The Headless Woman

The title deliberately evokes a B-movie ghoul-fest, but celebrated young Argentine director Lucrecia Martel delivers horror of a subtler sort, a dissociation of personality much realer and more common than gory decapitation. Maria Onetto carries the film as the title character, a well-off dentist who hits something in the road as she reaches for her cellphone. She bangs her head as she lurches to a stop. Slowly she gathers herself, looks in the review mirror and sees something, starts to get out but then drives on. We next see her getting a head x-ray at the hospital, and falling asleep repeatedly, seemingly either aphasic or amnesiac, at any rate a complete stranger in her own life. Her disorientation is ours, as together we try to make sense of an unknown world of relationships -- familial, social, economic, racial. Gradually her situation comes into focus, and she resumes her identity or some semblance of it, while her moral quandary plays out. If you’re willing to work at it, this is an engrossing mystery of psychological and sociological depth, but does take patience and attention even at its modest 87-minute length. Though not widely noticed, this film ranked highly in critics’ polls for best of 2009 -- #2 for Film Comment and #6 for indieWire. (2009, dvd.) *7* (MC-81.)

More Than a Game

A fan of the Cleveland Cavaliers can only take heart from the loyalty portrayed amongst LeBron James’s teammates from 5th grade through a national high school title in 12th at St. Vincent’s-St. Mary’s of Akron. Kristofer Belman’s documentary does not come up to Hoop Dreams, but that’s an impossibly high goal to reach, like LeBron himself possibly the best there ever was. Though not ideally structured nor visually dynamic, this is still an exciting and eye-opening film about high-stakes high school sports. If you are a follower of the Chosen One, a Witness to the wonders he works, this goes beyond self-promotion to an early gospel of the religion of hoops, the acts of the apostles in the wilderness of Akron. It’s about a group of boys saving themselves through commitment and communion on the court. Feel free to keep a skeptical distance, but if ye would heed, gather round and share the legend. Forget next year in Jerusalem, it’s this year in Cleveland. King James rules! (2009, dvd.) *7-* (MC-59.)

Red Beard

This was one of those Netflix disks that lies around for months before I watch it, and then in fits and starts. It turned out to be well worth watching, but you might be as daunted as I was. In essence this Kurosawa almost-classic is a Japanese Dr. Kildare set in the early 19th century and, clocking in at a little over three hours, might have been a miniseries. In the final collaboration between director and actor, Toshiro Mifune plays the title character, a wise old doctor who runs a village clinic for the poor, to which a hotshot young doctor has been exiled. Initially rebellious, the hothead gradually comes under the sway of the elder samurai -- er, doctor -- in caring for a variety of patients and learning their stories. Besides the length, this impeccable Criterion dvd is compromised by the film’s widescreen splendor in luscious black and white. Unless you’ve got a big HD screen, you’ll be missing much of the appeal, which is considerable. (1963, dvd.) *7-*

Taking Woodstock

In the tradition of bands of that era, this film might be named the Vanilla Cacophony – it’s bland and disorganized. I wouldn’t have seen it except that it was shot in the neighborhood, and thus fun to spot local scenes and watch for the name of my daughter’s boyfriend as the credits rolled. There’s some appeal to the casting and scene setting, but the film is under-written by James Schamus and uncertainly directed by Ang Lee. Though they are longtime successful partners, this story was too close for one and too distant from the other. So the point of the project is elusive, never more so than when it emulates the well-known Wadleigh (and Scorsese) documentary. Coming at the event from a tangent, the film slights the music onstage and highlights a variety of peripheral characters, too many and too varied for any character development. Demetri Martin is a cipher as the central character, the tentatively-gay son of Russian Jewish parents who own a run-down Catskills motel. He has the all-important permit for a music festival, and sets the madness in motion. Eugene Levy is good as Max Yasgur, on whose farm the festival landed, and several other actors make an impression, but in the absence of an overall impression, it’s all loose ends. (2009, dvd.) *5* (MC-53.)

Film Club resumes

The Cinema Salon Film Club will resume free screenings and discussion in the Clark auditorium on Friday, February 12, at 4:00 pm, and on alternate Fridays thereafter. The theme of this series will be “What in the World is Going On?” featuring a different country or region in each session. Steve Satullo, an independent film scholar who programs films at the Clark and writes the Cinema Salon blog, will select a representative feature film from each country, introduce it in the context of the director’s career and that nation’s film history, and lead a discussion afterward.

The subjects of the first three sessions will be Iran on February 12, China on February 26, and Africa on March 12. Thereafter subjects will be determined by consensus of the club, with reference to areas currently prominent in international news. Please note that each of these films earns a Metacritic rating that connotes "universal acclaim."

Friday, Feb. 12, 4:00pm: Offside. (directed by Jafar Panahi, 2006, 92 min.) A highly pointed satire on women’s status in Iran follows a group of girls who try to get into a World Cup soccer match from which they are barred. (MC-85)

Friday, Feb. 26, 4:00pm: The World. (directed by Jia Zhang-Ke, 2005, 143 min.) The hottest young director from China follows a group of internal immigrants from the countryside working at a Beijing theme park with reduced-scale copies of landmarks from around the world. (MC-81) [Please note: my introduction will begin at 3:45 due to length of this film. By the printed calendar, we are locked into 4:00 timeslot, but in future I will schedule screenings earlier, as requested]

Friday, March 12, 4:00pm: Moolaadé. (directed by Ousmane Sembene, 2004, 124 min.) The title translates as “sanctuary,” which is offered to girls in a Senegalese village who do not want to be subjected to the traditional practice of female circumcision. (MC-91)

For information on specific film selections and schedule of future screenings, as well as news of supplemental screenings at other times, there are three ways to keep current: online at www.cinemasalon.blogspot.com; by email notification requested from ssatullo@clarkart.edu; or by phone message at 458-0415.

The Cinema Salon Film Club is intended for interested viewers who approach film as a medium of engagement rather than entertainment, who wish to grapple intellectually and emotionally with the serious art of film, and to find in world cinema a way of engaging with the world and extending one’s understanding and empathy for other cultures. The point lies in actively entertaining new ideas and impressions, and not in being passively entertained by appeal to familiar feelings. Ideally the screenings will attract not just sophisticated film fans, but participants with particular interest or expertise in the region under discussion.

Up in the Air

Count me among those for whom George Clooney is the new Cary Grant – he dignifies and dapperizes whatever he’s in (though one Ocean movie was more than enough for me). But here he has a vehicle that keeps him aloft and grounded at the same time. Jason Reitman’s snappy adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel kicks off with a perfect mood-setting title sequence, with descending plane’s-eye views of cities and countryside set to a bluesy version of “This Land is My Land.” Clooney lives in airplanes, airports, and hotels – and loves it – as he jets from city to city on contract to fire people. Traveling light is for him not just a strategy, but a philosophy of life. In motivational speeches, he advises people to “empty their backpacks” of any attachment to things or people. Then two women come into his life, a go-go recent business grad (played deliciously by Anna Kendrick) with a scheme to take him and his ilk off the road and do the company’s firing over the Internet, and a sultry fellow traveler (played beyond deliciously by Vera Farmiga), who have him forming attachments he never anticipated. The film follows some rom-com conventions, but is ultimately subversive and grounded in the mood of this recessionary moment, as Clooney comes down to earth in a highly-debatable denouement likely to spark post-film discussion. I liked this film so much I wanted to give it an *8*, but it is certainly not a better film than A Serious Man or Summer Hours, so I guess that calls my numerical rating system into question. Anyway, it’s a recommendation with a little extra oomph. (2009, Beacon.) *7+* (MC-83)

Up

Pixar’s latest from Disney is just about as joyful as a corporate entertainment could be. Similar -- but preferable -- to Avatar in two ways, this 3-D animated feature (I would definitely see it in a 3-D theater if it came around again) is a mash-up of many familiar movie tropes, but with coherence and depth of emotion. The brilliant opening is reminiscent of Citizen Kane’s famous breakfast table anatomy of a marriage, in its swift and almost wordless portrayal of a lifetime shared by Carl and Ellie. We pick up with Carl as a cranky, square-jawed, white-haired widower voiced by Ed Asner. Though drawn together as children by a passion for a Lindbergh-like character with the message “Adventure is out there!”, the couple leads a quiet stay-at-home life that leaves the bereft Carl full of regret for the adventures they never had. As skyscrapers encroach on Carl and Ellie’s tidy “Little House,” just as on Virginia Lee Burton’s, Carl escapes by lifting the house into the sky with millions of colored balloons, reminiscent of Howl’s Moving Castle (and indeed the whole film is deeply imbued with the spirit of Miyazaki). He winds up with a stowaway boy scout, a rotund tyke who might be a refugee from Wall-E. As you would expect, adventure ensues, which I will leave you to discover for yourself. But I will take especial note of a mythical bird of paradise -- large, lithe, and brightly-hued -- and a pack of dogs with collars that hilariously translate dog-thought into English. The action cranks up, as it must, but not in a way that wearied me, as some otherwise admirable animated films have done, and returns at last to the quiet warmth of feeling that is the film’s hallmark. Plenty of “oh wow!” in this movie, but its miracle is in the expressiveness of its characters’ cartoon faces. (2009, dvd.) *8* (MC-88)

