My Best Friend

This is one of those French comedies that will inevitably be remade in Hollywood, and with all Gallic suavity removed will be revealed as empty-headed. Director Patrice Leconte leavens the frivolity with his usual seriousness, as does French star Daniel Auteuil, but the film is unabashedly implausible right through to its game show climax. Auteuil is passionate about his art collecting, but disconnected from people. When his lovely partner tells him he has no friends, they wind up making a bet over whether he has an actual best friend. You know how it goes -- all the “friends” he approaches can’t really stand him, so he meets an unlikely, likable acquaintance whom he tries to pass off as his best friend. This cabbie is appeallingly played by Dany Boon, previously unknown to me, but despite some manufactured shocks, the story doesn’t go anywhere you don’t expect and doesn’t unearth any hidden truths, satisfied to be a pleasant fantasy with a simpleminded message. The cultural milieu, however, is well depicted, and the sentiment is not too sickeningly sweet. (2007, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-65.)

Crazy Love

I suspect one’s ability to enjoy Dan Klores’ documentary about a decades-long (dys)functional relationship between two unusual people depends on how kneejerk one’s reaction is to physical abuse of women by lying men. If you revile the characters, it can be hard to see how well-made this film is. This couple managed to be the subject of tabloid scandal in the ’50s, the ’70s, and the ’90s, and the film dredges through the archives to present a visual and musical evocation of various eras. It’s just as well if you don’t know the backstory going in, because then the film can unfold with surprise after surprise. So if you’re capable of suspending judgment, as this film does, then you will likely enjoy the psychological and sociological probing this story offers, along with wit and visual interest. (2007, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-69.)

Distant (Uzak)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is walking in the footsteps of Tarkovsky and Kiarostami as the darling of international festivals for his excruciatingly-slow, emotionally-deadpan, anti-action films. But as with them, patience rewards. This Turkish film inventories all the forms of distance between people in proximity. An Istanbul photographer allows a country cousin to camp out in his apartment while looking for work, where they rub up against each other in ways that with subtle humor reveal their personalities, in long, static, but exquisitely composed takes. The photographer is disengaged and disenchanted, most especially in his relations with women. The younger cousin walks around in the snow and fog, looking for women as much as for work. They both fail to connect. Though there are moments of strange beauty, this is a bleak landscape indeed, like so many mega-cities around the world where people torn from their communal roots congregate in economic despair and personal isolation. (2004, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-84.)

The Journey

In a newspaper column, I was running down a pretty fair list of recommended recent documentaries, when this title I’d never heard of was cited as the writer’s favorite, so it went straight to the top of my Netflix queue. Well, you know, I wound up liking it a lot, though I found myself wondering whether it was all a crock. Eric Saperston was just out of college when he came up with this scheme to go cross-country in a VW bus, along the way beating down doors to get interviews with successful older people, to ask their advice for younger people just starting out. He roped some friends into taking the journey with him and acting as crew. It might be taken as a huge vanity project, and yet there is an appealing nebbishy quality to our Eric’s efforts and travails. And even where the material is thin (the biggest “get” is Ann Richards, governor of Texas before she lost re-election to a certain unmentionable person), the various strands are layered together in a way that gives it substance as well as humor. (2001, dvd, n.) *7*

Crossing the Bridge

Apparently the success of Buena Vista Social Club has paved the way for other films in which some music industry veteran goes to some exotic locale and brings back a variety of indigenous music. Here we get “The Sound of Istanbul,” and because it’s made by Fatih Akin, director of the marvelous Head-On, we get an intimate cross-section of contemporary Turkey, emerging from the oppression of military rule, with a flourishing diversity of ethnic and popular music. Unfortunately we get way too much of this German dude lugging his recording equipment around and hovering at the edges while the various groups are performing. But when the performances are allowed to run uninterrupted, they can be transfixing -- from politically minded rappers and street buskers on a mission to longtime pop stars, from Romany dance music to Kurdish laments. Istanbul is of course the crossroads of the world, where Europe and Asia meet, with the Bosporus as an ever-present reminder. This film presents the bridge across, in the actual span and in music. (2005, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-73.)

Venus

Lots of notable talent here -- director Roger Michell, writer Hanif Kureishi, and of course Peter O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave -- but all their labors depend on the success of newcomer Jodie Whittaker, who plays the rough northern teenager whom O’Toole woos in a climactic episode of geriatric satyriasis. And she’s good, unfolding from sullen brat into worthy goddess of love. O’Toole is fully convincing as the rascally old goat, engaging in antic byplay with old theatrical friend Leslie Phillips and wistfully pursuing the girl while treating her with a respect she’s never received before. Much of the film seems dark and smudgy, which is probably intended to deglamourize London and its theatrical milieu. Even the seaside escape is gray and cold. But there’s a little pilot light of lust, which ignites a steady flame of affection, and the tea gets made, though there is nothing cozy about it. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-82.)

Now that the baseball season has ended for me, as a stranger in the strange land of Red Sox Nation, I will have more time to watch films. I polished off a double feature by watching McCabe & Mrs. Miller for the umpteenth time, with particular attention to the use of Leonard Cohen’s songs, since they are my passion of the moment. It was also striking to revisit the young Julie Christie after recently seeing her lose her marbles in Away from Her, plus appropriate homage to Robert Altman after his recent passing. There’s no surprise to be had in seeing McCabe yet again, just confirmation of its frame by frame perfection and its place in my pantheon of transcendentally great films.

Chalk

Mike Akel’s modest indie mockumentary about teachers in a Texas high school, is presented by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and owes a good deal to the films of Christopher Guest. But it’s still a pleasantly homegrown effort, with convincingly local performers, which will resonate with those who frequent the teacher lounges of America. We follow several teachers and a novice administrator through a school year, as a fly on the wall in their classrooms, as an intimate of their confabs, and even as the voyeur of their afterhours webcams. Most of the jokes are funny and/or true, but the whole goes no place in particular, neither quite a celebration nor a satire of high school teaching. (2005, dvd, n.) *6-* (MC-70.)

In the Shadow of the Moon

Rave reviews got me out of the house to see David Sington’s documentary about the Apollo space program. And while it was certainly watchable, I could easily have waited to see it on the home screen. Some of the footage is dramatic and beautiful, but after decades of CGI space travel in movies, it looks less than spectacular. It’s ultimately more an interview piece with the surviving moon mission astronauts, and they are indeed interesting characters. There is some but not enough effort at historical context, from JFK’s initial invocation of the moon as the goal of the decade, through the tarnishing of grand Cold War gestures in the debacle of Vietnam, along with domestic unrest. For a long time the space program has seemed to me a government boondoggle for the military-industrial complex, but this film did resurrect the moment of “wonderful but ephemeral” achievement “for all mankind.” From the perspective of today, it seems inspiring yet foolish, an enormous waste of resources though a celebration of human resourcefulness. The film made me remember, but didn’t make me rethink. (2007, Images, n.) *7* (MC-84.)

Critical summary of 2006

This a compilation of my ratings of films released in the U.S. during last year, in comparison to four different critic polls. The basic ranking is taken from the Indiewire survey, which in seven previous years appeared in the Village Voice. It’s more offbeat than other lists, and incorporates many more documentaries and foreign films. Its numerical ranking is supplemented by the shorter and more mainstream lists of Premiere Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. That is followed by the decimal ratings of Metacritic (averaging critical scores on a scale of 100) and our very own Cinema Salon score on a scale of 10.

To summarize for those looking for films to put on their Netflix queue (where all these films are now available on DVD), here’s my ranking in rough order of the top features and top documentaries receiving official American theatrical release in 2006:

The Queen; Pan’s Labyrinth; Tristram Shandy; Volver; United 93; Days of Glory; Children of Men; Marie Antoinette; Fast Food Nation; Clean; Heading South.

49 Up; Neil Young: Heart of Gold; Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing; Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple; Street Fight; Wordplay.


Going down the list, you will find a number of others with a rating of *7*, which is my threshold of firm recommendation. For more information, you can reach my review easily by typing film title in search box at top of page.



1. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. MC-84 *7*
2. L'Enfant. MC-87 *6+*
3. The Departed. PM #6 EW #3 MC-85 *6*
4. Inland Empire. MC-72 *NR*
5. Army of Shadows. PM #3 MC-99 *6+*
6. Three Times. MC-80 *6*
7. Old Joy. MC-84 *6-*
8. United 93. PM #7 EW #4 MC-90 *8*
9. Children of Men. PM #8 MC-84. *8-*
10. Half Nelson. PM #13 MC-85 *7*
11. The Queen. PM #1 EW #1 MC-91 *9*
12. Climates. MC-72 *6+*
13. A Scanner Darkly. PM #66 EW #32 MC-73 *6*
14. Pan's Labyrinth. PM #2 MC-98 *9*
15. Borat. PM #11 EW #5 MC-89 *7*
16. A Prairie Home Companion. PM #23 EW #16 MC-75 *7*
17. Volver. PM #12 EW #6 MC-83 *8*
18. Battle in Heaven. MC-56. *5*
19. Letters From Iwo Jima. PM #9 EW #2 MC-89 *7*
20. Mutual Appreciation. MC-84 *6+*
21. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. MC-80 *8+*
22. Gabrielle. MC-79 *7-*
24. Clean. MC-75 *7+*
25. The Proposition. PM #26 MC-73 *6*
26. Inside Man. PM #16 EW #14 MC-76 *5+*
27. The Science of Sleep. PM #67 MC-70 *5*
28. Miami Vice. PM #57 EW #25 MC-65 *6*
29. Iraq in Fragments. MC-84. *7*
30. Woman Is the Future of Man. MC-63. *6+*
32. Casino Royale. PM #15 EW #8 MC-80 *6*
33. Brick. MC-72 *6-*
34. The Prestige. PM #61 EW #29 MC-66 *7-*
35. Flags of Our Fathers. PM #17 EW #15 MC-78 *7*
36. Little Children. PM #39 EW #12 MC-75 *6*
37. Our Daily Bread. MC-86 *7*
38. Neil Young: Heart of Gold. MC-85 *8*
39. Shortbus. PM #37 MC-64 *5+*
40. Le Petit Lieutenant. MC-71 *7*
41. Dave Chappelle's Block Party. EW #9 MC-84 *7*
42. Little Miss Sunshine. PM #18 EW #20 MC-80 *5+*
43. Marie Antoinette. PM #46 EW #35 MC-65 *8-*
44. Duck Season. MC-74 *6+*
48. An Inconvenient Truth. EW #7 MC-75 *7-*
50. The Devil and Daniel Johnston. MC-77 *7*
54. Days of Glory. MC-82 *8*
55. The Road to Guantanamo. MC-64 *7*
57. Deliver Us From Evil. PM #4 MC-86 *7*
58. Thank You for Smoking. PM #29 EW #13 MC-71 *6-*
60. Fast Food Nation. MC-64. *7+*
61. Babel. PM #50 EW #22 MC-69 *6*
64. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. MC-62 *5+
67. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. MC-79 *8*
69. The Good Shepherd. PM #32 EW #31 MC-61 *6-*
70. Notes on a Scandal. PM #20 MC-73 *7-*
74. 49 Up. PM #5 MC-84 *8*
76. The Illusionist. PM #38 MC-68 *6*
79. Water. MC-77 *6-*
80. Our Brand Is Crisis. MC-69 *6*
82. The Last King of Scotland. PM #25 EW #18 MC-74 *5+*
86. Tsotsi. MC-70 *6*
87. The Aura. MC-78 *6-*
88. Fateless. MC-87 *7*
99. Friends With Money. PM #28 MC-56 *5+*
100. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. PM #69 MC-56 *6-*
101. Quinceanera. PM #35 MC-72 *6*
103. Why We Fight. MC-78 *7*
105. Shut Up and Sing. PM #10 MC-77 *8*
120. House of Sand. MC-70 *6+*
123. The Ground Truth. MC-71 *5+*
125. The History Boys. PM #33 MC-74 *7*
126. The Painted Veil. PM #30 MC-69 *7-*
127. Street Fight. MC-85 *7+*
129. The Dead Girl. MC-65 *6+*
135. The Puffy Chair. MC-73 *6*
137. For Your Consideration. PM #48 MC-68 *7*
165. Heading South. MC-73 *7+*
167. Infamous. PM #34 MC-68 *6+*
175. Bobby. PM #81 MC-54 *6*
177. The Devil Wears Prada. PM #31 EW #30 MC-62 *6-*
179. This Film Is Not Yet Rated. MC-75 *6-*
180. Blood Diamond. PM #72 EW #34 MC-63 *5+*
NR. Jesus Camp. PM #19 MC-62 *7-*
NR. Dreamgirls. PM #22 EW #10 MC-76 *6-*
NR. Wordplay. PM #41 MC-73 *7+*

The Dead Girl

Writer-director Karen Moncrieff follows her promising debut in Blue Car with a grisly but honest inquest into the murder of young hooker, and the other “dead girls” whose lives intersect with the incident, in five discrete segments: The Stranger, The Sister, The Wife, The Mother, The Dead Girl. Toni Collette is the repressed woman who finds the body, browbeaten by her invalid mother (Piper Laurie, in full Carrie mode.) Marcia Gay Harden is the estranged mother who comes to identify the dead girl and learns that she has a granddaughter. Mary Beth Hurt discovers she is the wife of the murderer. Brittany Murphy is the dead girl herself, and the final episode leads up to her demise. Each part is populated by familiar names and faces, who can really act. The film came out of Moncrieff’s own experience on the jury of a murder trial, and it reeks of authenticity rather than exploitation, but there is still a heavy odor of sadness and waste about it. Not a fun night at the movies, but a truthful excavation of tragically limited lives -- and deaths. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-65.)

Thank goodness this film completes my review of films on the Indiewire poll for 2006, and now I can tardily put that year in film behind me. I watched as many of the 200 films on the list as I could bear, excluding only unappealing genre exercises or gorefests. My next post will summarize my own ratings, in tandem with four different tabulations of critical consensus.

Prince of the City

This was one of those films that rose to the top of my Netflix queue after such a long time that I forgot why I put in there in the first place. Maybe I was revisiting the high points of Sidney Lumet’s long, varied, and distinguished career as a director. This film implicitly is a sequel to Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, with Treat Williams stepping in for Al Pacino and more than living up to the role. It’s based on the true story of a young go-getting NYC detective who seeks absolution by selectively informing on police corruption, and is crushed between two institutions in self-protective mode. Long but not too draggy, even though there is more psychological gamesmanship and bureaucratic infighting than action, this Prince is a gritty and evenhanded tragedy of a man caught in the middle, enmeshed in his environment and entangled in his own missteps. Seriously intended and thoughtfully made, it's a police story with weight. (And yet another film by which The Departed suffers in comparison -- there is some truth to the cliche, “They don’t make ’em like they used to.”) (1981, dvd, r.) *7+*

Broken English

Parker Posey is ready for her close up. I’m a big fan of the indie queen, but here she goes deeper than the shiny, brittle, manic demeanor of many of her roles -- more natural, more naked, but still neurotic in her own inimitable way. So I was highly disposed to like this film, and debut writer-director Zoe Cassavetes didn’t mess it up too badly with her own neuroses. You sort of give away the autobiographical game when you cast your mom (Gena Rowlands) as your mom! Zoe -- daughter of John and sister of Nick in the indie director game -- goes awry when an honest look at the romantic panic of a youngish New York career girl devolves into rom-com convention and wish fulfillment. And then she really loses it by clipping her ending from Before Sunset -- a great model, but where is the line between appropriation and plagiarism? And where is the honest resolution to the questions you profess to address? I understand some viewers’ impatience with these proceedings, but I confess I’m a sucker for Parker. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-61.)

Private Fears in Public Places

I have had a keen appreciation for a number of Alain Resnais’ films over the years (Hiroshima Mon Amour, La Guerre Est Finie, Mon Oncle d’Amerique, Same Old Song), but what strikes me most about his latest is how far the 85-year-old director has come from his most famous and my least favorite: Last Year in Marienbad. That chilly exercise in enigmatic style has yielded over the years to a warmth of understanding bestowed on characters who are themselves trying to thaw the ice of their personalities. Private Fears in Public Places is based on the Alan Ayckbourn play of that name, transposed from London to Paris (and called Couers in France.) It is a series of blackout sketches (or more accurately whiteouts, for the scrim of falling snow that dissolves one scene into the next) involving a half-dozen interlocking characters in stylish Parisian sets. The common theme is the attempt for men and women to break through to connection, sexual or otherwise. And the tone is both amusing and sad, ironic and worldly-wise. These characters wear their hearts on their sleeves at the same time they are careful to keep them covered -- except for the pious striptease lady who heats things up (long story, too complicated to retell here.) If you would enjoy a bittersweet romantic comedy for adults, this is worth seeking out. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-77.)

