Still Life

If you’ve got a thing for Antonioni, you’ll probably fall for Jia Zhang-ke. He expresses feeling -- predominantly of dislocation -- through environment rather than through story or character. The World took place in a Vegas-like Beijing amusement park with reduced-scale models of the world’s great attractions from the Eiffel Tower to the Taj Mahal. Still Life transpires in an old city about to be inundated by the Three Gorges Dam in southern China, largest in the world. Two parallel but unconnected stories detail the quest of a spouse from the North who is searching for the mate that disappeared into this disappearing town. We mutely and slowly follow the searches of the man and woman through a doomed environment of buildings being vacated and demolished by gangs of workmen wielding sledgehammers. Beautifully filmed in HD video, with reference to traditions of Chinese painting and incursions of digital surrealism, this film engages one’s documentary interest in news from the other side of the world, if you have the patience for evocative enigmas without much emotion or event. The amazing landscape of the place and the scope of human displacement overshadow individual involvement with the fate of the characters. Jia is the hottest young Chinese director on the international scene, as evidenced by this film coming in 7th in the IndieWire poll for 2008. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-81.)

Gomorrah

I’d feel less certain of my reaction to this film if it weren’t shared by the three people I watched it with. What is the fuss all about? Compared to The Wire, Matteo Garrone’s film just does not deliver on its promise of revealing the interconnected truth of the culture of organized crime. Juggling loosely linked stories of the Camorra, the Neopolitan equivalent of the Mafia, the film offers no point of access through character, story, or wit. Some moments stand out, but for the most part it is a punishing slog. Grim reality is all well and good, but why not go all the way and offer a documentary framework, rather than placing the story in context just with explanatory aftertitles. As in The Wire, we see street-corner drug-dealing, life in the projects (here a truly bizarre structure), dubious “waste management” practices, container port smuggling and mass death, crime syndicate incursions upon straight business such as couture, feral kids taking on the color of their environment (even underage drivers of huge vehicles), with people getting blown away as an everyday occurrence. What the film didn’t give me was any reason to pay attention or to care. If you have that going in, maybe you will find the movie up to the awards and acclaim it has achieved. (2009, IFC/OD, n.) *6* (MC-86.)

The Passion of Ayn Rand

I stumbled across this little-noticed Showtime movie because DirecTV is offering several months of the channel for free (I see now it’s also on Netflix). With Helen Mirren as Ayn Rand, Peter Fonda as her husband, Eric Stoltz as her acolyte Nathaniel Branden, and Julie Delpy as his wife, on whose book the docudrama is based, the cast was intriguing enough for me to tune in. And it was indeed watchable, if largely uninformative and unrevealing, insufficiently controversial. Personalities come across -- Mirren as Rand in particular -- but motivations are unplumbed, reducing the story of one of the 20th century’s celebrated wackos to cross-currents of sexual jealousy. (1999, Show/T, n. ) *6*

I've Loved You So Long

Opinions may differ, but I found this exploration of a difficult but rewarding relationship between sisters even better than Rachel Getting Married. Kristin Scott Thomas gives a finely-tuned performance that was nearly as scandalously overlooked at awards time as Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky. I’m not getting into plot points, which are perhaps the weakest element of writer-director Philippe Claudel’s debut film. Certainly a good deal of suspense is generated along the way, but the plot mechanism -- who, what, and why dunnit? -- is the least of the film’s virtues. Moody and painterly, its best aspect is the developing relationship between Kristin Scott Thomas, who has been “away” for fifteen years, after a devastating event that is very gradually revealed, and her estranged but formerly close kid sister, a bright young literature professor played by Elsa Zylberstein. Together they dig out a character who has been buried alive by life and death, and reintroduce her to the world, step by tentative step. It’s all slow, quiet, and beautifully judged. Nothing happens, except a light going back on in the soul of a woman. (2008, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-79.)

It’s a relief to have seen a film I felt like talking about. There’s a wave of interesting new releases next week, and I’m working through the IndieWire critics poll (not as diligently as last year) before making my own pronunciamento on the best of 2008. Their #1 (The Flight of the Red Balloon) I’ve already given a lukewarm review. Their #5 (Happy-Go-Lucky) is my #1 so far, till all the votes are counted. Their #6 (Paranoid Park) earns only a shrug from me -- it was okay for a skateboarding murder mystery with arty pretensions, but the way is wide open for me to consider Milk, when I finally catch up with it, as the best Gus Van Sant movie of 2008.