In the Loop

Armando Ianucci may not have been totally successful in graduating from British sitcom into feature film, but this political satire travels pretty well. Think The Office, but in government offices instead, and higher up the food chain, with a much higher quotient of profane invective. You can put on a better suit, but a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat, public or private. The plot, such as it is, is driven by obvious parallel to the run-up to the Iraq war, but is disconcertingly nonspecific. No matter -- at this level of ministerial maneuvering, it’s just the perpetual careerist game of kiss and knife in the back, dither and bluster, preen and shirk. So a British cabinet minister (Tom Hollander) makes a clueless remark about war being “unforeseeable” and gets to crank up his cluelessness on both sides of the Atlantic, as he becomes a pawn in the game, “meat in the room.” At least he can flatter himself that he is “in the loop,” however loopy. But the star of the show is the manic Peter Capaldi, spewing nonstop hilariously filthy insults, in apparent parody of Tony Blair’s communications director. This isn’t “The West Wing,” though they talk even faster. I don’t doubt the scalding truth of the satire on how Washington and London work on a day to day basis, but the Iraq parallel is a bit of a tease, and gave me unease. Nor did the pacing of the film seem to fit the 100-minute length. So this won’t make my top ten films of the year, as it did in the indieWire poll, but if you have a taste for wit with a sharp, cynical tang, it’s worth sampling. (2009, dvd.) *6+* (MC-83)

Lorna's Silence

Ah, the ambiguities of iconic status. The Dardenne brothers swept to prizes at Cannes and international critical acclaim with a severe style and difficult outlook on the world, a Marxist view of underclass moral quandaries. So when they make their work just a little more accessible, the critics don’t like it as much. Here the camera is not so jerky, the setting not quite so circumscribed, the action more scripted, the parable of poverty more neatly laid out. Well, I liked this as much as my previous favorite of theirs, Rosetta, and for much the same reason, a captivating female lead. Here Arta Dobroshi (looking to me uncannily like an older Ellen Page) is an Albanian immigrant in Liege, who has acquired Belgian identity by marrying Jeremie Renier (familiar from other Dardennes’ films), a heroin addict expected to die soon. Or so you figure out, if you are watching closely. Turns out Lorna is being used to turn around as a widow and marry a Russian mobster, to earn him citizenship. With her share of the take from the scam, she hopes to open a snack shop with her Albanian boyfriend. What happens then is subject to debate, but as Lorna’s choices become more circumscribed, it’s safe to say that she awakens to a moral light within. If you are unfamiliar with the Bressonian films of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (La Promesse, Le Fils, L’Enfant), this is not a bad place to start. (2009, dvd.) *7* (MC-80)

Belated annual round-up

Each year I make a point of comparing my judgments to the critical consensus, as summarized by Metacritic and the annual critics’ poll from indieWire (2008 here and 2009 here). I have at last caught up with almost all the best films of 2008, while the lists for 2009 will direct my viewing for the next several months, as the films come out on dvd. Below are lists of my own recommendations, with their indieWire poll rankings. As I reviewed my reviews of 2008 releases, some as recent as last week, I began to see my numerical ratings as pseudo-scientific, so instead of a ranked list I sorted them into a sort of narrative:

Best of the Year: Three stand out for me. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (#5) only got better on a second (subtitled) viewing. I would expect Laurent Cantet’s quasi-documentary of a year in the life of The Class (#33) to hold up as well. But I’m not sure if the Philippe Petit documentary Man on Wire (#20) could replicate the surprise and delight of first viewing.

Outstanding: Slumdog Millionaire (#28) needs no introduction, just an explanation of how a “Best Picture” could also be a good film. The Visitor (#57) struck some as string-pulling, but I guess they were my strings being pulled. I’m surprised I rated I’ve Loved You So Long (not on 2008 list) so high – must have been infatuated with Kristen Scott Thomas.

Highly Recommended: In this category I have one American film and a handful from around the world. I’m a big fan of Charlie Kaufman, so it’s no surprise Synecdoche, New York (#9) ranks as the best of Hollywood for me. It was a reach to wrap my mind around that film, as well as the others in this category: Fatih Akin’s German/Turkish Edge of Heaven (#16); the French family gatherings of A Christmas Tale (#2) and The Secret of the Grain (#42), the animated Israeli confessional Waltz with Bashir (#10), and the German Oscar winner The Counterfeiters (not on list).

Recommended: I will lead with three documentary portraits of cities: post-Katrina New Orleans in Trouble the Water (#30); Terence Davies’ Liverpool in Of Time and the City (#29 for 2009); My Winnipeg (#13) from Guy Maddin. Then a group of American independents that all take a sympathetic look at marginal lives: The Wrestler (#18); Chop Shop (#46); Wendy & Lucy (#4): Ballast (#19); Frozen River (#49). For a really marginal life, take a look at Swedish teenage vampires in Let the Right One In (#14). And for the Masterpiece Theater crowd, I have to note how much I liked The Duchess (not on list), with not-my-favorite Keira Knightley.

Well-regarded and okay by me: I endorse, without fully sharing, the esteem given to Pixar’s WALL-E (#3), Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (#11), Gus Van Sant’s Milk (#15), and Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais (#21), but would bump up into this group Oliver Stone’s W. (#64).

Critical bandwagons I can’t quite jump on: The Flight of the Red Balloon (#1); Paranoid Park (#6); Still Life (#7); Silent Light (#8); The Dark Knight (#22); and Gomorrah (#25).

As for 2009, the early leader in the clubhouse for me is Jane Campion’s Bright Star (#19). I’m also recommending Summer Hours (#1), A Serious Man (#2), and Avatar (#26), with particular enthusiasm for Goodbye Solo (#47) and Adventureland (#43), with lots more yet to watch – excluding #3, the latest from my cinematic nemesis Quentin Tarantino.

Cria Cuervos

The title of Carlos Saura’s film translates as “Raise Ravens,” with the rest of the Spanish proverb implied: “…and they will peck out your eyes.” This portrays as death-haunted a world of childhood as Pan’s Labyrinth, and stars Ana Torrent, the grave but beautiful little girl who made such an impact in The Spririt of the Beehive. The girl’s mother, played by Geraldine Chaplin, remains a matter of fact presence in her life, even after we’ve witnessed her painful death from cancer. Chaplin also plays Ana as a grown up, in direct to the camera reminiscence. The mother’s death opens a whole world of mortality to the young girl, much of which she takes responsibility for, either the real heart attack of her father, one of Franco’s generals, or for the fantasized death and resurrection of her sisters. The film offers a lovely group portrait of the three girls, however dark the shadows in their house. Ana Torrent’s big brown eyes and bewitching gaze make this film memorable, and it’s surprising that the rest of her career is mostly unknown, unless she grew up to be Penelope Cruz. (1975, dvd) *7+* (Criterion page)

Beautiful Losers is a documentary I’d never heard of, till Netflix’s collaborative filtering pointed it out as something I might like. And I did. This was as well-done and ingratiating a piece of egregious self-promotion as I have seen. It tied into a traveling group exhibition of the same name, and it’s no surprise to learn that both film and show were put together by on-screen presence Aaron Rose, proprietor of the Alleged gallery where all the artists were affiliated. An aesthetic derived from skateboarding, graffiti, and punk linked them together but certainly put them at a distance from me (the only one I’d heard of was Shepard Fairey, and only because of that Obama poster). Nonetheless I became engaged with the group on their climb from losers to beautiful people, as their art went from intimate to corporate. Rather than begrudge their commercial sell-out, I am inclined to celebrate the power of collective effort for artists. (2008, dvd, MRQE)

Secret of the Grain [etc.]

