SIFF Week 2: Picks & Pans

Camille

A white-trash loser (James Franco) is pressured into marrying a beautiful but annoying loudmouth (Sienna Miller) who wants to honeymoon at Niagara Falls. Along the way, their motorcycle crashes and she dies, but inexplicably won't stay dead. With hubby being accused of her murder, and the still-lively body starting to decompose, it's a race against time to get to Niagara and rekindle their relationship. The bizarre premise is never properly explained or exploited; you'll feel like the undead watching it. (NR) LUKE Y. THOMPSON Uptown: 4 p.m.

Emmanuel Jal: War Child

A boy soldier in Sudan's bloody civil war in the late '80s, Emmanuel Jal knows a different kind of bedtime lullaby. "The music I used to hear was guns and bombs," sings the 20-something London rapper (who isn't sure of his age). Karim Chrobog's doc follows Jal, a hip-hop activist, as he returns home to visit a father he hasn't seen since he picked up an AK-47. Chrobog offers a glimpse into Jal's childhood during a war that claimed two million lives. His film is considerably better thanks to a 1989 documentary team that recorded a younger Jal as a spokes-boy for the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, offering a unique then-and-now perspective. With its focus on the charismatic Jal, the movie is no depress-you-mentary. But its tends toward hagiography (as if Jal could walk on crocodile-infested water), and its direction is wayward. What might be better than watching War Child? Pop, lock, and droppin' it to one of Jal's albums. (NR) JOSHUA LYNCH SIFF Cinema: 7:15 pm. (Also: 9:30 p.m. Sat., June 14.)

Jar City

A blockbuster in its native Iceland, Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City is a somber, sinewy police procedural with a head-clearing view of crime. The discovery of a bludgeoned body sets seen-it-all cop Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) and his squad on the trail of a decades-old mystery involving rape allegations, a corrupt small-town constable, and his trio of thug enforcers. Meanwhile, in a seemingly unconnected side plot, a dead girl’s grieving father immerses himself in shady doings at a genetic-research facility. The sharing of genomic and medical data—an ongoing controversy in a country of only 300,000 residents—stoked the movie’s popularity at home, where the issue of who has the right to control (or reveal) personal histories resonates strongly. Here, the movie’s urgency lies mostly in its convincing cast, its varied urban-to-pastoral locations (in light that ranges from harsh to bilious), and its cold-pro handling of familiar genre machinery, made fresh by unusual detail—such as the investigator’s fast-food predilection for sheep heads. (NR) JIM RIDLEY SIFF Cinema, 321 Mercer St. (McCaw Hall), 324-9996, www.siff.net. $9-$11. 9:45 p.m. (Also: Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 4 p.m. Fri. June 6.

Katýn

A national trauma on the order of Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and Little Big Horn all rolled into one, the Soviet Russian massacre of 15,000 Polish officers during World War II has been well studied in history books and documentaries. It's hard to understand, then, what new perspective the eminent Polish director Andrzej Wajda (Man of Iron, Kanal, etc.) hoped to add to the subject. His own father was one of the victims, so this is obviously a personal film. But it's also a sprawling, confusing, badly directed personal film. One family appears to be modeled on his own. How, why, and if they cross paths with other characters isn't terribly clear. It's hard to tell many characters apart. Years pass, but children don't age. The Nazis are bad, and the Reds are worse. And it takes way too long to get to the inevitable outcome. Only in its final, terrible moments does Katýn achieve a clarity of purpose—rendering the machinery of death in its every cog and detail. But then, not every creative work can be engineered so precisely as murder. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Egyptian: 7 p.m. (Also: 1:30 p.m. Sat., May 31.)

Ploy

SIFF has always liked Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (6ixtynin9, Monrak Transistor, Last Life in the Universe), but I'm a little less sold on the guy. His latest, about a married couple stuck in a Bangkok hotel, falls into what be called the cinema of stasis. He might leave her. She might leave him. He might have an affair with the 18-year-old girl—Ploy, that's her name, and apparently not an English-language pun—he meets in the hotel bar. The wife, an alcoholic former actress who hides coke in her purse, might have an affair with a creepy fan. Both apparently left their spouses to marry back in America, where they now live. Meanwhile, Ploy just wants a place to shower while she's waiting for her mother to pick her up the next day. And we're wondering—what the hell does a normal teenager want to do with a pair of depressed, unhappily married middle-aged people? To break free of this very interior drama set in the interior of a hotel, Ratanaruang provides visions of a passionate trust between two hotel employees (or they may be projections of Ploy's imagination). Likewise, scenes of murder and kidnapping may reflect the wife's movie-fed imaginings. Engrossing if not convincing, Ploy makes a waking dream of jealousy, doubt, and infidelity. It's a morose shadow-play cast by a marriage neither partner believes in anymore. Says the husband, "Sometimes, fighting reassures us that we're still close to each other." Tell that to your spouse after the movie. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Pacific Place: 9:30 p.m. (Also: 11 a.m. Sat., May 31.)

Ain't Scared