Bride and Prejudice

Wow, what a bunch of party poopers the critics are! (The new NY Times reviewer, Manohla Dargis, is establishing herself as someone I can count on disagreeing with.) And thanks again to Images Cinema, for having the wit to program this film. I’m not usually on board with over-the-top crowd-pleasers, but I found this sweet-natured Austen-meets-Bollywood extravaganza utterly engaging. Gurinder Chadha strives for jolly good fun, with a mild message of multicultural cross-gender acceptance, and I take away exactly that, with a smile on my face and a skip in my step. The divine Jane can take on any form of dress up, and here her Elizabeth and Jane Bennett wear the saris of a former Miss World and Miss India respectively, while Darcy seems to have stepped straight out of a Pierre Cardin advert. Implausibly all these translations work, right down to “Rory Gilmore” as Georgiana. It’s all movie madness -- silly songs, wild dancing, dizzy travelogue, clownish characters, sappy romance -- but it all works for me. Jane gives it backbone and Gurinder gives it pizzazz and color. (2004, Images, n.) *8* (MC-55, RT-66.)

Chadha vs. Nair. This was the match-up for the final slot of my upcoming survey of young directors to watch. I gave the nod to Gurinder over Mira, and comparing their latest (see review of Vanity Fair below) confirms the choice, as well as their continuing similarity. These two adaptations of classic 19th century English novels end with exactly the same shot: the swaying back end of an elephant carrying a just-married couple. But I admired the former’s what-the-hell, go-for-it assault more than the latter’s dutiful but overmatched approach. Of course, Nair’s Monsoon Wedding must have been a conscious model for Chadha’s Bride, and her elegance has so far produced more good films than the sloppy joviality of the younger woman, but Gurinder’s sheer joy in filmmaking is infectious.

I (Heart) Huckabees

Too strenuously zany to achieve either emotional or intellectual traction, David O. Russell’s fourth film is frequently funny and occasionally profound, but doesn’t add up to much, despite a stellar cast gamely trying to put over his chaotic but energetic conception. I’ve never really warmed to Jason Schwartzman and was unengaged with his plight as a incompetent conservationist and worse poet, but slightly amused at his real mother, Talia Shire, playing his mother. He goes to Jaffe and Jaffe, Existential Detectives (Dustin Hoffmann and Lily Tomlin acting dutifully wacky) to sort himself out, and falls in with another client of theirs, Mark Wahlberg, a fireman searching for meaning and deploring petroleum after 9/11. Jason’s antagonist is the cheerful corporate shill Jude Law, whose girlfriend Naomi Watts is the limber and perky spokesbody for Huckabees, a Wal-Mart-like chain of superstores. And oh yes, Isabelle Huppert is the nasty French counterpart to the Jaffes, her version of existentialism stressing meaningless rather than the blanketing connectedness they espouse. There’s some jazzy special effects as the film swings through Charlie Kaufman territory, but the relentlessly perky music rings tinny after a while. Russell is one of my favorite young directors, a "10 Under 50" choice, and I wanted to like his latest, but have to file it under “honorable failure.” (2004, dvd, n.) *6-* (MC-55, RT-59.)

Since Otar Left

A small miracle of empathy, writer/director Julie Bertuccelli’s first feature follows a family of three Georgian women as they work through their generational conflicts in the ramshackle capital of Tbilisi, while their son/brother/uncle Otar is away in Paris. He’s been to medical school but is working construction illegally till he can get a visa. All the performances are amazing, from the hunched-over but indomitable grandmother with a nostalgia for strongman Stalin, to the sensuous but stifled widow of the Afghan war, to the exquisitely plain beauty of the student daughter trying to negotiate between the older women while finding a way of her own. A window through the rusted-away Iron Curtain, with a poignant dream of the City of Light, this film feels right in each detail and every beat of its open heart. There’s an ineradicable beauty amidst the rubble, an emotional richness amidst the deprivation, a familial mix of smiles and tears right through to the quietly devastating but exalting conclusion. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-86, RT-98.)