Duck Season

My rating has to be provisional on this pleasantly minimalist film about four kids hanging out on a Sunday afternoon in a Mexico City apartment. They play video games, eat junk food, and make messes of many kinds. There’s a lot of deadpan humor and sly characterization. The two 14-year-old boys, 16-year-old neighbor girl, and a slightly older pizza delivery boy who comes to stay, are all appealing performers while remaining true to life. The black and white cinematography is jazzy and acute, when it isn’t gaping slackjawed, and the film doesn’t try too hard or overstay its welcome. And in fact, my viewing was cut five minutes short by a defective disk, so I don’t have a settled opinion. But if you give this debut film from Fernando Eimbcke a chance, you’ll likely start noticing and laughing in a process of gradual amplification. (2004, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-74.)

House of Sand

This is an intriguing home movie of sorts from Andrucha Waddington, the Brazilian director previously known for Me You Them. It stars his wife, Fernanda Torres, and his mother-in-law, Fernanda Montenegro, leapfrogging roles as mother and daughter through a story that spans sixty years. The setting is a remote desert region of Northern Brazil, near the ocean, and the women are first dragged there in 1910 by a crazed patriarch who has come by a deed to an isolated patch of sand. They spend decades longing for escape, but never really do, as the sands of time seep through and bury their house and their lives. The widescreen cinematography is spectacular, and if the story is sketchy, the actresses fill the screen admirably. It’s Woman of the Dunes with a samba beat, not adding up to much but lovely to look at and memorably scenic and sensuous. (2005, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-70.)

Woman is the Future of Man

South Korean cinema is hot on the international film festival circuit these days, and last year this Hong Sang-Soo film got a rare though limited American release and wound up at #30 in the Indiewire critics poll, and now comes to DVD with an introduction by the relentless cinema enthusiast Martin Scorsese. I found it intriguing but no great shakes, somewhat reminiscent of the American indie “mumblecore” movement in exploring the sexual and romantic entanglements of half-formed young people in the decade after college. In this case it explores the ambiguous friendship between a filmmaker just returned from the U.S. and a novice art history professor, both of whom had been involved during college with a woman they decide to re-visit on the drunken spur of the moment. Scorsese speaks accurately of the film’s “unfolding” quality, as the characters and their relationships emerge by indirection and asides. The story is small-scale and presented mostly in stable mid-shot, with minimal cutting or camera movement -- which seems characteristic of Asian cinema aside from chopsocky -- but with careful patterning and depth of field. There’s a fair amount of sex but it seems sad and inconsequential, so it’s wry humor and painful unconscious self-revelation that carry the film. The unfamiliarity of South Korean settings gives it continuous interest, even when the characters lose our sympathy. (2004, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-63.)

No excuses for sports spectating

I consider myself mostly a movie maven, but sometimes I’m a bit of a jock-head. And this has been a particularly gratifying season of viewing for a long-suffering Cleveland Indians fan with a subscription to MLB Extra Innings. So I’ve spent a lot of evenings watching Tribe games instead of films, and I hope to be doing more of the same deep into October (sorry, Red Sox fans -- and as for Yankee fans, tough luck!)

Other sports-related viewing that has occupied my time lately is catching up with the 22 hour-long episodes of the first season of Friday Night Lights on dvd. This NBC show has been critically-lauded and friend-recommended, though not widely watched and just barely renewed for a second season, which starts this coming Friday evening. But now I’m fully on board. The show may not be quite as good as the best HBO series such as The Wire, but does slot in with the all-time best network series dealing with high school life, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freaks and Geeks -- high praise indeed! You may think you have no interest in Texas high school football, but this series has a depth and universality of characterization that opens its soap opera pleasures and intrique to a wider audience than has yet discovered it. The actors are appealing across the board, and the on-the-fly, three-camera filming of scenes shot without rehearsal or staging conveys a rare authenticity for network tv, and a genuine sense of community. Most of the actors are unfamiliar and thereby even more convincing, but the standout is the one carryover from the feature film (also quite good, and directed by Peter Berg who is the producer of the tv series), namely Connie Britton as the coach’s wife and high school guidance counselor. Kyle Chandler is tight-lipped but thoughtful as the coach, the players seem unusually true to life as teenagers, and the hotties that surround them are given significant substance. And I liked a lot of the football action -- though no fan of the game itself -- even if it was implausibly cliff-hanging week after week. My viewing partner, however, tended to sigh when the game started, the same way she used to sigh when Buffy started to kick ass, but despite the obligatory action sequences, she’s hooked on the series as well. And it’s a rare show I could share with my son, a recent college grad with lamentable taste in movies and no interest in football whatsoever. Give it a try, if you’re into regular tv viewing, or queue up the first season on Netflix.

Battle in Heaven

Though I am dragging out my final review of 2006 way too long, your humble scribe is still subjecting himself to films that are no fun to watch, so I can recommend the ones you ought watch anyway. This Mexican film by Carlos Reygadas (ranked #18 in Indiewire critics poll) is not one of them -- unless you hanker for fleeting but explicit glimpses of actual sex acts. To be fair, much of the film is hypnotically watchable (e.g. a sequence of soldiers raising a huge Mexican flag), but it’s hard to tell whether the story itself is odious or merely otiose. The use of nonprofessional actors is sub-Bressonian and the oblique action involves the death of a baby and the murder of a beautiful young woman, but not in any involving way, which suggests mostly sensationalism, rather than the political or even spiritual significance ascribed by some critics. It may be a good film to argue about, but is not otherwise edifying or enjoyable. Nonetheless, Reygadas might be a filmmaker to watch in the future, with a distinctive visual style. (2006, dvd, n.) *5* (MC-56.)

Foreign Correspondent

I remembered this as one of the better Hitchcocks but was surprised by the sweep of the staging. I usually think of him as indifferent to setting -- outside of his own narrow narrative purposes -- so that he repeatedly resorts to back projection or obvious stage sets. But here he offers vivid scenes of London and Amsterdam in the run up to World War II, as well as the set pieces that are his own motivation. With his background as set designer, Hitchcock exemplifies storyboarding technique. The point of the movie is truly to render such pre-visualized scenes as the escape of an assassin shot from above so all you see is a waving sea of umbrellas, or most impressively, a near silent sequence set inside a windmill, where intrepid reporter Joel McCrea spies on Nazi plotting while the huge gears of the windmill turn, and the camera keeps finding revelatory graphic perspectives. I remembered this famous sequence as the climax of the movie, but in fact it occurs less than halfway through. The other notable aspect of the film is its atypical topicality, capturing the moment when Britain went to war while the U.S. retained its uneasy neutrality, with Hitchcock the recent Hollywood immigrant offering moral support to his native England, though he is usually not blamed for the final propagandistic sequence evoking Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts to America during the London Blitz. (1940, dvd, r.) *7*

Scoop

I used to think it admirable that Woody Allen could turn out almost a film per year strictly on his own terms, but I’m beginning to question the value of such sustained productivity. Maybe he should take a little longer, reach a little further. And he should definitely stop misusing Scarlett Johannson (here and in Match Point) and stop pairing himself with young lovelies. He has the ability to enlist superior performers, but apparently doesn’t give them adequate direction. Hugh Jackman, Ian McShane, and others are similarly wasted. Some of Woody’s own shtick is still wanly amusing, and the British settings convey some novelty, but we’ve basically seen this all before, better and sharper. I won’t bother to recapitulate the story, because it is utterly inconsequential. (2006, HBO, n.) *5* (MC-48.)

Coming attractions at the Clark

“Documenting Modern Artists: More Portraits in Film” picks up where the Clark's prior film series left off in June, offering feature length profiles of artists of the 20th century, sweeping from beginning to end, from two heroes of modernism to two antiheroes of postmodernism. Different styles of documentary filmmaking are explored as well as different styles of art. Screenings are Fridays at 4:00, with a repeat at 7:30.

September 28: The Mystery of Picasso. (1956, 75 min.) Unrivaled for immediacy, Henri-Georges Clouzot brings to this portrait of the fabled painter the same drive and dynamism that fueled his classic thrillers. It’s a bullfight! It’s an act of love! It’s a bravura performance! It’s Pablo painting. Nothing else is required to rivet your attention.

October 5: Homage to Chagall. (1977, 88 min.) Harry Rasky brings a more traditional approach to a film portrait of the artist and his work. Both life and work are admirable, demonstrating “The Colours of Love,” as the subtitle has it. The elderly Chagall and his wife make engaging interlocutors as well.

October 19: Crumb. (1994, 119 min.) Terry Zwigoff digs deep into the psyche of Robert Crumb, the underground cartoonist and obsessive draftsman, and elicits startling testimony from his brothers, wives, and other family, along the border between madness and genius, with equal attention to both sides.

October 26: How to Draw a Bunny. (2002, 90 min.) John W. Waters explores that same border in this inquest into the life and death of Ray Johnson, a denizen of the downtown New York scene who retreats to Long Island and obsession, with many major contemporary artists testifying to his importance.

If...

