Mongol warriors
Postal’s Troyer
gets lost in
Paradise.

The Promotion
½
SEANN WILLIAM SCOT T,
JOHN C. REILLY
THIRD RAIL, R
Supermarket-set slapstick
comedy stocks real laughs
Wannabe gangstas in the park-
ing lot, deli staffers joking about
cutting the cheese, backstab-
bing in Aisle ⁹—the hassles of a
second-tier position at a chain
supermarket have taken a toll
on Doug (Scott), a Midwestern
mensch. He’s hoping to make
manager at a new store so that
he and the wife ( The Office’s
Jenna Fischer) can move out of
an apartment where they can
hear their next-door neighbor
incorporating the banjo into his
sex life. Though his competition,
Richard (Reilly), is a steadfast
buffoon, he’s also a formidable
suck-up, and their jousting
becomes a slapstick take on get-
ting ahead. Though the presence
of Fischer and SNL’s Fred Armisen
suggest that the movie’s own
ambitions would be best fulfilled
on the small screen, director
Steve Conrad manages to laugh
at the characters, especially
Reilly’s pure-hearted loser,
without sneering, giving spiritual
weight to an amusing light farce.

of Asia. Mongol churns along like an old-fashioned epic, with blood brothers becoming sworn enemies, horses forever charging over the awesome horizon, sound and image always ready to strong-arm you into appreciating capital-D Destiny. At a sludgy two hours, it perhaps features one or two smoldering oaths of revenge too many, but the battle scenes—Gladiator-aping blasts of splashy carnage—help pass the medieval time.

Letter Bomb

Sicko satire by “worst” director is better than you’d think

Postal ½ ZACK WARD, DAVE FOLEY EVENTFILM, R

Popularly regarded as the worst director alive, Uwe Boll worked his way to infamy with an ouevre heavy with such brain-dead video-game adaptations as House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark. Having avoided much of his work in the belief that watching it would make me dumber, I can’t tell whether his latest—inspired by the first-person shooter of the same name—marks a departure from form, but it’s obviously the product of a man who’s not gonna take it anymore. Like a scuzzbucket version of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End, Postal rocks along angrily—as a politically engaged stoner film, a terminally bitter shoot-’em-up, and an excitingly offensive take on cultural apocalypse.

Our hero is the unemployed Postal Dude ( Ward), a nice enough guy living in the hellish town of Paradise. Discouraged after an awkward job interview, he drops in on his Uncle Dave (Foley), a phony guru running a religious commune who’s mostly in it for the chicks. In trouble with the IRS, Dave asks for his nephew’s assistance in stealing crates of the coveted Krotchy Doll—imagine a Tickle Me Elmo shaped like a penis. The plan hits a snag only because Islamic extremists—including

a huffy Osama bin Laden, seen diligently taking notes at a management-training seminar—also want to boost the toys. A counterterrorism plan hatched by one of Dave’s lackeys involves kidnapping Verne “Mini-Me” Troyer, who, playing himself, cannot fight off the many thousands of monkeys eventually encouraged to rape him.

The second half of Postal unfolds tediously,
Uwe Boll attacks a rumor about
the financing of this schlock with a
gag about concentration camps.

strange for a movie whose IMDb keywords include “head explosion,” “group sex,” “eating human flesh,” “9/11 joke,” and “Nazi.” See also “director cameo” for that last one—the German Boll attacking a rumor about the financing of this schlock with a gag about concentration camps and gold fillings. Uncomfortable and clever, the moment points to what’s best about the movie’s scattershot satirizing of God and man and law and order. It’s a gross-out comedy based on moral disgust.

Mongol
ALIYA, TEGEN AO
PIC TUREHOUSE, R
Rugged Russian epic strives
for Gladiator greatness
It’s hard out there for a tribal
chieftain: The world abounds
with rivals who want to kidnap
your wife, sell you into slavery,
and burn your mom’s house
down. Such are the trials faced
by the young Genghis Khan
in a Russian-made biography
tracing his growth from a bratty
nine-year-old undermining
plans for an arranged marriage
to a father of two illegitimate
children ready to conquer all

My Winnipeg
DARC Y FEHR, ANN SAVAGE
IFC, NOT RATED
More homegrown weirdness
from cult Canuck filmmaker
In Guy Maddin’s The Saddest
Music in the World—the
gorgeously strange ²⁰⁰³ musical
starring Isabella Rossellini as a
brewery owner whose prosthetic
legs are made of glass and filled
with beer—a newspaper voted
Winnipeg, Manitoba, the “world
capital of sorrow.” Yet, going
back home again in this pseudo
documentary, the director makes
the town seem less sad than
beautifully eerie. His narration
claims that Winnipeg has “ten
times the sleepwalking rate of
any city in the world,” and the
film glides along with a suitable
dreaminess. Glances back at
local history fade into winking
reenactments of family life,
and those bits of arch melo-
drama melt into gorgeous riffs
about snow.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE MUSIC OF The Promotion Advancing the plot of The Promotion, the filmmakers rely both on tracks by current alternative acts (the Flaming Lips, Andrew Bird) and the grandiose arena rock of yesteryear. In a running gag at once goofy and poignant, John C. Reilly’s schmuck of an assistant manager tries to self-help himself to success by listening to inspirational tapes that alternate hammy exhortations with soaring tunes. REO Speedwagon’s “Time for Me to Fly” and the Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” take precedence as the joke keeps slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into your ears.

REO Speedwagon
Reilly and Scott vie
for a Promotion.