Catching up

I haven’t been on vacation, but on hiatus I guess. Watching a lot of different stuff, but not feeling moved to commentary. The most significant part of my recent viewing has been the third seasons of two outstanding HBO series, The Wire and Deadwood. I will write about them soon at some length, but will first catch up with what I’ve been watching, which has been oddly divided into double features and then films that it took me several nights to get through.

Two of the double features were part of my “Brother to Brother” film series at the Clark, which disappointed me in terms of attendance, but not at all in the quality of the films, all of which would have earned at least a *7+* rating from me on re-viewing. Under the rubric “Brothers at Work” I showed Big Night (1995) and Adaptation (2002), and for “Brothers Documented” I showed Brother’s Keeper (1992)and Capturing the Friedmans (2003). If you haven’t seen all of these, you should. And like all films shown at the Clark, you can borrow the dvds from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown afterwards. Or queue them up on Netflix.

One night I watched a pair of films controversial for their sexual content, but actually fairly tame. Atom Egoyan’s latest, Where the Truth Lies (2005), was bad enough to call the whole auteur theory into question. Egoyan was one of my “10 Under 50” list of young directors to watch, but this film was pretty much unwatchable. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth were okay as a Martin-&-Lewis-type duo, big in the Fifties, who split up in the wake of a hushed-up sex-murder scandal, but Alison Lohman is woefully inadequate as the young reporter trying to dig up the story in the Seventies. You get traces of Egoyan’s obsession with young women in sexual jeopardy, but none of the strength and depth of Mia Kirshner in Exotica or Sarah Polley in The Sweet Hereafter. Let’s just write this off as Egoyan’s misguided bid for commercial success, and hope he goes back to the highly-personal and thought-provoking films he’s made heretofore.

By no means an abject failure, Friday Night (2003) is definitely slighter than Claire Denis’s earlier films, especially the modern classic Beau Travail, but bears the trademark of her highly sensual filmmaking -- languorously executed and exquisitely physical. This is the story of an unexpected one-night stand between a thirtyish woman about to move out of her apartment and in with a boyfriend, and the slightly older man to whom she gives a ride when a transit strike brings Paris traffic to a halt. Almost without dialogue, and without much overt sex either, this is a melodic tone poem on desire and release.

Another evening saw an adventitious double feature of documentaries. First I went to Images to see Sketches of Frank Gehry (2006), Sydney Pollack’s intimate and ingratiatingly modest portrait of his architect friend. I must say it was fun to see my friend, Tom Krens, in wide-screen close-up, his face twenty feet across, commenting on his partner in the construction of the world-renowned Guggenheim Bilbao. A standard mix of talking heads and glamour shots of fabulous buildings, this is nothing special as a documentary, but is as interesting as its subject. Good to see in a theater, it will also appear soon on the PBS series, American Masters.

I came back from Images to watch the dvd of Sunset Story (2003), Laura Gabbert’s portrait of two women in an L.A. retirement home for old radicals. Lucille is an acerbic ex-social worker in her nineties, and Irja is a sunny-minded ex-teacher in her eighties, the best of friends despite their different outlooks on life, one with a cane, the other with a wheelchair, but still mobile when they’re connected, still attending protest rallies together. Their adventures are circumscribed but their personalities are expansive. Hard to imagine spending time in a nursing home as entertainment, but this film has a spirit worth seeing.

Then there was a succession of films I watched over several nights, by happenstance all with the same initial, sort of an intermittent Four C’s. The Corner (2000) was an Emmy-winning HBO series of six one-hour episodes, a precursor to The Wire in writer, subject, and many of the actors, so I’ll discuss both series together later. It was natural for that to take several evenings, but the subsequent films each had a different reason why I couldn’t make it through in just one go.

Coffee & Cigarettes (2003), from indie icon Jim Jarmusch, is also episodic, composed over a number of years from assorted coffee shop vignettes of mismatched pairs: Steven Wright & Robert Benigni, Iggy Pop & Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett & herself, Steve Coogan & Alfred Molina, etc. etc. Low-key and hipper-than-thou, the dialogues do have their moments of wit, insight, or feeling, but in total it’s rather dry and repetitive.

Crack-Up (1946) intrigued me as a noir set in a museum, with an art historian as gumshoe, as it were -- I thought it might be a goof to show at the Clark some time, but it was neither wacky nor involving enough, a curiosity but not a gripper. The story of forged paintings (Gainsborough and Durer) and cover-up murder has its genre convolutions and stylistic elements, but doesn’t make much sense or have much drive. Pat O’Brien is more believable as Knute Rockne than as an art lecturer, even one with populist tastes. I’ve never heard of director Irving Reis, and there’s probably a reason for that.

I’ve most definitely heard of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, however -- I have yet to see a film from “The Archers” that I did not like and/or admire. The list is long and varied, but always strange and surprising; among my favorites are I Know Where I’m Going, Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes. Just before that amazing sequence fits A Canterbury Tale (1944), in a sparklingly-restored, lavishly-extra’ed two-disk dvd from the Criterion Collection. You never really know where this story is going, and only at the end does it fall into place as the gentlest, sweetest bit of war propaganda ever. After a prologue that jumps off from Chaucer, we follow an American soldier on leave (played by real-life army sergeant John Sweet), who gets off his Canterbury-bound train a stop too early, and falls in with “Land Girl” Sheila Sim, down from the city to help out on a farm. A phantom figure in the night pours glue in her hair, as he has done serially to a number of girls, and the pair pursue the mystery to its source, the highly-ambiguous figure of Eric Portman, a landowner and magistrate with a magical connection to the Kentish landscape. Eventually all the characters follow the Pilgrim Road into Canterbury Cathredal for a lovely and satisfying, if still enigmatic, conclusion. I think it’s safe to say you’ve never seen anything like this, unless you’ve seen other productions from The Archers. My mood wasn’t right at first approach, but then I went back and watched it through with mounting enthusiasm, and finished with a big smile. Not the first Powell-directed movie to watch, this will surely reward the adventurous viewer.

