| Selected films seen in 2004 & 2005:
(Includes all films on my "Best Films Seen in 2004" list - see my Home Page)
Reviews and Microreviews - Alphabetical by Film Title ANGELS IN AMERICA: I Millenium Approaches; II Perestroika (Mike Nichols, US, 2003). SPOILER ALERT! A cartoon in a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine shows a man chatting with the minister after a Sunday church service. “Oh, I know He works in mysterious ways,” the man says, “but if I worked that mysteriously I’d get fired.” The tone was more severe in Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Tony Kushner’s epic play, adapted by Mr. Kushner and directed by Mike Nichols for the small screen on HBO last year, and now available on 2 DVDs. When Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a gay man dying of AIDS in the mid 1980s, is given an opportunity to address a panel of Angels at the gates of Heaven, he discovers that a reactionary God became bored with man’s restless quest for progress and change, and vanished in disgust early in the last century, on the day of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, to be precise. Outraged by what he perceives as an act of such gross irresponsibility, Prior rails at the Angels, “If God shows up again, sue the Bastard for walking out!” Offered the choice between staying on in a comfortable if Godless Heaven and returning to a life dominated by suffering and uncertainty, Prior doesn’t hesitate: he chooses life over death because, as he says in a longish speech, where there’s life there’s hope. That’s really what this six hour miniseries comes down to: yes the world’s a terrible, treacherous place; yes there is little evidence of peace or justice, or of the love that they engender; yes, our efforts to move forward may merely amount to what Prior terms “a kind of painful progress.” But it is life here on earth that counts and to this we must commit ourselves. No institution in our society goes unskewered here. Our world is branded as “terminal, crazy and mean.” After a meandering cavalcade through the deeply troubled human arenas of faith, religion, politics, love, hatred, sexuality, marriage, prejudice, poverty, privilege and illness in the midst of the Reagan years, we emerge confronting a spirituality that is both minimalist and earth-bound, not elaborate or Heaven-inspired. When the Angel of America (Emma Thompson, who received no awards for her turn here, although I think she deserved something just for being a good enough sport to take on such a ridiculous role) visits Prior, she embraces him in literally electrifying sexual union, making use of all 8 of her vaginas. Magical realism may lace this production lavishly, but make no mistake, we're talking a seriously corporeal spirituality here, nothing ethereal about it. You probably know the history by now. In 1987, a group in San Francisco, the Eureka Theater, commissioned Kushner’s play about AIDS in the gay community. Part 1 (Millenium Approaches) debuted in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1991, then in London, before a Broadway debut in 1992 that won a Tony Award for Best Play and a Pulitzer Prize for Kushner. Part 2 (Perestroika) followed on Broadway in 1993. Literary critic Harold Bloom listed this play as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century. The timing of the stage productions was fortuitous – around the fall of the USSR and Berlin Wall, and before the upturn in the U.S. economy and better drug strategies for AIDs. The timing of the HBO production is even more poignant: with AIDS now spreading across the world, and the excesses and hypocrisies of the present Bush Administration making the Reagan era seem in some respects like the good old days. Not to mention the apocalyptic miasma that has enshrouded us since 9/11: near the end of the final hour, we see a silhouette of the lower Manhattan skyline (it’s 1990), and there are the twin towers of the World Trade Center, rising ghostlike in fuzzy gray tones. This miniseries, shot in New York City, except for the Heavenly scenes shot in Tivoli, Italy, teems with characters, subtexts and scenes, but it’s all pretty easy to follow. Prior’s gay partner of 4½ years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), a neurotic headtripper of Allenesque proportion, cannot face Prior’s illness and abandons him. Meanwhile, Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), a devout Mormon Republican lawyer, is involved in a disintegrating marriage to dependent, Valium-addicted Harper (Mary-Louise Parker). Joe is struggling to suppress his own longstanding homosexual yearnings. Joe is also a protégé of the notorious attorney Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), yes, the same malevolent shark who served as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel and as a prosecutor at the Rosenberg espionage trial in the 1950s. He’s a nasty man who is proud of his base and unethical machinations. He hates Communists, liberals, racial minorities and gays, though he is a barely closeted homosexual himself and, as it turns out, is also dying of AIDS in 1985 (Cohn did indeed die of AIDS in 1986, claiming to the end that he had liver cancer, just as portrayed here). Joe abandons Harper, and has a brief affair with Louis, whom he has met at work). Prior has visitations from ancestral ghosts (he’s from a family that has been important forever) and Angels. Wildly improbable as they may be, these visions ably serve several dramatic purposes. They provide grand spectacle, something that delights post-modern theater audiences, and that in fact is put in even finer form on the screen, thanks to CG technology and splendid production design by the veteran Stuart Wurtzel. These dazzling visitations also are as energizing for viewers as they are for Prior: they keep one awake and aroused amidst the pathos of life in these United States. Whether they also properly imbue the proceedings with the sense of millennial high stakes that Kushner wants is more open to argument. There is a great deal of unevenness in this series. Some characters are better than others. Pacino and Kirk are fine. Mr. Shenkman is rather one-dimensional, too much the immature urban Jewish stereotype, and the fiercely Angelic Ms. Thompson (who also plays an AIDS nurse and a homeless person of indeterminate gender in a vacant lot in the Bronx) is, well, awefully feathery. Heterosexual marriage, represented by "the Pitts," takes quite a beating in the film; I cannot be sure if this is Kushner’s intention, or if it is at least partially the unintended consequence of faulty acting by Ms. Parker and, especially, the wooden Mr. Wilson. The dialogue is highly variable, almost as if written by a committee. There is a fair measure of humor to be found, though not a lot. Amidst the jargon of 1980s New York City, there are scenes that have the ring of Shakespeare, others of Thornton Wilder, still others of a more canny 18th century wit, like the early Cocteau-inspired fantasy scene in which Harper and Prior discuss the limits of imagination. The introductory musical theme, featuring oboe, sounds very much like the music from the HBO Series, Six Feet Under. Small surprise, then, to find it was written by the same fellow, the prolific Thomas Newman. I haven’t yet mentioned the two best characters in the series: Meryl Streep (who plays a Rabbi; an Angel; the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who visits Roy Cohn's deathbed; and Joe Pitt’s matter-of-fact , unflappable mother, Hannah – her lead role), and Jeffrey Wright, who reprises his Tony Award-winning stage roles in AIA: Perestroika (he plays the former drag queen Belize, an AIDS nurse, as well as lesser roles as Harper Pitt’s fantasy tour guide, Mr. Lies, and, briefly, an Angel). Hannah Pitt drops her widow's life in Salt Lake City and rushes to Brooklyn to attempt to rescue Joe and his marriage, both beyond repair, as it turns out. But she finds plenty to do taking care of Prior and others, and adds a bit of drollery as well. Belize, full of wisdom, wit and swish for every occasion, is even helpful to Roy Cohn, who offers only insults in return. Prior Walter may be a valiant fighter struggling against all odds to cling to life, but it is Hannah and Belize who are the tough, unsentimental, resourceful sorts that respond best to those around them in need. If humanity does move forward, as Prior hopes, these are the stalwarts we will need. Grade: A- (10/15/04) THE AVIATOR (Martin Scorsese, US, 2004, Miramax, 169 min.). This new biopic about Howard Hughes is at once a vivid portrait of one of America’s most enigmatic 20th century public figures and also a frustratingly superficial probe into the character of this strange man. It’s not a matter of material being unavailable to the filmmakers, material that could have given more depth to a portrayal of Hughes’s personality and motivations. I think it is more that Mr. Scorsese is not partial to psychologizing about his characters, attempting to portray “interior” information about what makes somebody tick, or even going deeply into childhood experience or family roots for this purpose. (He gives us just one such image, a recurring one: a five year old Hughes being bathed by his mother, who coos to him about how the world is a hazardous place.) Scorsese has certainly had an abiding interest in outsized, eccentric and disturbed personalities (think of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing Out the Dead). But he has a perspective about the uses of film, this most visual of all storytelling media. He has always been primarily interested in photographable surfaces, intent upon showing us the conduct, the actions that emanate from a character’s personality, and leaving it at that, very much in the Hollywood filmmaking tradition. This film focuses on a 20 year period of Hughes’s life, from about age 22 to 42 (1927-1947). It begins two years after he moved from Texas to Los Angeles to make movies. As the film opens Hughes, played brilliantly by Leonardo DiCaprio, is directing his epic aviation flick, Hell’s Angels, about British fighter pilots going up against the Germans in World War I. The film ends with Hughes’s own post-World War II battles before a senate committee investigating his disposal of government funds contracted for military aircraft production, and his ever so short flight of the “Spruce Goose” (which oddly enough is now permanently housed in the countryside close to where I live in Portland, Oregon). Along the way we are made privy to his restive romantic relations with Catharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and, later, Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale); his daringly innovative, hands-on involvement in the development of new aircraft designs, working with people like Glenn “Odie” Odekirk (Matt Ross); his often reckless financial wheeling and dealing, implemented by his faithful business manager, Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly); and his more shrewd battle of wits with rival airline executive Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) and Trippe’s conspiratorial political chum, Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda). These relationships are all well acted and absorbing. We do learn some important things about Hughes’s personality. The film shows us quite convincingly that he was a visionary who would sacrifice endless time, energy, money, relationships, personal safety and even other people’s lives in the effort to fulfill his visions, which always concerned one or the other of his two great passions: aircraft design and filmmaking. Mr. DiCaprio also demonstrates quite credibly that Hughes was a severely disturbed, deeply neurotic individual who was susceptible to psychotic episodes. We see that he was not warmhearted, but rather an emotionally cool, often aloof, always self-centered person. His obsessive compulsive symptoms, such as ritual hand washing, muttering some phrase over and over, and phobic responses to clutter, were apparent already in those years of Hughes’s young adulthood, and we witness his bizarre behavior, probably a paranoid psychotic episode, when he isolated himself for weeks on end, in 1947 or shortly before. The film’s scene sequence suggests that Hughes pulled himself together, i.e., was able to suppress and end his psychotic episode, in response to the challenge of the Senate hearings before which he was subpoenaed to testify. While I do not know if this sequence is factually accurate, I have certainly seen clinical situations in which patients suffering from acute psychosis experienced complete cessation of delusional and hallucinatory symptoms in response to a realistic stressor requiring their full attention and coping capacity, e.g., the sudden need for surgery. The structure of the film is very well conceived. The first part is full of spectacle and action on a grand scale, with Hughes at the center of huge scenes with many players and extras, real Hollywood glitz. Later the focus narrows down more darkly to Hughes and his dealings with a few people and circumstances. This shift in motifs is as it should be. In the first years covered in the film, Hughes was principally preoccupied with filmmaking, hobnobbing with Hollywood glitterati, and his consuming romance with Hepburn. Later he was preoccupied with airline competition, aviation design during the war and, of course, his own increasing psychiatric incapacities. Leonardo DiCaprio offered an astonishingly skilled performance as Arnie Grape, the developmentally disabled kid brother to Johnny Depp’s Gilbert, in the 1993 film, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? He also did well in Marvin's Room, the 1996 film in which he played Hank, the depressed, defiant adolescent son of Meryl Streep's character. But, quite frankly, I’ve been waiting since then, with diminishing hopes, for him to perform again as well as he did in those films. His Howard Hughes fulfills my hopes. DiCaprio ably captures the complex, mercurial nuances of Hughes’s fragmented personality. He can show the strain, the chilling aloofness, the gritty determination, the sudden burst of inventive genius, the shrewd capacity for thrust and parry, the social anxiety, the momentary joy of success, the domineering, imperial manner of demanding that others do his bidding. It’s all there, all believable. The only bothersome thing is DiCaprio’s voice. The slight Texas drawl is fine. Hughes also is said to have spoken with a flat, nasal quality, and one hears that in DiCaprio's delivery. It’s the youthful timbre that bothered me. It's fine for the first half, when Hughes was still in his 20s (DiCaprio was 28 when the film was shot) But it does distract somewhat from the gravitas of Hughes’s darker persona as he ages into his early 40s later in the film. Now DiCaprio's vocalization becomes a constant reminder that Hughes is being played by a young actor. The other players are adequate or better, especially Blanchett, Reilly, Alda and Ross. Only Ian Holm, who plays a meteorologist that Hughes uses as an all purpose scientist prop when he needs one to influence other people, seems wasted here. Cameos abound, including glimpses of Willem Dafoe and Jude Law, among many others. Several members of the Wainwright family (Loudon III, Rufus and Martha) perform in a nightclub scene. Nearly every scene is rich with fascinating things to watch, thanks to production designer Dante Ferretti, who has worked on many of Scorsese’s big films and also, most recently, Cold Mountain. This may not be a great film but it a thoroughly absorbing entertainment that, as far as it goes, depicts and also celebrates one of the most unusual characters of our times. Grade: B+ (12/28/04) BEFORE SUNSET (Richard Linklater, US, 2004). SPOILER ALERT! I had not previously seen the 1995 film, Before Sunrise, and am very glad I watched it just two hours before seeing its new sequel, Before Sunset. Linklater, the American director of Slackers and Waking Life, has created a couplet of quintessentially French-style romantic films: movies chock full of talk and nothing but talk between a man and a woman. In Before Sunrise, an American man, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), and a French woman, Celine (Julie Delpy), in their early 20s, meet on a train and spend an afternoon and night together in Vienna before separately moving on again. Celine is beautiful and the more self assured. Jesse is gawky and self consciously smiley at first, then gradually settles down, turns more tender, more thoughtful. They gab away the evening and night, covering all the ground one might expect of young, adventuresome, unburdened youngsters, high on the excitement of discovering each other and enjoying what they find. They ambivalate about making love, and planning to see each other again. They do agree to meet again in six months, at the same train station in Vienna. Before Sunset begins nine years later, not in six months, and in Paris, not Vienna. Jesse has written a modest best selling romantic novel based on his night long ago with Celine, and is on a European promo tour, speaking and signing at a little bookshop near Montmartre, where Celine shows up. They are once again instantly and easily charmed by one another and spend the afternoon together, before Jesse’s flight back to the U.S. Their brisk conversation takes up as if it had never ended. Jesse, it turns out, had returned to Vienna as planned. Celine had wished to do so, but her grandmother’s sudden death had prevented this, and she didn’t have information to contact Jesse. At 32, both these soulmates feel the limitations of their lives now, no longer basking in the illusions of possibilities without boundaries. Celine’s story gradually unfolds: she’s still single and increasingly aware that her romantic hopes were left behind with Jesse in Vienna all those years ago. It is much the same for him, though he is unsatisfactorily married and has a young son he adores. As the afternoon moves on, Jesse seems more and more settled being with Celine, and by the time he escorts her home to her apartment, it has become clear that he will not leave. It is interesting to observe the development of these two people – I mean the two actors, who co-wrote the script with Mr. Linklater. Hawke seems unchanged by the years. He’s still sort of a skinny, gawky kid, all angles, not much different than he was at 23. In both films he says lots of philosophical things that don’t quite jibe with his physical persona and gestures. Much of it feels pretentious. And he’s forever prone to following up his serious comments with jocularity (which actually suits him better, even as it accentuates the pretense of his earlier words). Ms. Delpy, on the other hand, seems to have grown up. Her performance is more variegated, more nuanced in the second film. I think, for example, of her imitation of Nina Simone in the final apartment scenes, a riff she could not have performed convincingly nine years earlier. She’s also quite moving while riding in the limo, when she flares in anger at Jesse, who at that moment she mistakenly sees as having everything she lacks in life. The strength of both films is in the fly-on-the-wall view we get of the couple’s romantic encounters. These two people are utterly indifferent to us: they play only to and for each other, and that is the vital core of their drama. It matters not that we may think they are imperfect. They feel right to each other. Who does not relish the recollection of such unanticipated romantic encounters, those early moments together that were, and forever remain, pure magic? The first film played too long, the talk began to drag after the first hour. The new film is 25 minutes shorter and is the better for it. Grade: B(10/16/04) BEING JULIA (Istvan Szabo, Canada, US/2 others, 2004). SPOILER ALERT! Annette Bening stars as Julia Lambert, an aging actress, toast of the London stage, in a period film set in 1938, based on a novella by Somerset Maugham. Julia is weary, the joie de vivre drained out of her as she sits poised on the edge of career decline. Enter Tom Fennel (Shaun Evans), a crassly opportunistic, unpolished American half Julia’s age; they are introduced by Julia’s husband and business partner, Michael Gosselyn (Jeremy Irons) a former actor who now looks after the business end of things, producing plays, running the theater the couple own, all with a third partner, the corpulent good sport of a woman, Dolly de Vries (Miriam Margolyes). The early going is not altogether satisfactory: Evans plays Tom as such an odious, unappealing, shallow figure, that he sucks energy from the screen and one is dumbfounded that Julia could fall for him. Shows how desperate she had become, I suppose, though miscasting, I suspect, is more the likely answer. Jude Law would have been better here. In any event, things get livelier. The affair with Tom helps Julia recharge her batteries and reengage in her work. But Tom then two times her, taking up with a young actress, Avice Crichton (Lucy Punch), who lands a role in a new play the company is doing, starring Julia of course. It becomes clear that (a) Avice is a pretty effective comedienne who could upstage Julia, and (b) she’s having an affair with Julia’s husband Michael now. (Michael may have arranged for her selection for the new play because of this; moreover, Michael may also have had a knowing hand in arranging his wife’s affair with Tom in the first place. Those theater people: what else can one expect, after all.) Julia contrives a sweet revenge, inspired by the inner voice and “presence” of her dramaturgic mentor, the late Jimmy Langton (Michael Gambon), who, though dead for some years, still “visits” Julia regularly to “coach” her as she plans a scheme to humiliate Avice by ad-libbing a series of cleverly realized changes in the script, on opening night. Avice is brought down, along with Tom, the play’s a great success in its new form, and love is rekindled between Julia and Michael. Overall, it’s rather pat stuff, but entertaining enough. Bening and Irons hold up well, but the fun is provided by Gambon, Punch and Juliet Stevenson, as Evie, Julia’s dresser and personal assistant. (With other decent supporting turns from Tom Sturrige and Bruce Greenwood, with Rosemary Harris and Rita Tushingham in brief cameos). Grade: B (11/28/04) BEYOND THE SEA (Kevin Spacey, US/Germany/UK, 2004, 121 min.). CONSUMER ALERT! Making a biopic of nightclub singer Bobby Darin’s life has been an abiding passion of Kevin Spacey’s, so it saddens me to report that this is a lousy movie. Spacey conceived of this film, wrote the screenplay, directed and stars. In flashbacks we learn of Darin’s difficult early life, marked by severe rheumatic fever that would in time lead to heart valve disease that eventually took his life at 37. We also learn of Darin’s monomaniacal devotion to promoting his own career, his recording and performing successes in the 1950s and early 60s, his realized dream of playing the Copacabana, New York City’s most prestigious nightclub in its day, his later efforts to transform himself and his music when he became politically more conscious during the Vietnam War, before illness finally overcame him in 1973. The story is told in a stylized manner, in scenes that are emblematic set pieces, rather than realistic. To this end, Bobby as a young boy (played gamely by William Ullrich) appears in several scenes alongside the adult Darin, in order to show connections or segue between present and past roots. Mr. Spacey is too old for the part of Darin, lacks the prodigious boyish energy that Darin always brought to the nightclub stage, and his singing is substandard, though he really does try hard. The love story subplot works pretty well, and Kate Bosworth does a reasonable job as Darin’s first real love and eventual wife, Sandra Dee. Bob Hoskins also performs well as Darin’s brother-in-law, Charlie, and Caroline Aaron as Nina, Darin’s mother (referred to as his sister for all the years Darin did not know about his true maternity). John Goodman, on the other hand, is lost in the role of Darin’s long time manager and supporter, Steve Blauner (the real Mr. Blauner was an advisor to Mr. Spacey for this film), as is Brenda Blethyn as Polly, Darin’s grandmother (who raised him as if she were his mother). Grade: C (01/04/05)
THE BLIND SWORDSMAN: ZATOICHI (Takeshi Kitano, Japan, 2004). One of the decided joys of filmwatching in the late 60s and early 70s was seeing the latest Zatoichi adventure. Between 1962 and 1973, Shintaro Katsu starred in 25 B & W movies as the blind, shambling, wisecracking eccentric who wandered the 19th century Japanese countryside, making a living as a masseur and gambler, a man capable of slaying any number of evil doers with his combination of uncanny sensibility and mastery of the short cane sword. The 26th and final Zatoichi installment was made in 1989, the only one directed by Katsu himself, shortly before he died. Now Japanese entertainment megastar Takeshi Kitano has undertaken to revive Zatoichi in a lush color production that is shorter on humor but richer in its use of period details of place and costume, rhythm, breathtakingly choreographed swordplay, and an unending cavalcade of nasty fellows requiring disposal at Zatoichi’s surgical hand. Takeshi wrote, directed, edited and stars as the crafty blind warrior. (As an actor he still uses the name “Beat” Takeshi, a name left over from an early 70s comedy stage routine he performed with another actor, called “The Two Beats.”) His hair is dyed blond, a surprise, but his manner is familiar, typical of previous roles: he conveys a deeply inward-turning presence, he says little, and his periodic chuckling is a response to private jokes we never catch. His sword attacks are explosive flashes that last only seconds, rather than the more prolonged dances seen in typical Hong Kong martial arts flicks. Rhythms delight in unexpected ways: the cadence of farm workers hoeing the earth or trampling mud, and an extravagant dance number at the end. The story? Well, Zatoichi finds himself in a place where warring gangs are making everyone’s life miserable. He decides to aid two geishas intent upon revenge against one of the gangs that had robbed and slew their parents and sibs 20 years ago. Guess who triumphs? Grade: B+ (09/09/04) BORN INTO BROTHELS: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids (Zana Briski & Ross Kauffman, India/US, 2004, 85 min.). Unusual, heartrending documentary about children raised in the brothel district of Calcutta and the filmmakers’ efforts to enrich the lives of several. The kids are remarkably and tragically articulate in describing the realities of their lives. They show an almost unbelievable mix of a continuing capacity for joy and the thrill of new discoveries together with an undistorted awareness of their mothers’ lives and a sense that there is no hope that their own lives will be any better in the years ahead. The directors' efforts to improve things for these few kids can be seen as kindly, manipulative or a mere act of tokenism, take your choice. Oscar winner for best feature length documentary (over The Story of the Weeping Camel, a questionalble call in my opinion.) (In Bengali & English) Grade: B+ (02/16/05) CALLAS FOREVER (Franco Zeffirelli, Italy/France + others, 2002, 111 min.). This is one of the loveliest films I’ve seen in ages. It is in fact an adoring tribute to Maria Callas by her longtime friend, Franco Zeffirelli, whose friendship with the spectacular opera diva of the 1950s had spanned 25 years. The conceit of the screenplay, conceived by Mr. Zeffirelli, is for Ms. Callas’s fictional former concert manager to approach her with an idea to revitalize her career and spirits. It is 1977, near the end of her life, and she is living as a recluse in her lavish Paris apartment, whiling away her days playing cards with servants and drinking and popping pills, listening to her old recordings, lamenting the loss of her voice and her precious Ari Onassis, who had died two years earlier, though of course she had lost him much earlier, when he married Jackie Kennedy in 1968, something she never got over. The manager’s idea is for her to create a series of films in which she employs her still marvelous beauty and dramatic skills to enact her famous operatic performances, all the while lip-synching to recordings made years earlier when her voice was in its prime. She is reluctant, feels it is artistically fraudulent to use technology to simulate a performance, and, beneath this rationale, she is also frightened to return to the spotlight created by any sort of new venture. Finally she agrees to do Carmen, the one major role that she had recorded but never performed on stage (apparently this is true). In the end, Callas reverts to her earlier view and demands that the manager promise never to distribute the Carmen film. The elegant French actress, Fanny Ardant, stars as Ms. Callas, reprising a role she had performed on stage in Paris in Roman Polanski's much praised adaptation of Master Class in 1997. It is said that Ms. Ardant looks strikingly similar to Ms. Callas. Jeremy Irons plays the role of her former manager, Larry Kelly, a personable gay man who is sincerely devoted to Ms. Callas. There are romantic subtexts – Kelly and a gay young artist (Jay Rodan), Callas and the gorgeous young tenor (Gabriel Garko) who plays opposite her in the Carmen film-within-a-film. Joan Plowright plays a good humored journalist, an old acquaintance of the principals. But the joy of this film is watching the performances of both Ms. Ardant and Mr. Irons, photographed often in close-ups that capture the exquisite “facial acting” – to use Stanley Kauffmann’s term – of which both are so wonderfully