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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.