Encounters at the End of the World

I see all of Werner Herzog’s documentaries eventually (from Grizzly Man to the most obscure), but I was surprised to see this turning up on some “best of the year” lists while the Netflix disk was already sitting on top of my tv. Werner always takes us to farflung places to watch man confront nature, and here he takes us to Antarctica, the south pole where one of the film’s subjects says every untethered person in the world eventually slips. You do have to be a little strange to get a kick out of scuba diving beneath the ice in search of new organisms, penetrating glaciers or volcanoes, rhapsodizing about seals or whatever object of study has brought you to the nether end of the world. Herzog’s seemingly random observations always do add up to something, at least in the labyrinth of his own mind, but I did not follow the thread in this as well as others. So to me it was just an amalgam of odd characters and striking photography, especially underwater, which was what interested Herzog in the first place. He embarks with a promise not to put any “fluffy penguins” in his Antarctica film, but winds up finding a completely Herzogian penguin, who treks off from all the others, headed for distant mountains and certain death, a tiny dot in a frozen immensity. (2008, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-80.)

Iron Man

I usually eschew films about comic book superheroes, but intriguing reviews and a recommendation from my reliable daughter led me to give this a try, and you might want to as well, especially if you are susceptible to the roguish charm of Robert Downey Jr., really one of the more appealing stars in Hollywood. The film is fast and fun, and given a patina of relevance by the protagonist’s repentence over his arms merchant history. His antagonist is Jeff Bridges -- the Dude gone evil -- and his Girl Friday is Gwyneth Paltrow, blond and bland. Downey’s transformation into the title hero shows some technical ingenuity and flash, and the whole bobs along nicely on a current of wit. I glimpsed Jon Favreau (from Swingers) in a tiny role, and was thinking how he had come down in the world, until the final credits rolled and I saw that he was actually the director of the film, and not a bad one either. Personally I wouldn’t give a look to any film featuring Batman or the Hulk or any other Marvel character, but if you’re at all inclined that way, this is one you could watch without having your intelligence insulted or your senses assaulted. (2008, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-79.)

Longford

Lacking any thread to my viewing other than queue management, I keep coming back to a given film’s life on my lists. This one languished on my TiVo “Now Playing” list for more than a year. I recorded it when it was first broadcast on HBO, then deleted it when I realized I am too much of a Sunny Jim to relish serial killer movies (aside from Zodiac), but recorded it again after it won a slew of Emmys. What finally drove me to watch it was a strong recommendation by David Thomson in “Have You Seen ...?” -- his new book of “personal introduction to 1000 films.” (Come to think of it, that’s just what Cinema Salon is as well -- not quite up to a thousand, but getting there.) Anyway, the cast was an attraction as well, with personal favorite Samantha Morton playing convicted child killer Myra Hindley of the infamous Moors Murders in the ’60s, and the always-impressive Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford, the dotty old Labor minister who led a decades-long campaign for her redemption in the face of public odium. There’s also a chilling portrayal of Myra’s partner in crime by Andy Serkis, much scarier than his Golem. I’m not familiar with director Tom Hooper, more than competent here, but I’m now on the lookout for anything by writer Peter Morgan, of The Queen and other recent inquiries into the public life of Britain. This film lets no one off easy, least of all the viewer, in its exploration of guilt and forgiveness, evil and the possibility of conversion. It’s really better not to know too much about the facts of the case, nor to have formed an opinion, because the strength of this film is the way it leaves questions open, and infinitely ponderable. (2006, HBO/T, n.) *7* (MC-88.)

Rachel Getting Married [etc.]

Though I hadn’t been to a movie theater in a coon’s age, when Images Cinema reopened after a period of refurbishment, I felt moved to go to the first screening in the new space and renew my expired membership. The new entrance, direct from Spring St. instead of through a side alley, looked great (and reminiscent of the olden-days arrangement), and the new seats were a major upgrade. The film itself wasn’t bad either. I happened to be talking with two couples in succession recently, and one had said Jonathan Demme’s latest was terrible while the other recommended it. Me, I was glad to see it but I wouldn’t urge it upon the unwary. Basically, it’s Demme does Dogme -- handheld camera in long, roaming takes; no music except live within the action; in-your-face familial confrontation -- with a nod to Robert Altman’s Wedding as well. Anne Hathaway plays an addict released from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding, and she makes for a convincingly impossible person. (If you know her only as Disney’s diarizing princess--gag!--or the “smart, fat girl” in The Devil Wears Prada, this role seems totally out of character, but not so much if you’e seen Havoc.) The set-up is more than a little like Margot at the Wedding, but these two difficult sisters are somewhat easier to take. Rachel is well-played by Rosemary DeWitt (who was Don Draper’s first girlfriend in Mad Men), but the real delight to see is Debra Winger as their absconding mother, looking great and playing lots of subtle notes in her brief portrayal. The sororal relationship is believably complicated, and so is the sense of being present at the event, in all its joy and embarassment. Some people like all the live music and some people don’t, but it’s certainly justified in that the groom is in the music business, as well as many of the guests, not to mention Demme’s own concert work from Stop Making Sense to Heart of Gold. Being non-social myself, I found much of the film to be as excruciating as a wedding in the flesh, but as a fly on the wall it wasn’t too painful to observe. (2008, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-82.)

For one reason or another, I’ve been re-watching a variety of films on which I simply want to renew my recommendation. The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2006, MC-78) is definitely a documentary worth seeking out, working on a variety levels from personal portraiture to advertisement for Community Supported Agriculture. John Peterson is a fascinating amalgam of true son of a midwest family farm and countercultural fantasist. Through the vicissitudes of decades he loses and finds his vocation, obsessively observed first in home movies and then by his longtime friend Taggart Siegel, who is the director of this witty, moving, and informative film.

The Madness of King George (1994) got queued up in a Helen Mirren moment a few years ago, and it’s something I’ve thought of showing at the Clark. And it’s well worth a second look. Lady Helen is predictably excellent as the Queen, but Nigel Hawthorne as George III rules all. For a filmed play (written by Alan Bennett, and directed from stage to screen by Nicholas Hytner), the on-location spectacle of palaces and pageantry is very well handled, with plenty of humor and intrigue and even poignancy.

El Cid (1961) was an historical epic remembered fondly from my youth and highly praised in surveys of Anthony Mann’s directorial career, so reviews of a new Collector’s Edition led me to leap it to the top of my queue. Unfortunately Netflix, as is typical, sent an earlier DVD, widescreen but not digitally restored, so the viewing was not optimal. Still, it’s an impressive example of the overblown spectacles of its time, with Charlton Heston giving an unusually persuasive performance as the semi-mythical 11th-century Spanish knight who brought Christians and Muslims together to repel a Moorish invasion from Africa. Sophia Loren is a spectacle in herself as the love interest. As an independent producer, Samuel Bronston made a series of epics in Spain, but this one makes the most of Spanish landscapes, castles, and cathedrals, with scenes of combat escalating from a well-staged joust to an immense seaside assault on a walled city. Especially notable to me was the seeming authenticity of period art and decor -- this was not Malibu medievalism.

Also less than optimal was the disk of The Man from Laramie (1955), last of the celebrated Anthony Mann-Jimmy Stewart Westerns, quite an advance on The Furies and not just because it’s widescreen and technicolor. The story is familiar but not overly so, with plenty of surprises in both the action and the acting, with the feel for landscape that Mann is noted for, psychological instead of mythic in the Fordian vein. The retrospective elevation of Mann’s reputation seems justified, and his direction offers some guarantee of quality for those looking for oldies but goodies. Now that I’ve matched a Ford film series to a Remington exhibiton at the Clark, I will definitely behold the Mann if I ever do another series of Westerns.

The Color of Lies (Au Couer du mensonge)

Claude Chabrol turned out to be the most prolific director of the French New Wave, finding his method and material early and working it year by year to the present day. I may have seen ten of his films, but that just scratches the surface. Widely declared the French Hitchcock, his films all seem to show bourgeois life opening up a vein of violence. A sense of suspense drives the story, but the point is always psychological probing of ordinary people, families, and communities. I must have queued up this film because one of the characters is a painter, and his painting is taken seriously, so I might show this at the Clark one day, if I ever get around to a series on “Artists Behaving Badly,” to include Scarlet Street and others. I might also have been trolling for Sandrine Bonnaire films, since she seems to me the most interesting French actress of her generation. So here she’s the wife of an artist who falls under suspicion for the murder of one of his young drawing students. The plot is highly convoluted and basically beside the point. The setting in a village on the coastline of Brittany, however, is all important, as are the various interrelations among the inhabitants. The film is full of intelligent and interesting observation, if not visceral or conclusive. (1998, dvd, n.) *6+*

More gaps to fill

My viewing remains more random than usual. While generally diverse, now it’s hard to find any thread at all. Let’s see if we can tease one out. I really need to weed through and reorganize my Netflix queue, get it down from 200 to 100, and probably should economize by cutting back from five to three discs at a time. When I first subscribed to Netflix eight years ago, they only had one shipping point, in LaJolla CA, but now a two day turnaround in the mail is typical, so even if I watched one every day, the three-disc deal would be sufficient. And that was before I had TiVo, where I probably have twenty more films “Now Playing.” So these were the latest disks to show up in my mailbox:

There’s a strong presumption than any new Criterion Collection release is likely to be worth watching, and Barbara Stanwyck is an actress I look for, so that’s how The Furies (1950) got to the top of my queue. I’m not really up to speed with Anthony Mann’s Freudian Westerns, aside from one or two of the Jimmy Stewarts, but this transposition of King Lear to the New Mexico desert reeks of incestuous passion. Walter Huston, in his last film, is a cantakerous cattle baron, with Stanwyck as his spirited daughter, a mare who will not be broken. In noirish black and white, with more night scenes and interiors than wide open spaces, the film is a little much, but not enough, if you know what I mean. The leads are magnetic but much that surrounds them is laughable. Only for aficionados of one sort or another.

