Life in the Korengal Valley was not all fun and games for Specialist Misha Pemble-Belkin, Ross Murphy, and the rest of Battle Company, 173rd US Airborne at Outpost Restrepo in Afghanistan (photo © Tim Hetherington)
RESTREPO: ONE PLATOON, ONE YEAR, ONE VALLEY (Sebastian Junger & Tim Hetherington, 2010)
Angelika New York
18 West Houston St. at Mercer St.
Opens Friday, June 25
212-995-2000
www.restrepothemovie.com
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
From June 2007 to July 2008, journalists Sebastian Junger (THE PERFECT STORM) and Tim Hetherington (LIBERIA: AN UNCIVIL WAR) made a total of ten trips to the dangerous Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, documenting the full deployment of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. With snipers hidden all around them, the fifteen soldiers of Second Platoon built a remote, strategic outpost they named Restrepo after PFC Juan Restrepo, the well-liked company medic who was killed early on. Junger and Hetherington film such men as Captain Dan Kearney, Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice, and Sergeant Brendan C. O’Byrne as they go about their daily duties, joking around, playing the guitar, meeting with Afghan locals to get information about the Taliban, and digging trenches while prepared to be shot at at any moment. The journalists took more than 150 hours of footage, supplemented with interviews with several of the soldiers after they were safely back at home base in Italy, talking about what they went through. There is nothing political about RESTREPO, nor does it pull at the heartstrings with melodramatic, overemotional scenes; instead, it depicts the harsh realities of battle, including the long stretches of boredom punctuated by sudden life-or-death situations. There is no narration, no one discusses the possible merits of the war, and no generals or politicians are on hand to defend America’s involvement in the region. There’s no ethnocentric yahooism, nor is there racist treatment of the mostly unseen enemy. It’s just war, pure and simple, seen from the perspective of men who chose to join the army and risk their lives for their country. The film won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and recently screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Sgt. O’Byrne will participate in a Q&A at the Angelika following the 7:45 show on June 25; Junger was going to do the same after the 7:45 show on June 26 but has had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts.
Nothing is going right for poor Geng Hao (Huang Bo). After losing the national bike championship because he hammed it up by celebrating a split second too early, Geng’s life goes into freefall: His coach (Ma Shaohua) suffers a debilitating heart attack, and he loses everything after getting briefly involved with a shady snake-oil salesman, Li Fala (Jiu Kong), who dresses in Superman costumes as he promises that his questionable liquid concoction can turn anyone into a superhero. Soon Geng is a poverty-stricken bike messenger on the run from a Taiwanese drug kingpin and the cops, with a frozen Thai assassin in the back of his truck, and continually getting set up by Li Fala, who has some serious problems of his own. Nominated for Best Film at the 2009 Golden Horse Fillm Festival, CRAZY RACER (aka SILVER MEDALIST) is crazy good, an entertaining farce with absurd characters, a twisting plot, plenty of mistaken identity, Ning Hao’s (MONGOLIAN PING PONG) Guy Ritchie-inspired tongue-in-cheek direction, and, most of all, Huang Bo himself, who plays the sad sack Geng Hao with Buster Keaton-like appeal. Huang Bo, who will be awarded the Rising Star of Asia Award at the New York Asian Film Festival opening ceremonies on June 25, will introduce the June 26 screening and participate in a postscreening Q&A; he can also be seen in Guan Hu’s COW at the festival.
Although Japanese director Takashi Miike is best known for such gruesome, violent, cutting-edge films as AUDITION, ICHI THE KILLER, the DEAD OR ALIVE trilogy, and GOZU, he has recently been showing off his more childlike side in such kid-friendly fare as THE GREAT YOKAI WAR and ZEBRAMAN. Now Miike has focused his attention on the popular late 1970s animated television show YATTERMAN, turning it into a goofy live-action flick filled with bright, bold colors, a fairly simplistic plot, and very cute machinery. On the side of good is Gan-chan (Japanese teen idol Sho Sakurai) and Ai-chan (Saki Fukuda), while rat-faced Doronjo (Kyoko Fukada), pig-nosed Tonzura (Kendo Kobayashi), and sexy leader Boyakki (Katsuhisa Namase) form the nasty, rather hapless villainous trio after the giant mecha-hero Yatterman and the four pieces of the valuable Skull Stone. Nothing short of the fate of the world is in jeopardy as the increasingly silly bad guys battle our beautiful, innocent heroes. Much of YATTERMAN is discombobulated and hard to follow, and the production values at times are more akin to Saturday-morning television than a trip to the movies, but it has such a charming sense of humor and playfulness that you might just overlook many of its needless excesses. 
Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith’s harrowingly frustrating documentary is precisely the type of true story that explains why the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the Human Rights Watch organization itself, unfortunately needs to exist. Part of the Accountability and Justice section of the festival and chosen as the closing night film, PRESUMED GUILTY details the plight of Toño Zuniga, a young man arrested in Mexico City in December 2005 for a murder he did not commit and, despite all the evidence supporting his innocence — and even more important, no evidence proving his guilt — remains locked up, facing a long sentence. PRESUMED GUILTY is a maddening indictment of Mexico’s corrupt legal system, from cops who are paid by the arrest, to prosecutors who need to present nothing at trials, to judges who refuse to listen to the truth. Lawyers Hernández and Layda Negrete, along with documentarian Geoffrey Smith (THE ENGLISH SURGEON), are given remarkable access to Zuniga, following him in prison and ultimately filming his ever-more-ridiculous retrial, which he watches from a tiny barred area behind the judge. Zuniga himself is a fascinating character who is somehow able to hold back any anger as the inequities just keep piling on, but viewers won’t be able to temper their anger as the frustration builds to impossible heights. Smith and Hernández will participate in a postscreening discussion and reception that will bring the 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival to its conclusion, until next year, when another series of politically based dramas and documentaries expose other frightening tragedies occurring all over the world.