Surely You Fest

Following are reviews of movies from the closing week of the Philadelphia Film Festival, April 14-20. Up to the day of show, advance tickets may be purchased in person at all TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4 (10 a.m.-9 p.m.) and online at www.phillyfests.org (up to 36 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Regular ticket prices are $9.50, $7.50 for matinees until 4, with discounts for Philadelphia Film Society members.
Venue Codes:
IH International House, 3701 Chestnut St.
PMT Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.
RE Ritz East, 125 S. Second St.
RB Ritz at the Bourse, Fourth and Ranstead sts. (between Chestnut and Market)
TB The Bridge, 4010 Walnut St.

AFTER INNOCENCE
(Recommended)
It's impossible to imagine what it would feel like to spend decades in jail for a crime you didn't commit, but Jessica Sanders' powerful documentary gets as close to the feeling as you'd ever want to be. Philadelphians Vincent Moto (10 years) and Nick Yarris (26 years, most on death row) are among the wrongfully incarcerated men who emerge without a chunk of their lives, not to mention a place in the world. As heartbreaking as the exonerated men's stories are, and as awesome their ability to forgive, After Innocence's biggest surprises are the prosecutors who sent innocent men to jail. Some apologize, some cry sour grapes, and a notorious few fight to keep clearly innocent men in jail on any technicality they can find. Any system is bound to make errors, but Sanders convincingly argues that ours lacks the capacity to admit mistakes, let alone correct them. --Sam Adams (4/16, 2:30 IH*)

ARAHAN
(Recommended)
"I levitate to change light bulbs," admits one of the "Seven Masters," announcing Arahan's mix of Asian mysticism and modern urban life. Taking much the same approach to genre as Sam Raimi's Spider-Mans, director Ryoo Seung-wan laces the battle scenes with liberal doses of humor. The action is all wirework and CGI but impressive spectacle nonetheless; more importantly, the ample physical humor is never of the gratingly cute variety seen in so many Korean imports. Remember: No palm blasts in the house. --Shaun Brady (4/15, 10:00 RE; 4/17, 2:45 TB; 4/18, 4:45 RE)

ASTRONAUTS
(Highly Recommended)
Santi Amodeo's first solo directing effort is a worthy successor to Léon and Ghost World in the March-October semi-romance genre. Recovering addict Daniel (Nancho Novo) is understandably grumpy when not-quite-16-year-old runaway Laura (Teresa Hurtado de Ory, an astronaut on her way to a star) camps out in the stairwell of his building. Despite himself, Daniel enlists her help in keeping to his Decalogue, 10 rules for becoming an "exemplary citizen" (each embodied by helpful animation of a bowling-ball-headed gentleman). Unexpected, often funny, always real, and more bracing than inspirational, Amodeo's film is the calling card of a great Spanish stylist. --Ryan Godfrey (4/14, 7:30 TB; 4/17, 2:45 RB)

CHECKING OUT
(Recommended)
Peter Falk is adorable as a 90-year-old Shakespearean planning his final exeunt — a party to celebrate his impending suicide. As his three assembled children quarrel about whether their prankster dad really means to off himself, about how to stop him if he's serious, and about the place of humor in confronting tragedy, they pick apart the threads of their tangled family history. Sure it gets sappy, but Falk is such an endearing center of attention he makes a convincing case it's worth risking cornball sentiment if it leads to a greater enjoyment of life. --Keith Harris (4/14, 9:30 RB*; 4/15, 5:00 RB*)

CHILDSTAR
Dissimilar enough to Last Night to make you wonder if there might be two Don McKellars in the world (or at least the director's guild), Childstar is a woeful, uniformly flat satire. McKellar, whose sardonic presence has enlivened many a Canadian film, plays a pretentious out-of-work filmmaker (note the Mother and the Whore poster) who takes work minding Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall), a spoiled American (of course) preteen idol whose comeuppance is just a third act away. McKellar's dull barbs almost make you wish you were watching The First Son, the toothless parody of a kiddie action flick Taylor is in Toronto to film. Useless. —Sam Adams (4/15, 7:30 TB; 4/17, 2:30 PMT; 4/19, 5:00 RE)

