The Reeler on Spout

Under discussion:

Numb  (2008)

In Search of a Midnight Kiss  (2008)

Autism: The Musical  (2008)

Take the Bridge  (2007)

A Slim Peace  (2007)

Good Time Max  (2007)

Matthew Perry, smoked out in Harris Goldberg's Numb

By Michelle Orange

From this afternoon’s random sampling one might deduce that, like slime mold, all the sad young men have picked up and headed for the water. California, to be exact. Numb, Good Time Max, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss all seemed to have a bizarre number of things in common: dysfunctional men who move to Los Angeles; mothers who are either cold bitches or fare-thee-well featherweight and fathers who are absent or oblivious; a woman who’s going to fix everything (OK, only two of them have that); and a key character reference made via masturbation (one wants to jerk off on a bunny rabbit, another to his roommate’s girlfriend and the third to a three-second snippet of porn on a loop). I’m not even sure what all of this means, but it was too obvious not to note. Especially that last one. I only know one guy in LA, and I feel like I should give him a call. Maybe I can tell him about slime mold, it’s about the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.

I have to admit I have always had a soft spot for Matthew Perry, and though I mourn the loss of his chin, I still find him a very appealing comic presence, one fizzing with the uncomfortable zetz of darker terrain. In Numb, a Canadian film directed and written by Harris Goldberg, Perry jumps at the chance to go deep, though the film keeps some softball humor at the ready. Perry plays Hudson, a moderately depressed screenwriter who (over)smokes a joint and is sent over the edge into what is diagnosed as “depersonalization disorder.” Desperate not just to feel like himself again but to feel anything at all, Hudson seeks out a variety of treatments, and a host of drugs, running the shrink circuit like the unholy gauntlet the filmmaker apparently believes it to be.

When Hudson meets Sara (Tori Amos look-alike Lynn Collins), the need to get better becomes imperative; they trade flaws (he compares her to a lion, she insists he looks like an owl), watch the golf channel and tiptoe around what is clearly Hudson’s crippling issue. The problem (other than the fact that if Perry resembles anything it is -– as I have maintained for over a decade –- Beaker from The Muppet Show) is not the warm zip of chemistry between the two leads, but the unsteady handling of what is being presented as a serious problem with serious ramifications on the one hand but possibly just a bad patch on the other. Goldberg works in some really funny moments with Kevin Pollak as Hudson’s writing partner, and a hilarious turn by Mary Steenburgen, and Hudson’s frustration, which leads him to extremes in behavior to feel normal, is credible, but the resolution seems to undercut Hudson’s struggle to have his suffering taken seriously. It felt too easy to me, possibly because I began to root for the film, which musters a fair share of charm nevertheless.

Charm is the operative trait of the title character in James Franco’s Good Time Max, despite said character’s frequent protestations of genius. Max (played by Franco) and his brother Adam (Matt Bell) are both bright boys, though Max is a natural, while Adam sweats for every half a grade. For some reason (cold bitch mother + oblivious father?) wunderkind Max turns cokehead almost out of middle school, and when his giant brain fails to keep him from getting in a shitload of trouble, he tags along with his brother, who is heading to LA for a medical residency.

The fantastically handsome Franco, in a pair of look-at-my-nerdy-glasses (Adam wears them too), still has that jumpy, obstinate teenaged quality that has recently mellowed in its last best incarnation, Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s fun to watch the new leaf Max try to hold down an engineering job, and the office scenes are unexpectedly fresh even in their staleness. “Drugs are bad,” Max says, when propositioned by a co-worker. Well, yeah. What else? In due time, however, Max is back on the crack (or rather, the brain-eating crystal meth), and though we are meant to feel a greater sense of tragedy in Max betraying his brother’s trust, their bond is not established strongly enough to allow for it. Franco is clearly an involved, energetic director, though he does fall prey to the young director’s penchant for rock-and-roll, druggy-wuggy sequences (a couple of them find the twittering high of a drug haze very well-observed). The performances and direction are strong, but the material doesn’t quite measure up; just when you are beginning to think the film is going nowhere and taking a long time to get there (drugs are bad), Franco has Dr. Adam and Max do a switcheroo that is an even harder pill to swallow (ahem) than what has come before.

Of these three films, none show off Los Angeles to the (haunting) extent of In Search of a Midnight Kiss, a film I was ready to lose my patience with early on, but that settled into a less congratulatory, astringent tone as it progressed. Writer/director Alex Holdridge’s obvious love/hate relationship with LA comes through in the creepy, beautiful and creepily beautiful exteriors shot in Woody Allen black and white; the script is more Before Sunset, minus the charm and the rapport. But that seems to be the point, at least initially, for Wilson (Scoot McNairy), another down and out screenwriter bonging the days away in his shitty flat. On New Year’s Eve he is goaded into putting an ad on Craigslist for a date, and a shrill, psycho actress takes him up on it. The two are all corners for a while, walking and driving through LA and exchanging deadly trite dialogue and wondering who will be first to beg off; romance, it seems, is dead, and Wilson in particular is prone, even in his loneliness, to move straight to vulgarity. As the night goes on (will they make it to midnight, is the question), Holdridge begins to try to cash emotional checks that are unsigned, but the actors seem to get their footing as the material warms up -– perhaps just as two strangers might. I enjoyed seeing that strange, picture postcard LA light subverted in the black-and-white photography, and the conclusion does manage a rather nice melancholy high.

If the idea behind Yael Luttwak’s documentary, A Slim Peace, seems outrageous –- uniting Arab and Jewish in Jerusalem in the common goal of a smaller ass –- the execution is nuanced with wit and passion. Luttwak convinced Israelis, Palestinian, a Bedouin and two settlers (some of the women were religious and some not) to join a sort of weight watchers group, though her disingenuous claim that the group will not be political is immediately questioned by the Bedouin woman, who agrees to it nevertheless. Those there women all live quite close to each other, some of the Jews claim to have never met an Arab, and vice versa. In the run-up to and aftermath of the Palestinian election, which saw Hamas put into power, tensions ranneth over the ostensible chatter about fiber grams and calorie counts. Luttwak’s subjects are staunch women, fascinating subjects all, especially when, after the group disbands, most of them acknowledge that their superficial commonalities will never bridge their deep divides. This is a rare look at how life is lived by the middle class in this region; the native Israeli woman was surprised to find that she had more in common with the Arab from Ramallah than the humorless American Super-Jews from the settlement, and you might be too.

