The Flight of the Red Balloon

Capsules

Mr. Lonely, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Roman de Gar and Son of Rambow.

New Releases

The opening shot of Mister Lonely tells you everything you need to know. Okay, maybe not everything: You never in the remaining two hours find out exactly why the shot’s subject, Y Tu Mamá También’s Diego Luna, is a Michael Jackson impersonator, or why he’s riding a clown bike, or why attached to said clown bike is a monkey puppet on a string. But it lays the groundwork for what’s to come.

A self-styled enfant terrible, Korine used to make films that begged you to hate them and him, from his sensationalistic script for Kids to the misery of Gummo and the DV sludge of Julien Donkey-Boy. Apparently he’s thinner-shelled than imagined, as Mister Lonely—his first in nine years—is almost transcendently self-pitying, exhibiting a oneness with social outcasts and the deluded that screams veiled autobiography.

Luna is busting out heyday MJ moves at a geriatric center in Paris when he happens upon a fellow impersonator, a Marilyn Monroe facsimile played by Samantha Morton. After some arm-twisting, she drags him out to a commune of impersonators in Scotland populated by three Stooges, a Buckwheat, a hilariously profane Abe Lincoln (“I’m Abe fucking Lincoln!”), and managed by Denis Lavant’s Chaplin, whose firebreathing behavior, in union with that ’stache, makes him closer to Hitler. In a parallel plot whose relation to the main one is never explained, Werner Herzog plays a priest lording over a fleet of literally flying nuns.

Basically a kinder, gentler, less shocking Gummo, Mister Lonely takes on the traits of its subjects: irksome, yes, but ultimately sweet and at times moving. Morton in particular makes sure we always see the bottomless despair beneath her bubbly mimicry. Parts of Mister Lonely are so lovely—notably the aerial shots of the nuns free-floating among the clouds—that it’s a shame so much screentime is dedicated to go-nowhere improv. Korine’s clearly working through some demons, and given Lonely’s lack of kids shooting cats or electrical tape on nipples, his next film might be only a little annoying.

Reflective surfaces are everywhere in Paris, at least in Paris as seen by Tawianese director Hou Hsaio-Hsien, who often chooses to let entire scenes play out within windowpane reflections in this minor-key lovely little slice of life. The formal strategy makes a strange sort of sense, as Flight of the Red Balloon isn’t really a sequel to Albert Lamorisse’s classic 1956 short film The Red Balloon, nor is it technically a remake. Calling this curious project a reflection of the earlier picture seems most apt.

As in Lamorisse’s beloved classroom perennial, there’s a lonely little boy (here played by Simon Itneau) being followed by a magical red balloon with a surprisingly indomitable will of its own. But Hou uses the earlier film as merely a jumping-off point, allowing the balloon to drift in and out of the film as it pleases, while we follow the child home and observe his frenzied family life.

Mom (Juliette Binoche) is a trainwreck. She’s a professional puppeteer, and one of those curious children’s entertainers who doesn’t seem much interested in children. Her husband is in Canada at the moment. (He says he’s just working on a book, but everyone seems to already understand that he’s not coming back.) There’s also an insufferable tenant downstairs (Hippolyte Girardot) behind on his rent, and the newly hired nanny (Fang Song) is a film student from Beijing who’s working on a digital video, special-effects-laden remake of guess which 1956 classic?

As usual, Hou prefers to lock the camera down in a series of exquisitely composed wide shots, and we watch the characters come and go from a respectful distance. Nothing is foregrounded for the audience’s benefit. Rather, tiny slivers of story points emerge slowly and organically. The largely improvised dialogue (Hou doesn’t speak English and penned the script as a silent film) often serves as background noise. The nanny, video camera at the ready, serves as a directorial stand-in, a stranger in an unfamiliar city.

At times Flight of the Red Balloon feels slight enough to blow away alongside its title character. But if you’re patient enough, an affecting melancholy seeps through. Some scenes are maddeningly vague, but others wonderful and mysterious, capturing a child’s plaintive wide-eyed perspective for a few gorgeous fleeting moments.

One early morning in 1976 Claude Lelouch strapped a camera to his Mercedes-Benz and sped from one side of Paris to the other in just under nine transcendently awesome minutes. The result was the short C’Etait un Rendezvous, and it’s the coolest thing the French director has ever done.

