The Rest of the Fest

Venues:

Venues:IH: International House, 3701 Chestnut St. RB: Ritz Bourse, Fourth & Ranstead sts. RE: Ritz East, Second & Sansom sts. PMT: Prince Music Theater, 1421 Chestnut St.

A * after a screening time denotes director or other special guest.

Following are reviews of selected films from the second week (April 11-18) of the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. All times are p.m.

Tickets ($8 apiece; $6 for shows up to 4 p.m.) are available in person at the 15th and Locust TLA Video from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and the Prince Music Theater and the Ritz East box office from a half-hour before the first screening until a half-hour after the last screening; by phone from 215-733-0608, ext. 2; or online at www.phillyfests.com (up to 36 hours before the event). Same-day tickets can be purchased only at the screening venue.

Absolut Warhola It seems that just about everyone in the village of Miková, Slovakia, is an aunt or cousin of Andy Warhol. Although he never lived in or even visited the land of his parents, Warhol (Andrijku Warhola, to the locals) is now a haphazardly beloved regional icon, thanks to a new museum in nearby Medzilaborce devoted to his work.

The relationship between the late artist and his extended Slovakian family is a nice starting point for Stanislaw Mucha's quirky documentary, but Andy turns out to be merely a convenient excuse for a peek at the post-communist hardships and simple pleasures of a cantankerous but charming community that, in its own way, has popped art. --R.G. (4/16, 9:30, RE)

Back Against the Wall Experimental filmmaker James Fotopoulos, 25, has several films to his credit already, and while Back Against the Wall wavers at times, it has more than a few moments of genuine originality. It doesn't help that both the quality and, more important, the style of the acting is wildly divergent; as a man whose jealousy is slowly driving him insane, Martin Shannon speaks in a distant, affectless monotone that might generously be construed as Warholian anti-acting, while Debbie Mulcahy, as his stripper girlfriend, counters with a raw naturalism that presents a more interesting contrast to Fotopoulos' stark, static compositions. The story, which moves from a seedy apartment to a porn-ring ranch house, is almost comically contrived (you don't believe the milieu for a second), but the film's rhythms are hypnotic all the same. (It's helped enormously by its burbling musique concrète score.) The film has a roughness that can't just be chalked up to its nonexistent budget, but it's too original to simply dismiss. --Sam Adams (4/17, 9:30, IH)

Bastoni: The Stick Handlers It's a porn-star love triangle! Ryo's long-ago ex-girlfriend Miyuki (and his "inspiration" when professional difficulties, uh, don't arise) decides to try acting in adult videos, just as his pregnant wife and co-star Natsuo is about to give up the business. There's an even-by-porn-standards curious detachment to the abundant sex, which is always shown in long shot, with a cameraman between us and them. Unfortunately, that detachment carries over to the "relationship" scenes; it's as if the characters are play-acting their lives. The effect is frustrating on all counts; we never see the shipping product, we're just touring the factory. --Ryan Godfrey (4/11, 9:45*; 4/13, 2:30* RE)

Bottomfeeders Proof that authenticity is more a matter of skill than experience, this mock-doc produced and written by Celia Fischer, a former campaign manager for Ed Rendell and Bill Clinton, still feels like second-hand news. The major problem has more to do with documentary and politics -- though Madi DiStefano, complete with Dee Dee Myers locks, makes a convincingly frustrated state campaign boss (she's been dumped in Pennsylvania, which her presidential candidate is certain to lose), a number of other performances are far too broad to sustain any sense of realism (or even fake realism), and it's far too convenient (not to mention dramatically cheap) just to have characters explode in front of the camera every time a secret needs revealing. The War Room and The West Wing have set the bar awfully high, and Bottomfeeders acts like it's a limbo contest. --S.A. (4/15, 7:15 PMT*)