Autism: The Musical (yikes) is Tricia Regan’s documentary about one woman’s vision for a host of autistic children, including her son, to put together a musical performance, against the odds. Following five children from their homes to the rehearsal space and back again, the faces of the parents are uniformly heartbreaking, but even the slightest sign of a child emerging from the locked in chambers of their brain provides immense relief. The statistics on autism are beyond alarming, and hopefully works like this (flashy title and all) will bring attention to the ramifications not just for the families but society at large.

In Take the Bridge,Sergio Castilla’s intent debut, four young people attempt suicide in New York’s highly Dominican Washington Heights neighborhood, and are rather crudely united at the hospital. Unlikely friendships form, along with alliances in the struggle for a better life. The blocky dialogue of what seem to be reenactments (the film is narrated by a Dominican woman who shows up intermittently as a talking [gossiping] head in black and white) work against the game cast and heartfelt look at the fight to get out of (or fit back into) the hood.

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

Numb
Good Time Max
In Search of a Midnight Kiss
A Slim Peace
Autism: The Musical
Take the Bridge

Under discussion:

Live!  (2008)

Earlier in the festival we had the chance to check in with Eva Mendes, the star and co-producer of the scathing television satire Live! The narrative directing debut of Oscar-winning documentarian Bill Guttentag, Live! traces the efforts of a bloodthirsty network executive (played by Mendes) who seeks to up the reality-TV stakes by broadcasting a Russian roulette program. Mendes spoke with us about transitioning as a producer, the dearth of good women's roles in Hollywood and how to use the phrase "Red Bull" as a verb.

Watch this and more Tribeca coverage on ReelerTV
 

Discuss Live! and other Tribeca titles at Spout.

Under discussion:

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man  (2008)

Havoc 2: Normal Adolescent Behavior  (2007)

Watching the Detectives  (2007)

The Optimists  (2006)

The namesake of Stephen Kijak's documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

By Vadim Rizov

If you're not a music geek and the thought of watching Jarvis Cocker issue a string of bons mots doesn't get you all hot and bothered -– especially if you don’t know or care who Jarvis Cocker actually is -- you might as well skip down to the rest of the reviews. Like most music docs, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man preaches to the converted, rolling out a seemingly incongruous coalition of musicians and music geeks united only to praise its subject as one of the most influential. Musicians. Ever. Other highlights of the film include: listening to excerpts from Walker's songs; watching goofy screen-saver-ish illustrations accompany Walker’s songs; and listening to Walker talk about his songs. In other words, pure cinematic value disassociated from the subject is at a low premium, although the doc is as well-assembled as these things get.

Director Stephen Kijak's main task is to locate the roots of Walker's formerly deep-buried sadness and weirdness in his pop-star days with the Walker Brothers, and he succeeds admirably. There's no messing about in the interviews with said admiring subjects (who include Cocker, Damon Albarn, David Bowie, and, uh, Sting), just quotable bits, and the archival footage is all on point. Kijak moves swiftly from Walker's early days with the Walker Brothers to his first interpretations of Jacques Brel, making him look positively foolish by intercutting between footage of a sweaty, consumptive-looking Brel contrasted with Walker at his '60s sex idol prime singing the same songs. But the heart of the documentary –- the entire latter half -- is about the last 12 years and the ultra-controversial Tilt and The Drift (the latter of which my sophomore year roommate claimed to dislike because it was just too frightening). To ease the transition, Kijak offers generous strong excerpts with goofy CGI that seems like a third-grader's attempt to imitate 2001. This actually turns out to be a good idea, forcing viewers to actually focus on the songs rather than try to process visuals at the same time. I can’t recommend the film to all but the most hardened music geeks, but I had more fun watching it than the vast majority of the slate.

Watching The Detectives is as inoffensively middling as would-be quirky indie comedies get, but its premise is extra-special-annoying. Video store clerk/owner Neil (Cillian Murphy) is the archetypal stunted geek, obsessively watching movies and passing time with a bunch of equally amiable stunted co-workers. Enter Violet (Lucy Liu), a cute Asian hipster who comes into the store and wins Neil over with her apparent hostility. Neil and Violet become a couple, but he can never get comfortable. Violet is a role-player (non video-game/sexual category) who doesn't watch movies, sports or generally engage in any kind of passive activity; instead, she pranks her boyfriend(s). Her less innocuous pranks drive Neil to the brink of insanity, but of course the audience is supposed to find it endearing and fascinating, and the inevitable happy ending awaits.

Even by the low standards set by Natalie Portman in Garden State, Violet doesn't just strain credulity, she breaks it. Her stunts play like particularly cruel episodes of Punk'D, like when she sends in two of her friends dressed as cops to interrogate and threaten to rape Neil. If the romance made up the main plotline, the movie would be tolerable; at least it has a decent feel for what it's like to work in the kind of video store that's perpetually about to go under and seems to be populated by the weirdest film geeks in the world. (At one point, Neil's friends have a long argument about the merits of Japanese snuff anime vs. Korean torture anime.) No, what's really annoying is that Violet's frustration with Neil's film obsession turns into a long lesson about how you should stop watching so many movies and just "live life," whatever that means. (Like all magical indie pixie girls, Violet appears to have no job or commitments to detain her from constant game-playing.) Why in the world would you make a movie about how you should be less passive and watch fewer movies? And for the love of God, why would you screen it at a film festival, let alone host a press screening? I mean, Jesus.

After viewing more than three dozen movies, I sat down to carefully examine Beth Schacter’s Normal Adolescent Behavior and provide the same reasoned, measured judgments as for the last 41. Ha. Ninety minutes later, I still didn’t know what it was about. I can’t think of a way to summarize it without making it sound ridiculous, so: This is a film about six BFFs who have group sex. Repeat: not about a casual group of friends who hook up on and off, but who deliberately exclude everyone not in their club (three guys, three girls) and copulate exclusively with each other. Their reasoning actually makes a lot of sense: They’re not interested a world of drunkenly hooking up at parties and scheming for casual sex. Or, as Wendy (Amber Tamblyn) puts it, avoiding “texting some guy who’s gonna *** on my shirt.” Wendy loses the faith fast, though, falling for new jock in town Sean (Ashton Holmes) and getting torn between the potential disillusionments and pitfalls of monogamy and sticking with her friends.