In what seems to be the mode of the moment in serious French film, La Graine et le Mulet (in England, simply Couscous) inserts us into an extended family and forces us to figure out the relationships on the fly, the wrinkle here being that it’s a Tunisian immigrant family in a Mediterranean port city. Abdel Kechiche’s film is long and demanding, but immersive and engrossing. The patriarch of the family is dismissed from the shipyard job he has had for decades. Slimane (Habib Boufares in a nearly silent but speaking performance) has left his wife to live with another woman, who owns a small residential hotel, but he is in daily contact with his ex-wife and grown children (I’m still not sure how many altogether, but a half-dozen anyway, with spouses and kids), but his closest relationship is with Rym (the magnetically beautiful Hafsia Herzi), his mistress’s daughter. As a second-generation acculturated Frenchwoman, she helps him negotiate the bureaucracy as he seeks permits and financing for a scheme to turn an abandoned boat into a couscous restaurant featuring his ex-wife’s cooking. The story builds to a Big Night situation, long on suspense but light on food porn. You don’t know where it’s going, and when it ends, you’re not sure where it went, but it’s likely you will be drawn into this family, for better and for worse. (2008, Sund/T) *7+* (no MC, but MRQE here)

If Tunisian immigrants in southern France seem a little remote from your own experience, take a look at Tulpan (2009, dvd, MC-88), which might as well take place on a distant planet, in its portrait of a shepherding family on the desolate steppes of Kazakhstan. Sergey Dvortsevoy’s film will affect you either hypnotically or soporifically, more ethnographic documentary than standard film fare, though in effect a romantic comedy set among widely-dispersed yurts in a forbidding and unforgiving landscape. Tulpan (i.e. Tulip, in a place with hardly any vegetation at all) is the unseen heart’s desire of our hero, a young veteran of the Russian navy, living with his sister’s family and hoping for a bride and a flock of his own. I was watching this with someone else, who grabbed the remote and fast-forwarded through the second half, so I can neither support nor dispute this film’s highly-laudatory critical reception. I can, however, guarantee you it is different from any other viewing experience you’ve had, both majestic and empty, boring and amusing, understated and overpowering.

You’d be overpowered in a different way by District 9 (2009, dvd, MC-81), a sci-fi alien invasion flick with a novel premise, which bludgeons you with grisly humor before descending into the obligatory futuristic shoot-em-up. So in Neil Blomkamp’s film, the alien spaceship hovers over his native Johannesburg, and the aliens themselves are no superbeings but drones who have lost contract with their masters, and so become wards of the state, sequestered in the District 9 of the title, land too valuable for squatters, so a Halliburton-like company is brought in to move them forcibly to a more distant township, shades of apartheid. (Plot similarities to Avatar are probably part of the cultural moment.) The aliens are dismissively called “prawns” for their semi-crustacean and wholly-creepy appearance. The official responsible for their removal is nepotistically as out of his depth as many of the Bushies in the Baghdad Green Zone of 2004, but goes from comic butt to half-breed superhero as the movie careens to its conclusion. It’s certainly a dispensable film, but not without amusement.

Stanwyck redux

Not quite ready to relinquish my fixation on Barbara Stanwyck, I have been able -- through the good offices of TiVo’s “Wishlist” feature -- to feast on obscure films that have surfaced lately on Turner Classic Movies, and here I offer an appendix to my earlier Stanwyck career summary. In a way, the fact that these films are mostly long-forgotten is part of the appeal – it calls up the routine week to week production of Hollywood’s golden age. The first three were all directed by Frank Capra in the pre-Code era, and have a startling frankness, despite occasional circumlocution.

Ladies of Leisure (1930) makes no bones about the profession of its heroine. You could call our Barbara gold-digger or party girl, but there’s another name for a paid female companion for the evening. She meets up with a bored playboy painter, who wants to paint her portrait as an epitome of hope. And Capra certainly saw that quality in the aspiring showgirl who had been the orphan Ruby Stevens. Stanwyck shines for the first time on film, and while the story plays out conventionally, her fire shows through.

Forbidden (1932) is the only one of these films that really needs to be rediscovered and added to the essential Stanwyck canon. She starts off as a romantically thwarted librarian in a small town, with pince-nez glasses and a tight bun, but kicks over the traces and winds up in a slinky gown on a cruise to Havana. Onboard she falls for Adolph Menjou, and he reciprocates. Back in the States it turns out he’s a rising politician married to an invalid heiress. Melodramatic complications ensue in accelerating fashion, giving Barbara scope to hit all sorts of notes. Sure, there’s a headlong implausibility (yet predictability) to it all, but the dialogue is sharply written and crisply played. There’s a surprisingly natural toddler and BS is surprisingly natural with her, in a forecast of Stella Dallas. There are crimes of passion and moments of reconciliation as the lovers go gray, together and apart. Having been schooled by Douglas Sirk to see more than is immediately apparent in a “woman’s picture,” I found this melodrama absorbing and Stanwyck’s performance bravura.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) was scandalous (and a flop) because of its theme of forbidden interracial romance. Stanwyck is not believable as a missionary bride in China at a time of civil war, but smolders believably when she is abducted by a cultured warlord, who intends to keep her captive till she gives herself to him willingly. This was Capra’s attempt to go arty, and it certainly has an ersatz style to it, so it has some appeal as a period piece, but no lasting merit.

Jumping ahead to Christmas in Connecticut (1945), we are in a different cinematic universe. I don’t know whether it’s a quality of Stanwyck’s, or one of the few occupations for single women at the time, but she often winds up playing journalists. Here she’s a faux-Martha Stewart, writing an extremely popular “Great Housekeeping” column, all about her exquisite married life on a New England farm, written from her solo Manhattan apartment. The wacky premise involves a shipwrecked seaman and a publisher who unknowingly scents a great publicity stunt, of sending the lonely vet to have a traditional country Christmas with Barbara and her “family.” An imposture is set in motion and goes off like clockwork, cuckoo clock that is. Stanwyck carries an otherwise unmemorable troupe through its paces, though Sydney Greenstreet scores in some against-type comic moments as the publisher.

Stanwyck is back in calculating femme fatale mode in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), as an industrial tycoon who came into her inheritance by causing the death of her antagonistic aunt. That secret colors all the good she believes she’s accomplished through her wealth, and in true film noir fashion, it’s a secret that comes back to haunt her, in the person of Van Heflin, who returns to Iverstown long after the fateful adolescent night when he was supposed to be running away with Martha, but she wound up having the incident with her aunt. She has taken care of the other witness by marrying him, and he winds up being played impressively by Kirk Douglas in his first screen role, as a timid, troubled man whose political career has been advanced by his wife. The triangle plays out with some interest, and Lewis Milestone directs effectively, but this film does not achieve classic status.

In The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), Stanwyck is a woman in jeopardy, married to maniac painter Humphrey Bogart, and as in Sorry, Wrong Number from the next year, it goes against the grain of her appeal. She must always retain agency, never simply be acted upon. Even in disappointment and defeat, she must remain her own woman. Bogart is simply bug-eyed in his preposterous role, and aside from a few effectively gothic moments of wind and rain in an English mansion (directed by Peter Godfrey, like Christmas in Connecticut), this film is utterly disposable.

The Man with a Cloak (1951) is an historical curiosity of considerable interest, set in 1840s New York. Stanwyck is once again a woman in control of things, as housekeeper to a dying rich man (Louis Calhern), whose schemed-for inheritance is put at risk by the arrival of Leslie Caron, the young bride of the man’s grandson, who has come to get his support for their revolutionary efforts back in France. In the middle of things, solving all mysteries, is the eponymous Joseph Cotten – I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal that he turns out to be Edgar Allan Poe. Intriguing and atmospheric, literate and well-performed, Fletcher Markle’s period piece is worth a rediscovery.

Loose change

Here are some films that I’ve watched lately but can’t recommend, so I mention them in a cautionary way, in the interest of complete coverage at year’s end, from best to worst of a so-so lot. Each has elements that might lead you to expect something good, but in the end proves disappointing.

I’m not sure what led Michael Mann to think that the story of John Dillinger needed to be retold, but his Public Enemies (2009, dvd, MC-70) did not convince me on the merits. Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard are definitely worth watching, and jailbreaks, bank robberies, and tommy-gun shootouts are filmed in luscious HD with balletic as well as ballistic grace. But the story is told in a breakneck and inconsequential manner, with intriguing cameos but little genuine character development. Billy Crupup is amusing and surprisingly convincing as J. Edgar Hoover, and Christian Bale is steely and enigmatic as the G-Man charged with bringing in Dillinger “dead or dead.” But a number of well-known faces come and go in a flash. This latter-day gangster film looks good and goes down easy, but lacks point.

The same goes twice for another Depression-era true story, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2009, dvd, MC-63). The production values are smooth, but the point is elusive. Is it grief porn? We watch Angelina Jolie’s face in extreme close-up as it is tortured through all the emotions of a devastated mother, after her young son goes missing, and then the police return a different boy whom they insist is her son. Her denial of his identity is written off as hysteria and she is sent to an asylum to admit her obstinacy. So Angelina is back in the snake pit, where she first made her mark in Girl, Interrupted. But then there is the parallel story of an honest investigator who uncovers a serial killer of boys, and then the protracted, painful wait to confirm that her son was one of the victims. And then an equally protracted execution scene. All of which scenes go off in different directions, making for an aimless film, which exploits suffering rather explaining or exploring it.

