Sorry, ‘Game’ over

When Bruce Lee died in 1973, he left behind footage to an unfinished project titled “Game of Death” that producers filled out with a stand-in. (This much is true.) Director and co-writer Justin Lin imagines the audition process for Lee’s double in “Finishing the Game,” fashioning a film that intends to be both a breezy parody of ‘70s styles and a semi-serious look at how far (or not) Asians have come in Hollywood.

Only intermittently funny at best, but mostly full of dead air, the film is a let-down on both fronts. The cartoonish ‘70s parody has already been done to death (and with more wit and better art direction) in the video-rental classic “Spirit of 76” and the online series “Yacht Rock.”

Super-wide collars were funny-looking, yes, and the dubbing on imported kung-fu flicks was atrocious, we can all agree, but there’s no gas in the tank on such things being inherently funny anymore.

And by safely tucking his “Hollywood Shuffle”-style satire of race and representation into a period piece, Lin shields himself from having to examine too closely where he fits on the problem/solution scale when he directs contemporary junk such as “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.”

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“Finishing the Game.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes. At Landmark’s Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A. (310) 281-8223.

The kernels of a controversy

Fusing the personal-experience-journalism styles of Michael Pollan and Morgan Spurlock, the documentary “King Corn” aims to alert our brains to what’s rapidly altering our bodies: corn.

Food-activist best friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis met at Yale and hit upon the idea of moving to Iowa, farming their own acre of the country’s prominent commodity crop and tracking it from seed to marketplace to mouth. The journey reveals just how much industrialization, government subsidies and food technology have transformed subsistent family farming into a tradition-killing welfare system that intentionally overproduces, mostly to confinement lots that need animal-fattening feed, and to food makers who put high-fructose corn syrup in, well, seemingly every product in the grocery aisle.

It’s telling that Cheney or Ellis -- they’re pleasant enough hosts but too indistinguishable, unfortunately -- excitedly tucks into a just-ripened ear only to spit it out, saying, “It’s not very good.” Biophysics don’t require it to be.

Along the way our newbie growers humorously try to make corn sweetener in their kitchen, muse over a shared Iowan ancestry they didn’t know about, and even score a gentle interview with an enfeebled Earl Butz, former President Richard M. Nixon’s agriculture secretary, who ushered in payouts to farmers as we know it today. And the plaintive folk-guitar soundtrack that initially accompanies director Aaron Woolf’s pastoral images of proud Iowans helping Cheney and Ellis get themselves set up with equipment, seed, fertilizer (and that all-important subsidy sign-up) becomes something dirge-like by the end as it becomes clear just how cost-effective exacerbating obesity is in a crazily abundant America. “King Corn” is entertaining enough, but it’s also a moral, crucially skeptical road trip down the food chain.

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“King Corn.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869. The filmmakers will do Q&As; following the 7:30 p.m. screening today and Saturday.

Utah and its flood of newcomers

For the thousands of New Orleans residents displaced by a busted levee, the word “flood” could only mean a watery hell. For a lot of Utahans who saw 600 African American Katrina evacuees quickly transplanted to their mostly white state, “flood” meant something socially and culturally curious.

Director Alex LeMay has a potent post-Katrina subject in his documentary “Desert Bayou,” namely, just how integrated America is when a debilitating tragedy has the chance to bring races and classes closer together.

Does choosing a desert military base over a mid-city hotel -- as Utah did for its “welcomed” newcomers from New Orleans -- smack of segregation? Does running background checks on your traumatized guests indicate institutionalized suspicion or basic bureaucracy?

LeMay doesn’t shirk from the facts of New Orleans’ crime-ridden status -- and even focuses on the life-restarting efforts of two black families with crime or drug problems in their history.

But in aiming for fly-on-the-wall immediacy as well as a history of Mormonism’s views toward blacks, talking-head interviews and newsmagazine-like side stories (including the efforts of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to make evacuees feel at home), he too often loses his grip.

Still, there is undeniable power to the central dilemma of human beings at a crossroads, who must decide if the Big Easy is a troubled soul worth another chance, or if the big sky of a strange place -- however different it may be from everything they know -- holds the promise of a new beginning.

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“Desert Bayou.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. (323) 848-3500.

Near-noir thriller just too careless

There’s murder, deception, cruel twists and plenty of scenes at night in “If I Didn’t Care,” but writer-directors Benjamin and Orson Cummings lack the fatalistic glue of true film noir to hold it all in place.

In one sense the film is almost a haiku, as the story unfolds with a strangely blase expediency as a comfortably bored husband (Bill Sage) decides to kill his wife to clear the way for his new squeeze. Things go, not surprisingly, quite different than he plans.

Nearly every moment brings some other, better film to mind -- “Double Indemnity,” “Body Heat,” “The Last Seduction” -- and actress Susan Misner, as a combo femme fatale/fall guy, is something of a ringer for “Black Widow”-era Theresa Russell, which doesn’t exactly help either. Roy Scheider pops up as a cagey, velveteen local lawman, who seems onto them all from the word go. (One can only imagine he’s seen this scenario before, whether in an old movie or his own precincts.)

Perhaps the single smartest decision by the Cummings brothers is setting their film in the upscale enclave of the Hamptons during the off season, as they do capture the strangely spooky and deserted feel the place has when drained of vacationers. There actually is much to like in “If I Didn’t Care,” bits and pieces that might have come together in a way that’s more satisfying, but instead it just feels haphazardly tossed together.