In a weird climate that simultaneously markets and condemns teen sex depending on who’s watching, most films that try to take the subject seriously lapse into hysteria and unintentional camp. Which is to say that Normal Adolescent Behavior isn’t Thirteen Pt. 2 –- it’s far too becalmed and boring for that -– but it doesn’t cohere tonally. Is it a satire of the modern teen world, where girls who want to have relationships that involve first kisses and the innocent holding of hands are reviled as unnatural? The title’s would-be irony points in that direction, but it ultimately seems like the group has a point -– that is, until Wendy asks Sean to spank her and he freaks out. So is the message that teenagers need to be more open-minded about sex and less scared of their own desires? No clue. The movie itself is dull, filmed in would-be artful long takes that enable thespian showboating, but the implications are fascinating, as with any film that tries to seriously address a semi-taboo. The premise is ludicrous, but trying to figure out if it’s a satire of what adults think kids are doing or just a metaphorical way of dealing with high school sex could keep you up all night.

If you were thinking that a Serbian film titled The Optimists might be ironic in its intentions, you would be correct. Goran Paskaljevic's omnibus is divided into five vignettes reflecting his view of humanity, and -- for reasons too complicated to delve into here -- his vision of us is summarized in a final image of a bunch of people wallowing in a filthy lake and covering their bodies with mud, trying to convince themselves that this will cure cancer. At first, Paskaljevic seems to be hedging his bets, mixing tepid satire with pieties; the second segment tries to depict a brutal rape and follow it up with a scathing depiction of how the rich perpetually screw over the poor. The result is -- not to be impolite –- is a little too heavy on the rape emphasis to succeed as satire and a little too smirky to be taken seriously.

Soon, though, Paskaljevic takes the leap from realism to sheer absurdity. The best episode concerns a traveling cardiologist called in to the farm of a pig slaughterer whose son is a compulsive killer of animals, so much so that he's been locked in the room. You haven't lived until you've seen a pre-pubescent child informing his dad, "I can take over the business for you. Don't worry, you can die." The Optimists is, to be sure, heavy-handed in its persistent emphasis on the gap between rich and poor, but it's bleakly assured in its jokes. Filmed in another tone, it might be insanely depressing; as it is, it's kind of bracing, if only 60 percent successful. Three out of five ain’t bad.

Takva: A Man's Fear of God has heavy-hitter Fatih Akin (director of Head-On) as a producer, but it's a non-starter. Every year, American films demonstrate repeatedly that anyone devoutly religious is a hypocrite at best, and probably some kind of rapist or murderer in the bargain. Takva's main achievement is to extend that characterization to Islam, giving us Muharrem (Erkan Can), a devout and celibate Muslim whose sinful dreams consist of regular wet dreams and near-rape fantasies. But it's not just Muharrem who's denying his own true nature: his religious sect adopts him as their go-to financial manager, sending him out to collect rent and balance the books. Of course, Muharrem soon goes crazy when he discovers that the sect is perfectly OK with leasing out spaces to non-religious afternoon drinkers but simultaneously not OK with placing their money in a bank, because the interest raised might be sinfully contaminated. Someday, someone will make a movie about people of faith who aren't terrible human beings and/or aren't driven insane. It will not be a smirkingly liberal indictment of the hypocrisy of religion (always a known given in this type of film). This is not that movie.

The Man From the Embassy is the rare movie that is so low-key it actually has no impact. Herbert Neumann (Burghart Klaußner) is a mid-level German bureaucrat wh works in the Georgian embassy. Herman is only half-dysfunctional by arthouse standards: He spends most of his evenings staring blankly at RPG games on his LCD projector, but he's also carrying on an affair with a married co-worker (Marika Giorbani). Still, not being completely sexless isn't enough for Herbert, who strikes up a friendship with 12-year-old Sashka (Lika Martinova) and puts her up at his place. Herbert seems to be interested in playing a benevolent paternal role with Sashka -- whose mom spends her days discussing how easy it is to turn tricks as a hooker -- but the world understandably assumes pedophilia is involved.

The real problem with this movie isn't its low-key mode, but the fact that Herbert acts in a completely implausible manner. Emotionally constricted movie characters are typically reticent in disclosing key information, but Herbert's refusal to simply explain why he's hanging out with a 12-year-old is beyond the pale. His friendship with Sashka steers admirably clear of cranky old man redeemed by cute child cliches -- neither half of the pair actually fits into that sub-genre -- but its hero's unnatural silence eventually incites active annoyance. Being victimized by a cruel and non-understanding world is one thing; being downright clueless and helpless is another.

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
Watching The Detectives
Normal Adolescent Behavior
The Optimists
A Man's Fear of God
The Man From The Embassy

Under discussion:

Half Moon  (2007)

The Road to St Diego  (2006)

The Premonition  (2006)

Black Butterfly  (2006)

The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez  (2007)

The Matrimony  (2007)

Ismail Ghaffari and Hedieh Tehrani in the strange, compelling Half Moon

By Vadim Rizov

A long time ago I caught Bahman Ghobadi's A Time For Drunken Horses, easily one of the most miserable films I've ever seen. Not only were the characters orphaned Kurdish kids (that is, orphans within a society itself orphaned and oppressed by surrounding territories), one of them was a deformed dwarf. Something must've changed since then. I missed the intervening films, but Ghobadi's Half Moon isn't just stranger than most Iranian films dare to be, it's outright bizarre by any standard.

A group of Kurdish musicians set out to perform in newly liberated Kurdish Iraq, having labored for seven months to get the permit. Things predictably go from optimism to worst-case scenario in record time, but for very odd reasons. Lead musician Mamo (Ismail Ghaffari) makes a pit stop along the way to collect his female vocalist Hesho (Hedieh Tehrani). She's no ordinary singer, though, but one of female singers exiled to a city on territory forbidden to civilians where the women apparently spend all day singing in voices which sound like one human singing. Forget even the sheer impossibility of this scenario; the sight of the women standing in what looks like an ancient Mesopotamian village and singing together before breaking out into a spontaneous musical number is indelible.