Christmas in the Clouds One of the delights of films about American Indians is the practically guaranteed presence of Graham Greene in the cast. Unsurprisingly, Greene manages to steal every scene he's in as a hotel chef determined to keep his guests from ordering meat, but the rest of this not-that-white Christmas is more than able to hold its own as a smart, good-natured romantic comedy. Simple mistaken identity drives the story: Half-Indian Tina travels incognito to meet her pen pal at an American Indian-run mountain resort, where she's taken for a travel-guide writer reviewing the lodge. Naturally, Tina and Ray, the hotel manager, fall in love. Curmudgeon supreme M. Emmet Walsh chews scenery as the real (and utterly neglected) travel writer, but fortunately, unmasticated vistas abound. --R.G. (4/12, 8:30 PMT*; 4/14, 2:30, RE*)

Do It for Uncle Manny In Hollywood, everything real is fake and everything fake is real: not a surprising message from a movie that name-checks Swingers, to which it owes a large stylistic debt. Local triple-threat Adam Baratta wrote, directed and stars as out-of-work actor Danny, whose lawyer-to-be pal Stu (Shane Edelman) comes to L.A. to interview and to housesit for his famous producer uncle. When the boys start fronting with Uncle Manny's bling, femme fatale Kari Wuhrer hatches a scheme to put them in their place. It's nice to see that Wuhrer is capable of meatier roles than the Sexy Naked Chick she usually plays, and indeed the performances all around are nicely tuned for the droll material. If the overall effect of the comedy is something less than genuinely side-splitting, it's only appropriate to take comfort in the film's many ersatz charms. --R.G. (4/13, 9:30*; 4/14, 12:15*, RB)

Emmett’s Mark Ambitious but ultimately confused, Keith Snyder's shot-in-Philly debut -- which the festival has snagged as a world premiere -- wavers between probing psychological drama and generic cop-thriller stuff, and it never quite gets the balance right. (The score, which goes French Connection where it should The Conversation, doesn't help.) As the movie opens, homicide 'tec Emmett Young (Scott Wolf) is told he has an incurably fatal illness that promises to kill him slowly; when he meets a fellow cop (Gabriel Byrne) who promises him a quick way out, he's bound to accept. The trouble is that the quick way out involves hiring a man he's never met (Tim Roth) to kill him when he least suspects it. Even if this plot hadn't been used before, you could predict where things are going, even if Snyder didn't tack on a pro forma serial-killer plot just to keep things chugging along. Without a real character to play, Roth resorts to increasingly bug-eyed mugging, and Byrne's performance could have been cut together from Usual Suspects outtakes. The surprise here is Wolf, who's a credible enough leading man to knock Party of Five out of the head of anyone who's unfortunate enough to have it stuck there in the first place. Watch for the last-minute cameo by FestIndies curator Scott Johnston, as well as supporting roles by Greg Wood, Silk City and Repo Records. --S.A. (4/13, 8:15*; 4/14, 2:30, PMT*)

Freedom Highway Well-meaning but ultimately inconclusive, Freedom Highway sets its sights on tracking down the most notable figures in protest song. Moving testimony comes from figures like Rubén Blades, Hugh Masekela and Pete Seeger, even if some inclusions are questionable. Tom Waits and Elvis Costello are too mercurial to be pinned down in brief interviews, even if Waits' growling banjo-and-tambourine take on Leadbelly is one of the film's highlights. (And I think we've heard enough from Ani DiFranco, second-rate Joni Mitchell that she is.) Freedom Highway would be better off without its token nod to hip-hop -- either do it right or don't do it at all -- and for a film about protest, it's got surprisingly little to say, except for vague generalities about music being the voice of the people and so on. --S.A. (4/15, 7:15, IH)