Friday Night Lights

This jittery but highly watchable sports film is not quite up to the smash-mouth dynamism of Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, nor to the sociological insight of the unjustly neglected documentary Go Tigers! into the import of high school football mania in a depressed town (there Massillon OH, here Odessa TX.) But there’s a lot they didn’t mess up in adapting H.G. Bissinger’s nonfiction bestseller, about the 1988 Permian Panthers and their erratic march to the Texas state championship game in the Astrodome . Director Peter Berg does not dress it up or dumb it down too much, does not indulge overmuch in either celebration or desecration of the game and the passions it arouses. The kids are generally believable (Derek Luke a particular delight), and Billy Bob Thornton makes the coach more complex than you expect. (2004, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-70, RT-81.)

The Story of the Weeping Camel

In direct descent from Robert Flaherty, this Oscar nominee for best documetary is Nanook of the North with yurts instead of igloos, camels instead of sled dogs; set in the Gobi desert of Mongolia instead of the frozen north, but still focused on a family enclave in a forbidding landscape. Lots of patient anthropological (and bactrian) observation, but also the insertion of staged storytelling and sentiment. Apparently German-produced, this film arrives by way of National Geographic, which explains and limits its appeal. The camels are quite diffent from the Arabian sort, looking like something out of Star Wars mythology, and they are fascinating to watch, especially the white colt rejected by its mother. The herders have to bring a “violinist” (as the subtitles have it) to woo the camel back to its offspring, making her weep in the process. The trip to town is a leap across centuries, from ancient animal husbandry to tv cartoons, which bring a huge smile to the face of the photogenic young son who is the star of the family. A slow but winsome family portrait from an unfamiliar culture, this is worth a look if you have the patience for it. (2004, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-81, RT-95.)

Murder, My Sweet (aka Farewell, My Lovely)

Though Dick Powell and Anne Shirley are hardly Bogart and Bacall, this Raymond Chandler adaptation prefigures many of the pleasures of The Big Sleep, including pithy dialogue and witty narration, as well as a preposterously incomprehensible plot. Claire Trevor is okay as the femme fatale, but Powell is actually very good as Philip Marlowe, a career leap for the erstwhile crooner. Edward Dmytryk does well directing the RKO production team involved with Citizen Kane. Lots of deep focus and dark shadows, a drugged nightmare sequence and other endearingly low-tech special effects. The suspense elements tend to be risible in themselves, but a dynamic wit sustains this enterprise. It’s not the darkest of noirs but one of the most entertaining. (1944, dvd, n.) *7-*

I won’t presume to review Days of Being Wild (1991), but merely note my continuing insusceptibility to Wong Kar-Wai. Many are wild about the Hong Kong stylist and his collaborations with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, but after several tries I have not engaged with any of his films.

Ministry of Fear

Fritz Lang delivers a third-rate 39 Steps from a novel by Graham Greene, but at least had the grace to disown the result. It was successful at the time, and some accord it classic status, but its twists and turns are slow and stilted. Ray Milland is awkward and unconvincing as the lead character, just released from an asylum for the mercy killing of his wife, when he wins a cake at a fair that turns out to contain microfilm being smuggled out of the country by a web of Nazi spies, a plain vanilla maguffin if there ever was one. And the rest of the cast is uniformly unbelievable. The mystery is tricky, and some expressionistic elements work, but who cares? (1944, TCM/T, n.) *3*

P.S.

Okay, I admit it, I’m not objective. I’m more than a little in love with Laura Linney and I was rooting for her to get it on with Topher Grace, despite the difference in their ages and despite the implausibilities and dead ends of the plot. She works in MFA admissions at Columbia, and he gets into more than he applied for. There’s some hoo-haw about him being the reincarnation of her dead boyfriend from high school, but just ignore the inanity and concentrate on the genuine heat and wit the performers bring to this romantic comedy. Dylan Kidd’s second effort is nowhere near as sharp as his Rodger Dodger, but still a pleasure to watch. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-55, RT-56.)

