LA Weekly

PICK GO LEONARD COHEN I’M YOUR MAN  If you can’t think of a crisis in your life that’s tied to a Leonard Cohen song, then Canadian director Lian Lunson’s velvety, exuberantly hagiographic film of a 2005 Sydney tribute concert to the Prince of Pain may not be the movie for you. If you can, the experience will be weepy bliss. Produced by Hal Willner, the concert shows off Cohen’s unifying influence on an astonishingly diverse range of musicians, from Nick Cave (giving the lounge-lizard treatment to “I’m Your Man”), to Antony jigging up and down in an unraveled sweater and making a gorgeous symphony out of “If It Be Your Will,” a sweet duet of “Anthem” by concert organizers Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla and a rousing rendition of “Everybody Knows” by the Wainwright family. Cohen sings “Tower of Song” at the end, flanked by U2, but his life flashes by us, intercut with the musical numbers, in grainy footage and wry commentary by the man himself. A total babe in his salad days, if that’s the right expression for a man plagued all his life with depression, at 71 Cohen looks like any one of my heavy-lidded Jewish uncles, only with better suits. (He never got into the jeans thing, even while hanging with the Beats at the Chelsea Hotel.) But notwithstanding a touching moment when he gropes for the name of a musical movement (“Punk, that’s it!”), he’s sharp as a tack and as ready as ever to debunk his own myths: He can’t carry a tune. In his years as a monk, “I hated everyone, but acted generously.” And how could he be a ladies’ man when he spent “10,000 nights alone”?

Cohen may be as obsessive a reviser of his own history as he is of his songs and poems, but his way with words is so sublime, so gently precise and musical, you’d be a churl to quibble. And he seems as genuinely humble as he is proud to be lionized in such good musical company. “The Wainwrights have brought my music to life,” he says, “and I appreciate it.” Just as well, for if anyone steals his thunder in this movie it’s the magnetic Rufus Wainwright, who, with his sister Martha, brings such rapture to “Hallelujah,” among others, that you rediscover Cohen’s songs for the continuous hymnal they are. Angelic, sexy, androgynous and mischievously louche, Wainwright couldn’t be less like the manly, bass-voiced Cohen. But in putting his own simple yet operatic spin on Cohen’s gift for suffering and exaltation, he’s also keeping the faith. I don’t know whether those rolled-back eyes are the result of ecstasy or Ecstasy, but if Wainwright carries on making music like this, he’ll make willing bisexuals of us all. (Sunset 5, Monica 4-Plex) (Ella Taylor)


GO KRRISH In Krrish, the young Bollywood superstar Hrithek Roshan — a hunk with a perfect profile — plays the Indian subcontinent’s first true superhero, pulling on a Matrix-style black leather duster overcoat and lightning-bolt plastic mask to rescue a half-dozen children from a burning circus tent. Roshan is light on his feet in the requisite dance numbers and thoroughly convincing in the martial-arts and “wire fu” routines devised by Hong Kong’s Tony Ching Siu-tung (House of Flying Daggers), but his greatest asset as a masked marvel turns out to be his infectious grin, which inoculates the movie against solemn foolishness. He’s such a buoyant personality that when he takes flight, it makes perfect sense. Already a huge hit in India, Krrish (short for Krishna) is a family-made “home production,” a full-course meal of commercial entertainment serviceably directed by Hrithek’s father, Rakesh Roshan, and with music by his uncle Rajesh. It’s a relentless three-hour crowd-pleaser with the full masala recipe of mugging comic interludes and weeping family members, including a long-suffering “Ma” stuck in a cottage in the hill country. Paying off a somewhat laborious buildup in the first act with an escalating series of revelations and reunions in the final reel, Krrish is hearty pulp cinema that really sticks to your ribs. (Naz 8; Fallbrook 7) (David Chute)


LOWER CITY On the evidence of this overheated first feature, director Sérgio Machado needs to get out from under the shadow of Walter Salles (whose assistant he was on Central Station and Behind the Sun) and seek out a style and subject of his own. This frenetic potboiler about a love triangle on the Salvador waterfront smacks of liberal slumming and bristles with faux authenticity. Smitten with Karinna (Alice Braga) — a pneumatic stripper who agrees to sleep with them both in return for a ride — amateur boxer Deco (Lázaro Ramos) and his loose-cannon best friend Naldinho (Wagner Moura) find their camaraderie increasingly tested as both fall in love with this magnetic but unpredictable young woman. Braga, a niece of Brazilian actress Sônia Braga, has all her aunt’s slinky sensuality and then some — would that Lower City had half her moxie or instinctive smarts. Machado’s self-important camera zooms in relentlessly on gleaming muscles and swaying pelvises, generating a kind of Rousseauian porn of feral young things. But the hackneyed script (written with Madame Satã director Karim Aïnouz) has nothing on its mind beyond the worn-out ghetto-movie proposition that hookers are people too, love hurts, and we’re all desperate lovers under the skin. (Sunset 5; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5; Westside Pavilion) (Ella Taylor)


SHEM Writer-director Caroline Roboh’s moralistic paean to Jewish self-knowledge is so solemnly high-minded that one almost feels bad admitting that the film’s only spark comes from its occasional tawdry ludicrousness. Daniel (Ash Newman), a bisexually promiscuous, utterly callow London teenager, reluctantly travels across Europe at the behest of his dying grandmother to locate the grave of his great-grandfather, a Jewish rabbi who vanished during World War II. Since Daniel is such an incontrovertible prick, his quest is guaranteed to teach him Important Values — in this case, the need to honor his long-abandoned religious heritage — as he uncovers the truth about his great-grandfather’s heroism against the Nazis. But Newman, whose vapid countenance suggests that he might be the lobotomized zombie offspring of Jude Law, Ryan Phillippe and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, doesn’t have the chops to make Daniel’s transformation credible or the charisma to justify the character’s inexplicable sexual prowess with every man and woman he encounters along the way. Though Roboh positions Daniel’s carnal appetite as a symbol of his immaturity, Shem’s litany of random, implausible hookups actually comes as a naughty relief from the film’s otherwise flat moral mumblings about spiritual enlightenment — like enduring a dull lecture by sneaking peeks at the covert Penthouse by your side. (Fairfax; One Colorado) (Tim Grierson)


GO WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? Chris Paine’s lively investigation into the demise of General Motors’ zero-emission EV1, Who Killed the Electric Car? is neither the smoking-gun indictment of the auto industry nor the grassy-knoll petroleum-boardroom plot its title and marketing suggest. Instead, it’s a laudably complicated, if emotional and a little comic-book goofy, story of how a confluence of forces — industry skepticism, trained-seal lobbyists and, last but not least, consumer reluctance — undermined the future of a quiet little bean of mobile metal that the anointed few who could afford to lease it passionately adored. Paine rounds up a delightfully ragged panel of “experts” for the film, including Phyllis Diller (remembering the original early-century EVs), local pro-solar activist Doug Korthof and radical Catholic Mel Gibson, who leaven what might otherwise have been flat talking-head testimony from key elected officials, oil-industry shills and engineers. Narrated in onerous tones by Martin Sheen, the film also floats competing views: In one camp, there’s Chelsea Sexton, the GM sales specialist who became the EV1’s prime cheerleader, only to watch from the inside as the company ignored demand; in the other, Los Angeles Times columnist Dan Neil concludes that “If GM could make a car run on pig manure, it would.” Paine has the wisdom to leave it up to you which one speaks the truth, and his documentary has enough integrity to let you walk away suspecting there’s more than one answer. (ArcLight; NuWilshire; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Judith Lewis)