In Her Shoes

What I find interesting about this film is how precisely opposite it is to Wedding Crashers, and not just because one is a chick flick and the other is a buddy movie. Here I found the first 20 minutes rather shticky and off-putting, and I was on the verge of cutting it off (except that I am a Toni Collette fan from way back -- e.g. Muriel’s Wedding), but the film got more involving as it went along, though it went on too long and the resolution was a little too pat. High-quality, against-type direction from Curtis Hanson made the proceedings more appealing and elicited pleasingly subtle performances from Cameron Diaz and Shirley Maclaine, as Toni’s antithetical sister and long-lost grandmother respectively. I will date myself here by remembering when Shirley (Irma La Douce) was for a teenage boy the heart (and other organ) throb that Cameron is today. Okay, the message that the body and the brain need to learn from each other is not exactly novel, nor that sisterhood is powerful, but both the sentiment and humor of this story reached me. I find it intriguing that the critic with whom I agree most often, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, had exactly opposite reactions to this and Wedding Crashers -- must be an anti-gender thing. (2005, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-60, RT-74.)

Garden State

Strenuously strange, if a trifle thin and ultimately quite conventional, Zach Braff’s one-man show -- he writes, directs, and stars -- is made palatable by the presence of Natalie Portman as his love interest. He also enlists the support of reliable actors such as Ian Holm and Peter Sarsgaard, but does not give them much to do. The protagonist is a marginal actor who returns from LA to NJ for his mother’s funeral, meets up with various old friends and classmates who have made their own way or not in the decade since high school, and eventually emerges from the longterm numbness caused by a not very convincing old family tragedy. Quirky without genuine originality, heavy without real emotion, this is nonetheless a watchably humorous effort from a twentysomething with some promise. (2003, HBO/T, n.) *6* (MC-67, RT-87.)

Only the Strong Survive (2002) is not up to the normal standard of eminent documentarians D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, nor as infectiously delightful as similar films such as Wattstax or Standing in the Shadows of Motown, but makes for a pleasant return visit with Seventies soul singers such as Rufus and Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, and Sam Moore of Sam and Dave.

The Candidate

Though I have seen this film many times -- sat through it twice in a row when it first came out -- I haven’t watched in a while, and couldn’t resist when I saw the title while scrolling the TiVo listing of upcoming movies. Robert Redford and Michael Ritchie’s follow up to Downhill Racer is certainly one of the arguments for the early ’70s as the last golden age of Hollywood. It remains fresh and startlingly prescient about the unholy synergy of politics and media. Joe McGinniss had already written The Selling of the President but The War Room was twenty years off. Writer Jeremy Larner had been with RFK in ’68 so he knew his way around the scene. For Redford as the telegenic candidate for senator from California, there is a built-in meta-level about the leveraging of physical appeal into a political role. Melvyn Douglas is perfectly cast in the supporting role of the candidate’s former-governor father. Peter Boyle and Allan Garfield set the mold for the Carvilles and Aileses to come. This would be fun to pair in a double feature with Warren Beatty’s Bulworth. (1972, HBO/T, r.) *9*

Michael Ritchie makes for an argument against the auteur theory. He went on to complete a sort of trilogy on the American scene with Smile, a broad but deep satire on teenage beauty pageants. Then he had a big hit with Bad News Bears (which is not among my favorite baseball films) and never made another lasting film in three decades of regular work. There may be personal reasons for his decline from a super start, but perhaps it indicates that the tenor of the times, the liveliness and risktaking of the environment in which movies are produced, can be as much a factor in their worth as the director’s sensibility and skill. You could credit Redford as producer too, but he wasn’t involved in Smile.

Catching up

I finally finished two Derek Jarman films that had been kicking around my TiVo “Now Playing” list for months and months, one from Sundance and one from IFC. I’d seen Caravaggio (1986) before (and no, he didn’t paint the Deposition I mentioned two entries ago -- maybe I was thinking of the Mantegna "Dead Christ"?), but this was my first viewing of Edward II (1991), adapted from the Christopher Marlowe play. Jarman certainly is a distinctive filmmaker, if not exactly on my wavelength. He tends to film minimalist theatrical tableaux with decidedly gay themes and sensibilities. But his films are seductive if you give in to their appeal -- Wittgenstein (1993) is my particular favorite, but both this Baroque artistic drama and Plantagenet history play are eye-opening, lush with language and color and histrionics. Tilda Swinton and Nigel Terry anchor strong casts in both. Well worth watching if you have the taste for it, and not if not.

I also watched two documentaries that I can commend, if not urge you to see, unless you have an antecedent interest: the first two hour-long episodes of the surprisingly visual, if ultimately repetitious, National Geographic series on Jared Diamond’s influential book of geographical determinism, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which attempts to answer a New Guinean’s query, why do you people of the West have so much “cargo”?; and a Sundance Channel “doc day” presentation of Deadline, a well done analysis of how the death penalty actually works and Governor Ryan’s last minute commutation of every death row sentence in Illinois.

Then from the ridiculous to the sublime -- 5 films in less than 24 hours. Relaxing on a Saturday evening I watched Serenity, to confirm that not everything my Buffy main man, Joss Whedon, does is magic -- sure it has the snappy dialogue you’d expect from a third generation screenwriter, and the familiar space cowboy tropes of Star Wars et al. are leavened with the historical perspective he learned at Wesleyan, but I never got past the feeling I’d seen it all before and didn’t need to see it again. I will not be tempted to watch the short-lived Firefly tv series on which Serenity is based.

You know the thing about junk food -- it just makes you hungry for more -- so then I popped Wedding Crashers into the machine. I can’t believe I watched the whole witless thing. There’s some naughty energy in the set up, and Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson have some charm as the horndog duo, but the film just goes slack-jawed and drools. The gals who tame the guys have all the personality of inflatable dolls, and the story has by-the-numbers predictability. Nothing whatsoever is made of the highflown Washington setting, Daddy is supposedly Sec’y of the Treasury but might as well be a bloviating baron on an English estate, for all the changes that are rung on this tired old tale. I really do need to start cutting off this crap -- life is too short.

All Sunday afternoon I spent showing “Triple Feature: 3 Colors” to an ample and appreciative audience at the Clark. It was really worthwhile to watch Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs in succession. And seeing each for the third time, they lose little of their enigma but reveal the precision with which they are made. Where before I might have given the edge to Red, for the sheer loveliness of Irene Jacob if nothing else, this time through I was most impressed by Blue, plunging into the sad loveliness of Juliet Binoche, and the political cast of the humor in White came through to me more forcefully. I now see the trilogy as a perfect unity. I suspect I will have more to say about Kieslowski in the future. Yes, vita brevis, but truly ars longa.

Close-Up

I finally caught up with what is frequently referred to as Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece. I’ve seen a lot of his films and others of the Iranian New Wave, including Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s. And while the news is abuzz with strategies, military or diplomatic, on how to deal with this charter member of the “Axis of Evil” and its new loose-cannon president and revived nuclear program, it is a good idea to watch something that normalizes rather than demonizes the Iranian people. This self-referential amusement is utterly simple and yet as infinitely complicated as an image in facing mirrors. It’s enjoyable at first viewing, but I’m quite sure reveals ever-receding depths on subsequent consideration. The story of an unemployed baker and film fan, who is mistaken for Makhmalbaf but then assumes the director’s identity and is eventually arrested for fraud, the film is an undefinable quasi-documentary of apparently real trial footage (fascinating for its portrayal of the Iranian justice system) mixed with re-creation of the preceding events using the actual subjects as actors. This is one of the great films about the making and the loving of movies, though miles apart from Day for Night or 8 1/2. It is also highly revealing about economics and class in Iran, and ponders questions of appearance and reality, truth and justice. It’s strange, but not at all a chore to watch. (1989, dvd, n.) *8*

Son Frere

Am I my brother’s keeper? -- this film asks, astringently. Two estranged brothers reconnect, when the older shows up on the doorstep of the younger, asking for help as he goes back into the hospital for tests and treatment on a mysterious blood disease. The film starts in the middle, on a seaside park bench in Brittany, with an unknown old man soliloquizing the brothers about shipwrecks, and then works its way backward and forward. This breaks up the relentless narrative drive from diagnosis to death, and allows the leisurely observation of intimate, clinical detail. Perhaps the longest and strongest scene in the film shows two night nurses shaving the torso of the one brother in prep for a splenectomy, while the other brother watches. (Was it Caravaggio who did the famous “Deposition” with the feet-first perspective?) Frankly, this is not many people’s idea of entertainment, but it is a committed application of the art of film. Patrice Chereau’s previous film, Intimacy, applied the same close-up but dispassionate attention to sex as this does to disease. I can’t think of another film as honest about the hospital approach to death, except for Wit. (If you can bear only one film of this type, watch that instead, where Mike Nichols’ impeccable direction is made transcendent by Emma Thompson’s superlative performance, in my book best of the decade by any actress.) Neither brother is what you would call likable, the younger (Eric Caravaca) insists that he is helping only because he was asked and not because of any fraternal relationship, and the older (Bruno Todeschini) is understandably querulous and complaining. Their reconciliation is more implicit than overt. This is definitely not a feel-good movie, but it will linger with you, maybe longer than you would like (as may the song that haunts the film, “Sleep” by Marianne Faithfull.) The conclusion is no “triumph of the human spirit,” but perhaps a quieter victory. (2003, dvd, n.) *7-*

Country Boys

I can’t believe I watched the whole thing. This appeared as three successive two-hour episodes of “Frontline” and extensive promotion led me to tune in with hopes of seeing the poor white trash version of Hoop Dreams. Not even remotely. This story of two rural Kentucky boys trying to make it through high school owed more to reality tv than to the documentary aesthetic that I prize. It was possible to take an interest in the two boys and their families and the alternative school they attended, but I spent a good part of the running time contemplating the film’s deficiencies as “direct cinema” or “cinema verite.” So here are some rules for documentary posed by the negative example of David Sutherland’s Country Boys (2005, PBS/T, n.), which might have been twice as good at half the length:

* You have to shoot a lot of footage, but you have to throw out almost as much, especially shots and scenes you fall in love with but which do not advance the story.

