TV docs

No, not that kind. I’m not talking about the long line running from Dr. Kildare to Dr. McDreamy, but rather nonfiction films on television. I’ve been watching a lot of them lately, and along with the new baseball season and basketball playoffs (both hopeful this year for a long-suffering Cleveland sport fan), they’ve been cutting into my film-watching. Here’s a brief report.

I’ve plugged it a few times already, but I have to insist: Planet Earth is must viewing, either as broadcast on the Discovery Channel with narration by Sigourney Weaver, or on DVD with BBC narration by David Attenborough. I prefer her to him, less plummy, more straightforward, but the nature photography is stunning either way, a real argument for High Definition TV. The dozen or so hour-long programs are highly miscellaneous, without much scientific coherence, but cumulatively a vivid picture emerges of the diversity and hunger of life, and how that diversity of hungers is fed by the diversity of our one planet -- the ingenuity of evolution, the marvelous, manifold ways living things have found to survive and reproduce.

Another documentary series with a far less exhilarating theme, and much wider variation in quality was the PBS series, “America at the Crossroads.” I couldn’t bear to watch more than a minute of Richard Perle’s feeble re-assertion of righteousness, and several other films sinned against the art of documentary in my view, but there were two worth looking for and at. The Men Behind Jihad was basically a visual recapitulation of the argument of Lawrence Wright’s essential book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, and he appears prominently as a talking head, but the film puts together a lot of archival footage that illustrates the story well. And Operation Homecoming was a moving and informative view of the Iraq experience from the perspective of American soldiers.

A Crude Awakening, airing on Sundance channel, was an entertaining and eye-opening summary of America’s addiction to oil.

Putting together a continuing series at the Clark on “Documenting Artists,” I had occasion to look at two films that appeared on the PBS series, “American Masters.” From Ric Burns, in the familiar vein that he has worked with his brother Ken and independently, comes Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006), which at four hours is inflated both in rhetoric and running time, but still makes the case for Warhol’s importance as an artist, while showing how the shy, strange boy from Pittsburgh came to define fame and celebrity in late 20th century America. Norman Rockwell: Painting America (1999) is more modest in every respect, but also fills in the life story of another sort of American artistic icon, even while favoring us with the “expert” testimony of Steven Spielberg and the like.

Just to justify my dearth of film reviews lately, let me note that I also watched the new DVD release of the recent BBC miniseries of George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, which was good of its kind, but if you want to immerse yourself in an adaptation of a Victorian novel, then I strongly reaffirm my suggestion of last year’s Bleak House, recently rebroadcast and now on DVD.

While enumerating my visual distractions, let me note that I am keeping up with the new HBO seasons of The Sopranos and Entourage, but will save comment till they conclude.

Valmont

Though wobbly in tone and language, Milos Forman’s adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons makes it into my Fragonard-related film series at the Clark next Fall simply on the basis of costume and set design. This is a lovely film to look at, and will look great projected widescreen on the museum wall. Made at the same time as Stephen Frears’ version of the 1782 Laclos novel, Valmont ceded priority and esteem to the bravura ensemble of Glenn Close-John Malkovich-Michelle Pfieffer-Uma Thurman. Here the characters are embodied by Annette Bening-Colin Firth-Meg Tilly-Fairuza Balk -- not bad but no match -- their lines have little flavor of period or place, and there’s more bedroom farce than revelation of malevolence and decadence. But oh those locations, dresses, decor! (1989, dvd, n.) *6*

Reader advisory

I’ve been hither and yon lately, but I assure you I have no intention of abandoning Cinema Salon. On the contrary, I am planning new features. So please bookmark the site and please come back.

And please contact me with comments and/or suggestions (or even heckling) at: ssatullo@clarkart.edu. I am eager to make the site more useful and appealing. Now that Google has improved the Blogger search function, I urge you to use the search box at the top of the page, for ready access to my commentary on a given film or director or actor, to compare opinions or seek recommendations.

I am curious whether other features would make Cinema Salon more attractive. The name was supposed to betoken a discussion website, but I turned the comment feature off when it filled with spam. Now I have seen a number of sites where threaded commentary works well, and I wonder whether a moderated discussion by registered users would be worthwhile? Technical simpleton that I am, I am also contemplating late adoption of another common blog feature, in making a live link from the Metacritic rating I append to most reviews.

As for my own rating system, I will restate my rationale. My 10-point ranking compares neatly with Metacritic’s 100-point scale, though arrived at quite differently. Without pretense to collective objectivity, my ratings are unabashedly subjective, though I like to think they are offered with an informed subjectivity. But I don’t imagine that I am assigning some objective value to a film, but rather my particular response to a particular screening in a particular situation. It might alter considerably upon re-viewing. I wish only to share my enthusiasms and offer my caveats. So here’s what my scale implies:

*5* = B-. Anything less should be taken as a warning, since life is too short to spend on the less than good.

*6* = B. Definitely worth seeing, if you have the time and interest and opportunity.

*7* = B+. Recommended viewing, worth looking for.

*8* = A-. Among the best films of any given year, worth seeking out.

*9* = A. Among the best films of all time, must viewing.

*10* = A+. Go and see this, then come and talk to me about the art of film.

Clean

Maggie Cheung plays a cross between Yoko Ono and Courtney Love, in this film by her ex-husband Olivier Assayas. It says something about her appeal and skill as an actress that she makes such a grating personality into a sympathetic character -- she has presence and conveys feeling. Nick Nolte contributes a mannered but effective performance, as the father of Maggie’s OD’ed rock star husband, and guardian of the son she is too strung out to take care of. She struggles to get off drugs and put her life together, maybe for the first time, and he offers a message of forgiveness and redemption, played out in small steps and tiny gestures. Assayas’ style is intimate but visually exciting, and he’s got a subtle but sure touch with writing and direction. Can people change for the better? This film holds out a modest hope. Will be interesting to compare to Maggie Gyllenhaal in Sherrybaby. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-75.)

One Bright Shining Moment

“The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern” is the subtitle of Stephen Vittoria’s documentary. Though the man himself may be forgotten, the term “McGovernite” remains a term of abuse and ridicule in general political discourse, but I remember him with great fondness and regret, so I was happy for this film to resurrect memories and buff up the image of the “prairie populist,” the “right from the start” preacher man “too decent to be President.” The time is still too vivid for me to be in need of much recall, but it was good to hear from McGovern himself both then and now. The film is unabashedly partisan, to its own detriment, but the Vietnam-Iraq parallel does not have to be heavily underlined for the contemporary relevance of this documentary to be painfully obvious. If only we’d listened to George then, we wouldn’t be afflicted by W. now. Sigh. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-64.)

Overlord

This semi-documentary about D-Day won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, but wasn’t released in the U.S. till 2006, probably just as a promo for the now-released Criterion Collection DVD. With a small sample of reviews, it ranked absurdly high on Metacritic’s averaged ranking of the best films of the year. Maybe if I were able to read the liner notes by my old acquaintance (and now ubiquitous film critic) Kent Jones, I might have been more convinced of the importance of this film, but having only the dvd from Netflix, I have to say my response was lukewarm. As a use of Imperial War Museum film archives, it did not satisfy as much as the World At War tv series, which I watched religiously way back when, and can still summon the memory of the music and Laurence Olivier’s narration, behind the footage brought back by some amazingly brave and composed combat cameramen. Here, a slender story of one British soldier from conscription to just the moment before hitting the beach at Normandy is interwoven almost seamlessly by director Stuart Cooper with vintage documentary footage. The rigors of training and then of waiting, without any knowledge or control over your own fate, are most effectively portrayed. The contemporaneous horrors of war come almost as nightmare to the young soldier awaiting deployment, along with premonitions of his own death. It’s an honorable effort but the staged scenes are a little skimpy; what stands out is the documentary footage, and that makes me want (but dread) to watch World At War all over again. (1975, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-88.)

3 Cyranos

The character of Cyrano is so familiar, in the common coin of cultural currency, that it came as a surprise to find that I didn’t really know the play at all, aside from the basic premise. And an even greater surprise to find out how deep and resonant it is. I couldn’t have told you that Rostand’s play premiered in 1897, that it was written in Alexandrine verse, or that it was considered the last great popular historical romance. So the 1990 film version of Cyrano de Bergerac directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and starring Gerard Depardieu came as a revelation to me, most in how close to home the theme felt -- the fond hope that beauty of language may be more attractive than beauty of person, closer to the soul. Lavishly produced and festooned with awards, this French production is meticulous in its recreation of a 17th century milieu. The music of the language comes through even when one knows little French, and the subtitles written by Anthony Burgess effectively transmit the poetic meaning. This film made Depardieu an international star (after he had made 80 of his 160 films to date), and he is both an imposing and a wistful presence, swashbuckling and sensitive, up to rousing action and to plaintive retreat as well. And it’s easy to fall for Roxanne in the person of Anne Brochet. All round, an impeccable adaptation. *8+*

Jose Ferrer won a Best Actor Oscar for the 1950 Hollywood version of Cyrano de Bergerac and his way with the poetry in translation makes this highly watchable as well, sticking close to the play itself, or at least to the French movie. The other credits are unfamiliar, but while Michael Gordon’s direction is workaday, stage-set stuff, Mala Powers was good enough as Roxanne to make one wonder why she didn’t have much of a career thereafter. All round, an honorable adaptation. *7+*

