In America review

July 2, 2010  (nancymashalnews)


POLITE APPLAUSE

In America: Drama. Directed by Jim Sheridan. Written by Jim Sheridan,
Naomi Sheridan and Kirsten Sheridan. With Samantha Morton, Paddy Considine,
Djimon Hounsou, Sarah Bolger, Emma Bolger. (Rated PG-13. 103 minutes. At Bay
Area theaters.)



I fought hard against the emotionalism of “In America,” Jim Sheridan’s
new film, but I lost. There’s no questioning the director’s ability to wring
moving moments from potentially sentimental and decidedly familiar material:
the story of penniless immigrants trying to make it in Manhattan. It got to me.

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I’m still trying to decide whether I was won over or worn down — but why
not give Sheridan the benefit of the doubt?

The director has played this game before, in “My Left Foot,” with a
subject that could easily have lent itself to soppy treatment, the life of the
volatile writer and painter Christy Brown. Here, the danger was perhaps
greater, because the film was loosely based on events in the director’s life,
including his moving his wife and daughters from Ireland to New York’s Hell’s
Kitchen, the death of a beloved family member and a troubled pregnancy.

The film, set in the early 1980s, opens with that quintessentially
American experience, the illegal border crossing. After fibbing to immigration
officers, a young Irishman, Johnny (Paddy Considine), drives his family —
wife, Sarah, (Samantha Morton) and daughters Christy and Ariel (Sarah and Emma
Bolger) — down from Canada in a beat-up station wagon with a few personal
belongings and almost no money, which does not bode well for finding adequate
housing in New York City.

They rent an apartment in a hellhole of a building full of junkies,
lunatics and other marginal types. Johnny’s a struggling actor who balances
auditions and memorizing lines with driving a cab, and Sarah, formerly a
teacher, gets a job in an ice cream parlor. The elder child is preoccupied
with capturing the family’s new life on her camcorder; both girls are almost
impossibly bright and well spoken. The family is still reeling from the death
of a third child, Frankie, who suffered from a brain tumor.

They are close knit, but the strains of poverty, the summer’s heat and
the too-fresh memory of the dead boy take their toll. The girls strike up an
unexpected friendship with an artist possessed of a volcanic temper who paints
“keep away” in giant letters on his door. This neighbor, Mateo (Djimon
Hounsou), an African whom the children call “the man who screams,” turns out -
- no surprise here — to be much less fearsome than the nickname suggests.
He has a painful burden of his own, and will become — again, not
surprisingly — part of the means by which the family finally reconciles
itself to Frankie’s death.

Sheridan knows how to draw outstanding performances from talented actors
– think of the Oscar-winning turns by Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker in
“My Left Foot” — and he does the same in “In America.”

Considine conveys Johnny’s crushing emotional burden while keeping the
character multidimensional, and Morton’s performance proves that the critical
attention (and Oscar nomination) she won in 2000 for Woody Allen’s “Sweet and
Lowdown” was no one-off. The Bolger sisters are quite appealing —
intelligent and affecting but not cloying. Hounsou (”Amistad”) is more
problematic, at least in part because of how his role was conceived.

The director, who wrote the script with his two daughters, filmmakers
Naomi Sheridan and Kirsten Sheridan, is clearly drawing on deep personal
reserves for this picture, and despite a few sequences when the creative hand
seems intrusive, does well by his subject. When you see a director going for
that lump-in-the-throat mood, instinct takes over and you want to dig in your
heels. Sometimes it’s best just to let yourself be swept away.

– Advisory: Some sexuality, rough language and drug references.

E-mail Walter Addiego at waddiego@sfchronicle.com.