Julianne Moore is another mother in panic and pain over a missing child in Freedomland (2005, dvd, MC-43). Since the investigating cop is Samuel L. Jackson, along with other welcome performers such as Edie Falco and Clarke Peters, and the script is by Richard Price, adapted from his own novel (not his best but better than this), most of the blame for the failure of this film to move or enlighten, or even make much sense, must be laid to director Joe Roth.

As of fan of Buffy and Entourage, I had reason to hope that James Toback’s Harvard Man (2001, dvd, MC-49) -- with Adrian Grenier as the student-athlete of the title and Sarah Michelle Geller as his mobster-bred girlfriend -- was not as bad as they say. It is. And is only made worse by the ridiculousness of Joey Lauren Adams as a hot, hot philosophy professor with whom Toback’s autobiographical hero is having an affair. There was some amusement to be had watching this film with my Harvard man son, but I would warn anyone else away. The style is as annoying as the story, with the exception of some fun with distorting lenses that gives a pretty good representation of a bad LSD trip. The rest of the movie is a bad trip in itself.

Tunes of Glory

This is a film that I’d never seen, partly because I’d always confused it with Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, from the same era and with a similarly military setting, though a different war and nationality. When Criterion released a DVD a few years ago, I put it on my Netflix queue and it very gradually made its way to the top. Ronald Neame smoothly directed this story of a Highland regiment in the years after World War II, but it is really a showcase for two giants of British acting. Alec Guinness is a crude hard-drinking Scot with flame-red hair, who has risen from the ranks to achieve command, only to be succeeded by an Oxford-educated martinet played by John Mills. Our sympathies waver between the two, until both are destroyed from within. The process is never less than interesting to watch, but the resolution is not fully satisfying, rendering the film well-made but not especially significant. (1960, dvd.) *7*

Avatar

An experience not to be missed, James Cameron’s long-awaited, super-expensive venture into 3-D is a mélange of movies you’ve seen before, presented in a way you’ve never seen. At first I was aware of the 3-D lenses themselves, with their layers perceptible like floaters in one’s eyeball, but then I was simply immersed into a swooning depth of field as an alien world was penetrated, and finally the dimensions resolved simply into a more rounded way of viewing things, aside from a few “duck! here it comes!” moments. Blending Cousteau with Costner, eye-popping (un)nature documentary with primitive parable, all-over-the-place parallels to contemporary politics with gameboy blasting away, this film has something for everybody, but ultimately too much and too little to make it the future of film. It’s cowboys and Indians, it’s interstellar space opera, it’s ecological fable and New Age spiritualism, it’s kick-ass battle scenes and cross-species love story. It’s too much, but it’s quite a ride. You’d be well advised to respond, “I see you.” (On the other hand, you wouldn’t be amiss if you left the movie when Sigourney Weaver does, unless you’re a connoisseur of explosions and mayhem.) Another technological breakthrough of this film is in the evolution of the CGI technique of “performance capture,” to the point where an actor can be slipped seamlessly into the skin of an alien being. This is not a development I would expect to be thrilled by, but is in fact pretty thrilling. It doubles down on the meaning of the word "avatar." The story of this film is that the story and the characters are sort of beside the point, but when it comes to production values, it can’t be beat. (2009, Beacon) *8-* (MC-83)

Documentaries on parade

A heterogeneous assortment of documentaries continues to pass in review before my eyes, each of which I can recommend if you’re interested, and one I urge upon you even if you think you’re not.

If, for example, you’re interested in avant-garde favorite Guy Maddin, his quasi-documentary My Winnipeg (2007, dvd, MC-84) is a good place to start. His style is in place – fragmented, fantastical, in blurry black & white – but well suited to rendering a whimsical and wistful portrait of the city he has never been able to escape, where sleepwalking is a way of life and the winter never ends. The film comprises archival footage of Manitoban history and campy dramatic recreations of Maddin’s life with an overpowering mother, along with repeated scenes of “Maddin” sleeping on a train that is supposed to be taking him out of town at last. One suspects that much of the history is made up, fact melding into fantasy, but it seems a true portrait of this on-the-frontier, north-of-the-border city where radicalism meets somnambulism. And the lament for lost landmarks of the filmmaker’s youth, whether downtown department store or hockey arena, is poignant and true. I’m a fan of first-person documentaries -- “Self-Portraits in Cinema” as I called them in a series at the Clark some years ago -- and My Winnipeg offers a novel twist, an excellent companion piece to the recent Of Time and the City by Terence Davies.

One respectfully-received self-portrait that I do not recommend is The Windmill Movie, which noted Harvard documentarian Richard P. Rogers (The Midwife’s Tale, among many others) worked on for 25 years and left unfinished (or barely started) when he died of brain cancer. At the request of his wife, the celebrated photographer Susan Meiselas, protégé Alexander Olch reviewed all the footage and put together this homage. Though I personally tend to be tolerant toward cinematic navel-gazing, this film does not, despite some striking moments, break out of the self-referential into any wider significance.

Of the widest significance is Food, Inc. (2009, dvd, MC-80), which does an excellent job of aggregating the findings of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) into a thorough unmasking of megacorporate agriculture, which has turned farms into horrific factories, based on monocultures sustained by cheap oil, pesticides, government subsidies, and genetic copyright enforcement, disastrous in every facet of how and what they produce. This information is out there, though thoroughly obscured by corporate lobbying and advertising, but is here put together in a concise and striking manner. The film would be entertaining if it weren’t so scary, with indelible images of just what food production has become in this country. More like the lively King Corn than the meditative Our Daily Bread, Robert Kenner’s Food Inc. offers an indictment that has to be seen to be believed, in a latter day reprise of The Jungle of Upton Sinclair. It does not just diagnose the disease, but outlines the cure, through a profile of an enthusiastic and articulate sustainably organic farmer in Virginia. Warning: this film will haunt every trip to the grocery store after you see it.

I confess that I came at The Cove (2009, dvd, MC-82), a well-reviewed plea to save the dolphins, from a slant angle. Somehow I had formed the impression that it was a faux-documentary and I kept waiting for the twist that would reveal that it was all made up. I guess I’d read that it was a documentary that turns into a thriller, and that remains the problem I have with it. Director Louie Psihoyos brings an Ocean’s Eleven caper quality to his team’s effort to film the regular, but resolutely covered-up, slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese fishing village, a by-product of the capture of performers for marine parks around the world. The dolphins that don’t have the star quality to earn big bucks in aquatic entertainment are herded into a secret cove, where they are slaughtered to be sold as whale meat, in a primitive process that turns the entire cove red with blood. If the story hadn’t been told in such a self-congratulatory way, then the tragedy would have emerged in much starker terms, through the character of Richard O’Barry, who was the original trainer for the tv series Flipper and now holds himself responsible for the fate of dolphins worldwide, freeing them from captivity wherever and however he can. So admittedly I approached this film as a hoax (like a Holocaust or global warming denier), but I blame it for failing to convince me otherwise, for seeming more like a stunt than an exposé, though the truest thing in it is the haunted look on the face of Ric O’Barry.

In Ballets Russes (2005, dvd, MC-81), Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller craft a documentary with appeal well beyond its ostensible subject. Apart from the cogently presented dance history of the competing companies that vied for the mantle of Diaghilev from the Thirties through the Fifties, the hook here is the juxtaposition of supremely agile young bodies, shown vividly in archival footage, with their octogenarian incarnations, jumping off from a 2000 reunion of two groups that danced under the Ballet Russe banner. So we see Balanchine’s “Baby Ballerinas” in pre-adolescent exuberance and as white-haired old ladies, and it’s intrinsically fascinating and moving. Two troupes, mostly of émigré Russians, spread the gospel of dance through nonstop tours around the world, seeding local ballet companies across the globe, from Australia to Uruguay. Both the memories and the recorded performances are stirring.

If you think a film about origami would be cute at best, or at worst a deep snooze, then you have the same surprise in store that I did with the PBS “Independent Lens” presentation of Between the Folds (2008, now on dvd as well). Vanessa Gould’s film is intriguing and exhilarating, going way beyond the familiar craft of folded paper to jaw-dropping art and mind-blowing science. It comes at the subject from a variety of angles in profiling ten different people and their respective approaches to paper engineering, design, portraiture, even genetic modeling. I defy you to come away from this film without a newfound appreciation of origami -- it unfolds a whole new world.

