Beyond the Multiplex

"Who Killed the Electric Car?" will get you all revved up. Plus: A terrifying ground-level view of life in occupied Iraq.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

The EV-1 funeral in "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

June 29, 2006 | We're bullish on America yet again this week here at Beyond the Multiplex world HQ. OK, that's a lie -- as the latest crop of indie films demonstrates, our country is trapped in a slowly worsening nightmare in Iraq, and its energy policy (try to say that phrase without snickering) is pretty much being set in the boardrooms of Big Oil. But, hey. It's shaping up as a terrific summer for movies, even if you have only the vaguest idea that somebody, for some reason, made a new Superman film.

"A Prairie Home Companion" is now such a big hit ($12.6 million and counting) that dozens of theaters across the country are holding "Rocky Horror"-style singalong screenings. Yes, that's unbelievably dorky and sweet, and no, I'm not making it up. (Not sure if this has reached the stage of props and costumes yet, or snappy comeback dialogue.) Beyond the other obvious hits for the Dockers-wearing, Sauvignon Blanc-swilling set -- chiefly I mean "Wordplay" and "An Inconvenient Truth" -- all sorts of other, even less likely films are doing surprisingly well.

Larry Clark's positively cheerful skate-boy adventure, "Wassup Rockers," pretty much blew the doors off the Angelika in downtown Manhattan last weekend, and moves on to Chicago and L.A. this week. Lian Lunson's concert film "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man" did nearly as well. Delving deeper into the numbers, though, is where you find the really good news. Dan Ireland's "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont," starring Joan Plowright (which I haven't seen, although friends have loved it), has been creeping around the country since last fall, completely below the radar, and piling up close to $900,000. Deepa Mehta's "Water" has grossed $2.5 million. Kevin Willmott's mockumentary "CSA: Confederate States of America," still playing in five cities, has passed $660,000.

I had the impression that Nicole Holofcener's devastating "Friends With Money," for me one of the movies of the year, had been underappreciated. Not true; it's still playing on 38 screens and has grossed $13.1 million. Rian Johnson's Hammett-goes-to-high school cult hit "Brick" is closing in on $2 million. Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne's wrenching drama "L'Enfant," for which I had cynically predicted zilch at the box office, is at $630,000 -- pretty damn good for a downbeat foreign-language film about a guy who sells his own baby. Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine's terrific documentary "Ballets Russes" will end up a little north of $800,000, and that's a movie about a bunch of Russian ballet dancers in their 80s and 90s.

On the other hand, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' "Road to Guantánamo," which I wrote about at length last week, had a pretty weak opening despite tons of media coverage and a modest amount of controversy. Between the people who won't go see it because it's treasonous, and the people who won't go because it's too damn depressing, I'm afraid the American public is pretty much covered. The too-damn-depressing quotient might also be an issue this week, in the case of Andrew Berends' intriguing and frustrating documentary "The Blood of My Brother," the latest (and certainly not the last) in a series of films about the Iraq war that, it seems, Americans are not exactly rushing to see.

Chris Paine's documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is pretty damn depressing too, but it's liable to get people hopping mad, whether or not they buy Paine's overarching conspiracy theory. In the turbulent wake of "An Inconvenient Truth," this movie could be huge among eco-freaks and alterna-car geeks (may both their tribes increase a thousandfold). Finally, I know that Michael Kang's debut feature, "The Motel," sounds like a standard-issue immigrant coming-of-age fable -- Asian-American kid grows up in motel-owning family -- but it's a lot funnier and livelier than that, with some of the best dialogue I've heard all year.

Next page: What happened to Mel Gibson's and Tom Hanks' eco-rides?