HBO and other spectacles

Though the HBO documentary series Addiction is not pinpointed to my interests, I have been watching because it brings together an all-star lineup of documentarians, really everybody from Pennebaker and Maysles forward, with characteristic work from Barbara Kopple (about the Steamfitters Union’s self-insured and union-run alcohol treatment program) and Berlinger & Sinofsky (about Boston Drug Court.) All of these notable filmmakers submerge their identities in the oddly configured series, which is surely destined more for DVD than broadcast. All the various stories are squeezed into a 90 minute compilation, and then offered with more completion as a supplemental series of 15-30 minute films. If the subject interests you from a personal or therapeutic standpoint, or if you might appreciate a compilation album of the finest documentarists, then this series would be worth your time. It certainly hammered home its main scientific point with me, that addiction is a disease of the brain that we are learning more and more about, and that it is amenable to treatment based on extensive experience and experiment.

Another sort of HBO series to which I made a completist commitment has just concluded, and I have to say that I was not sorry to see Rome end, even though the story cuts off with the rise of Augustus. I would put it in a category with trashy but readable historical fiction. There’s enough history and visual opulence to keep you watching, spiced with blood and sex for those who like it hot. If you go in for the ultraviolence and a bit of the old inandout, you will find it horrorshow. (Turns out the Roman past is just as brutal as the Clockwork Orange future, and twice as alien.) If you like historical reconstructions, you will find plenty to keep your eyes busy, and some to keep your mind busy as well. Dramatically it’s just a lavish soap opera, with villains and villainesses, shocking revelations, broad emotions, and sex-sex-sex -- not that that’s a bad thing, you understand.

For different reasons, I had occasion to look at two recent cinematic spectacles that met with lukewarm critical receptions, and I found myself sharing the averaged reaction represented by their cumulative Metacritic scores, giving both a *5+*. I watched Idlewild (2006, dvd, n.) because it was strongly recommended by one of the critics I trust most, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com. (I think our disagreements must be confined to musicals, since I remember her disparaging one I liked a lot, Gurinder Chadha’s faux-Bollywood Bride & Prejudice.) Anyway, when it comes to OutKast, I’m an outcast -- never heard a song of theirs, didn’t recognize them as the stars of this film -- so I’m out of it from the get-go. Even if I bought into Bryan Barber’s hyperkinetic vision of a 1930s speakeasy in Idlewild, Georgia, once the music started and the singers started rapping, I was distanced from the proceedings in a way I wasn’t by the anachronism of, say, Marie Antoinette. (MC-55.)

Though I’d enjoyed the book, poor reviews kept me from Rob Marshall’s adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha. (2005, dvd, n.) There was something just so Hollywood in the way the movie had three Chinese actresses playing Japanese geishas speaking English -- that sort of cultural “whatever” smacked of the old days of painted movie illusion. But on the other hand, those three Chinese actresses were Gong Li, Ziyi Zhang, and Michelle Yeoh, so that’s some serious star power to go with dazzling beauty. Which of course the film ladles on in a big way. So the eye candy is certainly sufficient to make this a watchable experience, as obvious and inert as the film may be dramatically. (MC-54.)

A different sort of spectacle is on view in Rize (2005, dvd, n.), a rap musical I could get behind, about a form of rapid, even violent, but artful street dance indigenous to the mean streets of L.A., various strains of which convey a different sort of communal identity from Crips and Bloods. This is the first documentary from David LaChapelle, apparently known for his fashion photography and music videos. That background comes through in the disjointed quality of the film, watchable in its moments but not cumulative in its impact. This is no Paris Is Burning, the marvelous and deeply moving 1990 documentary about the vogue for vogueing among a community of transvestites in NYC. It’s less a journey than a gyration, but it does give voice to lives less noticed. *6* (MC-74.)

One last note before I’m away for a week: if you are partial to spectacular nature documentaries, I advise you to tune into the series Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel or on DVD. It represents the state of the art -- awesome in the truest sense of the word.

