The Ghost Writer

If not a masterwork, Roman Polanski’s latest is a work of mastery, so it adds the pleasures of craft to its thriller scenario.  The political conspiracy may not be up to the profundity of Chinatown, but the Hitchcockian motif of the pursued pursuing is handled very neatly. The always-fun-to-watch Ewan McGregor is the unnamed Ghost of the title, brought in to fix the manuscript of memoirs by a former British PM, whose resemblance to Tony Blair is fully intended, though artfully camouflaged in the performance of Pierce Brosnan.  Olivia Williams is his Cherie – and excellent in the role.  They are holed up in the magnificent beach house of the publisher, who’s got a $10 million advance at stake.  With a sterling cast that offers lots of amused recognition – Who is that?  Wait, it’s Jim Belushi.  Hey look at that, it’s 93-year old Eli Wallach! – there’s one casting against type you’ll either love or hate, Kim Cattrall as Brosnan’s aide and Williams’ rival (Samantha as a starchy Brit!).  And for unusual casting, you have to single out the north coast of Germany as a surprisingly convincing Martha’s Vineyard.  (Polanski no doubt enjoying the irony that his central character is hiding out in America to avoid international justice, while the director himself hides out in Europe to avoid American justice).  This is smoothly made, visually impressive, darkly humorous entertainment -- a deft piece of work from an old master, whether or not he is also a dirty old man.  (2010, dvd)  *7+*  (MC-77)

This is my chance to insert a brief postscript on another portrayal of the dark side of Tony Blair, which I watched some time ago: the HBO original movie The Special Relationship (2010).  Michael Sheen can probably do Tony Blair in his sleep, after this third incarnation.  Dennis Quaid is half-convincing as Bill Clinton (but does not win the presidential face-off with his brother Randy, who was a very memorable LBJ). Hope Davis has some good moments as Hillary.  Helen McCrory is Cherie here.  The film begins with a montage of Presidential-Prime Ministerial handshakes starting with FDR and Churchill, before it drops us into the courtship of Bill and Tony, and tries to answer the question: who’s screwing who?  There is sweep and wit in the high diplomatic scene setting, and some neat turns of character and maneuver, but ultimately the story peters out, as does our respect for Blair, with the clincher of real-life news footage of him behaving like “Bush’s poodle.”  (cf. The Ghost Writer for another theory on what was behind that.)

Greenberg

Noah Baumbach’s latest is a confession of assholedom.  He’s always specialized in difficult people, and sometimes had the winning actors to make them seem passably sympathetic (Laura Linney and Jesse Eisenberg come to mind).  Here Ben Stiller’s anxious, beset persona works for the title character, and wrings some bitter humor out of his self-obsessed rants, but earns a bare minimum of sympathy.  His emotional victim and potential savior is Greta Gerwig, who has it in her contract, I surmise, that she has to expose her breasts within the first five minutes of any film she’s in, and repeatedly thereafter – with some, this passes for openness and vulnerability.  I can see how there are those who are smitten with her, but I find her charms easy to resist, though I register the infatuation of others.  Maybe it’s a generational thing, as Greenberg himself opines.  There’s definitely some wit and craft in these proceedings -- with good support from Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a nice German Shepherd – but its spirit is bleak at best.  A romantic comedy, even one as acerbic and wised-up as this, depends on the appeal of its leads, and here they are equivocal at best.  The transplanted New Yorker view of everyday life in real LA locations is another supposed appeal, but did not ingratiate me in particular.  I did not loathe Greenberg, as many are bound to do, but I can’t bring myself to recommend it either, as many critics have done.  (2010, MC-76) 

Riding the omnibus

I’ve built up a big backlog of films about which I have something – if not a lot – to say, so let’s deal with them in one long bus trip, with many stops along the way.

I haven’t been a Leonard Cohen devotee for very long -- just since the tribute documentary, I’m Your Man  -- but it was inevitable that I would catch up with Leonard Cohen Live in London (2009).  The surprise was that I could crank up my admiration another notch, seeing the man in concert, so humble and giving and pleased to please, with a great group of singers and musicians whom he continually credited, and a croaking but expressive recitation of his words set to music.  This modestly but effectively filmed concert works either as an introduction or a remembrance of one of the world’s great towers of song.