Paranoid Park (2008, MC-83.) fell in a string of films that I lump together under the rubric, “These Kids Today,” about which I have little to say, except to acknowledge the camera-worthiness of the young leads. Another was Hard Candy (2006, MC-58.). Before Juno, Ellen Page was Hayley, a tough and taunting 14-year-old who does a turnabout on an older man who is stalking her. David Slade’s film was gripping in places, but so manipulative that it evaporated in the mind when it was over, except for the lingering image of a star being born. And in this category I include Friday Night Lights, more the current tv series (MC-84.), which I previewed on DirecTV, than the 2004 movie (MC-70), which I watched again after the fact. The film is much more about Texas high school football, and the true story of one season, than the portrait of community that the tv series has opened into (did I mention that the kids are attractive?). It was amusing to see the few carryovers from movie to tv series, most especially Connie Britton as the coach’s wife, who barely gets a line of dialogue in the film but becomes the central figure of the series, in delicious tandem with Kyle Chandler as the coach (Billy Bob Thornton in movie).

There’s another film I cannot rouse myself to review, but will note that I watched, for its possible inclusion in a Rome-themed film series at the Clark. I had hoped that The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) might pair nicely with Roman Holiday, but I couldn’t convince myself of the fit. It was certainly interesting to see Vivien Leigh (well past Blanche Dubois, let alone Scarlett O’Hara, but still magnetically attractive, despite having just been dumped by Laurence Olivier) at the end of her career playing off Warren Beatty (almost believable as an Italian gigolo) at the beginning of his. Also interesting was the transparent autobiographical intent of Tennessee Williams’ novella about an aging queen of the stage retiring to Rome and the boys thereof, with Lotte Lenya in a celebrated role as the procuress. But the actual Rome footage was clearly second unit stuff, with all the interiors done on a Hollywood soundstage, accenting the theatricality of the whole production, along with a lame voiceover. I was happy to watch it but can’t push it on other viewers. I look forward to being more pushy in the future.

W.

Neither the cathartic satire nor the excoriating expose it might have been, Oliver Stone’s film delivers a low-key but fairly honorable attempt to understand what makes Georgie Boy tick. Maybe it should have been a little wilder, but except for a fantasy sequence that is repeated long after we get what little point it has, the film comes across as a fairly straightforward docudrama with elements of sly humor. The big draw is seeing familiar faces impersonating other familiar faces, and they’re all spot on, from Josh Brolin as Bush and Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney on down--wait, isn’t that Rob Corddry as Ari Fleischer?! Jeffrey Wright channels Colin Powell as we hope he was, and Thandie Newton does a wicked caricature of Condi Rice. James Cornwell and Ellen Burstyn are uncanny as the not-so-proud parents, George and Barbara. And suddenly-ubiquitous local gal Elizabeth Banks does a creditable Laura Bush. You’ll spot a bunch more (like Toby Jones, aka Capote, as the ineffable “Turdblossom/Boy Genius” Karl Rove), but Richard as (you-don’t-know-) Dick is the key, making an implausible figure plausible, and his sit-room argument for invading Iraq is speculative and Strangelovian but rings true, as Powell asks “What’s our exit strategy? How do we get out?” and the little Napoleon answers chillingly, “We don’t. We stay.” I could have done with more scenes like that and fewer detailing the familiar tales of Dubya failing upward from fratboy to President, with the not-news flash that 43 was obsessed with earning the respect of and then surpassing 41, his aloof, patrician Poppy. Still, if you’re willing to spend any more time with--say it with me now!--The Worst President Ever, then you could do worse than watching W. (2008, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-56.)

Slumdog Millionaire

What pleases the crowd often pleases me not, but I was won over by the exuberance of Danny Boyle’s exploration of Mumbai, the clever exposition of a conventional story, and the appeal of Dev Patel as the central character in this gritty urban fairy tale of destined love. Three trios of attractive young actors hurtle the story backward and forward from the death of their mothers in anti-Muslim riots in the Bombay of the early ’80s to Patel’s appearance on the tv gameshow “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” in the booming Mumbai of the late ’90s. The borrowings from popular culture are unabashed and nonstop, from Boyle’s self-homage to the infamous toilet scene in Trainspotting, to obvious riffs on Dickens and Dumas, to the gameshow itself, and appropriation of stars and scenes from Bollywood movies. Like the characters, the camera and music hurtle through locations pulsing with life. I expected to be put off by a film revolving around a gameshow I never cared to watch, but was rather impressed by the way it triggered flashbacks to fill in the story. It’s impossible to take this film seriously, but equally impossible not to be swept along by its energy. Genial enough in spirit that I didn’t mind having my buttons pushed so insistently, this romantic fantasy is popular entertainment that is entertaining as well as popular. (2008, Images, n.) *8* (MC-86.)

