Part documentary, part dramatic recreation, The Road to Guantanamo offers forth a
prima facie account of three British citizens who were held for more than two
years without charges in the eponymous American military prison in Cuba,
an opaque facility whose continued operation represents an ongoing payoff in
propaganda for would-be international jihadists.

Michael Winterbottom, is a filmmaker known
— to the degree that he is, outside the hardcore arthouse set — largely for his
intersecting interests in war, class, sociopolitical activism and their
respective influences upon the human condition. His movies, too, often come
wrapped up in collagist, avant-garde storytelling. From both the similarly
minded Welcome to Sarajevo and In This World to last year’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
and 9 Songs, though, Winterbottom
remains a filmmaker in many ways more appealing in principle than in actuality
— an intellectual of wide and varied preoccupations who has a propensity for
getting lost in too much navel-gazing. Very interesting but in some ways also
frustrating, The Road to Guantanamo
continues that trend.

Intercutting dramatizations with neophyte actors and
interviews with the real-life figures they depict — Asif Iqbal, Ruhel Ahmed and
Shafiq Rasul, who range from 19 to 23 years of age at the time of the events —
the film chronicles the events that follow from the group setting out from the
British Midlands town of Tipon for
Asif’s arranged marriage in Pakistan.
After the wedding is postponed, the trio and another friend, Monir Ali, cross
over the Afghanistan
border just as the U.S.
bombing campaign of that country intensifies. From there their dark,
surrealistic misadventure only worsens, and they are eventually captured by
Northern Alliance forces, transferred to American custody and taken to Camp
X-Ray and, later, the more permanent Camp Delta, in Guantanamo.

Cast against the rhetoric of absolutes that President Bush
and, to a lesser if more articulate degree, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
have fed their respective publics about the enduring war on terror and the
identities of those radical, dangerous “dead-enders” held in Guantanamo, the
movie is undeniably illuminating. The so-called “Tipton Three” (Monir gets lost
and is never heard from again), while not angels (each was at some point on
probation for petty offenses back in England),
are hardly Al Qaeda terrorists or even flaming ideologues. They’re rendered in
full, three-dimensional form, and their caged humiliation and torture (at the
hands, variously, of Americans, Brits and, most brutally, Northern Alliance
Afghanis) delivers a calculable impact.

Still, The Road to
Guantanamo, from its too haphazardly quilted opening through the first 35
minutes or so, plays too coy with the group’s motivations, never adequately
assessing why these somewhat secularized loafers would go willfully into a war
zone on a good Samaritan’s lark. The admission of a more mercenary or at least
foolhardy call to arms wouldn’t necessarily completely dint the impact of the
subsequent moral questions under the microscope, but Winterbottom and
co-director Mat Whitecross seem to tacitly acknowledge the complications this
presents by skirting the issue entirely. The result, though, is a movie that
seems to be deficient in due diligence. Lacking both a sermon-to-the-choir
fervor or a libertarian persuasiveness, The
Road to Guantanamo instead lies flat.

Additionally, it’s problematic to cut back and forth between
characters and real-life figures who look little alike, and this tack robs the
movie of a sense of distinct rootedness. Instead, despite the fantastical and
inherently stirring true story on display, we’re left for the most part with only an
impressionist’s sense of swirling grey morality. (Roadside Attractions/Film
Four, R, 94 mins.)

The latest in Kids and Bully director Larry Clark’s voyeuristic forays into teenage alienation and sexual acting out, Wassup Rockers takes as its motley crew of protagonists a group of long-haired skateboarders from the South Central Los Angeles ghetto. As with all of Clark’s movies, there’s a verité immediacy to the proceedings. Unfortunately, unlike those two aforementioned in-your-face gems, there’s also a pandering and indistinctness that mark it as among the lesser of his works.

Wassup Rockers charts a skipped school day in the life of these “Latino Ramones” — black-clad, tight-pants-wearing punk aficionados who, constantly harassed for being different, fight to be themselves. Along with a few friends, the group takes a series of busses up to Beverly Hills to skateboard. There, hassled by the police,targeted by residents and seduced by two schoolgirls (Laura Cellner and Jessica Steinbaum) who spark as much to their ethnicity as their scruffiness, the boysmust navigate a surrealistic maze of mock-danger and try to return to the air-quote safety of their own impoverished burg.

Clark’s films typically have a roughhewn quality, but here he somewhat eschews the handheld nihilism of his earlier work for a few more staged and rooted shots. He still has his cinematic, fetishistic affection for skinny, shirtless teen boys and pouty, jailbait girls (in Clark’s world, everyone under 21 is a sexual magnet) and there’s his usual discerning eye for quick, shorthand detail — from the dirty crasher’s den that’s perfect in its name-brand-less anonymity to a scene where one character’s mother returns home in the morning with a wad of single dollar bills. The kids, too, are all right — they have a natural charm.

