Sugar

2008 // USA // Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck // September 13, 2009 // DVD - Sony (2009)

B - Given that their previous film, Half Nelson, featured a borderline outlandish premise, it's intriguing that Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck would tackle a story like Sugar, which concerns itself with mediocrity and universal experiences. Decisively rejecting sports movie cliché, Boden and Fleck's latest film follows the rise and fall of Miguel "Sugar" Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), a Dominican pitcher with dreams of Yankee Stadium and a new Cadillac, cultivated at the Caribbean training camp for a big league franchise. Sugar's narrative is comprised of arcs of hope and despair, as Santos journeys into the American farm teams, where he contends with culture shock and the awful realization that he is not, in fact, hot shit. Boden and Fleck occasionally aim for facile melodrama—Sugar falls for an Iowa farm girl!—but the film truly engages when it simply observes how an athlete manages the insufferable tangle of expectations from without and within. Boden and Fleck suggest that commercial athletics all too often treats players as commodities, extinguishing their joy of sport before tossing them aside. To say that Sugar is subversive is too strong, but it is refreshing and commendably precise in its evocation of mood.

Lorna's Silence

2008 // Belgium // Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne // September 9, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B- - There's something inexplicably chilly in the Dardenne brothers' most recent film, the urgently observed and somewhat confounding Lorna's Silence. At the center of its narrative is a complex and thoroughly indecent proposal. Albanian drycleaner Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) has married Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier, compelling even as a derelict) at the behest of gangsters in order to obtain citizenship. Their plan is to kill Claudy with a fake overdose and for Lorna to marry a Russian heavy, in a kind of murderous immigration two-step. Naturally, the enterprise comes apart, partly due to Claudy's shaky resolve to clean up and partly due to Lorna's flickering conscience. The brothers shoot with their customary vérité ruthlessness, leavening the gravity with sparing mirth and bringing tragedy down abruptly like a hammer. However, the film fails to develop much psychological detail within the confines of its style, dampening the potential drama. Doboroshi's performance is engaging, but perhaps too inscrutable, and the film never achieves the emotional depths necessary to move it much beyond thriller tensions or crude sympathy for its heroine. Still, the conclusion veers into intriguingly unexpected territory, posing stinging doubts about the absence of human connection in an increasingly mercenary world.

District 9

2009 // USA - New Zealand // Neill Blomkamp // August 27, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C+ - The lusciously realized science fiction setting of District 9 almost compensates for the film's slack qualities. Eschewing deep space wonders, director Neill Blomkamp brings his extraterrestrials into the dusty, militarized locale of modern South Africa. The first twenty minutes of District 9 constitute its most lively and gratifying stretch, as Blomkamp lithely blends faux footage from news programs, documentaries, security cameras, and other sources to set up his tale. However, what starts out as a gripping, blackly comic work evolves into a wearying slog, with the film reverting to the obnoxious chase-escape-chase rhythm of countless action films. (It's telling that a COPS-style ride-along early in the film is its best sequence.) The film's visual flourishes are arresting and often witty, from the swirl of flickering symbols within an alien cockpit, to the sight of giant insects in castoff human clothing. Such pleasures, however, aren't worth the surrounding ballast. The attempts to analogize the alien "prawns" with real-world refugees are clumsy and illogical. The story depends on a protagonist who acts head-slappingly stupid with irksome consistency, and doesn't evoke the sympathy that Blomkamp imagines he does. Most disappointingly, District 9 eventually succumbs to unfortunately typical scifi tedium.

Brüno

2009 // USA // Larry Charles // July 15, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C+ - It was inevitable that Brüno would prove to be less radical than the utterly pitiless Borat, the prior "ambush comedy" collaboration between director Larry Charles and the fearless Sacha Baron Cohen. Unfortunately, it's also less funny. Brüno, a ludicrously flamboyant Austrian fashionista who dreams of American celebrity, is simply not as fun to goggle at as Cohen's clueless Kazakh, perhaps because Borat's aspirations were simpler and his ego less gargantuan. Never mind his Teutonic origins; Brüno is portrayed as the apotheosis of American narcissism, shamelessness, and fame-addled stupidity. The film slumps when Charles relies excessively on scripted story or tired "Gays Are Gross" humor, and, on balance, its provocative subtext is less amusing than Cohen's exceedingly game jackassery. The biggest laughs are coaxed from absurdities like Brüno sneaking naked into a redneck's tent at 3 a.m. (because a bear ate his clothes, you see), or jumping out a window in terror to escape a dominatrix. While Cohen's characters, Brüno included, aren't exactly brilliant creations, they do shuffle on the bleeding edge of comedy, juggling a plethora of pop culture's most uncomfortable traits. Even if Cohen fumbles half the time, it's still a worthwhile show.

Food, Inc.

2008 // USA // Robert Kenner // June 24, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - If you've already devoured Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, you won't learn much in Robert Kenner's provocative documentary, Food, Inc., that you didn't already know. That might have something to do with Schlosser's producer credit, or the fact that both authors appear in and provide narration for the film. Kenner, in his theatrical feature debut, works within the comfortable confines of Alex Gibney's style, presenting Big Issues in a breezy, ever-so-slightly caustic package that preaches to the choir and looks damn slick while doing so. Fortunately, Food, Inc. refrains from indulgent stunts and cheap shots, preferring to lay out its case against industrial agriculture firmly, relentlessly, and with a warm, affirmative tone. Like any polemicist worth his salt, Kenner knows that a film like Food, Inc. won't convert his natural antagonists, but it may shift the perspective of viewers who weren't aware of the costs of modern agribusiness. Accordingly, the film's most enduring aspect is its human element: the mother who lost a son to E. coli poisoning, the seed cleaner financially ruined by Monsanto, and the ebullient organic farmer who emerges as a captivating advocate for a better way of eating.

Tyson

2008 // USA // James Toback // June 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - It's tempting to dismiss James Toback's absorbing documentary Tyson as an unapologetic hagiography of former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson. The film is narrated and produced by the champ himself, and it doesn't merely gloss over Tyson's rape conviction, but permits him to hurl insults at his alleged victim. Yet Toback's canny approach does much more than solidify a sympathetic characterization of the man. The director interviews Tyson from an indulgent distance, using the footage as the key component of an ambitious and unexpectedly personalized tale. Tyson recounts his life and expounds on his views in sprawling monologues replete with malapropisms, upwellings of rage, and moments of poetic clarity. Toback's camera swallows Tyson's version of events whole, but also devours his eccentricities and slumbering-lion features with a blend of awe and puzzlement. Refreshingly, the director is less concerned with hewing to a Fallen Sports Hero narrative arc than capturing the specifics of his subject matter with passion. The film reinforces the enduring wonder of Tyson's athleticism with a triumphal style, but offers its revelations in a reserved manner, allowing the viewer the freedom to mull over, discount, or titter at them.