Doc about artists loses focus

Although “Died Young, Stayed Pretty,” a documentary about the underground rock poster movement, begins with a freewheeling array of diverting poster graphics and provocative artist interviews, it soon becomes apparent that there’s no real structure or point of view to it all. In fact, by the movie’s frustrating second half, it’s almost as if director Eileen Yaghoobian (who also produced, shot and edited) decided to become as anarchic as the art she features here and just cut together her remaining footage willy-nilly, viewer engagement be damned.

The indie-rock poster subculture, at least as seen here, seems so largely populated by tunnel-visioned white guys living in a kind of low-paid, artistic exile, that, without digging beneath their offbeat surfaces (which Yaghoobian doesn’t), they simply become tiresome mouthpieces. In addition, the fact that the wildly imaginative posters these iconoclasts produce have so little impact nowadays (the same is unfortunately true of the obscure bands, unseen and unheard here, that their artwork promotes) it ultimately makes the film’s topic feel dated and superfluous.

However, after the movie drifts into such far-flung areas as drugs, the media, war and ice cream trucks, leaving behind a raft of unanswered questions about the rock poster world and its motley inhabitants, it’s truly zone-out time.

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Gary Goldstein --

“Died Young, Stayed Pretty.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. At the Downtown Independent, Los Angeles.

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‘Palladin’ fails to break new ground

“Looking for Palladin” meanders around Antigua (Guatemala) at a leisurely gait and enjoys the presence of Ben Gazzara in its central role. That’s about all there is to find, however.

A short-tempered, Ugly American talent agent named Josh (David Moscow) has come, reluctantly, to persuade long-missing Hollywood legend Jack Palladin to take a lousy-sounding cameo in a project related to one of his old movies. After he finally finds the ultra-mellow Jack (Gazzara), who works for kicks as a chef, the two are off for a night of self-discovery. Yep.

The film simply isn’t well thought out. It’s not credible that Josh doesn’t recognize his quarry when meeting him face to face, especially given their later-revealed personal connection. And Josh has come this far but knows nothing about the project he’s pitching. Sure, Jeremy Piven has pretty much destroyed this type for a generation but Josh doesn’t even introduce himself when working Jack. Jack, meanwhile, is too Yoda-like. He’s perfectly happy. He doesn’t need anything Josh is offering, so where’s the tension?

Is this a wacky comedy, as its wild coincidences and sprightly music imply? Or is it a serious family drama, as the final 20 minutes or so suddenly seem to be? Veteran writer-director Andrzej Krakowski’s pacing is languid to the point of torpor; shots linger without looking beneath the surface and scenes are slow without creating atmosphere. Paved with cliches, the apparently well-meaning “Looking for Palladin” is a long journey with no new places.

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Michael Ordona --

“Looking for Palladin.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, Beverly Hills; Laemmle’s Town Center, Encino; Edwards Westpark 8, Irvine.

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War tests bond between women

Writer-director Karin Albou follows up her impressive debut feature “Little Jerusalem” with the exquisite yet harrowing “The Wedding Song,” a story of two teenagers, the Jewish Myriam and the Muslim Nour, whose lifelong friendship is tested severely with the advent of the German occupation of Tunisia in November 1942. With intimacy and sensuality, Albou explores what it means to be a woman and the bonds that women form with each other in an increasingly precarious situation.

Myriam (Lizzie Brochere) and her widowed seamstress mother, Tita (Albou), live in an upstairs flat that shares a courtyard with the family of Nour (Olympe Borval) and other apartment dwellers in an old, modest quarter of Tunis. As the plight of Tunisia’s Jews worsens, Tita applies pressure upon her daughter to marry Raoul (Simon Abkarian), a slim, dapper, wealthy doctor in his 40s who has fled Paris for what he believed would be the safety of his hometown.

