The boys have a lot to learn. Scowling intellectual Jan squabbles with fun-loving Peter for heisting a $6,000 Rolex to fund a Barcelona getaway with girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch). How can they expect society to take them seriously and give up its bourgeois ways if they steal stuff? Peter winds up vacationing in Spain alone, though, because Jule has to work overtime in an upscale restaurant to pay off her $104,000 debt to a rich guy whose Mercedes she totaled after missing an insurance payment and losing her policy.
While Peter's away, Jule and Jan play, doing an Edukators number on the house of Jule's Mercedes creditor. Because she's an impulsive girl in love with two guys and he's an impractical dreamer under her spell (a nod to Jules and Jim), they fuck up, and wind up with a hostage: Fifty-year-old SDS-revolutionary-turned-$4.1-million-a-year-businessman Hardenberg (Burghart Klaussner). Peter returns to help them spirit Hardenberg to the remote alpine cabin of Jule's uncle, where they debate about justice and selling out.
DAVID LEE
Master deadpanner Murray and a surpringly endearing Stone in Flowers.
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This sounds boring, and it is simplistic, but Weingartner stages the debate intelligently—he busts everybody for self- delusion, including the kids. There are good moments of thriller tension, too. What makes the movie soar, though, is the marvelous acting, the sensitive, utterly realistic treatment of the young-love triangle, and the rueful fondness in Hardenberg's old eyes as he sees his younger self in theirs. The surprise ending is gimmicky, but the character study is consistently enthralling. The Edukators is educational—not intellectually, but emotionally. (NR) TIM APPELO
Saint Ralph
Opens Fri., Aug. 5, at Metro and Uptown
There are only a handful of good movies about running (Chariots of Fire, Without Limits, The Jericho Mile), and Saint Ralph isn't one of them. That would be fine, if it were just a decent '50s Canadian coming-of-age flick, but it doesn't even reach that standard. A freshman at a Catholic high school, Ralph (Adam Butcher) has only his coma-case mother in the way of becoming an orphan. His father died in World War II, and he lies to his teachers about living with a chum instead of in his empty, depressing family house. A smart-ass whose chief extracurricular pursuit is wanking off, he gets sentenced to the cross-country team for insubordination, where he falls under the Nietzsche-reading tutelage of Father Hibbert (Campbell Scott). When a nurse (Jennifer Tilly) tells Ralph of his mom, "The doctors are saying it'll take a miracle to wake her up," he decides that winning the 1954 Boston Marathon would do the trick, and he begins training like "a martyr" (as he calls himself).
A bigger miracle would be for Saint Ralph to escape its melodramatic foundation, but the kid can't run that fast. Ralph is no Duddy Kravitz, and Butcher doesn't make him either annoying enough or cute enough to care about. The young actor is skinny but doesn't carry himself at all like an athlete. His teen high jinks—like spying on the women's locker room—would hardly be considered shocking in the '50s (although in '50s Canada, maybe). Campbell's priest isn't pushing the boundaries of subversion either, particularly when his rival faculty members seem to be stuck in the Inquisition era. (For a better treatment of Catholic excess and devotion, Household Saints or even Heaven Help Us are closer to the cross.) "Please tell me there's a rational explanation for this," says Tilly's nurse. Sorry, no.
The film's best character and performer is stuck on the margins: Claire (Tamara Hope), the girl Ralph has a crush on. He thinks dressing up in a suit and taking her on a date might score him a little nookie. Wrong, Ralph—what really turns this girl on is incense, Mass, and the full Latin liturgy. Her eager, innocent, and yet carnal arousal is the best thing about the movie. Instead of Ralph fanatically sacrificing his body to resurrect his mother, cheerful Claire has no problem reconciling the flesh and her spirit. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER
Save the Green Planet
Runs Fri., Aug. 5–Thurs., Aug. 11, at Northwest Film Forum
South Korean writer-director Jang Jun-hwan's 2003 stew of a suspense thriller overcooks half a dozen genres: police procedural, science fiction, noir, Western, melodrama, and martial arts. To complicate matters, the tone changes so often that if you leave to get popcorn, you may think you've walked into the wrong film when you return. It's a space-case retread of Silence of the Lambs: Rabid sci-fi fan Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-gyun) lives in a rural compound above an old mine; to fill his time, he keeps bees, builds mannequins, and plots revenge against his former employer, a mysterious chemical plant that seems to have poisoned his mother. After years of stalking the plant head, Kang Man-shik (Baek Yun-shik), Lee kidnaps him and, convinced Kang is an alien leader bent on destroying the Earth, proceeds to torture him. Is Lee insane? His treatment of Kang gets brutal enough to make the film less a farce than a mild horror flick.
Yet the bloody cat-and-mouse game between captor and captive—finally interrupted by two detectives—keeps careening into slapstick, leaving you hard-pressed not to laugh even as you cringe. Then, late in the movie, there's a stirring montage of Lee's horrendous youth, the cause of his eventual psychosis, and a hilarious Bible parody that conflates the legend of Atlantis with the story of Adam and Eve. Both sequences suggest that if the director had picked a genre—or at least limited himself to two or three—Planet could have been a lot more fun. Still, if you're a fan of wacky gross-out humor à la Evil Dead 2, you might get a kick out of this space oddity. (NR) NEAL SCHINDLER
