Deserter explains his story

Cruelly abandoned by his parents as a child, left by his wife as a young man, and chafing under military rules, American soldier James Joseph Dresnok bolted for North Korea in 1962, where he became a “People’s Paradise” hero. More than 40 years later, filmmaker Daniel Gordon -- no stranger to the famously closed-off Communist country, from two sports documentaries he’d filmed there -- got permission to conduct the first Western interviews with Dresnok, the last of four U.S. soldiers to desert in the 1960s.

The resulting film, “Crossing the Line,” is a tale of alienation and adaptation both miraculous and strange, but also abduction both psychological and physical. Although a curious study in political exploitation for most of the film -- snippets of the Kim Jong Il-directed propaganda epic “Nameless Heroes,” starring Dresnok as a sinister American, are fascinating -- by the end, his sallow, corpulent frame has settled into stooge-like, Kool-Aid-drunk offensiveness.

Dresnok coyly avoids details about his deceased first wife -- who might have been a kidnapped Romanian -- and happily bad-mouths fellow defector Charles Jenkins for giving himself up to Japan for court-martial. But then he brags about how he always got his rations during the ‘90s famine that wiped out hundreds of thousands of his adopted land’s less fortunate citizens. So Dresnok may have hated the broken home that scarred his youth, but I guess it’s worth a smile and a kind word for your broken country when its problems conveniently pass you by.

-- Robert Abele

“Crossing the Line.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.

Baseball saga sags away from field

When director David Mickey Evans gets into a pitching/hitting/fielding rhythm in the game scenes of his true-story baseball flick “The Final Season” -- about a scrappy small-town Iowa high school team facing the end of an era -- you can feel Evans’ love for the sport the way one of those proud parents did rooting for their kid from the bleachers.

Unfortunately, the off-diamond scenes are a woeful mixed bag of corn-belt sanctimony and predictably plowed drama, built around a devilish, state-enforced merger with a more populous county that threatens to kill a long-winning baseball tradition in the teeny farm community of Norway, Iowa.

Evans does pull off two neat tricks. He imbues underdog status to a team that’s won nine of the last 10 state championships (ah, but will they win one more?). And he succeeds with the atypical casting of perma-sneer icon Powers Boothe as a heartland father figure whose ouster as coach -- negotiated so the Norway Tigers can play a last season with an untested coach (Sean Astin) and, the merger advocates hope, go out as failures -- is presented as the pinnacle of mound martyrdom.

Boothe nicely underplays it, and doesn’t even try to lose the sneer. But everywhere, it seems, exchanges between characters -- usually between any Norway-an and any outsider -- are excuses to wield the superiority of aw-shucks Americana like the business end of a Louisville slugger. (The Copland-esque score is also a form of weaponization.) And in a movie where the timing of a squeeze bunt is presented as the thing of beauty that it is, and the eradication of small-town culture in a changing world is a genuine concern, the simplifying countrified morality of “The Final Season” is the real crying shame.

-- R.A.

“The Final Season.” MPAA: PG for language, thematic elements and some teen smoking. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes. In general release.

Gee-whiz charm goes a long way

Near the conclusion of the end credits for “Colma: The Musical,” a background singer giddily exclaims “That’s so fun!,” and that piece of off-handed studio chatter pretty well sums up the exuberant charms of this low-budget, homespun, coming-of-age story.

Set in a small suburban nowhere just outside San Francisco, the film follows a trio of friends -- two guys and one girl, two straight and one gay -- as they negotiate the summer after finishing high school. Directed by Richard Wong, the film is fueled by the peppy, insistently catchy music written by H.P. Mendoza (who also stars), giving it a freewheeling spirit in which extras suddenly become background dancers and a well-placed hand clap brightens even the darkest moments.

“Colma: The Musical” is a winning amalgam of MySpace-ish self-involvement, digital video immediacy and “Hey kids, let’s put on a show” gumption. As anyone who saw the surprisingly multigenerational audience at Rufus Wainwright’s recent Judy Garland tribute show at the Hollywood Bowl can attest, there is something strangely reassuring in knowing that, for all the ways in which our culture seems to be mutating and advancing at an unstoppable pace, theater nerds and musical geeks will abide.

-- Mark Olsen

“Colma: The Musical.” R for language including sexual references. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. Friday and Saturday, midnight at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. (323) 848-3500.

Whose ‘Bright’ idea was this mess?

You have to wonder what David Beaird, writer-director of the execrable “The Civilization of Maxwell Bright,” was thinking when he created his abusive, misogynistic title character (so-named because Maxwell Smart was taken, obviously), then saw fit to foist him on an audience for a criminally long hour and 48 minutes. More astounding is why talented comic actor Patrick Warburton would agree to inhabit such a hateful boor, even if it meant a starring movie role.

Bright, a rich businessman sick of dating selfish crazies, pays a marriage broker (Simon Callow) $100,000 to find him a devoted and subservient Asian bride (hello, what century is this?). Mai Ling (Marie Matiko), a virginal, former Buddhist nun from China, soon lands on Max’s doorstep, instantly marries the sadistic jerk, rocks his bedroom and then allows herself to be repeatedly humiliated. Attention Asian Media Watch. Eventually, a boomerang of bad karma forces Max to face his mortality and the picture morphs into a drippy spiritual drama.

An OK supporting turn by Eric Roberts, along with curious cameos by Carol Kane, Nora Dunn, John Glover, Missi Pyle and Jennifer Tilly (as a former Mayo Clinic oncologist, no less), prove everyone just wants to work -- no matter what.

-- Gary Goldstein

“The Civilization of Maxwell Bright.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes. At Laemmle’s Grande, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown L.A. (213) 617-0268.