Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: A kidnappers' guide to São Paulo; one family's journey from Mao to now; the Darth Vader of "Donkey Kong"; "Zebraman" stripes against evil; on the road with Levi's ghost
Jason Kohn's gorgeous and terrifying film "Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)" is a confusing experience, and some might say needlessly so. Not merely does it give you a vertiginous overview of the colorful, divided, violent and intensely fucked-up nature of Brazilian society; it tries to reinvent documentary technique as it does so. When Kohn interviews a kidnap victim, an Amazonian frog farmer or the Brazilian attorney general, he sits a translator right next to the person speaking, so it's easy to get sidetracked: Wait a minute; which of these two attractive women had her ear cut off, and got sold back to her family for $3 million?

Kohn's pumping soundtrack of Brazilian rock, pop and rap is sometimes cranked so high you miss bits of conversation, and the glorious wide-screen cinematography of Heloisa Passos is frequently distracting on its own terms. Maybe I've finally become a fogey when it comes to documentary (it had to happen sometime), but I'm not at all sure this formal overload is serving Kohn's purposes. Then again, if the purpose of "Manda Bala" is to make you say, "Holy cow, honey! Let's cancel that Brazilian vacation!" then it's served admirably.

All that said, Kohn's film brilliantly depicts the Brazilian financial capital of São Paulo as a hallucinatory "Blade Runner" realm of the present, where the rich get richer through epic-scale political corruption, drive in bulletproof cars and fly above the city in private helicopters, the better to avoid the epidemic of kidnapping for ransom. (Hey, a plastic surgeon can always make you a new ear, as we observe in grisly detail.) Kohn actually interviews a balaclava-clad professional kidnapper, who talks about his deeds with a kind of professional neutrality, much as a salesman or banker would. It becomes clear that the poverty, wealth, crime and corruption of this city of 20 million are all aspects of the same thing, a massive societal dysfunction that is much more exaggerated than our own, but not so very different in kind. (Opens Aug. 17 at the Angelika Film Center in New York; Aug. 31 in Los Angeles; Sept. 14 in Boston, Houston and Philadelphia; Sept. 21 in Dallas, Detroit and Minneapolis; Sept. 28 in Chicago, San Diego, Washington and Seattle; and Oct. 12 in Las Vegas and Memphis, with more cities to follow.)

Chinese director Zhang Yang makes subtle, beautifully crafted films that blend a nostalgia for China's recent past with an appreciation for the greater personal liberty Chinese people enjoy today. He's on the other side of Chinese cinema from the bleaker, artier work of Jia Zhangke ("The World," "Still Life") but they're addressing the same issues. At times I found Zhang's new family epic "Sunflower" dipping into sentimentality, but taken in all it's a marvelously rich, tragicomic spectacle of father-son struggle and generational change.

Beginning in 1976, the year of Chairman Mao's death and a major earthquake in eastern China, Zhang tracks three decades in the life of Zhang Gengnian (played with marvelous reserve by Sun Haiying, a beloved star in China), a one-time Beijing artist whose career was derailed by the Cultural Revolution. Gengnian is a dour and unforgiving father, but we can always see in his eyes his aspirations for his son, Xiangyang (played by three different actors at different ages), who is growing up amid China's economic and social transformation. Joan Chen is terrific as Gengnian's wife, a would-be social climber frustrated at every turn. Given the intimacy and delicacy of "Sunflower," it's no surprise that it's at least partly autobiography. (Zhang Yang's father, Zhang Huaxun, is also a film director.) (Opens Aug. 17 at Lincoln Plaza in New York, with wider release to follow.)

I was all prepared to be intensely irritated by Seth Gordon's "The King of Kong," which follows the struggle between a Florida hot-sauce king and a Washington state schoolteacher for the all-time high score on the classic 1980s video game "Donkey Kong." I mean, who cares about these two losers with no lives, right? And this kind of subcultural spelunking has been done aplenty, if not in this precise realm. But eventually, by depicting the world of "classic arcade gaming" in all its intense nuttiness and geekery, Gordon throws the whole thing into human perspective. Is achieving 1 million in "Donkey Kong" any more of an arbitrary landmark than Barry Bonds' 756th home run? Or have we just convinced ourselves that one means more than the other?

As in any documentary about a self-enclosed social world, it's the human story that counts. Laid-off Boeing engineer turned science teacher Steve Wiebe has been trying to reach Donkey Kong's promised land in his garage for years, and finally unlocks the machine's notoriously difficult secrets to enter the legendary "kill screen." But the bizarre and insular world of East Coast video-game dorks, committed to an aging Jedi named Billy Mitchell -- a long-haired, über-patriotic Jesus-lookalike douchebag who now sells Buffalo-wing hot sauce -- won't accept Wiebe's world record, and suspect that he's in league with a guy named Mr. Awesome, who dresses up like Gen. Patton to sell his dating-secrets videos.

If this all sounds a bit too much like watching professional wrestling on TNT, all I can say is, it ain't faked. Mitchell and Wiebe (and Mr. Awesome too) are deadly serious about their rivalry, and ultimately Gordon's movie becomes both a hilarious story about an unbelievable collection of arrested-teenage morons and, yes, an inspiring fable of persistence and redemption. I haven't mentioned this movie's fabulous addition to the English language yet, so here it is: the verb "to chumpatize." (Opens Aug. 17 in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin, Texas; Aug. 24 in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Washington; Aug. 31 in Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Kansas City and San Diego; Sept. 7 in Atlanta and Meredith, N.H.; and Sept. 14 in Denver and Nashville, with more cities to follow.)

Next page: An apocalyptic fantasy set in 2010 -- for the whole family