Frozen River

This Sundance fave from Courtney Hunt is perhaps a little too well-made, too crafted for audience appeal. It loses some indie cred in its effective use of thriller-type suspense. But it’s certainly an open-eyed look at a rarely-seen aspect of the American Dream, where the goal is to move up from a trailer to a double-wide. And while illegal immigration is usually the province of the Mexican border, this looks at Asians coming across the frozen St. Lawrence River from Canada, taking advantage of the mixed jurisdiction of a Mohawk reservation that straddles the river. Melissa Leo is justifiably celebrated for her role as the trailer park mother of two boys, trying to get by when her gambling-addict husband absconds with the balloon payment on their about-to-be-delivered double-wide. The wonder of her performance is that she never seems as though she’s acting, but simply inhabiting the hardscrabble life and no-nonsense attitude of the character. The impassivity of the Mohawk woman who recruits her into risky car treks across the ice may be characterization, or perhaps simply nonprofessional acting, but it works for the story. Gunplay and a Christmas miracle take the proceedings over the top, but I still give the film props for honest observation of hidden lives. (2008, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-82.)

The Duchess

Perhaps I’m a sucker for plausible English Heritage productions, but I liked Saul Dibb’s film more than most. I discerned minor anachronisms in dialogue and attitude, but nothing like Becoming Jane or the most recent Pride and Prejudice. Meanwhile, the costumes and locations were enough to earn my endorsement. But beyond that, I found the film credible in the manner of (if a notch below) Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, making an 18th-century proto-celebrity intelligible and alive to a modern audience without excessive dumbing-down. As Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Keira Knightley is more appealing to me than she has been since Bend It Like Beckham, and manages to carry off the enormous hair-dos and confining dresses. She is taken in marriage (a most appropriate phrase) by the older Duke, one of the most powerful men in Britain and patron of the Whig Party in the 1780s. Ralph Fiennes gives the imperious cold fish many subtle shadings. The unhappy Duchess becomes the star of the Party and of Society, in a manner that is not too explicitly dependent on the fate of her descendent, Lady Di. Among her attendants are Charles Fox, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (School for Scandal is inspired by her), and future Prime Minister Charles Gray. Meanwhile, she invites a distressed lady friend into her home, and then has to deal with the divorced woman’s continuing relationship with the Duke, while pursuing her own affair and affairs. This is my idea of adult entertainment. And at just over a hundred minutes, it does not overstay its welcome, a rarity these days. (2008, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-62.)

Watched in passing

For the past month I have been deeply involved with a manuscript that is now on its way to the publisher, so finally I can catch up with what I’ve been watching in passing. Certainly the most significant was another fine Japanese film resurrected by the Criterion Collection, Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty Four Eyes (1954). I watched it because I was looking for more of Hideko Takamine. Here she plays a beloved teacher in a village on the Inland Sea, the 24 eyes belonging to 12 students whose lives we follow from 1928 to 1946. Understandably this makes for a long and grim film, comparable to a Western “women’s weepie” and as such very popular in Japan. It’s sad and beautiful, but also slow going, and sometimes frustrating in its reliance on long shots. I mean, if you had Ingrid Bergman in your movie, you wouldn’t want to shoot her as a small figure in the landscape all the time. So just give me more of Hideko Takamine!

Inadvertently on a Japanese theme, I also watched The Cats of Mirikitani (2007, MC-73), a modest but moving personal documentary, about a homeless old Japanese painter that the filmmaker, Linda Hattendorf, discovers living on the streets of Manhattan. After 9/11 she takes him into her small apartment and in a self-effacing manner helps him put his life back together. He had been born in Sacramento but went back to Hiroshima with his mother, to return to the US to avoid being drafted before the war, only to wind up in an internment camp for three years. These are the obsessive subjects of his art, the remnants of his identity, lost along the way. Ms. Hattendorf helps him regain his citizenship and finds him a home, in an impressive act of human resurrection. There is not a false or excess moment in a film that could have been cloying and self-congratulatory.

