WELLSPRING MEDIA
Chen Shang-Chyi in Goodbye Dragon Inn.
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Around the Bend
Opens Fri., Oct. 15, at Metro and others
Early in writer-director Jordan Roberts' profoundly flawed debut feature, an eccentric codger intones: "A family carries each other" (grammar, it seems, is not part of the shared family burden). That codger is Henry Lair (Michael Caine), a crotchety patriarch who kicks off at a Kentucky Fried Chicken 10 minutes into Bend, prompting a grudging reunion between his estranged son, Turner (Christopher Walken), and grumpy grandson, Jason (Josh Lucas, with a stick up his ass to rival Billy Crudup's in Big Fish). In accordance with the old man's will, lugging an urn full of Henry's ashes, the two set out on a scavenger hunt that requires them to dig up family secrets and, strangely, eat unhealthy amounts of fried chicken. Each stop on the Henry Death Tour involves a KFC, which might explain how Bend was financed; either way, what sort of kindly old man forces his only living relatives to recreate Super Size Me with poultry?
The film's familiar menu promises standard-issue intergenerational bickering and bonding, which Roberts garnishes with stale attempts at humor. When the duo consults a lawyer about Henry's will, the lawyer's senile mother dodders about the apartment, looking confused. Alzheimer's—now there's a surefire laugh riot! Later, Walken trades an urn containing a complete stranger's ashes for a dog abused by its redneck owner. None of this makes Bend come alive as a David O. Russell-style black comedy, and Roberts even manages to waste Walken's deadpan comic genius. Caine, at least, redeems himself by dying early; audiences may wish his costars had followed suit. (R) NEAL SCHINDLER
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Runs Fri., Oct. 15–Thurs., Oct. 21, at Grand Illusion
Tsai Ming-liang's latest feature concerns the inner life of a poured-concrete cavern in the heart of Taipei, a shabby temple unspooling a 1966 martial-arts flick—Dragon Inn—to a handful of devotees. Because the theater is about to shut down, there's a superficial resemblance to the canned nostalgia of Cinema Paradiso. But Goodbye is far less sentimental and considerably funnier than the old Miramax pocket liner. It's also a movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.
In one sense, the movie is a superimposed double feature. The action is entirely confined to the Fu-Ho theater; we hear Inn's music and the whir of the projector, while the big screen (within the screen) opens a glorious chasm of deep space in the gloomy bunker. In some shots, the internal movie registers only as patterns of light shifting on the empty seats. Meanwhile, Tsai's trademark monsoon allows for the contrapuntal pitter-patter of water leaking through the roof.
Tsai's characters include a young woman with a severe limp who takes tickets at the box office and cleans up after the show; a little boy attending the movie with his nostalgic grandfather; and a lonely Japanese tourist, who alternates between watching the movie and hopefully cruising the largely empty theater. "Do you know this theater is haunted?" someone asks the tourist. Indeed it is. Poltergeists noisily gobble their sunflower seeds. A pair of feet suddenly materializes over the tourist's shoulder. Two of Inn's original actors, Miao Tien and Chun Shih, are in the audience watching their younger selves on screen. But Tsai is less concerned with nostalgia than a sense of cosmic ritual or what might be called the "historical uncanny."
Goodbye puts the history of Taiwanese popular cinema between brackets, since Inn was among the most influential martial-arts films ever made, helping put Taiwan's popular cinema on the international map. Goodbye consigns that popular cinema to the crypt even while receding farther in time to evoke the increasingly archaic motion-picture apparatus itself. While Tsai's long, static takes are basic Lumière, his narrative evokes the lost world of silent cinema. A prolonged gag is derived from a spectator's efforts to retrieve her fallen shoe. A wordless scene in the men's toilet is a small masterpiece of comic timing. Later, the ticket taker makes an arduous journey, leg brace clanking, down an endless corridor and up the narrow stairs to the booth, where she leaves a portion of her meal as an offering for the phantom projectionist, as if to say, "Thanks for the show," regardless of whether the movies now only exist as ghosts. (NR) J. HOBERMAN
Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Runs Sat., Oct. 16–Mon., Oct. 18 and Wed., Oct. 20 at Northwest Film Forum
Call him the anti-Cheney. Warm, witty, and unpretentious, the famous lefty historian and author of A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn hasn't exactly mellowed into his 80s. Film clips of his involvement in the civil rights movement (when he taught at, and was fired from, all-black Spellman College) and the anti-Vietnam War movement show one mellow fellow, quick with a smile and amazingly unbitter about being billy-clubbed by the cops. Based on his autobiography of the same name, this documentary/hagiography presents a thoroughly admirable figure in a thoroughly pedestrian manner: talking heads, testimonials, old news clips, still photos, and voice-overs from his works read by Matt Damon. It makes Ken Burns look like Scorsese, and no one who's already read Zinn's works will find the film particularly illuminating or novel.