* You must maintain narrative drive, whether through Aristotelian dramatic unities or through some modern or postmodern strategy for propelling the story to its conclusion.

* Without making a game or a big deal of it, you have to acknowledge the camera’s and filmmakers’ presence on the scene.

* There is no absolute prescription against narration (or intertitles), especially when you lack the context or connection to give your scenes their full meaning.

* It’s okay to use subject voiceover to provide some narration, but you cannot simply break the bond of synchonous sound that gave first impetus to the movement of Maysles, Pennebaker, Leacock, Wiseman et al. You cannot edit a mosaic of conversation and lay it over a visual sequence of dubious connection, taking a statement from one context and putting it in the unseen mouth of the character in another scene. Aural and visual editing artistry is okay, but there needs to be a contract of authenticity.

* You should avoid excessive longshots of your characters walking through the landscape or streetscape, with a voiceover or song meant to convey meaning, or even worse conveying no meaning at all besides your own pictorial pleasure.

* You can establish your own ground rules -- whether Wiseman’s scrupulous observation, or the alternation of talking heads right at the camera, or inserting yourself provocatively in the scene as has been made famous by Michael Moore but done better by others -- but you cannot fudge the rules you have made.

* It’s not enough simply to snoop on alien lives, bemused by their stangeness and squalor. Your characters have to become emblematic while remaining idiosyncratic. You must strive for an open-eyed empathy, neither a blank stare nor a sentimental sympathy at your characters’ plight.

* Do not repeat shots or scenes or pieces of dialogue, especially when your film is languorous already. Know when enough is enough.

Saved!

Too inoffensive to count as satire, Brian Dannelly’s film is inventive enough to refresh a popular genre that has decayed from Heathers to Mean Girls. The main novelty is the setting in a Christian high school, so all the squirm-inducing scenes, from classroom to auditorium to hallways to parking lot, have a particular wrinkle to their familiar shape. The cast is okay too, from Jena Malone and Patrick Fugit (of Almost Famous), through Mandy Moore and Heather Matarazzo, to Martin Donovan and Mary-Louise Parker as the “adults.” So the overall effect is pleasant but soft. Still, there’s some topicality in Hollywood looking back at the evangelical world that demonizes yet emulates popular culture. The all-inclusive finale is sort of sappy, but along the way there is some good dirty fun. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-62, RT-60.)

Mysterious Skin

This makes a companion piece to Lilya 4-Ever, detailing child sexual abuse and prostitution from the boys’ side (much more harshly than the similarly themed L.I.E.) Gregg Araki’s adaptation of a Scott Heim novel is creepily convincing in showing a little league coach seducing one 8-year-old and raping another, and then picking up the story later, when one is a teenage hustler and the other is a befuddled dork who believes that blank in his memory means he was abducted by aliens. They follow their own damaging paths until they come together to tell their stories and achieve a fragile redemption. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is very good as the cocky boy fearlessly (and foolishly) selling his body, until he is brutalized in an exceptionally disturbing scene. Michelle Trachtenberg is his fag hag friend, but she will never, ever be as good as she was as Dawn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (my favorite tv series of all time, for those ears I haven’t already bent with rants about the greatness of Joss Whedon’s collective masterpiece.) (2005, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-74, RT-83.)

Shallow Grave

The antic visual style of Danny Boyle gives this gory comedy some energy, and reliably involving performers Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, and Christopher Eccleston make it watchable even if their characters are paper thin. They are well-off flatmates in a huge Edinburgh apartment, looking for a fourth. They dismiss a bunch of less hip candidates, but welcome a mysterious stranger, who promptly OD’s and leaves a satchel of cash under the bed. The roommates face temptation, and succumb, with predictably disastrous results. There’s gruesome fun as they get their comeuppance, but not up to the level of Boyle’s subsequent breakthrough, Trainspotting. (1994, IFC/T, n.) *5+*

Funny Ha Ha

Let’s be real. This no-budget indie fave looks bad and sounds worse. It may reek of authenticity rather than actually delivering it, but it does seem like a frontline report from twentysomethings trying to get a life after college. Andrew Bujalski is being hailed as an avatar of John Cassavetes, an enthusiasm I don’t particularly share, but there is definitely wit and perspective at work in this kitchen sink realism of postgraduate drift and angst. Kate Dollenmayer makes an attractive but believably confused protagonist, trying to find a boyfriend, a job, and a purpose in life. She’s stuck on a loser, but a loser (played by Bujalski himself) is stuck on her. She endeavors to navigate between them, while finding herself -- and that is the movie. The film was made in Boston but conveys no sense of location whatsoever, just low-rent apartments hosting random parties and awkward get-togethers. As a group portrait of a particular sliver of a generation it warrants attention, if not acclaim. I will look for Bujalski's follow up, Mutual Appreciation. (2005, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-78, RT-86.)

Before Sunrise/Before Sunset

When asked to pick my 5 favorite films of all time for Images Cinema’s newsletter, I went with the old warhorses, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, Renoir’s Grand Illusion, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and Bergman’s Persona, but just to indicate I wasn’t a total old fogey, I made my final pick Richard Linklater’s more recent series of films about Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). Having just watched the 1995 original for at least the fourth time and the 2004 sequel for the second, I’m here to confirm my choice. Both films rate a *10* in my book, but are so intimate I can hardly comment. All I can do is urge you to see them, or see them again. If you don’t love them, never take my word about movie recommendations again, because to me these small but perfect gems are what filmmaking is all about. The Godfather saga may paint a bigger canvas, but no other series of films is more stimulating or satisfying. If you think my enthusiasm is idiosyncratic, I point to Before Sunset's cumulative scores of 90 on Metacritic and 94 on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Holy Girl

Okay, this one stumps me. A. O. Scott of the NYTimes, and others, put it on their Top Ten for 2005. The reviews were mostly reverential, but I did not get the appeal at all. When the disk came from Netflix two months ago, I watched twenty minutes before conking out. With that “no late fees” appeal, I kept it around till I could do my duty. Well, it’s different, that’s for sure. Set in a hotel in provincial Argentina, where a doctors’ conference is being held, and where teenage girls are coming to terms with their sanctity and sexuality, and sometimes getting the two mixed up. The mother of one girl owns the hotel with her brother, and she vies with her daughter in a crush on one doctor. But you really have to work to figure out even this much, the storytelling and even the framing of shots are oblique to the point of obscurity. Some will tell you that Lucrecia Martel is a filmmaker to watch, but you’re on your own with this one. I didn’t hate watching it, but I couldn’t figure it out. (2004, dvd, n.) *NR* (MC-75, RT-75.)

The upside of bad movies

My mentor in film study, Professor Charles Samuels of Williams College, used to be notorious for walking out of movies in the first five or ten minutes. He was determined to see everything worth seeing, but not to waste a minute on trash. I, however, determined not to cut the performance short on anything I went into with some presupposition of quality. So if I decide to watch something, I usually watch it to the end. My god, I even made it to the end of Lethal Weapon, though it made me feel unclean to do so (but I had the sense to go nowhere near LW2 or 3 or 4.) So it was quite a statement when I couldn’t bear more than half of The Upside of Anger. If you surmise that something showcasing Joan Allen as the mother of a bevy of beautiful daughters has to have some redeeming value, let me disabuse you of that notion. I’ll forego names to protect innocent and guilty alike. This film’s one utility is to highlight by their absence all the virtues of The Squid and the Whale in detailing a family breakup, by using it only as a setup for shtick, neither funny nor true, and painful only in its ineptness.

Capote

I was glad to see this film at Images, but unlike most critics do not feel the urge to run out and recommend it to other people. Perhaps I was bothered by the way it, in the manner of Janet Malcolm, made the journalist more reprehensible than the murderer. On the plus side for one who styles himself a writer, the scenes of Truman holding court at Gotham literary cocktail parties were the most enjoyable to me. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is justly celebrated in the title role, and deserves credit for carrying the film of his high school friends, director Bennett Miller and writer Dan Futterman. Two of my favorite actors, Catherine Keener as Harper Lee and Chris Cooper as the chief inspector, contribute perfect supporting roles. The anomaly of Capote in Kansas is nicely handled, but the treatment of the central story, of random and official murder, does not compare in power to Richard Brooks’ 1967 film of In Cold Blood. I admired Capote in a number of ways, but it did not grab me and drag me into real-life horror, except at the writer’s temperament and deceit. (2005, Images, n.) *6+* (MC-89, RT-91.)