The first part of Lindsay Anderson’s film was so vivid, it was as if I had seen it just last month. The group portrait of English public school boys was indelible -- not just re-seeing Malcolm McDowell in his debut (after recently seeing him as Ari’s ex-boss on Entourage.) Equally impressive was the delineation of the school’s class structure, as an epitome of British society as a whole. And the film certainly took me back to the days when the “Missa Luba” was one of my most-played records, even though the music plays a surprisingly small role in the picture itself. But in total the movie is a sum of disparate parts that adds up to less than a whole. The line between reality and fantasy -- and between satire and violence -- is too wobbly. I guess you could blame the concluding but inconclusive hail of gunfire on the year of the film’s release, when insurrection and revolution seemed like live and not altogether unwelcome options. Here youthful anarchy has a different tone than in Vigo’s Zero de Conduite. Definitely worth seeing for the good parts, this is not a film I would recommend as a classic, despite the deluxe two-disk Criterion Collection treatment. (1968, dvd, r.) *7-*

Zodiac

David Fincher and serial killers are not two of my film favorites, and yet this movie held my interest throughout its protracted running time (destined to be even longer, and probably better, when the director’s cut comes out next year.) With good characters played by good actors -- led by Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo, along with Robert Downey Jr., Chloe Sevigny, Brian Cox, and a host of familiar faces -- the film offers more than frissons of real-life horror. The sense of period and location is strong -- i.e. San Francisco and other California locales from the late Sixties on -- and so is the subtext of movie history, in this chronicle of the case of the Zodiac killer, who effectively played the newspapers and media to launch a prolonged reign of terror without ever being caught. Gyllenhaal is a newspaper cartoonist and Ruffalo a police detective, who retain the irrepressible urge to solve the case, even after decades, obsessively revisiting the scene of the crime just as the film does. It’s an impressive mix of gruesome thriller, police procedural, and newsroom drama, presented with a realism uncharacteristic of the director or the genre. (2007, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-78.)

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

I was disappointed by this film, either from inflated expectations or by post-midnight lapses in attention. Ken Loach is on my shortlist of great contemporary directors (and indeed I enjoyed the dvd-extra hour-long profile of him and his working methods more than the feature itself) and this film comes festooned with the Palme d’Or from Cannes, but I failed to engage with it deeply. I’m also a fan of Cillian Murphy going back to the BBC adaptation of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, and an inveterate watcher of films on Irish themes (going back to my long collaboration with Kevin O’Hara on his book of Irish travels, Last of the Donkey Pilgrims.) There’s also a distinct contemporary relevance to this look at the Irish struggle for independence around 1920 (the same era covered in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins) -- as guerrilla struggle against an occupying army leads from sectarian strife to internecine violence. There are some shocking scenes of Black & Tan brutality, as well as Republican retaliation, which have an honest sense of chaos and fear. So why did this film fail to click for me? It’s well-shot and well-acted, but strangely hollow, reminding me of the old Russian saying, “The tears of other people are only water.” We are meant to identify with the tragedy of Murphy’s character, destined to be a doctor but derailed from healing into death-dealing by both sides of a reign of terror, but I couldn’t help thinking all the way through -- he should have known better. My own views are virtually as socialist as Loach’s but far more pacifist. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-82.)

I must say, in contrast, that my screening of The Impressionists at the Clark exceeded expectations. Though I did’t expect to watch the 3-episode docudrama from the BBC all the way through again, I was riveted and enjoyed it along with a large and enthusiastic audience. I’m still bothered by the total absence of Pissarro on one hand, and Cassatt and Morisot on the other, but otherwise the film conveys a sense of authenticity, both in the stories of the individual painters and paintings, and in the dynamics of the movement. Well-acted, highly plausible, and visually spectacular, this is art history at its most painless.

Miss Potter

This film about Beatrix Potter will cap my winter film series at the Clark, on literature and landscape in pastoral Britain. When I found that one of the Thomas Hardy films I was considering (Far from the Madding Crowd) was currently unavailable on DVD, I needed to come up with something new and this release from the very end of 2006 seemed a candidate. Unfortunately it had been at the top of my Netflix queue for months, with the unvarying report, “very long wait.” It was also unavailable at any local video store. (I suspect some nefarious Harvey Weinstein scheme -- same with Factory Girl.) So I had to catch it on pay-per-view, which I had never used and never will again, the widescreen film being shown in the abominably misnamed “full screen” format. Nonetheless I wanted to like the film, and I did. Director Chris Noonan (of Babe fame) re-pairs Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor from the retro ’50s romantic comedy Down With Love, this time as the bestselling children’s author and her publisher-suitor in the late Victorian era. Emily Watson is his sister and her best friend. Why did such a film receive a lukewarm critical response and indifferent distribution? I found it delightful from start to finish, when in the end Beatrix surmounts tragedy by using the money from her Peter Rabbit books to acquire and preserve large plots of the Lake District, an especially telling link between literature and landscape in a series that begins with a film about Wordsworth and Coleridge (i.e. Pandaemonium, followed by Sense and Sensibility and Tess.) So anyway, I look forward to seeing Miss Potter again in true widescreen, and to seeing whether my audience responds as favorably as I. (2006, PPV, n.) *8-* (MC-57.)

Cheyenne Autumn

There are some superbly pictorial moments in John Ford’s last film, and if you dropped the risible elements and straightened out the meanders in the overblown production you might have something. Some respect is accorded to the Cheyenne, but there are clear limits to authenticity when the chief is played by Ricardo Montalban and the impetuous brave is Sal Mineo. Richard Widmark has some grit but mails in his performance as army captain, and Carroll Baker (“Baby Doll” herself!) is a hoot as the Quaker schoolmarm. Some of the cavalry action is stirring, but the ultimate battle scene is staged with all the verisimilitude of a high school play. The Cheyenne break out of the fort where they have sought refuge -- from the rigors of the long trek from the reservation they were assigned in arid Oklahoma back to their ancestral lands near Yellowstone --and the action is incoherent and implausible. Karl Malden is a Prussian officer supposedly sympathetic to the Indians who follows orders to imprison them till they agree to return to the reservation. Then there is the pathetic climax when Secretary of the Interior Edward G. Robinson rides out to make peace with the remaining Cheyenne, shot against back projection that looks superbad in Super Panavision. Not to mention an utterly inane narration, and a ludicrous comic interlude with James Stewart as Wyatt Earp. Despite the Remington paintings come to life in widescreen glory, I can’t justify showing this in my “John Ford and the American West” film series next spring at the Clark. (1964, dvd, n.) *5+*

P.S. -- Then I watched My Darling Clementine (1946) -- which I may never have seen before -- and it secured the final slot in the series. Henry Fonda is a decidedly more credible Wyatt Earp, and the film holds together much better. (Even though there was some push and pull over it, with the DVD having John Ford’s rediscovered original cut on one side and producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s release cut on the other.) So the lineup is set: Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers. I’ll try to give Ford a fresh assessment at the time of the series, but I suspect he’ll never be a favorite of mine.

The Pirate

This flamboyant goof was groomed to be the next big MGM hit musical, starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, directed by Vincent Minnelli, with songs by Cole Porter. Apparently it flopped, just too queer for the day. Latterly it has become a cult film of sorts, with a gay aesthetic now out of the closet. I rather enjoyed the over-the-top-ness of it all -- the riot of color in a fantasy Caribbean, Judy’s on-the-edge emoting, Gene’s all-out hoofing -- but you definitely have to be in the right mindset not to dismiss it as ludicrous. (1948, dvd, n.) *6*

The Bourne Ultimatum

Now that’s what I call an action film -- nonstop, relentless action, from opening shot to closing credits. It’s a genre I would usually avoid, but for me Paul Greengrass is a must-see director. This film might have been called “Shattered Glass” if the title weren’t already taken. Not only is broken glass a recurring motif in the film, but its very style is composed of visual shards in dynamic mosaic. It’s really a lesson in how far humans have come in the ability to rapidly process fragmentary visual information. Oh yeah, there’s a story of sorts, an excuse for the chases and mayhem, and Greengrass is a serious man so amidst the frenzy there are some provocative implications about the surveillance state, but the game afoot is just to keep moving, which the film does admirably. Matt Damon (along with his stunt doubles) is very effective in the title role, and strong support is offered by the likes of David Straithairn and Albert Finney, Joan Allen and Julia Styles. I’m counting on Paul Greengrass to cash in this franchise success on some truly personal films. (2007, Regal at mall, n.) *7+* (MC-78.)

