Calling all docs!

I’m late in doing so, but I really want to call attention to the current season of “Independent Lens” on PBS, which has been presenting a lot of documentaries that I may show at the Clark sometime.  Two I’d just watched on dvd before they turned up on the program.  Waste Land I’ve already written about, and also worthy of recommendation was Marwencol (2010, MC-81).  The odd name denotes an imaginary town peopled by GI Joes and Barbies who enact the WWII scenarios of a man who had his brain damaged in a beating outside a bar.  The town, as 3-D artifact and as reproduced in photos, serves as physical and psychological therapy for Mark Hogancamp, to recreate an identity lost along with most of his personal memories.  His photos are discovered by an art magazine, leading to a New York gallery show, which challenges the creator’s identity in more ways than one.  Inspiring, almost mind-blowing, this is a film that works on many levels.

Another possibility for Clark showing is The Desert of Forbidden Art, which tells an intriguing story of a lone wolf collector of avant-garde painting banned by the Soviets, who created his own museum in unlikely Uzbekistan, in a fascinating mix of exotic themes.  Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child was not bad, but pales next to Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, as spectacularly embodied by Jeffrey Wright (with David Bowie as Warhol).

Off the topic of art, I definitely recommend Bhutto (2010, MC-68), also available on dvd, which focuses on Benazir as legatee of her father as leader of Pakistan, in a dynastic clan that is half-royal, half-democratic.  Twice prime minister, the first woman to lead a Muslim country, and twice deposed by the military, she was assassinated in 2007 when she returned from exile to run once again.  Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she provides an understandable window into an unknowable country, which has emerged as a crucial frenemy of the U.S.

Another PBS documentary series of consistent interest is “American Experience,” and I take particular note of two recent presentations.  Stonewall Uprising (2010, MC-74) is very effective at taking us back to the origins of gay liberation in the “riots” that took place in 1969 when the police raided that Greenwich Village bar once too often, after its Mafia owners failed to pay up, and the gay patrons took the brunt of the assault.  The jaw-dropping footage of official commentary in “educational” films and even on “60 Minutes” offers a crash course in just how far homosexuality has come out of the closet and into the mainstream of American life. 

Similarly we’ve come a long way from the situation of the Freedom Riders (2009, DVD) in Stanley Nelson’s extremely effective documentary about the 1961 bus protests against segregation on interstate transportation.  An interracial group from the Congress on Racial Equality embarked on a peaceful attempt to ride together from Washington to New Orleans, only to meet beatings and burning when they reached Alabama.  After the highly-publicized violence, other riders and the civil rights movement as a whole took up the challenge, escalating the issue until the Kennedys and the federal government were forced to intervene.  While we watch the protestors of the Arab Spring try to rise up against entrenched and illegitimate power, it is salutary to remember that fifty years ago, the situation was not that different in parts of America.

Another documentary for future showing at the Clark, just available from Netflix -- as most of these films are -- is Who Does She Think She Is? (2008), by Pamela Tanner Boll, who made the noteworthy Born into Brothels.  This film looks at a variety of women who persist in their art while raising families and facing all the obstacles to their success.  Though hardly earthshaking, it is genuinely inspiring.

Two more films to mention for completeness’ sake, both of which have their virtues but not my strong endorsement are Barbara Kopple’s latest, Gun Fight (2011) and Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman (2010, MC-81), which dealt respectively with the important issues of gun control and public education reform, but did not tell me anything particularly new or eye-opening, though I tend to support their conclusions.

Death of child or parent

Rabbit Hole.  (2010, MC-76)  The best thing I can say about John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of David Lindsay-Abair’s Pulitzer-winning play is that I had no sense of its being a filmed stage piece.  Carefully skirting grief-porn and restraining the wildness of his Hedwig and the Angry Inch persona, Mitchell relies on his actors to reveal emotion through indirection rather than bludgeoning, and leavens the proceedings with unexpected wit.  Aaron Eckhart and especially Nicole Kidman are excellent as a couple whose 4-year-old son was struck and killed by a car eight months before, each flailing to find the coping strategy that will work for him or her, but maybe not for them.  Diane Wiest as Kidman’s mother leads an effective supporting cast.  At a swift 92 minutes, the film does not wallow or browbeat, and while the setting lacks a tangible sense of reality (even in a grocery store aisle), the actors unfold the truth of their characters’ emotions and personalities.  Not exactly a film to lift one’s spirits, it does not punish the viewer but rewards attention.

The Father of My Children.  (2010, MC-76)  It’s no spoiler to say that at midpoint of this film, the father dies and the children grieve, three young daughters, each in her own way, and their mother in hers.  Mia Hansen-Love tells this story with such intimacy that you suspect it happened to her, and the father does turn out to be based on a well-known French film producer.  In the first half of the film his small independent operation comes under increasing pressure from all sides, as he suavely drives around while juggling two cellphones, to spend rushed but quality time with the delightful females of his family.  In the second half his family tries to pick up the pieces of his ruined life, in a film that gives equal weight to joy and sorrow, love and mortality.  It’s lively rather than deathly, and a sleeper on my best of the year list.

More classics or not?

Pardon me while I return for the nonce to my original purpose in writing this filmlog, started on 1-1-00 and put online five years later.  Namely, to keep track of what I’ve been watching and my immediate off-hand evaluation, to forestall the flaws of memory.  So lately I’ve seen or re-seen a lot of films I don’t feel moved to “review” in any meaningful sense, but merely to register my reaction.

First off, in my “Drawn to Portraits” film series at the Clark, Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) lived up to its billing as noir classic though I was struck most by its comic elements, which made me think of The Big Sleep, though Gene Tierney is no Bacall and Dana Andrews hardly a Bogart.  Portrait of Jennie (1948) delivered equally, in the vein of romantic fantasy, with sophisticated visuals and great location shooting in NYC by director William Dieterle, and well-played leads by Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, lovingly produced by her husband, David O. Selznick.  Only Vertigo failed to meet its overblown expectations – what are you thinking of, Sight & Sound critics poll, to vote this second only to Citizen Kane as the best film of all time?  I could name a half-dozen Hitchcocks I think are better (first off – Strangers on a Train).

It was another critics poll -- this for best of past decade -- that drove me to give their #2 choice another chance, in this case David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and I came away equally unconvinced.  I still don’t get it, though the film does showcase Naomi Watts to advantage.  Despite re-viewing, the film continues to make little sense for me, and any atmospheric impression it made quickly evaporated.