So then I went back and watched Steve Martin as an updated Cyrano in Roxanne (1987), which was probably my only direct acquaintance with the character heretofore. It’s certainly charming enough as a contemporary romantic comedy, with Fred Schepisi directing well in a Rocky Mountain town setting and Darryl Hannah as charming as Roxanne (Kowalski, in this case) as she was as a mermaid in Splash, but just as imaginary. Martin as scriptwriter jettisons most of the plot and all of the poetry, retaining a few bravura scenes and some of that wistful faith in the power of words. His fire chief C.D. Bales is as adept as the traditional Cyrano in some ways, though in others the film is somewhat slapsticky. Still, a competent and amusing effort, which suffers only by close comparison to the original. *7-*

Notes on a Scandal

Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett -- ’nuff said. They’re not the only good things about this film, but they are a sufficient recommendation. As directed by Richard Eyre from a Patrick Marber adaptation of a Zoe Heller novel, it surmounts two liabilities going in, a spoken narration and an overbearing musical score by Phillip Glass, until the conclusion resorts to histrionics instead of a quiet chill of psychological menace. But you’re in fascinating company with Dame Judi and babe Cate, the former an old battle-ax of a history teacher and the latter a novice art teacher at a London high school, who fall in with each other out of asymmetric need. Dench needs the companionship of a protege, needs to touch the life and person of a younger woman; Blanchett needs the excitement she missed when at 20 she married an older man and disappeared into motherhood, needs the touch of a younger man -- much younger, a 15 year old student of hers. The older woman wants to be a confidante, but settles for emotional blackmail when she discovers the younger woman’s affair. It’s a game of cat and mouse that turns into a fur-flying cat fight. Again, the two stars save the film, because they make their basically odious characters intriguing and even sympathetic (something an accomplished quartet could not do with the misanthopic Marber’s script for Closer.) They each get a quiet scene at the end, but not before things get very noisy indeed. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-73.)

Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World.)

Subdued but ravishing, this Alain Corneau film makes the case for music not just as the essence of human feeling, but as a way to raise the dead, literally a resurrection of spirit. Gerard Depardieu is court composer to Louis XIV, and though resplendent in ribbons and lace amidst the Baroque splendor of Versailles, he owes his soul to his severe mentor on the viola da gamba. He recalls his teacher in extended flashback in which his character is played by Depardieu’s own son, Guillaume. Jean-Pierre Marielle is the old Jansenist who becomes even more hermetic on the sudden death of his beautiful young wife, and neglects his two young daughters except for their musical education. Anne Brochet is the elder, who falls in love with the younger Depardieu, who insinuates himself into the master’s household but lacks the feeling to reciprocate in full. Later, after success at court, the older Depardieu is mortified into renewed submission to the tutelage of his master, now stripped of all human connection except through his music. A still life painting figures in the story as a parallel to music in art, nature morte indeed, and the cinematography by Yves Angelo is painterly in the extreme. Though I put together this “Age of Claude: Films of Painting and Performance in the 17th Century” series rather casually around a tenuous hook, it turned out to be much more powerful and coherent than I expected, with this film offering a perfect summation. (1992, dvd@cai, r.) *8+*

Heading South

Make a mental note of the name Laurent Cantet -- with this successor to Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001) he establishes himself as a director who guarantees an intellectually engaging film. Keenly attuned to the realities of economic life, he brings a political agenda that is tempered by a tough-minded empathy that extends across class lines. So this is a film about neocolonialism and sexual tourism, with lots to say about race and gender, but with clear-eyed sympathy for all its characters, except for Baby Doc Duvalier’s thugs in 1970s Haiti. We arrive with Karen Young (recognizable as Adrianna’s FBI case agent from The Sopranos) at a beachside resort, where she makes a beeline for a black youth lying on the beach, and soon meets Charlotte Rampling, a French literature professor from Wellesley who is the rooster-hen who rules this migratory roost of aging birds, well-off white women nesting with pretty black boys. They vie for the attentions and favor of the beautiful young man, who has troubles of his own outside the sequestered confines of this paradisal resort on an infernal island. There is no reflexive moralism here, but rather an honest acknowledgement of mutual need, and revelation of character under emotional stress. There is no taking of sides, just a depth-charged understanding of each side. Beautiful to look at, this film is even more impressive to think about. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-73.)

A week’s wrap-up

I’ve seen a lot of films in the past week, but I’m not up to offering succinct summations and assigned ratings, so I’ll make do with a series of rambling observations.

I was amazed to discover I had never seen Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) before showing it in the Clark auditorium as the penultimate film in my “Age of Claude” series about painting and performance in the 17th century. I assumed my memory was merely vague and nonspecific, but somehow I’d missed this film despite all its accolades (5 Oscar noms & 1 win, 11 Cesars, Cannes grand prize) and despite the fact I had it in my Video Archive at Either/Or (I confirmed by checking online with the Milne Library in Williamstown, where the collection now resides.) (Since I’m rambling anyway, I will digress to remind you that the Milne Library also gets the DVDs of all the films I show at the Clark, available to anyone with a Western Mass library card.) Anyway, this Cyrano was so good, I moved two other versions to the top of my Netflix queue and will review all three together soon. This lavish French production starring Gerard Depardieu and directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau will be hard to beat.

So that made two weeks in a row for my first time ever showing a film I’d never seen, and it worked out fine. I put this series together rather casually, so I’ve been surprised myself by its excellence, in detail and in sum -- as well as in audience response. If you’re in the area, I can offer a definite recommendation for the final film in the series this Friday at 4:00, another Gerard Depardieu film, this time playing a court composer to Louis XIV in All the Mornings of the World (Tout les Matins du Monde.)

Otherwise my watching has been an unaccountable mishmash, which I will organize into arbitrary double features. First off, my impromptu Rico Tubbs duo: I never watched the 80s tv show Miami Vice, so it took me a while to figure out who that familiar face was in Sparkle (1976), and it took the final credits for me to sort out his three first names, Phillip Michael Thomas. I did recognize Irene Cara as the title character, but I wonder why I didn’t recognize Lonette McKee as her older sister -- she had so much screen presence and yet I don’t remember her from anything else. Anyway this DVD release piggybacked on the theatrical release of Dreamgirls (which I missed but await on DVD), and some reviews cited it as a better film about a Supremes-like girl group in the early Sixties. Though this film certainly had moments of exuberance in the early going, it limply followed a template already old thirty years ago. I actually enjoyed it a bit, but it is definitely not something I would recommend.

In Michael Mann’s self-appropriation of Miami Vice for the big screen (2006), Tubbs is played by Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell is Crockett, and Gong Li (!) is the drug queen. All four are more than capable of holding the screen on their own, so this thriller is continuously watchable though intermittently intelligible. Rather than sun-kissed, this is a dark, tangled vision of a Carribean crossroads between heaven and hell -- fast, frantic, obsessive, visually striking but not particularly rewarding. I actually admired it a bit, but it is definitely not something I would recommend. (MC-65, me: *6*)

Now another ad hoc duo: very, very French films about amorous conflicts, notable for the ambition of the director and the astounding magnetism of the female lead. Isabelle Huppert has been as ubiquitous as Gerard Deperdieu in French film of the last three decades, and is equally capable of ringing changes on her persona. In Gabrielle (2005) she might just have recycled Madame Bovary in another tale of erotic misery, this from a story by Joseph Conrad, adapted by Patrice Chereau, but she plumbs new depths of despair as an upper class trophy wife who leaves her husband but then chickens out and returns within hours, but not before he has read the note she left behind, so devastating to his complacent self-regard (well embodied by Pascal Greggory.) Chereau’s direction is typically unblinking in its view of emotional desolation, though a little over-ingenious with switches between black & white and color, title cards, jump cuts, and other violations of cinematic convention. The two performances carry the day, however, grim as the proceedings may be. (MC-79, me: *7-*)

Large claims are made for Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours (To Our Loves) (1984), just released on DVD with full Criterion Collection treatment, but for me it was made remarkable just by the star-is-born debut of a 15-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire, as the confusedly promiscuous teenage daughter in a disintegrating family. Even if unaware of the subsequent career that would take her from Vagabond to Joan the Maid and many other notable films, you can feel the camera fall in love with her immediately, the subdued watchfulness broken too rarely by the radiant smile. That doesn’t mean you can really understand the actions of her character, or the rest of her dreadful family. The absconding father is played by Pialat himself, and the American correlative would be the films of John Cassavetes, to whom I never responded particularly and haven’t watched lately, despite his having become a touchstone for so many critics and young filmmakers. So this film is painfully intimate, ragged and supposedly real. I don’t know about that, but I do know that Sandrine is always a woman to watch.

Next up are two documentaries from 2006 that I TiVo’d from IFC and PBS respectively, but which are also available on DVD. Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated effectively demystifies the MPAA film rating system, but its efforts to be entertaining come across as cute and puerile, so I appreciate the service it provides but discern special interest pleading in its Metacritic score of 75. Contrariwise, a collective score of 79 doesn’t do full justice to Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: the Life and Death of the Peoples Temple, which interweaves a wealth of material into a powerful summation of an 1978 event that for someone of my generation and inclination was one of the horrific peaks of historical and emotional devastation on the continuum from the JFK assasination to 9/11. This perversion of hope into tragedy, as a vibrant and idealistic community committed suicide at the behest of a deranged leader, more than 900 people drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid in the isolated jungle of Guyana, is something that made my life sadder but wiser, and this film makes it present again in a judicious but lacerating manner.

