High School

Stoner-friendly B-movies don’t come much closer to producing a contact high than this dastardly little comedy. Without an original bone in its get-the-whole-school-high plot device, “High School” follows freshly reunited best friends Henry (Matthew Bush) and Travis (Sean Marquette). Even though Matthew Bush’s glazed-over eyes predict otherwise, Travis is the hardcore stoner of the pair. Henry has a shot at valedictorian if he doesn’t stray too far from the straight and narrow path he’s been pursuing throughout his high school career. All that goes out the window when a well-disguised Michael Chiklis — as school principle Dr. Leslie Gordon — announces school-wide drug testing. Brilliant Travis hatches a scheme to steal a mighty quantity of distilled THC from his local dealer Psycho Ed (Adrien Brody), a tattooed piece of work straight out of Rikers Island prison. Travis bakes up several pans of brownies that he substitutes at the school bake sale, and voila — nearly every faculty member and student is quite properly baked. With all drug-testing results effectively nullified, the only thing left to do is pay back Psycho Ed, who comes calling for the boys after discovering his loss. The film’s guiltiest pleasure derives from watching Colin Hanks play stoned as school administrator Brandon Ellis. A dearth of stoner movies in recent years makes “High School” an automatic guilty pleasure, but only by default.

Rated R. 93 mins. (B-) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

U.N. ME

Any doubts about the United Nations’ place as a shadow agency for genocide, child sex trafficking, arms shipments, funding nuclear proliferation in places like North Korea, and every other kind of social abuse imaginable, are put to rest in co-directors Matt Groff’s and Ami Horowitz’s shocking dissection of the respected peace-keeping organization.

Founded in 1945, on the ashes of World War II with the stated purpose of protecting human rights and providing humanitarian assistance where needed, the United Nations is shown to function more frequently at the farthest extremes of its stated objectives. “To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” is hardly on the agenda in 2012. The UN’s Counter-Terrorism Committee — charged with preventing terrorism — doesn’t even bother to define “terrorism.”

Our intrepid documentarian Ami Horowitz slips through the halls of power in places like Sudan, where he interviews Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman, Sudan’s nonchalant Ambassador to the U.N. Horowitz asks about the genocide there — something Osman flatly denies, attributing widespread civilian deaths to a drought. Cough. Horowitz sarcastically posits that the Prius automobile might provide a solution to the problems in Sudan. Osman agrees.

The list of U.N. crimes is a long one. U.N. snipers shooting local protestors in Côte d'Ivoire — check. Bulgarian UN troops in Cambodia raping local women and children en masse — check. An oil-for-food scandal that provided Saddam Hussein with billions of dollars, yet resulted in no UN officials being imprisoned, much less fired — check. Still, the most egregious offence comes from former Assistant Secretary-General of Peacekeeping Operations in Rwanda and Darfur, Kofi Annan. Annan actively ignored Rwanda Peacekeeping Mission Head Romeo Dallaire’s urgent requests for operational authority to nip the genocide there in the bud when he had the chance. Kofi Annan’s inaction costs the lives of 800,000 Tutsis, and won him a promotion to the rank of U.N. Secretary-General.

In the end, the U.N. is revealed as a stonewalling bureaucracy in thrall to the wealthy and powerful, so intent on keeping up its façade of international equanimity that little effort is made to fulfill its charter. Talk about prime real estate that could be much better served as low-income housing. You’ll never look at the U.N. the same after seeing this film.

Rated PG-13 . 80 mins. (B+) (Four Stars - out of five/no halves)

Beyond the Black Rainbow

You won’t find a less cohesive low-budget sci-fi shit show than newbie filmmaker Panos Cosmatos’s “Beyond the Black Rainbow.” Tedium sets in quickly as a poorly wigged Nile Rogers appears as Barry Nyle, a futuristic shrink intent on torturing his solitary patient, the near-catatonic Elena (Eva Allan). It’s the future, but everything looks like it was lifted off a “Brady Bunch” set from the ‘70s. Everything about “Beyond the Black Rainbow” screams Eastern-European-student-film. Look at all the blurry images under different colored light filters. Listen to the junky electro-noise musical score. Marvel at some of the worst acting you’ve ever seen. “Beyond the Black Rainbow” is destined to become a cult movie for acid-tripping losers who need something to do while they trip balls. Yes, this movie is worse even than “Battlefield Earth.” "Beyond the Black Rainbow" sucks black ant dingleberries.

