My Kid Could Paint That

Amir Bar-Lev’s absorbing documentary traces the meteoric career of a 4-year-old painter who was taken up by the celebrity machine, which then turned on her (or more specifically, her parents) after a debunking segment on 60 Minutes. The filmmaker is acutely conscious that he is part of the phenomenon he is recording, exploiting an unearned intimacy while trying to retain journalistic objectivity and even skepticism. So there’s a lot going on in this film -- family dynamics, media manipulation, the meaning of art and its market -- and a lot to think about. The little girl, Marla, is cute as a button, and her mother (a dental assistant in Binghampton, NY) is attractive and sympathetic, while the father is the question mark, a factory supervisor and amateur painter who may be an indulgent mentor to his young daughter, or may be a con man. The array of commentators includes Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, who has cogent things to say about contemporary art and its reception. The film is concise and continuously interesting, and the dvd extras carry the story further, though far from resolving the ambiguities. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-74.)

P.S. I just gave The Departed another look, to see if I had missed something, but this supposed “Best Picture” still strikes me as Scorsese’s worst. There’s quite a lot that’s good in it: dialogue and action, character and scene-setting, suspense and humor, but it’s still just a bloody thrill machine -- and the sole female character is such an implausible construct that the whole film falls apart the minute you think about it.

This Is England

This semi-autobiographical film by Shane Meadows might be pitched as The 400 Blows meets American History X, set in Midlands England during 1983, in the reign of Queen Maggie and her splendid little war in the Falklands. One of the casualties of that war was the father of Shaun, a pugnacious and sexually-precocious 12-year-old outcast, who finds a surrogate family in a surprisingly sweet band of skinhead brothers and sisters. Things start to sour after an older leader of the group gets out of prison after three years, and through xenophobic rants and violent demonstrations tries to turn the group into neo-Nazis. Shane/Shaun is embodied by superb newcomer Thomas Turgoose, while Stephen Graham is scarily intense as the disastrous father-substitute, who points to his own tattooed face and insists, “This is England.” The film has a finely honed sense of time and place (and sound), and is unpredictable yet true-seeming in its twists of characterization. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-86.)

Bamako

Bamako is the capital of Mali, and in a domestic courtyard there, a trial is taking place, among many be-robed judges and lawyers and stacks of documents, while the residents wander through and go about their lives. We come into the middle of the proceeding and gradually figure out that the plaintiff is “African Society” and the defendants are the World Bank, IMF, WTO, G-8, and the whole structure of global capitalism. Those in attendance are much like the denizens of the courtyard, and one by one they come forward as witnesses to tell the sad story of neocolonialism and the pauperization of Africa through debt service and conditions imposed by lenders. We wander back and forth between the trial and the characters who pass through, and there’s a parody of a spaghetti Western (featuring Danny Glover) dropped into the middle, so you definitely have to pay attention to keep up, but the film does gather momentum in the summations of the plaintiff’s lawyers. But I still don’t know whether a straight documentary might not have been more effective than this didactic surrealism. Nonetheless, Abderrahmane Sissako’s film is a rare opportunity to see Africa from the inside out. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-81.)

Things We Lost in the Fire

As I said here recently, any Susanne Bier film is worth watching, but this one was strangely overlooked last year, despite strong work from Oscar-winners Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro. She is the wife and he is the best friend of David Duchovny, all-round good guy who is murdered while trying to save a damsel in distress. Plus there are a couple of cute kids in a designer house, so it could have been very Movie of the Week, but the importation of Danish director Bier again keeps the suds astringent and the tears relatively authentic. The survivors’ stories are believably complicated. Benicio acts up a storm as a formerly-successful drug addict trying to reform after the death of his one enduring friend; Halle can’t keep up, but her beauty is highly watchable even when she’s looking drawn and grim. I suppose it depends on how much grief and recovery you can stand in your movies, but this one is more than pathetic -- it’s sympathetic. (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-63.)

The Edukators

I took note of this film because it featured Julia Jentsch, whom I found remarkable in Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Her co-star here, Daniel Bruhl, also looked familiar, though I had to look it up to recall him from Good Bye, Lenin! They’re part of a triangle of wannabe radicals who wish to make the bourgeoisie uncomfortable, by breaking into wealthy houses and rearranging all the belongings, then leaving a note that says, “You have too much money” or “Your days of plenty are numbered.” When a homeowner returns in the middle of their antics, the trio find themselves with a hostage, to whom they in effect become hostages. They retreat to a mountain hideaway, where it turns out their kidnappee is a veteran of ’68 --namedropping the best-known student rebels of the time -- who went corporate and made a mint, but still asks for the joint when it's going around. While the triangle goes clanging through their conflicting emotions, the old radical keeps a canny eye out, expresses selective sympathy and plays for power in a way the innocents hardly register. Who is the real Edukator here? It’s a question that’s kept tantalizingly open to the final scene, and maybe beyond. Director Hans Weingatner neatly balances elements of youthful romance and misadventure with serio-comic considerations of idealism and radicalism. (2004, IFC/T, n.) *7* (MC-68.)

