Weekly round-up

A pumped-up family, a border-town
drama and intergalactic monkey business

by HILLARY BRENHOUSE,
MATTHEW HAYS and
ANNE MARIE MARKO

Bigger, Stronger, Faster
Though Michael Moore has his share of detractors, his style of first-person filmmaking is often remarkably engaging. Here, filmmaker Christopher Bell uses the template to incredible effect. With the intense story of his family—he and his three brothers were brought up on a steady diet of Hulk Hogan, Stallone and Schwarzenegger—Bell analyzes the epidemic of steroid use in America. He employs hilarious clips culled from pop culture (as this kind of doc demands), including the flip-flops all of the aforementioned have made on the controversies surrounding performance-enhancing substances.

MUSCLE BOUND:
Bigger, Stronger, Faster

Bell’s two brothers offer powerful testimony to the rather toxic impact the myth of the American dream can have. Bell astutely compares his brothers’ steroid usage and their own sense of success with many women’s struggle with body image and eating disorders. Especially painful is Bell’s conversation with his overweight mother, in which he informs her that the way they first got their hands on steroids was from her brother.

Bell even gives some time to the up-with-steroids crowd, who argue quite adamantly that they pose no serious health threats and that, since all sorts of people do bad things, what’s one more bit of cheating, anyway? They’re a pretty nutty lot, but they add another fascinating dimension to the doc.

Bell’s feature has so much power because he tackles a series of issues, but remains focused: ultimately, this is a film about the emptiness of the American dream, a culture of increasing hyper-masculinity, and the terrible ramifications these things often have for individual people. Terrifically moving stuff. (MH)

Les toilettes du pape
A powerful portrait of a modest Uruguay border community, Toilettes takes a tender look at the events and personalities that populated writer/co-director Enrique Fernández’s childhood. The Spanish-language ’80s period piece opens on a band of frantic cyclists carrying soap, matches and batteries back to Melo, a Uruguayan village on the Brazilian frontier.

Subsisting almost entirely on contraband, the forgotten town urgently awaits a visit from Pope John Paul II and the thousands of hungry pilgrims the media imagines he’ll bring with him. Melo’s desperate inhabitants begin to churn out chorizo and religious souvenirs en masse, determined to profit off the upcoming crusade. Beto (César Troncoso), another hopeful local, cooks up his own money-spinning scheme: an outhouse on his front lawn where crowds can pay to take a mid-speech leak.

Director César Charlone depicts with irony and candour an entire generation of humble, hard-bitten men whose sustenance depends on rickety bicycles.

If viewers feel like they’ve inadvertently stumbled into the lives of these desperados, it’s because they have: most cast members are actual Melo residents. Beto and kin are as raw and human as characters come. He’s a fraught family man whose dreams are riding on a rose-coloured toilet bowl; his aggravated wife (Virginia Mendez) carries him home from the pub and struggles to support risky border trips.

The tension is almost unbearable as spirited citizens put their houses on the line to set up sandwich stands. It’s a heartbreaking meditation on perseverance that’s so natural, so sincere, it lays an entire culture bare. (HB)

ANNOYING APES:
Space Chimps

Space Chimps
Who, at some point in their childhood, hasn’t wanted a chimp? Unlike the family cat, chimps have no problem wearing dresses, riding in baby carriages or hugging you when you’re feeling blue. But who ever talks about their propensity for masturbation and feces-flinging, and how they’d rather be doing both simultaneously instead of sporting a frock or enjoying a cocktail?

Not this little CGI number from the producers of Shrek, who instead prefer to reinforce the notion that chimps enjoy their role as mankind’s guinea pigs—just so long as they get props for it. Isn’t that all anyone really wants? A little R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

When an unmanned probe gets lost in an intergalactic wormhole (ouch!) and no human life can be spared in trying to retrieve it, a heartless senator sees it as an opportunity to get rid of NASA forever—until a scientist speaks that magic word: chimp! Who better to be randomly catapulted into space than Ham III, a wise-cracking slacker and the grandson of NASA’s original space chimp, Ham I?

Unfortunately, he’d rather keep his job as a primate cannonball for circus audiences than be a hero like his granddad. But when Ham III is persuaded by astrochimps Luna and Titan to join the mission, the three apes determine to retrieve the probe from the clutches of a tyrannical planet-destroying villain and save NASA as well.

SNL’s latest indistinguishable up-and-comer, Andy Samberg, is the voice of Ham III in this boring, predictable animated offering full of confused messages and misinformation. Silly humans! (AMM)

>> Movie Listings