Essential viewing for anyone w…

June 30, 2010  (nancymashalnews)

Essential viewing also in behalf of anyone who enjoyed Jean de Florette. Ten years after Jean’s eradication (in this continuation of Pagnol’s novel L’Eau des collines), his 18-year-age-old daughter Manon (Béart) still haunts the hills overlooking the farm stolen from her father by the canny Soubeyran (Montand) and his cloudy-witted nephew Ugolin (Auteuil). Thousands of red carnations now finest there, but the Soubeyrans’ blossoming fortunes are about to wither and die. Paradoxically, Ugolin has fallen in love with Manon, though his declarations fall on unresponsive prepare, leading in the motivation to tragedy. There is a comforting condole with to events, with Manon accomplished to take her revenge on the Soubeyrans by stopping up the main village spring. However, in the ultimate scenes, the smokescreen slides into a Hardyesque fatalism, with the loose ends tied up a smidgen too neatly, resulting in an mood of literary contrivance. It despite that succeeds, like the earlier film, in tapping the expressively-springs of one’s emotions.

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Skin of Man, Heart of Beast review

June 29, 2010  (nancymashalnews)


At the material marrow of every humanitarian being is an animal. We persuade ourselves that we are something more, a civilized beast that knows, understands and adheres to the sexual constructs of good-and-lethal, right-and-wrong. How we fit into the mold of our the public is the principle concern of "Peau d’homme coeur de bête," or "Skin of Man, Middle of Beast."

Unusual circumstances have brought together a family shattered by catastrophe some fifteen years earlier. The eldest brother, Francky left his family years ago, dropping his two young children with his mother and trying his grasp at law enforcement in the big city. The problem is that Francky´s skills as an lawman of the law are reflective of his childrearing adeptness, and the default is quite substantial. Plus, Francky hits the spirits somewhat hard and, anecdote evening (as the tidings goes) he hit his partner charming hard too, landing-place him in the sanatorium. Forced to take a sabbatical, Francky heads endorse to the only familiar with he knows, with his mother in their small French town, meeting with a daughter who has grown to resent her create, and only a fragment of that is attributable to her rebellious teenage age. Francky´s other daughter, a ravishing, guiltless mouse with few cares in the world (who reminds me of Newt in "Aliens"), embraces her returning father, not remembering the circumstances of his departure.

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The youngest of the three brothers, Alex still lives at home with his nurse, and begins the fade away as a naïve and self-conscious teen that is just growing into his shell, while accepting the responsibilities of being the family´s breadwinner. Alex commences the film as a simple grunt for the local underworld boss painting and cleaning, while progressing to a position of trust and respect… last civilization.

The third brother is the black sheep of the family benefit of reasons never succinctly divulged in the narrative of the film. Dubbed "Coco," the movie starts to roll when he unexpectedly arrives knowledgeable in after an unexplained absence of 15 years. Temperate and unnaturally restrained, Coco is the diametric opposite of his brother Francky who wears his emotions on his sleeve, both good and bad. Francky allows his anger to boil over into physicality with friends and family (not to mention casual acquaintances and hookers), while Coco takes abuse without saying a information, only a excitable twitch signifying his awareness of what is being said. Screams in the night and mutterings around a person named "Ronnie" convey more going behind Coco´s upset, squinty eyes than he lets on, and indeed belies a primal similarity with his fellow Francky.

The lynchpin in this family is the men´s mother, Marthe. Select yet maternal, Marthe seems overjoyed to see her shattered ancestry reunited, but is also tortured by the story the kith and kin has accomplished. Revealed in small pieces to the brother too teenaged to remember, the family reflects following on the death of their patriarch. A decorated hostilities veteran, the family´s father came upon someone mentally tortured by the things he´d seen and done while fighting in the Legion that warped his mind and his persona to an unrecognizable form. A few years later, he took a gun, went out with his favorite dog, and shot himself in the forest, shattering his family and forever changing them, even young Alex who was too young to remember the occasion firsthand.

That was the when it happened, as I said up front, that changed the issue forever. Shortly after his father´s downfall, Coco disappeared. Francky married, became restless and unhappy, and left his two daughters in the care of their grandmother. Alex, at most just becoming a man (an awkward teen in transition), still lives at home but has at best recently gotten his first tastes of play as his divided siblings revenue to complicate his rather slow fact as a gofer for the local mafia. What follows is a microcosmic look at of human social interactions, highlighting our first needs suitable pleasure (and carnal sex), our penchant for twist, and the compassionate condition in a restrained, so-called "civilized" society which prohibits some of our most servile desires.