Julie & Julia

One more two-word recommendation: Meryl Streep – ’nuff said. It’s not that I have any familiarity with the real Julia Child, but Streep’s embodiment of her is pure joy in itself, deep and funny. Stanley Tucci is the perfect accompaniment, a delicious side dish as Julia’s husband. The critical consensus is correct -- one half of this dual story thoroughly outshines the other. As appealing as Amy Adams is, I found her vaguely annoying in the role of Julie, a would-be writer dying on the vine in Queens until she gets the idea of cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days, and blogging about it the while. Of her husband, it is kinder to say nothing. Nora Ephron negotiates the back and forth reasonably well, but 1949 Paris comes though much more engagingly than 2002 New York. Just so, one delightful portrait of an unlikely marriage -- between a fluting giantess and her small bald husband -- renders the other completely superfluous. (2009, dvd) *7-* (MC-66)

A Christmas Tale [etc.]

This French holiday feast from Arnaud Desplechin is de trop – too much packed in, too many characters and story threads, too many stylistic hijinks, too many references and allusions. As stuffed as it is, this repast requires a second helping, just too dense and yet diffuse to take in at a single sitting. A family gathers for Christmas in the provincial city of Roubaix, where the mother is diagnosed with leukemia and requires a bone marrow transplant from a compatible donor. Is anyone in this family really compatible? The mother (Catherine Deneuve) is regal and remote, the father is troll-like but genial, and the kids are messed up, largely it seems because their elder brother died at the age of six. The elder sister (Anne Consigny) has banished one of the brothers from the family, for reasons that remain hard to fathom, though goodness knows the Mathieu Amalric character would be enough to try anyone’s patience. Melvil Poupard is the younger brother, married to Chiara Mastrioanni (in one of the many inside jokes of the film, her real mother – Deneuve – dismisses her as boring, but I loved to watch her performance and see the genes of her famous parents express themselves in the play of her face). Desplechin muse Emmanuelle Devos turns up as Amalric’s girlfriend. So the movie has real Gallic star power to go with its familiar set-up, plus all the Truffaut, Nietzsche, Shakespeare – whatever – that the auteur can cram in. But unlike Olivier Assayas’ recent and not-dissimilar SummerHours, in which I understood, despite indirection and elision, exactly what each family member was thinking and feeling, here I remained on the outside looking in, however mesmerizing the scene going on behind the window of the family home. (2008, dvd) *7* (MC-84)

Another film that was a tad too French for my taste was Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress (2008, Sundance, MC-78). Yeah sure, l’amour fou, but the crazier the love, the less I get it. In 1830s France, a lush-lipped playboy renounces his longtime mistress, a Spanish fireball played by Asia Argento, for marriage to a virginal aristocrat. But the flamenco hottie refuses to be cast aside, even though their relationship is predicated on hate as much as love, not to mention the torrid sex on a tiger-headed rug. The film certainly looks good and has its moments, but the relationships are too kinky to make sense for the likes of me, more vampire horror than comprehensible romance, however weighted with doom.

I prefer my Frenchiness diluted a bit by British qualities, so I much preferred Cheri (2009, dvd, MC-63), Stephen Frears’ adaptation of two Colette novels. A very handsome production of the Belle Epoque, it tells of a society of aging but highly successful courtesans, as they negotiate their respective retirements. My recommendation of this film comes down to two words: Michelle Pfeiffer. At 50 she is still entrancingly beautiful, but not afraid to show her age in a longtime affair with decades-younger Rupert Friend, as the son of fellow-courtesan Kathy Bates. At barely ninety minutes, this is not a film that tries to do too much, but Michelle herself is quite enough.

A Serious Man

One is obliged to be of two minds about Joel and Ethan Coen. They’re funny when they’re serious, and serious when funny. I tend to like them less when slick and hugely successful (Fargo; No Country for Old Men), and more when off-beat and off-hand (The Hudsucker Proxy; O Brother, Where Art Thou?). This film feels as close to home as anything they’ve ever done. Though not Jewish myself, I grew up in a Jewish community in the suburban Midwest in the Sixties, precisely as portrayed in this film. It's the extreme accuracy of this portrait that has divided critical opinion on this film, with some Jewish writers clearly uncomfortable with how close to the bone it is. I found it hilarious and spot on. Sure, the Coen boys take a little too much glee in piling the tsuris on their main character, a college math professor played by Michael Stuhlbarg, but the sheer exuberance of their storytelling with this modern-day Job supercedes their cynical nihilism. This seriously funny film makes you think while you laugh, and think about why you’re laughing. (2009, Beacon) *7+* ((MC-79. For a while I’ve been linking to the Metacritic page for films I review, but now when there is one commentator who nails my take on a given film in a way that leaves me little to add, I will link to it directly -- in this case, A.O. Scott of the NYTimes.)

This was my first trip to the new Beacon Cinema on North Street in Pittsfield. It is an impressive facility and I wish them well. The viewing experience was among the best I’ve ever had, from comfortable seats to impeccable image and sound. Too bad there seemed to be more loitering staff than patrons the evening I attended. Some legitimate disappointment has been expressed that the Beacon will be less Triplex North than Mall South in its programming, but I am hoping for some improvement in film choices after their shakedown cruise. I’m certain there’s hunger for more serious films in Central Berkshire than their current marketing plan calls for. It’s troubling that in their first month they’ve shown only one film I considered worth going to the theater for (and which I could have seen at Images at the same time), but there’s reason to hope that the year-end critical faves will get to the Berkshires quicker now. And a 3-D venue may make Avatar a must-see.

Il Divo

Oh, those Italians! Paolo Sorrentino bids fair to join the ranks of Scorsese and Coppola, not to mention Fellini and Visconti. This autopsy on recent Italian politics through the character of Giulio Andreotti -- three-time prime minister, with high cabinet posts in four other governments, and currently at 90 still Senator for Life as he was appointed in 1991, despite conviction and then reversal for association with Mafia murders – is both opulent spectacle and sly comedy. Much of the politics and personalities will be highly confusing to the uninitiated, but the film includes a visual clue for American audiences as a key to understanding. There is a brief glimpse of a photo of the real Andreotti sitting next to Nixon in the awkward flesh. Just as an Italian wouldn’t be able to follow every Haldeman or Liddy in some film about Watergate, an American can’t follow all the factions and conflicts in Italian governments’ deadly dance with the Church and Mafia. But the central character, embodied stiffly but evocatively by Toni Servillo, inhabits the halls of power in a convincing manner. Even if one does not comprehend the political maneuvering going on, the scenes set in the Italian parliament, for example, make for a fascinating spectacle, with all the filmmaking stops pulled out for operatic effect. The eye candy carries the day even when the intellect struggles to keep up. (2009, dvd.) *7* (MC-81)

Ballast

This Sundance favorite involved me in its indirect approach, allowing a situation to make itself clear gradually, through inarticulate gestures rather than explanatory dialogue. What emerges from the desolate landscape of a wintry Mississippi Delta is the story of a teenage boy, whose estranged father has committed suicide. The father’s twin brother tries to kill himself as well, but survives, to take a slow and grudging interest in his nephew, even though he blames the mother for the father’s death. In a sidelong way, forgiveness and family feeling begin to emerge from emotional devastation. Understated yet eloquent, Lance Hammer’s film may look to some like nothing happening, but to me was invested with meaning and feeling, true to the marginal lives it depicts. (2008, dvd) *7* (MC-84)

Funny People

Judd Apatow should have a little less fun making movies, and give us a little more by serving up less. This film would have been better shorter -- less diffuse, less all things to all people (and therefore little to any). That said, there’s a lot of good stuff in the movie. Adam Sandler has proved himself to be an intriguingly off-putting actor, and Seth Rogen has not worn out his welcome yet. The world of stand-up comedy is intimately familiar to all involved, so there is some personal truth in the playing out of the movie, though muffled some by shtick and sentiment, however ambiguous. Sandler is -- quite a stretch -- a ridiculously successful movie comedian, who gets a death sentence from his doctor, and hires fledgling stand-up Rogen to be his flunky and fake friend. About when the story should be wrapping up, it takes a twist and goes on and on. Not that it’s all bad – we’re happy to see Mrs. Apatow (Leslie Mann) and their two kids – but the opportunity for focus and resolution is past. Maybe Judd is nostalgic for the run-on pleasures of a series -- such as the immortal Freaks and Geeks -- where he can let all his friends strut their stuff. This baby has an amusing face, and a good heart despite a potty mouth, but needs to lose a few pounds before it’s really attractive. (2009, dvd.) *6+ * (MC-60)

Random viewing

As it approaches its fifth anniversary, this blog will be undergoing a number of changes. First off is to leave behind its original impetus. With the turn of the millennium, I began a filmlog to help keep track of all the movies I was watching, with a number grade to remind me how much I liked each, and a one-line summary to jog my memory. Gradually the summations became longer, almost mini-reviews, and when I began to post them online at the start of 2005, became more like a searchable film guide, geared toward recommendations for the reader’s Netflix queue, straight from my own.

