In a ‘Perfect’ World

Satoshi Kon’s “Perfect Blue,” which opens regular runs Friday at the Colorado, Pasadena, and the Monica 4-Plex, arrives with a raft of rave reviews--which it lives up to. It is an amazing feat of animation, a stylish psychological thriller, in which a young singer, Mima Kirigoe, a member of the fading Spice Girls-like Cham, leaves the group to become a soap opera actress, playing an emotionally disturbed character. It would seem that, although our heroine is being menaced by a stalker for real, she also may be losing her mind, under the stress of the role and the stalking. What’s more, she may have an unknown enemy trying to drive her crazy. Adapted by Sadayuki Murai from Yoshikazu Takeuchi’s novel, “Perfect Blue” creates an increasingly terrifying world and pulls you into it with the effectiveness of a Hitchcock suspense classic. Colorado, 2588 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 796-9704; Monica 4-Plex: 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.

Kim Longinotto and Ziba mir-Hosseini’s “Divorce Iranian Style,” which opens Friday for a one-week run at the Grande 4-Plex (Figueroa and 3rd streets, downtown L.A.) as part of the Documentary Days series, is a strong, in-your-face cinema verite study of three very different women facing enormous odds to obtain divorces in a theocracy that frowns on divorce and deprives women of virtually all rights. What’s surprising is how combative and outspoken these women are--and that the filmmakers were even allowed to make so critical a documentary in the first place. (213) 617-0268.

Writer-director Hilary Brougher certainly deserves an “A” for ambition for her no-budget yet elegant supernatural thriller “The Sticky Fingers of Time,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Music Hall (9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills). Successful crime fiction writer Tucker Harding (Terumi Matthews) steps outside her East Village flat one day in 1947 and is whooshed 40 years into the future, where she’s thrust into a sinister adventure. Brougher is adept at defining past and present but mars her solid directing skill with a needlessly complicated premise and an overly arch tone that, intentionally or otherwise, suggests a certain smug self-satisfaction that’s a real turn-off. Much more effective is the subtle way in which Brougher suggests a lesbian subtext. (310) 274-6869.

The Sunset 5’s (8000 Sunset Blvd.) newest Friday and Saturday midnight show is just the kind of bizarre yet effective item that plays best at 12 a.m. Writer-director Tamara Hernandez displays a knack for camp pathos in her “Men Cry Bullets,” deftly walking a tight wire between outrageousness and seriousness as she tells of a novice drag entertainer (Steven Nelson) drawn to a wildly unstable writer of dark, anonymous erotica (Honey Lauren), who fluctuates dangerously between displays of brutal rage and aching vulnerability. The arrival of the writer’s blond debutante cousin (Jeri Ryan), who has her own dark side, doesn’t help matters. “Men Cry Bullets” is darkly funny yet its people and the damage that has been done to them have a disturbingly authentic quality. Hernandez inspires her cast to meet the fierce demands she places on them, but “Men Cry Bullets” would benefit from a tighter edit. (323) 848-3500.

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When a film has a star who’s just won an Oscar--and whose director has won wide praise for his debut picture--yet ends up premiering on a weekend morning slot a couple of years after it was made, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to smell a stinker. The trouble with “A Little Bit of Soul,” which opens a run Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, is not that it’s so terrible but simply that it’s such a bloody bore. David Wenham plays a nerdy scientist who is on the verge of discovering a way to halt the aging process. He receives an all-important invitation to a weekend in the country at the estate of a woman (Heather Mitchell) who has her own charitable foundation. When the scientist arrives, he finds himself in competition with his far more poised former girlfriend-assistant (Frances O’Connor)--and also finds that his hostess is married to none other than his nation’s federal treasurer (“Shine’s” Geoffrey Rush). Wenham and O’Connor are the innocents who find themselves in the increasingly sinister clutches of their sophisticated hosts. None of what ensues is engaging or original, and none of the stars, who have been pitilessly photographed, have the kind of looks or charm so helpful in putting over talky, old-fashioned hokum. This 1997 Australian film was written and directed by “Children of the Revolution’s” Peter Duncan. (310) 394-9741.

