Standing Really Tall

If ever there was an athlete made for the Imax screen, it is Michael Jordan. James Stern and Don Kempf’s 45-minute documentary, “Michael Jordan: To the Max,” opening Friday at the Universal Studios and Edwards Imax theaters, not only celebrates Jordan’s incomparable skill but also suggests that his stature as a man of character more than matches his physical height. There could be no finer role model for youngsters, and the film has been made with such verve and clarity that you don’t have to be a basketball fan to enjoy it.

When you think of Jordan, you think of the winner who has everything: great looks and cool charisma besides awesome athletic skills and intelligence. Yet, he says quietly to the camera, “I’ve failed over and over again. That’s why I succeeded.” The first setback, the one that galvanized him, occurred when he failed to make his high school basketball team the first time around, as incredible as that sounds today. As the filmmakers cover his final year, 1998, with the Chicago Bulls, we see not only tremendous skill and grace on the court, highlighted in slo-mo sequences, we sense the extra willpower and push needed from him to go out a champ. In between these action sequences, especially impressive on the Imax screen, we see Jordan in many other contexts, especially in his work with children and with his teammates, inspiring and teaching them how to be the best they can be.

Jordan is too smart to permit an invasion of the privacy of his family life, but he speaks of reverence and gratitude for his father, murdered in 1993. He tells us that he cannot see a father and son together without thinking of his loss and explains that when he dropped out of basketball for a year he wanted to see if he could become the baseball player his father always thought he could be. He proved, famously, not to be as gifted on a baseball diamond as on a basketball court yet gave it his very best shot, as the film makes clear, returning to basketball more appreciative than ever of his great gifts in that sport.

Universal Studios Cinemas: (818) 508-0588; Irvine Spectrum: (714) 832-IMAX; Valencia Grand Palace Cinemas: (661) 287-1740; Ontario Stadium 22: (909) 476-1500.

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The new Lake Arrowhead International Film Festival is presenting the U.S. premiere Saturday at 6:30 p.m. of Makoto Tezuka’s operatic, Fellini-esque fable of love and war, the bravura mythological epic “Hakuchi: The Innocent.” Tezuka has taken Ango Sakaguchi’s novella, written in the aftermath of World War II--which imagines that the war didn’t end in 1945 but is only now approaching a fiery apocalypse. This enables Tezuka to introduce television as the ultimate opiate of the masses, holding in its thrall the war-weary Japanese public with escapist entertainment.

The undisputed queen of the tube is Ginga (Reika Hashimoto), a pretty and talented if impersonal singer and dancer who appears in lavish production numbers. Working as a production assistant at Media Station, the fascistic, state-run TV production facility, is Izawa (Tadanobu Asano), a despairing former war correspondent and aspiring filmmaker. One day he is forced into the position of bringing down the wrath of Ginga, a pill-popping, sadistic and petty tyrant whose upcoming 20th birthday celebration is billed as the event of the millennium. As his situation at work worsens, he is drawn to the beautiful, mute Sayo (Miyako Koda), the wife of an eccentric artist-philosopher, Kogarishi (Masao Kusakari), who is holed up in a decaying house adjacent to the slum in which Izawa lives.

As this fable plays out against the picturesque squalor of the slums and the kitschy fantasy settings of Ginga’s TV specials of the vast Media Station, Ginga and Kogarishi reveal that they are not mad but live in a world gone mad. “Hakuchi” is in all ways a provocative and original major accomplishment. The festival takes place Friday through Sunday at the Blue Jay Cinema, 27315 N. Bay Road, (909) 307-1074.

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Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s “Angels of the Universe” has its U.S. premiere tonight at 7 at the American Cinematheque’s Lloyd E. Rigler Theater at the Egyptian as part of the Iceland Naturally Festival. At the beginning of this touching and comic, yet ultimately overwhelmingly sad, film of alienation and gratuitous cruelty to the sick, Ingvar Sigurdsson’s Paul is a struggling artist whose disintegration is triggered by the rejection of the snobbish young woman with whom he falls in love. The screening of “Angels” will be followed by a reception honoring Olafur Grimsson, president of Iceland, and hosted by Hollywood producer Sigurjon Sighvatsson and his wife.

The series continues at the Egyptian through Saturday afternoon, to be followed immediately by “A Story of Time: The Films of Alain Resnais,” the first major U.S. retrospective of the French master in more than a decade. “Last Year at Marienbad” opens the series at 5:30 p.m., followed by “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” and “Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime” at 8:30 p.m. (323) 466-FILM.

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Nicholas LoCasale’s “Hollywood and Nowhere,” which offers an intensely corrosive portrait of kids trying to survive on the mean streets of the erstwhile glamour capital of the world, launches, along with a revival of “American Pie,” Laemmle Theaters’ “American Independents 2000” weekend series. The series starts at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood ([323] 848-3500), Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m., with repeats at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica ([310] 394-9471), beginning May 13 and 14, at 11 a.m.

Opening a regular run Friday at the Monica 4-Plex is Iranian filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s “The May Lady,” a low-key but provocative study of a long-divorced documentary filmmaker whose teenage son is growing resentful of her never-seen lover. Another fine work from the feminist filmmaker of “Nargess” and “The Blue-Veiled.”