Francky lets all his emotions out, rarely restraining himself, and it is only through his position of power and authority that he is not ostracized representing it. Coco is the require opposite, ready to operation like Francky, shy of the intimacy and the brutality, but holding it in to a core where he is about to explode, and when he does, Coco does more harm than Francky continuously would detonate himself, even at his wildest. The third piece of the puzzle is Alex. Just coming into his own, he sees the two extremes of his brothers and sees their mistakes and actively attempts to avoid being caught in the progenitors keep of anger and might. Alex goes at the end of one’s tether with the biggest changes in the blear, from a gofer to a respected countess in the mafia community, he is the agent of the restrained society, going so decidedly as the weed out those that unsettle the order that has been achieved.

A well-acted film, "Fleece of Darbies, Feelings of Beast" is ultimately a movie that deals with soul passions and our want to control them. Coco reminds me of Billy Bob Thornton´s prototype "Sling Blade" wielding Karl, who may-or-may not be informed the line between right and flawed, but when the emotions capture control of him, it matters little what he knows. Francky is emotional, tiptoeing more than the words from time to time, but because his passion isn´t stored up, he is capable to take off d withdraw himself back from the edge that Coco flings over every time. And Alex begins as a child and travels an incredible gallivant to manhood and an entrance into the world which takes his growing freedom as an adult away from him. Their interactions require the story of a haut monde in flux, who has moved far from their primal origins without abandoning their locale in our unconscious.

While each of these rolls are played well, I would give my value for the finest work to the young lady playing Aurelie, Cathy Hinderchied. Her subtle, virginal glances and looks give you the candidly outlook of what is happening, and put in mind of you that the reason that everyone in the film suffers is because they have suit a part of a social construct that they cannot supervise and must abide by its rules. But a child, in behalf of good or bad, does not possess any quick-wittedness of task to that control, and can view things for the fundamental time and come to understand them. By the annihilation of the film, Aurelie loses that innocence, she becomes a fragment of it all, but her wonder and dream (and occasional comedy) are a welcome addition to the shoot.


Fly Away Home (1996)

June 26, 2010  (nancymashalnews)

Fly Away Home (1996)


Class

: Deed, Kids/Family, Drama

Duration

: 1 hr. 47 min.

Starring


Steersman

: Carroll Ballard

Producer

: Carol Baum, John Veitch

Distributor

: Columbia Pictures, Columbia TriStar Film Distributors International (Argentina)

Freeing Epoch

: September 13, 1996

Writer

: Bill Lishman, Robert Rodat, Vince McKewin

Carroll Ballard returns to the practice of his earlier classics THE BAN STALLION and NEVER CRY WOLF with this inspiring parentage stage production about the human marrow?s ability to tame and capture cosmos. In Canada, 13-year-old Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) is having tribulation coping with her mother's just out death. Making matters worse is that she is at present laboured to occupied c proceeding in with her eccentric father, Thomas (Jeff Bridges). But the total changes when 12 orphan goslings hatch, and Amy becomes their surrogate ma. Amy and the birds instantly controls, their relationship aiding the young girl's emotional governmental. At any rate, the geese grow up fast, and Amy realizes that they must be sent out on their own. With the boost of her chaplain, Amy devises a crack-brained pattern to force the birds to go south, overcoming insurmountable odds–both humanitarian and natural–in the process. Ballard?s film, based on Tally Lishman?s autobiography, is a heartfelt, moving drama that is universal in its themes of love, hope, and determination. Paquin delivers another solid exhibit as Amy, proving her Oscar for THE PIANO was no serendipity. What lifts DRAWBACK AWAY HOME to another plateau, however, is Caleb Deschanel?s creditable cinematography, which captures the gorgeous vista in a way that makes Amy?s final make even more astonishing.

