Limited movie runs

Friday, October 20, 2006

Limited movie runs

THE WAR TAPES

In the latest of what is getting to be a booming genre of Iraq war documentaries, director Deborah Scranton gives digital video cameras to five members of the New Hampshire Army National Guard so they can intimately record their year of service in the Middle East. As it turned out, only three of the five fulfilled their mission with any regularity and none has a striking gift for photo-journalism. But the edited results still make a scary diary of their increasingly dehumanized daily lives (mostly spent protecting supply convoys on the dangerous highways) and the movie evokes the futile larger war around them in a series of haunting images -- a family turned to charcoal by a car bomb, a young Iraqi woman accidentally crushed by a Humvee, a vast graveyard of rusting U.S. military vehicles incapacitated by an insurgency that only grew larger and stronger during the men's tour of duty. (William Arnold)

GRADE: B

At the Varsity through Thursday. 97 minutes. Unrated but contains graphic shots of war violence.

AMERICAN HARDCORE

Hardcore was a reaction to new wave's commercialization of punk rock. Paul Rachman's documentary, inspired by Steven Blush's 2001 book, "American Hardcore: A Tribal History," offers a nationwide overview of that music's history from 1980 to 1986. Rachman makes clever use of a map to criss-cross between Los Angeles. New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston, the cities upon which the film is primarily focused. Clips of dozens of bands, including DOA, TSOL and SS Decontrol, are as short and fast as the music itself in this informative look at one of the youth culture's last grass-roots movements. Anecdotes include Henry Rollins' story of how he became Black Flag's singer and Bad Brains' confession that the book "Think and Grow Rich" was the source of their "Positive Mental Attitude" philosophy. A lot of material is packed into 100 minutes, and some of the subjects, such as the roles played by women and minorities, are underdeveloped. Hardcore remains, in the words of Minor Threat's Ian MacKaye, the voice of "kids who refuse to be slotted into generic kids roles," so fans of current groups such as Disturbed may feel shortchanged by allegations that it was all over by 1986. (Bill White)

GRADE: B

At the Varsity through Thursday. 100 minutes. Rated R for pervasive language, including sex and drug references.