Rattling them off

This is a year-end sort-through of a mixed grab-bag of films I’ve been watching lately.

The high point of recent viewing has been the final two films in my “Crossing Channels” film series at the Clark. Topsy-Turvy (1999) more than held up on second viewing, in my mind confirming Mike Leigh as one of the very best directors working today. This film about Gilbert & Sullivan and the creation of “The Mikado” clicks on so many levels -- in period recreation, in depiction of artistic collaboration and process, in rounded characters and swift storytelling, and finally as musical comedy. At the time it seemed a departure from Leigh’s kitchen sink realism, but now seems a precursor to Vera Drake in its deep-down portrayal of an historical era. (My rating of *9* would fall right in line with its Metacritic score of 90.)

And then there was A Hard Day’s Night (1964) -- amazing how fresh the Beatles still seem; and yet more amazing that their heyday is now forty years past. Richard Lester’s film brilliantly captures the anarchic energy that burst on the scene back then. How could you not come out of this film with a smile on your face and a bounce in your step? As playful as the film is, there is a genuine documentary quality in its depiction of a cultural phenomenon.

In happenstance, I got a good look at the scene onto which the Beatles burst, by catching up with The Entertainer (1960) again after some decades, and it really filled in the gap in British musical hall history between Gilbert & Sullivan and the Beatles. The Entertainer is hardly entertaining but remains powerful, distinguished by its pedigree and its grim authenticity. Set in seedy postwar Brighton and scripted by “last angry man” John Osborne, directed by Tony Richardson, the film reeks of the decline of Empire before the resurgent empire of Pop. Laurence Olivier is Archie Rice, last in a line of song & dance men, odious but understandably so. Joan Plowright plays his daughter (though soon to be his wife in real life), and his sons are Alan Bates and Albert Finney. His father is Roger Livesey (best known as Colonel Blimp and other characters for Powell & Pressburger.) I have to say, I “get” Archie more now than I did as a young man thirty-odd years ago.

The only other film I’ve watched lately that approaches classic status is The Double Life of Veronique (1991). This film is fascinating as Kieslowski’s transition point between Dekalog and Trois Couleurs, but it doesn’t hold up as well as the Polish ten-episode series or the French tri-color. It does boast the sublimely beautiful Irene Jacob in the double role of Polish and French girls named Veronica, and it does weave the Kieslowskian spell of mystery, if not the authentic spirituality he reaches elsewhere, so it is well worth seeing or re-seeing, but less worth trying to make sense of.

Having watched a Peter Bogdanovich documentary on John Ford, I realized there was one of “the Calvary trilogy” I’d never seen, so I TiVo’d Rio Grande (1950) when it appeared on TCM. I plan to do a John Ford series when the Clark has a Frederic Remington exhibition, but this probably won’t make the cut. It’s a sequel to Fort Apache, in that John Wayne plays the same character, aged from Captain to Colonel. For the first of four times, he is paired with Maureen O’Hara, though her red hair does not blaze in b&w the way it will in The Quiet Man. We do get Ford’s macho Irish sentimentality, but more importantly the indelible myths of the American West. What this film really does is take one back to the Fifties when the whole Western mythos loomed so large in the culture, ruling both movies and tv. Robert Altman’s exquisite McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) definitively debunked that mythos, and the only remnant on tv is the decidedly post-modern Deadwood, whose down-and-dirty poetic raunch makes Ford’s martial pieties almost laughable.

I watched three more films from Holland, but none will get into my “NL” film series next summer as part of a Berkshire-wide celebration of Dutch culture. What can I say -- those Dutch are way too kinky for my staid audience at the Clark. Paul Verhoeven’s The Fourth Man (1983) is a David-Lynchian mind-bender, about an alcoholic bisexual novelist falling into the clutches of a lusty black-widowish hairdresser hawking Delilah hair care products. Artful and funny at its best, the film finally settles for just plain weird. His Turkish Delight (1973) is still the highest grossing film in the Netherlands ever, but what it amounts to is an X-rated Love Story, wild and crazy love in a miniskirt dying young. Then, by a director who shall remain nameless since it’s no one you’ve heard of or ever will, Godforsaken (2003) comes across as lesser Scorsese with a Dutch accent, as a teenager slides from aspiring major league baseball player to minor league gangster, having fallen under the spell of a stone cold crazy who leads him on a downward spiral. This is rough stuff, that keeps its heart hidden and not on its sleeve, but does have an off-beat fascination.

