Fellini and Farewell

I haven’t been posting as regularly this month, and will be away altogether for several weeks, but my commitment to Cinema Salon is definitely not waning, so please bookmark this site and return to it as new features take shape in the fall. In preparation for an absurdly uncharacteristic excursion to Italy, in the face of the August sun and heat, the tourists and the terrorists, as well as my crotchety Thoreauvian passion for my own little corner of the world, I have been re-watching a lot of Italian movies lately, in a half-assed attempt to absorb the language.

Rossellini’s Open City was definitely worth watching again, if mostly for the heroism of its making in the waning days of WWII and as the herald of the neorealist movement in film history. It’s powerful, important, and influential -- but not the greatest movie you've never seen.

I’ve always been ambivalent about Fellini. Outside of the incontrovertible masterpiece, 8 1/2, I tend to like his less regarded films more, and his more ballyhoo-ed films less. His first film remains my favorite -- The White Sheik (1951) holds up very well after many years, and even after long-ago frame-by-frame analysis it still delights and amuses me, with the mismatched newlyweds, Leopold Trieste and Brunella Bova, on a pilgrimage to Rome, him to meet family and pope, her to rendezvous with the man of her dreams, Alberto Sordi as the seedy sheik of the fumetti, popular photographic comic books.

I never shared the critical fervor for Fellini’s next film, I Vitelloni (1953), and I remain lukewarm to it overall, though there are certainly many marvelous moments in this group portrait of a circle of aging young layabouts in a provincial seaside town. There is a vein of memory and spectacle that Fellini will mine for the rest of his career, but the film assumes a sympathy for the gang of guys, as weak and hapless as they may be, that compromises the satire with sentiment. It’s complex and flavorful, but not to my taste ultimately, though the model for so many films about guys hanging out together.

Somehow I had managed to miss the iconic La Dolce Vita (1960), except for some of the famous clips like Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain. I was a furtive, impressionable teenager when it first came out, and I remember sneaking peeks at the drugstore paperback that had pictures of the infamous striptease sequence. Later, without seeing it, the film became fixed in my mind as a betrayal of neorealism, and another instance of the wearysome “sick soul of Europe” films of the time. Now that I have seen it, it is indeed all of that, a sprawling spectacle of the celebrity culture to come, again with superlative scenes of sweep and scope, again marred by uncertain sympathies and significance. Marcello Mastrioanni is reliably engaging as the tabloid journalist who pines for his literary roots, but is fully immersed in a world of manufactured media events and posing party-goers. The men are nasty and the women are incomprehensible, all glamour and indulgent self-destruction, as is the movie itself in the end.

I’ll be seeing you at the movies -- again -- after I get back from Italy. Arrivederci.

1 of 10 Under 50: Richard Linklater

1990: Slacker.
1993: Dazed and Confused.
1995: Before Sunrise.
1998: The Newton Boys.
2001: Waking Life.
2001: Tape.
2003: School of Rock.
2004: Before Sunset.
2005: Bad News Bears.
2006: A Scanner Darkly.

Rick Linklater is a fellow who likes to follow his own path, whether it leads him to the margins or into the mainstream. He’s hard to pin down. Various sources give his birthday as 1960 or ’61 or ’62, though all agree on Houston as his birthplace. He went to college in East Texas on a baseball scholarship, but dropped out to work on an oil rig for several years, to save up money and then move to Austin, where he started a film society and taught himself the technical aspects of filmmaking.

Though eschewing school, Linklater thrived in the intellectual ferment of the university town, and made it the subject of his first feature film, Slacker, a plotless succession of relentless talkers, dreamers, and nuts. The peripatetic philosophizing establishes one of the constants of his work, a celebration of idleness and ideation, clearing a space and a time to talk and to dream.

Nonetheless Linklater is no theorist, but a playful realist, focused on what he calls the “politics of everyday life.” His characters tend to talk big, but to live in the little details of their lives. His mission and method is simple: “What’s underrepresented in film is the real essence of life, the in-between space that gets glossed over.”

