The Exiles

Director Brent MacKenzie’s black-and-white documentary/narrative genre blender about urbanized Native Americans in 1961 Los Angeles is a cold glass of cinematic water drawn from the same well as Joseph Strick’s "The Savage Eye" (1960). MacKenzie uses editorial voice-over narration to elaborate on his reckless characters’ existential lifestyle during a night of carousing amid LA’s impoverished Bunker Hill neighborhood where the steeply inclined "Angel’s Flight" trolley car delivered passengers into the thick of its immigrant community. Bold in its visionary attempt to capture an essence of American Indian reality that is evermore significant today for its strangled condemnation of America’s betrayal of a people it murdered and displaced before such war crimes became articulated in our common vernacular, "The Exiles" is a one-of-a-kind film.

Not Rated, 72 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

Mister Lonely

If the future of American Cinema is, as Werner Herzog proudly states, Harmony Korine’s vision, then it is a tuna carcass dressed in a nun’s habit with a retarded white guy standing over it yelling obscenities. I admit to having loathed "Kids" (Harmony Korine wrote the script), I liked "Gummo" for its gothic humor, and I detested "Julien Donkey Boy" for being insidiously depressing. For "Mr. Lonely," I was just bored. Korine designs a purposefully artificial narrative contrivance with characters that are celebrity impersonators living in a rural castle in Scotland. Diego Luna is a Michael Jackson dance artist in Paris who strikes poses for money, and always dresses in costume. Michael’s already slim prospects diminish when he’s lured to an impersonators’ commune by a Marilyn Monroe lookalike (played by Samantha Morton). James Dean, Abe Lincoln, Madonna, the Three Stooges, Little Red Riding Hood, and a pockmarked Charlie Chaplin are some of the personalities Michael joins at the castle where the compound’s flock of black sheep come down with a disease that insures their necessary execution. Werner Herzog has a secondary role as a crazed Catholic priest who flies food-drop missions over Costa Rican villages, and he briefly commands the film whenever his unrelated subplot rolls around. Think of it as a cinema-of-the-infantile and you’ll be better able to stomach the utter boredom that goes along with Korine’s prepubescent logic.

Not Rated, 112 mins. (D) (One Star)

Brothers of The Head

"Lost In La Mancha" directors Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton take a flailing mockumentary shot at a convoluted narrative about a pair of conjoined twins-turned-punk-rock-duo. Based on the 1977 illustrated novel by Brian Aldiss, the movie mixes faux documentary and interview footage with the movie-time narrative to tell an incomplete story set in black comedy trappings. Band manager Zak Bedderwick (Howard Attfield) takes twins Tom (Harry Treadaway) and Barry (Luke Treadaway) from their impoverished life on England’s eastern coast to turn them into a pop music sensation called "Bang Bang." The punk rock circus act is sidetracked by the inevitable influence of drugs, alcohol and a divisive woman. The Treadaway brothers give inspired performances as the joined-at-the-side brothers and their sincere efforts, in the face of the filmmakers’ vague narrative intent, drives the entertainment element of the misguided picture.

Rated R, 90 mins. (C-)