Go Further (2004) and Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) are two heart-in-the-right-place arguments that come across as illustrated lectures, rather than demonstrating the searching quality of authentic documentaries. The first follows Woody Harrelson on a bike trip down the west coast, stopping at colleges -- or wherever people will listen -- about organic food and natural living. With the obligatory stop in Oregon for his bus to meet Ken Kesey’s in the field to which it has retired, Woody is here to say that the Sixties never died. I am sympathetic both to him and his message, but the whole deal smacks of celebrity promotion, whatever the cause. The inquest into the electric car presents itself as a trial of the usual suspects -- oil and auto industries, the Bush administration -- and predictably finds them guilty. It’s an exemplary case in many ways, but would have been better with a genuine sense of discovery. There are some great characters and stories here, but only snippets of testimony are advanced. There is, for example, one young woman who had been a GM salesperson for the EV1 and had become so convinced of the worth of what she was selling, that she became an anti-GM activist when the company started recalling all the cars and shredding them. We only piece her story together by the end, after a scattering of assertions and anecdotes, when we see that she is now a spokesperson for Plug In America. That’s of questionable candor, but also questionable art, because her personal journey would clearly engage the viewer’s interest. What we get instead is a random sampling of advocates, again heavy on the celebrities, who tend to come off as greener-than-thou. Still, this is a well-told story that needed to be told.

If you want to know what I mean by “the searching quality of authentic documentaries,” you need look no further than Werner Herzog, who is turning them out at an amazing rate. Grizzly Man was the first to attract widespread interest, but it is definitely worthwhile is go back and catch up with his prolific work over the past decade. I was aware of My Best Fiend (1999), but didn’t seek it out since I was not that interested in Klaus Kinski, but this film is nothing like a celebrity profile, rather a personal exploration of the psyche of a creative madman, in a sense disguised autobiography, as all Herzog’s films are. “Personal journey” may be an overworked phrase, but this is that, in multiple ways. Werner invariably asks us to forego the usual signposts and follow him on faith, and he usually takes us to astounding places.

While studios throw their Oscar-hopefuls into theaters in an end of the year rush, films released earlier in the year have their award chances flogged by DVD releases. I caught up with two presumed crowd-pleasers in the past week. The Devil Wears Prada delivered pretty much as advertised, as an upsized episode of Sex and the City, with the bonus of the ever-reliable Meryl Streep as the imperious fashion arbiter. Whether or not she does add to her record number of nominations with this film, in combination with this year’s Prairie Home Companion she definitely reminds us that she is perennially the “best actress.” The film itself is glossy and well put together. Ann Hathaway demonstrates she can do the Princess Diaries shtick without making one gag; Stanley Tucci is excellent in a supporting role; and Emily Blunt shows that My Summer of Love was no fluke. If you simply look, and decline to think very much, this movie is entertaining to watch. *6-* (MC-62.)

On the other hand, the appeal of Little Miss Sunshine is lost on me. I just don’t get it, don’t find it funny. Maybe in a raucous, appreciative audience, I would have laughed along with the crowd, but on my own I watched in stony silence. The dysfunctional-family-on-a-road-trip shenanigans struck me as weary pranks without reference to truth of character or situation. Some more than competent performers -- Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear, Alan Alda -- disguised the emptiness of the proceedings. It will be a sad commentary if this film carries the indie banner into the award season. Comparisons to You Can Count on Me are an insult not just to that fine film but to our intelligence. Studio-driven or no, this is a piece of product every bit as much as Prada, one may be glossy and one may be tatty, but both are machine made, rather than crafted by creative individuals. (My grudging *5+* belies the MC score of 80.)

On the third hand, nobody could claim The Puffy Chair is not the product of independent individuals. For better or worse, the Duplass brothers are completely responsible, as well as their parents, who produced and appear in the film. Mark stars in tandem with his girlfriend, Kathryn Aselton, while Jay works the camera, from a script they wrote together, clever in an inarticulate sort of way. Another road trip, but on this one no would-be life lessons are learned. This is an anti-romantic comedy -- we cheer as the couple breaks up before the final clinch. That girl ought to have known she had no future with a guy who addressed her as “dude.” Some gross implausibilities are woven into the ostensibly naturalistic flow of the narrative, but there is much more deadpan reality than L.M.S. can muster. (The MC score of 73 represents the usual affirmative action for indies, but I’m prepared to advance this promising debut a congratulatory *6*.)

All Hail "The Wire"

You probably won’t have heard it here first, but you will hear it from me with emphasis: The Wire. Is. The. Best. TV-series. Ever!

With the fourth season (out of five projected) just completed, I come not to bury The Wire but to praise it; not to recapitulate the story to date but to urge newbies to give it a try. There is an obsessive community of online partisans of the HBO show, who have discussed every character, theme, and episode at length. Check out Salon or Slate, the blogs House Next Door or Heaven and Here, or all the links therefrom, and you can find out anything you want to know about the show.

I’m also not the first to compare it to a Dickens novel, though as someone who took his senior honors seminar on the novels of Dickens, I make the comparison with some circumspection but no trepidation. The Wire is a fully-realized portrait of Baltimore, much as Bleak House is of London (and while I’m at it, let me also urge the recent BBC production of Bleak House as emphatically must-see TV on DVD.) And now we’ll be impatiently anticipating the fifth season, much as American audiences waited at the dock for the arrival from England of the latest serial installment of Dickens, to find out whether Little Nell lives or dies, or in this case, Omar and Bubbs.