What I will be abandoning is a complete record of my viewing. Some films require only a cursory notation as watched in passing. Films of particular current or retrospective interest will continue to get their 200 words or so, sometimes accompanied by short subjects -- documentary, animation, what-have-you. Films viewed in pursuit of a theme will be addressed together in longer essays. As for the rest, they will be lumped in a potpourri such as this.

On the domestic side, what assortment could be more random than Cash McCall (1959 – somehow lodged in my 12-year-old mind, led to revisit by relation to Executive Suite and Mad Men, features charming rascal James Garner as a corporate raider who slows down enough to woo Natalie Wood (yum!), daughter of a takeover target -- not quite as humorous or pointed as I remembered), Diner (1982 – heavily copied and no longer the novelty it seemed at the time, but not a classic in retrospect, this tale of a group of superannuated juveniles in Barry Levinson’s Baltimore introduced a lot of now familiar performers, and I watched largely to compare Mickey Rourke to his latest incarnation as The Wrestler), and Tropic Thunder (2008 – Ben Stiller’s funny-enough parody of making an Apocalypse Now-like movie is a self-referential comedy in the tradition of Airplane! and all its spawn, notable for the hilarious fake trailers at the beginning, lots of celebrity cameos, and Robert Downey in blackface).

As for imports, I would single out The Return (2003, MC-82), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s subdued but intense psychological thriller, about the mysterious return of the father of two teenage boys, who were happy living with their mother, but now have to adjust to an incomprehensible authority figure they hadn’t seen in ten years. With no explanation, the father takes the boys on a fishing trip to the ends of the earth, a remote spot near the Arctic Circle. Tensions build as the elder boy is only too glad to have a dad, but the younger distrusts this demanding stranger. It all plays out with the economy of a fable, to the accompaniment of breathtaking widescreen landscapes.

I watched Nenette & Boni (1996) to fill in Claire Denis’s filmography, but you don’t have to – for a taste of this intriguingly elusive director, go straight to Beau Travail (1998) or her newly-released 35 Shots of Rum, which I notice has a Metacritic rating of 96, just about the highest ever.

As I was researching Vittorio De Sica’s career for my film club introduction, I noticed that even though Shoeshine is still unavailable on DVD, The Criterion Collection has issued an earlier film of his that I had never seen. The Children Are Watching Us (1943) is anything but neorealist, a child’s eye view of a wandering mother somewhere between Anna Karenina and a desperate housewife. The story transpires in an upper middle class milieu that gives no hint that a war is going on, but offers a well-done soap opera made something more by the brilliant “acting” of the five-year-old boy.

Speaking of the film club, I found Il Posto to be up to my exalted memory of it, The Flowers of Saint Francis to be slight but indicative of Rossellini’s genius, Umberto D to be impressive but not transcendent, La Terra Trema to be interesting but an hour too long, and La Strada to be less sentimental and more coherent than I remembered. In my other series, The White Sheik confirmed my view of Fellini’s first as one of his best, and one of the most deeply delightful comedies ever. What a comedown to the next film in the series -- I had never seen the whole of La Dolce Vita, and now I know why. Same for Fellini's Roma -- hard to see how an accomplished director can fall so far from grace.

Still plugging

I have two more new documentaries to cite. From “Independent Lens” on PBS, I tuned in tentatively to No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos (2008), and found myself more and more engaged. I certainly knew Kovacs and Zsigmond as names to conjure with, cinematographers for many of the most memorable American films from the Sixties on, but nothing more. In this film, they emerge from behind the camera as interesting characters in their own right. Though it’s impossible to keep track of who did what, if you remember the look of any movie from Easy Rider on, chances are it was shot by one of them, so this documentary works as a clips reel if nothing else. But there was a brotherhood between these two film students who escaped Hungary together in 1956, smuggling out amazing on-the-scene footage of the Uprising stomped out by the heavy foot of Russian tanks. Together they made their way to Hollywood and wormed their way into filmmaking, by working fast, cheap, and beautiful, virtually sharing a 50-year career. Based on their blithe spirits, this documentary has some of the expected platitudinous Hollywood back-patting, but something more comes through.

Another film I gave a chance and found myself watching through with a grudging fascination was Audience of One (2007) on the Sundance Channel (also on Netflix). In the tradition of films about filmmaking gone bad, Mark Jacobs has found himself a doozy of a subject in a Pentecostal preacher in whom God (that “Audience of One”) has inspired Cecil B. Demille dreams. He embarks on what he, aflame with faith, believes will be the biggest movie ever, Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments. Bringing his own special brand of craziness to the crazy business of filmmaking, he displays a flabbergasting confidence, as the project just keeps getting bigger, the more his complete incompetence is being revealed. Maybe it’s just me, but I came to see him as indicative of Bush in Iraq. Once you replace fact with faith, you believe you can do anything you want. It’s hilarious until it’s chilling. The beauty of this documentary is that the preacher could be happy with it as an honest portrait, not regret the access he gave the documentarists, while the audience is free to take it as total satire and a cautionary tale on many levels.

Docs are still rockin'

I’m still pushing documentaries and have some more to recommend, first off several from PBS, which are available on Netflix, not just on DVD but as a free download for subscribers, and also on PBS.org. Botany of Desire recapitulates Michael Pollan’s great book of the same name, in a coherent and visually impressive manner, devoting a half-hour each to the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato, as each plant appeals to human desires – for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control – to insure its co-evolutionary survival. Pollan’s case for diversity is judicious and entertaining, filled with “gee, I didn’t know that” facts and striking images.

I caught up with two rebroadcasts from series I just recommended, each of which seemed particularly relevant – and revelatory -- to the news of the day. An “American Experience” segment on the Civilian Conservation Corps revisited one of FDR’s great stimulus plans for recovery from the Depression, from back in the day when government was still seen as part of the solution and not the problem, a rather amazing mobilization of collective will, much more extensive than I imagined, truly the “moral equivalent of war,” until it was superceded by war itself.

Then “Frontline” repeated its survey, Sick Around the World, which gives a global survey of what works and what doesn’t in providing universal healthcare at lower cost and with better results than the American non-system achieves. This sort of comparative analysis is precisely what is missing in the current debate over healthcare reform, as Congress reinvents the wheel by committee in the dark, relying on knee-jerk positions rather than facts. So see how they do it in Britain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland, and conceive what is possible when healthcare is treated as a right, and not a privilege reserved to those who can afford it.

HBO is still in the game as well. By the People:The Election of Barack Obama offers behind-the-scenes access as a freshman senator embarks on an improbable journey to the White House. It’s a story that I for one was happy to relive, from the perspective of the people behind the campaign, from the candidate down to passionately committed field workers. You know whether you’d be happy to share that thrill once again.

But I have an out-of-the-blue but strong recommendation for Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. I figured Spike Jonze’s documentary would just be a promo for his current adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, but it turned out to be an extremely well-done and intimate portrait of a prickly but fascinating character, a picture book artist who connected to children not because he knew them, but because of his connection to his own inner child, with all its passions and fears.

Another good HBO doc, which I can recommend only if you have the stomach for it, is Terror in Mumbai. Narrated by Fareed Zacharia, the film has the expected combination of news footage and eyewitness accounts by survivors, but is made riveting by the actual voices of the terrorist kids and their controllers in Pakistan through intercepted cellphone transmissions, plus video of the hospital-bed confession of the one surviving terrorist, and surveillance footage of the juvenile jihadists in deadly action. Chilling and premonitory.

Scrambled call letters

AMC has gone from a station I never looked at to the red-hot center of my television viewing pleasure. Its Sunday night has replaced HBO’s as the must-see line-up. Mad Men (MC-86) did not disappointed in its third season, nor did Breaking Bad (MC-85)in its second (with which I caught up in rerun). Both finished their seasons with a bang, and with a promise of more in 2010. If you haven’t made your way into either of these series, I strongly advise you to start at the beginning with the first season on DVD. As is the way with the televised megamovies that have become a preeminent form of popular culture, it doesn’t matter so much what they are about, as the way they have leisure to make characters and settings and communities engaging in a global and ongoing way. Were you really so interested in the business of the street corner crack trade, or of a family funeral home, going in? No, depth of engagement is the road into any of the worlds created by these high-quality series.

