Film Club update

The final two films in the first series of screenings for the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark will be:

Friday, 11/6, 4:00 pm: La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Luchino Visconti’s neorealist examination of life in a Sicilian fishing village is explicitly Marxist but also lyrical, long and slow but thoroughly involving.

Friday, 11/20, 4:00 pm: La Strada. (1954, 104 min.) Federico Fellini emerges from his neorealist roots into his own personal style of sentimental fantasy, on “the road” with a waif played by his wife Giulietta Massina, who is indentured to itinerant strongman Anthony Quinn..

Thereafter, the Film Club will break for the holidays and return in February with a new series of screenings, under the heading of “What in the World is Going On?” Check back to this website for updated information.

I happened to notice this week that coincidentally Lincoln Center is just now offering a much more extensive series on Italian neorealism, and their program notes offer a concise summary of the points I've been making over the past weeks. For more detailed info, check out their program guide.

Docs around the clock

One reason I’ve been reviewing fewer fiction films lately is that I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries, and here I’m going to sort through a range of recommendations. Titles in bold are available on DVD from Netflix (or soon will be) and recommended by me. The others are worth looking for if you have a particular interest -- they may be found on the linked-to network schedules, or possibly On Demand..

First off is the recent documentary outing by feature director James Toback: Tyson (2009, MC-83). Like you, probably, I did not think I was all that interested in Mike Tyson, but I found this film almost hypnotizing in its formally inventive approach to film portraiture. Much of the film is Tyson himself speaking to the camera, in that incongruously high-pitched lisp, as if in self-reflection before an unseen therapist, but broken up into overlapping pictures and sound, which suggest the multiple facets of a divided self. He seems utterly believable in all his contradictions. There is enough footage recapitulating his career to establish that he might have been one of most powerful, if not the greatest, boxers of all time, and also to delineate his public disgrace in a rape conviction and prison term, plus the ignominious career-ending bout in which he bit the ear of his opponent. Tyson never goes quite so far as to plead, “I am not the animal you think I am,” but the film makes that case eloquently, and perhaps convincingly.

There are several stations worth monitoring for outstanding documentaries. Sundance Channel features Monday as Doc Day. I have been engrossed recently in the five-part (and perhaps continuing) series, Brick City, which portrays the city of Newark in much the same way that The Wire does Baltimore, though with more uplift and less crushing despair. In one of its aspects, this series from Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin picks up where the excellent documentary Street Fight leaves off, with the story of mayor Cory Booker, the media-savvy Obama avatar who is bringing hope to a city that is a byword for bleakness. Other threads include the story of a police commissioner brought in to lower the murder rate, and a gang girl gone good who is developing a mentoring program for other gang girls. If 90% of success is showing up, then the filmmakers are pretty much there, finding themselves in the middle of one amazing scene after another. One of the joys of documentary is deep-felt access into other people's lives, and this series has that in ... um, I want to say spades, but there are some honkies too.

“Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions” aside, HBO demonstrates a real commitment to quality documentaries, frequently featured on Mondays as well. From this link, you can get more information on these films, listed in order of the urgency of my recommendation. In Boy Interrupted, a filmmaking couple try to come to terms with the suicide of their teenage son, in a wrenching but not exploitive manner that is edifying to the viewer as well as cathartic for them. The Yes Men Save the World with media stunts like going on tv masquerading as a corporate spokesman to apologize and offer reparation for the health disaster of Bhopal -- they are inventive and funny and jaw-droppingly revealing of the ethos of big business. The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant watches the last vehicle come off a massive assembly line in Ohio, and reveals the mixed feelings of the laid-off workers who have devoted most of their lives to the disappearing workplace. Prom Night in Mississippi is a bit of a stunt but turns out to be revealing, as Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the first integrated prom in his small hometown, which catalyzes debate over the lingering legacy of racism but also suggests the hope of a new generation free of the hatreds of the past. The Nine Lives of Marion Barry is like Tyson in going some way toward rehabilitating a black man who has become notorious for bad behavior. The Recruiter is just as much about the recruited, as we follow a variety of Texas youth into the military and through basic training, in a film that could be taken as a prequel to Stop-Loss. (Not a documentary but a spinoff from a great one, HBO's Grey Gardens, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the Bouvier daughter and mother, was not as superfluous as I imagined -- while some scenes were duplicated from the Maysles brothers' classic, the backstory is filled in and the actresses illuminate their characters -- and deserved the slew of Emmy nominations it picked up.)

PBS has long been a mainstay for documentaries, and they are a number of series I check regularly, foremost among them Independent Lens. Among the recent highlights are Herb & Dorothy, an absolutely delightful and fascinating look at the Vogels, a postal worker and librarian, who amassed an astounding collection of art from the Sixties on in their tiny Manhattan apartment, before three moving vans carted it away to the National Gallery -- I will look for the first opportunity to show this at the Clark. Butte, America mines fascinating archival footage and retrospective interviews to tell of the highly emblematic rise and fall of the "richest hill on earth," whose deposits of copper made the city boom, but whose mining companies went bust and left a legacy of environmental devastation.

Frontline is frequently worth checking out for extended treatment of important issues of the day, and Wide Angle is the same with an international perspective. Particularly notable from the latter is Time for School 3, which like the 7 Up series tracks a diverse group of children through time, ranging from an Afghan girl to a Brazilian boy, from a Romanian girl to a Kenyan boy. Initiated when an international accord promised a free education to every child in the world by 2015, this very well-done and affecting series periodically checks in on how that promise is being met or not in a variety of countries.

Two other venerable PBS series worth tuning into are American Experience and American Masters. Two episodes I've enjoyed lately are an old one of the former, A Midwife’s Tale, which uses an old diary and effectively minimal historical reenactments to offer a window on everyday life in colonial New England, and a recent broadcast on the latter, Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, which I didn't expect to watch, but caught while channelsurfing and remained caught by through its length -- I tend to think of Baez as a pretty voice covering other people's songs, but this film makes a case for her as a social activist who used singing as her most effective tool.

I've recently watched two other documentary dvds from Netflix that I commend to your attention. Kestrel’s Eye is a delight for birdbrains, offering a genuine bird's eye view of the lives of a family of hawks living in a cranny of an old Swedish church -- a spare but astonishing nature film, without narration or music, but with incredible camera angles and uncanny intimacy with the subject.

Many years ago I saw a memorable short film called Organism, a film about New York City which uses time-lapse photography to portray the city as a huge living organism. When I started to think about doing a film series of "city symphonies" at the Clark, I went looking for it and found it on a dvd called The Films of Hilary Harris -- it was every bit as good as I remembered, and as a bonus included 9 Variations, which is as good a dance documentary as I have ever seen, utterly simple but visually stunning and extremely sensual.

