A film that’s out of the bag

It would be best to simply recommend “Baghead” without any description so its surprises could remain intact. Nevertheless . . .

The characters are struggling actors with relationship complications who decide to write a movie to showcase themselves. But wait! It’s much better than it sounds. There’s a scary guy with a bag on his head (or perhaps just the idea of such a guy), the excruciating awkwardness of failed seduction, resonant snapshots of different kinds of love and some genuinely startling moments. Seriously.

The movie was written and directed by the Duplass brothers, whose “The Puffy Chair” was an indie-circuit darling. So, naturally, “Baghead” starts off with a delicious buffeting of the navel-gazing $1,000-movie crowd from whence the filmmakers come. Where it goes from there is delightfully unpredictable.

The acting by all four principals is very strong. Particularly effective is the earthily alluring Greta Gerwig, quickly becoming a staple of just the sort of camcorder-auteur films “Baghead” affectionately lampoons. The filmmakers maintain a delicate balance that generates tension on multiple levels, including sexual. They giddily mix genres, but “Baghead,” part meta-cinematic comedy, part relationship drama and part horror movie, remains rooted in reality.

-- Michael Ordona

“Baghead.” MPAA rating: R, for language, some sexual content and nudity. Running time: 1 hour, 21 minutes. In selected theaters.

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Too bad it takes more than it gives

“Take” is called a thriller in its press notes, but it’s really one of those tragedy-under-a-microscope slogs that assumes a surfeit of storytelling angles makes a harrowing incident automatically more interesting.

Writer-director Charles Oliver’s parallel-tracks narrative gives us Ana (Minnie Driver), an economically straitjacketed wife and mother trying to do the best for her developmentally challenged son, and Saul (Jeremy Renner), a lowlife with lethal debt problems who grows increasingly desperate about his situation.

Guessing how these lives tragically intersect isn’t terribly hard -- present-day scenes show us Saul on death row and Ana driving to witness his execution -- but it gives the movie an exploitatively creepy dramatic pall in which we’re just waiting around for the voyeurism of a shattering moment of violence and someone’s subsequent grief. Which is a shame, since both Driver and Renner are talented actors who can invest their individual scenes before that fateful meeting with a kind of everyday sympathy for downtroddenness. Oliver also has an admirable pictorial eye for widescreen compositions that suggest empty spaces resting uncomfortably next to people who have few options in filling the holes in their lives. But in the end, “Take” is too enamored of its time-shifting gimmick and cheap suspense to ultimately have much impact.

-- Robert Abele

“Take.” MPAA rating: R for some violent content with intense emotional impact. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes. In selected theaters.

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His relationships are all too real

Fear of intimacy trumps fear of death in “Love Comes Lately,” filmmaker Jan Schutte’s plaintively effective merging of three Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories (“The Briefcase,” “Alone” and “Old Love”) into one seriocomic rumination on the battle between ageless eroticism and aged thinking. The film’s protagonist is a celebrated septuagenarian Jewish writer named Max Kohn (Otto Tausig) who has real and imagined dealings with a variety of emotionally bruised temptresses: the long-suffering girlfriend (Rhea Perlman) whose caretaking zeal masks a jealous fear of abandonment, a disillusioned former student (Barbara Hershey) who makes a dispiriting lecture trip suddenly exciting, and a Cuban maid (Elizabeth Pena) in a Miami-set dream of Max’s whose forthrightness alarms him.

Making the richest, most haunting impression, however, is Tovah Feldshuh as the widowed neighbor of Max’s retiree alter ego in a short story Max reads aloud in the last part of the film. Till this point, Schutte’s approach with the material has been safely, shufflingly humorous -- thanks mostly to Tausig’s wry performance and the director’s unforced way with shifts in consciousness -- but in this final, devastating tale the movie comes closest to capturing Singer’s mastery with empathetically unheroic psychologies of self-preservation.

-- R.A.

“Love Comes Lately.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869; Laemmle’s Town Center, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 981-9811; and the Regency South Coast Village, 1561 W. Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, (714) 557-5701.

