Tonite Let's All Make Love in London: The Films of Peter Whitehead

Not everything from the antiwar '60s has to be roped in as a sweeping analogy for the war-torn NSA America of today. Sure, there are some man-on-the-sidewalk interviews with antiwar and pro-war voices in The Fall, an evocative documentary filmed on location in NYC in the summer of 1967, that sound eerily familiar to the polarized Red and Blue camps circa 2006. But sometimes the '60s are just the '60s. Arty underground London director Peter Whitehead was in Manhattan receiving an award for his hip earlier film, Tonight Let's All Make Love in London, when a gaggle of bourgeois admirers gave him some money and convinced him to stay in Manhattan to make another. Luckily, he took them up on it, and kismet brings us this gem, a time capsule that preserves 1967 better even than a dusty Jefferson Airplane LP. Whitehead, his camera, and his magazine-model girlfriend (they're often in the shots) cruise around NYC culling a non-narrative hodgepodge from the detritus of the era: protests, rock shows, television, advertising, Robert Kennedy, Black Panthers, and bitter members of the silent majority. Yes, Whitehead includes a tedious 20-minute, spliced-up psychedelic finale that's tame by today's cinematic standards—and that gets bogged down in, rather than transcends, the time. But that's the charm of this wonderful, color-drenched Polaroid of a movie. (JOSH FEIT) All films screen at Northwest Film Forum. Pop Films (a two-hour compilation of Whitehead's music promotional films, precursors to the modern music video), Thurs Nov 9 at 7, 9:30 pm. The Fall, Sat-Sun 7, 9:30 pm. For details see www.nwfilmforum.org.

Train Man

Train Man is fun to watch, at first, if you're drunk. Billed as a wildly-popular-in-Japan "true love story," the film details the dating ineptitude of a dork name Otaku who rolls his pants cuffs high and sleeps in a room full of action figures. Finally getting the chance to woo a hot babe, Otaku solicits dating advice via a message board full of other anonymous, isolated nerds and soon he's receiving fashion and lovin' advice from other internet shut-ins. Rather than being a lovable underdog, however, Otaku is downright pathetic. Initially, his awkward twitches seem sweet, but he seriously crosses the line into revolting dweebdom the second time he bursts into tears in front of a girl. The film also tosses in some jarring World War II reenactments and an infuriatingly awful "twist ending." (SARAH MIRK) Grand Illusion, Weekdays 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm.

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Babel

Babel is a huge, messy, sensuous film, its 142 minutes stretched over such riches as an embarrassingly intimate scene in which Cate Blanchett struggles to steady herself over a bedpan, a startlingly cheerful moment in which suburban American children are subjected to the slaughter of a chicken, and a lovely, turbulent sequence in which a deaf Japanese schoolgirl (the fascinating Rinko Kikuchi) takes Ecstasy and goes out dancing. The movie is clearly of a piece with Amores Perros and 21 Grams, the previous collaborations between writer Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu: A Japanese man traveling in Morocco gives a rifle to a goatherd, whose son accidentally shoots an American woman, whose government wildly overreacts. Meanwhile, the young son and daughter of the hemorrhaging woman are taken to a wedding in Mexico by their immigrant nanny; as the exhausted revelers return to California, U.S. border control guards provoke another wild overreaction, and the kids end up stranded in the desert. In the story with the most tenuous connection to the rest, a deaf Japanese schoolgirl tries to get laid or at least touched by other human hands. Each of the stories concerns parents and children, and each is preoccupied with the arbitrary yet unbridgeable borders between people. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

It's hairy, balls-out humor—but behind the seemingly random spray of political incorrectness, it's very carefully calibrated. Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a Kazakh television personality from a backwater where, supposedly, retarded brothers are stored in cages, where sisters are prostitutes and wives are enormously ugly, where pretty much everybody is related to the town rapist. On a scale of dangerous humor, riffs about a place few Americans have ever heard of, except perhaps in news reports about its self-aggrandizing dictator, are probably pretty safe. Humor about humorless feminists: relatively safe. Humor about idiot frat boys ingesting unidentifiable substances: very safe. Almost not-humor about red-state bigots: Uh, wait, aren't they most of the moviegoing public? Humor about Jews (even delivered by a Cohen): safe as Palestinian houses. There's also a reason it isn't being initially released in much of Middle America. It comes down on homophobes hard, and proves, without a doubt, that Jews eat sandwiches too. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Catch a Fire

