 years old — as she suffers a series of embarrassments in front of family, friends and classmates. King captures Ramona’s spunky, oddball spirit, but her imaginative antics, often embellished with ill-fitting fantasy CGI, frequently take a backseat to the inconsequential romantic predicaments of big sis Beezus (Gomez) and Aunt Bea (Ginnifer Goodwin). Ramona’s story admirably attempts to address issues of adult abandonment, social alienation and economic instability, the last of these via a timely subplot about Ramona’s dad (John Corbett) being downsized; it’s all wrapped up with disingenuous happily-ever-after tidiness. Yet even more than the overriding milquetoast atmosphere, it’s this focus on real-world fears that destabilizes Allen’s film, as the plethora of pressing adult concerns eventually becomes so pronounced that any trace of comedic verve dissipates, thereby draining the proceedings of the very color that defines its idiosyncratic protagonist. (Nick Schager) (Citywide)

VALHALLA RISING After the increasingly black comic violence of his Pusher trilogy and Bronson, Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn — who apparently never got over A Clockwork Orange — goes left field with Valhalla Rising, a movie as maddeningly ponderous and self-important as its black-metal title. As with Robert Zemeckis’ recent Beowulf, Refn is inexplicably fixated on the conflict between virtuous pagans and hypocritical, self–respect-destroying Christians during the Viking era; specifically, mute warrior One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) versus all kinds of Christian scum. This is full-on portentous allegory, with One-Eye ironically ending up martyred as an alternate pagan Christ, while hypocritical Christians proselytize, then get picked off by unseen hillside savages. There’s a vague Lars von Trier–ish feeling hanging over the whole movie, not just in the unflinching yet weirdly comic gore but in the ridiculously weighty chapter titles (“Chapter V: Hell,” “Chapter VI: The Sacrifice”). Frequently dull and stupidly obvious, you nonetheless have to applaud the misguided ambition of Refn’s career turn. If nothing else, as the metal guitars grow louder and louder, the synergy between Viking imagery and the pagan-obsessed metal freaks it spawned has never been clearer. (Vadim Rizov) (Sunset 5)