The Wire is the ultimate fruition of a decades-long collaboration between David Simon and Ed Burns. Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter and Burns was a police detective who became a primary source. Homicide begat The Corner, which begat The Wire. Simon first wrote the book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which was developed by Baltimore-based director Barry Levinson into a well-regarded network tv series that ran for seven seasons. Then Simon and Burns together wrote The Corner, a look at the street-level drug trade from the perspective of a family destroyed by drug use, which was made into an Emmy-winning six-hour miniseries on HBO, directed by Charles Dutton.

With that track record, Simon and Burns were able to develop their own show for HBO, and that creative control raised their work to a sublime level. And what a creative team they assembled -- a company of actors you probably never heard of, who indelibly inhabit their characters without a false note in the whole consort -- a rotation of directors with feature film experience -- and a stable of writers, with such thoroughbreds as Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos!

But Simon and Burns lead the mission -- to tell nothing but the truth and the whole truth, and to do it in an uncompromising way, too smart to be dumbed down. Not just about the drug trade or the police, but about all the institutions of the city -- politics, schools, unions. So if you watch television to put your mind to sleep, or at least on automatic pilot, then stay off The Wire. On so many levels you will have to work to understand it -- the language, the plot, the system, the implications.

The Wire has to be “read” with all the concentration and persistence that you would bring to a classic novel. It’s not made up of tidy episodes on which you can drop in at random. You really nead to start at Chapter 1 and work your way through. Seasons 1-3 are now available on DVD, from Netflix or a high-quality video store. You might be able to catch up with a re-run of Season 4 on HBO. And then you’ll be with the rest of us, waiting on the dock for our ship to come in, the one with the fifth and final season in its hold.

Of course, you can bide your time, by immediately going back to watch from the beginning again, because I can assure you, you didn’t get it all the first time through. I can’t imagine a show with greater repeatability, you’ll learn much more on each viewing. Oh sure, you might say, I’ve got 60-odd hours to devote to a TV show, then turn around and do it all over again. Well, time is a precious commodity, but The Wire rewards every hour devoted to it.

It borrows the long-form narrative attraction of the soap opera or telenovela -- you live with these characters long enough to become intimately attached. It has the immemorial appeal of tales of gangsters and police. But it comes out of a tradition of reportorial accuracy and community commitment, leavened by intelligent, skeptical analysis, that carries it far beyond the canny lure of its storytelling. And oh yeah -- it’s funny as hell.

I couldn’t get into character or plot without going on forever, so I’ll conclude this urgent recommendation with the briefest overview for what you’ll be getting yourself into if you follow my advice. Season 1 is about a group of Baltimore poe-lease getting up on “the wire” to infiltrate a gang and bring down a pair of drug lords. Each organization is shown from top to bottom, with parallel dynamics. Season 2 shifts to the port and, before the Dubai Port World uproar, really brought home the reality of container shipping. Season 3 is in essence a rematch of the first, but infinitely ramified, with more serious attention to civic issues than a dozen op-ed pages. Season 4 reflects Ed Burns’ personal journey from the police to the schools -- after 20 years as a detective he became a teacher -- with focus on four middle-schoolers and how they might drift into “the game,” in parallel with the ripped-from-the-headlines story of a mayoralty race in Bodymore, Murderland.

But over all is the presiding genius of David Simon, who not only writes and produces but even shows up in online discussions to clarify and amplify points of discussion or controversy.

Demotic brilliance. That’s the salient characteristic of The Wire -- speaking of the people in the language of the people, and doing it with glittering intelligence. Telling hard lessons in civic engagement, clothed in emotive storytelling -- you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll quake in your boots, but most of all -- you’ll think.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Those Romanians, what a bunch of cards! This “comedy” follows a sixtyish man for the eight hours between the time he calls an ambulance for the headaches and vomiting he is experiencing, and his death as he lies naked on a hospital gurney, waiting for neurosurgery at the fourth hospital he has visited in the course of an infernal night (not for nothing is his first name “Dante” to go with the suggestion of “Lazarus” in his last.) He is escorted through this hell of medical indifference by an ambulance attendant, fiftyish but flame-haired, initially impatient but finally the helpless old man’s only humane advocate. The film unfolds in what feels like real time, as an unholy mash-up of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Hospital and a low-energy E.R. in Bucharest. The 38-year-old director Cristi Puiu cites Rohmer as another influence, and this film is certainly talk-talk-talk. Frankly, it took me three evenings to get through this Death, so I can hardly join in the chorus of raves it has received. It’s not purely a matter of art house masochism (e.g., who knew so many Romanian doctors were beautiful young babes?), but if you demand entertainment from your movies, this is not for you. What humor there is, is black and deadpan. The action -- or inaction -- is artfully choreographed, with handheld camerawork that makes the most of the low budget, and with economical and revealing dialogue and characterization, but loitering in hospitals through the night at death’s door is not my idea of fun. (2005, dvd, n.) *NR* (MC-84.)

Dutch treats?