Casino

In effect a sequel to Goodfellas, this Scorsese-Pileggi collaboration starring DeNiro and Pesci tells a broader story, of the mob in 70s Vegas, with documentary brio and eye-dazzling design, and is almost as good as its precursor. Sharon Stone brings her own thunder to the cast, but there is no sympathetic character to provide our entry into this alien world of shabby glitz and violence. DeNiro’s bookmaker turned casino manager is an interesting but chilly presence. True to form, Pesci is maniacal and chilling. You learn more than you feel, except for revulsion, but this is a revealing glimpse of one aspect of American ways of business and entertainment. (1995, dvd, r.) *8* (MC-73, RT-85.)

Happy Endings

Don Roos does not duplicate the happy surprise of The Opposite of Sex, but Lisa Kudrow again demonstrates her comedic range as a mother in equivocal search for the son she gave up for adoption as a teenager, and Maggie Gyllenhaal anchors a parallel story that only collides at the very end. Bobby Cannavale and Tom Arnold are both humorous and believable as the respective partners, and Steve Coogan is delightfully witty (bring on Tristram Shandy!!!) as one of a gay couple involved with a lesbian couple and a conflict over donated sperm. The tangential stories are too complicated to recapitulate, but the performances are pungent and the script is fitfully funny. The film evaporates in the mind after viewing, but is quite entertaining to watch. (2005, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-57, RT-57.)

A River Runs Through It

The Montana scenery is beautiful, as is the filigree of cast flies over glistening rivers, and Brad Pitt is beautiful, as delivered by likewise beautiful director Robert Redford, but the emotions are muffled by a failure to connect, of the filmmakers as well as the characters, and consequently the film fails to satisfy in the end, despite being eminently watchable. Over-reliant on the voiceover of Norman Maclean’s memoir, read by Redford, the film manages to be both too explicit and inscrutable. The time and place are well rendered, but not the motivations of the characters. Even if this is a family in which things are left unsaid, the film should not leave so much hanging. (1992, dvd, r.) *6+*

2005 Year End Roundup

Herewith a quick reference to the best films that I have seen and reviewed in the past year. The first list constitutes my “best of the year” so far. The second list ranks older films I watched or re-watched over the course of the year. The grade of *7* is my threshold of recommendation, so the 2005 list contains anything graded *7-* or better. For the older films, it takes a *7+* to make the list. The month after the title indicates under which 2005 monthly archive my review can be found in the links column at the right.

New in 2005:

*8+*: The Squid and the Whale. Dec.

*8*: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. June
Syriana. Dec.
Walk the Line. Nov.

*8-*: The Constant Gardener. Oct.

*7+*: Bearing Witness. June
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Nov.
Good Night, and Good Luck. Nov.
Grizzly Man. Oct.
Junebug. Sept.
Mad Hot Ballroom. Oct.
My Summer of Love. July

*7*: Broken Flowers. Sept.
Look at Me (Comme une image.) Sept.
Millions. Dec.
Murderball. Dec.

*7-*: Brothers. June
Crash. Sept.
Pride and Prejudice. Dec.

Not yet seen: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Cinderella Man, A History of Violence, Match Point, Munich, Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, etc.

Not likely to see: Batman Begins, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter & Goblet of Fire, King Kong.


Retrospective through 2004:

*9+*: Hoop Dreams. [1994] May

*9*: All About Eve. [1950] June
Days of Heaven. [1978] Mar.
Thelma and Louise. [1991] Apr.
The Straight Story. [1999] Mar.
Ararat. [2002] July
Vera Drake. [2004] Jan.

*9-*: All That Heaven Allows. [1955] Jan.
Aviator. [2004] Feb.

*8+*: The Philadelphia Story. [1940] Mar.
The Lady Eve. [1941] Jan.
Once Upon a Time in the West. [1968] Apr.
A Room with a View. [1986] Apr.
Waking Life. [2001] Jan.

*8*: The Little Foxes. [1941] Feb.
The Yearling. [1946] Jan.
Panic in the Streets. [1950] Oct.
Casque d’Or. [1952] Feb.
Umberto D. [1952] Aug.
Divorce -- Italian Style. [1962] July
Grey Gardens. [1976] Feb.
Philadelphia. [1993] Mar.
Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud. [1995] Jan.
Lilya 4-Ever. [2003] Nov. (or Dec.?)
Since Otar Left. [2003] Mar.
Bride and Prejudice. [2004] Mar.
Sideways. [2004] Jan.

*8-*: All the King’s Men. [1949] Oct.
The Trial of Joan of Arc. [1962] Sept.
Carnal Knowledge. [1971] Jan.
Late August, Early September. [1998] Mar.

*7+*: Queen Christina. [1933] June
Bringing Up Baby. [1938] Jan.
Born Yesterday. [1950] Feb.
Gimme Shelter. [1970] Feb.
Down by Law. [1986] Nov.
Tampopo. [1986] May
Black Robe. [1991] Jan.
Lovers on the Bridge. [1991] Jan.
Paradise Lost: Child Murders at Robin Hood Woods. [1996] Nov. (under HBO)
Kirikou and the Sorceress. [1998] Sept.
Devdas. [2002] July
Being Julia. [2004] May
Born into Brothels. [2004] Apr.
Bright Leaves. [2004] July
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. [2004] Feb.
Festival Express. [2004] Oct.
Finding Neverland. [2004] Feb.
In Good Company. [2004] Dec.
Million Dollar Baby. [2004] Feb.

The Run of the Country

So what did Peter Yates get up to in the long years after Bullitt and Breaking Away? This was his next to last, and shows a practiced directorial hand. The material is familiar but layered, a boy losing his mother and trying to find his manhood, Irish village life and the troubles on the border, a Romeo and Juliet inevitably from feuding clans. But the characters have a reality and depth that makes you content to be in their company, particularly Albert Finney as the father who is a Garda sergeant. That none of the other actors is familiar to me contributes to the air of authenticity. I’m tempted to give another look to The Playboys, also written by Shane Connaughton. The glimpses of Co. Cavan add to my secondhand impressions of Ireland, useful in collaborations with Kevin O’Hara. (1995, IFC/T, n.) *6+*

Speaking of the devil, here’s a shoutout to KO: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076530984X/qid=1136231782/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-9113259-6210469?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

In Good Company

Paul Weitz follows up the Nick Hornby-adaptation, About a Boy, with another sweetly sentimental comedy, though this time brother Chris shares credit only as producer and not writer-director. He’s got a sure touch with light but not insubstantial material, and is well served by a stellar cast. The reliable Dennis Quaid is a 51-year-old ad salesman for a national sports magazine that is taken over by a giant media conglomerate, which shunts him aside for 26-year-old whizkid Topher Grace. Not only does Dennis have to fire his colleagues and friends, his own status is more and more precarious, as his wife announces her surprisingly late pregnancy while older daughter Scarlett Johannson transfers from SUNY to much more expensive NYU. It only gets worse when Topher and Scarlett meet and fall for each other. Both the corporate takeover and romantic entanglement are well-handled. If the sharp satire goes soft at the end, that’s only fitting since we wouldn’t want to leave any of these most appealing characters unhappy. (2004, HBO/T, n.) *7+* (MC-66, RT-82.)

Filling in

Being a bit of a completist, I have recently been watching justly-neglected films by engaging young directors: A Life Less Ordinary from Danny Boyle, Mr. Jealousy from Noah Baumbach, and She Hate Me from Spike Lee. It’s pretty rare for me to look at films with Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes scores in 20s and 30s, but three in a week indicates how betwixt and between I am at the moment. Each of the three is a mess, yet perversely watchable and instructive.

Millions made me look at Boyle again, and an extremely positive reference by Stephanie Zacharek, the critic (of Salon.com) with whom I agree more than anyone, led me to the big American film he got to make after Trainspotting became a hit. I’m afraid I cannot join her solitary enthusiasm for A Life Less Ordinary (1997), but it does have some appealing aspects -- energy above all. And Ewan MacGregor, whom I am starting to see as a young Cary Grant, always himself but game for any role, from slapstick to musical to drama (he does a bit of everything in this film), is always charming. Cameron Diaz is, to be honest, a little scary to me, with those sculpted cheekbones and all, but does contribute yet more energy. The story is inconsequential on several levels, with him kidnapping her (or vice versa), and a pair of angels played by Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo (you’ve got to be kidding -- but I don’t take the joke), who will be kicked out of heaven if they don’t make the thrown-together couple fall in love. Not a good movie but a fun enough ride.

The Squid and the Whale represents a quantum leap forward for Baumbach after Mr. Jealousy (1998), which has its good points and its bad. The extensive voiceover narration suggests an inadequate adaptation of very personal material, turned into film by means of New Wave recyclings. I’m not going to come down hard on a film that appropriates music from Jules and Jim and visual tricks from Shoot the Piano Player. Eric Stoltz and Annabelle Sciorra are better than all right as the main couple, and Christopher Eigeman is always a welcome satirical presence, but the thirtysomething downtown NY scene has been covered often and better. I enjoyed the self-referential fun, but found that the film went on too long, with several deflating scenes tacked on to the end.