"Best of Youth" at the Clark, Sept. 9-10

This you must see. Simple as that. The Best of Youth was not just the best-reviewed film of 2005, but an enduring classic in the making, on a par with the Godfather films or Visconti’s Leopard, or any favorite family saga of historical sweep.

I cannot contain my enthusiasm for this cinematic masterwork, so I will share it by offering a rare opportunity to immerse yourself in six hours of fascinating family dynamics, and forty years of recent Italian history, from the Florence floods of 1966 to a sunny Tuscan villa today, with sojourns in Rome, Turin, and Sicily along the way.

As a very special encore to my summer film series at the Clark, “Brother to Brother,” there will be a free screening of The Best of Youth in two 3-hour halves on the weekend of September 9-10, part one on Saturday, part two on Sunday, both starting at 1:00 pm.

La Meglio Gioventù was originally produced as a miniseries for Italian television, which declined to show it, so it was introduced as a film at Cannes in 2003, where it won an award. A brief U.S. theatrical release in 2005 landed it at the top of several critic’s Top 10 lists, and earned it the year’s highest rating from Metacritic.com -- a score of 89, where 80 indicates “universal acclaim.”

Time Out, by far the most reliable of annual film guides, praises The Best of Youth for a “sure sense of time and place” and avers that the “complex but lucid script and the visceral depth and subtlety of the performances result in classical storytelling of the highest order.”

I won’t give away anything about character or plot -- you deserve to discover it for yourself, unfolding and enfolding as life is lived -- and you must bring your full attention to bear. The fact that there is not a recognizable name or face in the cast or crew of this film only contributes to its air of perfect realism, at the same time it offers enough operatic melodrama to draw tears from a stone. The film elicits a compulsive absorption well suited to marathon viewing -- six hours pass more rapidly than your average two-hour movie. You can’t get enough of it -- I’ve been eager to watch it through again since the moment I got to the end.

Trust me, this film is worth devoting a weekend to. But if you can’t make it to the Clark, I remind you that all DVDs shown there can subsequently be borrowed from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown. Or put it on your Netflix queue. Any way you can -- see The Best of Youth! It really is the best.

A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklater is my favorite young American filmmaker, but I’ve never read Philip K. Dick and have never been taken with the dystopian movies made from his stories, so no wonder my reaction to this film is mixed. This is about slackers gone to seed, dazed and confused to the point of paranoia and dementia -- drug users, dealers, and agents in a dance of death, epitomized in the little red pills of Substance D. Very appropriately, Linklater revisits the techniques of Waking Life, with rotoscoped animation from a live-action digital original. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder are all completely recognizable even through transmorphed, and each is very good, with Downey astounding on several levels. The film is funny and freaky, but neither funny nor freaky enough. Neither the characters nor the story engage sufficiently to take one through all their twists and turns, so one is left with a deficient “oh wow!” response. (2006, Images, n.) *6* (MC-73.)

The Promised Land

Andrzej Wajda is one of the great directors of the world, and this historical epic of the industrial revolution in Poland was recently restored in color and sound, and the dvd looks a lot better than his Man of Iron or Man of Marble. His films from the Fifties like Ashes and Diamonds and Kanal are enshrined in archival quality dvds, but it’s hard to catch up with his subsequent work, in a career that continues to this day. Lodz, where the famous Polish film school was located, was highly industrialized in the 19th century, like Lowell or Manchester, but escaped either destruction or rebuilding in the 20th, so provided the perfect scene for this reenactment, and indeed some of the most impressive scenes take place in a vast factory, with hundred of looms clacking and giant flywheels turning. This story of three young men with entrepreneurial dreams -- a Polish nobleman, Jewish financier, and German businessman -- follows them from youthful energy through fulfillment and disappointment to the point where the leader lapped in luxury orders the shooting of striking workers. In some ways it’s too familiar, and in others not familiar enough, so my appreciation of the impressive mise en scene was muted. (1974, dvd, n.) *6*

Keane

Lodge Kerrigan’s third film is an uncomfortably close-up portrait of a man losing his mind, and just maybe finding it again. Damian Lewis is effective as Keane, whom we find haunting the Port Authority bus terminal months after his 7-year-old daughter, it seems, was abducted while he was supposed to be putting her on a bus back to her mother, from whom he was divorced after a brief marriage. The atmosphere is claustrophobic and uncertain both inside his head, and from the frame-filling outside. He mutters and rants, in a manner one can see frequently on the streets of New York. In the dead-end hotel where he lives, there is an abandoned mother with her own little girl, in whom Keane takes an unsettling interest. The film builds an effective sense of suspense and dread, but can hardly be recommended as entertainment, though it does have a cumulative power in its portrayal of mental breakdown and possible redemption. (2005, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-79.)