Author: Joe Bendel

By Joe Bendel. If a stoner rises from the dead as a zombie, would anyone notice the difference? Two slackers try to carry on as usual when one suddenly finds himself undead and rather parched, but the constant proximity with death has serious repercussions in D. Kerry Prior’s meathead buddy horror mash-up, The Revenant (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Bart Gregory would like to think he shipped off to Iraq for idealistic reasons, but the truth is he was trying to avoid making a commitment to his longtime girlfriend Janet. Thanks to a rather murky ambush, he won’t have to. It would seem Gregory is dead as a doornail, but he is actually undead. Staggering out of his grave and into his loser best friend Joey Leubner’s crash pad, Gregory struggles to come to terms with his new existence as a “revenant.” He can no longer keep down solid food, but it seems vast quantities of pot and booze are A-OK. For sustenance, though, he will need human blood.

No problem—this is Los Angeles. There is an unlimited supply of violent low-lifes in need of killing. Suddenly, the boys are vigilante media sensations. Unfortunately, Gregory and Leubner are really sloppy about their hunting practices, leading to all kinds of bad karma—and of course, gore.

Though it opens in Iraq, Prior largely resists the urge to pontificate on current events. These are not allegorical zombies. That’s the good news. However, The Revenant really does not have any ideas to take the place of didactic soap-boxing. Prior offers several scenes of truly inspired gross-out humor, but the in-between periods are rather slack and dreary.

Still, David Anders plugs away admirably as the nice guy walking dead, keeping viewers somewhat invested in the grisly story. On the other hand, before it is over, the audience will be ready to rise up collectively, like pitchfork wielding peasants, to put a stake through the heart of Chris Wylde’s annoying as all get-out Leubner.

The Revenant built up quite a rep with cult movie fans through a series of well received midnight festival screenings. Frankly, that is the best venue for the film, catering to lubricated crowds primed to laugh and holler. It simply will not hold up as well for comparatively staid regular theatrical audiences. The Revenant has its moments, but not nearly enough for a ringing endorsement when it opens today (8/24) in New York at the Cinema Village.

LFM GRADE: C-

Posted on August 24th, 2012 at 10:35am.

By Joe Bendel. In recent years, China’s greatest export has been the best and brightest of the next generation. They call them girls. China’s One Child Policy, cultural preferences, and dire rural poverty created a perfect storm of little orphaned girls. Over 100,000 have been adopted worldwide, out of which over 80,000 are now Americans. Four such teenaged adoptees are profiled in Linda Goldstein Knowlton’s Somewhere Between, which opens this Friday in New York.

Few adoptees really expect to find their birth parents. It is a matter of simple math: over a billion people and scant documentation. Nonetheless, many will try to trace their roots, not necessarily to reconnect with the parents that let them go, but to help come to terms with who they really are. Jenna, Haley, Ann, and Fang (or “Jenni”), the primary POV figures in Somewhere, are indeed high achievers. Some admit part of their drive stems from the lingering feeling of abandonment—that is a loaded word in the film, but it is hard to get around it. However, it may come to pass China will regret losing out on their talents and those of scores of young women just like them. While the flow of adoption has slowed, the impact on upcoming Chinese generations will be felt in years to come.

Perhaps the greatest revelation in Somewhere is the continuing engagement of not just the girls but their entire families on the issue of Chinese orphans. One Evangelical family has formed a nonprofit to deliver much needed supplies to the ill-equipped provincial orphanages. Yet, the film’s most moving subplot by far involves Fang and her family’s efforts first to fund physical therapy for a little disabled girl, and then to help facilitate her placement with an American family ready and willing to provide the care she needs.

Unlike in most documentaries, the Evangelical community is presented on balance quite positively in Somewhere. They are the adopting demographic, after all. The kids at school can still be insensitive jerks, though. Hopefully, Knowlton’s film will lead to greater understanding. Indeed, viewers should realize girls like the Somewhere quartet will be their children’s future classmates or maybe even their own daughters.

Smart and uncommonly together, each of the featured young women is worth meeting on-screen. Clearly they were comfortable opening up to Knowlton, who set out to make the film to provide her own adopted Chinese daughter some points of reference for when she is old enough to start grappling with these issues. Well intentioned, emotionally engaging, and never polemical, Somewhere Between is recommended rather strongly when it opens this Friday (8/24) in New York at the IFC Center, with Knowlton and several participants appearing at select screenings throughout the weekend.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on August 21st, 2012 at 10:55am.

By Joe Bendel. The holy texts of Tibetan Buddhism are not very portable. That is not necessarily a problem if you are studying peacefully in a monastery, but it is a serious drawback if your country is invaded by an imperial power. Such was indeed the fate of Tibet. Following the 1950 Communist invasion, centuries of Tibetan culture were at of risk of being lost forever. However, one American scholar successfully spearheaded a drive to digitize, translate, and disseminate thousands of sacred and secular Tibetan texts. His campaign is documented in Dafna Yachin’s Digital Dharma (trailer here), which is currently screening during DocuWeeks New York 2012.

