This Week's Attractions

Bukowski: Born Into This
Runs Fri., July 30–Thurs., Aug. 5, at Varsity

When Barbet Schroeder released his 1987 treatment of the life of alcoholic skid-row poet Charles Bukowski (1920–1994), Barfly, The Village Voice's Michael Musto bitchily inquired, "Is that an adverb?" Indeed, Bukowski did everything in the manner of a barf: At his legendary poetry readings, he demanded two bottles of wine and a pot to vomit in, and his writing was one long, colorfully pungent streak of logorrhea.

John Dullaghan's new Bukowski docu-bio is much more restrained. In the many scenes of the writer through the years, at public readings and in private interviews with Dullaghan and others (including Schroeder), we meet a man whose barf is worse than his bite. Only once, in a horrifying scene captured on video by Schroeder, does Bukowski reveal his vicious side, drunkenly assaulting his doting wife Linda for vague if not imaginary offenses. The rest of the time, he's sweet, funny, pensive, philosophical. As his admirer Roger Ebert once told me in amazement, most people who tried living the way Bukowski did would wind up down and out, but he started out on the bottom and nihilistically caroused his way to the top.

Unlike most of his fans and imitators, Bukowski had a secret weapon: Besides drink, his other excess was work. A heroic failure as a wage slave, he did as little as possible for 16 years at the L.A. post office, so as to reserve time for the important things in life: red wine, stinky bidi cigarettes, and writing hundreds of pieces a year. Then, at the turn of the '70s, when his barely solvent would-be publisher offered him the equivalent of $479 a month in today's money to quit his job and write full time, he batted out an autobiographical novel, Post Office, in 19 days. In the documentary, his publisher recalls asking, astonished, how he could write so fast? "Fear," answered Bukowski.

He had plenty to fear for most of his life. Beaten savagely as a child by a brutal father (abetted by his German mother), Bukowski was an outsider at school, too, thanks to a truly startling case of acne. He reminisces about a high-school dance he watched from the sidelines, his face wrapped in blood-oozing toilet paper. Later in life, we see how the grown-up Bukowski aged into a kind of battered handsomeness; his sly, slitty eyes, naughty grin, abominable showmanship, and remarkably prolific work drew droves of groupies. Eventually, he settled down with wife Linda, who actually helped him quit drinking shortly before he died.

While this movie argues that Bukowski wrote better than Whitman and Wordsworth—certainly untrue—you come away convinced he could definitely drink and fight better. In his own clownish, romantic-rebel way, that's not a bad legacy to leave. (NR) TIM APPELO

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
Opens Fri., July 30, at Meridian and others

Weird summer. Not only has Danny Leiner, director of Dude, Where's My Car?, somehow delivered a sharp, sporadically hysterical teen comedy, it's also everything Dude shoulda/coulda been: a deliriously profane stoner lark with enough satiric subtext to certify that the creators aren't as moronic as their characters. Interestingly, H&K's titular protagonists aren't dolts at all, but bright, upwardly mobile, three-dimensional minorities liberated from the indignity of lame, forced catchwords like "shibby" and "hoo-hoo."

Like Kevin Smith's early, refreshingly unpretentious work, the story is driven by the characters' basest Jersey-boy instincts. After intentionally blowing his umpteenth med-school interview, acidic, deadpan Kumar (Kal Penn) convinces his best buddy, Harold (John Cho), a pantywaist junior investment banker, to get baked and head to White Castle, home of the love-'em-or-hate-'em, 40-cent, onion-slathered, square-pattied mini-burgers. Zany, lowbrow, hit-and-miss adventures ensue—potential hottie love interests play a game of "Battleshits" in the women's room—but H&K branches out into nobler, if sometimes poorly realized, tangents.

The movie sets up a rogue's gallery of blatantly racist cardboard obstacles to torment its Korean and Indian-American heroes, most gratingly an "extreme" skate-punk gang and a cabal of corrupt, nightstick-wielding suburban cops. These villains are harmless Crayola cartoons, yet their unceasingly vile rhetoric clashes with H&K's generally genial comic tone. Here the film misses a great opportunity to score intelligently against institutional racism.

Meanwhile, two of Harold and Kumar's bong-hitting buds salivate over The Gift on cable, eagerly anticipating Katie Holmes' topless scene. This seems like throwaway frat humor until the thread reappears 10 minutes later, and one of the stoners mutters, in spot-on Seinfeld, "This is the most confusing film ever. Is she possessed, is she not possessed?" just before the full monty payoff.

H&K lives and dies on timing and the bizarre. Doogie Howser's Neil Patrick Harris cameos as an e-popping, stripper-ogling self-caricature, a turn that makes Fred Savage's "Wait! I can feel my dick!" moment in The Rules of Attraction look like Travolta in Pulp Fiction. If this pleasant midsummer surprise is any indication, at least Cho and Penn won't be asking Dude, Where's My Career? anytime soon. (R) ANDREW BONAZELLI

A Home at the End of the World
Opens Fri., July 30, at Egyptian