Little Children

Not a bad film, but a major disappointment based on expectations from previous work of director Todd Field (In the Bedroom) and writer Tom Perrotta (Election, Joe College, this novel), particular favorites of mine. No disappointment in Kate Winslet -- by herself she makes the film worth watching -- except for the potential criticism of being too beautiful for the role. Though I guess they were setting the bar high by making her only have to be less beautiful than the wife of straying hubby Patrick Wilson, played by Jennifer Connelly. Jackie Earle Haley won a lot of praise for his comeback role as the paroled pedophile who inflames the passions of a well-off suburban New England community and sets in motion what story there is. I for one thought the movie, and the original novel, would have been better off without that character at all. As it was, I found the film all over the place and uncertain of tone, with some very good scenes and some very strained scenes, patched together with a most annoying narration. On the one hand, it was good to hear Perrotta’s wry novelistic voice, but on the other it betokened a failure of focus and imagination in the film as an independent entity. And it was disconcerting that the actual narrator’s voice was familiar from dozens of PBS documentaries, throwing me out of the proceedings even more. This film might have been Rohmeresque, if not Flaubertian, but settled for the desperation of housewives and the hyped up terrors of suburbia. (2006, Images, n.) *6* (MC-75)

Burn! (Queimada!)

I’ve been looking for this film for a long time, since it is Gillo Pontecorvo’s follow-up to Battle of Algiers, in my view one of the greatest films ever. Plus Brando! In a way it wasn’t a disappointment to watch, even though it was a mess, just too many elements that fail to coalesce. How long is it? What language is it? Apparently there is an 132 minute version in the “original” Italian, so Brando is dubbed. The recently-released dvd here is twenty minutes shorter, and in English, so you get Marlon’s second stab at a Fletcher Christian accent in his own voice, and everyone else is dubbed. He plays William Walker, who’s an international adventurer/fixer for the Queen’s Navy, who first comes to this Antilles island to foment revolt among the canecutters against the Portuguese, and then returns ten years later to put down revolt among the same people against the English now in control. The island of Queimada -- which literally means “burned-over” -- was initially colonized when the Portuguese burned out the natives and brought in African slaves to work the sugar plantations. Walker revisits that strategy against the slave insurgency in 1848. The contemporaneous Vietnam connections are obvious and powerful, the billows of flame recalling nothing so much as napalm, and the notion that it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. There is a lot going on here, the ambition is staggering, but Pontecorvo does not manage to hold it together, and the polyglot cast is fragmenting as well. There are sweeping scenes and set pieces, but no coherent flow. The color photography is sometimes striking, but sometimes amateurish, and the Ennio Morricone score seems slapped on from some other movie entirely. Still -- Brando was yet a mesmerizingly beautiful man at the time, and always fascinating to watch in his offbeat approach. And the film’s warnings about colonialism and imperialism are still highly relevant. (1968, dvd, n.) *6*

For Your Consideration

I suppose comedy really resides in the eye (and gut) of the beholder, but I do not share the critical consensus that this latest from Christopher Guest and his repertory company is not up to the standard set by Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. To me it’s very much of a piece, and of particular interest since it skewers the movie business and the whole Oscar mania. An idiotic piece of Southern schmaltz called Home for Purim starts to generate Oscar buzz while still in production, and several of the actors start to lose their sanity in lust for the golden, little ball-less man: Catherine O’Hara as the dying mother/queen Esther, Harry Shearer as the dad trying to make a comeback from his fame as the foot-long weenie in tv commercials for hot dogs, and Parker Posey (looking startlingly like Katherine Hepburn in period dress and coif) as the prodigal lesbian daughter returning to reconcile before her mother’s death. All the usual Guest troupers (plus new guests such as Ricky Gervais) march through, contributing their own largely-improvised cameos, and covering a lot of satirical ground in under 90 minutes. Frankly, some of the deleted scenes ought to have been included. Much of the satire is gentler than Borat’s but almost as cringe-worthy. This may not be the best Guest visitation, but I wager you would find your share of laughs here. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-68.)