The late E. Gene Smith was a perennial student who specialized in East Asian languages with little commercial application. Tibetan was perfect for his purposes. Yet, as he immersed himself in the culture, he became increasingly alarmed about its chances for survival. After the initial invasion and again during the Cultural Revolution, monasteries were ruthlessly razed and books were systematically burned. As a result, many critical texts were completely unavailable to the Tibetan Buddhist Diaspora.

Fortunately, most of the books still survived, hidden away to avoid the Communist rampages. In the 1960’s, as a Library of Congress field worker in non-aligned India, Smith catalogued and facilitated the publication of hundreds of volumes smuggled out of Tibet. Retiring from the Federal government, Smith eventually co-founded the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, which would pursue the mission of digitization and translation, insuring that the wisdom of Tibet will survive and spread across the world.

Clearly, Yachin nearly venerates the Tibetologist as if he had been a lama himself. While Smith surely did invaluable work preserving the endangered Tibet culture, he was not infallible. In fact, the 1960’s era pacifist seems to have carried some residual ideological baggage, leading to the somewhat debatable decision to leave his collection to the Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu, Sichuan. Smith was determined to return the ancient documents to the Tibetans, laudably considering himself only a temporary caretaker. Yet, just how trustworthy a caretaker a Chinese chartered institution will be surely remains to be seen, particularly considering earlier efforts to transfer his collection were forestalled by the 2008 riots that swept across Tibet. At least the contents of his collection are now preserved for posterity.

Often fascinating, Digital offers viewers some helpful context for understanding Tibetan Buddhism as well as the captive nation’s thorny history over the past seventy years or so. It is also one of the more polished productions seen during this year’s DocuWeeks, featuring some stylish but also informative graphics. Despite prompting some unanswered questions, Digital Dharma tells a great story. In fact, it is the rather rare film that presents both religion and technology in a positive light. Respectfully recommended for amateur Tibetologists and China watchers, Digital Dharma screens through Thursday (8/23) at the IFC Center in New York, as DocuWeeks 2012 comes to a close.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on August 21st, 2012 at 10:54am.

By Joe Bendel. Is Bart Simpson an agent of oppression? He is to the legions of Chinese slave laborers, forced to churn out cheap licensed merchandise in work camps. Such involuntary servitude is one of China’s greatest competitive advantages in the global marketplace. Peter Navarro ominously warns America about the dangers of Chinese economic hegemony in the alarmist yet still highly alarming documentary, Death by China (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

To Navarro’s credit, DBC repeatedly distinguishes between the decent, hardworking Chinese people and their oppressive Communistic government, often reminding viewers the former is the greatest victim of the latter. To this end, they enlist no less an authority than former dissident and Chinese Gulag inmate Harry Wu. Any film featuring Wu is worth our attention.

While DBC raises some salient human rights issues, its primary message is one of economic protectionism. Adapting his book of the same title for the screen, Navarro blames China’s predatory export subsidies for the drastic outsourcing of the American manufacturing base. We hear this echoed by several union leaders, whose rigid contracts and outright featherbedding have spurred the very outsourcing they bemoan.

Nonetheless, the film is on solid ground when it discusses the lack of environmental protection and consumer product safety regulation in China. Indeed, many innocent Chinese citizens are living with the toxic pollution released from the production of export-goods toxic to American end-consumers. It also makes a strong national security argument when it points out how much of our technologically advanced weaponry is assembled with parts made in China. In fact, given what we know or suspect about the Stuxnet virus, the film might actually underplay this line of inquiry.

You know DBC is well researched when it sites an article published in The Epoch Times. Shrewdly, it also maintains a legitimately bipartisan spirit, equally blaming Clinton and a Republican Congress for supporting China’s entry into the WTO (the original sin in Navarro’s judgment) and featuring interview segments with members of both parties, including longtime human rights champion Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ).

Given his ideological baggage, though, the choice of Martin Sheen as narrator might drive away some that might otherwise be receptive to the film’s message. However, the greatest problem with the film is the wildly over-the-top interstitial animation. The bleeding American flags will just make it too easy for my snooty colleagues to dismiss the film wholesale.

In fact, DBC is not nearly as simplistic as those transitional graphics might suggest. Whether or not you accept the pseudo-protectionist premise, the sheer volume of American debt held by China is a problem the current administration has done its best to ignore. Recommended for its human rights content and for simply challenging our national policy of China-denial during an election year, the earnest but sometimes overheated Death By China opens this Friday (8/24) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B-/C+

Posted on August 21st, 2012 at 10:52am.