Mopping up

I have been doggedly making my way through all the best-reviewed films of 2006 (aside from certain genres, usually bloody) to match my own ratings -- and other critical compilations -- against the Indiewire critics poll rankings, and the summation will be a forthcoming blogpost. The capstone was supposed to be the just-released-on-dvd Inland Empire, which came in at #4 in the Indiewire poll. Well, I watched enough to get a sense of it, though there was precious little sense to be made of it. I’m no fan of David Lynch, the only film of his I really love is the most uncharacteristic, The Straight Story. And if I couldn’t be bothered to try to figure out Mulholland Drive, then I certainly didn’t have the patience for the self-indulgent, shot-on-DV, three endless hours of Inland Empire. If ever there was an artistic movement or sensibility that leaves me cold, it would be surrealism. Rather than “Oh wow!” I go “Oh puh-lease!” (*NR* MC-72.)

In the same boat sinks The Science of Sleep -- I jumped ship once I saw that Michel Gondry minus Charlie Kaufman does not equal another Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I like Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg enough to have finished the film sometime, but it was due back at the library, and c’est la vie -- so many movies, so little time. (*NR* MC-70.)

And though I really liked Nine Queens, it took me three tries to get through Fabien Bielinsky’s follow-up -- and final -- film, The Aura. Mostly set in the woods of Patagonia, this Argentine film is certainly pleasant enough to look at, but as a quirky thriller it is so far off beat as to lose me. Ricardo Darin is an epileptic taxidermist with a mental hobby of masterminding imaginary heists, who after killing someone in a hunting accident, finds himself in the middle of a real deal going down. But the film is slow and enigmatic rather than swift and propulsive. If you’re fond of puzzlers, you may like this more than I did -- many do. (*6-* MC-76.)

I also join the minority on Deepa Mehta’s Water, which again was lovely to look at but troubling to think about. The attempt to combine Bollywood-style romance with a serious exploration of the practice of widow sequestration -- which was controversial enough to have Hindu fundamentalists shut down the film so it had to be finished in Sri Lanka -- leads to wobbles in tone and impact. We follow a bewildered 8-year-old, widowed before she even realized she was married, as she is deposited at a group home for widows, who are forbidden to remarry and in effect outcast. There’s a monstrous madam who runs the joint, whose power is mitigated by a wiser and kindlier woman. And there’s the ridiculously beautiful young widow, who is prostituted for the home’s upkeep. She is espied by an oh-so-hunky young man who is espousing Gandhian principles, and wishes to espouse the lovely widow, until he learns the details of her life. Gandhi himself arrives on the scene, just released from a British prison in 1938, as a deus ex machina. There’s no actual dancing, but plenty of music, and the glossy drama of the model-beautiful couple muddles the feminist message of the film. If you’re not bothered by the film’s failure to coalesce, you may find it pretty enough to view favorably. (*6-* MC-77.)

Perfume: the Story of a Murderer

This film is visually exciting and intermittently interesting, but finally too long and too cold. Director Tom Tykwer invests the suspenseless murder story with some of the kinetic energy of Run Lola Run, but the effort to squeeze in too much of the Patrick Suskind novel bogs down the proceedings. The depiction of 18th century Paris is picturesquely squalid, the worst smelling place on the planet, more miserable than Victor Hugo could imagine. The main character was born under a fishmonger’s table to a mother who abandoned him there and was subsequently hung for the offense. Besides an incredible instinct for survival, the babe has a preternatural sense of smell, and the film’s most distinctive aspect is the attempt to visualize smells and the act of smelling. After a childhood more Dickensian than the dickens, he goes to Paris and for the first time catches the scents of perfume and of young women, and then in his wild child ways, mishap leads to murder, and thence to a calling. The frail but indomitable Ben Whishaw apprentices himself to parfumeur Dustin Hoffman (in a perfume-y performance whose fragrance may tickle your nose but won’t linger.) From there the film follows him to Provence to complete his education in scent, and mingles the gorgeous with the macabre. Alan Rickman is a local noble who tries to protect his beautiful young daughter from the fate of other beautiful young women who are being murdered serially. With no satisfactory conclusion to the unsavory doings, the film wanders through some spectacular scenes to a vaporous ending. (2006, dvd, n.) *6-* (MC-56.)

51 Birch Street

You could say this is nothing more than a glorified home movie, but it is a glorious home movie -- witty, subtle, profound, of both psychological and sociological interest. The first-person filmmaker Doug Block had always been close with his mother and distant with his father, so when after more than fifty years of marriage his mother died quite suddenly and his father remarried within three months, he and his sisters were shocked and mystified. Doug tries to unpack the mystery, through interviews with surviving family members, as well as going through old family pictures and films. Without the overt scandal of Capturing the Friedmans, this well-recorded life of a Long Island household (not for nothing is the film named for the address of the house) delves revealingly into family history and dynamics. Mina was Betty Friedan with her light under a bushel, and her voluminous diaries give Doug an avenue back into the past. Mike was a mechanic, a mechanical engineer in fact, and somebody who approached life from a common-sense mechanical perspective, rather baffled by his wife’s push for passion. Though Doug starts out on his mother’s side, he discovers another side of his father, in a film that has a genuine feeling of exploration and a surprising universality emergent from the specifics of one family’s life. (2006, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-77.)

Just a word of recap on “In Dutch” film series just completed at the Clark: Of the films I was willing to sit through again, Oscar-winner Character struck me as even better second time through, while Oscar-winner Antonia’s Line struck me as a little better but still not good, but little-noticed Simon moved in my estimation from pleasant surprise to hidden gem. If you’re into sex and drugs, or engaged with issues like gay marriage or euthanasia, then definitely seek out Eddy Terstall’s lively exploration of the ethos of contemporary swinging Amsterdam. You won’t find it in any film guidebooks, but it is available from Netflix. (Or soon at the Williamstown public library, where go all the dvds I show at the Clark, including Twin Sisters, which drew a big and enthusiastic audience, and the Criterion Collection disk of The Vanishing, a superb psychological thriller, not to be missed if you have the nerve for it.)

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing

I normally wouldn’t have watched any of the recently released “Joan Collins Collection,” but I try to keep up with films about architects, and this was interesting for Ray Milland’s portrayal of Stanford White. A very young Joan Collins plays a sanitized Evelyn Nesbit and Farley Granger is the demented rich boy Harry K. Thaw, to complete the fatal triangle. White’s work and the era in general are rather thinly characterized, but the Cinemascope dazzle of Richard Fleischer’s direction certainly characterizes an era when Hollywood turned to spectacle to try to win audience back from television. The rendition of real events is far from reliable and actual motivations are self-censored, so the story is a bit of a hash, sort of minor league Lola Montes with the sex bleached out. But even while putting on a demure act, Joan/Evelyn sizzles, and the well-restored scope and bustle of the colorful staging made this a nice workout for a big new tv. (1955, dvd, n.) *5+*

Once

John Carney’s film -- about an Irish busker (Glen Hansard) called simply “the guy” and a Czech immigrant (Marketa Irglova) known only as “the girl” -- is thoroughly charming and enchanting, a rough-hewn but romantic musical dramedy. The guy and girl meet cute on the street in Dublin, with a low-key but hilarious bit of business involving a vacuum cleaner, and they proceed to make music, if not love, together. That’s it for 88 minutes, but that’s plenty. Much as in Richard Linklater’s great Before Sunrise, it’s a stripped-down story of two people learning how to communicate with each other. Music is a foreign land to me -- I sometimes like to visit, but don’t really understand the language -- but I had no trouble picking up the melody of faces in this film, even while missing many of the words. I look forward to seeing it again on dvd -- to take advantage of subtitles -- but even with gaps in understanding of dialogue or lyric, this is a film to love. (2007, Images, n.) *8* (MC-88.)

Sansho the Bailiff

This Kenji Mizoguchi classic is indubitably great, but undeniably slow and lugubrious. It’s a lustrously beautiful black & white rendering of a folk tale of 11th century Japan, but seems to have two more direct impulses: the country’s recent defeat and suffering in war, and an attempt to capitalize on the international success of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The same cinematographer contributes the same sun-dappled and gloomy-shadowed look, though Mizoguchi has his own style and story to tell. Two repeated refrains sum up the tale, “Without mercy man is a beast,” and “Life is torture.” An enlightened governor is exiled for siding with the peasants against the generals, and ten years later when his wife and son and daughter go to reunite with him, they are waylaid by bandits and sold into slavery. The son has his ups and downs of fortune, but as is usual the women bear the greater brunt of suffering. Painterly compositions and evocative camera movement make the film a pleasure to watch, even while the suffering is piled on. It’s now on a typically impeccable Criterion Collection DVD, and I happened to watch it on a brand-new HDTV, so it was dazzling to see while painful to contemplate. (1954, dvd, n.) *8*

Le Petit Lieutenant

Part of the fun of going to movies is falling in love with people, and then maintaining relationships with them over the years. I first fell for Nathalie Baye when she was the scriptgirl in Francois Truffaut’s sublime lovesong to cinema, Day for Night (1973), then was ravished by her beauty in The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), and revelled in the mature eroticism of An Affair of Love (1999.) So it was a trip from the get-go to see her as the mature captain of a squad of Parisian detectives, a supercop daughter of a supercop, back on the job after several years off to overcome alcoholism. Director Xavier Beauvois obviously loves her too, ending the film with a protracted close-up of her silent face, as she conveys emotion enough to win the Cesar for best actress. She has been compared to Helen Mirren in the BBC series Prime Suspect, which I will have to take a look at. Mahnola Dahrgis of the NYTimes also compared the film to The Wire, which I hadn’t while watching but it makes sense, for the honest depiction of the detailed drudgery of detective work, and the clear-eyed view of the lives of cops. This is a police procedural that resolutely refuses to go where you think it’s going, and retains the randomness and surprise of real life. The inevitable violence is not choreographed but presented as the messy struggle it truly is. The cast is effectively close-knit, but Nathalie Baye steals the show. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-71.)

