Amy Wendel's Benavides Born is throwing me for a loop, and I'm getting a little frustrated about it. I understand that this film isn't trying to be Step Up 4 or the female weightlifter version of Rudy--but it's not really giving us a viable alternative to that kind of programming, either. On a very basic level, I don't know what this movie's about. The small town of Benavides, Texas has only three industries: fast food, an oilrig, and the military; high-school senior Luz Garcia (Corina Calderon) is disenchanted with all three. Outside of school and her customer-service job at Whataburger, she devotes her life to competitive weightlifting. What's driving me nuts is that Garcia doesn't lift weights because she's seeking relief from her humdrum working-class existence and that's the only time she feels truly alive, as in Saturday Night Fever. No, Garcia doesn't even like lifting weights. She's only doing it because she's aiming to get a college scholarship and leave Benavides without incurring any student debt. What does she want to study? What does she want to be? If weightlifting isn't her dream, then what exactly is? Co-writer/director Wendel never gets around to asking these questions. She admires Garcia for her pragmatism and perseverance, but is sheepish about the way her college goals are born almost exclusively out of a desire to distance herself from her working-class Mexican-American family. This culminates in an awkward plot development late in the film where Garcia helps a family of illegal aliens into San Antonio and then drives to confront the Admissions Dean at the University of Austin. Does this mean she's saying goodbye to her Mexican self? Coming to terms with it? It feels like superficial action cooked up by a filmmaker who's let political correctness sterilize all the tension organic to the material. The result is a piddling, rambling film that broaches social issues more than it explores them.

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I'll admit that I can't readily imagine anybody ever making a better film on the subject of the Toynbee Tile phenomenon than Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. The problem isn't that it's done poorly--it's that anybody thought it should have been done at all. Filmmakers Justin Duerr, Jon Foy, Colin Smith, and Steve Weinik worked on this project for five years, but I don't really understand why. Were they actually hoping to solve the mystery? And if they solved it, well, what then? Insofar as the Toynbee Tiles hold any interest for us at all, it's as a non sequitur, and what's the point of making sense of a non sequitur? Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose? As explained by WIKIPEDIA, the Toynbee Tiles are a series of messages embedded in asphalt across approximately two dozen American cities and four South American capitals. The message on each tile is essentially always the same: "TONYBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE 2001/RESSURECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER." Sometimes "movie" is substituted with "Kubrick's" and oftentimes this main inscription is supplemented with paranoid asides about Jews, journalists, and the Mafia. Toynbee Tile enthusiasts believe that the "Toynbee idea" refers to a passage in historian Arnold Toynbee's Experiences that describes the possibility of the deceased coming back to physiological life rather than being resurrected in an immaterial supernatural dimension. Apparently, the tiler believes that Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is suggesting this rebirth will occur on the planet Jupiter. Duerr, a Philadelphia-area artist and musician who first became interested in the tiles in the mid-nineties, spearheads the investigation into their origin. It's an obsession over an obsession. What kind of person would make these tiles and what kind of person would be interested in the person who made these tiles? When ironic detachment is held onto long enough, it ceases to be ironic but doesn't exactly become sincere, either. Anybody who devotes five years of his life to a film about the Toynbee Tiles hasn't just wasted it--he's affirmatively stated that the deeper questions of human existence are no more material than a perverse preoccupation with kitsch. This is a profoundly obnoxious film.

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What a waste. The cast assembled for George Ratliff's Salvation Boulevard is one for the ages. You have Pierce Bronson as super-evangelist Reverend Dan Day, Jennifer Connelly as infatuated housewife Gwen Vandeveer, Ciarán Hinds as Gwen's hard-ass Naval vet father Billy, and Ed Harris as pompous, bearded intellectual Dr. Paul Blaycock. These are traditionally serious dramatic actors in roles that lend themselves to caricature, yet they invest these characters with history and a point-of-view, providing substantive depth to the most basic of outlines. There's a real sense of professional pride to the performances here; Bronson, Connelly, Hinds, and Harris love these people and believe in them. Instead of coasting their way to their next paycheck, they're fucking earning it by doing some real fucking acting. But it's all for naught, as these great actors are completely squandered by a writer-director who doesn't care nearly as much about his chosen craft. (I'm reminded a bit of Matt Zoller Seitz's brilliant review of Sphere.) I'm obliged to report that not every performance in this film is created equal. Greg Kinnear stars as Carl, an "ex-Dead Head"/current member of Day's flock who's married to Gwen. Kinnear is not in the same league as the other four I mentioned. The only time he ever impressed me was in Paul Schrader's Auto Focus, and, of course, that's because the part was tailor-made for his shallow amiability. It's not that he's bad in Salvation Boulevard, he just reliably does whatever it is that Greg Kinnear does. Marisa Tomei, on the other hand, is very bad indeed as stoner security guard Honey Foster, who knew Carl back on the "Dead Head" circuit. Tomei goes for the cheap and easy laughs, but even then I don't blame her as much as I do a screenplay that hasn't given her the luxury of one dimension to play. Tomei doesn't do the work that Ratliff couldn't be bothered with, but she at least has enough courage to make a total fool of herself. What is there to say about the picture itself? It's Satire with a capital S, taking on that easiest of pickens: Christian fundamentalism. I won't bore you with plot details or analysis. Suffice it to say that believers will feel insulted, non-believers will feel coddled, and neither will feel particularly challenged to consider the other's perspective.