There's a world of great documentaries out there, and if you're not looking for them, you're missing a great part of the art of film.

Film Club update

The film at the Clark this Friday (10/23) at 4:00 pm is Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. (1952, 89 min.) Again They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? aggregates useful background on the director, and the Criterion Collection includes two essays on the film with its dvd (here and here). I find that the Turner Classic Movies site frequently has good background in its reviews (here).

Remember that the film club will be deciding collectively which Visconti film to watch next. (Scroll down to be reminded of the choices.) And we will be open to suggestions on what to view after that, though Fellini's La Strada might be the default choice.

Bright Star

I don’t know when I’ve seen a film with a more authentic period feel than Jane Campion’s take on the Romantic entanglement of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. To me everything seems just so, not just dress and décor, but the attitudes and emotions of 1820 England. Every garment looks handsewn, each sparse interior is dimly lit by fire or candlelight or daylight slanting through a window. And a tragic unconsummated romance is believably played out in glances and delicate touches of fingertips and lips, with poetry spoken as if it were at once the language of everyday life and transcendent love. The cast is uniformly up to the task, from Kerry Fox as the widowed Mrs. Brawne, Fanny’s mother and Keats’s landlady, to Paul Schneider as his roommate and fellow poet, to Ben Whishaw as the waiflike yet willful Keats, broken by disease and poverty and critical response to his work, yet exultant in his command of Romantic feeling, for nature and the lovely, lively girl next door. That girl is Abbie Cornish, Australia’s latest gift to Anglophone film (Nicole & Cate et al. – make room!). She is the Bright Star of Campion’s film as well as Keats’ poem, a strong-willed seamstress with a thirst for fashion and passion, who ignores the liabilities of the match and attaches herself to the dying poet in spite of all the world. This chaste film burns hot with feeling. (2009, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-81.)

I happened to see Ms. Cornish in another film just two nights later. In Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, she also convinces as a Texas good old girl, fiancé to one soldier returning from Iraq (Channing Tatum) and longtime friend of his buddy (Ryan Phillippe). Coming almost ten years after Pierce’s breakthrough with Boys Don’t Cry, this film was greeted as a letdown, and flopped like every other film about Iraq. Though its approach to the subject may seem formulaic and unfocused, Stop-Loss deploys a lot of energy in laying out the familiar story of boys coming home from war, with pieces of themselves left behind, so nothing hangs together anymore. The quicksilver scenes from Iraq are vivid, and as comprehensible as the reality of the situation allows. The community back home in Texas, well-cast in every particular, is sketched in as memorably as that of Friday Night Lights, though obviously without the sustained amplitude of the latter (back for a 4th season later this month!). And the outrage at the unfair treatment of returning servicemen is well taken and important, ought to be seen and absorbed. But the film has an unresolved quality that is more frustrating than open-ended, so my recommendation is equivocal. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-61.)

Little Dorrit times two

In the Little Dorrit sweepstakes, the 8-hour 2008 BBC production wins hands down over the 6-hour 1986 film by Christine Edzard. In fact, the former renders the latter dispensible, despite admirable performances from Derek Jacobi and Alec Guinness. So let’s focus on the latest from accomplished screen adapter Andrew Davies, who scored triumphs with Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House for the BBC. Besides their long tradition of superior acting, the BBC now provides impeccable production quality, whether the location is London or Venice, a debtors’ prison or an Italian villa. So they have the luxury of television series duration with no sacrifice of film’s visual splendor. And with Dickens they are virtually guaranteed topicality, a reliable contemporary relevance, as well as that Victorian period feel. There’s one character in Little Dorrit who might as well have been called Bernie Madoff. And so many other perennial species of human fauna and flora! And so well portrayed by this cast! In the most striking contrast with the Edzard film, here Amy Dorrit is perfectly embodied in newcomer Claire Foy, who is able to go from waiflike to radiantly beautiful, as the character must do. Highest honors must go to Tom Courtenay as Mr. Dorrit, outdoing Alec Guinness and absolutely convincing through all the character’s changes, from longtime prisoner for debt to haughty "aristo." Matthew Macfadyen is also excellent as Arthur Clennam, though younger and more eligible than the life-weary Jacobi, removing the pediphiliac impediment of the earlier film (and probably Dickens’ original). In every role the tv series effaces the film, but the most striking support comes from Eddie Marsan (the driving instructor in Happy-Go-Lucky -- “En Ra Ha!”) as Pancks, and Andy Serkis, acting more evil than Golem himself, as a French murderer who doesn’t even appear in the film, but here becomes the hinge of the story. Which is a problem, because when he reveals the secrets at the heart of the story, the reveal is impossible to follow, even when you rewind and watch it again. But that is the only flaw in a literary adaptation that I cannot recommend highly enough. (MC-82)

Film club update

The next film for the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark will be Roberto Rossellini’s Flowers of Saint Francis (1950, 83 minutes, title more literally translated as Francis, Jester of God) on October 9th at 4:00 pm.

Someone requested links to material to read in advance of (or after) the screening and discussion. So here are a couple that I’ll be using myself. One of the best aggregators of information on directors is the website, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where you can find links to high-quality online articles about a given director. The essay accompanying the Criterion Collection edition of Flowers of Saint Francis is available here.

To facilitate interaction among members of the film club, I am turning on the comments feature of this website (splog made me turn it off), and club members can also email me directly at: ssatullo@clarkart.edu -- with questions, suggestions, feedback, and to vote on club polls.

The first decision for the club to make collectively is which Luchino Visconti film to watch on November 6th. I will announce the choices at the next meeting and the decision will be made at the October 23rd screening of Vittoria De Sica’s Umberto D. The Visconti choice is among (in my own order of preference):

A) La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Classic neorealism with a Marxist bent, set in Sicilian fishing village.

B) Ossessione. (1942, 139 min.) Ur-text of neorealism, uncredited adaptation of James Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice.

C) Rocco and His Brothers. (1960, 180 min.) Transition from neorealism to Visconti’s later operatic style. A Sicilian family adapts to life in Milan, with Alain Delon and other well-known actors.

Let me know what you think. Let us think about film together.

"Projections of Rome" at the Clark

A free film series on Saturdays at 2:00 pm in the Clark Auditorium

The “Projections of Rome” film series extends the Clark’s fall focus on representations of Rome from still photography to motion pictures. The Eternal City is a mirror onto which we tend to project ourselves, and especially so in the movies. We look first at two takes on Ancient Rome -- Shakespearian and “sword & sandal” -- then at two romantic fantasies of Rome in the Fifties, and finally two excursions by the cinematic bard of Rome, Federico Fellini.

