Infamous

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

The Last King of Scotland

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

L'Enfant (The Child)

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

The Impressionists

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

Marie Antoinette

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

The Ground Truth

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

None But the Lonely Heart

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

Pan's Labyrinth

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

Illusions on film

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

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

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

Ten

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

The Devil & Daniel Johnston

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

Volver

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

Children of Men (& others)

Alfonso Cuaron is among the best of younger directors in the world, and his latest is a visually intense dystopian speculation that imagines a dismal future emerging from the events of today. The projections from contemporary issues of immigration and insurgency are frightfully convincing. The fallen world of Britain twenty years on, last bastion in a world wracked by terror and disease, is densely imagined and brilliantly sketched in the first half of the film, before the blockbuster machinations kick in. The five credited screenwriters are a dead giveaway, and this on top of the original novel by P.D. James; they each seem to contribute a standard Hollywood trope with a twist -- chase, crash, assault, fem-in-jeop, nativity! -- so that the story falls apart if you think about it for a moment. But of course you don’t have a moment to think, as the plot goes hurtling on. Cuaron certainly deserves honors for his editing, and credit for two of most impactful explosions seen on film since Saving Private Ryan -- this is not a guy who blows things up just for the fun of it. But top honors have to go to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki -- paired with his uncanny work in The New World, you must admire his ability to capture the look and feel of any period from 1607 to 2027. The actors are no slouches either -- it may be Clive Owen’s best role since Croupier, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine make the most of limited screen time, and newcomer Claire-Hope Ashitey is effective as the ’fugee “Virgin” Kee, carrying the first child in a world where all humanity has been infertile for nearly two decades. This is a film that aspires to be something more than entertainment, but entertainment imperatives undermine it in the end. (2006, Triplex, n.) *8-* (MC-84.)

No entertainment imperatives intrude on Carl Dreyer. I’ve been viewing or reviewing the work of the famously severe Danish master (if for no other reason than the Critierion Collection set of DVDs sitting on library shelves as I browsed), so you can look forward to a career summary in this space soon. So far, I’ve watched Ordet and Day of Wrath, next up are Vampyr and Gertrude, and of course The Passion of Joan of Arc is always worth another look. Will say more later.

I won’t say more than the titles of the films I’ve been watching to to fill the final slot in my “Documenting Artists: Portraits in Film” series coming up at the Clark in June. I will simply list them in my order of preference, from inspiring to routine. The first title made the cut and I will write it up in upcoming program notes; the rest were all interesting in so far as you are interested in the artist going in (and all are available from Netflix), but only the Frida Kahlo makes a moving movie in its own right:

The Life & Times of Frida Kahlo.
Homage to Chagall.
Mary Cassatt: A Brush with Independence.
Cezanne: Three Colors.
Robert Rauschenberg: Inventive Genius.
Man Ray: Prophet of the Avant-Garde.
Jasper Johns: Ideas in Paint.

Breaker Morant

I didn’t have contemporary relevance in mind when I decided to re-view this classic of military injustice, but it was hard to escape while watching. It may be that the Boer War was the first modern insurgency against the last modern empire. With the Bush-men so bent on resuming the British imperial role in the Middle East, there are lessons to be learned in this film. But apart from that, the film is as well made as I had remembered. It’s an early high point in Bruce Beresford’s up-down-&sideways directorial career, from peaks like Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy, and Black Robe, to troughs like Bride of the Wind, with whole ranges unscaled by me. Edward Woodward was excellent in the title role, indelibly so since I never saw him in anything else. The courtroom drama of the original play is successfully opened out by flashbacks to the incidents of testimony. The true story is apparently legendary among put-upon Aussies as emblematic of British imperial hubris, with themselves as pawns and scapegoats in Big Power machinations. (1979, dvd, r.) *8*