Half Moon is full of similar weird flights of fancy that justify Fellini comparisons, and eventually the dream sequences become practically incomprehensible. At bottom, though, Ghobadi is still the same miserable bastard I was acquainted with in 2000, and understandably so -- the plight of the Kurds is enough to depress anyone -- but at least he can no longer be accused of beating his audience into emotional submission. Half Moon is by turns alternately rich and strange and, occasionally, didactic and/or indecipherable. The results are uneasy but mostly compelling; Ghobadi might yet become important as more than the world's token Kurdish auteur.

The premise for The Road to St. Diego is almost too cute to tolerate in summary form, let alone contemplate seeing. Young Argentinian "Tati" Benitez (Ignacio Benitez) is so obsessed with soccer star Diego Maradona that, finding a tree root in the forest that resembles Maradona’s face, he makes a statue out of it and sets off on a road trip to deliver it to his ailing idol. Oh, and it's a mockumentary. Yet unbearable whimsy turns out to be in low supply in Carlos Sorin's film, which taps into a low-key vibe reminiscent of the slept-on The World's Fastest Indian. Both films set out to affirm the fundamental goodness of human nature by placing a character on a quest at the mercy of the kindness of strangers without ever getting burned. But it works; even for incorrigible cynics, it would be hard to deny the appeal of star Benitez, whose perpetual goofy smile and open disposition take the edge off of an obsession that's just off the tip of the kind of madness that makes muttering recluses out of people. (Like the entire cast, Benitez is a non-professional actor, and the attendant benevolence surrounding all the characters might have something to do with that.)

Sorin intends some kind of parallel between the modern cult of celebrity worship and the previous power of the church (still a stronger -- and more benign -- influence here than in any American film), but whatever it is doesn't really come off. What's left is a series of low-key-funny but never mawkish encounters delivered briskly and competently. It's a much-needed respite from a festival that -- like all festivals, really -- prides itself upon challenging rather than immediately gratifying audiences.

The Premonition is a very bland, very boring film for 80 minutes before its lead character suddenly starts hallucinating (or maybe not) and takes the film to a whole different level of mediocrity, one where things aren't just boring but completely inexplicable as well. Actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin's directorial debut finds him also essaying the role of a lawyer who, disgusted with his comfortable bourgeois life, moves to a lousy apartment complex and sets up shop. His wife (Anne Canovas) divorces him, his family (including Hippolyte Girardot, also in the festival’s Lady Chatterley) practically disowns him, and he no longer works for the firm, but he seems to be finding some kind of personal satisfaction and absolution. All of this changes when casually giving some free legal advice to a desperate would-be divorcee (Ivan Franek) leads to being deemed his lawyer when the man -- apparently unhappy with the tediousness of the legal system -- takes a shortcut and tries to murder his wife instead. A daughter (Amandine Janin) in severe shock is left behind, and the lawyer decides to take her in.

It might be easier to feel some kind of reaction to or interest in Darroussin's character if he inspired any emotion besides irritation. As it is, how seriously can you take a character who muses to himself, "I should write poems -- poems no one will read"? The last 20 minutes make it impossible to suss out whatever the intended effect is, but that turns out to be less a bold move and more a bigger mistake than what's come before. Well-shot and paced in exactly the kind of middlebrow way that gets films labeled "very French," The Premonition is blandly watchable -- and that's it.

The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez is a kind of unofficial companion piece to Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which used the disgraceful incident analyzed here as a jumping-off point for a much better film. Jones is the dispassionate narrator of this baseline competent video documentary, which is in three basic parts. The first third attempts to give some background on Hernandez and humanize him, then abruptly shifts into a hardcore analysis of the incident. Hernandez –- an 18-year old US student living on the US-Mexico border in Redford, Texas –- was shot to death by Marines on drug patrol duty on May 20, 1997. The Marines claimed Hernandez was firing at them, but pretty much all the reasonable evidence suggests, damningly, that Hernandez was shooting innocently at rocks to divert himself while goat-herding and the Marines panicked, not realizing that no one –- not even a suspected drug-dealer –- can see men in camouflage from 200 yards away. The Marines opened fire, Hernandez died –- and a grand jury exonerated them. The film’s analysis of the incident is painstaking and convincing; the attempts of the final third to get some kind of emotional reaction from the people involved is a mere anticlimax.

Here's the thing: Apparently in some people's minds you can either make a formally well-crafted film, or you can make create a muckracking public-service document that, by virtue of the evidence on display, is “important” and thereby excused for sloppiness of execution. This is frankly a load of crap, most recently disproved by Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke. Passionate anger is not the best reason to make a movie, and the film seems to have been made without any regard for the medium; the result would make an equally convincing book. Even the film’s actual argument is of limited value: The Hernandez incident is important not just because an innocent person died, but because border patrols seem to have learned nothing from it. The film settles for a brief shot of George W. lurking sinisterly in the background of daddy’s inauguration and then a card announcing that #43 has ramped up border patrols to an extent unprecedented since Hernandez’s death. Not good enough; at least Jones’ fictional version had a real sense of place in its location shooting. Aside from the central breakdown, this film is just washed-out video and people crying in the lens, and that’s just not enough. It might essential viewing for scholars of the subject, but that’s hardly the festival’s place to decide.

The festival’s nadir so far arrives in the form of Black Butterfly. Francisco J. Lombardi’s film surely gets some kind of speed record for quickest turn-around time between the collapse of a repressive regime (in this case, the presidency of Peru’s Alberto Fujimori under the guidance of his criminal advisor Vladimiro Montesinos) and the making of movies about it, but otherwise there’s nothing new here. A dreadful feeling of familiarity comes with the opening, where a cynical gum-chewing journalist (Magdyel Ugaz) crosses paths with the fiancé (Melania Urbina) of a recently murdered judge. The journalist, of course, drinks to numb the pain of political disillusionment while the widow weeps and screams “Why?” repeatedly. Eventually, the widow helps the journalist regain her idealism, enlisting her in the quest for revenge.

Every moment is telegraphed with unbearable portentousness, every possible subtext hammered home emphatically. Example: The journalist’s name is Angela, and the drunk widow announces at one point “Angela, you’re my angel.” Yes, she is. Solemn to the point of ridiculousness, the film screams about the cowardice of people who don’t stand up to an evil regime with the confidence of creators who know they are now safe to say such things. The Fujimori regime may indeed have been as awful as the film makes it seem, but what’s on display is virtually identical to every single film ever made about life under similar conditions. Worst of all, the actors are powerless to help, delivering completely predictable conditions seemingly tailor-made for Oscar clip reels. Excruciating.