Then there was the latest from two appealing British comics, both of which were funny enough in parts to be enjoyable, but neither close to being a good film. Steve Coogan plays a hapless high school drama teacher in Tucson in Hamlet 2 (2008, MC-54), which is in effect an understudy to the classic Waiting for Guffman. He has his moments, as does the film, and also supporting players like Catherine Keener, but as a whole it is no better than mildly amusing. (As is frequently the case, Stephanie Zacharek nails it in a way that leaves me with nothing else to say.) The same goes for Simon Pegg in Run, Fat Boy, Run (2008, MC-48), a loser who unaccountably leaves a lovely and pregnant Thandie Newton at the altar, only to try to woo her back years later by entering a London marathon to best her new stockbroker boyfriend (Hank Azaria). Both these films display an effortful wackiness but contain not the slightest surprise, basically just sitcoms on film.

As for TV itself, there’s some good stuff going these days. As a DirecTV subscriber, I’ve already watched the entire third season of Friday Night Lights (MC-84), which is now running on NBC. Recovering from some eye-rolling fumbles in Season 2, this reestablishes the show as a marvelous group portrait of a small rural Texas community where high school football is the only game in town. But it is certainly not the only game in the series, which has multiple soap opera pleasures as well as a delicious portrait of the marriage between Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. He’s Coach Taylor and she’s now the school principal. All their interaction is a delight to watch. And then of course, there are all the high school hunks and honeys. Though better to watch on dvd, this is the rare broadcast network series worth committing to. DirecTV has used the platform to launch another series created by Peter Berg, and it’s looking pretty good after three episodes. Wonderland explores the world of a NYC mental hospital based on Bellevue, and seems involvingly interwoven and slambang in impact.

Now in progress are the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactic (MC-85) on the SciFi Channel and the third season of Big Love (MC-79) on HBO. While each has its ludicrous moments, each ultimately is worth the time it takes to get into them. BG modulates its action with thought-provoking parallels to current international issues, and BL takes the premise of modern Mormon polygamy and delves into all sorts of amusing and touching areas of family life. The acting of the latter is more consistently up to snuff than the former, but both offer significant pleasures and provocations of continuity.

Worth re-watching at any length

I’ve been spending a lot of time watching films I’ve seen before, and they each seem worth the time, from the short and sweet to the very long and overpowering. It was fun to revisit Porpoise Spit, on the north coast of Australia, for P.J. Harvey’s Muriel’s Wedding (1994), and to see a young and blimped-up Toni Collette hook up with a young and slender Rachel Griffiths to do a karaoke duet of “Waterloo.” Together they make this slight but sly slice of life eminently re-watchable. And of course, the ABBA music is infectious -- I may have to take an antibiotic to get “Dancing Queen” out of my head -- and better integrated to the story here than in Mamma Mia!

For complete antithesis, I re-watched Woman in the Dunes (1964) as a longshot candidate for a Japanese film series at the Clark. It doesn’t really fit there, but I was very glad to see it again. My hazy impression had been that I don’t generally care for allegory or fable in film, but this film came as a shock in its intensely real specificity. It’s the story of a Tokyo science teacher on a specimen-seeking trip to the seaside, who gets tricked into joining a woman who is trapped in a house at the bottom of a huge hole and needs to ceaselessly (and Sisyphus-ly) shovel sand to keep from being buried. The sand itself is the third character in the drama, and it's photographed expressively in high-contrast black and white. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara renders the simple elements in the film -- sand, skin, wood, water -- with remarkable sensuous detail. He breaks down each of the man’s attempts to flee as diagramatically as Robert Bresson -- this could be called “The Man Who Didn’t Escape.” The distinctive electronic music and the acting of the two principals make this a complete package, and deserving of more thanks to the Criterion Collection, though the restored twenty minutes were perhaps unnecessary.

It wasn’t that long ago that I watched and reviewed Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary, Tom Petty: Runnin’ Down a Dream, but in the interim I have become a big Tom Petty fan and now know the songs, so when I saw it come around again on Sundance Channel, I tuned in to watch some concert performances, but stayed to watch the whole four hours all over again. The music is classic, and so is the film. Hear it, see it.