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Truly radical surfer dudes

The rowdy, cocky and ultra-talented Australian and South African surfers who invaded Hawaii’s big wave mecca the North Shore and upended the zenlike aristocracy of the sport in the mid-’70s are the subject of the documentary “Bustin’ Down the Door,” a mostly enjoyable wave of nostalgia in which these now wrinkled, a little heavier and mostly gray or bald legends recall their game-changing ways with smiles, gusto and even a few tears. As with any surf flick worth its salt, director Jeremy Gosch features plenty of great archival footage of wall-riding hot doggers like Mark Richards, Shaun Tomson, Ian Cairns and others doing their thing, but because their reputation was rarely about respecting the “perfect wave” ethos and instead taking on any swell, it often seems there’s as much film of them wiping out as executing breathtaking moves.

At heart, “Bustin’ Down the Door,” narrated by Edward Norton, is about the benefits and pitfalls of advancing your passion through sheer attitude. So it says something that one of the film’s nerviest sections is all talking head, as Wayne Bartholomew recalls the threatening atmosphere in the Aloha State after some brashly insulting interviews he and fellow Aussies had given trashing Hawaiian culture. Eventually, the spirit of professional competition helped keep the peace -- not to mention turning the sport into a billion-dollar industry -- but until that shift, “Bustin’ Down the Door” entertainingly captures surfing’s last great hoorah of no-holds-barred radicalism.

-- R.A.

“Bustin’ Down the Door.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. At Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741; the Regency Lido, 3459 Via Lido, Newport Beach, (949) 673-8350.

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A perfect storm on the screen

“No Regret,” heralded as the first true gay film in the Korean cinema, is an explosive no-holds-barred movie that mixes melodrama and social comment in the tradition of Douglas Sirk and especially R.W. Fassbinder. As a love story, it could scarcely be more tempestuous and as an expose of class differences and sexual hypocrisy it could hardly be more scathing -- or, more important, entertaining.

Sumin (Lee Young-hoon), an 18-year-old fresh from a rural orphanage, lands a factory job in Seoul only to be laid off -- but not before he has caught the eye of the factory owner’s son, Jaemin (Lee Han). Sumin winds up working as a hustler in a gay bar, where he again catches the attention of the infatuated Jaemin. Proud and contemptuous, Sumin resists Jaemin’s overtures mightily, but Jaemin is as persistent as he is impassioned. Alas, he is engaged to be married. His imperious mother doesn’t care that he’s gay but is adamant that he go through with the wedding for the sake of appearances as heir to the family business.

The resulting emotional conflict between Sumin and Jaemin escalates beyond one’s wildest imaginings, and fearless writer-director Leesong Hee-il, in an exhilarating feature debut, risks the improbable and the anti-climactic to end on a note of surprisingly persuasive psychological validity.

-- Kevin Thomas

“No Regret.” Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some violence. In Korean with English subtitles. At the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.

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A story that’s been told better

That “Asian Stories (Book 3)” won an audience award at the 2006 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival says more about the paucity of leading roles for Asian American actors than it does about the quality of this mediocre movie. Jin (James Kyson Lee) has lost his fiancee to their wedding teacher two weeks before their marriage. Distraught and in debt, Jin turns to his pal Alex (Kirt Kishita), a gourmet cook and professional hitman, to kill him. But at the mountain resort where his assassination is to take place, Jin meets Amanda (Kathy Uyen), an attractive painter who has just been similarly jilted. It would take lots of energy and wit to make this familiar premise work, but writer Ronald Oda and his co-director Kris Anthony Chin have come up with an uninspired picture that’s draggy, overly talky and rarely amusing. Lee, Kishita (who has considerable presence and personality) and the lovely Uyen, however, are capable actors deserving of better opportunities.

-- K.T.

“Asian Stories (Book 3).” Unrated with adult themes and language. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes. At the ImaginAsian Center, 251 Main St., Los Angeles, (213) 617-1033.

