Beyond the Multiplex

An abortion film that will upset you, no matter which side you're on. Plus: What would Jesus do ... if his kid were gay?

By Andrew O'Hehir

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

Still from "Lake of Fire"

Oct. 4, 2007 | You have to be nuts -- or more specifically, you need to have an especially pernicious variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder -- to try to keep track of film releases at this time of year. I guess that's why they gave me the job! Everyone I know in this racket is looking even more hollow-eyed and ghoulish than usual (which is saying something) as we spend the loveliest days of fall creeping from one dark room to another to ingest salutary fables about abortion, homosexuality, religious fundamentalism, suicide and torture. (I don't understand how and why it happens that the mood of Page One infects art-house cinema, or vice versa, but it definitely does.)

I count 12 more-or-less new independent films reaching audiences this week, and that's not counting some intriguing mainstream fare (like George Clooney's star turn in "Michael Clayton"), the launch of a New York retrospective on the terrific French director Arnaud Desplechin and the films that inspired him, or the outstanding array of premieres on offer at the New York Film Festival. Of course I'm not confident that I've made the right choices of what to cover and what to skip; making any choices in the face of this onslaught feels like a moral victory.

Still, we bush-league obsessive-compulsives must prostrate ourselves before Tony Kaye, the quasi-legendary English-born director who has spent most of the last decade "in the wilderness," as he puts it, after the tempest surrounding his 1998 picture "American History X." Kaye feuded extensively and publicly with New Line Cinema and star Edward Norton Jr. after the studio re-edited the film, vainly tried to take his name off the final cut, and even proposed commissioning a new script from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott and shooting the whole thing over from scratch. Something of a flop on initial release, "American History X" is now a widely revered cult film (it's currently No. 41 on the IMDB users' Top 250), although Kaye succeeded in totally sabotaging his own career.

Five years after botching an opportunity to shoot a documentary about the late Marlon Brando's notoriously eccentric acting classes -- Kaye and Brando had a falling-out, reportedly after the former came to class dressed as Osama bin Laden -- Kaye is back. Kind of. His long-brewing documentary about America's abortion wars, "Lake of Fire," reaches theaters this week. It's in black-and-white, it's almost three hours long and nearly all of it was shot during the Clinton administration. So when Kaye claims that he doesn't care whether people see it or not, he actually might not be bullshitting. (He also insists that, like all his work, it isn't really finished yet.)

This week also brings us a social-issue documentary of a completely different flavor, Daniel Karslake's "For the Bible Tells Me So," a polished, heartfelt, PBS-style exploration of how Christian families deal with adult children who come out as lesbian or gay. A.J. Schnack's haunting "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" might be the most intimate screen treatment of the late indie-rock god, despite the fact that Cobain himself is almost never seen in the film. Lynn Hershman Leeson's "Strange Culture" explores the Kafka-esque odyssey of an oddball artist sucked into our government's vacuum-cleaner approach to fighting terrorism, while Alex LeMay's uneven "Desert Bayou" follows displaced African-American Katrina refugees to new homes in lily-white Utah. Then there's a morose little indie comedy called "The Good Night," written and directed by Jake Paltrow. It displays a few flashes of mean-spirited imagination, and it stars his big sister, Gwyneth.

I should note that another major title opening this week is Amir Bar-Lev's fascinating documentary "My Kid Could Paint That" (about the much-celebrated painter Marla Olmstead, now 7 years old), which I'll cover in a separate feature. Also opening, unseen by me: Justin Lin's post-Bruce Lee mockumentary "Finishing the Game," the family drama "Black Irish" and the decadent neo-noir "Broken," starring Heather Graham and Jeremy Sisto.

Next page: A very close look at abortion