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“If I Didn’t Care.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. Laemmle’s Grande, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown L.A. (213) 617-0268

Moody sketches of Boston’s Irish poor

“Black Irish,” writer-director Brad Gann’s coming-of-age drama set in working-class South Boston, boasts many memorable scenes and fine characterizations but ultimately plays more like a series of snapshots come to life than as an organically satisfying story.

Gann has a major asset, though, in star Michael Angarano (“Sky High,” “The Final Season”), who’s becoming one of the screen’s more reliable and appealing young actors.

As Cole McKay, an upstanding, baseball-crazy teen anchoring a fraying Irish Catholic family, he brings depth and nuance to a familiar role, along with winning warmth.

Whether avoiding “the sex talk” with his gruff dad (Brendan Gleeson), getting the pants beaten off him -- literally -- by his bad-news older brother (Tom Guiry), or soliciting a kitchen job from a mobbed-up restaurateur (Michael Rispoli), Angarano is a pleasure to watch work.

Unfortunately, the movie is saddled with too many melodramatic strands, including Cole’s parents’ dead marriage; his father’s secret illness; a creaky moral clash between Cole’s unwed, pregnant sister (Emily Van Camp) and their devout mother (Melissa Leo); and a contrived climax that pits brother against brother.

As for the title, it’s a derogatory term once used to describe the Irish poor -- a group this movie’s diligent hero clearly won’t be part of for long.

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“Black Irish,” MPAA rating: R for some language and brief violence. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes. Regency Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd. at Fairfax Avenue, (323) 655-4010.

Linking Burma to our boardrooms

Documentary filmmaking doesn’t get much more timely or topical than “Total Denial,” an unexpectedly gripping look at the ongoing political and human-rights situation in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Bulgarian-born filmmaker Milena Kaneva forges the film with of a rough-hewn urgency, and whatever it may lack in graceful image-making it more than makes up for in emotional immediacy.

Burmese activist Ka Hsaw Wa -- who lives as a fugitive outlaw when in his own country -- and his American wife use a semi-obscure U.S. law that ironically dates back to colonial times to initiate a lawsuit in the federal court system for abusive activities undertaken on behalf of American businesses operating in Burma. (Not surprisingly, oil is at the root of it all.)

The cross-cutting between the jungles of Southeast Asia and the courtrooms of California never ceases to startle, and Kaneva cannily uses the lawsuit to give the film a strong spine and sense of drive.

Kaneva often seems downright smitten with her subjects, never particularly feigning objectivity, but she also allows the opposing side to speak for itself in a hearty example of a give-’em-enough-rope. Without portraying corporate culture as purposefully evil, Kaneva shines a spotlight on what happens when a willful blind-eye is turned to abuses committed in the name of business.

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“Total Denial.” Unrated. In Burmese and English with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes. Regency Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd. at Fairfax Avenue, (323) 655-4010.

A dorkumentary with a heart

Combining as it does elements of historical reenactment and Dungeons & Dragons, the easy laughs in a film about live-action role players are pretty obvious; not so apparent is the inspiring heart and commitment of the players themselves. In “Darkon,” filmmakers Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer look at a deeply immersive group of players in Baltimore, and rather than approaching the subject with the expected skepticism and ridicule, they portray the gamers as downright heroic. (And, it should be noted, this isn’t simply a boy’s own fantasy world, as there are a surprising number of female players, as well as some extremely patient wives.)

The film takes on a sense of something larger by exploring the fundamental dichotomy between the gamers’ lives in-character and out of character. While they may work on an assembly line, at Starbucks or as office drones during the week, in the realm of Darkon they are warriors and leaders, Amazonian battlers and quick-witted rogues. Eventually, some of the gamers are seen eking out improvements in their real lives, in part from the confidence and tenacity that Darkon instills in them.

By approaching the subject without a sense of ironic distance, Neel and Meyer get at something elemental, a variation of the American Dream at work, in which everyone can live out their life as they see it, even if that’s as a medieval elf. As one player says, “Sometimes I do the things I dream of.” The nerds, perhaps, will have their revenge after all.

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“Darkon.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes. Laemmle’s Grande, downtown L.A.

Musical is short of revolutionary

The 1956 student uprising in Communist Hungary was a watershed moment in youthful rebellion, if tragically short-lived, and now the date of the revolt is a national holiday there. As welcome as a Hungarian film telling a story of that time should be, a rock-musical version of “Romeo and Juliet” filmed from a vigorous stage production would have to be pretty deft to be effective. The choppy, awkward “56 Drops of Blood” isn’t.

The doomed pair here are a Soviet officer’s daughter (Monika Veres) and a deported actor’s son (Tamas Palcso), a tense-enough notion but one that doesn’t ultimately fit the Shakespeare tale’s mold, since no single lover’s fate is as important as that of the homeland’s. Plus, director Attila Bokor’s film is a disconcerting mixture of bad English-language dubbing in the dialogue scenes -- featuring British, American and Eastern European dialects -- and the actors’ original Hungarian-language performances for the songs.

Separately filmed scenes with the priest character (Attila Kaszas) and a figure representing his conscience, meanwhile, are mostly ludicrous. And as for the numbers, the subtitled lyrics have a lost-in-translation feel, while the Andrew Lloyd Webber-ish score doesn’t so much reclaim rock ‘n’ roll as the music of revolution as make you wonder why, say, the priest’s anguished solo calling for God’s help has a funky bass jam in the middle.

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Unrated. Run time: 1 hour, 32 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. (323) 848-3500.