EIKE SCHROTER
Female impersonators Vardalos and Colette.
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Connie and Carla
Opens Fri., April 16, at Metro and other theaters
Or, My Big Fat Drag Musical. After the massive soccer-mom embrace of her Big Fat Greek Wedding, former Second City improviser Nia Vardalos is back to follow up (atone for?) her runaway hit with a female buddy flick that doubles as a gender-bending musical. (At the pitch meeting, the phrase "Thelma & Louise meets Yentl" was likely uttered.)
Essentially a series of drag gags strung together with subplots (estranged brothers reunite, Russian gangster acquires taste for Mame, etc.), C&C starts out embarrassingly broad, then develops into an amusing, frothy showcase for its divalicious leads, Vardalos and Toni Collette (who play Connie and Carla, respectively). If these women couldn't put on a slam-bang show, the film would be as bad as it sounds: Our heroines witness a Mafia hit (à la Some Like It Hot) and flee to L.A., where they turn a gay cabaret on its ear by (gasp!) actually singing instead of lip-syncing. They win a regular gig at the club by pretending to be drag queens, which complicates Connie's budding romance with a shy guy (David Duchovny) whose tentative efforts at hanging out with his cross-dressing brother (Stephen Spinella) aren't going so hot, either. Vardalos' script is full of body-positive speeches with all the subtlety of Oklahoma!, and the love story feels forced, but she and Collette make every musical number shine. Bottom line: If a film with a Debbie Reynolds cameo in the finale is your kind of thing, you already know who you are. (PG-13) NEAL SCHINDLER
Hukkle
7 and 9 p.m. Fri., April 16–Thurs., April 22, at Little Theatre
Before seeing this odd little Hungarian movie, I was unaware that dirty fingernails could be so beautiful. Or that the hiccups of a wrinkly old man could sound like an exquisite symphony. It's clear why this complex, innovative, and visually rich film by György Pálfi was a favorite at SIFF last year. The story essentially relates the fragility of the living and the perishable nature of the organic: a pail of milk about to tip over; a fawn about to be crushed by a plow; an already ill man about to be murdered. It's also a bit of a murder story, both fascinating and perplexing, as we try to understand the mysterious demise of the community's elderly men. Meanwhile, the women's behavior is equally confusing as they dart around in the shadows, conferring suspiciously between iron fences like the members of some secret society.
Hukkle—a kind of Magyar transliteration for hiccup—is devoid of dialogue but rich in the raw noises of life. The sounds of animals and of the natural world smother the disruptive racket made by humans, while also indicating the similarities between the beasts in each realm. The steady hum of machines also betokens the clash between the old world and modern society. Detailed shots of microwaves, stereos, and an arriving jet capture an encroaching new culture as it cracks the ceiling of this small Hungarian hamlet. With quietly powerful insight, Hukkle shows us the reality, and the resiliency, of life within a precious ecosystem fractured under the weight of modernity. (NR) HEATHER LOGUE
Mayor of the Sunset Strip
Runs Fri., April 16–Thurs., April 22, at Varsity
There are a lot of photographs in this music-world documentary in which subject Rodney Bingenheimer poses with celebrities. In all of them, he looks straight into the camera. Those eyes—big, black, gloomy—seem goofy at first, then sweet, then haunted. Abandoned as a teenager by a starstruck mother in mid-'60s Los Angeles, the small, sweet-tempered Bingenheimer became a major scenester in the city's emerging rock scene, palling around with Sonny and Cher, working as Davy Jones' double on The Monkees, and living off the women he charmed, before bringing British glam rock to the U.S. in the early '70s via his famed nightclub, Rodney's English Disco. Soon after, he became the most influential DJ on L.A.'s—and soon America's—most influential radio station, KROQ, where the punk, new wave, and alternative rock bands he championed would form the backbone of the "modern rock" radio format.
What Bingenheimer spends most of Mayor doing, though, is hold onto his own waning fame—chiefly by mingling with pop stars as his radio show is relegated to increasingly obscure hours. Bingenheimer maintains that his primary gift is to act as "a bridge between the famous and not-so-famous," but that bridge plainly hasn't seen much traffic of late. ("I think they're afraid to fire him," one colleague bluntly puts it, because of what Bingenheimer has previously meant to the station.) When his protégé (and Mayor co-producer) Chris Carter gets a job at a rival radio station, and Bingenheimer loses his temper, ordering the camera turned off, it's jarringly truthful—the one moment of the film where the strain of keeping a good-guy facade finally comes to the surface.
It's not as if George Hickenlooper (who previously directed the painfully candid Apocalypse Now documentary Hearts of Darkness) doesn't give Bingenheimer plenty of opportunities to break through his blank facade. There are a couple of heartbreaking visits to his father and stepmother's house, where the famous son's photos are shunted off to the bedroom wall. On several other occasions, when his snapshots with famous friends are passed around, the name Kato Kaelin is mentioned. It's a good laugh line—the O.J. Simpson gadabout who got on the A-list for basically doing nothing—but Kaelin is also the movie's bad conscience, the guy Bingenheimer could have easily turned into had he proven something less than merely charming. Mayor doesn't back away from examining harsh truths about that charm, and it certainly casts him as a representative L.A. type. Yet the film isn't mocking or heartless; it renders Bingenheimer deeper and more poignantly than you'd have any reason to expect. (R) MICHAELANGELO MATOS
