David Elliott on movies: ‘Hurt Locker,’ ‘Brüno’

“The Hurt Locker”

It has receded as news, but the Iraqi war is still killing people. Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” was carved from about a million feet of digital footage shot in Jordan near the Iraqi border, and has the force of ravaged news that refuses to die.

Mark Boal wrote the best movie about the war’s homefront backwash, “In the Valley of Elah,” and in “Locker” he has scripted the best war film about Iraq. Bigelow’s work (”Point Break,” “K-19,” etc.) often deals with male-bond rites. Her most formative film experience was a double-bill of “Mean Streets” and “The Wild Bunch,” and she has not forgotten Scorsese and Peckinpah lessons when using almost documentary tactics with tremendous visceral force (ironically the best “action” may be not the bomb gut-twisters but a sniper duel in the desert).

Bigelow can use such stars as Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes like supporting actors because her movie is not about stars. It is about a place, a team and the fusion of them. If there is a star, it is Jeremy Renner as Staff Sgt. William James, who joins the bomb defusing squad led in Baghdad by Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie). Though James claims over 800 successes (a colonel puffs up on hearing about it), he worries Sanborn, a by-the-book guy who feels driven to consider murder.

James moonlights for extra servings of danger and evidently needs the rush. The bomb episodes shoot nerves up our spines, well beyond what defuser Jack Palance endured in “Ten Seconds to Hell.” This picture is closer to the small-combat classic “Men in War.” Like those soldiers in Korea, the men’s only real politics is to work closely for survival. Renner is both a survivor and a danger-maker, like Aldo Ray in the 1957 movie. The Iraqis, both as victims and feared aliens, are far more alive in this film than the Koreans in that one.

Even with some rather G.I. Joe sentiment involving an Iraqi kid, in impact and intimacy this is one of the finest American war films. It is unrelenting. Off-duty in their sterile barracks, the men ventilate pressure by getting drunk and belting each other. James likes it. For him, hell is a place to live for, even if every day feels like dying. (Opens tomorrow, July 10, at Landmark Hillcrest and UltraStar Flower Hill; rated R) ★★★★

“Brüno”

“Borat” was funny because Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakh idiot, full of rustic anti-Semitism and primeval show-biz impulses, was a magnet for other fools. Borat was clueless yet so were most of those caught in the net of Cohen’s smartly faked docu-skits exposing our many prejudices, as Borat doofed his way across America. Much of the appeal was that almost everyone watching the movie could feel superior to almost everyone in the movie, since we got the gag.

The tall British comic (and canny actor) stumbles with “Brüno,” which stretches another of his TV characters too far, and relies mainly on “Jackass”-ian raunch. Brüno is a flagrantly gay fashion hound and vanity star who gets canned from his little Austrian show. “For the second time in a century,” we are informed, “the world had turned on Austria’s greatest man.” More Hitler gags might be a relief, once Brüno flies to Hollywood seeking celebrity and wraps his Wiener schnitzel accent around situations with little satirical bite (there is also a dead-zoned sequence in the Middle East).

Certainly Paula Abdul was clued in, yet nervously sits on Mexican laborers whom Brüno uses as chairs before she turns indignant (maybe her PC reflex needs a peppy song cue). Former candidate Ron Paul looks stupefied, yet ragingly reveals himself as a homophobe. The raucous encounter with a black audience furious about a gay cruiser “adopting” a black baby and naming him O.J. has its rude moments, so does the slapstick of Brüno learning from a combat expert how to fend off gays armed with dildos. But soon he heads into fever swamps where redneck hunters, sex swingers and fundamentalists can evidently be gulled because they’ve never heard of Cohen or the art of the put-on.

Where’s the art? Not only is sidekick Gustaf Hammarsten a poor substitute for obese Ken Davitian of “Borat,” but Cohen is cornered by a concept that flogs. Brüno’s accent and outfits wear thin fast, and although this R-rated joker would have made the founders of the rating system rip off their ears and poke out their eyes, it is “raw” without real edge. Cohen exposes stupid homophobes by caricaturing gay males as anally fixated boors who fear and hate women — this movie virtually tells gays to be phobic about themselves. (Rated R) ★★

“Soul Power”