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

Oh my god, I’m a convert to the Church of Leonard. This proselytizing tribute/concert film won me over, modest Canadian production that it is, but worthy celebration of the cult troubador -- he's my man now. I wasn’t a fan beforehand -- I did consider his songs to be an essential element of the greatness of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but mainly knew his work through covers by the likes of Judy Collins (there, I’ve revealed way too much about myself.) The film incorporates tantalizingly little of his own singing, but his songs are well rendered in a “Came So Far for Beauty” concert at the Sydney Opera House, by a variety of McGarrigles and Wainwrights and Thompsons et al. The performances are intercut with interviews with Cohen himself and a gaggle of admirers, two of whom are Edge and Bono (pontificating with point, as usual), with the climax coming when U2 backs Leonard singing “Tower of Song.” First-time director Lian Lunson is no great shakes, but her film and subject both reflect an appealing blend of sincerity and artifice, which applies to the musical performances as well. Now I am willing to accept this singer-songwriter as poet-prophet, the elusive and allusive lover as Zen monk, the gravel-in-the-gutter voice as truth-telling visionary, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the race. A few weeks back I commented on a great year for musical documentaries, and while it may not be the best, this one moved me most of all. (2006, dvd, n.) *8+* (MC-68.)

Borat

I’m nearly speechless, not so much breathless from laughter or shock, as simply past the wave of this cultural phenomenon. Sacha Baron Cohen is obviously a very smart man who has a lot on his mind, but he does go in for a lot of mindless laughs and Jackass behavior. The film certainly is funny, and more satiric than just offensive for the hell of it. Some of the “Oh no, he didn’t!” moments had been spoiled for me by prior description. But I have to say that the extras on the DVD, deleted scenes and in-character promotional appearances, are every bit as funny as the film itself. The character of faux Khazak reporter Borat is the thing, and the situations he gets into. It’s more peripatetic performance art than a film per se. So I can’t go overboard with my rating. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-89.)

Nine Queens

This delightful film from Argentina is -- like David Mamet’s House of Games -- adept at the long con and the short con. Everyone in it is a con man, including writer/director Fabian Bielinski. A couple of small-timers meet cute in a convenience store, and in a day of running scams, happen upon a big score, an immaculate forgery of a philatelist treasure, the sheet of stamps known as Nueve Reinas, the Nine Queens, with an eager buyer waiting. Ricardo Darin and Gaston Pauls are excellent as the duo, laid back and perpetually wary but wise in the ways of the world, canny at playing on the weakness and confusion of anyone (including the audience.) The twists and turns are fun to follow, when you can, and if the big twist at the end is a “Now wait a minute” moment, well, you’re jolly enough to take the ride to the end. But the film has a ground level reality that distinguishes it from constructions like The Sting or Oceans 11, so there is genuine observation and insight going on amidst the gameplaying. (2002, IFC/T, n.) *7+* (MC-80.)

Omagh

Paul Greengrass was one of the writers on this film made for Irish TV, in effect a melding of Sunday Bloody Sunday and United 93, and Pete Travis directs very much in the distinctive Greengrass style of docudrama -- in close, intense, in the middle of the action, handheld and quick-cut. Here the terrorism is homegrown -- a faction of the IRA tries to undermine the Good Friday Accords by setting off a car bomb on Market Street in Omagh, Northern Ireland, on August 15, 1998, killing 29 and wounding 200, many of them children. Of course many more are actually wounded by the senseless violence, including the family of one dead young man. His father is played by Gerard McSorley, who becomes the spokesman for a group of families seeking justice from the authorities, who in turn variously have their own reasons to make the problem go away, to cover their asses or “not to disrupt the peace process.” So no one is ever tried for the crime, and the family needs to find its own way of healing. Available on DVD from Netflix, this film is a moving and informative statement on one of the salient traumas of our time, the super-empowerment of small groups of angry men bent on destruction, and their continuing effect on the social fabric. (2004, Sund/T, n.) *7*

