Opening
ThisWeek

PBig in Japan

Runs Fri., Feb. 20–Thurs., Feb. 26 at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not rated. 100 minutes.

I am not going to insist you should’ve heard of the local band Tennis Pro, nor be a fan, to enjoy this ersatz documentary, which follows the trio from Seattle ignominy to a slight bump of fame in Tokyo’s grubby bar-scape. What’s real here (chemistry, fun, music) is inseparable from the scripted material (fake, fake, fake) that director John Jeffcoat devised while trailing the pop-rockers on three Japanese tours. As he explained prior to the film’s SIFF screenings last year, comic vignettes were extrapolated and rewritten from the band’s travels abroad and struggles at home. The band members (and some family members) capably play themselves: David Drury, the phlegmatic guitarist and part-time professional blackjack player; Phillip Peterson, the buoyant bassist and family man; and Sean Lowry, the deadpan drummer/hairstylist/bachelor at large.

In the film, Tennis Pro resists the notion that they’re “a fucking novelty act” that doesn’t fit into our post-grunge/Macklemore music scene. On a bare-bones tour in Japan, however, they find the grunge halo useful—and even busk in a park wearing their Bjorn Borg tennis whites. Shady managers come and go, record deals are dangled, and our three heroes try to maintain their ideals (basically: loyalty to one another and their springy, bouncy pop sound). There’s even a detour into a Miyazaki-style anime sequence.

The plot here—and the zippy energy—isn’t much more complicated than an old episode of The Monkees: simply the comic misadventures of innocents abroad. What Big in Japan really has going for it is street-level pace and texture. Jeffcoat and his cast shot the film guerrilla-style, without permits, as the band performed and cavorted around Tokyo’s colorfully bohemian Shimokitazawa district (usually called Shimokita). This gives the film—which is not a documentary—a documentary feel; and Jeffcoat, director of the 2007 local comedy Outsourced, has ample experience with music videos and club-land milieu. (This project sprang from his experience on MTV’s $5 Cover series.) Certainly Big in Japan has its promotional aspect, but few films (or bands) manage the trick of both wanting to be liked and actually being likable. So if Tennis Pro thus books more gigs and sells more albums (yes, there’s a soundtrack), I’m fine with that.

Note: The band will perform after the Friday and Saturday screenings (preceded by Jeffcoat’s remarks); on Monday, Jeffcoat will present five Tennis Pro music videos, one new, at a free 6:30 p.m. screening. Brian Miller

Girlhood

Opens Fri., Feb. 20 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 112 minutes.

There’s no parallel between the American film Boyhood and the French film Bande de Filles, except that a clever marketer thought it would be useful to have Girlhood be the title for the latter movie. Can’t blame them for that one, but Girlhood stands on its own as a thoughtful, nonjudgmental look at a lost teen who finds definition over the course of a few rocky months. Her name is Marieme (Karidja Toure), a wary girl whose mother works nights as a janitor. (She’s barely seen in this youth-ruled scenario, set in a poor, immigrant-filled banlieue outside Paris.) Marieme’s older brother is a bully, and she seems to have made herself as plain and anonymous as possible. One day at school she falls in with a trio of cool girls, led by the glammed-up Lady (Assa Sylla), whose habits include shoplifting, taunting other groups of girls, and connecting over their shared sense of displacement. A lip-synching scene to Rihanna’s “Diamonds” shows their powerful bond better than 20 pages of dialogue could.

Writer/director Celine Sciamma (Tomboy) is white, but she brings no outsider perspective to this clique of black teenagers; whatever kind of trouble they might get into, the movie stays right at that level, letting us understand how that stuff might happen with decent kids. Most of the material falls into the category of closely observed behavior, from Marieme’s tentative romance with a guy who’s friendly with her brother—he’s afraid of making a move because the brother could get rough with him—to the way Marieme tries to enact a motherly role toward her two younger sisters. The movie doesn’t spend a whole lot of time with the sisters, but it’s a tribute to Sciamma’s economical storytelling that you can see the writing on the wall for these children in desperate need of supervision.

Not everything in Girlhood works that well, but it’s definitely better than the average coming-of-age tale. When Marieme truly begins to fall through the safety net, the film looks as though it’s going to take on epic proportions—but it doesn’t fulfill those ambitions. At the core, though, is that persuasive portrait of how other people make a difference, and how these girls are brightened by their shared experience—like diamonds in the rough, as the song puts it. Robert Horton

Hard to Be a God

Runs Fri., Feb. 20-Mon., Feb. 23 at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not rated. 170 minutes.

Perhaps it is hard to be a god, according to the title of this sprawling Russian epic. But everybody else looks miserable, too. We are in a world called Arkanar, invented by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky for a speculative 1964 novel that must be easier to understand than this film. Arkanar is a pigsty, a horror show, a decadent party at James Franco’s house. It resembles the muddier years of Earth’s Middle Ages, but we are told it is a planet where the society has developed more slowly than ours. We are also told—and this is important to grasp in the movie’s swirl—that our main character, Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), is actually a visitor from Earth. He pretends to be a god in Arkanar, passing through the squalid society and observing it.

The film’s 170 minutes are oozing with bodily fluids, casual brutality, and complete disdain for anything like conventional suspense or storytelling. Director Aleksei German uses black-and-white and an incredibly complex soundtrack to immerse us in this unpleasant world, his camera snaking around cramped interiors and muddy hillsides. It would be no exaggeration to claim Hard to Be a God as one of the most densely designed movies ever made; somewhere in the world Terry Gilliam is weeping in despair at ever approaching its level of beastly creativity. German (who died in 2013, before completing post-production) was some kind of visionary, and labored for many years on this project. His previous movie, Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), is arguably more connected to recognizable reality, but is just as baffling in its refusal to submit to audience expectations.