capable. These players are sensational when separate and especially in scenes when they appear together. I have rarely seen Jeremy Irons show such a light, nimble sensibility, setting aside his more typical tendency toward melancholy. The photography and mise en scene are as lovely as Ms. Ardant. Especially wondrous are scenes showing Callas’s apartment and, even more so, the scenes from Carmen (the exterior scenes were shot on location in Spain). Throughout, of course, we are treated to Ms. Callas’s arresting coloratura soprano in recorded performances of various arias from among those for which she was famous. Ms. Ardant performance more than rises to the passionate requirements for her various scenes as Carmen. These are truly thrilling. This film has had extremely poor distribution, in Europe and North America. That is unfortunate, for it is an aesthetic treat the likes of which are all too rare. (In French, Italian and – mainly – English). Grade: B+ (03/13/05) CHARLIE: THE LIFE AND ART OF CHARLES CHAPLIN (Richard Schickel, US, 2003). Schickel is the prolific film critic and historian who reviews for "Time Magazine" and other periodicals. He has published more than 20 books on film, and produced, written and directed many films on cinema for TV and the big screen. Here he has created a straightforward, chronological account of Chaplin’s life, loves and films. The archival film clips are marvelous and are the real meat of this fairly lengthy (131 minute) documentary. Narrator Sydney Pollack offers useful commentary as we watch wonderful scenes from all of Chaplin’s longer features and a number of shorts as well. The narrative, presumably written by Mr. Schickel, who should know these things, suggests that The Immigrant (1917 – Chaplin’s own favorite 2-reeler), The Kid (1921), The Circus (1928 – probably his most purely hilarious feature) and City Lights (1931 – the last of his masterpieces) represent his best work. Details about Chaplin’s difficult experiences as a child in East London are especially interesting, as is information about his brother Sidney and other family members. Apart from Marcel Marceau’s brief but sublime presence, and the comments by Norman Lloyd, who acted with Chaplin and Keaton, most of the interviews otherwise are of only average interest, and one or two could have been deleted entirely. This film is a bit of a letdown after seeing the stupendous film about Louis Kahn, My Architect, the day before. Compared to Nathaniel Kahn's success in capturing the essence of his father’s personality and vision, Chaplin's spirit somehow eludes the makers of Charlie, even though our sense of the man is enhanced by this film. On the other hand, Schickel has given us a definitive illustrated catalog of the Chaplin oeuvre. This movie made me want to rush out, grab up all the recommended material, and enjoy a Chaplin film marathon before moving on. Grade: A- (02/04) CLOSER (Mike Nichols, US, 2004). SPOILER ALERT! This film is an inquiry into the darker side of love: distrust, sexual obsession, possessiveness, jealousy, betrayal and intrusiveness. In particular it is about the tenuous balance that exists, at best, between the conflicting human needs of intimacy and privacy. In love the boundary that separates two persons and serves to perpetuate the integrity of their individual personalities - their “selves” - gives way to the compelling urge to merge, for two people in love to become one. At what point does this process of merging dishonor the integrity – indeed, the sanctity - of the individual? What are the proper limits of closeness? This story asks such questions. The setting is contemporary West End London. The casting is sublime and, as is nearly always the case in a Mike Nichols film, the actors are skillfully directed: Natalie Portman is Alice/Jane, a young American who earns her way waitressing or stripping and table dancing; Jude Law is Daniel, a failed novelist who write obits for a daily paper; Julia Roberts is Anna, a professional portrait photographer, and Clive Owen is Larry, a dermatologist who has just started up a Harley Street practice. Because I want to dwell mainly on the complicated ideas expressed in this drama, let me just add up front here that Julia Roberts gives the finest dramatic (non-comedic) performance I have seen her do. Her face in closeup reflects so much depth of feeling, mainly in the wistful, pensive, subtly melancholic registers, as befits the character she inhabits. Natalie Portman is a dazzling force of nature, giving her second stellar turn in a row, following her fine contribution as Zach Braff's quirky love interest in Garden State. Jude Law plays ably against type: not a suave, self assured Lothario but a blundering neurotic. Clive Owen is much rougher, tougher here than we saw him in Croupier. My point is that this is a brilliant ensemble, a joy to behold. The music is quite wonderful too, consisting of selections from Mozart's opera, "Cosi Fan Tutte" juxtaposed with bosa nova numbers, among other pop material. For the most part the music blends so unobtrusively with the action on screen that one is unaware of the score: nearly always a good sign. But at a few key moments, just the opposite occurs. The most striking example is when Daniel and Anna first touch in her studio. The score at this point, a gentle passage from Cosi, seems almost to embrace the couple, to enfold them within its sweet strains. Magical! On with the story. The film opens in the past, though we don’t yet know that, when Daniel witnesses Alice struck down by a taxi (she was looking left instead of right, a risky error that newcomers to Britain sometimes learn the hard way). She’s just scraped up a bit. They get acquainted when he takes her to the ER and end up living together. Perhaps two years go by, and we next see Daniel having his photo taken for the jacket of his first novel. He’s smitten with the photographer, Anna, who requites his feelings. A few nights later, Daniel amuses himself by pretending to be a woman on an Internet sex chat room and is linked up with Larry, who’s passing time while on call at a hospital. Daniel, presenting himself on line as Anna, agrees to meet Larry next day at the aquarium. By coincidence, Anna is visiting the aquarium and Larry approaches her. They begin an affair that rapidly leads to marriage, but even before they marry, Anna also begins an affair with Daniel, which she sustains after marrying Larry. All this goes on for a year, at which point Daniel and Anna tell their respective partners about their affair and break off with them in order to be together. The abandoned partners are separately miserable. They meet once by chance: Larry wanders into a nightclub where Alice is dancing. They may or may not have a brief sexual tryst. Eventually Anna and Larry reconcile. Dan and Alice also get back together but briefly. Dan presses Alice unceasingly to divulge whether she had sex with Larry, and, when she says she did, to share all the details. Alice responds to these intrusive demands for intimate details by telling Dan she suddenly no longer loves him, it’s the end. She means it. Regarding Anna’s long affair with Daniel, Larry, though hurt, is forgiving – he wants Anna back. And yet he behaves toward her in the same obsessively jealous, competitive, intrusive manner as Dan treated Alice about her possible one-night stand with Larry. Larry wants to know all the details of Anna’s lovemaking with Dan, even which locations in their house they used for sex. “Why, why, why must you do this to me,” Anna asks Larry. But she too seems forgiving, in the long run, her love does not appear to be mortally damaged by Larry’s bullying probes, unlike Alice’s loss of love for Dan. The story is bold in declaring the differences between men and women in love, especially when in comes to sex. The men are both obsessed with issues of sexual performance and response. Neither can tolerate not knowing what exactly went on sexually between their beloved woman and the other man. Both men have no regard whatsoever for the woman’s right to privacy. It’s as if we haven’t moved an inch from primitive times: women are the sexual property of men. It’s analogous to buying an upscale used car and demanding to know every detail of the breakdown, repair and maintenance record. And men obsessively measure their sexuality in comparative terms. “Was he a better fuck than me? “ men demand to know. Women do not understand this male bent and are deeply (and understandably) offended by the interrogatory invasion of their personal memories and private experiences by inquisitive men. In its relentless, forced nature, these inquires are tantamount to rape. The differences between the men and between the women are also intriguing, though they are etched less distinctively in the screenplay. Larry was cuckolded for a year and then jilted by Anna. Dan rejected Alice and then got squirrelly over a single sexual encounter she may have had with Larry. You might say, at least, that Larry thus had the greater grounds for sexual jealousy. His interrogations of Anna are not excusable because of this, but they are more understandable. Dan speaks of his own selfishness, and he’s clearly less mature than Larry. Late in the story, Larry tells Dan that he doesn’t understand compromise, while Larry and Anna do. When Dan further reveals his naivete, his superficiality, by saying that everyone is simply looking for happiness, Larry also challenges that notion. He says that may not be true of Anna, that she’s a depressive sort who may find confirmation for her negative outlook on life in a relationship that is not so full of happiness. True or not, Anna tolerates Larry’s intrusiveness; it doesn’t extinguish her love. Alice, on the other hand, is younger, more innocent, more in love with an ideal of love, and thus more delicate, her love more fragile. Dan’s invasion of her privacy is a deal breaker for Alice. Dan, who had seemed the gentler of the two men, in fact has seriously miscalculated Alice’s fragility. The force of his intrusion into her soul shatters her ideal and that’s the end of love, snuffed out in an instant. Quick as a person with a borderline personality can switch from idealizing another to hatred and rejection. Good as the ideas and acting are here, this film feels throughout more like a theatric production than a cinematic one. There’s lots of talk and not much motion. Dialogue, while full of meaning, is often formal, quick and smartly accomplished, too much so at times, unlike the sloppier syntax and more uneven pace of ordinary conversation among intimates. All of this should be unsurprising, since the screenplay is an adaptation of a stage production of the same title. And it was written by the playwright, Patrick Marber. His theatric production in London received the Olivier/BBC and London Critics Circle awards for best new play of 1997, and it has been performed in over 100 cities since then. For me, despite its flawed cinematic values, this film is quite outstanding, one of the best ever in exploring the question of finding the right distance in love: being not as close as possible but close enough. Grades: cinema values: B; acting: A; realization of themes on intimacy: A (12/05/04) THE CONTROL ROOM (Jehane Noujaim, US, 2004). Documentary on management of news during the recent Iraq War, with an emphasis on the Arab news organization, Al Jazeera. This network is the principal television news source for 40 million people in the Arab world. It came into existence after the BBC shut down its Arab World Service; many of the journalists now at Al Jazeera came over from BBC at the time of the shutdown or subsequently. We learn about the people who run this organization, and we see how news was managed by Al Jazeera and the US-dominated Coalition Central Command, with only a little information about news coverage by western - and specifically US - news media. Of the people interviewed, the most interesting is Samir Khadon, the general producer in charge of news at Al Jazeera. He wears a crumpled western suit, chain smokes, is intense but humorous, has perfect English; he says with only a trace of amusement that if Fox News offered him a comparable job, he’s take it, and that when his kids grow up he wants them to be educated in America, maybe even stay to live here. He is impatient with the backwardness and lack of awareness of world events among Arabs. He tells Ms. Noujaim that it is his mission to “…wake up the sleeping Arab world…They’re still sleeping… I need to wake them, to tell them, look! There’s something happening in the world!” The richest and most revealing exchanges occur in a running dialogue between Hassan Ibrahim - an articulate, jolly, rotund (his wife calls him “Boobie”) Al Jazeera journalist (one of those who came over from the BBC) - and Lt. Josh Rushing, a US Marine Corp. liaison to journalists at the Coalition Central Command Media Center. Ibrahim is relentless but gently good natured in pressing the issue to Rushing that the US distorts its media reports. Al Jazeera has been criticized for showing photos of dead and maimed Iraqi civilian war casualties. The Central Command counters that many of those killed are people used either as human shields by Iraqi combatants, or are suicide bombers. Ibrahim demands from Rushing, “Well, if that’s the case, show us your pictures that prove this!” (none are ever forthcoming). Next we see Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference asserting that Al Jazeera stages and fakes photos of injured civilians, and while Rumsfeld’s voice carries on we see footage of hospitalized injured Iraqi children that are obviously valid. For his part, Rushing says that it shocked him to realize differences in his own responses to photos of dead and wounded Americans vs. Iraqis. On the one had, he had a visceral, pained response to seeing photos of dead and wounded American troops; his response to comparable photos of Iraqis was one of concern, but definitely less passionate, less visceral. Afterwards this troubled him: he sees that it is morally suspect that he did not have the same feelings for people from both sides. Rushing repeatedly says that both US and Arab nations and their journalists need to understand each other’s perspectives. He says there’s a sign on his office wall that reads “No Spin” – but that creating spin – distorting news to favor our side – is something “…we all do, almost automatically.” He says straight out at one point that Americans are not getting good information in our media about the situation in Palestine (the implication is that what we get always has a pro-Israeli spin). David Shuster, an NBC news man, is so respectful of Rushing’s sensibility and candor that he quips, “… it’s a good thing Rushing’s not a girl, or I’d fall in love with him.” Besides pictures of the dead and wounded, there are other unsettling images. Al Jazeera was criticized especially for showing footage of captured US military personnel, in violation of Geneva Convention war rules. I had not seen such footage before, and some is shown here. What stands out is the fear expressed non-verbally by the captives: eyes open wide, brows furled, facial expressions otherwise impassive; coarse tremors of torso and head in one or more cases. I’ve seen these signs of stress before in my work with combat Veterans. These people shown on Al Jazeera are suffering from acute stress disorder, no doubt about it. In another series of concerning images, inside the Al Jazeera newsroom, filmed probably at the Central Command Media Center in Doha, Qatar, we see one of the translators viewing footage on a television monitor: a Rumsfeld press conference, a Bush speech, and other material from US leaders. He speaks with a look of concentrated seriousness into a microphone as he watches, presumably translating the voices of the American speakers into Arabic, for dubbed taping and later broadcast on Al Jazeera. We never hear a back translation so we can know what he is saying, and compare this to the original. What we do see, after he finishes a segment (this happens at least twice, perhaps three times), is his body language, which suggests derision of the American speaker he has just translated. This isn’t subtle: there’s laughter, eye-rolling, hand gestures, shoulder shrugs, a regular Chaplinesque lexicon of gestures that says in mime: “I’ve just been watching (Rumsfeld, Bush, whoever) – what a clown, what a jackass - blowing smoke at the world. What a laugh riot that joker was!” This is far from the sober, constrained conduct of translators that we’ve always seen at UN conferences or Presidential Summits. The Al Jazeera translator’s conduct here does not inspire confidence that his dubbed translations are free of spin, nuance, and anti-American slant. (It does not matter whether I personally may react to footage of Rumsfeld or Bush in the very same manner as this translator. Actually I do. And I know for sure that my anti-Iraq War sentiments would disqualify me to give untainted, unspun translations were I in the shoes of the this Al Jazeera worker. Is he a good enough professional at his task that he can step out of his biases and do a straight job on the air? Perhaps. But the film gives us no proof and little assurance that this is so.) Mohamed Jasen, general manager of Al Jazeera, gave the Pentagon the exact geographic coordinates marking the location of the network’s offices in Baghdad, just before the war began, so US bombers could avoid hitting this site. But one morning, well into the war, and following repeated instances of controversy between the US military and the Arab press, three separate Baghdad sites housing Arab journalists are hit by US air-to-ground missiles: the same Al Jazeera headquarters just referred to, the offices of another Arab news service, and the Hotel Palestine offices of still a third Arab news group. A journalist at each site was killed, including Tarek Ayyoub at Al Jazeera, whose reports we had seen samples of. Coincidence? That seems hard to swallow on the face of it. If you assume this is coincidence, then perhaps you might also be interested in some marvelous view lots in the Columbia Gorge, or shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. And yet…why didn’t Ms. Noujaim take a moment to give us names and photos of the other two journalists killed that morning? She had the time. After all, she spent several minutes on the little brouhaha in which a deck of most wanted Iraqi playing cards was first displayed and promised for inspection by journalists, and then not forthcoming. (She did name the news agency whose office was attacked in addition to Al Jazeera, but she didn’t mention the name of agency whose journalist was at the Palestine Hotel.) Omitting this information leaves lingering though presumably unnecessary doubts about her account. It invites the inference that she could be spinning. Lt. Rushing is shown at a press conference at Central Command afterward, denying intentional attacks, saying “…if we had wanted to turn off Arab media we could have attacked earlier, we could have used ground troops to attack more efficiently, or jammed their communications systems electronically.” We learn that the Jessica Lynch story was first released by Central Command on the very day US troops were entering Baghdad, the implication being that the Lynch story was timed to distract journalists’ attention and reportage of the invasion of the city. We see intriguing footage, shot next day or so, of the Baghdad square where a tall statue of Saddam is toppled. We are told that many journalists were gathered close to this square, though we do not see this. We can see for ourselves that the square was virtually deserted (a fact never shown in the US, either in TV footage or print stills) except for a small group of young men – about college age, quite a homogeneous group – who methodically, slowly mount the platform. They “just happen” to have a long rope and “just happen” to have a 20 year old flag of the old Iraqi Republic before Saddam came to power. Some of our troops “just happen” to be standing nearby and lend a hand to topple the statue. The obvious implication is that this event was staged purely for media consumption and was not the spontaneous outpouring of populist sentiment that it was subsequently made out to be in our press. What is a bit troubling about this film is that its intended purpose or focus is never explicitly declared. The film’s director, Ms. Noujaim, was born and raised in Egypt, immigrated to Boston in 1990, graduated from Harvard, and became a protégé of the famed husband-and-wife documentary film partnership of D.A.Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. Ms. Noujaim’s work to date has not been at all politically slanted: she’s focused on music and the business world. She was a cinematographer for the films Down From the Mountain (about musicians who did the score for the Coen Brothers’ film, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?), Startup.com (PIFF 24), and the recently released feature film on soul musicians who recorded for Stax Records, Only the Strong Survive. Noujaim made her directing debut in collaboration with Hegedus for Startup.com. Technically, it is expertly crafted, as one expects of any product from the Pennebaker/Hegedus group, with excellent photography and editing, and an unobtrusive, intermittent musical score. Noujaim obviously created a welcoming, positive ambience that drew out those she interviewed – Arabs and westerners alike - to yield rich information and perspectives. But there seem to be political and critical evasions afoot here. Is Control Room intended to be an uncritical, sympathetic portrayal of Al Jazeera? Or is the film supposed to portray the far broader perspective that, in the immediacy of a heated, controversial world event, no news is likely to be objective? It often seems as if the film is attempting to be both. If this is an ode to Al Jazeera, Noujaim owes it to viewers to state her intentions and her biases more clearly. If she’s striving to create a cautionary tale, i.e., one that demonstrates that news media are never objective and almost reflexively slant news toward the biases of their sponsors and audiences, the film needed additional material. Juxtaposed with “spin” by our side (Jessica Lynch; Saddam’s statue) there should have been examples of spin on the part of Al Jazeera (what did that translator say and how did he say it; and other examples as well). If Noujaim wasn’t just out to create a love song to Al Jazeera, if she wanted to criticize war news spin more broadly, her film would have been much stronger if she had presented the balanced perspective she sometimes seems to advocate, if she had walked the walk more consistently and not appeared to do some spinning herself. Grade: B+ (02/21/04) THE CORPORATION (Jennifer Abbott, & Mark Achbar, Canada, 2004). Fast paced, extensively researched, smartly composed and compelling documentary examination of the private corporation as a pathological institution, covering its birth, history, permutations, and its worldwide sociopolitical and environmental impact. This is definitely a movie on a mission - a film with an edge. Abbott and Achbar remind us that for over a century, corporations in our nation have enjoyed the highly protected status of “legal persons” under the 14th Amendment, which was intended to protect the rights of African American citizens. OK. So if corporations benefit from the protections accorded to individual persons, isn’t it fair to measure their conduct using the criteria by which psychopathology is measured in individual persons? Yes say the filmmakers, of course it is, and that view provides the central premise of this film. Abbott, Achbar and writer Joel Bakan take up the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality (ASP) disorder from DSM-IV and marshal data from "case histories" of corporate conduct showing that corporations clearly qualify for this diagnosis. This model of corporation as having an antisocial personality is based on an analysis by Dr. Robert Hare, who is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a consultant to the F.B.I. With images in mind of Enron, Worldcom, Adlephia or whatever other corporate criminals are your favorites, you can contemplate the application of these criteria for ASP: a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, manifested by such things as failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest; deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying or conning others for personal profit; reckless disregard for safety; consistent irresponsibility; lack of remorse, and so on. Potential “psychotherapies” for curing the antisocial corporate patient are discussed. But the film cautions that, unlike corporeal persons, corporate persons have "no soul to save and no body to incarcerate." Professor Hare is just one of an impressively large group of prominent and informed resource people interviewed in the film. Among others are Noam Chomsky; Ray Anderson (CEO of Interface, a large carpet manufacturer, who has seen the light and asserts that no corporation is sustainable from a standpoint of maintaining human and natural resources); Charles Kernaghan (activist who exposes sweatshop abuses – e.g., the Kathy Lee Gifford clothing line at Wal-Mart; GAP clothing); and Jane Akre and Steve Wilson (journalists fired by Fox News for refusing to suppress their report on rBGH use in cows). A toned-down Michael Moore, whose work I have criticized for featuring his self-serving performance art at the expense of ethical film journalism, comes off well here: his quite eloquent, serious remarks on the hazards to public welfare posed by corporations impressed me; I wish he would present himself more often in his own films as he does here. The guiding light for this film is script writer Joel Bakan, a Professor of Law at UBC and former Rhodes Scholar. His book on the subject, “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” was just published. Both directors are experienced in making documentaries, though it is Abbott’s first feature as director. She wrote an earlier documentary directed by Achbar, about transsexuality (Two Brides and a Scalpel: Diary of a Lesbian Marriage), that I have not seen. New exposes in June, 2004, of transcripts of Enron energy traders in Portland documenting their callousness while jacking up electricity futures prices during the 2002 crisis are only the latest sign that corporations can and do behave like antisocial persons. To learn more about this provocative film, which is just now receiving wider distribution, visit the film’s website: www.thecorporation.com. (In English & Spanish) Grade: B+ (02/17/04) DEAR FRANKIE (Shona Auerbach, UK, 2004, 102 min.). Behind the opening credits we catch closeup glimpses of glassware and other articles being wrapped in newspaper and carefully placed in boxes. We know in an instant that whoever these people are, it’s moving day. Indeed, there’s a fugitive quality about the little trio making up the Morrison band. There’s Lizzie (Emily Mortimer, who happens to be the daughter of Sir John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, among many other writings), a worried woman with a haunted look; her 9 year old deaf son Frankie (Jack McElhone), a self sufficient, sober yet plucky youngster; and Lizzie’s Mum, Nell (Mary Riggans), a sweet and sensible old dear, provided she doesn’t run out of smokes. Not long after the Morrisons settle into an apartment in Glasgow, we get more of that fugitive feeling when Nell notices a missing person newspaper ad about Lizzie and makes a secretive phone call demanding that someone stop their efforts to locate her. Frankie’s dad apparently died or disappeared years earlier, but Lizzie has kept up a pretense with Frankie that his Dad is alive and well, sailing the world as a merchant seaman. She makes up the name of a ship, the Accra. Frankie writes his dad letters, sent to a local post office where Lizzie picks them up (she convinces Frankie that all the ship’s mail – in and outgoing – comes through this local center). She answers each letter as if the response is coming from the father. All is well until news arrives one day that the Accra (yes, darn the luck, there is a ship with that name) is coming into port shortly. Nell advises Lizzie that this is the time to tell Frankie the truth. But instead Lizzie hits upon the idea of renting a man for a day to pose as Frankie’s dad (years earlier she had carefully removed every vestige of him from view). Lizzie turns for help to her employer and friend, Marie (Sharon Small, whom PBS Mystery fans will recognize as Inspector Lynley’s partner, Detective Sgt. Barbara Havers). To our surprise, Marie delivers the goods: quite a fit fellow (a rugged and entirely likable Gerard Butler), whose actual name we never learn. This stand-in Dad proves not only kind and genuinely affectionate toward Frankie, but he also unintentionally opens Lizzie’s wary heart as well. However, the vexing central dilemma remains: what is Lizzie to do about the charade she has created not only for Frankie but in her own life, after the Accra departs and the stranger also leaves (he’s a seaman on some other vessel)? I can only say that matters do get resolved with only small demands upon the audience for suspension of disbelief. This is a small, nearly perfect movie about large matters of love and loss. It is a sentimental story in the finest sense: we can unabashedly accept the filmmakers’ invitation to enjoy the bittersweet pleasures of a boy’s love of his absent father, and a still young mother’s loneliness and need for a love of her own, without once feeling betrayed or tricked by maudlin or treacly tactics. The acting all around is first rate, though