Best known for 1966’s hugely successful bit of cartoonishly français pap A Man and a Woman, Lelouch has never held much currency with cinephiles. But the last several years have seen him failing at even putting asses in seats, most ego-crushingly with the drubbing over his “La Genre Humain” trilogy, which is only two-thirds complete. But Rendezvous, receives an homage in Lelouch’s latest, Roman de Gare—a good sign. Lelouch went so far as to premiere the film pseudonymously—partly to disassociate it from his stinky name, partly because it fits right in with the film’s mad procession of false identities.

Indeed, Roman de Gare opens with novelist Fanny Ardant, seen talking about her latest tome—a rollicking thriller filled with twists and death. Before we have a chance to definitively realize she’s essentially talking about the film we’re watching, Lelouch drags our attention over to a mysterious loner (rubber-mouthed Jean-Pierre Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon) and a harried woman (Audrey Dana) whose irate fiance has just left her at a petrol station.

Dana is a big fan of Ardant’s. Funny she should say that, says Pinon as he gives her a lift, since he’s Ardant’s longtime ghostwriter. Pinon tells Dana he was just kidding—but was he?

To reveal more would do a disservice, as most of the fun in Roman de Gare is the way it cheerfully jerks us hither and thither, with characters exchanging identities and motives at the drop of a chapeau. Speed, as it was in Rendezvous, is the key here, and as long as Lelouch races us through the story’s countless hairpin turns, Roman de Gare remains an assured, bubbly delight. But all vehicles have to stop at some point, and when Roman de Gare slows down, its aims for intellectual pretension and reliance on faux-urbane bon mots become easier to spot. But for a good while there it seems like Lelouch has, after all these years, regained the cool.

Mega-film producer Scott Rudin must be pissed about the existence of Son of Rambow. No sooner does he fork over a hefty sum for the life rights to the three guys who, as kids in the ’80s, remade Raiders of the Lost Ark shot-for-shot, does a low-budget British film about kids redoing First Blood pop up. Rudin can always pass his version off as the inevitable American remake of some modest import, though at least the fresh-faced tweens in Son of Rambow aren’t trying for anything so herculean as a grunt-for-grunt carbon copy of Sly Stallone’s pec-o-rama.

Closer to fan fiction, this backyard opus is perpetrated by the unlikely duo of the school bully (Will Poulter) and the religious kid (Bill Milner). A member of the fundamentalist “Plymouth Brethren” family, Milner is prohibited from even watching school film strips. So when a series of outlandish circumstances put this kid who’s never once seen a movie in front of Poulter’s freshly bootlegged copy of First Blood, cinephilia puts him in such a stranglehold he not only has to act it out but exuberantly agrees to play a wiry John Rambo for Poulter’s budding cineaste, who sometimes doubles as his Col. Trautman.

Just as the spirit of rinky dink film imitations seized upon Passaic, N.J., in Be Kind Rewind, so does the Rambo mania do a number on the film’s school. Soon the school’s hipsters, notably the tres chic French exchange student and his many dorky charges, have joined the project, much to the chagrin of the secretly brooding Poulter.

Mostly atoning for their Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy adaptation, director/producer team Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith borrow liberally from the Wes Anderson playbook, but they’re careful to stay rooted in believable emotions. The idea of kids doing the first Rambo picture, blissfully oblivious of its questionable politics, may sound like a job for the Max Fischer Players, but Rambow is more interested in limning the elemental power of children’s imaginations than chucking out arch ideas.

Rambow tosses off several hilarious on-set set pieces, but the best jokes tend to be rooted in character and performance. Rambow falters a bit in the home stretch and ultimately feels like it could’ve been better still, but Rudin’s Raiders movie has a lot to live up to.

Not Reviewed

Speed Racer
The guys who made the Matrix make Cars—minus the heart. (Opens Fri., May 9.)

What Happens in Vegas
Two attractive strangers (Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kucher) accidently get married. Hilarity ensues. (Opens Fri., May 9.)

Ongoing

Alexandra
Director Alexander Sokurov has stated he steadfastly believes, war or no, Russia should hold onto Chechnya, the subject of his antiwar film Alexandra. This conservative stance—though tempered by a respect for the Chechen culture and its livelihood—sneaks into a couple of dialogue exchanges, but it’s superseded by his belief in the horror and mundanity of all wars. B- (M.P.)

Baby Mama
Amy Poehler is carrying Tina Fey’s child in this Weekend-Update-meets-Odd-Couple-meets-Junior all-star comedy. (Not reviewed.)

Body of War
Ever wonder what happened to Phil Donahue? He and co-director Ellen Spiro have helmed this month’s Iraq War documentary nobody is going to go see. C (S.B.)

CJ7
A dad brings home a lovable pet alien in this Gremlins-meets-Flubber-meets-ET family comedy by the director of Shao Lin Soccer. (Not reviewed.)