Scarface

I was led to this Howard Hughes production by The Aviator, and as directed by Howard Hawks it’s an early sound classic that holds up, setting the model not just for the Brian DePalma remake with Al Pacino, but the entire tradition of gangster movies through The Godfather and beyond. Pre-Code and pre-PC, the film is full of sexual and ethnic innuendo, and was held up for a year or more until Hughes tacked on some moralizing elements and the subtitle, “Shame of a Nation.” But it has a sophisticated visual style and some striking performances, notably Paul Muni in the title role, loosely based on, and admired by, Al Capone. (1932, TCM/T, n.) *7*

Meet John Doe

Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper carry this film until it loses its way in the confused politics of Frank Capra (for whom I will have to cut a little slack now that I know he was born in Sicily.) She’s a determined newspaper columnist who saves her job by creating a populist hero called John Doe, and then recruits baseball-pitcher-turned-hobo Cooper to impersonate him, generating a movement manipulated by crypto-Fascist media tycoon Edward Arnold. Of course she falls for her creation, and of course he comes to believe in the message he’s made to deliver, that the little people can cure the mess of the world through simple neighborliness. John Doe is supposed to jump off the roof of city hall at midnight on Christmas Eve to protest, you know, the rotten state of things. Of course he actually winds up there, when the fraud becomes the truth. Does he jump? Not even Capra could figure that out, shooting three different endings, none of them satisfactory. Give the guy credit though, he went on to make the highly worthy WWII propaganda series, “Why We Fight,” and later enlivened my schooldays with the Bell Lab documentaries, including Our Mister Sun and Hemo the Magnificent. (1941, TCM/T, n.) *6-*

Vanity Fair

Mira Nair’s adaptation of Thackeray is not nearly nasty enough, but does offer satisfactions of the Masterpiece Theater ilk -- settings, costumes, and a brilliant array of British character actors. This is a gallop through a great baggy monster of a novel, with a stampede of characters rushing by -- granted -- but it’s the tone that’s the real problem. Reese Witherspoon has proved she can be wicked enough (vide Tracy Flick in Election), but a gee-whiz American innocence lingers here around a performance that should be utterly knowing and scheming, all about class and climbing. What ought to be scathing, even chilling, comes across as plucky. A Becky Sharp who doesn’t make you cringe is hardly a Becky Sharp at all. This ain’t Jane Austen, you know. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-53, RT-48.)

How to Draw a Bunny

This documentary about the life and death of Ray Johnson, “the most famous unknown artist in America,” may try a little too hard, but succeeds as a collage about a collagist and performance artist, acquaintance and correspondent of many New York artists from the late 50s on, whose final work of provocation and hermetic meaning was his own apparent suicide. Put together by John Walter from a welter of elements -- interviews, photos, videos, music, intertextual moments -- this film brings an artist’s artist to greater public attention, and moreover shows he deserves a look. The man remains an enigma, as he did to all who knew him, but his art displays its own obsessive charm. I’ll definitely seek an opportunity to show this at the Clark sometime, and also get the dvd for the excellent extras it is reputed to contain. (2002, Sund/T, n.) *6+*

Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

Lone Scherfig is the least dogmatic of the Danish Dogme group, and leaves the stringency behind as she goes to Glasgow for the story of two brothers who inherit a used bookstore and a gloomy family history. The ubiquitous but reliable Shirley Henderson shows up, a poor single mother who brings life to the brothers' death-haunted existence. The film has wit and sentiment, and decent performances all around, but lacked some specific gravity to give it weight. Still, it’s a pleasant enough film about death and brotherhood. (2002, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-69, RT-85.)

Intermission

John Crowley’s directorial debut features an Altmanesque swirl of Dublin characters in fast-paced interlocking stories. A lot of familiar if not yet famous faces help keep the merry-go-round turning. A thankfully pre-Alexander Colin Farrell is a punk villain. Cillian Murphy is a superstore clerk who has made the unforgivable mistake of breaking up with Kelly Macdonald. Shirley Henderson is her heartbroken, mustachioed sister. Colm Meany is a tough cop who fancies himself a Dirty Harry, despite a musical taste for Clannad. There’s robberies and assault, vehicular mayhem and gunplay, but this is basically an astringent romantic comedy, much better than the usual run of wacky capers from the British Isles. (2003, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-64, RT-73.)