It was a long time ago that I watched The World at War. When it first appeared on tv way back in 1974, I tuned in obsessively. And recently noting its appearance on dvd, I have been making my way through all 26 hours all over again. Masterful. The archival footage from all sides of WWII, the interviews from the 70s (now scarily further removed in time than the War was then), the narration by Laurence Olivier, the haunting music -- all retain their power. And from the perspective of today’s crises, it’s reassuring to imagine that if the world could recover from such total devastation, then it can probably recover from its current grim outlook.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This handsomely mounted production from David Fincher is ponderous and long-winded, and owes too much to Forrest Gump, also written by Eric Roth, but the scope is large and many of the scenes are impressively staged. It jumps off from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a baby who is born old and gets progressively younger. With seamless CGI wizardry, the title character played by Brad Pitt ages from wizened small boy to his fortyish self and on to his youthful beauty, along the path to infancy and death. Meanwhile Cate Blanchett is growing from a young girl to a celebrated dancer to a fortyish mother and finally to a very old woman on her deathbed. Over the course of the decades, their relationship reverses, but they meet in the middle for a romantic mating. The historical background is rendered perfunctorily, but New Orleans comes through as a developing character in its own right, though the framing story, set in the run-up to Katrina, is rather otiose, and the narration a bit overbearing. Many elements are moving if not really convincing, but the picaresque whole does not come together and does not sustain the nearly three hour running time. Among the subsidiary characters, Tilda Swinton stands out as the wife of a British diplomat in WWII Russia, who initiates the young-old Brad/Benjamin into the mysteries of love. So it’s all quite overblown, but still impressive, not least in the performances of the two leads. (2008, Images, n.) *6+* (MC-69.)

Heights

If you feel the world of artsy, neurotic New Yorkers has not been sufficiently explored by Woody Allen, then you may want to see this film. Or if you like urban romantic rondelays like London’s Love, Actually or the Parisian Same Old Song. Chris Terrio’s debut feature adapts a play by Amy Fox, but opens it up nicely to Big Apple locales. Glenn Close plays a fearsome theatrical celebrity who is playing Lady Macbeth on Broadway. Pittsfield native Elizabeth Banks is her daughter, caught between a nascent career as a photographer and a prospective marriage to a guy who is secretly gay. George Segal and Isabella Rossellini are among the familiar faces that turn up in peripheral roles, as a large cast deceives each other, and especially themselves. Too familiar by half, and only half-smart, this still is not a chore to watch. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-59.)

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Virtually unknown in this country, Mikio Naruse is the fourth great director of the generation of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and the somewhat younger Kurosawa. (And thus completes my proposed film series for next summer at the Clark, “Four Seasons in Japan: A Cycle of Film Classics.”) The woman in question is Hideko Takamine, new to me but apparently an actress to put beside Setsuko Hara for beauty and sublime expressiveness. She made 17 films with Naruse, and many others as well -- I will be looking for them. The stairs ascend (or descend) to the second-floor bar where she works as an all-round female companion and manager of same, in a Ginza niche between geisha and prostitute. She’s a young widow who has made a name for herself in her world, namely “mama,” but still leads an economically precarious life, and is reaching the age when her options come down to marrying some client or opening her own bar. Scene by scene those options are closed down. In style, Naruse comes across as a pessimistic Ozu. Ozu’s world is sad enough, to be sure, but Naruse’s is bleak, but somehow exhilaratingly so in his quality of precise attention. I was reminded of another favorite film of mine, from the very same year and in the same widescreen intimacy. In The Apartment, Shirley MacLaine is a girl similarly trying to negotiate her assets in a world of businessmen, but here “mama” has no mensch like Jack Lemmon to rescue her. Now that I’ve seen one Naruse, I want to see many more, but this is the only one available on dvd. Here’s hoping the the Criterion Collection gets such a response to this that they come out with an Eclipse boxed set, as they have for Ozu and Mizoguchi. (1960, dvd, n.) *8*