An apartheid drama about the making of a righteous terrorist, Catch a Fire contains two inflammatory theses. One: Terrorism is not an absolute evil; it's an extra-military tactic that can be put to noble use. Two: Oppressive governments create terrorists by imprisoning and torturing innocent men. Derek Luke steps seamlessly into the real-life role of Patrick Chamusso, a black South African yes man turned antiapartheid rebel who, as a documentary clip at the end of the film illustrates, later founded an orphanage (truth is always cheesier than fiction). His wife, Precious, is pretty and "likes nice things"; his out-of-town mistress is a baby-laden footnote. When the oil refinery where Patrick works is attacked, he's arrested—and since his actual alibi involves spending the night in adulterous sin, he takes his beatings instead of fessing up. Patrick pays for this cowardice with a radical political awakening in prison. Given the complex motivations at play, it's unfortunate that the script (by Shawn Slovo) doesn't go in for much psychology and wastes precious minutes halfway humanizing Patrick's Boer rival (Tim Robbins). (ANNIE WAGNER)

Conversations with God

It'd be easy to call Conversations with God a bad movie. I could sit here and tell you that it's smug, creepy, and exploitative. A seeping carbuncle on the back of the ever-expanding Neale Donald Walsch merchandising juggernaut. Mass-produced spirituality for boring people. That the God-is-everything scheme is, like, the fifth-oldest trick in the theological book. But that would obfuscate the main issue here, which is that Walsch and his legions of suckers are also suuuuuper kookoo krazy-go-nuts!!! The movie tells the "true" life story of Neale Donald Walsch (Henry Czerny), a successful radio professional who, finding himself suddenly wifeless and jobless, comes to inhabit a tent in an Oregon park—a literal bum! Things are looking dire (garbage sandwich!), until Walsch begins receiving sassy advice from a disembodied chatterbox calling itself God. God speaks with Walsch's own voice, the point being, of course, that God is you. God is me. God is a hobo and a douchebag and a blowhard named Neale Donald Walsch. And now Neale Donald Walsch is a millionaire. (LINDY WEST)

The Departed

Returning at last from the gold statuette wilderness, Scorsese has assembled The Departed with an absolute precision that's been lacking in his work since Goodfellas. The result is a film that's not so much a puzzle as it is a pretzel, overlapping and tying itself up at any given moment, and effectively capturing us within the twisted lives of its two leads. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Flags of Our Fathers

Clint Eastwood's much-anticipated depiction of the events surrounding the famous flag raising at Iwo Jima, comes off as a rather puzzling misfire. The canvas here may be too large, or the history too weighty, for the director to find an in. Whatever the reason, as both war epic and historical character piece, it feels weirdly insubstantial. Eastwood's honorable, heartfelt, well-acted film has its moments of frisson, certainly—most notably a tense, spooky tunnel sequence that bodes well for next year's more intimate, Japanese-soldier-POV companion piece, Letters from Iwo Jima—yet its overall failure to engage proves insurmountable. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Flushed Away

Bad news first: Flushed Away, Aardman's first feature-length film since the triumphant Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (and notably, the first made without the participation of W&G creator Nick Park), is indeed significantly more manic than the films that made the studio famous. Fortunately, it's a great kind of manic, with an unapologetically crass, blitzkrieg approach that more than delivers the comedic goods. The plot—spoiled pet rat gets accidentally washed into the sewer, only to discover a cockney rodent subculture held under the thumb of a toad mob boss (Ian McKellen)—is slight, yet charming. What makes the thing zing is the attention to detail, spanning from the large (the cityscape, cobbled together from various flotsam and rubbish, is a marvel to behold) to the blink-and-you-miss-'em gags. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Harsh Times

Freddy Rodriguez and Christian Bale star as buddies from South Central LA.

The Illusionist

The Illusionist is, according to usually staid critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "a lush piece of romanticism" (read: a sepia-stained triumph of ahistoricism); or, if you prefer to have it from Stephen Holden, The Illusionist "rouses your slumbering belief in the miraculous" (read: Jessica Biel is so boring you'll nod off in your cushioned megaplex seat). I saw The Illusionist (twice) at the Seattle International Film Festival, back before beer bongs and airborne snakes ruled the screens, and I can assure you, with all confidence, that the movie is dumb. Really, really, dumb. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum is good when Maggie Smith is bopping people on the head, and pretty effing horrible the rest of the time. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Little Miss Sunshine