the guys (Mr. Butler and young Mr. McElhone) and grandma Nell (Ms. Riggans) more-or-less steal the show. The photography is imaginative, and the editing is wonderfully economical (as in that opening scene, where only a few brief glimpses established so much about the Morrison family’s way of life). The screenplay is intricate but sufficiently believable. This is a fine feature directing debut by Ms. Auerbach. (In Glaswegian, a peculiar form of spoken English that cries out for subtitles, though Ken Loach is the only director generous enough to ever provide them.) Grade: A- (01/28/05) DOWNFALL (Der Untergang) (Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany/Italy, 2004, 150 min.) Spellbinding docudrama of the final days of Adolf Hitler’s life (from his 56th birthday on April 20, 1945, until his suicide 10 days later), days he spent in a vast and complex maze of underground command quarters in Berlin. Based on eyewitness interviews and written accounts. With Bruno Ganz in a masterful performance as Der Führer. Ganz brilliantly captures Hitler’s complex and divided, psychologically unintegrated or disarticulated personality: his capacity for warmth and considerate charm up close with his intimates juxtaposed with his unfeeling and utterly callous attitude toward the German people (he’d rather see them all dead if his dream of Germania dies; “compassion is a primal sin,” he says, “it’s something for the weak”). His careful, rational, sometimes even timid persona juxtaposed with crazed tirades when things don’t go his way, or when people violate his orders. His analytical and visionary capacities juxtaposed with virtually psychotic denial of the realities of the military situation near the end. It’s all here in the most penetrating character study of Hitler attempted to date on film. At 2 ½ hours, the film is so absorbing it feels half that long. A finalist for Best Foreign Film Oscar this year. (In German & Russian) Grade: A (2/10/05) EMPATHY (Amie Siegel, US, 2004). Thoughtful, imaginative essay documentary on "boundary issues" between people, especially in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. For an extensive review, see www.Psychflix.com. Grade: B+ (03/04) ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry, US, 2004) Sunshine is a romantic adventure story about the dire steps taken to end a relationship when a couple’s discouragement with each other looms large, after the infatuated gloss of perfection wears off and the warts begin to show. Dire steps indeed. As everyone in the world must know by now, the young woman, Clementine (Kate Winslet) avails herself of a new high tech brain altering treatment: the selective electronic removal of all memories of former lover Joel (Jim Carrey), at the hands of the good doctor Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his staff, which includes chief assistant Stan (Mark Ruffalo playing against type as a whiny nerd) and receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst) who, we eventually discover, was also once a patient of Dr. Mierzwiak’s. Joel inadvertently discovers what Clem has done and in outrage arranges to have his memories of her erased. The film opens after both characters have completed the procedure. They meet again while coincidentally heading for a beach where they had first met, suggesting that some nuances of their former shared experiences remain, however vague these may be. This is the first subtle hint of the genius behind this story. They don’t recognize each other, of course, but they are mutually attracted, just as they had been originally, two years earlier. We then proceed via flashbacks to review their first encounter, early love and it’s later souring. Clementine’s breezy impulsivity, Joel’s shy conservatism, features that once beckoned as delights, become sources of acrimony. When Clem’s finally had her fill of Joel’s critical suspicions about her fidelity, she goes for the memory erasure. Doesn’t sound like much more than a little sci-fi short story, does it? Well, it’s much more. Carrey, in a role nearly devoid of his patented physical comedy, is entirely convincing as the sober, almost melancholic Joel. Winslet likewise seems entirely natural as a superficially ditzy but soulful woman who only wants the basics in life: a loving man and a family. Their match of opposites is tender, humorous and believable, as is their fury in falling out. But that’s not the half of it. The long middle segment of the film traces Joel’s experience of having his memories of Clem erased, and it is done with extraordinary imagination. (I say memories, though the nature of most of Joel's imaginings during the erasure session is much more the stuff of dreams.) A scene glimpsed in trailers of people disappearing one by one from the lobby of Grand Central Station as Joel and Clem run through. Books disappearing from a scene in the store where Clem works. A memory merging sequence in which Joel’s easily aroused sense of humiliation is recalled in its primal form when his mother discovers him masturbating. These are only a few of many brief scenes that catch us up like a kaleidoscope. The whole context is so artfully arranged that it easily pulls us in, suspending disbelief and readily accepting the premise of memory erasure as entirely credible. Credit Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay and director Gondry’s vision for this in part. Credit also the techie age we live in, a world where "gamma knife" electronic beams kill off brain tumor tissue and functional MRI imaging shows little parts of our brain lighting up when we’re depressed or crave cocaine. The seduction is so complete that we can feel the poignancy of Joel’s struggle in the middle of his memory erasure to stop the session, to awaken and preserve some remaining shreds of Clementine and the love they shared. Unlike Kaufman’s narrative for his last film, Adaptation, where an inane ending betrayed a rich story, Sunshine ends very well indeed, its formidable loose ends pulled together as convincingly as can be, without tossing aside the main drift of the work. A terrific, adventuresome romantic comedy laced with rueful wisdom and with heart. Grade: A- (06/06/04 and 08/03/04)
FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (Michael Moore, US, 2004). This is the best work yet from Michael Moore, a documentary about the response of George W. Bush and his administration to the events of September 11, 2001. It begins with his (non)election as President, traces the rather aimless course of his first months in office (the Washington Post noted that he was on vacation 42% of the time during the first 8 months), events in the hours and days following the attacks, the war on terrorism, the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the abrogation of civil liberties under the USA Patriot Act, and the aftermath of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. The film is severely and unremittingly critical of Bush and his team. Tony Blair and Sen. Tom Daschle get a poke in the eye as well. But otherwise no politicians are hung out to dry here, and Moore is always respectful of the military. The film virtually ignores any other aspect of the Bush Presidency, e.g., the fragile economy, regressive tax changes, attempts to unravel environmental protections, and so on. Reference is made to the lack of funding for state and local public safety, and lack of domestic jobs as an inducement for poor people to join the Army. Why all the fuss about this film? A majority of people throughout the world generally share the view of America presented here. To anyone with a modicum of interest in opposition views to the Bush Administration’s spin on things, there really is nothing new. No huge revelations. No smoking guns we hadn’t already sniffed. We are given an eye opening account of the long established and mutually profitable connections between the Bush family, Saudi royals and the Binladen family. We see G.W.H. Bush, James Baker and John Major lined up with Saudis on the board of the Carlyle Group, a multinational arms manufacturer. We learn that James Bath, a buddy of W’s in the Texas Air National Guard, was in charge of investing Saudi money in Texas enterprises that included such W business misadventures as Harken and Arbusto. Most revealing is that W’s recently released Air National Guard records had Bath’s name blacked out. The Bush people were obviously concerned about revealing this link between W and Saudi money. This film is nothing but a liberal propaganda screed, its detractors assert. Well, yes. It does selectively and artfully depict one side of the debate about our government’s responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It does so with every cinematic means at Moore’s disposal. Moore shows scenes before the Iraq war of kids playing in Baghdad, followed by bombing scenes. There is footage of civilian carnage in Iraq from Al Jazeera, juxtaposed with Donald Rumsfeld’s saccharine reassurances about the humane precision of bombing sorties to spare innocents. (Could anyone brighter than an orangutan ever take Rummy’s reassurance seriously?) There is footage of W. sitting there in the reading class in Florida the morning of 9/11 for seven minutes after receiving word from Andrew Card of the second WTC crash (he had been told of the first tower crash before entering the classroom). This scene is shown in slow motion, making Bush appear more witless and dumfounded than he is at regular film speed. There are scenes with Lila Lipscomb - a patriotic, conservative social services worker who probably voted for Bush - covering her anguish and rage at losing her son, on military assignment in Iraq. A few minutes later Moore intones that Bush committed an immoral act sending good kids to war based on a lie. These clever thematic choices, edits and juxtapositions, surely are the stuff of propaganda making. So what? The history of the documentary feature film is the story of propaganda making. Until the recent advent of cable TV and low cost digital video equipment, private funding for the documentary film form was virtually nonexistent and all noteworthy documentaries were made with government sponsorship. Dziga Vertov, who invented the rules of cinema verite, fashioned the world’s best early newsreels and documentaries, from 1918 to 1929, to support socialism in the USSR. Later, in the 1930s, John Grierson, father of the modern sound documentary, created a number of films for the British government with humanistic and socialistic themes. Grierson once said that “…cinema…is a form of publication, and may publish in a hundred different ways…of these the most important is propaganda.” Grierson thought it was the highest responsibility of a filmmaker “…to command, and cumulatively command, the mind of a generation.” Thus Moore’s work here stands firmly in the tradition of the great documentary makers. Well, selectivity of content aside, what about the accuracy of the assertions Moore makes? Again, I found little in this film that I had not read five or a dozen times before over the past two years in the pages of The Nation, The New Yorker, or The New Republic. Even Robert Kagan’s neocon polemic, "Of Paradise and Power," provides a doctrinal basis for arrogant, unilateral bullying by the U.S. based on nothing other than raw, unopposed power. (Resolution of international conflicts through peaceful multinational consensus, Kagan argues, is merely the path of the weak.) Philip Shenon, writing for the New York Times, lists several “facts” in the film that are disputable, including that Saudi investments amount to 6% to 7% of U.S. equity holdings; that Saudis have invested $1.4 billion to aid the Bush family and their friends over the past three decades; and that eight planes were employed to evacuate more than 24 Saudis, including Binladen relatives, out of the U.S. on 9/13, while airspaces were generally closed and without any interrogations. (There is also some question whether Unocal remains a partner in the proposed natural gas line to run through Afghanistan, as asserted in the film). However, Shenon also notes that Moore hired some of the best fact checkers in the business – a team from The New Yorker – to vet this film. Well, OK, how about Moore’s purposes here? Is he sneaky about the propagandistic nature of his work? Filmmakers may be coy, naive or – now and then - of more than one mind about the aims of their films. But Moore has been crystal clear all along. He wants to unseat Bush in November. Period. Will this film aid such a purpose? That’s debatable. It’s a given that the electorate is severely polarized. Only about 10-15% of voters may be undecided about whom to vote for. Liberals like me are merely a choir for Moore to preach to. I cannot imagine that many liberals would be negatively influenced by this film, as some “backlash” mongers have predicted. Bushies, if they bother to see it at all, will foam at the mouth and read through the USA Patriot Act looking some clause to justify Moore’s permanent imprisonment as a terrorist sympathizer. What will the 10% in the middle think? Hard to tell. There were maybe 100 people in the theater the afternoon I saw the film (July 7, 13th day on screen, way beyond the first two weekends). I heard an occasional gasp: that spontaneous rapid sucking in of air one hears when somebody is blown away by a piece of important new information. An occasional sprinkle of applause or chuckles (the film has a few very funny moments, like the Bonanza sequence in which the faces of Bush, Blair, Rummy and Cheney appear on archival intro footage of the four heroes on horseback from the TV series). A hiss and boo or two when Rummy or Bush says something awful (at a banquet of the rich, Bush says, “…some call you elite; I call you my base”). But by and large people just watched silently. I have criticized Moore in the past for his egocentrism, his need to insert himself as the central character in his films, as much or more the performance artist than documentarist. Not so here. For the first time he stays pretty much in the background. The few scenes in which he appears are brief. The film, like Bowling for Columbine before it, is technically splendid. Moore has employed music to better advantage here than in any of his past films. Having seen this well realized work, I can better understand the praise for Moore recently expressed by the distinguished documentarist, Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA, American Dream). You may lament the fact that we seem to need lopsided media pieces like F 9/11 to help tell the full story of Iraq and related matters. But we do. The government, for its part, routinely edits and embroiders facts to suit its own propagandistic aims. We all know the story regarding WMD. Who was the fact checker for the State Department's recent blatantly false announcement that terrorist events had precipitously declined this past year? How could Paul Wolfowitz testify in Congress that about 500 military personnel had died in Iraq at a point when the figure was closer to 800? At the very least it shows how little he cares. And the mainstream beltway news media regularly lapse into collective amnesia or silence, playing patsy to this sort of manipulation, not following through and demanding accountability from our leaders when they have spoken in error. I suppose that it is only fitting, given that we live in a polarized society, that efforts to sway the court of public opinion must be conducted in an adversarial manner, as in any other courtroom. Whether you're listening to the Bush team or Michael Moore, it's a matter of caveat emptor: let the buyer - or in this case the viewer - beware. Reflecting on Moore’s achievements here, I think of the disappointing showing of Air America, the recent liberal talk radio effort to take on Rush Limbaugh and his trash talking right wing clones. Take ham handed Randi Rhodes, for example: now there’s somebody who might cause backlash among liberals. She sure turned me off in a hurry. Thinking of the edge that the right has over the left on talk radio, I find great comfort in the fact that when it comes to film – fiction as well as documentary – it’s totally the other way around: liberals (the Disney corporation notwithstanding) still rule the silver screen. Grade: A THE FOG OF WAR: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Errol Morris, US, 2003). If you’re like Errol Morris, and you want to make documentaries about unusual personalities, it’s one thing to choose obscure subjects, people like the designer of prison execution equipment, Fred Leuchter (aka Mr. Death) or men that excel in topiary hedge sculpture or the study of the African mole rat (two of the people interviewed in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control). Not many critics out there will be waiting to pounce if you don’t get things just right about the likes of people like these. But it’s quite another matter if you choose Robert McNamara, one of the last century’s most towering, controversial, and - some would say - evil characters. Fog of War distills more than 20 hours of interviews that Morris conducted with McNamara over a span of two years, when McNamara was in his mid-80s, and the subjects - all various McNamara ventures - range from “his” World War II, through his days at Ford Motor Company, the Cuban missile crisis, and – finally and mainly – his views of the Vietnam War. As a result, Morris now finds himself in a no man’s land of critical crossfire. On the one hand, film critics – people like Steven Holden, Roger Ebert and J. Hoberman – uniformly praise this work. While political pundits of the left – people like Eric Alterman and Alexander Cockburn of The Nation – lacerate Morris, accusing him of being overmatched, manipulated, not doing his homework (i.e., being naïve and unprepared), and thus allowing his film to be nothing but a conduit for the formidably crafty McNamara’s continuing campaign of self aggrandizement and distortions of history. Whew. I think the controversy here is based on a misconstruction of the film’s purposes by the pundits. First, it is quite clear that McNamara, in full command of his fierce intellectual and interpersonal powers, is not about to be pushed around by an assertive interviewer. McNamara is gonna say what McNamara wants to say, period. To drive home this point, Morris gives us a brief epilogue in which he asks McNamara a few trenchant questions about his sense of responsibility for the Vietnam War, why he didn’t speak out against the war, and so on. And McNamara won’t bite. He stonewalls Morris absolutely, with comments like, "I am not going to say any more than I have." Or, “I always get into trouble when I try to answer a question like that.” More importantly, it doesn’t matter very much if Morris or McNamara does not get all the facts straight. If the political pundits went to the movies more often, at least to Morris’s films, they would know that his primary interest is in the character of his subjects – their integrity and beliefs and ways of explaining or rationalizing themselves and their lives: he’s into people way more than into facts. Fog of War is not an oral history, it is a study of a person. For all that, in my estimation, Morris does get on film as close to an acceptance of responsibility for his actions in two wars as McNamara is likely ever to make, short of some dramatic, delirium-driven deathbed confession. He speaks of the likelihood that he and Curtis LeMay would have been deemed war criminals for the fire bombing of Japanese cities, had our side lost. And he speaks clearly when he says “we were wrong” in not seeing that the Vietnam War was a civil war, not a phase of larger Cold War aggrandizement by the USSR or China. What do the pundits want? Nor was it Morris’s purpose to use Santayana’s lesson about repeating history to rail at Bush’s preemptive war in Iraq. In fact Morris decided to make this film way back in 1995, after reading several books by McNamara and concluding that he was a quintessential man of the 20th Century, embodying all that was so outstandingly smart and sophisticated and ultimately destructive. The interviews wrapped sometime in 2001, the year before Iraq. As usual in Morris films, the editing is superb, with seamless use of archival footage and special visuals created for this film. I do think Morris gratuitously flattered McNamara by organizing the film around 11 platitudes of his – many of them banal aphorisms known to most high school graduates, students of martial arts or your grandmother (e.g., “get the data,” “empathize with your enemy,” “rationality will not save us,” “belief and seeing are both often wrong”). Political pundits, mired in interpreting concretisms from the historical record, not only see too few films but also don’t take seriously the symbolic visuals and sounds offered here. Philip Glass has created an edgy, anxious score that feels just right, just creepy enough for the macabre subjects at hand. I’m also thinking of the scenes when McNamara is recounting his pioneering (he claims) studies of auto safety. As we listen to him, Morris shows us human skulls wrapped in white linen being dropped several floors through a stairwell to smash in slow motion upon the floor below. The effect is chilling and speaks volumes about McNamara’s famed passionless capacity to treat human carnage as a matter of statistical calculation. It is through such poetic characterization that Morris keeps the game with McNamara in balance. Grade: A- (01/04) GARDEN STATE (Zach Braff, US, 2004). Fresh, tender, quirky and genuine, the adjectives just want to pour forth to describe this marvelous romantic comedy/coming-of-age story. First time writer-director Braff also stars as Andrew, a 25 year old, marginally employed actor in LA who returns home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral. He hasn’t been around his old friends or seen much of his father since he was sent off to boarding school at 16. Several disparate forces move Andrew now to rethink his life. The film concerns these developments that will reshape his future. The first, of course, is the death of Andrew’s mother. We never meet her but learn that she had been rendered paraplegic years earlier, when she fell in the kitchen, after being pushed by an angry 9 year old Andrew. Plagued by poorly controlled emotions after that (what kid wouldn’t be?), Andrew was placed on medications to blunt his moods by his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm, in a minor role), and had remained emotionally numbed by meds for the past 15 years. He was dispatched to boarding school for the same reason, we also learn, to decompress the emotional angst in the family household. Amazingly, we are informed of Andrew’s past without resort to a single flashback. Dissatisfied with the course of his career and life in LA, Andrew decides to stop taking his mood stabilizing medication upon learning of his mother’s death. Back in the suburb where he grew up, reunions with old chums now contribute to Andrew’s unfolding self reappraisal. More importantly, he meets Samantha – Sam (Natalie Portman), an inquisitive young woman who seems to care about and accept him from the getgo. In the end it is the budding romance with Sam that catalyses Andrew’s resolve to change his life. But this could not have occurred without him freeing himself of the enormous burden of guilt for causing his mother’s paralysis, a burden only made worse by his father’s misguided “treatment” of Andrew’s non-existent mood disorder and his virtual banishment from the family. He confronts his father about these matters in one of the film’s more moving scenes. Among several reasons why this film works so well, perhaps the most important is the lack of schmaltz. There is not a single note of over-the-top melodrama or pathos here. No shouting or screaming. We are never insulted by any belaboring of the obvious psychological nuances in play. Braff writes with respect for the intelligence of his audience. Many little scenes and plot twists delight because they are unexpected gifts. The off key pop solo sung by Andrew’s aunt at Mother’s funeral. Various people living in odd circumstances. One old buddy got rich selling his invention of soundless Velcro and now trundles down the corridors of his unfurnished McMansion in a golf cart. Another buddy, Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), sells jewelry he acquires in a highly unusual manner. Braff also writes simple yet refreshing dialogue, with plenty of offbeat humor, yet none of it is strained, nothing is played self-consciously for laughs. Braff himself has a warm, easy-to-watch screen presence. He can say nothing during the lull in a conversation, while the camera remains focused on his face, and it feels right. Portman and Sarsgaard are also genuine, each wonderfully relaxed in their roles. Production design is superb: details in every scene are arranged well, and the photography, by Lawrence Sher, is - like the story and the acting – unpretentious, never distracting, tricky or cute. This film never seems to manipulate us; instead it engages us, arouses our curiosity and amusement, bids us gently to care about Andrew and Sam and even Mark, leaving us entertained in the best sense. This movie is as confident, as secure in itself, as comforting, as a well worn pair of house slippers or your favorite reading chair. A splendid film. Grade: A- (09/09/04) GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING (Peter Webber, UK/Luxembourg, 2003). Film about the 17th Century Delft master painter, Johannes (Jan) Vermeer (Colin Firth) and a young woman (Scarlett Johansson) who served as a model for one of his most famous paintings, “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (c. 1665). Based on Tracy Chevalier’s 2001 novel, which itself was an imagined story of the young girl (about whom nothing factual is known), called Griet here, purported to be from a working class family made destitute by her father’s illness, pressed into service as a maid in Vermeer’s home. He becomes entranced by her, in part because she shows some artistic sensibility herself, teaches her to mix his paints as a pretext for having her close to him, finally paints her at the demand of a lecherous patron, van Ruijven. None of this escapes the notice of Vermeer’s wife, Catharina, whose jealousy finally wins out, despite efforts to silence her by her own mother, Maria, who knows Vermeer’s occasional commissions for the rich are the only thing standing between the Vermeers and the poor house. (Vermeer in fact lived a short life, dying at 43, painted only about 45 canvases, and achieved virtually no fame beyond a small circle of rich patrons. Catharina bore him 15 children, not the least reason for family financial woes.) Splendidly photographed, richly detailed period costumes and sets, together with the precarious family tensions, would have made this film sufficiently absorbing. But it is more than that: it is mesmerizing, thanks to Johansson, who is luminous as Griet. She holds the center of the film with stupendous power, all the more remarkable because of her subtlety. It is a role based on quietude that gives her few and simple lines to speak. Instead, it is the magic of her pale (dare I say pearlescent) beauty, her perpetually reticent expression, and her movements, her absolutely flawless body language - poised almost nobly at some moments, subservient at others, instantly fearful at still others, when Vermeer moves too close - that make her performance such a triumph. Firth’s Vermeer is moody, remote, withdrawn (as was Vermeer’s real temperament, one discovers). Judy Parfitt is superb as the tough minded realist Maria, who manages to charm new commissions for her ill tempered cash cow son-in-law. Naysayers liken the experience of viewing this film to watching paint dry. That's cute, but I cannot agree. Grade: B+ GOOD BYE, DRAGON INN (Bu san or Bu jian bu san) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2003). SPOILER ALERT! Here’s the latest anti-movie from Mr. Tsai. The old Fu Ho Grand Theater in Taipei is closing, and we are present on the last night of screening. The film showing is the 1992 Hark Tsui martial arts flick, “Dragon Inn,” set in 1457, when powerful eunuchs commanded warriors. (Cautionary side note: selecting as a leader someone devoid of testosterone doesn’t necessarily guarantee a peaceful nation. The thirst for power comes from the head, not the penis. Which, of course, has nothing to do with this film. Watching Tsai’s movies leaves a lot of time for reflection on other matters. Sorry.) About 10 or 11 people attend the screening, by my count. It is distinctly possible that about half of them are ghosts of theater habitues from the past (the first burst of dialogue, about half way through the film, begins when a one man tells another that the theater is haunted). These 10 are nearly lost in the vastness of the old movie house (earlier shots of the theater in its salad days revealed a packed house). Two people work the theater. The camera is stationary, Bresson style. We stare at everyone for a long time. There is almost no narrative movement and there are only two brief bursts of dialogue, taking up in the aggregate about 30 seconds. The other 80+ minutes consist of time, space and silence. Well, no, that’s incorrect. Every now and then we hear a line or two from “Dragon Inn” – which runs on the theater screen throughout Tsai’s movie. As is usually the case in Tsailand, it’s raining hard outside and, because of leaks, bucketsful inside, so we hear water a lot. The woman who works at the theater has a clubfoot; her heavy shoes strike the floors loudly as she hobbles here and there. Her movements with their attendant sounds hold some special