CLEAN
Enlivened by Maggie Cheung's turn as a junkie's ex-wife (as in he's ex-alive) trying to kick the habit and win back her son, Olivier Assayas' up-the-middle drama belies his enfant terrible rep. Assayas has a feel for the smoke and sweat of rock clubs (he lets his scene-setting band get through an entire song), and Don McKellar makes up for Childstar with his cold, sharp performance as the band manager who blames Cheung for her fading rock star husband's death. Clean's lack of moralizing is refreshing, but there's just not much to get excited about. —Sam Adams (4/15, 9:45 RE)

COOL!
Considering that Theo Van Gogh was murdered over a short filmed just before Cool!, one might expect something more provocative than this Boyz N the Dutch Hood. The idea came from Van Gogh's interest in an experimental reform school, which (from what can be gleaned from the film's erratic editing) works via tough love group therapy. The kids who get sucked into being bank heist fall guys are almost all Moroccan, and a hip-hop group serves as a Greek chorus, but the dots never form a bigger picture of Amsterdam's social ills. Van Gogh's preachy tendencies seem better suited to the short form; his non-linear vérité approach can't compensate for the familiar story. --S.B. (4/17, 9:30 RE; 4/19, 5:15 RE)

CUTIE HONEY
Anime comes to high camp life in director Hideaki Anno's obnoxiously over-the-top superhero fantasy. While anything that tries this hard inevitably ends up spawning a few enjoyable moments (one villain singing his own theme song backed by violin-playing henchmen, a delirious J-horror spoof), 10 minutes will suffice for all but the most diehard genre fanatics. The momentum flags drearily between sugar-rush highs; there is no middle ground. --S.B. (4/16, 10:00 RE; 4/18, 7:15 RE; 4/19, 2:45 TB)

DEADROOM
(Recommended)
Four directors, four visions and four vignettes come together in Deadroom, a strong, quiet omnibus that is neither horror story nor ghost thriller. The unnervingly minimalist deadroom is the place where the living search for closure and the dead demand answers. We meet a rapist and his victim, a woman who wishes to remarry after her husband is decapitated in a car wreck, a man posing as a journalist interviewing a man posing as an author, and a woman who wants desperately to tell her co-worker how much she loved him. The script is plodding at times, but the actors carry it valiantly. --Ashlea Halpern (4/17, 9:15 PMT*; 4/18, 7:15 IH*)

EVILENKO
Alex. Caligula. And now this guy, a serial child-raping cannibal: Shouldn't Malcolm McDowell try playing a character with an edge? Just kidding, Malcolm; please don't eat me while you're in town. Loosely based on the life of Ukrainian Andrei Chikatilo, killer of at least 52 (!) women and teens in the 1980s, Italian director David Grieco's adaptation of his own novel is somehow less about the depths of unalloyed depravity than it is an earnest allegory of the moral failings of Soviet communism. Huh? McDowell knows better than to play this degenerate-but-loyal apparatchik straight, though, and his hints of glint and smirk nearly manage to subvert Grieco's righteous excess. --R.G. (4/16, 9:30 TB*; 4/17, 5:00 RE*)

THE FAR SIDE OF THE MOON
(Highly Recommended)
Former festival honoree Robert Lepage pays tribute to that most Canadian of character traits: introspection. Fittingly, Lepage plays the lead, or both of them: droopy, depressive philosopher Philippe, at work on a thesis linking space exploration and narcissism, and his glib weatherman brother André. Liquid transitions between scenes and time frames reflect the movie's interior orientation and its origin as a stage play, although Far Side is anything but closed-off. At once fantastic and mundane, it's life as seen from space — through a telescope. —Sam Adams (4/15, 12:15 TB; 4/16, 9:45 PMT; 4/18, 7:15 TB)

HARI OM
(Recommended)
Rickshaw driver Vijay Raaz and French tourist Camille Natta have little enough in common to be the leads in a romantic comedy — that's the easy part. The trick is to make their inevitable infatuation seem like more than the fulfillment of genre convention. Their sometimes hectic, sometimes idyllic journey through the Indian countryside — he's fleeing brutal creditors, she's been abandoned by her jerky boyfriend — provides a credible impetus to attraction. But the clincher is each character's nuanced resistance, a display of self-awareness you rarely encounter on the way to a happy ending. --K.H. (4/14, 7:00 RE*; 4/19, 7:15 RB)

THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS
Asia Argento's frenetic adaptation of J.T. Leroy's stories is faux art brut, a desperate jumble of celebrity cameos, extreme close-ups and gone-to-town performances, including Argento as a wanderlustful mom who makes Courtney Love look like Blythe Danner. (Her accent, which slaps a Southern drawl on Argento's Italian lilt, is almost reason enough to watch.) Those who thought Argento's Scarlet Diva was an off-the-rails masterpiece will no doubt feel the same. Don't drink the Kool-Aid. —Sam Adams (4/17, 9:30 PMT*; 4/18, 5:00 TB*)

HEROIN TOWN
First-time filmmaker Josh Goldbloom visits Willimantic, Conn., the subject of a 60 Minutes episode focused on the town's drug users and their seedy headquarters, the coincidentally named Hotel Hooker. Heroin Town's mission is to show what Dan Rather didn't — the people whose lives have been reduced to tabloid headlines. An admirable goal, perhaps, but Goldbloom, a student of the Michael Moore school, spins the story in equally reductive fashion, going so far as to defend the hotel's sleazy slumlord. Cast as the virtuous poor fighting off the evil Man, the residents are a fascinating lot of cross-dressers, Jehovah's witnesses, and yes, addicts, who almost save this film from its own moralizing agenda. --Elisa Ludwig (4/14, 7:15 IH*)

KING OF THE CORNER
You'll know Peter Riegert when you see him, but despite the fact that he's worked steadily for the last 25 years, you have to go back to Local Hero (or at least Crossing Delancey) to find a role distinctive enough to put a face to. The same, unfortunately, goes for Riegert's generic directorial debut. As a marketing exec who's wearying of his job at the same time his bosses are looking to replace him with someone younger and cheaper, Riegert tries to stretch a character actor's turn to lead length, while Isabella Rossellini, Eli Wallach, Rita Moreno and Beverly D'Angelo consistently outdo him in minor roles. (You get the feeling Riegert called in a career's worth of favors.) The movie's minor pleasures are overwhelmed by its major flaws. —Sam Adams (4/16, 7:30 RE*; 4/17, 2:45 RE*)

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
(Recommended)
Not quite lost-masterpiece material, Clarence Brown and Maurice Tourneur's 1920 adapation boasts stunning, silvery landscapes and slightly less animated performances. The Indian-settler dynamics are less racist than you'd think, though they're more schematic than in the earlier Inceville Westerns. But on the big screen, the photography and the large-scale battle scenes should be impressive. —Sam Adams (4/17, 4:45 PMT)

LILA SAYS
It's not easy to do the young-girl-coming-into-her-sexuality thing without seeming like a sleaze, and Ziad Douieri (West Beirut) doesn't come close to pulling it off. Winsome, one-note Vahina Giocante (Marie Baie des Anges) plays a 16-year-old French girl who entrances the Arab boys in her seaside town with pornographic monologues that'd put a poke in any pervert's raincoat, but the intended provocation merely registers as crass. The movie seems as repulsed as it is fascinated by her sexuality, and wouldn't you know repulsion wins out? —Sam Adams (4/15, 9:30 RB; 4/17, 5:00 RE)

LIPSTICK & DYNAMITE
(Recommended)
If you think Trish Stratus is tough, it's time to rethink your definition of "pussy whipped." Lipstick & Dynamite takes an up-close look at lady wrestling in the 1940s and '50s, when women were often booked as half-time diversions on a par with alligator wrangling. Starring the Fabulous Moolah, Gladys "Killem" Gillem, Penny Banner and more, Lipstick is packed with archival footage, scissor-kicking stunts, and backstabbing interviews. Reunited after nearly half a century, the lady wrestlers come face-to-face with their longtime rivals. Old grudges hold fast, and the tension is delicious. --A.H. (4/15, 7:15 RB*; 4/16, 5:15 RB*)

MAD HOT BALLROOM
(Recommended)
This Slamdance crowd-pleaser about inner-city kids prepping for a ballroom dance competition may seem like the same old Fame old, but the delight is in the details: the teacher who tells them to put on their "tango face" and dance the foxtrot "sneaky"; the kids who argue over partners; and of course, the steppin' out. —Sam Adams (4/16, 2:45 PMT; 4/17, 7:30 RE; 4/19, 7:15 IH*)

