Capsules

Gunnin’ for That No. 1 Spot, My Winnipeg and Surfwise

New Releases

From a cursory glance, it would seem that Gunnin’ for That No. 1 Spot—an inspirational high school basketball saga from Beastie Boy Adam Yauch—is just another goddamn niche documentary. Like Spellbound, Murderball, Wordplay and Planet B-Boy, it seems like it’ll offer another entertaining but frustratingly shallow look at a craze.

But not so fast.

Essentially Hoop Dreams remade with the same endearingly madcap sensibility that wrought the videos for “Shake Your Rump,” “Body Movin’” and “Ch-Check It Out,” Gunnin’ introduces us to an octet of the country’s premiere precollegiate B-ball players en route to a tournament held at Harlem’s hallowed Rucker Park, the original training grounds for the likes of Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Sure, Gunnin’s subjects represent a broader swath of the socioeconomic landscape than usual, from inner-city youths and a kid from Chester, Pa., to the insanely privileged nephew of none other than Beach Boy Mike Love. But this is still a niche doc, and information and commentary must be eventually quelled so we can bathe in some serious court skills.

And that we do, with Yauch—for the first time not employing his goofy directorial nom de plume Nathaniel Hörnblowér—cutting the inventively filmed action into the kind of rhythmic orgy only a seasoned musician could achieve. (And backed by the kind of old-school hits-laden soundtrack only someone of his stature could afford.)

Interspersed between the fun is chatter from those involved in the business of basketball, each and every one painting a bleak, pessimistic view of the world these kids wish to enter. One points out the ranking of high schoolers is arbitrary as hell before lamenting that “PR comes too soon.” Another adds that they’re “treated like a star before they’re a star.”

Even among this apocalyptic waxing, Yauch remains upbeat, and it slowly becomes clear that he seeks to capture that tiny moment when the players are on the rise but still enjoying what they do. Even as directed by a man who’s retained his youthful exuberance, Gunnin’ comes off as a melancholic ode to youth on the verge of corruption.

It’s best to take the “my” in My Winnipeg with a quarry of a salt. Guy Maddin—the loopy Canadian retro stylist best known for equipping Isabella Rossellini with glass legs filled with beer in The Saddest Music in the World—has a habit of making “autobiographies” that are transparently, hilariously nothing of the sort.

In Cowards Bend the Knee, the protagonist, a hockey player embroiled in Cormanesque intrigue, is named “Guy Maddin.” Ditto his previous feature The Brand Upon the Brain!

In truth Maddin was born in and has never moved from Manitoba. “I must leave now,” the director bellows early on in My Winnipeg. This latest feature purports to cover his childhood—for realsies, this time. Well, almost. Via his usual blend of silent-era-style filmmaking and obtuse wackiness, Maddin summons up the oft-snowy Winnipeg of his childhood.

“What if I filmed my way out of here?” he asks on the purplish narration track, and thus emerges a florid, 80-minute montage of newsreel, anecdotes, miscellany and recreations.

Among the latter is Maddin’s family, which he evokes by (he claims) subletting his childhood home and casting “uncanny” lookalikes as his family. (In the film’s most bizarre stroke of countless bizarre strokes, his mother is played by the apparently exhumed Ann Savage, the freakily intense star of the 1945 cheapie classic Detour.)

There are more dubious claims to come. Was he really born in the locker room of a hockey arena? Does Winnipeg truly have 10 times more sleepwalkers than any other metropolis? In 1942, did the city actually take part in “If Day,” in which people dressed up as Nazis to simulate a takeover (and sell war bonds)?

Even when Maddin produces footage, as with the latter, you still can’t be sure of the truth.

It sounds like Maddin keeps it coming, but the pacing is, for him, relaxed. This is the first time one of his features hasn’t nearly exhausted its welcome. (His best work remains the six-minute “subliminal melodrama” The Heart of the World. YouTube it.) That may mean fewer highs than usual, but for a filmmaker who still provides things like footage of horses frozen in a lake, their heads eerily protruding from the ice, that’s clearly a relative term.

How many documentaries require a spoiler warning? Surfwise, from Doug Pray (Scratch), isn’t exactly narrative-driven, but about halfway through it turns on a dime, going from one kind of documentary to another kind entirely.

Actually, there’s one twist that comes pretty early: Turns out Surfwise has nothing much to do with surfing. The subject is one Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, father of the much-reported “first family of surfing.” When he was young he pulled an Albert Brooks in Lost in America and left his lucrative profession, deciding on a life lived out of a Winnebago.