Donkey Skin (Peau d’Ane)

This film completes an implicit trilogy with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort -- for director Jacques Demy, star Catherine Deneuve, and composer Michel Legrand. It’s a beautifully literal-minded translation of a fairy tale from the same pen as Cinderella, viewing the most extravagant tale with a child’s matter-of-fact logic of magic. Kind of creepy, as many genuine fairy tales are. Dying Queen makes King promise not to marry again unless he finds a wife more beautiful. He looks around but finds none more beautiful than his daughter. He proposes and she is shocked, but not inclined to refuse until her fairy godmother straightens her out, counseling her to make escalating demands, up to asking for the skin of the King’s fabulous gold-shitting donkey. The King is undetered in his misguided love, so the godmother has to whisk the Princess away and hide her under the cloak of the donkey skin, until she is discovered by the Prince of her dreams. Kinky stuff -- more Cocteau than Disney. One of many homages to Cocteau is Jean Marais as the King, very much as he was as the beast in La Belle et la Bete. Catherine Deneuve is every inch a Princess, even when smeared with grime and covered with a rather grisly donkey skin, and Delphine Seyrig is a swanky godmother. (Amusing sidelight: the Prince, Jacques Perrin, went on to become director of the great documentary Winged Migration.) The plot of the story is a foregone conclusion, but the details of its visualization are a continuing surprise and delight. Special effects are few, but the effects of costume, location, and camera are definitely special. (1970, dvd, n.) *7-*

Where Angels Fear to Tread

This may be taken as the runt of the litter of E.M. Forster adaptations that came out in succession in the decade after 1984, and it’s quite mousy in the radiance of A Passage to India, Howards End, or A Room with a View. I may have missed it altogether at the time, or otherwise found it utterly unmemorable, but it recently came out on DVD and got bumped to the top of my Netflix queue when I was browsing through Helen Mirren’s filmography. She is indeed excellent as always, as the wealthy young English widow who goes to Italy and is seduced by the country and the young son of a Tuscan dentist, but she departs a third of the way in and takes much of the film’s energy with her. Director Charles Sturridge is rather stodgy in his staging, and while the scenery is nice the camera is not ravished by the landscape, as it ought to be. Helena Bonham Carter and Judy Davis contribute their usual excellent characterizations, and Rupert Graves is more than adequate in a pivotal role. But muttered dialogue and obscure motivations made me long for the subtitles this DVD did not have, though a long-ago college course in Forster’s novels helped me through the story. (1991, dvd, n.) *6-*

Casino Royale

You need a greater appetite for destruction than I to appreciate this exercise in mayhem and momentum, and a greater tolerance for genre formula. But I acknowledge that Martin Campbell’s direction moves right along, visiting the usual sequence of photogenic locales and staging some inventive chases, and that Daniel Craig makes a most intriguing James Bond (an intense and interesting pair with his Perry Smith in Infamous), and that Eva Green is appropriately seductive and mysterious as the feminine foil, more a woman than the typical Bond Girl, but still a plot point and not a person. I make a point of avoiding almost all pop movie franchises, but I have seen a few Bond films over the years, and this certainly ranks with the very best. But let’s face it, this sort of movie is the enemy of everything I believe film should be. So take the ride, if that’s your thing, but realize this sort of blockbuster destroys not only vehicles and buildings, not to mention the body count, but also preempts the possibilities of film as genuine art. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-80.)