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
(Recommended)
Multimedia artist Miranda July's debut is like the best of '90s indies, only more sincere. July plays a lonely artist who makes experimental videos and hangs out with the sweet, wistful senior citizen she escorts in her Elder-cab. Across town, July's future crush (Deadwood's John Hawkes) is separating from his wife and setting up a new home with his two sons. Questions of love and mortality arise; July manages her characters' pain with comedic grace. Beautifully shot, Me and You has a sense of wonderment that makes even its banal moments meaningful. --E.L. (4/16, 7:30 PMT*; 4/17, 12:30 RE*)

MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH
FestIndies' weakest overall program offers Mark Brodzik and Andrew Geller's Mouina (The Tree), an affectionate portrait of a Lebanese South Philly resident whose decade-long devotion to the same Christmas tree is either to be admired or feared, and Liesje Kraai's What Is Animation?, a funny mixed-media piece which slaps animated heads on the bodies of real people as they answer the titular question. —Sam Adams (4/16, 9:30 IH*)

MUSIC FROM THE INSIDE OUT
(Recommended)
Less of a tourist-office circle jerk than Rittenhouse Square, Daniel Anker's doc does the Philadelphia Orchestra's members the service of treating them like international figures rather than local curiosities. Given that many admit they turned to music due to a difficulty with words, Anker's pursuit of unanswerable questions like "What is music?" would seem to be a blind alley, but he gets thoughtful, if hardly life-altering, responses. If you've gotten a musician drunk, you've heard it before, but it's put together with style and intelligence. --S.A. (4/20, 7:00 PMT*)

OFF BEAT
Hendrik Holzemann's debut follows a young German paramedic named Crash (Matthias Schweighofer) as he and his partners try, mostly unsuccessfully, to revive heart attack victims and protect battered women. His grim take on German youth culture is undermined by the fact that the young Germans here are generally types rather than individuals. While Holzemann seems to feel the need to temper the film's darkness with something, he can't decide whether to go for "surreal" or "quirky." Instead he splits the difference and tries to convince us that surrealism is just really, really quirky. --K.H. (4/14, 9:30 RE; 4/16, 12:15 TB; 4/18, 2:30 RE)

ONLY HUMAN
(Recommended)
A comedy of errors unfolds when a young Jewish woman introduces her Palestinian fiancé to her wacky family. Everyone — the brain-addled grandfather, the belly-dancing sister, the dad who sleeps around and the brother who turned Orthodox after seeing Fiddler -- has something to say about it. Spaniards Teresa Pelegri and Dominic Harari have assembled a stellar cast to take funny one step further in this quick-witted film that puts a Romeo and Juliet spin on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. --A.H. (4/18, 7:00 RE; 4/19, 12:30 RE)

PALINDROMES
(Highly Recommended)
"Spell it forwards or backwards, it's always the same." Unnecessarily defining his title, Todd Solondz offers his critics the chance to accuse him of repeating himself, but those who see Palindromes as only Solondz's latest thumb in the eye are missing the boat. Opening with the funeral of Welcome to the Dollhouse's Dawn Weiner (so we know how fond Solondz is of that comparison), Palindromes is the most concentrated attack on audience identification since Todd Haynes' Superstar. Aviva, a baby-obsessed 13-year-old who skips town after her parents force her to abort, is played by seven actors, from tiny white girls to obese black women, a young boy to — nah, let's not spoil it. The boldly colored backdrops and awful-yet-moving performances — Ellen Barkin's blank-eyed mother is a true work of genius — push the movie into Godard territory, where Solondz seems surprisingly at home. Now can we stop talking about whether or not he's "nice?" — S.A. (4/14, 7:15 PMT*)

QUIET SUMMER
(Recommended)
Shuhei Fujita's debut is an autobiographical study of contemporary relations between Japan and Taiwan, illustrated through the return of a young Japan-raised Taiwanese (Kageyama Yukihiko) to the island of his ancestors. Well, that's the intended subject, and in his travels the young man does indeed encounter a variety of perspectives on the nations and their people. But as the film creeps leisurely forward in extended takes, it becomes a visual poem dedicated to Yukihiko's beatific face; his eyes all but upstage the landscape of Taiwan itself. --K.H. (4/15, 5:00 PMT*; 4/17, 12:15 PMT*)

