Wordplay

After Spellbound and Word Wars, this documentary might seem redundant and derivative, but in the viewing actually comes across as fresh and lively. A live crossword competition seems unlikely from the get-go, and nothing new after similar sagas about spelling bees and Scrabble games, but director Patrick Creadon and his mostly-family team of filmmakers have used music and graphics and celebrity interviews to liven up the proceedings. Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart and other crossword enthusiasts are crosscut with crossword constructors and NYT editor Will Shortz to give a rounded (or foursquare) picture of a benign obsession. And somehow they manage to jazz up this epic confrontation of nerds with Wide World of Sports pizzazz in a way that actually draws the viewer into the contest of a group who are not all that exciting up close and personal. Afterwords [sic], I had to grab the Sunday Times magazine and take a shot at the puzzle. After spending nearly the running time of the movie in cogitation, I had it just about half filled in. Oh well, I’m never going to play big league baseball or basketball either. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-73.)

49 Up

This is the latest installment of a supreme masterwork of the documentary form. In 1963, Michael Apted was a 22-year old research assistant on a 20-minute segment for a news program on British television, which profiled a cross-section of 7-year-old English children to study the differences in class and expectation amongst them. Every 7 years since, he has gone back to offer an updated profile of each still willing to participate, now 13 of them. There is breadth in the range of personality and situation, and depth in the passage of time. Each episode recapitulates each biography, and the moving snapshots of individuals at regular intervals of their lives is sufficient to elicit fascination. But Apted is a canny filmmaker, with first-rate features such as Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist to his credit, and his innovation in this episode is to bring his presence if not his image into the picture. The subjects sometimes address him directly as “Mike” and allude to their shared history, and especially the toll that participation in the project has entailed. The slightly more relaxed approach probably has to do with shooting on digital video instead of film, allowing footage and subjects to unwind. The project itself is a widening gyre, and you can enter at any point. All episodes are now on DVD, and there’s certainly an advantage in living the subjects’ lives with them as they unfold, but don’t be put off by the prospect of coming in on the middle or even working backward from the latest. So if you don’t yet know Tony or Neil or Suzy or the rest, make their acquaintance however you can, and experience the archetypal flow of life from childhood to adulthood and beyond. (2006, dvd, n.) *8* (for this installment; *10* for whole series.) (MC-84.)

I should be embarassed to admit that my knowledge of Stephen Sondheim pretty much begins and ends with West Side Story, so I am certainly late to the party in acknowledging what an amazing lyricist he is. For my “Crossing Channels: Art and Music into Film” series at the Clark, I screened the television recording of his original cast Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985. Uncharacteristically I’d only seen a bit of it beforehand, but put it on the schedule since it fit the themes of the series so perfectly. Though frankly no fan of theater in any manifestation, I was blown away by this record of a performance. The staging was impressive, Bernadette Peters was outstanding and Mandy Patinkin was more tolerable than I expected, but the real revelation was in Sondheim’s lyrics, so sophisticated, so humorous, so profound.

The Comfort of Strangers

Aside from his notable scripts for Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ), I was a big fan of Paul Schrader’s first directorial effort, Blue Collar, and have followed his career thereafter, with particular notice of Hardcore, Mishima, Patty Hearst, Light Sleeper, and Affliction. In The Comfort of Strangers, he works from a script by Harold Pinter adapted from a novel by Ian McEwen, starring Natasha Richardson (intriguingly reminiscent of her mother -- Vanessa Redgrave), Rupert Everett, Christopher Walken, and Helen Mirren, with the exquisitely photographed setting of Venice. So how do all these elements of quality add up to so bad a film? And why do so many of the Fellow’s Favorite films selected by visiting art scholars at the Clark turn out to be dis-favorites of mine? Rhetorical questions I don’t intend to answer. Suffice it to say that this is a film you will love or you will hate, and I incline toward the latter. (1990, dvd@cai, n.) *4*