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I have officially reached the point in my life where when I see a cop beating up on a hippie, I identify with the cop. There's a shot in Marshall Curry's If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front in which the police spray two ELF members directly in the eyes with mace during a peaceful sit-in. Some audience members behind me interjected, I think by pure reflex, "That's not fair!" But I found myself feeling considerably less enraged. Yes, these protesters were being entirely non-violent, but what alternatives have they left the police? The cops are there to break up the protest and allow loggers to cut down trees. If the loggers can't do their job, it means the police haven't done theirs. And if these people can't do their jobs, then that means they can't make their mortgage payment or feed their kids. With all that at stake, conceding to the protesters isn't exactly a viable option. If a Tree Falls doesn't really rise above the level of a generic direct-to-HBO/PBS/Netflix Instant issue documentary; I was never fully sold on the validity of the ELF's cause. The Earth Liberation Front appears to be predicated on the notion that our forests should be protected simply because they're aesthetically pleasing, or because they've been on the planet for hundreds of years. Logic like that is shaky at best. The bulk of the film deals with ELF member Daniel McGowan, who was charged and eventually convicted with helping set fire to Superior Lumber Company and Jefferson Poplar Farms in 2001. After 9/11, his case fell under a new "terrorist enhancement," which would mean a harsher sentence. I get the feeling that nobody involved in the Earth Liberation Front sees the liberation of the Earth as a cause worth going to federal prison for. These acts of arson are depicted as the dumb actions of a dumb kid several years ago and not the work of a real "terrorist." It all strikes me as incredibly disingenuous: if Curry isn't going to romanticize McGowan as a martyr for his movement, it seems to me he should be more proactive in exposing the underlying naiveté of his cause.

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From 1983 to 2009, Deborah Peagler was incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility for the murder of her boyfriend, Oliver Wilson. Wilson battered Peagler, forced her into prostitution, and molested her daughter from a previous relationship, but because he took out an insurance policy before his death naming Peagler as a beneficiary, and because the actual murder was carried out by two Crips she went to for protection, the district attorney at the time presented this as a hired killing. All evidence of abuse at the hands of Wilson was suppressed. In 2002, encouraged by a new California law giving battered women a second chance for a hearing if the original court did not consider evidence relating to the abuse, land-use lawyers Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran took Peagler's case pro bono and spent the next seven years fighting for her release. Crime After Crime rather preciously argues that battered women who kill their abusers are victims, too. I mean, no shit, right? The case of Deborah Peagler is a pretty easy one to get indignant about. Accordingly, Crime After Crime is neither incredibly intelligent nor particularly challenging. It is, however, wonderfully entertaining. Director Yoav Potash was there from the very beginning, and the intimacy he developed with his three subjects during that time lends the picture genuine warmth that cuts through the sermonizing. And I like how Wilson kind of fades from memory as the film progresses. This is not at all a depressing documentary and only superficially an angry one. Twenty-six years is a long time (Peagler ends up spending more of her life in prison than she did as a free woman)--much too long to stay angry or resentful and much too long to go without establishing some sort of personal identity and purpose. While incarcerated, Peagler directed the prison gospel choir and earned two associate's degrees. Potash additionally includes the testimony of a former drug addict who credits Peagler with helping her to earn her bachelor's degree. The last thing you could feel while watching Crime After Crime is pity for a wasted life.

