SATURDAY, JUNE 12
6:30 p.m., Pacific Place
Last Train Home
SIFF
Monogamy
SIFF
The Wildest Dream
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Directed by Lixin Fan, one of the Chinese-Canadian crew on Up the Yangtze (SIFF '08), this powerful documentary also follows that country's huge, migratory workforce. Only instead of working on cruise ships catering to tourists, the Zhang family in Last Train Home just makes garments for Westerners. (In one scene, workers marvel at our waist sizes.) Mother and father Zhang left their village in Sichuan Province when their daughter was 1. They return home from Guangzhou once a year—in early spring, for Chinese New Year—to see her (and Grandmother, and a younger son). Titles inform us that 130 million workers perform the same homeward trek, and the scenes Fan captures are amazing. The Guangzhou train station becomes a sea of humanity—crying, fainting, pushing, cutting in line, the army and police trying to maintain order, railroad delays lasting for days. Seen from overhead, in the rain, it's a pointillist mass of black-haired heads interspersed with colorful umbrellas. Imagine your crowded Metro bus during rush hour. Now add another 100 passengers to that bus. Now imagine hundreds more buses exactly like that. Yet the Zhangs persist; this is their only chance to see their kids. But back home, unsurprisingly, their teenage daughter views them as strangers. They sacrifice for her education; she complains, "School is like a cage!" It's an old dilemma, and the fractious home scenes can feel like reality TV. But Last Train Home is a remarkable document of globalization, one you should remember each time you button your jeans. (NR) BRIAN MILLER (Also: 1:30 p.m. Sun., June 13.)
7 p.m., Egyptian
Documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet) originally intended to produce Howl as a nonfiction film before rethinking it as a narrative. They didn't rethink it enough. Howl is their dramatic deconstruction of the 1957 obscenity trial following the publication of Allen Ginsberg's epic poem. (James Franco plays Ginsberg, Bob Balaban the tough but fair judge.) The whole enterprise feels bogged down by a slavish dependence on factual matter: court transcripts, Ginsberg's own words, montages of news clippings, text on screen. It's a lot of regurgitated information, and very little interpretation. Partially inspired by Illuminated Poems, a collection pairing Ginsberg's verse with drawings by New Yorker cover artist Eric Drooker, Howl also contains animations teasing out the source poem's themes and imagery, intercut with Franco recreating its first public performance. The animation, luridly colored and sometimes laughably literal-minded, lurches and flows in an approximation of Ginsberg's juxtaposition of crudeness and grace. Howl is only partially animated, but it's all cartoon. There is not a bad actor in this movie (including Jon Hamm), but each cast member seems mired in wild impersonation. (NR) KARINA LONGWORTH
8:30 p.m., Pacific Place
Solitary Man
Directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who wrote The Girlfriend Experience, have here created The Michael Douglas Experience; whether you respond to the material depends largely on how much you enjoy the actor lazily riffing on the oily creatures of his past. After a prologue, set six and a half years ago, shows thriving car dealer and loyal husband Ben Kalmen (Douglas) being told by his doctor that there's an irregularity in his EKG, the film returns to the present with the damage of his mortality scare already done. Divorced from college sweetheart Susan Sarandon and his business ruined, Ben is free to continue his pathetic behavior: bedding girlfriend Mary Louise Parker's 18-year-old daughter and asking his own daughter, Susan (Jenna Fischer, the most revelatory of the crowded, hardworking supporting cast), for rent money. Koppelman's script contains some tart dialogue about deluded, middle-aged male vanity—"Give me a hug, so people will think we're married," Ben tells Susan—and the film courageously shows its reprobate hero sliding further, not redeeming himself. "The men who live like Ben Kalmen all model themselves after characters Michael has played," Koppelman says in the press notes—and the lead is all too content not to stretch himself beyond playing a copy of a copy of a copy. (R) MELISSA ANDERSON
