americangraffitiblog

Each of her stories has the timeless quality of a fable, and each has
wisdom and a quiet, stoic sense of defiance in the face of patriarchal
tradition. The first, “Havva,” finds a 9-year-old girl with one hour left
before she becomes a woman and has to sever ties with her best friend, a young
boy. The girl, played with perfect simplicity by Fatemeh Cheragh Akhtar,
doesn’t understand these customs. As her last minutes of childhood count down,
she manages a vague, wistful comprehension of the changes she faces.

In “Ahoo,” the second episode, a young housewife disobeys her husband by
riding in an all-women bike marathon. On horseback, the husband catches up
with and berates her, telling her to dismount. Defiant, she keeps riding until
a number of men overpower her.

Finally, in “Houra,” an old crone goes on a shopping spree, buying an array
of household items that she was always denied.

There’s a thematic thread among these stories, and a unifying quality —
call it chutzpah — shared by the three female protagonists. Meshkini draws
them with affection and frames their stories with graceful compositions and
slow, easy pacing. In the end, it’s easy to imagine them as manifestations of
the same person.

– Edward Guthmann

Documentary. Directed by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman. (Not rated. 60
minutes. Today through Wednesday at the Fine Arts in Berkeley, April 18 at the
Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, April 24-26 at the Towne in San Jose.)

Judging by its title, “Secrets of Silicon Valley” might be a press release
from a high-tech public-relations firm. More chest beating about technological
advances? About the high-tech economic miracle and the ways in which it’s
changing our lives?

Think again. In fact, “Secrets” is a bracing expose of the “digital divide”
that separates Silicon Valley billionaires from the underpaid workers who keep
the industry afloat. While high-level techies earn fortunes — and the media
celebrates a brave new world that’s redefined communications and modes of
business — an underclass of “temp slaves” struggles to live on $8 an hour.

Directed by Berkeley filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, “Secrets”
reveals the downside of a boom industry — one in which companies use
outsourcing and subcontracting to cut costs, and allow certain workers (mostly
white) to get rich while the rank and file (mostly nonwhite) can’t afford to
live decently.

“Secrets” doesn’t have an angry tone, and yet the evidence it provides, and
the stories told by its two principal characters, Magda Escobar and Raj
Jayadev, are disturbing. Escobar, a Latina, runs a low-income computer-
training center in East Palo Alto but finds that inflated rents are forcing
out the people she needs to reach.

Jayadev, an assembly worker in a Hewlett-Packard @break packaging plant,
loses his job when he blows the whistle on pay inequities and health and
safety conditions. “There’s nothing new about this new economy,” Jayadev says.
“The only difference is that the (poor working conditions) aren’t acknowledged.
”

– Wesley Morris

Animation. Directed by Michael Haigney. (G. 95 minutes. At Bay Area
theaters.)
.

If the kids are sleepier this time around, “Pokemon 3″ is too. The film is
more inert than the first two “Pokemons.” The odd subtexts include the Tao of
capitalism, cuddly critters as objects of euphemistic cockfighting, and
spiritual apocalypse, all tied into a G-rated, family-friendly knot.

“3″ is set in a verdant land called Greenfield and focuses on a girl who
loses her Pokemon-hunter father to an ominous, swirling entity. She thinks
he’s been reincarnated as a legendary feline Pokemon called Entai and demands
that he go out and fetch her long-dead mother. Instead he comes back with
Delia Ketchum, the doting mom of adolescent Pokemon trainer Ash. Neither the
girl nor Mrs. K — both in some kind of post-traumatic consumer delirium —
can tell the difference. Ash knows, though.

But under the entity’s spell, Greenfield has become an impenetrable kingdom
– or a pulsing, glittering radicchio. Ash will need a curiously strong
vinaigrette to get her out, that or his Pokemon buddies. Either way, the
stakes are pretty low. The first two films — respectively about cloning and
eco-friendliness — had a greater sense of chaos and how to tame it. And the
sarcasm of bumbling Pokemon catchers Team Rocket is kept to a cruel minimum.
The series’ maudlin energies take over instead. Even little trainer’s pet
Pikachu appears to have seen it all before.

At times it all calls to mind Oz, Narnia and the interplanetary squabbling
of “Battlefield Earth.” And the incidental themes of materialism persist: The
aforementioned entity is called the “Unown,” a subliminal call to America’s
children to turn in their tie-in tchotchkes. Although anyone living on the
kiddie cutting edge knew halfway through the previous “Pokemon” flick what the
folks responsible for this one can’t admit: Pokemon is over. Where’s our Power
Puff Girls movie?

– Edward Guthmann

Comedy. Starring Jean Reno, Christian Clavier and Christina Applegate.
Directed by Jean-Marie Gaubert. (PG-13. 88 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

The time-travel comedy “Just Visiting” is, as the French say, amusing
enough. They should know.

This is an English-language remake of a 1993 French film. As “Les Visiteurs,
” it was a smash hit in France but didn’t catch on in the United States in a
subtitled version called “The Visitors.” This new one keeps the same stars,
Jean Reno and Christian Clavier, as a 12th century nobleman and his lackey,
but switches the modern locale from France to Chicago and adds digital effects
for the bad-trip witchcraft that strands them in today’s world.

The formidable Reno (”The Professional,” “The Big Blue”) holds the film
together with his unwinking gravitas as a knight trying to get a handle on
modern life but proudly sticking to his old ways. He treats his servant, Andre
(Clavier), with contempt, and in return Andre invariably thanks him for each
insult and instance of abuse.

A lot of the humor deals with hygiene and sanitation, as the middle-age
Middle Agers try to cope with modern toilets, kitchen utensils and such. The
premise might tend to get tiresome, but director Jean-Marie Gaubert, who also
did the French version, brings it in under 90 minutes and ties all the loose
ends together in a slick wrap-up.