I was looking for another Therese adapted from a French novel, recommended by an emeritus professor who frequently comes to my screenings at the Clark, but wound up with Therese Raquin (1953), a Marcel Carne film from after his classic period (which was capped by all-time great Children of Paradise). Despite a tendency to turn Zola into potboiler, this story of a fatal triangle is carried by a luminous young Simone Signoret and a rugged Raf Vallone. Nearly unknown, it is not something you need to seek out, but not without interest

It must have been sheer randomness that brought Death and the Maiden (1994) to the top of my queue. I may have put in on after I had a chance to meet Sigourney Weaver briefly at a Williamstown Film Festival event, or maybe I was filling in my Roman Polanski life list. At any rate, it was years ago and the reason has been forgotten. My viewing was slightly discombulated by a dirty disk, but even allowing for the disruption, I don’t think this adaptation of an Ariel Dorfman play about torture, guilt, revenge, and forgiveness, set in an unnamed country reminiscent of Chile after Pinochet, would have worked for me, starting with the artificiality of the English-speaking cast. Sigourney is strong but not quite right as the torture victim who gets an unlikely chance to get back at one of her tormentors, played with requisite ambiguity but not much resonance by Ben Kingsley. Stagey as the set-up may be, Polanski brings a personal intensity to the volatile proceedings, which makes the film hard to dismiss despite evident flaws.

At some point when I was on a noir kick, it occurred to me that I had never seen the Jack Nicholson-Jessica Lange remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Now I have, and while it offers more than the 1946 version with John Garfield and Lana Turner, it also offers less. More of the book, but less sense. More sex, but less heat. More real, but less feel. It’s fascinating to watch Jack and Jessica in their prime, as they go down and dirty, if rather tastefully so. This is pulp gone classic, with script by David Mamet, direction by Bob Rafelson, and cinematography by Sven Nykvist (!). It’s a rare case in which a single reviewer -- Vincent Canby -- says everything I would say and more. Yeah, what he said.

Not as bad as one may have heard but not as good as one might have hoped, Art School Confidential (2006) is the follow-up by director Terry Zwigoff and writer/artist Daniel Clowes to their zingy, zesty Ghost World. As an art museum film programmer, I felt obliged to watch a film with “Art” in the title (plus, Zwigoff’s Crumb is a doc I’ve shown twice at the Clark already). So I kept my eyes and mind open, despite the critical pummeling this film took upon release. I found it half-good, with an effective skewering of art school pretension (like Claire’s experiences in Six Feet Under), but then some undernourished mystery about a serial killer develops and the satire goes from stinging to distasteful and disproportionate. Some familiar faces, some not so, appear in the film, but no acting worthy of a name. So now it’s on my list, but I wouldn’t recommend it for yours. (MC-54.)

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

This vanity project projects sufficient humility to be watchable, if not a must-see. First-time writer-director Dito Montiel adapts his own memoir of growing up in Astoria, Queens in the 1980s, a prescription for self-importance, but enlists Robert Downey Jr. and Shia LeBeouf to play his older and younger selves, and Dianne Wiest and Chazz Palminteri for his parents, with Martin Compson (of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen) as one of a variety of believable street boys and girls, another of whom grows up very believably and rivetingly to be Rosario Dawson. So across the board the acting trumps the ego involved, and with big assists from cinematographer and editor, plus Sundance workshopping, this film is able for its duration to make you forget its descent from Mean Streets and all its progeny, and lose yourself in a time and a place and a group of people hanging out and hooking up, getting by and coming to grief. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-67.)

Filling in the gaps

Lately I’ve been re-viewing a lot of films without being moved to review them, so I will just mention some of them in passing. Zhang Yimou’s staging of the Beijing Olympics led me back to To Live (1994), which some time ago was a revelation to me (Gong Li!) and set me off on a binge of Chinese movies, including all of his. Lately he has relied too much on sheer spectacle, in historical martial arts epics, but formerly alternated relatively intimate films of contemporary peasant life. To Live contains both elements, in a decades-long family saga within an historical pageant (for which I tend to be a sucker -- e.g. The Best of Youth), following China from World War II through the Cultural Revolution. This time the filmmaking seemed a bit stodgy, but the history lesson remained vital.

I was happy to relive the bejeweled music box perfections of two French classics of aristocratic adultery, but feel disinclined to look too much inside the works, to examine the delight-producing mechanisms. In my intermittent retrospective of Jean Renoir (in which La Bete Humaine filled a gap and Elena and Her Men stuck me as his worst effort, chaos without control), I had the Criterion Collection disk of Rules of the Game (1939) around for months, while I spent way too many evenings watching election coverage of one sort or another. But once Barack was safely elected, I was free to revisit the chateau where Renoir’s figures high and low go through their clockwork dance. What a perfect construction -- delightfully complicated, exquisitely sad, lightly profound! Though I will always prefer La Grande Illusion personally, I cannot quibble with the consensus view that La Regle du Jeu is one of the very best films of all time.

Meanwhile another new Criterion Collection disk finally arrived after a “very long wait” on my Netflix queue. Max Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame de ... (1953) displays similar clockwork charm, though his mechanism is a moving camera rather than Renoir’s deep focus. Through the contrivance of the eponymous jewelry, which passes back and forth like the clap in La Ronde, Ophuls tells a story of passion that breaks through the mirrored facades of fin-de-siecle France. Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio De Sica are sublime as the lofty lovers, while Charles Boyer maintains his dignity as the cuckolded general. One marvels at the construction, but catches a breath of passion as well -- it’s all artificial but moving nonetheless.

Peter Watkins must be one of the most unwatched and unwatchable of great filmmakers. Gradually more of his work is becoming available. It was decades before I got another chance to see an old favorite, Battle of Culloden (1964), but when I caught up with Punishment Park (1971) on IFC recently I couldn’t bear the old counter-cultural hysteria. Privilege (1967), however, retained its interest despite seeming amateurish and implausible. There was some incisive social analysis in the story of pop star Paul Jones being exploited to subvert dissent into semi-fascist conformity. Jean Shrimpton is blankly effective as the bird of the moment, and the broad caricatures of British business and religious leaders are sometimes spot-on, if you can see past the lameness of the overall enterprise.

The Coen brothers, on the other hand, are sometimes undermined by their own facility, which can border on slickness. While recently underwhelmed by No Country for Old Men -- at least relative to its Best Picture Oscar -- I retain appreciation of a number of their films. Having read several references to the growing cult status of The Big Lebowski (1998), I decided to give it another look. Sure enough, it’s very funny in places, and its central conceit of plopping aging stoner Jeff Bridges in the midst of a Raymond Chandler-like plot gives free rein to a number of reliable performers, such as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, and others. It’s not a great film, but it does fit neatly in the Coen career project of genre deconstruction. I think most would agree, “The Dude abides.”

Charles Burnett seems to me to have been given the benefit of critical affirmative action, with many willing to overlook the low-budget flaws of his slice-of-ghetto-life stories. While Killer of Sheep was sustained by the soundtrack -- whose clearances kept it from being released for decades -- My Brother’s Wedding (1983) proves less worthy of resurrection. There are some flavorful characters, but it is less the amateur actors than the flat-footed script that undermines the authenticity of Burnett’s picture of Black life in L.A.

Having passed the midpoint of my “Anime for Grown-Ups” film series, I am inclined to pat myself on the back for my selections from Studio Ghibli. Grave of the Fireflies is truly one of the great anti-war films of all time, Whisper of the Heart a delightful and poignant story of a young girl growing up and finding her purpose in life, and Porco Rosso an accomplished pastiche of cinematic adventure and romance seen through personal perspective of Hayao Miyazaki. I tried to pick animation that would appeal to filmlovers who don’t typically watch animation, and these films certainly fill the bill.