Another second look confirmed another less than enthusiastic response.  Naked (1993) remains a strong but unpleasant experience.  I am usually a big fan of Mike Leigh’s kitchen sink dramas, but though David Thewlis is powerful here as a blow-in from Yorkshire to London, where he crashes with an old girlfriend, while abusing her and her roommate and any other woman who happens by, this does not rank with my favorites.  His tirades are compelling in a bitter, bilious, spittle-spewing way, but for me the misogyny was not redeemed by any empathy-extending understanding of the character.  

Pure happenstance led me to re-viewing Wise Blood, John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of the Flannery O’Connor novel, but I recall from long ago a similar reaction of exhilaration and letdown.  Brad Dourif is perfectly squirrelly as Hazel Motes, a GI who returns to the southern town of his hellfire upbringing, and rebels against the Jesus-soaked atmosphere by preaching fanatically the “Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ.”  It’s extremely pungent, but in the end I find the story, like O’Connor herself, too extreme and arbitrary.  But there is a reek of gothic reality and wicked satire along the way.

Also caught on TCM was Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1950), Albert Lewin’s surprisingly literate romantic melodrama set in a technicolor Spanish village, where American émigré songstress Ava Gardner captivates all the men and is in turn captivated by James Mason, the mysterious sailor whose identity is given away in the title.  The movie aspires to myth in a manner that is lush but not totally laughable.

The same might be said of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), which I watched because I was hoping to show a series of Cleopatra films at the Clark, in conjunction with an appearance by bestselling biographer Stacy Schiff, but that fell through.  This fairly lavish production of the G.B. Shaw play features Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh to good effect, but ultimately doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of the spectacle, a problem that may be characteristic of films about the Queen of the Nile.

Mildred Pierce (1945) I watched again to compare Joan Crawford’s performance with Kate Winslet’s, also good but also lost in an unengaging story.  Michael Curtiz’s version adds a murder to spice things up, but the design and the acting, and the implicit social commentary on woman’s lot, are not enough to involve me with a bunch of not-so-interesting characters.  Compare Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas for a more compelling movie about a mother sacrificing all for an ungrateful daughter.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987) was another film I was willing to give a second chance, and it was no hardship to watch Daniel Day Lewis and Juliet Binoche, and director Philip Kaufman’s clever insertion of them into newsreel footage of the Prague Spring uprising, but it does go on and on, the characters remain opaque to me, and I eventually fast forwarded to the end.  Lena Olin, however, caught my eye, so I went back to another film I remember liking more, Enemies, a Love Story (1989).  Paul Mazursky’s adaptation of an Isaac B. Singer novel tells of a Holocaust survivor who finds himself in a vividly-realized 1949 New York, with “wives” in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx.  One is Lena Olin, as electrifying as I remembered, and another is Anjelica Huston, wry and witty with deep submerged pain.  To me there were a few key gaps in motivation and narrative, but the acting and atmosphere carried the day, though I found it hard to forgive Ron Silver in the central role for the actor’s subsequent emergence as a right-wing apologist.

One last note on what’s classic and what’s not:  A while back I made an effort to confront the inflated reputation of Nicholas Ray, an especial favorite of my favorite director, Francois Truffaut.  They Live by Night (1948) got me interested, with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell extremely affecting as two hardscrabble kids in love and on the run, in a film that effectively combines social realism and doomed romanticism.  So then I watched On Dangerous Ground (1951), and bought in somewhat to its reputation as a noir classic, intrigued by Robert Ryan as the rough-edged cop and Ida Lupino as the blind woman he investigates and falls for, though I still found something slipshod and unconvincing in Ray’s direction.  Then I went back to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and found the trio of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo iconic but their story once again unconvincing.  Johnny Guitar (1954) is indeed an eye-popping curiosity, a luridly-colored Western with a monumental Joan Crawford as the whore-turned-businesswoman, and Sterling Hayden as the gunslinging title character who wants to protect her against the raging jealousy of Mercedes Cambridge and her pack of vigilantes.  But again I do not see the mythic Freudian depths that some choose to see in Ray’s work.  And in King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days to Peking (1962), I see none of the intimate reality that Ray is purported to bring to his standard epics.  I remember being impressed by the latter as a youth, but Charlton Heston is by now another actor I cannot abide because of his off-screen activities and on-screen impassivity.  I understand that Nick Ray himself is a Bigger Than Life (1956) character in film history, but his films stubbornly do not make much of an impression on me.  Someday I’ll give the highly-esteemed In a Lonely Place (1950) another chance, and catch up with a couple of other Ray films on TCM, but I don’t imagine I’ll come over to Nick in time.

Catching up with film

Once I fall out of the habit of writing about films the day after I see them, they begin to back up, and now I’m stunned to see that I haven’t posted here in more than a month.  So I begin a process of catching up, starting with recent films, now that I have only two more must-sees due on dvd before I close the book on 2010 releases and make my official picks for best of the year.  Between now and then I will also catch up with recommended tv series, documentaries, and another round of “Classic or not?”  I will also have further word on upcoming film series at the Clark, so please keep coming back to Cinema Salon, even though I haven’t given you much to see lately.

White Material.  (2010, MC-81)  Claire Denis’ latest earned the bronze medal, voted third-best of 2010 in Film Comment poll, but strikes me as a film I would have to see again to settle on an opinion about -- but which I have no desire to see again.  As a director, Denis is a refined taste whose films I sometimes get (Beau Travail, Friday Night) and sometimes don’t (The Intruder, this film).  Here she returns to themes of her upbringing in Africa (as in Chocolat), with French settlers driven out in a civil war waged by child soldiers led by a charismatic and progressive young officer.  The ever-interesting Isabelle Huppert, whitest of the white, alien to the dark continent, has only one thought, to save her coffee plantation and its current crop, but forces are unleashed that will consume everything around her within the two days the film covers, in its own roundabout way.  The treatment is elliptical and enigmatic, but the sense of encircling menace is persuasive.  The shock ending adds to, rather than resolves, the puzzlement.