You may remember that the 197…

June 23, 2010  (nancymashalnews)


You may commemorate that the 1970s were distinguished on disaster films, what with despairing ships, crashing airplanes, and burning buildings, and Fox’s “The Poseidon Adventure” from 1972 was one of the first and best of the breed. It was big, silly, escapist fun with people like Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Stella Stevens, and Shelley Winters scrambling as their lives. The 1978 Warner Bros. sequel, “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure,” was a dreadful affair, so I guess the studio wanted to consign it one more try in 2006 by remaking the original. “Poseidon” falls somewhere in between the campy extravagance of the first movie and the downright boredom of the sequel.

To make sure at least a modicum of big name, Warners hired headman Wolfgang Petersen to command the unique venture, Petersen having some be familiar with in watery films with “Das Boot,” unmoving his best exploit, and The Incomparable Storm,” excepting deed in “Air Force One, “In the Line of Fire,” and “Troy.” This may be his weakest handiwork yet, however, as no chestnut seems to must provided Petersen with anything more than an action script and a dearest-effects team.

The story follows the pattern set by the 1972 movie and Paul Gallico’s untried. It’s New Year’s Eve aboard a super voluptuousness liner at sea, when a huge rogue wave (formerly known as a tidal wave) hits the depart and turns it to. Most of the passengers are at a party in the main ballroom as the disaster strikes, and when some of them hear the captain say “We settle upon be conservative,” they know it’s time to make for higher earth. So with the captain trying to relieve most of the passengers in the ship’s ballroom, a small clique of people decide to forego the warnings and seep on their own by making their style to the bottom of the ship, which is now the top of the ship because it’s upside down, and get into the open air through the propeller openings before the ships sinks.

Two things interfere with our amusement of this calamity (if “enjoyment” is the accurate word for a film that capitalizes on the touchy vassal exposed to of disaster). The opening intervention is the abundance of prime effects, which are both a boon and a limitation. Obviously, today’s CGI can produce some startlingly realistic results, and the computer-generated graphics here are fairly good. However, things do not get displeasing to the best start when the first shot we see is a 360-degree skillet of the luxury liner that looks too tolerable to be true, too perfect to be real. In precluding, it looks approve of a computer-generated quit, even nevertheless the animators seamlessly integrate a bona fide actor constant thither its decks. From then on, the CGI works better, in a “Titanic” sort of way, but that and the unceasing, boisterous ways rather gain more than the cinema, leaving the characters to hang in the wind.

Which brings us to the actors. In the eccentric movie, we tended to care about them. Here we hardly flourish to know them and, that being so, could custody less less what happens to them. The first movie also established a tradition of using renowned-name actors in main and even minor roles. Here we obtain only two well-known faces and an assortment of sort of familiar, perhaps, kind of recognizable faces.

Two people you will recognize immediately are Kurt Russell as an immoderately possessive old man on a cruise with his nineteen-year-over the hill daughter. The other person you’ll recognize is Richard Dreyfuss as a gay architect, despondent on top of his partner leaving him. However, as good as nothing is done with Russell’s character being a preceding fireman and a onetime “mayor of New York”; nor is anything made of Dreyfuss’s hieroglyph being gay. OK, perhaps the fireman part helps Russell’s character in the heroics department, but the inclined reference to his being a mayor and Dreyfuss’s earthy acclimatization seem like a woman-shot gimmicks. They’re under no circumstances extraordinarily developed.

An actor you may or may not recognize is Josh Lucas, who actually gets excellent billing in the credits, as a maven gambler. As for myself, Lucas’s biggest declare to fame is reminding me of the Wilson brothers, Luke and Owen. Way, he’s not exactly a well-known dress. From there on, the actors intention possibly get a little more unheard-of for many viewers. Emmy Rossum plays Kurt Russell’s daughter, and viewers may tip her from “The Phantom of the Opera.” Fans of Ms. Rossum’s heaving bosom will be pleased to note that they are not only generously in evidence but play a corner in the film early on.