As he traveled from beach to beach, he and his wife popped out nine kids, only one of them a girl. Denied anything resembling a normal, formally educated upbringing, they were taught instead to live capriciously, the only boundaries involving the running of their father’s lax surfing camp.

Now an octogenarian prone to naked exercising and casual rhapsodies on the time he learned how to correctly eat pussy, he’s treated here like a wisened, new-agey ode to a life truly lived … for a while. But starting around the 40-minute mark Surfwise begins its nosedive into darker territory. Paskowitz’s multiple spawn, now middle-aged, suddenly pipe up en masse on their parents’ nightly habit of loudly fucking within close proximity.

Next thing you know there are allegations of abuse and the red-hot temper of their seemingly Zenlike paterfamilias. While some have grown up to work at least partially in the surf business, most complain of being socially and vocationally stunted by years of living, as one puts it, as if they were “constantly on vacation.”

It’s not clear whether Pray originally intended a valentine to libertinism only to stumble upon something thornier, but Surfwise’s second half finds itself torn in several directions. Paskowitz, who seems blissfully oblivious to the pain he’s wrought, goes from a paean to a life not wasted in a cubicle to a selfish pratt and a close cousin to Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums.

And yet Pray can’t quite come to decry him himself, letting the complexities sit there and eat into the audience’s minds. Even if the clearly orchestrated family reunion finale ends things too optimistically, Surfwise remains chillingly complicated.

Not Reviewed

Finding Amanda
Matthew Broderick plays a drunk gambler sent to Vegas to reform his slutty niece. “Hilarity” ensues. (Opens Fri., June 27.)

Refusenik
A retrospective documentary about the grassroots movement to free Soviet Jews during the Cold War. (Opens Fri., June 27.)

Wall-E
An adorably lovelorn robot stars in Pixar’s latest offering. (Opens Fri., June 27.)

Ongoing

Before the Rains
As with Shakespeare Wallah and Bombay Talkie, Santosh Sivan’s film is just as awestruck over the environs as it is keenly alert to the prickly relationship between East and visiting (or in this case, occupying) West. B- (M.P.)

Brick Lane
A young Indian girl is forced into an arranged marriage with an old guy. She’s a dutiful wife until she starts banging a English fellow closer to her own age. (Not reviewed.)

The Children of Huang Shi
The epic true story of some white people (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell) saving some Chinese orphans (with help from Chow Yun-Fat) and learning how to love in the process. (Not reviewed.)

The Fall
The Fall finds an injured movie stuntman (Lee Pace) trying to keep the attention of a cute little girl (Catinca Untaru) by pulling an epic directly from his posterior. B (M.P.)

Get Smart
That dude from The Office tries to save the world with that chick from The Princess Diaries. (Not reviewed.)

The Happening
M. Night Shyamalan does it again … whatever “it” is. (Not reviewed.)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Crystal Skull turns out to be a serviceable little nostalgia piece. It’s a fun night out at the movies. No more than that—but certainly no less. B (S.B.)

The Love Guru
Another Mike Myers movie with weird accents and Verne Troyer. (Not reviewed.)

Mongol
Running only two transparently edited-down hours, Mongol has seemingly been gutted of psychology or anything but ’Scope shots of open spaces, languorous shots of a quiet man’s man in deep brood and enough bloody violence to bring in the gorehounds. C (M.P.)

Mother of Tears
Mother of Tears feels like a bald-faced attention-grabber, even if most of the attention it’s received has been not exactly kind. C+ (M.P.)

Roman de GareNovelist Fanny Ardant talks about her latest tome. Before we have a chance to realize she’s talking about the film we’re watching, director Claude 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. B- (M.P.)

Savage Grace
Icky and incoherent but luridly compelling all the same, director Tom Kalin’s long-awaited follow-up to his 1992 New Queer Cinema landmark Swoon is another creepily sexualized true-crime saga. C+ (S.B.)

Stuck
Stuck, a rock-solid indie from Stuart Gordon, is based on the true story of Texas woman Chante Mallard, who struck and killed a homeless man with her car. B (M.P.)

Standard Operating Procedure
Standard Operating Procedure once again finds director Errol Morris far more interested in summoning ominous portent and experimenting with distracting film techniques than in any old-fashioned nonsense like conveying information. C- (S.B.)

The Strangers
This nasty little number is a grab-bag of nifty widescreen compositions and sound design stingers, with nothing on its mind besides its own virtuosity. C- (S.B.)

What Happens in Vegas
Two attractive strangers (Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher) accidently get married. (Not reviewed.)

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan
Klutzily lurching between inspiration and inanity, Zohan stars Adam Sandler as a supernaturally skilled Mossad agent bored by the cycle of Middle Eastern strife. C (M.P.)