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.)