Burstyn injects life into ‘Stone’

It’s always a pleasure to watch Ellen Burstyn, even in a film as routine as “The Stone Angel,” adapted by director Kari Skogland from Margaret Laurence’s revered novel. As Hagar Shipley, a 90-year-old widow recalling her past before being shipped off to a nursing home by her earnest son (Dylan Baker) and icy daughter-in-law (Sheila McCarthy), Burstyn gets to use her full bag of tricks to bring this crabby, hard-knocks survivor to life.

Though she’s aged 15 unflattering years, forced into awful old lady clothes and her character teeters on unsympathetic, the actress manages a rich, vanity-free performance, perhaps her best since “Requiem for a Dream.”

Unfortunately, too much of the Manitoba-shot picture evokes Hagar’s earlier days, wherein her iron-fisted father (Peter MacNeill), unruly husband (Cole Hauser) and reckless son (Kevin Zegers) led to a compromised life that -- hot sex aside -- was not especially unique or compelling.

Shifting the present-day action from the book’s 1960s setting to now may also account for the film’s dated feel, as well as for its questionable timeline.

In addition, although talented newcomer Christine Horne is ideal as the younger Hagar, letting Burstyn play the character at around 50, despite best-effort lighting, was not the wisest choice.

-- Gary Goldstein

“The Stone Angel.” Rated R for sexuality and brief language. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes. At the Landmark, 10850 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 281-8233; Laemmle’s Town Center 5, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 981-9811; and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500.

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Acting veterans get a spotlight

China Zorrilla is a grande dame of South American stage, film and television, and with “Elsa and Fred,” Argentinian writer-director Marcos Carnevale has created an unabashed valentine to her and her equally venerable leading man, Spain’s Manuel Alexandre.

The film may be fearlessly sentimental, but it is sturdy enough to provide rewarding major roles for two veterans, who are of an age when such starring parts are rare. Zorilla’s Elsa is a plump, effervescent blond in her 80s, and it is easy to see how, back in the day, she reminded men of Anita Ekberg, with whom she identifies strongly.

When she moves into a Madrid apartment house and discovers that her neighbor is the polished but very proper recently widowed Fred, she becomes determined to have one last fling. There are no surprises in this picture, but it is a pleasure to see veteran performers draw upon a lifetime of effortless technique and undiminished talent in a romantic comedy inevitably tinged with an aura of mortality.

-- Kevin Thomas

“Elsa & Fred.” Unrated with adult themes. In Spanish with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes. Exclusively at the Landmark, 10850 W. Pico Blvd., West L.A., (310) 281-8233.

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A setup that grows old fast

The titular character in the comedy “Harold” is a 13-year-old suburban boy (Spencer Breslin) whose premature baldness created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since nearly everyone save his tough-love mother (Ally Sheedy) and his older teenage sister (Stella Maeve) thinks he’s an old man, he’s become the part: cranky, stooping, plaid-favoring, bunion-riddled, proud of being “regular,” and conversant in “Murder, She Wrote.”

If this sounds like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, that’s because co-writer-director T. Sean Shannon worked there for years, but he’s still stuck in a three-minute-idea mind-set. There’s little indication, beyond the endlessly unfunny school humiliations and fogey-dom signposts (ha ha, he uses Old Spice), that the notion of a preteen codger is worth our sympathies.

The nice overweight girl (Nikki Blonsky) hangs around waiting for Harold to stop sucking up to his tormentors and notice her but, sheesh, you know she can do better.

Where “Superbad” found something raucously winning in hanging with adolescence’s loser elite, “Harold” is a disingenuous, one-note underdog portrait. Especially when they trot out the tired sexist gag of Harold’s fat, desperate, hard-bitten neighbor setting her carnal sights on what she assumes to be a mature bachelor. Because no matter how much ridicule a pretend old man endures, nothing’s more comically pathetic in this movie’s eyes than an actual old woman.

-- Robert Abele

“Harold.” Rated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes. Exclusively at the Laemmle Monica 4-Plex, 1332 Second St., Santa Monica. (310) 394-9741.