fascination for Tsai, so we see and hear a lot of her clomp, clomp, clomping about, though she never speaks once. She services the restrooms, where more water sounds occur. There are also loud sounds of rustling cellophane food wrappers and the percussive cracking of pistachio nut shells generated by the lone, obviously rather ravenous, woman in the theater audience. There are occasional moments of physical humor. A lot of pretentious posing is on display: actors standing alone or arranged together in various tableaux representing social estrangement, a requirement in all Tsai movies (though again, some of the estrangement in this particular film may derive by the juxtaposing of live patrons with ghosts). Having emptied my quiver, I now have a confession to make. After thinking about this movie for several days, I’ve become more and more persuaded that Tsai’s methods actually work pretty well for the subject matter at hand, far better than these methods worked in his earlier films (The River, The Hole, What Time Is It There?). Put in another way, Tsai has found a story and setting for which his preferred methods can be applied successfully. There is a parallel here in the recent films of Gus Van Sant, who has been dabbling in minimalism himself. The methods he employed in his dreadful, irritating film Gerry - minimal plot, dialogue and character development; shots held for a long, long time (though his cinematographer, Harris Savides, nearly always relies on tracking shots, not a static camera) - when applied to the Columbine High massacre, resulted in Elephant, a luminous, eerie, poetic meditation on teen violence that is a near masterpiece. I am prepared to concede that Good Bye, Dragon Inn poignantly conveys the atmosphere in many run down old movie houses as well as nostalgia for the brighter movie going days of times past, so nicely underscored by the tears moistening the eye of a handsome older member of the audience, the presence of two other attendees – a little boy with his grandfather, and by the lyrics of the film’s closing song. Right after we saw What Time Is It There? last year, my partner said, “…if I wanted the kind of experience this film offers, I’d go to an art museum, not a movie. I thought that was spot on. If you slowed down the action in Good Bye much more, you’d end up with something like a Hopper painting. (In Mandarin and Taiwanese) Grade: B (02/09/04) LE GRAND ROLE (The Great Role) (Steve Suissa, France, 2004, 89 min.). CONSUMER ALERT! Silly movie about Maurice (Stephane Freiss) a struggling French actor, a Jew who tries unsuccessfully to land the role of Shylock in an all-Yiddish film production of “The Merchant of Venice” being cast and shot in France by Rudolph Grichenberg (Peter Coyote), a renown director. Maurice’s lovely wife Perla (Berenice Bejo) is dying of cancer, and to comfort her Maurice pretends that in fact he has gotten the part and is working on the film every day. Maurice has a coterie of stumbling, bumbling buddies who try to help him pull off this ruse. They even persuade the film director to visit Perla and lie that Maurice is doing well in the role, but she has already learned the truth watching TV. The whole enterprise is banal: dumb and dumber stuff. (Final screening at the annual NWFC/Jewish Film Festival) Grade: C (02/02/05) HEAD-ON (Gegen die Wand) (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2004, 121 min.). SPOILER ALERT! I offer first a short review of this splendid film, followed by a much longer one. Both reviews reveal important developments that are made known to the viewer only late in the film. Simply put, this tumultuous, raw love story of Turks living in Germany is close to being a perfect film. It is well structured, well paced, intriguingly photographed, and brilliantly acted by the two star-crossed lovers, the brooding, impulsively violent Cahit (Birol Ünel) and the mercurial, incandescent Sibel (Sibel Kekilli). This pair meet at a psychiatric hospital after suicide attempts, where the psychiatrist tells Cahit, “…you can end your life (i.e., your present way of life and circumstances) without killing yourself. Do something useful. Go to Africa. Help people.” A pretty fresh and thoughtful pitch, I thought, but the bristling, hostile Cahit isn’t buying it. Later Cahit is persuaded by Sibel to enter into a marriage of convenience. But in the midst of bedding others, they gradually fall in love, though by this time events occur which will separate them for years to come. Sibel’s profile is a pretty clear cut case of borderline personality disorder: conflict in all key relationships; faulty modulation of emotions; impulsivity; frequent self destructive, suicidal behaviors; drug and alcohol abuse; promiscuity. In the end, when Cahit tries to reunite with Sibel, she turns him down in favor of the simple, straight, calm life she has achieved, living in Istanbul. During the long years apart from Cahit, she has made a positive, stable life for herself by yielding to the very thing she had fought hardest against with her traditional Turkish family back in Germany: the conservative way of life of traditional Turkish women. She now has a young daughter, a devoted boyfriend, a doting older sister. When Cahit comes for her, she no doubt rightly senses that breaking away from the safe life and support system she has taken years to establish might be ruinous, and so she chooses not to go with Cahit. It is a wise decision, though a classically tragic one. (In German, Turkish & English) Grade: A (02/20/05) HEAD-ON (Gegen die Wand) (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2004, 121 min.). SPOILER ALERT! An electrifying, often destructive, quirkily humorous love story of a Turkish odd couple living in Hamburg. He is the brooding, ferel, impulsively violent Cahit, played by Birol Ünel, who evokes haunting images of a young Mick Jagger, with hints also of Dirk Bogarde and Donald Sutherland. She is the mercurial, danger seeking Sibel, played by Sibel Kekilli, a former porn film star, whose dazzling screen presence is incandescent. Her stunning allure - with sharply chiseled facial features that, while hardly glamorous by any conventional standard, still convey a deep sense of beauty - reminds me of a youthful Anouk Aimee. Along the way we learn something about the vastly complicated and problematic Turkish exile community in Germany. The story is set principally in Hamburg, though the very first scene is of a six piece Romany instrumental group supporting a female singer, performing Turkish ballads outdoors on a carpet strewn shoreline of the Bosphorus Strait, with the Istanbul skyline in the background. We return to this lovely ensemble again and again, as the musicians serenade us periodically to mark transitions between segments of the story. Lulled by this brief, charming opening, we are next thrown headlong into Zöe, a dingy tavern in the Turkish sector of Hamburg, where a drunken, disheveled man (Cahit) collects some bottles in an alleyway (that’s how he earns a living), next flattens another solitary drinker at the bar who has been taunting him, then drives his car at moderate speed directly into the side of a building. In the next scene we see this fellow again: now wearing a neck brace, he’s a patient in a mental hospital, where the psychiatrist tells him, “…you can end your life without killing yourself. Do something useful. Go to Africa. Help people.” A pretty fresh and thoughtful pitch, I thought, but the bristling, hostile Cahit isn’t buying it. Born in the southern Turkish town of Mersin, on the Mediterranean, not far from the Syrian border, Cahit emigrated to Germany as a young man. He’s now nearing 40 and still grieving the death of his beloved wife, an artist, several years earlier. He is a man without a country or prospects: he has repudiated all things Turkish but is a failure in his adopted land, a drunken sot at the bottom of the economic food chain. He has but one friend, Seref (Goven Kirac), who helps him out of scrapes, and there is a German woman, Maren (Catrin Sriebeck), with whom he occasionally indulges in coke-crazed sex. In the hospital Cahit meets Sibel, who was admitted after slashing her wrists, neither the first nor last of such acts for her. She’s a wild thing half Cahit’s age, impetuous, full of unbridled energy, eager for sexual adventure. Born in Germany, she nevertheless comes from a close knit, oppressively traditional Turkish family who find her promiscuous, brazen ways repugnant and demand that she settle down, marry a Turkish man of their choosing. She’s got a broken nose to show how her older, thuggish brother punctuates the family’s demands. The prospect of being forced to live a repressive Turkish style of life with some dolt of a man is what drives Sibel to suicidal despair. But now she sees a way out. On a clandestine date while they are still hospitalized, Sibel proposes a deal to Cahit, a marriage of convenience. If he will present himself to her family as a proper Turk, get their blessing and marry her, she will cook, clean and make a good home for him but otherwise impose no demands: he can go his way, she hers, as far as seeking partners and pleasure. When Cahit rejects this proposal, Sibel, who’s been drinking with him, suddenly breaks a beer bottle and cuts her arm deeply, savagely. As in the scene where Cahit drove his car into the wall, this one too leaves the viewer momentarily stricken by the lightening speed and sheer ferocity of the act. That seems to be the way it is for these two, what they find attractive in one another: a fierce and fearsome, spring coiled, exhilarating if destructive energy. After Sibel’s slashing, we cut to the shores of the Bosphorus for the next musical interlude. Subsequent chapters in the story feature Cahit’s change of heart, cleaning himself up for presentation to Sibel’s family; the raucous wedding; the couple’s unconsummated arrangements; Cahit’s gradual opening of his heart to Sibel, which primarily takes the form of jealousy over her escapades with other men. There is more than a touch of humor along the way, especially scenes when Cahit visits Sibel’s relatives, or when he chafes at the well ordered apartment Sibel has arranged. There are inklings of tenderness as well, a moment or two when Cahit approaches Sibel gently. But mainly the film travels a tightrope of tension and suspense in which we sit on edge, awaiting the next harsh or incendiary event. We’re never disappointed. One night at Zöe a man who has been regularly shagging Sibel begins to taunt Cahit aloud that everyone in the neighborhood knows his wife is nothing but a whore. Cahit takes all he can, then quickly attacks the man, wounding him badly. Sibel responds with another suicide attempt. The truth of their situation is discovered by Sibel’s family, who, in humiliation and in the name of family honor, proceed to burn every photo and other trace of Sibel’s existence and actually try to corner and kill her. Cahit goes to prison for 12 years and Sibel escapes to Istanbul, where her sister takes her in. Sibel’s flirtations with death are not yet finished, however. Craving drugs and sex, she also seeks her own demise by provoking an attack by some street thugs. At the end, having survived a near fatal stabbing, Sibel makes a new, calm, straight life for herself over the years of Cahit’s imprisonment. She now has a young child and a devoted boyfriend. And then Cahit, fresh from prison, arrives in Istanbul searching for her. They meet and enjoy a couple of days of tender, soulful lovemaking - a consummation at long last - in scenes filmed in deep, rich colors befitting an Italian Renaissance painting. Cahit plans to go on to Mersin; we can’t tell if it’s just for a visit or to stay. He wants Sibel to go there with him. He waits in vain for her at the bus station the next morning. We see him leave on the bus, alone. Cut to the Romany ensemble once more: they play one last time, then the players and the singer take a deep bow and the screen goes to black.
Simply put, this tragic, raw love story is close to being a perfect film. It is well structured, well paced, intriguingly photographed, and brilliantly acted by the principals playing its two star-crossed lovers. The clash of cultures that is a major subtext of this story is even well signified by the music: the Romany strains on the Bosphorus are countered in Hamburg by goth-punk 80s numbers by Sisters of Mercy and Depeche Mode. Head-On was named Best Film at the 2004 Berlin Festival, won five German national film awards, and was voted best film in Europe last year as well. (In German, Turkish & English) Grade: 4.5 A (02/20/05)
HERO (Ying xiong) (Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2003). Here’s one for you hard core Hong Kong martial art flick aficionados. Just before the Warring State Period ended with the unification of China by the large and powerful western Qin Kingdom, around 221 BCE, other states were struggling to maintain their autonomy, the largest of which was the Zhao Kingdom in eastern China. According to the story in this film, the Zhao king has dispatched three renowned assassins to kill the Qin king. The Qin king lives in a state of constant apprehension, fearing for his life even as he prepares his vast army to crush the other states. His visitors cannot come closer than 100 paces from his throne or they will instantly be killed. Then one day a humble nobody – his name is actually Nameless (played by Jet li) is brought before the Qin king to a share a remarkable story: that he has succeeded in slaying all three of the Zhao assassins! The king is incredulous that a simple fellow the king has never heard of, a man without the slightest reputation as a fighter, has performed so well. The King insists that Nameless approach closer to his throne, drink with him, and tell the details of how he managed to bump off the bad guys (well, one’s a woman, played by Maggie Cheung). Most of the film consists of a series of long flashbacks as Nameless tells the story from several perspectives. Two of the assassins had been lovers: Flying Snow, played by Ms. Cheung, and Broken Sword, played by Tony Leung. These two starred in another romance of sorts, In the Mood For Love. The film is loaded with over-the-top combat scenes. There are massive sets using hundreds of warriors, scenes of epic Cecil B. DeMille style grandeur. And there are 1-on-1 fights between Nameless and others that go way beyond Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the gravity-defying improbability of the fighters’ movements. The sets, the mise-en-scene, and the photography present us with lush, rich, spectacular visual delights at every turn. That is the real strength of Hero. It is interesting to compare this film with Twilight Samurai, the other oriental martial arts flick currently making the rounds. In that film there are just a few 1-on-1 battles, and the character of the protagonist is revealed with great skill. In Hero we get zero character development and so many fights that they lose their power to astonish, like eating way too much chocolate or spaghetti, or what have you. The trouble with being engorged is not only that the flavor and texture of the food becomes flat, you also get sleepy. That’s how I felt after a while watching this film. (In Mandarin) Grade: B- (higher for those who can't get enough of Kung Fu choreography, no matter how schmaltzy.) (02/28/04) HOTEL RWANDA (Terry George, Canada/UK/Italy/South Africa, 2004). For 100 days, between April and July, 1994, 600,000 to 800,000 people were slain in the Rwandan massacres while the rest of the world stood by. Worst carnage since the heyday of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Using principally machetes and clubs, Hutu gangs literally butchered people, mainly the minority Tutsis (it has been estimated that nearly 80% of the Tutsi population were killed) but also Hutus judged to be close to Tutsis. This in a country where people from the two ethnic groups traditionally had led intertwining lives, mixing in the same neighborhoods and frequently intermarrying, as in the case of the real life couple whose story is depicted in this competently crafted, emotionally stirring docudrama. Paul Rusesabagina (a Hutu married to a Tutsi woman, Tatiana) was, at the time of the genocidal attacks, the temporary manager of the ritzy Hotel Mille Collines, a five star garden luxury spot operated by Sabena, the Belgian national airline, in central Kigali, the Rwandan capitol. A shrewd, resourceful and deeply principled man, Rusesabagina found ways to shelter Tutsi and other hunted refugees during the genocide, while keeping military death squads and roving Hutu civilian gangs at bay, until a successful rebel uprising ended the killing. The hotel was one of a very few safe, protected shelters where Tutsis who stayed in country were able to survive. Rusesabagina’s actions are credited with sparing over 1,200 lives; miraculously, no one billeted at the hotel died. In the film, Don Cheadle plays Rusesabagina, and Sophie Okonedo (whom you may recall as in Dirty, Pretty Things) plays Tatiana. The story is presented in a straightforward, well scripted and photographed manner, with the main focus always on Rusesabagina and the people and events immediately surrounding him. We get the full picture of the situation in the hotel and in the surrounding city and countryside. We see how he struggles to sustain the survival of his family, friends and others, more than once with someone’s gun barrel aimed at his head. It helped a little that he had taken good care of important government types staying at the hotel in the past. For bribes, literally to purchase people’s lives, he has access to money, jewelry and liquor – some at the hotel, more that he pilfers from another hotel where he had worked previously. Rusesabagina is close to a senior UN military officer from Canada, Col. Oliver (played by Nick Nolte). At a few key moments, Oliver and his little force help protect the hotel, though it’s really all bluff. The film is properly unsparing in its depiction of the impotent role of UN forces, who are under orders not to shoot anybody. They aren’t peacekeepers, just observers, Col. Oliver is clear to state. Rusesabagina also knows how to work the phones. He keeps officials at Sabena headquarters in Brussels informed of what’s going on, and they in turn, through government back channels with the French, sponsors of the Hutu government, succeed in calling off military squads who have come to the hotel to kill everyone. The number of close calls is staggering, a story with parallels to those told by Holocaust survivors in an earlier generation. Cheadle is entirely convincing in the principal role. He is by turns fretful, loving, tough, ingratiating and scared, whatever the immediate situation demands, and he’s always intense, on his toes every moment. He also gets Mr. Rusesabagina’s English accent just right (see next paragraph). Okonedo, Nolte and several other players are effective in supporting roles. At the screening my partner and I attended, we were privileged to have a Q & A led by the director, Terry George, and the real life Mr. Rusesabagina. Both are modest, quiet, earnest men. It is easy to see how they could strike a comfortable collaboration. They are working to promote organizations that aid genocide survivors. Here’s a key one in case you’re interested: www.survivors-fund.org.uk/. The Rusesabagina family were evacuated to Belgium, where they have lived for the last decade. Recently Mr. Rusesabagina has returned to Kingali to visit, having reunions with many he had aided. The Hotel Collines is still thriving (though Sabena Airlines is presently in bankruptcy). In 2000, Mr. R. received the Immortal Chaplains Prize for Humanity (former awardees include Archbishop Desmond Tutu). The film is an independent effort with financing from multiple international sources. Amnesty International has sponsored a number of festival and other special screenings. Now United Artists has signed on to provide wider commercial distribution of the film in the U.S., beginning on December 22. For more, visit the film website at www.hotelrwaqnda.com. Back to our screening: Mr. George and Mr. Rusesabagina received a standing ovation from a packed house, well deserved for the valuable film they have made and the promise of dividends of constructive social action that it may earn. Grade: B+ (12/05/04) HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (Shi mian mai fu) (Zhang Yimou, China/Hong Kong, 2004, 119 min.). SPOILER ALERT! Mr. Zhang has been an influential leader in the rise of Chinese cinema after the Cultural Revolution. He has made several splendid films, including Red Sorhgum, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, To Live, Not One less and The Road Home. Two years ago he entered the martial arts film derby with Hero, a lavish production reminiscent of the great Hollywood action epics of Cecil B. DeMille (Samson and Delilah, The Ten Commandments) and William Wyler (Ben Hur). Now Zhang follows Hero with another mart-art flick, a very different sort of film that has more in common with Ang Lee’s recent hit, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Where Hero presented spectacular crowd scenes and massive battles, House of Flying Daggers is more intimate, entwined with a story that is on a simpler, more human scale, a story of vengeance and of love. Rather than relying primarily on one kung fu hero, Jet Li, as he did in Hero, in Flying Daggers Mr. Zhang gives us a trio of intriguing characters. For me, these differences make Flying Daggers the better film. Hero was freighted with glitter and schmaltz. In Flying Daggers we are treated instead to the spellbinding natural beauty of the woods and fields through which the protagonists chase each other, discover truths, do battle, make love. Early on we get an equally impressive treat at an upscale brothel where the heroine, the blind Mei (Zhang Ziyi, who also starred in Hero, Crouching Tiger and The Road Home) performs a sensational dance in a circle of drums, during her first encounter with the man who will become her new passion, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro). The plot, not that it matters, concerns antagonisms between the government and some righteous outlaw gangs back in 859 CE. The House of Flying Daggers is the most formidable of these groups, and the head of the government’s army vows to break them. The local leader of the authorities, Leo (Andy Lau) is in fact a mole planted years ago by the Daggers gang, and he is also the longtime lover of the heroine, Mei. These facts are well hidden from viewers until late in the story. Leo taps his most able lieutenant, the swashbuckling Jin, to ingratiate himself with Mei by pretending to fall in love with her, then let her lead him (and a military garrison led by Leo quietly following close behind) to the Daggers headquarters, where soldiers can then kill off the gang’s leaders and break their power. A significant problem arises when Jin does in fact fall in love with Mei. There are plenty of close range fights in this film, all of them choreographed to perfection, in the manner we all came to enjoy in Crouching Tiger (sequences high in trees as well as on the ground). Most fights are fantastical, comic book stuff, but that goes with the genre territory. Everything is gorgeously filmed. And in the end everybody dies, the requisite outcome for a story that aspires to tragedy. If you like mart-art films, this one is better than average. But it doesn’t rise to the standard of Mr. Zhang’s best films. And it’s no Crouching Tiger either. Grade: B (01/04/05)
HOWARD ZINN: YOU CAN’T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN. (Deb Ellis & Denis Mueller, US, 2004). An ever cheerful, impish yet innocent boyishness radiates from the bright eyed, smiling face of historian Howard Zinn. You can see it when he was a young man and its still there, now when he’s past 80. This feature (78 minute) documentary reviews Zinn’s life and work as a social activist. It is a splendid inspirational antidote for the despair many of us often feel at the unending and seemingly unstoppable egregious misconduct of our politicians and corporations, when we think there’s nothing to be done about it. Zinn’s irrepressible exuberance, his natural sense of decency, charity and goodwill, are evident in a famous credo that sums up his life’s work: "To be hopeful in bad times,” Zinn has said, “is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness… And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” We review the experiences of the young Zinn, whose social conscience was formed in part by an upbringing in poverty, early shipbuilding union membership, killing of innocents in WW II when he served as an air force bombardier, and an initial college teaching post at all black Spelman College in Atlanta near the dawn of the civil rights movement. From there we follow his battles in protest of the Vietnam War, his formative trip to Hanoi, his fights for employee and student rights at Boston University, his steadfast intellectual support of student protesters. He spoke against the Vietnam War in front of a hotel where BU trustees would be voting on his tenure that same day. (As it turned out, they had already approved his tenure before he gave his speech, although Zinn didn't know that at the time he spoke.) We hear a bit about his most famous book, "A People’s History of the United States" (1980), in which he reviews our history from the frame of reference of ordinary (and oppressed) groups: Native Americans, blacks, new immigrants, trade unionists, the marginal and the poor. The book thoroughly irritated academic historians and endeared Zinn to a generation of popular readers, having now sold a million copies in 17 languages. We see he hasn’t changed: he’s still in love with Roz, his wife of 35 years and also the only person he permits to edit his book drafts before he sends them off to the publishers. The end titles celebrate the achievements of their two adult children. Zinn and Roz are still marching in anti-war parades, he’s speaking out at rallies, and he’s just written a play in which Karl Marx returns in the present day and finds things much the same as they were in 1848. It’s interesting to contrast Zinn with his fellow Bostonian, the radical academic and public intellectual, Noam Chomsky, who appears here briefly. Chomsky, as is well known, always has an encyclopedic trove of information at his fingertips relevant to any political subject, and he relentlessly declaims on the intransigence of our government with quiet but deadly seriousness. Chomsky these days is no longer certain that protest can change things; though he still goes at it, he often appears grumpy. Zinn is more plain spoken. His messages are simpler. You won’t be edified by an avalanche of damning new facts listening to Zinn. But, where Chomsky maybe has lost heart, Zinn’s appeal remains grounded in goodwill. There’s that twinkle in his eye, as if he’s thoroughly enjoying himself in the role of public gadfly. His good humor is infectious. Perhaps most telling in the film is footage of his recent visit to a high school class, where silent and surly (by my reckoning) kids get a dose of Zinn advocating as usual the importance of common people standing up for their beliefs. At the end, the filmmakers show brief “exit interviews” of some of the students, and they have been energized by Zinn in the most lovely way. One girl says, “He said all the things that are in my head.” Is this a teacher who can reach kids or what?! And who among us doesn’t also need the sort of uplift that a good man like Zinn can deliver? Grade: B+ (06/21/04) IMAGINARY HEROES (Dan Harris, US, 2004, 117 min.). CONSUMER ALERT! This wretched psychodrama uses every shabby device in the book to wheedle attention and sympathy from us for its characters, who, with one exception, are not worthy of any notice at all, let alone two precious hours of filmgoers’ time. As in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (a superb film that, in comparison, clearly shows the vacuity of Heroes), a late teenage boy has died, leaving his family in the throes of bereavement. In this case, the death was a suicide, an event that nearly always poisons the emotional well of the survivors in a particularly corrosive way. We follow these people over the next 8 or 9 months. The father (Jeff Daniels) becomes a withdrawn, virtually mute, usually drunken stiff who secretly takes leave from his job for months, sits instead on a park bench all day, and insists on setting a full plate of food at the deceased son’s place for every meal. He treats everyone else in the family with unerring nastiness. He sees his doctor regularly but the issue of therapeutic intervention in his obviously dysfunctional state never comes up. The mother (Sigourney Weaver) yells at the neighbor woman, among others, gets busted when she stupidly tries to buy "marijuana" (her term) at a head shop (what adult in reality would ever try such a dumb stunt?), and, near the end, swoons into coma with a lung condition that everyone in the theater assumes is cancer (she’s a heavy smoker). The older sister (Michelle Williams) is away at college and all too happy to distance herself from the family zoo. The younger brother (played by Emile Hirsch) is the only credible member of the family. His suffering is genuine, its causes multifold, and his conduct is coherent within the circumstances. But Mr. Hirsch’s character is too softspoken, too morose and beaten down, to carry the movie. Ms. Weaver has a few flip lines but generally behaves too unintelligently to merit much empathy. The other bit players, subtexts and gimmicky, unreal dialogue don’t help. The suicide theme is echoed in an