There are also moments of fun in She Hate Me (2004), but Spike Lee’s piling on of topical points makes for the worst film by an admirable director that I have every seen. The uneasy combination of corporate expose and sex comedy is difficult enough but becomes ludicrous, not in a good way, by tossing in Watergate and other bits of Spike’s outrage, which bloats a thin conceit into epic length. While the whole is appalling, there’s enough wit and competence on display to keep one watching, but at the end of 138 minutes, all you can say is, “Wow, that was a piece of shit.”

Triple Features at the Clark

Did you ever sit in the auditorium at the Clark? It’s comfy -- lots of elbow and leg room to stretch out. And a good thing too, since this winter I am inviting audiences to settle in for three long Sunday afternoons of filmwatching, three interconnected programs each day, in a series called “Triple Feature: 3 Colors, 3 Painters, 3 Studios.” So on the final Sunday of the next three months -- if you’ve got the seat for it, have we got a seat for you!

These marathon viewings for the iron-bottomed brigade are intended to add up to more than the sum of the parts, unique opportunities to survey a subject at one sitting. Alternatively, of course, you can pick and choose from the constituent programs, all of which are free admission, as is the museum itself in the off-season. So make a day of it -- visit the galleries, browse the museum shop, walk up Stone Hill, refresh yourself at the cafe, and then settle back in your easy chair for more highly visual viewing.

The first program in the series, on January 29, comprises Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs trilogy: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge. Blue will screen at 11:00 am, White at 1:30 pm, and Red at 4:00 pm.

Put together over the course of an amazingly productive year in 1993, these three films based on the tricolor of the French Revolution and the corresponding themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity -- addressed from a spiritual and not a political perspective -- were Kieslowski’s swansong to cinema. He withdrew from filmmaking after Red was released to international acclaim, and died in heart surgery little more than a year later, at the age of 54.

Kieslowski emerged from a documentary movement in Poland, eventually moving from tv to film. He broke into international recognition in the late Eighties with The Decalogue, a series for Polish tv, each hour segment jumping off from one of the Ten Commandments. Thereafter, he worked primarily in French, becoming a darling of the art house circuit with The Double Life of Veronique in 1991. Three Colors came next, the culmination of his meteoric career.

The three separate films have different casts of characters, but were put together by a single creative team, from scriptwriter and composer through the crew, except that each has a different cinematographer to highlight the respective colors in a distinctive visual scheme. And each has a luminous French actress to illuminate the emotional tone.

Blue belongs to Juliette Binoche. Losing her husband and daughter, she wants to cut herself free from all human relations, but the music she shared with her composer husband will not let her go, and draws her back to life and connection. Rarely has grief been explored with such tact and sensitivity.

Julie Delpy sets the black comedy of White in motion by humiliating her Polish husband in Paris divorce proceedings. He has to return to Warsaw to get his balls back, and regains equal status with her by making a killing in the new capitalist free-for-all. After being equally hurtful to each other, they love anew.

Irene Jacob was Veronique, and in Red she is Valentine, a sensitive heart-throb of a student and model in Geneva. She hits a dog with her car, and discovers the owner is a misanthropic retired judge played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Opposites will attract, and the two form an unusual bond of fraternity.

But believe me, few films are less dependent on plot to weave their spell. The Three Colors are a symphonic cascade of sound and shade, incident and reflection, faces and feelings, gestures and acts. Immerse yourself and discover a new way of cinematic knowing.

Enigmatic but never obfuscating, these films demand an unusual quality of attention from viewers, to make all the connections and yet come face to face with the unsolvable puzzle at the center of the story, the mystery of motivation and the accident of destiny in each life.

Nobody could describe his purpose better than Kieslowki himself: “Film is often just business -- I understand that and it’s not something I concern myself with. But if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music, and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us, and give people the feeling they are not alone.”

Beyond the nominal tricolor signification of liberty, equality, fraternity, this trilogy meditates on contingency, coincidence, synchronicity. The human situation in a world of chance and choice. In words of one syllable, these films are about life and death, love and fate. Let us ponder together.

This series continues with “Triple Feature: 3 Painters” on February 26: Artemisia at 11:00, Carrington at 1:30, Pollock at 4:00. And concludes with “Triple Feature: 3 Studios” on March 26, which will be a marathon exploration of animation way beyond Disney or Pixar, surveying the work of The National Film Board of Canada, Aardman Animation (of Wallace & Gromit fame), and the Hubley Studios -- Academy Award-winners all.

Syriana

Stephen Gaghan, writer of Soderbergh’s Traffic, gets to direct his own script here, and does well by his globe-spanning, densely-populated story which straddles the line between thriller and documentary. You know it is the product of research, that he has gone to those scenes and met those people, and recorded the dialogue almost verbatim within a fictionalized construct. This to me is a million times more real and effective than Fahrenheit 911, for example, in revealing the global politics and economics of oil and neo-colonialism. George Clooney is the grizzled, paunchy CIA operative who needs to come in out of the heat, before one of his own missles seeks him out. Matt Damon is a go-go energy trader who gets in over his head. Chris Cooper is a CEO engineering a huge oil company merger, and bribing his way to energy concessions in the volatile Middle East. Jeffrey Wright is a lawyer doing due diligence on the merger for rainmaker Christopher Plummer. The fictional Gulf emirate is represented by the dynastic struggle at the top and the unfortunate fate of immigrant oil workers at the bottom. You definitely have to pay attention to pick up the interweaving of plot strands, but huge amounts of information are delivered in passing, along with a “you are there” feel for some of the world’s trouble spots. When it comes to the role of oil in the world’s woe, this film is preaching to the converted in my case; I already believe the bastards of big oil (along with big pharma, as revealed in the vaguely similar Constant Gardener) are behind most of it. And this film strains my credulity less than Michael Moore. To get it, you need to work at it, and I like that in a movie. (2005, AMC in PA, n.) *8* (MC-76, RT-74.)

This is a busy season, of course, and my film viewing lately has been catch as catch can. I watched a couple of documentaries on the building of the Guggenheim in NYC, for a piece I was writing on Frank Lloyd Wright. The 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder brought a re-broadcast of Imagine, and since I’ve been revisiting Sixties musical icons lately, I was quite interested in this rather hagiographic documentary. Another blast from the past was Three Days of the Condor: Sydney Pollack’s 30-year old thriller about the CIA and oil holds up very well, better than most from the so-called golden age of Hollywood independents; the only real problem is that Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway are way too glamorous for their roles -- so much for gritty realism. Realism was the crux of 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom’s recent leap over the barrier between feature films and pornography -- he makes explicit sex engaging and psychologically revealing, but just alternates bedroom with concert scenes, and leaves out the narrative structure that would make it compelling.

The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach’s swift and spare domestic tragicomedy makes its points, but not too many. It is less autobiographical venting than a precise dissection of familiar specimens. The sparing use of music is indicative, never to tug emotions but always pointed. I give it a plus for its portrayal of my old neighborhood of Park Slope. The parents of this disintegrating family are both writers, i.e. utterly self-absorbed. Jeff Daniels as the father is the more pathetic of the two; the film has the grace to feel sorry for him while it eviscerates his pretensions and inconsequentiality. Laura Linney as the mother is slightly more sympathetic, because she is Laura Linney, but is also a monster of obliviousness. The boys, 16-year-old Jesse Eisenberg and 12-year-old Owen Kline, emulate and act out the bad behavior of their parents. Everything is painfully true, woefully funny. As Philip Larkin tells us, “Your mum and dad, they fuck you up.” (2005, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-82, RT-95.)

Murderball

This is certainly a worthy documentary, but did not excite me as it has many. Its virtues may have seemed surprising seen fresh, but coming festooned with lavish praise, made me wonder what the fuss was about. Maybe my enjoyment is held back by medical squeamishness, though the matter-of-factness of its approach to quadriplegia is the film’s salient strength. The film also rolls past most of the cliches of competition stories, to peer into the community of the limbless that lies behind the sport of wheelchair rugby. Well worth watching on a number of levels, this doc did not strike me as an exemplar of the genre, for which public enthusiasm is now rising to meet my own. (2005, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-87, RT-97.)

The Triumph of Love

This Marivaux play from 1732 is handsomely mounted in an Italian villa, with sumptuous period costumes and decor. Directed by Claire Peploe and produced by hubby Bernardo Bertolucci, its handheld, jump-cut style, with postmodern flourishes, may have been chosen deliberately or dictated by budget constraints. The disjunction between style and subject strikes some as fresh but does not work for me. I have no idea what the original French may sound like, but this English translation seems rather flat-footed, with none of the poetry that sustains the silliness of a cross-dressing comedy like “As You Like It.” Nonetheless, this a well-acted piece. It makes one wonder where Mira Sorvino has been hanging out since Mighty Aphrodite -- turns out the magna cum laude graduate of Harvard has recently married and had a child, but will be back. Her princess has to seduce every character in the movie and she certainly seduced me. Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw delight as a brother and sister who have both forsworn love philosophically, only to succumb to the miraculous Mira. I didn’t like this as much as the Clark audience for the final “Fellows Favorite” film did, nicely primed by visiting scholar Melissa Hyde’s introduction, but I liked it more than the critical consensus. (2001, dvd@cai, n.) *6* (MC-58, RT-48.)