October 17: Julius Caesar. (1953, 122 min.) Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and James Mason lead an all-star cast in Joseph Mankiewicz’s bracing and intelligent adaptation of the classic Shakespeare play.

October 24: The Fall of the Roman Empire. (1964, 187 min.) Anthony Mann’s sweeping widescreen epic marshals a notable cast led by Alec Guinness and Sophia Loren, with a feel for historical accuracy in the dynastic conflict around Marcus Aurelius, a story later retold in Gladiator.

November 7: Roman Holiday. (1953, 118 min.) Audrey Hepburn bursts to stardom as the princess who goes AWOL in Rome, with American reporter Gregory Peck showing her around and photographer Eddie Alpert dogging their heels, under the direction of William Wyler.

November 14: Three Coins in the Fountain. (1954, 102 min.) The star here is the Oscar-winning CinemaScope photography on location in Rome -- a silly Fifties romance about three American secretaries finding the continental men of their dreams is redeemed by the scenery and a fine cast.

November 21: The White Sheik. (1951, 88 min., in Italian with subtitles.) Fellini’s first film, one of his best, follows a newly-wed couple from the provinces as they make a pilgrimage to Rome, the groom eager to visit the Pope while the bride only wants to see the third-rate Valentino of the title, played by Alberto Sordi.

November 28: La Dolce Vita. (1960, 174 min., in Italian with subtitles.) Fellini moves from outsiders to the in-crowd in this tour of the “sweet life” of show-biz Rome, in what became an international sensation, with journalist Marcello Mastrioanni covering the decadent scene as our guide to these infernal circles.

Pace and presence

By coincidence, last night I watched two arty foreign films, and both ended with a long slow shot looking up at the sky. One a daylight sky into which an object ascends until it disappears from sight, and the other a post-sunset sky into which a myriad of stars gradually appears. I wouldn’t say my response to either was like day and night, more like dawn versus twilight, just a different shade of light coming or going. But they will remain linked in my mind by questions of languorous pacing and the presence of the staring camera eye, which seems to be la mode du jour among knowing international film critics these days.

So I came to Heaven (2002, MC-68) by pure happenstance, browsing in the college library for a dvd to fill in a gap in my Netflix cycle. Cate Blanchett on the cover caught my eye, though I knew nothing of the title. Turns out it had a posthumous script by Krzysztof Kieslowski -- intended to be the first of a trilogy (with Hell and Purgatory) that might have rivaled his Three Colors: Red, White, and Blue -- and direction by Tom Tykwer, best known for the highly kinetic Run Lola Run. A shared obsession with synchronicity joins the ruminative fables of one and the thriller dynamics of the other, woven together through the slow and oh-so-steady movements of an aerial camera. This film is lovely to look at, whether it’s the roofs of Turin or the hills of Tuscany we pass over, and intriguing to think about, at least till the spell is broken by a series of “Hey, wait a minute, what about ...?” questions. Cate Blanchett is an English teacher in Italy, and we first see her in the process of planting a bomb in an imposing modern office building. We later learn that she is driven to righteous revenge because the police had refused to act when she told them her target was a drug kingpin, but her bomb goes horribly awry in a way she only learns when the police are interrogating her. Giovanni Ribisi is a translator for the carabineri who immediately falls for her and helps her escape. His devotion redeems her awful acts and restores her to the world through love. Or so one reading would go. I have stubborn objections to the way that’s worked out, though scene by scene I am swept along by the vivid visual presence of beauty, both Cate’s and the landscape’s.

Similarly, I eventually made my peace with the glacial pace of Silent Light (MC-79) just because it was beautiful to look at, for however long it took. Carlos Reygadas’ third film is set in a rural Mennonite community in Mexico, speaking a rare German dialect, and the first comparisons I reach for are Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and Carl Dreyer’s Ordet. Weird, huh? You’ll have to see it for yourself, but only if you have a zen-like patience for prolonged shots in which very little is happening. You could judge by the first shot, maybe five minutes long, of the sun rising over farm fields and distant mountains. Though that will come to seem expressive next to similarly prolonged shots of two characters standing silently with their backs to the camera. Once a story finally emerges, it’s pretty racy. Though Johan has an adorable blond-haired brood of children by his loving wife Esther, he finds himself drawn magnetically to a woman in town named Marianne. Each character refers to each other as “poor such and such,” but mutual sympathy only goes so far. Tragedy is bound to ensue, but is there a redemption beyond all personal conflict? Opinions may differ. Mine is that there is something here to recompense the time put in, but I imagine few could sit still for it. Usually I only go as slow as, say, Terence Malick’s The New World, but I managed to watch this without ever hitting the fast-forward button.

Sugar

The filmmaking team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck follow up the impressive Half Nelson with an ambitious effort to track the progress of a lanky pitcher with prospects, from his native Dominican Republic to a tryout (concentration?) camp in Arizona to a minor league stint as a stranger in the strange land of Iowa to assimilation into the Dominican neighborhoods of NYC. Each of these environments is convincingly sketched, with most of the roles filled by nonprofessional actors whose roles mimic their actual experience. Crucial, of course, was the lead they picked from a roll call of more than 500, to play Miguel, known as “Sugar” for his sweetness on the mound and with the ladies, and he fills the bill admirably. It’s the nature of this story of displacement that the film should be one inexplicable, discontinuous scene after another, and it’s right for us sometimes to be as disoriented as the protagonist we follow. The baseball scenes are unusually convincing and everything is shot with a distinctive visual style. But at one crucial turning point the story defeats one’s expectations, ultimately to good purpose, but from my perspective too abruptly. Interestingly, among the deleted scenes on the dvd was just the one that filled that gap. With that scene put back in I can give this film an unequivocal recommendation, more so if you’re a baseball fan and are curious what’s behind the growing Dominican presence in the game. (2009, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-82)

State of Play

This American remake of a brilliant British miniseries tries to cram too many plot twists into its running time. Where the 6-hour series was continuously surprising, the 2-hour film seems manipulative. That said, you are being manipulated by some mighty fine actors, from Russell Crowe as the rumpled old-school reporter to Helen Mirren as his high-powered editor trying to cope with the new corporate owners of the “Washington Globe,” with adequate support from Rachel McAdams as the online newbie with whom Crowe is oddly coupled, and Ben Affleck as his old college roommate, who is now a crusading congressman with a whole closetful of secrets. Dynamic young director Kevin Macdonald certainly knows how to keep up the pace of the original, though sometimes leaving the sense behind. Many opportunities for topicality are strewn in the story’s wake, especially the Blackwater-like mercenary army that is the subject of Affleck’s investigating committee, but more in the vein of exploitation than explanation. At the heart of the enterprise is a nostalgia for the disappearing world of print journalism, and a romantic hope for the persistence of its values into the realm of the internet. I’m inclined to recommend this film, if just for the lovely coda of the closing credit sequence, where we take a last lingering look at a newspaper being “composed” (or whatever they call it these days -- when my printer father worked wallcase or linotype he was called a compositor), rolled through the presses, collated, packed, and sent out on trucks into a new day. My brother -- who should know, having worked his entire career at newspapers, until he escaped into public broadcasting last year -- asserted the film got the newsroom atmospherics right, though much of the substance wrong. (2009, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-64)

