In Good Company

Paul Weitz follows up the Nick Hornby-adaptation, About a Boy, with another sweetly sentimental comedy, though this time brother Chris shares credit only as producer and not writer-director. He’s got a sure touch with light but not insubstantial material, and is well served by a stellar cast. The reliable Dennis Quaid is a 51-year-old ad salesman for a national sports magazine that is taken over by a giant media conglomerate, which shunts him aside for 26-year-old whizkid Topher Grace. Not only does Dennis have to fire his colleagues and friends, his own status is more and more precarious, as his wife announces her surprisingly late pregnancy while older daughter Scarlett Johannson transfers from SUNY to much more expensive NYU. It only gets worse when Topher and Scarlett meet and fall for each other. Both the corporate takeover and romantic entanglement are well-handled. If the sharp satire goes soft at the end, that’s only fitting since we wouldn’t want to leave any of these most appealing characters unhappy. (2004, HBO/T, n.) *7+* (MC-66, RT-82.)

Filling in

Being a bit of a completist, I have recently been watching justly-neglected films by engaging young directors: A Life Less Ordinary from Danny Boyle, Mr. Jealousy from Noah Baumbach, and She Hate Me from Spike Lee. It’s pretty rare for me to look at films with Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes scores in 20s and 30s, but three in a week indicates how betwixt and between I am at the moment. Each of the three is a mess, yet perversely watchable and instructive.

Millions made me look at Boyle again, and an extremely positive reference by Stephanie Zacharek, the critic (of Salon.com) with whom I agree more than anyone, led me to the big American film he got to make after Trainspotting became a hit. I’m afraid I cannot join her solitary enthusiasm for A Life Less Ordinary (1997), but it does have some appealing aspects -- energy above all. And Ewan MacGregor, whom I am starting to see as a young Cary Grant, always himself but game for any role, from slapstick to musical to drama (he does a bit of everything in this film), is always charming. Cameron Diaz is, to be honest, a little scary to me, with those sculpted cheekbones and all, but does contribute yet more energy. The story is inconsequential on several levels, with him kidnapping her (or vice versa), and a pair of angels played by Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo (you’ve got to be kidding -- but I don’t take the joke), who will be kicked out of heaven if they don’t make the thrown-together couple fall in love. Not a good movie but a fun enough ride.

The Squid and the Whale represents a quantum leap forward for Baumbach after Mr. Jealousy (1998), which has its good points and its bad. The extensive voiceover narration suggests an inadequate adaptation of very personal material, turned into film by means of New Wave recyclings. I’m not going to come down hard on a film that appropriates music from Jules and Jim and visual tricks from Shoot the Piano Player. Eric Stoltz and Annabelle Sciorra are better than all right as the main couple, and Christopher Eigeman is always a welcome satirical presence, but the thirtysomething downtown NY scene has been covered often and better. I enjoyed the self-referential fun, but found that the film went on too long, with several deflating scenes tacked on to the end.

There are also moments of fun in She Hate Me (2004), but Spike Lee’s piling on of topical points makes for the worst film by an admirable director that I have every seen. The uneasy combination of corporate expose and sex comedy is difficult enough but becomes ludicrous, not in a good way, by tossing in Watergate and other bits of Spike’s outrage, which bloats a thin conceit into epic length. While the whole is appalling, there’s enough wit and competence on display to keep one watching, but at the end of 138 minutes, all you can say is, “Wow, that was a piece of shit.”

Triple Features at the Clark

Did you ever sit in the auditorium at the Clark? It’s comfy -- lots of elbow and leg room to stretch out. And a good thing too, since this winter I am inviting audiences to settle in for three long Sunday afternoons of filmwatching, three interconnected programs each day, in a series called “Triple Feature: 3 Colors, 3 Painters, 3 Studios.” So on the final Sunday of the next three months -- if you’ve got the seat for it, have we got a seat for you!

These marathon viewings for the iron-bottomed brigade are intended to add up to more than the sum of the parts, unique opportunities to survey a subject at one sitting. Alternatively, of course, you can pick and choose from the constituent programs, all of which are free admission, as is the museum itself in the off-season. So make a day of it -- visit the galleries, browse the museum shop, walk up Stone Hill, refresh yourself at the cafe, and then settle back in your easy chair for more highly visual viewing.

The first program in the series, on January 29, comprises Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs trilogy: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge. Blue will screen at 11:00 am, White at 1:30 pm, and Red at 4:00 pm.

Put together over the course of an amazingly productive year in 1993, these three films based on the tricolor of the French Revolution and the corresponding themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity -- addressed from a spiritual and not a political perspective -- were Kieslowski’s swansong to cinema. He withdrew from filmmaking after Red was released to international acclaim, and died in heart surgery little more than a year later, at the age of 54.

Kieslowski emerged from a documentary movement in Poland, eventually moving from tv to film. He broke into international recognition in the late Eighties with The Decalogue, a series for Polish tv, each hour segment jumping off from one of the Ten Commandments. Thereafter, he worked primarily in French, becoming a darling of the art house circuit with The Double Life of Veronique in 1991. Three Colors came next, the culmination of his meteoric career.

The three separate films have different casts of characters, but were put together by a single creative team, from scriptwriter and composer through the crew, except that each has a different cinematographer to highlight the respective colors in a distinctive visual scheme. And each has a luminous French actress to illuminate the emotional tone.

Blue belongs to Juliette Binoche. Losing her husband and daughter, she wants to cut herself free from all human relations, but the music she shared with her composer husband will not let her go, and draws her back to life and connection. Rarely has grief been explored with such tact and sensitivity.

Julie Delpy sets the black comedy of White in motion by humiliating her Polish husband in Paris divorce proceedings. He has to return to Warsaw to get his balls back, and regains equal status with her by making a killing in the new capitalist free-for-all. After being equally hurtful to each other, they love anew.

Irene Jacob was Veronique, and in Red she is Valentine, a sensitive heart-throb of a student and model in Geneva. She hits a dog with her car, and discovers the owner is a misanthropic retired judge played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Opposites will attract, and the two form an unusual bond of fraternity.

But believe me, few films are less dependent on plot to weave their spell. The Three Colors are a symphonic cascade of sound and shade, incident and reflection, faces and feelings, gestures and acts. Immerse yourself and discover a new way of cinematic knowing.

Enigmatic but never obfuscating, these films demand an unusual quality of attention from viewers, to make all the connections and yet come face to face with the unsolvable puzzle at the center of the story, the mystery of motivation and the accident of destiny in each life.

Nobody could describe his purpose better than Kieslowki himself: “Film is often just business -- I understand that and it’s not something I concern myself with. But if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music, and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us, and give people the feeling they are not alone.”

Beyond the nominal tricolor signification of liberty, equality, fraternity, this trilogy meditates on contingency, coincidence, synchronicity. The human situation in a world of chance and choice. In words of one syllable, these films are about life and death, love and fate. Let us ponder together.

This series continues with “Triple Feature: 3 Painters” on February 26: Artemisia at 11:00, Carrington at 1:30, Pollock at 4:00. And concludes with “Triple Feature: 3 Studios” on March 26, which will be a marathon exploration of animation way beyond Disney or Pixar, surveying the work of The National Film Board of Canada, Aardman Animation (of Wallace & Gromit fame), and the Hubley Studios -- Academy Award-winners all.

Syriana

Stephen Gaghan, writer of Soderbergh’s Traffic, gets to direct his own script here, and does well by his globe-spanning, densely-populated story which straddles the line between thriller and documentary. You know it is the product of research, that he has gone to those scenes and met those people, and recorded the dialogue almost verbatim within a fictionalized construct. This to me is a million times more real and effective than Fahrenheit 911, for example, in revealing the global politics and economics of oil and neo-colonialism. George Clooney is the grizzled, paunchy CIA operative who needs to come in out of the heat, before one of his own missles seeks him out. Matt Damon is a go-go energy trader who gets in over his head. Chris Cooper is a CEO engineering a huge oil company merger, and bribing his way to energy concessions in the volatile Middle East. Jeffrey Wright is a lawyer doing due diligence on the merger for rainmaker Christopher Plummer. The fictional Gulf emirate is represented by the dynastic struggle at the top and the unfortunate fate of immigrant oil workers at the bottom. You definitely have to pay attention to pick up the interweaving of plot strands, but huge amounts of information are delivered in passing, along with a “you are there” feel for some of the world’s trouble spots. When it comes to the role of oil in the world’s woe, this film is preaching to the converted in my case; I already believe the bastards of big oil (along with big pharma, as revealed in the vaguely similar Constant Gardener) are behind most of it. And this film strains my credulity less than Michael Moore. To get it, you need to work at it, and I like that in a movie. (2005, AMC in PA, n.) *8* (MC-76, RT-74.)

This is a busy season, of course, and my film viewing lately has been catch as catch can. I watched a couple of documentaries on the building of the Guggenheim in NYC, for a piece I was writing on Frank Lloyd Wright. The 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder brought a re-broadcast of Imagine, and since I’ve been revisiting Sixties musical icons lately, I was quite interested in this rather hagiographic documentary. Another blast from the past was Three Days of the Condor: Sydney Pollack’s 30-year old thriller about the CIA and oil holds up very well, better than most from the so-called golden age of Hollywood independents; the only real problem is that Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway are way too glamorous for their roles -- so much for gritty realism. Realism was the crux of 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom’s recent leap over the barrier between feature films and pornography -- he makes explicit sex engaging and psychologically revealing, but just alternates bedroom with concert scenes, and leaves out the narrative structure that would make it compelling.