Speaking of the Fellows’ film series, I didn’t write about last week’s Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time because I didn’t have anything new to say on third viewing. If you haven’t seen it, do so at your earliest convenience (and like all dvds shown at the Clark, it is subsequently borrowable from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown.) And if you have see the film, well then, I don’t have to tell you about the artist who ranks with Christo as my favorite contemporary. Interestingly, Clark Fellow Molly Donovan has done books with both, and her introduction offered valuable context to a large and appreciative audience, and a first look at Goldworthy’s recent installation at the National Gallery in Washington, for which she was curator.

A new group of Clark Fellows will resume this Thursday at 7:30 film series late next semester.

A Face in the Crowd

Before it devolves into a noisy rant, this Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg follow-up to the imperishable On the Waterfront makes some prescient points about the midcentury marriage of media and politics. Andy Griffith debuts as an Arkansas drifter plucked by go-getting college girl Patricia Neal to feature on her radio program, named the same as the film. His calculated folksy charm goes over well and he’s soon on tv. It’s not long till his ability to woo and sway the public attracts the attention of a right-wing cabal of plutocratic politicos. The film breaks down when the character does, but up to that point it is all quite convincing, from the two leads down through an excellent cast that includes Walter Matthau, Anthony Franciosa, and Lee Remick, with walk-ons by the likes of Walter Winchell. Somewhere on the continuum between Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Network, this is not a classic but bears watching. (1957, dvd, r.) *7*

Millions

A holiday heartwarmer is not what you expect from Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later fame, but that’s what he delivers here, from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce, frequent collaborator with Michael Winterbottom. Adorable urchin Alex Etel narrates and animates the story, as a 7-year-old who engages in easy conversation with saints in the flesh, asking if they’ve seen his recently dead mother in heaven yet. He’s in his backyard cardboard castle when a satchel of cash is thrown off a passing train. After his 9-year-old brother also sees the fantastical money, as he doesn’t the saints, they are in a quandary what to do with their found treasure. Boyle’s characteristic camera-trickery imbues this charming fairy tale with magic-realist energy, but the boys and the sentiments keep their sweet Nativity spirit. (2005, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-74, RT-88.)

Closer

Swank and stupid, this is as bad as a film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, and Clive Owen could be. Meant to be blisteringly truthful about love and sex, it is more lurid and wearisome than revelatory. Yet again, dialogue taken for shocking and meaningful on the stage is revealed as shallow and stagey by the steady gaze of the camera. Still, there’s a lot of eye candy here, star power and sleek London settings, and some craft as well. Too bad all these talented people were not better employed. Carnal Knowledge, this ain't. (2005, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-65, RT-68.)

Pride & Prejudice

I had a contrary reaction to this, compared to Walk the Line. Here I was the true fan, stringently judging how well the movie came up to the source material. And here I was ready for the film to end well before it finally did. Keira Knightley was certainly an appealing heroine, though hardly Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, the whatshisname Darcy was okay, as were some of the other players, but the best thing by far about this film were the realistic production values and the Constable-like views of the English countryside. But pictorial authenticity did not extend to a true sense of historical period and social mindset. Austen’s subtle nuance and insidious humor are Brontefied and Hollywoodized. Everything is overt and heightened, instead of gently unmasked. I was much more tolerant of the appropriations of Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice. (2005, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-83, RT-86.)

Lilya 4-Ever

What makes this film watchable, as well as heartbreaking, is the luminous spirit of the title character, played by Oksana Akinshina. Lilya is a teenaged girl, abandoned by her mother in a ravaged post-Soviet landscape when she escapes to America with her thuggish boyfriend. Then Lilya is shunted aside by a wicked aunt who appropriates the mother’s apartment and sends her off to a dismal flat in which an old man has just died. Her downward spiral follows with all the inexorability of a Zola or Dreiser heroine. Betrayed by a friend who drags her to a disco where Russian new capitalists troll for young girls, Lilya’s each painful step into degradation is carefully delineated, mitigated only by the affection between her and a younger boy, cast out by a brutal father, with whom she forms her only remaining bond. When a handsome, gentle man offers to engineer her escape to Sweden, the boy is rightfully suspicious, and devastated when she grasps the one glimmer of hope afforded her. There is some parallel both in radiant beauty (light against dark) and in plight to the girl in Maria Full of Grace, but Lukas Moodyson, despite the gentleness so well expressed in Show Me Love and Together, is much more relentless in his depiction of her helpless descent. Snatched from the plane in Stockholm, Lilya is imprisoned in a featureless high-rise apartment and taken out only to be sold to a sickening succession of men, her only respite in relation to the remembered boy who is now a half-fledged angel, but unfortunately no guardian. Their whimsical reunion in some rooftop heaven is the only palliative to her dismal fate. Though the story of one indelible character, this film suggests a world of pain over the betrayal and exploitation of children. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-82, RT-85.)

Walk the Line

Charged by the magnetic performances of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, this film’s energy is well channeled by director James Mangold. Like Taylor Hackford of last year’s Ray, he is an underappreciated craftsman, and could have pushed his way on to my “10 Under 50” list of best young directors if I’d already seen this film, coming after Heavy, Cop Land, and Girl, Interrupted. (He is the son of painter Robert Mangold and grew up over in the Hudson valley.) But -- all props to the man behind the camera -- this film belongs to its stars, both the original performers and the actors embodying them, and ranks with Coal Miner’s Daughter at the head of a talented class of country music biopics. There are the traditional tropes of the genre: the hardscrabble childhood, the ravages of life on the road, the sex and drugs, the struggle to find one’s voice and then to sell it, on stage and in the recording studio, the importance of finding a nice house in the country at the end of the road. And there’s also an engaging love story. So it’s all very familiar, but very particular as well. True fans may complain that the film only captures a slice of Johnny Cash’s talent and stature, but for such as myself it was an admirable opening up of some unexplored peaks of the musical landscape. And I would gladly have spent more time in the engaging, exuberant company of Johnny/Joaquin and June/Reese. (2005, AMC Theater in PA, n.) *8* (MC-72, RT-82.)

Again with the diary

Here’s what I’ve been watching lately, none of which rates a strong recommendation. Though each is okay or better, I do not feel driven to apply a number rating or a full-fledged review. (Admittedly it’s an open question how mature the plumage is on even my reviews of widest span.) So on with it:

Two Days in October appeared on the PBS program “American Experience” and marks Robert Kenner as a documentarian to watch. It pairs up two events in 1967 that really paint a portrait of the era -- a Marine detachment is ambushed and massacred in the jungles of Vietnam, which the generals try to pass off as a victory, while back on the homefront at the U of Wisconsin, students sit in to protest Dow recruiters on campus and are violently routed by Madison city police, which radicalizes the entire campus. The mix of archival footage and talking head retrospect is extremely well put together and evocative.

Tarnished Angels is a Douglas Sirk from 1958, not on DVD but broadcast on Turner Classic Movies, in Cinemascope but surprisingly B&W after he had made a string of amazingly expressionistic color films. Adapted from the novel Pylon, this was declared the best film made from Faulkner by the author himself. The leads from Written on the Wind are re-teamed: Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack. The first two have some fresh moments, but the last is just his steel-jawed self. Hudson is a maverick reporter for the New Orlean Times-Picayune who becomes fascinated with the flying gypsies of a traveling airshow. Stack is a WWI flying hero now barnstorming in his biplane, with Malone his parachute-jumping wife. Complications ensue, with a good deal of wild chariot-racing low over the water and around the pylons. In some ways a preposterous period piece, in others the film bears the mark of Sirkian sophistication.

De-lovely is almost de-lightful. The Cole Porter songs certainly are, as is Kevin Kline in the lead role. Ashley Judd is appropriately swanky as his wife of convenience and a good deal more. This biopic is infinitely franker about Porter’s homosexuality than Night and Day starring Cary Grant, which is referenced in this film. The problem is that much is referenced but little is developed. There’s a half-heartedly meta- framing device, but the through-line is weak. The music and the performances are worth watching, however, and it’s a kick to hear Ashley tell Kevin that she is engineering his escape from Hollywood debauchery by purchasing a house in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Reefer Madness: The Musical is jaunty and irreverent, a Sundance fave apparently. For two-thirds of its length, the energy of the singing and dancing definitely carry the story along; the final third spins out of control in a manner that failed to entertain me. I guess you could say the buzz wears off. Kristin Bell (tv’s Veronica Mars) is extremely effective as the ingenue; her death signals the film’s. Alan Cumming is snappy in a variety of roles. Neve Campbell pitches in a nifty dance piece, in support of her brother who plays the lead. Good dirty fun, for the most part, but when it goes over the top I am as reluctant to follow as a smart WWI soldier in a trench.

Hail Caesar! Hail HBO!

Last evening I brought myself up to date with two praiseworthy HBO original series. Oddly, I find I can’t write about tv the way I write about film. When you stop to think about it, they are different aesthetic experiences. A film seems a self-contained object, which can be judged objectively, with whatever subjective shading. A tv series on the other hand is more like a transaction between sender and receiver, a developing relationship which grows closer, uncritically, or fades away to pointlessness. I certainly formed a bond with Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus of the series Rome, watching riveted to the final shots of their first season. And also with Julius Caesar, as embodied nobly by Ciaran Hinds, memorable as Captain Wentworth in the superb film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It won’t be giving anything away to reveal that he dies at the end, a bloody corpse on the Senate floor. It’s good news that the rest of the characters we’ve come to know -- maternal monsters, mealy-mouthed polticos and martial heavyweights, would-be emperors and their families -- have been renewed for a second season. It really does bring ancient history alive, in a variety of ways. On a different scale from my film ratings, I would give Rome an A- as a tv series, ranking just behind The Wire and The Sopranos.