The only reason The Matrimony isn’t as bad as Black Butterfly is that it’s shorter. Audiences of midnight movies are notoriously unselective (Toronto once offered up Saw as a closing night piece), but The Matrimony is dismally bad in ways that aren’t even funny. It’s a Chinese ghost story, ha ha: Boy (Leon Lai) loves girl (Bingbing Fan), girl gets run over by truck and dies, girl returns to haunt husband and new wife (Rene Liu). Hua-Tao Teng’s film has some of the worst CGI I’ve ever seen, and its scares –- arriving every three minutes or so with comforting regularity –- can easily be predicted by whenever bass rumbling enters the soundscape. Loud, sudden noises are the order of the day, and the cheap jolts are barely a cut above the American remake of Pulse. Even the twist ending sucks; it’s not even a full twist, just merely nonsensical, and there’s not a single memorable set piece, even as camp. The only thing holding The Matrimony back from being truly unbearable are its occasional, lush recreations of ‘30s China: a trip to an old movie theater is a rare glimpse for American audiences of a history we have little access to. Still, the price of this set decoration versus the price of actually sitting through the film is way too high.

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

Half Moon
The Road to St. Diego
The Premonition
The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez
Black Butterfly
The Matrimony

Under discussion:

Dirty Sanchez: The Movie  (2007)

The Bubble  (2007)

Palo Alto  (2007)

The Devil Came on Horseback  (2007)

My Father My Lord  (2006)

The Last Jews of Libya  (2007)

One of the many Darfur atrocities haunting the dcoumentary The Devil Came on Horseback

By Eric Kohn

Activist causes take kindly to the documentary format because it provides an immediate venue for expression. Sign all the petitions you want, but at the end of the day, the power of image wins out. So it goes with The Devil Came on Horseback, which explores the horrific genocide of Darfur by letting the visuals tell the story. In fact, gut-wrenching stills and video of natives who suffered at the hands of the government-armed milita group Janjaweed don’t only lead the narrative -- they dictate its existence. Consistent in its method and indisputably well-made, The Devil Came on Horseback could do for Darfur awareness what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming.

Directors Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern keenly follow the experiences of US Marine Capt. Brian Steidle, a hardened fighter whose position in the area as the village massacres began to increase in frequency gave him a unique angle on the unfolding disaster. Steidle was sent by the United States to keep watch over the region’s ceasefire between opposing communities (“How do you monitor a ceasefire?” he asks), but they equipped him not with a gun but a camera. Unable to help prevent the Janjaweed attacks in Darfur (his reports on the events were repeatedly ignored), Steidle headed back to the country and shared his exclusive photographs with The New York Times, instantly raising national awareness of the events abroad. He became a momentary hero, appearing on talk shows and giving speeches, driving home the message that the country has a duty to get on the ground and restore order to the fragile African region.

No sooner did the flurry of attention climaxed, however, than the backlash came hard and fast, replete with government cover-ups and denials from all concerned parties. Steidle remains on message, but the responsible parties have kept him marginalized. Sundberg and Stern use Steidle as their anchor, combining his narration with footage shot in Darfur and in the United States to craft a timeless narrative: Mr. Smith goes to Washington, but he can’t make it to the Senate floor. One of the most receptive audiences to Steidle’s speeches, interestingly enough, comes from Jewish communities. It takes an experienced eye to recognize a Holocaust in action, apparently.

A narrative that’s destined not to please some Jewish communities, My Father My Lord aims to reflect them. Israeli filmmaker David Volach tells the intimate story of a strictly observant family in an ultra-Orthodox community, primarily using a fly-on-the-wall approach to unveil a life of insular behavior dictated by tradition. Unlike the heartwarming portrait of faith-based redemption in a Hasidic family at the heart of last year’s moderately acclaimed Israeli drama Ushpizin, Volach’s direction has a much more subversive angle: Using stark realism, he critiques the championing of spiritual conviction over practicality. Around the third act, an older couple loses a loved in a tragic accident, and the husband tries to hide from his grief through spirituality. It’s a feeble effort. But Volach never condescends to his subjects’ way of life; instead, he allows the drama to provide a vessel for his ideas, and he gets the job done.

Clearly shot on the cheap despite its skillful execution, My Father My Lord suggests the style of early American neorealism. It wouldn’t be fair to consider this representative of all Israeli filmmaking, however; if Volach gives Israel its John Cassavetes, then Eytan Fox is the country’s Richard Linklater. Fox has always made movies that have immense international appeal, using standard storytelling methods to reveal Israel’s intricate social dynamic in ways that few others have attempted in the past. The headline-making Yossi & Jagger told the taboo-breaking tale of homosexuality in the Israeli military. Walk on Water, a thriller of sorts, interrogated the ethics of Zionism. His work comes to the Tribeca Film Festival this year with The Bubble, a Slacker-esque peek at the revolutionary tactics of the nation’s youth. A small band of friends spend much of the movie hanging out in Tel Aviv, doing drugs, having sex, whatever. The big reminders of the specific setting arrive whenever a bomb goes off, leading the protagonists to pick up their phones and struggle to make sure their friends are uninjured (not always the case). Fox uses a light touch with his dialogue, giving his characters vulgar but lovable idiosyncracies. He boldly implements wit in an increasingly bleak storyline, but he seems to imply that entertainment-based activism is a naïve form of expression. “Let’s dance instead of shoot!” declares a young woman, attempting to organize a rave to oppose Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Like, totally.

Touchy Jewish viewers imbued with Zionist proclivities will probably feel uneasy in The Bubble, but they’ll find some common ground in The Last Jews of Libya. Although indisputably slight at 50 minutes, Vivienne Roumani-Denn’s documentary tells a compelling personal tale of struggle and survival in the face of certain extinction. The North African community of Sephardic Jews is miniscule after World War II, but the small band of families that remain intact find a way to flourish. Using narration by Isabella Rossellini, Roumani-Denn uses plenty of archival footage to give her movie the appropriate time traveling effect.