So he tends to be boldly speculative at the same time he is devoted to the earthy specificities of real life, which enables him to negotiate the divide between independent and commercial cinema, the handmade and the popularly accessible. Dazed and Confused has emerged as a classic teen stoner flick, but its real merit is in the precise depiction of the last day of high school in a Texas town in the summer of ’76, the swirl of characters that anatomize the sociology of a given community at a given moment.

Though Linklater’s first mid-budget studio film, The Newton Boys, a genial reversal of Bonnie and Clyde, flopped, he clicked with the joyous School of Rock, and is back in theaters right now with a remake of Bad News Bears. Between his flop and his hit, he went back to basics and made two films originating on digital video that couldn’t have been more different. Tape is a three-character, one-room, real-time psychological chamber piece, while Waking Life is a sprawling, phantasmagoric exploration of dreaming, dazzlingly animated from a live-action original. (He returns to that technique in the forthcoming Philip K. Dick adaptation, A Scanner Darkly.)

Linklater’s masterpiece so far, his incomparable paean to the intimate joy of talking, worthy of an Eric Rohmer, is the pair of films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Both center around days in the life of two characters, embodied by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, first when they meet on a train in Vienna, and nine years later when they meet again in Paris. We can hardly wait till the next decade for future installments in a series likely to rival Francois Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series.

As far as I’m concerned, Rick Linklater is the shining hope of American cinema today -- intellectual yet accessible, intimate yet socially conscious, personal yet popular, serious yet funny – in a phase, artistic without being arty.

Desiree

Schoolgirl’s-eye-view of revolution and empire, with Marlon Brando as Napoleon and Jean Simmons as the protagonist. I remember watching it on tv as a schoolboy, and it may have gotten me interested in Napoleon’s biography. He jilts her as a young girl for his “destiny” and winds up after Waterloo handing his sword to her and accepting exile -- she gets him to surrender in a way Wellington never could. The production may be drowned in Fifties Cinemascope luxe, but it still looks cheesy to me, except perhaps for the gowns. Desiree snares Marshal Bernadotte (Michael Rennie -- “klatu barada nictu”) on the rebound, and winds up Queen of Sweden. Merle Oberon is Josephine and gets crowned in a tableau straight out of the David painting (which is too immense to be part of the Clark’s current exhibition, “Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile,” but is represented in the galleries by preliminary drawings and full-scale reproduction of details.) There may not be a close-up in the whole film, as the characters rattle around the widescreen frame, so there is no psychology at all in Brando’s performance, but he does strut convincingly. I don’t regret not having my “Citizens and Sovereigns” film series to show this in, but it is not without amusement. (1954, FMC/T, r.) *4+*

The Wire: Season Two

Just let me note as explanation for the week’s gap that I have been watching the 12 episodes of the second season of what just might be the best tv series ever. At some point I will write about it in greater detail, but for now I will simply reiterate my unqualified recommendation. If you have the time and inclination to immerse yourself in a long and rich visual novel about contemporary American life and the way we do business (comparing favorably with both The Sopranos and The Godfather Saga), then you must get The Wire on dvd and watch it straight through from chapter one of season one. The second season folds the Baltimore docks, longshoremen, and international smugglers into its institutional study of the drug trade, along with another highly believable cast of characters, all flawed and yet somehow engaging, predictable and yet not -- in a word, real.

1 of 10 Under 50: Alexander Payne

1961: Born in Omaha, Nebraska.
1996: Citizen Ruth.
1999: Election.
2002: About Schmidt.
2004: Sideways.

A true independent who manages to work within the Hollywood system, Alexander Payne is a writer-director who does not have to compromise his own personal vision. He grew up in Omaha and in crucial ways has never left, even though he went to Stanford and majored in history and Spanish literature, did post-graduate work in Spain, and then got his MFA from UCLA Film School.