Flight of the Red Balloon

I just can’t get with the program on Hou Hsaio-Hsien. Though the Taiwanese Hou is frequently anointed by critics as the cinematic heir of Ozu, my enthusiasm for the one has never extended to the other. For me, it’s the difference between nothing happens and nothing happens. But in Hou’s latest, Juliet Binoche happens, and she makes a big difference. The going is slow and the story almost nonexistent, but Juliet comes through expressively, as the chaotic mother of a young boy, trying to balance running a boho household with a career leading a puppet troupe. She’s got tousled, bleached hair, and a distracted air. She hires a Chinese film student to mind her son, but loves him despite her distraction. The interrelations within the house emerge obliquely, in the course of long takes that combine seeming randomness with precise visual design. And then of course there’s the whole “symbolic” level of the red balloon, which follows the boy through the streets of Paris and hovers outside various windows, in overt homage to the 1956 Albert Lamorrisse children’s film classic. I acknowledge there’s a lot going on for the filmmaker, but for this film viewer, not so much. I suspect it would help to watch this on the big screen, where you could use your leisure to explore the depth and breadth of the frame, or in an audience of adoring film festival fans who could sweep you up in their admiration. I don’t resent the time spent at Hou’s pace and angle, but it doesn’t fly for me. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-86.)

If you like that sort of thing...

I’m not going to tell you that Mamma Mia! (2008, dvd, MC-51) is a good movie, but I rather enjoyed it and you may too. The stage show might be even more engaging, but I was won over by the film’s exuberant silliness. I’ve never really listened to ABBA, but one absorbs such popular music by osmosis. The story, such as it is, is a flimsy armature on which to string the songs, but for the first time I could make sense of the words, not that there’s a whole lot of sense to be made. Set on a picturesque Greek island (and some unconvincing stage sets), the film features Meryl Streep as the single mother of a 20-year-old bride-to-be, played by Amanda Seyfried (of Big Love), who invites to her wedding each of the three men who might be her father. Both women are highly appealing and decent singers, with Meryl having a lot of unabashed fun dancing and emoting her way through the songs. The prospective fathers are Colin Firth, Stellan Saarsgaard, and Pierce Brosnan, the last of whom is ridiculous but touching as he tries to croak out “S.O.S” and other songs, braver than James Bond ever had to be. Meryl, as the ungracefully aging but still beautiful hippie, has two old girl group pals in Julie Waters and Christine Baranski, and their antics are fun to watch as they fool around. Some may feel left out of the fun, but as part of the same age cohort, I was into them. Now that I have a better grasp of ABBA’s songlist, I want to go back and watch Muriel’s Wedding again, re-catch Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths at the start of their careers.

As Happy-Go-Lucky settles into my memory as the best film of 2008, I happened to notice that a PBS Masterpiece Theater presentation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion that I TiVo’d long ago also starred Sally Hawkins, now destined for a Oscar nom but then unknown. I hadn’t felt moved to watch at first because the 1995 Roger Michell version remains my favorite Austen adaptation of all. But Poppy does Jane was irresistible. She made a truthful and endearing Anne Elliott, but could not supplant Amanda Root in my affection. And the Wentworth had nowhere near the Caesarian strength of Ciaran Hinds (though Rome’s Brutus does turn up as Anne’s scheming cousin, and Buffy’s Giles as her father.) I found the roughness of the semi-documentary style of filming to convey a better sense of place and period than glossier attempts to package the Divine Jane for present-day consumption, though at 90 minutes the adaptation was rather abrupt and overt.

In the interests of completeness, I should mention a worthwhile documentary called The Spirit of the Marathon, which follows six runners at different levels as they train for and run in the 2005 Chicago Marathon. It’s quite well done, and enters the lists as an elite sports doc, but you may have to have some connection to a marathon runner to really enjoy it. My son ran London last year and is now training for Boston, so it was a bonding experience to watch this film with him.

And for complete completeness, there are two more films I should mention, depending on whether you have a taste for serial killer comedies and musicals, even though I definitely do not. For each, you can go by Metacritic or you can go by my definite non-recommendation. Memories of Murder (2005, MC-82.) had been on my DVR for more than a year till I broke down and watched it. Made by the Korean director Joon-ho Bong, who also made the well-received creature feature The Host, which I didn't care for either, mixes humor with the truth-based story of a sensational sex murderer in Korea, a mix that did not take for me despite some understanding of what others saw in it. I also watched Sweeney Todd (2007, MC-83.) in the interests of playlist maintenance, and liked it no better than I expected to, despite the "Universal Acclaim" Metacritic assigns to it. If you go down their listing to my two favorite reviewers, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker and Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, you will find my opinion expressed. Neither Johnny Depp nor director Tim Burton convinced me that this film should have been made, nor did the stripped down Stephen Sondheim music.