almost nonchalant manner in the case of two other minor characters. So what is Mr. Harris trying to say about this subject? Why Jeff Daniels agreed to play the sap of a father as written in this screenplay is something only his therapist might possibly be able to answer. Avoid this dog. Instead rent Redford’s classic. Grade: C- (2/17/05) IN GOOD COMPANY (Paul Weitz, US, 2004, 109 min.). When Globecom, an omnivorous international conglomerate, buys up a major New York ad agency, Carter Duryea (Topher Grace), an ambitious young upstart, is sent in to kick some ass. He immediately displaces the veteran sales manager, Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid) and starts looking for people to fire. He keeps Foreman on as his “wing man,” mainly because Carter has zero experience selling adverts. Lest you think we’re headed for serious dramatic consequences here, let me hasten to mention that this is really just a fancy sitcom in wolf’s clothing. Carter’s glamour marriage almost immediately disintegrates and his tenuous grip on his job is further weakened because he doesn’t know the first thing about how to take care of himself. He wangles an invite to dinner at the Foreman home, where he proceeds to fall for Dan’s daughter Alex (Scarlett Johansson), whom he had bumped into in an elevator back on his first day at the agency. Their brief romance is the most refreshing part of the film. Full of unexpected lines and a proper outcome. The smart old pro versus cocky new kid on the job subtext is far more clichéd and predictable. Quaid is always pleasant to watch, of course, and he doesn’t disappoint here. Topher Grace (the name is short for Christopher) is a lively new film presence whose career development hopefully will be interesting to watch. Ms. Johansson is her usual luminous self. Her particular beauty, like a statue made of fine white marble, is animated here by a forthrightness, an honesty in her character’s conduct that stands in contrast to the enigma she presented in Lost in Translation and the nearly mute deference of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. She continues to amaze. With Philip Baker Hall, David Paymer, and Malcolm McDowell as Teddy K, the charismatic CEO of Globecom. Mr. Weitz also directed About a Boy, a much stronger film than this one. Grade: B- (01/29/05) INCIDENT AT LOCH NESS (Zak Penn, UK, 2004). CONSUMER ALERT! Blair Witch Project meets Living in Oblivion in this peculiar, gratuitously artsy-smartsy mockumentary about legendary German film director Werner Herzog’s misadventures in Scotland, where he has traveled to make a film about the ethos of Nellie, the Loch Ness monster. The structure is film-within-a-film: a crew headed by John Bailey is shooting Herzog and his team making the doc about Nellie. Featured on this film team are Zak Penn (he and others play themselves) as the self serving, sociopathic producer of the Nellie doc; Michael Karnow, an actor posing as a zany crypto-zoologist - meaning that he studies unclassified, mysterious life forms; Kitana Baker, a shapely young actress who is supposed to be a sonar expert (inspiring salacious thoughts about plumbing her depths); and Herzog, of course, who by turns seems to be amused, edgily tolerant, or seriously pissed about the proceedings, which degenerate outrageously. It is made clear that Penn intends to employ large fake models to suggest Nellie in the water. Things get out of hand when an apparently real monster shows up to the party, sinks the boat the crew is using and wreaks other havoc resulting in the “deaths” of two of the crew (by then we know this is all fakery, though the actors keep up a mock seriousness about the disaster). Mr. Penn gets the final word in an interview with a reporter when he deadpans that the two who died surely made sacrifices, but they hardly compare with the sense of guilt he must live with for placing them in peril. In a way this film is like a Farrelly Brothers comedy for Herzog groupies rather than 12 year olds: it’s silly without being very funny. In case the hommage to the great one is not apparent to somebody, brief footage from Fitzcarraldo and My Best Fiend is shown. Now, if only Herzog had tried to move Loch Ness to Romania for the shoot, then we’d have something. Herzog and Penn co-wrote and produced. Add: Of course there’s another possible take on this film, and a serious one at that. Herzog has long been interested in the question of whether films do or even can tell the truth. He gets into the issue a bit in this film. He likes the phrase, “ecstatic truth,” as opposed to “factual truth” or fact. He means that one can employee fictional devices – fakery, if you will - in the service of larger truth telling. What filmmaker would disagree? Fellini, for one, always referred to himself, when making films, as “a liar.” Yet I’m sure he would have felt misunderstood if one extrapolated from his self description the idea that he thought his films portrayed his personal history, human nature or Italy untruthfully. For “ecstatic” one might substitute the term “essential” or “existential” depending upon the themes of a film. I think Herzog would agree that this issue pertains as much to documentary filmmaking as to fictional films. One is always selective in what to shoot, how to shoot it, and how to utilize the footage within the editing and narrative strategies chosen for the film. The seminal history of the documentary is steeped in sociopolitical propagandizing (e.g., the films of John Grierson or Dziga Vertov) and fictionalizing, for that matter (e.g., the work of Robert Flaherty). Herzog and Penn could easily be seen as toying with these notions of relativism and subjectivity in making “truthful” documentaries. Perhaps they captured in this kinky movie something of the essence or ethos of Nellie, or Nellie seekers, after all. Grades: C (B+ for Herzog devotees). (12/12/04) THE INCREDIBLES (Brad Bird, US, 2004). I’m not wildly enthusiastic about animated feature films. Maybe it’s from all the imprinting early in my life, watching a cartoon before the feature in the old days of moviegoing, but I have always preferred my animation viewing experiences to be brief, in the 5 to 20 minute range, or even shorter. Good friend and animator Laura DiTrapani makes some 30 to 60 second long films for “Sesame Street” that knock my socks off. I also like short animated segments embedded in a live action feature, as in Quentin Tarantino’s ingenious weaving of a Japanese animation sequence into Kill Bill, Vol. 1. So it was with significant trepidation that I agreed to see the 2 hour long Incredibles, the newest computer animated feature from Pixar/Disney that has received a uniformly warm welcome from critics this season. Mr.Incredible (voice of Craig T. Nelson) is a really big, really strong Superhero, built like a steroid-fed NFL lineman with a jaw the size of New Hampshire. He bears no resemblance to any old agey Superheros I can recall. I think he is Democrat though, as he has some features in common with Bill Clinton (outsized, cheesy style), John Kerry (that chin) and leftist gadfly celeb, the actor Woody Harrelson (overall facial looks). The trouble for Mr. I is that the age of Superheros has passed. The country has been taken over by girlie men, you know, those Old Europe types, who disapprove of strong arm methods to fight crime. Mr. I and his fellow Supers have had no choice but to accept a government sponsored relocation program providing anonymity and new careers, sort of like the witness protection program. Mr. I has found some pleasure in his marriage to another Super, the infinitely flexible Elastigirl (voice of Holly Hunter), who can elongate and morph her body in ways that amaze you, for awhile. She is obviously the granddaughter of Plastic Man, though this fact goes unmentioned in the film. Their children also have supernatural powers, but have been properly raised not to use them. That’s taboo now for all the Supers. Elastigirl (a.k.a. Helen Parr) is a homemaker, and Mr. I (a.k.a. Bob Parr) is a clerk in a huge insurance bureau. After 15 years of this, he’s overweight, out of sorts and dying of boredom. Just in the nick of time a serious bad guy emerges, Syndrome (voice of Jason Lee), a bright but evil little runt who had idolized Mr. I in the old days and begged to join him back then, but was spurned. Mr. I always worked alone. Syndrome has turned his hurt into vengeance, crafted a truly nasty, hugely destructive android and some other tricks to aid him in battle, and has been systematically tracking down former Supers and terminating them. He has a lovely female associate coax Mr. I into taking on a new Super “assignment,” and of course he jumps at this chance to escape from the insurance business. And thus, after the first hour of novel imagery and occasionally clever dialogue, we now enter the second hour of the film, one that invokes the standard adventure formula from time immemorial: good guy is lured into trap by bad guy, other good guys (the rest of Mr. I’s family) follow, things look bad for a long while, but in the end the good guys triumph. All five member of Mr. I’s family join in the fray, even baby Jack Jack, and they are aided toward the end by a slim cool black dude known as Frozone (voice of Samuel L. Jackson). He is literally cool, as his special schtick is to shoot streams of chipped ice that quick freeze his opponents faster than you can induce world class sinus pain guzzling a blended triple margarita. During that final hour of the film, I felt myself drifting not unpleasantly into a richer state of lassitude than Bob Parr had been feeling at the insurance company. I began to imagine that Syndrome represented Newt Gingrich fighting with Bill Clinton in their tenacious battles of 1994-98. Remember Newt, that crafty little dude who put out a contract on America? He was the bellicose cyberfreak with a thousand tricks up his sleeve to slay the cheesy giant President, who always ended up winning (though the country did not). I would have liked this film more, I’m sure, if my mind were properly pre-programmed from watching 40 hours a week of domestic sitcoms, superhero adventures and video games, the way all red blooded American do. Adventure comics meets family values. That's this film in a nutshell. Mr. I's big epiphany in the final battle scenes is that he does not have to fight alone; that he can actually accomplish more by collaborating with his wife. Sigh. The only three animated features I’ve seen in recent years that I enjoyed all come from foreign sources and couldn’t be more different from The Incredibles. One was Princess Mononoke, made with dazzling visual aesthetic values by the contemporary Japanese master animator, Hayao Miyazaki. Another was Chicken Run, the stop action, claymation barnyard allegory about forced labor camps by Brits Peter Lord and Nick Park (of Wallace and Gromit fame). And the third was Sylvain Chomet’s deliciously weird French adventure of a bicycle racer and his mother, Triplets of Belleville. Call me un-American, but next to these films, Incredibles seems coarse, silly and trite. Grades: C for serious filmgoers; low B+ for persons under 12 and PlayStation 2 habitues of any age. (11/30/04) INSIDE IRAQ: THE UNTOLD STORIES (Mike Shiley, US, 2004, 95 min.). Documentary about recent conditions in Iraq, i.e., since our invasion in March, 2003. Mr. Shiley, who is not a professional journalist, nonetheless managed to arrange nominal sponsorship from the Portland, OR, ABC-TV affiliate and one or two other ABC stations in return for their rights to broadcast material he filmed. He spent two months in Iraq, around December, 2003. He shot video footage and stills in three locales. Twice he was embedded with U.S. military units: in a highly dangerous area west of Baghdad (in the center of the “Sunni triangle”), and on another occasion in a safer Kurdish area to the north. He also shot film while walking the streets of Baghdad accompanied only by a privately hired Iraqi guide. The photography is outstanding. Especially his still shots of ordinary people. (One learns on the film’s website www.insideiraqthemovie.com - that Mr. Shiley is a seasoned photographer and film producer. He worked as a freelance photographer for CNN, covering the Bosnian war in Sarajevo, and has produced travel films on Iraq, Nepal, Thailand and Cambodia.) Many stories unfold in these photographs and videos, a number of them full of fresh nuances and activities not previously known to us. Here are some examples: Walking the streets of Baghdad: many glimpses of friendly people; coffee breaks; traffic jams; car bombings; shopping in open markets; visits to Muslim and Christian churches – Iraqis singing Christmas carols at the latter). In the Kurdish north: bad drinking water in salty wells (Saddam had trucked in water, which he could control, instead of improving the wells, as a means of manipulating villagers); landmine removal (Iraq has displaced Cambodia as the most mined nation, thanks to Saddam); horribly mine-injured children at a hospital set up by Italians specializing in landmine injuries; a gun market where for $75 anybody the Kurdish dealer likes can buy a grenade launcher and a grenade (grenade refills are $25 each)…they’ve got AK 47s and anything else you might want at bargain prices as well. At the Anaconda U.S. military base, where Army units in the region dump tons and tons of perfectly good supplies before decamping (everything from huge sealed food packages to high tech military radios, to structural steel – the sergeant who showed this dump to Shiley for filming was later passed over for promotion); a U.S. Army Major and several troops visiting a grade school where they pass out candy and toothpaste to the kids to win their hearts and minds; the same Major hiring Iraqis to cut down tall grasses around the base perimeter so insurgents will not have cover for sniping and other actions; a U.S. soldier training Iraqi militia, giving a stern lecture on the prohibition of torture. Shiley speaks of little gizmos called “flash drives” – 3 inch long flat metal strips - that store photographic information electronically. They are plugged into a computer to view the images. There is a market among the soldiers in what they call “military porn” – flash drives showing stills of bloody, maimed bodies of dead Iraqis. One flash drive Shiley acquired is a video purportedly shot from an Apache helicopter at night using infrared film, showing the shooting of several people on the ground who were suspected of being insurgents, though this had not been verified at the time of the shootings. In the Sunni triangle, in a town reputed to be so dangerous that that no other journalist will go there, Shiley volunteers to be imbedded with a tank crew. He is taught to fire tank-mounted weapons so he can be up in the open turret during night patrols, when the tank crews regularly fire cannon and other weapons down residential streets just to intimidate the locals. This wasn’t Shiley’s first trip to Iraq: earlier, in April, 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion, he had accompanied a medical team sponsored by the Northwest Medical Teams NGO to Erbil, a Kurdish city in northern Iraq. Footage from this trip is also included in the film. The team (Dr. Catlin Goss, a Seattle surgeon; Jackie Gust, a Portland nurse; and Scott Gotter, a paramedic with the Portland Fire Bureau) was assigned to conduct triage and urgent care as needed, and we get to follow this process. For me, there is a serious drawback to the present version of this film: it is the narration, which is performed by Mr. Shiley himself. He is a fine photographer and a courageous, wonderfully curious man, but he is a poor narrator. For one thing, he has a sophomoric, overly earnest, “Gee, golly, look at this” style of speaking. Second, he not only narrates in voiceovers while we watch stills or video footage, but in addition there are numerous scenes interspersed throughout the film in which he sits on a tall stool in a studio setting, with lightstands showing, and we watch as he speaks at length into the camera. He belabors the obvious, often explaining in a breathless manner things that are pretty obvious just from watching the film. He also talks down to the audience. In fact his approach is one that would be right for a mid-high school audience, but no one older. The director was present at the screening we saw of this film, though his remarks to us were quite brief. He says his aim was to present a middle-of-the-road perspective, not one biased for or against the war. This orientation may have guided his choices of what to photograph, but the slant of his narration seems fervently critical of the war. He also says he realizes that the film needs further editing. You bet. Someone else should write or at least edit the narrative script, and possibly a professional narrator would be better. The in-studio soliloquies perhaps could be eliminated altogether, which would make more time available to show footage shot in Iraq. In any event, the narration needs to be non-condescending, pitched to the level of a more sophisticated adult audience. In fairness I should mention that I shared my views about the narration in an e-mail exchange with Mr. Shiley. He responded that he basically agreed with my perspective and hopes to improve the narration in later editing, as resources permit. But he also added that he has received many e-mails from people who tell him that they loved the narration style because they did not feel lied to or "spun." I can appreciate this, although I stand by my criticism. Mr. Shiley, whose home is here in Portland, is a remarkable fellow. In addition to the adventures I’ve already mentioned, the film website indicates that he has visited 36 countries. He once trekked to an Everest Base Camp in Nepal, and completed a 3,000 mile solo bicycle trip from British Columbia to Cabo San Lucas. He is also an accomplished scuba diver and, as a certified Divemaster, he has guided over 250 dives in the Red Sea in Egypt. This film is quite valuable as it stands, and it could be made even more valuable with further editing. Grades: Overall: B; Visuals and facts: A; narration: D. (01/02/05) INTIMATE STRANGERS (Patrice Leconte, France, 2004). Patrice Leconte is fascinated by offbeat, enigmatic, eccentric relationships. Most of all, he likes to film quirky love stories. Monsieur Hire (1989), was adapted from a Georges Simenon novel about a forlorn voyeur who is obsessed by a beautiful young woman he watches constantly from afar. The Hairdresser’s Husband (1990), is the story of a drifter, a man with a passion for women barbers that began in childhood, who finally fulfills his dream. In The Girl on the Bridge (1999), a down and out carnival knife thrower and a striking young woman save each other from suicide. And in Felix and Lola (2001), another carnie with dubious prospects is attracted to a seductress with questionable loyalties. Even in The Widow of St. Pierre (2000), arguably his best film, although the story focuses to a degree on the connections between two men, their tie owes its existence to the more substantive relationship each has with the same woman. Certain themes keep resurfacing in this corpus. The men are always middle aged, shopworn by responsibilities, personal habits or life itself. The women are attractive, sexy, mysterious and bold. More bold than the men, who tend toward reticence and inhibition. The women also seem more influential, if not stronger. They are able to discern and open up closed places within the psyche of these men, while at the same time the women remain enigmatic to their devoted consorts. A sexual relationship seems less important than the man’s fascination with the enigma of the woman, and her ability to evoke hidden aspects within the man. Now we have Leconte’s latest offering, Intimate Strangers. The story revives all the familiar Leconte themes. It even stars Sandrine Bonnaire, who also played the young woman that so captivated M. Hire in Leconte’s film 15 years earlier. Here she is cast as Anna, a dyslectic, depressed, mysterious and powerful Parisian beauty who seeks psychiatric help for marital troubles. On the day of her first appointment with a psychoanalyst, she gets the directions to his office wrong and ends up spilling out her problems to an upscale tax accountant, William Faber (Fabrice Luchini), who at first mistakes her for a new tax client. Her husband Marc has withdrawn emotionally from her, Anna tells Faber; he refuses sex or affection. She wants help to restore their former harmony. The plain, fastidious Faber is so retiring, surprised, and spellbound by this lovely woman, that he cannot collect himself enough to stop and redirect Anna, who pretty much runs the conversation and ends by asking for a second appointment, which William reflexively consents to. He tries to square things at this second meeting, but Anna dismisses his claim not to be a doctor by saying she is well aware that not all analysts hold doctorates. These doings set the stage for an amusing romantic comedy. It's one that takes a few good natured pokes at psychoanalysis. But as events unfold, one might easily conclude that this story could represent an analyst’s most enjoyable fantasy, a therapist’s deluxe wish fulfillment: having your patient and helping her too, while getting all the good lines, the fees, immunity from ethics charges, and a free lunch into the bargain. Grade: B+ (08/17/04) JAPANESE STORY (Sue Brooks, Australia, 2004) Road movies are all about adventure, and this one does not disappoint. There are plenty of breathtaking scenes of the other worldly terrain of the northwest Australian desert, and ominous hints of danger ahead for the two principals on this journey into a vast primeval land. But the main adventures in this film concern the human heart. Toni Collette gives the finest performance of hers that I’ve seen as Sandy Edwards, a tough talking geologist, who gets stuck as chauffer and guide for Hiro (Gotaro Tsunashima), a diffident, joyless man from Kyoto, on a tour of mines in isolated locales out on the desert. One thing leads to another, and an awkward, icily strained beginning for these two morphs into a fling as surprising as it is delightful. Regrettably, I cannot discuss the climactic events that give this movie distinctiveness and ambiguity without introducing major spoilers. Let me just say that the love these two share can only be temporary, for a number of reasons, not the least being that Hiro has a wife and two kids back home. Being with Sandy has the effect on Hiro of opening his heart, and this in turn allows him to rekindle feelings for his family. By itself, this could be a precarious moral for any story. Certainly it is opposite to the moral high ground achieved through the unconsummated relationship in Lost In Translation, a significant element helping to make that film so exceptional. But, as already noted, there is more to this film’s message than I can declare here. I can only offer hints by describing the impressive range of Ms. Collette’s emotions as the story unfolds: anger, boredom, superiority, resignation, perspicacity, coquetry, sensuousness, panic, helplessness, grief, integrity, compassion. You name it. Collette delivers. Grade B+(06/06/04) KHACHATURIAN (Peter Rosen, US, 2003). The life and music of Armenian composer Aram Il’yich Khachaturian – considered along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich to be the “Big Three” among Soviet composers - are vividly portrayed in one of the best music documentaries I can recall. Khachaturian was born in 1903 in Tiflis, in a valley between the Caucasus Range and the Armenian Highlands, grew up in Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia, and later went to Moscow, in 1921, during the halcyon days of the new Leninist state, to study music. His life and career paralleled the course of Soviet history itself, until his death, a month short of his 75th birthday, in 1978. By the time he completed musical studies (cello first, then composition) in 1933, Stalin was entrenched in power. Stalin for the most part favored him, perhaps because they shared roots as common folk from Georgia. This favor helped Khachaturian during WW II (he tried to enlist in the Army but was told he could better help the cause by writing music) and later when he became the head of the national musicians organization. Khachaturian was a Communist Party member, and always remained loyal to the Soviet Union, even through the dark days (1948-1954) when he – along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich - was denounced as not only “formalist” but “anti-people” during the early phase of the Cold War, a time when Soviet musicians whose works had received acclaim in the West did not fare well politically or musically back home. He was redeemed politically after completing his ballet, “Spartacus,” in 1954 (Spartacus was admired by Karl Marx) and thereafter he again enjoyed broad public adulation and success to the end of his life, demonstrated compellingly by scenes of his funeral and burial. His most popular compositions were often inspired by Armenian folk music, and not infrequently by the propagandistic aspects of Soviet goals and heroism. It is interesting to wonder, as the filmmakers hint here, whether his “Spartacus” was a veiled expression of his sense of enslavement by the regime during his time as an outcast. This handsome film was obviously prepared for the big screen and is graced by flawless production values. Peter Rosen has used archival film footage and stills to perfection, and blended these with rich recently shot views of the Georgian landscape and intriguing contemporary interviews of his great friend, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Khachaturian’s son and nephew, and even the man who denounced him back in 1948, only to relent 6 years later. Ample cuts of performances of his two famous ballets – the “Gayaneh”(Op. 50, 1941-42, which contained the well known Sabre Dance) and “Spartacus” (Op. 82, 1950-54) are included here, along with his Concerto for violin and orchestra in D minor (Op. 46, 1940) dedicated to and performed in the film by David Oistrakh, and his Concerto-Rhapsody for cello and orchestra (Op. 99, 1963), dedicated to and performed here by Rostropovich. This spellbinding film sweeps you up and carries you along through an intense, dramatic career in an equally dramatic sociopolitical milieu. Grade: A (01/04) KILL BILL Volume 1 (Quentin Tarantino, US, 2003). I waited until Volume 2 was available on VHS/DVD so I could view both films for the first time close together. In Volume 1, a young bride simply called “The Bride” with a violent past (the only other name we know her by is black mamba, her assassin name) is left for dead like nearly everyone else in her wedding party, the work of an international gang of assassins, of which she had been a member. She wakes from a coma after 4 years and wants revenge, big time. This and a companion film (Volume 2) tell the story of The Bride’s exploits getting even with the people who took her down. Volume I is a lavish, stylish, highly colorful martial arts flick, composed of episodes (called chapters in printed stills) in which the bride does battle with one or a hundred opponents. Limbs and heads are lopped off like suckers in springtime on your fastest growing bush, and at every turn blood spews forth like oil from a runaway gusher. This is contemporary samurai stuff. There are strong Japanese accents throughout. One of the bride’s nemeses is a yakuza boss in Tokyo; there are even animated sequences from Japan; and sometimes The Bride herself speaks perfect Japanese, duly translated with English subtitles. In this genre, I prefer my kung fu movies served with more attention to choreography and a sensible narrative line, and less bloodletting than Tarantiino indulges in here. I guess I’m just a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon kind of guy. But for sure this film is better fare than your standard Hong Kong mart-art flicks, with their standard corny acting, nauseating English dubbing and such. Grade: B+ (11/15/04) KILL BILL Volume 2 (Quentin Tarantino, US, 2004). CONSUMER ALERT! “The Bride” gets three more names in the second installment: Arlene, Beatrix Kiddo and Mommy, and Bill does get killed, alright, but there’s not a whole lot more to say about the sequel. Yes, sequel is the right word: this movie is emblematic of all the lousy followup films Hollywood has made for years, schlock coattailing on the success of a first picture that was good. It’s for the most part self conscious, posed, postured and full of forced contrivances, with none of the steady, lavish style and movement that made Volume 1 sustain one's interest. Unlike anything one might ever have expected of a film made by QT, this is b-o-r-I-n-g. Dullsville. Yawn time. ZZZZZZZ. OK, out of 137 minutes of film here, there’s about 30 minutes worth watching – Beatrix’s martial arts training from old Pai Mei, her showdown battle with Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), and the final encounter with Bill (David Carradine). Otherwise it is sag city. Grade: C+ (11/27/04) KINSEY (Bill Condon, US, 2004) Docudrama/biopic about Alfred C. Kinsey, the pioneering researcher into human sexual behavior. Kinsey was a biology professor whose chief earlier work was creating a taxonomy of wasps, compiled in an obscure 1929 volume. He learned from this work that there is tremendous diversity in the living world, even within the same genus of animals. In the 1940s and 50s, he attained world wide notoriety as the first legitimate scientist to survey human sexual behavior, using systematic interview methods and data processing techniques. Once again, what he showed was enormous