Standard Operating Procedure

Errol Morris’s latest documentary examines the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs -- who took them and why? what they show and what they don’t show? It’s definitely a meta-exercise and not “just the facts, ma’am,” as the jazzy graphics and stagings seem to betray. While it is interesting to see some of the convicted soldiers (Lynddie England et al.) tell their side of the story, and there is point to the Susan Sontag-like concern with the inherent meaning of photography as a medium, this is a pivotal story told askance, and suffers badly in comparison with Taxi to the Dark Side in telling the truth about America’s descent into torture. The film does help you get inside the heads of the “bad apples” who were held accountable, but does not follow the trail to the bad apples in the White House who were truly responsible, as Alex Gibney’s film does so well. So ultimately it says more about Errol Morris’s standing operating procedure (showy but generally effective) than about the S.O.P of military interrogation, and fits more usefully into his own oeuvre than into the essential but suppressed debate over whether the U.S.A. is a torture state. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-70.)

Happy-Go-Lucky

I was happy to view Mike Leigh’s latest with little advance knowledge, so the film could unfold for me like life itself, never knowing just what’s next, with first reactions misleading and final feelings mixed. That is the essence of Leigh’s process, the six months he spends with the cast, working through the characters from the outside in and the inside out, and letting the story emerge from the personalities and interactions that develop. It works so well, one wonders why more directors don’t work the same way. After Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, and more, Leigh definitely ranks with the best directors in the world. At first glance, Happy-Go-Lucky may look like a departure, more light-hearted and uncomplicated, but it becomes progressively deeper and more complex, even days after viewing. I confess to having borrowed a bootleg copy of this new release, but will see it again if it ever arrives at a theater near me, and it’s sure to seem different with hindsight, the randomness illuminated by the canny construction, the artful raising and subverting of expectation. I won’t spoil any surprises for you, but just describe the opening scene. Through the credits, we see Poppy riding her bike through the streets of London, smiling broadly and waving at strangers. She stops and goes into a bookstore, annoying the taciturn clerk (and some of the audience) with a stream of laughing patter while she browses. As embodied indelibly by Sally Hawkins, she’s an attractive but psychotically cheerful 30-year-old, turned out in a rainbow of flounces and furbelows. Too much to take, it seems, but beneath her antic aspect, we gradually discern finer qualities. She comes out of the bookstore to find her bike stolen, but her only regret is that she didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to it. In subsequent scenes we see her partying with her female mates, and learn that she has found her niche as a primary school teacher. And we find out that her good cheer is not a natural mania, but a chosen way of being in the world. We follow her through several weeks of small (mis)adventures, and find out just what it means to view the world through Poppy-colored glasses. Sally Hawkins seems destined for a totally-deserved Oscar nomination (like Imelda Staunton as Vera Drake), and however you wind up feeling about her character, you have to love her performance. Equally potent is Eddie Marsan (memorable as Vera’s son) as the tightly-wound driving instructor, whose weekly sessions with Poppy frame the story. The rest of the cast live in their roles, revealing much in small and sidelong ways. This is a film to see with an open mind and an open heart, as well as open eyes. (2008, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-84.)

Late Marriage

I went into this film not knowing what to expect, and it kept taking turns I didn’t anticipate. Dover Koshashvili sets his film within the Georgian emigre community in Israel, and indeed casts his mother as the mother of his protagonist, so this comes across a bit like a home movie -- and what a strange home it is. Lior Ashkenazi plays a superannuated student still living off his parents while he completes a doctorate in philosophy. The actor looks disconcertingly like Steve Carrell, so I was tempted to look at this film like “The 31-Year-Old Non-Virgin.” His parents are eager to arrange a marriage for him, and the film starts with one in a long string of matchmaking meetings, this with a hot but sullen teenager. Later in the evening we find out why Zaza showed so little interest -- he goes to visit his lover, a 34-year-old Moroccan divorcee, played with unabashed sexuality by Ronit Elkabetz. I wasn’t expecting an extended sex scene in an Israeli movie, and this one is startling in its naturalness, quite unlike any film sex I’ve ever seen. But Zaza’s family finds out about the affair and takes collective action, which is just as startling. This insular community is rigid in its ways, and will accept no deviations from its norms. What will Zaza do? Whatever you expect, you will be surprised, and probably not satisfied. It’s a strange world, and you’ll likely remain on the outside looking in. Is this a deadpan comedy, a scathing satire, or a scarring familial drama? You decide. (2002, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-82.)

The Edge of Heaven

After Head-On, Fatih Akin is a filmmaker of whom I expect much, and while he doesn’t disappoint here, the plus in my recommendation is dependent on the dvd’s “Making of” extra, one of the best I’ve seen in showing how the elements of the film came together. Born in Germany of Turkish parents, Akin’s films all confront that duality, and this story too shuttles between the two countries and amongst a group of six characters who sometimes connect and sometimes don’t, in a fatalistic dance signaled by two title cards that announce the deaths of characters before we even meet them. The element of contrivance is strong, but so is the sense of human reality, and discovery as well. The story is broken up in Babel fashion, but much less forced. Schematic sure, but adventitious too, with a documentarian’s feel for local color, whether it’s a red-light district in Bremen or a village on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, a German language bookstore in Istanbul or a prison in Hamburg. Each of the actors is quite involving, though only Hanna Schygulla is a familiar face. Once upon a time Fassbinder’s muse, here she is the hausfrau mother of a young woman who gets involved with an illegal immigrant woman, a radical on the run and looking for her mother, who had long been sending money back to Turkey from Germany. That mother had fallen in with an old Turkish man, whose son teaches Goethe in a German university. These characters collide in different contexts, in a world of hurt where only forgiveness can justify hope. I was struck by the happenstance of watching back to back two foreign films of culture clash, in which characters of differing nationality have to rely on English as their medium of communication, an instance of the soft power of the American imperium. (2007, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-85.)

The Band's Visit

Though admirably minimalist in its heart-tugging or lesson-learning, this is a crowd-pleaser that didn’t especially please me. Writer-director Eran Kolirin follows an official Egyptian band of eight, dressed in powder-blue military uniforms, as they go astray on their way to perform at the opening of an Arab cultural center somewhere in the Israeli desert. Finding themselves stuck in a remote settlement with “no Arab culture, no Israeli culture, no culture at all,” they have no choice but to accept the hospitality of a lively cafe owner, played so enticingly by Ronit Elkabetz that I had to move Late Marriage to the top of my Netflix queue, where it has languished for years. The culture clash is muted here in the middle of nowhere, with both sides finding common ground in English (which kept this film out of the running for a foreign film Oscar). With some charming set-ups and amusing awkward moments, the film does not press its message of can’t-we-all-just-get-along? It remains astringent and deadpan, but in the end the anecdotes did not add up to much of anything. This is certainly a film that does not insult your intelligence while it tickles your funnybone or heartstrings, but it didn’t tickle mine all that much. (2007, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-80.)

The Visitor

I am pleased to return to film reviewing with a strong recommendation, for this second film from writer-director Tom McCarthy -- The Station Agent was his first, and as an actor he’s familiar as Templeton the sleazebag reporter in season five of The Wire. Nothing surprising happens in this story of an aging professorial widower, whose life is revived when he returns after a long absence to his pied-a-terre in Greenwich Village and discovers it inhabited by a young Muslim couple, illegal immigrants from Syria and Senegal respectively -- but the film continually surprises in the justice of its quiet observation. It unfolds without underlining. Much of the subtlety is in the performance of Richard Jenkins, a familiar character actor who makes the most of his chance at a starring role. He is matched by Hiam Abbass as the woman who reawakens his soul, completing the work begun by her son, a friendly Syrian drummer who restarts the beat of the older man’s heart by teaching him to play the djembe. The charming young musician is snatched by immigration officials when he gets hung up in a subway turnstile, and is sent to a featureless holding facility in Queens, until he can be deported. Neither his girlfriend, a lovely black woman who sells her jewelry at street fairs, nor his mother can visit him without risking detention themselves, so the disheartened econ prof has to become the go-between that holds them together. This quartet makes for an involving chamber piece set within the great symphony of the city, and the even larger music of a globalized world. This is a film with heart and smarts, that does not oversell its message. (2008, dvd, n.) *8+* (MC-79.)

Next up at the Clark

Anime for Grown-ups: The Art of Japanese Animation.

Saturdays at 1:00 pm in Japanese with subtitles
& at 3:00 pm in dubbed American version

Anime, as Japanese animation is usually called, is an immense presence in the culture of Japan, with global reach as well. The Clark will look at anime not from the perspective of genre expectations, but through the work of directors who speak in the international language of film. So -- no bodacious robot babes or cyberpunk gunslingers, but rather serious and wide-ranging exploration of character and theme in an influential graphic medium, a cinema of dreams replete with fantastic imagery. We’ll screen three films by different directors from Studio Ghibli, led by Hayao Miyazaki, and two films by a leading director of the next generation, Satoshi Kon.