A dysfunctional family road trip comedy built upon a mountain of character quirks. Call it Indie Filmmaking 101. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette is Sofia Coppola's cash-in, her reward for low-budget ka-chings and the crafty seduction of so many underserved grown-up filmgoers. It is, in a word, a waxworks. The movie can be strikingly gorgeous at times, an exploding plastic inevitable somewhere between Peter Greenaway's tableaux-nuts The Draughtsman's Contract and every other 18th-century costume epic ever made. But waxworks, being lifeless, are quickly perused spectacles; Coppola's film is over two hours and is almost perversely undramatic and repetitious. The history covered is straight up: Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria (Kirsten Dunst), at 14, is shipped to France in order to wed a 15-year-old Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). She has trouble getting pregnant, plunges into marital doldrums, then embraces self-indulgence (at the state's expense) and is eventually executed during the Revolution. Visually, Dunst is a veritable creamsicle, but her role is so featureless it comes to resemble the actress hanging out backstage, dressed and prepped with nowhere to go. Inadvertently, Coppola has painted a pathetic portrait of a spoiled kitten not unlike herself, born into unlimited resources and without a thought in her pretty head, before she lost it entirely. (MICHAEL ATKINSON)

Open Season

Open Season is a cartoon about man vs. beast. Not in the depressing Steve Irwin vs. stingray kind of way. In the Bugs Bunny vs. Elmer Fudd kind of way. (MEGAN SELING)

The Prestige

The complicated plot boils down to a mundane feud between rival London magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. The origin of their rivalry is the death of Jackman's wife (Piper Perabo), possibly at Bale's hands, in a dangerous but well-practiced stunt. Otherwise, their differences are minor. One has a talent for showmanship; the other boasts only ingenuity. One gets to put his grubby mitts on the likes of Scarlett Johansson (usually costumed like a peacock, and outfitted with an accordingly pea brain); the other has to contend with true love. They strive to steal each other's best tricks, and they push each other to unhealthy limits, including an ill-advised consultation with Nikola Tesla (David Bowie, hamming it evil genius). There's no rhythm to its budding, no tightening at its most interesting intersections (like the sadistic truth behind the apparent teleportation of a bird). The film is all formless and shallow until the final payoff—known in magic jargon as "the prestige"—when doubles and sacrifice and character all coalesce into one dark metaphysical conceit. There's no sleight-of-hand here, just sick magic (not slick, mind you, sick), and it's tremendous. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Queen

The central conflict in The Queen is, literally, whether Her Majesty Schoolmarm will deign to mention the unseemly death of an ex-princess—but no one in the whole supposedly accurate movie even notices that Mother Teresa has gone tits up. Nevertheless, The Queen's myopia is so complete, the performances so meticulous, that you can't help but start to care about, or pine for, or want to overthrow the British monarchy. Basically, The Queen is The West Wing populated by stuck-up twits, and in addition to the studiously wooden figurehead (a metaphor that's never seemed so apt), there is a whole crew of politicians and staffers conducting surreptitiously from backstage. Michael Sheen, as Tony Blair, is excellent as the sort of squishy leader celebrity-era democracy is prone to. And the minutiae of public relations have never seemed so stupid—or so fascinating. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Return

A thriller starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Running with Scissors

Much of the structure of Running with Scissors—broken home, gay main character coming of age, mom prone to mental breakdowns, and oodles of eccentric supporting roles—practically howls "For Your Consideration." But the particulars—mom allows her even crazier psychiatrist to adopt Augusten, leading to attempted suicide, statutory rape, criminal negligence, and rampant substance abuse—are too harsh even for a fall-release family drama. But that's why Burroughs's memoirs are great: He reports the horrors of his life with a nonchalance that gives the reader permission to laugh. This movie doesn't work because an honest adaptation of Running with Scissors can't work. Without Burroughs's narration, we're left with a Tobe Hooper horror film. The movie-making changes—casting an older Augusten; miniaturizing the importance of Natalie Finch (Evan Rachel Wood), Augusten's vital support system in the book; and Gwyneth Paltrow's jarring presence—accumulate into story-killing wounds. (PAUL CONSTANT)

The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause

Tim Allen battles a dude with an icy fauxhawk.

Shortbus

The sexy scenes are overlaid with the kind of ridiculous humor that will distract the most dogged voyeur (you try getting turned on while watching someone hum "The Star-Spangled Banner" mid-rimjob), or are strung together in flitting montages that would frustrate the most single-minded masturbator. (Acrobatic heterosex on a piano! Oops, you missed it. Yogic consumption of one's own ejaculate! Oops, you missed it.) No one wants to get off in an art-house theater, and Mitchell lets you have your cake and leave it on the platter, too. Shortbus relies too much on its friendly, exotic, giddy tone. It's a cozy invention, the NYC Shortbus cabaret whose orgies are presided over by a benevolently catty Justin Bond. But a setting can't sustain an entire movie, and the plot is outright lazy. (Literal climax, anyone?) The energy of the film sputters out halfway through—Shortbus could stand to lose 30 minutes off its flabbily melancholic denouement. (ANNIE WAGNER)