Rated R . 110 mins. (F) (Zero Stars - out of five/no halves)

Boys Don't Cry — CLASSIC FILM PICK

Kimberly Pierce’s remarkable 1999 filmic version of Brandon Teena’s final days is a scalding indictment of the conscious intolerance that runs through America’s Midwest and South. The film is also a celebration of youthful romantic desire. In the role that launched her career, Hillary Swank plays Lincoln, Nebraska-born Brandon Teena (née Teena Renae Brandon). With short hair, a chiseled jawline, and handsome charm, the “transgendered” Teena experiments with the fine art of passing as a boy. A rolled up sock or artificial penis and scrotum fill Brandon’s underwear. A tightly wrapped Ace bandage flattens her chest. Threats of violence by local boys, and run-ins with the law due to forged checks and shoplifting, make Brandon’s escape from Lincoln a necessity. The 21-year-old Brandon sublimates his sexual identity crisis by reinventing himself in the Falls City region of Richardson, Nebraska.

In this culturally desolate location, Pierce places Brandon’s tragic story primarily in nighttime settings to give the film a sense of floating through a nocturnal atmosphere of rural routes. Brandon temporarily explores his romantic desires with a young single mother named Candace (Alicia Goranson), whom he meets at roadhouse bar. A fistfight with slur-slinging bar patrons ensues. The episode introduces Brandon to a couple of seemingly benevolent ex-cons, John Lotter (Peter Sarsgaard) and Tom Nissen (Brendan Sexton III). It becomes clear that Brandon is out of his depth during a “bumper-skiing” contest in which Brandon stands on the bed of a fast moving pickup truck while holding onto a rope — rodeo-style. John and Tom are temporarily fooled by Brandon’s ruse, but they won’t remain deluded for long.

The film soars during Brandon’s passionate sexual encounters with the true object of his romantic yearnings, Lana Tisdel (Chloe Sevigny). A moonlit tryst between Brandon and Lana on a blanket in an open field directly addresses Brandon’s capacity for lovemaking. The exquisitely erotic sequence surges into a musically embellished transition with a bong-toking car ride where Brandon sits in blissed-out ecstasy between Candace and Lana while another girl drives. Liberation exists.

Co-writing with Andy Bienen, Kimberly Pierce anchors the narrative with the theme of following your dreams regardless of the circumstances stacked against you. The filmmakers choose not to bog the film down with factual backstory elements of Brandon’s youth, which involved abandonment and sexual abuse by his uncle. They recognize that there's a limit to the amount of cruelty an audience can stand. Brandon’s confidence of self-identity enables him to live—however briefly—as a fully expressed person with a wellspring of loving emotion.

Men In Black III

Some of the luster has worn off the once-promising “Men in Black” franchise, if for no reason other than its long absence since the second installment in 2002. Nonetheless, the return of Barry Sonnenfeld — the director on the previous two films — allows for the required visionary cohesion.

The tension-riddled relationship between Men-In-Black partners Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) is just as contentious as ever. Boris the Animal (Jermaine Clement) escapes from a lunar prison built for the purpose of containing, well, him. Agent K should have killed Boris when he had the chance back in 1969 during a showdown at Cape Canaveral during the launch of Apollo 11. Now back on Earth, Boris poses no small threat to humanity in general, and to Agent K in particular. To put Boris in his proper place —a shallow grave — Will Smith’s Agent J must travel back in time to make sure Agent K kills Boris. The hokey plot device allows Josh Brolin to step up as a 40-year-younger version of Tommy Lee Jones. Sure enough, Brolin nails Jones’s laconic Texas drawl to a tee. The film’s unnecessary 3D effects are (spoiler alertà) less than impressive, but some choice comic episodes make the magic happen, as when Emma Thompson’s Agent O delivers a speech in an alien tongue. An interlude at Andy Warhol’s Factory gives Bill Hader some comic distance to run with as the wigged master of pop art.

