SIFF Week Two: Picks and Pans

Angel-A

What if you took It's a Wonderful Life and replaced George Bailey with a scruffy Parisian con man and swapped Henry Travers' doddering guardian angel for the half-naked chick with the $10 million pasties from Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale? You'd wind up in the humid imagination of La Femme Nikita writer-director Luc Besson. In this amiably inconsequential fairy tale, one-armed Moroccan-born comic Jamel Debbouze (Days of Glory) draws on his sawed-off, scrappy charm as a quick-talking Brooklyn-based loser who's about to jump into the Seine to avoid his gambling debts when suddenly a literal suicide blonde (Rie Rasmussen) materializes on the same bridge. When the leggy sprite and her companion aren't wandering a desolate, neon-flecked City of Lights—shot in silvery black-and-white—the portentously named Angela (geddit?) throws roundhouse kicks in a bid to restore her man's latent decency. Is she the director's muse? Is ex-pat Debbouze's love-hate relationship with Paris symbolic of Besson's own tenuous position in Gaulywood, where he functions as a kind of Gallic Jerry Bruckheimer? There's little beyond the surface-deep pleasures of this talky, balky, strangely subdued distaff riff on Wings of Desire, although the knockabout pairing of the raffish Debbouze and the gawky Rasmussen provides ungainly sweetness. But the loony grand passion and profligate imagination of Besson's sci-fi whatsit The Fifth Element are sorely missed. (R) JIM RIDLEY Neptune: 9:45 p.m. Thurs., May 31; 4:30 p.m. Mon., June 4.

Big Rig

Doug Pray once made the terrific 1996 grunge documentary Hype!, well grounded in a Seattle scene he knew, populated by figures he admired but didn't worship. It also helped that those flannel-clad rockers mostly had a sense of humor about their sudden blow-up to fame. Now he introduces us to the sincere, patriotic, and irony-free world of long-haul truckers, a less-publicized group, and one that he simply lionizes in a series of random interviews. Big Rig just couples together colorful drivers, endless montages of roadside scenery (set to drivin' music by Buck 65), and liberty-lovin' rhetoric of the most predictable kind. "The day of the independent is gone," one driver laments. Fine, but Pray never goes further to explain how big firms (Wal-Mart included) control the trade, why unions don't form, or the effect of NAFTA, with Mexican drivers crossing the border. And trucks haul all our food—cantaloupes, pigs, tomatoes! What's all that cargo worth to our national economy and health? Given the opportunity to make Fast Food Nation on 18 wheels, Pray merely delivers a chrome-polished version of BJ and the Bear. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Egyptian: 9:30 p.m. Fri., June 1; 3:15 p.m. Sat., June 2.

Black Irish

Not another Ed Burns movie! You're right to worry, but The Brothers McMullen stands like Citizen Kane next to Brad Gann's coming-of-age twaddle. Set in south Boston sometime in the '80s, the presumably autobiographical Black Irish pummels you with stereotypes—the knocked-up sister; the black-sheep brother with a heart of gold; the sensitive teen hero who observes it all; their mismatched parents (Brendan Gleeson and Melissa Leo, deserving better) who stick together because, well, that's just what families do. Whenever hard-drinking, unemployed Dad punches another hole in the wall, the McKays hang happy family photos over the damage. Even if that's a truthful detail in Gann's memoir-ish account, there are times when you need to embellish because the truth is so stale. Pass me another pint of Guinness and some salt to choke down the clichés. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Lincoln Square: 9:30 p.m. Fri., June 1; 6:45 p.m. Sun., June 3.

Black Sheep

Or: Mutton Chomps. Genetically tweaked and dangerously pissed-off sheep turn rabid in this cheeky, campy Kiwi gorefest, loosely modeled by writer-director Jonathan King on countryman Peter Jackson's early dead/alive puppet gross-outs. Subtext—indeed, substance—is nonexistent, but King's sense of fun is as infectious as the disease of his zombie sheep, sharp-fanged stuffed animals tossed from offscreen toward the jugulars of various deserving victims. Bitten humans turn sheepish, too, which allows the FX department to uncork some old-school, American Werewolf–style flesh-ripping transformations. Karo syrup abounds, as does the irresistible spirit of juvenilia; the last few gags in particular are a gas. (NR) ROB NELSON Lincoln Square: 9:45 p.m. Thurs., May 31. Neptune: midnight, Sat., June 2

Born and Bred

Pablo Trapero has a gift for charging every composition with a palpable sense of life's pulsating vitality, but he saddles his latest film with a cipher at the center. And it's rarely a good thing when the scenery is more interesting than the characters. After a car accident demolishes his family, a successful interior designer drops out, leaves no forwarding address, and re-emerges in the frozen tundra of Patagonia. The remote outpost, with its primitive airport and crude, hard-drinking denizens, has an exotic vibe but soon comes to feel as familiar as a Pony Express outpost in any modern Western. The alienated hero, a dislocated urbanite who's picked his own purgatory, likewise feels fresh at first before tripping over one too many clichés. The movie aspires to be a subtly nuanced character study, but its inability to communicate his pain or make us empathize with his situation renders it a good-looking but existential exercise. (NR) MICHAEL FOX Pacific Place: 4:30 p.m. Thurs., May 31.

The Champagne Spy