Mother.  (2010, MC-79)  Bong Joon-ho’s latest came in 11^th in that same critics poll (8^th in indieWire).  After The Host and Memories of Murder, the young South Korean is definitely one of the flavors of the month in world cinema, putting his personal stamp on various genres, following that wry creature-feature and offbeat police procedural with this “wrong man” mystery widely described as Hitchcockian, though Bong is even weirder than that chubby old pervert.  When not strange and fascinating, he can be flat-footed as well as deadpan, but this film is made by the performance of Kim Hye-ja as the mother determined to exonerate her dim-bulb grown son, who is accused of murdering a schoolgirl.  The twists of the story sometimes elicit a “Huh, what?” response, but in the end it all hangs together around that central performance.

Two favorite directors I included in my “10 Under 50” film series at the Clark some years back had recent releases that attracted almost no attention, but with which I finally caught up based on the talent involved.

Michael Winterbottom’s Summer in Genoa (known as Genova (MRQE-64) when released in Britain in 2008) is just out on US dvd, probably predicated on Colin Firth’s recent anointing as Best Actor.  He’s good here as the father to two girls, probably 16 and 10, who were with their mother when she was killed in a car accident.  Old college friend Catherine Keener gets him a teaching position in Italy and he feels that getting far away is the best way for the girls and him to cope.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  The film casts a real Don’t Look Now vibe over the narrow alleyways of the medieval city, which are penetrated by Winterbottom’s travel-light style of filmmaking.  With a compelling mix of beauty and risk, the film is flawed mainly by a conclusion that makes the whole thing seem like all wind-up and no pitch.

Similarly ominous but unresolved is Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth (2009, MC-51), which also went nowhere despite the presence of two compelling performers in Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal. They play a well-to-do New York couple who share a fabulous loft apartment with their young daughter and her Filipina nanny.  She’s an emergency room doctor on the night shift, and he’s a computer game designer off to Asia to sign a big contract, so as much as they love their daughter, the girl’s primary relationship is with the lovely nanny, who has left her own two boys back on the islands in order to earn a better life for them in this globalized but fractured world.  Each character in the film suffers in isolation from the others, despite connection by cellphone and distant affection.  Grim and moody to match the maker’s name, with lovely images and haunting music, this film has much to recommend it, but finally fails to satisfy.  The world may be a rigged game, but this film seems a bit rigged as well.

Here are two more films I found more interesting than many did, given a certain affinity going in:

Aaron Katz’s Quiet City (2007, MRQE) is a “mumblecore” enactment of twenty-somethings drifting through the Brooklyn scene.  Having once been a twenty-something drifting through Brooklyn, I was willing to expend attention on a newer version of same.  As is characteristic of this genre, the girl is attractive but not conventionally so, and the guy is a shlub.  Each shot -- some of them lovely -- is held too long, as if trying to protract the proceedings to feature length.  The film would love to be another Before Sunrise, but falls in the middle of the mumblecore pack, among whom only Andrew Bujalski so far emerges as a talent to watch. 

Marco Amenta’s The Sicilian Girl (2010, MC-48) I got into initially for its striking images of the island of my forefathers.  Then I was held by the performance of Veronica D'Agostino as the feisty teenage girl who decides to revenge the deaths of her father and brother by informing on the Mafia, and goes into ineffective witness protection in Rome.  The story follows, perhaps too faithfully, that of a real young woman about whom the director has already made a documentary, and never really goes as deep as you hope it might.    

Catching up with TV

Like Metacritic, I offer a hearty endorsement to Downton Abbey (2011, MC-92), which I did not see when it was broadcast on PBS Masterpiece Theater last winter, but caught up with on dvd (streaming video also available from Netflix).  I simply found it outrageously entertaining, mixing all the pleasures of British heritage productions with a winking wit that managed to collect a host of old clichés into a postmodern soap opera delight.  The seven episodes follow the life of the title character, a massive old pile sure to impress, from the sinking of the Titanic to the start of World War I, brilliantly sketching in the lives of a score of characters upstairs and down.  I don’t know when I have seen a better ensemble of actors, every last one making the most of his or her minutes on screen.  Julian Fellowes wrote Gosford Park and here combines that with Remains of the Day and many a BBC production, but comes up with something that seems totally fresh.  The subsequent revival of Upstairs, Downstairs seemed pallid by comparison.

I hope you are taking in the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights (MC-82), now showing on NBC but already out on dvd, which I previously watched on DirecTV last fall.  If not, you really ought to start with the first season and watch the whole series.  It definitely ranks in my Top 10 of all time.  Yes, it’s nominally about high school football in Texas, but it offers one of the great continuing portraits of a marriage in the coach and his wife, superbly played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, to go with a believable and involving group portrait of a community, intelligent about currents of race and sex and economic reality.  Lots of cute chicks and studs too.  Really, give it a try, it will surprise you.  Though it wandered from its core inspiration into melodrama in the second season, the show reinvented itself in subsequent seasons and ended its five-season run on a perfect series of notes.

In that, it couldn’t be more different from Big Love (MC-85 -- you've got to be kidding!), which utterly fizzled in its finale, spinning further and further into absurdity.  As with another recent HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce (MC-69), at the end I was not just disappointed but wanted back all the time and attention I had invested to that point.  But just when I was thinking about canceling my HBO subscription, the second season of Treme (MC-84) began.  To me, David Simon can do no wrong, with The Wire my all-time favorite tv series, and Generation Kill ranking pretty high too.  This multifaceted look at the music and culture of New Orleans as it tries to come back after Katrina may lack narrative drive, but steeps the viewer in a creative gumbo of diverse characters.  Again the acting is strong across the board, carrying multiple storylines forward in a way that makes one care about each and every one (though Lucia Micarelli most of all).  And for somebody who can’t get enough of Bunk and Lester, it’s great to see Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters again.  And Kim Dickens coming over from FNL, etc. etc.

I’m a latecomer to Men of a Certain Age (MC-86) on TNT, but after my interest was piqued by one new episode, I went back and caught up with the first season on dvd, and am currently watching reruns of the second in preparation for its resumption with new episodes on June 1^st.  I was definitely not among the Everyone who Loves Raymond, so I was not alert to Ray Romano’s new show, but now I have to say that at least I like him.  And even more I like Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula as the guys with whom he hikes, eats lunch, shoots the shit, and negotiates the vicissitudes of midlife.  More affectionate and truthful satire than sitcom, this show presents believably rounded characters in characteristically believable situations of work and family.  Try it, and if you’re at all like me, you will find a pleasant surprise.

