Muddy but unbowed: Julian Bleach

Dorian and David Paskowitz get Surfwise.

in the developing world, a priest (Werner Herzog) goes on a relief mission with women who turn out literally to be flying nuns. Mixed in there, beneath the hazy pop-culture critique, film-buff in-jokes, and doggedly poetic talk of miracles, is a palpable sense of melancholy. You feel it in the air that lifts the hem of Marilyn’s white dress and ripples the sisters’ habits as they shoot through the sky.

Tripping Out

Music-vid maker offers opulent, ultimately empty, fantasy

The Fall LEE PACE, CATINCA UNTARU ROADSIDE A TTRAC TIONS, R

The Children of
Huang Shi ½
JONATHAN RH YS MEYERS,
RADHA MITCHELL
SON Y PIC TURE CLASSICS, R
Buckles get swashed in
art-house adventure flick
Like an Indiana Jones movie
with art-house pretensions,
this adventure flick tells the
trueish story of British journalist
George Hogg (Rhys Meyers) in
1930s China, where nationalists
were fighting Communists and
the Japanese were slaughtering
everybody. Needing to lie low
after some ridiculous escapes
from death, Hogg hightails it to a
decrepit orphanage, tipped off to
the remote spot by a fast-talking
nurse (Mitchell). The kids there,
all but feral, have only one old
woman, a cook, tending to them,
and she’s got more maggots than
food in her pantry. Guess who’s
got to turn these boys into men?
Director Roger Spottiswoode
( Tomorrow Never Dies) peddles
the uplift-the-youth message
softly, saving energy for the more
robust corniness of gun battles,
lovers’ clinches, and an appear-
ance by Chow Yun-Fat as an
impossibly rugged swashbuckler.

In 1915, Alexandria (Untaru), an adorable five-year-old, slipped from a ladder while picking oranges, broke her arm badly, and now spends her days bobbling around an L.A. hospital. Fellow patient Roy (Pace), a stuntman, tumbled from a horse, found himself paralyzed, and now can’t decide which is drearier: his immobility or his girlfriend leaving him for the leading man. So that’s actually two falls, but the title also points to the movie’s majestic leaps of visual imagination. Then there’s the fact that all the surface opulence leads to a letdown.

Roy spins Alexandria a story about five heroes united against a dastardly overlord. There’s the scimitar-wielding Indian, the black leader of a slave rebellion, the Italian explosives expert with the accent of a pasta-sauce pitchman, and Charles Darwin. (The scientist totes a monkey sidekick around in his knapsack.) The fifth guy, a Zorro type, shares his looks with Roy himself.

This fairy-tale A-Team undertakes its revenge quest in a world constructed entirely of extravagant landscapes. Tarsem (one name only, thanks, for the director of J. Lo sci-fi trip The Cell) is out

to stun viewers with sand dunes, grand palaces, and the absolute blueness of tropical seas. At times, it’s as if he’s discovered new wonders of the world—a welcome distraction from the film’s absence of substance.

The Fall arrives presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze, and in this context, those aren’t the respective directors of Zodiac and Being John

Malkovich; they’re the guys who made videos
for Madonna’s “Vogue” and Beastie Boys’
“Sabotage.” Here, the music-clip aesthetic gets
a feature-length canvas, and while the most
ravishing images will stick with you for days,
the characters never stick in the first place, not
even darling little Alexandria. Tarsem plays her
chipmunk cheeks and perfect pigtails to the hilt,
relying on textbook cuteness to ice a cake suppos-
edly devoted to staggering beauty.

Mister Lonely
DIEGO LUNA, SAMANTHA MORTON
IFC, NOT RATED
Jacko, Madonna, and Marilyn
manqués meet in quirkfest
Harmony Korine—writer of
Kids and creator of Gummo and
Julien Donkey-Boy—comes up
with something sweeter than
his earlier movies, though no
less bizarre. In Paris, a Michael
Jackson impersonator (Luna)
meets a faux Marilyn Monroe
(Morton), who draws him away
from a life of moonwalking for
loose change to a Scottish retreat
for celebrity look-alikes, where
Madonna, the Three Stooges,
and Charlie Chaplin nurture their
dreams. Meanwhile, somewhere

Surfwise ½
DORIAN PASKOWITZ,
JULIE T TE PASKOWITZ
MAGNOLIA, R
Documentary hangs ten with
offbeat surfing dynasty
Near the start of this quick-witted
documentary, we see a news clip
from the 1970s, when the surf-
ing Paskowitzes were a minor
sensation. Nine children in wet
suits file out of their home—that
is, an RV—and line up on the
beach; the reporter explains that
the dad, Dorian, was a Stanford-
trained doctor who chucked his
career and became a bohe-
mian nomad. The remarkable
interviews that follow profile a
patriarch (now in his 80s) who
still thinks he’s a free spirit and
his kids, who run the gamut from
well adjusted to just as damaged
as you’d expect. (No sugar was
one rule and no school was an-
other.) Despite a few slow spots,
the movie compellingly charts a
family life that was part surfin’
safari and part endless bummer.

_M SPO_i T_sLI_t G_e HT_rON_LT_oHE_nM_eUS_lI_yC OF At the outset, Mister Lonely tips its hat to the pining Bobby Vinton song of the title—“I wish that I could go back home”—and thereafter turns its soundtrack over to the psych folk of Sun City Girls and hypnotic rock from Spiritualized’s J Spaceman. Whatever the movie might have to “say” about anything escapes words, and this noise compensates for that silence. Full of ethereal glides, extraterrestrial dirges, and melodic drones, it makes lonely seem lovely enough.

Sun City Girls

The Children of Huang Shi explodes.