RACING AGAINST THE CLOCK
(Highly Recommended)
It's not a wonderful title for a doc about senior to very-senior women track stars — you know someone considered "Finish Line" — and director-editor Bill Haney rates no more than a participant ribbon, but it's hard to quibble with his unique subject and the five driven, awe-inspiring women he chooses to follow from the 2003 U.S. prelims to the World Masters Athletics Championships in Puerto Rico. Just try to count how many simultaneous emotions you feel — joy, suspense, pain, dread, absurdity, unthrottled amazement, et al — as you watch a 75-year-old widow attempt to break the world pole-vaulting record. A dark horse candidate for audience favorite. --R.G. (4/17, 7:00 PMT; 4/18, 5:00 IH)

THE RETURN OF CAGLIOSTRO
(Recommended)
Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco's irreverent mock-doc follows the making of the "famed masterpiece" of the La Marca brothers, a corrupt Sicilian duo who trade in their religious statuary business for a mob-financed shot at cinematic fame. What ensues is a slapstick send-up of movie history, fueled by a flatulent, stuttering, vomiting ensemble of religious leaders, possessed noblemen, snotty film critics and alcoholic Hollywood stars. --E.L. (4/15, 2:30 RE; 4/16, 12:30 RB; 4/18, 9:30 RB)

SEQUINS
(Recommended)
Claire (winning Lola Naymark) is a pregnant teen who drops out of school and quits her supermarket job, telling everyone she's gained weight because she has cancer. Confused and in denial, Claire shuts out the baby's father, rides a scooter against her doctor's advice and wishes she could still have an abortion. That Claire finds solace and human connection through her needlework is a potentially hackneyed premise that, managed with great subtlety, becomes entirely believable in Eleonore Faucher's poignant debut. --E.L. (4/15, 7:15 PMT)

SHOOTING LIVIEN
What we have here is failure to communicate. Loaded with pedestrian symbolism and maudlin dialogue, Rebecca Cook's third feature revels in painful cliches. Yes, there's an aspiring musician. Yes, he lives in Brooklyn. Yes, he wears ironic T-shirts, gets naked in public and never washes his hair. But wait — there's more. You see, John Livien (The Grudge's Jason Behr) thinks he's John Lennon. He wears granny glasses and fakes a British accent. He makes a pilgrimage to Strawberry Fields in a drug-induced madness. And his girlfriend breaks up the band, just like Yoko. Sigh. The edge-of-insanity claptrap is uninspired and Behr's character is wholly unlikable. At this rate, Livien will never be more popular than Jesus. --A.H. (4/16, 4:45 IH*; 4/17, 9:30 IH*; 4/19, 9:30 IH)

THE SOUP, ONE MORNING
(Recommended)
Shot in a lovely muted blue/yellow digital palette, and confined almost entirely to a three-tatami Tokyo apartment, Izumi Takahashi's quietly caustic, claustrophobic drama about the dissolution of a domestic relationship begins with stately, static shots and gets progressively more jittery as the characters drift apart. Jobless and medicated, Kitagawa is depressed and increasingly involved in the cultish "Sublimation House," to the dismay of Shizu and their mutual bank account. "Normal religions don't sell karmic sofas," she sniffs. Takahashi's assured directorial debut is full of such tiny comic moments, all in koan-like service to an eventual larger, sadness-infused wisdom. — R.G. (4/15, 7:15 IH; 4/16, 12:30 PMT; 4/18, 9:30 IH)

STRATOSPHERE GIRL
(Recommended)
It's overstating matters to say that M.X. Oberg's luded-out thriller toys with images of sexual menace. In fact, the tale of Angela (Chloé Winkel), a naïve Dutch cartoonist who relocates to Tokyo to entertain businessmen as a "hostess," is largely an excuse to loiter over languorous images of a city and an ingenue dreamily unreal enough to deserve such treatment. By dissolving from Angela's manga-style sketches to live-action, Oberg transforms a potentially creepy exercise in voyeurism into a study of the lively imagination lurking behind Winkel's gorgeously impassive stare. --K.H. (4/16, 7:15 TB; 4/18, 4:45 RE; 4/19, 12:15 TB)