Another new show I was slow to see, but now look forward to more of, is The Big C (MC-66), Showtime’s attempt to match the success of Weeds, a show I sampled but decidedly did not get hooked on.  The new series stars Laura Linney, however, and I’ve been half in love with her since You Can Count on Me, so I was inclined to give it a try when I had the opportunity, despite not being drawn by the idea of a comedy about cancer.  And Ms. Linney is indeed a delight, but the whole show is wittier and sharper than I expected, definitely worth catching.

Documentary round-up

Inside Job (2010, MC-88) suffered for me from the high expectations I brought to it, having found Charles Ferguson’s first film, No End in Sight, the most enlightening documentary I’d seen about the Iraq War.  So I figured he’d really unpack the banking meltdown of 2008, and very likely I’d join the critics of the Film Comment poll and rank Inside Job among the top handful of films from last year.  Not quite.  The film offers a clear enough picture of the financial skullduggery behind the crisis, and I agree that some people should have gone to jail for it, but I didn’t find its argument as informative and convincing as I expected.  So I can’t quite agree with its Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Another nominee that I found more surprising and satisfying was Waste Land (2010, MC-78), which I will certainly schedule for the Clark at first opportunity.  Vik Muniz is an artist well-known for his re-photographed portraits in chocolate, sugar, or dust, and a pair of matching Madonnas, one in peanut butter and one in jelly.  Lucy Walker’s film follows Muniz when he returns to Brazil, having achieved success in the global art world, in an effort to give something back to the community from which he arose.  He chooses as his focus the largest landfill in the world, where most of the waste in the Rio area goes, and as subject for his portraits the catadores, or pickers, who recycle a modest living out of the piles of garbage.  He takes photos of them, and then enlists their aid in recreating the portraits by arranging refuse on the floor of a warehouse and then re-photographing the construction from above.  He then takes the portrait subjects to a London gallery show and auction of the finished works, returning the money raised to the pickers’ association for mutual aid.  There are many ways this film could have turned icky, but it maintains its humor and intelligence throughout, and winds up quite moving as well.

At first I assumed the HBO documentary Reagan (2011) would be an anodyne celebration of the Gipper’s hundredth birthday, another amnesiac hagiography of the patron saint of all Republicans.  But then I saw that it was directed by Eugene Jarecki, who in Why We Fight went back to Eisenhower’s farewell speech and lucidly showed just how the “military-industrial complex” has taken over in the fifty years since the old soldier’s warning.  This film manages to debunk without anger, and still to celebrate what there was to celebrate in Reagan’s leadership.  It works as a reality check both ways, more a serious work of history than a partisan argument.

Another documentary I approached dubiously on PBS "Independent Lens" series, For Once in My Life (2010), turned out to be well worth seeing.  I suspected this story of a band of variously-disabled performers from a Goodwill facility in Miami getting ready for a big public performance would be a source of saccharine uplift, but the film by James Bigham and Mark Moormann included as much eye-opening insight as special pleading, on the path to its rousing and heartening conclusion.

I also didn’t expect a competition among pastry chefs for the French honor of  “master craftsman” to make for a riveting film either, but I certainly had enough respect for giant of direct cinema D.A. Pennebaker and his partner Chris Hegedus, to give a look to Kings of Pastry (2010, MC-69).  The film baked up more amazement and emotion, not to mention humor and suspense, out of sculptures in sugar than one could have easily imagined going in, with a small subject that revealed unsuspected depths of implication. 

A much weightier subject is addressed in Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2010, MC-78).  Gini Reticker’s film follows a peace movement among Christian and Muslim mothers, led by Leymah Gbowee, which managed to bring an end to Liberia’s civil war with the overthrow and exile of corrupt strongman Charles Taylor.  This film makes an excellent prequel to The Iron Ladies of Liberia, another good documentary which covers the subsequent election of Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson as the first woman president in Africa, and the initial efforts at reconstruction by her largely female administration. 

Also worthy of note is the second season of the Sundance Channel series, Brick City (2011), a high-toned reality show that follows Newark mayor Cory Booker as he deals with budget apocalypse and a re-election campaign.  Booker is an admirable and engaging character, a Rhodes scholar who takes on the mission of saving New Jersey’s beleaguered largest city against formidable obstacles, while maintaining some sense of mystery about his private life, if any, and his deepest motivations.  His story is intertwined with that of the police chief and various reforming gang members, as well as the entrenched opposition of native Newark or would-be radical forces.  In the current days of municipal meltdown and threatened default, these stories are important to see, and the comparison to The Wire as a portrait of a city in multiple crises is well-deserved.  Booker’s story is fascinating to follow, from the excellent stand-alone documentary Street Fight, which detailed his first, unsuccessful run for mayor, through the first season of Brick City, in which he wins and takes office for the first time.  I’m eager to see whatever’s next.

As an addendum to the Cinema Salon film club’s first series on “The Art of Documentary,” let me re-recommend F for Fake, Orson Welles’ elegantly braided exploration of art and lying; The Gleaners & I, Agnes Varda’s amusing and thoughtful exploration of the margins of economic system, and an obvious inspiration for Waste Land; and most especially, Heddy Honigmann’s  Forever, which seemed even better to me on second viewing, in its exploration of death and immortality, art and memory, through the window of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Displaced persons

The central character of Amreeka  (2009, MC-73) is as much placeless as displaced.  As she has to inform airport security, she has no country, she is Palestinian and comes from occupied territory.  Her 15-minute commute to work takes two hours because she has to go around the Wall and through checkpoints where she and her son are routinely hassled.  Her husband has left her for a younger, slimmer woman, and her son urges that since the old man’s done what he wanted, they ought to do what they want, which is move to America when their papers come through.  They go to stay with her sister in suburban Illinois, her husband a doctor whose successful practice is suddenly shunned after 9/11.  Despite two degrees and ten years experience in banking, our heroine has to take a job at White Castle, while pretending to her family that she is working in the bank next door.  Cherien Dabis knows whereof she makes her film, and while it may run through a checklist of predictable plot points, it does so with grace, charm, and wit.

