War/Dance
dir. Sean Fine, Andrea Nix Fine
War/Dance blends together two of the more played-out doc
topics—life during wartime and kids in a Spellbound-type
competition—into a slick, gorgeously shot film that should win
over even the biggest Eeyore. Making a return to theaters after a
strong showing at SIFF, this crowd-pleaser certainly goes down sweet,
but it’s rarely cloying.
First-time directorial team Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine set their
sights on the children of Patongo, a northern Ugandan refugee camp
barely weathering the effects of a 20-year civil war. After a brief
flurry of information about the history and residents of the
camp—many of whom ended up there after being kidnapped by a
ferocious rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army—the
film focuses on three teenagers (a choir singer, a dancer, and a
xylophone player) picked to perform in a legendary music competition in
the capital city of Kampala.
The first half of the film, in which the clear-eyed camp residents
talk about their hardships, is admittedly a bit of a tough sit, but
once the competition begins, the good vibes pour on in waves,
particularly in the climactic performance of a remarkably intricate,
centuries-old royal dance. War/Dance does occasionally feel
overproduced (you’ve never seen so many beautifully extraneous
landscapes), but the passion on both sides of the lens shines through.
Children in dire situations can be a tricky, quasi-exploitive subject
for filmmakers—see, for example, the scene where a blind toddler
stumbles through a minefield in the otherwise brilliant recent Kurdish
film Turtles Can Fly—but it’s handled here in a
responsible, occasionally joyous fashion. You can still feel your
heartstrings being pulled, but when it’s done this well, it’s tough to
bear a grudge. ANDREW WRIGHT
How to Cook Your Life
dir. Doris Dörrie
A more precious concept hasn’t been seen in Seattle theaters since
What the Bleep Do We Know, but I forced myself to keep an open
mind: We’re dealing with the shadowy world of self-help cinema here,
and Zen cookery is downright benign compared to Bleep‘s wanton
misinterpretation of quantum physics. And as it turns out, How to
Cook Your Life isn’t all slogans and dangerous nonsense. It’s also
the portrait of a single flawed adherent, a teacher who is still
relearning a (possibly impossible) lesson.
Twinkly-eyed Edward Espe Brown is the instructor at a Zen-based
cooking school, where classrooms full of mostly older women and the
occasional suspicious teenager learn to find serenity chopping
vegetables and kneading dough. As far as the documentary is able to
communicate, the overriding philosophy seems to be “chill out.” And
maybe also, “use the leftovers.” But chilling out isn’t as easy as it
sounds, and after the
filmmaker catches Brown throwing a little
tantrum, he returns to his lessons with what seems like twice the
personality he had before. Just like that, he’s a complex, fascinating
character.
Which is good, because the rest of the film gives the unfortunate
impression of a foreigner (director Doris Dörrie is German) being
sort of condescendingly awestruck by West Coast culture. She makes
little forays into San Francisco, finding such apparent novelties as
hungry people and a woman who Dumpster dives. When Dörrie is
confronted by an organic farmer who uses turkey byproducts to fertilize
his chard, she comes off as righteously confused. “So it isn’t really
vegetarian,” she challenges, irrelevantly. (Zen and the art of gotcha
journalism, I suppose.) But these toneless episodes make the retreat
back to Brown’s cooking classes feel strangely comforting. Kneading
dough may be therapeutic after all. ANNIE WAGNER
Holly
dir. Guy Moshe
For a movie about the child sex trade in Cambodia, Holly is
mercifully easy on the stomach. Guy Moshe’s film is shot on location,
sometimes in actual brothels, but doesn’t aspire to verisimilitude.
Instead, it focuses on the adventure of a 14-year-old Vietnamese girl
sold into the sex trade, and an American vagabond and cardsharp named
Patrick who wants to save her.
Patrick (a brooding and big-chinned Ron Livingston) is on some
relatively harmless black-market trip when his motorcycle breaks down
in a dusty Cambodian village where foreigners come to find prostitutes.
He waits for his motorcycle to be repaired for a few days and tries to
be extra nice to Holly, the new girl, who is obviously not where she is
supposed to be. At this point, 30 minutes in, you figure Patrick will
find his nerve, throw her on his motorcycle, and they’ll spend the rest
of the movie outrunning Cambodian pimps. Maybe he’d even adopt her and
everything would be swell. Instead, Patrick ditches her, dithers for a
while, wonders if he should go back to get her, then goes back to get
her.
Meanwhile, Holly has escaped (with her virginity intact) and takes
us on a guided tour of What’s Crappy About Cambodia—she walks a
minefield, becomes a garbage picker, and is then sold into another
brothel by a helpful policeman. By the time Patrick and Holly find each
other, they’re both beyond redemption.
Director Guy Moshe never rubs our faces in the dirt. (And he avoids
that other possibility, almost too horrible to consider—making
his movie surreptitiously sexy.) But even more than Moshe’s restraint,
it’s the deus ex machinas and the sometimes inexplicable behavior of
his characters that keep us from being sucked into the horror of his
subject matter. The harder the movie is to believe, the easier it is to
watch. BRENDAN KILEY