Mad Men has a lot going for it in the glamour of its setting and era, but all the design in the world wouldn’t attract a passionate audience without a full cast of rounded characters to live with and get to know. Highbrows can enjoy the pleasures of soap opera without guilt. On the other hand, a guilty complicity is at the heart of Breaking Bad’s appeal. Walter White is a guy just like us, a high school chemistry teacher with a perfectly ordinary middle American home and family -- in the marvelous Bryan Cranston literally a sitcom dad -- whose life is derailed by a diagnosis of cancer into unimagined depths of depravity as he schemes to turn all his technical knowledge into fast money by cooking up the best crystal meth in the world. We feel with him every step of the way, as he descends the ladder of despicability. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we gasp in horror, sometimes both at the same time. BB’s second season certainly ended with a bang, and has us on the hook for another, but MM’s finale was the best I could imagine, not only rounding off this season but setting up the next in a way that has us panting with anticipation. How good was it? It had me comparing it to one of my top ten films of all time: The Seven Samurai.

Meanwhile, from the BBC I’ve been watching Cranford, a series that was previewed on the Little Dorrit dvds, and while it does not have the scope of the Dickens, this adaptation of several works by Elizabeth Gaskell does have an appealing cast (led by Judy Dench) and a savory Jane-Austen-ish flavor. It follows one year, from 1842 to 1843, in the life of a small village, a spinster gynocracy led by Eileen Atkins, as elder sister of Dame Judy and arbiter of all matters and manners in the neighborhood. Imelda Staunton is a good-hearted but inveterate busybody next door. A handsome young doctor comes to town and sets hearts aflutter; an estate manager crosses the lady of the manor by trying to educate and advance a poor but promising local lad; and the train threatens to reach Cranford and change its hidden-away charm forever. Of these threads and more the five-hour series is woven, increasing in complexity and significance as it goes. I’m happy to see a second series is due to be broadcast on PBS early next year.

Britain’s ITV gets in the game with Lost in Austen, which takes the premise of a modern London girl, obsessed with Pride and Prejudice, who swaps places with Elizabeth Bennett. Some amusing situations are spun out of the premise, but it does go on and on. I didn’t check the length when I popped in the Netflix-recommended DVD, and thought I was watching a film (which apparently is now in pre-production). When I started to ask myself when this thing was going to end, I checked the envelope and saw it was a series totaling almost three hours. I watched to the end with increasing disenchantment, as it strung out to a series of audience-catering, self-canceling conclusions. But the movie might be worth looking at when it comes out, once they’ve trimmed the story to reasonable feature length.

With the next seasons of the AMC duo now breathlessly awaited, the one show I look forward to every week is Friday Night Lights (MC-81), whose fourth season I am lucky to be able to preview as a DirecTV subscriber, months before it will debut on NBC. I won’t gloat by telling you how good it remains, but will simply note that in a neat passing of the baton between favorite shows, one of the corner hoppers from The Wire turns up as the replacement for ace running back Smash Williams in the new season of FNL.

Film Club update

The final two films in the first series of screenings for the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark will be:

Friday, 11/6, 4:00 pm: La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Luchino Visconti’s neorealist examination of life in a Sicilian fishing village is explicitly Marxist but also lyrical, long and slow but thoroughly involving.

Friday, 11/20, 4:00 pm: La Strada. (1954, 104 min.) Federico Fellini emerges from his neorealist roots into his own personal style of sentimental fantasy, on “the road” with a waif played by his wife Giulietta Massina, who is indentured to itinerant strongman Anthony Quinn..

Thereafter, the Film Club will break for the holidays and return in February with a new series of screenings, under the heading of “What in the World is Going On?” Check back to this website for updated information.

I happened to notice this week that coincidentally Lincoln Center is just now offering a much more extensive series on Italian neorealism, and their program notes offer a concise summary of the points I've been making over the past weeks. For more detailed info, check out their program guide.

Docs around the clock

One reason I’ve been reviewing fewer fiction films lately is that I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries, and here I’m going to sort through a range of recommendations. Titles in bold are available on DVD from Netflix (or soon will be) and recommended by me. The others are worth looking for if you have a particular interest -- they may be found on the linked-to network schedules, or possibly On Demand..

First off is the recent documentary outing by feature director James Toback: Tyson (2009, MC-83). Like you, probably, I did not think I was all that interested in Mike Tyson, but I found this film almost hypnotizing in its formally inventive approach to film portraiture. Much of the film is Tyson himself speaking to the camera, in that incongruously high-pitched lisp, as if in self-reflection before an unseen therapist, but broken up into overlapping pictures and sound, which suggest the multiple facets of a divided self. He seems utterly believable in all his contradictions. There is enough footage recapitulating his career to establish that he might have been one of most powerful, if not the greatest, boxers of all time, and also to delineate his public disgrace in a rape conviction and prison term, plus the ignominious career-ending bout in which he bit the ear of his opponent. Tyson never goes quite so far as to plead, “I am not the animal you think I am,” but the film makes that case eloquently, and perhaps convincingly.

There are several stations worth monitoring for outstanding documentaries. Sundance Channel features Monday as Doc Day. I have been engrossed recently in the five-part (and perhaps continuing) series, Brick City, which portrays the city of Newark in much the same way that The Wire does Baltimore, though with more uplift and less crushing despair. In one of its aspects, this series from Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin picks up where the excellent documentary Street Fight leaves off, with the story of mayor Cory Booker, the media-savvy Obama avatar who is bringing hope to a city that is a byword for bleakness. Other threads include the story of a police commissioner brought in to lower the murder rate, and a gang girl gone good who is developing a mentoring program for other gang girls. If 90% of success is showing up, then the filmmakers are pretty much there, finding themselves in the middle of one amazing scene after another. One of the joys of documentary is deep-felt access into other people's lives, and this series has that in ... um, I want to say spades, but there are some honkies too.

“Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions” aside, HBO demonstrates a real commitment to quality documentaries, frequently featured on Mondays as well. From this link, you can get more information on these films, listed in order of the urgency of my recommendation. In Boy Interrupted, a filmmaking couple try to come to terms with the suicide of their teenage son, in a wrenching but not exploitive manner that is edifying to the viewer as well as cathartic for them. The Yes Men Save the World with media stunts like going on tv masquerading as a corporate spokesman to apologize and offer reparation for the health disaster of Bhopal -- they are inventive and funny and jaw-droppingly revealing of the ethos of big business. The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant watches the last vehicle come off a massive assembly line in Ohio, and reveals the mixed feelings of the laid-off workers who have devoted most of their lives to the disappearing workplace. Prom Night in Mississippi is a bit of a stunt but turns out to be revealing, as Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the first integrated prom in his small hometown, which catalyzes debate over the lingering legacy of racism but also suggests the hope of a new generation free of the hatreds of the past. The Nine Lives of Marion Barry is like Tyson in going some way toward rehabilitating a black man who has become notorious for bad behavior. The Recruiter is just as much about the recruited, as we follow a variety of Texas youth into the military and through basic training, in a film that could be taken as a prequel to Stop-Loss. (Not a documentary but a spinoff from a great one, HBO's Grey Gardens, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the Bouvier daughter and mother, was not as superfluous as I imagined -- while some scenes were duplicated from the Maysles brothers' classic, the backstory is filled in and the actresses illuminate their characters -- and deserved the slew of Emmy nominations it picked up.)

PBS has long been a mainstay for documentaries, and they are a number of series I check regularly, foremost among them Independent Lens. Among the recent highlights are Herb & Dorothy, an absolutely delightful and fascinating look at the Vogels, a postal worker and librarian, who amassed an astounding collection of art from the Sixties on in their tiny Manhattan apartment, before three moving vans carted it away to the National Gallery -- I will look for the first opportunity to show this at the Clark. Butte, America mines fascinating archival footage and retrospective interviews to tell of the highly emblematic rise and fall of the "richest hill on earth," whose deposits of copper made the city boom, but whose mining companies went bust and left a legacy of environmental devastation.

Frontline is frequently worth checking out for extended treatment of important issues of the day, and Wide Angle is the same with an international perspective. Particularly notable from the latter is Time for School 3, which like the 7 Up series tracks a diverse group of children through time, ranging from an Afghan girl to a Brazilian boy, from a Romanian girl to a Kenyan boy. Initiated when an international accord promised a free education to every child in the world by 2015, this very well-done and affecting series periodically checks in on how that promise is being met or not in a variety of countries.

Two other venerable PBS series worth tuning into are American Experience and American Masters. Two episodes I've enjoyed lately are an old one of the former, A Midwife’s Tale, which uses an old diary and effectively minimal historical reenactments to offer a window on everyday life in colonial New England, and a recent broadcast on the latter, Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, which I didn't expect to watch, but caught while channelsurfing and remained caught by through its length -- I tend to think of Baez as a pretty voice covering other people's songs, but this film makes a case for her as a social activist who used singing as her most effective tool.