The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach’s swift and spare domestic tragicomedy makes its points, but not too many. It is less autobiographical venting than a precise dissection of familiar specimens. The sparing use of music is indicative, never to tug emotions but always pointed. I give it a plus for its portrayal of my old neighborhood of Park Slope. The parents of this disintegrating family are both writers, i.e. utterly self-absorbed. Jeff Daniels as the father is the more pathetic of the two; the film has the grace to feel sorry for him while it eviscerates his pretensions and inconsequentiality. Laura Linney as the mother is slightly more sympathetic, because she is Laura Linney, but is also a monster of obliviousness. The boys, 16-year-old Jesse Eisenberg and 12-year-old Owen Kline, emulate and act out the bad behavior of their parents. Everything is painfully true, woefully funny. As Philip Larkin tells us, “Your mum and dad, they fuck you up.” (2005, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-82, RT-95.)

Murderball

This is certainly a worthy documentary, but did not excite me as it has many. Its virtues may have seemed surprising seen fresh, but coming festooned with lavish praise, made me wonder what the fuss was about. Maybe my enjoyment is held back by medical squeamishness, though the matter-of-factness of its approach to quadriplegia is the film’s salient strength. The film also rolls past most of the cliches of competition stories, to peer into the community of the limbless that lies behind the sport of wheelchair rugby. Well worth watching on a number of levels, this doc did not strike me as an exemplar of the genre, for which public enthusiasm is now rising to meet my own. (2005, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-87, RT-97.)

The Triumph of Love

This Marivaux play from 1732 is handsomely mounted in an Italian villa, with sumptuous period costumes and decor. Directed by Claire Peploe and produced by hubby Bernardo Bertolucci, its handheld, jump-cut style, with postmodern flourishes, may have been chosen deliberately or dictated by budget constraints. The disjunction between style and subject strikes some as fresh but does not work for me. I have no idea what the original French may sound like, but this English translation seems rather flat-footed, with none of the poetry that sustains the silliness of a cross-dressing comedy like “As You Like It.” Nonetheless, this a well-acted piece. It makes one wonder where Mira Sorvino has been hanging out since Mighty Aphrodite -- turns out the magna cum laude graduate of Harvard has recently married and had a child, but will be back. Her princess has to seduce every character in the movie and she certainly seduced me. Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw delight as a brother and sister who have both forsworn love philosophically, only to succumb to the miraculous Mira. I didn’t like this as much as the Clark audience for the final “Fellows Favorite” film did, nicely primed by visiting scholar Melissa Hyde’s introduction, but I liked it more than the critical consensus. (2001, dvd@cai, n.) *6* (MC-58, RT-48.)

Speaking of the Fellows’ film series, I didn’t write about last week’s Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time because I didn’t have anything new to say on third viewing. If you haven’t seen it, do so at your earliest convenience (and like all dvds shown at the Clark, it is subsequently borrowable from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown.) And if you have see the film, well then, I don’t have to tell you about the artist who ranks with Christo as my favorite contemporary. Interestingly, Clark Fellow Molly Donovan has done books with both, and her introduction offered valuable context to a large and appreciative audience, and a first look at Goldworthy’s recent installation at the National Gallery in Washington, for which she was curator.

A new group of Clark Fellows will resume this Thursday at 7:30 film series late next semester.

A Face in the Crowd

Before it devolves into a noisy rant, this Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg follow-up to the imperishable On the Waterfront makes some prescient points about the midcentury marriage of media and politics. Andy Griffith debuts as an Arkansas drifter plucked by go-getting college girl Patricia Neal to feature on her radio program, named the same as the film. His calculated folksy charm goes over well and he’s soon on tv. It’s not long till his ability to woo and sway the public attracts the attention of a right-wing cabal of plutocratic politicos. The film breaks down when the character does, but up to that point it is all quite convincing, from the two leads down through an excellent cast that includes Walter Matthau, Anthony Franciosa, and Lee Remick, with walk-ons by the likes of Walter Winchell. Somewhere on the continuum between Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Network, this is not a classic but bears watching. (1957, dvd, r.) *7*

Millions

A holiday heartwarmer is not what you expect from Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later fame, but that’s what he delivers here, from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce, frequent collaborator with Michael Winterbottom. Adorable urchin Alex Etel narrates and animates the story, as a 7-year-old who engages in easy conversation with saints in the flesh, asking if they’ve seen his recently dead mother in heaven yet. He’s in his backyard cardboard castle when a satchel of cash is thrown off a passing train. After his 9-year-old brother also sees the fantastical money, as he doesn’t the saints, they are in a quandary what to do with their found treasure. Boyle’s characteristic camera-trickery imbues this charming fairy tale with magic-realist energy, but the boys and the sentiments keep their sweet Nativity spirit. (2005, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-74, RT-88.)

Closer

Swank and stupid, this is as bad as a film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, and Clive Owen could be. Meant to be blisteringly truthful about love and sex, it is more lurid and wearisome than revelatory. Yet again, dialogue taken for shocking and meaningful on the stage is revealed as shallow and stagey by the steady gaze of the camera. Still, there’s a lot of eye candy here, star power and sleek London settings, and some craft as well. Too bad all these talented people were not better employed. Carnal Knowledge, this ain't. (2005, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-65, RT-68.)

Pride & Prejudice

I had a contrary reaction to this, compared to Walk the Line. Here I was the true fan, stringently judging how well the movie came up to the source material. And here I was ready for the film to end well before it finally did. Keira Knightley was certainly an appealing heroine, though hardly Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, the whatshisname Darcy was okay, as were some of the other players, but the best thing by far about this film were the realistic production values and the Constable-like views of the English countryside. But pictorial authenticity did not extend to a true sense of historical period and social mindset. Austen’s subtle nuance and insidious humor are Brontefied and Hollywoodized. Everything is overt and heightened, instead of gently unmasked. I was much more tolerant of the appropriations of Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice. (2005, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-83, RT-86.)

Lilya 4-Ever

What makes this film watchable, as well as heartbreaking, is the luminous spirit of the title character, played by Oksana Akinshina. Lilya is a teenaged girl, abandoned by her mother in a ravaged post-Soviet landscape when she escapes to America with her thuggish boyfriend. Then Lilya is shunted aside by a wicked aunt who appropriates the mother’s apartment and sends her off to a dismal flat in which an old man has just died. Her downward spiral follows with all the inexorability of a Zola or Dreiser heroine. Betrayed by a friend who drags her to a disco where Russian new capitalists troll for young girls, Lilya’s each painful step into degradation is carefully delineated, mitigated only by the affection between her and a younger boy, cast out by a brutal father, with whom she forms her only remaining bond. When a handsome, gentle man offers to engineer her escape to Sweden, the boy is rightfully suspicious, and devastated when she grasps the one glimmer of hope afforded her. There is some parallel both in radiant beauty (light against dark) and in plight to the girl in Maria Full of Grace, but Lukas Moodyson, despite the gentleness so well expressed in Show Me Love and Together, is much more relentless in his depiction of her helpless descent. Snatched from the plane in Stockholm, Lilya is imprisoned in a featureless high-rise apartment and taken out only to be sold to a sickening succession of men, her only respite in relation to the remembered boy who is now a half-fledged angel, but unfortunately no guardian. Their whimsical reunion in some rooftop heaven is the only palliative to her dismal fate. Though the story of one indelible character, this film suggests a world of pain over the betrayal and exploitation of children. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-82, RT-85.)

Walk the Line

Charged by the magnetic performances of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, this film’s energy is well channeled by director James Mangold. Like Taylor Hackford of last year’s Ray, he is an underappreciated craftsman, and could have pushed his way on to my “10 Under 50” list of best young directors if I’d already seen this film, coming after Heavy, Cop Land, and Girl, Interrupted. (He is the son of painter Robert Mangold and grew up over in the Hudson valley.) But -- all props to the man behind the camera -- this film belongs to its stars, both the original performers and the actors embodying them, and ranks with Coal Miner’s Daughter at the head of a talented class of country music biopics. There are the traditional tropes of the genre: the hardscrabble childhood, the ravages of life on the road, the sex and drugs, the struggle to find one’s voice and then to sell it, on stage and in the recording studio, the importance of finding a nice house in the country at the end of the road. And there’s also an engaging love story. So it’s all very familiar, but very particular as well. True fans may complain that the film only captures a slice of Johnny Cash’s talent and stature, but for such as myself it was an admirable opening up of some unexplored peaks of the musical landscape. And I would gladly have spent more time in the engaging, exuberant company of Johnny/Joaquin and June/Reese. (2005, AMC Theater in PA, n.) *8* (MC-72, RT-82.)

Again with the diary

Here’s what I’ve been watching lately, none of which rates a strong recommendation. Though each is okay or better, I do not feel driven to apply a number rating or a full-fledged review. (Admittedly it’s an open question how mature the plumage is on even my reviews of widest span.) So on with it:

Two Days in October appeared on the PBS program “American Experience” and marks Robert Kenner as a documentarian to watch. It pairs up two events in 1967 that really paint a portrait of the era -- a Marine detachment is ambushed and massacred in the jungles of Vietnam, which the generals try to pass off as a victory, while back on the homefront at the U of Wisconsin, students sit in to protest Dow recruiters on campus and are violently routed by Madison city police, which radicalizes the entire campus. The mix of archival footage and talking head retrospect is extremely well put together and evocative.