Incidentally, HBO will soon start rebroadcast of the first three seasons of The Wire, leading up to the premiere of season four, which may yet overtake Buffy the Vampire Slayer as my favorite tv series of all time. I for one will have my TiVo revved up to catch season three, not yet available on DVD. And while I’m at it, I may give the first season of Deadwood a try, now that it is on DVD.

In a different vein, HBO also produces the Paradise Lost documentaries of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. I’d heard good reports on the original, but it wasn’t available on DVD till very recently; the sequel was, but I avoided it till I could see the first. A third is now in the works, and it is not hard to see how the story compels an ongoing fascination. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Woods (1996) details the grisly case of three mutilated young boys found in a drainage ditch in West Memphis, AK, and the trials of three teenaged boys charged with killing them in a satanic ritual. The original documentary is credited with unblinking objectivity, but certainly seems to make the case for the railroading of the charged youths, seemingly more for their taste in clothes and music than for any actual evidence. You begin to assume that this film, like Errol Morris’s Thin Blue Line, will get an unjustly condemned man off death row. But no. Ten years later Damien Echols is still on death row, and his two friends in prison for life without parole. Reasonable doubt? There’s plenty. After the original documentary an internet-spawned group grew up to “free the West Memphis Three,” and they become the focus of Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (1999), along with the deeply scary stepfather of one of the victims, a drug-fueled camera-hound redneck behemoth who makes himself the best candidate for the actual murderer -- all he lacks is a leather mask and a chain saw. The amazing access, to families and suspects and lawyers and the court proceedings themselves, that drives the original, is shut off in the sequel and many key moments are covered by text on a black screen that explains they were forbidden to film. The film, however, compels one to the website -- www.wm3.org -- where one discovers the legal battle is ongoing, with the U.S. Court of Appeals just last month granting a plea of habeas corpus to Damien, who has also published poetry and a memoir written from solitary confinement. Not a word is said about the death penalty itself, but the whole case suggests the capriciousness with which it is sometimes dispensed. This is certainly a real-life courtroom drama to trump any fiction on the tube. As a tv series, it’s a definite A; as films, I would give the first a *7+* and the second a *7*, both essential representatives of the power of the documentary form.

Salvatore Giuliano

I didn’t really get this film when I saw it at MoMA thirty-odd years ago, and I still don’t. Francesco Rosi’s neo-neorealist reconstruction of the death and deeds of a Sicilian bandit leader in the years just after WWII is meticulous but incomprehensible. Shot in operatic black & white, on the actual sites of the events, with actual townpeople in all but two of the roles, the film uses time-fractured editing to depict a complicated tale of conspiracy and double-cross in postwar chaos, among the bandits, separatist politicians, and the Mafia. It’s like watching JFK if you had no antecedent knowledge of the facts of the case, though Rosi is an unturned Stone when it comes to wild speculation. Still, there’s something there about controlling insurgencies in the Mediterranean world, from Algiers to Baghdad, that comes through in this beautifully-presented Criterion Collection dvd. (1961, dvd, n.) *5+*

The Son (Le Fils)

This film is so un-American, but perhaps that’s just what a Belgian film should be. Critical darlings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne follow La Promesse and Rosetta with another penetrating look at proletarian life. The brothers remain true to their documentary roots, and to the environment in which they grew up. The long takes seem captured on the fly, though in reality carefully rehearsed. We see more of the protagonist’s neck than of his face, viewing most of the action from over his shoulder. Also un-Hollywood is the refusal to explain -- you have to watch intently and figure it out as you go -- plus the inversion of the typical revenge fantasy (or even atypical ones like In the Bedroom.) The brothers built the film around their favorite actor, Olivier Gourmet, but allowed it to grow from its initial inspiration into something quite strange and surprising, a gripping suspense story without any of the usual tropes of cinematic suspense. Olivier (the character) is a carpentry instructor in a trade school for delinquent boys, who takes an unsettling interest in one of his students, for deep but only gradually revealed reasons. But be forewarned, if you do not approach this film as a quest for understanding, it will frustrate and irritate you. (2002, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-86, RT-89.)

In the proletarian vein, if you wish to dig a little deeper into the recent news from France, then I strenuously recommend that you watch La Haine, a 1995 film by Mathieu Kassovitz, a Parisian Mean Streets set in precisely the milieu that is now aflame.

Good Night, and Good Luck

George Clooney honors his news anchor father with this well-made tribute to Edward R. Murrow, superbly embodied by David Strathairn. With evident documentary intent, he lets Senator Joseph McCarthy play himself in old newsreels of his communist witch hunt days. The old tv footage blends seamlessly with the deep, rich black & white cinematography, which calls up the Fifties without ever stepping out of doors -- from smoke-filled studios where a crew of bespectacled go-getters use primitive technology to seat-of-the-pants the tv news, to the smoke-filled bar where they swirl bourbon in the glass and strategize the stuggle of a free press in a troubled time. A time, the estimable Mr. Clooney does not even need to imply, that bears some similarity to our own. He also evokes the spirit of the Fifties by effective use of a female blues singer as a sort of Greek chorus. The story is a bit thinly painted, though the canvas is large and looming -- it begins and ends with a lecture, with a civics lesson in between -- but this is honest work of high degree. As drama it lacks some elemental pull, but as dramatized documentary it is a mesmerizing swirl of smoke, infinitely preferable to anything Michael Moore might concoct. George Clooney, to me, is one American hero commenting on another, who inspired him in speaking truth to power. And David Strathairn is an absolute must for a Best Actor nomination, way beyond mimicry of Murrow to a deep channeling. It’s not a great film, but has many elements of greatness. (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-80, RT-94.)

No Direction Home

Two American masters meet, Bob Dylan and Marty Scorsese, with appropriately epic results. This 3 1/2 hour documentary takes the generational icon up to his motorcycle accident in 1966, at age 25. What would it take to cover the subsequent forty years? I’d be eager to find out. I have friends who expressed impatience with the pace of this piece, but pace them, I happily took the whole ride, down memory lane and into the man of that moment -- a cocky kid and musical sponge with an amazing verbal facility, who bemusedly became the voice of a generation. There’s so much going on here -- the music, the history, the American fable of celebrity -- it seems more inexhaustible than exhaustive or exhausting. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+*

Hana-Bi (Fireworks)

There’s an undeniable charm to this fragmented but sentimental yakuza flick written, directed, acted, and painted by Takeshi Kitano, but this is another critical bandwagon I just can’t get on board. I leave it to the Tarantinos of this world. “Beat Takeshi” may be the Buster Keaton of Japan, but I find him as off-putting as ingratiating. His tangram storytelling, mixing pieces into various shapes, engages but does not convince. As the central character, a police officer who holds himself responsible for his partner getting shot and another officer killed, he turns to bank robbery to pay off loans from the mob, and to take his terminally ill wife on a final tour of Mt. Fuji, the ocean, and other Japanese sights. This film is sweet, funny, and (implicitly) violent, as assured as it is idiosyncratic, but it does not hold together for me, makes me watch but not follow. (1997, dvd, n.) *6*

Search function

You may have noticed that Blogger has added a beta version of a local search engine to its service. While far from comprehensive yet, if you fill in a movie, director, or actor's name at the top of this page and click the "Search this blog" button, you may come up with review listings from my archives.

King Creole

With this I wrap up my choices for a “Remembering New Orleans” film series, which may or may not run soon at the Clark. I expected this to be goofy fun, but what is universally proclaimed Elvis Presley’s best film is in fact a good film, from when he was plausibly being positioned as a singing James Dean. Accomplished veteran director Michael Curtiz, of Casablanca fame, mixes extensive location shooting with story-justified singing numbers as Elvis goes from busboy to headliner on Bourbon Street. In well-shot black & white with noirish tone, the story (from a Harold Robbins novel) echoes Rebel Without a Cause. Walter Matthau, of all people, is the villain of the piece, and Carolyn Jones, who would become tv’s Morticia Addams, makes a fine hooker with heart. And oh my, that “Pelvis” is something! (1958,dvd, n.) *7*

Down by Law

Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan comedy starts with a long sequence of tracking shots of just the New Orleans neighborhoods that Katrina probably washed away, before focusing in on Tom Waits as a much-fired deejay being thrown out by girlfriend Ellen Barkan, and small-time pimp John Lurie ignoring a lecture from his naked but philosophically acute Black whore. They wind up railroaded into the same Orleans Parish jail cell, into which comes the irrepressible Roberto Benigni (back in the day when he was still sufferable, and a nice contrast to Jarmusch’s seeming lassitude), who utters the movie’s tagline: “Ees a sad and beautiful world.” Roberto (big fan of Walt Whitman and “Bob” Frost in Italian translation) foments a prison break, and they wind up slogging through the bayou, bickering and bonding, to a fanciful but apt ending. The laughs sneak up on you, and while the film is much too hip to wear its heart on its sleeve, it definitely beats within. (1986, dvd, n.) *7+*