If that’s too heavy for you or something, Dirty Sanchez offers a wildly crass alternative to familiar documentary content. Essentially Jackass Goes to the UK, this comically grotesque round-up of vignettes follows the exploits of several performers intent on enacting the most unsettling acts they can muster up the energy to endure. They begin by giving themselves justification -- sort of. The devil tells the boys that they must enact the seven deadly sins in order to satisfy his satanic desire. Cue the gross-out moments: These guys are nothing if not intense in their brashness, nailing themselves to wooden planks, drinking their extracted fat, driving hooks through genitalia, whatever. After a while, it’s not nearly as funny as much as it is mercilessly (and numbingly) grotesque, but anyone who can relate to this shamelessly beer-guzzling mentality is sure to find themselves in heaven.

It’s the fury of youth culture that allows movies like Dirty Sanchez to find an audience. But the chilled out interaction of suburban youth is so last year, which is something that Palo Alto seems to misunderstand. A low-key story about several disgruntled teens wandering around California in between romances and aimless soul-searching, the series of conflicts and sexual incursions look good on paper, but that’s hardly enough to bring the material to life. The filmmakers appear too earnest in their willingness to bring their memories to life. Put it this way: Nostalgia alone doesn’t dictate good movies.

Under discussion:

Zolykha's Secret  (2007)

The Third Wave  (2007)

Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe  (2007)

Steep  (2007)

Purple Violets  (2007)

The Power of the Game  (2007)

(L-R) Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, the subjects of Black White + Gray

By Michelle Orange

That fact that Tribeca is filled with what are essentially competent television biographies of figures who would never make it past a preliminary production meeting at A&E has both good points and bad. The good, of course, is that we get to learn of people other than those who sell advertising; Anita O’Day and Scott Walker are two on offer at Tribeca this year. But the bad is that the format is so tried and true that many filmmakers see no reason to deviate from it.

Perhaps a sale to a television network is the goal for many festival directors, and who could blame them? Not one hour ago, after limping away from a six-hour movie marathon in a theater complex, I found myself contemplating a wall of boxed cinnamon buns beside an elderly lady at my local grocery store. She turned to me and said, “I remember when four of these were 99 cents -- we’d each buy a box and take them to the movies. When we’d leave the theater: Whoops! No more cinnamon buns!” I laughed and said it’s a good thing what you eat at the movies doesn’t count, and she said, “That was a long time ago, I don’t go to the movies anymore. Now everything is on TV anyway, why would I go to the movies?”

Well, I don’t know that James Crump’s Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe is going to convince my C-Town crony to break her embargo; perhaps -- and perhaps ideally -- she’s right and it will end up on TV anyway. Crump has the format down, and Wagstaff, whose relationship with Mapplethorpe came in some way to define the lives and careers of both men, proves an apt and ample subject. The marquee handsome Wagstaff, a privileged, pedigreed WASP and “deb’s delight” in the 1950s, was secretly gay and not-so-secretly loathing his life in advertising. He returned to school to study fine art at NYU and got into curation during a time -- very different from today, it is observed -- when a museum curator or collector could function almost like an artist him or herself.

Taking an interest in photography when others in the art community turned up their noses, Wagstaff quickly gained the reputation as a tastemaker and began amassing a collection of late 19th-century photography, a lot of it anonymous, with a special eye on the poignant and perverse (decapitations especially seemed to do it for him). When Wagstaff met Mapplethorpe in the early '70s, bells were said to ring and a match was made, though some commenters acidly note that the 26-year-old from Queens saw nothing but a cash cow. Patti Smith and Dominick Dunne make appearances, but even better is the peek into Wagstaff’s collection (ultimately he sold it to the Getty Museum), which brings to bear the film’s most interesting idea: that a collector can use his carefully selected pieces to construct something of a self-portrait. The sad coda is that both men died of AIDS, during the first and hopefully the worst assault of the “gay cancer” against New York’s art community.

Speaking of New York’s art community: Ed Burns, everybody! Purple Violets is Burns' return to writing and directing following 2006’s terrible The Groomsmen, and returns us (i.e. me) to the impossibly shiny New York of Suburban Girl. In Black White + Gray, Sam Wagstaff is said to have lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking Washington Square park, where, one visitor notes with distaste, even a brief survey made it clear that it was a place where a lot of sex was being had. There doesn’t seem to be any sex happening in the agonizingly haute apartments of Patti (Selma Blair), Brian (Patrick Wilson), Michael (Ed Burns) and Kate (Debra Messing). All four went to NYU together; Patti and Brian broke up in Washington Square Park, Michael and Kate had sex there, and 12 years later the girls run into the boys at a swanky restaurant.

Kate is married to a lout (Donal Logue, doing a cockney accent) and has given up on her once promising writing career; Patrick is a best-selling pulp fiction writer, longing for some highbrow credibility; Michael is a lawyer and Kate is a teacher. The story follows both couples (though mainly Patti and Brian) as they find their way back to each other citing unfinished business. The story is not bad, the bigger problem is that everyone but Burns is grievously miscast. Messing is actually terrific as a foul-mouthed, bitterly wronged woman, but it’s hard to get around the fact that she can’t credibly play 33 anymore, particularly beside someone like Blair, who has the body of a 12-year-old boy. And both Blair and Wilson could not be less believable as the madly gifted literary talents they avow each other to be. It’s not just the Banana Republic beauty and irritating collection of designer sweaters and boots; it’s the fact that neither actor can even pretend to have the crack -- to paraphrase a friend of mine who was paraphrasing Leonard Cohen -- that lets the light get in. Burns gets all the great lines and he makes the most of them, but none of the couples, particularly Logue and Blair, who are supposed to have been married for seven years, but most crucially Blair and Wilson, generate the barest fraction of the sexual energy I bet Wagstaff’s Washington Square penthouse was putting out on any given Friday.

The Third Wave is volunteer worker Alison Thompson’s wrenching document of the time she spent in Sri Lanka following December 2004’s cataclysmic tsunami. Thompson, who also spent six months at Ground Zero following Sept. 11, and her boyfriend, Oscar Gubernati, intended to spend a week or two lending their services in the small village of Peraliya, where no organized aid had yet arrived, but ended up spending over a year trying to help the devastated local population rebuild. Much of the footage (including the seemingly endless task of corpse collection) is hard to take, but imperative nevertheless; Peraliya is one of countless villages that were forgotten in the relief efforts, and only two and a half years after one of the worst natural disasters the world has ever known, who now speaks of it? It is pointed out by frustrated Sri Lankan emissaries that much of the pledged international aid money simply failed to arrive.

