LA Weekly

GO  ALEXANDRA Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown. The star, octogenarian Galina Vishnevskaya, is an opera diva who never sings. Sokurov, who has more than once attempted to document the Russian soul, may be a visionary, but his eponymous protagonist is resolutely down-to-earth. An instant anomaly, Alexandra clambers out of a transport train into a dusty station — presumably at some point during the second Chechen war. Stern and stolid, when not sighing with annoyance, the old lady is surrounded by Russian troops and a swirl of whispers, laughs and faint melody. Alexandra has come to see her grandson, an army captain in his late 20s, and is escorted to the base, at one point riding in a tank. The son of a Soviet military officer, Sokurov spent his childhood moving from base to base, and there’s a mascot quality to Alexandra as she makes her tour of inspection. The movie has no shortage of incident, but it’s less a narrative than a situation: The emphasis is on boredom and routine. Sokurov may not clarify the situation in Chechnya but, in chronicling Alexandra’s trip to the front, he illuminates its reality. (Nuart) (J. Hoberman)

The Cinema Guild

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Alexandra

PICK GO ARMY OF ONE  A Russian grandmother visits the troops, and brings light to their misguided mission in Chechnya Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown. The star, octogenarian Galina Vishnevskaya, is an opera diva who never sings. Sokurov, who has more than once attempted to document the Russian soul, may be a visionary, but his eponymous protagonist is resolutely down-to-earth. An instant anomaly, Alexandra clambers out of a transport train into a dusty station — presumably at some point during the second Chechen war. Stern and stolid, when not sighing with annoyance, the old lady is surrounded by Russian troops and a swirl of whispers, laughs and faint melody. Alexandra has come to see her grandson, an army captain in his late 20s, and is escorted to the base, at one point riding in a tank. The son of a Soviet military officer, Sokurov spent his childhood moving from base to base, and there’s a mascot quality to Alexandra as she makes her tour of inspection. The movie has no shortage of incident, but it’s less a narrative than a situation: The emphasis is on boredom and routine. Sokurov may not clarify the situation in Chechnya but, in chronicling Alexandra’s trip to the front, he illuminates its reality. (Nuart) (J. Hoberman)

GO  BRA BOYS Russell Crowe narrates — and is reportedly developing a dramatic remake of — this compact history of Australia’s notorious Maroubra beach community, an economically depressed, inner-Sydney suburb so rough and tumble as to make the South Santa Monica of the Dogtown era look like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Maroubra also happens to be a breeding ground for expert pro-surfers, many of them — like the film’s director, Sunny Abberton — refugees from public housing and broken families. Abberton offers an absorbing overview of the historical clash between surfers and authorities, dating back to the British colonial era (when surfers were charged special taxes for their boards) before honing in on the story of his own family, its central role in the formation of the titular surf “tribe,” and the 2003 arrest and trial of his younger brother, Jai, in connection with the shooting death of a local underworld figure. Rudimentarily made as documentaries go — and more than a touch self-glorifying at times — Bra Boys is nevertheless intriguing for its insider’s perspective of an outsider culture steeped in tradition, male-bonding rituals, and intense localism. That the film refuses to get too specific about the details of Jai’s alleged crime is at once frustrating and entirely in keeping with the Bra Boys’ tight-lipped, Old West ethos. (Sunset 5; Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7; Redondo Beach Cinema 3) (Scott Foundas)

CHAOS THEORY Who could lift the American screen comedy from a vast muck of sniggery boner gags and crap-pop bricolage? I’m pulling for Ryan Reynolds, the stud comic whose gouging inflection and tenuous arrogance have piloted such disarming fare as Just Friends and Definitely, Maybe. Marcos Siega’s Chaos Theory finds our man playing an uptight lecture-circuit efficiency expert, reasonably happily married (to Emily Mortimer), with a kid, when one blip in his immaculate schedule upends him down a steep tumble of coincidence and into the undiscovered world beyond his daily planner. From overly familiar beginnings — a wry bad-boy bachelor best friend whose idea of a good time is (head-slap) to “go to Rascals and play some blackjack” — the plot off-roads into almost free-associative happenstance. Reynolds, called to 180 from anal nebbish to feral beast, is beautifully committed, but he gets no help on the other side of the camera. The actors have to vie for attention with a bum-rushing soundtrack of emotionally instructive, anemic mope music and a director-cinematographer duo that seems more invested in creating outstandingly pretty setups that seem like a pitch for commercial work (the lighting is plush, the stained-teak Crate & Barrel interiors just so) rather than serving the scene or hustling for laughs. (ArcLight Hollywood) (Nick Pinkerton)

A FOUR LETTER WORD In praise of Larry Kramer’s Faggots, specifically its forked satire, author Reynolds Price wrote: “It offers us oddly entertaining, generally exaggerated copies of foolish or evil behavior in order to provoke our ridicule.” As a litmus test, Casper Andreas’ A Four Letter Word is equally useful, proving that the line between Kramer’s prickly tragicomedy and the gay minstrelsy of Showtime’s Queer as Folk may only be a matter of taste. Shot in and around New York City’s queer hot spots and brought to you in part by Manhunt, Andreas’ pun-choked rom-com asks only for our passive identification, preening on the same wavelength as Jesse Archer’s Luke, who sets out to prove that he is neither exception nor stereotype, only exceptional, after Stephen (Charlie David) — a hustler, professed top, and Luke’s future boy toy — calls him “a gay cliché.” “All our world sees of our community is you,” Stephen says, almost as if he were describing the film. Shrill to a most obnoxious extreme (“Let’s blow this joint,” says Stephen, to which Luke naturally responds, “I already have!”), the film’s sitcom-ish purview uncritically embraces the insularity of the queer community that it depicts, denying seriousness and replacing Kramer’s healthy self-deprecation with vulgar self-satisfaction. (Sunset 5) (Ed Gonzalez)

ORTHODOX STANCE Dmitriy Salita is an up-and-coming boxer, a Chabadnik who won’t fight on Shabbat, and a sweet and decent young man from Brooklyn via Odessa. This is a newsworthy enough combination to have gotten him an invite to George Bush’s Hanukkah party, which made his day. But it’s not quite enough to qualify him for colorful-character status let alone fill up the center of Jason Hutt’s mildly absorbing vérité trot through the pugilist’s quest for a junior title, which will put him on the pro-boxing map. Hutt followed Salita around for three years, diligently trying to tease out a theme from the threads of this impeccably well-brought-up lad’s devotion to the sport, a calling that saw him through his mother’s premature death. Jews were the dominant ethnic minority in U.S. boxing between the world wars, so it will hardly do to position him, as Hutt does, as something new in the history of sporting Semites. What’s more, Salita is such a careful, reined-in fellow that one comes away wanting to have seen much more of the men around him — the grizzled African-American trainer who shows such tender respect for his protégé’s religious observance; the red-headed rabbi who doesn’t quite get his disciple’s dedication to beating the crap out of human flesh; the quiet handler who whips up kosher meals in Vegas hotel rooms; and the charismatic Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu, who frequently warms up for this likable but stolid young boxer and could teach him a thing or two about grandstanding. (Music Hall) (Ella Taylor)