Nearly witless yet sharply satiric, Four Lions  (2010, MC-68) portrays a group of Muslim young men living in England but not at home there, longing for jihad, with pratfalls at every step.  This film can only be categorized as terrorist slapstick, so be prepared to laugh as one dunderhead after another blows himself up, and if you can’t imagine laughing at such things, then pass this film by.  In one respect, Chris Morris’s film is very much like The Hangover (which I just happened to catch in passing on HBO, but did not find special in any way), in which a group of wild and crazy guys find nothing but misadventure on their path to paradise, whether it be Las Vegas or scented gardens with 77 virgins.  Given the exploits of the underwear bomber and the clown who left a carful of fertilizer in Times Square, this film may give a truer than expected portrait of the losers who turn to terrorism, but it still winds up a mixed bag, which may or may not be yours.

In Alamar  (2010, MC-77), a young boy is transported to something like paradise, above the coral reefs of Mexico.  He is the product of a brief union between an Italian mother and a Mexican guide, and is going to spend time with his father, living in a house on stilts above the water and spending his days baking in the sun on fishing boats, falling into the rhythms of an extremely elemental life, while tacitly absorbing paternal lessons in communion with nature.  Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s film is half documentary, half rhapsody, slow and stately, intimate and sensual, quiet but ultimately powerful.

I guess I was the person displaced from Around a Small Mountain (2010, MC-63) – I just didn’t get it.  Jacques Rivette’s latest falls under my category of “The New Wave gets old,” and as with Resnais’ Wild Grass, I am disinclined to follow.  Only my man Rohmer was strong till the very end.  Rivette as usual looks at the lives of performers, in this case a traveling circus in the south of France, but unusually and mercifully this film is quite short.  I’m interested enough in Jane Birkin to watch for 80 minutes to try to figure out why she left the circus 15 years ago and why she’s back now, and whether she will fall for the Italian charmer stalking her.  But I didn’t figure it out, and I didn’t really care.

I’ll squeeze one more recent film under this heading:  It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010, MC-63).  This unmemorable title suits this kind of okay movie, about a teenager who is displaced by checking himself into a mental hospital, when suicidal feelings get the better of him.  It’s a plush place where he learns some not-very-hard life lessons and meets a cute girl with just a few cosmetic scars on her wrists and face.  The whole thing is less “Boy, Interrupted” than “Boy Goes to Overnight Camp.”  Still, I watched it because I’d been impressed with the earlier films of the directorial team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Half Nelson and Sugar. They should forget catering to a wider audience, and go back to making their own stories, instead of adapting popular young adult novels.  Keir Gilchrist is ingratiating enough as the central character, Zach Galifianakis is good as the fellow crazy from whom he learns the ropes, and the rest of the cast is inoffensive in this “cuckoo’s nest lite.”  So the film won’t bore you silly or altogether betray your sense of plausibility, but you won’t remember it or its title for very long.

Never Let Me Go

Don’t let this one go by.  Mark Romanek’s adaptation of a Kazuo Ishiguro novel received some lukewarm reviews, but I’m with those who see its virtues.  Foremost among them is Carey Mulligan -- I believe I could watch the subtle movements of her kewpie-doll face for the duration and be content.  The suddenly ubiquitous Andrew Garfield also seems to be inherently interesting.  And here Keira Knightley has something within her range.  They are residents of a not quite right British boarding school some decades ago, in this strangely-retro speculative fiction of cloning to harvest organs.  There, I’ve given it away.  And will do so more by comparing this film to Gattaca in its thoughtful addressing of questions of genetic ethics.  The three characters are earlier played by a younger trio who mirror them nicely.  The film is prettily shot by and I found Rachel Portman’s music to be appropriately lugubrious and meditative.  Aside from the set-up, I leave the mystery and romance to unfold for you step by quiet step – it won’t make you happy but it will hold your attention, and give you plenty to think over afterward.  (2010, MC-69) 

Lovers discourse

Showing Eric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse (1967) to the Cinema Salon film club was one of the most agonized viewing experiences I've ever had, with its provocative aggravations hardly giving most of my audience an inviting introduction to one of my favorite directors.  Yet I could have as easily made a case for it as apologized for it, and I was glad when some of the audience spoke up in favor.  Later the same day, I watched two other of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” and confirmed that he is indeed engaging as well as persistently interesting, and now I’ve been on a binge of watching or re-watching every Rohmer film I could get my hands on.

The most excruciating scene of La Collectioneuse was certainly when the annoyingly pretentious artist Daniel persisted in mindlessly stamping his feet on the living room floor.  The character was played by a real artist named Daniel and he no doubt considered his rudeness a conceptual performance piece, as painfully prolonged as many such are.  While the discomfort of the scene might have seemed too mimetic, still one could see Rohmer doing interesting things within it, in the reactions of the other two characters, the man who smirks admiringly at this friend’s effrontery even while his own leg falls into the other’s rhythm, and the girl who determinedly moves to her own rhythm and gives a sensible if exasperated response.  The whole film is there in miniature, if you can bear to watch.

But the thing is, Rohmer is usually easy on the eyes -- like Haydée in this film -- and if you pick up his rhythm, get on his wavelength, he is endlessly and seamlessly entertaining, yet continually thought-provoking.  Like Ozu, he is a master who basically made one lifelong film, comprised of interlocking (and almost interchangeable) chapters.  So here’s my brief take on a number of those chapters.

  

The “Moral Tales” I watched to get the taste of La Collectioneuse out of my mouth were Ma Nuit Chez Maud  (1969) and Love in the Afternoon (1972).  Both were every bit as good as I remembered them to be, well establishing the Rohmer formula – a few attractive people in an attractive place, ruminating endlessly on the ambiguities of attraction.  One person is pursuing another, but is distracted from pursuit by a third.  Much rationalization -- and comic delusion of self and other – follows.  The characters are specimens we observe with sympathetic amusement. 

In My Night at Maud’s, the black & white setting is Clermont-Ferrand at Christmastime.  That’s Pascal’s hometown, and the film revolves around the question of Pascal’s Wager, as Jean-Louis Trintignant pursues his “innocent” blond dreamgirl Marie-Christine Barrault, despite his attraction to dark-haired, worldly-wise divorcee Francoise Fabian.  In Chloe in the Afternoon (as it was first released in the U.S. to avoid confusion with the Audrey Hepburn film), a stuffy Parisian businessman threatens his comfortably bourgeois marriage by taking up with an old bohemian flame.  In Claire’s Knee (1970), which I’ve seen often enough not to need my memory refreshed, the setting is summer at a Swiss lake, where an engaged diplomat forms a fixation on a blond teenager’s lovely gam.