“Men In Black III” might not have all the earmarks of a comic classic, yet Will Smith and Josh Brolin each give performances so polished you could shine your shoes from a block away in the reflection. The only thing missing from Tommy Lee Jones’s screen-time is that there isn’t enough of it. Go ahead and eat some popcorn. “Men In Black III” is a great excuse to do so.

Rated PG-13. 105 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

Sweet Movie — CLASSIC FILM PICK

Dusan Makevejev’s widely banned cornucopia of radical agitprop cinema is one of the most transgressive and subversive films ever made. A key contributor to Yugoslavia’s Black Wave, Makevejev’s follow-up to his controversial “WR – Mysteries of the Organism” (1971), uses similar collage techniques of avant-garde filmmaking toward an artistic work of political criticism aimed uniformly at communism, capitalism, and leftist revolutionary ideology. The film is saturated in political references. Rare footage of the Nazi exhumation of mass graves of Polish nationals from the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940 bears disturbing witness to atrocities committed under Stalin’s order. The unsettling black-and-white images contrast with disgusting sequences of infantilized artistic expression by Otto Muehl’s Wilhelm Reich-influenced Friderichshof commune. Makevejev challenges his audience to question what they find most repellent, and why.

The ambitious filmmaker creates archetypical characters to represent various cultural movements. Mr. Dollars (John Vernon) is a puritanical Canadian millionaire who puts on a beauty pageant [“The Crazy Daisy Show’] made up of virgins, from which he plucks his new bride Miss Monde (Carole Laure). The ignorant and crass captain of industry promptly has her virginity publically confirmed for the show’s television audience by a gynecologist known as Dr. Middle Finger. Mr. Dollars is deathly afraid of catching sexually transmitted diseases. On the consecration of their marriage Mr. Dollars exposes his gold-painted member, from which he urinates on his new bride rather than penetrating her. Miss Monde’s rejection of Mr. Dollars maltreatment is cause for her to be carried off by a black body-builder named Mr. Muscle, a “certified psychopath” with his own advertising slogan — “Try me I’m delicious.” Mr. Muscle collapses Miss Monde’s petite body into a suitcase and ships her off to Paris. Carole Laure’s mute character represents a commercial model of femininity to be endlessly exploited.

On the opposite but equal side of the coin is Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal), a free-love-offering communist revolutionary banned in all countries. Anna helms a candy-filled boat called “the Survival” through Amsterdam’s waterways to avoid legal restrictions. A giant handmade likeness of Karl Marx’s face adorns the boat’s bow. A plastic bag filled with water hangs from the caricature’s left eye as a solitary teardrop beneath his bandaged eyebrow. In plying her trade of attracting revolutionary recruits of all ages, Anna kills whomever she seduces — revolution equals death. Anna Planeta represents the last throes of revolutionary existence. Pierre Clémenti’s “Potemkin” mutineer sailor falls unquestioningly for Anna’s charms in spite of her warning that she her love will kill him. The boat is filled with the “corpses” of her lovers. The couple’s outré lovemaking sessions, in a giant suspended bed of sugar, contribute the film’s metaphor for the Western world’s endlessly over-sweetened products.

To this day, “Sweet Movie” remains a powerfully defiant film deeply rooted in anti-authoritarian motives. A recurring ballad rhetorically asks, “Is there life on the Earth? Is there life after birth?” Dusan Makevejev inflames his audience with everything he has in his filmic arsenal. The effect is more than a little thought provoking.

intouchables

Writing and directing duo Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano tick all the necessary cliché boxes in adapting this true story of a wealthy quadriplegic who hires a lower class assistant in order to enrich his life. The filmmakers cheat the original story by changing the nationality of the personal aide from Arab to a Senegalese-born Frenchman. While questionable in their motives for doing so, the choice allows for a winning performance from Omar Sy (“Micmacs”) as Driss, a family man who temporarily leaves behind the gloom of Paris housing projects to soak up the good life while helping his charge Philippe (Francois Cluzet) find joy in his radically abbreviated existence. The movie shines via the tender friendship that develops between Driss and Philippe. Having lost use of his body below the neck in a hang-gliding accident, Philippe relies on his staff to exercise his muscles, if not his mind and imagination. He’s not looking for empathy, but rather the brand of tough love that a smalltime ex-con such as Driss can effortlessly supply. While some audiences will find fault with the film for its racial stereotyping, “The Intouchables” is a well-crafted comedy built on humanitarian values.

