In Brief

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

KIDS IN AMERICA
PG-13, 91 minutes


Director Josh Stolberg is either an utter moron or a total genius. After watching his feature-film debut, I’m leaning toward the latter. An utterly inauthentic movie about teenagers standing up for themselves and fighting their repressive school principal, Donna Weller (Julie Bowen), “Kids in America” has blundered into some of the most entertaining and surreal territory since the heyday of the 1980s teen comedy. Featuring an Asian girl obsessed with her own anus, a musical ode to George Michael cruising public bathrooms (performed twice), and Hollywood’s longest screen kiss (blowing away the three-minute-and-five-second record previously held by 1941’s “You’re in the Army Now”), this is a movie that at once has a lot on its mind and nothing at all.


A multi-culti gang of high school kids led by “Everwood” star Gregory Smith (channeling Christian Slater in “Pump Up the Volume”) decides that although they come from different tribes (fatty, queer, cheerleader, rebel, Asian, black) they’re united by their hatred of abusive authoritarian adults and they need to fight the power – ASAP. It’s a lesser, weirder version of “The Breakfast Club” with a little bit of “Saved by the Bell” and a shifting, inconsistent tone that will drive you bananas unless you manage to ignore it and go with the flow (try drugs).


Opposing the kids is an army of Blist actors: Malik Yoba (“Cool Runnings”), George Wendt, Rosanna Arquette, Adam Arkin, Elizabeth Perkins (“Weeds”), Charles Shaughnessy (“The Nanny”), and Samantha Mathis. And, if nothing else, this flick finally settles the great issue of our day: Nicole Richie is a much better bad actress than Paris Hilton.


– Grady Hendrix


AFTER INNOCENCE
unrated, 95 minutes


Call me heartless, but a movie that makes you cry isn’t necessarily a good movie. Take “After Innocence,” a documentary about men who were wrongly imprisoned for staggering amounts of time, exonerated by DNA evidence, and released back into society.


Following several people who have lost decades of their lives, “After Innocence” shows them trying to pick up the pieces and move on. Black, white, Latino; accused rapist, accused murderer – all are linked by the Innocence Project, an overwhelmed, underfunded group that fought for their freedom at no charge.


It’s impossible not to be moved by these men and their shattered lives, but this documentary comes across as a terrific commercial for the Innocence Project. Anyone who opposes their good work is portrayed as a stooge, and any complexity is smothered beneath the director’s ham-fisted desire to jerk tears. It’s no surprise that the documentary’s producer and writer is an Innocence Project alum.


The most satisfying feature-length documentaries are the ones that focus on a small patch of turf and dig in deep. There’s too much ground to cover in “After Innocence,” and the filmmakers have no beliefs beyond the rectitude of the Innocence Project and the depravity of everyone else. No one would deny that the Innocence Project is a worthy organization, but unless you’re unbearably self-righteous, this is an issue that’s as slippery as a bar of soap – and you can feel the filmmakers desperately trying to hold on. “After Innocence” feels so morally compromised that it carries no more weight than the upcoming military recruitment film “Annapolis.”


– Grady Hendrix


CONGO: WHITE KING, RED RUBBER, BLACK DEATH
unrated, 84 minutes


How do you make an interesting documentary about crimes that occurred more than 90 years ago? If you’re the director of “Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death,” you use re-enactments, actors reading first-person accounts, fabricated courtroom scenes, and a Congolese historian wandering around Belgium, the home of King Leopold II.


The king of Belgium basically owned the Congo from 1885 to 1908, and personally made $231 million off its rubber trade. This personal fortune came at a high price: In 1880 the population of the Congo was 20 million. By 1920 it was 10 million. The king had unaffectionate parents, a disastrous arranged marriage (he had to get sex tips from Queen Victoria), a desperation to outstrip his father in wealth, and weird facial hair – the standard formula for a genocidal maniac. His army ran riot in the Congo, killing natives who didn’t make their weekly rubber quota, severing right hands as punishment, and torturing people to death. Only a public outcry – started by journalist Edmund Morel, missionary John Harris, and British civil servant Roger Casement – forced the king to give up the Congo in 1908.


King Leopold II burned all his Congo related papers, and Belgium has rewritten history, viewing the genocidal king as a visionary monarch. The Belgian government has even denounced this documentary as a “diatribe” – which should come as no surprise. This documentary occasionally lapses into a state of exquisite tedium, but it’s got more story to waste than a dozen of this year’s “based on a true story” duds.