TAKE A DEEP BREATH
It's always tempting to search for cultural critiques in foreign films, but Take a Deep Breath is soap opera, pure and simple. After a car accident leaves her boyfriend hospitalized, Sasa (Ana Franic) falls in love with his sister, much to the chagrin of Sasa's father (Bogdan Diklic), a conservative judge. The real reason behind the judge's displeasure will come as no surprise, but director Dragan Marinkovic cranks every revelation to near-operatic pitch. Perhaps if he had gone all the way and shot this as a musical, the cast of unpleasant characters would have been more palatable. — S.B. (4/16, noon, RE*; 4/18, 7:15 RB*)

THIS CHARMING GIRL
(Recommended)
Lee Yoon-ki's morose, minor-key character study finds a female postal worker (Kim Ji-soo) reeling from the end of her engagement and her mother's recent death, walking through life in a soft white haze. The movie's reserve fits the character's emotional withdrawal, though its muted sadness can seem one-note. Even if the Smiths reference is a red herring, This Charming Girl gives wistfulness a good name. --S.A. (4/15, 9:45 TB; 4/16, 5:15 PMT)

THREE DANCING SLAVES
(Recommended)
A Gallic (and better for it) American History X, Gaél Morel's triptych (co-written with Ma Mére director Christophe Honoré) follows three working-class part-Muslim brothers at the periphery of the mainstream in nearly every way — environmentally, socially, religiously and sexually. Christophe (Stéphane Rideau of Loin and Come Undone), the eldest, is newly out of prison and has vowed to get his life in order, complete with a girl and a factory job. Middle brother Marc (Nicholas Cazalé) idolizes Christophe's previous criminal incarnation, however, and is playing (out of his depth and, eventually, tragically) at being a small-time hood. Olivier (Thomas Dumerchez), the youngest brother, is having a secret affair with Christophe's best friend and co-gang member Hicham. There's a bit of tough poetry in Morel's elliptical prodding at the seams of the French underclass, and more than a little capoeira; there may be other dance/martial-art hybrids, but none so homoerotic. — R.G. (4/18, 9:30 RE*; 4/19, 2:30 RE*)

THROW DOWN
Apart from a Sanshiro Sugata reference and a fondness for long shots, it's hard to see how Akira Kurosawa inspired Johnnie To's alleged tribute to "the greatest filmmaker"; maybe I missed the one with the slo-mo fight scenes and the jerk-till-your-tear-ducts-bleed score. Throw Down bears more resemblance to Seijun Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter, or at least its primary-color nightclub locale, but it lacks the spark of manic inspiration, settling for reprise instead of reinvention. By the time eager beaver Aaron Kwok and washed-up ex-champ Louis Koo get to their preordained judo showdown, you could be halfway through Kagemusha. --S.A. (4/14, 9:30 RE; 4/16, 4:45 RE)

TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIE
A banal, Three's Company-ish comedy of mistaken identity and intention in the Korean sticks. Much of the plot machinery depends on an ob-gyn randomly declaring (for all to hear) that a woman who has wandered into his hospital wing is three months pregnant. This woman, a good-hearted ex-con trying to return a stolen wedding ring, has no reason to fib, but she has to claim to a befuddled small-town mayor and wife that she's their son's intended, if only to stretch the movie beyond a 10-minute short. Regarding further filler, the Pepper Boy competition is a highlight, much like our own Miss Dairy Juniata County pageant. --R.G. (4/15, 7:15 RE; 4/17, 2:30 RE; 4/19, 5:00 TB)

WINTER SOLSTICE
Josh Sternfeld's debut feature deals with the morose family dynamics in which the Sundance Screenwriting Lab seems to specialize. Anthony LaPaglia stars as a widower raising teenage sons, whose parenting style veers between tense confrontations and front-porch reconciliations. The fine cast manages to sketch in details left opaque by Sternfeld's flimsy script, which is far too preoccupied with heavy-handed metaphor (LaPaglia's gardening job should send up warning flags). The ensemble cast, mawkish acoustic guitar-scored montages and open-ended resolutions leave a nasty TV-pilot taste in the mouth. --S.B. (4/15, 7:30 RE*; 4/16, 12:15 RE*)