In the Mood for Love

Even with a second viewing, I just cannot get with the program on Wong Kar-Wai’s much-praised opus. Does it effectively establish a mood? Yes. Is it lovely to look at? Definitely. Is it cleverly elliptical and swooningly stylized? You bet. But did it move me or mean something to me? Sorry, no. Some may see it beautifully exploring the border between restraint and abandon in love, but not being quite that nice (in the classic Jane Austen-ish sense), I tend to see it just as a frustrated and frustrating affair. It’s certainly possible to enjoy the entire movie just for the succession of sheath dresses clinging to the exquisite form of Maggie Cheung, all cut the same way with a high, tight neck but in an astonishing array of fabric, color, and design; she must wear 40 different dresses in 98 languorous minutes. She and Tony Leung are accomplished actors as well as impossibly beautiful stars to watch. Nat King Cole and the rest of the soundtrack is very pleasant to listen to. I’m sure there’s an entire Asian frame of reference that I am oblivious to. But still, this to me was a film that went nowhere, way too slowly. And why did it end up at Angkor Wat, besides an excuse for an unpeopled coda of slow tracking shots? I read le mot juste on this film in the Time Out Film Guide (which is, incidentally, the indispensible reference for the film fan), calling it “scored as a valse triste.” You may like that sort of thing, apparently many knowledgeable people do, but I have other preferences in film. In fact, even here, one of the things I liked best was the documentary aspect of conveying the tight, dark density of living conditions in 1962 Hong Kong. The slow-mo and other stylistic tricks I could do without. (2000, dvd/cai, r.) *7-* (MC-85, RT-87.)

Comments

Hello again. I'm back from a trip, to resume posting, but regretfully the first thing I have to do is turn off the comments feature of Cinema Salon. I had imagined the possibility of a serious ongoing conversation about films, but it didn't quite work that way. Only one person was genuinely responsive (thanks, la.dauphine, whoever you may be) and now I am overrun by what I just learned from the news today is called "splog." I would still welcome comments at ssatullo@clarkart.edu but won't allow these spam blog posts to appear.

All the King's Men

I’d been meaning for some time to watch this and Face in the Crowd again, for their relevance to contemporary American politics, but this got bumped forward because I am contemplating a film series on “Remembering New Orleans.” In actuality, the particularities of Huey Long and Louisiana are quite submerged in the film, in the interests of the broader political fable, of demagoguery and the corruption of power. Hmm, still relevant -- and the film holds up pretty well, probably earned its Oscar for Best Picture, as Broderick Crawford did for Best Actor and Mercedes McCambridge for Best Supporting Actress. It may just be a Classics Illustrated version of Robert Penn Warren, with Robert Rossen’s densely-packed frames replacing the novel’s depth of insight, but a good one nonetheless. For example, he can only include half of what to me is one of the most memorable lines in American fiction, when Willie Stark instructs Jack Burden to dig up the dirt on Judge Stanton, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption. He passeth from the stink of the didey to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” As it happens, Steve Zallian (Searching for Bobby Fischer) is now in post-production with a remake starring Sean Penn -- should be interesting. (1949, dvd, r.) *8-*

Another New Orleans film I just caught up with, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), is a real car wreck of a movie -- a pile-up involving Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift; Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Joseph Mankiewicz; incest and homosexuality, madness and murder, demons and blasphemy. You can’t watch, but you can’t look away either.

Mad Hot Ballroom

Shamelessly entertaining, this documentary about kids competing is not as deep or as well-constructed as Spellbound, but does borrow from its subject an irrepressible energy and charm. Fifth-graders in NYC are required to take a ten-week course in ballroom dancing (now that right there would have forced me to drop out of school and run away from home), with citywide competitions at the end. We start with schools in Brooklyn, Tribeca, and Washington Heights, which are gradually winnowed away by the contests and the film itself. Many intriguing characters are glimpsed, but no more, though by the championships we know our favorites pretty well, at least by name and style of hip-shaking. Much of the film’s humor and warmth comes from the premise of pre- or incipiently-sexual children doing flagrantly-sexual dances such as the rhumba, merengue, and swing, all very proper and polite you understand. One very knowing little girl, Jodie Foster precocious, explains seriously that 11-year-old girls are the object most desired by perverts. So I have to be careful what I say, but these kids, girls and boys both, are damn cute. Director Marilyn Argelo puts many appealing elements together, mixing music and gym class, etiquette and enticement, so it hardly matters that the film just skims the surface, when it does it so dancingly. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-71, RT-82.)

Panic in the Streets

An unrecognized gem, this outstanding noir film from Elia Kazan makes a worthy companion piece to his On the Waterfront from four years later. And it is still timely today, depicting a public health hazard that threatens New Orleans, in the form of an infection brought into port by an illegal alien. Panic in the streets is just what Richard Widmark is trying to avoid, as a Navy doctor responsible for public health, when a murdered hood turns out on autopsy to have pneumonic plague. He works assiduously to contain and quarantine the infection, but needs the initially reluctant help of police captain Paul Douglas to find the murderer(s) before they flee and spread the disease to parts unknown. That would be Walter Jack Palance in a memorable screen debut, with Zero Mostel as his flunky and foil. Widmark is both steely and fragile as he fends off medical disaster, while the clock ticks on solving a crime with no clues. Barbara Bel Geddes makes the absolute most of her few scenes as his lovely, straight-talking wife. The dialogue and character work are astoundingly naturalistic and flavorsome, as are the classic noir cinematography, of black shadow and atmospheric light, and the dockyard and warehouse location settings. With FEMA so much in the news these days, it’s fascinating to watch a federal officer deal with police, politicians, and press to fend off a public health disaster. If only “Brownie” had Widmark’s competence and conviction! (1950, dvd, n.) *8*

Monterey Pop

As a time capsule, this is fabulous. As a film, not so much. So its documentary worth depends largely in how interested you are in the subject -- the time, the place, the people, the performers. As a concert film, it is seminal but not altogether successful. Thirty years on, it all looks very old hat, but at the time it was a first chance for a who’s who of direct cinema -- Pennebaker, Leacock, Maysles et al. -- to bring their cameras to bear on a music festival as a defining cultural moment, with benefit of advanced (for the time) sound recording. Some camera innovations work and some don’t, some of the music is great and some isn’t, some of the performers have lost none of their electrifying power (Janis) and some have turned into a joke (Jimi), but all are utterly redolent of the moment when I, for one, was turning 21. The final performance by Ravi Shankar on sitar is excruciatingly prolonged, but does implicitly signal that the Monterey International Pop Festival was an initial wave in the rising tide of globalism, as well as an advertisement for San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” and the transformative power of youth culture. In the sea of wildly clapping hands at the finale, the camera pans past one guy in gloves clapping only because he’d look like an idiot if he was the only one who wasn’t -- that could be me. (1968, dvd, r.) *7-*

Dear Diary

I am off my regular rhythm of film viewing and reviewing, but I wouldn’t want you to think my commitment to Cinema Salon was waning, so I’m going to offer a quick round-up of what I’ve been watching this week in the absence of worthwhile movies.

With my beloved Tribe falling just short of the baseball playoffs, I take only a distant interest in the postseason proceedings. I can’t love the White Sox who ousted my guys, but I am rooting for the end of another near-century-long Sox curse. And as it happens, I will be in Chicago while games 6 & 7 of the World Series may be transpiring. That didn’t work out so well in ’86, when I happened to be staying at the Sheraton in Boston and watching on tv as the Red Sox tried to close out the Mets. I was getting ready to go out and join the insanely joyful midnight crowds in Kenmore Square, when that dribbler rolled through Buckner’s legs.

For my winter film series at the Clark, I will be offering “Triple Feature: 3 Colors, 3 Painters, 3 Studios.” The last part will be a marathon of animation from three different studios: the National Film Board of Canada, Aardman Animation (of Wallace & Gromit fame) and the Hubley Studios. I’ve been surveying all available films by the last, to put together a program of Academy Award-winning shorts and others by John, Faith, and Emily Hubley. I will write up my findings in some detail soon.

As for my current film series, “Architectural Dreams,” it has been meeting a better response than I ever dreamed possible for a special interest series of documentaries on architects. I selected the films to survey documentary styles as much as architectural styles, and each is a good movie in its own right. If you’ve missed them, check out the program notes in my Archives of September 2005, and catch up with these excellent films from Netflix, or from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown, where the DVDs are available to borrow after they’ve been shown at the Clark.

While I was holding on to the Hubley disks from Netflix, my other viewing turned to daily TiVo maintenance. I am quite enjoying the current HBO series, Rome, which is sexed up but historically accurate as far as I have checked. It’s not The Wire or The Sopranos, but does maintain an HBO tradition of quality original series. This week I’ve been getting double doses of the Daily Show, as Jon Stewart has cloned off The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert is as talented and funny as good old Jon, but his one-note persona, as hilarious as it is, may wear thin after a while. Also, with a satellite upgrade I can now get a regular PBS station, so I’ve programmed a “season pass” to Jim Lehrer’s Newshour, to go with my daily Charlie Rose. I have to check the latter every day, since my good old friend Tom Krens is supposed to show up there sometime soon. Rose consistently has the most interesting talkers on tv, and is it just me getting more tolerant or is he gradually learning to shut up and let his guests answer questions without excess interruption? I tended to tune out the news after last year’s election, but as the dismantling of the disastrous Bush Administration proceeds apace, my interest is renewed and I’ve even started reading political blogs again.

