Film
TRIAD ELECTION Heroically prolific Hong Kong director Johnnie To (Exiled, The Heroic Trio) has made it his mission to bring the gangster film into the 21st century—even while carrying another centuryʼs worth of genre baggage on his back. In this stand-alone sequel to his Election, which drew comparisons to The Godfather, To locates a new frontier—the wild west that is the Chinese economy—and sets up a secession parable that incorporates Hong Kongʼs tentative relationship with its new ruler, dissent and disillusion within the secretive Triad Society, and the ardent desire of one of its members (smoldering Louis Koo as the sharp-dressed, MBA-wielding Jimmy) to go straight and grab his piece of the legit pie. All that plus a hostageʼs limbs getting ground into puppy chow! Jimmyʼs plan to get out by getting back in is the platform for a lot of loaded roundtable sit-downs and clenched, stagy street fights. Toʼs roving camera circles its cagey subjects as if they were prey, sometimes drawing in for a close, almost tender framing of his cut-out characters, sometimes yanking back to find them swallowed by the grandeur of both urban and rural China. Each angle—and Toʼs take on the plight of the modern gangster—is inspired. In Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles. —Michelle Orange (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)
DALE Strictly for the fans (and dedicated as such), this glossy, worshipful biography of the late Dale Earnhardt comes bathed in a magic-hour glow, serving up the usual sports-doc skim of background info and career highlights to an engine-revving score of blue-collar country and rock. The many who still mourn #3 after his untimely death at Daytona in 2001 will treasure the intimate footage assembled by filmmakers Rory Karpf and Mike Viney, including lengthy scenes of the driven Earnhardt atypically at rest on a fishing break. Even so, the clips are rarely illuminating, except to show how indistinguishable the close-mouthed NASCAR champ was from his fans off the track: in civilian threads, like so many of his peers, he couldʼve passed for any of the watchers in the stands—surely a key to the sportʼs immense popularity. But the doc only comes to life behind the wheel, when its subject stops being an icon and becomes the bad-ass Intimidator—a ruthless, nervy, almost sadistic son-of-a-gun who infuriated ace competitors such as Darrell Waltrip (whose remembrances still mix annoyance with respect). One clip of Earnhardt swerving at top speed over the dirt shoulder to pass his adversaries is worth 100 wet-eyed testimonials. —Jim Ridley (Now playing through June 21 at participating Regal Cinemas)
YOUʼRE GONNA MISS ME: A FILM ABOUT ROKY ERICKSON Add to a small but extremely fruitful recent subgenre of documentaries about damaged Texas singer-songwriters this superb portrait of Erickson, the early psychedelic rocker whose urgent, manic garage-punk with the 13th Floor Elevators influenced fans from Janis Joplin to ZZ Topʼs Billy Gibbons. Even before the macabre oddity of his celebrated later albums, featuring white-knuckled odes to gremlins and two-headed dogs, Ericksonʼs bad trips and mental problems were legend: busted for one joint in 1969, he escaped jail only to end up in shock treatment, left to play in a psych-ward band with rapists and multiple murderers. But Keven McAlesterʼs film makes the mystery of Ericksonʼs monster-movie muse, his fragmented family and his squalid existence in a din of white noise (to silence the voices in his head) grimly fascinating. The crowning touch: unusually evocative cinematography by Richard Linklaterʼs longtime collaborator Lee Daniel, who at one point pulls back to show the silhouetted Erickson casting a shadow the length of a football field. That describes the movie, and the haunting presence of its subject. Highly recommended. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)