Documentary round-up

I’m going to sort through a group of recent documentary features, some well-reviewed but not recommended by me, others little-noticed but worth seeking out in my opinion.

Rachel Boynton’s Our Brand Is Crisis is basically The-War-Room-goes-to-La-Paz -- James Carville and his gang go to Bolivia to try to regain the presidency for the surrogate-American candidate known as “Goni,” massaging the message through focus groups and negative campaigning in a wide-open race. Goni sneaks through to re-election with little more than 20% of the vote, but is deposed by violent demonstrations within a year, while the consultants indicate regret but no guilt over the outcome. The story is inherently instructive about our peculiar electoral system and the limits of its exportability, but the film does nothing special to frame it. (2006, dvd, MC-69) *6*

On the other hand, Ralph Arlyck’s Following Sean appeared on the PBS series “P.O.V.” with little fanfare, so little that I hadn’t bothered to TiVo it, but tuned in purely by happenstance as it was starting and felt compelled to watch all the way through. It was pitched as another American variant of the 7 Up model, revisiting the film record of a child now grown up. But it is really a first person essay film, more like McElwee or Berliner or Steve James in Stevie. As a student living in Haight-Ashbury at the height of the hippie phenomenon, Arlyck made a film about the 4-year-old son of a hardcore hippie family living upstairs, an urchin who navigated the streets freely in bare feet and bragged about smoking dope. The film achieved some mix of celebrity and scandal, and Arlyck revisits it and the characters updated by more than thirty years, but he also weaves in meditations on many themes, his own French wife and semi-radical parents, and eventually his own grown-up kids, various philosophies of labor and activism, family and community. What emerges is thoughtful and rich, a small subject opening out to wide vistas. (2006, PBS but also available on DVD, MC-64.) *7*

Jonathan Berman’s Commune is another recent film that looks at the aftermath of hippiedom, surveying the story of the Black Bear Commune in Northern California from 1968 to date. It is reminiscent of In the Same River Twice in juxtaposing vintage footage of nude frolickings with revisits to the characters as they approach Social Security age. A sobering vision indeed. But being in the same boat, I’m kind of a sucker for this boomer nostalgia. This one told me nothing new, however, so it’s MC-74 rating is much higher than I would go. Still, it’s indicative of the lively documentaries to be seen on the Sundance Channel.

HBO is another refuge for good documentaries, if you look past Taxicab Confessions and the like. It recently broadcast Coma, a new film from Liz Garbus, who has been on my list of directors to watch since I was blown away by The Farm: Angola USA (1998.) She also directed one of the features in the recent HBO series on Addiction and was involved with Berlinger and Sinofsky in the excellent series, “Ten Days that Unexpectly Changed America.” Coma follows four patients recovering (or not) from brain trauma, framed by the celebrated cases of Terry Schiavo on one hand, and on the other the man who recovered brain function through electrical stimulation after 18 years without. These are tales of unbearable suffering and hopes raised and dashed, but the filmmakers demonstrate tact and caring in becoming intimate with each family’s tragedy, and the fitful promise of medical advance.

Nonetheless it is still PBS that most consistently showcases worthy documentaries. The two series running currently that are always worth checking out are “Wide Angle” and “P.O.V.” The first, in the usual “Frontline” timeslot, offers a fascinating hour’s worth of an international perspective too rarely seen on tv. Two recent standout hours looked at the emerging legal system of China, and an extremely popular talk show on Arab satellite tv that features four women of different nationality (only the impossibly beautiful Saudi wears a headscarf) frankly discussing taboo subjects such as divorce, homosexuality, and female masturbation, as well as fundamentalism and terrorism. Really eye-opening! And on “P.O.V.”, besides Following Sean, I have recently been favorably impressed by two feature-length documentaries: Revolution‘67, about the race riots in Newark and the other American cities on fire in what was summer of rage, insurrection, and military reaction, as well as of hippie love; and Prison Town USA, which explores the community implications of America’s huge boom in prison building, and incarcerated populations, on the rural towns where they replace old mills or any other form of regular employment.

One further note: I finally watched The Agronomist (2003), which I had TiVo’d from IFC months ago. Jonathan Demme’s celebrated film about Jean Dominique, long-time radio station owner and force for liberation in Haiti, is more than competent though trickier than it needs to be. Dominique is a vibrant character, as is his wife and partner, and their comings and goings to and from exile, and their periods of free broadcasting punctuated by shoot-ups of their radio station by government thugs, chart the history of Haiti from Papa Doc to Baby Doc, from Aristide to military coup and back again, with the U.S. always pulling the strings -- occasionally with human rights in view, at least under Carter and Clinton. Anything but a sad character, Dominique comes to a sad end in a sad country, but not before spreading the good word of hope.

The History Boys

Without making any great claims for this film, I did like it much better than The Dead Poets Society. Nicholas Hytner has effectively transposed Alan Bennett’s play from stage to screen, as he did with The Madness of King George. Cast and crew tossed off the film in the break between its London and (Tony-winning) Broadway runs, so the ensemble has the material down cold. Maybe a little too cold, since the movie lacks the spontaneity of real (or even reel) life, the lines and moments flow a little too smoothly and patly. But the lines and moments are funny and genuine in their own way. We follow eight grammar (i.e. public) school boys from Sheffield who qualify to pursue Oxbridge scholarships, and get an extra semester of coaching from a team of teachers. The boys are well-characterized and differentiated, and the three teachers are strong characters as well -- the aging, portly, poetry-besotted “general studies” instructor who loves the boys a little too much (embodied by Richard Griffiths), the seen-it-all-but-still-cares history teacher (Frances de la Tour, very much like an elder Alison Janney), and the young hotshot scholar brought in to tutor the boys on how to game the system. There are no surprises in the film, and it would have been better if they did not try to insert one at the end, but it is witty and well-intentioned, wised up but not excessively so. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-74.)

The Proposition

I suspect this Australian Western would have earned a plus if seen on the big screen, but the characters would still have been invested with antithetical attributes rather than rendered authentically complex. So the outlaw personification of evil actually loves sunsets and his brothers, and the lawman tries to impose civilization through low cunning and brutal violence. It’s all a bloody business, red in tooth and claw, but rendered aesthetically by John Hillcoat, a la Sam Peckinpaugh or Sergio Leone. The singer/songwriter Nick Cave, well known apparently but not to me, wrote the script that got the project made, and supplied the distinctive music. A roster of impressive acting talent was assembled -- Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, John Hurt, Emily Watson, Danny Huston -- and the full mythic mode of Western storytelling was rolled out, with special attention to blood and dust, flies and sweat, the focus on the feral behavior of human jackals. It either overwhelms you, or it puts you off, or maybe both at once -- a reaction as self-contradictory as the characters themselves. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-73.)

Climates

I am coming at Cannes critical fave Nuri Bilge Ceylan backwards; this was the Turkish director’s follow-up to the acclaimed Distant, and clearly the afterglow from that affected the reception of this, which was the 12th best film of 2006 according to the Indiewire critics’ poll (of which more anon.) The touchstone in most reviews is Antonioni, so it’s not surprising I am not wildly enthusiastic -- mostly slow and meticulously framed scenes set in exotic landscapes, of a loveless couple who barely speak but are presumed to be communicating more to us than to each other. The couple is played by Ceylan himself and his wife, Ebru Ceylan, considerably younger and lovely in a strikingly un-Hollywood way, though they are emphatic in denying autobiographical relevance. I confess to being impatient with the pace of the film, and with the opacity of the characters. But the beauty and craftiness of the visual and sound design sometimes jolted me awake, and the unfamiliarity of the Turkish settings keeps things interesting, even when the characters aren’t, despite effective performances. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-72.)