While on the subject of documentaries, let me reiterate my strong recommendation that you catch up with Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel or on DVD -- it really represents the state of the art when it comes to nature cinematography, and it doesn’t dilute the wonder of evolutionary diversity with excessive anthropomorphism. This week I will be watching the ballyhooed PBS series, America at the Crossroads, and will report back to you..

The Mother

Roger Michell is not a name that leaps to mind when one talks about the best directors working today, but maybe it should. Persuasion was the best of a spate of Jane Austen adaptations in the 90s, and Notting Hill is about as good as a frothy romantic comedy can get. Here he does well by a Hanif Kureishi script, with its characteristic candor and insight into the erotic lives of contemporary Londoners. It starts almost like a British transposition of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (a great place to start!), with provincial parents paying an unwanted visit to their upwardly mobile children in the city, in an excruciating clash of culture and family. But when the father dies suddenly, the mother can’t go home again, and intrudes on the life of her children, most grievously by involving herself with her daughter’s lover. Anne Reid is pitch perfect as the difficult woman in her 60s trying to imagine a new life for herself, and Daniel Craig (who is emerging as one of the best actors working today) convinces equally as the 30ish man who feels sympathy and something more for her, despite or because of the disorder of his own existence. Now we’re in the terrain of Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (a great place to wind up!), an unblinking look at the erotic connection between an older woman and a younger man, each character all too real. The result is well-wrought and well-judged, with a dynamic visual style and a strong emotional pull. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-72.)

Carnival in Flanders (La Kermesse Heroique.)

This was the first time I’d ever programmed a film at the Clark that I hadn’t seen myself, based only on critical reputation and fit with the theme of the series. Otherwise unavailable in this country, I had to order a DVD from Britain and rely on the A-V wizardry of the Clark auditorium manager to find a way to show it. The film turned out to be well worth the effort, a true specimen of the golden age of French filmmaking (pre-New Wave, that is.) Exquisitely designed and wittily directed by Jacques Feyder, it brilliantly evokes the world and style of native Flemish masters, particularly Brueghel, while demonstrating political and cultural prescience in its amusing dissection of the war between men and women, as well as occupier and occupied in the military sense. When a Spanish army on the march stops in a remote Flanders town, the men run and hide and the women take up the conjoined causes of homeland defense and sexual liberation. Entertaining and provocative, this is an old film with a modern spirit. (1935, dvd@cai, n.) *8*

The Lives of Others

Though Pan’s Labyrinth would win my vote, this German film from first-time writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnesmarck was a worthy choice for best foreign film at the Oscars. It’s portrayal of East Germany’s transition from the gray, Stasi-haunted landscape before the fall of the Wall, to the graffitti-plastered freedom of re-unification is extremely persuasive. The focal character, played with just the right touch of melting steel by Ulrich Muhe, is reminiscent of Gene Hackman in The Conversation, the agent experienced in surveillance and interrogation gradually changed by the lives he spies into, in this case a playwright of ambiguous affiliation and the actress/muse he lives with. The film runs a little long as it tries to pack in resolution of all its themes, and the central conceit that if you are receptive to art and beauty then you must have a conscience, and a soul despite the stoniness of your personality, is rather baldly stated -- but carried off by the skill of the performances and detail of the filmmaking. (2006, Landmark Chicago, n.) *8-* (MC-89.)

The Notorious Bettie Page

Slight but well-made, Mary Harron’s film about the Fifties pin-up queen is surprisingly charming. The same can be said for Gretchen Mol in the title role, really delightful in both appearance and personality. The B&W evocation of the era is slightly reminiscent of Good Night and Good Luck, though here David Strathairn plays Estes Kefauver instead of Edward R. Murrow. Along with Lili Taylor, he typifies the top to bottom quality of this production. Rather than heavy breathing over pornography or censorship, this film comes across as good-natured and winsome as its subject, a Southern girl of religious bent who was preternaturally comfortable undressing and dressing up for the camera, even in bondage regalia, innocent and yet kinky. Bettie/Gretchen is as sunny in aspect as the colorful Florida interludes that punctuate the film in faux-Technicolor, more sweet and funny than powerful or penetrating, but still a thoughtful effort all round. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-64.)

HBO and other spectacles

Though the HBO documentary series Addiction is not pinpointed to my interests, I have been watching because it brings together an all-star lineup of documentarians, really everybody from Pennebaker and Maysles forward, with characteristic work from Barbara Kopple (about the Steamfitters Union’s self-insured and union-run alcohol treatment program) and Berlinger & Sinofsky (about Boston Drug Court.) All of these notable filmmakers submerge their identities in the oddly configured series, which is surely destined more for DVD than broadcast. All the various stories are squeezed into a 90 minute compilation, and then offered with more completion as a supplemental series of 15-30 minute films. If the subject interests you from a personal or therapeutic standpoint, or if you might appreciate a compilation album of the finest documentarists, then this series would be worth your time. It certainly hammered home its main scientific point with me, that addiction is a disease of the brain that we are learning more and more about, and that it is amenable to treatment based on extensive experience and experiment.

Another sort of HBO series to which I made a completist commitment has just concluded, and I have to say that I was not sorry to see Rome end, even though the story cuts off with the rise of Augustus. I would put it in a category with trashy but readable historical fiction. There’s enough history and visual opulence to keep you watching, spiced with blood and sex for those who like it hot. If you go in for the ultraviolence and a bit of the old inandout, you will find it horrorshow. (Turns out the Roman past is just as brutal as the Clockwork Orange future, and twice as alien.) If you like historical reconstructions, you will find plenty to keep your eyes busy, and some to keep your mind busy as well. Dramatically it’s just a lavish soap opera, with villains and villainesses, shocking revelations, broad emotions, and sex-sex-sex -- not that that’s a bad thing, you understand.

For different reasons, I had occasion to look at two recent cinematic spectacles that met with lukewarm critical receptions, and I found myself sharing the averaged reaction represented by their cumulative Metacritic scores, giving both a *5+*. I watched Idlewild (2006, dvd, n.) because it was strongly recommended by one of the critics I trust most, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com. (I think our disagreements must be confined to musicals, since I remember her disparaging one I liked a lot, Gurinder Chadha’s faux-Bollywood Bride & Prejudice.) Anyway, when it comes to OutKast, I’m an outcast -- never heard a song of theirs, didn’t recognize them as the stars of this film -- so I’m out of it from the get-go. Even if I bought into Bryan Barber’s hyperkinetic vision of a 1930s speakeasy in Idlewild, Georgia, once the music started and the singers started rapping, I was distanced from the proceedings in a way I wasn’t by the anachronism of, say, Marie Antoinette. (MC-55.)

Though I’d enjoyed the book, poor reviews kept me from Rob Marshall’s adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha. (2005, dvd, n.) There was something just so Hollywood in the way the movie had three Chinese actresses playing Japanese geishas speaking English -- that sort of cultural “whatever” smacked of the old days of painted movie illusion. But on the other hand, those three Chinese actresses were Gong Li, Ziyi Zhang, and Michelle Yeoh, so that’s some serious star power to go with dazzling beauty. Which of course the film ladles on in a big way. So the eye candy is certainly sufficient to make this a watchable experience, as obvious and inert as the film may be dramatically. (MC-54.)

A different sort of spectacle is on view in Rize (2005, dvd, n.), a rap musical I could get behind, about a form of rapid, even violent, but artful street dance indigenous to the mean streets of L.A., various strains of which convey a different sort of communal identity from Crips and Bloods. This is the first documentary from David LaChapelle, apparently known for his fashion photography and music videos. That background comes through in the disjointed quality of the film, watchable in its moments but not cumulative in its impact. This is no Paris Is Burning, the marvelous and deeply moving 1990 documentary about the vogue for vogueing among a community of transvestites in NYC. It’s less a journey than a gyration, but it does give voice to lives less noticed. *6* (MC-74.)

One last note before I’m away for a week: if you are partial to spectacular nature documentaries, I advise you to tune into the series Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel or on DVD. It represents the state of the art -- awesome in the truest sense of the word.

Little Children

Not a bad film, but a major disappointment based on expectations from previous work of director Todd Field (In the Bedroom) and writer Tom Perrotta (Election, Joe College, this novel), particular favorites of mine. No disappointment in Kate Winslet -- by herself she makes the film worth watching -- except for the potential criticism of being too beautiful for the role. Though I guess they were setting the bar high by making her only have to be less beautiful than the wife of straying hubby Patrick Wilson, played by Jennifer Connelly. Jackie Earle Haley won a lot of praise for his comeback role as the paroled pedophile who inflames the passions of a well-off suburban New England community and sets in motion what story there is. I for one thought the movie, and the original novel, would have been better off without that character at all. As it was, I found the film all over the place and uncertain of tone, with some very good scenes and some very strained scenes, patched together with a most annoying narration. On the one hand, it was good to hear Perrotta’s wry novelistic voice, but on the other it betokened a failure of focus and imagination in the film as an independent entity. And it was disconcerting that the actual narrator’s voice was familiar from dozens of PBS documentaries, throwing me out of the proceedings even more. This film might have been Rohmeresque, if not Flaubertian, but settled for the desperation of housewives and the hyped up terrors of suburbia. (2006, Images, n.) *6* (MC-75)

Burn! (Queimada!)