The best of recent films I’ve seen lately, but not to the level of firm recommendation, was The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009, MC-69), Werner Herzog’s update of Abel Ferrara’s grisly and not-that-great original.  I watched it because of Herzog, but I wouldn’t necessarily have recognized it as his work, though it is certainly directed with a sure hand.  Nicholas Cage – in the Harvey Keitel role -- has to be one of the odder stars in film today, but his off-kilter quality is well suited to the role of the good/bad cop going crazy on drugs, first pain prescriptions for a back injury sustained in the line of duty, and then every street drug he can lay his hands on.  He serves in the line of laughing megalomaniacs that Herzog has put on screen, from Klaus Kinski on.  There are plenty of amusing and startling twists in this drug-dealing thriller, and some sense of locale in post-Katrina New Orleans, which raises it above most films of this ilk.

Not rising above are two other films new to dvd.  With its stellar cast, you wonder how The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009, MC-54) could go wrong, but it certainly does in the end.  This film wants to be a commentary on military lunacy in the tradition of Catch-22,  M.A.S.H., or Three Kings, but doesn’t come close. George Clooney’s charm as a gung-ho psy-war agent, who can kill a goat with his stare, carries you through most of the proceedings, until the story starts to fall apart.  Jeff Bridges brings his essential Dudeness to the role of leader of the New Earth Army, a branch of the military that tries to take a New Age approach to warfare.  Kevin Spacey brings his reptilian badness to the role of the traitor to the cause, who winds up devising means of torture in Iraq.  Just as with The Informant! we have here a jaunty satire undermined both by uncertain tone of  direction (Grant Heslov’s in this case) and the inherent seriousness of the subject, which is betrayed by the impulse to entertain in worn-out ways.  Aside from a woefully errant third act that departs from the strange-enough nonfiction book of the same name, this film is undermined by the miscasting of Ewan McGregor as the Midwestern schlemiel of a reporter who hooks up with Clooney on an unsanctioned roadtrip into the warzone of Iraq, in instant refutation of my claim that he is always fun to watch. 

Another favorite of mine, John Cusack, also tests that claim in Hot Tub Time Machine (2010, MC-63), which would love to be mentioned in the same breath as Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married, but really comes out of the coarsened tradition of recent gross-out humor devoted to guys behaving badly.  In some ways it does make a virtue out of the obvious cheesiness of its flashback to Eighties styles and fads.  At least Cusack fits in his role, and lends it a little more interest.  Rob Corddry brings his familiar wild man persona from The Daily Show, and films I haven’t seen like The Hangover.  The rest of the cast is fine, at the level of sketch comedy, but Steve Pink’s film does not rise above its genre in any significant way.

Looking backward, I caught a TCM presentation of Petulia (1968), which did not hold up in retrospect.  The glimpses of San Francisco in the heyday of Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia are intriguing, but buried in a rather annoying would-be romance between kooky Julie Christie and baffled George C. Scott, and in the half-absorbed borrowings of director Richard Lester and cinematographer Nicholas Roeg from the time-fracturing style of Alain Resnais, with artiness substituting for any depth of portrayal.   

I was intrigued enough by The Lemon Tree to seek out The Syrian Bride (2005, MC-70), an earlier collaboration between Israeli director Eran Riklis and Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass.  This film does a good job of making the political personal, in the story of a young Druze woman living in the Golan Heights, whose occupation by Israel is unrecognized by Syria, so when a marriage is arranged with a Syrian sitcom star whom she has never met, she will have to cross a highly-contested no-man’s-land to reach her groom, and will never be able to return to the rest of her family again.  Abbass is the older sister who holds the whole family together, while the father is in and out of Israeli jails for his political activities; the eldest brother went to school in Russia, married a Russian doctor, and was written out of the family; and another brother is a shady international dealmaker and ladies’ man.  They all congregate for the marriage of the younger daughter.  This could have been My Big Fat Syrian Wedding, but remains low-key and truthful, highlighting the bureaucratic and familial absurdities of being an alien in one’s own country.