Bobby

Emilio Estevez’s film is Grand Hotel meets The Candidate, wishing it were Nashville. It surveys California primary day at the Ambassador Hotel in LA in 1968, and it is so stuffed with familiar actors that just to list them would take this review beyond its allotted length, starting with Anthony Hopkins and Emilio’s dad, Martin Sheen, and ending with Lindsay Lohan, between stints in rehab. There’s some amusement in seeing who will turn up next, though none of the mini-stories is gripping in itself. How the film works best is as a time capsule, capturing the look and sound of the times, not least in the extended excepts from RFK’s speeches, which were indeed moving and revelatory. I was a Gene McCarthy man at the time, saw Bobby as a ruthless opportunist, but am willing to be swayed a bit by this hagiography. Bobby’s assassination did not hit me the way that MLK’s did at the time, but it was certainly a nail in the coffin of political hope, with more to be added in that dreadful summer. I was more than content to give this film two hours of my time, but not impressed enough to recommend it unless you are a child of ’68 yourself, or in need of a diffuse history lesson. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-54.)

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary

This is hardly a movie at all, just 90 minutes of a well-put-together 81-year-old woman talking directly to the camera, about her first job 60 years ago, her boss, and her coming to terms with what she knows of the business in retrospect. Simply distilled from hours of head-on footage of Traudl Junge breaking silence and offering expiatory testimony shortly before her death, without further embellishment, the film assumes dimension when viewed in conjunction with two others. The straightforwardly penitent Traudl could hardly be more of a contrast with an evasive and self-justifying Leni in the queasily fascinating documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). And her eyewitness account of the final days in Hitler’s bunker was clearly a primary source for Downfall (2004), in which Bruno Ganz brilliantly impersonates an all-too-human Fuhrer. Though more document than documentary, Blind Spot illuminates the ambiguities of its title from within. (2002, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-79.)

Days of Glory (Indigenes)

Though the English title is more than a little misleading, there is an element of “Saving Private Sayeed” in this story of a small unit of soldiers taking back Europe step by step from the Nazis. The wrinkle of Rachid Bouchareb’s film is ironically alluded to in the French title, which properly means “Natives” -- that the soldiers liberating the “motherland” of France are Arabs from its North African colonies. Though not without Spielbergesque underlining, Bouchareb’s direction is meticulous and his point well taken. It was clearly an act of cultural and historical recovery for him and the actors, who as an ensemble won an award at Cannes -- and had an impact to the extent of convincing Chirac to restore the pensions of French soldiers in the now-free colonies. The military action is very well rendered, the characters well delineated, and the issues too. The impulse, however, is celebratory rather than angry, focused more on the valor and camaraderie of the good fight, than on the futility of war and empire. I figured we would wind up with any survivors fighting against the French in the Algerian War, but instead we postscript 60 years later at a military cemetery in Alsace. Still, this is an honorable effort all round, an action flick with a heart, a war movie with a brain. (2006, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-82.)

Jesus Camp

Scary and funny in its depiction of Evangelicals raising up a new generation “to take back America for Christ,” this film by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady is deadpan enough to please the people portrayed (except de-frocked charlatan Ted Haggard), and yet overt enough to frame the action with radio commentary from an appalled Christian with a more liberal viewpoint. That the kids are cute and engaging, as in Spellbound or Mad Hot Ballroom, only makes the fire & brimstone cult behavior all the more alarming. That the jolly, plus-size child pastor is a dedicated educator only makes her nonsense more ominous. Her madrassa is different from one in Pakistan or Palestine only because, “Of course, we’re right.” One more example, if any is needed, of fear being hyped up as a form of social control, of religion exploited as a call to holy war. This film is uncomfortable yet fascinating to watch, on several levels, not least to explain how 30% of the populace is still sufficiently divorced from reality to support Bush and his gang. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-62.)

Documenting artists recap.

I’ve been watching Simon Schama’s Power of Art series currently showing on PBS, but I’m not recommending that you tune in. There’s enough art and context to engage a middlebrow such as myself, but I have two main impressions. One is that Schama reminds me a little of the Clark’s director of education, Michael Cassin, but with the latter’s delightfully animated manner carried to the point of caricature. And secondly, that this series demonstrates by contrast the particular excellence of the films I just showed in the “Documenting Artists” series, and will show in a “Documenting Modern Artists” series come September. The films on Michelangelo, Van Gogh, and Frida Kahlo were each notable in a different style, but the film I want to plug particularly in retrospect is Winslow Homer: Society & Solitude (2007.) Filmmaker Steve Ross was kind enough to bring his just completed film to the Clark for an advance screening, and it delighted a capacity crowd, many of whom stayed around for a lively Q&A afterwards. I urge you to look for it at a museum near you, or eventually on PBS or dvd. The film is a well-rounded view of the life and times of a fascinating American original -- Homer and his era come through vividly in an interweaving of multi-faceted imagery and polyphonic commentary, for a circumspect and many-sided view of the artist and his work.

Not worth mentioning

Here are two films that I can’t recommend you see, and there is no chance you’re thinking about seeing, unless you are a directorial completist such as myself.

With films such as Battle of Culloden and Edvard Munch, Peter Watkins was established for me as a director to watch, so when I saw his latest had been released on dvd, I moved La Commune (Paris, 1871) to the top of my Netflix queue. Despite its six-hour length, I thought it was something I might wind up showing at the Clark during some Impressionist show. But this was no Best of Youth, where the hours speed by in a pageant of beauty and passion -- frankly it was a chore to sit through despite its obvious merit, and I fast-forwarded through the second disk (still able to read the subtitles.) Watkins assembled a group of 200 actors, and commandeered an abandoned factory to create sets of several streets of the 11th arrondisement. Over a period of weeks, the actors researched their characters and the revolutionary events of 1871, and then staged reenactments into which the camera plunged as a participant. The layers of reality are transparent and permeable, the actors speak in character and out, on historical fact and contemporary relevance, and the medium is the message to the extent that most of the action is covered by male and female reporters in period dress for Commune TV, while the other side is seen by news commentators on the official Versailles TV. There’s a good deal going on, but Watkins does nothing to speed up the process, allowing lots of repetition and then slowing things down even more with explanatory title cards instead of voice-over narration. Still you get a palpable sensation of revolutionary fever building, with a strong feeling of “You Are There” (for those old enough to remember the Walter Cronkite series from the ’50s.) At half the length, this might have been a great film, or it might have been a truncated record of a great experience, who knows?

I have no recollection of what led me to put In Celebration (1974) on my Netflix queue; it took years to filter to the top of that list of 200+ films. It must have been the idea that it was a Lindsay Anderson film I had not seen. But it was less a film than a modestly opened-out record of a stage production of a David Storey play -- very much a late product of England’s Angry Young Men, sort of “Long Night’s Journey into Day” meets “Who’s Afraid of John Osborne?” Three sons return to their old home in a Yorkshire mining town to celebrate their parents’ 40th anniversary. Family history is dredged up, dysfunction is revealed behind a brittle facade, you know the drill. Alan Bates is excellent but not quite right for the eldest son who wants to unearth grievance and turn everything over. A startlingly young Brian Cox is the tormentedly silent youngest brother. The middle brother is a successful businessman who wants to make everything okay for his parents, while suppressing his apparent homosexuality. The father has spent nigh on fifty years down in the mines, mainly to hide from the chilly woman who married down and whose main concern is to maintain “human hygiene” in a dirty world. It was all interestingly familiar to me (the mother strikingly like my English grandmother), enough to make me go back and finish it after it had put me to sleep the first time through.

"In Dutch" film series at the Clark

"In Dutch: Highlights of Film from Holland" is a series of free screenings at the Clark, Saturdays at 2:00 p.m. starting July 14th. Offered in conjunction with “NL: A Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires,” this survey of “Netherlandish” films explores a variety of national themes and historical situations, and includes two Academy Award-winners for Best Foreign Film. All films are in Dutch with English subtitles, and true to the mature spirit of Dutch culture, this free series of Saturday matinees is decidedly not for children.

July 14: Keetje Tippel. (1975, 104 min.) Paul Verhoeven, best-known of all Dutch directors, mounts the Netherlands’ most lavish historical recreation ever, following a young girl (Monique van der Ven as the title character) as she comes to Amsterdam from the country with her large and impoverished family in 1881, and makes her way into society, high and low, exploiting her beauty and free spirit.

July 21: Character (Karakter.) (1997, 114 min.) Set in Rotterdam in the years after 1900, this Oscar-winning oedipal drama directed by Mike van Diem is adapted from a classic Dutch novel, with a dour but distinctly Dickensian flavor, telling the story of a bailiff father and his lawyer son, severely estranged but locked in life and death struggle.

