Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

The Pact (Thu., Dec. 7, 7 p.m., $5-$7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St.) Nearly victims of Newark's streets, the "Three Doctors" behind the best-selling book The Pact are a conscious inspiration to fellow black Americans looking for a way out of poverty. In Andrea Kalin's documentary, less an adaptation of the book than an extended postscript to it, Rameck Hunt, Sampson Davis and George Jenkins all give the sense that their lives could have turned out very differently. Hunt recalls praying for just one of his parents to get off drugs, while Davis revisits the juvenile detention center where he did time for armed robbery. The movie is oddly circumspect on "the pact" itself, perhaps not wanting to cannibalize book sales too much; it gets the three men up to the point where they met, then jumps to the present day, while they juggle the lives of young (and sometimes struggling) doctors with a jam-packed calendar of speaking engagements and book signings. (At one event, they play likeable second fiddle to a typically abrasive Bill Cosby.) Davis doesn't devote enough time to exploring the problems still facing Newark today, but the book's impact speaks for itself in the faces of the doctors' audiences.

The Pact

The Pusher Trilogy ($39.98 DVD) Nicholas Winding Refn's so-so debut wasn't exactly screaming for a sequel, let alone two, but the director of the intermediate flops Bleeder and Fear X is frank about his reasons for returning to Copenhagen's underworld: He needed the dough. Perhaps that explains why Pusher II's hapless ex-con Tonny (Casino Royale baddie Mads Mikkelsen) spends most of the movie trying to pay off an unexpected debt, and Pusher 3's Serbian drug kingpin (Zlatko Buric) finds himself suddenly in thrall to a group of Albanian upstarts when he comes up short on a deal. II is merely a novel twist on the first Pusher's gritty tedium (a huge hit in Refn's native Denmark), but 3 strikes new ground, largely thanks to Buric's titanic performance. An imposing figure in both previous movies, he is here reduced to cooking dinner for his even more frightening daughter's 25th birthday party, while also trying to kick drugs and not get himself killed. It's end-of-the-line gangster farce, at once bleakly realistic and a giant fuck-you to Scarface-heads who took the first movie as wish fulfillment.

(sam@citypaper.net)