Miscellanea

I’ve been watching a bunch of stuff that doesn’t cross the threshold of recommendation, but is worthy of notice. HBO’s Recount (2008) was a well-done docudrama about Florida 2000, which was even funny when you could put out of mind the lamentable consequences of the last eight years. All the actors turned the neat trick of being recognizable as themselves and as simulacra of real people, notably Laura Dern as Katherine Harris and Tom Wilkinson as James Baker. Kevin Spacey was playing someone less familiar, but did a good job of holding the story together. If you can bear to relive that aftermath of that election, this film will really take you back.

I am always looking for films about artists to show at the Clark, so I took in Klimt (2006) despite lackluster reviews. Director Raul Ruiz is unusually arty, best know for the Proust adaptation Time Regained, and this multinational co-production in English is indeed a feast for the eyes, though the mind goes a little hungry, and the heart hardly comes into it. John Malkovich is not so much Klimt as John Malkovich playing John Malkovich. There are a lot of lovely lady models, frequently disporting in the nude, so you have to give the film points for eye candy, and also some feel for Paris and Vienna in the early years of the 20th century.

One from the Heart (1982) is the studio-bound film that nearly sunk Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. Resolutely artificial in its depiction of romantic angst in a stage-set Las Vegas, the film relies on the songs of Tom Waits, sung with Crystal Gayle, to convey all the emotion the film is too busy with camera and lighting tricks to get across. Teri Garr is really quite appealing as the travel store clerk who longs to travel, and Frederic Forrest looks startlingly Brandoesque as her sedentary junkyard beau of five years. After a fight they dance off with exotics Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski respectively, before inevitably getting back together, under the painted sunset outside of the neon-lit models of the Strip. This film tries with some success to be something new and a throwback at the same time, but does not come from or speak to the heart.