Man on Wire

Amazingly assured -- that description applies to both this film and its subject. Director James Marsh documents the astounding feat (and feet) of aerialist Phillipe Petit -- “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers” (as in the title of Mordicai Gerstein’s superb Caldecott-winning picture book -- as good as this film is, Mordicai’s book is even better, in clarity of story and impact of illustration -- see the movie by all means, but look at the book as well!) Something between a heist film like Oceans 11 and a Maysles documentation of a Christo project, this film is well done in all its various parts -- the retrospective interviews with participants, the stylized but convincing recreations of “Le coup” on August 7, 1974 (with Nixon’s resignation playing on the tv), the vintage footage and stills, the evocative music. Marsh is adept in what he leaves out as well as what he puts in -- when he includes footage of the World Trade Center being built he doesn’t need to reference its destruction, a universal memory triggered every time an airplane appears in the film. The case is convincingly made that Petit’s impish stunt was also an aesthetic statement, an acte gratuite (“There is no why”) of surpassing beauty. One is swept up into his mad passion, as were his accomplices, without blinking at his animating solipsism. It’s fun, it’s exhilarating and inspiring, but it’s no fantasy, rather a willful act that somehow evades its consequences. Phillipe is an Icarus who flies too close to the sun and lives to tell the tale, the man who didn’t fall from the sky. (2008, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-89.)

As part of my continuing retrospective of Hollywood’s second “golden age” in the Seventies, I checked out the recent dvd release of Payday (1972) -- Rip Torn is good as a dissipated country singer on the road, but his act is a little more familiar than it was at the time, and the film is not as snappy or as authentic as it might have been. Since I’m not offering a recommendation, for accurate detail I refer you to the source I find most reliable for short reviews, both online and in its printed annual guide, i.e. Time Out.

So the Olympics end and the party conventions take their place in eating my time and keeping me from movies. I keep up quality viewing with Mad Men on AMC and Generation Kill on HBO, both of which I will write about sometime soon. As for films lately, I seem only to watch what I show, and my “Visions of a Gilded Age” film series at the Clark just concluded. I have to say I was glad to see each film again on the big screen, and each (except The Bostonians) went up in my estimation, especially the final two Edith Wharton adaptations. Age of Innocence was confirmed as a classic for me -- would that Marty Scorsese made more films like that and fewer like The Departed! Among other things, it may use narration as well as any film I’ve seen; Joanne Woodward is the perfect authorial voice, integral to the film’s texture and not something stuck in to cover gaps in the story. Sure, the sets and costumes are something to see, but it’s the characters inside the costumes that rivet the attention, from Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfieffer on down. And House of Mirth, as unmirthful as it may be and merciless in its portrait of a beautiful woman in distress, comes quite close to the mark as well -- much closer to Dreiser than Jane Austen in its portrayal of society. Terence Davies brings out the emotional brutality of the situation, and a good cast led by Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart delivers the grim reality in convincing fashion. Come to think of it, this series didn’t have much in the way of happy endings. All good to great films, however.

King Corn

This documentary does a fairly entertaining job of presenting the ideas of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) in a digestible format. Director Aaron Woolf follows two best friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, after their graduation from Yale, as they pack into a pickup and head for the Iowa town where by chance the great-grandfathers of both came from. They intend to grow one acre of corn and follow it from field to market, to explain how our bodies got to be so full of the stuff. They trace the development back to Nixon’s infamous secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, who changed farm policy from subsidizing non-production to encouraging all-out production. The incentive became to grow as much as possible, with all the profit in the process coming from the federal subsidy. As industrialization increased yield, the product had to have a place to go and it went largely to bulking up cattle, even though they are meant to eat grass and the corn would kill them if they weren’t slaughtered first. Then that excess corn was processed into the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, which has destroyed the American diet over the past few decades and yielded an epidemic of obesity. And now of course, we are subsidizing the inefficient production of ethanol from corn. A disastrous policy all round. The two guys are not characterized sufficiently to make for an involving documentary drama (or comedy in the vein of Super Size Me), but in trying not to be dull they pull out all stops, from timelapse photography of the growing cornfield to animation involving a plastic toy farm picked up at a real farm’s foreclosure auction. The antics can be a little scattershot, but the message gets across. If you’ve read Pollan, it’s a lot of fooling around to make a familiar point, but if not, it’s important information in a palatable format. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-70.)

Much in the same vein, Everything’s Cool, a 2007 documentary by Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand, leavens its warnings about global warming with humor and a variety of filmic techniques, from interviews with the likes of Bill McKibben to animation by Emily Hubley, but in sum the effect is less eclectic that merely miscellaneous. The most illuminating part offers clips of oil-financed “scientists” sowing doubts about the facts of the case, and trying to reduce global warming to one “theory” in a “debate.” This muddying of the waters, of course, has been the Bushies’ main strategy on various issues, from evolution to education, from preemptive war to torture and other human rights violations. But it is still not true that if you say something false often enough with a straight face -- aside from the contemptuous sneer -- that the facts become debatable. Eventually reality will bite you back.

I’m not sure why I’ve been sucked in like never before, but the Beijing Olympics are definitely eating into the my film viewing these days. Perhaps it’s the same with you. Nonetheless I will soon resume the pace of my reviewing.

Werckmeister Harmonies

I’m a cinematic Goldilocks who likes his films not too fast and not too slow, but just right, matched to the duration of my heartbeat and the endurance of my pants seat. Bela Tarr’s stripped-down follow-up to his notorious 7 1/2 hour Satantango may be only one-third as long, but still exceeds my patience for exquisitely composed and fluidly protracted shots that run, or rather walk, the full length of a film reel, 11 minutes plus. Despite his anointing by the most serious of critics (notably Susan Sontag), it took me three tries to get through Tarr’s dark Hungarian fable, and with that I had to hit the fast-forward button repeatedly. The striking images are more black than white and the sinuous camera reveals more ordinary ugliness than transcendent beauty, but I can glimpse the appeal of such self-assured filmmaking. There’s something there, to be sure, some hypnotic power and some precise evocation of wonder and despair, but it is not an experience I would urge upon anyone who doesn’t feel up to the test. (2000, dvd, n.) *NR*