His thesis film was screened at Sundance, and attracted notice that gave him a foothold in the industry. Not shy of addressing taboos, his first commercial feature was a fearless plague-on-both-sides satire on the abortion controversy. Laura Dern is Citizen Ruth, an excessively fertile, paint-sniffing lowlife who is ordered by an Omaha judge to have an abortion, and who exploits the situation by becoming the poster child for each side in the ensuing public brouhaha.

Payne emerged as a critical darling with his second film, the hilarious and painfully real Election, which showcases Reese Witherspoon in a star-making role as Tracy Flick, a ruthless Omaha girl determined to be president of her school, as a springboard to greater success in the political realm. The genius of both director and actress is that she remains a sympathetic character, though clearly a monster. Her foil is Matthew Broderick as the teacher who wants to stop the Tracy bandwagon before it’s too late, and slimes himself in the process, a perfect comeuppance for the erstwhile Ferris Bueller.

About Schmidt induced Jack Nicholson to play against type, as a retiring Omaha businessman who is left bereft by the death of the wife he never really knew. He gets a Winnebago and goes on a cross-country quest to reconnect with his daughter, before she marries into a family of California hippie-dippies, with Kathy Bates as the be-muu-muu-ed matriarch. Payne and his longtime writing partner, Jim Taylor, transpose Louis Begley’s novel from NYC to the midwest, and as they always do, shamelessly adapt the source to their own themes and purposes.

Same with Sideways, which last year became a real standard-bearer for skeptical, ambiguous, humorous character studies as opposed to the glorified cartoons that rule the roost in Hollywood, sweeping the Independent Spirit Awards while also nominated for five Academy Awards. Bringing his observant attention to real life in real locales, Payne roadtripped through California wine country with a couple of guys, and the girls they hook up with. He considers casting an extension of writing and matched his characters beautifully with Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, and his then-wife Sandra Oh.

Payne went so far as to publish a “Declaration of Independents” in Variety magazine, a real credo in which he declares, that regardless of funding source, “Cinema is independent only to the degree that it reflects the voice of one person, the director (in conjunction with his or her hand-picked creative team).” He argues that films should be “intelligent, uplifting, and human,” a mirror to life and not a “consumer-oriented projection.” (Read the whole statement at www.alexanderpayne.net/articles.)

Sardonic and ruthless, and yet somehow warm-hearted and sympathetic, with a fine palate for the taste of human foible, Payne is reputed to be returning to Nebraska for his next film. Many confirmed fans will take that or any other trip with him.

Rosetta

I’d been anticipating a dvd of this Cannes Palme d’Or winner for years, when it surprisingly turned up on HBO Signature. It’s a magnetic portrait of a teenage girl trying to stay afloat in a world of shit, but would be relentless to watch for any but the most confirmed of bleeding hearts. If movies mean entertainment for you, then look elsewhere. It’s an up-close and in-your-face depiction of a feisty, almost feral, Belgian girl struggling to survive with an alcoholic mother in a trailer park caravan without running water, desperately yearning to be employed but frustrated at every turn, even in a grimly comic attempt at suicide. Her obsessive routines are never explained but you get the drift after some repetition, e.g. she hides a pair of rubber boots in a culvert so she can change out of her “work” shoes before wading into the cesspool of her homelife. Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes made the equally grim and powerful La Promesse and Le Fils, also about marginal lives on the dark edge of European life. Here they are aided immeasurably by the punk luminescence of the title character, played by Emilie Dequenne, lovely but tough, whose face fills nearly every frame of the film. She may be that character in real life, like Bresson’s Mouchette, or she may be an actress like Sandrine Bonnaire, to go on from Vagabond into screen stardom. I, for one, would like to see more of her. (1999, HBO/T, n.) *7* (MC-76, RT-84.)