But something about Wassup Rockers feels reductive, perhaps because there’s so little individual insight into the characters. There’s no doubt legitimacy to the tension between the Latino “rockers” of the title and their neighborhood’s African-Americans,as well as the preppy teens they encounter in Beverly Hills, but things here feel paradoxically authentic and staged. The settings are grungily accurate — save for when we enter tonier territory — and the crew eventually achieves a sort of collective wounded grace and place in our memory (Clark is a superb caster, as the careers of Kids alums Rosario Dawson and Chloe Sevigny attest), but Wassup Rockers is beset with clownish, wildly farcical elements that ring false.

We know the kids aren’t Mexican, as they constantly have to remind various folks they encounter, but they do come across as emblems of a cultural minority that Clark seems to want to flog and celebrate by merely contrasting with buffoonish subsets from other races. By the time Janice Dickinson, in a weird cameo, is electrocuted in a tub after attempting to seduce Kico, you’re left wondering exactly whose view of Los Angeles Wassup Rockers represents. (First Look, R, 110 mins.)

There are comedies of guilty affirmation — about overworked,
and thus insensitive, parents — and there are comedies about omnipotent wish
fulfillment, and now there’s Adam Sandler’s Click, a middling mash-up of various well-tested comedic
formulas that’s rooted in a familial maturation not fully evidenced in the
movie’s trailer and television advertising campaign.

The story centers around Michael Newman (Sandler),
a workaholic architect who’s so caught up in striving to give his family — wife
Donna (Kate Beckinsale), young son Ben (Joseph Castanon) and daughter Samantha
(Tatum McCann) — the material things that he didn’t have growing up that he
often finds himself on the outside of his domestic life looking in. Constantly
striving to please his boss (David Hasselhoff) and win a crucial promotion,
though, has taken its toll on Michael’s patience and health. When his
frustration over a series of petty incidents involving a remote control boils
over, Michael heads out late one night to buy a universal remote. At a Bed Bath
& Beyond, he stumbles across an eccentric employee named Morty (Christopher
Walken) who bestows upon him an experimental prototype gadget that allows
Michael to exert godly all-powerful control over the mundanities of life.

Michael understandably becomes addicted to this
rush of power, fast-forwarding through commutes to work, obligatory dinners
with his parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner), arguments with Donna and the
like. He even uses it to settle a few scores with the smarmy neighbor’s kid (in
a winking shout-out to Billy
Madison’s O’Doyle family). But before Michael knows it, the
remote is anticipating his choices and programming itself, a la a Tivo
wish-list. After he decides to flash forward a couple months to the previously
mentioned promotion, Michael finds himself hurtling through time against his
will, and stuck with a personal life dinged by regret and disaster.

Early on, Sandler flaunts his typical gleeful
mania, but the film also injects some of Punch-Drunk Love’s swallowed, tears-of-a-clown
melancholy. While Beckinsale isn’t required to do much more than show up, look
pretty, halfheartedly argue and flirt a bit, Click dials up the sweeping, familial emotionalism to an
intriguing degree, courtesy of Rupert Gregson-Williams’ maudlin score and other
musical choices that highlight the poignancy of Michael’s increasing despair.
That the movie is rooted in family isn’t a surprise in and of itself, given
Sandler’s well-documented grandmother fetish and dedicated loyalties, on
display in everything from his solo comedy CDs and Happy Gilmore to later work
like Big Daddy and Mr. Deeds. His own
impending and subsequently realized fatherhood, however, has obviously colored
and matured Sandler’s take on life, and Click reflects that.

The film isn’t “dark” per se, but it is being sold,
in a bit of an end-around, as a much broader comedy than it really is. Click’s grab at Bruce Almighty-type,
Everyman omnipotence is unsurprising, given that it’s also penned by that
film’s writers, Mark O’Keefe and Steve Koren. From Michael’s first interaction
with the magical remote up through two clarifying return trips to Morty, Click hits its
expected beats in mostly winning fashion. When the remote mimics DVD menu
options, Michael flits back to various adolescent highlights, witnesses his
“making of,” explores different language and aspect ratio options for his own
amusement and even listens to James Earl Jones’ audio commentary track on his
life.

As directed by Frank Coraci (The Waterboy, The Wedding Singer), though,
the movie slowly morphs into an earnest vehicle for the affected espousal of
platitudes. Sandler plays these dramatic scenes fairly well, and special
make-up effects designer Rick Baker provides gives the movie an extra card up
its sleeve. Still, while these moments are deeply felt, the jumps to and fro
seem arbitrary. When the compulsory leap back to learned, It’s a Wonderful Life-style
illumination occurs, it feels a bit like, well, flipping on the television and
catching the moving but emotionally partitioned conclusion of a movie you
haven’t necessarily seen before but have already heard about through friends. (Sony/Revolution, PG-13, 106 mins.)