A ragtag crew of people from around the world ended up coming to Peraliya, and worked to build a school, a medical center, flagging down passing aid trucks for food and supplies on the fly. Thompson doesn’t shy away, however, from including the footage from about three months into their stay, when the local population and that of surrounding villagers began to turn on the volunteers, each one suspicious that they were not receiving as much as their neighbor. Dastardly human nature threatens to taint the morale and the work of the volunteers, and the problems in communication and flagging stamina are closely and unflinchingly observed, mainly by the Sri Lankan who manned the camera when Thompson’s nursing duties took precedence. In the face of almost unthinkable circumstances, almost unthinkable generosity prevailed; despite the tragic context, it will do your heart good to watch The Third Wave, to remember and maybe even to do some good yourself.

The natural disaster of Afghanistan’s punishing drought is rivaled only by the unnatural disaster of the Taliban. While documentaries about this region and this regime began to flow forth after Sept. 11, narrative films are fewer and farther in between, with 2004’s Osama the last one before Zolykha’s Secret, Horace Ahmad Shansab’s humble, impassioned feature. Shansab follows an Afghan family trying to live quietly as the threat of the Taliban (and the ensuing international conflict) grows ever closer. It is a feeling almost akin to relief to see these stories finally being told by Afghans, in Afghanistan, where one worries that almost all aspects of civilized life, including art, are in jeopardy; it is a relief also to see Afghan life presented as something other than the Other. Though Shansab clearly has good storytelling instincts, the quality of the sound and images is very poor, and the performances tend toward stiffness. Given a little more time and, God willing, the means, he could be a key lifeline for Westerners into a country and a war whose ongoing difficulties have taken a back seat to those of Iraq.

Steep and The Power of the Game trace the passions and the passionate devotees of extreme skiing and World Cup soccer, respectively. Steep features some truly unbelievable photography and the seemingly inevitable death of one of its subjects. There is a lot of wide-eyed exultation over the purity of the high one gets while skiing down or leaping off of 50-degree slopes, especially for the first time, but once the Americans got a load of the practice (and quickly commodified it), the dream became not just “I want to ski,” but “I want to be in ski movies.” The only rationale that made sense to me for putting one’s self in such peril was a love affair with gravity, its endless pull and when almost all of the men (only two women appear) who break bones like they're dinner plans say that the risks they take are worth it -- spectacular visuals be damned -- I still want to slap them.

The Power of the Game is a Michael Apted affair, so we get to hear his vaguely bemused, British voiceover in between Up Series installments. This is a National Geographic production and, as such, seems better suited for television; I could even envision the commercial breaks in between disparate segments, which look at various countries competing in 2004’s World Cup in Germany. It’s a little airless but smoothly done, and while soccer is often lauded as the sport that does much to unite the world, it is as often shown to divide it as well. I can’t say I understand the fanaticism behind soccer any better for having watched it, but who could explain a phenomenon that inspires a band of Iranian women who, after arguing their way into a stadium to watch a soccer game that the government has banned them (and all women) from attending, hold up an Iranian flag and scream in support of their country?

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe
Purple Violets
The Third Wave
Zolykha’s Secret
Steep
The Power of the Game

Under discussion:

The Gates  (2007)

Taxidermia  (2009)

Fireworks Wednesday  (2007)

This is England  (2007)

Towards Darkness  (2008)

Blackout  (2007)

Thomas Turgoose as the young anti-hero of Shane Meadows' This is England (Photo: IFC First Take)

Roughly 60 percent of the way through, Tribeca is offering roughly a 1 in 3 chance that what you're seeing will actually be good. The trouble for the average viewer is that there's not too many hyped movies coming in from other festivals guaranteed to be noteworthy, and it's virtually impossible to sift through the smaller films and get a good feel for any of them. Anything, it seems, can get a positive review from Variety. It's a pleasure, then, to find that two of the festival's sure things -- This Is England and The Gates -- actually deliver on their promise.

This Is England is arguably the higher-profile of the two: Shane Meadows' drama about skinhead life in the Thatcher era was controversial before it even premiered, and ratings battles are still going on. The opening credits are the best of the fest so far, a montage of '80s images that actually feels fresh. Maybe there's a British equivalent of lazy '60s montages splicing together the moon landing, Woodstock and Vietnam to Jefferson Airplane, but here instead it's Thatcher, the Falklands and the first CDs being pressed with a reggae backbeat. Initially the film makes like a shaven-headed Dazed and Confused, throwing in young, bullied and recently fatherless Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) with an adoptive pack of friendly youths. The kids shave Shaun's head, get him into some Doc Martens and introduce him to the pleasures of smashing up abandoned houses. As the screenplay reminds us, skinheads weren't initially racist; the original generation actually arose from an infatuation with black culture, reggae in particular. So far, so innocent.

The fun can't last, of course, but Meadows perfectly negotiates the shift from comedy to tragedy, never lapsing into rote didacticism. Correction: While there's no verbal preaching, there is a plaintive piano score. It almost ruins the movie, signaling clearly (and unnecessarily) whenever something bad has happened. Hard as it is to believe, it's quite literally the only element keeping this film from genuine greatness. Whatever he thinks, Meadows probably doesn't need to give us any overt cues that, say, beating a Jamaican nearly to death is a Bad Thing. And the music works against the film's complex characterization, which refuses to demonize the newly aggressive skinheads as somehow inhuman or inherently evil. The skinheads may be racists, but they're also out-of-time nationalists, as dumb and easily misled as they are dangerous - and, crucially, right about the appalling nature of the Falkland Islands War. Though This Is England is hardly fun after its first half-hour, it's riveting pretty much straight through, and a major example of political filmmaking done right (even if Meadows stresses the Falkland angle about five too many times). Now if we could just get rid of that damn piano...

The Gates is the sixth and possibly final Albert Maysles film documenting the projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. (They’re all getting old, after all, and Maysles is now 80.) I've seen all but one of the others and can attest that The Gates rests comfortably near the top of the heap, just below Christo's Valley Curtain. The project itself should be familiar to anyone who was in New York in 2005 or paid any attention to the news for the two weeks that 7,500 frames with orange hanging drapes dominated the walkways of Central Park. As with pretty much all of the duo's projects, permission was long and truculent in coming. Maysles opens with a Bloomberg press conference announcing the project's go-ahead, then flashes back to 1979, as the Christo team gathers to try and convince parks commissioner Gordon Davis to approve the project. The hostile reactions at the meetings are some of the most severe in the documentaries: At one end of the spectrum, people protest the defamation of nature, despite Christo's reminders that the entire park is an artificial creation. On the other side are people like the memorably misguided woman who protests that layering one work of landscape art on top of another would be like "Picasso painting Guernica on top of The Last Supper."