Miscellanea

I’ve been watching a bunch of stuff that doesn’t cross the threshold of recommendation, but is worthy of notice. HBO’s Recount (2008) was a well-done docudrama about Florida 2000, which was even funny when you could put out of mind the lamentable consequences of the last eight years. All the actors turned the neat trick of being recognizable as themselves and as simulacra of real people, notably Laura Dern as Katherine Harris and Tom Wilkinson as James Baker. Kevin Spacey was playing someone less familiar, but did a good job of holding the story together. If you can bear to relive that aftermath of that election, this film will really take you back.

I am always looking for films about artists to show at the Clark, so I took in Klimt (2006) despite lackluster reviews. Director Raul Ruiz is unusually arty, best know for the Proust adaptation Time Regained, and this multinational co-production in English is indeed a feast for the eyes, though the mind goes a little hungry, and the heart hardly comes into it. John Malkovich is not so much Klimt as John Malkovich playing John Malkovich. There are a lot of lovely lady models, frequently disporting in the nude, so you have to give the film points for eye candy, and also some feel for Paris and Vienna in the early years of the 20th century.

One from the Heart (1982) is the studio-bound film that nearly sunk Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. Resolutely artificial in its depiction of romantic angst in a stage-set Las Vegas, the film relies on the songs of Tom Waits, sung with Crystal Gayle, to convey all the emotion the film is too busy with camera and lighting tricks to get across. Teri Garr is really quite appealing as the travel store clerk who longs to travel, and Frederic Forrest looks startlingly Brandoesque as her sedentary junkyard beau of five years. After a fight they dance off with exotics Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski respectively, before inevitably getting back together, under the painted sunset outside of the neon-lit models of the Strip. This film tries with some success to be something new and a throwback at the same time, but does not come from or speak to the heart.

War Dance

This Sundance doc fav was too pretty and too predetermined, raising issues of authenticity, but did stir some of the emotions it was working too hard to get across. Hard not to, with the horrific stories of three child victims of the Ugandan civil war, orphaned in a refugee camp but part of a school competing in a nationwide musical competition. However stagy the presentation, the pain of their lives is real enough, as is the joy of their release into song and dance. And if uncontextualized suffering is uneasily linked to the Spellbound/Mad Hot Ballroom formula of youthful competition, there is still beauty and spirit on display in this product of the team of Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine. (2007, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-68.)

Mafioso

I’m not sure what I think about this recent revival, which got a theatrical release and a Criterion Collection dvd last year, and which I caught up with on Turner Classic Movies. Somehow “not sure what to think” might be exactly the reaction director Alberto Lattuada was looking for, as he mixes neorealism, farce, and thriller into an unsettling comedy-drama about displacement. Alberto Sordi (so great as The White Shiek and others) is a lab-coated efficiency expert in a Fiat plant in Turin, the epitome of rationalized modernity, until he takes his blond wife and girl home to Sicily on vacation, and is drawn back into ancient tribal ways. I confess to watching this film over two nights, which might be partly responsible for my feeling it doesn’t quite hold together. It starts as a family comedy and winds up an obvious precursor of The Godfather, and includes such off-the-wall scenes as a group of vitelloni on the beach sculpting an anatomically incorrect woman in the sand while discoursing on “the problem of the South” like so many professors from the North. Whether or not it works as whole, the various elements are enough to recommend it. (1962, TCM/T, n.) *7* (MC-88.)

Open Hearts

At this point I think it’s safe to say that any Susanne Bier film is worth watching, sure to be filled with raw and honest emotion, open-hearted in an unsentimental manner, more like surgery than a greeting card. This Danish film is essentially a romantic melodrama -- as indicated by the more literal translation of its title, “I’ll Love You Forever” --but with the music turned down low, a soap opera with particularly astringent suds, formulated to the tenets of Dogme 95. A young couple on the verge of marriage is severed by an accident that leaves the man paralyzed. The woman turns for comfort to a doctor, who happens to be married to the woman who drove the car that injured the man. An unlikely but conventional set-up perhaps, but the way it plays out strays freely from convention into authenticity. All the actors are excellent, though only Mads Mikkelsen as the doctor is readily identifiable. In this open-ended romance, one is never sure how it will end, or even how one wants it to end, but can remain sure of truth of feeling. (2002, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-77.)