Dodsworth

This film was buried deep in my Netflix queue but got bumped up when Time mag recently did a promo on the 100 Best Films, and chose to highlight this as the best of the Thirties. Well, it’s a prestige production all around, and it does still have some life in it, notably in the acclaimed portrayal of Walter Huston as the title character (quite a revelation if you only think of him only as the crazy but wise old coot in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) He’s a benevolent auto magnate who sells his company in order to grand tour in Europe with his younger (and determined to stay so) wife, played with authenticity by Ruth Chatterton. Her idea of the broadening effect of travel is to flirt with an Englishman (David Niven), canoodle with a sophisticated Frenchman, and pledge herself to a younger dancing Austrian, anything to keep from returning to grandmotherhood in Zenith. Huston as Dodsworth is natural, thoughtful, accomodating, powerful yet yielding, thoroughly American abroad, till he finds his own solace with an expatriot divorcee in Naples, played by Mary Astor. Sidney Howard adapted Sinclair Lewis’s novel into a play, and then transposed it to a screenplay, just as Huston was transposed from Broadway. Sam Goldwyn hired William Wyler to direct with his usual impeccable craftsmanship, though there lingers a sense of stagebound blackouts between scenes. It’s all unusually mature, perhaps revelatory, but there are definitely Thirties films that are more alive today than this. (1936, dvd, n.) *7*

My Summer of Love

A masterful three-character chamber piece from Pawel Pawlikowski (apparently his debut feature Last Resort is another film to look for), this tale of two mismatched teen girls in love is naturally dependent on the performers. In a depressed but picturesque Yorkshire village, Natalie Press (Mona) is an isolated but animated, gritty but witty, working-class girl (reminiscent of Sissy Spacek in Carrie or Badlands), who happens to hook up with Emily Blunt (Tamsin), riding her high horse down from her mansion on the hill, where she is holed up after being suspended from boarding school. Paddy Considine (of In America fame) plays Mona’s brother, a violent ex-con who’s found Jesus and turned their mother’s pub into an evangelical meeting place. The set-up seems obvious enough, but the film has enough twists of mood and incident to make it seem unpredictable. There’s swoony adolescent romance, but also a restless probing of character for fantasy and pretense. The camerawork can be skittish and subjective, but also strikingly pictorial. But again, it’s the three performers who make the sale, on this fresh and affecting story of love and deceit. Thanks to Images Cinema for bringing in one of the best-reviewed films of the summer; see it there through next Thursday (7/21). (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-82, RT-90.)

Ararat

I haven’t been re-reviewing the films in my “10 Under 50” film series at the Clark so far, because Almost Famous and Three Kings did not strike me anew, though they certainly held up in my estimation. But with Ararat, on first viewing I was struck most by its density, while second time through I was struck by its lucidity. This is a must-see film, but you must see it awake and alert, in a questing frame of mind. The layers of narrative and meaning must be carefully unpeeled, like an onion. At the center is a film within the film, a compelling but somewhat Hollywoodish historical recreation of the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915. The main action involves a swirl of characters in contemporary Toronto, most connected to the making of the film or a contemporaneous museum exhibit of the paintings of Arshile Gorky, who was himself an Armenian refugee. As is director Atom Egoyan, his wife and star Arsinee Khanjian, the fictional producer Eric Bogosian, and director Charles Aznavour (you are permitted not to share my frisson of delight that his character is called Edouard Saroyan, same as in Shoot the Piano Player, one of my favorite films by my all-time favorite director, Francois Truffaut.) Egoyan regulars Elias Koteas and Bruce Greenwood supply their reliably fine performances, and Christopher Plummer guests memorably in a crucial role. David Alpay and Marie-Josee Croze are equally memorable as third-generation Armenian-Canadians, step-siblings and lovers, around whom the outer layer of the film revolves. I won’t even try to recapitulate the story, will leave it to you to sort all the meta-levels of subject and media, from photograph to painting to film to video and back to film again. Though a puzzler, this movie plays fair, makes sense, and has a visceral as well as an intellectual impact. If you’re not prepared to do the work, you may wind up with the same lukewarm response as the generality of critics. (2002, dvd@cai, r.) *9* (MC-62, RT-56.)