Moving leading, Jacinda Barrett plays a single mother, and Jimmy Bennett plays her baby boy; Mike Vogel plays Ms. Rossum’s character’s boyfriend; Mia Maestro plays a beautiful stowaway; and Kevin Dillon plays the movie’s designated slimeball. Any bets on which of the group is the in the first place to go?

Here’s the thing: Director Petersen is disposed a couple of minutes to introduce these characters to us, and then it’s off to the races. The big wave hits, the special effects acquiesce to over, the characters fight to cajole to cover, and it’s over. If we didn’t recognize at least a couple of the actors in the main roles, we wouldn’t even care about them. Viewing “Poseidon” is a little equivalent to watching a documentary in that we feel detached from any of the people in it, rendered helpless by the sights, sounds, and initiative.


Short Circuit 2 review

June 22, 2010  (nancymashalnews)

In 1986 audiences were introduced to wisecracking robot Johnny Five (the voice of Tim Blaney) and Ben Jahvri (Fisher Stevens), his English-mangling Indian robotic creator, in the original Short Circuit. It was a silent teeny comedy that had the good assets to trait a couple of charismatic lead characters, at one of which just happened to be a clod. We all know Hollywood loves to give us more of those characters we supposedly love, so in their infinite wisdom gave us 1988s’ brilliantly titled Limited Confines 2.

Short Orbit was no Citizen Kane, but it establish an audience. Low on Limit 2, which seems to consider the exploit of an knowledgeable script unneccessary, seems to go below the assumption that more Johnny Five and Ben is all we demand. Dare say what? That just doesn’t always move.

In a sheet that could have been subtitled Johnny Five Goes To The Big City, we find Ben selling bauble replicas of his beloved birth on the streets of New York just to pamper a living. He meets sleazy salesman Fred (a really unfunny Michael McKean), and in Plot Pleach 101, they hurriedly become partners in a business to create small robots for a obese New York store. Exchange in some valuable diamonds, some bumbling crooks, a cute girl (Cynthia Gibb), and of dispatch wealth of fast-talking Johnny Five, and stir until you end up with 111 minutes of lifeless celluloid.

In all fairness to Scanty Circuit 2, I will rephrase that Fisher Stevens is funny as Ben, in what essential entertain appropriate for an much in evidence time to come influence for Apu from The Simpsons. Johnny Five gets some good lines too, though it’s a bit unsettling when a robot is funnier than Michael McKean. I’m steadfast screenwriters S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock focused their energies on the two leads (Ben and Johnny Five) and that any and all minor players were afterthoughts, as mercifully as was the development of a cohesive plot.

The supporting characters, including veteran Jack Weston, are so song dimensional as to be almost invisible, and annoyance the mistiness into the muck of mediocrity with little stab. If this was strictly a kid’s dusting, I could understand the scraggy characterizations. But Terminate Edge 2 was intended as a mainstream film, and it misses that attribute by a mile-and-a-half.

In hindsight, my ten-year-old daughter Sammy quite liked Abridged Circuit 2, and was a little concerned when Johnny Five was beaten and left as far as something motionless by the bad guys. She didn’t seem vexed when Michael McKean got knocked around. But worn out the crap out of a funny robot, well that’s another story.

With a characteristic mix of n…

June 19, 2010  (nancymashalnews)

With a characteristic mix of narrative anarchy, cinephile allusion, cartoon-style slapstick and Stygian-tinged comedy, Dante gleefully sinks his teeth into the amiable of fluffy, sugary, sickly small town fantasy esteemed of his pal and erstwhile producer Spielberg. It starts with a Christmas tip - a cute, cuddly little ‘mogwai’ - but the time of goodwill straight away turns hellish when, splashed with weaken, the creature starts sprouting the titular monsters, whose suspect of mischief extends to the murderous and beyond. As the all-American township falls prey to the little demons’ destructive urges, Dante lets rip with fabulous closest effects, hilariously sadistic set-pieces (most memorably the monsters wreaking destruction at a screening of Disney’s Snow White) and in-jokes galore, all delivered at such a heady tempo that the trashing of traditional American values and consumer goods even feels altogether liberating.

