Driving in Persepolis

Melanie Diaz, Jack Black, and Mos Def don’t sweat late fees.

niscent of a Harold Pinter play, a Tarantino wannabe, and a deranged cell-phone commercial, the legitimately suspenseful How to Rob a Bank has the courage to embrace the ridiculous, or so you must believe when watching Gavin Rossdale—yes, Gwen Stefani’s Gavin Rossdale—lug out his lines as the gang leader.

VHS or Better

Jack Black is truly magnetic in a whimsical vision of video

Be Kind Rewind ½ MOS DEF, JACK BLACK NEW LINE, PG- 13

Persepolis CHIARA MASTROIANNI, CATHERINE DENEUVE SONY PIC TURES CLASSICS, PG- 13 Compelling cartoon depicts a hard-knock life in Iran

Adapting her memoir into
a starkly beautiful animated
feature, comics artist Marjane
Satrapi braids personal history
and national tragedy. From the
perspective of her parents, the
initial fallout of 1978’s Islamic
Revolution is merely awful, but
when the Iraq-Iran War follows
and mortar fire becomes a
nightly occurrence, they send her
to school in Vienna, where she
enters an adolescence so sullen
that it forms a kind of exile itself.
Returning to Iran years later, she
rushes into marrying a boyfriend
mostly because the authorities
catch the two holding hands.
Despite all this misery, Persepolis
avoids both ponderous gloom
and cheap uplift. It’s a quick-
witted fable for the real world,
leavened by affecting goofiness,
as in the scene in which burgeon-
ing metalhead Marji cops a
contraband Iron Maiden tape
on the streets of Tehran.

The titular establishment dodders along on a shabby corner in Passaic, New Jersey. It’s a neighborhood video store whose owner—called Mr. Fletcher, as if this were Sesame Street, and portrayed by Danny Glover in grumpy grandpa mode—continues to stock VHS tapes. Exclusively. With the holes in this business plan finally about to close the shop, Fletcher goes on an extended stakeout of the chain store around the way, leaving employee Mike (Mos Def) to man the counter. Mike is a good kid—he even tolerates Jerry, who works and lives in a junkyard down the street in the shadow of an electrical substation. Jerry thinks the waves and radiation are damaging his brain. The audience, seeing the energetic idiocy Jack Black brings to role, will likely concur.

And here the fantasy logic of director Michel Gondry springs into whimsical action. Though bluer and slower than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep— Gondry’s two love stories set in the subconscious—Be Kind Rewind shares their faith in weird science and unblinking acceptance of the absurd. After Jerry’s attempt at high-voltage sabotage converts him into a human magnet,

he erases every tape in the inventory. Then he and Mike try to fix things by remaking the movies, starting with Ghostbusters: Mike wraps himself in tinfoil to approximate Bill Murray’s uniform; Jerry’s mechanic puts on a wig to play Sigourney Weaver’s role; they apparently buy materials for the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man down at the bodega.

Director Michel Gondry connects
their toil and glee with a jazzed
creative joy that’ll never die away.

What begins as a scheme turns into a hit, and as Passaic starts clamoring for these makeshift versions of Rush Hour 2 and Driving Miss Daisy, Gondry connects the guys’ toil and glee with a kind of old-time neighborhood hominess that’s dying away and a jazzed creative joy that never will. When boyish Mike and childish Jerry pick up the camera and their dime-store special-effects supplies, they’re not really making Boogie Nights and The Lion King. They are making Michel Gondry films, as if playing in a dreamy sandbox.

How to Rob a Bank NICK STAHL, ERIKA CHRISTENSEN IFC, NOT RATED Off-the-wall indie heist thriller is right on the money

Loopy but glossy, this heist movie plays like a camp classic searching for its cult. Jason (Stahl), who has wandered in from some Reality Bites remake, goes to the bank to take out his last 20 bucks or maybe just to whine about his ATM fees. His visit coincides with that of a group planning a much larger withdrawal, and he ends up locked in the vault with the gang’s pert accomplice (Christensen), juggling calls from hostage negotiators and criminal masterminds. Variously remi-

The Killing of John
Lennon ½
JONAS BALL, KRISHA FAIRCHILD
IFC, NOT RATED
First dissection of Beatle assas-
sination might also be the best
This portrait of psychosis
slouches into release a couple
months before the other Mark
David Chapman movie, Chapter
27, which stars Jared Leto as the
shooter and Lindsay Lohan per-
haps just for the hell of it. What
Killing lacks in celebrity sparkle, it
compensates for in raw ambition
and rude chills. To watch Ball’s
Chapman, acting as if he’d only
heard rumors of normal human
behavior, lurch from his home in
Hawaii to Lennon’s doorstep at
the Dakota is to follow a bizarre
pilgrim’s progress through pop
myth and clammy madness.
While a production this unpol-
ished, with its arty excesses and
embarrassing anachronisms,
doesn’t really want to court
comparisons with Scorsese, it
gets a lot of juice from referenc-
ing Taxi Driver—another medita-
tive horror film about a lone
gunman and his solitary soul.

Dr. Mable John

SPOTLIGHT ON THE MUSIC OF Honeydripper

Honeydripper, about an Alabama nightclub floundering in the 1950s, begins with the crude noise of a rudimentary slide guitar— one warbling wire, one empty soda bottle—and builds to mellow blues licks and wailing gospel songs, grooves from the Stax singer Dr. Mable John and a jail-cell sing-along to “Midnight Special.” It’s enough to make you forgive writer/director John Sayles for setting the film in a town called Harmony. Besides, Honeydripper spends half its time in a legendary realm where a drifter might roll off a boxcar, guitar in hand, to take the backwoods electric.

Jonas Ball takes aim in John Lennon.