I’ve been looking for this film for a long time, since it is Gillo Pontecorvo’s follow-up to Battle of Algiers, in my view one of the greatest films ever. Plus Brando! In a way it wasn’t a disappointment to watch, even though it was a mess, just too many elements that fail to coalesce. How long is it? What language is it? Apparently there is an 132 minute version in the “original” Italian, so Brando is dubbed. The recently-released dvd here is twenty minutes shorter, and in English, so you get Marlon’s second stab at a Fletcher Christian accent in his own voice, and everyone else is dubbed. He plays William Walker, who’s an international adventurer/fixer for the Queen’s Navy, who first comes to this Antilles island to foment revolt among the canecutters against the Portuguese, and then returns ten years later to put down revolt among the same people against the English now in control. The island of Queimada -- which literally means “burned-over” -- was initially colonized when the Portuguese burned out the natives and brought in African slaves to work the sugar plantations. Walker revisits that strategy against the slave insurgency in 1848. The contemporaneous Vietnam connections are obvious and powerful, the billows of flame recalling nothing so much as napalm, and the notion that it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. There is a lot going on here, the ambition is staggering, but Pontecorvo does not manage to hold it together, and the polyglot cast is fragmenting as well. There are sweeping scenes and set pieces, but no coherent flow. The color photography is sometimes striking, but sometimes amateurish, and the Ennio Morricone score seems slapped on from some other movie entirely. Still -- Brando was yet a mesmerizingly beautiful man at the time, and always fascinating to watch in his offbeat approach. And the film’s warnings about colonialism and imperialism are still highly relevant. (1968, dvd, n.) *6*

For Your Consideration

I suppose comedy really resides in the eye (and gut) of the beholder, but I do not share the critical consensus that this latest from Christopher Guest and his repertory company is not up to the standard set by Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. To me it’s very much of a piece, and of particular interest since it skewers the movie business and the whole Oscar mania. An idiotic piece of Southern schmaltz called Home for Purim starts to generate Oscar buzz while still in production, and several of the actors start to lose their sanity in lust for the golden, little ball-less man: Catherine O’Hara as the dying mother/queen Esther, Harry Shearer as the dad trying to make a comeback from his fame as the foot-long weenie in tv commercials for hot dogs, and Parker Posey (looking startlingly like Katherine Hepburn in period dress and coif) as the prodigal lesbian daughter returning to reconcile before her mother’s death. All the usual Guest troupers (plus new guests such as Ricky Gervais) march through, contributing their own largely-improvised cameos, and covering a lot of satirical ground in under 90 minutes. Frankly, some of the deleted scenes ought to have been included. Much of the satire is gentler than Borat’s but almost as cringe-worthy. This may not be the best Guest visitation, but I wager you would find your share of laughs here. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-68.)

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

Oh my god, I’m a convert to the Church of Leonard. This proselytizing tribute/concert film won me over, modest Canadian production that it is, but worthy celebration of the cult troubador -- he's my man now. I wasn’t a fan beforehand -- I did consider his songs to be an essential element of the greatness of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but mainly knew his work through covers by the likes of Judy Collins (there, I’ve revealed way too much about myself.) The film incorporates tantalizingly little of his own singing, but his songs are well rendered in a “Came So Far for Beauty” concert at the Sydney Opera House, by a variety of McGarrigles and Wainwrights and Thompsons et al. The performances are intercut with interviews with Cohen himself and a gaggle of admirers, two of whom are Edge and Bono (pontificating with point, as usual), with the climax coming when U2 backs Leonard singing “Tower of Song.” First-time director Lian Lunson is no great shakes, but her film and subject both reflect an appealing blend of sincerity and artifice, which applies to the musical performances as well. Now I am willing to accept this singer-songwriter as poet-prophet, the elusive and allusive lover as Zen monk, the gravel-in-the-gutter voice as truth-telling visionary, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the race. A few weeks back I commented on a great year for musical documentaries, and while it may not be the best, this one moved me most of all. (2006, dvd, n.) *8+* (MC-68.)

Borat

I’m nearly speechless, not so much breathless from laughter or shock, as simply past the wave of this cultural phenomenon. Sacha Baron Cohen is obviously a very smart man who has a lot on his mind, but he does go in for a lot of mindless laughs and Jackass behavior. The film certainly is funny, and more satiric than just offensive for the hell of it. Some of the “Oh no, he didn’t!” moments had been spoiled for me by prior description. But I have to say that the extras on the DVD, deleted scenes and in-character promotional appearances, are every bit as funny as the film itself. The character of faux Khazak reporter Borat is the thing, and the situations he gets into. It’s more peripatetic performance art than a film per se. So I can’t go overboard with my rating. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-89.)

Nine Queens

This delightful film from Argentina is -- like David Mamet’s House of Games -- adept at the long con and the short con. Everyone in it is a con man, including writer/director Fabian Bielinski. A couple of small-timers meet cute in a convenience store, and in a day of running scams, happen upon a big score, an immaculate forgery of a philatelist treasure, the sheet of stamps known as Nueve Reinas, the Nine Queens, with an eager buyer waiting. Ricardo Darin and Gaston Pauls are excellent as the duo, laid back and perpetually wary but wise in the ways of the world, canny at playing on the weakness and confusion of anyone (including the audience.) The twists and turns are fun to follow, when you can, and if the big twist at the end is a “Now wait a minute” moment, well, you’re jolly enough to take the ride to the end. But the film has a ground level reality that distinguishes it from constructions like The Sting or Oceans 11, so there is genuine observation and insight going on amidst the gameplaying. (2002, IFC/T, n.) *7+* (MC-80.)

Omagh

Paul Greengrass was one of the writers on this film made for Irish TV, in effect a melding of Sunday Bloody Sunday and United 93, and Pete Travis directs very much in the distinctive Greengrass style of docudrama -- in close, intense, in the middle of the action, handheld and quick-cut. Here the terrorism is homegrown -- a faction of the IRA tries to undermine the Good Friday Accords by setting off a car bomb on Market Street in Omagh, Northern Ireland, on August 15, 1998, killing 29 and wounding 200, many of them children. Of course many more are actually wounded by the senseless violence, including the family of one dead young man. His father is played by Gerard McSorley, who becomes the spokesman for a group of families seeking justice from the authorities, who in turn variously have their own reasons to make the problem go away, to cover their asses or “not to disrupt the peace process.” So no one is ever tried for the crime, and the family needs to find its own way of healing. Available on DVD from Netflix, this film is a moving and informative statement on one of the salient traumas of our time, the super-empowerment of small groups of angry men bent on destruction, and their continuing effect on the social fabric. (2004, Sund/T, n.) *7*

Donkey Skin (Peau d’Ane)

This film completes an implicit trilogy with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort -- for director Jacques Demy, star Catherine Deneuve, and composer Michel Legrand. It’s a beautifully literal-minded translation of a fairy tale from the same pen as Cinderella, viewing the most extravagant tale with a child’s matter-of-fact logic of magic. Kind of creepy, as many genuine fairy tales are. Dying Queen makes King promise not to marry again unless he finds a wife more beautiful. He looks around but finds none more beautiful than his daughter. He proposes and she is shocked, but not inclined to refuse until her fairy godmother straightens her out, counseling her to make escalating demands, up to asking for the skin of the King’s fabulous gold-shitting donkey. The King is undetered in his misguided love, so the godmother has to whisk the Princess away and hide her under the cloak of the donkey skin, until she is discovered by the Prince of her dreams. Kinky stuff -- more Cocteau than Disney. One of many homages to Cocteau is Jean Marais as the King, very much as he was as the beast in La Belle et la Bete. Catherine Deneuve is every inch a Princess, even when smeared with grime and covered with a rather grisly donkey skin, and Delphine Seyrig is a swanky godmother. (Amusing sidelight: the Prince, Jacques Perrin, went on to become director of the great documentary Winged Migration.) The plot of the story is a foregone conclusion, but the details of its visualization are a continuing surprise and delight. Special effects are few, but the effects of costume, location, and camera are definitely special. (1970, dvd, n.) *7-*

Where Angels Fear to Tread

This may be taken as the runt of the litter of E.M. Forster adaptations that came out in succession in the decade after 1984, and it’s quite mousy in the radiance of A Passage to India, Howards End, or A Room with a View. I may have missed it altogether at the time, or otherwise found it utterly unmemorable, but it recently came out on DVD and got bumped to the top of my Netflix queue when I was browsing through Helen Mirren’s filmography. She is indeed excellent as always, as the wealthy young English widow who goes to Italy and is seduced by the country and the young son of a Tuscan dentist, but she departs a third of the way in and takes much of the film’s energy with her. Director Charles Sturridge is rather stodgy in his staging, and while the scenery is nice the camera is not ravished by the landscape, as it ought to be. Helena Bonham Carter and Judy Davis contribute their usual excellent characterizations, and Rupert Graves is more than adequate in a pivotal role. But muttered dialogue and obscure motivations made me long for the subtitles this DVD did not have, though a long-ago college course in Forster’s novels helped me through the story. (1991, dvd, n.) *6-*

Casino Royale

You need a greater appetite for destruction than I to appreciate this exercise in mayhem and momentum, and a greater tolerance for genre formula. But I acknowledge that Martin Campbell’s direction moves right along, visiting the usual sequence of photogenic locales and staging some inventive chases, and that Daniel Craig makes a most intriguing James Bond (an intense and interesting pair with his Perry Smith in Infamous), and that Eva Green is appropriately seductive and mysterious as the feminine foil, more a woman than the typical Bond Girl, but still a plot point and not a person. I make a point of avoiding almost all pop movie franchises, but I have seen a few Bond films over the years, and this certainly ranks with the very best. But let’s face it, this sort of movie is the enemy of everything I believe film should be. So take the ride, if that’s your thing, but realize this sort of blockbuster destroys not only vehicles and buildings, not to mention the body count, but also preempts the possibilities of film as genuine art. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-80.)

