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.
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