I’ve watched a lot of bizarre double features in my time, but none more so than the match between this and the film I showed at the Clark earlier in the day. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) remained enigmatic on second viewing, but still a highly watchable spectacle and an interestingly perverse variant of the English country house genre, way weirder than Masterpiece Theater. Peter Greenaway’s obsessions are not mine, but I have to say my impression of his writing and direction was enhanced on a meta-level when I read that he did all the draughtsman’s drawings as well, it’s his hand we see in the frame, which made the whole subtext about looking and rendering more tangible, more graphic. The evocation of time (1694) and place (Kent) is precise yet passing strange. It’s talky and convoluted, static and stagey, but visually acute, both funny and creepy. This quintessence of art film did not cost even a hundredth of what the Bond movie or others of its ilk cost, and I haven’t the slightest doubt where the better aesthetic value lies. Give me the inaction film over the action movie anytime. You could say the world is big enough for both sorts of cinema, but I believe Gresham’s Law holds here, bad movies drive out good films.

Letters from Iwo Jima

Another grim, gray film, somewhat done in by exaggerated expectations. I still think Clint Eastwood may really have something when he puts his two Iwo Jima films into a single saga-length narrative, but this half didn’t grip me as much as I’d been led to expect. Maybe some people need the “war is hell” theme reinforced, but I require no convincing, and this was just so unrelievedly hopeless. Certainly it is striking for Hollywood to look at WWII from the perspective of the enemy, in their own language and in sympathy with their plight. It’s all well done, with fine acting from Ken Watanabe on down (it was in fact easier to keep the Japanese characters straight than those on the other side in Flags of Our Fathers), but still it’s a bit relentless, mechanistic, claustrophobic. (2006, Images, n.) *7* (MC-89.)

Fateless

I do not share the view that there cannot be too many Holocaust films, but this Hungarian entry comes with a high pedigree, and definitely has a different approach from Schindler’s List or The Pianist or -- God forbid -- Life is Beautiful. Adapted by 2002 Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz from his own memoir/novel, and directed by Lajos Koltai, best known as cinematographer for Istvan Szabo, this film is narratively understated but visually striking. It follows a teenage boy in Budapest, whose father is sent to a “labor camp” and then he himself is rounded up, almost casually, and sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His step by step descent into an all too real hell is sketched in a succession of blackout memories, a pile-up of horrific scenes that seems almost as incomprehensible to us as to the boy experiencing them. Nothing is hyped, and the silences are as effective as Ennio Morricone’s music. Even with color all but drained from his palette, Koltai finds an uncanny beauty with his camera. While exemplary of its kind, this film gets a qualified recommendation from me, dependent on your willingness to endure its grimness. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-87.)

Fast Food Nation

First let me acknowledge that Richard Linklater is a hero of mine, and his release of this film in the same year as A Scanner Darkly puts him in the same category of versatile virtuosity as Michael Winterbottom (with Tristram Shandy and The Road to Guantanamo to his credit last year) -- able to balance quirky literary adaptations with engaged docudrama. Here Linklater and Eric Schlosser adapt the latter’s muckracking book about industrial food production into a different sort of illustrated lecture from An Inconvenient Truth, more in line with the far-out conversations that have been Linklater’s trademark from Slackers through Waking Life to the absolute classic Before Sunrise/Before Sunset. They interweave wisps of story, in a flat-footed but effective way -- bringing together the putrid realities of meat processing, with illegal Mexican immigrants who work the slaughterhouse and disaffected American teenagers who sling the burgers, along with assorted others either caught up in, or greasing, the food machine, including the cattle themselves. Made fast on a low budget, the film has a certain drabness, dramatically and visually, that is compensated by the cogent points made by a succession of characters in striking cameos by the likes of Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis. What story there is, is framed perfectly in the adorable visage of Catalina Sandino Moreno (indelibly Maria Full of Grace.) Among many others, two characters stand out, Greg Kinnear as a burger business executive dawning to the truth but surpressing his conscience, and Ashley Johnson as a perky but engaged teen who finds out about the poop in the patties she’s dispensing. In the end the human victims stand aside for the bovine, in documentary footage that is as salutary as it is gut-churning. While its stomach may be flopping, this film has its heart and its brain in the right place, making many salient connections amongst the various liabilities of the way we eat here and now. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-64.)

