The Adventures of Power
** | Parody
“The Adventures of Power” is sprinkled with moderately amusing comic moments, but your enjoyment of this film will be proportional to your tolerance for the one-joke phenomenon of air drumming.
Ari Gold (who also wrote and directed) stars in the story of a young man named Power who plays drums that aren’t there, pounding on air to the beat of familiar rock songs. He is working with his father (Michael Mc-Kean) at a New Mexico copper mine but is fired for air-drumming on the job. That sends him on a cross-country journey to Newark to join up with some other air drummers who are bent on winning a big talent competition in New York.
This is parody as dry as it comes — the air drummers approach their craft with the seriousness of neurosurgeons — and in more skilled hands it might have worked nicely. But Gold the director couldn’t find a consistent tone, and Gold the actor needed to be more eccentrically lovable and less irksome. Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times
Written and directed by Ari Gold; starring Gold, Annie Golden, Adrian Grenier, Nick Kroll, Chiu Chi Ling, Jane Lynch, Michael McKean, Shoshannah Stern, Steven Williams. 1 hour 28 minutes. PG-13 for a little bad language. Starz FilmCenter
The House of the Devil
*** 1/2 | Teen Thriller
“The House of the Devil” is a fine little old-school thriller, set in the 1980s and devoted, fondly, to the visual syntax and Farrah-inspired hair of the era. When the main character, a cash-strapped college sophomore played by Jocelin Donahue, listens to music, she does so on a Sony Walkman-type apparatus that could level a large forest animal.
The best bits in the film use period detail for unexpected shivers. Remember that robotic male voice emanating from so many answering machines back then, the one instructing us earthlings to “please. leave a. message. after the. beep”? It’s here. So is the grungy pay phone that rings unexpectedly. (What’s a pay phone?)
Sam, our heroine, needs money. She answers a campus flier, and even though the voice on the other end of the line sounds suspicious (“I promise to make this as painless as possible”), she agrees to the job and bums a ride out to a scary, old rural Victorian home. Once inside the house (of the devil!) she discovers there’s no baby to sit; her charge is the unseen mother (shades of “Psycho”) of Mr. and Mrs. Ulman, a pair of creeps played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov.
A lunar eclipse provides the backdrop for writer-director Ti West’s sly suspense-building exercise. Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Written and directed by Ti West; starring Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace. 1 hour 33 minutes. R for some bloody violence. Starz FilmCenter
The Yes Men Fix The World
*** | Documentary
The Yes Men are a New York political-action cooperative specializing in hoaxes that embarrass corporations by dramatizing their evils and excesses. They put up phony websites, print fake business cards and pose as representatives from the companies that are their targets. It’s amazing what they get away with.
Consider the “SurvivaBall.” This is a fake survival suit, presented as a new product from Halliburton. This is an inflated padded suit, round as a beach ball. Obviously, if you fell over, you’d have no way to stop yourself from rolling, or be able to stand up on your own. It comes with the big red Halliburton trademark.
In the post- 9/11 paranoia, the Yes Men seriously pitch this invention at a conference for the security industry. There isn’t a look of incredulity in the room. Not a single security “expert” seems to suspect a hoax.
More recently, the Yes Men staged a phony press conference announcing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was reversing its stand on global warming. Some news organizations double-checked this, but not Fox News, which repeated the story all day.
The Yes Men are represented in this documentary by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano. They are disguised in a way that makes them above suspicion: Why, they look and talk exactly like middle-aged white men in conservative business suits. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Not rated. Written and directed by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano. 1 hour 36 minutes. Starz FilmCenter
Ninja Assassin
* 1/2 | Action
In Japan, where the blades are shiny and sharp and if the fake blood isn’t staining the lens, you’re not trying hard enough, there’s a rich tradition of sword- and-splatter pictures. It’s the foundation of “Ninja Assassin,” a run-of-the- mill Hollywood ninja movie.
For a thousand years, “The Nine Clans” have taken in orphans from around the world and forged them into cold-blooded killing machines. Meet their price, and they’ll kill anybody you say.
Raizo remembers this brutal training in flashbacks. But he got out. Now hiding in Berlin, he tries to help those the clan has marked for death.
The brawls are graphic in the extreme — the most realistic decapitations and dismemberments ever filmed, if that matters to you.
There aren’t many surprises here, but “Ninja Assassin” has some cool touches — the death warning to the doomed is a wax-sealed envelope with dark black sand in it. However, since “cool” was the only goal, I have to say “Ninja” just isn’t cool enough. Roger Moore, The Orlando Sentinel
R for strong violence and language. Directed by James McTeigue; starring Rain, Naomie Harris and Ricky Yuen. 1 hour 33 minutes. Area theaters