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More than plants grow in his yard

In 1976, when Pearl Fryar and his wife moved to tiny Bishopville, S.C., a prospective neighbor asserted, “black people don’t keep up their yards.” The Fryars settled in a more “welcoming” part of town and proved the bigots wrong in a way that gave “ironic” new meaning. Without formal training -- just passion, energy and discards from the local nursery -- Pearl began sculpting his acreage into a dazzling array of abstract topiary art, earning this sharecropper’s son the local “Yard of the Month” award. Nowadays, Pearl’s hugely expanded, wildly impressive topiary garden has become a major tourist attraction, source of community pride and unique bridge between local whites and blacks.

Inspired yet? Wait till you see the winning documentary “A Man Named Pearl,” which not only makes you want to get out there and play Edward Scissorhands but can, at least for its 78 jazz-and-gospel infused minutes, help replenish one’s faith in humanity. Even without the testimonials directors Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson present from Pearl’s countless admirers, it’s clear this generous, gentlemanly artist, now 68, is one of a kind.

Though the film could’ve used more technical insight into Pearl’s artistic process, it’s hard not to be stirred by this hopeful portrait.

-- Gary Goldstein

“A Man Named Pearl.” MPAA rating: G. Running time: 1 hour, 18 minutes. In selected theaters.

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CSNY is not just a nostalgia act

Though it may be another in a long line of choir-preaching, anti-Iraq war documentaries, “CSNY/Deja Vu,” Neil Young’s effective hybrid of concert film and political snapshot, is one of the shrewdest and most entertaining of the bunch. The movie, which the veteran rocker directed under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, chronicles Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 2006 “Freedom of Speech” reunion tour in which the aging, politically conscious musicians criss-crossed the U.S. and Canada performing Vietnam-era protest hits along with newer songs from Young’s Internet-debuted “Living With War” album.

Audiences’ varied, sometimes heated reactions to the concerts’ more combative tunes -- particularly the gutsy “Let’s Impeach the President” -- provide a vivid reminder of where the blue state-red state divide stood just before that fall’s midterm elections.

To increase the film’s heft, Young wisely invited reporter Mike Cerre (“Nightline”), an ex-Marine, to embed with the CSNY tour and help probe the obstacles the band would surely face. The journalist’s profiles of notable Iraq war veterans he meets up with along the way also provide keen and moving insight.

Recent and archival interview, news, war and music footage, which often juxtapose the Vietnam and Iraq conflicts, round out this unflinching, well-constructed picture.

-- G.G.

“CSNY/Deja Vu.” MPAA rating: R for some language and brief war images. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes. At the Landmark, 10850 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 281-8233.

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Neither trashy nor smart enough

“Eight Miles High,” based on the memoirs of Uschi Obermaier -- German-born model, commune-member, actress, political rabble-rouser, vagabond adventurer and affiliate to the rock ‘n’ roll jet-set -- wants to be both a tangy piece of Eurosleaze and an overview of one woman’s transformations from the heady days of the 1960s onward.

That’s a lot to take on, and the film stumbles on both counts, failing to fulfill the fun trash quotient while also never getting at what makes Obermaier tick.

As portrayed in the film, Obermaier (played with a tussled allure by Natalia Avelon) seems to be a participant of her times but never definitive of her time in the same influential, ongoing way as an Edie Sedgwick or Anita Pallenberg. The character just feels like a wisp in the wind, blowing from here to there without will or purpose.

During the film’s closing credits, a series of photos run along the side of the screen, apparently Obermaier’s own personal snapshots. That they seem to tell the same story more convincingly than the movie that precedes them says what a missed opportunity “Eight Miles High” might really be. Any film that uses the Stooges’ drone-y song “We Will Fall” to underscore a drug-love scene can’t be all bad, but they, as apparently does Uschi, deserve better than this.

-- Mark Olsen

“Eight Miles High.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes. In German with English subtitles. At the Laemmle Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West hollywood, (323) 848-3500.