Hostel: Part II

Writer/director Eli Roth reprises his 2005 hit “Hostel” franchise with another scary cautionary tale.  Same plot, same locale.  In the first film, three male tourists take a train from Amsterdam to a hostel where the local women are hot.  This time, three females take a train from Rome to a hostel near a hot-springs spa to get away from jerks.  All are abducted and auctioned to rich thrill-seekers who pay big bucks to mutilate and murder them.  Europe, it seems, is the place to purchase experiences to take home: Upscale tourists torture unlucky tourists in Roth’s satire of capitalist leisure. 

“Hostel” ended with Paxton (Jay Hernandez) minus two fingers, escaping his captors.  “Hostel: Part II” begins with him relating his nightmare to Italian authorities.  This scene supplies the backstory, including the meaning of tattoos of bulldog heads.  Next we meet a trio of American art students in Rome: nice Beth (Lauren German), nerdy Loma (Heather Matarazzo from “The Princess Diaries”) and nasty Whitney (Bijou Phillips from “Havoc” and “Bully”).  The model in their drawing class leads them to the lethal hostel.  Too bad they take her stylish black skull-and-crossbones T-shirt as a fashion statement, not a travel warning. 

Presented by Quentin Tarantino — his “Pulp Fiction” plays on the hostel room’s TV set — “Hostel: Part II” is a slam against “First World materialism,” as the press notes put it.  The almost biblical plot dispenses the death penalty to evildoers and their victims as they trade roles.  Doing unto others is one’s undoing.  Roth taunts fans who pay to see torture on the screen, though he charges far less than Elite Hunting.

Rated R for sadistic scenes of torture and bloody violence, terror, nudity, sexual content, language and some drug content. Two and a half stars. – Bill Stamets

Once

Anyone who aches for an antidote to the lavish spectacle of recent movie musicals (“Chicago,” “Dreamgirls”) will find it in John Carney’s thoroughly winning film “Once.”  The Irish director is onto something with this understated indie film; he may well have paved the way for a new type of movie musical. 

“Once” tells an unpretentious tale through charming acting, great songs and not one false note.  No one suddenly breaks into song here.  The music evolves naturally out of the story and the interaction of the two main characters, played by Glen Hansard, lead singer for the Irish band The Frames, and Eastern European pianist Marketa Irglova. 

So absorbed are you in the film that it’s over before you realize Carney has given these characters no names — they’re just the Guy and the Girl.  He’s a thirty-something busker who still lives with his dad above the family vacuum repair shop where he works when not in the streets doing what he does best.  She’s an immigrant — a classically trained pianist from the Czech Republic who lives with her mother and young child and makes ends meet by selling flowers and magazines and cleaning houses. 

They are two lonely souls who meet on Dublin’s busy Grafton Street; she disarms him by asking who the love songs he sings are written for.  He’s not passionate about anything except writing and singing, but while other people his age have moved on in life, he still hasn’t figured out his next step.  He shuffles about hoping for a big break, yet does nothing to make it a reality.  She is younger, a bit sassy and much more alive and in the moment.  Her eye is focused on the future with a sensibility and determination that eventually rubs off on him.  Rated R for language. Four Stars – Mary Houlihan

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Ken Loach’s breathtakingly authentic story of two brothers in the Irish Republican Army who find themselves drifting apart, personally and politically, after the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty in the early 1920s. 

You don’t have to know about the history of “the troubles” in Northern Ireland to be swept up in the human drama of the film.  With almost tactile immediacy — you almost can smell the smoke and the wild grasses in the hills, feel the rain and the fog in your bones — this movie places you shoulder to shoulder with people who are living and dying for their country, their families, their friends and their principles. 

We’ve seen some fine war movies recently — and not all of them contemporary documentaries — from Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima” to Rachid Bouchareb’s “Days of Glory (Indigenes).”  “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” ranks with the best of them — and among the best war films ever made.  There are echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” set in France just a few years earlier, and Loach’s film is worthy of that comparison, but it’s told from down at the grassroots level.  Not Rated. Four stars – Jim Emerson