"I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night; I'm not gonna lie," admits actor Sean Faris, in town to promote his new film, Never Back Down, a martial arts-oriented drama that opens areawide on Friday. "I went to junior high and high school here, so I had my boys come down because I needed some normalcy from the non-reality of my business."

Faris, who refers to himself as the "pretty boy actor guy," has had a good run so far. After starring in Fox's Reunion and the ABC drama series Life As We Know It, he had guest spots on Smallville, One Tree Hill and Boston Public before making his motion-picture debut in Pearl Harbor. But none of that properly prepared him for his role in Never Back Down as Jake Tyler, a football player who has trouble adjusting when his family moves from Iowa to Florida during his senior year of high school.

When a tough classmate named Ryan (Cam Gigandet) beats his ass with an arsenal of martial-arts moves learned through participating in after-school "fight clubs," Jake decides to train so that he will, as the movie title suggests, "never back down" in the future. He meets a local trainer (Djimon Hounsou) who's a former champion fighter and now runs a local gym/training facility. Even though the trainer has a policy that bans fighting outside the gym, Jake starts to prepare both mentally and physically for another showdown with Ryan. Faris had to do some physical preparation of his own. To beef up for the role, the slender actor hit the weight room and added 15 pounds to his frame.

"It was tough; I had never done any formal training before taking this role," he says. "They had us training six hours a day; six days a week. After doing that for six hours, I would go to see either a chiropractor or a massage therapist. We had to do that to keep our bodies tuned up. It's like a race car. You have to be revved up and ready to go. Then I would go see our weight trainer at Gold's Gym."

Along the way, Faris broke a bone in his lower back, pushing back the fight scenes (of which there are plenty) to the last three weeks of shooting the film. As a result, Faris lost all the weight he gained doing the 12-hours-a-day required to shoot the fight scenes.

"It was the hardest thing I've had to go through physically in my life so far," he says. "It screwed me up a bit emotionally. But it was a great challenge, and I never took a day off."

While he didn't have a martial-arts background to draw upon, he did, however, reflect upon his childhood experiences for the role, namely a move from Houston to Parma when he was in junior high.

"I was just about to set into those relationships with people who would be my friends for life," says Faris, who attended St. Bridget's. "When I got here, I was an outcast. I was completely different from everyone else. I had a lot of adjusting to do."

The world of Never Back Down, however, isn't like that of any typical high school. All the male students have abs of steel and the women have implants, which they reveal during the numerous pool-party scenes. The fight scenes are bloody and gruesome and accompanied by a soundtrack of slick hard rock tunes. It's a pretty violent movie for having a non-violent message and could be dismissed as gratuitous fare.

"I hope the message is clear enough," Faris admits. "Jake starts out fighting out of insecurity and fear of not knowing where he stood in life. He gets beat up really bad and trains out of anger and rage to get back at these people. Along the way, the trainer becomes a father figure to him and he finds a guide in life. He starts to really listen and has a change of heart. He learns through training to fight for the right reasons and have some self-control." - Jeff Niesel

The Band's Visit

Eight members of an Egyptian band - the full title is "The Alexandria Ceremonial Police Band" - get stranded in a podunk Israeli town on their way to a gig in The Band's Visit, a charmingly ragged fish-out-of-water comedy by first-time writer-director Eran Kolirin. An audience favorite at last year's Cannes and Toronto film festivals, Visit is probably best-known as the movie that didn't get an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film because AMPAS aparatchiks decided that too much of the dialogue was in English. Ironically, it's the absence of subtitles which should make this a hit with stateside arthouse mavens. Warm-hearted but never soft-headed, Kolirin's eminently accessible, wryly amusing parable about culture shock and cross-cultural relations deserves to find as wide an audience as possible.