Using footage from the 1974 concert in Kinshasa, Zaire, a celebration of black music (African, American, Afro-Latin) staged some weeks before the fabled Ali-Forman fight, “Soul Power” is vital but suggests a pulling of glamorous fragments from a treasury of rubble. Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, who was an editor on Leon Gast’s great Ali-Foreman film “When We Were Kings,” it has many highs, very few lows (some of the “native” faces are not far from the heart of darkness). While it’s fine to savor Ali’s magnificent spiels, the ego preening of Don King, Miriam Makeba’s famed “Click Song,” the swivel-hipped Crusaders, Celia Cruz in Cuban ferment, B.B. King whipping Lucille through “The Thrill is Gone” and the sweaty if rather rote showmanship of James Brown, what held me best was Bill Withers’ intimate but powerful “Hope She’ll Be Happier.” And one shot of a young African saxophonist on the street, smiling with all the pride of his briefly shining moment. (Opens tomorrow, July 10, Landmark Hillcrest; rated PG-13) ★★★

“Blood: The Last Vampire”

When a director has made “Empire of the Wolves” and “Kiss of the Dragon,” then “Blood: The Last Vampire” is just another messy day at the pulp mill. Chris Nahon’s film is an acted revamp of a 48-minute Japanese anime from 2000. Giann Jun is cute in her girlish sailor uniform as Saya, a demon-slayer who, after 400 years of brooding and carnage, finally gets hip to the fact that she is the spawn of a wise sword master and a vampire dominatrix from hell named Onigen (no relation to Pushkin’s Onegin).

Saya rescues a dippy American teen (Allison Miller) from a U.S. base near Tokyo (or, a California base with Mt. Fuji digitally added). She butchers demons whose veins gush a kind of corpuscular raspberry jam. Finally she faces down mom, who has perhaps the prettiest parasol in film history but is also an absolute bitch. The chop fests are vivid, but bloodsucker mythology is barely utilized. There is time to admire the dangles of hair across Saya’s inexpressive face, and also to wonder: Is bad American acting worse than bad Japanese acting? In this Japan, yes. (At a Landmark theater; rated R) ★★

STARS: FOUR (excellent), THREE (worthy), TWO (involving), ONE (dud), ZERO (nada)

NEWS Etc.

Thank you, Karl: Karl Malden, who died at 97 on July 1, did awfully well for a potato-faced Chicago guy first named Mladen Sekulovich. Memories abound: as Brando’s Method buddy Mitch in the great stage and film versions of “A Streetcar Named Desire”; the priest working on dockhand Brando’s conscience in “On the Waterfront”; the obsessed father of Anthony Perkins in “Fear Strikes Out”; the hard, then relenting prison warden in “Birdman of Alcatraz”; Gen. Bradley, so often frustrated in “Patton”; and, of course, the savvy TV cop with the battering-ram voice in “Streets of San Francisco.”

For me, two other Malden performances linger best. First, sheriff Dad Longworth, so courtly and coy with Brando until he viciously smashes his hand in “One-Eyed Jacks.” Second, redneck Archie Lee in “Baby Doll,” constantly sweating about sexy Carroll Baker, bellowing “Food! Food!” to get his supper, and oafishly sneering, “Is that what they call a Mona Lisa smile you got on your puss?” Even Mona Lisa would have laughed.

Molto Italiano: The small but growing San Diego Italian Film Festival is offering screen antipasti before its main, festive course arrives in late October. Rural intrigue is the heart of “Il Vento Fa il Suo Giro” (”The Wind Blows Round”), Giorgio Diritti’s film about a French goat herder and cheese maker who moves with family and flock to a fading Piedmontese village. The town soon shows itself more medieval than Euro as the free-thinking arrival stirs resentment. I found it a bit scattered (what’s with the vaguely flirty wife?). But this grounded visit to a very old, mountainous Italy is yours (for a suggested $8 donation) at 7 p.m. Saturday (July 11) at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 700 Prospect St. in La Jolla. Infosite: www.sandiegoitalianfilmfestival.com

DVD: No director ever courted our intelligence more smartly than Louis Malle in “My Dinner With Andre.” Malle’s 1981 film is like the Platonic dream of Woody Allen’s ambition, as actor and playwright Wallace Shawn and theater director and tireless seeker Andre Gregory sustain a rambling, often funny conversation in a New York restaurant. Shawn’s adenoidal nerdiness is a façade for his eager brain, and he mostly listens and reacts to Gregory’s spiels, tales and tangents. The guru also learns something, and Malle’s direction is infallible. “Dinner” arrives in a new Criterion double-disc, the second with Noah Baumbach’s interview with the stars and a 52-minute film on Malle.

A QUOTE (not a blurb!)

“I was beginning to realize that the only way to make this evening bearable was to ask Andre a few questions.”– Wallace Shawn, ready to launch his restaurant dialectics with Andre Gregory in “My Dinner With Andre.”

David Elliott is the SDNN movie critic.

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