Berkshire arts organizations are collaborating on a joint program for next summer, to celebrate Dutch culture, so I decided to look at films from the Netherlands for a possible series at the Clark. Never aware of Holland as a hotbed of cinema, I started with two of the the best reviewed I could find.

Twin Sisters (De Tweeling.) Though this is basically Beaches-with-Nazis, I was strangely tolerant of its heart-tugging. I have not in fact seen Beaches, but it’s rather legendary as a women’s relationship weepie based on a bestselling novel, which is certainly the quality that got this film Miramax distribution and an Oscar nom for best foreign film. It begins in 1926 when the two sisters are peremptorily separated at their father’s funeral, one to a wealthy Dutch aunt, one to a dirtbag German Catholic uncle. The film weaves together their separate journeys through life and intermittent reunions, played by three pairs of actresses at different ages, with the young women in the middle being attractive enough to hold the whole thing together. Now this is unabashed melodrama, so I was also tolerant of the music, which was appropriately Germanic and operatic. Through the decades of the sometimes creaky plot, the sisters’ relationship becomes interestingly emblematic of that between Holland and Germany, close but antithetical, distant but primordial. Not a great film by any means, but I wouldn’t rule it out of a potential series. (2002, dvd, n.)

Soldier of Orange. Paul Verhoeven is the only Dutch director that I have ever heard of, because he came to America for Robocop and went on to a Hollywood blockbuster career. This film also explores the relationship between Holland and Germany through the crucible of World War II. It’s based on the memoir of an aristocratic young student who becomes involved in the Resistance, and eventually returns from service as spy and RAF bomber as an aide to Queen Wilhelmina. The film begins in 1938 with a hazing ritual for freshman, out of which six young men become friends, with each of them typifying a different relationship to the Germans when the war comes. Rutger Hauer is actually quite nuanced as the lead character, and Jeroen Krabbe is also good as his best friend, making this a character study as well as a war thriller, not to mention Verhoeven’s usual focus on sex. I will check out others of his Dutch films, but wouldn’t mind showing this. (1977, dvd, n.)

Two films not worth blogging

John Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979, Sund/T, n.) I’d been meaning to see for a long time, for any light it might shed on my own personal pre-history, as the child of an English warbride. Trouble was, way too much light was shed; instead of being lit like Vera Drake for example, whatever effort was made at period restoration was drowned in studio wattage. And the music! In the hands of a Douglas Sirk, melodrama can really appeal to me. But when you just ladle on the strings to goose emotions that aren’t there, it’s oh-so-icky. A period soundtrack might have worked, but this is just orchestral drygoods, sold by the yard. So -- gesamtkunstwerk okay, but otherwise be very abstemious with musical cues that can’t be rationalized as live sound. And the formulaic, sentimental storytelling! How can a telegraphed punch take so long to land. And to tell you the truth, Richard Gere and Lisa Eichhorn did not remind me much of me mum and dad. Gere was a sergeant warming up to be “an officer and a gentleman”; Eichhorn was lovely but not convincingly British. In a parallel story, the always enchanting Vanessa Redgrave is involved with an American air force officer, played unappealingly by William Devane, who does not borrow charm from his frequent JFK impersonations. But I have to admit I only fast-forwarded though a couple of the most ludicrous moments.

Then I watched The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978, dvd, n.) because Time Regained had led me to more Raul Ruiz and this seemed to have potential for future showing at Clark. Maybe so, but someone else will have to second the nomination. This film may be too smart for me. Is it a fascinating critical analysis of a fictional painter, or a parody of fatuous intellectualization? Or both? And how do you tell? Whatever -- it’s very French (though Ruiz became Parisian as a refugee from the Allende coup in Chile.) Six paintings are all the work that is left of a student of Gerome, whose career had been ruined by scandal after one Salon exhibition from which he was forced to withdrawn. An obsessed collector tries to analyze and recreate the scandal, by literally walking through the paintings as tableaux vivants, hypothesizing the missing painting that will explain all the rest. Though I have neither read the book nor seen the film of The Da Vinci Code, Ruiz’s film may come across as a highbrow precursor, in unpacking the esoteric mysteries of painting. Who knows? It’s just the prejudice of an old philosophy student, but I get skeptical the minute I hear the name Nietzsche. Still, this Hypothesis is undeniably well-crafted.

The Queen

There are plenty of Oscar hopefuls I haven’t seen yet, but if there is a better candidate for Best Picture, then this will be a very good year. Helen Mirren is a likely shoo-in as Best Actress, to get an Oscar for portraying Elizabeth II hard upon winning an Emmy for playing Elizabeth I in the HBO miniseries. Heck, she deserves the award just for the way she walks her dogs. Overall, her performance goes well beyond convincing, to completely empathetic. You know just what the old mum (that’s how ma’am is pronounced, not to rhyme with ham, and be sure you remember that in her presence) is feeling, but more amazingly -- you care. The real surprise, though, is just how good a film director Stephen Frears has mounted around her, based on a canny script by Peter Morgan. Personally I was utterly indifferent to the death of Princess Di back in ’97 -- I figured she just had gone to a better place, where she could date Elvis and double with Marilyn and James Dean. But this film uses the occasion for a continuously interesting, witty, and ultimately moving exploration of monarchy and modernity, politics and media, tradition and family dynamics. Michael Sheen is marvelous as Tony Blair, poignantly contrasting his eager early time in power with his current Iraq-scarred endgame. The rest of the cast is impeccable as well. This intimate recreation of a single critical week in recent British history is convincing and suggestive, well-judged in every respect. Without going into further descriptive detail, I urge you to see it for yourself and let its delightful surprises unfold for you, and its tendrils of implication ramify. (2006, Images, n.) *9* (MC-91.)