While presenting my “Spanish Masters of Cinema” series at the Clark, I’ve also been watching films with an eye to future series.  Here are several that I will be working into the winter schedule.  Peter Greenaway has always been a troublesome director (though I do admire The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Pillow Book), more arty than artful, with a mean misanthropic streak.  Pauline Kael nailed him long ago as “a cultural omnivore who eats with his mouth open.”  But he has recently returned to his first interest, painting, and made a pair of companion films about Rembrandt.  Nightwatching (2007) tells the story behind Rembrandt’s most famous painting, “The Night Watch,” as well as his relations with women, in a series of stagey tableaux and direct-to-the-camera commentary by the characters.  Rembrandt is surprisingly well-embodied by Martin Freeman, of the British comedy series, The Office.  Rembrandt’s J’accuse (2007) deals with the same subject in a documentary fashion, really an illustrated lecture in which Greenaway explicitly makes the case that the celebrated and controversial painting actually reveals a murder conspiracy, and the dark underbelly of Dutch society.  I plan to show them back-to-back for a series tentatively called “Old Master Portraits.”

For another long snowbound afternoon, in a series to be called “Thieves of Beauty,” I will present a “Masterpiece Mystery” from the BBC.  Painted Lady (1997) stars Helen Mirren as a once-famous Celtic blues singer, who is rescued from addiction and given sanctuary by an Irish gentleman.  She is living in his guesthouse when he is murdered during the theft of some paintings on his estate.  To track down the killers, Mirren masquerades as a Polish countess and art collector, to get inside the legitimate and illicit trade in paintings.  The first half in particular offers an interesting on-location look at the London art business.  The second half is more a thriller devoted to unraveling the identity of the killer, with the ever-watchable Ms. Mirren in various sorts of jeopardy.

I also had the Clark in mind when I watched a documentary called Forever (2006), by Heddy Honigmann, of whom I had never heard, but will watch for in the future.  Apparently she’s big on the international festival circuit, but essentially unknown in America.  Raised in Peru after her parents fled Hitler, she went to film school in Italy and is now a globe-straddling Dutch citizen.  Forever is ostensibly about the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the famous and not-so who are buried there, and the people who visit their graves.  But the real subject is a profoundly lovely meditation on life and death, art and immortality – beautifully photographed, cleverly ramified, deeply thoughtful.  Finding Honigmann is like discovering another Agnes Varda, and that’s a very good thing. 

One last postscript:  I was so engrossed by the Sundance documentary series The Staircase that I made a point of tracking down the made-for-tv movie on the same case, The Staircase Murders (2007).  It was interesting to see the story told from a completely different perspective, with the fictionalized documentarists included in the frame.  Treat Williams gives a compelling interpretation of the defendant Michael Peterson, accused of the murder of his wife, as a narcissistic megalomaniac.  While the documentary makes the case that he was wrongly accused and focuses on the children of the blended family who stood resolutely with their father, the Lifetime movie assumes his guilt and looks at the case from the perspective of the dead woman’s daughter, who deserts the united family front.  I don’t know whether the tv movie would hold up without the interest generated by the documentary series, which may have been wrong-headed but was so effectively involving, though it does provide an alternative explanation to a complicated and riveting mystery.

The Art of the Steal

Start with the premise that the best documentaries are not “objective” but have a distinct personal point of view, and you can take this one as a lively and engaging screed against the move of the Barnes Foundation’s astounding collection of art (181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picasso’s, and much more.) from suburban Lower Merion to downtown Philadelphia.  I would argue against its argument, but defend its expression.  Director Don Argott’s view of the situation is partial, to say the least, but it is presented in a provocative and entertaining manner.  And the case of the Barnes itself could hardly be more interesting in the diverse and challenging issues it raises, in its nexus of art and money; politics and race; competing personalities, communities, and values.  This film does a good job of presenting one side of the story.  But don’t come away convinced, until you’ve considered other perspectives, asked the questions this film does not choose to ask.  The Barnes controversy is as much a matter of cultic fervor as cultural preemption.  (2010, dvd.)  *7-*  (MC-75)

I’ll be showing this film at the Clark on Saturday, November 6^th at 2:00 pm, and I hope to get my brother Chris, former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and current news director of public broadcasting in Philly, to come and provide some journalistic balance. 

On the margins

I’ve got another trilogy of marginal films to less-than-recommend, though each of these films proved a little better than I expected.  I had put none of the three on my Netflix queue, but each seemed a viable on-demand option when I didn’t have a dvd on hand, and each happened to look at life out on the margins.

The honey that attracted me to The Secret Life of Bees (2008, MC-57) was the pre-Runaways Dakota Fanning, who turned out to be pretty good.  The problem is that this movie is really about black women in the Sixties South, so it’s focus on the white girl is really misdirected, though typical of Hollywood, and perhaps a hangover from Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling novel.  The real heroine of the film is Queen Latifah as the leader of a female community  -- which also includes Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys -- who runs a successful honey operation, under the logo of a Black Madonna.  A rare black female director, Gina Prince-Blythewood, with Love & Basketball (2000) to her credit, adds a little authenticity to the too-sweet, too-white-bread proceedings.  Like a second dessert, you won’t mind taking this confection in, but may feel differently after it sits on your stomach a while.