In Dutch

I’ve been engaged in the hard labor of digging some gems out of the Low Country landfill of films from Holland, to show at the Clark as part of this summer’s “NL: A Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires.” I’m not going to write about most of them, since you don’t want to see them, trust me. Most recently, I watched back-to-back double features. Alex van Warmerdam’s The Dress (1996) was a watchable progression through the unfortunate events that befall a number of women who own a particular dress in succession, but I’m not sure whether the Dutch title De Jurk refers to that piece of clothing or the writer-director-star of the film. Further down the road of male boorishness was Siberia (1998), which had me pressing the fast forward button. More of same on display, of course, in Teetje Kippel (1975), which nonetheless slipped into the Paul Verhoeven slot in my film series -- more on that later. And finally, the diet was varied with a neat survey of female boorishness in Zus & Zo (2002), about three weirdish sisters who conspire to keep their gay brother from inheriting the family vacation hotel in Portugal, by marrying a woman according to the conditions of the father’s will. Somehow this last was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film, as much a mockery of the Academy as the just-released nominations of this year, or any other. (BTW, this obsession with the Academy Awards horse race has got to stop -- it’s a marketing tool that has been flogged to death, and has become utterly stultifying to film discourse.)

Stolen

This is a documentary that ought to have been better than it is, with a fascinating subject, an impressive array of interesting characters and interested commentators, and the participation of Albert Maysles, godfather of direct cinema. But despite an Audience Award at Sundance, Rebecca Dreyfus’s documentary doesn’t add up to much of anything. It recounts the unsolved mystery of the 1990 robbery of 13 paintings (including 5 Degas, 2 Rembrandt, and one of the 35 Vermeer paintings extant) from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Using archival footage and the voices of Blythe Danner and Campbell Scott, it narrates the collecting efforts of Isabella and her agent, Bernard Berenson. It allows the authors of three novels about Vermeer to wax emotional about the painter’s mystery and magic, and the rare value of the stolen painting, and various hangers-on to enthuse about Mrs. Jack and her museum. It follows the efforts of an aged art detective, in the final throes of skin cancer, to solve the last and biggest case of his career, with cooperation from Scotland Yard and not so much from the FBI and Boston law enforcement, along with the dubious testimony of various con men and admitted art thieves, who point to the presumed involvement of Whitey Bulger and the IRA in the heist. There’s a lot going on here, but it comes to no point of resolution and involves way too much visual filler in its relatively brief running time. The film is available on a Netflix-produced DVD and will soon be shown on PBS’s “Independent Lens,” but will not appeal to those who know too much or too little about the subject. (2006, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-61.)

Double Dutch

I’m still trying to scrounge up a half-dozen good films from Holland to show in conjunction with “NL,” a Berkshire-wide celebration of Dutch culture this summer. I had already ruled out For a Lost Soldier (1992) for its poor DVD transfer, even before the romantic scene where a Canadian soldier buggers a 12-year-old Dutch boy, after removing his wooden shoes and wet clothes. Set primarily at the end of WWII, this is essentially a gay “Summer of ’45,” with the Allied forces bringing sexual as well as military liberation. The story is framed by the boy, grown up to be an English-speaking choreographer, rehearsing teenaged boys and girls in a dance presumably titled like the movie, in remembrance of his initiation into the mysteries of love in the brief interval before the soldier was redeployed, never to be seen again. The film does convey a sense of place and character, but is not particularly well-made and its calm acceptance of pedophilia would be too politically incorrect to show at the Clark. The boy is evacuated from Amsterdam to a seaside fishing family, where a dozen occupying soldiers taking over a German watchpost on the water is the only sign of war, and you do get a sense of why the Netherlands is one of the “low countries,” with the land as flat as the sea.

Simon (2004) on the other hand, while provocatively permissive in its attitudes toward sex, drugs, gay marriage, and euthanasia, is a genuine find and something I would be pleased to show to an unsuspecting audience. It starts as a raucous comedy about the meet-cute-in-a-traffic-accident friendship between a gay dental student and the title character, a drug-dealing, sex-obsessed wild man, and sometime movie-extra in Thailand. They have an abrupt falling out, but meet again 14 years later, again traffic-accidentally. Simon is the successful owner of a chain of Amsterdam coffee shops, living large with his nearly-grown half-Thai daughter and son, and a retinue of old friends and girlfriends. But there is one problem -- he is dying of cancer. The rest of the film is a moving yet still humorous requiem, with hints of Longtime Companion and The Sea Inside (good company indeed!) in its tragicomic acceptance of mortality. Eddy Terstall is fast and funny in his writing and direction, effective and affecting. Independent of its telling take on the Dutch approach to life and death, Simon is a film that I would recommend to the curious, even if I’m a little reluctant to give it an outright rating of *7*.