– Grady Hendrix


EMMANUEL’S GIFT
unrated, 80 minutes


“Emmanuel’s Gift” documents the life and triumphs of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah, who was born into desperate poverty with an abortive stump in place of one of his legs. Despite the death of his mother and the departure of his father, the young man overcomes his disability and becomes a remarkable athlete – a competitive cyclist, swimmer, and runner. This is all the more impressive considering he comes from Ghana, where prospects for the disabled are particularly bleak. Traditionally viewed as both a burden and a curse, many are killed in their infancy; others can look forward to a life of begging, poverty, and shame.


About Mr. Yeboah himself, one can only utter words of praise. He has not only achieved an incredible degree of personal success in sports, but has used his success to act as a champion for the disabled in Ghana. Co-directors Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern, however, deserve something less than praise. Although their documentary brings Mr. Yeboah’s story to an international audience, it does so in an unjustly tedious way. The film contains neither dramatic tension – his triumphs over adversity are treated as givens – nor insight, as those interviewed tend to reiterate a few well-worn points.


Narrated by Oprah Winfrey and shot with a handheld video camera that frequently shifts from color to black and white, “Emmanuel’s Gift” is not unlike the montages typically seen before the introduction of an inspirational guest on Ms. Winfrey’s show. But the additional 77 minutes of footage here do not improve on the template Ms. Winfrey has created.


– Kevin Lam


ROOMS FOR TOURISTS
unrated, 91 minutes


Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s feature length debut is supposed to evoke Hitchcock. The press notes must have been referring to Earl Hitchcock.


In “Rooms for Tourists,” a group of pregnant women traveling to get abortions are methodically killed when they end up in a secluded town inhabited by an ultra-religious populace. The women are stalked and eliminated one by one by an ominously masked killer. It soon becomes clear that the whole town is involved with the murders, as punishment to the women who want to abort their pregnancies. This plan is probably not too well thought out, since dismembering the pregnant women results in killing the fetuses the townsfolk are trying to protect. (On a side note, most masked psychopaths cut out eye and nose holes for themselves, but this one seems to have neglected that small detail. It’s a wonder he gets around as well as he does without suffocating or knocking into walls).


If the film has one thing going for it, it’s a gleeful excess of gore. Mr. Bogliano makes sure to include a healthy mix of violent ends for his protagonists, ranging from a shotgun blast in the head to a kitchen knife in the abdomen. “People say I look like Meg Ryan,” a character remarks at one point. I didn’t notice the similarity, but by film’s end, she certainly did look like the man without a face. But even the extreme carnage is compromised, due to Mr. Bogliano’s decision to shoot his film in black and white. It’s a simple fact of life that intestines oozing from stomachs are far more interesting to look at in color.


– Edward Goldberger


PROTOCOLS OF ZION
unrated, 92 minutes


Marc Levin’s new documentary, “Protocols of Zion,” opens with footage of fanatics who claim that Jews planned the attacks of September 11, 2001, that 4,000 Jewish workers were contacted and told not to come into work that day, and that, as a result, no Jews died in the attacks. Such conspiracy theories, Mr. Levin (“Slam”) discovers, are rooted in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the long-since debunked 19th-century handbook that reportedly documented the minutes of a top-secret meeting of Jewish leaders outlining their plan to take over the world (Henry Ford gave away a copy with each car he sold, we learn). Shocked by the resurgence of the book, Mr. Levin goes on a journey to confront those who accept such hate as truth.


Though well-intentioned, Mr. Levin seems overwhelmed by his task. He quickly drops the September 11 theme to tackle the history of and current status of modern-day anti-Semitism. He also seems content to repeatedly bring up conflicts and drop them to move on to something else, with scattershot and unfocused results.


Despite this lack of focus, Mr. Levin’s film can be absorbing and unsettling, especially when it looks at the hate people are ready to accept (perhaps the most chilling moments when Mr. Levin discovers that the “Protocols” is available at Wal-Mart). His interview subjects range from spiritual leaders to Nazi sympathizers (one skinhead remarks that he doesn’t think Hitler was “suicidal in the slightest,” leading to an awkward pause when he’s reminded how Hitler met his end). With better organization, the film might have substantial staying power. As is, it’s still worth a look.


– Edward Goldberger

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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