Movie Reviews: The Tillman Story, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, Brotherhood

THE SCENESTERS Movies about moviemaking, no matter how scathing they're meant to be, often end up simply stroking the machine, which in turn transforms barbs into love taps. Writer-director Todd Berger tries to short-circuit that circuitous process: The Scenesters also takes aim at the poses and pretensions of L.A.'s Eastside (specifically Silver Lake), while satirizing the efforts of an asshole producer and pretentious director to make a documentary about a serial killer. Unfortunately Berger's satire is often toothless, rarely pushing beyond the obvious even as his plot becomes more convoluted. The film plays like an in-joke home movie of the very folks it means to send up. When struggling director Wallace Cotton (Berger) is hired as a crime-scene videographer by the L.A.P.D., he meets CSI wannabe Charlie Newton (Blaise Miller), who works for Aftershocks, a company that cleans up crime scenes. After Charlie realizes that a series of Eastside murders are related, Wallace and his producer talk him into withholding information from the cops while they film a documentary and the body count rises. (In one of the movie's best lines, Wallace woos Charlie by telling him, "People from all over the world — from Venice to Berlin to Toronto — will get to know you," name-checking locales of three of the world's largest film festivals.) A love story, the history of the dismantling of L.A.'s public transit system by the auto industry, and a huge red herring are thrown in the mix (as well as John Landis as a judge) but can't charge the film's listless pulse. (Ernest Hardy) (Downtown Independent)

GO  THE TILLMAN STORY Amir Bar-Lev's assiduous, furious documentary on the Army's craven cover-up of the death by friendly fire of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan in 2004 — and the exploitation of his corpse for recruitment purposes — is a withering assessment of U.S. military culture. Unlike recent Afghan war doc Restrepo, Bar-Lev's film feigns no pretense of "neutrality." War is hell, the former documentary relentlessly (if unhelpfully) reminds us. But The Tillman Story goes deeper, exposing a system of arrogance and duplicity that no WikiLeak could ever fully capture. While members of Tillman's immediate family and his widow, Marie, are powerful, riveting talking heads, his mother, Mary, emerges as the tireless moral compass, aided by a former special-ops soldier in decoding 3,000 pages of heavily redacted documents about her son's death. Bar-Lev portrays Tillman, who read Chomsky and Emerson and shunned professional-athlete megalomania, as a fiercely private, principled person. For his sacrifice, leadership and character, his body was hatefully used as propaganda, his family lied to and gravely let down by Congress, which ultimately let Donald Rumsfeld and several four-star generals off the hook. (Melissa Anderson) (Landmark)

VAMPIRES SUCK Writer-director team Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer continue to act as the drain trap to our pop culture toilet. The Date Movie and Meet the Spartans collaborators have made a career of low-overhead channel-surf bricolages catering to ninth-graders with nothing else to do on a Friday night, movies not meant to be watched so much as texted during. (Smart money says Friedberg and Seltzer never sit through these movies in entirety.) Their Vampires Suck isn't a spoof of vampire movies as a genre, which would demand an audience whose collective memory reached beyond 2008, but of the first two Twilight movies specifically, with iconic scenes re-enacted and laced with gags. Many of the film's jokes, such as they are, consist of mentioning the titles of contemporary reality-TV shows, which should be a riot for viewers who think that their cable-channel guide is the soul of wit. Jenn Proske provides a reasonable facsimile of Kristen Stewart's soulful lip-gnashing and eyebrow-fluttering, and there's a giggle-worthy bit with a Segway, but SNL's "The Franks" parody had more laughs, and the distinct advantage of being only two minutes long. If you've ever read a single book — we'll include Stephenie Meyer — you're probably better than this. (Nick Pinkerton) (Citywide)