LA Weekly

BABY MAMA Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on that other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Wait a minute — you say Baby Mama’s a movie and not a TV show? Seriously? Coulda sworn ...) It was funny the first time around when Fey, as late-night-TV exec Liz Lemon, suddenly found herself drawn to the sound of cooing and the scent of baby powder. Baby Mama extends the joke, then softens it, then smothers it in its crib — an unpleasant picture perhaps but not any more disagreeable than the phrase “Produced by Lorne Michaels.” Ultimately, that’s all this shrugging disappointment is: a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched a good hour past the point of no return. It even pairs Fey with her former “Weekend Update” co-anchor Amy Poehler, who shows up as mercenary womb-provider Angie, a character that is really just Amy Poehler barely trying to maintain a hillbilly accent. Ultimately, the movie exists solely to reunite a winning comic duo: two women so singularly in sync that, during their “Weekend Update” stint, they genuinely laughed at each other’s jokes despite their well-rehearsed familiarity come showtime. Kate and Angie are just Tina and Amy goofing around — drunk-dancing, crooning along to video-game karaoke and, once more, finishing each other’s sentences. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky)

GO  BLIND MOUNTAIN Li Yang’s follow-up to his 2003 Blind Shaft (a shockingly direct account of greed and murder in China’s illegal coal mines) exhibits a similar documentary subtext and “blind” narrative force, detailing the spectacle of a spirited, pretty college student (Huang Lu) abducted and sold as a bride to a troglodyte husband, then held as a virtual prisoner in a remote Shanxi village. “This can’t be happening,” Xuemei wails, waking from a drugged sleep to find her duplicitous traveling companions gone and her ID vanished, leaving the viewer to ponder the enormity of losing one’s identity in China — a land where government authority appears helpless and bad luck rules. Blind Mountain forces its way through numerous illogicalities and several plot lapses to a shockingly abrupt ending that brought down the house at the movie’s Cannes Film Festival press screening last May. Although Li evidently made a number of cuts before Blind Mountain’s international premiere, the movie manages to land its share of eye-blackening blows. Rural medics are seen demanding payment up-front before attending to a dying patient. The ruggedly beautiful, indifferent landscape cares more about Xuemei’s plight than do the police. The point is made: Although the movie is strategically set in the early ’90s, slavery has hardly been eradicated in China. (Grande 4-Plex) (J. Hoberman)

GO  BODY OF WAR Co-directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue — yes, that Phil Donahue — Body of War is neither the most cinematic nor the most elegantly crafted of recent Iraq war documentaries, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of the most deeply affecting. Where Spiro and Donahue triumph is in putting a human face on the war — namely, that of U.S. Army Specialist Tomas Young, a patriotic Kansas City youth who was shot through the collarbone and paralyzed from the chest down after less than a week on the ground in Baghdad. Unambiguously angry and direct in an old-fashioned protest-movie way (complete with original, Phil Ochs–ian anthems composed and performed by Eddie Vedder), Body of War follows Young’s bittersweet homecoming, his adjustment to life in a wheelchair, his conversion into an antiwar activist and the gradual collapse of his marriage. But the most devastating scenes in the film are arguably Spiro and Donahue’s found-footage flashbacks to the 2002 debates in both houses of Congress leading up to the authorization of war — eerily sound-alike sound bites that turn Body of War into the latest uncredited Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake. (Nuart) (Scott Foundas)

GO  CONSTANTINE’S SWORD X marks the spot, literally, where Christianity and the Catholic Church fostered the centuries of religious hatred and anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust. So argues James Carroll in his 2001 book Constantine’s Sword and in this searching, intellectually lively documentary. Carroll, the former priest turned National Book Award–winning novelist, journalist and memoirist, claims the die was cast in the year 312, when Constantine I claimed his decisive Roman victory under the sign of the labarum. Once the cross displaced life-giving emblems (shepherds, fish) as the symbol of Christianity, the religion made Christ’s death its rallying point — providing a handy weapon against the fingered murderers, Europe’s thriving Jews. How long could the damage linger? Fast-forward almost two millennia to the U.S. Air Force Academy in the evangelical hotbed of Colorado Springs, where Jewish cadets face thousands of brass-sanctioned fliers for The Passion of the Christ and insistent proselytizing. Journeying from Colorado to Rome to Auschwitz with his own tangled father-son military history as a running thread (and director Oren Jacoby heightening the tone of moral imperative), Carroll runs the risk of conducting a Gray Line whirlwind tour of religious intolerance. But if his film is more provocative personal inquiry than reportorial knockout punch, it still pokes needed holes in the concept of papal infallibility and, if nothing else, demonstrates why we should feel cold shivers whenever President George W. Bush bandies the term “crusade.” (Music Hall) (Jim Ridley)

GO  DARE NOT WALK ALONE The more things change, the more they stay the same for disenfranchised African-Americans in the historic Florida city of St. Augustine. At least that’s the argument persuasively, if haphazardly, put forth by director Jeremy Dean’s documentary Dare Not Walk Alone, which casts one eye back to the city’s not-insignificant role in the 1960s Civil Rights movement while keeping the other fixed on the communities of local blacks still living in virtual Third World poverty. Inelegantly made and sometimes awkward in its transitions between the two eras, Dean’s film nonetheless packs a punch, thanks to vivid archival footage from this lesser-known (compared to Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham) hotbed of Southern racial unrest, but also to its clear-eyed look at the adversaries of Martin Luther King Jr.’s utopian “dream.” Interviewed in 2005, octogenarian motel owner James Brock (whose Monson Motor Lodge became a locus of pro- and anti-segregation demonstrations) refers to his old adversary Dr. King as “a fancy manipulator” and shows little contrition about having once poured acid into a swimming pool filled with black youths. Meanwhile, Dean notes the lack of so much as a single black officer in St. Augustine’s police and fire departments. Serendipitously arriving in theaters just as the nation’s first serious African-American presidential candidate has a major-party nomination in his sights, Dare Not Walk Alone reminds us that, for far too many Americans of color, “free at last” has meant trading one sociological prison for another. (Grande 4-Plex) (Scott Foundas)