I've recently watched two other documentary dvds from Netflix that I commend to your attention. Kestrel’s Eye is a delight for birdbrains, offering a genuine bird's eye view of the lives of a family of hawks living in a cranny of an old Swedish church -- a spare but astonishing nature film, without narration or music, but with incredible camera angles and uncanny intimacy with the subject.

Many years ago I saw a memorable short film called Organism, a film about New York City which uses time-lapse photography to portray the city as a huge living organism. When I started to think about doing a film series of "city symphonies" at the Clark, I went looking for it and found it on a dvd called The Films of Hilary Harris -- it was every bit as good as I remembered, and as a bonus included 9 Variations, which is as good a dance documentary as I have ever seen, utterly simple but visually stunning and extremely sensual.

There's a world of great documentaries out there, and if you're not looking for them, you're missing a great part of the art of film.

Film Club update

The film at the Clark this Friday (10/23) at 4:00 pm is Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. (1952, 89 min.) Again They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? aggregates useful background on the director, and the Criterion Collection includes two essays on the film with its dvd (here and here). I find that the Turner Classic Movies site frequently has good background in its reviews (here).

Remember that the film club will be deciding collectively which Visconti film to watch next. (Scroll down to be reminded of the choices.) And we will be open to suggestions on what to view after that, though Fellini's La Strada might be the default choice.

Bright Star

I don’t know when I’ve seen a film with a more authentic period feel than Jane Campion’s take on the Romantic entanglement of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. To me everything seems just so, not just dress and décor, but the attitudes and emotions of 1820 England. Every garment looks handsewn, each sparse interior is dimly lit by fire or candlelight or daylight slanting through a window. And a tragic unconsummated romance is believably played out in glances and delicate touches of fingertips and lips, with poetry spoken as if it were at once the language of everyday life and transcendent love. The cast is uniformly up to the task, from Kerry Fox as the widowed Mrs. Brawne, Fanny’s mother and Keats’s landlady, to Paul Schneider as his roommate and fellow poet, to Ben Whishaw as the waiflike yet willful Keats, broken by disease and poverty and critical response to his work, yet exultant in his command of Romantic feeling, for nature and the lovely, lively girl next door. That girl is Abbie Cornish, Australia’s latest gift to Anglophone film (Nicole & Cate et al. – make room!). She is the Bright Star of Campion’s film as well as Keats’ poem, a strong-willed seamstress with a thirst for fashion and passion, who ignores the liabilities of the match and attaches herself to the dying poet in spite of all the world. This chaste film burns hot with feeling. (2009, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-81.)

I happened to see Ms. Cornish in another film just two nights later. In Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, she also convinces as a Texas good old girl, fiancé to one soldier returning from Iraq (Channing Tatum) and longtime friend of his buddy (Ryan Phillippe). Coming almost ten years after Pierce’s breakthrough with Boys Don’t Cry, this film was greeted as a letdown, and flopped like every other film about Iraq. Though its approach to the subject may seem formulaic and unfocused, Stop-Loss deploys a lot of energy in laying out the familiar story of boys coming home from war, with pieces of themselves left behind, so nothing hangs together anymore. The quicksilver scenes from Iraq are vivid, and as comprehensible as the reality of the situation allows. The community back home in Texas, well-cast in every particular, is sketched in as memorably as that of Friday Night Lights, though obviously without the sustained amplitude of the latter (back for a 4th season later this month!). And the outrage at the unfair treatment of returning servicemen is well taken and important, ought to be seen and absorbed. But the film has an unresolved quality that is more frustrating than open-ended, so my recommendation is equivocal. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-61.)

Little Dorrit times two

In the Little Dorrit sweepstakes, the 8-hour 2008 BBC production wins hands down over the 6-hour 1986 film by Christine Edzard. In fact, the former renders the latter dispensible, despite admirable performances from Derek Jacobi and Alec Guinness. So let’s focus on the latest from accomplished screen adapter Andrew Davies, who scored triumphs with Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House for the BBC. Besides their long tradition of superior acting, the BBC now provides impeccable production quality, whether the location is London or Venice, a debtors’ prison or an Italian villa. So they have the luxury of television series duration with no sacrifice of film’s visual splendor. And with Dickens they are virtually guaranteed topicality, a reliable contemporary relevance, as well as that Victorian period feel. There’s one character in Little Dorrit who might as well have been called Bernie Madoff. And so many other perennial species of human fauna and flora! And so well portrayed by this cast! In the most striking contrast with the Edzard film, here Amy Dorrit is perfectly embodied in newcomer Claire Foy, who is able to go from waiflike to radiantly beautiful, as the character must do. Highest honors must go to Tom Courtenay as Mr. Dorrit, outdoing Alec Guinness and absolutely convincing through all the character’s changes, from longtime prisoner for debt to haughty "aristo." Matthew Macfadyen is also excellent as Arthur Clennam, though younger and more eligible than the life-weary Jacobi, removing the pediphiliac impediment of the earlier film (and probably Dickens’ original). In every role the tv series effaces the film, but the most striking support comes from Eddie Marsan (the driving instructor in Happy-Go-Lucky -- “En Ra Ha!”) as Pancks, and Andy Serkis, acting more evil than Golem himself, as a French murderer who doesn’t even appear in the film, but here becomes the hinge of the story. Which is a problem, because when he reveals the secrets at the heart of the story, the reveal is impossible to follow, even when you rewind and watch it again. But that is the only flaw in a literary adaptation that I cannot recommend highly enough. (MC-82)

Film club update

The next film for the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark will be Roberto Rossellini’s Flowers of Saint Francis (1950, 83 minutes, title more literally translated as Francis, Jester of God) on October 9th at 4:00 pm.

Someone requested links to material to read in advance of (or after) the screening and discussion. So here are a couple that I’ll be using myself. One of the best aggregators of information on directors is the website, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where you can find links to high-quality online articles about a given director. The essay accompanying the Criterion Collection edition of Flowers of Saint Francis is available here.

To facilitate interaction among members of the film club, I am turning on the comments feature of this website (splog made me turn it off), and club members can also email me directly at: ssatullo@clarkart.edu -- with questions, suggestions, feedback, and to vote on club polls.

The first decision for the club to make collectively is which Luchino Visconti film to watch on November 6th. I will announce the choices at the next meeting and the decision will be made at the October 23rd screening of Vittoria De Sica’s Umberto D. The Visconti choice is among (in my own order of preference):

A) La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Classic neorealism with a Marxist bent, set in Sicilian fishing village.

B) Ossessione. (1942, 139 min.) Ur-text of neorealism, uncredited adaptation of James Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice.

C) Rocco and His Brothers. (1960, 180 min.) Transition from neorealism to Visconti’s later operatic style. A Sicilian family adapts to life in Milan, with Alain Delon and other well-known actors.

Let me know what you think. Let us think about film together.

"Projections of Rome" at the Clark

A free film series on Saturdays at 2:00 pm in the Clark Auditorium

The “Projections of Rome” film series extends the Clark’s fall focus on representations of Rome from still photography to motion pictures. The Eternal City is a mirror onto which we tend to project ourselves, and especially so in the movies. We look first at two takes on Ancient Rome -- Shakespearian and “sword & sandal” -- then at two romantic fantasies of Rome in the Fifties, and finally two excursions by the cinematic bard of Rome, Federico Fellini.

October 17: Julius Caesar. (1953, 122 min.) Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and James Mason lead an all-star cast in Joseph Mankiewicz’s bracing and intelligent adaptation of the classic Shakespeare play.

October 24: The Fall of the Roman Empire. (1964, 187 min.) Anthony Mann’s sweeping widescreen epic marshals a notable cast led by Alec Guinness and Sophia Loren, with a feel for historical accuracy in the dynastic conflict around Marcus Aurelius, a story later retold in Gladiator.

November 7: Roman Holiday. (1953, 118 min.) Audrey Hepburn bursts to stardom as the princess who goes AWOL in Rome, with American reporter Gregory Peck showing her around and photographer Eddie Alpert dogging their heels, under the direction of William Wyler.

November 14: Three Coins in the Fountain. (1954, 102 min.) The star here is the Oscar-winning CinemaScope photography on location in Rome -- a silly Fifties romance about three American secretaries finding the continental men of their dreams is redeemed by the scenery and a fine cast.

November 21: The White Sheik. (1951, 88 min., in Italian with subtitles.) Fellini’s first film, one of his best, follows a newly-wed couple from the provinces as they make a pilgrimage to Rome, the groom eager to visit the Pope while the bride only wants to see the third-rate Valentino of the title, played by Alberto Sordi.

November 28: La Dolce Vita. (1960, 174 min., in Italian with subtitles.) Fellini moves from outsiders to the in-crowd in this tour of the “sweet life” of show-biz Rome, in what became an international sensation, with journalist Marcello Mastrioanni covering the decadent scene as our guide to these infernal circles.