Rated R. 112 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

Battleship

“Battleship” is yet another headache-inducing failure of a spectacle movie based on a video game — which, in this case, is based on a popular ‘70s board game. Slow out of the gate, and laced with awful clichés, the story involves an alien invasion that happens to coincide with an international series of oceanic war games. 26-year-old Alex Hopper (Taylor Kisch) is a screw-up younger brother to by-the-book-Navy-man Stone (Alexander Skarsgard). Stone forces Alex to join the Navy after Alex commits one fuck-up too many. Still, Alex has the leggy love of Samantha, daughter to his ship’s commander Admiral Shane (well-played by the ever reliable Liam Neeson).

The action takes place in the waters off Oahu, where five giant alien craft deliver more torpedoes and invincible soldiers than you can count. An especially effective weapon in the alien arsenal is a giant gyroscopic spinning razor-wheel machine of unfathomable destruction. A subplot involving an African American war vet with high-tech prosthetic legs adds a real-war shade to the cartoonishly overblown action that passes for a story. We never get any sense of the alien side of the equation. Everything is battle for battle sake. They never once utter the famous television commercial for the board game, “You sank my battleship.” The movie could have used the humor.

“Battleship” is a loud and booming-blow-‘em-up movie made for a 12-year-old target audience. Adults should sit this one out — that is, if you don’t want to be exposed to a two-hour long headache.

Rated PG-13. 130 mins. (C-) (Two Stars - out of five/no halves)

Moonrise Kingdom

Cannes Opener
Wes Anderson’s Divine Kingdom
By Cole Smithey

Wes Anderson has honed his formally composed vernacular of kitschy nostalgic magic realism cinema to a super fine point. Making his debut animated film “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009) seems to have allowed the perpetually youthful filmmaker to correct for narrative missteps he was previously susceptible to in films such as “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004) and “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007). “Moonrise Kingdom” is a blissful celebration of pubescent romance that relishes every detail of cherry-picked cultural influences from its nearly idyllic 1965 setting.

An understated theme of ecological preservation runs through all of Anderson’s films, yet perhaps never more so than in “Moonrise Kingdom.” A lush complexity of starry-eyed circumstance and organic atmosphere come together on the fictional island of New Penzance — off the New England coast. A storm is due to hit the sparsely populated island in just a few days. An outcast 12-year-old orphan named Sam (wonderfully played by newcomer Jared Gilman) has run away from Camp Ivanhoe, the pitched site of his Khaki Scout troop, much to the dismay of the troop’s scrupulous leader Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton).

Headstrong Suzy (Kara Hayward) is also 12. She lives in a plush red house on the island with her three younger brothers and irresponsible parents (played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). Secretly, Sam and Suzy have been writing letters for the past year, planning for a 10-day romantic adventure to be alone together on the “16-mile-long” island of “Chickchaw” territory. The sweet romanticism that passes between Sam and Suzy during their brief escape from the adult world presents an exquisite crucible of emotional and sensual awakening that carries the film’s distinctive tone. Kara Hayward (also a newcomer) has all the big-screen charm and natural poise of an instant movie star.

“Moonrise Kingdom” is a dynamic ensemble chamber piece of stylized comedy that exerts an adoring fascination with childhood perspective. Anderson gives generous credit to children’s capacity for maturity in the face of their own precious naiveté. His child characters possess an innate confidence of character. A captivating scene where the scantily clad Suzy and Sam dance on their private beach to the strains of Francoise Hardy singing “Le Temps de L’Amour” percolates with a heady blend of daring curiosity and avid sophistication.

