LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL GUIDE 2008
June 18, 2008
LA WEEKLY (Los Angeles)

BY L.A. WEEKLY FILM CRITICS
Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - 5:54 pm

PRESSURE COOKER (USA) “Break the mentality of the McDonald’s palate!” is among the tough-love advice dispensed by culinary-arts instructor Wilma Stephenson, whose inner-city Philadelphia high school students have racked up millions in prestigious trade-school scholarships. It’s too bad that co-directors Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker haven’t taken more of their subject’s advice to heart, shoehorning Stephenson’s story into the “contest documentary” mold that already seemed tiresome back when Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom were making a mint peddling it. Can I get fries with that? (Mann Festival, Sat., June 21, 7:30 p.m.; The Landmark, Tues., June 24, 7:15 p.m.; Regent, Wed., June 25, 1:45 p.m.) (SF)

PRINCE OF BROADWAY (USA)“Will you stop mumbling?” This, to leading man Prince Adu, the most garrulous (though not necessarily the least inspired) of the improvisers who populate Sean (Greg the Bunny) Baker’s sentimental echo of the Dardennes brothers’ The Child. Adu plays Lucky, the West African street hawker of designer knockoffs on whose doorstep is dumped the awesomely cute little snot-nose who sets his paternal heart thumping. Along the way, disjointed subplots threaten to intersect, a handful of New York types undergo cursory development along predictable lines, and rare, muted snatches of real poetry manage to filter through the incessant histrionics. (Regent, Sun., June 22, 7 p.m. and Mon., June 23, 1:45 p.m.; The Landmark, Thurs., June 26, 4:30 p.m.) (RS)

THING WITH NO NAME (South Africa/USA) Like Lord Voldemort, AIDS in South Africa is so frightening to many that it’s not referred to by name but instead by various oblique descriptors; the disease thus undefined, it’s harder to teach locals to treat it as a tangible, preventable thing. Documentarian Sarah Friedland tries to put a face on this situation by showing us the lives of two women living with full-blown AIDS: elderly Ntombelini and 33-year-old Danisile. The challenge of a film like this lies in getting an audience to invest emotionally in people who they know will likely be dead by the end, and Friedland doesn’t quite achieve that. (Perhaps focusing on only one subject would have allowed for more identification.) It doesn’t help that the soundtrack’s constant high-pitched squeals and tin drums feel like sonic assaults.(Regent, Sat., June 21, 2 p.m.; The Landmark, Sun., June 22, 10 p.m.; Italian Cultural Institute, Fri., June 27, 4:30 p.m.) (LYT)

GO TRICKS (Poland) This mostly charming Polish comedy concerns the efforts of 6-year-old Stefek (Damian Ul) to cajole his estranged father back toward their family. The familiar premise is made appealing by the whimsical indirectness of the boy’s approach. The title refers to a series of sly, fate-altering tactics practiced by our hero and his resourceful teenage sister (Ewelina Walendziak); it’s a credit to writer-director Andrzej Jakimowski that this film about carefully wrought contrivance has a winning sense of spontaneity. (The Landmark, Fri., June 20, 4 p.m.; AMC Avco Center, Sun., June 22, 7 p.m.) (Adam Nayman)

TRINIDAD (USA) Gender dystopia finds its ultimate remedy in Trinidad, Colorado, “sex-change capital of the world,” as evidenced in this interesting documentary that sheds light upon a highly marginalized community. The efforts of three prominent transsexual citizens to build a recovery house for post-op patients prove that the pioneer spirit is still alive in this quaint Western town. There is much bowling, golfing, bronc riding and analysis of the transsexual condition, but if graphic footage of gender-reassignment surgery makes you queasy, then this film may not be for you. (Majestic Crest, Sun., June 22, 4:30 p.m.; Mann Festival, Mon., June 23, 4:30 p.m.; Italian Cultural Institute, Fri., June 27, 7 p.m.) (JT)

GO USELESS (China) Like his Still Life, Jia Zhanke’s Useless is a sort of doc-fiction hybrid, though it’s slanted more toward the former. Jia’s unostentatiously gorgeous film takes a hard look at the indignities of industrial employment in China. It also gets at something more slippery (and less familiar to festival-circuit docs): the contradictions of high-end “handmade” aesthetics. We’re never asked to judge Shanghai-based designer Ma Ke as she describes the particulars of her new Paris-feted collection — clothes buried in the ground for that literal salt-of-the-earth feeling — but a sequence depicting a group of miners trying to get that dirt off their shoulders speaks (or, this being a Jia film, whispers) volumes. (The Landmark, Sun., June 22, 7 p.m.; Regent, Mon., June 23, 9:30 p.m.) (AN)

GO VISUAL ACOUSTICS: THE MODERNISM OF JULIUS SHULMAN (USA) Architectural photographer Shulman — whose profound engagement with the houses of Neutra, Schindler, Koenig, Lautner, et al. did more to mythologize mid-’50s California Modern than the many thousands of words published alongside his work inTime, Life and House & Garden — is 97 and still swimming against the tide of Postmodernism. Although filmmaker Eric Bricker’s intentions, at once didactic and valedictory, would have been more effectively realized had he spent less time fine-tuning his swooshing PowerPoint aesthetic and more of it orchestrating the conversation among his talking heads, the photographs, Shulman himself and DP Dante Spinotti’s way with a tracking shot more than compensate for the lack of structural integrity. (The Landmark, Sun., June 22, 4 p.m.; Billy Wilder Theater, Wed., June 25, 4 p.m.) (RS)

WHEN CLOUDS CLEAR (Ecuador/USA) When Clouds Clear is an ironic title for a blurry documentary. Anne Slick and Danielle Bernstein’s film about an isolated Andean community desperately fending off the advances of mining firms is rife with incident (including footage of violent clashes between villagers and company representatives) but short on measured analysis. It’s also shapeless: The chronology of events seems fuzzy, and while the filmmakers’ insistence that their subjects speak for themselves is admirable, the interview segments eventually start to feel redundant. (The Landmark, Sat., June 21, 10 p.m.; Regent, Sun., June 22, 1:30 p.m.) (AN)

GO WHERE ARE THEIR STORIES? The influence of Carlos Reygadas is unmistakable on writer-director-editor Nicolás Pereda’s impressive debut feature, in which the grandson of a dying Mexican woman travels from the Puebla countryside to Mexico City in an effort to stop his aunts and uncles from selling the old woman’s land out from under her before she has taken her last breath. Running a mere 70 minutes and composed of long, largely wordless, single-shot sequences, Where Are Their Stories? suffers from a smattering of self-consciously arty affectations (the opening titles don’t appear until 20 minutes into the film), but it’s mostly a controlled, beautifully observed rumination on stasis, change and the things in life to which we don’t pay enough mind. (AMC Avco Center, Sat., June 21, 4:30 p.m.; The Landmark, Wed., June 25, 7 p.m.) (SF)

http://www.laweekly.com/2008-06-19/film-tv/laff-a-to-y/7