Stranded at the airport when their hosts fail to meet them, conductor Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai) and his bandmates take a bus to the town where they're supposed to be playing. Naturally, it turns out to be the wrong town. Since there aren't any more buses running that day, the band is forced to spend the night with some accommodating locals. Tawfiq and the group's resident Romeo (Saleh Bakri's Haled) bunk at the home of cafe manager Dina (the wonderfully sultry Ronit Elkabetz from Late Marriage), the other members of the band stay with family man Itzik (Rubi Moscovich). Before shipping out the next morning, the gaping chasm between Israel and Egypt will shrink just a little and everyone - the initially standoffish villagers and the formerly wary band members alike - will have a new appreciation for the other's "differences." If all that sounds borderline precious and/or dreary, it's not. Kolirin shares Aki Kaurismaki's deadpan drollery (a scene at a local roller disco where Haled gives a less confident bandmate tips on picking up women is priceless), as well as the Finnish master's knack for understated pathos. The late-night gabfest between Tawfiq and Dina in which they open up to each other, confessing their mutual loneliness, manages to be moving without descending into mawkishness. The Band's Visit might not have any seismic impact on Middle Eastern relations, but it's a sweet dream anyway. - Milan PaurichK

Opens Friday at the Cedar Lee Theater, 2163 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights, 440-564-2034, clevelandcinemas.com.

Bomb It

Graffiti raises dozens of questions about art and public space: Who decides the décor on a wall built by tax dollars, what is vandalism and what is beautification, and what motivates a person to do something at once illegal and beautiful? Most of those questions are explored in Jon Reiss' 2007 documentary, Bomb It. Reiss aims at the uninitiated, beginning with memories and thoughts from seminal characters in Philadelphia and New York who began painting in the late '60s and early '70s. He portrays the foundations of hip-hop-style graffiti and its motivations and principles briefly before the film begins a world tour, profiling writers and their ideas in Europe, South America, Japan and finishing in Los Angeles. He briefly touches on South Africa, but that's a token hip-hop cultural outreach event in a neighborhood where writing graffiti is an unfathomable luxury.

Graf as we know it now may have started in East Coast cities of the USA, but the North American writers in this film don't show nearly as much depth of thought or generosity of spirit as those Reiss finds abroad. While most of the Americans espouse an art driven by ego, and some the stated goal of "fucking shit up," artists in Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Sao Paolo consider the architecture, make political or social statements, and work to bring art into the lives of impoverished kids. A Parisian artist stencils rats all over the City of Light because he's decided that's what fits there, and the hip-hop style just doesn't. A schoolteacher in Amsterdam talks about bringing art and color to the kids. A writer who paints his florid decorations on the walls of the sewers beneath Sao Paolo talks about how it helps him cope with depression and introduces a family he met that lives in that underground world. Reiss gives the victims some time, too, portraying them as sincere and frustrated, but with none of the depth and color that draws people to the writing on the wall. - Michael Gill

Bomb It: 10 p.m. Friday, March 14 and 9:30 a.m. Sunday, March 16, Cleveland International Film Festival/Tower City Cinemas.

College Road Trip

Is it just me or is there something almost tragic about Martin Lawrence - the only stand-up comic to ever receive an NC-17 rating from the MPAA for a concert film (1994's You So Crazy) - headlining a G-rated Disney comedy? Martin proved his dramatic chops starring opposite Eddie Murphy in the late Ted Demme's unfairly maligned Life from 1999, but his choice in material since then has been, uh, spotty at best. Following on the heels of such chronic Lawrence underachievers as Bad Boys 2, Rebound, Wild Hogs and last month's mostly negligible Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, College Road Trip looks less like an aberration than more slop from the same sty. The only shocking thing about Road Trip is its squeaky-clean rating. Couldn't they have squeezed in a "shit" or passing reefer joke to at least earn a P-frigging-G? After all, it's "College Road Trip," not "Day Care Road Trip."

