LA Weekly

GO CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN Not quite drama, not quite comedy, not quite romance, this gossamer first feature by Hans Canosa is one of those seemingly wafer-thin chamber pieces that seep pleasurably into you the morning after. Not entirely by chance, two nameless old flames, played by Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter, meet at a New York wedding a decade after they parted less than amicably. Inevitably they spend the night together. But sex, ordinarily the climax of such a setup, comes fairly early on and plays second fiddle to endless gabbing about then and now and what went right and wrong. This would get really old, really fast, were it not for Gabrielle Zevin’s funny, fluid screenplay and Canosa’s deft use of split screen — often the laziest of thematic shorthands — to show us not only this couple’s skittish history and their equally checkered present lives, but also the ebb and flow of their ambivalent attraction. Bonham Carter gives a wise and wonderfully rueful performance, Eckhart can do smug bastard in his sleep, and though the movie is occasionally too clever-talky for its own good, it has the authentic ring of an elegy for love lost when one partner grows up while the other runs in place. (Westside Pavilion; Sunset 5; One Colorado) (Ella Taylor)


GO PICK EDMOND In David Mamet’s third (and best) movie as writer-director, Homicide (1991), police detective Bobby Gold, tricked — by circumstance, or fate, or the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — into a futile quest for personal and tribal authenticity, winds up naked on the proverbial ash heap, undefended against whatever circumstance, fate, or whoever may still have in store for him. The 20 or so tableaux that constitute Mamet’s 1983 one-act play Edmond, here brought to the screen by Stuart Gordon (who, unbeknownst to many fans of Reanimator, Dolls and Robot Jox, produced and directed the 1974 world premiere of Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago), serve up a variation on much the same cosmic con game. Following a portentous encounter with a storefront fortuneteller (“You are not where you belong!”), white-collar white guy Edmond (William H. Macy, in his most ferociously committed performance since Magnolia) abruptly walks out on his wife and smack into a second portentous encounter, this time in a bar, with a Man (Joe Mantegna) who voices some strong opinions about “niggers” and sets Edmond on the first leg of a grim rite of passage through the grimier precincts of Nighttown (or rather, Sunset and Hollywood boulevards doing their best to impersonate Eighth Avenue back in the day). There, in the wake of a mugging, a knifing, a hand of three-card monte and a series of abortive encounters with the hottest hookers (Starship Troopers’ Denise Richards, Revenge of the Sith’s Ling Bai and American Beauty’s Mena Suvari) to be found on this or any other planet, Edmond, having given full vent to his inner racist, manages to bed down the game young neurotic (Julia Stiles) who will point him toward the way out of his misery. Which brings us about halfway to the punch line and to the peace only abject humiliation can provide. Edmond may play out like the marathon version of every uptight middle-aged cracker’s favorite dirty, self-deprecating joke, but it manages, in the course of a single tersely delineated story, to say more about the dark pathology of American racism than any five character arcs in Crash. So go, by all means, but be prepared to take a beating. (One Colorado; Sunset 5)
(Ron Stringer)


GO THE HOUSE OF SAND Set in the Maranhño Desert of northern Brazil and spanning six decades (starting in 1910), Andrucha Waddington’s admirably pretentious epic of woman in nature makes the rare attempt to impart a purely visual experience: Sensual shots of gargantuan sand dunes appear at least as important in storytelling terms as the faces of three women — mother, daughter and granddaughter (Fernanda Montenegro plays all three in old age) — who are forced to traverse this barren landscape in search of somewhere to settle. Waddington, a veteran of 200 TV commercials (and the ho-hum Me You Them), delivers no shortage of trailer-ready images (major elements include sun, sky, wind, rain and hair), which in succession become hypnotic. The movie naturally works best without dialogue, although the presence of one or two men in Waddington’s forbidding landscape compels some verbal foreplay en route to the universal language of softcore. The current scarcity of art-house cinema that favors poeticism over plausibility works to the great advantage of a film that’s old-fashioned even in its thematic concerns, including what it means to come and go when one’s house is not a home, but the earth itself. (One Colorado; Royal) (Rob Nelson)


THE L.A. RIOT SPECTACULAR According to writer-director Marc Klasfeld’s spoofy re-enactment of the L.A. riots, the 1992 disturbances were the result of too much TV exploitation of the Rodney King–beating tape. We gather this from a scene in which George Holliday’s infamous home video is auctioned off at a Sotheby’s-type gathering of media companies, and from the pair of vapid entertainment reporters who surface throughout the malarial narrative to interview victims and perpetrators of the carnage that follows the acquittal of King’s police assailants. Elliptically narrated by rapper Snoop Dogg, Riot is full of willfully tasteless set pieces and frat-boyishly profane characters (a Korean-owned store in South-Central called Mr. Kim’s Riquor, King’s yarmulke-wearing lawyer, a neo-Nazi suburban living room). Klasfeld shows some technical skill by adroitly working archival footage into the proceedings, and his cast includes Emilio Estevez, Charles Durning, Ronny Cox, Ron Jeremy and George Hamilton. But this vision of the riots as a kind of Kentucky Fried Movie doesn’t lend itself to film the way, say, L.A.’s urban violence does to Sandow Birk’s apocalyptic paintings. Nor does it help that the gags are mortally unfunny. (Sunset 5) (Steven Mikulan)