My Brilliant Career

The brilliant career this film celebrates is Judy Davis’s -- all blazing intensity, glowing freckles, and wild red hair, she has gone on to ornament any movie she has appeared in since, especially Husbands and Wives and other Woody Allen films, and reached prima donna status by channeling Judy Garland in a recent acclaimed tv biopic. I would single out two films from her native Australia for particular recommendation: she’s hilarious as Stalin’s one-time lover in Children of the Revolution, and multifaceted as a backup singer to an Elvis impersonator in High Tide, where she re-teams with director Gillian Armstrong, another brilliant career that emerged from this film. An adaptation of an autobiographical novel by a 16-year-old girl emerging from the Outback at the end of the 19th-century, the success of this film comes in capturing two historical moments besides the one depicted. First, that stage of the women’s movement when it became popular to cheer for the girl who chose work of her own over the handsome leading man. And second, the emergence of Down Under into its current preeminence on the stage of world cinema (think Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Peter Jackson, etc. etc.) It’s fun to see a young Sam Neill as well, but it’s Judy Davis who makes this more than a period piece in multiple ways. Though for me the director is usually the star of a movie, lately I have become more and more fascinated with the cinematic magnetism of certain actresses, the ones the camera is said to love, who communicate a naked appeal through any character, however dressed and situated. (1979, dvd, r.) *7*

Bright Leaves

Ross McElwee’s films are all of a piece -- meandering, ruminative, first-person visual essays -- and this new one is up to par, if not quite at the level of Sherman’s March or Six O’Clock News. He always spirals outward from a personal theme, and generally follows a homebound path. He’s taught for decades at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, but he’s still a North Carolinian at heart, and here returns to his beloved home state to tease out the implications of its, and his family’s, long association with tobacco. Following his usual modus operandi, he ricochets from scene to scene, following his pinball train of thought. His old friend and teacher Charlene makes her obligatory appearance, and continues to amuse. He mingles home movie footage of both his father and son, but he’s really on the quest for his great-grandfather’s story, a tobacco grower who invented the Bull Durham formula but then was driven out of business by James B. Duke, or more particularly to find out whether his ancestor was the model for the Gary Cooper character in a 1950 Michael Curtiz film, Bright Leaf. McElwee tracks down co-star Patricia Neal, who divulges that Cooper was the love of her life, but not whether the character was based on the McElwee patriarch. He also goes around in circles with Harvard film theorist Vlada Petric, but mainly focuses on his hometown neighbors’ tangled history with the weed, especially patients of the three generations of McElwees who became surgeons, with their own perspective on the heritage of tobacco. Ross is always on the outlook for the documentary aspects of feature films, and the entertaining and illuminative aspects of documentary recording, and this go-round is continuously amusing and thought-provoking, if somewhat parochial in its approach to larger themes. (2004, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-79, RT-85.)

1 of 10 Under 50: Atom Egoyan

1960: Born in Cairo, Egypt.
1984: Next of Kin.
1987: Family Viewing.
1989: Speaking Parts.
1991: The Adjuster.
1994: Exotica.
1997: The Sweet Hereafter.
1999: Felicia’s Journey.
2002: Ararat.
2005: Where the Truth Lies.

The son of Armenian refugees, Atom Egoyan was born in Egypt but soon moved to British Columbia, so he comes naturally by his career-long obsession with familial interaction and cultural alienation. Though unapologetically Canadian, Egoyan has become an international presence in world cinema.

His first two films announced his themes quite explicitly -- Next of Kin and Family Viewing -- though any of his films might be called sex, lies and videotape, if that title weren’t already taken. With Speaking Parts and The Adjuster, Egoyan continued to center in on his dominant concerns and to develop his style and working methods. The style is consciously enigmatic and offbeat, and the method requires a stable of regular actors to embody his personal visions, led by his wife Arsinee Khanjian.