The First Saturday in May
It all comes down to the Kentucky Derby in this horse-racing doc. (Not reviewed.)

Forbidden Kingdom
Jackie Chan and Jet Li join forces. ’Nough said. (Not reviewed.)

Irina Palm
Marianne Faithfull plays a London granny who gets a job at a sex shop wanking knobs through a glory hole. C- (M.P.)

Iron Man
Best comic book movie of the week, featuring Robert Downey Jr. in the title role. (Not reviewed.)

Leatherheads
George Clooney’s screwball about the early days of professional football. Co-starring Renée Zellweger and The Office’s John Krasinski. (Not reviewed.)

Hairless metal:

Paranoid Park
Gabe Nevins stars as Alex, a sad-eyed and troubled young skateboarder who alternates between blocking out and coming to terms with his complicity in the accidental death of a security guard in Gus Van Sant’s fragile, deeply felt film. A- (S.B.)

Priceless
It’s a bold choice for Salvadori, making such a sunny, feel-good romantic comedy about two characters who are, for all intents and purposes, miserable whores preying upon the loneliness of widows and the elderly. C+ (S.B.)

The Ruins
Writer of 1998’s A Simple Plan, Scott B. Smith adapts his own novel into yet another horror movie offing American tourists in exotic locales. (Not reviewed.)

Run Fatboy Run
In Hot Fuzz it was a treat to watch Simon Pegg break away from his emotionally stunted slacker routine and prove he could play uptight and humorless with equal panache. Fatboy, alas, represents the fabled step back, casting him as a nerdy loser who, in the film’s opening, runs out on his wedding to Thandie Newton. Jump ahead five years and he’s making a belated attempt to win her back from her current beau (Hank Azaria). C (M.P.)

Smart People
A self-obsessed college professor (Dennis Quaid) must reevaluate his life when his free-spirited brother (Thomas Haden Church) pays him an unexpected visit. Also starring Ellen Page and Sarah Jessica Parker. (Not reviewed.)

Snow Angels
Adapted by David Gordon Green from Stewart O’Nan’s novel, the tale is one of your standard Sundance-friendly miserablist multicharacter roundelays, as a fumbling, wide-eyed teen (Michael Angarano) not just copes with the divorce of his own parents but also must witness the horrible fates of his beloved former babysitter (Kate Beckinsale) and her alcoholic born-again husband (Sam Rockwell). The best parts of Snow Angels are the stray details discovered in this working-class community. B- (S.B.)

Street Kings
We’re back in James Ellroy country. The notorious crime novelist’s dirty fingerprints are all over David Ayer’s slicked-up, egregiously miscast sophomore directorial effort. Full of angst-ridden alcoholic peace officers (played this time by Keanu Reeves) surrounded by sleaze and systemic corruption, pining for dead lovers and slouching toward redemption, Street Kings will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever stayed up all night tearing through an Ellroy paperback. C- (S.B.)

Superhero Movie
Yet another genre parody from the writer of Scary Movie 3 and 4. (Not reviewed.)

21
The true story of five MIT students who took Vegas for millions gets a slicked up, depressingly Hollywood-ized treatment, chock-full of dopey inventions from a Screenwriting 101 manual. D+ (S.B.)

Under the Same Moon
Ridiculously manipulative but effective all the same, this heart-tugging saga of 9-year-old Carlitos and his wildly improbable journey across the border to find his mom in Los Angeles is half magic-realist fable, half social commentary tract. B- (S.B.)

The Unforseen
Laura Dunn’s eco-doc literally descends upon the area in and around Austin, Texas, to uncover an elemental tale of man vs. nature—or rather real estate development against the mythical intelligent designer itself. B (S.B.)

The Visitor
Thomas McCarthy’s follow-up to The Station Agent finds him tackling an even more insurmountable subgenre: the classic “minority experience inexplicably told through a white perspective” setup, as seen in Cry Freedom, Mississippi Burning, Blood Diamond and so on. No luck this time: McCarthy and his very talented actors are vanquished by the need to say something capital-I Important in the least subtle way possible. C (M.P.)

Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?
A monumentally epic waste of time and an exercise in narcissism run amok, the film uses a tasteless 9/11 joke as a launching pad for our so-called hero’s panic over his wife’s pregnancy. As any caring and supportive husband would, Spurlock reacts to the news by grabbing a camera crew and booking flights to the Middle East, announcing that in the interest of providing a safer world for his unborn child, he’s going to single-handedly hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. F (S.B.)