Beatrice Romand plays another teenager, a dark frizzy-haired foil to Claire, but grows up to return as the main character in Le Beau Marriage (1981), in Rohmer’s next series, “Comedies and Proverbs” (and will return again, as is Rohmer’s habit with actresses, as the delightfully difficult middle-aged seeker for love in An Autumn Tale in 1998).  Here she’s a young woman who’s never had trouble attracting men, commuting between art studies in Paris and family home and job in the old section of Le Mans, when she decides arbitrarily to get married and suddenly encounters disappointment in her pursuit of a mate.

We return to a seaside summer in Pauline at the Beach (1983), with our first glimpse of the delightful Amanda Langlet as the 15-year-old title character, who follows the erotic escapades of her va-va-voom older cousin and begins to form her own attachments.  As usual, Rohmer manages to find humor, pathos, and complication in his bikini-clad characters.  Summer (Le Rayon Vert) (1986) features another difficult babe and Rohmer favorite, Marie Riviere, as she restlessly seeks a place to vacation and some sort of romantic companionship.  Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L’Ami de mon amie) (1988) concludes the “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, back in a fancy new suburb of Paris, where young professional women try to find a mate and sort out their love lives, as usual charmingly complicated and fondly satirical.

Then Rohmer turned to his “Tales of Four Seasons,” beginning with A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps) (1989), which follows a young Parisian philosophy teacher as she falls in with a younger girl and eventually her father, in another rondelay of hidden motive and sexual scheming.  Amanda Langlet returns in A Summer’s Tale (Conte d’été)  (1996), again wise beyond her years as she waits for a young man to make up his mind, while he vacations on the Brittany seacoast waiting for his tardy girlfriend and encountering a hot chick, emulating the choice of Paris in selecting the fairest of the three.  Scandalously unavailable in any video format, I remember An Autumn Tale (1998) most fondly of the tetralogy, for its winning reunion of Beatrice Romand and Marie Riviere, the former as a winemaker ripe for love amongst her beautiful vineyards.  I don’t remember much about A Winter’s Tale (1991), except that it delivered the reliable, though ineffable, pleasures of any Rohmer film.

I recently reviewed Rohmer’s last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2006), and then at last, I caught up with his penultimate film, Triple Agent (2004), which as a World War II spy saga seemed like an outlier in his oeuvre, but turned out to be quintessential Rohmer in its depiction of intimate deception of one’s self and the other.  Based on a real case, the film examines a White Russian general living in France, who may be collaborating with the Nazis or the Russians, but is certainly deceiving his stay-at-home Greek painter wife, in Rohmer’s usual round of conversations filled with themes of loyalty and betrayal, trust and suspicion.  Amanda Langlet reappears as the upstairs neighbor in this very interior drama.

These last two films complete another implicit cycle of Rohmer's work, which might be categorized to as historical stylizations.  However different in setting and style, each essentially recapitulates all his obsessions, of romantic complications among attractive people, usually young.  The Marquise of O (1976) adapts a Kleist novel into a beautifully chaste though passionate vision of domestic life during the Napoleonic wars.  Perceval (1978) emulates a medieval pageant, on minimally unreal sets, to retell a tale of chivalry and knighthood amongst a group of lovely modern young people, especially notable for introducing Fabrice Luchini as the title character, humorously balanced between naiveté and nobility.   The Lady and the Duke (2001) plays out an affecting story of the French Revolution from the perspective of the nobility, against green-screened period paintings of interiors and exteriors, an effective innovation in historical recreation that surprisingly has not been much emulated.

So there in capsule form is the career of one of the greatest of all filmmakers.  Dip in at any point, and enjoy!

Recent viewing

Reviews are mixed, by myself or the critics, on these assorted films from 2010 that I combine here simply because I’ve watched them in the past few weeks. 

The biggest surprise to me was Animal Kingdom (2010, MC-83), which I put in the category of Red Riding Trilogy as films that ought to be loathsome in their violence and corruption, but actually approach the pity and terror that is the point of such drama.  David Michôd’s debut crime thriller follows the disintegration of a Melbourne family of not-so-goodfellas, with their pride -- preying and preyed upon -- led by a dowdy old lioness, a seductive and deceptively sweet grandma named Smurf (believably embodied by Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver with a bleach-blond mane).  She takes in her 17-year-old grandson when her estranged daughter ODs on heroin.  He comes under the wing of his uncles, for whom armed robbery (as in The Town) is the family trade, though threatened by cops more eager for the kill than the collar.  This grimy, unglamorous revenge tragedy plays out in a sunny suburban landscape of gas stations and supermarkets, yet remains hypnotically absorbing through its twists and turns, feints and blows.  Character, even when creepy, is more important than action.  The acting is good across the board, though only Guy Pearce, as an unusually honest cop, is a familiar face.

Also worthy of note is Lebanon (2010, MC-85).  Written and directed by Samuel Maoz, this film -- like Waltz With Bashir – is a personal reminiscence of being a very raw Israeli conscript in the 1982 war in Lebanon.  The particular novelty here is that the entire film is shot from a viewpoint inside an armored vehicle, so it does for tanks what Das Boot did for submarines, evoking a claustrophobic atmosphere so dense you can smell and taste it.  In some ways the film is as formulaic as a play, as one character after another drops through the porthole for a scene or two with the four typically assorted crew members, but the gunner’s-scope view of chaotic battles and civilian devastation seems particularly potent and powerfully evokes the director’s personal experience.  Not a must-see, but worth a look if the subject interests you.

Creation (2010, MC-51) is one film I endorse more warmly than the Metacritic average.  I found Paul Bettany quite convincing as Darwin and Jon Amiel’s direction good at evoking wonderment in the face of nature and portraying a plausible struggle to write.  Bettany’s wife, Jennifer Connolly, serves as Darwin’s pious and severe wife, who dreads publication of his ideas.  Marsha West (daughter of “McNutty” on The Wire) is engaging as the deceased child whose ghost haunts and inspires Darwin.  I wouldn’t say this rises far above a good BBC television production, but it certainly held my interest and more, intellectually convincing despite some sentimental contrivance.