Street Fight

This stirring and provocative documentary follows the 2002 mayoral election in Newark, NJ. No film is a one-man-job, but Marshall Curry deserves all credit for this, and deserved his Oscar nomination for best documentary feature last year. Basically just him and his little DV camera following the story for more than a year, then spending another year in a closet with his editing computer, cutting 200 hours of shooting to less than two. The DVD arrives with a timely update on results from the subsequent 2006 election, and one of the producers of the film turns out to be Netflix. This little package portends big changes in the business of film production and distribution. And the film is a pleasure to watch. We mainly follow insurgent Cory Booker, sort of a younger and paler Barack Obama -- went to Stanford on a football scholarship, Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law grad -- as he mounts a campaign against the entrenched mayor, Sharp James, who became a political force after the Newark riots in ’67, then spent 16 years on the City Council and 16 more as mayor, the firebrand become machine boss. I first heard about this film on a Wire discussion website, and it offers instructive comparison with the Carcetti vs. Royce campaign for mayor of Baltimore in that superlative HBO series. Street Fight is a heartening parable of democracy at work, both in its subject and the means of its making, even when the reality depicted is quite disheartening. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-88.)

In the same vein, the PBS “Independent Lens” doc Two Square Miles depicts a grassroots civic campaign to keep an immense cement plant from being built by a Swiss conglomerate in nearby Hudson, NY, on the banks of the river that spawned a whole school of art. Again, both the movement and the movie are about democratic empowerment. It’s a messy process, but it works for us. But you can see how hard it would be to export the mechanics to a place where democracy has not been long enshrined as a cultural ideal.

Filling in the gaps

Amidst the comings and goings of the holiday season, I seem to be watching movies to fill various gaps, rather than devoting concerted concentration to cin-e-mah, so this “salon” will be a chatty conversation.

Not to say that I haven’t been watching some very good things lately. After seeing 49 Up, I went back and watched the first three episodes, which I had never seen, having come into Michael Apted’s engrossing documentary series at 28 Up. It doesn’t hurt to watch them out of sequence, though the revelations of time will be relative, strike you differently. The whole thing is a spiral you can enter at any point. Cumulatively, this is certainly one of the greatest films of all time, and I will be pitching the Clark to show the entire series over the course of six weekly screenings.

One evening I happened not to have any Netflix disks on hand, so out of a choice offered by a companion the group decided on Prime, a title as unmemorable and inconsequential as the movie itself, which came out a year or so ago and sank without a trace. This so-so rom-com features an amusing turn by Meryl Streep as a Jewish mother/therapist, whose boychik has fallen for an older shiksa, who just happens to be one of her patients, Uma Thurman. These ladies are always pleasant to watch, but I am forgetting the name of the writer-director, not to hold this film against him in the future. People who want to like this might reference Woody Allen -- maybe, but only the sapless Woodys.

Another fill-in from the local library was Gates of Heaven (1978). I’m a big enough fan of Errol Morris to give this early film another look, but it certainly did not earn its cover blurb from Roger Ebert as one of the ten best films -- I think but can hardly believe he said -- “of all time.” I can tick off three better from Morris himself, and maybe more: Thin Blue Line; The Fog of War; Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control. This film about pet cemeteries certainly embodies some of Morris’s persistent obsessions, and his method of subverting the ostensible subject of his documentary, but he does that more significantly with Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. Anyway, Gates of Heaven is cruelly funny in its way, and has plenty to say about family dynamics and the domestication of death. But I wouldn’t want to oversell it.

Another gap was filled when one of the visiting scholars at the Clark picked Next of Kin for the Fellow’s Favorite film series. I had somehow missed Atom Egoyan’s first film, even when I picked him for my own series last year: “10 Under 50: Young Directors to Watch.” In Next of Kin (1984), the 23-year-old announces most of themes and obsessions that will infuse his films over the next two decades, with peaks in Exotica and Ararat and the only real misfire in his latest, Where the Truth Lies. This first film is more than promising but less than revelatory.

On a Sunday evening with no news to watch during dinner, I channel-surfed to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and since my companion had not seen it yet, we watched to the end. With this and the American version of The Office, which I’ve never watched because I’m too attached to the Ricky Gervais original, Steve Carrell has sprung from the Daily Show to wide recognition, but I want to give props to writer-director Judd Apatow for making this painfully funny and not-too-painfully true film, in the wake of the great but short-lived tv series, Freaks & Geeks, which I urge you to view on DVD.