November 1: Porco Rosso. (1992, 94 min., PG) A decade before he became a household name in America with an Oscar for Spirited Away, as well as other children’s favorites, Hayao Miyazaki directed this film explicitly for adults. Rather like Casablanca meets Only Angels Have Wings, it tells of a World War I flying ace, reduced to bounty hunting against air pirates over the Adriatic while the Fascists come to power in ’20s Italy -- and oh, incidentally, he’s turned into the Crimson Pig of the title.

November 8: Whisper of the Heart. (1995, 111 min., PG) Unlike Disney, Studio Ghibli is collaborative rather than corporate. For this thoroughly charming tale of adolescent romance and a bright young girl’s search for self, Miyazaki wrote the script but gave the direction to heir apparent Yoshifumi Kondo. Set in a realistic present, it is a testament to the expressive powers of rather simple animation, with brief fantasy interludes. If you liked Juno, you will love this winning story of a brash schoolgirl finding both a boyfriend and a calling in life.

November 15: Grave of the Fireflies. (1988, 88 min., PG-13) Directed by Isao Takahata, Miyazaki’s longtime collaborator, this sensitive, harrowing film depicts the impact of war on children, warranting comparison to all-time classic Forbidden Games. Two orphans, a boy and his younger sister, struggle for survival in the aftermath of the World War II firebombing of Japan, finding evanescent beauty in a terminal landscape. This sad and powerful masterpiece evokes the horror of war and the hope of humanity as well as any live-action film.

November 22: Tokyo Godfathers. (2004, 92 min., PG-13) Satoshi Kon has established himself as a younger director to watch, among those for whom animation is simply an expressive medium for serious films of all sorts. Here he transposes John Ford’s Western Three Godfathers to the underbelly of modern day Tokyo, with three tramps -- an alcoholic, a transvestite, and a teen runaway -- finding a baby on Christmas Eve, and encountering comic adventures in their heartwarming attempt to return the child to its mother.

November 29: Paprika. (2006, 90 min., R) Satoshi Kon delves into the sci-fi realm so common in anime, but with a distinctive bent, adapting a (non-graphic) novel obsessed with psychoanalysis and the meaning of dreams. Paprika is the therapeutic avatar of a powerful woman psychiatrist, partnered with a blubbery nerd genius who has invented a machine that allows physical entry into the dreams of subjects, a dangerous weapon in the hands of the unscrupulous and power-mad. This may be the boldest popular exploration of dream imagery since Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

Coming to the Clark

This season offers an innovation in film programming at the Clark -- “Artists from Screen to Scholar,” a series of feature films about artists offered in a context that only the Clark can provide. On selected Thursdays at 7:00 pm, a Clark-related or invited scholar will introduce a film about the life and work of an artist, and then after the screening serve as interlocutor for a comparative discussion of film and artist. This format begins with a documentary about the contemporary artist Christo and continues with three films from three nations about the multifaceted Spanish painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, each presented with expert commentary.

Thursday, October 16, 7:00 pm
“Interrogating The Gates: Christo Documented and Elucidated”
When “The Gates” were installed in Central Park back in February 2005, the Clark offered a very popular marathon screening of five Maysles Brothers’ films about earlier Christo projects. By then Albert Maysles had been following this project since 1978, from conception to rejection and thence to approval and triumphant realization, and his work was picked up and completed by Antonio Ferrera. This documentary (2007, 98 min.)debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and was thereafter broadcast on HBO, but can now be seen at proper scale at the Clark, with context and commentary provided Lisa Green, the Clark’s Director of Communications and Design.

Thursday, October 23, 7:00 pm
“The Many Faces of Goya: Take One”
Goya’s Ghosts (2006, 114 min.)
Director Milos Forman tries to recapture the Hapsburg magic of Amadeus, turning his attention to Spain in the same era, and portraying Goya as eyewitness to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic occupation. Stellan Skarsgaard plays Goya, whose role as painter gives him an inside view of history in the making, with the changes embodied in characters played by Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman. Michael Cassin, Director of the Center for Education in the Visual Arts, based at the Clark, will elaborate and debunk the portrait of the artist presented here.

Thursday, November 6, 7:00 pm
“The Many Faces of Goya: Take Two”
Goya (1971, 134 min., in German with English subtitles)
This is a very rare opportunity to see this massive Eastern European co-production in its original widescreen glory. Derived from a novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, it’s an epic biography of the great artist directed by Konrad Wolf. Presented in cooperation with the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Williams College, the film will be introduced and illuminated by Barton Byg, longtime teacher of German and film at UMass Amherst and founding director of the DEFA Film Library there.

Thursday, November 20, 7:00 pm
“The Many Faces of Goya: Take Three”
Goya in Bordeaux (1999, 105 min, in Spanish with subtitles)
Director Carlos Saura takes on Goya, one Spanish master to another, looking back from his approaching death in exile in 1828 to the passionate passages of his earlier life. The production is lavish and phantasmagoric, interspersed with tableaux-like recreations of Goya’s work, particularly the series of etchings, “The Disasters of War.” Mark Ledbury, Associate Director of Research and Academic Programs at the Clark, will bring his scholarly expertise to the presentation and discussion of artist and film.

More random viewing

Another new dvd to mention is the resurrection of the barely-released Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, a fascinating time capsule from 1981 but not a very good film. This saga of a punkette band called the Stains features a 15-year-old Diane Lane and 13-year-old Laura Dern, with support from a not much older Ray Winstone, who becomes their guide into punkdom. Indifferently directed by music producer Lou Adler, with weak production values and a scattershot script, this still has an aura of authenticity and knowledge of the rock biz. (Not unlike how Payday knows country.) But let’s go back to Diane and Laura as nymphets, and you might have plenty of reason to watch this, or maybe you want to watch members of The Clash and Sex Pistols play backup. Punk is a style of music that passed me right by at the time, as have most subsequent styles, but I must say I have lately been finding out about it through some pretty good films. This isn’t one of them, but isn’t without interest.

Continuing with my half-hearted recital of films I’ve managed to squeeze into gaps in election or financial news, I should take note of one that slipped my mind almost immediately. Smart People (2008, dvd, MC-57) is a half-bright effort from director Noam Murro, about a curmudgeonly English professor played by Dennis Quaid. With support from Ellen Page as his smart-mouthed daughter, Sarah Jessica Parker as his implausible love interest, and Thomas Haden Church as his free-loading brother, this ought to have been much better than it is. The Squid and the Whale this definitely is not. The setting of Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh comes through pretty well, but the script is not nearly as witty as it imagines itself to be, and incidents pile up in sitcom fashion rather than with any organic development. It has some tasty bits going down, but more than Chinese food leaves you hungry a minute after you’re finished with it.

I’m going to close out these random updates with two last films, before going back to individual review and ratings. Both are recommended but with reservations. Snow Angels (2008, dvd, MC-67) is well-made but awfully sad. David Gordon Green halfway crosses over from his indie roots with this adaptation of a Stewart O’Nan novel, mixing thriller and even teen comedy elements into the pathos of small town lives gone astray. I like Kate Beckinsale and she does her best with the role, but seems out of place as a bereft working-class beauty in what was SE Pennsylvania in the 70s in the novel, but is now Nowheresville in an undefined present (actually Halifax). Sam Rockwell, however, fits right in as her estranged loser husband, out of jail and recovery and into evangelical Christianity. A subplot revolves around a highly believable and charming high school romance between Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby (Juno’s sidekick), two young actors to watch for in the future. The agonizing arc of the drama is marked by many moments of truthful observation, even when you want to resist the conclusion.

The Rape of Europa (2007, dvd, MC-77) is a conventional but absorbing documentary on art as one of the victims of World War II -- the looting by Hitler and Goering, the evacuations of art from the Louvre and the Hermitage, the collateral damage of the Allied drive up the boot of Italy, the eventual repatriation of Nazi booty to the Jewish heirs of Holocaust victims, and the heroic efforts of the “Monument Men” of the advancing Allies, committed to preserving what they could of the art history of Europe. The approach is miscellaneous but cumulatively powerful, “The World At War” from the perspective of art objects. This will be shown at the Clark next April.

Random updates

Like many another political junkie, I have been diverted from my usual diet of movies by the ongoing soap opera of the election. This may go on for a while. So in the absence of serious film comment, I will briefly review my recent viewing and offer a few recommendations.