Tarnished Angels is a Douglas Sirk from 1958, not on DVD but broadcast on Turner Classic Movies, in Cinemascope but surprisingly B&W after he had made a string of amazingly expressionistic color films. Adapted from the novel Pylon, this was declared the best film made from Faulkner by the author himself. The leads from Written on the Wind are re-teamed: Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack. The first two have some fresh moments, but the last is just his steel-jawed self. Hudson is a maverick reporter for the New Orlean Times-Picayune who becomes fascinated with the flying gypsies of a traveling airshow. Stack is a WWI flying hero now barnstorming in his biplane, with Malone his parachute-jumping wife. Complications ensue, with a good deal of wild chariot-racing low over the water and around the pylons. In some ways a preposterous period piece, in others the film bears the mark of Sirkian sophistication.

De-lovely is almost de-lightful. The Cole Porter songs certainly are, as is Kevin Kline in the lead role. Ashley Judd is appropriately swanky as his wife of convenience and a good deal more. This biopic is infinitely franker about Porter’s homosexuality than Night and Day starring Cary Grant, which is referenced in this film. The problem is that much is referenced but little is developed. There’s a half-heartedly meta- framing device, but the through-line is weak. The music and the performances are worth watching, however, and it’s a kick to hear Ashley tell Kevin that she is engineering his escape from Hollywood debauchery by purchasing a house in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Reefer Madness: The Musical is jaunty and irreverent, a Sundance fave apparently. For two-thirds of its length, the energy of the singing and dancing definitely carry the story along; the final third spins out of control in a manner that failed to entertain me. I guess you could say the buzz wears off. Kristin Bell (tv’s Veronica Mars) is extremely effective as the ingenue; her death signals the film’s. Alan Cumming is snappy in a variety of roles. Neve Campbell pitches in a nifty dance piece, in support of her brother who plays the lead. Good dirty fun, for the most part, but when it goes over the top I am as reluctant to follow as a smart WWI soldier in a trench.

Hail Caesar! Hail HBO!

Last evening I brought myself up to date with two praiseworthy HBO original series. Oddly, I find I can’t write about tv the way I write about film. When you stop to think about it, they are different aesthetic experiences. A film seems a self-contained object, which can be judged objectively, with whatever subjective shading. A tv series on the other hand is more like a transaction between sender and receiver, a developing relationship which grows closer, uncritically, or fades away to pointlessness. I certainly formed a bond with Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus of the series Rome, watching riveted to the final shots of their first season. And also with Julius Caesar, as embodied nobly by Ciaran Hinds, memorable as Captain Wentworth in the superb film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It won’t be giving anything away to reveal that he dies at the end, a bloody corpse on the Senate floor. It’s good news that the rest of the characters we’ve come to know -- maternal monsters, mealy-mouthed polticos and martial heavyweights, would-be emperors and their families -- have been renewed for a second season. It really does bring ancient history alive, in a variety of ways. On a different scale from my film ratings, I would give Rome an A- as a tv series, ranking just behind The Wire and The Sopranos.

Incidentally, HBO will soon start rebroadcast of the first three seasons of The Wire, leading up to the premiere of season four, which may yet overtake Buffy the Vampire Slayer as my favorite tv series of all time. I for one will have my TiVo revved up to catch season three, not yet available on DVD. And while I’m at it, I may give the first season of Deadwood a try, now that it is on DVD.

In a different vein, HBO also produces the Paradise Lost documentaries of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. I’d heard good reports on the original, but it wasn’t available on DVD till very recently; the sequel was, but I avoided it till I could see the first. A third is now in the works, and it is not hard to see how the story compels an ongoing fascination. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Woods (1996) details the grisly case of three mutilated young boys found in a drainage ditch in West Memphis, AK, and the trials of three teenaged boys charged with killing them in a satanic ritual. The original documentary is credited with unblinking objectivity, but certainly seems to make the case for the railroading of the charged youths, seemingly more for their taste in clothes and music than for any actual evidence. You begin to assume that this film, like Errol Morris’s Thin Blue Line, will get an unjustly condemned man off death row. But no. Ten years later Damien Echols is still on death row, and his two friends in prison for life without parole. Reasonable doubt? There’s plenty. After the original documentary an internet-spawned group grew up to “free the West Memphis Three,” and they become the focus of Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (1999), along with the deeply scary stepfather of one of the victims, a drug-fueled camera-hound redneck behemoth who makes himself the best candidate for the actual murderer -- all he lacks is a leather mask and a chain saw. The amazing access, to families and suspects and lawyers and the court proceedings themselves, that drives the original, is shut off in the sequel and many key moments are covered by text on a black screen that explains they were forbidden to film. The film, however, compels one to the website -- www.wm3.org -- where one discovers the legal battle is ongoing, with the U.S. Court of Appeals just last month granting a plea of habeas corpus to Damien, who has also published poetry and a memoir written from solitary confinement. Not a word is said about the death penalty itself, but the whole case suggests the capriciousness with which it is sometimes dispensed. This is certainly a real-life courtroom drama to trump any fiction on the tube. As a tv series, it’s a definite A; as films, I would give the first a *7+* and the second a *7*, both essential representatives of the power of the documentary form.

Salvatore Giuliano

I didn’t really get this film when I saw it at MoMA thirty-odd years ago, and I still don’t. Francesco Rosi’s neo-neorealist reconstruction of the death and deeds of a Sicilian bandit leader in the years just after WWII is meticulous but incomprehensible. Shot in operatic black & white, on the actual sites of the events, with actual townpeople in all but two of the roles, the film uses time-fractured editing to depict a complicated tale of conspiracy and double-cross in postwar chaos, among the bandits, separatist politicians, and the Mafia. It’s like watching JFK if you had no antecedent knowledge of the facts of the case, though Rosi is an unturned Stone when it comes to wild speculation. Still, there’s something there about controlling insurgencies in the Mediterranean world, from Algiers to Baghdad, that comes through in this beautifully-presented Criterion Collection dvd. (1961, dvd, n.) *5+*

The Son (Le Fils)

This film is so un-American, but perhaps that’s just what a Belgian film should be. Critical darlings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne follow La Promesse and Rosetta with another penetrating look at proletarian life. The brothers remain true to their documentary roots, and to the environment in which they grew up. The long takes seem captured on the fly, though in reality carefully rehearsed. We see more of the protagonist’s neck than of his face, viewing most of the action from over his shoulder. Also un-Hollywood is the refusal to explain -- you have to watch intently and figure it out as you go -- plus the inversion of the typical revenge fantasy (or even atypical ones like In the Bedroom.) The brothers built the film around their favorite actor, Olivier Gourmet, but allowed it to grow from its initial inspiration into something quite strange and surprising, a gripping suspense story without any of the usual tropes of cinematic suspense. Olivier (the character) is a carpentry instructor in a trade school for delinquent boys, who takes an unsettling interest in one of his students, for deep but only gradually revealed reasons. But be forewarned, if you do not approach this film as a quest for understanding, it will frustrate and irritate you. (2002, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-86, RT-89.)

In the proletarian vein, if you wish to dig a little deeper into the recent news from France, then I strenuously recommend that you watch La Haine, a 1995 film by Mathieu Kassovitz, a Parisian Mean Streets set in precisely the milieu that is now aflame.

Good Night, and Good Luck

George Clooney honors his news anchor father with this well-made tribute to Edward R. Murrow, superbly embodied by David Strathairn. With evident documentary intent, he lets Senator Joseph McCarthy play himself in old newsreels of his communist witch hunt days. The old tv footage blends seamlessly with the deep, rich black & white cinematography, which calls up the Fifties without ever stepping out of doors -- from smoke-filled studios where a crew of bespectacled go-getters use primitive technology to seat-of-the-pants the tv news, to the smoke-filled bar where they swirl bourbon in the glass and strategize the stuggle of a free press in a troubled time. A time, the estimable Mr. Clooney does not even need to imply, that bears some similarity to our own. He also evokes the spirit of the Fifties by effective use of a female blues singer as a sort of Greek chorus. The story is a bit thinly painted, though the canvas is large and looming -- it begins and ends with a lecture, with a civics lesson in between -- but this is honest work of high degree. As drama it lacks some elemental pull, but as dramatized documentary it is a mesmerizing swirl of smoke, infinitely preferable to anything Michael Moore might concoct. George Clooney, to me, is one American hero commenting on another, who inspired him in speaking truth to power. And David Strathairn is an absolute must for a Best Actor nomination, way beyond mimicry of Murrow to a deep channeling. It’s not a great film, but has many elements of greatness. (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-80, RT-94.)