Egoyan himself is quite explicit about his method: “I encourage audiences to be aware that I am photographing people and to be deeply suspicious of my reasons for doing so.” So, true to his early influences, Beckett and Pinter, he never allows viewers to slip into the illusion that they know what’s going on, that they have a firm grip on reality.

Egoyan’s obsession with voyeurism blossoms in his breakout film, Exotica, a steamy yet intellectual mind massage, without a happy ending, set in a dance club of the same name. Egoyan regular Bruce Greenwood is a square sort of patron, a taxman mysteriously obsessed with Mia Kirshner, whose schoolgirl striptease gets everybody hot and bothered, including the cynical emcee Elias Koteas. The strip joint owner is the director’s wife, very pregnant with their son-to-be Arshile, which reinforces that Egoyan is always making a twisted sort of home movie, on the contested ground between fantasy and reality, anxiety and desire.

He crossed over more than one border in next adapting Russell Banks’ novel, The Sweet Hereafter, which earned him an Oscar nomination for best director. He brought most of his regular actors with him, augmented by Ian Holm and Sarah Polley, plus his hypnotic focus on an isolated community responding to the worst kind of tragedy in its midst, a lethal schoolbus accident. For me, his obsessions muddy up a crystalline novel, but one must still admire the way he made adapted material entirely and powerfully his own, and reached a much wider audience.

He next adapted another of my favorite novelists, William Trevor, with Felicia’s Journey, another anxious tale of sexual obsession, compounded of familial horror and humor. Bob Hoskins is a fastidious Midlands catering manager, who takes an unsettling interest in Felicia, an abjectly pregnant Irish colleen in search of her absconding boyfriend.

In Ararat, Egoyan returns full-bore to his own personal obsessions -- his Armenian heritage, life in exile, the ambiguous consolations of memory and media, art and history, family and culture. He achieves a documentary of inner states, a cinema verite of haunted emotions.

Turning outward again, his forthcoming Where the Truth Lies plumbs the break-up of a Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis-like duo, played by Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon. It debuted this year at Cannes, and will have its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. It’s hard to know what drew Egoyan to the story, but you can bet the result will be a very personal film beneath the Hollywood veneer.

Devdas

I had a nice conversation last week with Janet Curran, editor of Images Cinema’s Focus newsletter (interview to appear in next issue), and one of the questions she asked was about the advantages of seeing a film in a theater vs. at home on a DVD. There are certainly films for which the proper state of receptivity is overpowering immersion, and not just movies meant to jolt and jostle. Devdas is one of these. I meant to see it when Cinephiles presented it at Images last May -- circumstances conspired against it, but I wish I hadn’t missed the opportunity to see this Bollywood spectacle in widescreen celluloid glory. Even the 3-hour running time should be a form of immersion, and a congregation of awestruck fellow viewers should be part of the experience too. But even dimmed and shrunken, robbed of dimension and fragmented to fit my own schedule, this film wove its spell over me. How can I describe it? Sort of like Heathcliff and Cathy meet Romeo and Juliet somewhere outside of Calcutta. A combination of the eye-popping melodrama of Douglas Sirk with the energetic hoofing and bedazzled camerawork of a Busby Berkeley musical, and occasionally monumental cameo close-ups worthy of an Ingmar Bergman. And these are just the resonances a Western viewer might feel -- for a Hindi audience there must be aesthetic, social, and even mythic levels of response, not to mention pop cultural stargazing. Apparently this is a popular Indian novel which has been adapted to film many times, so the intended audience would not spend the first hour in a swirl of uncertainty, trying to sort out the title character and his aristocratic family from his love next door and her less exalted family. The archetypal story comes clear, however, and then takes a number of unexpected twists, interspersed with big production numbers, most of which amplify rather interrupt the drama and its themes. Devdas is Shahrukh Khan, apparently a huge heartthrob in India, while his love Paro is the impossibly beautiful Aishwarya Rai, who can shake a mean bangle, especially when paired with Madhuri Dixit as the courtesan who also loves Devdas. I know nothing about the director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, but he clearly knows what he is up to. The sets are all sumptuous light and color through shifting veils, the music catchy, the dance sweeping and intricate. Heartstrings are played, but rarely off-key. It’s quaint and touching in this era to see a movie totally devoted to sex come through as completely PG, as well as PC and Oprah-ready. Women stand for love against social constraint, while men are either weak or rigid. Right down to the terpsichorean retelling of the romance of Krishna and Radha, this is popular entertainment vivid enough to cross cultures. (2002. dvd, n.) *7+*