Film club at Clark starts 9/25

Here I'm just going to copy a press release I wrote for the start of my film club at the Clark next week. As a point of information, I reconsidered showing Rossellini's Open City when I discovered that the Criterion Collection will issue it in November, in a boxed dvd set with Paisan and Germany Year Zero, so there was no point in showing it in its unrestored condition. Criterion did Flowers of Saint Francis several years ago, so I substituted that in my series, in a demonstration of the nimbleness and open-endedness I intend for the film club. So here's the news:

Independent film scholar Steve Satullo will initiate the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark on Friday, September 25, at 4:00 pm in the Clark auditorium. Offered without charge and conceived on the model of book clubs that have become popular over the years, the Film Club will meet on alternate Fridays, with Satullo offering an extended introduction and moderating a discussion after screening the film.

The opening series will explore the theme of “Triumphs and Tragedies of Italian Neorealism” and begin on the 25th with a personal favorite of Satullo’s, intended to serve as a touchstone for those who might be interested in what he will be showing and talking about. The first film is Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto (1961), about a young man leaving his village for Milan and “The Job” of the title, definitely from the lighter side of Neorealism.

On October 9 the club will return to the fathers of Neorealism with Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis (1950), and continue on October 23 with Vittoria De Sica’s Umberto D. (1955). Subsequent screenings will be determined by the film club collectively, with a Luchino Visconti film to be picked for November 6 and an open choice on November 20, after which the club will break for the holidays.

Satullo, formerly proprietor of Either/Or Bookstore and Video Archive on North Street in in Pittsfield, has been programming films at the Clark for a dozen years, and for the past five has been writing film commentary on his personal website, Cinema Salon, which will become interactive with the film club.

Satullo thanks the Clark for providing a venue for taking Cinema Salon live, to offer serious engagement with film art and audience, an approach he has been working toward for decades, since he was student and friend of Charles Thomas Samuels, distinguished film scholar at Williams College in the early 70s. The opening film choice is a bit of an homage to Professor Samuels, since Ermanno Olmi was the unexpected selection in his eye-opening collection of interviews, Encountering Directors.

In hosting the film club, Satullo hopes to cultivate a collective approach, with members stepping forward to suggest films to watch and discuss, and to lead future sessions. Old-fashioned cinephilia is the only prerequisite. If you approach films as art more than entertainment, and enjoy sharing observations and opinions with other engaged viewers, then Cinema Salon might be just the club for you.

For more information, contact: Steve Satullo; (413) 458-0415; ssatullo@clarkart.edu.

Films to watch, then not so much

A new school year ought to be a fresh start, even for us superannuated scholastics, so I am going to wrap up an annoying backlog of pending reviews by just rambling through the list of films I’ve watched lately, dispensing with quasi-definite numerical ratings and presenting them in the order of how much I liked each. So if you’re only interested in strong recommendations, just read the first three. If you just can’t get enough of my opinions, then plow through to the bitter end.

Goodbye Solo. (2009, MC-89.) With his third film, each better than the last, 34-year-old Rahmin Bahrani confirms himself as a young director most deserving of attention. Though jumping off from the premise of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, Bahrani is not at all derivative but has a rare purity of engagement. Set indelibly in his native Winston-Salem, and aside from the two leads populated entirely by actual residents, this film offers authenticity as well as visual acuity and emotional honesty. Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) is a Senagalese taxi driver who picks up William (Red West) and becomes involved in his life when the weathered old man offers him big money for a one-way trip to Blowing Rock, a precipice in the Smoky Mountains. William moves out of his apartment and into a motel while he winds up his affairs. Solo, irrepressibly gregarious and hopeful, inserts himself in William’s life and tries to talk him out of his intention. He has a sweet and wise-beyond-her-years stepdaughter, who cements the fugitive bond between the two men, one who embraces the new world and one who wants out of the old. Savane is amazingly engaging, and West (high school friend and longtime bodyguard of Elvis) is evocatively silent. Irresistible force meets immovable object, and the resolution is convincingly true and surprisingly beautiful, despairing and hopeful at the same time.

Adventureland. (2009, MC-76.) Jesse Eisenberg (of The Squid and the Whale) is adorably nerdy as an 1987 Oberlin grad who is stuck with a summer job as booth attendant at a tacky amusement park in Pittsburgh, before he can go off to Columbia Journalism School. Greg Mottola’s romantic comedy of growing up weird plows familiar ground, but is sufficiently grounded in his own genuine experience to offer as many home truths as easy (or uneasy) laughs. Kristen Stewart is excellent as the more experienced, but not hardened, girl for whom our hapless hero falls. Heartthrob Ryan Reynolds is the slightly older (and married) maintenance worker who compensates for his dead-end job by cultivating the fantasies of younger women. And the always-delightful Freaks & Geeks alum Martin Starr adds his quirky support. The embarrassments and exhilarations of starting out in life are accurately and excruciatingly portrayed in this funny and touching little gem.