Oh yeah, the plot. Lawrence plays James Porter, an overprotective Chicago dad who elects to take his teenage daughter Melanie (pre-Hannah Montana Disney Channel tweener sensation Raven-Symone) on a tour of college campuses. She wants to go to Georgetown; he wants her to stay closer to home and attend Northwestern. Since the entire movie was shot in Connecticut, I guess it doesn't really matter where aspiring lawyer Melanie ends up since all of the schools she visits - including the University of Pittsburgh - look identical. Although four writers are credited with the cookie-cutter script, the best that they could come up with is stupid pet pig tricks (Melanie's kid brother and his prized oinker turn up as stowaways) and a beyond-strange role for former teen idol Donny Osmond as one half of another daddy-daughter act trolling colleges. (For those of you keeping score, this is Osmond's first screen appearance since 1978's Goin' Coconuts.) Even at a bare-bones 82 minutes, College Road Trip feels padded and repetitive. The director of record here is Roger Kumble whose previous credits include a couple of goodies (Cruel Intentions, Just Friends) and one "what-were-they-thinking?" jaw-dropper (2002's ghastly The Sweetest Thing with Cameron Diaz). On second hand, make that two "what-were-they-thinking?" catastrophes. - MP

Dirty Country

Though it snags onto a country-and-western music singer-songwriter as its narrative hook, this documentary cuts across musical genres to present the melodic netherworld of "dirty" recording artists and performers. These are largely unsung artists whose metier is doing the filthiest music possible - sexed-up, crotch-centric ragtime piano sing-alongs, raps, rhymes and ballads that are the song equivalent of pornography. Most prominent on camera is Larry Pierce, a salt-of-the-earth factory worker from Middletown, Indiana, hero to long-haul truckers for his prodigious output (14 CDs, 120 songs) of twangy tunes such as "I Like to Fuck" and suchforth, marketed almost exclusively at truck stops and evidently great aural gratification during the endless white lines and guardrails. We see Pierce (happily married for 24 years) giving concerts in his garage and getting belated appreciation from an up-and-coming raw rock band. Other faves of the unleashed eros include top-hatted John "Dr. Dirty" Valby, product of a Jesuit education and a 30-year fixture at mid-Atlantic clubs for his keyboard renditions of "Gang Bang" and other signatures. And durable Florida-based Blowfly, who may never get an NAACP Image Award but who just may be the first-ever rap/hip-hop stylist ever recorded.

Refrain is that these marginalized folks (banned from most venues) are heaps more normal and grounded in private life than you'd expect. Heck, compared to Top-20 hitmakers like Britney Spears and Michael Jackson, they're role models of sanity. A bunch of PhDs and authors are trotted out to elucidate the appeal of the obscene (no Camille Paglia? Her pact with Mephistopheles to appear in every damn documentary ever made must have come with an expiration date). What's missing is any historical perspective; just a brief reference to Redd Foxx and none at all about the great Rusty Warren, the %@*$#! Surely Doctor Demento could have provided savvy background about "party records" and taboo blue humor in the pantheon of American music. Dirty Country may not make you a fan, but it's not a shame, either. Except when it is, of course. - Charles Cassady Jr.

Dirty Country: midnight Friday, March 14, 9:30 p.m. Saturday, March 15

and 9:30 a.m. Sunday, March 16, at Cleveland International Film Festival/Tower City Cinemas.

The Pixar Story

Leslie Iwerks - granddaughter of legendary animator and original Walt Disney cohort Ub Iwerks - directed this documentary on the preeminent digital animation studio Pixar, the minds behind Ratatouille, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles and Finding Nemo. This chronicle has a well-honed sense of the history (opening montage is worth an admission ticket alone) that spans the first flip-book animation to the terabytes of hard-drive space it takes to render photo-realistic landscapes inside a computer, and the trick of the thing is to retain the essentials of characters and worlds the viewer can care about, something mastered in cels by Disney's Nine Old Men of the storyboard workshops. We get some great bytes of CGI-film history, with forerunners of Pixar's digital productions showing up as ancillary details in flicks like Futureworld and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Animator and CalArts grad John Lasseter, very much the hero/Christ figure in this saga, got stoked by the revolutionary computer visuals in Tron and urged The Brave Little Toaster to be the first Disney CGI-animated film, only to get that dream shot down by petty-minded studio suits, one of many conflicts with Magic Kingdom tyrants here. We learn Disney bosses - treating animators like dirt, like most studios did and do - nearly pulled the plug on Pixar numerous times. An early cut of the now-classic Toy Story was so mean-spirited and overlong, with an abrasive Cowboy Woody (dang, I think I want to see that), it nearly cost everyone their jobs, until Lasseter and crew reworked it completely in one frantic weekend, tossing out the "edgy" stuff they claim the studio had demanded in the first place. In its more self-aggrandizing modes, The Pixar Story seems a bit like a new-hire corporate orientation video, dwelling on how much money this hit took in, how much A Bug's Life generated on opening weekend, etc. There's good reason for the obsession with the bottom line; according to interviewees, just one commercial disappointment - just one - and Pixar would be deleted altogether. Hence the sustained excellence in entertainment Pixar continues to uphold. Meanwhile Lasseter pleads to spend some time with his family. Nice stuff, this showbiz.

