It’s 1985 and an executed Bronx drug dealer’s pregnant girlfriend finds herself on the lam after a Puerto Rican gang lord marks her for death.  Twenty-one years later she is living peacefully underground in Connecticut, playing suburban mom to two unsuspecting sons, when her past—and the gangstas who gunned down her former love—catch up to her.  She does what any mother would do: uncorks a treasure trove of hidden semi-automatic weapons and unleashes holy hell to the shock of her boys in Illegal Tender, a glossily silly piece of hood provocation that by all rights should have gone direct to video.    

Millie DeLeon (Wanda DeJesus) faces the problems of many typical single mothers: raising an adolescent right while keeping a young adult kid out of trouble and looking for a stable boyfriend.  Alienated collegiate son Wilson (Rick Gonzalez) knows nothing of his father’s legacy, and mom’s smart stock investments (!) have kept the family living high on the hog for nearly two decades. Then a chance encounter in a grocery store sends Millie into a frenzy and back on the run.  Wilson is about to find out what Big Bad Mama is made of—and how.  Before long, he’s done a 180 and is gallivanting around Puerto Rico, keeping time with big boss Javier (Gary Perez) and of course, developing a newfound love and respect for mama, which churns odd Oedipal undercurrents in the film’s late stretches.  No one will accuse Illegal Tender of being boring¾or good.     

Wanda DeJesus, memorable in Clint Eastwood’s Bloodwork, does enough acting here for three films, and that’s not a good thing.  In full strut as a Pam Grier-esque archetype of seasoned sexuality and wildly protective maternal instincts, DeJesus stalks the film with both guns blazing, giving as much zest to her endlessly over-emotive familial lectures, such double-barreled tripe as “Here I am motherf***ers! Come and get me!”  It is a riotous performance that overshoots the mark in every scene, cartoonish and loaded with actorly tics and super-saturated pathos that director Franc Reyes should have calmed down after the first take.  It feels as if DeJesus knew what crap she got herself into and decided to blow the whole wad in every frame, faking it up to the level of the rest of the film.  It’s either brilliantly inspired or wretchedly awful—or both.  And while she may be physically galvanizing, the over-the-top theatrics and forced line deliveries are a real hoot, and I can safely say that I was very entertained by her, if by nothing else here.   

Illegal Tender is the type of shoddy film pitched directly into sensationalism, not above subtitling a scene, “Bronx, New York” (for the directionally challenged). Complete with fast cars, a hip-hop soundtrack, guns galore, millions in stolen loot, hoochie-mama hit women and a fey Puerto Rican boss man harboring a ho-hum secret.  And who can forget a laugh-out-loud line about a certain lucrative ‘80s investment delivered with a straight face?  The film is nothing but B-movie gangsta-porn, catering with lowdown glee to the audience that has made Scarface a modern cult classic for all of the wrong reasons.  Skip it.    

 The 11th Hour

It’s a little embarrassing to confess that the gripping, Oscar-winning global warning An Inconvenient Truth left me with a tinge of “not in my lifetime” apathy. And I felt a similar, politically incorrect sentiment for The 11^th Hour, a potent subject given an inert treatment in a documentary about how we have abused our blue planet’s resources, and are a species marked for extinction.   

Narrated and co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, the film is a talking-head onslaught of global hysteria, as an avalanche of academics, conservationists, environmentalists and even progressive CEOs flood the frame with cautionary, well-thought perspectives on something most of us already know quite well: we’re using everything up, and putting nothing back.    

The signs seem everywhere that something has gone amiss on Earth: the planet is heating up; severe floods and drought are common; catastrophic, unexpected flooding washes away communities; hurricanes and Tsunamis devastate; fly-over states are pelted with hurricane-level storms.     

According to DiCaprio and company, these global incidents, while reported in the media as isolated freaks of nature, are really much more than that—connected symptoms of a large scale red flag:

That our “civilized” race has made the grave error of viewing itself as separate from the rest of nature,  revolutionizing our lifestyles and comforts at great expense to our natural home.  The film asserts that some 50,000 or more species go extinct by our hands in each calendar year.  And we are part of that food chain.   