I part company with the critical consensus in the opposite direction on Dogtooth (2010, MC-73), a prizewinner at Cannes and nominee from Greece for Best Foreign Film.  I confess I was slow to get the point of this fable of horrific parenting by Giorgos Lanthimos, but by the time I got over its sheer weirdness, I was put off by several scenes of shocking violence, gratuitous or not (less so by the graphic sex).  So be forewarned about this story of three post-adolescent children who are kept sequestered in a gated compound, and whose isolation is enforced down to being taught nonsense meanings to words that might suggest a world outside.  You could take this as a very bleak black comedy, or you could just leave it.

For You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010, MC-51), my “meh” response pretty much matched the critical average.  I’m not sure why I keep watching Woody Allen, as he obsessively recycles his material year after year.  There’s always an intriguing cast, and a smoothly delivered veneer, but never anything new being said.  Naomi Watts made this one tolerable to watch, though Anthony Hopkins could do nothing with the hackneyed role of the old guy besotted with a young hottie, and several other familiar faces are wasted.  We follow a group of loosely-related characters for an hour and a half, and then the narrator throws up his hands and closes the proceedings abruptly.  I couldn’t believe that was it, that these desultory sketches were supposed to add up to a feature film.   

Oscar contenders

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up with all the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, and while none would be my pick over The Social Network or Winter’s Bone, most were worthy in their own right (and better than The Kids Are All Right in my book). 

My friend suffers from a family affliction, a half-ironic obsession with the Royal Family, so she was eager to see The King’s Speech  (2010, MC-88) as soon as it came out, even before its large haul of Oscar nominations.  And why not?  With Colin Firth as Bertie, destined to be George VI, and Helena Bonham Carter as the future Queen Mother, and Geoffrey Rush as the idiosyncratic speech therapist who helped the king-to-be to assume his duties as head of state, all directed by Tom Hooper, whom I’d noted for last year’s Damn United – what could go wrong?   Not much did, and I liked the film more and more as it went on, as it got past the jokey byplay featured in previews, and really deepened into a study of an unlikely friendship.  I wasn’t blown away, but was thoroughly entertained, and as moved as an anarchist can be by the personal travails of royalty.  I liked the little girl who played Elizabeth too, and thought about her growing up to become Helen Mirren in The Queen.

I’m not sure what surprised me more about True Grit (2010, MC-80) – how purely entertaining this old-fashioned Western proved to be, or how little of the Coen brothers’ quirky personalities came through?  Nonetheless it was immaculately made, with superb performances from Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon as “LeBeef”, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, the stalwart young girl who recruits the other two to track down her father’s killer.  But the true star of the film was the dialogue lifted directly from the Charles Portis novel, in an archaic diction that achieved the same unlikely self-contained believability that the harsher dialect of Deadwood did.  (I caught up with the John Wayne version on AMC, and while the Duke had his iconic portrait readymade, plastic smoothie Glenn Campbell and the Disneyesque Kim Darby are not a patch on the remake’s other pair.  How did the Coens follow the original so closely and yet make it so much hipper?) 

An even bigger surprise was Toy Story 3 (2010, MC-92), which more than overcomes the stigma of a sequel.  Like Up, this Pixar animation is fit to play with the big boys, and definitely deserves consideration as one of the best films of the year.  Andy is going away to college, and has to decide what to do with Woody, Buzz, and the rest of his long-disused toys.  The film is both hilarious and effectively tearjerking, as the toys experience a variety of possible fates -- including a garbage truck and a preschool that is not the utopia it seems at first glance -- before finding a safe haven.  The standout among the new characters is a Ken doll, who has as much surprising personality as the dog in Up, though a sinister huggy bear and a discarded baby doll also make a deep impression.  Despite being a cartoon and a sequel, this is certainly among the most powerful cinematic experiences of the year.  It made me go back and check out Toy Story 2, which I had skipped in a prejudice against films with a number at the end of the title, and found it almost equally charming and eye-popping.

Last and certainly least of Best Picture nominees (aside from Inception) is Black Swan (2010, MC-79).  Darren Aronofsky’s intense direction kept me involved till the Grand Guignol turned silly, and Natalie Portman’s performance, both as ballet dancer and crazy person, was better than I expected, but in the end I found this an empty-headed horror film, relying on shrieking chords and shock cuts instead of meaningful characterizations.  A puppet show rather than a genuine backstage drama, this film’s pretension to follow in the steps of The Red Shoes or All About Eve is totally overblown, a traducing of cinema history.

And the final nominees are...

I dutifully took in two final multiple-Oscar nominees in a self-made double feature at Beacon Cinema, both highly competent translations to the big screen of interesting real-life stories, both including in the final credits footage of the real characters behind the stories, but neither of which is likely to make my Best of 2010 list. 

You have give credit to an exuberant director like Danny Boyle for taking on the challenge of such a constricted subject as 127 Hours (MC-82).  The title refers to the time Aron Ralston spent alone in a canyon crevice with his arm caught under a huge boulder, until he did what he had to do to escape with his life.  The first major hurdle is to find an actor with whom we would want to spend extended time up-close and very personal, and one could hardly do better than James Franco.  As it happened, I went to this film immediately after catching a few minutes of him as dropout Daniel in the short-lived but immortal tv-series Freaks & Geeks – that crooked smile charming even in 1999 as a high school student (and now a graduate student at Yale and RISD, not to mention co-host of this year’s Oscar ceremony).  Boyle gets things going with a burst of kinetic exhilaration, multiple images to a pounding beat, as Aron escapes the big city on a Friday night and heads for the canyon wilderness of Utah, for a weekend of biking and hiking, and penetrating the landscape.  Until he falls down the rabbit hole.  Boyle has the opportunity to interject hallucinatory imagery, but from then on, it’s just us and Mr. Franco in very close quarters.  There’s some gore, of course, more horrific than a horror picture, but the essence of this film is still its intimacy and its ratiocination, as Aron confronts his dilemma with the limited tools at hand.