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Though I enjoyed watching this film again as part of my “Age of Claude” film series at the Clark, I have to admit that this was one of those rare films that was beyond the capacity of DVD (non-HD) and the Clark’s good but not great digital projector. The attention to light in this film required that special quality of being projected piercingly through celluloid, rather than splashed on the screen in an array of colored dots. So we didn’t do justice to Eduardo Serra’s cinematography, but the film’s other assets came through, most especially Scarlett Johanssen in the title role, a nearly silent but most telling performance. Colin Firth has a believably intense gaze as Vermeer, and the supporting cast is quite good as an ensemble. The set design and the intent quality of Peter Webber’s direction contributed to the visual feast, and conveyed a tangible sense of Delft in 1655. The pace is slow, the emotions surpressed and enigmatic for the most part, but if you’re of the sort who could be entertained by watching a painting dry, then you’ll enjoy this film, maybe even be moved by it. (2003, dvd, r.) *8* (MC-74.)

Havoc

Being a bit of an auteurist, and directorial completist, I TiVo’d this Barbara Kopple feature when it showed up on Sundance. Not much to it, but I wasn’t sorry to watch it. Kopple actually makes the transition from documentary pretty well, but is saddled with a hackneyed script (rich girl from Pacific Palisades looks for kicks and explores her dark side by trips into the Barrio, and learns more than she bargained for) and thin characterizations (Anne Hathaway and Bijou Phillips bare their boobs more than their souls, and Freddy Rodriguez of Six Feet Under is amusing but risible as the Latin drug lord.) I’ve been spoiled by The Wire not to accept anything less than complete authenticity in depictions of The Corner, but Kopple does imbue these good-girl-on-the-bad-side-of-town proceedings with some sense of place and risk. And give her credit, at the same time she was spreading this piece of cheese, she was co-director on the outstanding documentary, Bearing Witness, about five newswomen in Iraq, a hard film to track down but well worth the effort. (2005, Sund/T, n.) *5+*

Let Joy Reign Supreme (Que la Fete Commence)

I have to confess it took a long time for me to be sure that I had seen this film before. I was vetting it for an “Ancient Regimes” film series I’m proposing to tie in with the Clark’s Fall exhibition on Fragonard. In that regard, it’s probably too early in period as well as too risque, though I wouldn’t rule it out. Bertrand Tavernier’s second film may be characterized as a tragi-farce about the Regent of France in 1719, reigning between Louises XIV and XV. It’s certainly staged as a comic pageant, set more in bordellos than at court, though it ends with royal rot and revolutionary flame, and comes across as politically and historically engaged. Philippe Noiret is superb as Philippe of Orleans, especially in banter and byplay with Jean Rochefort as the Abbe Dubois, the Regent’s oldest friend and closest advisor. Though stagey, the historical feel is real. Though funny, the film’s pain has impact. (1975, dvd, r.) *7-*

Re-viewings

While on the rare occasion a second look may yield a radical revaluation, most often I find a re-viewing is more likely to confirm and intensify the initial reaction. Some recent cases in point:

I showed Rembrandt (1936) to kick off my “Age of Claude” film series at the Clark, almost ten years after I showed it as part of the very first series I offered there, “British Sterling: Classics of the English Silver Screen.” And it still fit the bill. In all, an amazingly accomplished film. Charles Laughton discards the ham shanks he gnawed as Henry VIII, and gives an understated and moving performance, as the painter beset by family and financial woe, aging before our eyes much as the famous self-portraits do. The direction and set design by Alexander Korda et al. is top drawer; though presumably shot on a soundstage, the streetscapes of Amsterdam and the Dutch interiors, as well as the 17th century dress, come across with surprising verisimilitude. Though much of the script has Laughton as Rembrandt reciting biblical verses, it all works well. *8+*