The Straight Story

Quiet, profound, perfectly judged, this David Lynch charmer amazes as much by what it doesn’t do as what it does. With an unblinking refusal to ingratiate, it slows a medium devoted to the young and the quick down to old-man-on-a-lawnmower pace. Pared to essentials -- wide empty spaces and small mute gestures -- the film blossoms with feeling and spirit. Richard Farnsworth is uncanny as the sick old man with an unhappy history, who sets out on an unlikely mission of reconciliation with his estranged brother, 350 miles across Iowa on a John Deere riding mower. This could hardly be more un-Disney, but there you go -- this counter-intuitive match of director and studio is an unlikely total success. Sissy Spacek and Harry Dean Stanton make the most of their moments, as the damaged but dutiful daughter and the stroke-stunned brother, and all the characters met along the road reek of rural authenticity. Both the sweeping cinematography and the haunting music help slow the beat of this film, till it achieves perfect synch with the viewer’s heart. A more than worthy entry in the Cinematic Landscapes film series, and something that has to be seen on the big screen. (1999, dvd@cai, r.) *9* (MC-86, RT-95.)

They Live By Night

Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger are sweet but not saccharine as the naive young lovers on the lam in Nicholas Ray’s first film. (She was equally sweet as the girlfriend of the armless veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives.) From the novel Thieves Like Us, and later remade under that title by Robert Altman, this is a sentimental version of the Bonnie and Clyde genre. Granger may be a convicted and escaped murderer, but he is essentially an innocent, fallen in with rough men, and fallen for by the even more innocent O’Donnell. Ray’s direction is energetic and suspenseful, but the violent action cedes the screen to a doomed romanticism. If you ask me, this is noir like it. (1948, TCM/T, n.) *7*

People Will Talk

Somehow Joseph L. Mankiewicz turned in this lacklustre effort between two enduring classics, All About Eve and Julius Caesar. Go figure. And it’s a rare stinker for Cary Grant, too, who looks ten years older than he will eight years later in N by NW. This is in many respects a quality production, but none of the parts fit together, and the tone wobbles all over the place. I guess the point of the story is a great but unconventional man being assaulted but not brought down by the whispers of the little people. Cary Grant wears the role of Dr. Praetorius like an ill-fitting suit, and Cary Grant is all about perfect fit. I suspect the estimable but mysterious doctor was meant to be Mankiewicz’s admiring self-portrait. He wishes. This smart, sympathetic, multitalented windbag is no one ever encountered in real life. Apparently the film is esteemed for its bold topicality within in its McCarthyite time, and for the dash with which Mankiewicz salts the script with his contrarian opinions, but it does not hold together or hold up. (1951, dvd, n.) *5*

Alice Adams

One of Katharine Hepburn’s twelve Oscar-noms, and one of her best performances ever, as a charming but fraught, annoying but luminous social climber in an Indiana town. I’ve never read Booth Tarkington, but on the basis of this and The Magnificent Ambersons, there must be something there. Astringent satire of social stratification, and status role-playing, is somewhat subverted by a tacked-on happy ending, when Alice/Kate winds up getting her man after all, sympathetic rich youth Fred Macmurray, despite the horrorshow of a family dinner presided over by the slapstick nonchalance of Hattie McDaniel as the domestic for the day. This time capsule of social attitudes was George Stevens’ first film. (1935, TCM/T, r.) *7*

The Girl on the Bridge

A winsome contemporary fable of knife-throwing and nymphomania, a fantasia on love and luck, this stars Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis (French pop star and now Mrs. Johnny Depp.) Patrice Leconte directs in sumptuous widescreen black and white, with New Wave-ish energy. But even more than Truffaut, the reference point is Fellini, with the La Strada-like story and continuous “Fellini-esque” details like the circus backstage. Watchable but disposable, this is sustained by a pinball travelogue, from Paris to Istanbul, and by the sex appeal of the performers. (1998, Sund/T, n.) *6*

