Short Takes

BODY OF WAR Co-directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue—yes, that Phil Donahue—Body of War is neither the most cinematic nor the most elegantly crafted of recent Iraq War documentaries, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of the most deeply affecting. Where Spiro and Donahue triumph is in putting a human face on the war—namely, that of U.S. Army Specialist Tomas Young, a patriotic Kansas City youth who was shot through the collarbone and paralyzed from the chest down after less than a week on the ground in Baghdad. Unambiguously angry and direct in an old-fashioned protest-movie way (complete with original, Phil Ochs–ian anthems composed and performed by Eddie Vedder), Body of War follows Young’s bittersweet homecoming, his adjustment to life in a wheelchair, his conversion into an anti-war activist, and the gradual collapse of his marriage. But the most devastating scenes in the film are arguably Spiro and Donahue’s found-footage flashbacks to the 2002 debates in both houses of Congress leading up to the authorization of war—eerily sound-alike sound bites that turn Body of War into the latest uncredited Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake. —Scott Foundas (Opens Friday at The Belcourt)NOTE: Tomas Young will appear 7 p.m. Saturday for a post-film Q&A moderated by Bruce Barry, professor of management and sociology at Vanderbilt’s Owen School of Management, with an introduction by longtime political strategist Bill Fletcher, CEO of Fletcher-Rowley-Chao-Riddle, Inc.

BOARDING GATE As an actress, Asia Argento might not have what you call “range”: you could cast her as Scarlett O’Hara or the Virgin Mary and still end up with a ravenous raccoon-eyed succubus four Special K hits into an all-week rave. But there’s not a more alive or electric presence anywhere in movies today—at least not one who gives off her musk of threat, arousal and total abandon. Her blessedly unhinged performance as an addled Alice in a rabbit hole of commercial skullduggery gives some urgency to Olivier Assayas’ tawdry thriller, even if the movie’s still little more than the sum of its stricken poses—the suspense film as window display. Between gigs as a drug smuggler, Argento’s bruised party girl resumes her kinky alliance with a retiring moneyman (Michael Madsen, here to satisfy anyone’s fantasy of seeing Fred Flintstone in bondage) while his partners and hers cook up import-export conspiracies that quickly turn murderous. The plot is a murky MacGuffin that lets Assayas (the gifted French critic and director of the wondrous Irma Vep) indulge his love of glass-partitioned spaces, ambient camera surfing and eroticized menace, displayed most nervily in an Argento-Madsen duet for cunnilingus and asphyxiating belt: What results is more a collection of coolly tossed-off conceits than a coherent work. (Dig the entrance of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, international woman of mystery.) But few contemporary thrillers offer even that much incidental pleasure—certainly not with the amazing Argento a-twitch with fear and desire, looking like she’d enjoy nothing more than clawing her way out of the screen and hurling your popcorn into the next county. Bonus points for a gorgeous last shot and that swoony Sparks song over the end credits. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at The Belcourt)

REDBELT Does David Mamet harbor some wish to be M. Night Shyamalan? When Mamet’s in popular-entertainer mode, as in his sucker-bait thrillers Spartan and The Spanish Prisoner, you’re aware from the outset that some kind of elaborate scam is being rigged, and by now there’s no surprise whenever he flips over another empty walnut shell. (That includes the habitual casting of Joe Mantegna as The Guy Who Will Fuck You Over at a Critical Juncture.) The same is true of this entertaining but preposterously plotted martial-arts melodrama, which chugs along on the strength of its genre machinery and a coiled, compelling lead performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor—an actor who can accomplish with a wounded stare what Bruce Lee did with jeet kune do. Ejiofor plays the pure-hearted master of a struggling dojo who comes to the aid of an aging action star (Tim Allen!) in a bar brawl. Through a series of laboriously scaffolded contrivances, he’s drawn reluctantly into the world of a winner-take-all ultimate fighting championship, caught in the classic Mamet stand-off between principle and cash-cold compromise. As cool as it is in theory to get a Mamet rewrite of Never Back Down—first prize is a Cadillac, second prize is a set of steak knives, etc.—the fight scenes don’t have the clarity and exultance in swift, disciplined motion that the best martial-arts movies provide, and the traps that drive the hero to the mat are laid out as subtly as hedge clippers in a Friday the 13th clone. But as the writer-director knows, it’s impossible not to root for the last honest man in a ring of shills and fixers—especially when Ejiofor embodies him so nobly. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at Green Hills)