Horseback spurs thought

In America people cry because someone made fun of their hero Britney Spears. In Darfur they cry because they have nothing.
The Devil Came on Horseback was made in the midst of the Darfur genocide by ex-Marine Brian Steidle. In 2004 Steidle answered an ad for a truce observer in Africa on the Internet and next thing he was working in the Sudan Nuba Mountains, monitoring the truce of a recently ended 20-year civil war.
Directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg used photographs and video taken by Steidle to explain the situation in Darfur in the western region of Sudan. The first hour of the film fleshes out Steidle's backstory and then proceeds to illustrate the complex yet ultimately barbaric genocide taking place in Darfur. The last half hour concludes with Steidle taking his photos on a lecture tour in North America to raise awareness of the situation.
Much of the early parts have a horrific intensity in that we view many photos of the aftermath of several villages being destroyed. But the charred limbs and bound burnt bodies don't jar your senses like the shot of a large tire in the middle of a dirt street. Next to the tire is an axe and bloody ground. Later Steidle took video footage of a village being actively burnt from a distance. If he had ventured any closer he tells the camera, he would be killed.
Steidle points out how one village of 20,000 took a week to destroy because the Arab militia set the huts on fire methodically, one by one. Said militia also called Janjaweed allow Steidle to take their photos in a neutral city. Janjaweed is Arabic for man on a horse or devil with a gun on a horse. These rebels tell Steidle they are working for the Sudanese government. On Steidle's subsequent lecture tour some believe him and some don't.
You have to shake your head in both disbelief and shame coming out of a documentary like The Devil Came on Horseback. Better still, if someone made a documentary on why American¹s have no compassion for the greater world situation would anyone watch?
Brian Steidle will attend the Wednesday night (Sept. 19, at 7-ish) screening and conduct a Q&A afterwards at the downtown Angelika Film Center

- Michael Bergeron

Action takes movie litmus test

Nobody expects movies to be real, they're movies. So when people start shooting at each other in movies it always seems to look patently unreal.
There are stylistic excursions like Sin City. That's a movie where anything thing can happen as long as it adheres to the physical laws of that universe. But when I see a movie where the hero has tens of bad guys shooting at him with automatic weapons and they all miss, and meanwhile the hero picks off the baddies in one shot each that film better have some panache or I'm outta there.
A film like Death Sentence where the violence beckons comparisons to exploitation films, or Shoot Em Up that displays the aforementioned thugs who can't hit Clive Owen with multiple machine guns despite his being an easy target diving in slow motion, makes me cringe. No style, just cinematic excess.
So now comes Jodie Foster as a vigilante on the dark streets of Gotham in the Neil Jordan directed The Brave One (opens 9/14). This is only the third film in which she's starred in this decade (the other two being Panic Room and Flightplan), but it's also a return to form, as this is simply one hell of a performance. Foster conveys a kind of feral intensity playing a radio personality who's mugged, and beaten into a coma. When she revives she buys a gun and takes the law into her own hands. The violence also comes off as realistic because she shoots a handgun three or four times (as opposed to Shoot Em Up's 100s of times) and even misses once. In scene after scene Foster appears wearing tee shirts that show off her petite yet muscular build. One shirt is a red tie-dye thingy, I swear it's a copy of the same shirt she wore 30 years ago in Taxi Driver in the cafeteria scene between her and Travis Bickle.
If we're talking violence in movies being totally realistic however the go-to director is David Cronenberg. Eastern Promises, opening September 14, feels more like a chamber drama, similar to Spider than Cronenberg's last opus A History of Violence. The conversations and situations in Eastern Promises revolve around Eastern European mobs and how they operate in London. A nurse, Naomi Watts, trying to find the family of a baby whose mother was murdered goes deep into a little seen view of England's ethnic neighborhoods.
There's actually very little physical violence in Eastern Promises but when it rears up its ugly head you feel it in the pit of your being. Specifically an opening scene features a throat being slit while a guy's sitting in a barber chair and the film closes with a literal knife fight to the end. As another viewer remarked upon the movie's end, when you really engage in a battle to the death it has none of the glossy glory and slow motion histrionics of more deliberate filmmakers. Viggo Mortensen also stars and provides a steely portrait of how far a man can change into a machine when his allegiance is to gangsters.

- Michael Bergeron

Who is Alan Tudyk?

In the last week I some films that I thought were so bad they make SOUL PLANE look like a four star comedy: I am talking about Balls of Fury, Death Sentence and Shoot Em Up. You've been warned. But the question for today is who is Alan Tudyk and where has he been hiding? Tudyk plays supporting parts in two current films (3:10 to Yuma and Death At A Funeral) and was also in the smash comedy Knocked Up.

For Knocked Up Tudyk plays Katherine Heigl's boss at E! TV. Remember, Tudyk's assistant tells Heigl, this is Hollywood, we don't like liars. It's a small bit but Tudyk plays smarmy well especially when he wants Heigl to exploit her own sense of motherhood by doing red carpet interviews with stars who are pregnant.

In 3:10 to Yuma, Tudyk plays a doctor who removes a bullet from Peter Fonda's stomach in a rather bloody and gut wretching scene. As Fonda looks around the office all he notices are drawings of animals. What kind of doctor are you he demands. Tudyk's subtly comic answer: Let's just say it's good to finally be able to talk to one of my patients.

Tudyk has a penchant for mild sarcasm but with the look of an everyday guy who knows more than he takes credit for; he dresses conservative but radiates coolness. In Death At A Funeral, a sort of wacky American style raunchy comedy but set in the middle of a proper British wake, Tudyk has what may be the best part of the talented ensemble. Tudyk plays the fiance of a lass from a starched background, but whether her parents approve of him is besides the point. His character accidentally (isn't that always the case) ingested some hallucinogenic pills and in the middle of the minister's oration he starts to trip his balls off, promptly strips naked and climbs on the roof. Tudyk stands out in all the films just mentioned, while not quite stealing the thunder from the actual story. Next time I see him on the screen though, I know who he is.