Top recommendation unquestionably goes to Generation Kill, the new HBO miniseries from David Simon and Ed Burns -- creators of The Wire -- that follows a Marine unit through the first three weeks of the Iraq War. When compared to documentaries like Occupation: Dreamland and Gunner Palace, it’s realer than real. Scripted word for word out of the nonfiction reporting by embedded Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright, it is impeccably acted and utterly involving. As with The Wire, however, getting involved takes some work, absorbing a large cast in chaotic action, while gradually learning to make sense of the communal lingo and behavior of the hard young men. You are thrown into the midst of a situation and have to sort it out for yourself, much as the Marines themselves have to do. A tip -- visit the HBO website, where you can sort out the characters, their ranks and relationships, humvee by humvee. The glossary helps too. Though clearly critical of the unclear mission, and without blinking at the reality of their actions and attitudes, this series clearly supports the troops, in the sense of making us aware of exactly what we are asking of them. The view is intimate, but just as much admiring as appalled. For non-HBO subscribers, the dvd will be available in mid-December.

If you are on HBO, then one documentary to look for is The Black List, tremendously moving and informative, just twenty talking heads of well-known African-Americans from Chris Rock to Colin Powell, but extremely well shot and edited. Elvis Mitchell is the unseen and unheard interviewer, while Timothy Greenfield-Sanders directs. (Also, Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, debuts on HBO Monday 9/29, one of the most painful must-see films ever. The dvd releases the next day. My review is here.)

It’s always nice to have at least one show to look forward to week by week, with soap opera immersion, and for me these days that show is Mad Men, now in the midst of its second season on AMC, with the first season available on dvd. The characters are as soapy as you could ask for -- you really want to find out what happens to them next -- but the real charm of the piece is its time-capsule capture of a particular period and place, a Madison Avenue advertising firm in the early Sixties. In a way, it’s like a tv spinoff of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, a longtime favorite of mine.

For once in the 8+ years I’ve been a subscriber, Netflix is making money on me these days, minimizing their postage and processing expenses as I fail to watch and return the disks I have on hand. One I did get around to recently is Brand Upon the Brain (2007, MC-79). Guy Maddin certainly has an identifiable brand upon his brain, like no other, a herky-jerky black-&-white style that harks back to the heyday of silent films and surrealism. He grounds his flights of Grand Guignol fantasy firmly in autobiography (the main character is called “Guy Maddin”) and claims they are “97% true.” Well, maybe he didn’t grow up in a lighthouse where his parents ran an orphanage. And maybe his father wasn’t a mad scientist who distilled a rejuvenating nectar from the brains of the orphans, or his mother didn’t wield the lighthouse light to search out every sexual secret of her son and daughter. And maybe the son and daughter didn’t have polymorphously perverse relations with a boy and girl pair of twin teen detectives. But it’s all surprisingly plausible and coherent in a funhouse sort of way. If you have a notion to give Maddin’s retro avant-garde stylings a try, this is a good place to start. It’s plenty weird, but you can get into it.

The Counterfeiters

Winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, this German docudrama is a worthy successor to The Lives of Others in its historical evocation of the moral dilemmas propounded by authoritarian evil. Stefan Ruzowitzky adapts a nonfiction memoir into a story about inmates of a Nazi concentration camp recruited for their artistic, printing, or banking skills into a counterfeiting scheme to ruin Allied economies by flooding them with false currency. They realize that their survival, and even comfort, is bought at the risk of extending the war, so while they do produce more than 130 million pounds, subtle sabotage keeps them from perfecting the dollar, just long enough for their camp to be liberated in 1945. Karl Markovics is remarkable as the seemingly amoral artist and con man who takes to the task as to the masterpiece of his craft. The film is swift and continuously engrossing, while remaining even-handed and morally complex. It does not wallow in the awfulness of the Holocaust, but reveals it in short, strong strokes of heart-piercing sharpness, then gets on with the question of how and why you might survive in such a surreal situation of total risk. What it comes down to is the same wisdom shared by the wonderful characters of Bunk and Omar in The Wire: “Man’s gotta have a code.” (2008, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-78.)

Sweet Land

This fine indie debut by writer-director Ali Selim wins my Truth in Titling award; it is indeed sweet and the land is indeed the dominant character. Making the absolute most of its tiny budget, the film recreates Norwegian immigrant life in 1920s Minnesota in a manner that is both believable and picturesque. Though there are some familiar faces in supporting roles (Alan Cumming, Ned Beatty, John Heard), the two leads were previously unknown to me. Elizabeth Reaser is beautiful and winning as the strong-willed mail order bride (like an unobnoxious Andie Macdowell), and Tim Guinee is stoic and hunky as the taciturn farmer for whom she is destined. Though utterly predictable every step of the way, this story of a slow-burning romance emerging from an arranged marriage still charms, with relevant subtexts of religion, xenophobia, and socialism. And it doesn’t hurt that this lovely film recalls two even better, particular favorites of mine: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, and Jan Troell’s magnificent diptych, The Emigrants/The New Land, starring Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow and still criminally unreleased on home video. Sweet Land is a little film that plays big, and is worth seeking out. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-75.)

Man on Wire

Amazingly assured -- that description applies to both this film and its subject. Director James Marsh documents the astounding feat (and feet) of aerialist Phillipe Petit -- “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers” (as in the title of Mordicai Gerstein’s superb Caldecott-winning picture book -- as good as this film is, Mordicai’s book is even better, in clarity of story and impact of illustration -- see the movie by all means, but look at the book as well!) Something between a heist film like Oceans 11 and a Maysles documentation of a Christo project, this film is well done in all its various parts -- the retrospective interviews with participants, the stylized but convincing recreations of “Le coup” on August 7, 1974 (with Nixon’s resignation playing on the tv), the vintage footage and stills, the evocative music. Marsh is adept in what he leaves out as well as what he puts in -- when he includes footage of the World Trade Center being built he doesn’t need to reference its destruction, a universal memory triggered every time an airplane appears in the film. The case is convincingly made that Petit’s impish stunt was also an aesthetic statement, an acte gratuite (“There is no why”) of surpassing beauty. One is swept up into his mad passion, as were his accomplices, without blinking at his animating solipsism. It’s fun, it’s exhilarating and inspiring, but it’s no fantasy, rather a willful act that somehow evades its consequences. Phillipe is an Icarus who flies too close to the sun and lives to tell the tale, the man who didn’t fall from the sky. (2008, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-89.)

As part of my continuing retrospective of Hollywood’s second “golden age” in the Seventies, I checked out the recent dvd release of Payday (1972) -- Rip Torn is good as a dissipated country singer on the road, but his act is a little more familiar than it was at the time, and the film is not as snappy or as authentic as it might have been. Since I’m not offering a recommendation, for accurate detail I refer you to the source I find most reliable for short reviews, both online and in its printed annual guide, i.e. Time Out.

So the Olympics end and the party conventions take their place in eating my time and keeping me from movies. I keep up quality viewing with Mad Men on AMC and Generation Kill on HBO, both of which I will write about sometime soon. As for films lately, I seem only to watch what I show, and my “Visions of a Gilded Age” film series at the Clark just concluded. I have to say I was glad to see each film again on the big screen, and each (except The Bostonians) went up in my estimation, especially the final two Edith Wharton adaptations. Age of Innocence was confirmed as a classic for me -- would that Marty Scorsese made more films like that and fewer like The Departed! Among other things, it may use narration as well as any film I’ve seen; Joanne Woodward is the perfect authorial voice, integral to the film’s texture and not something stuck in to cover gaps in the story. Sure, the sets and costumes are something to see, but it’s the characters inside the costumes that rivet the attention, from Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfieffer on down. And House of Mirth, as unmirthful as it may be and merciless in its portrait of a beautiful woman in distress, comes quite close to the mark as well -- much closer to Dreiser than Jane Austen in its portrayal of society. Terence Davies brings out the emotional brutality of the situation, and a good cast led by Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart delivers the grim reality in convincing fashion. Come to think of it, this series didn’t have much in the way of happy endings. All good to great films, however.

King Corn

This documentary does a fairly entertaining job of presenting the ideas of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) in a digestible format. Director Aaron Woolf follows two best friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, after their graduation from Yale, as they pack into a pickup and head for the Iowa town where by chance the great-grandfathers of both came from. They intend to grow one acre of corn and follow it from field to market, to explain how our bodies got to be so full of the stuff. They trace the development back to Nixon’s infamous secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, who changed farm policy from subsidizing non-production to encouraging all-out production. The incentive became to grow as much as possible, with all the profit in the process coming from the federal subsidy. As industrialization increased yield, the product had to have a place to go and it went largely to bulking up cattle, even though they are meant to eat grass and the corn would kill them if they weren’t slaughtered first. Then that excess corn was processed into the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, which has destroyed the American diet over the past few decades and yielded an epidemic of obesity. And now of course, we are subsidizing the inefficient production of ethanol from corn. A disastrous policy all round. The two guys are not characterized sufficiently to make for an involving documentary drama (or comedy in the vein of Super Size Me), but in trying not to be dull they pull out all stops, from timelapse photography of the growing cornfield to animation involving a plastic toy farm picked up at a real farm’s foreclosure auction. The antics can be a little scattershot, but the message gets across. If you’ve read Pollan, it’s a lot of fooling around to make a familiar point, but if not, it’s important information in a palatable format. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-70.)