Children of the Century

This bodice-ripper from Diane Kurys about the tempestuous romance between George Sand and Alfred de Musset features some very fine bodices but adds up to a tempest in a teapot (or glass of absinthe, as the case may be.) As Sand, Juliette Binoche is not as lively as Judy Davis was in Impromptu, and Benoit Magimel, the real-life father of her children, is odious and impenetrable as Musset. Oh sure, the prolonged, systematic derangement of the senses may have been all the rage in 1830s France, but this romance doesn’t make much sense at all. Lovely to look at, however, and something I had to vet as possible to program at the Clark sometime (Delacroix is a minor character), this illustration of the lives of classic authors was as lost on me as the authors themselves. It’s not as tiresome as Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud in Total Eclipse, but not nearly as engaging as the portrayal of Coleridge and Wordsworth, two Romantic poets I actually care about, in Pandaemonium. (1999, dvd, r.) *5+*

Time Regained

To tell the truth, I never got more than a hundred pages into Proust, so I am not one to judge the adequacy of Raoul Ruiz’s adaptation of the final volume. (Nor have I seen any of his other films.) Certainly it would help to have the backstory to keep the characters straight, but the merit of the film is that it stands on its own, with its visualization of time transformed from a line into a Moebius strip -- twisting, turning, doubling back on itself. Ignorance may even be a help in staying with it -- I may not know Odette but I sure recognize Catherine Deneuve; I may not know Gilberte but am quite familiar with Emmanuelle Beart. And John Malkovich as Baron Charlus puts me on home terrain. This is a movie to go with the flow, rather than try to follow. It put me in mind of The Russian Ark, for its ceaseless, searching round of upper class affairs, but I found it much easier to stay with than that long single shot set in the Hermitage. Here I was struck by the surrealism of tracking shots, where not just the camera moved but the objects themselves, in an effective visual metaphor for the flux of time and memory. The presence (and absence) of World War I reverberated with two of my absolutely favorite films, Jules and Jim and The Grand Illusion. So all in all, I had no problem sitting through 162 minutes of elusive and allusive beauty. (1999, dvd, n.) *7*

They All Laughed

Not too much, they didn’t. Meant to be priapic, this would-be romantic comedy winds up flaccid. I rather like Peter Bogdanovich, and I can see why this is his favorite of all his films -- it’s practically a home movie -- but it will not be anyone else’s favorite. I had more tolerance for this film because I happened to watch the dvd extra interview between him and Wes Anderson beforehand, and thus had the backstory to a film that doesn’t have much story at all. So I knew Ben Gazzarra and Audrey Hepburn were actually having an affair, as were Dorothy Stratton and Bogdanovich, who is impersonated by John Ritter. The long-haired hippie who is fellow detective to the other two guys was actually the producer of the film, and created his own patter. Perhaps the most vivid character in the film is the city of New York, and the caught-on-the-fly footage on the streets of the city is the best part of the movie. It’s the staged moments that seem surprisingly awkward, and the sound design is notably amateurish. Dorothy is authentically lovely as a young, golden dream, but the film’s comedy is shadowed by the fact that the jealous husband, glimpsed only through the windows of their apartment, in real life wound up killing her. (See Star 80.) And Audrey is authentically lovely as a middle-aged matron (her actual 20-year-old son plays vapid foil to several young women), but whatever she had going on with Ben, it doesn’t come across the screen. Other young lovelies bounce around the film, but nothing adds up or has any narrative drive. (1981, dvd, n.) *5+*

Though much too little is made of her in one of her very last films, it was neat to see Audrey in her 50s the day after seeing how she was in the ’50s. I showed Funny Face (1957) as part of my “Crossing Channels: Art & Music into Film” film series at the Clark, and she was delightful as the bookstore clerk turned high-fashion model. Fred Astaire was also good as the Richard Avedon/Pygmalion character who discovers her, and then woos her. He can still hoof it for an old guy, but makes a bit of a queasy match for our young Audrey. The film procedes with a marvelous energy -- not least in Kay Thompson as the Vogueish magazine editor -- which peters out into nonsensical complications and a repetitious resolution. Stanley Donen’s direction begins as a swirl of color and movement, including a whirlwind travelogue of Paris, but flaws start to accumulate toward the end, so the final effect is less than euphoric, despite the charm on view.