1 of 10 Under 50: David O. Russell

1958: Born in New York City.
1994: Spanking the Monkey.
1996: Flirting with Disaster.
1999: Three Kings.
2004: I (Heart) Huckabees.


David O. Russell majored in English and Political Science at Amherst and graduated to union organizing and literacy activism in Maine and Boston. Beginning with documentation of workers’ conditions, he went on to an internship at PBS and got grants to make a number of short films.

Spanking the Monkey, his directorial debut feature, won awards at Sundance and the Independent Spirit Awards, and this maverick filmmaker was on his way, shocking and amusing audiences with a ribald incest comedy. Jeremy Davies plays a would-be medical student stuck at home for the summer with Alberta Watson, his bedridden mother, hobbled by a leg cast. A time of baleful frustration yields to forbidden desires, both hilarious and poignant.

Russell went on to even greater success with slapstick family dysfunction in the uproarious Flirting with Disaster. Ben Stiller is a sad sack who feels he can’t name his own child until he finds out who his real parents are. Adoptive parents Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal are dismayed, and wife Patricia Arquette is bemused, but adoption counselor Tea Leoni is determined to help on his quest. After several misdirections, he discovers his superannuated hippie birthparents, Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda. Two gay FBI agents are along for the ride, and chaos ensues. Screwball but smart, this film begins to crystallize the director’s subversive sensibility.

Moving from the familial to the political, Russell is equally subversive in Three Kings, set in Iraq during the chaotic aftermath of the first Gulf War. He turns the war film genre on its head, mixing it with crime caper and irreverent satire. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube are ambiguous heroes, going off-mission to pursue their own treasure hunt, but coming into uncomfortably close contact with the Iraqis themselves. Incisive and funny, speedy and unpredictable, Russell has evolved his own idiosyncratic style.

Even if his next film, I (Heart) Huckabees, bumped up against the limits of that style, he deserves credit for pursuing his own vision of things. Two more sad sacks, Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg, hire the team of “existential detectives,” Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, to ferret out the source of their malaise. The Hoffman character, based on Robert Thurman, Uma’s dad, with whom Russell studied Buddhism, espouses theories of the connectedness of everything, while rival French existentialist Isabelle Huppert stresses the meaninglessness of it all. It all collapses into too-muchness, but you have to acknowledge the filmmaker's boldness in addressing the biggest themes with the most fearless humor.

Who knows where David O. Russell will turn his sharp wit next, but you can be sure that it will be funny and thought-provoking, dazzling and daring.

Divorce -- Italian Style

Here Italy is quick and witty, in contrast to the foregoing. Pietro Germi’s comedy holds up very well indeed, but it’s amazing that it was nominated for three Academy Awards, and won for Best Original Screenplay (a different era in film, for sure, though maybe Almodovar is the modern avatar.) Marcello Mastrioanni was certainly worthy of his Best Actor nod, a genius performer and an immensely appealing personality, even as a Sicilian baron scheming to dispose of his ardent but mustachioed wife so he can marry his 16-year-old cousin. I relished the satire on “my people,” however far away I was raised from those sun-baked stones, with their “men of honor” so slithery and wicked, buffoonish and yet somehow ingratiating. (1962, dvd, r.) *8*