I’ve watched a lot of bizarre double features in my time, but none more so than the match between this and the film I showed at the Clark earlier in the day. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) remained enigmatic on second viewing, but still a highly watchable spectacle and an interestingly perverse variant of the English country house genre, way weirder than Masterpiece Theater. Peter Greenaway’s obsessions are not mine, but I have to say my impression of his writing and direction was enhanced on a meta-level when I read that he did all the draughtsman’s drawings as well, it’s his hand we see in the frame, which made the whole subtext about looking and rendering more tangible, more graphic. The evocation of time (1694) and place (Kent) is precise yet passing strange. It’s talky and convoluted, static and stagey, but visually acute, both funny and creepy. This quintessence of art film did not cost even a hundredth of what the Bond movie or others of its ilk cost, and I haven’t the slightest doubt where the better aesthetic value lies. Give me the inaction film over the action movie anytime. You could say the world is big enough for both sorts of cinema, but I believe Gresham’s Law holds here, bad movies drive out good films.

Letters from Iwo Jima

Another grim, gray film, somewhat done in by exaggerated expectations. I still think Clint Eastwood may really have something when he puts his two Iwo Jima films into a single saga-length narrative, but this half didn’t grip me as much as I’d been led to expect. Maybe some people need the “war is hell” theme reinforced, but I require no convincing, and this was just so unrelievedly hopeless. Certainly it is striking for Hollywood to look at WWII from the perspective of the enemy, in their own language and in sympathy with their plight. It’s all well done, with fine acting from Ken Watanabe on down (it was in fact easier to keep the Japanese characters straight than those on the other side in Flags of Our Fathers), but still it’s a bit relentless, mechanistic, claustrophobic. (2006, Images, n.) *7* (MC-89.)

Fateless

I do not share the view that there cannot be too many Holocaust films, but this Hungarian entry comes with a high pedigree, and definitely has a different approach from Schindler’s List or The Pianist or -- God forbid -- Life is Beautiful. Adapted by 2002 Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz from his own memoir/novel, and directed by Lajos Koltai, best known as cinematographer for Istvan Szabo, this film is narratively understated but visually striking. It follows a teenage boy in Budapest, whose father is sent to a “labor camp” and then he himself is rounded up, almost casually, and sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His step by step descent into an all too real hell is sketched in a succession of blackout memories, a pile-up of horrific scenes that seems almost as incomprehensible to us as to the boy experiencing them. Nothing is hyped, and the silences are as effective as Ennio Morricone’s music. Even with color all but drained from his palette, Koltai finds an uncanny beauty with his camera. While exemplary of its kind, this film gets a qualified recommendation from me, dependent on your willingness to endure its grimness. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-87.)

Fast Food Nation

First let me acknowledge that Richard Linklater is a hero of mine, and his release of this film in the same year as A Scanner Darkly puts him in the same category of versatile virtuosity as Michael Winterbottom (with Tristram Shandy and The Road to Guantanamo to his credit last year) -- able to balance quirky literary adaptations with engaged docudrama. Here Linklater and Eric Schlosser adapt the latter’s muckracking book about industrial food production into a different sort of illustrated lecture from An Inconvenient Truth, more in line with the far-out conversations that have been Linklater’s trademark from Slackers through Waking Life to the absolute classic Before Sunrise/Before Sunset. They interweave wisps of story, in a flat-footed but effective way -- bringing together the putrid realities of meat processing, with illegal Mexican immigrants who work the slaughterhouse and disaffected American teenagers who sling the burgers, along with assorted others either caught up in, or greasing, the food machine, including the cattle themselves. Made fast on a low budget, the film has a certain drabness, dramatically and visually, that is compensated by the cogent points made by a succession of characters in striking cameos by the likes of Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis. What story there is, is framed perfectly in the adorable visage of Catalina Sandino Moreno (indelibly Maria Full of Grace.) Among many others, two characters stand out, Greg Kinnear as a burger business executive dawning to the truth but surpressing his conscience, and Ashley Johnson as a perky but engaged teen who finds out about the poop in the patties she’s dispensing. In the end the human victims stand aside for the bovine, in documentary footage that is as salutary as it is gut-churning. While its stomach may be flopping, this film has its heart and its brain in the right place, making many salient connections amongst the various liabilities of the way we eat here and now. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-64.)

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Though I enjoyed watching this film again as part of my “Age of Claude” film series at the Clark, I have to admit that this was one of those rare films that was beyond the capacity of DVD (non-HD) and the Clark’s good but not great digital projector. The attention to light in this film required that special quality of being projected piercingly through celluloid, rather than splashed on the screen in an array of colored dots. So we didn’t do justice to Eduardo Serra’s cinematography, but the film’s other assets came through, most especially Scarlett Johanssen in the title role, a nearly silent but most telling performance. Colin Firth has a believably intense gaze as Vermeer, and the supporting cast is quite good as an ensemble. The set design and the intent quality of Peter Webber’s direction contributed to the visual feast, and conveyed a tangible sense of Delft in 1655. The pace is slow, the emotions surpressed and enigmatic for the most part, but if you’re of the sort who could be entertained by watching a painting dry, then you’ll enjoy this film, maybe even be moved by it. (2003, dvd, r.) *8* (MC-74.)

Havoc

Being a bit of an auteurist, and directorial completist, I TiVo’d this Barbara Kopple feature when it showed up on Sundance. Not much to it, but I wasn’t sorry to watch it. Kopple actually makes the transition from documentary pretty well, but is saddled with a hackneyed script (rich girl from Pacific Palisades looks for kicks and explores her dark side by trips into the Barrio, and learns more than she bargained for) and thin characterizations (Anne Hathaway and Bijou Phillips bare their boobs more than their souls, and Freddy Rodriguez of Six Feet Under is amusing but risible as the Latin drug lord.) I’ve been spoiled by The Wire not to accept anything less than complete authenticity in depictions of The Corner, but Kopple does imbue these good-girl-on-the-bad-side-of-town proceedings with some sense of place and risk. And give her credit, at the same time she was spreading this piece of cheese, she was co-director on the outstanding documentary, Bearing Witness, about five newswomen in Iraq, a hard film to track down but well worth the effort. (2005, Sund/T, n.) *5+*

Let Joy Reign Supreme (Que la Fete Commence)

I have to confess it took a long time for me to be sure that I had seen this film before. I was vetting it for an “Ancient Regimes” film series I’m proposing to tie in with the Clark’s Fall exhibition on Fragonard. In that regard, it’s probably too early in period as well as too risque, though I wouldn’t rule it out. Bertrand Tavernier’s second film may be characterized as a tragi-farce about the Regent of France in 1719, reigning between Louises XIV and XV. It’s certainly staged as a comic pageant, set more in bordellos than at court, though it ends with royal rot and revolutionary flame, and comes across as politically and historically engaged. Philippe Noiret is superb as Philippe of Orleans, especially in banter and byplay with Jean Rochefort as the Abbe Dubois, the Regent’s oldest friend and closest advisor. Though stagey, the historical feel is real. Though funny, the film’s pain has impact. (1975, dvd, r.) *7-*

Re-viewings

While on the rare occasion a second look may yield a radical revaluation, most often I find a re-viewing is more likely to confirm and intensify the initial reaction. Some recent cases in point:

I showed Rembrandt (1936) to kick off my “Age of Claude” film series at the Clark, almost ten years after I showed it as part of the very first series I offered there, “British Sterling: Classics of the English Silver Screen.” And it still fit the bill. In all, an amazingly accomplished film. Charles Laughton discards the ham shanks he gnawed as Henry VIII, and gives an understated and moving performance, as the painter beset by family and financial woe, aging before our eyes much as the famous self-portraits do. The direction and set design by Alexander Korda et al. is top drawer; though presumably shot on a soundstage, the streetscapes of Amsterdam and the Dutch interiors, as well as the 17th century dress, come across with surprising verisimilitude. Though much of the script has Laughton as Rembrandt reciting biblical verses, it all works well. *8+*

Since it had been decades since I last watched it, I happened to record Bonnie and Clyde (1967) when it appeared on TCM last summer. Obviously I wasn’t dying to see it again, but finally got sick of it on my TiVo “Now Playing” list, so tuned in so I could delete when I’d watched my fill. Once started, I watched it all and confirmed that it is indeed a classic. I’d heard years after the fact that Newman and Benton first gave the script to Francois Truffaut, hoping he would direct, and in retrospect I can see why. The mix of comedy and tragedy is very similar to Shoot the Piano Player. I’ve always been a sucker for Warren Beatty, and Faye Dunaway is hot-hot-hot. Just think the number of lives that would have been saved if they had Viagra back in the Depression. Bonnie and Clyde would have been too busy getting it on to kill anyone. As it is, the phallic gun imagery is laid on with a trowel, but the effect is mostly comic and true to the pulp spirit of the enterprise. But the gangsters-and-molls-on-the-run formula is enhanced by Arthur Penn’s offbeat direction, and the lush nostalgia of Burnett Guffey’s camera. With first-rate support from Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and Michael J. Pollard, this film that Warner Brothers almost refused to release continues to burn with star wattage and radical wit, more up to date than anything at the cineplex this weekend. *9*