Raisin in the Sun

I may be the last earnest white liberal in America to finally make the acquaintance of Lorraine Hansberry’s play in any medium. When there was yet another tv adaptation some time back, I tuned in for a while but soon determined P. Diddy was no Sidney Poitier, and if I was going to spend the time it ought to be on the original. As an acting exercise, the film was quite interesting. As a breakthrough in African American depictions of African American lives, it still carries weight. As the record of a famous Broadway play, it has merit (if not many cinematic values). Poitier’s performance is highly-mannered and gestural, more for the balcony than the tighter focus of film, but still powerful. Ruby Dee is memorable as his wife, and Claudia McNeil monumental as his mother. I won’t recount the plot, since it is either familiar to you, or could come across with surprising relevance in a year when an African American may actually become President. (1961, TCM/T, n.) *7*

Lust, Caution

Ang Lee returns to China, and follows up the sexual provocations of Brokeback Mountain with this NC-17 look at Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation in WWII, strangely parallel to Black Book in finding a woman’s body as the prime site of contestation. A young woman is recruited into a college drama group, which after mounting an inspiring patriotic play decides to turn toward more direct action, specifically the assassination of a high-ranking collaborator. The newfound star (of both play and movie) is sent to seduce the official into a trap. Hot stuff happens and the plan is derailed. Lee is not as gleefully trashy as Verhoeven, but is equally sensationalist, and this film elicits a number of sensations, if ultimately it goes on too long without getting anyplace special. (2007, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-61.)

Now playing at the Clark

Seasons of Ozu: The Late Films of a Japanese Master
Four Free Screenings -- Fridays at Four -- at the Clark in June

The Clark celebrated the selection of Tadao Ando as architect for its expansion some years back with a Yasujiro Ozu film series, and now is pleased to celebrate the opening of Stone Hill Center -- the first Ando-designed building on the Clark campus -- with another. Now it’s easy to see what Ozu and Ando have in common: a highly-distinctive minimalism of contemplative stillness and tranquility, in simple geometric forms of familiar materials charged with feeling, seemingly austere but deeply attuned to beauty.

The Criterion Collection has recently issued the late work of the master director, making it clear that Ozu’s immortal classic, Tokyo Story (1953), was not an isolated peak but simply the most visible summit of a Himalayan career. In this film series, we see Ozu at his very steady best, quiet and controlled, yet funny and moving -- the same characters in the same situations make everything familiar yet still surprising. The actors, the settings in home, office or bar, the resolutely formal approach to filming -- all are in Ozu’s signature mode, ringing changes on a small (but big) set of themes. His professed aim is “to make people feel without resorting to drama” and his concentration of approach requires -- and amply rewards -- a special sort of attention, as one enjoys an ever-new chamber music drawn out of a few familiar notes and shadings

Late Ozu tracks the gradual emergence of Japan as a modern country from the ashes of a feudal militarism, where the beauty of traditional ways are on their way out, though their passing is comic as well as sad. Ozu is generally said to be the most Japanese of film directors, his conservative spirit summed up in the concept of mono no aware, a sad resignation to the cycles of life, a sense of “the tears of things.”

June 6: Early Summer. (1951, 125 min.) Six years after unconditional surrender, the scars of war lie mostly in memory and the American occupation is invisible, except in the subtle struggle between the old ways and the new, between traditional Japanese norms and the influx of Western modernity. The struggle is played out in the matrimonial conflicts of a 28-year-old woman who lives in a well-off seaside suburb of Tokyo, in the house of her retired father and mother, along with her doctor brother, his wife and two boys. She’s an independent-minded working girl, who is gradually succumbing to the pressure to marry, and finds she has to make up her own mind while everyone around her is relentlessly matchmaking. The film features Ozu’s usual repertory company, in particular the incomparable Setsuko Hara and stalwart Chishu Ryo.

June 13: Equinox Flower. (1958, 118 min.) Ozu’s first color film blooms, making the domestic interiors and dress even more evocative of a distinctive Japanese aesthetic. Again he uses the family as the crucible for tensions between a traditional society and liberalizing Western ways. The main character is a businessman who punishes his daughter for choosing her own mate while he advises the daughters of his friends to follow their own hearts. With quiet humor and pathos, the patriarch is oh-so-slowly brought round to self-recognition, by the deferential strategies of all the women around him.

June 20: Late Autumn. (1960, 129 min.) In this reprise of Late Spring (1949), Setsuko Hara is mother instead of daughter -- a young widow who must convince her daughter to marry and leave her to live alone -- but still sublime. Social mores have changed, as emphasized in the parallel story of three comical old gents and the brash young woman who sets them straight in matters of the heart.

June 27: The End of Summer. (1961, 103 min.) As always obsessed with the economic and emotional task of making a good marriage -- like Jane Austen -- Ozu ends his relatively rowdy penultimate film with a funeral instead of a wedding, perhaps aware of his own impending death. The retired patriarch of a family of three daughters leaves management of his Osaka sake brewery to his son-in-law, while more involved in his own hanky-panky than properly marrying off his eldest, widowed daughter (Hara again) or his youngest (Yoko Tsukasa, Hara’s daughter in the previous film but now her sister.)