Bread and Roses
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Oak Street Cinema, Friday at 7:30 p.m.
Citing both aesthetic and economic reasons, the socially conscious British director Ken Loach is on record calling Los Angeles "the most horrible city in the world." So it makes sense that he has set (and shot) his latest film in the city of soiled angels. Bread and Roses is a sardonically humane fictionalization of the Justice for Janitors campaign, an early 1990s labor movement that resulted in wage increases (bread) and a modicum of dignity (roses) for thousands of disenfranchised, Mexican-born high-rise cleaners. Following the Saving Private Ryan of illegal-border-crossing scenes, Loach charts the consciousness-raising of one building's janitors through the efforts of a passionate radical organizer (Adrien Brody, who aptly resembles an upside-down mop) and his flirtatious relationship with a headstrong custodian (Pilar Padilla). We also get one standout tête-à-tête between sisters; an awkward collection of painfully unfunny slapstick set pieces; and a general stickin'-it-to-the-man vibe that's old-school enough to earn Loach some slack for being less subtle in his attachment to the common man's plight than in recent triumphs such as My Name Is Joe. The film is heavy-handed, even for the socialist Oliver Stone--but perhaps the American class system deserves the harshest denunciation possible. In any case, trade unionists needn't check their cards at the door. Mark Peranson
Croatia 2000: A Winter to Remember
Heights Theater, Sunday at 5:00 p.m.
Dr. Franjo Tudman, Croatia's first post-Tito leader and the kind of crypto-royalist eminence U.S. newspapers used to describe with the word strongman, finally expires, creating room for the birth of real democracy. This superb documentary records the process of that birth through unprecedented access to the players: Codirectors Rajko Grlic and Igor Mirkovic follow all the splintered opposition parties and their candidates, revealing a primary season and a general election mashed together and held at triple speed. The comedy for American audiences, of course, comes in our recognition of the universality of glad-handing, spin-mongering politics--and in the sadness of the pasty-faced progressive candidates complaining, "The people want a father--someone who's likable, not responsible." (The winner, Stipe Mesic, bears more than a passing resemblance to the governor of Minnesota.) The filmmakers grab some amazing material on the fly: a pseudo-Iggy Pop rocker defending his far-right benefit concert; Tudman's minister of finance sneaking a bottle of vodka into a state function. Hardly dry and C-SPANish, Croatia 2000 is a funny and hair-raising kick. Matthew Wilder
Stroke
Heights Theater, Sunday at 7:00 p.m.
A stroke can rob a person of many things--the ability to move about, certainly, but also the power to express thoughts and feelings that may remain fully intact. For Phil (Teddy Weiler), newly felled by a stroke yet committed to regaining his identity as a poet, the tragedy is all the more complete because he can no longer command his art and must rely on his only friend (Edwin Johnson) to survive. Director Rob Nilsson shot Stroke in black-and-white digital video with his Bay Area-based Tenderloin Group of homeless and inner-city residents, and the reality of experiences gained on the jagged edges of society allows a fine example of the filmmaker's mandate to challenge American cultural fears. All of the movie's characters--including a heartsick waitress who used to be a call girl, and a skin merchant in search of his next payoff--are forced either to live with fear or to cease to live at all. These people would be hard to forget in any context, but Nilsson makes certain that we recognize them as ourselves. Caroline Palmer