Presumably German is showing us human existence refracted through his cracked lens. But the film seems less about ideas than about creating a troubling experience, one in which the viewer is constantly assailed by things being thrown at the camera: birds, weapons, excrement. As a fully imagined carnival, Hard to Be a God is astonishing, but it’s hard either to discern how it sheds light on mankind’s backward character or guess for whom it’s intended. “I’m speaking to you,” says a character in the film, “but that doesn’t mean we’re having a conversation.” We are shown that the world is a cesspool, in repetitive detail, for three hours. It’s an incredible-looking and -sounding immersion, but not quite a conversation. Robert Horton

McFarland, USA

Opens Fri., Feb. 20 at Kirkland Parkplace and other theaters. Rated PG. 128 minutes.

Disney has really carved out a genre for itself: the underdog sports story as cultural melting pot, complete with the Middle American white coach/scout/father figure whose preconceptions are overturned by scrappy kids who overcome every hurdle with heart and hard work. That guy was Jon Hamm in Million Dollar Arm and Josh Lucas in Glory Road. In McFarland, USA, also inspired by a true story, he’s a high-school football coach whose temper has landed him at an underfunded school in a largely Mexican-American town in the California desert. “Are we in Mexico?,” his daughter asks, as they drive past sad little homes of cracked stucco and sun-parched dirt yards. It gets a laugh, but makes a point: This is a Third World neighborhood within our borders. For that I give the film some credit. It gives a big-screen face to an American culture generally relegated to the margins of mainstream movies. Too bad it belabors as many stereotypes as it challenges.

Kevin Costner plays Jim White (the film has fun with that one), who provides our perspective into McFarland. There White soon loses his football coaching position and creates a cross-country team. His prejudices and assumptions are mirrored right back at him by a glib coach from an affluent school, a nice moment that Costner handles with a mix of shame and self-reflection. As a coach, White sees the untapped speed and endurance of his Cougars; as a person, he’s got no idea of their real lives. This is, after all, a town where the prison is across the street from the high school to remind kids that it’s pretty much their only alternative to working the fields.

Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) stirs Southwestern spices through the usual scrappy-little-team-that-could ingredients. The kids are types rather than characters with agency or aspirations. They run in sneakers that threaten to fall apart mid-stride. Coach White rides his daughter’s undersized Barbie-bike as a pace vehicle. There’s a quinceanera and a dancing chicken. There’s even a romance between the angry but earnest team star (Carlos Pratts, of the TV show The Bridge) and the coach’s teenage daughter—so chaste that it feels like a checklist tick from the screenwriter’s manual. Costner meanwhile delivers rousing pep talks as a mix of private conversation and earnest confessional. Otherwise the film favors easy sentiment over sociology. All these kids needed was someone who believed in them—preferably a flinty but compassionate white guy who can overcome his preconceptions in the process. Go, Cougs! Sean Axmaker

PWhat We Do in the Shadows

Opens Fri., Feb. 20 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 85 minutes.

“We’re not Twilight!” Thus protests a New Zealand vampire, confronted with a noob—bitten within the past decade—who tries to drag his exiled undead tribe into the 21st century of Skype and instant messaging. There are no jokes about Facebook here, but What We Do nicely settles upon the conflict between age-old vampire traditions and today’s hook-up customs.

Granted, the premise here is ’90s-stale: basically MTV’s The Real World cast with vampires, presented as direct-address documentary. The droll comedy comes from the brain trust behind 2007’s Eagle Vs. Shark: Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi, who play neck-biters Vladislav and Viago, respectively. Also in their unkempt household are lazy Deacon and basement-dwelling Petyr (the latter in full Nosferatu fright makeup). Mind-control and flying are uncertain aids to their blood feasts, and these vampires make a for a hapless coven—flock? pack? gaggle? what is the proper term?—of undead would-be swingers. Viago is still stuck on a lost paramour, now 96; and while Vladislav talks a great game, like some bloodthirsty Lord Byron, he can barely get lucky. Patrolling the darkened streets of Wellington, our three main vamps can’t get invited into any of the good clubs or discos—they end up forlorn in an all-night Chinese diner.

After all the aestheticized languor of Only Lovers Left Alive (and the earnest teen soap opera of Twilight), the silly deadpan tone here is quite welcome. Clement and Waititi know this is a sketch writ large (forget about plot), so they never pause long between sneaky gags. The ever-polite neatnik Viago, before a date, carefully lays out newspapers on the floor to contain the mess. A rival pack of werewolves, led by Conchords manager Rhys Darby, struggles mightily against lupine transformation—they’re like a sensitive Robert Bly talk circle. The recent convert to the group, besotted with his new flying powers, quickly becomes a nuisance. Instead of the window, Vladislav snaps, “Why don’t you just use the door?”

When the city’s vampires, zombies, werewolves, and witches assemble for their annual masquerade ball, the gathering has a desperate, dorky air like Comic-Con or cosplayers. But that’s really Clement and Waititi’s core joke: These neck-biters have been at it so long that they’re only imitating old vampire stereotypes. Things have gotten to the point, Vladislav admits, where they’re even cribbing from The Lost Boys. Brian Miller

E

film@seattleweekly.com