Since it had been decades since I last watched it, I happened to record Bonnie and Clyde (1967) when it appeared on TCM last summer. Obviously I wasn’t dying to see it again, but finally got sick of it on my TiVo “Now Playing” list, so tuned in so I could delete when I’d watched my fill. Once started, I watched it all and confirmed that it is indeed a classic. I’d heard years after the fact that Newman and Benton first gave the script to Francois Truffaut, hoping he would direct, and in retrospect I can see why. The mix of comedy and tragedy is very similar to Shoot the Piano Player. I’ve always been a sucker for Warren Beatty, and Faye Dunaway is hot-hot-hot. Just think the number of lives that would have been saved if they had Viagra back in the Depression. Bonnie and Clyde would have been too busy getting it on to kill anyone. As it is, the phallic gun imagery is laid on with a trowel, but the effect is mostly comic and true to the pulp spirit of the enterprise. But the gangsters-and-molls-on-the-run formula is enhanced by Arthur Penn’s offbeat direction, and the lush nostalgia of Burnett Guffey’s camera. With first-rate support from Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and Michael J. Pollard, this film that Warner Brothers almost refused to release continues to burn with star wattage and radical wit, more up to date than anything at the cineplex this weekend. *9*

My memory is of being underwhelmed by Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive when I first saw it shortly after it came out in 1973. Then it was a critical darling and art house hit on whose bandwagon I could not jump, and now it has been issued on DVD by the Criterion Collection and mentioned as a point of comparison in many reviews of Pan’s Labyrinth, as a girl’s eye view of Fascist Spain after Franco’s takeover -- and my reaction is still barely lukewarm. Ana Torrent is enchanting as the little girl obsessed by Frankenstein, but the story that unfolds oh-so-slowly around her is opaque and inconclusive. Though visually striking in random detail, if this film has a coded political or psychological message, it was lost on me. *6-*

Fists in the Pocket

The term “dysfunctional family” may not have been coined when this film first came out and made a splash on the international festival circuit, but it is certainly a jaw-dropping illustration of the concept. Marco Bellocchio’s first film was made in his mother’s house, and he clearly had some issues to work out: blindness, epilepsy, idiocy, incest, and murder for starters. He certainly brought intensity and passion to the project, which elicits reactions ranging from horror to laughter. Personally, I didn’t know how to react, though the film was transfixing as well as head-scratching. I distantly remember a positive response to his second film, China Is Near, though I may be mixing it up with Bertolucci’s roughly contemporaneous Before the Revolution, but now the Criterion Collection has resurrected his first, and though it is something to see, I can’t recommend seeing it. (1965, dvd, n.) *5+*

Babel

Mesmerizing but unconvincing, this film is decidedly less than the sum of its parts, watchable but not believable or parseable. Four farflung vignettes, from Morocco to Japan to the Mexicali border, are mashed up non-chronologically, but the connections are asserted rather than illuminated, a scenarist’s conceit rather than a revealing juxtaposition. The speaking in tongues is more babble than Babel. That said, there is a lot to admire here. The three locations are rendered vividly, as are the various characters. Director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto convey a distinctive feel for disparate locales, and situate each of the actors effectively, but the characters are moved around like pieces on a global chessboard, their motivations assigned instead of emergent from the action, more arbitrary than plausible. Scene by scene, you are swept along, but overall the construction is a crumbling tower, undermined by the filmmakers’ attempt to take a God-like perspective. It is easy to praise the look (and sound) of the film, and the quality of individual performances, but not to be taken in by the whole. Though the most recognized this award season, this is certainly the least of the recent films from the admirable and ambitious three amigos from Mexico, Children of Men and especially Pan’s Labyrinth being more fully realized. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-69.)

Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing

Barbara Kopple is one of the great directors of direct cinema, best known for the Oscar-winning documentaries, Harlan County USA and American Dream, but she had wandered from stories of striking coal miners or meatpackers into celebrity profiles with Wild Man Blues, about Woody Allen, and a PBS series on The Hamptons. Teaming here with Cecilia Peck, she beautiful melds the two strands in a politically-astute personality piece with concert footage. The Chicks had become the best-selling female group of all time, when they opened in London around the time Bush was getting ready to invade Iraq, and lead singer Natalie Maines had the temerity to say she was ashamed the President was from Texas -- a bland enough assertion, one would think. But the country music “base” was mobilized into outrage -- boycotts and radio bans ensued, Bush-era bullying ran wild -- and basically the Chicks lost one career and had to recreate another. This saga of branding and re-branding is more engrossing than such a show business expose has any right to be. In the best tradition of cinema verite, there is no narration and no talking head interviews, just intimate access and authentic presentation. But the material works on multiple levels. There’s something about performers when they appear without varnish -- they seem to unearth their emotions in a volatile way (cf. Metallica: Some King of Monster.) So this is a group psychobiography, as well as a business and political story, and a concert film. I had no antecedent knowledge of the Dixie Chicks, but got a real sense of the community that supports and is supported by their performing. One is allowed to find them less than admirable, but the film certainly elicits some respect for the honesty of their endeavor. You can’t feel sorry for them, they obviously haven’t been shut up altogether, but their process of reinvention is rather inspiring, and oh-so-American. I am no longer, if I ever was, a knowledgeable fan of popular music, but lately there has been a striking succession of distinguished directors making notable films about contemporary performers, from Martin Scorsese on Bob Dylan in No Direction Home to Jonathan Demme on Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Michel Gondry on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, to Barbara Kopple on the Dixie Chicks. All are well worth seeing, whether you’re partial to the artists portrayed or not. (2006, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-77)

Flags of Our Fathers

I look forward to seeing Letters from Iwo Jima, which I’m sure will affect my judgment of the Clint Eastwood diptych, so I refrain from rating this first half, which should have been seen in a theater rather than on a tv anyway. Though Eastwood as director does not rank as high for me as for many, he does put the film in the can, and it is very watchable stuff. In this case a good story (and film) is folded over in its time sequence, and stuffed into a post-dated envelope. To get the message, you have to discard the envelope and unfold the pages. One day it may simply be interleaved with the Japanese perspective, and Eastwood can edit a whole, in the manner of the “Godfather Saga,” that will have scale, scope, and impact. Such is intimated in parts of this jagged half. Certainly this film does for the Pacific Theater what Saving Private Ryan did for the European, and then some. The black sand island of Iwo Jima (with Iceland subbing) makes a perfect landscape of hell for battle. And the whole afterstory -- of the famous flag-raising picture and the enlistment of its surviving subjects in an immense bond drive to keep the war going against Japan while concluding against Germany -- adds essential dimension and continuing relevance. So this is quite a good movie that may come to be seen as part of a great one. Its confusions can be taken as the fog of battle, since the three leads do emerge effectively -- Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach -- and the story sweeps from battlefield to White House to Yankee Stadium with visual dash. And if you can sort out the overlapping narrations, it does have something to say. (2006, dvd, n.) *NR* (MC-78.)

The Prestige

I found this altogether more magical than The Illusionist, which forms a ready-made comparison, almost as much as the two duelling Capote films. Christopher Nolan is much more self-conscious about the parallel between magic and cinema -- less magic on film and more film magic -- and leaves a greater residue of wonder and mystery, even if he is over-reliant on the disorienting time-shifts that have been his trademark since Memento. The film is sometimes a choppy and puzzling construction, but overall the sense of period, place, and character is strong. With Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as cut-throat rivals in the world of Victorian magic, deception, and showmanship -- supported by the likes of Michael Caine, David Bowie, and Scarlett Johansson -- the acting is good across the board, and across the boards of theatrical London around 1900. Amid all the other uncanniness, it’s odd that The Prestige winds up with almost the same Metacritic score as The Illusionist, averaged over a similar spread of opinion. It seems you like one or the other but not both, depending on your predilection for fairy tale or science fiction. And my preference for The Prestige was bumped up when I listened to a spoiler link on Slate, that revealed a plot point I frankly had missed, which makes the film darker still, and even more of a wonder. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-66.)