Among the cast: computer wizard Steve Jobs and the inimitable George Lucas, both of whom were Pixar's patrons at one time or another. If I'm hearingThe Pixar Story correctly, this claims that Lucas, via Pixar's cutting-edge technology, could have taken his Industrial Light & Magic into realms of medical imaging and satellite reconnaissance. - CC

The Pixar Story: 4:45 p.m. Friday, March 14 and 6:45 p.m. Saturday, March 15, at Cleveland International Film Festival/Tower City Cinemas.

Swing State

In 1961 documentarian Robert Drew made nonfiction film history with the verite TV special Primary, the first up-close-and-personal political documentary, in which hand-held cameras at eye level followed political rivals John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey through Wisconsin. Never before had spectators enjoyed such a close-up look at voter stump strategizing. While I'm not sure if the local-interest-heavy Swing State will go down as such a milestone, the DV feature sure points up how ubiquitous cameras have made us all voyeurs of a sort, how the personal has become the public in the 45 years since Primary. We sure haven't had a Running-Mate's-Son-cam (TM) until now.

Subject of Swing State is Lee Fisher, running on this state's gubernatorial ticket in 2006 along with Democratic contender for the Ohio governor's seat Ted Strickland. Following Fisher is the ultimate in embedded reporters, his own scion, Jason Zone Fisher, one of the movie's co-directors. You can't get much more intimate than this, as Jason winces at finding the Fisher refrigerator still holds food that expired in 2005, helps dad answer the door at Halloween time for trick-or-treaters, and finds the half-naked elder Fisher up past bedtime answering campaign-related e-mail or at ease in sleeveless Cavs sweatshirts. Of course, the candidate also makes the rounds of public appearances and drop-ins on John Lanigan and Jimmy Malone, in a campaign under tight national media scrutiny following a likely crooked 2004 presidential election.

It's a personal comeback for Fisher, whose emotional 1998 defeat for governor was also dutifully videotaped by a then 14-year-old Jason. Lee tells Jason he's trying to do some good for the world, as well as fulfill a regard he himself has for underdogs and losers who redeem themselves. Effective villain of the piece, unsurprisingly, is Republican bulwark Ken Blackwell, described as an extremist, who oversees an already questionable ballot system. At a barn rally of rural riflemen, Blackwell attacks Lee Fisher for not liking guns (Buckeye gun nuts ought to get a look at Lee Fisher dressed down at home; he looks like their hero, Larry the Cable Guy), but saves Strickland for the real smear, a charge of being soft on pedophilia, pulled out of thin air, that gives the Fox News right-wing windbags something to pretend they care about for a minute or two.

Sure, a lot of Swing State may be old news to the hometown crowd, but we do get an eyeful of the campaign grind, the loss of family time, the relentless pandering for donations. Conclusion of the race, even with more voting "irregularities" experienced by the Fishers at ground zero is no surprise, though foreshadowing of a Democratic presidential victory in the near future (both Hillary and Obama log appearances) gives the saga a timely hook. - CC

Swing State: noon Wednesday, March 12 and 9:30 a.m. Thursday, March 13, at Cleveland International Film Festival/Tower City Cinemas.