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Still more people finding their way

Movies about young -- and not-so-young -- people adrift in a soulless Los Angeles became a genre unto itself long ago. Writer-director Jason Freeland’s “Garden Party,” although competently acted and directed, lacks a fresh point of view and its people lack individuality.

The arrival in L.A. of a chic, beautiful 15-year-old (Willa Holland) fleeing an untenable home life sets in motion a series of stories about people whose lives inevitably interconnect.

Among them are a shy young gay guy (Alex Cendese) stuck in a miserable job as an assistant to a hard-edged, manipulative hotshot Realtor-pot dealer (Vinessa Shaw). He’s drawn to an aspiring singer (Erik Scott Smith), a boyish-looking street urchin, while one of the Realtor’s prospective clients (Richard Gunn) realizes she is the onetime porn actress he has fantasized about for a decade. (The lure of the easy money from making porn and from posing for naughty stills seems a constant temptation for Freeland’s people in their struggle for survival.)

Making the strongest impression is the veteran Christopher Allport as a rugged, middle-aged playboy, crass in manner yet vulnerable to ageism, real or imagined.

-- K.T.

“Garden Party.” Unrated with adult situations, drug use, language. Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741; Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; Edwards University Town Center 6, 4245 Campus Drive, Irvine, (949) 854-8818.

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Survivors tell their stories

An especially shameful chapter in U.S. history -- the internment of innocent Japanese Americans during World War II -- is sensitively examined in the overly brief but worthy documentary “Passing Poston.”

The film, directed by Joe Fox and James Nubile, recounts FDR’s inconceivable post-Pearl Harbor edict, made in the name of national security, which forced the transfer of nearly 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent -- 60% of whom were American citizens -- to remote, spartan detention camps from California to Arkansas.

Profiles of four survivors of Arizona’s Poston Relocation Center anchor this illuminating look at an underreported, three-year period of American paranoia.

Former detainee Leon Uyeda, now 83, cuts the most poignant figure here, crippled by feelings of displacement and ethnic inferiority to this day. Conversely, Ruth Okimoto, 71, has helped reconcile her imprisonment through her stirring, metaphorical artwork. More recently, she even journeyed back to Poston to better understand a time that remains inexplicable.

The movie’s ultimate reveal, that the unpaid Poston detainees were unwittingly used by the U.S. government to help build and improve the infrastructure of the Colorado River Indian reservation on which they were housed, is a crucial, complex secret deserving of its own investigative documentary.

-- G.G.

“Passing Poston.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour. At the ImaginAsian Center, 251 S. Main St., Los Angeles, (213) 617-1033.

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Kudrow enchants in ‘Kabluey’

Broken lives and the comic menace in the everyday are writer-director-star Scott Prendergast’s bailiwick in “Kabluey,” a dark piece of whimsy that enchants and befuddles in equal measure.

It starts with a bedraggled military wife (Lisa Kudrow) distraught over her husband’s extended tour in Iraq, who, with two unruly kids and money problems, becomes desperate enough to call in her jittery, hapless brother-in-law Salman (Prendergast) for baby-sitting help.

Unfit for that chore (they may be brats, but tying them up outside the store like dogs is a no-no), he finds thankless work wearing the sexless, suffocating blue mascot costume of a decimated Internet start-up company seeking to rent out its office space.

But suddenly, like an indie superhero, the suit’s symbolic invisibility and otherworldly cuteness grant him the ability to perceive the world around him a little more clearly, including the secret to his sister-in-law’s corrosive bitterness.

Prendergast’s melancholic, quirky humor and eye for comically scenic desolation have enough stylistic goodwill to help overcome the inevitable monotony of watching him wander around incessantly in a sky-colored mushroom-shaped get-up.

Always captivating, though, is Kudrow, who invests her abandoned, at-wits’-end war bride’s harshest gestures -- and 90% of her lines are like razor cuts -- with an aching humanity that begs understanding.

-- R.A.

“Kabluey.” Rated PG-13. Running time: 86 minutes. At the Laemmle Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. (323) 848-3500.