Encounters at the End of the World

I see all of Werner Herzog’s documentaries eventually (from Grizzly Man to the most obscure), but I was surprised to see this turning up on some “best of the year” lists while the Netflix disk was already sitting on top of my tv. Werner always takes us to farflung places to watch man confront nature, and here he takes us to Antarctica, the south pole where one of the film’s subjects says every untethered person in the world eventually slips. You do have to be a little strange to get a kick out of scuba diving beneath the ice in search of new organisms, penetrating glaciers or volcanoes, rhapsodizing about seals or whatever object of study has brought you to the nether end of the world. Herzog’s seemingly random observations always do add up to something, at least in the labyrinth of his own mind, but I did not follow the thread in this as well as others. So to me it was just an amalgam of odd characters and striking photography, especially underwater, which was what interested Herzog in the first place. He embarks with a promise not to put any “fluffy penguins” in his Antarctica film, but winds up finding a completely Herzogian penguin, who treks off from all the others, headed for distant mountains and certain death, a tiny dot in a frozen immensity. (2008, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-80.)

Iron Man

I usually eschew films about comic book superheroes, but intriguing reviews and a recommendation from my reliable daughter led me to give this a try, and you might want to as well, especially if you are susceptible to the roguish charm of Robert Downey Jr., really one of the more appealing stars in Hollywood. The film is fast and fun, and given a patina of relevance by the protagonist’s repentence over his arms merchant history. His antagonist is Jeff Bridges -- the Dude gone evil -- and his Girl Friday is Gwyneth Paltrow, blond and bland. Downey’s transformation into the title hero shows some technical ingenuity and flash, and the whole bobs along nicely on a current of wit. I glimpsed Jon Favreau (from Swingers) in a tiny role, and was thinking how he had come down in the world, until the final credits rolled and I saw that he was actually the director of the film, and not a bad one either. Personally I wouldn’t give a look to any film featuring Batman or the Hulk or any other Marvel character, but if you’re at all inclined that way, this is one you could watch without having your intelligence insulted or your senses assaulted. (2008, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-79.)

Longford

Lacking any thread to my viewing other than queue management, I keep coming back to a given film’s life on my lists. This one languished on my TiVo “Now Playing” list for more than a year. I recorded it when it was first broadcast on HBO, then deleted it when I realized I am too much of a Sunny Jim to relish serial killer movies (aside from Zodiac), but recorded it again after it won a slew of Emmys. What finally drove me to watch it was a strong recommendation by David Thomson in “Have You Seen ...?” -- his new book of “personal introduction to 1000 films.” (Come to think of it, that’s just what Cinema Salon is as well -- not quite up to a thousand, but getting there.) Anyway, the cast was an attraction as well, with personal favorite Samantha Morton playing convicted child killer Myra Hindley of the infamous Moors Murders in the ’60s, and the always-impressive Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford, the dotty old Labor minister who led a decades-long campaign for her redemption in the face of public odium. There’s also a chilling portrayal of Myra’s partner in crime by Andy Serkis, much scarier than his Golem. I’m not familiar with director Tom Hooper, more than competent here, but I’m now on the lookout for anything by writer Peter Morgan, of The Queen and other recent inquiries into the public life of Britain. This film lets no one off easy, least of all the viewer, in its exploration of guilt and forgiveness, evil and the possibility of conversion. It’s really better not to know too much about the facts of the case, nor to have formed an opinion, because the strength of this film is the way it leaves questions open, and infinitely ponderable. (2006, HBO/T, n.) *7* (MC-88.)

Rachel Getting Married [etc.]

Though I hadn’t been to a movie theater in a coon’s age, when Images Cinema reopened after a period of refurbishment, I felt moved to go to the first screening in the new space and renew my expired membership. The new entrance, direct from Spring St. instead of through a side alley, looked great (and reminiscent of the olden-days arrangement), and the new seats were a major upgrade. The film itself wasn’t bad either. I happened to be talking with two couples in succession recently, and one had said Jonathan Demme’s latest was terrible while the other recommended it. Me, I was glad to see it but I wouldn’t urge it upon the unwary. Basically, it’s Demme does Dogme -- handheld camera in long, roaming takes; no music except live within the action; in-your-face familial confrontation -- with a nod to Robert Altman’s Wedding as well. Anne Hathaway plays an addict released from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding, and she makes for a convincingly impossible person. (If you know her only as Disney’s diarizing princess--gag!--or the “smart, fat girl” in The Devil Wears Prada, this role seems totally out of character, but not so much if you’e seen Havoc.) The set-up is more than a little like Margot at the Wedding, but these two difficult sisters are somewhat easier to take. Rachel is well-played by Rosemary DeWitt (who was Don Draper’s first girlfriend in Mad Men), but the real delight to see is Debra Winger as their absconding mother, looking great and playing lots of subtle notes in her brief portrayal. The sororal relationship is believably complicated, and so is the sense of being present at the event, in all its joy and embarassment. Some people like all the live music and some people don’t, but it’s certainly justified in that the groom is in the music business, as well as many of the guests, not to mention Demme’s own concert work from Stop Making Sense to Heart of Gold. Being non-social myself, I found much of the film to be as excruciating as a wedding in the flesh, but as a fly on the wall it wasn’t too painful to observe. (2008, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-82.)

