Reel-View Ratings: The Bigger The Beard, The Better The Movie
FANTAIL
Tania, a white girl who identifies as a Maori, is devoted to her sickly mother and her rambunctious brother Pi — who quickly runs off and gets himself entangled with a bunch of bad-news delinquents. It’s an interesting, engaging setup that goes in a thousand directions and also never really goes anywhere. Tania’s racial ambiguity could’ve been a major plot point, but it fizzles into something approximating superfluity. The darker turns of the narrative aren’t always supported by overall tone. Side characters flit in and out without quite enough exploration to capture interest, but with too much screen time to dismiss. It’s engaging, interesting — but lacking, all told, once the credits roll.
Plays at 1 p.m. Sept. 12 and 7:30 p.m. Sept. 13 at Doris Duke Theatre
JIMMY’S HALL
James Gralton returns home to Ireland after 10 years in America, and somehow he gets roped into opening a dance hall that quickly blossoms into a hub of dance and political theater. The local pastor objects to all this merry-making, and things escalate to no good end. Does that sound like the plot of Footloose? That is the plot of Footloose. This Ken Loach film, lush with human emotion and character moments, may be based on true events that took place in 1920s post-civil war Ireland, but it bears a lot of resemblance to a certain ‘80s flick, with a lot less joy and a lot more overt left-wing philosophizing.
Opens Sept. 4 at Kahala
MERU
Mt. Everest remains the last ascent to glory for mountain climbers the world over, but some would argue that Meru Peak (also in the Himalayas) is the true final frontier. It is the mountain no one has ever successfully scaled. This documentary follows three men on two attempts to scale Meru and its final ascent: Shark’s Tooth, a 1,000-foot straight-vertical wall. The men all have harrowing stories and motivation to accompany their dangerous dream, of course. Narrator Jon Krakauer (author of Into Thin Air, a first-hand account of a Mt. Everest climbing disaster) and other talking heads add context in between shots of the unreal landscape. One gets the impression at times that the film is glossier than reality, but the first-person shots of that icy slope? Stunning.
Opens Sept. 4 at Kahala