July 28: Twin Sisters (De Tweeling.) (2002, 137 min.) Two young girls are abruptly separated at their father’s funeral in 1926, and follow different fates when one goes to a well-off family in Holland and the other to a hardscrabble farm in Germany. Three pairs of actresses effectively portray their respective passages through World War II, the Cold War, and beyond -- based on a Dutch bestseller, and Oscar-nominated.

August 4: Antonia’s Line. (1995, 102 min.) This Oscar-winning family saga from Marleen Gorris became an international hit and a feminist rallying point. In her 80s, Antonia reflects on her life in flashback, from World War II onward, telling about the generations of women she raised and sheltered on a communal farm in rural Holland.

August 11: The Vanishing (Spoorloos.) (1988, 106 min.) This chilling psychological mystery was perversely remade in Hollywood by director George Sluizer, but the original remains a revelation, one of the most authentically scary horror films ever made, and no doubt the quietest. A young Dutch couple is headed for vacation in France, when she disappears at a rest stop, and he is haunted by her fate thereafter, until he meets the sinister character who holds the key of knowledge.

August 18: Simon. (2004, 102 min.) Sex and drugs, gay marriage and legal euthanasia, this free-spirited Dutch tragicomedy from Eddy Terstall has it all. Simon is the straight but crooked friend of the gay dentist narrator, and the film follows their friendship in swift and funny fashion, from its heyday in swinging Amsterdam to its surprisingly wise and moving conclusion.

Wide Awake

Lucky Alan Berliner -- he gets to indulge his own obsessions, and turn them into completely personal films. Unlucky Alan Berliner -- though he makes films that are funny and intriguing, almost no one notices. Compared to him, Ross McElwee is a superstar celebrity (both figured in a film series I showed at the Clark a while back, “Self-Portrait in Cinema”). His new film has no Metacritic listing, and only one review on the Movie Query Research Engine; the user comments on IMDB and Netflix are preponderantly impatient and dismissive. Well, I’m here to tell you -- Alan Berliner is a filmmaker you ought to be watching. He has mined his own family history and visual archive to make incisive and entertaining films like Intimate Stranger and Nobody’s Business, and gathered a dinner party of a dozen people with the same name as his in The Sweetest Sound. He’s a compulsive archivist of family pictures (even of families he doesn’t know) and old footage (from home movies to educational films to antique Hollywood clips), as well as random sound effects, and he edits them fast, furious, and funny. The personal obsession in his latest film is his odd sleeping pattern, how he got it and how to keep his infant son from developing the same. His family is tolerant and good-natured but sometimes annoyed with his intrusive insistence on talking day and night about his insomnia. The audience should be the same -- he’s demonstrably nuts, but he makes you laugh and he makes you think. With a rapidfire cascade of imagery alternating with narcissistic image-taking and direct to the camera monologue, Berliner takes you on a giddy ride, while circling a small subject that widens out as it unspools. (2006, HBO/T, n.) *7+*

Wandering off topic.

I have to confess to a recent cross-media obsession with Leonard Cohen. I guess the excuse for writing about it here is that I just re-watched the recent concert/tribute film, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, and also the ancient Film Board of Canada documentary from which its early footage is filched. In my enthusiasm for the discovery of an overlooked master, I gave the concert film an *8+*, which on second viewing I would demote to a *7*, as a barely adequate and sometimes annoying approach to a great subject. But in between viewings I made intimate acquaintance with the work of the man himself, and I am blown away. It’s like having a new star in the heavens swing into ken. Who knew? Some did, but not I. I knew Cohen almost exclusively for the songs in McCabe & Mrs. Miller and cover renditions by Judy Collins and her ilk. Little did I know that all these years, he’s been vying with Bob Dylan for the heavyweight songwriting crown -- both of them ecstatic wordsmiths with a divine croak of a voice, masters of many sounds, prophets in motley. (Of course, Dylan has fought many more bouts, lost a few but still a champ, while Cohen has compiled a Joe-Louis like career.) Reviews compiled by Metacritic had led me to purchase his only new cd in the past dozen years, “Ten New Songs,” but a cursory listen then yielded only a drone and it went into a drawer -- until the film revealed that Leonard Cohen is indeed my man. After I’d returned to and absorbed that album deep into my soul and the soundtrack of my life, I got the two-cd set of "The Essential Leonard Cohen," and lately I’ve listen to nothing else. And when I’m not listening, the words are revolving in my mind and revealing new aspects all the time. I just obtained two books of his poetry as well, though I haven’t started to read them yet. As a poet, Cohen is a bit sing-songy, but as a songster he is transcendentally poetic and prophetic. I love the way he plays his well-enunciated, gravel bass off against varied orchestrations and soaring female voices. Either in the guise of ladies’ man or Zen monk, he is attuned to the spirit that moves in the world, and the love that moves the sun and stars. I admire the man immensely, and urge you to make his acquaintance if you have not already.

Sherrybaby

Maggie Gyllenhaal is certainly the story here, as a slutty addict trying to stay clean after coming out of prison, so she can reclaim the love of her young daughter, lost when she was deep in a love affair with heroin. There’s an intimation of voyeuristic slumming in this production, but also an authentic attempt at intimacy with broken lives being pieced back together. It follows a familiar indie formula, but the writing and direction by Laurie Collyer has some understated grace. The supporting cast is solid too. It’s hard to pinpoint just what this film lacks, but with Maggie it’s worth watching, if you don’t mind an hour and a half in the company of desperately needy people. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-66.)

The Bridge

Normally I like documentaries that let you see for yourself and make up your own mind, but if ever there was a film that cried out for narration, personalization of viewpoint, or contextualization of some kind, this is it. Otherwise, Eric Steel’s film about the 24 people who jumped to their death from the Golden Gate bridge in 2004 is perilously close to being a snuff film for morbid voyeurs. The viewer really needs to know how and why this film was made, the responsibility the filmmakers took for what they were observing. With gorgeous photography of the magnificent bridge, and the use of music and cinematic suspense, the film flirts with the romantic myth of the Golden Gate as the place to step off to suicide. In defense from criticism, the director has explained that they had two cameras, wide and telephoto, recording HD video all day every day for a year, and that the cameramen would call bridge security whenever they started to follow someone who looked about to jump. The interviews with survivors (the friends and relatives left behind, but also one jumper who lived to tell) provide some backstory, and raise interesting questions. But the film does not answer them, or the reason for its own existence as document. Sure, the timelapse photos of fog rolling in are pretty to look at, and the actuality of self-murder has a grisly fascination, but why should we be watching? After the fact, the makers can make the connection to Bruegel’s “Fall of Icarus” but what we actually see in longshot is a pretty postcard picture of the bridge, with a sudden and inexplicable splash in the water. What does it mean? (2006, IFC/T, n.) *5* (MC-58.)

Blood Diamond

A queasy enterprise all round. Not just the business of smuggling diamonds, in trade for arms that fuel African civil wars, but the business of making preachy thrillers. When this film opens with a frightening scene of child soldiers on a rampage in Sierre Leone in 1999, you are receiving important news viscerally, but when the chases and fireballs continue you are being subjected to would-be blockbuster entertainment. And don’t get me started on the juiceless romance between Leonardo DiCaprio (otherwise okay as a Rhodesian soldier of fortune) and Jennifer Connolly (otherwise ludicrous as a crusading reporter.) Nor on the waste of Djimon Hounsou as an epitome of African suffering and nobility (just notice how he ends up being applauded without being allowed to speak a word.) Edward Zwick makes a film that is pure Hollywood flapdoodle, interspersed with earnest lectures on the dirty backstory of bling. I admit I was a bit drowsy while watching this, but far from waking me up, this high-calorie, low-nutrition concoction was dozey rather than a doozy. (2006, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-63.)

Young Adam

Well-shot and well-acted, this film unfolds depths of odiousness in its main character, and then lets him escape judgment, so it will never be a crowd-pleaser. But it is flavorful, even if the aftertaste is bitter. David Mackenzie’s film is mostly set on a barge plying the canals between Glasgow and Edinburgh in the 1950s, so the visual comparison to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante is inevitable, though the contrast in tone and outlook is striking. Ewan McGregor has enough innate appeal to make his success with woman plausible, but also to keep the audience on his side until it has to turn away in revulsion. Tilda Swinton and Emily Mortimer are two he woos and wounds. The film works as a highly sexy mood piece with starkly beautiful -- though down and dirty -- visuals, but it’s convoluted unfolding of the central mystery and unmasking of the amoral protagonist are likely to alienate many. (2002, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-63.)