For one reason or another, I’ve been re-watching a variety of films on which I simply want to renew my recommendation. The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2006, MC-78) is definitely a documentary worth seeking out, working on a variety levels from personal portraiture to advertisement for Community Supported Agriculture. John Peterson is a fascinating amalgam of true son of a midwest family farm and countercultural fantasist. Through the vicissitudes of decades he loses and finds his vocation, obsessively observed first in home movies and then by his longtime friend Taggart Siegel, who is the director of this witty, moving, and informative film.

The Madness of King George (1994) got queued up in a Helen Mirren moment a few years ago, and it’s something I’ve thought of showing at the Clark. And it’s well worth a second look. Lady Helen is predictably excellent as the Queen, but Nigel Hawthorne as George III rules all. For a filmed play (written by Alan Bennett, and directed from stage to screen by Nicholas Hytner), the on-location spectacle of palaces and pageantry is very well handled, with plenty of humor and intrigue and even poignancy.

El Cid (1961) was an historical epic remembered fondly from my youth and highly praised in surveys of Anthony Mann’s directorial career, so reviews of a new Collector’s Edition led me to leap it to the top of my queue. Unfortunately Netflix, as is typical, sent an earlier DVD, widescreen but not digitally restored, so the viewing was not optimal. Still, it’s an impressive example of the overblown spectacles of its time, with Charlton Heston giving an unusually persuasive performance as the semi-mythical 11th-century Spanish knight who brought Christians and Muslims together to repel a Moorish invasion from Africa. Sophia Loren is a spectacle in herself as the love interest. As an independent producer, Samuel Bronston made a series of epics in Spain, but this one makes the most of Spanish landscapes, castles, and cathedrals, with scenes of combat escalating from a well-staged joust to an immense seaside assault on a walled city. Especially notable to me was the seeming authenticity of period art and decor -- this was not Malibu medievalism.

Also less than optimal was the disk of The Man from Laramie (1955), last of the celebrated Anthony Mann-Jimmy Stewart Westerns, quite an advance on The Furies and not just because it’s widescreen and technicolor. The story is familiar but not overly so, with plenty of surprises in both the action and the acting, with the feel for landscape that Mann is noted for, psychological instead of mythic in the Fordian vein. The retrospective elevation of Mann’s reputation seems justified, and his direction offers some guarantee of quality for those looking for oldies but goodies. Now that I’ve matched a Ford film series to a Remington exhibiton at the Clark, I will definitely behold the Mann if I ever do another series of Westerns.

The Color of Lies (Au Couer du mensonge)

Claude Chabrol turned out to be the most prolific director of the French New Wave, finding his method and material early and working it year by year to the present day. I may have seen ten of his films, but that just scratches the surface. Widely declared the French Hitchcock, his films all seem to show bourgeois life opening up a vein of violence. A sense of suspense drives the story, but the point is always psychological probing of ordinary people, families, and communities. I must have queued up this film because one of the characters is a painter, and his painting is taken seriously, so I might show this at the Clark one day, if I ever get around to a series on “Artists Behaving Badly,” to include Scarlet Street and others. I might also have been trolling for Sandrine Bonnaire films, since she seems to me the most interesting French actress of her generation. So here she’s the wife of an artist who falls under suspicion for the murder of one of his young drawing students. The plot is highly convoluted and basically beside the point. The setting in a village on the coastline of Brittany, however, is all important, as are the various interrelations among the inhabitants. The film is full of intelligent and interesting observation, if not visceral or conclusive. (1998, dvd, n.) *6+*