My memory is of being underwhelmed by Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive when I first saw it shortly after it came out in 1973. Then it was a critical darling and art house hit on whose bandwagon I could not jump, and now it has been issued on DVD by the Criterion Collection and mentioned as a point of comparison in many reviews of Pan’s Labyrinth, as a girl’s eye view of Fascist Spain after Franco’s takeover -- and my reaction is still barely lukewarm. Ana Torrent is enchanting as the little girl obsessed by Frankenstein, but the story that unfolds oh-so-slowly around her is opaque and inconclusive. Though visually striking in random detail, if this film has a coded political or psychological message, it was lost on me. *6-*

Fists in the Pocket

The term “dysfunctional family” may not have been coined when this film first came out and made a splash on the international festival circuit, but it is certainly a jaw-dropping illustration of the concept. Marco Bellocchio’s first film was made in his mother’s house, and he clearly had some issues to work out: blindness, epilepsy, idiocy, incest, and murder for starters. He certainly brought intensity and passion to the project, which elicits reactions ranging from horror to laughter. Personally, I didn’t know how to react, though the film was transfixing as well as head-scratching. I distantly remember a positive response to his second film, China Is Near, though I may be mixing it up with Bertolucci’s roughly contemporaneous Before the Revolution, but now the Criterion Collection has resurrected his first, and though it is something to see, I can’t recommend seeing it. (1965, dvd, n.) *5+*

Babel

Mesmerizing but unconvincing, this film is decidedly less than the sum of its parts, watchable but not believable or parseable. Four farflung vignettes, from Morocco to Japan to the Mexicali border, are mashed up non-chronologically, but the connections are asserted rather than illuminated, a scenarist’s conceit rather than a revealing juxtaposition. The speaking in tongues is more babble than Babel. That said, there is a lot to admire here. The three locations are rendered vividly, as are the various characters. Director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto convey a distinctive feel for disparate locales, and situate each of the actors effectively, but the characters are moved around like pieces on a global chessboard, their motivations assigned instead of emergent from the action, more arbitrary than plausible. Scene by scene, you are swept along, but overall the construction is a crumbling tower, undermined by the filmmakers’ attempt to take a God-like perspective. It is easy to praise the look (and sound) of the film, and the quality of individual performances, but not to be taken in by the whole. Though the most recognized this award season, this is certainly the least of the recent films from the admirable and ambitious three amigos from Mexico, Children of Men and especially Pan’s Labyrinth being more fully realized. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-69.)

Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing

Barbara Kopple is one of the great directors of direct cinema, best known for the Oscar-winning documentaries, Harlan County USA and American Dream, but she had wandered from stories of striking coal miners or meatpackers into celebrity profiles with Wild Man Blues, about Woody Allen, and a PBS series on The Hamptons. Teaming here with Cecilia Peck, she beautiful melds the two strands in a politically-astute personality piece with concert footage. The Chicks had become the best-selling female group of all time, when they opened in London around the time Bush was getting ready to invade Iraq, and lead singer Natalie Maines had the temerity to say she was ashamed the President was from Texas -- a bland enough assertion, one would think. But the country music “base” was mobilized into outrage -- boycotts and radio bans ensued, Bush-era bullying ran wild -- and basically the Chicks lost one career and had to recreate another. This saga of branding and re-branding is more engrossing than such a show business expose has any right to be. In the best tradition of cinema verite, there is no narration and no talking head interviews, just intimate access and authentic presentation. But the material works on multiple levels. There’s something about performers when they appear without varnish -- they seem to unearth their emotions in a volatile way (cf. Metallica: Some King of Monster.) So this is a group psychobiography, as well as a business and political story, and a concert film. I had no antecedent knowledge of the Dixie Chicks, but got a real sense of the community that supports and is supported by their performing. One is allowed to find them less than admirable, but the film certainly elicits some respect for the honesty of their endeavor. You can’t feel sorry for them, they obviously haven’t been shut up altogether, but their process of reinvention is rather inspiring, and oh-so-American. I am no longer, if I ever was, a knowledgeable fan of popular music, but lately there has been a striking succession of distinguished directors making notable films about contemporary performers, from Martin Scorsese on Bob Dylan in No Direction Home to Jonathan Demme on Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Michel Gondry on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, to Barbara Kopple on the Dixie Chicks. All are well worth seeing, whether you’re partial to the artists portrayed or not. (2006, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-77)

Flags of Our Fathers

I look forward to seeing Letters from Iwo Jima, which I’m sure will affect my judgment of the Clint Eastwood diptych, so I refrain from rating this first half, which should have been seen in a theater rather than on a tv anyway. Though Eastwood as director does not rank as high for me as for many, he does put the film in the can, and it is very watchable stuff. In this case a good story (and film) is folded over in its time sequence, and stuffed into a post-dated envelope. To get the message, you have to discard the envelope and unfold the pages. One day it may simply be interleaved with the Japanese perspective, and Eastwood can edit a whole, in the manner of the “Godfather Saga,” that will have scale, scope, and impact. Such is intimated in parts of this jagged half. Certainly this film does for the Pacific Theater what Saving Private Ryan did for the European, and then some. The black sand island of Iwo Jima (with Iceland subbing) makes a perfect landscape of hell for battle. And the whole afterstory -- of the famous flag-raising picture and the enlistment of its surviving subjects in an immense bond drive to keep the war going against Japan while concluding against Germany -- adds essential dimension and continuing relevance. So this is quite a good movie that may come to be seen as part of a great one. Its confusions can be taken as the fog of battle, since the three leads do emerge effectively -- Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach -- and the story sweeps from battlefield to White House to Yankee Stadium with visual dash. And if you can sort out the overlapping narrations, it does have something to say. (2006, dvd, n.) *NR* (MC-78.)

The Prestige

I found this altogether more magical than The Illusionist, which forms a ready-made comparison, almost as much as the two duelling Capote films. Christopher Nolan is much more self-conscious about the parallel between magic and cinema -- less magic on film and more film magic -- and leaves a greater residue of wonder and mystery, even if he is over-reliant on the disorienting time-shifts that have been his trademark since Memento. The film is sometimes a choppy and puzzling construction, but overall the sense of period, place, and character is strong. With Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as cut-throat rivals in the world of Victorian magic, deception, and showmanship -- supported by the likes of Michael Caine, David Bowie, and Scarlett Johansson -- the acting is good across the board, and across the boards of theatrical London around 1900. Amid all the other uncanniness, it’s odd that The Prestige winds up with almost the same Metacritic score as The Illusionist, averaged over a similar spread of opinion. It seems you like one or the other but not both, depending on your predilection for fairy tale or science fiction. And my preference for The Prestige was bumped up when I listened to a spoiler link on Slate, that revealed a plot point I frankly had missed, which makes the film darker still, and even more of a wonder. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-66.)

Salacious 17th Century comes to the Clark

Let’s be honest – it’s all about the sex. You could say that about film and art in general, but specifically I’m talking about the upcoming film series at the Clark. Officially the series has the decorous title of “The Age of Claude: Films of Painting & Performance in the 17th Century” – it takes off from the subject of the Clark’s winter exhibition, “Claude Lorrain: The Painter as Draftsman,” noting that the artist was born in 1600 and his life nearly spanned the century. It turns out that era, at least as seen through the lens of the 20th century, was obsessed with sex.

The free film showings run on Fridays at 4:00 pm, starting on March 2nd. The series starts with three English language films, then after two weeks off, returns with three French films, but each of them depicts erotic conflicts in a high-collared, buttoned-up age seething with secret passions.

March 2nd: Rembrandt. (1936, 85 min.) Charles Laughton is magnificent and touching as the great but embattled Dutch painter, and his wife Elsa Lanchester (best know as the Bride of Frankenstein) plays Rembrandt’s beloved Saskia. Directed by Alexander Korda, this is one of the peaks of British cinema.

March 9th: Girl With the Pearl Earring. (2003, 99 min.) Vermeer’s famous painting is brought to life, and the Delft of 1665 is brought to light, by director Peter Webber from Tracy Chevalier’s novel. Colin Firth is the painter, and Scarlett Johansson is the servant Griet, who captures his eye and other organs.

March 16th: The Draughtsman’s Contract. (1982, 103 min.) Director Peter Greenaway is characteristically puzzling and provocative, not to say perverse, in this story of an artist commissioned to do renderings of an English estate in 1694, and the payment he demands from the lady of the manor.

April 6th: Carnival in Flanders (La Kermesse Heroique.) (1935, 115 min.) Director Jacques Feyder emulates Bruegel in visualizing a Flemish town invaded by the Spanish, in which the women try a novel form of homeland defense. This classic film is a sex farce with a premonitory political twist.

April 13th: Cyrano de Bergerac. (1990, 138 min.) Gerard Depardieu bursts to stardom as the tumescently-nosed Cyrano in this highly-acclaimed version of the Rostand play, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and lavishly orchestrated with a real feel for the period, the poetry, and the characters.

April 20th: All the Mornings of the World (Tous les Matins du Monde.) (1992, 115 min.) Gerard Depardieu returns, as court composer at Versailles, and his son plays the same character as the young and randy student of another musician, with a seducible daughter, in Alain Corneau’s melodic film.