diversity of sexual experiences, more than anybody had previously guessed. Operating from his academic base at the University of Indiana, and with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey trained a team to conduct interviews with thousands of adults. The results were published in two volumes, “Sexual Behavior of the Human Male” (1948) and “Sexual Behavior of the Human Female” (1953). The first report resulted in widespread controversy that was, in the main, helpful to Kinsey, though there were always criticisms of his methods of acquiring information and doubts about the veracity and representativeness of his findings. By the time the second volume appeared, witch hunts for Communists were in full sway. One Congressional Committee, the Reece Committee, suggested that Kinsey was a Communist trying to erode the moral fiber of the U.S. through his trumped up findings. Though always staunchly supported by the U. of Indiana President, Herman Wells, Kinsey’s main financial backer, The Rockefeller, withdrew support and Kinsey could not find replacement funds. His third intended study, of sexual perversions, was never initiated. Three years after publishing the female sexuality study, Kinsey was dead, at 62, following a heart attack. Kinsey was vilified by his detractors, including conservative religious groups. Accusations of unusual sexual behaviors made against him and his staff were numerous and, in many instances, never confirmed or supported by a convincing body of evidence. Generally he was described as a bisexual masochist, probably not far from the truth, and a view certainly depicted in this film. More specifically, among other allegations, it was often said that Kinsey seduced graduate students and staff members at his Institute, encouraged group sex among his staff, and prompted his wife and some others to take part in films of sexual activity. Among masochistic pursuits, it was said that he indulged in such habits as sticking a toothbrush up his urethra, cinching a rope around his testicles, and once attempting self-circumcision without anaesthesia. I have no independent verification of the severe conflict with his father that is depicted in the film. We see in several scenes that the senior Kinsey was regularly and blatantly critical and condescending toward the younger man, and favored his brother. The father also apparently had some unusual illness in his own childhood involving his genitalia, though what connection this has to Kinsey’s life is never clear, except that the father thought Kinsey had wasted his education and training to pursue such a subject as sexuality. This film is as well crafted as Mr. Condon’s 1998 hit, Gods and Monsters. It is lucidly written and edited, and straightforwardly photographed. The story is told with unflagging pace, and it always sustains one’s attention. The cast are excellent in all the key roles: Liam Neeson (Kinsey), Laura Linney (Clara, known to Kinsey as “Mac,” his wife of 35 years), Peter Sarsgaard (Kinsey’s key aid and sometimes lover, Clyde Martin), Oliver Platt (U. of Indiana President Wells), John Lithgow (Kinsey’s harsh father, Alfred S. Kinsey) and Dylan Baker (Rockefeller Foundation head Alan Gregg). Neeson captures what we all presume, I guess, was the complexity of Kinsey’s personality: an obsessive, tenacious workaholic, drawn to his subject, perhaps, by his own complicated sexual preoccupations, who was at the same time an innocent, a tough minded researcher, a sophisticated voyeur, intensely curious about other people’s sex lives, and a loving husband and father. The film shows that he was a skillful interviewer, able to delve into the details of others’ most intimate sexual experiences and fantasies, and to do this successfully because he was empathic, non-judgmental, caring and humane. Nevertheless he was blind to the fact that bias might be introduced, e.g., when the interviewer knows or has a special relationship to the interviewee: he interviews his colleagues, even his own father. We cannot tell whether he envisioned his role as a cultural trailblazer, helping to hack out the path toward a more open, freer approach to sexual knowledge and conduct. But he was that. Grade: A- (12/19/04) KITCHEN STORIES (Bent Hamer, Norway/Sweden, 2003). Industrial psychology came of age in the 1930s, when time-motion studies boosted worker efficiency (satirized so brilliantly by Chaplin in Modern Times). This lovely film pokes fun at the application of such studies to domestic tasks in the years after World War II; apparently the Swedes were particularly fascinated with this sort of thing. We are told that they gathered data on patterns of kitchen use, how far a housewife walked between which functions (stove, refrigerator, sink and so on) in a day. Kitchens could then be reconfigured to cut down on required movement. Someone claimed that such measures could reduce a woman’s annual kitchen travel from equaling a trip around Africa to one around Italy. In this story, set in the 50s, Swedish observers trained to measure such things are dispatched to a rural community in Norway, where their task is to size up the kitchen movements of men living alone, bachelor farmers. This set up permits a few comic swipes at stereotypical differences between Swedes and Norwegians. More importantly, the research project provides a pretext for examining social isolation and connection in a farcical manner. The film settles down quickly to focus on one pair, Isak the “host” farmer and Folke, his Swedish “observer.” Folke is expected to avoid all interaction - even ordinary conversation - with Isak, who in turn begins to cook in his bedroom upstairs rather than be watched silently by Folke, who sits in a high chair looking down on him as he makes notes about Isak’s conduct. Gradually these two lonely men warm to one another, reaching out across disparate roles and national prejudices to find friendship. As Isak says, once the ice is broken, “how can we understand each other without talking?” Comparing Kitchen Stories to other recent films about new friendships between men, Hamer’s film makes Patrice Leconte’s The Man on the Train seem ostentatiously star struck. It’s focus on ordinary men gives Kitchen an appeal more like the sweetly earnest and largely unnoticed domestic film, Spring Forward. But there is far more drollery - more dry good humor - in this one than in either of the others. (Here’s a sample: Isak tells Folke about his friend Oskar’s habit of opening a beer each day at exactly two minutes before 5 o’clock. One day, Isak says, he asked him why, and Oskar replied, “Well, it’ll be 5 before you know it.”) Tomas Norstrom (Folke) and Joachim Calmeyer (Isak) each contribute marvelous turns. (In Norwegian and Swedish) Grade: A- (02/04/04) LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Thailand, 2004). The director’s prior film, Monrak Transistor (Transistor Love Story) opened and closed well, but the middle 75% was, in a word, dumb. After 20 initial minutes of fast paced loud music, dancing, romance, lots of animals and a fight, the male protagonist began to make one toweringly stupid decision after another, sinking the entire enterprise into tedious melodrama, until a musical number near the end, when all the actors who had had speaking roles reappeared brightly as backup singers. From start to finish, Last Life is way better. It never flags, but fascinates always. The story concerns Kenji (Tadanobu Asano, at age 30, already a veteran of 30 films), a Japanese national living in Bangkok. We don’t know why he’s there. He lives in a splendid apartment but works as a library assistant. He may be a criminal - a Yakuza gangster - on the lam. He is also obsessively neat, to an extreme bordering on OCD, and prone to frequent suicidal impulses as well. His scornful brother Yukio arrives with a friend in time to interrupt Kenji’s latest plan: to hang himself, leaving a note that states “This is Bliss.” Next the brother’s buddy abuptly shoots Yukio, and, in turn, Kenji shoots the buddy. End of sequence. Later, while standing on a high bridge, contemplating a suicidal dive, Kenji meets up with two Thai sisters, Nid and Noi (real life sisters, Laila and Sinitta Boonyasak), who are having a foulmouthed spat over a man they’ve both rogered. Nid has been evicted from Noi’s car and, further distracted seeing Kenji at the bridge rail, she is hit by another car, sending her to the hospital with severe injuries. Kenji tags along with Noi, first to the hospital and then to her family’s house in the country, where she is now staying alone. Noi’s place is as messy as Kenji’s is pristine. It’s hard to overstate their vastly divergent stances on cleanliness and order, a recurring source of amusement. Cases in point: Noi thinks nothing of putting out a cigarette in her rice; Kenji rearranges bars of soap in restrooms so edges run parallel to the counters. Kenji stays on at Noi’s for several days. And once or twice Nid’s spirit also visits the house when we least expect it. Or is it Nid herself? Alas, all good things must come to an end. Eventually Noi must go to Japan to work (she and Nid are working girls at a bunny club with a branch in Osaka, coincidentally Kenji’s home town). So she leaves and Kenji returns to his own apartment, just in time to encounter not only Noi’s ex-squeeze, a nasty fellow who’s itching to reinforce Kenji’s death wishes, but also a band of assassins who just happen to drop in from Osaka, looking rather too earnestly for Kenji themselves. Kenji’s compulsive need to flush the toilet imperils him needlessly at one very intense moment here. Apart from this, in good conscience I cannot tell you how this dicey situation resolves itself, but I can assure you that Kenji remains smitten with Noi until the end. Everything about this movie works. The cliché term “riveting” fits the bill to describe my absorption in the story. Tadanobu and Sinitta B. (Noi) are each beguiling characters. The cinematography is absolutely stunning, shot by the Australian Christopher Doyle, whose credits include The Quiet American, Rabbit-Proof Fence, In the Mood for Love, Liberty Heights, Temptress Moon, and before those a bushel of Hong Kong action flicks. There is one scene near the end - when Noi gazes pensively into the breeze while riding in her VW bug convertible being driven by Kenji - that is delicious, and there are so many others as well. Rather than screechy jumpcuts, the editors employ old-fashioned black interludes between major changes in scenes. The musical score is spare yet deeply physical: in long sections there is a barely audible slow pulsing rhythmic keyboard sound that suggests the heartbeat of a long distance runner. At times there is no music at all. It all fits in so well you aren’t aware of the transitions. Sometimes we can’t be sure whether a scene is actual or someone’s reverie, but it isn’t problematic. There are deconstructionist elements in the film, bits that are reminiscent of another recent Thai film, “Joe” Weerasethaku’s Blissfully Yours. The film’s title, for example, doesn’t appear until around 35 minutes in. Major things happen (Nid’s accident, the shootings in Kenji’s apartment) that are not followed up until much, much later, and then only elliptically. But there still is an overall flow, a sense of continuity that went missing in Blissfully Yours. By the way, any of you Thai experts out there know what the attraction of the term “Bliss” is for these filmmakers? (In Thai, Japanese & English) Grade: B (022/11/04) THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (Wes Anderson, US, 2004, 118 min.). It’s hard to know quite what to say about the humor, or lack of it, in Anderson’s latest film. He is naturally drawn to droll, offbeat comedy (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) but Life Aquatic seems almost an anti-humor piece: rarely have I seen so much comic talent able to produce so few honest laughs. Big production comedies these days tend to bomb because everyone tries too hard to be funny, to wring the last laugh from every scene. Here’s an instance where maybe people didn’t try quite hard enough. The result is not so much a send up of Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s career – the manifest theme of the screenplay – as it is a parody of a send-up. It’s as if the comedians here, and there are certainly some fine talents at work (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jeff Goldblum, Anjelica Huston, Bud Cort) were trying to outdo one another in throwing away lines or acting the straight role; it’s like a pissing contest in a hurricane. That’s not to say that the thing is freighted with pathos or even earnestness. Terms like off the mark and somnambulistic instead come to mind. The plot, for what it’s worth, goes like this. Renown pop oceanographer/filmmaker Zissou (Murray) is on the downslope of his career. On his latest voyage, he loses his oldest and dearest associate in the briny, when, Zizzou claims, the man is eaten alive by a beast he calls a “jaguar shark.” Narrowly escaping himself, Zissou vows to spare no expense to get revenge in a newly mounted expedition. Trouble is, he has no money or backers willing to risk more money on a has been. Even Zissou’s wealthy wife Eleanor (Huston) is tired of pouring family money into his ventures and now not only refuses but leaves Zissou for hunkier pastures. Enter Ned (Wilson), Zissou’s possible bastard son, who has inherited a cool $275K on the recent death of his Mom. Not one to flinch in the face of such a wide open opportunity, Zissou immediately confirms his paternity, makes Ned a crew member (complete with standard uniform: powder blue jumpsuit with a “Z” logo, custom cross-trainers labeled “Zissou,” a Glock pistol and a bright red wool seaman’s cap) and gratefully receives the cash. What the expedition’s vessel (The “Belefonte”) lacks in necessary equipment for the venture Zissou arranges to steal from his well-heeled rival, Eleanor’s former husband, Alistair Hennessey (Goldblum). Along the way romance, jealousy, murder, kidnapping, reconciliation, truth telling and, finally, a glimpse of the culprit shark all work their way into our attention. It all sounds so exciting. But it isn’t. Yet it’s not a bad movie to watch; it’s better entertainment than you can find anywhere on TV. High points include brief animated fish forms by Henry Selick and several David Bowie songs performed in Portuguese by Seu Jorge, who plays one of the crew members. The end credits are especially catchy (the main cast members walk along a pier, the group adding a member each time that’s actor’s name flashes on screen, followed by Mr. Jorge sitting in front of an ornate stage curtain, playing guitar and singing behind the nearly interminable tech credits (I have rarely seen a neighborhood theater audience hang around for end credits like they did for these). With Cate Blanchett as a pregnant journalist and Willem Dafoe playing against type as an overly sensitive, approval seeking crew member. Grade: B- (03/19/05)
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (Thom Anderson, US, 2004). In a long and absorbing introduction to this film, we are told, among other things, that because of all the moviemaking there, Los Angeles is the most photographed city in the world. Who can doubt it? This inventive, intelligent documentary tour de force utilizes clips from Hollywood feature films to portray the City of Los Angeles – demonstrating both the realities of the place and the distorted, mythical, purely fictive views of the city conjured in the movies. The film is narrated by Encke King, who reads from a script written by the director, Thom Anderson. Anderson’s premise is this: just as many filmgoers discover dramatic value in the increasingly popular genre of feature documentaries, perhaps it is also possible to find truth documented in fictional dramatic films as well – truth about Los Angeles. To this end he surveys Hollywood’s products from 1915 to the present and offers over 150 clips from more than 100 movies - always clearly citing each film’s title and first release date - that portray Los Angeles in one way or another. (I certainly didn’t count these things…I cropped the numbers from another on-line review.) The film is divided into a brief introduction and three major segments, each roughly an hour long, dealing with a particular way in which Los Angeles has “participated” in films: as “background,” as a “character,” and as a “subject” of films. The film’s title was adapted from a 1972 gay porn flick, LA Plays Itself (use of the term “LA” irritates Anderson, who sees this as a way of trivializing and dehumanizing the city he loves). Until 40’s noir films based on the novels of James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, The Postman Always Rings Twice), Los Angeles landscapes and buildings (like the Bradbury Bldg., or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown mansion) were typically used as anonymous props, usually representing someplace else: it could be Chicago, Osaka, or more often a place without a name. But the city became a distinctive character – the iconic venue of decadence and crime - with the advent of crime stories based on the novels of Cain and Chandler. “Low Tourist” auteurs like Woody Allen, Hitchcock and most other British directors snubbed Los Angeles. Hitchcock much preferred the ritziness of San Francisco, and of the 30 films he made in this country, Anderson claims that only one featured recognizable scenes of Los Angeles. Allen remarks in Annie Hall, referring to Los Angeles, “…who wants to live in a place where the major cultural achievement is being able to make a right turn at a stop light?” But “High Tourist” directors – notably Roger Corman, Andy Warhol and filmmakers from continental Europe – have loved Los Angeles, finding great joy in photographing such features as the Watts Towers (Warhol) and vast industrial sprawls like City of Industry (Antonioni). Corrupt police and transportation – the automobile-based way of life – have been notable facets of Los Angeles treated as a film character. After an intermission (at the 110 minute point) Anderson focuses in on the city itself as a central subject of movies. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) marked a watershed reframing of Los Angeles from film character to subject, even though the “historic” events about water rights and development that it depicts were fictitious, as Anderson goes to great pains to demonstrate. Blade Runner was the quintessential film of the 1980s, about a futuristic Los Angeles; in the 1990’s it was L.A. Confidential, set in the 50s. Both films are nostalgic, Anderson asserts: Confidential, for a lost past, and Blade Runner for a vision of the future that has now itself become outdated. Near the end comes the part that fascinated me the most: a review of neorealist films that depict a Los Angeles far removed from mainstream Euro-American glamour and crime, the Los Angeles of ethnic and racial minorities. He gives us a film-based history of the Bunker Hill melting pot, so well represented in the 1961 Kent Mackinzie film, The Exiles (about alcoholic, socially dislocated Native Americans in Bunker Hill) and three films about African Americans in Los Angeles: Bush Mama (1975), Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983). Anderson is a film academician, a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts, in Santa Clarita, an hour’s drive northwest of Los Angeles. His erudition shows very keenly both in the intellectual gravitas of his narrative and the careful citation of all the film clip sources. He has made his own films dating back to experimental shorts in the mid-60s. In 1995, collaborating with Noel Burch, he made the feature documentary Red Hollywood, which purports to show how Hollywood filmmakers blacklisted in the McCarthy era actually did weave Communist ideals into their films (I have not seen this film; Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader rated it in his top 10 films for 1996). Though he is a transplant, born in Chicago, Anderson was raised in Los Angeles and quite obviously is head over heels in love with the city. This film, the culmination of a four year effort, is a genuine labor of love, the product of Anderson’s twin passions of film and his adopted city. Anyone who shares one or both of these passions will find this film a joy to see. My home film library consists of four items, two of which are copies of The Blues Brothers that I found at yard sales. But I’m sorely tempted to buy a DVD of this film when available. The only criticism I have is that at 169 minutes, the film is longer than it needs to be. The final hour seems tightly edited, dense and rich. But the first two segments contain more illustrations of the points Anderson is making than need be offered. The material becomes repetitive and I must confess I glazed over some, despite my wild curiosity about the film (I lived in Los Angeles for 13 years). I think that 20-30 minutes could be cut from the 110 minute segment before the intermission. It’s precious hard for academics to be succinct. I should know. Grade: B+ (02/04) THE MACHINIST (Brad Anderson, Spain, 2004). Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) is seriously unwell. He says he hasn’t slept in a year and his weight keeps on plummeting: he’s starting to look like a Nazi camp survivor at the end of WW II. Odd things seem to be happening to him: he thinks there’s a plot to frighten or possibly harm him. He encounters a man, Ivan (John Sharian) who later seems not to have existed at all. Or does he? Someone keeps slipping into his apartment when he’s out, leaving cryptic post-its on his refrigerator. It also appears, in the film’s opening scenes, as if Trevor might have killed someone in his apartment during a struggle: we see him, face freshly bruised, in the night rolling the body, wrapped in a carpet, into the river. Trevor works in a machine shop. He used to get along OK with his fellow workers, though he was never one to go out for drinks and cards with the others after work. In recent months he’s become withdrawn and unsociable, even in the locker room. When another man loses an arm, mangled in a machine when Trevor, preoccupied, mistakenly turns on a switch, the others turn against him, and finally he’s fired after flying into a rage at his supervisor. He only seems at peace in the company of women. There’s Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a prostitute who’s actually quite taken with him. And Marie (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), a night waitress in a coffee shop near the airport, where Trevor passes sleepless hours visiting with her over his coffee and pie nearly every night. With each of these women, he reveals a calmer, more tender side, even though he is so emaciated. He spends Mother’s Day with Marie and her young son at an amusement park, where he snaps a photo of them that triggers a déjà vu memory: a picture he recalls taken in exactly the same spot years ago of his mother and himself as a child (his mother had since died). Other odd twists and coincidences pile up as tension builds in this taut thriller. Indeed, my only real criticism of the film is that there are so many little things piling up, more than we need, gratuitous stuff that gets a bit too noisy for me. Screenwriter Scott Kosar just couldn’t contain himself, I guess. Trevor’s fear and agitation mount. We begin to wonder what is real and what is hallucinatory or illusion for him. The music effectively augments the sense of foreboding and danger. Composed by Roque Baños (who also did the music for Goya in Bordeaux and Sexy Beast), it is often spare, eerie, rhythmically repetitious, in the style of Philip Glass. There is also unusually haunting photography, by Xari Gimenez and Charlie Jimenez. Although it is filmed in color, the colors are leached thin, giving an effect more like old fashioned tinting of black and white material. And many, many scenes are darkly lit and seem to be rendered in varying tones of gunmetal blue-gray. This coloration reminded me of the visual treatment in the recent Russian suspense story, The Return. In mood, the film also evoked the apprehension I felt in The Return, and in Darren Aronofsky’s film, Pi. It is clear that Trevor is in the grips of a severe psychiatric illness, but it is not one easily classifiable in conventional diagnostic terms. Part of this is simply artistic license: there’s no compelling reason why screenwriters must follow DSM-IV, after all, even though I sure do wish they would. There are strong elements to suggest psychotic depression here (extreme weight loss, insomnia, guilt feelings, irritability, agitation, probable hallucinations, possible paranoid delusions). Incompatible with this degree of depression, though, are the facts that Trevor manages to work every day and act normally with women, even mustering some libido as well as charm. Even then, not all of his symptoms can be explained by this diagnosis. In time certain information is revealed that lets us know there are dissociative aspects to the illness, including, among others, clearly etched visual hallucinations (not common in psychotic depression). Ultimately we also learn that there was a very specific precipitating event for Trevor’s illness, one quite consistent with both severe depression and dissociative states, but I am sworn not to reveal any spoiling details here. The film is nearly an all-Spanish production, except for it’s director, writer and several lead actors, but it is spoken entirely in English. Mr. Bale gives an astonishing performance. I refer not only to his physical preparation for the role (he lost 63 pounds, by eating a single can of tuna and one apple a day), but the keen intelligence and understated, infectious anguish he brings to the role. Only Ralph Fiennes comes to mind as someone else who could have played Trevor as well. I’m thinking of Fiennes in Spider here. Like that film, Machinist is not likely to appeal to everyone’s tastes. But it’s undeniably an intriguing psychflick. Grade: B+ (11/28/04) MARGARETTE'S FEAST (A Festa de Margarette) (Renato Falcao, Brazil/US, 2004). This is a tender, hilarious romp of a movie, a tribute to the era of silent, black & white comedies like Chaplin’s. It’s done that way, and without even using narrative or dialogue cards, though it does have a musical soundtrack. Pedro, his wife Margarette, and an extended family all share a tiny isolated shack by a river. They all seem happy as clams living in poverty, except for Grandma, who’s an incorrigible grump. Pedro is the lighthearted ringleader, the funmeister, doing magic shows, leading the family in spoon-on-the-glass marimba-style sambas around the dinner table, doing little kiss and dance routines with his glowing wife. This idyllic existence is threatened when Pedro is laid off from the auto assembly plant where he works in the city (we see him at work there in an homage to Chaplin in Modern Times). Much of the film from that point on is fabulous, in the literal sense. Pedro likes all women but adores his wife. He dreams splendiferous dreams in which his severance package is so large that he can dash through the city spending money like water, falling into unexpected adventures along the way with his new buddy, a taxi driver, and finally throwing a stupendous party to celebrate Margarette’s upcoming birthday. There is a fine gown for her and wondrous gifts for everyone, even a fur coat for Grandma that finally uncorks the old lady for some merriment. Alas, Pedro awakens to find that the adventures were largely a mirage. Except for what is real: a huge unpaid bill for the food and drink, the taxi driver, and unbridled joy in everyone’s heart. This is a first feature for the director, but the movie turns about 140% on the work of its star, Hique Gomez, who plays Pedro. Gomez is 44 but looks younger; he hails from Puerto Alegre in the far south of Brazil. He is an astonishingly talented performer, a scruffy, bearded entertainment polymath. Trained in classical violin, he also plays piano, guitar, and mandolin and is a composer (he did the soundtrack for this movie). By age 15 he was playing with combos in local nightclubs. Along the way he also studied acting and dance. Physically he’s a cross between Rowan Atkinson and Raffi. His most arresting feature is a wide eyed, glowering stare. He’s mainly interested in fun, but, like Chaplin and Tati, he makes surprising moves, never takes convention for granted, and he’ll get his dander up if someone tries to take advantage of him. Gomez and a partner, Nico Nicoaiewsky, set an all time record for long stage show runs in Brazil with their comedy, song and dance revue, “Tangos and Tragedies,” that played in Puerto Alegre from 1984 to 1999. Gomez has made music videos for MTV, founded his own recording company, and toured recently with a new show to Buenos Aires, where a little parade by his troupe caused a downtown traffic jam. He’s a performance artist to be reckoned with, and I hope I can see him again. I sure want to see this film again sometime, too. It’s a carefully performed, outrageous happy blast of a movie! (Winner of the 2003 International Critics Prize from the International Federation of Film Critics.) (In Portuguese) Grade: A- (02/04) MARIA FULL OF GRACE (Joshua Marston, US/Colombia, 2004). SPOILER ALERT! Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a young woman intent upon finding a better life than she can ever hope for if she remains mired in her family’s little town near Bogota, stripping thorns from roses in a floral export sweatshop, where she must beg to pee and then make up the lost production. She’s tired of supporting her mother and her sister and baby nephew on the pittance she brings home. Early on we see that she can be bold: she shames her loser boyfriend by insisting he scale the face of a three story building and join her on the roof if he wants sex that day. (He chickens out.) Next she quits her job, sending her dependent family into a tizzy. She meets a guy from the city one evening at a local dance. When he presents her with an opportunity to make much more money and travel to the U.S. as a drug smuggling “mule,” it doesn’t take her long to decide to attempt this dangerous strategy for her own emancipation. Having established these matters in the first half hour or so, the film thereafter is devoted to the drama of mules. Maria is taught how to swallow small sausage-like, plastic wrapped tubes containing cocaine, presumably (I don’t believe the specific drug is actually mentioned in the film), practicing first by swallowing large grapes. Preparing for her flight, she is given laxatives, her throat is sprayed with a local anaesthetic to make the task easier, and she then manages to swallow and keep down 62 bags. She’s given a flight ticket, some money, a hotel destination, and the promise of more money if she succeeds in getting through to deliver the drugs. If she doesn’t deliver the full shipment of 62 bags, she will be punished and forfeit the money. If she disappears with the drugs, her family back home will be harmed. She discovers on her flight to Newark that her friend Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), who worked with her back home at the flower factory, is also aboard; she too has signed on as a mule. So is Lucy (Guilied Lopez), an experienced mule Maria met earlier. And another woman – 4 mules in all on this one flight. The traffickers do this, calculating that if one is seized at the U.S. entry point, it will be easier for the others to get through undetected. Serious problems unfold after everyone reaches Newark. Maria is seized on suspicion of being a mule but escapes when a urine pregnancy test is positive (it’s no surprise to Maria), preventing authorities from X-raying her abdomen. Yenny and Lucy pass through without incident. The fourth woman is caught and led away in handcuffs. Lucy subsequently dies as a result of a drug overdose, when a drug bag ruptures inside her and she absorbs a huge amount. Maria and Yenny escape harm, after more adventures in Queens, New York City, where they travel to find Lucy’s sister, who lives there in a Colombian ex-pat community. In the end, Yenny returns to Colombia but Maria, at the last minute, decides to stay behind, to return to Queens, where she has met a few helpful people already. Writer-director Marston had only a 1998 NYU film school diploma and one short grad school film under his belt when he decided to make this film, his first feature. He literally spent years – at least two – researching his subject. He met a woman in New York who had been a mule. He talked to authorities. He visited Colombia. His screenplay and the photography and editing are superb. The story unfolds straightforwardly. No gimmicks, no flashbacks, no fancy or hectic intercuts. The pace is deliberate, the style declarative, realistic and clear. It is sure work. His decisions to do the film in Spanish - which he planned from the beginning - and to use new players and no stars, are bold and certainly counter-commercial. This suggests that Marston has a healthy penchant for refusing to compromise his artistic vision. (He wrote the script in English, then had someone else translated it into Spanish.) He handles his actors with great skill. The three principal women offer fine performances. Ms. Moreno (who was about 22 when making the film, though her character is supposed to be 17) hails from Bogota, where she studied acting at a theater. Someone there sent word to the casting agency for this film in New York, suggesting her for the role of Maria. She has an extraordinary screen presence. Physically her face assumes very different proportions depending on camera angles (not unlike most people). From the side, at times she doesn’t appear particularly attractive. But face on, she can be breathtakingly beautiful. There is a scene near the end, at a mortuary where Lucy’s body lies in a casket, where Maria is shown in a close up in which she strikingly resembles the Mona Lisa, that uncanny melding of beauty and enigma. The filmmakers obviously caught this resemblance: it is held for the longest time, and rightly so. With regard to her acting, Ms. Moreno is able to convincingly convey a nuanced range of attitudes and feelings: vulnerability and strength, resolve and fear, hesitation and decisiveness. This may well be the best dramatic film of the year; I’ve certainly not yet seen better. So far Maria has won the Sundance Audience Award for Best Film, and awards at the Berlin Film Festival for Best First Feature and Best Actress (Ms. Moreno). On December 11, the film received 5 nominations for Independent Spirit Awards: Best Feature Film, Best Director (Marston), Best First Screenplay (Marston), Best Female Lead (Ms. Moreno) and Best Supporting Female (Ms. Vega). (In Spanish) Grade: A- (12/12/04) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (Michael Radford, US/Italy/Luxembourg/UK, 2004, 138 min.). Based on information listed at the Internet Movie Database, this is at least the 18th film production of Shakespeare’s tale of anti-Semitism and revenge, dating back to 1908 – half made for the big screen, the rest for TV - and including French, Indian and Maori versions. I am not sufficiently versed to judge the quality of the work, i.e., in comparison to the other filmed versions, none of which I’ve seen, or to stage productions. If I were to look at other film adaptations, I'd choose two made for TV: a U.S.1969 version, adapted and directed by Orson Welles, in which he also starred as Shylock, and a 1973 British Old Vic production, directed by Jonathan Miller with Sir Lawrence Olivier as Shylock. As for the faithfulness of Radford’s adaptation to the original text, critic Anthony Lane (who was educated in Britain), discussing the film in The New Yorker magazine, writes of Radford’s “…vast sheddings of the text…” I can tell you that the cinematography and production design are marvelous: the film is truly a feast for the eyes. But it is also dark: the lighting is turned down throughout, in keeping with the tragic story that unfolds. With one exception, the editing is adequate, but around the middle there was one scene change so abrupt and discontinuous as to suggest that the wrong reel had been put up next. I was very much impressed with the performances of all four principals: Al Pacino (Shylock), Jeremy Irons (Antonio), Joseph Fiennes (Bassanio) and Lynn Collins (Portia). I might have preferred Ian McKellan as Antonio – he was slated for the role but had to drop out. McKellan probably would have brought more spunk to the role and a more explicitly homoerotic edge to Antonio’s relationship with Bassanio. Mr. Irons, as in nearly every role he plays, exudes an infectious hangdog air of melancholic defeat, etched deeply into every facial expression and gesture. Mr. Pacino’s turn is marked by uncommon restraint, a bent toward understatement that differs from his usual penchant for histrionics. This gives his performance a depth that is memorable. It is as if he bears a burden for all the Jews in Europe in their inextinguishable hope for fair treatment, quiet fury when it fails to occur, and resultant humiliation and sadness. Grade: B+ (01/27/05) MILLION DOLLAR BABY (Clint Eastwood, US, 2004, 137 min.). SPOILER ALERT! Clint Eastwood has made by far the best American film of 2004 and quite possibly the best film of his long and successful career. This is a quintessential boxing story, but more importantly it is also a meditation on the responsibility we each have, or should feel, for the welfare of those whom we love. Themes of guilt, culpability and redemption were sounded in Mr. Eastwood’s last film, Mystic River, but that film pales when compared to the intense and unrelenting examination of these themes conducted in Baby. Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) is an aging boxing trainer, manager and gym owner. His only close friend is Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), a former boxer for whom Frankie served as cornerman late in Eddie’s career. Eddie lost an eye in his last fight, and for 23 years Frankie has blamed himself for not demanding the fight be stopped. Probably out of guilt as much as friendship, Frankie has made a permanent home for Eddie as the general factotum at the gym, where he also bunks at night. As the film opens, Frankie is currently managing Big Willie Little (Mike Colter), a very good fighter, a man that everybody, including Eddie, thinks has been ready for a shot at the title for a couple of years at least. But Frankie won’t hear of it, thinks a title fight still would be premature, exposing Willie to a loss that would forever sink his prospects. Finally Willie quits Frankie for another manager and promptly wins the title. Eddie minces no words in letting Frankie know that in his opinion, Willie’s carrier had been held up wrongly by Frankie’s overprotectiveness. Frankie has an estranged daughter too. He has been writing to her regularly for years, but every letter is returned unopened and he files them away in a large box in the closet. We never learn the basis of their rift, but it is clear that the loss of his daughter’s affection burns at the center of Frankie’s soul. Frankie is a devout Roman Catholic who attends Mass seven days a week and regularly engages the bemused priest in moral discussions of such repetitious and ponderous proportions that the priest, who considers Frankie a victim of his own pathological guilt, wearily pleads with him at one point to just take a day off and not come to Mass at all. Enter a woman named Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), the admitted product of a white trash hillbilly family from the Ozarks or thereabouts, who without the benefit of any professional training to date has had mild success boxing in local undercard matches and desperately wants Frankie to train her. He scoffs and rejects her, but she hangs around the gym and Eddie encourages her. Finally her persistence (no doubt aided by the empty place in Frankie’s heart vacated by his daughter) softens Frankie up. But Maggie’s 31; she wants training 10 years too late, Frankie tells her. Nevertheless, once worn down and committed, Frankie gives her everything he’s got as a trainer, though he says up front he will not manage her, that he wants no responsibility for arranging fights for her, for shaping her career in the ring. This more or less formulaic setup between Frankie and Maggie segues into the most predictable segment of the film, when Maggie - managed by Frankie despite his resolve to not act in this capacity - is stupendously successful, winning all of her fights, most by first round knockouts, and with each victory Frankie shifts more and more from reserved, overly cautious, wary old ringside denizen to smiling, even affectionate enthusiast, or proud papa if you wish. At one point Eddie tries to arrange another manager for Maggie, one who will be more likely to arrange a title fight for her soon, the same man who took over Willie Little’s career. But Maggie refuses; she’s absolutely loyal to Frankie. After a round of triumphs in Europe, Frankie, against his own better judgment, but still fresh from his unfortunate parting with Willie, agrees to a title fight for Maggie against the champion, Billie “The Blue Bear” (Lucia Rijker), a German woman who is notorious for dirty, dangerous tactics that have left several opponents with serious injuries. Frankie is doing well several rounds into their match, when Billie hits her from behind after the bell ending a round, and the stunned Maggie crashes to the floor, her head hitting the stool in her corner, breaking her neck. The scene then shifts to a hospital where a permanently quadriplegic Maggie requires constant artificial ventilation to survive. Frankie spends every spare minute with her. She transfers to a rehab center but it is clear that she will never be off the ventilator or move again. Her relatives come, hoping she’ll sign away her financial interests to them. She is prepared to consent when her mother betrays her contempt for Maggie’s efforts as a boxer, saying simply that she lost the big match, as if that is all that mattered. Maggie suddenly sees that her mother is guided solely by her own selfishness and lacks even a shred of understanding or concern for Maggie. She balks, banishing her mother and a gaggle of other relatives, telling her mother never to visit again. In the final scenes, reminiscent of the recent Spanish film, The Sea Inside, Maggie begs Frankie to take steps to let her die. After a soul searching struggle, he does so and then he disappears for good. The story is told partly in voiceover narration by Eddie, and at the end it is clear that this narration is the content of a long letter Eddie has been writing to Frankie’s daughter, to tell her the sort of man her father really was. I realize in reviewing this plot synopsis that much of it sounds quite pat and conventional. Well, the story is simple, yet simple stories can be the most powerful sometimes. That’s the case here. There are two reasons. First, the acting of the three principals is impeccable. It is Paul Haggis’s screenplay (as well as Mr. Eastwood's direction) that makes such exquisite use of these actors, the script’s rhythms deftly moving to and fro among dyadic encounters, e.g., between Frankie and Eddie, Maggie and Frankie, Eddie and Maggie, creating a sort of round-robin dramatic dance among the three. Eastwood and Freeman seem like they really have been together every day for 23 years (they had worked together as gunslinging partners in Unforgiven). And Ms. Swank has the genuine dazzle and swagger, the forthrightness, to hold her own with both men. The supporting players are adequately cast, and their more casual contributions provide almost necessary respite from the intense exchanges among the principals. Effective original music was composed by Mr. Eastwood. The other reason this film glows with its power is the serious subtext of basic questions about personal responsibility that it raises and struggles to answer. We are taught that, indeed, we are our brothers’ (and sisters’) keepers. But are there any limits to this responsibility? How far should one go in shouldering a burden of personal culpability when things don’t work out well for a loved one? Is it ever justified to renounce one’s obligations to someone close? Do we sometimes impede the growth and opportunities for success of those we care about by meddling too much in their lives? Holding them back when it isn’t called for? Trying unrealistically to shield them from the risks inherent in living? These are the questions that burn at every turn in this searing moral inquiry. Don’t miss it! (For the first time in memory, I agree with the Academy in recognizing Baby as best film of 2004.) Grade: A (01/30/05)
THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES (Diarios de motocicleta) (Walter Salles, US/Germany/UK/ Argentina, 2004). Coming-of-age/biopic/road movie based on the memoirs of two Argentinean men, best friends who in 1952, while in their 20s, set out from Buenos Aires on a six month adventure, traveling over 8,000 miles through South America. One was Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (played by the Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal), a medical student at the time, who would emerge just a few years later as Che Guevara, guerrilla hero of the Cuban revolution. The other was Alberto Granado (Argentinean actor Rodrigo De la Serna, a second cousin of Che’s), a biochemist a few years older than Guevara, who later accepted Che’s invitation to establish a medical clinic in Cuba (at the end of the film, we see Granado as he is today, at age 82, still living in Cuba). They begin aboard an ailing, vintage motorcycle, proceed by foot after the bike dies, hitchhiking, and finally journey by boat, ending up as volunteers at a leper colony on the Amazon in Peru. The story features several standard humorous predicaments, the sort one expects in a tale of innocent young adventurers, and, in a sentimental fashion, it suggests how various encounters with impoverished peasants along the way gradually kindle a social consciousness in Guevara, who had grown up in comfortable urban middle class circumstances. If this were all there was to it, the film would be a yawner. It is better than that for two reasons. One is the majestic sweep of the lands through which the heroes travel. Patagonia, the long spine of Chile, and the Peruvian countryside unfold before us in breathtaking fashion. But even this glorious visual bounty would not rise above the standard of a good travelogue were it not for the pairing of the two adventurers, characters who are delightfully dissimilar. Bernal’s Guevara is soulful, pensive and introverted, while Rodrigo’s Granado is fun loving, sunny, engaging, a great dancer. Both give performances that seem utterly natural and true, and the contrasting elements of their personalities give the film a richness that makes this one of the better "buddy movies" ever made. (In Spanish) Grade: B+ (10/25/04) MY ARCHITECT: A SON’S JOURNEY (Nathaniel Kahn, US, 2003). The architect, Louis Kahn, was fond of saying that “…the world never needed Beethoven’s 5th Symphony until he created it; now we can’t live without it.” A simple statement, but one that helps immensely to understand Kahn’s vision, his deep belief in the transcendent significance and power of monumental artistic creations, massive works that are grounded in classical form and spirit. This film is a brilliantly realized documentary about Kahn and the people most touched by this forceful, mysterious man. His son, Nathaniel, a man with a handful of modest screenwriting and acting credits until now, manages here in his filmmaking debut to create a monumental work of his own, weaving a rich tapestry of three threads: a study of the work of a creative genius, an intimate biography of a complex man, and the story of a son’s yearnings to discover a father he hardly knew, all of this done 25 years after Kahn’s precipitous death. There are interviews with several major architects who knew Kahn well (among them I. M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson), some of his associates, and members of his three separate and concurrent families. Nathaniel Kahn must be a delightful fellow to chat with, because the interview material he shares is incredibly full and candid, so revealing of Louis Kahn and of the individuals who speak about him. The music – at one point boldly juxtaposing the choral movement from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony alongside a ballad sung by Neil Young – and the photography are outstanding feats of artistry in themselves. The overall outcome is a deeply edifying, inspirational tribute to Kahn, one in which subjectivity accents - harmonizes with - the objective record. The film is rendered no less spiritually and aesthetically moving because it is as frank about Kahn’s shortcomings as it is laudatory about his vision and achievements. If you value the transcendental possibilities of artistic works, or are intrigued by the paradoxes of human nature, don’t miss this film. It swells the heart. Grade: A (02/14/04) NOBODY KNOWS (Dare mo shiranai) (Kore-Eda, Hirokazu, Japan, 2004, 141 min.). Fortunately for us, Mr. Kore-Eda is in the habit of making enchanting, meditative films (Maborosi, After Life) about the nature of existence, death, loss and the importance of the way we act in the world. In this story, inspired by an actual situation that took place in Tokyo, he focuses on the conduct of a family of four abandoned children, ages 5 to 12, showing their remarkable capacity not only to survive, but to comfort, care for and even school themselves within the confines of an urban apartment for many months. A remarkable though very long, slowly paced film. I don’t have time to write more on this outstanding film, but I may at some point. (In Japanese) Grade: B+ (02/18/05) OASIS (Chang-dong Lee, South Korea, 2004). Mr. Chang-dong made the quite good psychodrama, Peppermint Candy, that screened at PIFF 24. That film concerned a man who suffered from Post-traumatic stress disorder, who ultimately committed suicide after his life slid ever further into failure and despair. Sounds burdensome, but the film was the opposite: it was electrifying. Chang-dong, who writes his own screenplays, used a structure like that in Memento (it begins with the suicide, then moves back in time, in flashback segments placed in reverse chronology). Oasis reunites Chang-dong with his two principal actors from Peppermint Candy, Kyung-gu Sol as Jong-du Hong, a man just released from prison when we meet him in the opening scenes, and So-ri Moon as Gong-ju, a woman who suffers from severe cerebral palsy. Jong-du is an innocent, a fellow who doesn’t comprehend ordinary social conventions and expectancies. His penchant for making faulty judgments and conducting himself in ways that offend and irritate others is hard to overstate. He appears to me to be suffering from a severe case of ADHD and may also be mildly deficient in IQ points. At 30, he’s almost hopelessly immature, flighty and fidgety, has never done a thing that you could call successful, is uneducated, lacks job skills, and his family dread his homecoming. Gong-ju ‘s father was killed in an auto accident for which Jong-du was sent to prison (it was a hit-and-run, and the conviction was for involuntary manslaughter – Jong-du spent 2 ½ years in the slammer; it was his third offense, after attempted rape and DUI convictions earlier in life). Shortly after settling down again, at his Mom’s apartment, Jong-du takes a basket of fruit to the family of the deceased man as a way of conveying his regrets over their loss. The family are outraged and throw him out, but not before he meets Gong-ju, who suffers from severe spasticity and choreo-athetosis: her body, face and hands are twisted and writhing continuously, she’s nearly unable to speak and is wheelchair bound. Her favorite pastime is reflecting a hand mirror on the wall, then fantasizing that the white reflections morph into birds or butterflies. What then develops is a love story in which these two handicapped souls, each living on the margins of society, borne along grudgingly by families who are ashamed of them and wish they would just go away. Their love is as tender and touching as it is astonishing, especially given the nature of the couple’s harsh initial encounter, hardly one that promises requited romance. There are marvelous dream and fantasy scenes in which Gong-ju can move and walk normally, or when the characters on an exotic wall hanging in her bedroom come to life and join the principals in a dance. Of course the circumstances make their love star-crossed: we are certain from the getgo that it will not last, that they will be discovered, that things will turn out badly. What surprises is that the consequences work out as well as they do. The screenplay here is as imaginative as was Chang-dong’s structure for Peppermint Candy. He has a knack for employing characters with psychiatric and neurological afflictions - presented with impeccable clinical authenticity – to serve such dramatic purposes as the portrayal of innocence and the power of events and uncontrollable circumstances to shape one’s life. Both lead players offer fabulous turns. We expect this of Mr. Kyung-gu, based on his earlier performance in Candy. But the real blockbuster turn is by Ms. So-ri, who had a minor role as the protagonist’s wife in Candy, but here is able to stay completely in character as a severely neurologically handicapped individual who nonetheless feels and somehow expresses normal emotions and needs. Her mastery of the physical manifestations of cerebral palsy is so complete and it would be difficult to imagine she is a normal person without providing, as Chang-dong does, a scene in which we can see her change from impaired to normal before our eyes. This scene, by the way, is woven seamlessly into the narrative; there is nothing showy or self-conscious about it. Oasis challenges our core assumptions about what it is to be loveable and to love. Grade: B+ OSAMA (Siddiq Barmak, Afghanistan, 2003). It’s not about bin Laden. The first film made entirely as an Afghan project since the rise and fall of the Taliban, Osama presents a chilling look at the marginal existence of people living in Kabul during the Taliban era, with an emphasis on the oppression of women. The struggles of a 12 year old girl provide the central story. She, her widowed mother and her grandmother are faced with severe privation when the hospital where the mother works closes, and gravely ill patients are turned out. The women cannot even go into the streets without a male companion, unless they have prior employment arrangements. The older women cut the girl’s hair short so she can pass as a boy, and a shopkeeper gives her work. But he can’t make ends meet and soon closes the business and disappears to Pakistan. Meanwhile, the girl is forced to spend a part of each day with the “other” boys learning the Quran, military tactics, and muslim-style sexual hygiene at a madrasa run by the Mullahs. She has one friend at school, Espandi, a streetwise young fellow we have met in the film’s opening sequence, though he extracts a bribe from her to keep her secret. And he gives her a boy’s name: “Osama.” But her gender is eventually discovered, with disastrous consequences. Nothing shown here will surprise anybody who’s been following reports about this forlorn country. The film vividly shows the sorry state of the city, with smoldering rubble everywhere and no electricity, a war torn, tattered, shell shocked place. I did not expect the Taliban to use power hoses to break up a women’s protest march; never imagined they could generate that much pressure in the water system. Barmak received film training in Iran and a masters degree in directing from the Moscow University in 1987. This is his first project as writer-director. The screenplay and photography are well accomplished. Dramatically, though, the film suffers because the central character - the girl named “Osama” – is too wimpy. She is either allowed or requested by Barmak to be entirely passive, cry at the drop of a hat, and muster no effort to swagger the least bit when masquerading as a boy. Had she shown more spunk, it could only have enhanced the ironies of the story. Instead she longs only to skip rope, which she fantasizes about in mental escapes from her travail. Possibly her conduct would strike a different chord for Afghans. Or perhaps I’m being too harsh. The girl is an amateur, actually she’s a street beggar. Her passivity may feflect the fact that she’s simply experienced too much travail. In any case, this is an important production that I urge you to see. (Osama won a special jury prize at Cannes and was voted best foreign film at the Golden Globe Awards.) (in Dari [Afghan Persian]). Grade: B THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET (Marcos Bernstein, Brazil/France, 2004, 97 min.). Fernanda Montenegro, the Brazilian national acting treasure who starred in Walter Salles’s 1998 international hit, Central Station, returns in the role of Regina, a long divorced, trim and plucky woman who sees no reason why aging should render people as either “old, crippled or idiots” as she candidly puts it to another older woman. Like a lot of aging women, Regina dutifully walks her dog Betina along Copacabana Beach each morning and dotes on her preschool age grandson. But she also spends her time these days as one of several volunteer undercover informers in “Senior Service,” a special program to assist the local police. Her code name is “Snow White” and she has never been wrong in fingering suspects for her leader, Detective Alcides, hanging out in disco clubs where drug deals are made and other places that are more than a tad dangerous for anybody. But Regina goes too far when one night she observes through her binoculars a man in an apartment across the street from her place giving what appears to be a lethal injection to a woman. It turns out the man is an important judicial official in the government, and Det. Alcides fires Regina for getting him in trouble after he sends officers to the judge’s apartment to investigate the death of his wife, who, it turns out, was dying of cancer. Matters take a different turn when Regina sets things up to begin a relationship with Camargo, the judge (Raul Cortez), in order to get the goods on him, only to find herself drifting toward a romantic attachment to his man. The judge’s movement from suspect to lover in Regina’s estimation occurs in an entirely convincing manner. The screenplay, based on a story by the director, Marcos Bernstein - who also co-wrote the script for Central Station and makes his directorial debut here - is almost without exception well crafted, the dialogue sparkling. Ms. Montenegro, who was 74 when this film was shot, is enchanting: think of the Italian actress Giulietta Masina but with more of an edge. Mr. Cortez is more than adequate playing opposite her. (In Portuguese) Grade: B+ (02/15/05) OUR HOUSE (Sevan Matossian, US, 2003). Stunning documentary on life in a community residential group home for adults with developmental disabilities. For full review, see my other website: www.Psychlix.com. Grade: B+ OUT OF THE SHADOW (Susan Smiley, US, 2004). Stunning documentary about the 30 year odyssey of a woman suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia, made