The film suggests that, for the Germans, the radio, fortified by pamphlets dropped from planes, proved to be a potent propaganda tool, insisting that bombing by Anglo-American forces is at the instigation of “international Jewry,” pitting Arab against Jew. The Germans promise independence from French colonial rule; from this notion it is easy to suggest that the French exploited and oppressed Arabs while they allowed Jews to become rich and independent -- never mind that much of Tunis’ Jewish population is poor. Albou brings to life a Tunis in which its very specificity of time and place yields a timelessness: In many places women remain oppressed, large populations suffer from a lack of education that make them vulnerable to rabble-rousing propaganda. Yet in the face of all this adversity the bond between women just may hold.

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Kevin Thomas --

“The Wedding Song.” MPAA rating: Unrated. In French and Arabic, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. At the Music Hall, Beverly Hills; University 6, Town Center, Irvine.

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A crime against humanity, indeed

In the thoroughly terrible “Victory Day,” Sam Cassels (Sean Ramsay), a hot-headed photojournalist working in Prague, becomes a one-man judge and jury after abducting a billionaire Russian oligarch (Milan Kolik) he accuses of crimes against humanity in the former Soviet Union. But it’s producer-director-star Ramsay, an ex-Reuters news photographer, who belongs on trial for foisting this implausible stuff on moviegoers.

David Fellowes and Tony Weston, who wrote the screenplay based on a story by Ramsay, also deserve 40 lashes. Their dialogue is so flat and clunky (“When you do what makes you happy, you live until you die and then you die happy”), the best actors couldn’t make it work. Not that there are any of those here.

Led by the affectless, monotone Ramsay, the cast is laughably bad, making the whole enterprise seem like a “Saturday Night Live” version of “The Bourne Identity,” as helmed by Ed Wood. But as Oksana, a young Russian woman trafficked into sex slavery -- and saddled with the world’s worst hairdo -- who Cassels tries to save from evil forces, Natalie Shiyanova gives perhaps the film’s most egregiously awful performance.

Meanwhile, Czech actor Kolik is, at times, so visibly dubbed into English, it’s like watching some old Italian-made sword-and-sandal epic. If only.

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Gary Goldstein --

“Victory Day.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. In English, Russian and Czech with English subtitles. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

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‘Yes Men’ punk big business

Fleet and amusing, “The Yes Men Fix the World” is a self-chronicled rundown of the corporation-shaming Trojan horse antics of anti-globalization pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who were previously shadowed for the 2004 documentary “The Yes Men.” (The pair co-directed the follow-up.) Using fake websites they create, the goal is to get invited to public forums as stand-ins for established, malfeasant companies and propagate inherently crazy ideas that expose their targets’ insatiable thirst for profit, whether a new candle made from a dying Exxon employee (called “vivoleum”), or a “Sleeper”-reminiscent, wearable bubble pod for post-disaster scenarios called the Survivaball.

The movie is a greatest swipes collection with arguably negligible damage though: Are these two tilting at windmills with their PR-savvy hoaxes? (The Survivaball presentation, given as fake Halliburton reps, mostly earned them a few business cards.) Nevertheless, it’s fun watching the square-headed Bichlbaum, who smoothly captures the doublespeaking indifference of business types, play a Dow flack announcing to an unsuspecting BBC interviewer the company’s unprecedented $12 billion in reparations payments to long-ignored victims of a 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India. Or unveiling -- in the guise of a HUD deputy at a privatization-friendly post-Katrina reconstruction conference in New Orleans -- a grand plan to restore affordable public housing as well as Big Oil-destroyed wetlands.

They are careful to show that their wishful-thinking (and in the case of Dow Chemical, temporarily stock-plummeting) cons aren’t cruelest to the already victimized. “Totally worth it,” a beleaguered health clinic head in Bhopal tells them, citing new attention to a stagnant cause. But getting greed-driven conglomerates to recognize the human cost of their actions is, the pair admit, a bigger task than a brief, if intelligently conceived, public spanking, which makes “The Yes Men Fix the World” an odd combination of righteous, raucous and rueful.

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Robert Abele --

“The Yes Men Fix the World.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes. At Laemmle Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Playhouse 7, Pasadena.

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