Notorious

I am not the sort of Hitchcock idolator who reads profundity into his psychological quirks, but I do appreciate the strangeness of this film as a product of Hollywood. Behind the artifice, sometimes perfunctory and sometimes highly stylized, lurks a quality of twisted obsession that is the Hitchcock trademark. I doubt there are two stars who have ever held the screen more brightly than Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, so those tight two-shots are bound to work. Through back-projection, the Rio setting is no more than stage dressing, and by now it seems a wonder that such feeble fool-the-eye ever worked for film audiences. But those sweeping crane shots up and down the curving marble staircase still work for sure, long after the zoom has been pretty much retired as camera trick, except when combined with a tracking shot in the oft-imitated technique Hitchcock pioneered. He certainly was a master of visual disorientation, and there are many such shots in this film, but the casual filler is disconcerting to me, the tossed-off illusion undermining the magic of the rest. Besides star power and dazzling direction, this film has Claude Rains and a stereotyped but effective supporting cast, but for me it remains superior entertainment, and despite the subtexts, not a serious work of engagement. (1946, dvd, r.) *7*

Infamous

I don’t have the heart to compare this to the film that beat it in the Capote sweepstakes, but it would make an interesting exercise; throw in Richard Brooks’ stark film of In Cold Blood, and you could really examine three different ways of handling the same material. Put aside the comparison and this is a decent little film, with an astounding cast: Toby Jones is Capote to a T, Sandra Bullock is authentically Alabamian as Harper Lee, Daniel Craig is a powerful Perry Smith, and Capote’s NY retinue is impersonated delightfully by the likes of Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rossellini, Hope Davis, and Peter Bogdanovich. Though egotistical and devious, this Capote is not as big a villain as the other. See, it’s impossible not to talk comparatively about these simultaneously produced and equally effective films on the same small subject, with precedence to the one that made it to theaters first. So this Truman is funnier, less distasteful, and more intelligible to me. By all means, if you have the stomach for it, see either or both. And maybe I’ll get around to reading the book, which I eschewed as off-puttingly popular at the time it was published -- I remember riding a train back to college, and half the people in the car were reading it. I read lots of other Capote, but determined to avoid In Cold Blood. Now it seems that it can’t be avoided. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-68.)

The Last King of Scotland

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a movie go from pretty good to pure crap with such a clear line of demarcation. About two-thirds of the way through, an implausible sex scene leads to one mounting implausibility after another, and what seemed like a serious examination of a real-life situation devolves into a senseless thriller. Kevin MacDonald certainly knows how to direct propulsively, as he showed with two previous documentaries, One Day in September (about terrorism at Munich Olympics in 1972), and Touching the Void (about a mountain-climbing expedition gone horribly awry), but here he repulsively drags his film through the most pointless genre conventions, just when it was getting to the point. Which was about a doctor fresh out of med school in Scotland, who finds himself in Uganda looking for adventure, and finds more than he bargained for when he bumps into Idi Amin at a car accident, and is thereafter seduced by the dictator who has just siezed power, into becoming first the strongman’s family physician and then his closest advisor. Forest Whitaker physically and emotionally inhabits the character of Amin, and deserves the Oscar he appears to be headed for, but James McAvoy is also good as the callow but appealing young medic. Just when the doctor’s tastes for adventure and high living have backed him into a moral quandary and a weighty dilemma, and we are wondering how he will extricate himself, he does something so incredibly stupid that neither the audience nor the movie can take him seriously thereafter, and he becomes a pawn of the preposterous plot and its offensive implications (we’re supposed to be getting our chills by following the escape of the white guy, while barely noticing as the black characters fall like dominoes.) Still, before it goes off the rails, the film does convey a sense of time and place and outsized personality, and poses an interesting moral puzzle, only to blast it off the screen in the race to an utterly unsatisfying denouement. (2006, Images, n.) *5+* (MC-74.)

L'Enfant (The Child)

My admiration for the Dardenne brothers, Jeanne-Pierre and Luc, remains remote though real. To reverse the assertion I made two posts ago, it’s just as worthy to elicit our sympathy for a low-life petty-thief man-child, who sells his infant son on the black market, as for a doomed profligate queen. But while there was a queasy fascination in watching his appalling dead-end behavior, Bruno remains more a specimen more than a person, in a real but excessively arid landscape of industrial waste space in a Belgian factory town. You evaluate his underclass pathologies more than you understand his behavior. As in the Dardennes film I found most engaging, Rosetta, there is a beautiful but bereft young girl, the clueless teen mother of the baby, to draw one into the film, but still it’s hard to generate enough sympathy to make their final reconciliation (and the boy’s potential redemption) moving and finally convincing. I give the Dardennes credit for eschewing musical cues to prod nonexistent feelings, but I was definitely left outside the minimalist emotions conveyed by their deadpan camera eye. That said, the acting is quite effective. But this film, despite (or because of) its Palme d’Or at Cannes and critical acclaim, is a tough sell. Socially engaged and spiritually ambitious, call it junkyard Bresson. Or a Dosteyevskian examination of the EU’s underbelly. Either way, it’s an acquired taste. (2005, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-87.)

The Impressionists

This is a well-produced BBC docudrama miniseries that may or may not be coming to PBS, but for which I will try to arrange a screening during the Monet exhibition at the Clark this summer. Lovely to look at and respectful of fact, with the actual locations and paintings very well repesented, this program is precisely aimed at a middlebrow viewer such as myself, who knows enough to verify the veracity of the narrative and brings enough antecedent interest to care about a less than gripping narrative, but doesn’t know enough to be thrown out of the story or driven to debunk. As a film on its own merits, it may not be more than pretty and well-informed, but as a cultural travelogue, it’s hard to beat. None of the actors was immediately familiar to me (except for the delightful Amanda Root of Persuasion as Monet’s second wife), which contributed to the film’s air of you-are-there reality. Even with my limited background, I had to ask where is Pissarro? and what about Morisot and Cassatt? -- but as presented through the reveries of Monet at Giverny in 1920, the series does sketch in the stories of Manet, Degas, Renoir, and Cezanne in a relatively true-to-life group portrait, giving an honest impression of the Impressionists. (2006,dvd, n.) *6+*

Marie Antoinette

Here’s another of those love it or hate it films; to dispense with suspense -- I loved it. It helps to have watched a recent PBS documentary on the reviled French queen, or to have read the revisionist Antonia Fraser biography, but Sofia Coppola is eminently successful in constructing her own alternate reality. It helps to have the real Versailles as your stage set, and amazing costume and set design. It also helps to have an amazing cast, from Kirsten Dunst on down. I liked Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI more than as Max Fischer in Rushmore, and that’s saying something. Right down the line the casting is off-beat but spot-on: Marianne Faithful as the Austrian empress, Steve Coogan as the ambassadorial adviser, Judy Davis as mistress of French protocol, Rip Torn as Louis XV, right through to major French star Mathieu Amalric in a walk-on role. With one possible exception, the ’80s music -- described as post-punk by those who know more than I -- worked amazingly well too. I was prepared to find the anachronistic acting and music annoying, but instead found it continuously engaging in recasting Marie Antoinette as the first teenage celebrity, which may be an exaggeration but is no lie. This is definitely a film to astonish the eye and the ear. As a radical egalitarian, I would have been surprised as any to hear in advance that two of the best films of 2006 would focus on unsympathetic Queens. However, since the essential moral purpose of cinematic art is to broaden our sympathies, it is just as worthy to elicit our sympathy for a misbegotten Royal as one of the criminal underclass. Sure, this isn’t the real story of the French Revolution, but it is a real story of a young girl stripped of her bearings and thrust into a situation out of her control, in which she must nonetheless discover herself. And that may be truer to history than one would imagine. (2006, dvd, n.) *8-* (MC-65.)

The Ground Truth

It wasn’t so much that this documentary was one-sided, since it’s my side and I’m inclined to see it as the side on which truth lies, but that it wasn’t honest about its one-sidedness. If it had presented itself as the testifying voices of Iraqi Veterans Against the War, it would have been more truthful. But instead it slices and dices testimony to make an uncontested case, following a composite of the soldier’s experience from enlistment enticements to the evasion of VA responsibility for aftercare. Only at the end do you realize that the common bond of all these soldiers is antiwar activism, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that should have been announced from the beginning instead of merely dawning in conclusion. It makes the whole film the equivalent of a campaign commercial, and even if I support the cause, I have to take it with a grain of salt. For me the definitive film about the soldier’s eye view of the war in Iraq remains Operation: Dreamland. (2006, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-74.)