No Direction Home

Two American masters meet, Bob Dylan and Marty Scorsese, with appropriately epic results. This 3 1/2 hour documentary takes the generational icon up to his motorcycle accident in 1966, at age 25. What would it take to cover the subsequent forty years? I’d be eager to find out. I have friends who expressed impatience with the pace of this piece, but pace them, I happily took the whole ride, down memory lane and into the man of that moment -- a cocky kid and musical sponge with an amazing verbal facility, who bemusedly became the voice of a generation. There’s so much going on here -- the music, the history, the American fable of celebrity -- it seems more inexhaustible than exhaustive or exhausting. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+*

Hana-Bi (Fireworks)

There’s an undeniable charm to this fragmented but sentimental yakuza flick written, directed, acted, and painted by Takeshi Kitano, but this is another critical bandwagon I just can’t get on board. I leave it to the Tarantinos of this world. “Beat Takeshi” may be the Buster Keaton of Japan, but I find him as off-putting as ingratiating. His tangram storytelling, mixing pieces into various shapes, engages but does not convince. As the central character, a police officer who holds himself responsible for his partner getting shot and another officer killed, he turns to bank robbery to pay off loans from the mob, and to take his terminally ill wife on a final tour of Mt. Fuji, the ocean, and other Japanese sights. This film is sweet, funny, and (implicitly) violent, as assured as it is idiosyncratic, but it does not hold together for me, makes me watch but not follow. (1997, dvd, n.) *6*

Search function

You may have noticed that Blogger has added a beta version of a local search engine to its service. While far from comprehensive yet, if you fill in a movie, director, or actor's name at the top of this page and click the "Search this blog" button, you may come up with review listings from my archives.

King Creole

With this I wrap up my choices for a “Remembering New Orleans” film series, which may or may not run soon at the Clark. I expected this to be goofy fun, but what is universally proclaimed Elvis Presley’s best film is in fact a good film, from when he was plausibly being positioned as a singing James Dean. Accomplished veteran director Michael Curtiz, of Casablanca fame, mixes extensive location shooting with story-justified singing numbers as Elvis goes from busboy to headliner on Bourbon Street. In well-shot black & white with noirish tone, the story (from a Harold Robbins novel) echoes Rebel Without a Cause. Walter Matthau, of all people, is the villain of the piece, and Carolyn Jones, who would become tv’s Morticia Addams, makes a fine hooker with heart. And oh my, that “Pelvis” is something! (1958,dvd, n.) *7*

Down by Law

Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan comedy starts with a long sequence of tracking shots of just the New Orleans neighborhoods that Katrina probably washed away, before focusing in on Tom Waits as a much-fired deejay being thrown out by girlfriend Ellen Barkan, and small-time pimp John Lurie ignoring a lecture from his naked but philosophically acute Black whore. They wind up railroaded into the same Orleans Parish jail cell, into which comes the irrepressible Roberto Benigni (back in the day when he was still sufferable, and a nice contrast to Jarmusch’s seeming lassitude), who utters the movie’s tagline: “Ees a sad and beautiful world.” Roberto (big fan of Walt Whitman and “Bob” Frost in Italian translation) foments a prison break, and they wind up slogging through the bayou, bickering and bonding, to a fanciful but apt ending. The laughs sneak up on you, and while the film is much too hip to wear its heart on its sleeve, it definitely beats within. (1986, dvd, n.) *7+*

In the Mood for Love

Even with a second viewing, I just cannot get with the program on Wong Kar-Wai’s much-praised opus. Does it effectively establish a mood? Yes. Is it lovely to look at? Definitely. Is it cleverly elliptical and swooningly stylized? You bet. But did it move me or mean something to me? Sorry, no. Some may see it beautifully exploring the border between restraint and abandon in love, but not being quite that nice (in the classic Jane Austen-ish sense), I tend to see it just as a frustrated and frustrating affair. It’s certainly possible to enjoy the entire movie just for the succession of sheath dresses clinging to the exquisite form of Maggie Cheung, all cut the same way with a high, tight neck but in an astonishing array of fabric, color, and design; she must wear 40 different dresses in 98 languorous minutes. She and Tony Leung are accomplished actors as well as impossibly beautiful stars to watch. Nat King Cole and the rest of the soundtrack is very pleasant to listen to. I’m sure there’s an entire Asian frame of reference that I am oblivious to. But still, this to me was a film that went nowhere, way too slowly. And why did it end up at Angkor Wat, besides an excuse for an unpeopled coda of slow tracking shots? I read le mot juste on this film in the Time Out Film Guide (which is, incidentally, the indispensible reference for the film fan), calling it “scored as a valse triste.” You may like that sort of thing, apparently many knowledgeable people do, but I have other preferences in film. In fact, even here, one of the things I liked best was the documentary aspect of conveying the tight, dark density of living conditions in 1962 Hong Kong. The slow-mo and other stylistic tricks I could do without. (2000, dvd/cai, r.) *7-* (MC-85, RT-87.)

Comments

Hello again. I'm back from a trip, to resume posting, but regretfully the first thing I have to do is turn off the comments feature of Cinema Salon. I had imagined the possibility of a serious ongoing conversation about films, but it didn't quite work that way. Only one person was genuinely responsive (thanks, la.dauphine, whoever you may be) and now I am overrun by what I just learned from the news today is called "splog." I would still welcome comments at ssatullo@clarkart.edu but won't allow these spam blog posts to appear.

All the King's Men

I’d been meaning for some time to watch this and Face in the Crowd again, for their relevance to contemporary American politics, but this got bumped forward because I am contemplating a film series on “Remembering New Orleans.” In actuality, the particularities of Huey Long and Louisiana are quite submerged in the film, in the interests of the broader political fable, of demagoguery and the corruption of power. Hmm, still relevant -- and the film holds up pretty well, probably earned its Oscar for Best Picture, as Broderick Crawford did for Best Actor and Mercedes McCambridge for Best Supporting Actress. It may just be a Classics Illustrated version of Robert Penn Warren, with Robert Rossen’s densely-packed frames replacing the novel’s depth of insight, but a good one nonetheless. For example, he can only include half of what to me is one of the most memorable lines in American fiction, when Willie Stark instructs Jack Burden to dig up the dirt on Judge Stanton, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption. He passeth from the stink of the didey to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” As it happens, Steve Zallian (Searching for Bobby Fischer) is now in post-production with a remake starring Sean Penn -- should be interesting. (1949, dvd, r.) *8-*

Another New Orleans film I just caught up with, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), is a real car wreck of a movie -- a pile-up involving Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift; Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Joseph Mankiewicz; incest and homosexuality, madness and murder, demons and blasphemy. You can’t watch, but you can’t look away either.

Mad Hot Ballroom

Shamelessly entertaining, this documentary about kids competing is not as deep or as well-constructed as Spellbound, but does borrow from its subject an irrepressible energy and charm. Fifth-graders in NYC are required to take a ten-week course in ballroom dancing (now that right there would have forced me to drop out of school and run away from home), with citywide competitions at the end. We start with schools in Brooklyn, Tribeca, and Washington Heights, which are gradually winnowed away by the contests and the film itself. Many intriguing characters are glimpsed, but no more, though by the championships we know our favorites pretty well, at least by name and style of hip-shaking. Much of the film’s humor and warmth comes from the premise of pre- or incipiently-sexual children doing flagrantly-sexual dances such as the rhumba, merengue, and swing, all very proper and polite you understand. One very knowing little girl, Jodie Foster precocious, explains seriously that 11-year-old girls are the object most desired by perverts. So I have to be careful what I say, but these kids, girls and boys both, are damn cute. Director Marilyn Argelo puts many appealing elements together, mixing music and gym class, etiquette and enticement, so it hardly matters that the film just skims the surface, when it does it so dancingly. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-71, RT-82.)

Panic in the Streets

An unrecognized gem, this outstanding noir film from Elia Kazan makes a worthy companion piece to his On the Waterfront from four years later. And it is still timely today, depicting a public health hazard that threatens New Orleans, in the form of an infection brought into port by an illegal alien. Panic in the streets is just what Richard Widmark is trying to avoid, as a Navy doctor responsible for public health, when a murdered hood turns out on autopsy to have pneumonic plague. He works assiduously to contain and quarantine the infection, but needs the initially reluctant help of police captain Paul Douglas to find the murderer(s) before they flee and spread the disease to parts unknown. That would be Walter Jack Palance in a memorable screen debut, with Zero Mostel as his flunky and foil. Widmark is both steely and fragile as he fends off medical disaster, while the clock ticks on solving a crime with no clues. Barbara Bel Geddes makes the absolute most of her few scenes as his lovely, straight-talking wife. The dialogue and character work are astoundingly naturalistic and flavorsome, as are the classic noir cinematography, of black shadow and atmospheric light, and the dockyard and warehouse location settings. With FEMA so much in the news these days, it’s fascinating to watch a federal officer deal with police, politicians, and press to fend off a public health disaster. If only “Brownie” had Widmark’s competence and conviction! (1950, dvd, n.) *8*

Monterey Pop

As a time capsule, this is fabulous. As a film, not so much. So its documentary worth depends largely in how interested you are in the subject -- the time, the place, the people, the performers. As a concert film, it is seminal but not altogether successful. Thirty years on, it all looks very old hat, but at the time it was a first chance for a who’s who of direct cinema -- Pennebaker, Leacock, Maysles et al. -- to bring their cameras to bear on a music festival as a defining cultural moment, with benefit of advanced (for the time) sound recording. Some camera innovations work and some don’t, some of the music is great and some isn’t, some of the performers have lost none of their electrifying power (Janis) and some have turned into a joke (Jimi), but all are utterly redolent of the moment when I, for one, was turning 21. The final performance by Ravi Shankar on sitar is excruciatingly prolonged, but does implicitly signal that the Monterey International Pop Festival was an initial wave in the rising tide of globalism, as well as an advertisement for San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” and the transformative power of youth culture. In the sea of wildly clapping hands at the finale, the camera pans past one guy in gloves clapping only because he’d look like an idiot if he was the only one who wasn’t -- that could be me. (1968, dvd, r.) *7-*

Dear Diary

I am off my regular rhythm of film viewing and reviewing, but I wouldn’t want you to think my commitment to Cinema Salon was waning, so I’m going to offer a quick round-up of what I’ve been watching this week in the absence of worthwhile movies.