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Renowned documentary filmmaker and UCLA professor Marina Goldovskaya has said of Hungarian documentarian Peter Forgacs that “he breathes life into the archive of history,” which aptly describes two films he has built around the footage of two talented amateur filmmakers, Nandor Andrasovits and Gyuri Peto. The UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and the International Documentary Assn. will hold a workshop with Forgacs on Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Melnitz Hall Design Room 3534 and will screen Forgacs’ 60-minute “The Double Exodus” (1998) and the 75-minute “Free Fall” (1996) on Monday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. A discussion and reception will follow; both events are free.

In both instances Forgacs, with economy, simplicity and understatement, has taken silent footage, presented it with maximum grace, pace and impact and enriched it with spoken texts of the filmmakers and his subjects, drawn upon complementary archival footage and had Tibor Szemzo compose remarkably evocative scores, a major contribution.

Nandor Andrasovits was captain of the Danube flatboat the Queen Elizabeth and in that capacity took part in a dramatic attempt to transport Hungarian Jews to Palestine in 1939 despite the fact that, bowing to Arab pressure, the British had begun to restrict Jewish immigrations. The journey becomes fraught with peril and suspense as complications and dangers mount, with the fleeing Jews facing oppression on all sides, causing you to wonder if this odyssey will turn out to be another Voyage of the Damned. The second half deals with the captain transporting Bessarabian Germans, fleeing Soviet control, to be relocated in Poland, where in voice-over we hear a woman telling us of the fate of her family. Andrasovits was a gifted filmmaker, and Forgacs assembles the captain’s footage to suggest that he was a humane, compassionate individual at a time when Europe was disintegrating into chaos and evil.

“Free Fall” is even more intense. Peto, who was born in 1906, filmed his extended family--he often had a friend or relative turn the camera on him as well--to record the pleasant existence of upper-middle-class Hungarian Jews that, despite a constant erosion of civil rights, continued to a remarkable degree right until Hitler occupied the country in March 1944. (Still, you wonder why they didn’t try to flee the country before it was too late, especially since they apparently were aware of the Nazi concentration camps.) In any event, you become quite involved with Peto, his family and friends, and especially his attractive fiancee Eva Lengyel, and as the film’s end draws near, you start fearing for their lives and wonder whether they survived the Holocaust. (310) 206-3225.

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The Strand Releasing 10th anniversary series continues at the Sunset 5 on Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. with “Grief.” In this unlikely titled 1994 ultra-low-budget comedy, writer-director Richard Glatzer makes hilarious use of his experiences as a producer of “Divorce Court” as he takes us into the crazed world of writers for a fictional lurid daytime courtroom TV show, “The Love Judge.” The staff runs the gamut of sexual leanings from gay to straight, from an individual uncertain about his orientation to another of indeterminate gender. Craig Chester and Jackie Beat star.

The UCLA Film Archive and the Silent Society of Hollywood Heritage Inc. present Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater the poetic 1929 romantic tragedy “The Last Performance,” by Paul Fejos. It stars a mesmerizing Conrad Veidt as a magician torn by unrequited passion for his young assistant (Mary Philbin), who falls in love with a younger man (Leslie Fenton, who a decade later became a respected director). With live musical accompaniment by Michael Mortilla. (310) 206-FILM. Note: UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television presents in the James Bridges Theater tonight at 7:30 “A Tribute to George Burns.” (310) 206-8013.

Further Notes: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, is celebrating the memory of Roddy McDowall, a devoted member of the academy who served as a governor and an officer, with a screening Friday at 8 p.m. of John Ford’s 1941 classic “How Green Was My Valley,” a story of a Welsh mining family. The multi-Oscar-winner was restored by the academy and the UCLA film archive. (310) 247-3600.

The Latino International Film Festival will present Spanish director Carlos Saura with its lifetime achievement award along with his newest film, “Goya in Bordeaux,” Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Egyptian Theater. (323) 469-9066.