One Fine Spring Day Sound engineer Sang-Woo and radio producer Eun-Su, collaborating over several months on a project to record the sounds of nature -- a forest stream, the wind through bamboo -- fall in, and out, of love. Director Hur Jin-Ho's approach is austere and contemplative, textbook Ozu: long, strongly composed stationary shots, no camera motion, no close-ups. The tone is cribbed from Wong Kar-Wai at his most wistful: small, sensual instances half-remembered through the lens of how it ended. Although Hur is not yet Wong and Ozu's equal in beading moments into bittersweet visual jewelry, at least he has chosen to apprentice with the best. --R.G.(4/13, 7:00, RB; 4/16, 7:00, IH)

Nine Queens This film is so redolent of House of Games that writer/director Fabián Bielinsky had better put a few pesos in reserve just in case David Mamet comes a-calling. But even if it's obvious from the get that Nine Queens is the kind of movie where everyone is fucking everyone else over, you still have to figure out how, and that's the fun. With obvious parallels to the recent history of Argentine corruption, Bielinsky creates a world where no one can be trusted and even the most strait-laced citizen gets a little on the side. It would be a much better movie without the last 90 seconds (where the twist we knew was coming comes), but Nine Queens is still a nifty twist on an old genre, enlivened particularly by the performances of Gastón Pauls and Ricardo Darín (also in the upcoming The Son of the Bride). --S.A. (4/12, 7:15 RE; 4/15, 5:00, PMT)

Runaway Chances are, you go to Runaway looking for difference, a view of life "over there." But this documentary view of life in a Tehran shelter for runaway girls reveals that women face the same problems the world over. Not that that's a comforting thought, when said problems involve girls who leave home because their drug-addicted fathers try to turn them out, or when a mother whose husband has tried to molest her daughter blames the last and tries to solve the problem with kerosene. The shelter profiled in Runaway has existed for only a few years, and the film strongly but subtly conveys the sense of a culture only beginning to address the issues it raises. The feeling is of a profound change only barely under way, and of savvy filmmakers who have practically captured a birth on film. The Friday screening will be followed at 5 by "Muslim Women: Reel and Reality," a free panel discussion at 1616 Locust St. including Runaway co-director Ziba Mir-Hosseini. --S.A. (4/13, 2:30*; 4/14, 5:00 PMT*)

Shrapnel in Peace Even if you dig Kiarostami the most, Shrapnel in Peace may strike you as a pretty slow-moving thing. Ali Shah-Hatami's debut has plenty of strong imagery, from a lone woman stumbling under the weight of enormous pieces of war salvage to the sight of a man gamely attempting to sell off a tank he claims he's found. But an attempt at collective storytelling comes off like dissolution, and we're left with a series of vignettes that, while solid enough on their own, never really cohere. --S.A. (4/11, 7:15; 4/16, 12:00 RE)

A Single Drop of Water in a Mighty River The drop is a young Japanese woman named Yukiko. The mighty river is probably something like Life. Yukiko has to figure out where she stands on the TraditionalCosmopolitan continuum. Should she stay in Tokyo or move back to her small-town home to care for her dying father? Should she marry her childhood sweetheart or pursue the Russian trumpeter who once showed her around Moscow and who is now in Japan? The questions asked would demand compelling answers if Yukiko's character were drawn as something more than a collection of reactions to the forces around her. We never find out enough about her qua her to keep us interested in her presumably important life issues. It stands to reason that A Single Drop is still all wet. --R.G. (4/16, 12:00; 4/17, 7:00 RE)

Southside You can't really blame Brian Austin Green for taking parts that serve to dissociate himself with the ZIP code, but this one's no knockout. Green plays unlikably sleazy tough Jacko, whose only friend is Travis (Bret Roberts), a young boxer with the talent and a shot to get them both out of the bleak industrial morass of their neighborhood. There's untapped sexuality at the heart of their macho companionship, enough to make homo-hating Jacko twitchily violent. It doesn't help -- Jacko's temper or the movie's earnest bid to be taken seriously -- that Travis' secret weapon in the ring is groin-to-groin contact with the other fighter. Someone made this stuff up, but it wasn't me. --R.G. (4/13, 9:30*; 4/14, 4:30 RE*)




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