With my beloved Tribe falling just short of the baseball playoffs, I take only a distant interest in the postseason proceedings. I can’t love the White Sox who ousted my guys, but I am rooting for the end of another near-century-long Sox curse. And as it happens, I will be in Chicago while games 6 & 7 of the World Series may be transpiring. That didn’t work out so well in ’86, when I happened to be staying at the Sheraton in Boston and watching on tv as the Red Sox tried to close out the Mets. I was getting ready to go out and join the insanely joyful midnight crowds in Kenmore Square, when that dribbler rolled through Buckner’s legs.

For my winter film series at the Clark, I will be offering “Triple Feature: 3 Colors, 3 Painters, 3 Studios.” The last part will be a marathon of animation from three different studios: the National Film Board of Canada, Aardman Animation (of Wallace & Gromit fame) and the Hubley Studios. I’ve been surveying all available films by the last, to put together a program of Academy Award-winning shorts and others by John, Faith, and Emily Hubley. I will write up my findings in some detail soon.

As for my current film series, “Architectural Dreams,” it has been meeting a better response than I ever dreamed possible for a special interest series of documentaries on architects. I selected the films to survey documentary styles as much as architectural styles, and each is a good movie in its own right. If you’ve missed them, check out the program notes in my Archives of September 2005, and catch up with these excellent films from Netflix, or from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown, where the DVDs are available to borrow after they’ve been shown at the Clark.

While I was holding on to the Hubley disks from Netflix, my other viewing turned to daily TiVo maintenance. I am quite enjoying the current HBO series, Rome, which is sexed up but historically accurate as far as I have checked. It’s not The Wire or The Sopranos, but does maintain an HBO tradition of quality original series. This week I’ve been getting double doses of the Daily Show, as Jon Stewart has cloned off The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert is as talented and funny as good old Jon, but his one-note persona, as hilarious as it is, may wear thin after a while. Also, with a satellite upgrade I can now get a regular PBS station, so I’ve programmed a “season pass” to Jim Lehrer’s Newshour, to go with my daily Charlie Rose. I have to check the latter every day, since my good old friend Tom Krens is supposed to show up there sometime soon. Rose consistently has the most interesting talkers on tv, and is it just me getting more tolerant or is he gradually learning to shut up and let his guests answer questions without excess interruption? I tended to tune out the news after last year’s election, but as the dismantling of the disastrous Bush Administration proceeds apace, my interest is renewed and I’ve even started reading political blogs again.

Trying to clear out items that have been on my “now playing” list for months, I finally got around to watching the Luis Bunuel short film, Simon of the Desert. I’ve never been a Bunuel fan, immune as I am to the appeal of surrealism, not even Viridiana or Belle de Jour or other presumed classics. But I had fond memories of seeing Simon thirty-odd years ago at the Weston Language Center of Williams College. The story of the eccentric ascetic perched on his pillar in the desert, and repeatedly tempted by the devil in the shape of a voluptuous woman, is amusing if slight.

Another Spanish language film offered no such pleasure. Jamon Jamon is, as its title announces, a piece of ham, a diluted-Bunuel, sub-Almodovar sex farce that wishes it were a Spanish Tampopo. Despite the presence of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, director Bigas Luna accomplishes the remarkable feat of making sex tedious, farce unfunny, and food tasteless. I’d say you couldn’t pay me to watch it, but that’s exactly what the Clark did. I wouldn’t give it a number grade, but will say that it vies with Lethal Weapon for the title of worst film I’ve ever watched all the way through, but loses because I don’t find kinky sex as offensive as supposedly funny violence.

In a completely different vein is the silly but not stupid Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The title had come up when I was researching 1955 films for a possible Clark 50th anniversary tie-in; then there were some favorable reviews when the anniversary DVD came out. So I TiVo’d the recent TCM presentation. I’m definitely not an aficionado of MGM musicals in Cinemascope and eye-poppin’ color, but this was watchable. Howard Keel and Jane Powell don’t radiate star power, but this adaptation of a S. V. Benet story about the “Sobbin’ (i.e. Sabine) Women,” makes something of its 1850 Oregon setting, even if studio-bound. Stanley Donen can be a lively director, and Michael Kidd contributes some notable choreography. None of the songs were familiar to my ears, but none grated on them either. But it's a little hard to take how women are treated as chattel, either in the 1850s or the 1950s.

I’m going to be traveling a bit over the next ten days, but after that I will be back with more serious film reviewing, so please keep Cinema Salon bookmarked and come back again.

The Talk of the Town

What a weird amalgam! Sort of a screwball version of Fritz Lang’s Fury, mixing lynch mobs with romantic comedy. And what an odd pairing of Cary Grant and Ronald Colman as well, two Englishman supposedly representing antithetical New England types. And then the strange triangle in which they vie to give up Jean Arthur to each other. None of it believable for a minute, but with these three performers the nonsense hardly matters, and George Stevens is enough of a craftsman as director to give the proceedings some surface plausibility. Grant is a milltown anarchist (Leopold Dilg, if you can imagine -- well no, you can’t) falsely accused of arson and murder; Colman is the aloof and prematurely aged law professor destined for the Supreme Court. Through the agency of the appealing Ms. Arthur, the escaped fugitive winds up in the attic of the lawyer, and through debate on the philosophical basis of the law (I kid you not!), they become friends and both the better for it. Bizarre but enjoyable. Would certainly be fodder for any cultural psychoanalysis of American society in that era -- check out Colman’s relationship with his “man Tilney,” actor Rex Ingram. *6* (1942, dvd, n.)

Grizzly Man

The documentaries of Werner Herzog are always about something more than their ostensible subject, and here the theme is styles of self-dramatization. Not just of Timothy Treadwell, who obsessively filmed himself interacting with grizzly bears in the remote Alaskan wilds -- until one ate him -- but of every other person who appears in the film, including the director himself. With hundreds of hours of Treadwell’s filming to work with, Herzog constructs a meditation on wildness, environmentalism, personal weaknesses and coping strategies, filmmaking, and a whole savory pot of bear stew. The up-close footage of bears in the wild, foraging and fighting, is extremely vivid, even if the animals are continually upstaged by Treadwell himself. I’m sure Herzog left out most of the “Wild Kingdom for kiddies” footage and focussed on those frames where Tim’s damaged self-assertion were strongest. But everybody gets in the act: the coroner, a bush pilot, old girlfriends, each seeks to dramatize their touch with celebrity, just as Treadwell tried to borrow celebrity from the bears and foxes whom he professed to love. And of course, Werner’s own self-assertion is implicit. His narration starts defining and interpreting Treadwell even before the subject appears on screen, and keeps on pointing out and underlining through the course of the film. The voiceover is bit hectoring, but makes clear that this film is a personal essay and does not attempt to be an “objective” documentary, despite the he-said-she-said, on-the-one-hand-and-the-other talking heads. Still, there is a richness of material that leaves the viewer to his or her own conclusions. (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-86, RT-93.)

A Very Long Engagement

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and star Audrey Tatou of Amelie re-team in this adaptation of Sebastien Japrisot’s WWI novel. Despite the exuberance and fancy of Jeunet’s style, the insane horror of that conflict comes through as well as in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. But there’s mystery and romance and humor as well, too much of everything in fact. Frankly I did not give the film my best viewing, but its own excesses of plot and whimsy contributed to the wandering of my attention. Wow, wait a minute, that French housewife is Jodie Foster. Man, look at that crane shot, that CGI recreation of Paris, those sepia tones in the stunning cinematography. In a theater, perhaps it would all have washed over me, immersively, but in my easy chair it was just a box of bonbons, from which I was happy to sample a few and leave the rest. (2004, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-76, RT-78.)

A Special Day

Netflix subscribers beware, the DVD of this title is very low quality and dubbed. As such, I cannot give it a rating. It was watchable, however, as a last pairing of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni -- she a frumpy(!), homebound mother of six and fan of Mussolini, he an antifascist homosexual about to be deported. Nonetheless, how could you keep them apart, it’d be like keeping the pasta separate from the sauce? They live across the courtyard in an apartment complex, unknown to each other until the day in 1938 when everyone else goes to join the parade as Il Duce welcomes Der Fuhrer to the grandeur of Rome. Ettore Scola’s story and direction seem rather diagrammatic, but the setting is invested with authenticity and the stars provide passion and complexity. I have to believe that Meryl Streep went to school on Sophia Loren here to prep for the similar character and story of Bridges of Madison County. (1977, dvd, n.) *NR*

The Constant Gardener

Director Fernando Meirelles achieved acclaim for City of God (though I preferred the documentary Bus 174 as a portrait of Rio’s homeless youth), but here his swift mosaic brand of filmmaking is perfectly suited to the shattered glass worldview of John Le Carre’s novel. Fast-paced, dense and impenetrable, passionate and explosive, all-out and all-inclusive, the style suits the story. Though I felt a slight muddling of energy toward the end, and the denouement seemed implausibly underlined, this is really a marvel of visual storytelling, nonlinear, fragmented, caught on the fly in burning images. You get a sense of the overpowering realities of Africa, from the teeming streets of Nairobi to a desert refugee camp in the Sudan. Ralph Fiennes is excellent as the title character, a British diplomat, and Rachel Weisz is seductive and strong as the firebrand activist who marries him to get to Africa so she can confront the heart of darkness, which in this case is Big Pharma. This is a thriller with a brain and a heart, cannily unfolding its mysteries and puzzles, and bringing light to a hidden corner of the world’s woes. (2005, Images, n.) *8-* (MC-82, RT-82.)