Summer Hours. (2008, MC-84.) I will look for the first opportunity to show this Olivier Assayas film about the disposition of a family art collection at the Clark, but in waiting weeks to write about it I have lost my chance to capture its elusive quality of family truth and domestic beauty. A matriarch brings her farflung children home to the house, and legacy of art, bequeathed by her beloved painter uncle. The oldest son is an economist who has remained in France and responsibly wants to keep the inheritance intact. The younger son is off running a sneaker factory in China, and the daughter is a designer working in Japan (this film shares ever-captivating Juliet Binoche and the Musee D’Orsay connection with last year’s Flight of the Red Balloon.) So who will maintain the integrity and identity of the French aesthetic heritage? Through sidelong and elliptical glances, this film portrays the subtle, unheard music of family relations, and raises the largest of questions without rushing to easy answers. What deserves to survive, and how? Many changes are played upon this theme in a quietly engrossing manner.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. (2008, MC-79.) Kevin Rafferty’s entertaining time capsule of a documentary relies more than I expected on endearingly primitive footage of the 1968 football contest indicated by the title -- so it would be hard to recommend to someone with no feel for the sport -- but there’s lot more going on here. The course of the game is broken into by the reminiscences of players from both sides. Both teams went into the game undefeated, but the similarities end there. Yale was a nationally-ranked powerhouse, led by future NFL star Calvin Hill and Brian Dowling, the former St. Ignatius High School (in Cleveland) star quarterback who hadn’t lost a game since 6th grade and became the model for the Doonesbury character B.D. They had a coach who instilled a military sense of discipline, while Harvard had a laidback coach who allowed the players to run the team almost as an anarchist commune. In the highly charged year of 1968, that made for an extremely suggestive matchup. Let’s be frank -- from a pure football perspective, this was one ugly game. And with 42 seconds to go and Yale up by 16 points, the result seemed preordained. What followed can only be described as a comedy of errors (or tragedy, if you happen to be an Eli). Unaccountably, the football gods intervened on the side of the counterculture. These guys (including Tommy Lee Jones for the Crimson) are my exact contemporaries, so I was fascinated by their retrospective observations in homespun interviews, and watched a full hour’s worth of extended footage on the dvd.

Gran Torino. (2008, MC-72.) I’ve never been a fan of Clint Eastwood, but have to be impressed by the way he has become in old age an intensely personal filmmaker, dispassionately deconstructing his own tough-guy mythology. At least from The Unforgiven on, he seems to be offering penance for the violence of his Dirty Harry/Man With No Name persona, but rarely as overtly as in this story of a crusty old racist who comes to terms with the Hmong people who have invaded his Detroit neighborhood. There is not the least suspense about where this story is going, but step by step it is well done. Clint is quite funny with his growls and epithets, which makes less cloying his inevitable warming toward the charming young Hmong brother and sister next door.

Patton. (1970) This is one of those films that lingered years on my Netflix queue until I forgot why I thought I should watch it again. George C. Scott’s performance is indeed monumental, and Franklin Schaffner’s direction of Francis Ford Coppola’s script is intriguingly poised on the cusp between old-time gung-ho war picture and the emerging anti-war sentiment of movies to come. Scott’s Patton is an outright psychopath, but a useful one in the context of a psychopathic endeavor like war. It takes a sick grandiosity to become a conquerer, and a rational, calculating soldier like Omar Bradley (Karl Malden) may require a crazy man to get the job done.

Hands Over the City. (1963) Francesco Rosi is in the second wave of Italian Neorealism and focused much of his career on the nexus between crime and politics in southern Italy. But instead of the Mafia, here he takes on municipal corruption in Naples. Rod Steiger is both a city councilor and a land developer looking to make a killing, and he maneuvers his way through a political scandal with brute force. It’s unusual to see a thriller of sorts based on shady real estate deals. Would that such a film could be made in America today.

Germany Year Zero. (1947) From the roots of Neorealism comes Rossellini’s examination of life in the rubble of postwar Berlin, following the struggle for survival of a 13-year-old boy in a disintegrating family, city, and nation. His fate is hard, but one can hardly warm to his persistent Aryan attitude. Important as a document, it’s not what you would call a movie, in terms of entertainment or emotion.

The Valet. (2006) So-so French comedy from Francis Veber, very much of a piece with The Dinner Game or My Best Friend, but not as entertaining.

Last Year at Marienbad. (1961) I have considerable esteem for Alais Resnais’ other films, so when the Criterion Collection issued a sparkling new DVD of the one I never could stand, I thought to give it another chance. Nope -- don’t care for it, never will.

Falling for Barbara Stanwyck

As a confirmed auteurist, I generally approach films with the notion that the controlling artist is the director, but for once I’ve been taking a fanboy approach and making my way through the collected works of Barbara Stanwyck. At one level, I can’t presume to compete with the appreciation written by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker two years ago, on the hundredth anniversary of her birth. But besides offering a film series at the Clark called “An Artist in Her Own Right: Barbara Stanwyck and the Modern American Woman,” I’ve been filling in my knowledge of her immense filmography, and I have some highlights to share.

Night Nurse. (1931) Like Baby Face, this is part of TCM’s “Forbidden Hollywood” collection, but not at all what one would expect. Yes, these nurses do seem to change out of their clothes quite frequently, but that is incidental to the way that Barbara Stanwyck both seduces and challenges the medical establishment, as she does the right thing in revealing a plot against a pair of children in her care. The mother -- in the sort of Depression-era characterization of the irresponsible rich that we are likely to be seeing more of in coming days -- is in thrall to bootleg liquor, jazz, and the evil chauffeur Clark Gable, who is scheming to get his hands on the children’s trust fund. Joan Blondell is Stanwyck’s fellow nurse, and there is a fair bit of attention to what a nurse’s career actually entails before the suspense kicks in. Besides the abundant underwear shots, the ending in which the “good” guy gets away with murder was a flagrant flouting of the production code, which is recalled in a documentary included as an extra on this dvd.

Baby Face. (1933) I had not seen this entire movie, definitely not in its pre-censorship state, so I was surprised by its sharpness and wit, and pleased by how well it was received by the Clark audience. It’s delectable to see our Barbara at work, with absolute confidence in her power over men. She’s not conventionally beautiful, despite the dialogue that reinforces that notion throughout her career, but she has no doubt about her desirability. The certainty of allure is the key to her career. I enjoyed swotting up her biography for my introduction to the film series. Ruby Stevens, born in Brooklyn in 1907, became a tough broad at an early age. Her mother died in a trolley car accident when she was very young, and her father took off, leaving four children to fend for themselves among family and foster homes. Ruby left school for good at 13 and lived with her older sister, who was a showgirl. By 15 she was in a Ziegfield chorus line herself, and before she was 20 had a hit on Broadway, under the new name of Barbara Stanwyck. Within a year, she was making films in Hollywood, and kept doing so for sixty years. Parallels to the protagonist of this film suggest themselves, as she sleeps her way up a ladder of men. Maybe it’s just acting, but there’s an unsettling conviction about it. After beginning my intro with Anthony Lane’s remark, “When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck,” and assertion that “no actress delivered a more accomplished body of work,” I wrapped up with the conclusion from David Thomson’s essay on her, “She was honest, sharp, gutsy, and smart. Terrific.”

Annie Oakley. (1935) This films seems to signal Stanwyck taking control of her career and her image. No longer a contract player in films like Ladies of Leisure, Forbidden, The Woman in Red, she was free to move between studios and choose her own material. So in this film she is the legendary heroine, demure though dead-eye, who comes out of rural southern Ohio to become an international star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Here Barbara first displays the riding skill that will stand her in good stead for decades to come. The romance is a little saccharine, and leaves the proto-feminist comedy of the sure-shot woman behind, but George Stevens does mount some impressive Wild West spectacles, which suggest that the movies actually began fifty years before -- before film was even invented.