Much in the same vein, Everything’s Cool, a 2007 documentary by Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand, leavens its warnings about global warming with humor and a variety of filmic techniques, from interviews with the likes of Bill McKibben to animation by Emily Hubley, but in sum the effect is less eclectic that merely miscellaneous. The most illuminating part offers clips of oil-financed “scientists” sowing doubts about the facts of the case, and trying to reduce global warming to one “theory” in a “debate.” This muddying of the waters, of course, has been the Bushies’ main strategy on various issues, from evolution to education, from preemptive war to torture and other human rights violations. But it is still not true that if you say something false often enough with a straight face -- aside from the contemptuous sneer -- that the facts become debatable. Eventually reality will bite you back.

I’m not sure why I’ve been sucked in like never before, but the Beijing Olympics are definitely eating into the my film viewing these days. Perhaps it’s the same with you. Nonetheless I will soon resume the pace of my reviewing.

Werckmeister Harmonies

I’m a cinematic Goldilocks who likes his films not too fast and not too slow, but just right, matched to the duration of my heartbeat and the endurance of my pants seat. Bela Tarr’s stripped-down follow-up to his notorious 7 1/2 hour Satantango may be only one-third as long, but still exceeds my patience for exquisitely composed and fluidly protracted shots that run, or rather walk, the full length of a film reel, 11 minutes plus. Despite his anointing by the most serious of critics (notably Susan Sontag), it took me three tries to get through Tarr’s dark Hungarian fable, and with that I had to hit the fast-forward button repeatedly. The striking images are more black than white and the sinuous camera reveals more ordinary ugliness than transcendent beauty, but I can glimpse the appeal of such self-assured filmmaking. There’s something there, to be sure, some hypnotic power and some precise evocation of wonder and despair, but it is not an experience I would urge upon anyone who doesn’t feel up to the test. (2000, dvd, n.) *NR*

Honeydripper

I don’t know John Sayles personally, though he was a Williams classmate of mine, but I’ve always felt an affiliation with his filmmaking -- he is truly the stand-alone model for the fully independent writer-director. And his heart is always in the right place, while his projects take him around the country and the world to bring back stories that need to be told. Some criticize him for being more literary than cinematic, but in my view, over a thirty-year career he has made a number of very good films and a few superlative ones. Eight Men Out and Lone Star stand out for me as the most fully realized, but I’d tick off more than a handful that are well worth seeking out, and Honeydripper is another. Sayles’ films are not likely to set your pulse racing or your heart to overflowing, but each makes a considered appeal to your mind and conscience. With exiguous financing and a drive to keep telling more stories, his films don’t always have the finish they might, but they are always literate and engaged, with fine acting from a large and diverse cast. In this film, set in Alabama in 1950, the cast is almost all African-American, led by Danny Glover as the proprietor of the juke joint of the title. Filmed on location, as always, the cast is filled out with nonprofessionals for genuine local color. Even some of the featured players are appearing in their first film, including Glover’s beautiful stepdaughter (model Yaya DeCosta, who steps nimbly from the runway into period character) and the itinerant guitar player she falls for (real performer Gary Clark Jr.) Besides capturing the moment when the blues gave way to rock ’n roll, the film gives an authentic rendition of Holiness tent revival preaching, and doesn’t demonize whites while still making clear the realities of the Jim Crow South. There are no real surprises along the way, but this film takes you places you ought to go. (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-68.)

Red Road

I blame Lars von Trier for anything that’s wrong with this film -- with his preposterous fixation on redemption through female sexual degradation (cf. Breaking the Waves, one of the rare films I cared about enough to hate). The Dogme 95 strictures are slipping by now, but I still find it an admirable approach to making films -- limited means lead to the largest payoffs. One might call that one of the central lessons of cinema history. The plan here was to have three filmmakers approach the same characters in the same setting and situation with the same actors. Up first was Andrea Arnold, who had won an Oscar for best live action short with Wasp (which is an extra on this dvd, and bumps the disk up to a firm recommendation from me -- with caveats.) She tells the story in a way that is suspenseful and sensual, while remaining quietly observational. Kate Dickie is riveting as a CCTV surveillance monitor for City Eye in Glasgow, the ultimate Rear Window situation, as she sits in front of a bank of monitors, calling up a particular view to pan and zoom on. She’s bereaved and numb, for reasons that emerge very gradually, and I won’t say more than that. There is gritty, underclass supporting work from Tony Curran, Martin Compston (memorable from Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen), and Nathalie Press (excellent as the focus for Wasp, and also memorable from My Summer of Love). Don’t worry, there are subtitles for the Glaswegian accents, and while this film is certainly down and dirty, you might call it Hitchcockian with all the kinks exposed. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-73.)

Random updates

A miscellaneous week of film-watching began with the highly miscellaneous film, Paris Je T’aime (2006), an international portmanteau film in which some twenty filmmakers take a five-minute look at a specific neighborhood of Paris -- some of the sketches are good, some not so, but they don’t add up to much of anything outside of a quirky travel anthology. If you do love Paris, you will be able to sustain your own interest through the highs and the lows.

Though the Korean film, The Host (2007), was embraced by many as a witty and well-done creature-feature, I couldn’t get into it, and after the first half-hour I wound up fast-fowarding through the rest without finding any reason to stop. I did the same with Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1974), which wanted to be wild and transgressive, but proved to be amateurish and cloacal, not at all worthy of its resurrection by the Criterion Collection.

Among 2007 also-rans, We Own the Night was a real mixed bag. An hour into James Gray’s retro crime saga -- with the Russian mob in 1988 Brooklyn set against the police whose insignia proclaim the title -- I thought it might be what The Departed wanted to be, but thereafter it drifted into implausibility and inconsequentiality, despite -- or maybe because of -- a well-done car chase that offered one more twist on The French Connection. The set-up is striking, with Joaquin Phoenix excellent as the manager of a Brooklyn hotspot that fronts for the Russians’ drug-dealing. Unbeknownst to his employers, his father (Robert Duvall) is a police chief and his brother (Mark Wahlberg) the head of narcotics. Even for a black sheep, family loyalties are divided and our boy gets himself into a tight place, but just as the psychological suspense is building, all hell breaks loose and the film races past all believability to a ramshackle conclusion.

Despite the setting in 1987 Bucharest, there is nothing ramshackle about 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (my review here), which is grim but utterly controlled, with a sustained sense of dread in painfully ordinary circumstances, as one student helps another to get an illegal abortion. Though I am not on the current critical bandwagon regarding Romanian film, a second viewing confirms Cristian Mungiu’s film as one of the best, if not the very best of the year. On the other hand, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest was slight but intriguing, in which a host on a provincial television station asks whether there was or was not a revolution in their town in 1989. Did the local crowds pours into the public square before or after 12:08 on that December day, the minute that Ceausescu stepped down and the Communist regime fell? The only guests he can round up to consider the question are an alcoholic high school teacher with suspect revolutionary claims, and a retired Santa Claus impersonator, who’s not sure what all the fuss is about. Most of the film looks like a clumsy public access panel discussion, but the wit is sly and biting.

After being quite taken with my re-viewing of The Heiress (1949) when I showed it to lead off my “Visions of a Gilded Age” film series at the Clark, I was moved to go back and watch Washington Square (1997) again, for the sake of comparison. And I’m glad I showed the version I did, which was more dramatically structured and better acted in every role. I thought I preferred the direction of Agnieska Holland over William Wyler's, but not so. And Olivia de Havilland was much more subtle and convincing than Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ralph Richardson both more imposing and comprehensible than Albert Finney, with literally no comparison between Montgomery Clift and Ben Chaplin. I was also pleasantly surprised by re-viewing The Innocents (1961) in the second slot of the series, which came across well in widescreen, with Deborah Kerr commanding in the central role as the governess losing her mind to ghosts, and director Jack Clayton and cinematographer Freddie Francis providing the chilling Gothic atmospherics.

One more film finally rose to the top after years on my Netflix queue, Joseph Dorman’s 1998 documentary, Arguing the World. If you share my interest in “New York intellectuals” -- the old Partisan Review crowd -- then this is well worth seeing. It goes far beyond a talking-heads summation, and effectively uses archival footage and photos to survey the history of the American Left from the Thirties to the Sixties and into the Nineties. The film follows four disputatious friends from the Trotskyite lunchroom alcove at City College around 1940, through the McCarthy era and the New Left and on to the Reaganite Right. Over the years, the four move from solidarity to various slots on the political spectrum, with Irving Howe remaining committed to Democratic Socialism while Irving Kristol became the godfather of the neo-conservative movement, and Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer staked out positions somewhere in between. The film, however, is gratifyingly more interested in personality than ideology, though the sociology is not scanted.