As with most of the documentaries (aside from the catastrophic Umbrellas, where a few accidental deaths halted the project before completion), the first half is devoted to wrangling for approval and the second to contemplating the finished object. The Gates raises the bar from the previous films with a closing half-hour-plus montage in which Christo and Jeanne-Claude almost completely disappear from the screen. It's a remarkable sequence which leaps from perfectly designed shot to shot, stringing together quiet contemplations of the many visual angles of the project with viewer reactions and quick snatches of park life. Personally I'm more interested in the process, but there's no denying the skill at work here. And major props for the gently self-deflating ending, which finds a park vendor nothing that this piece is "OK, but I liked their umbrellas thing more." It's always something.

A less-hyped but equally worthy discovery, Asghar Farhadi's Fireworks Wednesday is a perfectly calibrated chamber drama. In what may be a first for Iranian films screened on this side of the pond, women are treated not as unfortunate victims of society but as full-blooded people with careers, satisfying relationships and generally well-rounded lives. Rouhi (Tareneh Alidoosti) is saving up money from her cleaning job to pay for her upcoming wedding. Unnervingly, she finds herself in an apartment whose couple seems on the verge of collapse, if not utter insanity. The wife (Hedye Tehrani) is convinced that her husband's (Hamid Farokhnezad) having an affair, seemingly without any justification, and Rouhi becomes a pawn for spying and communication between the two over a workday that goes way past normal hours.

Drama awaits in the classical mode: Slow-burning discontents blossom into ever more violent confrontations. It's the hardest kind of drama to pull off -- virtually humorless and with frequent shouting -- but Farhadi avoids rote histrionics. The characters seem to move naturally to their frequently irrational actions, and the results are engrossing rather than shrill and overplayed. Seamlessly constructed and dependent on the excellent cast to keep going, it's still no filmed play: Farhadi uses the apartment's dividing lines and walls for all they're worth while editing for maximum tension and uptempo pacing. It may be the most conventional Iranian movie I've ever seen -- the coverage is fully up to Hollywood snuff -- but that hardly makes it a less rewarding film.

Things you will see lots of in Taxidermia: blood, internal organs, semen, masturbation, penetration, decapitations, guttings, vomiting. Gyorgi Palfi’s film arrives pre-sold by virtue of being quite possibly the most disgusting movie ever. It’s also a completely original film visually, and perhaps a completely empty one at bottom. Ostensibly the saga of three generations of men in the same saga, it plays instead like three related shorts strung together, each segment neatly running in at just under half an hour. A plot summary would be more confusing than helpful, and I’m bewildered as to what it might actually mean. The middle segment is the stand-out, a grotesque satire of status quo mediocrity in the Soviet Union that takes speed-eating to the next level. Huge men shovel disgusting food into their faces, vomit and purge between courses, and meanwhile a typically severe Soviet coach is yelling about how once the Olympics recognizes speed-eating as an official sport, the world will finally understand the greatness of the Soviet champions.

The humor here is obvious, a parody of the USSR’s many claimed achievements (as opposed to the unhappy reality), but don’t ask me to explain the first or third segments: I don’t know why a man’s penis is shooting fire, and I’m not terribly sure I care. Taxidermia is riveting throughout: Palfi has the rare gift of shooting incredibly opaque material in a way that makes it look like a blockbuster, with plenty of slick “impossible” shots and more than enough weirdness to keep you entertained. It should be seen at least once by anyone who values sheer originality above all else.

Towards Darkness plays like an extended Columbian episode of 24: hostages are taken, men bark out orders tersely, jittery cameras zoom in relentlessly on sweaty faces and abused bodies. In other words, despite the pretensions of the film to verisimilitude -- someone is kidnapped every three hours in Colombia, and the film claims to be inspired by a true story -- it's basically a B-budget action movie with generic manly men standing in for the missing action stars that would lend the project some real personality. Two things make Towards Darkness more than a competent if overly self-regarding thriller. One is the chronology, which approaches the torturous fragmentation of an Inarritu film, albeit with the different function of filling in dead periods in the ostensibly real-time narrative with flashbacks and contextual information; the other change-up would be unfair to reveal. It's enough to say that the ending of Towards Darkness undercuts the entire ostensible point of the conventional action film, using recognizable cinematic syntax to end up in a totally different place. As laudable as that goal may be, Towards Darkness remains what it is: a slick, forgettable thriller that never attains the seriousness it aspires to, and whose genre scrabbling doesn't seem to have been entirely thought out.

Jerry Lamothe’s Blackout wants to be to this decade what Do The Right Thing seemed like in 1989; it settles for not being utterly unwatchable. LaMothe takes as his dubious premise the idea that the remarkably orderly Northeast Blackout of 2003 was only peaceful in white areas; in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, it was a whole other story. Huh? Unless Wikipedia’s lying to me, there were five fatalities in New York as a result of the blackout, all of them accidental. In Blackout (inexplicably capitalized “BlacKout” in the opening credits), though, the neighborhood becomes a seething hotbed of violence in record time, an opportunity for Black America to run riot and explicate all of its ailings in tidy monologues.

No surprises here (spoilers though, should you actually still be contemplating seeing this): Yes, the promising young kid who’s gotten a full academic scholarship, thereby getting him out of the neighborhood, will die tragically and senselessly. Yes, there will be a big aggressive guy with a gun who almost kills someone for no reason. Yes, there will be sassy barbershop talk. And why? Because that’s what it’s like in the ghetto. Haven’t you seen Boyz N The Hood? Blackout gets good mileage out of its neighborhood setting and overqualified cast (Jeffrey Wright and Saul Rubinek works wonders with their lousy lines), but a dozen dramatic monologues strung together to make sure no subtext isn’t dragged into the light does not a movie make. It’s an elementary stab at trying to issue a state of the nation address for Black America -- and way too schematic to succeed.

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

This Is England
The Gates
Fireworks Wednesday
Taxidermia
Towards Darkness
Blackout