Stella Dallas. (1937) Apparently Sam Goldwyn had a lot of emotion as well as money invested in this remake of his 1925 hit. Barbara Stanwyck was not among his first half-dozen choices for the title role, but made it her own and earned her first Oscar nomination, as well as locking in the essential duality of her persona, the tough exterior masking an inner nobility, or at least personal resolve. Selfless mother was not her most comfortable role -- neither in film nor life -- but even her self-sacrifice is made on her own terms. King Vidor’s film is not great, but Stanwyck’s performance qualifies as iconic.

Golden Boy. (1939) Wow, William Holden seems startlingly young in his debut. Apparently Stanwyck took the young actor under her wing (she was famous for her cordial relations with co-workers on the set, part of an impeccable professionalism) and I believe he wound up handing her a “golden boy” decades later, when she finally won an honorary Oscar. As usual, she has great rapport with her fellow lead, who is electric as the shy Italian violinist who becomes the brash boxing champ. Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of the Clifford Odets’ play is sharp and smooth, with surprisingly good fight scenes despite the clanking plot. Barbara is caught between her boy and long-time squeeze Adolphe Menjou, his manager. Joseph Calleia is amusingly tough as the gangster who wants a piece of the boy, and Lee J. Cobb (just six years older than Holden) plays the ethnic dad. This really needs to be added to the topflight films of Hollywood’s annus mirabilis.

Remember the Night. (1940) In an obvious nod to It Happened One Night, this romantic comedy of a mismatched couple on a road trip brings together Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, in a far cry from Double Indemnity. He’s a hotshot district attorney, and she’s apprehended after shoplifting from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. When he sees that the public defender is successfully playing on the jury, he has the case postponed till after Christmas break. Of course he is not immune to our Barbara’s charms, feels guilty that she will spend the holiday in jail and arranges bail, and when he finds out she’s from Indiana too, offers to drive her home for Christmas. I don’t need to tell you how it turns out, but a witty script from Preston Sturges and smooth direction from Mitchell Leisen, along with the chemistry of the leads, certainly make this a palatable holiday confection.

The Lady Eve. (1941) Stanwyck’s peak -- and Preston Sturges’ as well. I wanted my series to build toward it, so only later did I find out it was made earlier than Ball of Fire, which probably explains why it was the latter that earned her second Oscar nod. Certainly she plays well in that ensemble, but here she is the centerpiece, the absolute jewel in the setting, in a brilliant quasi-dual role as adventuress and aristocrat, even though they are “definitely the same dame.” As usual, she partners effectively with Henry Fonda, and Sturges at his best goes Wilde, so this remains firmly among the most delightful of all American comedies.

You Belong to Me. (1941) Stanwyck’s chemistry with Fonda was immediately capitalized upon in this misnamed follow-up, written and directed by Wesley Ruggles. Here she is a dedicated doctor on a skiing vacation, and he is a playboy who is immediately smitten when she tends to him after an accident on the slopes. He soon proposes and she declines, citing the demands of her career, but when he promises not to interfere with her practice of medicine, she accedes. The promise is easily made, but push soon comes to shove, and she is out the door at the most frustrating moments. Henry has made his bed and now must sleep in it -- alone. You will be relieved to hear that the resolution does not involve our Barbara giving up her career for her marriage, but you know it wouldn’t have been a Stanwyck movie if she had.

Ball of Fire. (1941) Just so, Sugarpuss O’Shea may have fallen for her “Pottsy” -- he-man nerd Gary Cooper, in another re-pairing from that same year (Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe) -- but there’s no doubt the showgirl will continue to wrap the professor around her little finger, or maybe her shapely ankle. Billy Wilder’s script and Howard Hawks’ accomplished screwball direction made this a big escapist hit when it came out around the time of Pearl Harbor. Amazing though these four films in the same year may be, a few years later Stanwyck’s career reached another peak when in 1944 she edged out Betty Davis as the highest-earning woman in America, apparently on the basis of films that are mostly forgotten, except for:

Double Indemnity. (1944) There’s that ankle again, this time Fred MacMurray’s undoing. It seems that working with Stanwyck only made you want to do it again. So Wilder turned to her when he turned director with a bang. It’s possible to take this film merely as a chilly exercise in style, but stylish it is, and Stanwyck, MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson invest it with recognizably human qualities.

Sorry, Wrong Number. (1948) I suppose Stanwyck got her final Oscar nomination for playing against type as the helpless, bedridden woman menaced by ominous phone calls. But this thriller continually betrays it source in a radio play, and Stanwyck is only herself in the flashbacks, which show her as a rich girl claiming Burt Lancaster as her husband. It’s no surprise that he is scheming to escape her invalid clutches. Anatole Litvak’s direction is smooth enough, but the transposition of radio to film seems slight and artificial.

East Side, West Side. (1949) But here’s one I found much more substantial than its reputation, despite the soap opera plot of will-she-or-won’t-she stay with her straying husband. James Mason as Stanwyck’s rich lawyer husband is drawn to the wilder side of town by the strikingly young and tempting Ava Gardner, while good guy Van Heflin moons over Barbara, waiting to save her from her degradation as betrayed wife. She talks over her dilemma with best friend Nancy Davis, soon to be Reagan. It’s a period piece, to be sure, but nicely put together by Mervyn LeRoy, with a genuine feel for New York City.

The Furies. (1950) Here’s how I reviewed this last winter: “I’m not really up to speed with Anthony Mann’s Freudian Westerns, aside from one or two of the Jimmy Stewarts, but this transposition of King Lear to the New Mexico desert reeks of incestuous passion. Walter Huston, in his last film, is a cantankerous cattle baron, with Barbara Stanwyck as his spirited daughter, a mare who will not be broken. In noirish black and white, with more night scenes and interiors than wide open spaces, the film is a little much, but not enough, if you know what I mean. The leads are magnetic but much that surrounds them is laughable. Only for aficionados of one sort or another.” That of course includes Stanwyck fans, and this is a foretaste of the Westerns which would predominate in her later career, jumping off from her real-life ownership of a ranch.

Clash by Night. (1952) This would have been the final film in my Stanwyck series, if the budget allowed. I would have been glad to see it again, but I will simply quote what I wrote in my filmlog shortly before I started this website: “Fritz Lang’s noirish adaptation of Clifford Odets’ play is set with some reality in a Monterey fishing and canning village. Barbara Stanwyck is effectively wised-up as the defeated wayward girl who returns home and settles for marriage to Sicilian fishing boat captain Paul Douglas. Robert Ryan is the bad man with whom sparks fly. A very young Marilyn Monroe plays the lively, expansive girl that BS might once have been. The script is literate, if filled with a lot of hooey on the battle of the sexes, and Lang’s direction is careful and shapely. Aside from the baby who is little more than a plot point, this is a believable kitchen sink drama.”

