A whipped dog of a country, Romania still seems to be licking its wounds from the Ceausescu era, which ended precisely at 12:08 in the afternoon of Dec. 22, 1989. Seventeen years later, the date still preoccupies residents of a small town to the east of that nation's capital; for them, the revolution was something only witnessed on TV and celebrated in the town square. But, a TV producer asks, did the revolution really take place at all? (Yes, this is something like Bishop Berkeley and the tree.) He gathers the world's least dynamic television panel to discuss the matter—consisting of himself, an affable old pensioner, and a somewhat tipsy academic who reproaches his students for not even knowing how to cheat properly. The movie renders this in a manner somewhere east of deadpan. It's a comedy of sighing and groaning, of long-take conversations that consist mainly of long pauses. No one wants to say things were better under Ceausescu, so they avoid that statement by mostly saying nothing at all. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Pacific Place: 5 p.m. Fri., May 25; 9:45 p.m. Sat., May 26.
Vanaja
SIFF's description of Vanaja is deceptive. Its summary claims the film is about a destitute Indian teen who dreams of becoming a dancer. It's actually about a young girl's sudden leap into adulthood after she's raped and becomes pregnant. Fans of cheery Bollywood bombast should pass on this one. It doesn't get more somber than Vanaja, a film where life never gets better, unless you have a lot of money. The movie boasts some beautiful sequences of traditional south Indian dance, placed there only to advance plot, not express character—especially Vanaja's. Worse, the film keeps pushing her into increasingly harmful situations for increasingly dubious reasons. Director Rajnesh Domalpalli loads so much misery into Vanaja's overlong, 111-minute run time that the tragedy becomes overwhelming, rather than creating empathy. But at least you'll know your watch batteries don't need replacing. (NR) FRANK PAIVA SIFF Cinema: 9:30 p.m. Sat., May 26. Harvard Exit: 1:45 p.m. Sun., May 27.
Waiter
"What kind of bullshit story is this? I'm a worthless character!" The complaint is directed at the writer of a story being erratically revised on his computer screen, and the complainer is the protagonist we're watching on the movie screen. As played by Alex van Warmerdam (also Waiter's writer and director), deadpan Edgar endures every manner of humiliation in love and restaurant work, but he has his limits. He demands better of the writer, who soon supplies him with a new girlfriend, dangerous criminals next door, roaming African warriors, and even a polite Japanese hit man to liven things up. But each new complication only tends to make life worse for Edgar; when the writer falls asleep on the keyboard, he can only say, "Eeeeeeeeee." Some might compare the absurdist humor to Charlie Kaufman or Stranger Than Fiction, but van Warmerdam's influences run past Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode and into Ionesco. As the author and his creation grow increasingly at odds, the humor darkens to a Dutch hue of existentialism. Edgar knows that his future can be deleted with a keystroke, yet he retains his dignified, weary professionalism to the end. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Neptune: 11 a.m. Sat., May 26; 9:45 Sun., June 3.
A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory
Was Andy Warhol a bottom? Sea brings us closer to the horrible truth. Pity we know less about Warhol's onetime boyfriend and undiscovered avant-gardist Danny Williams, who may or may not have drowned in the summer of '66. Forty years later, Williams' niece Esther Robinson tries to shed light on the man's abbreviated life, providing what may be the toothiest exposé yet into the soul-sucking modus operandi of Warhol's Factory. The filmmaker never knew her uncle, but she comes to understand him as something of a kindred spirit of Edie Sedgwick—which is to say, a better person than Warhol. (NR) ED GONZALEZ Northwest Film Forum: 6:30 p.m. Sat., May 26; 9:15 p.m. Sun., May 27.
The Yacoubian Building
This three-hour Egyptian epic—the most expensive ever made—has been crafted (in the old school, by youngish pro Marwan Hamed) as a massive Arabic soap opera, a Cairo-based Gone With the Wind swoony with mourning for a privileged colonialist past and with fascination for the bloody ideological conflicts of the present. Notably in a nation with notoriously strict censorship laws, Hamed's film revolves around the need for, and degeneration of, sex and money, and it's groundbreakingly frank about homosexuality and female exploitation. Hammy, lavish, and often thunderfooted, the movie is an immersion in rare ethnographic pulp. (NR) MICHAEL ATKINSON Pacific Place: 1 p.m. Sat., May 26. Harvard Exit: 6:30 p.m. Mon., May 28.