The Wide Blue Road

Gillo Pontecorvo’s first film is almost a remake of Visconti’s La Terra Trema in its focus on an Italian fishing village, except it’s in widescreen color and stars a young and magnetic Yves Montand, along with Alida Valli, so it’s more melodrama than neorealism. (So Battle of Algiers must have been a later return to roots, with nonprofessional actors and jagged immediacy.) Despite the gloss, the moral of the story is the similar to Visconti’s Communist-produced epic. Montand is a go-it-alone, entrepreneurial sort, who fishes only with his two young sons, using dynamite to stun the catch, and shuns the co-operative which fishes together with nets. You know it’s not going to end well for him, even if he is ultimately a good father and honorable man. Play with capitalism and it will blow up in your face. The Dalmatian coastal waters, running through rocky coves and islands, are the beautifully-shot title character of the film. (1957, TCM/T, n.) *6*

Comment je me suis dispute... (‘ma vie sexuelle’)

Way, way too long, and a terrible dvd transfer to boot, but I managed to sit through all three hours. The problems here begin with the title, which is rendered in English as My Sex Life...or, How I Got into an Argument, just the sort of wordy indirection this film traffics in. A bunch of attractive but annoying thirtyish academics try to sort out their love lives. The characters, like the writer/director Arnaud Desplechin, are way too much in love with themselves; nobody is quite real to anyone else, so nobody is quite real to us, despite some amusingly familiar quirks, and oddball scenes like the dead monkey behind the radiator. This is the third movie with Mathieu Amalric that I’ve seen in a week, and I am willing to see more, he’s sort of a Gallic Peter Sarsgaard. (1996, dvd, n.) *5+*

The Philadelphia Story

This may not be the perfect movie, there are certainly weightier films, but I cannot imagine it better at what it is. Katharine Hepburn masterfully engineers her comeback from “box-office poison” -- gets a play written for her, a playful take on her public persona, makes it a Broadway success, then returns to Hollywood on her own terms, gets her favorite director, George Cukor, and co-star, Cary Grant, plus emerging star James Stewart, to create an enduring Hollywood classic, a bit of froth that keeps its head after all these years. It’s got enough heart to show that Kate had one, enough plutocratic luxe to revive a Depression genre, enough wit to evoke a permanent smile. (1940, dvd, r.) *8+*

Bad Education

I seem to be in a critical minority, but I found Pedro Almodovar’s latest to be a distinct comedown from All About My Mother and Talk to Her. Not that there weren’t good things in it, primarily Almodovar’s trademark theatricality, but my interest waned as the story took one noirish twist after another. I could follow (if not believe) the convoluted story within a story within a movie, but I couldn’t care about the characters, despite the kaleidoscopic presence of Gael Garcia Bernal -- straight, gay, and transgendered. Clever, comic, confident, and even compassionate, this film simply did not add up for me, wore out its welcome. (2004, Images, n.) *6-* (MC-81, RT-87.)

Crossfire

I’ll admit I was drowsy but this supposed classic sure didn’t wake me up. More interesting for political implications than as a film per se. This beat Gentleman’s Agreement to the punch for postwar investigation of anti-Semitism, following a hate crime by recently-demobbed soldiers. Interestingly, the victim was changed from novel to film, from homosexual to Jew -- movie tolerance seems to follow disaster, whether Holocaust or AIDS. And this film got its makers, including director Edward Dmytryk, in trouble with HUAC during the Hollywood witch-hunt and blacklist. After growing up with “Father Knows Best,” I had a hard time accepting Robert Young as the pipe-smoking detective, and Robert Mitchum and Gloria Grahame are wasted in ancillary roles, though Robert Ryan establishes himself as the heavy. Surprisingly, this low-budget expressionist noir received a slew of Oscar nominations, but lost them all to Elia Kazan’s more polished production on the same theme. (1947, TCM/T, n.) *6-*