Executive Suite. (1954) Directed by Robert Wise from a script by Ernest Lehman, this is an unusually intelligent and still-relevant business drama, as five executives vie for control of a furniture company after the president dies suddenly. Each has a strategy based on their speciality, numbers man Frederic March squaring off especially against innovator William Holden, in a battle for the soul of the company and the support of disenchanted heiress Stanwyck.

Forty Guns. (1957) In an extremely gutsy role for a fifty year old woman to take on, especially for crazed director Samuel Fuller, Stanwyck keeps all forty of those guns at her disposal, whether it’s thundering across the countryside on horseback, leading the phalanx like a troop of private cavalry, or sitting in satin and frills at the head of a banquet table where they again line up in two docile rows. But forty pistols are not enough, so when Barry Sullivan wanders on the scene, she goes after another. She obviously does her own riding and stunts, including being dragged by the heel in the stirrup of a horse spooked by a twister, in this jaw-dropping take on Western mythology, dripping with sexual innuendo.

Crime of Passion. (1957) This low-budget noir offshoot is notable for completing the picture of Ms. Stanwyck as a woman who will not be kept down. She’s a Miss Lonelyhearts at a San Francisco paper, who gets a big scoop by bringing in a woman who killed her husband, in the process meeting LA homicide detective Sterling Hayden. Sparks fly, more or less believably -- Babs is still pretty well put together at 50, though clearly her character is meant to be in her 30s -- and soon she is giving up that big break at a New York paper, and going to live in an LA bungalow with her cop hubby. No bungalow is big enough to hold our gal, and the parties where the cop buddies play poker in living room while their wives talk about nothing at all in the kitchen quickly drive her insane. Soon she’s scheming to advance her husband’s career, and then she really loses her mind, just like the lost souls who used write her for advice. This decent B-movie is a waystation on Stanwyck’s path to revival of her career in television, where she won three Emmys to make up for the four Oscars she failed to take home.

Roustabout. (1964) When her career descended to B-movie status, Barbara Stanwyck did not fall as far as other classic Hollywood screen goddesses, no Baby Janes for her. No, she’s still trim and sharp, hip to the younger crowd, as the carnival owner who encourages a certain drifter to stick around and work for her. Maybe she was in fact working for Elvis (or Col. Parker), but I know who stole the show for me. In widescreen and garish color, the tough old broad holds her own against the gyrations of all those kids.

For further Stanwyck favorites, here’s a site where various people pick their own five best.

Waltz with Bashir

I would have to see this film a second time to render a firm judgment. Nonetheless I am recommending it, though you may find yourself, as I did, drifting and dozing momentarily in the course of it. This may have something to do with the dream-like spell the animated documentary weaves. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is one over which I maintain a calculated ignorance, so the events of the 1982 war in Lebanon were not lodged in my memory, which would have made this film more coherent and engaging to me. But I loved the animation, found it potent even when it repeated or when I lost the thread. The film starts with a dream sequence of wild dogs running through a city, which the dreamer recounts to the film’s director, Ari Folman (or his animated avatar), leading Folman to try to recover his own suppressed memories of the experience as a 19-year-old soldier. He does this by going to interview fellow vets, also animated, and then illustrating their memories. My point of comparison would be Generation Kill, for its first person view of the chaos and horror of war. (2008, dvd, n.) *7 (or better)* (MC-91)

Two Lovers

James Gray is halfway interesting as a writer-director, and his latest film is halfway interesting too. A filmmaker’s dependence on other films can be a plus or a minus, but I found it a distraction here, like a parlor game. Yep, there’s Rear Window and there’s Vertigo. The outer borough view of Manhattan as a distant fantasyland seems lifted from Saturday Night Fever. But the whole story is virtually a remake of the Israeli film, Late Marriage, going so far as to import the actor who plays the central character’s father. Joaquin Phoenix does carry the film in what purports to be his last acting role, as a young man trying to recover from a bout of mental illness, with the good luck to be caught between two women, Gwyneth Paltrow as the amazing shiksa who appears on his doorstep in Brighton Beach and Vinessa Shaw as the plainly beautiful Jewish girl who has been arranged for him, to seal the merger of their fathers’ dry cleaning chains. All these characters seem authentic in their behavior, believably poignant and pathetic, and earnestly romantic. The supporting players definitely add flavor, with Isabella Rossellini as an improbable but convincing Jewish mother and Elias Koteas as the suave Manhattan lawyer with whom Joaquin must vie for the attentions of Gwyneth. But the sense of real people and real emotions is undermined by the quotation marks around many scenes, and the conclusion suffers from comparison to the exquisitely wrought coda to Late Marriage. Maybe I would have liked it better without the baggage of constant reference to other films, but perhaps that wouldn’t be an impediment to your enjoyment. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-74)

Docs rock!

Let me start with a confession of bias. To me, film originated with two opposing impulses -- Lumiere vs. Melies, the train pulling into the station vs. the rocket to the moon -- which I characterize as documentary vs. fabulation. I am a lifelong member of the party of Lumiere, and it’s not just that I prefer documentaries to fiction films, but that fiction films appeal to me by how much they document a real world, and lose my interest when they depend on fantasy and fashion. So following a rundown of features that I couldn’t quite bring myself to recommend, here’s a variety of nonfiction films that I heartily endorse. If the subject interests you, each is worth seeking out.

Scandalously unable to finance another feature after the high critical acclaim and low public response to The House of Mirth (2000), Terence Davies turned to documentary, and returned to the theme of his earlier films about growing up Catholic and gay in postwar Liverpool. Of Time and the City (2009, MC-81) is an unapologetic mash-up of poetry and music, archival footage and cinematic contemplation of Liverpool as it has become today. Davies is crotchety as well as passionate, acerbic as well as lyric. He appropriates, uncredited, a lot of poetry that was immediately familiar to me, notably Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and music ranging from Mahler to dancehall. Along with images old and new, words and music weave a mood of reverie, of celebration and regret, in 72 artful and highly personal minutes. Davies may not be a guy you’d want to know, but he expresses himself in a film you ought to see.