And speaking of great tv series, I am re-viewing the first season of The Wire on DVD, even as I wait impatiently for the final weekly episodes of season four on HBO. After next week’s climax I will write more about this absolute must-see. I remain a rabid partisan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and renew my enthusiasm whenever I happen to revisit an episode, but next to The Wire I gotta admit it’s just kid stuff. We are privileged to be witnessing a work in progress that transcends media and genre, what can only be described as a 66-hour documentary novel on film, a profile of a city (Bodymore, Murderland) and its institutions, and the people who work within and against the rules. It’s informative and intense, brilliantly scripted and acted; a visual, aural, and intellectual workout. You feel me? Ah be back at you, mos’ def.

Wordplay

After Spellbound and Word Wars, this documentary might seem redundant and derivative, but in the viewing actually comes across as fresh and lively. A live crossword competition seems unlikely from the get-go, and nothing new after similar sagas about spelling bees and Scrabble games, but director Patrick Creadon and his mostly-family team of filmmakers have used music and graphics and celebrity interviews to liven up the proceedings. Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart and other crossword enthusiasts are crosscut with crossword constructors and NYT editor Will Shortz to give a rounded (or foursquare) picture of a benign obsession. And somehow they manage to jazz up this epic confrontation of nerds with Wide World of Sports pizzazz in a way that actually draws the viewer into the contest of a group who are not all that exciting up close and personal. Afterwords [sic], I had to grab the Sunday Times magazine and take a shot at the puzzle. After spending nearly the running time of the movie in cogitation, I had it just about half filled in. Oh well, I’m never going to play big league baseball or basketball either. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-73.)

49 Up

This is the latest installment of a supreme masterwork of the documentary form. In 1963, Michael Apted was a 22-year old research assistant on a 20-minute segment for a news program on British television, which profiled a cross-section of 7-year-old English children to study the differences in class and expectation amongst them. Every 7 years since, he has gone back to offer an updated profile of each still willing to participate, now 13 of them. There is breadth in the range of personality and situation, and depth in the passage of time. Each episode recapitulates each biography, and the moving snapshots of individuals at regular intervals of their lives is sufficient to elicit fascination. But Apted is a canny filmmaker, with first-rate features such as Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist to his credit, and his innovation in this episode is to bring his presence if not his image into the picture. The subjects sometimes address him directly as “Mike” and allude to their shared history, and especially the toll that participation in the project has entailed. The slightly more relaxed approach probably has to do with shooting on digital video instead of film, allowing footage and subjects to unwind. The project itself is a widening gyre, and you can enter at any point. All episodes are now on DVD, and there’s certainly an advantage in living the subjects’ lives with them as they unfold, but don’t be put off by the prospect of coming in on the middle or even working backward from the latest. So if you don’t yet know Tony or Neil or Suzy or the rest, make their acquaintance however you can, and experience the archetypal flow of life from childhood to adulthood and beyond. (2006, dvd, n.) *8* (for this installment; *10* for whole series.) (MC-84.)

I should be embarassed to admit that my knowledge of Stephen Sondheim pretty much begins and ends with West Side Story, so I am certainly late to the party in acknowledging what an amazing lyricist he is. For my “Crossing Channels: Art and Music into Film” series at the Clark, I screened the television recording of his original cast Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985. Uncharacteristically I’d only seen a bit of it beforehand, but put it on the schedule since it fit the themes of the series so perfectly. Though frankly no fan of theater in any manifestation, I was blown away by this record of a performance. The staging was impressive, Bernadette Peters was outstanding and Mandy Patinkin was more tolerable than I expected, but the real revelation was in Sondheim’s lyrics, so sophisticated, so humorous, so profound.

The Comfort of Strangers

Aside from his notable scripts for Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ), I was a big fan of Paul Schrader’s first directorial effort, Blue Collar, and have followed his career thereafter, with particular notice of Hardcore, Mishima, Patty Hearst, Light Sleeper, and Affliction. In The Comfort of Strangers, he works from a script by Harold Pinter adapted from a novel by Ian McEwen, starring Natasha Richardson (intriguingly reminiscent of her mother -- Vanessa Redgrave), Rupert Everett, Christopher Walken, and Helen Mirren, with the exquisitely photographed setting of Venice. So how do all these elements of quality add up to so bad a film? And why do so many of the Fellow’s Favorite films selected by visiting art scholars at the Clark turn out to be dis-favorites of mine? Rhetorical questions I don’t intend to answer. Suffice it to say that this is a film you will love or you will hate, and I incline toward the latter. (1990, dvd@cai, n.) *4*

