'Beautiful Losers' is a freewheeling portrait of modern artists
MOVIE REVIEW CAPSULES
Also reviewed: 'I Served the King of England'; 'Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild!'
The age-old question "What is art?" is again considered in the colorful and spirited documentary "Beautiful Losers," an absorbing look at how a circle of dispossessed young artists from the 1990s eventually found its way to mainstream success.
The film, directed by Aaron Rose, whose influential Alleged Gallery in Lower Manhattan began as a grungy party spot-exhibition space for such do-it-yourselfers as Ed Templeton, Geoff McFetridge and Shepard Fairey, immerses the viewer in a world of anything-goes creativity and eccentric self-expression. The artists' wares, a range of pop visual styles born of the skateboarding, graffiti, surf and hip-hop cultures, won't be for every taste, but the way Rose (with an assist from co-director Joshua Leonard) presents their eclectic work is both disarming and inventive.
Less successful are the interviews with the artists themselves, a committed but benignly narcissistic bunch whose penchant for brooding incoherence or random thought can prove more frustrating than insightful. Fortunately, Rose's on-camera turns as a kind of "I-was-there" guide through the various incarnations of the Alleged Gallery and its starrier alumni, help give this freewheeling portrait a welcome heart.
-- Gary Goldstein
"Beautiful Losers." MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes. At Landmark's Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A., (310) 281-8223.
'King' fails to get royal treatment
Returning to the screen after a two-decade absence, writer-director Jiri Menzel has adapted his "I Served the King of England" from a novel by major Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, having based his Oscar-winning 1966 "Closely Watched Trains" on another Hrabal book. Menzel retains his jaunty absurdist sensibility, but lightning has not struck twice. The new film is so leisurely paced and overly long that what means to be at once charming yet darkly satirical lapses into tedium and barely comes alive.
After 15 years in prison Jan (Oldrich Kaiser) is released in Communist Czechoslovakia in the early '60s and sent to live in a derelict mountain community to maintain its gravel road. The unexpected presence of a beautiful young woman causes Jan to look back on his life as a waiter (Ivan Barnev) with his eye ever on the main chance. Swiftly moving up the ladder, Jan works in swanky hotels and restaurants awash in sex, gluttony and gorgeous women, with plenty left over for him.