Wrapping up 2007

Since I watch the vast preponderance of my movies on dvd, my year-end round-up is always delayed by months. Here are my highest rated films of the year, accompanied by their rankings in two critics’ polls, IndieWire and Film Comment. Most of my very best films I have confirmed with a second viewing on dvd after seeing in the theater. All are now available on Netflix, and my reviews can be found by clicking on the title. Please remember that my ratings are unabashedly subjective, with no pretense to objectivity, though some appeal to knowledge and experience.

*8+*
Away from Her. (IW #26, FC #17)
Taxi to the Dark Side. (too late to be listed, despite Oscar for best documentary)
No End in Sight. (IW #47, FC #14)

*8*
Once. (IW #12, FC #32)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. (IW #13, FC #16)
Michael Clayton. (IW #24, FC #13)
Persepolis. (IW #21, FC #22)
The Lives of Others. (IW #34, FC #11)

*8-*
2 Days in Paris.

*7+*
Zodiac. (IW #2, FC #3)
Ratatouille. (IW #20, FC #21)
Lady Chatterley. (IW #27, FC #7)
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. (IW #36, FC #15)
Paprika. (IW #42, FC NR)
Knocked Up. (IW #56, FC #37)
The Bourne Ultimatum. (IW #47, FC #31)
Juno. (IW #97, FC #2)

*7*
There Will Be Blood. (IW #1, FC #2)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. (IW #5, FC #8)
Offside. (IW #10, FC #18)
Private Fears in Public Places. (IW #29, FC #20)
The Savages. (IW #44, FC #28)
Rescue Dawn. (IW #32, FC #48)
The Darjeeling Limited. (IW #23, FC #39)
Enchanted.
Starting Out in the Evening.
Things We Lost in the Fire.

On their lists (in rough descending order), but not on mine (though reviewed on this site): No Country for Old Men, I’m Not There, Syndromes and a Century, Assassination of Jesse James, Killer of Sheep, Black Book, Into the Wild, Bamako, Atonement, Margot at the Wedding, Gone Baby Gone, Superbad, Control, 3:10 to Yuma, In the Valley of Elah, Across the Universe, Southland Tales.

Not seen or still to be seen: Colossal Youth, Eastern Promises, I Don’t Want to Live Alone, The Host, 12:08 to Bucharest ,Grindhouse, Sweeney Todd, We Own the Night.

The Darjeeling Limited

I’m no fan of Wes Anderson -- there’s something offputting to me in trying so hard to look like you’re not trying too hard -- so I was surprised to like this whimsical train trip through India. I suspect the travelogue mitigated the wacky interpersonal dynamics. Of the persons involved I had no great expectations, but Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and especially Adrien Brody turned out to be an involving threesome, as estranged brothers trying to re-bond a year after their father’s sudden death. They go on a capricious spiritual quest concocted by the eldest, visiting various Indian shrines as the train stops. The younger two don’t know that their ultimate destination is a remote monastery, where their mother has become a sister. Anjelica Huston, when we finally see her, lends a welcome weight to the feathery antics of her cinematic sons. The trio are not really plausible as brothers, but I take that as part of the point of this Odd Triple. But as a brother myself, I certainly tuned into their interaction, and found it believable. And Anderson is surprisingly successful in negotiating a transition from madcap to serious, with a sense of purpose somewhere between gawking tourist and dedicated documentarian. He has the taste to emulate Renoir’s The River and to appropriate Satyajit Ray’s music, so I’m inclined to give his quirks a pass on this one. (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-67.)

Wall-E

I’m afraid I can’t join Frank Rich and all the rest of the critics on the Wall-E bandwagon, nor share my grown daughter’s enthusiasm. Sure, he’s a cute little cuss -- for a trash compactor. And sure, it’s surprising to see Walt Disney Inc. come out against consumerism. And wow, Pixar can do anything it wants with computer animation, and get away with it through sheer visual splendor. (I gather director Andrew Stanton was previously responsible for Finding Nemo.) I was definitely into the Chaplinesque first half, but when the action/adventure component started to accelerate I just began to tune out. I guess I’m the opposite of the grade school crowd -- what you have to do to maintain their attention loses mine. Nonetheless I grant that this highly-animated animation is something to see, witty and even scathing about humankind’s mania for consumption, with an endearing romance between two robots separated by centuries of technogical development -- as different as 8-track tapes and iPods. I was also a little bothered by the parallels to Battlestar Galactica, and could not keep from thinking of Wall-E as the nicest Cylon of them all -- is he the yet-to-be-revealed 12th model? It would be a fine irony if this turns out to be the biggest grossing film of the year. (2008, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-94.)

Control

The only way I’ve even heard of the post-punk group Joy Division was because I so enjoyed 24 Hour Party People, the Michael Winterbottom/Steve Coogan evocation of the Manchester music scene of thirty years ago. So I didn’t come to this musical biopic with any of the prevalent mystique about the early demise of front man Ian Curtis, but unlike my equally clueless viewing of Last Days, Gus Van Sant’s take on Kurt Cobain’s suicide, this descent into depression and death kept me engaged. The very well-done recreation of Joy Division live carried the film for me. I respect the rock photographer and videomaker Anton Corbijn for avoiding easy psychologizing in his first film, and the widescreen black & white cinematography is lustrous and evocative. He offers more sympathy than diagnosis, but certainly provides the material for the latter. But unless you’re already invested in the myth of Ian Curtis, then he comes across as opaque, despite the brilliant performance of Sam Riley, especially in the musical sequences. Samantha Morton is hardly recognizable as his teenage bride, younger and plumper than one expects, but with her usual ability to invest mousey characters with wells of feeling. The film is based on the widow’s memoir, but offers fair play to the Belgian girlfriend, the other horn of the dilemma on which our Romantic poet hero is gored. Again, not taking sides is a virtue of the film, but also robs it of drama. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-78.)

Rescue Dawn

What’s surprising about this well-done but familiar-seeming POW escape picture is that it shows no signs of its chaotic creation. There was a fascinating article about its making in the New Yorker a couple years back, which suggested that when it comes to cinematic madness in the jungle, Werner Herzog makes Francis Ford Coppola look like a milquetoast. And sure, he starves and tortures his actors, until they willingly chow down on a bowl of maggots or a raw snake, but the story is smoothly told, in a manner befitting a production company called “Top Gun.” Herzog does not quite go Hollywood in a feature remake of his excellent 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, but he does find in his fellow German all the qualities he admires most in Americans, “courage, perseverance, optimism, self-reliance.” Dieter is fiercely loyal to America because the Air Force gave the immigrant the chance to fly, so when he is shot down on his first mission, a covert bombing run into Laos in 1965, he adamantly refuses to renounce his adopted country to secure better treatment when captured, and immediately starts planning his escape. Christian Bale is excellent in portraying the demented joyfulness of Dieter’s survival instincts. He drags an equally excellent Steve Zahn along on his mad slog through the jungle, while a quirky Jeremy Davies refines his continuing portrayal of rational cowardice in extreme situations. One might expect a more overtly oppositional political stance from Herzog, but this conventionally rousing story of heroism is really another of his tales of crazy human encounter with nature in the raw. Alongside Grizzly Man, you could say that sometimes the bear eats you and sometimes you eat the bear (or the snake). (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-77.)

In Bruges

I never would have watched this film except that my son happened to be in Bruges, and I wanted to see what he was seeing in the “most completely medieval city in Europe.” The Flemish setting is beautifully rendered, but the story is about two hit men on the lam, with all the blood-spattering that implies. Despite a reliance on basic gangland movie tropes, this first film from Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is notable for its profane eloquence and wit, along with a perverse Catholicity. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes are all excellent as killers with quirks and sensibilities. I am not of the party who chose Pulp Fiction as the #1 cultural artifact of the first 1000 issues of Entertainment Weekly, and I have next to no interest in the School of Tarantino, but in that spurting vein of cinema, this film did entertain me. Maybe it was the Irish in it. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-67.)

P.S. -- I do not subscribe to the Pauline Kael dictum of seeing a film only once, but I do find it striking how rarely one has significantly different reactions to a given film, except when the viewer has changed significantly in the interim. Though the pure painful/joyful surprise of watching The Diving Bell & the Butterfly unfold was past, upon re-viewing Julian Schnabel’s film confirmed its place for me as one of the very best of 2007.

Next up at the Clark

Visions of a Gilded Age: Film Adaptations of James and Wharton
Saturday Afternoons at 2:00 pm in the Clark Auditorium

Out of the same era and milieu as the American artists featured in the Clark’s summer exhibition, “Like Breath on Glass,” the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton have elicited a wide range of film adaptations, which this series will survey.

July 12: The Heiress. (1949, 115 min.) William Wyler directs this adaptation of Henry James’ Washington Square. Olivia de Havilland won an Oscar for her portrayal of the beset daughter of domineering father Ralph Richardson, who fends off her fortune-seeking suitor Montgomery Clift. Oscars also won for set and costume design, as well as music by Aaron Copland.