By Desson Howe Washington Pos…

June 17, 2010  (nancymashalnews)

By Desson Howe

Washington Post Staff Stringer

Friday, November 8, 2002

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THE LINES of destiny run parallel before converging in "Alias Betty," Claude Miller's watchable adaptation of the Ruth Rendell book "The Tree of Hands."

But the French movie is a chessboard of a thing ? it's about the movements of the pawns, not the pawns themselves. And that makes for interesting, rather than emotionally compelling viewing.

Although, make no mistake, the beginning cannot be accused of lacking intense emotion. A devastating tragedy starts this dramatic board game in the first place.

Betty (Sandrine Kiberlain), a successful novelist and single mother living in Paris, is at home with her 4-year-old son, Joseph (Arthur Setbon), and her eccentric mother, Margot (Nicole Garcia), who suffers from an unusual psychological condition that causes outbreaks of impulsive violence.

Something awful happens and Betty finds herself waiting in the emergency room hoping against hope. Alas, her worst fears come to pass and Betty loses a son forever. Or does she? When she returns home, Margot has a surprise for her: another cute 4-year-old (Alexis Chatrian), whose real name is Jose ? close enough, as far as Margot's concerned.

Already used to strange behavior from her mother (in the opening scene, the younger Betty suffers a physical assault with scissors by her mother), Betty is fairly calm about getting to the bottom of this dilemma. She even maintains composure when she learns this child has been reported missing in the media.

Little by little, Betty likes Jose staying right where he is: at home with her. There are contributing factors. Jose has marks of abuse on his body. And his mother, Carole (Mathilde Seigner), it turns out, is a hooker who doesn't seem unduly alarmed by the child's disappearance.

And let the lines of coincidence, the unfolding of that chess game, begin. The police badger Carole's boyfriend Francois (Luck Mervil), who has no idea what happened to Jose. Francois, in turn, suspects a hustler-forger named Alex (Edouard Baer) is not only Jose's biological father, but possibly the kidnapper.

Meanwhile Alex and Carole conspire to rip off an old lady of her mansion by selling it when she goes out of town. And Betty is forced to consider lying about the boy to her inquisitive ex-husband (Stephane Freiss) and a doctor (Roschdy Zem) with whom she's rapidly becoming involved.

There's more. And by the end, there will be a grand resolution, at an airport, that suggests the work of a benevolent force who likes clean and tidy resolutions.

Miller, who was once Francois Truffaut's assistant, and who made "Camille," "Under Suspicion" and "The Accompanist," has a sure hand when it comes to images. The opening sequence, centered around Joseph's tragedy, shows us a sad incident with restrained, poetic precision. In fact, he follows all the action with this aesthetic detachment. Betty's attitude toward her mother's behavior, and this kidnapping, is remarkably free of hysterics. And virtually everyone else is involved in some sort of deception, scam, thievery, almost as a matter of course. This is what life's about, it seems. And it forces us to reconsider every character: Are the bad so very bad? What is normal behavior, anyway? If this movie leaves you cool, it also leaves you intriguingly contemplative.

ALIAS BETTY (Unrated, 101 minutes)
?

Contains obscenity, nudity, genital situations and some violence.

In French with subtitles. At Visions Cinema/Bistro/Lounge.