Speaking of things you ought to see but don’t really want to, War Photographer (2002, MC-79) follows the career of James Nachtwey as he documents war and famine, devastation and destitution, around the globe, from Bosnia to Rwanda to Indonesia and beyond (after the film was made, he was seriously injured in Iraq, but seems to have recovered). Nachtwey is a quiet, even subdued personality who funnels all his passion into steely acts of attention and witness. Director Christian Frei follows him into the heart of the action, and the photographer also has a mini-cam attached to his camera, so we share his view as he takes his pictures. Besides the witness to human suffering, this film proffers a provocative debate on the ethics of photography, in implicit answer to Susan Sontag. What might be ghoulish sensationalism is rendered admirable by the hushed intensity of focus that the photographer brings to his anguished subjects.

Trouble the Water (2008) also follows behind and incorporates the images of a witness to devastation, in this case Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. The eyewitness in this case is a 24-year-old woman from the Lower Ninth Ward, who couldn’t afford the “luxury” of evacuation and took refuge with family and others in the attic of one house as their neighborhood was inundated, wielding her camcorder the while. Documentarians Carl Deal and Tia Lessin discover her and her footage of the storm, and then follow as she and her husband escape to the relative paradise of Memphis but then return to participate in the reconstruction of New Orleans. Kimberly Roberts is a force of nature herself. Daughter of a drug addict who died of AIDS, she initially seems a bit wacked, but is gradually revealed as strong and articulate, with a rap persona who winds up crafting some powerful songs about the disaster, including the title song that plays over the final credits. Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke will remain the definitive view from outside of Katrina, but this film offers an intense and ultimately uplifting view from the inside. No dvd release has been scheduled yet, but it has been shown on HBO. Watch for it.

Rahmin Bahrani, American neorealist

Rahmin Bahrani is emerging as one of the most interesting young filmmakers in America. His latest -- Goodbye Solo -- may seal the deal, but I haven’t seen it yet, though its reception prompted me to catch up with his first two films. Born in North Carolina and educated at Columbia, he then spent several years in his parents’ native Iran before returning to America to make films. The influence of Kiarostami is evident, as are the antecedent debts to Italian neorealism, Satyajit Ray, and Robert Bresson.

Man Push Cart (2005, MC-71) is a deceptively simple Sisyphean parable of a Pakistani immigrant in NYC, who every day before dawn wheels his coffee cart into traffic and drags it many blocks to its spot on the street, the play of neon reflections on its faceted stainless steel a silent commentary on the man’s dark, drab existence. The repetitive process is rendered with grim lucidity, which is enlivened by chance encounters on the street, with a girl from Barcelona who is filling in at a relative’s news stand, and a yuppie from Lahore who recognizes the pushcart man as formerly a successful singer back in Pakistan. But romance or rediscovery is not in the cards for our hero, just the daily grind of pushing that rock up that hill. It could all be very depressing, but comes across as astringent and bracingly real.

Chop Shop (2008, MC-83) takes place in a realm that seems fantastical but is utterly factual, a little slice of the Third World right in the Big Apple -- Willets Point, a twenty-block area of fly-by-night auto repair shops, presided over by the looming presence of Shea Stadium. We follow 12-year-old Alejandro, an apparent orphan, as he works odd jobs and small crimes to survive, while allowed to live above one of the repair shops. He is thrilled when his 16-year-old sister Isamar comes to live with him, but not so thrilled when he learns what she has to do to get by. They dream of getting a burrito van of their own. Bahrani’s world is not one where dreams have much chance of coming true, but where life is lived as if it’s real, in a savvy mix of exhilaration and despair.

Rossellini's Historical Films

The Criterion Collection once again proves its inestimable value and exquisite taste with an Eclipse boxed set of “Rossellini’s Historical Films: Renaissance and Enlightment.” Though made for tv broadcast and popular consumption, Rossellini’s late films seem esoteric and strange, until you fall under their spell and they become an acquired taste. The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, separately released by Criterion, is certainly the most approachable of those I’ve seen, but in this set the one that gripped my attention was Blaise Pascal (1972); it certainly had me taking down my old paperback of the Pensees and grazing through my old annotations. I liked when Pascal bested Descartes in disputation, but Rossellini went on to give fair play to the latter in Cartesius (1974), never a thinker I cottoned to but whose life was interesting to follow. I confess to fast-forwarding through parts of the three-episode Age of Cosimo de Medici (1973), though the third part, which focuses on Leon Batista Alberti, is consistently fascinating. First off, let’s grant that these films are long and slow, with lengthy bits of argument and exposition somewhat awkwardly declaimed, but their pageant-like quality, with devotion to scenic verisimilitude and patient reenactment, offers a wide window into the past. I eagerly anticipate another set that will include Socrates and The Messiah.

Speaking of esoteric, I won’t do much of a postmortem on my “Four Seasons in Japan” film series, but will note my pleasure in drawing a more than decent audience for such high-flown fare, and look forward to cultivating that audience in that time slot, with my Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark starting in September. Of these four, Ugetsu was a bit of disappointment, most of the Mizoguchi images that stuck in my mind must have come from Sansho the Bailiff, but there are still more films of his I would be eager to see when they become available. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs certainly held up, on a second viewing within a relatively short period, and I tracked down another Naruse film, Late Chrysanthemums, which whets my appetite for more. A re-viewing of An Autumn Afternoon merely confirmed how much I love Ozu, certainly among my favorite directors. And Ran was a revelation -- turns out I had never seen it, just the start on an inadequate videotape -- proving that Kurosawa was a master to the end.

Boston blackguards

Confusable with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in multiple ways, What Doesn’t Kill You (2008, MC-71.) also stands in the shadow of The Departed, Mystic River, and Gone Baby Gone, so it’s no surprise it came and went without notice, despite worthy performances by Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke, and an authentic directorial perspective on South Boston from Brian Goodman, telling more or less his own story. Ruffalo plays him, and he himself plays the gang leader under whose sway the two longtime friends chafe, each going astray in his own way, with one headed for redemption and one for oblivion. It’s all done well enough (including Amanda Peet as the wife), but not well enough to stand out in a crowded field.

I also caught the recent Criterion release of the granddad of all these films, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), directed by Peter Yates from the George V. Higgins novel. Not exactly Bullitt goes to Boston, this film suffers from too many “friends” and not enough Eddie, in the person (and presence) of Robert Mitchum. He’s a small-time hood and Quincy family man in a bind, running guns and facing time, negotiating with other crooks and the cops, caught in a web he doesn’t begin to discern. At times this film plays like an instructional documentary for a bank heist, and at others like a primer on deviousness, as the bad and not-so-good guys make their deals in the shady bars of Boston, and on the plaza of the then-new City Hall. As gritty and downbeat as it gets, as meticulous and observant as it is, this film lacks a beating heart, ending with only a flashing neon sign in an almost empty bowling alley parking lot.