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Despite having recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, children's-show cartoonist Kent Osborne is no closer to leaving young adulthood behind. Never married and not a father, he finds himself too embarrassed to date anyone. Every single woman his age feels her biological clock ticking and asks, on the first date, whether he's ready to have children. With no greater purpose outside of his work, Osborne wastes his days smoking pot, frequenting Chatroulette, and trolling craigslist. You would think that Joe Swanberg's Uncle Kent was made as a reaction to Greenberg (particularly as that film stars Swanberg expatriate Greta Gerwig, of Hannah Takes the Stairs fame), but I can find nothing within the picture that would support this conclusion. Uncle Kent has a lot less bite than Greenberg; Osborne's callow self-absorption is considerably more benign. There are none of Greenberg's petulant tantrums or scenes that remotely correlate with his semi-predatory seduction of the family employee Gerwig plays. I sort of doubt that Uncle Kent is any more truthful than Greenberg, though it's certainly a lot less interesting. As in Hannah Takes the Stairs, these characters have a tendency to talk around things, coding every communication with irony and a gracious unwillingness to offend or concretely state any affirmation of feeling or value. They rarely let themselves get angry or sad, as they wouldn't want you to think that you're the cause. The most they'll show is frustration or discontent. This is probably why the film's sex and nudity fail to truly shock, much less titillate. Nudity is paradoxically used as a means for the characters (and, I think, the actors) to avoid exposing themselves. If somebody pulls his dick out in front of you or demonstrates how he masturbates, you'll mistakenly believe that he's being frank and be reluctant to probe deeper. This is all very novel (or at least it was three years ago; I admit to kind of avoiding these Mumblecore movies), and it successfully rationalizes Swanberg's lo-fi minimalism. But inert characters make for an inert filmgoing experience--and after Uncle Kent, I was still hungry to watch a real movie.

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There are two incredible images in Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. The first of these is during a preamble to the main story. A small Arabic boy is having his head shaved. We push in on his face as he stares contemptuously at us. Everything childlike has been gutted out of him and he's been filled back up with rage. I can't recall the last time I saw the aftermath of child abuse concentrated so concisely and with so much potency. This shot feels vaguely invasive, as though we're seeing a part of him we weren't meant to see. The second incredible image is of childbirth. The mother is Palestinian and her lover, the father of her baby, was just recently murdered by her brothers as part of an honour killing. Her grandmother is keeping her protected until she has the child. This baby looks like an actual newborn: wrinkled, veiny, bloody, covered with waxy vernix. The infant embodies all those romantic hopes for a better future, but there's a bodily horror to it, too. By having this child and bringing it to term, the mother has essentially assured her own demise, or at least the complete rejection of the only family she knows. I don't see ambiguity like that very often. It's thrilling. While I'm not convinced that Incendies would work without these two images, with them Villeneuve proves ready and willing to reward our emotional investment. I'm a little disappointed that Incendies was Canada's official submission for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award this year and is now one of the five final nominees, as this indicates that backlash--particularly, I fear, towards the picture's unabashedly sentimental climax--is just around the corner. This is, quite simply, one of the best films of this year or last.

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A bunch of twentysomething idealists go out into the woods to get away from civilization, lugging plasma-screen displays and a refrigerator full of Capri Suns along with them. That's basically the one joke of Matthew Lessner's The Woods. It's a pretty good joke. The image of these pseudo-hippies playing "Wii Sports" in the middle of a forest is evocative in a way that cannot be readily communicated with words. Wyatt Garfield's cinematography effectively parodies the look of a Land's End or L.L. Bean catalogue, demonstrating how anti-consumerist sentimentality has essentially become another product to be consumed. Consumerism is part of our national identity; even in rejecting it, we are viewing ourselves in consumerist terms. The folly of these faux-naturalists isn't just in their hypocrisy, it's in their belief that they could exorcise the influence videogames and social media have had on their lives. Alas, aside from that one good joke and Garfield's aesthetic prowess, there's really not much to differentiate The Woods from that shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark those kids from Mississippi made in the '80s. It's a textbook example of a film that was probably a lot of fun to make but isn't much fun to watch. Although Lessner seems to have encouraged his cast to improvise and come up with new variations on his central theme, he himself never builds upon it, and the movie meanders in a lateral direction. We quickly grasp everything The Woods has to say, at which point all there is to do is wait for it to end. It appears that everyone was so engrossed with the filmmaking process they forgot to actually make a film.