July 19: The Innocents. (1961, 85 min.) Deborah Kerr stars in Jack Clayton’s atmospheric and chilling adaptation of the James novella The Turn of the Screw, as the governess on a country estate. The children in her care are haunted by ghosts, or is she the one succumbing to evil visions?

July 26: The Bostonians. (1984, 120 min.) Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve lead a distinguished cast in this classic Merchant-Ivory adaptation of the James novel, set amongst the women’s suffrage movement in 19th century New England.

August 2: Portrait of a Lady. (1996, 142 min.) Jane Campion directs Nicole Kidman as the James heroine Isabel Archer, a spirited and independent American woman abroad, who falls under the sway of worldly Europeans, Barbara Hershey and John Malkovich.

August 9: The Golden Bowl. (2000, 130 min.) Merchant and Ivory are back again, with a sumptuous look at James’ final novel, about a wealthy American played by Nick Nolte who is collecting art in Europe with a plan to build a museum back home. His young wife Uma Thurman becomes entangled with the marriage of his daughter Kate Beckinsale.

August 16: The Age of Innocence. (1993, 138 min.) Martin Scorsese’s direction dazzles in this adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel about New York society in the 1870s. Proper lawyer Daniel Day Lewis is engaged to Winona Ryder, but can barely resist the charms of the scandalous Michelle Pfeiffer.

August 23: The House of Mirth. (2000, 140 min.) In Terence Davies’ stark but sensitive adaptation of the Wharton novel, Gillian Armstrong is the precarious social climber trying to make her way into New York society, at the mercy of ruthless characters like Dan Ackroyd and Laura Linney.

Jeremiah Johnson

It’s nice to see a film from Seventies Hollywood that actually holds up to that era’s reputation as a golden age of sorts. I had fond memories of this, and when I saw it mentioned in recent obituaries for director Sidney Pollack, I moved it up in my Netflix queue and renewed my appreciation for it. Coming on the heels of Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, it certainly represents a high point for the revisionist Western. And coming at the same time as The Candidate, it certainly testifies to Robert Redford’s range and star power, while also presaging his continuing identification with that Rocky Mountain landscape. He plays an ex-soldier looking to escape “civilization” sometime around 1840 by becoming a hunter and trapper in the high mountains. The landscapes are spectacular, and the story has a Thoreauvian appeal -- fronting only the essentials of life -- as well as the usual Indian fighting and loving, which is presented with unusual respect for the Other. While mostly a solitary figure in an immense and unforgiving landscape, Redford has formative encounters with other mountain men, as well as brushes with various Indian tribes and the cavalry. It’s odd for a film under two hours to have an “Overture” and “Intermission,” which suggests this film was meant to be even more epic except for budget constraints. At least Pollack and Redford insisted on shooting not in the studio but on location, which more than makes up for any scrimping they had to do. (1972, dvd, r.) *8-*

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi masterfully adapts her graphic memoirs into a simply but expressively animated film about growing up in Iran under the last years of the Shah and the first years of the Islamic revolution. In adolescence she is exiled to Vienna by her protective, progressive parents, and after she returns to sample life under the mullahs, finally finds a new home in Paris. Boldly graphic in black & white, except for a few scenes in color at Orly Airport in Paris, from which the rest of the film flashes back, the hand-drawn animation is a marvel of economy and effect. The flat, stark, monochrome 2-D imagery achieves three dimensions and more, yielding all sorts of colors and tones. And the very specific story of one brash and passionate girl growing up achieves global and historical significance. We need to know about Iran more than ever, now that it is be positioned as our biggest enemy, and this film is eye-opening in more ways than one, as well as funny and moving. I found it worthwhile to watch both in an American-dubbed version, and in the original French, where the girl is voiced by Chiara Mastroianni and the mother by her real life mother, Catherine Deneuve, and the grandmother by the doyenne of Gallic film, Danielle Darrieux. (2007, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-90.)

The Other Boleyn Girl

Well, the costumes are certainly the best thing about this costume drama. The direction by Justin Chadwick (of the superlative BBC Bleak House) is quite fluent, if emotionally inert. More might have been expected from Peter Morgan, screenwriter for The Queen. Natalie Portman acts her little heart out as Anne Boleyn, evincing no winces but little genuine insight either, while Scarlett Johansson is reliably watchable as her sister Mary, each of them pimped out in turn to by their father and uncle to Henry VIII. As the latter, Eric Bana is no more than a clotheshorse. Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas as the girls’ parents add class to the proceedings, but nothing really adds up. This attempt to find one more angle on an oft-told story sometimes works as eye candy, but seldom as drama. (2008, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-50.)

Charlie Wilson's War

I had one word hovering in mind that kept me from finding this film satisfactory -- “blowback.” The word is never used in the film, which is precisely the problem. We are meant to find Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson admirable despite his peccadilloes -- he’s played by Tom Hanks, after all -- and applaud his crucial support for the mujahedeen and the covert war in Afghanistan, leading to the defeat of the Soviet Army and the fall of Communism. But never is it mentioned that those we supported and empowered were the Taliban and their ally Osama bin Laden, nor that we are now engaged in another war in Afghanistan, against those we enabled with weapons and money. And now we are the arrogant empire being brought to grief by the fierce Afghanis, part of a long line that probably goes back to Alexander the Great. So what kind of hero can this weapons dealer be, and how exhilarated can one get while tabulating the number of Soviet airships blown out of the air by the ground-to-air missiles supplied by the U.S. through the combined offices of Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia? This is an admirable triumph of American diplomacy? This good old Texas buttkicking is something to applaud? I think not, so this film has no chance with me. Despite the wit of Aaron Sorkin’s script and the swiftness of Mike Nichols direction. Despite reliably good performances from the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, as well as producer Hanks. I can’t figure out whether the film is meant to be satire or celebration, but its moment certainly passed a while back -- on, say, September 11, 2001, or maybe the day we realized that the mission was anything but accomplished. (2007, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-69.)

My Kid Could Paint That

Amir Bar-Lev’s absorbing documentary traces the meteoric career of a 4-year-old painter who was taken up by the celebrity machine, which then turned on her (or more specifically, her parents) after a debunking segment on 60 Minutes. The filmmaker is acutely conscious that he is part of the phenomenon he is recording, exploiting an unearned intimacy while trying to retain journalistic objectivity and even skepticism. So there’s a lot going on in this film -- family dynamics, media manipulation, the meaning of art and its market -- and a lot to think about. The little girl, Marla, is cute as a button, and her mother (a dental assistant in Binghampton, NY) is attractive and sympathetic, while the father is the question mark, a factory supervisor and amateur painter who may be an indulgent mentor to his young daughter, or may be a con man. The array of commentators includes Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, who has cogent things to say about contemporary art and its reception. The film is concise and continuously interesting, and the dvd extras carry the story further, though far from resolving the ambiguities. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-74.)

P.S. I just gave The Departed another look, to see if I had missed something, but this supposed “Best Picture” still strikes me as Scorsese’s worst. There’s quite a lot that’s good in it: dialogue and action, character and scene-setting, suspense and humor, but it’s still just a bloody thrill machine -- and the sole female character is such an implausible construct that the whole film falls apart the minute you think about it.

This Is England

This semi-autobiographical film by Shane Meadows might be pitched as The 400 Blows meets American History X, set in Midlands England during 1983, in the reign of Queen Maggie and her splendid little war in the Falklands. One of the casualties of that war was the father of Shaun, a pugnacious and sexually-precocious 12-year-old outcast, who finds a surrogate family in a surprisingly sweet band of skinhead brothers and sisters. Things start to sour after an older leader of the group gets out of prison after three years, and through xenophobic rants and violent demonstrations tries to turn the group into neo-Nazis. Shane/Shaun is embodied by superb newcomer Thomas Turgoose, while Stephen Graham is scarily intense as the disastrous father-substitute, who points to his own tattooed face and insists, “This is England.” The film has a finely honed sense of time and place (and sound), and is unpredictable yet true-seeming in its twists of characterization. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-86.)

Bamako

Bamako is the capital of Mali, and in a domestic courtyard there, a trial is taking place, among many be-robed judges and lawyers and stacks of documents, while the residents wander through and go about their lives. We come into the middle of the proceeding and gradually figure out that the plaintiff is “African Society” and the defendants are the World Bank, IMF, WTO, G-8, and the whole structure of global capitalism. Those in attendance are much like the denizens of the courtyard, and one by one they come forward as witnesses to tell the sad story of neocolonialism and the pauperization of Africa through debt service and conditions imposed by lenders. We wander back and forth between the trial and the characters who pass through, and there’s a parody of a spaghetti Western (featuring Danny Glover) dropped into the middle, so you definitely have to pay attention to keep up, but the film does gather momentum in the summations of the plaintiff’s lawyers. But I still don’t know whether a straight documentary might not have been more effective than this didactic surrealism. Nonetheless, Abderrahmane Sissako’s film is a rare opportunity to see Africa from the inside out. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-81.)