Children of the Century

This bodice-ripper from Diane Kurys about the tempestuous romance between George Sand and Alfred de Musset features some very fine bodices but adds up to a tempest in a teapot (or glass of absinthe, as the case may be.) As Sand, Juliette Binoche is not as lively as Judy Davis was in Impromptu, and Benoit Magimel, the real-life father of her children, is odious and impenetrable as Musset. Oh sure, the prolonged, systematic derangement of the senses may have been all the rage in 1830s France, but this romance doesn’t make much sense at all. Lovely to look at, however, and something I had to vet as possible to program at the Clark sometime (Delacroix is a minor character), this illustration of the lives of classic authors was as lost on me as the authors themselves. It’s not as tiresome as Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud in Total Eclipse, but not nearly as engaging as the portrayal of Coleridge and Wordsworth, two Romantic poets I actually care about, in Pandaemonium. (1999, dvd, r.) *5+*

Time Regained

To tell the truth, I never got more than a hundred pages into Proust, so I am not one to judge the adequacy of Raoul Ruiz’s adaptation of the final volume. (Nor have I seen any of his other films.) Certainly it would help to have the backstory to keep the characters straight, but the merit of the film is that it stands on its own, with its visualization of time transformed from a line into a Moebius strip -- twisting, turning, doubling back on itself. Ignorance may even be a help in staying with it -- I may not know Odette but I sure recognize Catherine Deneuve; I may not know Gilberte but am quite familiar with Emmanuelle Beart. And John Malkovich as Baron Charlus puts me on home terrain. This is a movie to go with the flow, rather than try to follow. It put me in mind of The Russian Ark, for its ceaseless, searching round of upper class affairs, but I found it much easier to stay with than that long single shot set in the Hermitage. Here I was struck by the surrealism of tracking shots, where not just the camera moved but the objects themselves, in an effective visual metaphor for the flux of time and memory. The presence (and absence) of World War I reverberated with two of my absolutely favorite films, Jules and Jim and The Grand Illusion. So all in all, I had no problem sitting through 162 minutes of elusive and allusive beauty. (1999, dvd, n.) *7*

They All Laughed

Not too much, they didn’t. Meant to be priapic, this would-be romantic comedy winds up flaccid. I rather like Peter Bogdanovich, and I can see why this is his favorite of all his films -- it’s practically a home movie -- but it will not be anyone else’s favorite. I had more tolerance for this film because I happened to watch the dvd extra interview between him and Wes Anderson beforehand, and thus had the backstory to a film that doesn’t have much story at all. So I knew Ben Gazzarra and Audrey Hepburn were actually having an affair, as were Dorothy Stratton and Bogdanovich, who is impersonated by John Ritter. The long-haired hippie who is fellow detective to the other two guys was actually the producer of the film, and created his own patter. Perhaps the most vivid character in the film is the city of New York, and the caught-on-the-fly footage on the streets of the city is the best part of the movie. It’s the staged moments that seem surprisingly awkward, and the sound design is notably amateurish. Dorothy is authentically lovely as a young, golden dream, but the film’s comedy is shadowed by the fact that the jealous husband, glimpsed only through the windows of their apartment, in real life wound up killing her. (See Star 80.) And Audrey is authentically lovely as a middle-aged matron (her actual 20-year-old son plays vapid foil to several young women), but whatever she had going on with Ben, it doesn’t come across the screen. Other young lovelies bounce around the film, but nothing adds up or has any narrative drive. (1981, dvd, n.) *5+*

Though much too little is made of her in one of her very last films, it was neat to see Audrey in her 50s the day after seeing how she was in the ’50s. I showed Funny Face (1957) as part of my “Crossing Channels: Art & Music into Film” film series at the Clark, and she was delightful as the bookstore clerk turned high-fashion model. Fred Astaire was also good as the Richard Avedon/Pygmalion character who discovers her, and then woos her. He can still hoof it for an old guy, but makes a bit of a queasy match for our young Audrey. The film procedes with a marvelous energy -- not least in Kay Thompson as the Vogueish magazine editor -- which peters out into nonsensical complications and a repetitious resolution. Stanley Donen’s direction begins as a swirl of color and movement, including a whirlwind travelogue of Paris, but flaws start to accumulate toward the end, so the final effect is less than euphoric, despite the charm on view.

The Road to Guantanamo

The prolific Michael Winterbottom cements his claim as director of the year, by offering this important semi-documentary just months after releasing the delightfully convoluted Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. This film includes its own fearless (or heedless) convolutions. Without advance preparation, it takes the viewer a while to figure out that we are alternating after-the-fact talking-head interviews of three Muslim young men, with rough-and-ready footage of their version of events being enacted by four others, who don’t clearly match up, and then actual news footage of events in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. We take at face value -- literally -- the claim that the British Muslim boys were in effect on a pre-nuptial lark when they crossed over from Pakistan to Afghanistan and then got sucked into events, which eventually landed them in Guantanamo. Frankly this film is preaching to the choir, when it shows how dehumanizing treatment debases captive and captor alike. It does not reenact Abu Ghraib-like abuses, but shows how the norm of treatment, once the Geneva conventions are thrown away, is both brutalizing and unproductive. When the Tipton Three were released from Guantanamo after two years of incarceration, they were held for less than a day by British police, since the alibi for why it couldn’t have been them, consorting with Mohammed Atta as alleged, was confirmed by their former probation officers. Painful viewing, but a must-see -- not the whole story, but a realistic perspective. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-64.)