Wes Anderson’s acute sense of humor is an acquired taste. His loving and meticulous attention to detail approaches an obsessive degree of precision. Visual and aural elements are presented in a simplified space to allow for maximum comic resonance. Comic background occurrences permeate the foreground action at hand. There is no question that Wes Anderson is a force of nature, and an indisputable genius. And yet, Anderson is such a passionately individualist filmmaker that some audiences will remain indifferent to his films. His movies never subscribe to any Hollywood-approved template of what a film should contain or how it should proceed. Wes Anderson’s maturing process as a filmmaker is nonetheless of enormous interest to audiences who appreciate his definitively bold style of instinctual cinema. You can savor every frame.

Rated PG-13. 93 mins. (A) (Five Stars - out of five/no halves)

Polisse

French auteur Maiwenn’s provocative slice-of-life examination of a Parisian Child Protection unit is haphazard to a fault. Attempts to capture an authentic quotidian view of police agents whose personal lives frequently fall prey to the demands of their job flip between a cavalier sensibility to a kneejerk tendency to mock and humiliate suspected offenders during interrogations. A couple of such interrogation scenes slip into exploitation territory because they are presented without adequate context. The cases are viewed from a fly-on-the-wall perspective before being abandoned completely. The effect is a distancing one. To the film’s credit, the audience becomes well acquainted with the unit’s many members, which includes its share of adulterers. “Polisse” is an energetic but overreaching film that plants its surprise climax as kind of un-foreshadowed bomb. The gimmick doesn’t do the audience, or the material, justice.

Not Rated. 128 mins. (C-) (two Stars - out of five/no halves)

Titicut Follies — CLASSIC FILM PICK

Frederick Wiseman’s classic black-and-white documentary exposé of the horrendous conditions and treatment of mental patients at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts is one of the most famously banned films in America. An attorney-turned-activist-filmmaker, Wiseman received permission from the institution’s superintendent to freely film inside the all-male facility in 1967. With the help of cameraman John Marshall, the two-man team recorded interviews between patients and staff, daily rituals—such as the cleaning of patients’ rooms—and interactions between the inmates. The result is a shocking and undiluted look inside callous institutional exploitation.

Candid footage of perpetually nude inmates being extracted from their cells for bathing and room cleaning, displays bare cells without so much as a table or chair, much less a cot.

Guards verbally harass an inmate named Jim with constantly repeated questions about the condition of his room until he finally lashes out with grimaced screaming responses.

Made during an era when mental hospitals dotted America’s map like flies on manure, “Titicut Follies” presents an invaluable time capsule. The film’s title comes from an inmate talent show that opens the film. Titicut comes from an Indian name for the Taunton River that runs near the facility.

One of the film’s most memorable sequences involves the force-feeding of a starving inmate by a cigarette-smoking bureaucrat who shoves a rubber hose down the compliant inmate’s nose. Short on Vaseline, the administrator casually requests lard or butter to lubricate the tube. Guards use towels wrapped around the naked man’s feet and wrists to restrain him. Wiseman uses quick cuts to show the man’s corpse being prepared for burial. Needless to say, the brutal force-feeding treatment is not effective. Although Wiseman later came to regret his “heavy-handed” editorializing, the cuts add a jarring quality of welcome disapproval by the filmmaker for the outrageous conduct he witnessed.

After winning awards at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in Germany, and at Italy’s Festival Dei Popoli, “Titicut Follies: film was banned by the Massachusetts Superior Court just before it was to be shown at the 1967 New York Film Festival. Massachusetts Superior Court judge Harry Kalus ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed, citing Massachusetts laws about patients' rights to privacy and dignity.

Wiseman appealed the case to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which allowed it to be shown only to “doctors, lawyers, judges, health-care professionals, social workers, and students in these and related fields” in 1969. It was the first time in American history that a film was banned from general distribution for reasons other than “obscenity, immorality, or national security.” “Titicut Follies wasn’t available for viewing by the general public until 1989.

The Samaritan

“The Samaritan” takes its title for the name of a con in which the mark gives up his cash in the interest of helping out one of the team of con artists conspiring against him. Canadian director/co-writer David Weaver has pulp noir on the brain. Samuel L. Jackson is Foley, a recently released prison inmate who did 25 years for killing his con partner in crime. As we discover in the backstory, Foley didn’t have much of a choice about whether or not to kill his associate. Samuel L. Jackson sinks his teeth into his portrayal of an ex-con in a way audiences rarely get a chance to witness. Here is Jackson giving 120% in a small budget crime thriller. The whole movie rides on Jackson’s performance, and he’s not about to come up short. You can’t help but pull for his character.