The message is clear—we are wiping out the earth by relentless economic growth and overpopulation, and that while the planet will eventually recover from this eco-depletion and regenerate long after a very possible Dark Age, we certainly won’t be on it.  Yet is this downfall inevitable?  Or can we fix it before the eleventh hour is upon us?   

While The 11^th Hour is rich in perspective and obvious passion from its filmmakers, there is something too academic and familiar in the approach. A multitude of talking heads issuing doom and gloom, completely plausible, yes, and likely true scenarios yet after about a half hour or so, monotony sets in as directors Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners continue a mechanical shuffle through their scores of experts.  I lost my patience and only recommitted intermittently.     

The comparisons are inevitable and An Inconvenient Truth, essentially a dressed-up PowerPoint presentation, had more resonance than The 11^th Hour, however well intentioned.  There simply has to be a way to make these films more compelling than testimony, disaster footage, testimony, nature footage, testimony, disaster footage, ad nauseum.   

What ultimately makes The 11^th Hour work is a third-act reversal, a wish list in which hopeful prescriptions are offered for how each of us can do our part to turn the impending storm around.   

It’s an important topic given a rather routine film treatment.   

  Resurrecting the Champ

 Josh Hartnett, the unassuming and likable young actor found too often dressing up glossy genre vehicles like The Black Dahlia and Lucky Number Slevin, delivers a complex performance in Resurrecting the Champ. A surprisingly intelligent look at some weighty subjects—journalistic ethics, father and son relationships, the struggle to make a mark in the world and the lies we tell our loved ones when we feel like we are nobody, going nowhere.   

Based on a true story, second-string Denver Post sports writer Erik Kernan just can’t get a break.  His hard-nosed editor, Metz (Alan Alda), thinks his writing lacks heart, and he is eclipsed by the looming shadow of his father, a once a beloved radio broadcaster. At the same time, Kernan’s relationship with his sensitive six-year-old son is becoming a casualty of a separation from his estranged wife (Kathryn Morris), a more talented scribe for the same daily, who has grown up—and beyond—his reach.   

Everything changes when Kernan finds his one big idea and shot at redemption: a feature story on fallen-from-grace, ‘50s prizefighter Bob Satterfield (Samuel L. Jackson), thought long-dead but actually living homeless and on the streets of Denver, routinely beaten by local teens who refer to him as “Champ.”  While Metz passes on the “empty hole” of a subject, Kernan surreptitiously pitches the story to the paper’s weekend magazine, whose editor (David Paymer) bites on the angle of the long-lost, resurrected hero.   

Meanwhile, Kernan fears losing his grip on his son, whom he distracts with tall tales of celebrity friends and fabricated famous exploits. But after the story is published, overnight sensation Kernan is courted by a cynical Showtime producer (Teri Hatcher) as the network’s latest discovery and new TV sportscaster.  But reality quickly sets in, and when the integrity of the story is questioned, Kernan is forced into messy moral territory.   

While Resurrecting the Champ might initially seem like a feel-good buddy movie about a writer who gets his one big scoop, writers Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett skillfully weave the several resonant thematic threads into a layered look at the divide between fathers and sons and the role of ethics—journalistic and human—in building that relationship.  Kernan and Champ each have unresolved father-son issues, both with their own fathers and their sons, and their reporter-subject relationship deepens.   

Hartnett is simply superb as the young father who desperately wants to be loved and admired by his growing son, hitting an emotional stride late in the film that culminates in two deeply affecting scenes, one set in a children’s classroom and another at his son’s bedside.  It is a performance that fully informs Erik Kernan’s personal and professional crossroads, with equal heart given to the plight of a frustrated journalist as well as to a father alienated by lies told to win the love of a son.  And Jackson, the always-dependable movie badass, here finds new grace notes of regret and pathos. And then there is the supporting cast of Alda, Paymer and Peter Coyote, who lend a workman-like professionalism to the film, with Alda walking a very fine line between faith in and disillusionment with his rising young star.   

Director Rod Lurie has charted similar morally ambiguous territory before in The Contender, a hard charging political drama about a presidential candidate undone by scandal.  But here he uses the gray areas to strike at the heart, and the unabashedly touching Resurrecting the Champ emerges as a thoughtful look at the lies we tell for love.