The Road to Guantanamo

The prolific Michael Winterbottom cements his claim as director of the year, by offering this important semi-documentary just months after releasing the delightfully convoluted Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. This film includes its own fearless (or heedless) convolutions. Without advance preparation, it takes the viewer a while to figure out that we are alternating after-the-fact talking-head interviews of three Muslim young men, with rough-and-ready footage of their version of events being enacted by four others, who don’t clearly match up, and then actual news footage of events in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. We take at face value -- literally -- the claim that the British Muslim boys were in effect on a pre-nuptial lark when they crossed over from Pakistan to Afghanistan and then got sucked into events, which eventually landed them in Guantanamo. Frankly this film is preaching to the choir, when it shows how dehumanizing treatment debases captive and captor alike. It does not reenact Abu Ghraib-like abuses, but shows how the norm of treatment, once the Geneva conventions are thrown away, is both brutalizing and unproductive. When the Tipton Three were released from Guantanamo after two years of incarceration, they were held for less than a day by British police, since the alibi for why it couldn’t have been them, consorting with Mohammed Atta as alleged, was confirmed by their former probation officers. Painful viewing, but a must-see -- not the whole story, but a realistic perspective. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-64.)

Prairie Home Companion

Like the children of Lake Wobegon, all the participants in this film are “above average,” led by a pair of genial old masters, writer and performer Garrison Keillor and director Robert Altman. Meryl Streep is way above average and makes a delightful pair with Lily Tomlin as the gospel-singing Johnson Sisters. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are stupidly but ingratiatingly hilarious as a pair of singing cowboys. Kevin Kline is Guy Noir, private eye become security guard, and the likes of Virginia Madsen, Lindsay Lohan, and Tommy Lee Jones fill in the gaps. Keillor’s regular radio troupe appears as well, and it’s fun to put faces to pleasantly familiar voices. The backstage story is nugatory, but all the performances are enjoyable. Everybody seems to be having a good time, and I did too. This is not Nashville, but I’m the heretical Altman fan who likes this St. Paul version just as much. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-75.)

The River

I do not quibble with the critical consensus about Jean Renoir’s detour to India on his way back from Hollywood to Europe. Again the documentary aspects are marvelous, and in their first Technicolor film (another Scorsese-inspired and Criterion-produced restoration), director Jean and cinematographer Claude live up to the painterly heritage of Pierre Auguste. But somehow Renoir does not have the special aptitude of the neorealist in directing non-professional actors -- too many come across as amateurish rather than authentic, which is disabling to the story and the characters. Adapted from Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel about growing up in an English colonial enclave, but entranced by the life of India flowing past like the Ganges, the story focuses on three teenaged girls who have a crush on a visiting veteran who lost his leg in the war. Now that I think of it, that must have been WWI, but it’s indicative of the apolitical context of the film that it hardly matters whether it’s before or after Gandhi. Girls will blossom into womanhood under any regime; death will intrude but life will go on. Like the river. (1951, dvd, r.) *7*

Shortbus

I don’t have much to say about this film, except to take the opportunity to recommend John Cameron Mitchell’s first film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has an energy and impact that this second lacks. Hedwig is really one of the best rock films ever, an excellent translation of a Downtown NYC musical review about a transsexual singer from East Berlin. Shortbus comes out of the same downtown milieu, shares its free spirit but not its drive or raucous humor. There are a few laughs, but the new film is sweet and inconsequential rather than sexy and stirring -- despite the explicit sex, both hetero- and homo-, on display. Made of the intertwined stories of a sex therapist (no -- “couples counselor”) in search of her own first orgasm, a gay couple coping with one guy’s depression, and a reluctant dominatrix looking for genuine friendship, the film winds up as a big group hug, but not one you really want to get into. (2006, Images, n.) *5+* (MC-64.)