Festival Express

This rock doc about a 1970 train trek across Canada is a time capsule for the era (which coincidentally is “my” era.) Swallow it and you are swept back to the Sixties. Obviously a lot of critics got high on this (witness cumulative scores below), but I just caught a mellow buzz, nothing like the wild times the musicians had in the capsule of the train -- drinking, drugging, playing and singing -- jamming the groove to the rhythm of the tracks. Oh yes, they’d occasionally get off the train and give concerts, and the performance footage is excellent. I’d just seen Janis Joplin’s same all-out performances of “Cry Baby” and “Tell Mama” in another doc about her, and it was good to see alternate takes from The Band performing “The Weight” and “I Shall Be Released” (though Scorsese’s Last Waltz will remain forever definitive), but the revelation was the Grateful Dead in “Workingman’s Dead” mode, which was the only period in which I really followed them. Fact is, Jerry Garcia was quite a musician. There’s a scary-funny-thrilling sequence in which he, Janis, and Rick Danko are in the bar car wailing away at an old work song. She would be dead of a heroin overdose in two months; the guys would follow in their own due time. But what a time it was while it lasted. (2004, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-85, RT-96.)

Garbo again

Two weeks ago would have been Greta Garbo's 100th birthday, which was celebrated not just by the long-awaited release of ten of her films on DVD, but also by the best station on tv, Turner Classic Movies, presenting an original documentary by film scholar Kevin Brownlow, titled simply Garbo. This was a profile that went beyond simple clips and interviews to present a complex and intriguing portrait of the mysterious star, but the best moments of all were from a brief screentest from 1949, seven years after her last movie, for a project that never got off the ground, despite the fact that she was clearly still a face that the camera loved, alive with a range of emotion, in spite of her reclusive personality. Garbo is an old-time star whose artistry is still alive, so get Camille or some other films of hers, and settle in for some real Hollywood magic.

Junebug

Just the opposite of the previously reviewed film, the characters in Phil Morrison’s debut directorial effort have an earned ambiguity. They are mysterious and open-ended, even while nakedly revealed and boxed into the corner of family and self. We see them in bits and pieces, seemingly pinned down but squirming free of our expectations. Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davidtz are a recently-wed and still-horny husband and wife (as they were brother and sister in Patricia Rozema’s delicious Mansfield Park.) She is a Chicago art gallery dealer, born in Japan of British diplomat parents, who goes to North Carolina to pursue an outsider artist whose specialty is pornographic visions of the Civil War dictated by God. He is a successfully escaped cracker homeboy (and Baptist choirboy!) taking the chance to introduce his wife to his insular family, setting off all sorts of cultural and personal collisions. There’s some redneck humor, but the ironies are fair and balanced, all the characters are round enough to have good and bad sides. The film slows to a rocking-on-the-front-porch Southern pace, as the high-powered Davidtz tries to fit in, but metabolically cannot. Amy Adams provides the heart and soul of the film, as the wide-eyed and eager, very pregnant and not nearly as dumb as she seems sister-in-law, who delivers this dropdead line to her transcendently mopey husband, testament to the sharpness of Angus MacLachlan’s screenplay and summation of the film’s approach: “God loves you just the way you are, but He loves you too much to let you stay that way.” (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-80, RT-87.)

Crash

Too schematic and artsy, too eager to sell its message, this is nonetheless a well-made film on an essential American subject, race and racism in the stirred-up melting pot of L.A. I had some of the same problems with Paul Haggis’ directorial debut that I had with his screenplay for Million Dollar Baby -- too overt, too scripted. But he attracted an undeniably excellent cast -- Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, and all the rest. And while the motif of interlocking City of Angels stories is very familiar -- from Short Cuts, Grand Canyon, Magnolia, and even What’s Cooking? -- it is neatly handled here, too neatly in fact. Such a big theme needs more real world messiness. This film may want to leave audiences arguing, but does so not so much from genuine ambiguity as from contradictory self-assertion. So the racist cop is also a father-loving hero, etc. etc. And the film mistakenly tries to go for elegance rather than grittiness, with its swooping crane and tracking shots, and its hypnotic, soaring music. So in the end, it’s a highly watchable movie, but not as smart as it wishes to be. (2005, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-69, RT-77.)

Tokyo Godfathers

Endearing oddball anime from Satoshi Kon, this is adapted from a minor John Ford western, Three Godfathers, but is most notable for its exquisite painting of contemporary Tokyo, high and low. Though it was a kick to learn after the fact that the homeless trannie was based on the John Wayne character. And also to be reminded that Satoshi Kon made Millennium Actress, another anime that stands out in my memory. So the Ford provenance explains why this story is set on Christmas day, but can’t explain the other engaging oddities of the film, the mix of humor and pathos that also recalls Chaplin and Capra, or the particularly Japanese social commentary. The transvestite would-be madonna and two other homeless creatures, a bum who drank and gambled away his family, and a teenage runaway girl, find an abandoned baby and go in search of its parents, with various adventures along the way, the wackiness combined with breathtaking animation. (2004, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-73, RT-88.)

Everybody Rides the Carousel

Marred only by a creaky scaffolding that suggests this feature length animation was originally shown on tv with commercial breaks, this is otherwise an entertaining and edifying explication of key psychological concepts. It provides a visually and mentally stimulating (as well as amusing) exploration of the eight stages of life as outlined by Erik Erikson. Following the common Hubley studio practice of working from live sound improvisations or captured dialogue, the drawing is varied and arresting, ranging from cartoonish to pictorial, from primitive to abstract. Lovely to look at, the film is also intellectual comedy and commentary of an unusually high order. (1975, dvd, n.) *7*

Broken Flowers

This apotheosis of deadpan hipster minimalism from actor Bill Murray and director Jim Jarmusch follows the aging, depressive Don Juan(-ston) on a mystery-plumbing roadtrip as he revisits old flames, after he has received an anonymous letter suggesting he has a 19-year-old son. The women are Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton, a fascinating quartet of middle-aged women if ever there was one, which sustains interest in the quiet conceit of director and male lead. The film is impressively detailed and determinedly paced, right from the knockout title sequence that follows the implicating letter from a hand dropping it in mailbox to delivery in home mailslot. At times the film seems more about modern American vernacular architecture and design than anything else. It’s all maddeningly intelligent and inconclusive, pleasurable and funny and intriguing, and yet somehow lacking in impact. (2005, Images, n.) *7* (MC-79, RT-88.)

Nothing Sacred

Nothing special to my eyes, this screwball comedy is best known for Carole Lombard’s performance and Ben Hecht’s cynical script -- and both are okay, as are William Wellman’s direction and Fredric March’s co-starring role. There’s a great aerial sequence of the skyline of 1930s Manhattan, and some acerbic commentary on newspapering and public gullibility, but this is a hit that didn’t hit home with me. The “Selznick touch” comes through mostly in the unnecessary and antique-looking Technicolor. Lombard is a Vermont girl supposedly dying of radium poisoning who exploits and is exploited by reporter March to become the toast of New York, but they can’t hold a candle to Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in Hecht’s and Hawks’ His Girl Friday. Still, it’s amusing to be reminded that newspapers were lacking in public esteem long before their current death throes. (1937, dvd, n.) *5+*

Kirikou and the Sorceress

In this really delightful 2-D animation of a Senegalese folktale by Michel Ocelot and a team of French and European filmmakers, Kirikou is a hero literally from birth, and as an infant releases his village from the power of the sorceress who has appropriated their water, their gold, and their men. The visual style is a mixture of African folk art and Henri Rousseau, the music by Youssou N’Dour, in a hero tale with quite balanced moral lessons to convey, and plenty of humor. This film got bumped to the top of my Netflix queue when I was putting together an animation program for the Clark winter calendar. I ultimately took a different approach in compiling a program of shorts, but if those screenings are any kind of success, I will come right back with another triple feature including this, some Japanese anime, and some third multicultural variant to the domination of Disney. (1998, dvd, n.) *7+*

Pauline at the Beach

Classic French bedroom farce updated with the Eric Rohmer touch, this is solid entry in his “Comedies and Proverbs” series, as always precisely balanced between intellect and libido. Pauline is an absolutely lovely 15-year-old, and the beach is Normandy at the end of summer. Her older cousin is a tawny blonde babe, over whom two men joust, and Pauline drinks in their adult erotic banter, and meets a boyfriend of her own on the beach. Complications ensue, but it is all quite simple in the end. In the unmatchable words of John Barth in The End of the Road: “Who would not delight in telling some extragalactic tourist, ‘On our planet, sir, males and females copulate. Moreover, they enjoy copulating. But for various reasons they cannot do this whenever, wherever, and with whomever they choose. Hence all this running around that you observe. Hence the world.’” (1982, dvd, r.) *7*