Then I watched a few minutes of the Super Bowl on the big screen -- the Beacon showing it for free -- and went back to another screening room to watch The Fighter (MC-79).  The boxing film is firmly delineated as a genre, a tight box all its own, and it’s surprising to see a director as wacked out as David O. Russell work within the small lighted ring, so indelibly inscribed by a whole range of films, out of which Raging Bull stands as the peak.  Of course, he’s got Christian Bale to go all crackhead crazy for him, as the coulda-been-a-contender, who punched his one-way ticket to palookaville with drugs, but now fitfully tries to guide his younger half-brother to the success he never reached.  Mark Wahlberg effectively plays Micky Ward, and this project is his homage to a hometown hero, the Pride of Lowell.  Unfamiliar with boxing, I wouldn’t know that for three straight years after 2000, Ward’s bouts were hailed as the fight of the year, but this film deals with the decade before, when the craziness of his family – not just his brother, but his manager mother, the formidable Melissa Leo, and a Greek chorus of seven furious sisters – drove him out of the game.  It takes the equally tough and adorably foul-mouthed barmaid Amy Adams to return him to his dream.  All involved acquit themselves well, but in the end cannot escape the boxing movie formula, however true to life it may be.  While I wouldn’t say that The Town was a better film, Affleck’s Charlestown exceeded my expectations by about as much as Wahlberg’s Lowell fell short of what I expect from director Russell, a personal favorite.

Two new documentaries

The Tillman Story.  (2010, MC-86)  The title of Amir Bar-Lev’s accomplished documentary (following My Kid Could Paint That) refers to at least three different stories:  Pat Tillman’s personal story, the story the military made up for propaganda purposes, and the story of the Tillman family’s attempt to get at the truth, and restore the integrity of their son’s life and purpose.  One strength of this film is that it doesn’t force an argument at you, but offers a many-sided portrait that holds together more and more as you think about it.  It would be easy to solicit rage around this subject, and maybe rage is an appropriate object, but even-handed contemplation offers more manifold truth.  Pat Tillman became, unwillingly, a patriotic icon when he turned his back on a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist in the Army Rangers after 9/11.  When the army literally killed him in Afghanistan, they had to make up a story of an All-American hero’s death -- as always in war, “truth is the first casualty.”  His family – mother, father, two brothers, wife – insist upon the real story of his death, as forthright and thoughtful as he had been in life.  We follow as these strands spool out and interweave, free to take sides but not forced to do so.  The final story takes shape in our minds after viewing.  Call it “fratricide” or “friendly fire,” this is a tale with powerful overtones of tragic irony. 

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.  (2010, MC-68)  Alex Gibney is among the best of polemical documentarians working today, but his latest does not come up to the standard of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; Taxi to the Dark Side; or even Casino Jack and the United States of Money, which he must have been working on at the same time as this film, which shares themes of big money and the corruption of politics.  Not that Spitzer isn’t a character of some interest, but this film is too long and diffuse, goes off in too many directions, suggesting but not proving a number of conspiratorial connections.  No doubt Spitzer made some powerful enemies, and Hank Greenburg of AIG and others parade their satisfaction at his downfall on screen.  The politicization of the Justice Department in the Bush years is well known, but if the whole case amounted to a sting, and a hit job, well then, Spitzer himself was no innocent party.  He manfully if not candidly admits to as much in interview, while also elevating himself with talk of Greek myth – hubris, Icarus, all that.  One might also suggest that there was some ironic, if not causal, connection between Spitzer’s takedown and the financial meltdown of 2008.  But then you add an inside look at the world of high-end escort services, introducing an intriguing array of characters, including one who didn’t want to appear in person so her words are replicated by an actress, and you’ve got a serious distraction.  Overall, Gibney has developed a jazzed-up, argumentative documentary style as identifiable and influential as Ken Burns in his sedate PBS manner, but this film does not get deep enough into the character of Spitzer to invest him with the weight assigned to him. 

Catfish and other fry

Your reaction to a documentary has a lot to do with the expectation of truth that you bring to it.  For me that yielded a response to Catfish (2010, MC-65) that was just the opposite of my reaction to The Cove, each documentary arriving with some question in the air about its relation between fact and artifice.  With The Cove, that skepticism was amply confirmed by the “mission impossible” vibe, so I wound up thinking the whole thing was a hoax, which maybe it wasn’t.  With Catfish, however, the approach was so modest and D-I-Y, that I granted some trust to its reality, and I did not find myself disappointed.  Perhaps some reviewers were put off by the way the film was being pitched, as a real-life thriller, and refused to be had.  But I found the whole operation sincere, if conscious of effect and aimed to a purpose.  But that purpose was not to unmask a Web imposter, but to get to the real person under the mask, and in the process make multiple points about social media, NYC vs. the Heartland, as well as art in the construction of identity and personality.  Ariel Schulman, with Henry Joost, set out to make a film about his brother Nev’s internet romance with not just a young woman but her whole family out in Upper Michigan, and his eventual quest to meet them in person.  To my mind, the DVD extra with the three of them sitting together and answering questions about the film more than confirms their genuine geniality, and the essential honesty and good will of the project.  See for yourself, but for me this is the real deal.

Not so real but fun just the same was I Love You, Man (2009, MC-70), which one reviewer accurately described as the best Judd Apatow film that Judd Apatow had nothing to do with.  Apatow regulars Paul Rudd and Jason Segel are, however, at the heart of this bromance, and writer-director John Hamburg does mix in a good measure of psychological truth along with the gross-out humor, so this tickles the funny bone without insulting the brain.

In an odd coupling, even odder than Paul and Jason, I have to mention another film about the bond between men.  Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novocento) (1976) follows the lives of two boys born on the same day in 1900, who grow up to be Robert DeNiro as the padrone, and Gerard Depardieu as the peasant communist, whose lifelong friendship and antagonism comes to a head on Liberation Day in 1945, with the overthrow of evil Fascist Donald Sutherland, whose leering performance typifies this film’s cartoonish approach to the politics of the first half of the 20^th century.  Even after I decided against showing this film in a peasant-themed series I am doing at the Clark next summer, as tie-in to a Pissarro exhibition, I persisted through its original 5 ½ hour length, for the operatic elements that overcame a lot of awkwardness.  I watched it dubbed in English to get the real voice of DeNiro and the other American actors, but perhaps the Italian would have seemed less stilted.  Burt Lancaster wanders in from Visconti’s Leopard, along with many other borrowings from that master, but this film’s ambition of depicting brotherhood with historical sweep would eventually be achieved much more fully in a later Italian epic, The Best of Youth.