Happy to savor the taste of freedom again, Foley isn’t likely to fall for any tricks from the grown son of the man he killed 25 years ago. Unpredictable Ethan (well played by Luke Kirby) wants to guilt Foley into pulling off a “Samaritan” scam against one of Toronto’s most feared gangsters, Xavier (Tom Wilkinson). For all of his childish ignorance, Ethan has boiled up one hell of a hook to get Foley on board with the con. Said catch comes in the guise of a street tramp named Iris (Ruth Negga), who has a secret involving Foley that even she isn’t privy to. One thing’s for sure; your stomach will hit the floor when you find out what it is.

Although the plotline gets a bit sloppy in its articulation of the big scam at hand, the filmmakers take every advantage of the story’s 800-pound narrative gorilla that motivates Foley to do things he desperately doesn’t want to do. “The Samaritan” is a juicy little crime thriller that does the job.

Not Rated. 93 mins. (B-) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

DARK SHADOWS

Tim Burton’s tantalizingly delightful reduction of ABC television’s gothic daily soap opera (1966-1971) makes the most of its vampiric leading man Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp). If a couple of supporting characters —such as Barnabas’s love interest Victoria Winters/Josette DuPres— get shuffled away to back burners, there’s hardly opportunity to hold a grudge amid the compact storytelling. Bolstered by an energetic cast that includes Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green, Helena Bonham Carter, and a scene-chewing Chloe Grace Moretz, “Dark Shadows” plays to its depiction of early ‘70s America without slipping into camp. A cherry-picked soundtrack of era-appropriate music ranging from Iggy Pop to The Carpenters to Alice Cooper adds ironic lilt to the pokerfaced humor on hand. Danny Elfman’s evocative score hits all the right notes in setting a darker tone for the spunky melodrama.

As the backstory goes, the Liverpool-born Barnabas Collins helped with his father’s successful fishing business from the cavernous comfort in Collinwood Mansion in the coastal Maine town of Collinsport in the mid to late 1700s. A miscalculated dalliance with a jealous Wiccan house servant named Angelique Bouchard (played with delicious poise by Eva Green) cost Barnabas the lives of his parents, and that of his true love Josette DuPres. The spurned Angelique turned Barnabas into a vampire before siccing the angry locals on him. His fate was to be buried alive.

Nearly 200 years later, construction workers dig up our displaced vampire hero across from a McDonald’s parking lot. He responds by killing them. Well, Barnabas Collins is a bloodthirsty vampire after all. Barnabas’s unwelcome resurrection corresponds with the arrival at Collinwood Mansion of Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote)—the spitting image of Josette DuPres—who responds to an ad for a nanny to the household’s youngest member David (Gulliver McGrath)—son to Jonny Lee Miller’s unfit father figure Roger Collins. Barnabas reclaims his rightful place as the household patriarch in the face of Angelique’s place as a permanent rival to the family fishing business, which hangs on by the barest of threads. The only slightly ruffled vampire quickly goes into action to restore the family fortune even as family secrets spring to the surface like so many blades of grass on a golf course.

Depp’s Barnabas Collins gets ample opportunity to put the bite on his share of necks. Since working together on seven previous films director Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have developed a sharpness of communication that translates easily to the audience. “Dark Shadows” is a lot more fun than any of the “Twilight” movies combined. The movie sustains a unique tone of gleeful gothic fun. To that end, it achieves its clever goals quite nicely.