Janis

Nothing exceptional as a documentary, just performance footage and interviews, this up-close look at one of the icons of my youth definitely reconnects me to a cultural moment. It’s so up close that it doesn’t even refer to Janis Joplin’s drug-related death in 1970, just focusing on her defiantly plain, exaltingly contorted face as she belts out the white mama blues that helped define the Sixties or wincingly remembers growing up an outsider in Port Arthur, Texas, during the conformist Fifties. The raw bacchanalian frenzy of her performance may strike the un-initiate as caterwauling, but to her devotees she is simply the transporting Truth, the raw emotional reality of agonized longing, sung loud and proud. Janis came out, burst out of her shell, strode from the margins to centerstage, and millions came out after her, and the Right has been struggling to put us back in ever since. To me the real divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, when it comes to reaching and moving the public, but between the Party of Pleasure and the Party of Fear. Janis is a genuine apostle of the principle of pleasure (along with its attendant pain.) She had one of the best replies ever to the question of what the youth of the day wanted: “Sincerity and a good time.” Dead at 27, she’s not dead yet. (1974, Sund/T, n.) *7*

This past week, under calendar deadline, I have been putting together a Winter film series at the Clark to be called “Triple Feature: 3 Colors, 3 Painters, 3 Studios.” I will certainly write more about the series as its time approaches, but the final slot came down to a choice between the Eames and Hubley studios. I went with the latter, because they will better complete a day of animation, but I have definitely noted the films of Charles and Ray Eames for future showing. “Toccata for Toy Trains” and “Tops” were delightful semi-animations of vintage toy collections, and “Fiberglass Chairs” was a marvelously concise and cogent visual depiction of the design and fabrication process. “Powers of Ten” was a predetermined choice, but the revelation to me was “The World of Franklin & Jefferson,” made to accompany a traveling exhibition that the Eameses designed for the Bicentennial in 1976. More than the slow and talky Ken Burns style that has come to characterize historical documentaries, this is a rapidfire survey of the entire visual culture of the revolutionary era, while Orson Welles supplies the informative narration. Really outstanding.

The Flowers of Saint Francis

The actual Italian title, “Francis, jester of God,” is probably closer to Rossellini’s intent (with an assist from Fellini.) There’s actually more of Brother Juniper than Saint Francis himself. But this is an interesting concoction, comic medieval neorealism -- it’s a little scattered but does not overstay its welcome. There is a pleasing and appropriate air of naivete about the whole proceedings. Francis and his monks are portrayed by a real group of Franciscan monks, and there’s just enough 13th century lingering in Italy to provide a bare period backdrop. Essentially a sequence of anecdotes from the brief time between the monks’ mission being approved by Pope Innocent III and their actually setting off to preach, the telling is whimsical and yet strong. The initial sequence in the rainstorm is notable for the dark sculptural quality of the monks in their dripping rags, yet joyful withal. I don’t share the enthusiasm of Scorsese and others for this film, but I did like it, though not enough to urge you to see it. I’ve been on a bit of a Saint Francis kick lately, having recently visited La Verna and Assisi, but I would still recommend, over this, Zeffirelli’s gorgeous hippie Francis in Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Rossellini’s film is certainly more astringent and authentic, but lacks an overall impact. (1950, dvd, n.) *6+*

The Trial of Joan of Arc

Not available on dvd, this had been kicking around my TiVo playlist since last October, so it seemed an opportune moment to watch another Bresson. And this time the subject is perfect for his severe and constraining style. Using the actual transcripts of Joan’s trial, Bresson has orchestrated an elliptical but profoundly real portrayal of an extraordinary historical event, more memorial pageant than you-are-there document. As the saying goes, “the past is another country,” and Bresson makes history suitably foreign. His refusal of sentiment or spectacle allows the confrontation between the massed power of church and state and the faith of the individual to achieve the starkest outline. And his Joan is an amazingly believable teenaged girl, demure but strong, dignified but fragile. This film makes a most instructive contrast to the silent Dreyer/Falconetti version, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and now that I am thinking about programming marathons at the Clark, wouldn’t it be interesting to show them together, throw in a bit of Ingrid Bergman and/or Jean Seberg, and then wind up with Sandrine Bonnaire in Rivette’s two-part Joan the Maid? (1962, TCM/T, r.) *8-*

In one of my all-time most bizarre double features ever, the same evening I also watched the dvd of Sideways, but my reaction was so much the same as the first time that I refer you to my original posting, which you can find by clicking on “Archives: January 2005” in the column to your right. I will say, this time around, it did strike me that Paul Giamatti was indeed cheated out of a Best Actor nomination, but with Bresson in mind it also struck how much the role was constructed out of performer’s tricks. Still, I’m all in favor of cinematic intoxication, and this film decants a fine blend of flavors, witty and tart, truthful and rueful.

Architectural Dreams film series at the Clark

ARCHITECTURAL DREAMS:

A CINEMATIC CELEBRATION OF BUILDING
Free Films Fridays at 4:00 pm at The Clark.

Sept. 16: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. (1948, 93 minutes.) This classic screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy is intended as a teaser for a group of documentaries about architects and their work. Not just a bait-and-switch, this film offers a keynote to the series by focusing on the messy process of building, more that the finished products celebrated in the rest of the series.

Sept. 23: Frank Lloyd Wright. (1998, 153 minutes.) The preeminent American architect gets the Ken Burns treatment in this Peabody Award-winning film biography that spans his full 90 years, from his prairie boyhood through apprenticeship to Louis Sullivan all the way to his final masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.

Sept. 30: My Architect. (2003, 116 minutes.) Nathaniel Kahn goes on a personal quest in search of the father he hardly knew, the esteemed but eccentric architect Louis Kahn, through exploration of his buildings and interviews with those he worked with, from the Salk Institute to the capital of Bangladesh.

Oct. 7: I.M. Pei. Two films by Peter Rosen, First Person Singular (1997, 85 minutes) and The Museum on the Mountain (1998, 48 minutes), follow the architect from his birth in China to his education in Boston and back again, a 20th century journey with stops at the Louvre Pyramid, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and the Miho Museum outside of Kyoto.

Oct. 14: Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. (1995, 96 minutes.) Frieda Lee Mock’s Academy Award-winning documentary profiles the creator of the controversial but now much-beloved Vietnam War Memorial, as well as a Civil Rights Memorial and even a house in Williamstown, MA.

Oct. 21: Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center. (1998, 100 minutes.) Master documentarian Albert Maysles and his associates follow the creation of L.A.’s hilltop Getty Museum from conception to fulfillment, as the complex takes form in dialectic between the museum’s directors and architect Richard Meier.

Oct. 28: Making the Modern. (2003, 60 minutes.) Tadao Ando, architect of two buildings destined to transform the Clark campus, is profiled in this film about the creation of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the highly acclaimed building -- a vision of light, stone, and water -- that engages in neighborly dialogue with Louis Kahn’s renowned Kimbell Museum next door.

1 of 10 Under 50: Michael Winterbottom

1961: Born in Lancashire, England.
1996: Jude.
1997: Welcome to Sarajevo.
1999: Wonderland.
2000: The Claim.
2002: 24 Hour Party People.
2002: In This World.
2003: Code 46.
2004: 9 Songs.
2005: A Cock and Bull Story. (forthcoming)

More than any single project, the amazing thing about Michael Winterbottom is his prolific process, throwing himself fearlessly into situations of risk and creating feature films that take a quasi-documentary approach to reality, whether past or present, at home or abroad, in the warzone or in the bedroom.

Though critically esteemed, Winterbottom’s films can be hard to catch up with. There are several early films (and work for the BBC after graduating from Oxford) which I didn’t list because I haven’t seen, and I’ve only read about the last three. His work is so disparate that it took a while for me to realize that he was the connecting link to a number of diverse but surprisingly good films.

For Jude, the attraction was Thomas Hardy’s novel and Kate Winslet as Sue, but if you go in expecting a Masterpiece Theater adaptation, you are in for a surprise. There is no romantic haze over the dire doings of Hardy’s world, no flinching from his grim fatalism.

Welcome to Sarajevo is another open-eyed look at very bad things happening, this time the war in Bosnia, seen through the eyes of a group of English-speaking journalists. Based on a memoir, the film mixes in news footage and you-are-there re-creations to make reality present and pressing.

Wonderland comes back to contemporary London, and brings a sense of lived reality to its intertwined stories of three sisters and their romantic travails. If the scene called for a sister to be working in a Soho restaurant on a Saturday night, it was shot in a Soho restaurant on a Saturday night, with genuine customers as extras.

The Claim returns to Hardy in its transposition of The Mayor of Casterbridge to an authentic Gold Rush West, and deserves praise for holding its own in comparison to its obvious model, Robert Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

But 24 Hour Party People is something completely different. If like me, you’ve never heard Joy Division or heard of the Manchester rave scene in the 80s, do not be put off. This is an extremely smart and funny film, a fractured fairy tale of real life, with Steve Coogan brilliant in the lead role (watch with subtitles, however.)

In This World literally follows two Afghan refugees trying to make their way to England. Winterbottom did not even understand the language of his nonprofessional actors, but just caught their simulated plight on the fly, through Iran to Turkey and into a container ship, on a tightrope walk between reality and representation.

In Code 46, Winterbottom goes to sci-fi Singapore with Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. His 9 Songs achieved notoriety, if little distribution, for being the first non-porn film in which the actors are not just simulating sex, though I suspect his impulse was more documentary than pornographic. I eagerly anticipate the release of his new film with Steve Coogan, as Tristram Shandy in A Cock and Bull Story, an adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century eccentric classic novel.

