Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: Best parkour-style convenience-store dance number in movie history! Plus Estonia's "Singing Revolution" and Andy Warhol's missing boyfriend.
In the very first scene of Adam Rifkin's "Look," we watch (supposedly via surveillance camera) as two nubile teenage girls strip down to their thongs in a clothing-store dressing room, compare butt-jiggles, pretend to make out, discuss whether or not to get, um, a certain anatomical area bleached, and then "forget" to take off the stuff they were trying out when they put their own clothes back on. If you think that sounds like thoroughly disreputable grade-C trash, well, you'd be right. But it's well-made trash, a rare commodity these days. And it's also the beginning of a funny, filthy, dark-hearted ensemble drama that's something like "Crash" with no conscience and really evil drugs in its system. I liked it a hell of a lot.

OK, granted, there are some plausibility issues with a whole movie that pretends to consist entirely of surveillance images. Like the fact that, for the most part, surveillance cameras don't record sound. Doh! So when we watch one of the aforementioned mall hotties, Sherri (Spencer Redford), trying to seduce her upstanding, married-with-a-pregnant-wife English teacher (Jamie McShane) by slithering out of her underthings in the high school parking lot, we shouldn't really be hearing her nasty come-ons too, should we? Details, details.

While Sherri seeks to bag the wavering Mr. Krebbs, other stuff is going on in this grainy-cam view of west Los Angeles. A Kevin Smith-style pair of convenience-store doofuses argue about girlfriends and perform an awesome parkour-style dance number to a dance-metal song called "Electrocuted." ("I'm gonna be elec-tro-cute-ed / 'Cause I killed my whole fam-i-lee.") But aren't those friendly guys buying a carton of Parliaments and pints of brandy actually the Candid Camera Killers, who've been on a three-day carjacking spree and just shot a cop in full view of his own dashboard-cam? How awesome.

In and out of these people's lives also come a department-store Lothario with a truly impressive record of luring female co-workers into the storeroom, a high-priced defense lawyer with a new baby, a gorgeous wife and a hunky African-American male lover, and a hopeless workplace dweeb who has become the butt of endless, humiliating practical jokes. Just wait for the bad-taste male-stripper gag at the end of the movie that rubs your face in the miserable state of humanity! You'll love it!

No, seriously -- I recognize that praising this pseudo-experimental indie made by the guy who directed "Detroit Rock City" (and, what is far worse, wrote "Underdog") is close to embracing perversity for its own sake. But frankly, I'd rather see this assemblage of good-humored overactors delivering a quasi-comical, profoundly misanthropic essay on why life is Totally Fucked than sit through another earnest indie drama about people and their pain. Watch what happens to Mr. Krebbs after he gets into the front seat of that Nissan with the conniving nymphet! Now that's some human suffering. (Opens Dec. 14 in New York and Los Angeles and Dec. 21 in Chicago, with more cities to follow.)

I imagine that Jim and Maureen Tusty's documentary "The Singing Revolution" will mainly be of interest to Estonian immigrants, their families and other people from the former Eastern bloc, but it's actually a wonderful exploration of that still little-understood period, from the mid-1980s through 1991, when the empire of Soviet communism rapidly collapsed. Viewing that collapse from the perspective of a tiny, intensely patriotic country (total population: 1 million) whose principal nationalist expression is choral singing -- well, that makes it all the more improbable and delightful.

Repeatedly overrun by larger neighbors, and occupied by the Soviets since the end of World War II, Estonia nearly had its idiosyncratic culture and language wiped off the map. But as the Tustys' interviewees explain it, the choral tradition literally kept the nation alive, and the result was that in 1991 Estonia had a democratic revolution in which no guns were fired and no one was killed, even in a bitter standoff between the country's Estonian majority and a large and belligerent Russophile minority. This movie was supported extensively by the Estonian government, and as such is very much the official version of events. It does not explore the problems that have afflicted all of Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet era. But still: Estonia, Baltic land of beautiful forests, incipient democracy and weird, cool singing! What's not to love? (Now playing in Los Angeles. Opens Dec. 14 in New York, with more cities to follow.)

When making the documentary "A Walk Into the Sea," director Esther Robinson tried to track down people in Andy Warhol's former inner circle who remembered her uncle, Danny Williams. An aspiring filmmaker who was apparently Warhol's lover and collaborator before being driven out of that notoriously catty clique, Williams disappeared off a Massachusetts beach one night in 1966 -- presumably either a suicide or an accidental drowning victim -- and also disappeared from official histories of the Warhol "Factory."

There's an appealing emotion, not to say naiveté, in Robinson's quest to rescue her uncle's reputation from one of the most difficult and vicious artistic scenes in cultural history, but such veteran Warholians as filmmaker Paul Morrissey, actress Brigid Berlin, photographer Billy Name and Velvet Underground member John Cale can give her only drug-addled fragments of memory. (Cale is the only one of these people who does not appear to have had his immortal soul eaten by Andy Warhol.) Like her uncle, Robinson seems like a sweet, talented person flummoxed by the riddles of the Warhol world, such as whether that atmosphere of ultimate nastiness and self-destruction somehow enabled an explosion of creativity. As far as it goes, her movie is a lovely, dreamlike concoction. (Opens Dec. 14 at Cinema Village in New York.)

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