Prairie Home Companion

Like the children of Lake Wobegon, all the participants in this film are “above average,” led by a pair of genial old masters, writer and performer Garrison Keillor and director Robert Altman. Meryl Streep is way above average and makes a delightful pair with Lily Tomlin as the gospel-singing Johnson Sisters. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are stupidly but ingratiatingly hilarious as a pair of singing cowboys. Kevin Kline is Guy Noir, private eye become security guard, and the likes of Virginia Madsen, Lindsay Lohan, and Tommy Lee Jones fill in the gaps. Keillor’s regular radio troupe appears as well, and it’s fun to put faces to pleasantly familiar voices. The backstage story is nugatory, but all the performances are enjoyable. Everybody seems to be having a good time, and I did too. This is not Nashville, but I’m the heretical Altman fan who likes this St. Paul version just as much. (2006, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-75.)

The River

I do not quibble with the critical consensus about Jean Renoir’s detour to India on his way back from Hollywood to Europe. Again the documentary aspects are marvelous, and in their first Technicolor film (another Scorsese-inspired and Criterion-produced restoration), director Jean and cinematographer Claude live up to the painterly heritage of Pierre Auguste. But somehow Renoir does not have the special aptitude of the neorealist in directing non-professional actors -- too many come across as amateurish rather than authentic, which is disabling to the story and the characters. Adapted from Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel about growing up in an English colonial enclave, but entranced by the life of India flowing past like the Ganges, the story focuses on three teenaged girls who have a crush on a visiting veteran who lost his leg in the war. Now that I think of it, that must have been WWI, but it’s indicative of the apolitical context of the film that it hardly matters whether it’s before or after Gandhi. Girls will blossom into womanhood under any regime; death will intrude but life will go on. Like the river. (1951, dvd, r.) *7*

Shortbus

I don’t have much to say about this film, except to take the opportunity to recommend John Cameron Mitchell’s first film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has an energy and impact that this second lacks. Hedwig is really one of the best rock films ever, an excellent translation of a Downtown NYC musical review about a transsexual singer from East Berlin. Shortbus comes out of the same downtown milieu, shares its free spirit but not its drive or raucous humor. There are a few laughs, but the new film is sweet and inconsequential rather than sexy and stirring -- despite the explicit sex, both hetero- and homo-, on display. Made of the intertwined stories of a sex therapist (no -- “couples counselor”) in search of her own first orgasm, a gay couple coping with one guy’s depression, and a reluctant dominatrix looking for genuine friendship, the film winds up as a big group hug, but not one you really want to get into. (2006, Images, n.) *5+* (MC-64.)

Le Jour se Leve (Daybreak)

One of the peaks of pre-war French cinema, this collaboration between director Marcel Carne and writer Jacques Prevert makes a bookend with the supreme Les Enfants du Paradis at the end of the war. The quintessence of “poetic realism,” the film exudes a gloom that seems prescient, as good man Jean Gabin is subverted by the evil seducer Jules Berry into murder and suicide. Set design and music weave a spell that enhances superior performances all round, including Arletty and Jacqueline Laurent who round out the self-destructive foursome. The film is told in flashback as Gabin holes up in his garret under police siege after shooting Berry, and we learn why he was driven to that desperate act. He and Laurent are orphans who discover each other when she wanders by mistake, while trying to deliver flowers, into the shop where he works at sandblasting machine parts. They fall sweetly in love, but consummation is prevented by the machinations of vile dog-trainer Berry, whose assistant Arletty winds up with Gabin on the rebound. Though revolving around simplistic dualities, the film spins a complex web of evocation. (1939, IFC/T, r.) *7+*

Three Times

Hou Hsiao-Hsien assembles three vignettes of the same two actors in the Taiwan of 1966, 1911, and 2005. The first is sweet and light, scored to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and other period ballads: a conscript meets a pretty pool hall attendent, writes her letters, but when he returns on leave she has moved, and he has to track her through several towns till they meet again, have dinner, and as they stand at a bus stop, their hands touch and then clasp. That episode is almost wordless, and the second is silent, in keeping with its era, with musical acccompaniment and dialogue on intertitles, set in a sumptuously visualized brothel, where a courtesan hopes to be saved by a young journalist who visits periodically but is preoccupied with freeing Taiwan from Japanese occupation -- when she gets a letter from him oh so hopefully, it only contains impersonal political news. Modern day Taipei is quite a jolt -- all motorscooters, neon, electronics. The couple, this time an epileptic, bisexual pop singer and a hunky photographer, communicate mostly through text messaging and sex, with no slow build to a quiet moment of real feeling, so the story is less satisfying in itself, though it does follow through the parallels between stories that give the whole weight. Hou is a little-seen critical darling, worth seeing but not a must-see, and this seems to be a representative anthology. (2005, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-80.)