Wherever Winterbottom’s career may take him, you can confidently predict that his work will be radical (not for nothing is his production company called Revolution Films) -- far-reaching and profoundly unsettling in its embrace of complicated realities.

Au Hasard, Balthazar

I won’t deny that Robert Bresson is a great director, a distinctive cinematic genius, but to me all his films feel like prison or monastic cells and the only one that makes my pantheon is the prison break film, A Man Escaped. Strangely enough, it was my “Donkey Man” friend, Kevin O’Hara, who led me back to this film. On tour promoting his memoir of an epic Irish travel adventure, Last of the Donkey Pilgrims, he had been recommended to see this film where the title character is a donkey. So when Criterion Collection brought out its beautifully restored version of Au Hasard, Balthazar, I queued it up on Netflix. Having watched it again myself, I will pass it on to KO, and I will be amused to see his reaction to something so far out of his normal range of viewing. Will it strike him as bizarrely stilted, so strange in its rhythms and what the camera chooses to look at, more often the characters’ feet than their faces? Or will he just be looking at the donkey, and weeping for its fate, and the fate of sinful humanity? Is Bresson strictly a refined and sophisticated taste, or might he appeal to the cinematically naive in his pared down simplicity of portrayal? Very much the French intellectual, theorizing his practice, Bresson makes an impressive appearance in an interview included as an extra on the Criterion disk. With his abhorrence of “acting,” Bresson eschews the emotive aspects of most movies, and relies on ratiocination to achieve his chaste emotional effects. With his films more than most, you get out what you bring to it. So if you’re looking to confirm your feeling that the world is a bad and sad place, and that people are the worst thing in it, this might be just your film. Or if you take the donkey’s life to be a sentimental paradigm of saintly suffering. But if you want to be amused and engaged by the character of a donkey, turn to Kevin’s story of his journey with Missie around the entire coast of Ireland. (1966, dvd, n.) *6*

Empire Falls & other HBO series

This HBO movie could be the textbook definition of “less than the sum of its parts.” At 3 hours in 2 parts, it should be an hour shorter or at least twice as long, with the characters pruned back or given room to grow. Richard Russo is one of my favorite contemporary novelists, even if this Pulitzer Prize-winning book is not his best, but it was a mistake for him to adapt his own screenplay, leaving it in limbo somewhere between literary conceit and plot-driven melodrama. Since Paul Newman gets a producing credit, I assume this grew out of their work together on Nobody’s Fool. And what a cast has been assembled -- besides Newman and his better half, Joanne Woodward (though her character is one of the weak points of this production), there are Ed Harris, Robin Wright Penn, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt, Aidan Quinn, Theresa Russell, Kate Burton, etc. etc. There are attractive Maine and Martha’s Vineyard settings, and an experienced director in Fred Schepisi, who has done good work all the way from Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith through Last Orders. Each of the well-known actors makes an impression, so there is some sense of recognition as the whole community is sketched in, but they never move much beyond that initial impression. A novel can burrow in and circle around, offer a subtler sort of reveal, than this adaptation which needs to flog the story along, and tries to use narration to tie up its themes too neatly. I liked the set-up very well, but as the plot kicked in I liked it less and less, until by the end my reaction was less than lukewarm. Even though I can’t give this film a firm recommendation, it does have numerous elements to recommend itself, so I note that it will be released on dvd later this month. (2005, HBO/T, n.) *6*

As for other HBO series -- I do not mourn the passing of Six Feet Under, its time had definitely come. R.I.P. I watched it through with growing irritation at its characters and its formulas. The new series, Rome, betrays the same provenance in the cable network that brought you G-String Divas and Taxicab Confessions, not to mention Real Sex, with the need to throw naked bodies in bed together every ten minutes or so. But Rome seems to take its history quite seriously, and the participation of director Michael Apted is a guarantee of quality, so I’m in for the duration. Of course what I really want to catch up with is Season 3 of The Wire, so that I can look forward to its next season even more than the return of The Sopranos.

1 of 10 Under 50: Gurinder Chadha

1961: Arrived with parents in Britain, after birth in Kenya.
1993: Bhaji on the Beach.
2000: What’s Cooking?
2002: Bend It Like Beckham.
2005: Bride and Prejudice.
2006: I Dream of Jeannie. (?)


A British-Indian born in Africa, married to and writing with a Japanese-American, Gurinder Chadha is genially subversive of all orthodoxies, but affirmative of universal hopes and dreams, each culture’s different but similar embrace of family values.

While establishing herself as a documentary filmmaker in the Nineties, Chadha was able to direct her first feature film, the surprising and delightful Bhaji at the Beach, about three generations of Indian women in England, taking a daytrip to Blackpool, the working class resort. What she said about that applies equally to all her films: “You have tradition on one side and modernity on the other, Indianness on one side, Englishness on the other, cultural specificity and universality -- but in fact there is a scale between each of the polarities and the film moves freely between them.”

Food and family take center stage in her second film, set in Los Angeles, as four different ethnic enclaves prepare for the All-American feast of Thanksgiving. What’s Cooking? was her first collaboration with her LA-born husband, Paul Mayeda Berges, and it is steeped in multicultural authenticity, displaying the wit and heart and specificity of all her work. Again, theirs is the best description of their own work: “Norman Rockwell with a fresh color palette -- ‘Our Town’ for the new millennium.”

A natural crowd-pleaser despite her contrarian streak, Chadha achieved her breakout with Bend It Like Beckham, about an Indian girl growing up in Chadha’s own neighborhood of West London, who lives to play soccer despite the traditional conservatism of her family. Gurinder's joyful and affectionate approach to life and film connected with audiences worldwide and Beckham became one of the most successful British films ever, emerging as an anthem of female empowerment.

The pull of ethnicity amidst the universality of family concerns provides the throughline of Chadha’s career, and she continued her global melding with Bride and Prejudice, which married Bollywood and Hollywood, Jane Austen and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai, satire and sentiment, English domestic comedy with Indian song and dance. Sheer exuberance and a welcoming spirit invite acceptance across the bounds of place, culture, and gender.

Gurinder Chadha is now in negotiation with Hollywood to direct I Dream of Jeannie, a prequel to the old tv series, but whether she works within the system or continues her independent efforts, she is likely to retain her emphatic embrace of feminine freedom and cross-cultural understanding, in a joyful celebration of difference and sameness. She aims to entertain as well as to inform and provoke, admitting her films are not “all big anti-racist statements, they’re just about humanizing people who are different and showing you people in a different light and showing you people you thought were different to you but actually very similar.”

Look at Me (Comme une image)

Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri are a wonderful filmmaking team -- they both write and act, she directs -- and apparently divorce has not hindered their collaboration. I loved their previous Taste of Others, and might have loved this one if I were more knowledgeable musically, since singing is at the center of the story, and there are no subtitles to translate music. From reviews I know it was Monteverdi, Haydn, and Schubert, but while it was certainly pleasing to my ear, there was a whole level of nuance that I was deaf to. At the center of the story is a 20-year-old singer, a fat girl with a disheveled emotional life, and her voice teacher, played by Jaoui herself. The girl’s father is Bacri, a monstrously self-involved writer and publisher, and the teacher’s husband is a writer whose sudden success brings him into the orbit of the crotchety Sun King. Many subsidiary characters are woven into the fabric of the story, but the pattern comes from the father-daughter push-and-pull, and whether she can achieve the velocity to escape his orbit. The Parisian literary milieu may be wearisome in a way, even when skillfully skewered, but the music, culminating in a performance in an ancient country church, offers an anodyne. Everyone is seeking attention, but few are capable of giving it. In art, however, it can be paid and repaid. If you’re a fan of Eric Rohmer’s talky but seductive comedies and tales, you should keep your eye on Jaoui and Bacri. (2004, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-79, RT-88.)

The Motorcycle Diaries

I never wore a Che t-shirt, never really had any particular opinion about him, and that sure hasn’t changed after seeing this movie. Walter Salles offers a pretty-enough travelogue of South America, and Gael Garcia Bernal presents a more-than-pretty-enough portrait of the revolutionist as a young doctor. In the early Fifties, Ernesto Guevara teams up with a slightly older, somewhat earthier biochemist friend, and they set off on an ancient and unreliable motorcycle for a ten thousand kilometer circuit of the continent that surrounds their native Argentina, to grasp the land and maybe some ladies along the way. After traversing Chile and Peru, they finally reach -- on foot -- a leper colony on the Amazon, where Che’s social conscience really kicks in. To me this film is hardly more than a fistful of picture postcards, with an unrevealing message on the back of each. Garcia Bernal is always pleasing to watch, but if you want to take a roadtrip with him, see Y Tu Mama Tambien instead. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-75, RT-83.)

The Man in the Moon

Back when I had a video store, I got a copy of this and my mother recommended it, but I never watched it. But now it was worth picking up as Reese Witherspoon’s debut, and she was really good from the get-go, as the 14-year-old tomboy with an Elvis passion in Fifties Louisiana, who falls hard for an older boy, only to lose him first to her older sister, and then to a farm accident. Robert Mulligan, as the veteran of To Kill a Mockingbird and Summer of ’42, knows how to direct this borderline schmaltz. Sam Waterston and Tess Harper make for an appealing and believable pair of parents. But when the teen romantic comedy turns to tragedy, the energy just leaks right out of the enterprise. Reese, however, is a star in the making. (cf. Scarlett Johansson in Manny & Lo.) (1991, dvd, n.) *7-*