There was plenty to like in The Soloist (2009, MC-61), particularly the duet between Robert Downey Jr. as LA Times columnist Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayres, a schizophrenic homeless man he meets on the street, who turns out to be a former Julliard cello prodigy, and becomes the focus of a number of columns and eventually a book, on which the film is based.  They definitely keep it real – and astringent -- in a story that threatens at various points to veer into sentimentality.  I found director Joe Wright to be less annoying than in his Keira Knightley duo, Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, despite expressionist tangents that annoyed some.  The supporting players, including Catherine Keener as Lopez’s ex-wife and current editor, and a scrum of genuine homeless loonies from the mean streets of LA, also keep the story from going too squishy.  Another star player is Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, a suitably destabilizing venue for Lopez’s efforts to get Ayres back on track.  Yet I wouldn’t say you’ve missed much if you don’t see the film.

The main thing you might miss in Moon (2010, MC-67) is Sam Rockwell’s celebrated dual role as a solitary attendant at an energy extraction base on the lunar surface, who through a glitch in the operation comes face to face with the clone who is meant to replace him.  Duncan Jones’s debut film is a refreshing return to high-concept sci-fi, instead of CGI blast-aways, but it reaches for more of an intellectual tingle than it achieves.  Perhaps we should refer to Jones, the son of David Bowie, as Ziggy Moondust.  His film is an engaging performance, but hardly an exploration of deep space, either out there or in here.  As a modest little conundrum, however, this speculative fiction is more than all right, and worth a look for sci-fi fans.

Don't bother

Cinema Salon has become a multi-platform vehicle for sharing my cinematic enthusiasms, but this blog has taken the aspect of consumer advice, so I will offer brief comments on several 2010 films already out on DVD that you might consider seeing, but from which I’ll warn you off, so you can save the time I wasted.

 Scorsese and DiCaprio – a talented pair, but no guarantee of a great movie.  I’m a fan of both, and liked The Aviator in particular, so I ignored the disparaging reviews and my own lukewarm response to supposed “Best Picture” The Departed, and was willing to give a look to Shutter Island (2010, MC-63).  What I wasn’t willing to do was watch it all the way through, fast-forwarding to the conclusion.  So I don’t presume to evaluate the film, but simply to report there was little in it for me.  As a devotee of classic cinema from Hollywood and around the world, Scorsese has made virtuoso films, and may do so again, but as a director he now seems trapped in a cycle of would-be commercial product, his long-awaited Oscar making him a prisoner of corporate moviemaking.

Within the rock biopic genre, I have enjoyed a number of films about groups that I never listened to myself, so with some critical prodding I gave The Runaways (2010, MC-65) a chance.  Was the Seventies group of that name a breakthrough all-female proto-punk band, or a jailbait marketing ploy?  Or both?  With Kristen Stewart (who means Adventureland to me and not the Twilight series) evoking Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning breaking out as the baby doll lead singer Cherie Currie (on whose memoir the film is based), under the svengali managing of Michael Shannon, the movie does a pretty good job of exploding “Cherry Bomb” in our faces, but then director Floria Sigismondi does not know where to go with the story except down the tried -- and more tired than true -- road of too-much-too-soon in the world of sex- drugs-and-rock’n’roll.

Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon are another talented pair.  I’ve followed the former since Bloody Sunday and through United 93 and even into at least one of the Bourne series with Damon, so uninspiring notices did not keep me out of the Green Zone (2010, MC-61).  And indeed Greengrass’s style of on-the-fly, you-are-there-in-the-middle-of-a-shitstorm filmmaking did draw me in, until the superhero thriller dynamic took over the proceedings, and all plausibility went out the window.  After the film establishes a highly credible picture of Baghdad in the first months after the American invasion, Matt Damon’s “Chief” goes way off the reservation, as he rebels from his assignment to search for nonexistent WMDs to go unraveling the contradictions and fabrications of the American mission.  At the same time, the film goes way off track, in morphing from serious political exposé to tiresome first-person-shooter video game.  Is blowing shit up a war crime, or is it entertainment?  Make up your mind.