Christina Applegate (”Married . . . With Children”) plays the sword-
wielding knight’s modern descendant, and when he screws up and overreacts, she
will explain, “He’s French.”

Advisory: Contains gross-out humor.

– Bob Graham

ALL ACCESS

Concert documentary. Directed by Martyn Atkins. (Not rated. 62 minutes. At
the Sony Metreon.)

Sting says the late Miles Davis once told him he had the biggest head.
Turns out Miles had seen the singer in a movie, on the big screen.

A cross-section of today’s pop stars — Macy Gray, Sheryl Crow, Kid Rock —
get even bigger heads in this IMAX giant-screen concert documentary. The
performances range from freaky (George Clinton’s riotous P-Funk) to unusual
(Al Green with Dave Matthews) to just plain weird (the Roots with B.B. King
and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio).

The sound is wonderfully state of the art. During Sting’s rehearsal take of
“Desert Rose” with guest Cheb Mami, cowbells and other percussion instruments
are distinctly audible from overhead and behind, even as the voices come at
you head on.

That clarity can’t rescue such middle-of-the-road performances as Crow’s
“If It Makes You Happy,” performed solo on an empty soundstage, or the great
Rev. Green’s goofy version of “Take Me to the River,” performed with the
Matthews band at Chicago’s Soldier Field.

Santana sounds sharp as ever, but Rob Thomas’ guest spot on the smash
“Smooth” only demonstrates how little star quality the Matchbox Twenty singer
actually has.

On the plus side: Clinton’s house-party medley, Moby’s contemplative end
piece and, surprisingly, the typically insufferable Kid Rock, who rips through
his signature song, “Bawitdaba,” with his late sidekick Joe C. at his knee.

“Music is a clearer indication of what’s in somebody’s soul than language,”
says Anastasio in one of several bits of backstage footage. No argument there.
But “All Access” never gets near the soul of today’s pop music.

– James Sullivan

GYPSY BOYS

Romantic comedy. Written and directed by Brian Shepp. (R. 103 minutes. At
Bay Area theaters.)

Brian Shepp’s “Gypsy Boys” is an eternal, repetitive, albeit earnest search
for signs of intelligent (or at least emotionally available) life in a gay
universe. Politically speaking, the film is mum. Elsewhere, it won’t shut up.
The men here are as vexed with the games and etiquette as the women of “Sex
and the City.” Shepp brings the fed-up attitude, but none of the wit. For some
guys, watching a dozen characters comb San Francisco’s AsiaSF nightclub for
love, sex and laughs might hit so close to home, the experience could be like
breaking and entering.

Otherwise, “Gypsy Boys” is wrecked by self-congratulatory pith that
purports to get at the heart of the promiscuity but only inspires head
scratching about why these are the lives writer-director Shepp chose to
dramatize. The interwoven stories make up a sadly ordinary, brutally plotless
soap. It opens with its three most hapless characters searching for 25 spots
on the body from which to drink champagne and ends with a literal pony ride
into the sunset. Shepp’s observations might be ones you’ve had a hundred times
and wished someone would put on film — again, only with worse lighting and a
deeper house soundtrack.

These guys are queer as folk too. To the film’s credit, though, the
romantic angst seems less packaged and only slightly less pretentious than
those on that Showtime series. Shepp proffers nothing new in the gay discourse

department. But all the froth is warmed over, too. Knights in shining armor
(or skin so sweaty it gleams) and the men of the characters’ dreams come, go
and literally fade into the movie’s ether. Things never get deeper than the
duo handing out doorway disses at the entrance of AsiaSF like “Muppets”
armchair critics Statler and Waldorf. The sincere dramatic conflicts only
beget more cliches. And in accordance with everything else in “Gypsy Boys,”
they are from the heart — and the loins.

Advisory: This film contains strong language and sexual situations.

– Wesley Morris

HIT AND RUNWAY

Comedy. Starring Michael Parducci, Peter Jacobsen. Co-written and directed
by Christopher Livingston. (R. 105 minutes. At the Lumiere.)

A premise in search of a better-executed movie, Christopher Livingston’s
“Hit and Runway” appears to be looking for a slot in the CBS lineup. Painfully
untalented writer Alex (Michael Parducci) teams up with Elliot (Peter
Jacobsen), a playwright, to write an action movie, and for a little while,
comedy ensues. Alex is a macho Italian. Elliot’s a gay Jew with a painful
resemblance to Woody Allen. Livingston flirts with screwball, satire and
homage but gets tangled in conventions, exactly the kind Alex would learn in
his screen-writing night class.

At its least grating, “Runway” plays as a cheesy ode to unlikely creative
partnerships. In the process of growing unbearably sentimental, it snowballs
into a criminally derivative copy of “Manhattan”-era Allen. On its surface,
the film plays like a less fraught redux of the hetero-homo relations in “Kiss
Me Guido.” But Jacobsen appears to have been instructed to do Allen, in the
same way Livingston and co-writer Jaffe Cohen have cribbed the Woodman’s lines
and scenarios.

The real fits of inspiration come early, as Alex bribes Elliot into
collaboration by promising him a date with Joey (”Dawson Creek’s” gay-hottie-
in-residence Kerr Smith), the waiter/actor working at Alex’s brother’s
restaurant. Joey happens to be a Judeo-phile, a trait that yields a kiss
that’s like watching Sal Mineo’s mouth collide with Karl Malden’s. Unclean,
but endearing anyway. The movie, on the other hand, with its strained stabs at
straight romance (girls with glasses are hotter without them, and other non-
observations), is mostly unclean.

– Wesley Morris