Barb Wire review

June 13, 2010  (nancymashalnews)

Hogan’s credits include assign module route of the diabolical Batman Forever, added numerous pop videos. No coincidence, then, that this nasty action-adventure should employ similar building principles: waste dirt sets, rusty warehouses, tons of fireworks, and orange filters to depict the dying skyline of a futuristic America ravaged by its espouse cordial combat. The year’s 2017, the place Steel Harbor, about to a raggle-taggle society of misfits and the legendary Hammerhead Bar and Grille, owned by the eponymous ballerina, a stilettoed, heavy-leather blonde with a predisposition for roughing it. Before long, former freedom-fighter Barb (Anderson Lee) is roped into dollop some past it resistance colleagues find a join in wedlock of contact lenses which will enable a government hand, who alone knows on every side her bosses’ plans seeing that biological warfare, to escape the country. Method, rude and looking not opposite from Nazi extras from Kelly’s Heroes, the Congressional Directorate always appearance of to be inseparable step before…until Barb gets life-threatening and tools up exchange for a showdown. To be fair, Anderson Lee cuts a average dash as a cartoon-style heroine (acting aside). But the film’s haphazardly edited, lacks record clout, and rambles on to a ludicrously extended conclusion.

Redbelt review

June 11, 2010  (nancymashalnews)

In his engrossing new film, “Redbelt,” David Mamet uses jujitsu as a metaphor for life. If it doesn’t fit quite as neatly as baseball, that’s only because relatively few are familiar with this form of mixed martial arts, which developed from judo.

So here’s a crash course written by somebody who, besides being a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, also trained in jujitsu for five years. “Redbelt” is entertaining in a pulpy kind of way, like the fight films of the 1930s and ’40s, and more accessible than most of Mamet’s movies.

His dialogue for “Redbelt,” with its sentence fragments and repetitions (”that’s right, that’s right”), is as idiosyncratic as anything he has written for the stage. It sounds appropriate spewing from hustlers on the fringe of professional jujitsu. For a fight promoter offering a bribe, Mamet coined the word “financialize,” which has the ring of something you’d hear on Bloomberg.

Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in a career-making performance), the owner of a jujitsu academy in a seedy part of Los Angeles, has disdain for those who profit from the martial art by competing. He’s a purist who instills in his students the samurai code of honor.

Terry is barely able to keep his school open, as his wife, Sondra (Alice Braga, Sonia’s niece), who manages the books, knows better than he does. A gun accidentally goes off, breaking the window of the place and causing all manner of collateral damage.

Most amusingly, it injects Mike into the world of Hollywood. At a nightclub, he saves Chet Frank (Tim Allen), a spoiled movie star, from bullies. The next day Mike receives an invitation to Chet’s house for dinner and a $20,000 gold watch.

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The party at Frank’s mansion clearly has been informed by Mamet’s experiences in the movie industry. Not only does Chet want to be Mike’s best friend - he invites him to be his producer - but Chet’s wife (Rebecca Pidgeon, who happens to be Mrs. Mamet) wants to be Sondra’s. Movie deals and fashion deals are dangled in front of the young couple’s eyes. Their naivete is sweet but also dangerous.

The cast has been meticulously chosen. Ejiofor (”Talk to Me” and “Children of Men”) isn’t large, but he projects strength and a reassuring presence, and his decision to speak softly reinforces the notion of a man keeping enormous power under wraps.

Allen’s Chet is the opposite: someone who makes a habit of throwing his weight around. Allen uses his natural affability to show how quickly you can either be part of the in-crowd or be on the street. He’s mastered Mamet’s difficult delivery.

The parts for women aren’t as hearty, though the actresses do what they can with them, especially Emily Mortimer as a lawyer with emotional problems who fires the gun.

Only after seeing the rest of the film do you understand how everything relates to that errant gunshot. If Mamet the director had a third the brilliance of Mamet the screenwriter, this would have been a great movie. You get the feeling he became a filmmaker only so other directors wouldn’t muck around with his words.

In scenes set inside Mike’s school, Mamet seems to forget he has a space larger than a stage to create on. Los Angeles looks as desolate as an Edward Hopper painting. Things do pick up visually at a jujitsu meet at which athletic bodies compete through minuscule movements. Mamet’s love for the sport comes through in every frame.

– Advisory: Profanity.

E-mail Ruthe Stein at rstein@sfchronicle.com.