Deliver Us From Evil

So the Catholic hierarchy is in deep denial about sex in all its aspects, closes ranks against outsiders as much as the Mafia, and maintains corporate lies like a spiritual Enron? Well, yeah. Did you ever doubt it? So Amy Berg’s documentary is hardly breaking news, after endless pedophile and sexual abuse scandals among the priesthood over the last decade or more. And except for a few deeply incisive moments, the film does not tell anything one didn’t know about perpetrators and victims. Nonetheless the subject is important and the film is well-made, even if the situations are a bit manufactured and the case closed before the film begins to roll. The reality is chilling, and needs to be aired, but the film preaches to the converted rather than revealing hidden depths in the subject. There’s no psychological mystery to be unraveled, as in Capturing the Friedmans, from the other side of a similar issue. (2006, Images, n.) *7* (MC-86.)

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America.

This film has an interesting history: made by Kevin Willmott, a professor of film at Kansas U., it debuted at Sundance in 2004 but took a while to achieve distribution, through the offices of Spike Lee, to whose Bamboozled it bears more than a passing resemblance. C.S.A. has been catergorized both as a comedy and as a documentary, so the designation of mockumentary seems made to order. It’s a dog’s breakfast of differing elements -- overall, a Ken Burns-like mix of archival visuals and talking heads, ostensibly made for British television to tell the history of America, from the surrender of Grant to Lee to the present day, interlaced with commercials for Darky Toothpaste and Niggerhair Cigarettes and the Coon Chicken Inn, which a kicker at the end reveals as real products in the pre-Civil Rights era. I don’t suppose there was ever a Slave Shopping Network, however. The history jumps off from the premise that Judah Benjamin’s envoy worked, so England and France came in on the side of the South, which proceeded to win at Gettysburg, leading to a rout of Union forces and the taking of Washington. What follows takes some huge speculative leaps, but still circles back to fact. The South pillages the North, Blacks and abolitionists flee to Canada and develop an alternate culture, while the CSA pursues empire into South America. America is neutral against the Aryan Hitler, but attacks the colored Japs. Kennedy is elected as a reformist president but is still shot in Dallas. The ambition of Willmott’s film certainly exceeds his means; some of the acting is at summer stock level, and while the commercials are acceptably cheesy, the famous film parodies do not achieve the style of the originals. In its scattershot way, however, the film does hit a number of satirical targets. (2006, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-62.)

My Flesh and Blood

An Audience Award at Sundance several years ago, or maybe it was the Oscar nomination, was enough to make me put this documentary on my Netflix queue, but I imagined something excessively heartwarming or icky, so it lingered around the 180th position as newer releases leapfrogged forward. Then one time, running my eyes down the user ratings on my queued films, the four-plus stars for this caught my eye and I moved it up. And thus I finally caught up with Jonathan Karsh’s superbly moving film about Susan Tom and her adopted brood of a dozen special needs kids. The special needs run from horrific diseases to accidents to birth defects. There’s a boy with CF and ADD, and another whose skin peels off from EB while he also battles CA. There’s a bright young girl whose face was burned away in a crib fire and a bouncy tween whose body just happens to be legless. Such damage is hard to look at, but if you force yourself to do so, you will begin to see a glimmer of light, a refracted radiance through the pool of tears in your eyes. The film follows the lives of its subjects in being sad but funny, desperate but hopeful. Susan Tom herself is a great character and not a plaster saint, which is confirmed in the essential extras on the Docurama DVD -- including deleted and additional scenes, and an especially worthwhile dialogue between director and subject. This is a film that cries out for a sequel, like the "7 Up" series. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-78.)