None But the Lonely Heart

Another Cary Grant film resurrected by Turner Classic Movies in their monthlong festival of Oscar winners, this was especially interesting for its rarity and the fact that Archie/Cary was said to have identified with this part more than any other in his career. Indeed he initiated the project by convincing his friend Clifford Odets to adapt the script from a Richard Llewellyn novel, and direct for the first time. Odets lays on his trademark gutter poetry a bit thick, as the actors do the Cockney accents, and the atmosphere is murky (whether it’s the London fog, the unrestored age of the film, or inadequate digital transmission by satellite or DVR), plus the story is overloaded with some suggestion that our jaunty but beset interwar hero will become the unknown soldier of WWII, but nonetheless I found this gripping to watch throughout. Unlike The Talk of the Town, for example, here Cary Grant negotiates the tragicomic to perfection. His Ernie Mott is both funny and moving, an inveterate drifter who settles with his mother in the East End when he finds out she is dying. Ethel Barrymore is superb as the mother, and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. June Duprez is the odd but affecting, proto-noir femme fatale, and Jane Wyatt the bright-eyed but too-good-to-be-true neighborhood girl. Even Barry Fitzgerald is believable as the the older-but-wiser friend. It’s all very theatrical, but with an undercurrent of reality and surprise. (1944, TCM/T, n.) *7-*

Pan's Labyrinth

This is a mighty grim “Alice in Wonderland” tale, call it “Ofelia in Maliceland.” I feel a bit bullied in rating this film, since it comes with a Metacritic average of 98, fourth highest ever on the site. I went in looking for a reason to debunk the hype, and yet I couldn’t find a single one. I’m no fan of CGI-dependent filmmaking, but here it was so seamlessly interlaced with the “real” world of the film, together they made a mythos. As for Guillermo Del Toro, I was never tempted to see Hellboy or his other comic-book-based Hollywood films, and was not taken with his previous film about a child in Fascist Spain, The Devil’s Backbone, but with this he moves into must-see director company with his two amigos from Mexico, Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel). Here is the story of an 11-year old girl (Ivana Baquero in a wholly believable performance, on either side of the looking glass) who clings to her books of fairy tales, while thrust into a real world of legendary badness, when her widowed young mother weds an evil stepfather. No, I mean really, really evil. Sergi Lopez is Fascism made flesh, creepy but all too real. (His performance is enhanced by contrast of his roles in With a Friend Like Harry and An Affair of Love.) It’s 1944 and while the Allies may be liberating France, Franco is cementing himself in power in Spain, where the Fascists are relentlessly rooting out the last bit of Resistance in the hills. Maribel Verdu (well-remembered for Y Tu Mama Tambien) is housemaid to the commandant, but sister to the rebel leader, and she undertakes to protect the defenseless girl. But unbeknownst to all, Ofelia is a princess of the underworld in exile, who undertakes three missions assigned her by a huge fawn, in order to return to her idyllic home beneath the earth. Set design and music, makeup and computer animation, all conspire to weave a spell on the borderline between fairy tale and grim reality, interpenetrating states of being rendered with colliding force. Will definitely be worth another look, may well reach classic status. (2006, Images, n.) *9* (MC-98.)

Illusions on film

Lately watching a variety of movies not calling for either strong recommendation or warning against, I take the lull to ruminate on the theme of illusion in film. As you might expect, The Illusionist (2006, dvd, n.) sets the theme. This film definitely divided critical opinion, getting an average grade of 68 from Metacritic, based on a number of 100s (from respectable critics!) running down to several of 50 or less -- and I have to say I tend toward the latter end of the scale. For me it simply lacked some element of plausibility or engagement, the illusion did not take. It was nice to look at, with Prague as usual standing in for Vienna 1900; Edward Norton and Paul Giammati are consistently interesting actors; there was a fairly fascinating interweave of fairy tale and the mechanics of magic. And yet it never came to life for me. Perhaps in the immersive environment of a theater I would have been swept up in the spectacle, but slumped in my easy chair I found it inert (and felt glad to have saved my admission money.) So despite the illusive endorsement of Jonathan Rosenbaum and others, I am not about to anoint Neil Burger as a promising young writer-director.

Tickets (2005, dvd, n.) is a portmanteau film by a trio of Neorealist masters, Italian director Ermanno Olmi (beloved by me for Il Posto and Tree of Wooden Clogs, among others), Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, and the great British leftist Ken Loach, confined to a Trenitalia train headed from Austria to Rome. Here everything is invested in the illusion of reality, you ride the train with these various groupings of people, virtually real time in a real space, a public location of common experience. Olmi follows an old research scientist returning from a consultation with a pharmaceutical company, daydreaming about the young female assistant who escorted him to the train. Kiarostami follows a belligerent older woman and the younger man escorting her; their enigmatic relationship turns out to be that he is doing public service to attend the general’s widow to a military ceremony. Loach returns the leads of his Sweet Sixteen as three young soccer fans from Scotland heading to a match in Rome, this episode rather loud and funny compared to the others but equally in need of subtitles. Weaving through the stories is a multigenerational family of women and children, who turn out to be refugees, and in the Olmi episode there is an unsettling presence of English-speaking soldiers with dogs, apparently sniffing out terrorist plots while the old guy fantasizes about his young honey. But the political points are definitely muted in what seem like real life encounters of an unmediated sort, or so the illusion is created. This was definitely more my sort of filmmaking, but I couldn’t really recommend it over the films of each of these estimable artists on their own.

Stardom is of course one of the foundational illusions of film, but among the realest of the real stars you have to number Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. After reading about a recent biography recounting how Archie Leach created the illusory character of Cary Grant, I was moved to TiVo a couple of Turner Classic Movie offerings, both of which had surprised me on first viewing but just seemed pleasantly familiar on second, well worth seeing but not essential to re-see. They may both be taken as warm-ups for the sublimely delightful Philadelphia Story, by director George Cukor as well as the pair of stars, though each is a little kinky in its own way. Sylvia Scarlett (1935) features a startlingly cross-dressing Kate impersonating a boy travelling with deadbeat dad Edmund Gwenn, and falling in with con man Cary, to become a travelling seaside troupe of Pierrots and to run into an enclave of artists running their own cons. This is a film that was definitely halfway out of the “celluloid closet” way before its time. It does not sustain its effervescence all the way through, but is strange enough to be continuously fascinating. Holiday (1938) has a late-Depression subversiveness in its satire on the rich (despite the drawing room gloss of the Philip Barry play), and its preference for free play over moneygrubbing. Cary is an earnest young Harvard man, who doesn’t want to get ahead so much as to use a windfall to go on holiday to find out who he really is. Unfortunately he’s fallen for the drab though bedaubed daughter of a Fifth Avenue banking magnate, but have no fear, Kate is the stick’s unconventional sister, and there is never a moment’s doubt who belongs with whom. Edward Everett Horton is Cary’s funloving professor friend, and it’s a kick for a Rocky & Bullwinkle fan to put a face to the distinctive voice of “Fractured Fairy Tales.”

Ten

Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami maintains a mode of maximal minimalism, and makes it work. It doesn’t sound like a recipe for success, but m-m-m -- that’s a tasty Persian dish. Just take two digital cameras mounted on the dashboard of a car, one fixed on the driver and the other on the passenger seat. Add a beautiful thirtysomething woman in a succession of fashionable headscarves as driver, and mix in a succession of passengers -- her son, sister, friend, a holy woman and a prostitute, non-actors all -- then set them in dialogue while the streets of Tehran swirl through the window in backdrop. Mix 23 hours of footage down to 90 minutes, and count down 10 episodes with interspliced film leader. Voila! The chef is most creative in standing aside, and letting his selected ingredients slowly simmer in their own juices -- most personal in removing himself from the scene. The film tastes like a documentary (and is a very timely look inside an undemonized Iran), but Kiarostami seasons it with his favorite flavors so it has the signature of his hand. And of his mind -- as uncontrolled as it is, few films are more thought out. As you will discover if you watch the feature length extra on the dvd, “10 on Ten,” in which the camera is fixed on Kiarostami himself as he drives through the landscape of A Taste of Cherry, and expounds the thinking behind the film in ten “lessons.” This may not be the best entree to Kiarostami, but if he is to your taste, you will love this offering. (2003, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-86.)

The Devil & Daniel Johnston

Coincidentally I watched this the same day that the new issue of Focus reported it was Images Cinema’s lowest grossing film of last year, but confirmed their bold judgment in showing it. Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary is exceptionally well-made and should be of interest even to those like myself, who have not even heard of the alt-indie icon who is its subject -- a reedy-voiced, off-key singer-songwriter and outsider artist, who happens to be crazy as a loon but has still managed to achieve a measure of fame and recognition, while shuttling between mental hospitals and the care of his parents and siblings. Reminiscent of Crumb in its depiction of artistic mania, and of Capturing the Friedmans in its canny use of obsessively recorded family life, this film is continuously unsettling and engrossing, a case study that opens out to larger questions of the creative mentality even if one doesn’t buy into the exaggerated claims for Daniel Johnston’s genius. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-77.)

Volver

Unless you are committed to the subtle and understated, Pedro Almodovar is hard to resist. His sheer exuberance as a filmmaker is infectious, as is the love he shows for his characters, as well as the actresses who play them. He plays with dolls and he plays with us, but it’s all in good spirit. If men are MIA or DOA, diablos for sure, well then, they get plenty of adoration in other movies. It’s just us girls here. In abundant variety, but inveterate beauty. The story is snappy, the visuals are lush, the music is grabby -- what’s not to like? I am not as wild for Penelope Cruz as many are, either her looks or her acting, but she does anchor the ensemble nicely in this film, a Donna Quixote tilting at the huge modern windmills of La Mancha. Lola Duenas is adorable as her sister, Carmen Maura enchanting as her mother, her daughter and friends all appealing. If a few men have to die to spread happiness among the ladies, that’s fair enough -- let the love of women have its day, let sisterhood and motherhood reign. With men out of the way, the women can forgive each other and live happily every after. The enigmatic title of “Volver” might have been translated as “To Return” but I believe our Pedro wanted it to stand as a homologue of “Vulva.” (2006, Images, n.) *8* (MC-83.)