Frescoes & fiascoes: Italia ad absurdum

I’m afraid I’ve wasted my time this week with two terrible movies, only partially redeemed by handsome widescreen travelogues of Florence and Venice respectively. Light in the Piazza (1961, TCM/T, n.) is merely nonsensical until you start to think about it, when it becomes offensive. What’s a beautiful retarded girl (Yvette Mimieux) to do but go to Italy and fall in love with a puppyish rich Italian boy (George Hamilton!), where she’ll fit right in and no one will notice her mental deficiency? Her mother (Olivia de Havilland) is in a quandary, about whether to let her go and whether to succumb to the charms of the boy’s father (Rossano Brazzi.) The viewer is in a quandary, whether to turn off this idiocy or turn off his mind and simply absorb the beauty of Tuscany. One wonders how this was turned into a musical that recently won five Tony awards? Maybe Broadway audiences don’t notice its mental deficiency. Death in Venice (1971, dvd, r.) is awful in a different way. This was the movie that gave me a negative impression of Luchino Visconti, which subsequently has been overturned by catching up with his earlier masterpieces, but I am far from won over by a second viewing. This adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is punishingly slow and ludicrously overt, albeit with some visual elegance. Dirk Bogarde is not too bad as Aschenbach (changed from writer to composer, to justify the Mahler soundtrack), but most of the film is a resolutely unfunny joke, a deathly artifice about the perverse vitality of beauty . Did I mention that the movie is s-l-o-w-w-w . . . adagio . . . lentamente . . . z-z-z-z-z-z? I’m not giving these movies a numerical grade, but if you take my word for it, you don’t want to see either of them, unless you’re hankering for the scenery.

1 of 10 Under 50: Cameron Crowe

1957: Born in Palm Springs, CA.
1982: Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Wrote screenplay based on his nonfiction book.)
1989: Say Anything. (Writer/director of this and subsequent films.)
1992: Singles.
1996: Jerry Maguire.
2000: Almost Famous.
2001: Vanilla Sky. (remake of Alejandro Amenabar’s Open Your Eyes.)
2005: Elizabethtown. (due in October.)

California born and bred, Cameron Crowe is an apt transitional figure from the classic writer-directors of comedies in the Hollywood system such as Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder, to the new breed of independent writer-directors celebrated in this film series.

By the time he graduated from high school at the age of 15, he was a widely-published rock journalist with a regular gig at Rolling Stone magazine, which is the source for the autobiographical story of Almost Famous, which won him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

As a baby-faced 22-year-old, he went back to high school as an undercover journalist, and published his findings in the successful book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which he adapted into the screenplay for the even more successful movie, directed by Amy Heckerling.

After some years of struggle, that success led to his own first directorial effort, Say Anything, a now-classic and unusually true-to-life teen comedy, involving the romance between valedictorian Iona Skye and dropout John Cusack, whose aspiration is to be kickboxer.

He moved on to the romantic travails of twentysomethings in Singles, set in the Seattle grunge music scene and starring Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon, and Bridget Fonda.

He broke through to commercial success and multiple Academy Award nominations with Jerry Maguire, with Tom Cruise as a bigtime sports agent who has a disastrous attack of conscience, Cuba Gooding as the one football star who stays with him, and Renee Zellweger as the single mom whose heart he wins with the change of his own.

Crowe then published a book of interviews with his hero and model, Conversations with Billy Wilder, before releasing his most personal film yet, Almost Famous, which landed on more than 150 lists of the Top 10 films of the year. The 10<50>Untitled: The Bootleg Cut.

He re-teamed with Tom Cruise for Vanilla Sky, a remake of a Spanish-language thriller, and his forthcoming film with Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon is called Elizabethtown.

Crowe is married to Nancy Wilson of the rock group, Heart, and they have twin boys.

His affectionate humor and love of popular culture make him one of the more successful independent auteurs of the new American cinema, personal yet personable, ambitious yet accessible.