Rated PG-13. 113 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

Tonight You're Mine

As far as movies about nothing go, David Mackenzie’s synth-rock fantasy love story scrapes the bottom of the barrel. Teen idol characters and their booze-filled fans gather at Scotland’s outdoor music festival “T in the Park” to mix bodily fluids with tobacco, pot, rain, and grime. Luke Treadway’s Adam is the egotistical singer for a crummy rock duo band with a proclivity for rehearshing acoustic versions of their songs in the back of ultra-compact cars. The disposable pop musician meets his polar opposite/equal in rival bandleader Morello (Natalia Tena) when the two find themselves handcuffed together by an asinine festival prankster who promptly disappears with the key. Unskilled in the art of using a paperclip to unlock a handcuff, the pair spends the movie bickering with their respective partners when they aren’t drawn into performing onstage together against their will. Short on substance, and barely approaching any degree of musical interest, “Tonight You’re Mine” is a half-baked piece of cinematic fluff for barely pubescent female audiences who ostensibly don’t know any better. What a snooze.

Rated R. 80 mins. (D) (One Star - out of five/no halves)

STRANGE DAYS - CLASSIC FILM PICK

One of the most ambitious examples of the dystopian genre, Kathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days" (1995) is a forward-looking predictor of America's economic collapse that combines sci-fi and political elements with a back-handed love story.

Set on the potentially apocalyptic eve of the millennium, and co-written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, the film's hook is a futuristic black-market mini-disc technology called SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) that records real-life experiences directly from the cerebral cortex of the wearer. The recorded experiences can be relived by anyone with a SQUID player and a bootleg copy of the original disc. Adrenaline-pumping criminal activities and sensual encounters provide hot commodities that former LAPD officer Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) deals to "wire-tripping" junkies. Lenny desperately wants to steal back his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis) from Philo (Michael Wincott), a sleazy record producer who promises to sign rock-singer Faith to a record deal. At home, Lenny keeps a stash of intimate SQUID recordings of his relationship with Faith that he returns to frequently to remind him of what he’s lost. Lenny is a broken loser feeding on the negative energy that surrounds him in turbulent Los Angeles. No amount of humiliation or physical abuse is sufficient to make him forget his loss.

The film opens with one of nine virtuosic point-of-view sequences from inside the mind of a SQUID-wearer. A gun wielding masked robber accompanies two rowdy accomplices through a Chinese restaurant where cash is grabbed before cops arrive to chase the audience-as-subjective-criminal to a rooftop showdown that doesn't end well. Lenny snaps out of the deadly event he has been viewing. He’s angry that his SQUID disc connection Tick (Richard Edson) is trying to sell him a “blackjack” snuff clip. Indeed, the four-minute sequence bristles with hair-raising energy.

“Strange Days” owes adebt to Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” the film that ruined his storied career. A key subplot involves a SQUID wearer who rapes and kills a woman upon whom he places the recording device so that she sees what he sees as he kills her. 

Kathryn Bigelow exhibits an acute eye for detail and an affinity for maintaining an energized tempo to the action. As a woman filmmaker, Bigelow also sinks her teeth into a seething sensuality that emanates from her powerful female characters. Juliette Lewis’s nude scenes spring from the screen with slinky feline determination. Lenny’s best friend Mace (Angela Bassett) carries equal protagonist duties. Bassett’s theme-carrying character simmers with a fury that consistently erupts with ever increasing force toward the story’s socially volatile climax. If ever there was proof that a woman filmmaker can go toe-to-toe with the boys in the arena of complex action sequences, this is it. You’ve never seen chase scenes like these before.

I Wish

Master Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to his trademark familial themes with a charming coming-of-age film that focuses on an emotional, rather than sexual, awakening. Twelve-year-old Koichi (Koki Maeda) and his younger brother Ryunosuke (Ohshiro Maeda) have lived apart since their parents’ divorce. Koichi is with his mother Nozomi (Nene Ohtsuka) and grandparents (Isao Haahizume and Kirin Kiki) in Nozomi’s southern hometown of Kagoshima. Ryunosuke resides with the brothers’ musician father Kenji (Joe Odagiri) in the northern city of Hakata. Koichi misses his little brother terribly. Telephone calls do little to assuage Koichi’s feelings of displacement. News of a new bullet train that will connect the two distant towns stimulates the boys' imaginations. The hopeful siblings imagine that witnessing the two trains passing one another at top speed on the line’s maiden voyage will bring true the wish of whoever is there to witness the singular event. The brothers hatch a plan to ditch school with a few of their friends and meet up at the midway point on the train line to realize their fantasy. The improbable adventure calls for raising the necessary funds to purchase train tickets. Help from their young friends, family, and other adult figures play a crucial part in making the miracle happen.

