When we're introduced to the documentary subjects of HMiB in 2005, their band, Acrassicauda, is the only one of its kind in Iraq. The guys who previously told their story in Vice magazine are excited to be setting up for one of their very few gigs to date. Thanks to the U.S. invasion, it's virtually impossible to facilitate a sweaty mosh pit. For security reasons, the gig is to be in the early afternoon, in a hotel outside the Green Zone, where a power outage soon interrupts the show. Yet, despite the hiccups, it's something of a triumph for a band once forced to sing the praises of Saddam. Primarily enjoyable on an educational level, this well-meaning doc doesn't suggest that Acrassicauda is delusional enough to believe their name will one day be synonymous with Mötley Crüe. Performing, practicing, growing out their hair, and raising their families in peace is all they ask for. (They also ask in English; all speak the language fluently.) By the film's end, they reunite as refugees in Syria, where they follow the freedom of their metal idols—if only by recording a few demos. But it's the scenes back in occupied Baghdad that stay with you. We see enough on the nightly news of shoulder rockets, masked gunmen, and mass graves. But to witness here the difficulty of these 20-somethings to manage simple band tasks—like walking through their neighborhood to rehearse without getting shot or stepping on an IED—somehow makes the larger situation in Iraq seem all the more dire. (NR) CHRIS KORNELIS SIFF Cinema: 9:30 p.m. (Also: 11 a.m. Sun., May 25.)
The Home Song Stories
Tony Ayres' Australian immigrant drama is intensely personal and clearly autobiographical. The narrator, a writer, tells you as much in a prologue. His analogue, Tom (the watchful, never cloying Joel Lok), comes to the strange suburbs outside Melbourne in 1964 with an older teen sister and their saloon-singer floozy of a mother (Joan Chen, brave and frazzled). To gain citizenship, this Shanghai chanteuse marries the first Aussie she can find, a naval officer, then dumps the poor chump for a series of men and an ocean of booze. Seven years later, she comes crawling back. Her kids naturally disapprove of her every behavior, and the whole cycle of reproach, tears, and reconciliation repeats itself about 12 times too often. (For variety, there are suicide attempts and trips to the mental ward.) Ayres clearly has aspirations on the order of Wong Kar-wai or Terrence Davies to plumb the period melancholy of families and love affairs that, for all the emotion involved, will never work. The Home Song Stories is acutely remembered and felt, but poorly organized. Tom is bursting with wuxia stage fantasies; meanwhile his sister is discovering David Bowie and attracting notice from one of her mother's young lovers. Ayres is too sensitive to turn this family album into camp or melodrama, but sometimes a little vulgarity helps to clarify those painful memories of youth. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Uptown: 4 p.m. (Also: 9:15 p.m. Wed., May 28.)
A Man's Job
SIFF
The Fall, with Justine Waddell, is all spectacle.
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Erase Deuce Bigalow from your mind. Yes, the unemployed family man at the center of this sober, powerful Finnish drama decides to sell his body for sex. But the laborer, afraid to tell his chronically depressed wife that he was fired months ago, undertakes his freelance profession with a craftsman's pride. Former colleagues from the stone yard set him up with a cell phone, sex toys (in a discreet briefcase), and a Web site. He shaves and changes into a suit only when out of the house. And he treats his clients—mostly older women—with respect, never snickering at their needs or wondering what their husbands, if they have them, can't or won't provide. Tommi Korpela plays Juha with admirable restraint. His services are "no big deal," he tells his best friend (who acts as his IM pimp, too), but he underestimates the emotional nature of what's supposed to be a merely sexual transaction. Some women cry, one turns violent, some just need to talk, and one particular client is unique in a way that may disturb us non-Scandinavian prudes, but probably shouldn't. Director Aleksi Salmenperä relates his story with sparse, well-framed economy: There is a job to do, and a wage to be earned, and a moral cost that must be paid back home. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Egyptian: 11 a.m. (Also: Uptown: 9 p.m. Mon., May 26.)
Mermaid
A prize winner at Sundance, this bubbly, irresistible tale by Russian writer-director Anna Melikyan fuses folklore with her very polished background in advertising. Mostly set in the crass yet alluring present of the moneyed New Russia (brilliantly photographed by Oleg Kirichenko, with seamless digital effects), the story has its origins in the same soulful Slavic myths appropriated by Hans Christian Andersen. Seen first as a girl and later as a teen, Alisa (the luminous misfit Masha Shalaeva) arrives in Moscow to meet her destiny. And if that destiny is a man to love (disheveled ad exec Evgeny Tsyganov), so much the better. Both he and the city are experienced through Alisa's wide-open eyes; you could call the view enchanting, but Mermaid gradually makes clear that she's the enchantress. The green-haired Alisa isn't so much a seeker as a maker of fate. The last foreign movie I saw that percolated with this much life and energy was Amélie. How does one translate "magical realism" into Cyrillic? (NR) BRIAN MILLER Egyptian: 1:15 p.m. (Also: Pacific Place: 9 p.m. Mon., May 26.)
My Effortless Brilliance