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The rape scenes in Kim Ji-woon's I Saw the Devil are the most blatantly eroticized and sadistic I've seen since Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, but they're countered by the hilariously gory revenge scenes against the rapist (Choi Min-sik) by his victim's boyfriend (Lee Byung-hun). The film isn't trying to rationalize the rape with the revenge or the revenge with the rape. Rather, it regards women and the men who rape them as equally undeserving of our sympathy. One is tortured for thrills, the other tortured for laughs. There doesn't appear to be any kind of coherent moral perspective here, it's just Kim pushing our buttons and taking whatever strong reaction he can get. What makes I Saw the Devil so very good is that he pushes them exceptionally well. I kind of agree with Bret Easton Ellis, who said, "If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies." I suppose you could dismiss I Saw the Devil as superficial or even immoral, but that seems to minimize how viscerally stimulating it all is. There's the shocking first attack, a tour-de-force multiple stabbing in a taxicab, witty homages to Blue Velvet,  Kill Bill, Vol. 1, and Se7en, and the strangely poignant image of the rapist killer playing guitar over the body of his latest conquest. If the film has anything substantive to say about vengeance, it might actually be saying it through its length. After two-and-a-half hours of revenge and counter-revenge, we're just plain exhausted. More than the idea that the boyfriend has essentially changed roles with his girlfriend's rapist, or that he's doing this more for himself than for her, what ultimately comes across is that neither the rapist nor the boyfriend will ever stop on his own accord. It's perfectly noble to ensure that evildoing is ultimately punished, but you reach a point where you simply have to let it go and get on with your life.

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Goran Hugo Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 begins with a disclaimer explaining that this film is not intended to categorically define the Black Power movement, but merely to represent a few Swedish filmmakers' impressions of it. This seemingly innocuous statement raises more questions than it answers. Why would Swedes want to tell this story in the first place? Do they have the right to tell this story? And what's the point of looking at the Black Power movement of the late-sixties and early-seventies in 2011? It seems the moment you make a film about the Black Power movement, it becomes a commodity to be consumed, at least in part, by a white audience. I believe that whites are attracted to stories of the black experience and to the icon of the black militant for a number of reasons, perhaps least among them liberal guilt. On an individual level, the white may feel disenfranchised and see the black militant as a kind of romantic ideal. Or maybe he believes himself to be relatively lacking in cultural identity and looks upon the strongly defined culture and identity of African-Americans to satisfy this need. The Black Power Mixtape is a compilation of direct documentary footage shot by Swedish journalists in the United States from 1967 to 1975. Olsson has mildly contextualized what we're seeing via several contemporary audio interviews with major figures like Angela Davis and Melvin Van Peebles, and he scores it to songs by The Jackson Five and The Roots; the film is a coherent and edifying history of the Black Power movement tightly wound into an efficient 96 minutes. But in unabashedly indulging our taste for nostalgia, and in preying on the fundamental emptiness of the "white experience," it's also a rollicking entertainment. (The spell is broken, briefly but provocatively, by a lingering shot of a heroin-addicted infant.) By consciously underlining the fact that he and his fellow countrymen are essentially outsiders interpreting this material, Olsson introduces a tension between the revolution-as-revolution and the revolution-as-pop. The film exists as one, the other, and everything in-between.

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Director Jason Eisener and screenwriter John Davies must have been left in the care of a particularly negligent babysitter throughout the 1980s. Their Hobo with a Shotgun, an adaptation of a fake trailer the two made for Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse contest back in 2007 (it won, and was subsequently attached to Canadian prints of the film), not only cites Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Robocop, and probably Cobra among its myriad references but also pays what I think is incontrovertible homage to Tinto Brass's infamous 1980 debacle Caligula. The villain's preferred method of public execution greatly resembles Caligula's "lawnmower" and he has no shortage of naked bimbos to shower in the blood or join in on the torture. Hobo with a Shotgun is essentially in the Troma tradition--there's a rather studious contempt towards anything resembling introspection or sincerity, much less good taste, and there's a very deliberate amateurishness at work here. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this more than the garishly oversaturated cinematography; Hobo with a Shotgun isn't upstaged by its look, though it is defined by it. This isn't a real movie so much as the kind of X-rated cartoon that pedophiles keep in the basement for the purpose of grooming young boys. Similarly attention-grabbing are the villain's two sons, Tom Cruise parodies who sport Ray Bans, drive a DeLorean, and whoop and holler like they're in The Color of Money. They mutilate homeless men for sport, placate the townspeople with Tony Montana-sized mounds of cocaine, and recite dialogue like, "They only thing I'm going to let slide is my dick in your pussy." Somehow, the joke of this '80s rich-kid douchebaggery never grows stale.

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