Alice et Martin

Andre Techine’s film is beautifully shot but has a novelistic feel, eschewing the usual cinematic conventions for its fractured time sequence, forcing the viewer to make the leaps between scenes and then figure out what happened in the gap. All the through-line one needs is provided by the luminous face of Juliet Binoche as Alice, enough to make one believe in any sort of romance, even one as offbeat as this. Well-acted from top to bottom, and engrossing despite its narrative quirks, this film fills the eye while having a lot on its mind, telling little while showing a lot. Love and murder, family and business, art and fashion, city and country, all in a stew; any plot summary would be beside the point. (1998, IFC/T, n.) *7*

Philadelphia

Jonathan Demme’s last good film offers hope that he may yet come back from his recent slump. This may be studio product but it’s high quality, well put together from start to finish, from Bruce Springsteen to Neil Young, from Tom Hanks to Denzel Washington, from Joanne Woodward to Jason Robards, on and on. Sure it reeks of liberal pieties, but hey, I’m a pious liberal. There are better depictions of gay life and the impact of AIDS (Longtime Companion for one), but this film does strike a blow against homophobia. But what really gives it weight is its depiction of and affection for various kinds of love, from personal to familial to professional. (1993, TCM/T, r.) *8*

Late August, Early September

With intimacy and immediacy, Olivier Assayas plunges us into a group of friends, thirtyish Parisians of literary bent, as they react to the illness and death of one of their number. But this is not exactly a Gallic Big Chill. There’s a headlong, off-hand quality to the filmmaking, that catches the marvelous performances on the fly and makes them seem not like acting at all. Nothing is spelled out but a compelling group portrait emerges, from four discrete chapters set over the year-and-a-bit of the title. This is just what you want a French film to be: smart and sexy, with a look and style of its own. And therefore, not to everyone’s taste. (1998, dvd, n.) *8-*

Days of Heaven

This is the second time I’ve shown Terrence Malick’s masterpiece for the Clark, this time for the Cinematic Landscape film series, tying in with the current small but intriguing exhibition of George Inness in the Berkshires. (The last time was in 35mm at Images for the “Epics of the Soil” series, in conjunction with the Millet exhibition in 1999.) It holds up every time on the big screen, confirming Nestor Almendros’ Oscar for cinematography. And Malick’s legend holds up too, from bursting on the scene with Badlands and following up with Heaven, then the twenty years silence till his next film, The Thin Red Line, and now seven years after that, The New World, apparently a retelling of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, with a star-filled cast led by Colin Farrell, now in post-production and eagerly anticipated. Epic in its visualizations of farming on the Great Plains in the Texas Panhandle leading up to World War I, Days of Heaven is brilliantly narrated but sparsely dramatized, more like a Greek drama or a silent film than a conventional movie, though Richard Gere, Brooke Allen, and Sam Shepard cast plenty of star power, even in continuous silhouette or swapping tight closeups with locusts or worms. (1978, dvd@cai, n.) *9*

Our Daily Bread

Though its politics are nebulous, King Vidor’s self-financed portrayal of the Depression-era “back to the land” movement can only be described as “commonist,” with a celebration of collective labor derived from Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, if not from Lenin or Stalin. The characterizations are formulaic and the plot implausible, but there is real exhilaration in the concluding sequence, after the boss of the collective decides not to run away with the floozy, and the men band together to beat the drought by digging an irrigation ditch from a mountain stream to their dusty corn patch. (1934, dvd, n.) *5+*

The Same River Twice

So-so documentary about a group of “riverdogs” who had a sort of floating commune on the Colorado River twenty years ago, and are now mostly middle-aged family folk, with two small-town mayors among them and one unreconstructed hippie. The film has some observations to make about aging from the Eden of youth, when time was endless and clothes were optional, but Robb Moss doesn’t do much to shape or reflect upon his material, not even so much as a reunion, just each individual chuckling at his or her younger self on tape and commenting on how life has changed for them in the interim. Not without its moments, but there’s neither the context nor the intensity to add up to a real direct cinema experience. (2003, Sund/T, n.) *6-*