Trying to clear out items that have been on my “now playing” list for months, I finally got around to watching the Luis Bunuel short film, Simon of the Desert. I’ve never been a Bunuel fan, immune as I am to the appeal of surrealism, not even Viridiana or Belle de Jour or other presumed classics. But I had fond memories of seeing Simon thirty-odd years ago at the Weston Language Center of Williams College. The story of the eccentric ascetic perched on his pillar in the desert, and repeatedly tempted by the devil in the shape of a voluptuous woman, is amusing if slight.

Another Spanish language film offered no such pleasure. Jamon Jamon is, as its title announces, a piece of ham, a diluted-Bunuel, sub-Almodovar sex farce that wishes it were a Spanish Tampopo. Despite the presence of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, director Bigas Luna accomplishes the remarkable feat of making sex tedious, farce unfunny, and food tasteless. I’d say you couldn’t pay me to watch it, but that’s exactly what the Clark did. I wouldn’t give it a number grade, but will say that it vies with Lethal Weapon for the title of worst film I’ve ever watched all the way through, but loses because I don’t find kinky sex as offensive as supposedly funny violence.

In a completely different vein is the silly but not stupid Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The title had come up when I was researching 1955 films for a possible Clark 50th anniversary tie-in; then there were some favorable reviews when the anniversary DVD came out. So I TiVo’d the recent TCM presentation. I’m definitely not an aficionado of MGM musicals in Cinemascope and eye-poppin’ color, but this was watchable. Howard Keel and Jane Powell don’t radiate star power, but this adaptation of a S. V. Benet story about the “Sobbin’ (i.e. Sabine) Women,” makes something of its 1850 Oregon setting, even if studio-bound. Stanley Donen can be a lively director, and Michael Kidd contributes some notable choreography. None of the songs were familiar to my ears, but none grated on them either. But it's a little hard to take how women are treated as chattel, either in the 1850s or the 1950s.

I’m going to be traveling a bit over the next ten days, but after that I will be back with more serious film reviewing, so please keep Cinema Salon bookmarked and come back again.

The Talk of the Town

What a weird amalgam! Sort of a screwball version of Fritz Lang’s Fury, mixing lynch mobs with romantic comedy. And what an odd pairing of Cary Grant and Ronald Colman as well, two Englishman supposedly representing antithetical New England types. And then the strange triangle in which they vie to give up Jean Arthur to each other. None of it believable for a minute, but with these three performers the nonsense hardly matters, and George Stevens is enough of a craftsman as director to give the proceedings some surface plausibility. Grant is a milltown anarchist (Leopold Dilg, if you can imagine -- well no, you can’t) falsely accused of arson and murder; Colman is the aloof and prematurely aged law professor destined for the Supreme Court. Through the agency of the appealing Ms. Arthur, the escaped fugitive winds up in the attic of the lawyer, and through debate on the philosophical basis of the law (I kid you not!), they become friends and both the better for it. Bizarre but enjoyable. Would certainly be fodder for any cultural psychoanalysis of American society in that era -- check out Colman’s relationship with his “man Tilney,” actor Rex Ingram. *6* (1942, dvd, n.)

Grizzly Man

The documentaries of Werner Herzog are always about something more than their ostensible subject, and here the theme is styles of self-dramatization. Not just of Timothy Treadwell, who obsessively filmed himself interacting with grizzly bears in the remote Alaskan wilds -- until one ate him -- but of every other person who appears in the film, including the director himself. With hundreds of hours of Treadwell’s filming to work with, Herzog constructs a meditation on wildness, environmentalism, personal weaknesses and coping strategies, filmmaking, and a whole savory pot of bear stew. The up-close footage of bears in the wild, foraging and fighting, is extremely vivid, even if the animals are continually upstaged by Treadwell himself. I’m sure Herzog left out most of the “Wild Kingdom for kiddies” footage and focussed on those frames where Tim’s damaged self-assertion were strongest. But everybody gets in the act: the coroner, a bush pilot, old girlfriends, each seeks to dramatize their touch with celebrity, just as Treadwell tried to borrow celebrity from the bears and foxes whom he professed to love. And of course, Werner’s own self-assertion is implicit. His narration starts defining and interpreting Treadwell even before the subject appears on screen, and keeps on pointing out and underlining through the course of the film. The voiceover is bit hectoring, but makes clear that this film is a personal essay and does not attempt to be an “objective” documentary, despite the he-said-she-said, on-the-one-hand-and-the-other talking heads. Still, there is a richness of material that leaves the viewer to his or her own conclusions. (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-86, RT-93.)

A Very Long Engagement

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and star Audrey Tatou of Amelie re-team in this adaptation of Sebastien Japrisot’s WWI novel. Despite the exuberance and fancy of Jeunet’s style, the insane horror of that conflict comes through as well as in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. But there’s mystery and romance and humor as well, too much of everything in fact. Frankly I did not give the film my best viewing, but its own excesses of plot and whimsy contributed to the wandering of my attention. Wow, wait a minute, that French housewife is Jodie Foster. Man, look at that crane shot, that CGI recreation of Paris, those sepia tones in the stunning cinematography. In a theater, perhaps it would all have washed over me, immersively, but in my easy chair it was just a box of bonbons, from which I was happy to sample a few and leave the rest. (2004, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-76, RT-78.)

A Special Day

Netflix subscribers beware, the DVD of this title is very low quality and dubbed. As such, I cannot give it a rating. It was watchable, however, as a last pairing of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni -- she a frumpy(!), homebound mother of six and fan of Mussolini, he an antifascist homosexual about to be deported. Nonetheless, how could you keep them apart, it’d be like keeping the pasta separate from the sauce? They live across the courtyard in an apartment complex, unknown to each other until the day in 1938 when everyone else goes to join the parade as Il Duce welcomes Der Fuhrer to the grandeur of Rome. Ettore Scola’s story and direction seem rather diagrammatic, but the setting is invested with authenticity and the stars provide passion and complexity. I have to believe that Meryl Streep went to school on Sophia Loren here to prep for the similar character and story of Bridges of Madison County. (1977, dvd, n.) *NR*

The Constant Gardener

Director Fernando Meirelles achieved acclaim for City of God (though I preferred the documentary Bus 174 as a portrait of Rio’s homeless youth), but here his swift mosaic brand of filmmaking is perfectly suited to the shattered glass worldview of John Le Carre’s novel. Fast-paced, dense and impenetrable, passionate and explosive, all-out and all-inclusive, the style suits the story. Though I felt a slight muddling of energy toward the end, and the denouement seemed implausibly underlined, this is really a marvel of visual storytelling, nonlinear, fragmented, caught on the fly in burning images. You get a sense of the overpowering realities of Africa, from the teeming streets of Nairobi to a desert refugee camp in the Sudan. Ralph Fiennes is excellent as the title character, a British diplomat, and Rachel Weisz is seductive and strong as the firebrand activist who marries him to get to Africa so she can confront the heart of darkness, which in this case is Big Pharma. This is a thriller with a brain and a heart, cannily unfolding its mysteries and puzzles, and bringing light to a hidden corner of the world’s woes. (2005, Images, n.) *8-* (MC-82, RT-82.)

Festival Express

This rock doc about a 1970 train trek across Canada is a time capsule for the era (which coincidentally is “my” era.) Swallow it and you are swept back to the Sixties. Obviously a lot of critics got high on this (witness cumulative scores below), but I just caught a mellow buzz, nothing like the wild times the musicians had in the capsule of the train -- drinking, drugging, playing and singing -- jamming the groove to the rhythm of the tracks. Oh yes, they’d occasionally get off the train and give concerts, and the performance footage is excellent. I’d just seen Janis Joplin’s same all-out performances of “Cry Baby” and “Tell Mama” in another doc about her, and it was good to see alternate takes from The Band performing “The Weight” and “I Shall Be Released” (though Scorsese’s Last Waltz will remain forever definitive), but the revelation was the Grateful Dead in “Workingman’s Dead” mode, which was the only period in which I really followed them. Fact is, Jerry Garcia was quite a musician. There’s a scary-funny-thrilling sequence in which he, Janis, and Rick Danko are in the bar car wailing away at an old work song. She would be dead of a heroin overdose in two months; the guys would follow in their own due time. But what a time it was while it lasted. (2004, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-85, RT-96.)

Garbo again

Two weeks ago would have been Greta Garbo's 100th birthday, which was celebrated not just by the long-awaited release of ten of her films on DVD, but also by the best station on tv, Turner Classic Movies, presenting an original documentary by film scholar Kevin Brownlow, titled simply Garbo. This was a profile that went beyond simple clips and interviews to present a complex and intriguing portrait of the mysterious star, but the best moments of all were from a brief screentest from 1949, seven years after her last movie, for a project that never got off the ground, despite the fact that she was clearly still a face that the camera loved, alive with a range of emotion, in spite of her reclusive personality. Garbo is an old-time star whose artistry is still alive, so get Camille or some other films of hers, and settle in for some real Hollywood magic.