Magical realism permeates a story that honors a child’s natural inclination to explore the world in a way adults have forgotten. That such a discovery would be impossible without some amount of tacit approval and even complicity from the adult world around them brings to light a communal sense of awareness and maturity in Japanese culture. Innocence has incalculable power in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s thoughtful study of childhood perspective. Wide-eyed humor, eternal optimism, and fearless audacity come with this territory.

Rated PG. 128 mins. (A) (Five Stars - out of five/no halves)

Girl In Progress

A deconstructionist take on the teenage coming-of-age story, director Patricia Riggen’s adequate adaptation of Hiram Martinez’s screenplay makes bold statements about immigrant culture and values in America. Grace (Eva Mendes) is a single mother working two jobs. Her days are spent cleaning the expensive home of Dr. Hartford (Matthew Modine), with whom she is having an affair. At night, she works at a seafood restaurant. In extramarital cliché fashion, Dr. Hartford promises to leave his wife to care for Grace, and her teen daughter Ansiedad (Clerra Ramirez). Ansiedad isn’t the only one with some growing up to do. An English-class assignment prompts Ansiedad to carefully plot her own by-the-book trajectory into young adulthood. Her maturing process will end with her deflowering at the hands of the school stud, if all goes as planned. Although the film’s third act gets strained by one sub-plot too many, “Girl In Progress” is a provocative young adult film that eschews self-righteousness.

Rated PG-13. 90 mins. (B-) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

9 ½ Weeks — CLASSIC FILM PICK

With its tantalizing title suggesting an ideal timeline for a fetishized affair, Adrian Lyne’s beautifully stylized adaptation of Elizabeth McNeill’s novel is a milestone of mainstream erotic cinema. Finished in 1984, but released in 1986 — one year before Oliver Stone’s milieu-similar “Wall Street” — the Manhattan-set story centers around a sadomasochistic relationship that develops between financial district arbitrageur John Gray (Mickey Rourke) and SoHo art gallery hot shot Elizabeth McGraw (Kim Basinger).

John is a master seducer for whom money is no object. His SoHo penthouse apartment is a study in ‘80s modernist minimalism. Every glossy surface is black or gray. He is a sexual adventurer well equipped to draw the classy Elizabeth into his polite game of master and servant. Rourke’s implacable charmer temporarily presents himself as the latter, giving Elizabeth gifts he subtly uses to manipulate her into her new role as his personal sex slave. A gold watch he gives her comes with the request that each day at noon, when she looks at the timepiece, she thinks of him touching her.

Elizabeth imagines herself falling into a conventional, albeit well-funded, relationship based on love more than lust. If Elizabeth’s sensual awakening is every woman’s fantasy of sexual fulfillment, the subtext demands a bank account deep enough to provide for it. Cold irony lurks. Perhaps she really is the seducer after all.

Adrian Lyne establishes the film’s moody soft-core parameters during an iconic sequence wherein Elizabeth masturbates in the art gallery basement while watching a slideshow of artworks. Fragmented projector beams of clouded light cut across Elizabeth’s blonde hair, candy-apple red lips, and luxurious white blouse. Pedestrians walk across the shadow-riddled sidewalk grate that hovers over her head. Voyeuristic New Yorkers are always nearby.

Lyne celebrates the effortless sexual chemistry between Basinger and Rourke, who each give exquisitely authentic portrayals. A centerpiece erotic sequence of foreplay involves John feeding the shut-eyed Elizabeth various foods while the couple sits in front of an open refrigerator. The sequence, along with one in which Elizabeth does a striptease in front of a blinded window, went on to inform a generation of music video filmmakers.

A noirish gloom hangs over the palpable ecstasy in “9 1/2 Weeks.” Cinematographer Peter Biziou masterfully exploits the dramatic potential of every carefully constructed composition to create a world of erotic suspense. Although the film flopped during its theatrical release, and was widely panned by critics, it has come to be recognized as a well-crafted example of soft-core eroticism.