by her daughter, a veteran documentarist. For an extensive review, see my other website, www.Psychflix.com. Grade: A (10/04) OUTFOXED: RUPERT MURDOCH'S WAR ON JOURNALISM (Robert Greenwald, US, 2004). Fox News Channel flashes its “fair and balanced” slogan so relentlessly and often that it easily invites doubt. In his new documentary, veteran TV and big screen filmmaker Robert Greenwald not only feeds this doubt but exposes the larger truth that Fox News is nothing but a flamboyant mouthpiece – make that megaphone – for the Bush administration and all things to the far right of the political center in this country. Greenwald shows, with the great help of Fox personnel, past and present, how the subjects and slants for each day’s “news” (which liberal personality or position is to be skewered relentlessly and how) are dictated via e-mails from executives in Fox News Chief Roger Ailes’s offices in New York every morning. Stories and talent who ARE fair and balanced don’t survive this process. Aiding this masquerade of objective journalism is the regular and egregious transgression of ethical lines. We learn, for example, that the wife of Fox senior political reporter Carl Cameron was an active worker in the Bush 2000 campaign at a time Cameron was influential in reporting this campaign. We get affirmation that Bush's first cousin, John Ellis, a Fox reporter covering election night, made the fateful (and erroneous) decision to announce that Bush had won Florida late that night, producing a cascade of lemming-like judgments to this effect on the other networks. Many believe these declarative reports set the course of inevitability for Bush becomesing President. (Much later, Roger Ailes apologized for Ellis misleading others that night, and with a straight face.) The film is short (78 minutes) and its pace is somewhat dizzying, relying as it does on a non-stop patter of talking head newsbite snippets. It’s almost nauseating to try to read every word in the title of each expert or reporter who speaks. But after 15 minutes, seeing the same folks and titles recycled, that effect wears off and the film becomes easier on the eye. There are extensive short clips of Bret Hume, Sean Gannity and Bill O’Reilly - Fox’s heavyweights - at work. I’ve been an overly protected naïf all these years and had never seen Gannity or O’Reilly before. I am shocked by their all consuming rudeness and narcissism, never mind their extreme views. I am even more shocked that intelligent viewers would choose to waste their time exposed to the crass behavior of these thuggish commentators, whose very approach is such an insult to anyone’s intelligence, left or right. Mr. Greenwald, who was present at this screening, got it right when he labeled O’Reilly and Gannity as bullies, and that the best response to bullies is to laugh at them, at the sheer stupidity of the swagger they substitute for substance. In fact the only semi-intelligent reason to watch O'Reilly or Gannity is to view them as clowns. Indeed, someone in the audience chirped that Murdoch gives us the two best comedies on TV: The Simpsons and Fox News. Greenwald himself has told interviewers around the country that he doesn’t understand why Fox is ashamed to state it is a Republican news channel. If Fox would only do that and jettison the “fair and balanced” lie, Greenwald says he’d have little quarrel. Outfoxed has had some effect, Greenwald says, insofar as Fox has recently toned down some of its right wing excesses. He’s also proud that Bill O’Reilly recently accused him of running a smear campaign against Fox. Greenwald urges viewers fed up with Fox to lodge complaints with Fox sponsors and, most importantly, to support efforts to promulgate alternative media and media reform. (Such as opposing Michael Powell’s shenanigans at the FCC to cast aside regulations limiting the owning of multiple media outlets in a given market by a single corporation.) The grandest irony revealed in this film comes when Jeremy Glick, whose father was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, infuriates O’Reilly during an interview by noting that the terrorist expertise behind 9/11 owes much to U.S. training of Afghans and others in that region during G. W. H. Bush’s term. O’Reilly twists, distorts and lies in his misrepresentations of Glick’s comments, both during the interview and in follow up comments later. As reflected in an interview with Al Franken, Glick came to Franken to ask if he could sue O’Reilly for lying. Franken asked his attorney, who replied that the key issue is whether the liar knows he has lied. Turns out this is more difficult to prove against someone who lies habitually, like O’Reilly, than against someone unaccustomed to lying! The most chilling fact in the film is a review of the extent of Murdoch’s media holdings around the world, to the effect that his video and print media reach 3 ½ billion people! That, folks, is scary. Despite its one dimensional strategy (a bushel of talking heads), this film is one that everybody should see, a call to arms in the effort to reform our media, something we desperately need. The success of any democracy depends on voters being well informed. Grade: B (filmmaking); A (newsworthiness; public service) (08/15/04) RAY (Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Story) (Taylor Hackford, US, 2004). A fine biopic about Ray Charles, covering 17 years (1948-1965, from when he was 18 to 35) that saw him rise from dirt poor adolescent naif with a love of piano playing and a talent for imitating other performers’ styles to superstardom based on his unprecedented blending of R & B and gospel to produce what became known as soul music. His contributions didn’t stop there. Once on top, he went back to other musical genres and left a legacy of great hits in the traditions of rock and roll, country and heavily orchestrated mainstream pop, like his signature “Georgia.” Everything he did was infused with his preternatural energy, a voice unlike any other – punching rough and gravelly, but often turning up to delicate high finishes to end a riff, and a precision in performance alloyed through legendary attention to detail and marathon rehearsals. He was always a harsh taskmaster with band members and background vocalists. The title performance by Jamie Foxx is spectacularly true to Charles in every sense: physiognomy, movement and mood. Mr. Hackford insisted that Foxx wear patches to blind himself throughout 12 to 14 hour film shooting days, to keep him grounded in the experience of blindness (Foxx also lost 35 pounds to better approximate Charles’s skinny frame). In flashbacks we learn of Charles witnessing the childhood drowning of his younger brother, which would haunt him with intense guilt thereafter, and we see how Charles’s values were learned from his mother, who demanded that he become self sufficient and not succumb to invalidism after he went blind from glaucoma at age 6. Nevertheless, Charles’s success came despite all too familiar self imposed obstacles such as heroin addiction and womanizing, and we see plenty to illustrate both in the film. The film is long - 152 minutes – but it doesn’t feel that way: there’s no sagging or tedium afoot. As in most biopics, there are many characters, several of whom are little more than prop roles, but all are done quite well here, a credit to the casting department and Mr. Hackford. Kerry Washington (as Charles’s wife, Della Bea), Clifton Powell (as Charles’s faithful companion Jeff Brown), and Sharon Warren (Charles’s mother, Aretha) are especially good. See this film on the big screen with a THX sound system if you can. For people who love his music, there’s plenty of it and it is satisfying to hear, even though most numbers are not presented in their entirety. Most of the Charles’s numbers (at least 8 or 10) are actual dubbings but these are seamlessly, convincingly synched with Foxx’s movements. Foxx, who had classic piano training, also performs a couple of Charles’s songs himself. It is well known that after the mid-60s, Charles rode along a plateau of success for nearly 40 years, creating no further pioneering music but continuing to perform and record material based on his earlier innovations. When asked in a recent interview why he didn’t film anything from this long, successful period, Mr. Hackford said “Well, frankly, that part is boring to me. He’d become the artist he was, and he was that artist for the rest of his life. To me it’s the attaining that’s interesting and the struggle.” Fair enough. Grade: B+ (10/30/04) RECONSTRUCTION (Christoffer Boe, Denmark, 2004). The film opens with a tall, thin, haunted looking man, harshly illuminated and surrounded by billows of smoke, doing a magic trick, suspending a cigarette in midair between his hands. A vocal of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” accompanies. A voiceover tells us, “Remember…it’s a film. It’s all a construction. But it still hurts.” This sequence introduces a convoluted psychodrama with touches reminiscent of Last Year at Marienbad, Run Lola Run, Memento and Swimming Pool. Swedish actress Maria Bonnevie, whose reticent beauty makes me think of a young Catherine Deneuve, plays two roles very well, very distinctively, here: she is the glamorous Aimee, wife of a novelist, August Holm, and she is also the more plain, down to earth Simone, girlfriend of a young Danish photographer named Alex. Mystery, stagnation, falsity and distrust in love relationships are the major themes. Alex takes Simone for granted and chases after Aimee, who feels cast aside by August, who is forever preoccupied with his writing and celebrity. But after his first encounter with Aimee (or is it just the latest of several encounters with her?), Alex is caught short when Simone, his father and his other friends treat him as a stranger, as if they’ve never seen him before. Even his apartment has changed. How can this be? How much do we really know the people we love? Is it possible that Aimee and Simone are merely two sides of the same individual? This film thrives on the posing of such questions. The photography is punctuated by intriguing grainy effects: many close-ups emphasize strong contrasts of shadow and light on facial planes; aerial photo-diagrams, introducing major new scene sequences, pinpoint characters and places much like surveillance maps might do; nightlit urban scapes feature flows of traffic, sometimes with superimposed walking people; there are reoccurring black silhouetted images of a man falling vertically while running in place. Alex speaks Danish but the women he converses with (Aimee, Simone) speak Swedish. The music sometimes consists of minimal pulsings of slow, sustained keyboard chords, but at other points of emotional tension Barber’s Adagio for Strings is employed. Near the end we wonder - as viewers were led to do at the end of Ozon’s Swimming Pool - whether we have been taken, along with Alex and the women, on a novelistic wild goose chase by August, merely caught up in his imaginings for the novel he's now writing. The film ends with a reprise of the hand magician at work. Go figure. Or, if you prefer, just blow the film off as arty pretentious guff. Not me. I found this movie to be a visual treat, and its exploration of the vicissitudes of love are teasingly inventive. (In Danish and Swedish) Grade: B+ (02/04) THE RETURN (Vozvrashcheniye) (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2004). A man returns unannounced to rejoin a family he left 12 years ago, when his sons were small. Now Andrei is 15 and Ivan is 13. Where has the father been? In the military? In prison? The adults aren’t telling and the boys don’t know. The film focuses on the interactions between the father and his sons over the course of the first six days after the father’s return (the mother and grandmother are very peripheral characters in this drama). The three go off camping and fishing. It’s a difficult, bumpy business for them to overcome their awkwardness together. The older boy, Andrei, is more successful, more able to identify with Dad, but Ivan is intimidated and resentful about the father’s intrusion into his heretofore predictable life. Ivan is stubborn; he constantly creates contests of will with his father. In fact, Ivan is sort of a chip off the old block. For his part, the man is often insensitive and coarse in his approach to both boys. He is taciturn, often chooses ill conceived tactics to discipline or convey his expectations, and sometimes he is just too punitive. He tries to teach the boys some survival skills, but too often they are off the mark, not appropriate for young teens. They are adult skills that he has honed to persevere in what we can only suppose has been a hard, dangerous life in the years he was absent. It takes a long while even for the viewer to discern that he does care about his sons, does want to create a bond with them; small wonder, then, that the boys aren’t at all confident that he cares. On the sixth day unforeseen events emerge as a result of these frictions, and tragic consequences follow. Despite its difficult ending, the film portrays this father and his sons in a sensitive, empathic, insightful manner, as they struggle to find the emotional connection and grounding that they all so very much need. Think of this film as a cautionary tale about parenting and the consequences of long separations. (In Russian) Grade: B+ Add: Here's a sad and oddly linked event: Vladimir Garin, the 15 year old actor who played Andrei , the older brother - I thought he gave the best performance in the film - died by accidental drowning a few months ago. (02/14/04) RORY O’SHEA WAS HERE (Inside I’m Dancing) (Damien O’Donnell, UK/Ireland/US, 2004, 104 min.). Here’s a film about the limitations and possibilities in living for severely handicapped people. Must be an ed flick or PBS documentary, right, you ask? Nope. It’s a tender comedy that somehow rises above its formulaic, manipulative structure. It’s a “feel good” film that actually leaves you feeling good. James McAvoy plays Rory, an irreverent, wheelchair bound punker who suffers from progressive muscular dystrophy. He must finally yield his independence, banished to a long term residential care center somewhere on the outskirts of Dublin, where this film is set. There he meets Michael (Steven Robertson), severely handicapped by cerebral palsy, also wheelchair bound, a docile young man who has languished for much of his life in an institutional setting, since being rejected by his well to do father, a distinguished, high profile judge. Rory is able to understand Michael’s spastic speech, something most people can’t fathom. Rory can also see at a glance that Michael needs a stiff injection of unruly fun in his life, and sets out to arrange for this. The two become fast friends: Michael the straight man and Rory the rogue and schemer. One thing leads to another, and they end up living together semi-independently in a well-appointed apartment paid for by Michael’s dad. Their personal needs for assisted living are met by Siobhan (Romola Garai), a gorgeous young thing they hire to adorn their lives. The guys live according to their whims, leaving Siobhan to pick up the pieces. Michael develops a crush on her that eventually becomes a deal breaker for their mutual arrangements. In the film’s most poignant scene, as Siobhan prepares to take her leave, she tells it like it is to the buddies. Just because your handicapped, you can’t pick a fight in a bar and then play victim, she tells them. You can’t come home half drunk in the middle of the night and always feel entitled to instant comfort care. You can’t expect a girl to love you if you don’t happen to be the right man for her. Her parting shot to Rory: “Your disability is that you’re an arsehole!” She’s telling these guys that there are responsibilities as well as rights when you live in this world, that they are people first, handicapped second, and have to play by the same rules as everyone else if they lay claim to living independently like others. It’s a marvelous credo for anyone afflicted with a serious disability. This film reminds me of the hilarious 2001 Norwegian comedy, Elling, about two eccentric guys outplaced from a mental hospital whose strengths and weaknesses are sufficiently complementary that they are able to help each other get by in the larger world. James McAvoy is a real charmer. Among his other talents, he is a competitive fencer, boxer, gymnast, acrobat, rugby player and fire eater, not to mention that he is also gorgeous. Steven Robertson is making his acting debut here. His cerebral palsied speech and movements are astonishingly realistic. I cannot find a decent bio sketch of him on the Internet, but the absence of any allusion that he in fact suffers from CP leads me to assume that he does not, that this is the skilled performance of an adept physical actor, much like the female lead role played in the South Korean film Oasis last year by So-re Moon. Do see this one if you can! Grade: B (02/03/05) THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2003). Every time I think I may have outgrown my weakness for dark, twisted, bizarre humor, a film like Saddest Music comes along to slap down this illusion and reset my appetite for oddity. Apparently Guy Maddin does this sort of thing a lot, though I’d never heard of him nor seen any of his films until today. This film is set in Winnipeg in 1933 in the throes of the Great Depression. It is made in very grainy, misty black and white, so it has the appearance of vintage footage that has not been well preserved or remastered (there are a few brief scenes in color, though what color signifies in this film escapes me). The film begins with a sleazy man (Chester Kent) and his ingénue companion (Narcissa) consulting a psychic, an old woman with deer antlers tied to her head, like some apparition from the Red Green show. Deep in a conveniently placed chunk of ice, the man peers into a scene from his own early life. His father (a loony World War I combat vet) is playing piano, his mother is singing, he’s playing a trumpet and his older brother Roderick is playing cello. His mother keels over onto the piano keyboard and dies. Chester reacts cheerily to these images from the past, as he does to almost any poignant occurrence throughout the film. Meanwhile, the wealthy owner of a local brewery, Lady Helen Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini, tricked out to resemble her mother, Ingrid Bergman), is scheming to make a fortune. She’s aware that south of the border, the Americans are about to repeal Prohibition, ands she aims to make a killing selling beer in the States. To promote her product, she decides to organize an international competition to determine which musical group representing what nation can play – yes, you guessed it – the saddest music in the world, just the right touch for these times of hardship, poverty and remembrance of the 9 million lives lost in WW I. Lady Helen has her own source of lamentation: she’s a double a-k (above the knee) amputee. We learn how this occurred and in fact see a flashback of the grizzly event. The contest commences. Dad turns up to represent Canada playing piano. Gloomy brother Roderick the cellist represents Serbia, with all the woe associated with this site of the event that kicked off the Great War. Chester, a washed up Broadway impresario, naturally puts together an extravaganza to represent the U.S. There are Chinese flutists, Mexican mariachis, Scot bagpipers, and more. Lady Helen personally decides the winners, though somehow she also gets incorporated into Chester’s final performance of the U.S. show. She also receives a present – a pair of unusual prosthetic legs that unfortunately prove vulnerable to the strains of Roderick’s cello. If that isn’t clear, I can understand. It is really not possible in words to describe adequately the over-the-top blend of pathos and slapstick that permeates this weird, surreal movie. I loved it. But you may not. Grade: B+ (02/03/04) SCHIZO (Shiza) (Gulshat Omarova, Kazakhstan/Russia/France/Germany, 2004, 86 min.). SPOILER ALERT! CONSUMER ALERT! Some of the boxing scenes are quite brutal. Mustafa (Oldzhas Nusupbayev), about to turn 15, is an unhappy camper in school, and his misfit stance has earned him the sobriquet “Shiza,” - Schizo, short for schizophrenic - among the other kids. His mother, Kulyash, takes him to the local doctor, whom she pays with produce and other food. The good doctor ascertains that Mustafa does get into fights and doesn’t like going to school. He prescribes a medication and advises some further specialized psychiatric evaluation and treatment. I, on the other hand, found zero evidence throughout the movie that this youngster, the protagonist in the story, suffers from anything worse than cunning, pluck and a penchant for landing on his feet after every scrape that befalls him. Which shows that even in remote, rural Kazakhstan, which looks a lot like central Saskatchewan, flat as a pancake, modernity has arrived in the form of overdiagnosis of psychiatric disorders in kids who misbehave at school. We spend the next hour or more swept along in a series of Schizo’s adventures. His mother’s boyfriend Sakura uses and deals drugs. What’s worse, he works for Almaz, a well to do gangster who is not only a drug kingpin but promotes clandestine boxing matches that not infrequently result in one fighter killing another. Sakura brings Schizo around to make a little money working for Almaz himself. We witness one boxing match that ends in the death of a fighter, Ali, but before he succumbs, Ali asks Schizo to take the money he has earned fighting to his lover and his 4 year old son. This is how Mustafa meets Zina, a slight woman who takes a liking to him, and Ali’s 4 year old son. Other adventures follow. When Almaz offers a Mercedes as top prize in a major match featuring his best boxer, an ox of a fellow, Schizo makes a trip by train in search of an uncle reputed to be a tough fighter, to put up against this giant. The uncle, older and smaller, nonetheless prevails and drives off in the prize car, leaving Almaz decidedly angry, not a good state of affairs. He threatens to kill Sakura unless the latter comes up with the car or its value in money. By the time Sakura catches up with the uncle, the car has been sold and the money divided several ways. Schizo takes his share as a gift to Zina, who rewards him with a sexual initiation that begins a deepening romance between the fey older woman and the charming kid. Sakura enlists Schizo in a daring plan to rob a currency exchange in the city and split the money, thereby solving Sakura’s longevity problems with Almaz while making a bundle for Schizo’s mother and Zina to boot. But Sakura pulls a double cross and attempts to take away all the loot. Schizo, not to be outdone, shoots Sakura and arranges for all the money to be split between the two women in his life. Eventually he is convicted, but serves less than his 6 year term because of an amnesty. Zina and her son are waiting for him at the prison gate. It requires a fair degree of suspension of disbelief to accept that a kid barely turning 15 could be such a clever operator, so savvy in getting the better of his elders at every turn and a good woman into the bargain. Every young man’s fantasy come true these days, perhaps. This movie might not be worth recommending on the merits of its story, but, there’s no denying that Mr. Nusupbayev (Schizo) turns in a strong performance as a youngster caught between boyhood and manhood and seemingly comfortable in both (nicely captured when Mustafa takes away one of the little boy’s miniature toy cars to play with in the midst of the high stakes drama swirling around him). For another thing, as is so often true of films that come from far away places, this one is worthwhile for the gaze it provides into the culture and conduct of these people. Do you think there is anyplace in the old Soviet Union where crime and criminals does not rule these days? (This was Kazakhstan’s entry for Best Foreign Film Oscar this year.) (In Russian) Grade: B (02/02/05) SCHULTZE GETS THE BLUES (Michael Schorr, Germany, 2003, 114 min.). For those of you in a rush, here’s a microreview: “Satisfying, long, slow moving, quirky geezer comic road movie from Germany.” For others, here’s more. This film is in the tradition of slow moving droll European comedies like last year’s Kitchen Stories, Hukkle or Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Schultze (Horst Krause) and his best buddies, Jürgen and Manfred, have toiled literally in a salt mine for 30 years and now retire. There isn’t a whole lot to do in their small town on the Saale River in the eastern part of Germany. Schultze’s two cronies are soon entrained by their wives into domestic serfdom, but the stout, phlegmatic Schultze himself must bear the burden of freedom. His wife is shut away in a nursing home, the victim of moderately severe Alzheimers. Schultze dutifully visits her, where he is much sought after by a libidinal and cognitively unimpeded woman with a ready bottle of Bushmill’s single malt. He gets regular opportunities to drink beer and play chess with his mates. But much of the time he is left to wash the faces of the statuary gnomes in his garden, practice the accordion (he basically knows about two polkas) and dine alone. We watch for a long time as Schultze lives out his slow paced and unexciting daily life (a major feature of his day is a battle of wits with the fellow in the railroad observation tower who runs the manually operated gate at the road crossing; he likes to leave the gate down, to elicit the impatient ringing of Schultze’s bike bell.) Finally, near the half way mark, Schultze is selected to represent his town, and to play his accordion, at a festival in New Braunfels, Texas, his town’s “sister city.” (Earlier, when he had said he hoped he would not be chosen, one of his friends showed a keen awareness of Texas justice, teasing, “Hey, Schultze, you afraid they’ll put you in the electric chair for your polka.”) The remainder of the film tracks his adventures in the U.S., first in New Braunfels (he sees how good the other accordionists are and never goes near the stage to play), then running a small fishing boat down a river to the Gulf, then over to what is probably the lower Mississippi delta region in Louisiana. Nothing much happens, beyond running out of gas once. He gets on well enough with people, though his English vocabulary consists of about four words, goes to dances, sees a lot of scenery, and winds up under a full moon on the roof of a delta houseboat, where the owners, a black woman and her daughter, have taken Schultze in, fed him full of fresh steamed crab, and taken him to a Cajun dance. Not an ebullient soul, Schultze nonetheless seems content with his travels and writes regularly to his friends about his adventures. The film ends on a somewhat somber note but that does not nullify the sense one has of having been quietly and sweetly amused. (In German & English). Grade: B+ (02/09/05) THE SEA INSIDE (Mar adentro) (Alejandro Amenabar, Spain, 2004). This richly produced docudrama makes the case for the right of an individual with a severe, irreversible medical illness, debilitating injury or handicap to choose suicide, and to be assisted by others if necessary, without risk of penalties to those who aid the individual. The issue here is not physician assisted suicide, but something broader: euthanasia or mercy killing at the request of the person with the illness, suicide, if you will, assisted by anyone – friends, relatives or others. The story is based on the life and death of a real person, Ramon Sampedro (played brilliantly in the film by Javier Bardem), a quadriplegic Spanish fisherman who fought for nearly 30 years for his right to die. At the age of 25, Sampedro suffered a severe injury to the cervical spine in a diving accident. A formerly hearty, physically robust young man, he became miserable living a shut in, bedridden life, even though he was able to develop keen writing skills, to the point of publishing a book of his experiences and poems, “Letters from the Inferno.” Cared for by his devoted sister-in-law and other relatives, he also remained a charming and persuasive man, capable of attracting the allegiance and support of many people, especially women. With the assistance of several attorneys, Sampedro challenged the Spanish law that declared it a felony to assist another person to commit suicide, punishable with a prison sentence of up to 10 years. He won judicial reviews at both state and federal levels, but his bids to overturn the law were unsuccessful. He lost patience with this legal struggle after five years and carried out a carefully contrived plan that culminated with Sampedro filming himself sipping a lethal potassium cyanide solution, in 1998. "When I have drunk this I will have renounced one of the worst types of slavery, that of being a living head glued to a dead body," he said in the videotape later shown on Spanish television. "You can punish [the person helping me] if you want. But you know that what you will simply be doing is seeking revenge when, in fact, I am the only person responsible for my actions." Spanish police tried to find out who was behind the camera and who helped prepare the cyanide, but eventually gave up. Sampedro’s case has become one of the most celebrated in the Death with Dignity movement in Western Europe. All the arguments concerning euthanasia are presented here, albeit with a bias in favor. Most lively is a shouting debate Ramon conducts with Padre Francisco (Jose Maria Pou), a quadriplegic priest who has come to the Sampedro house to talk Ramon into abandoning his quest for death. The priest’s wheelchair is too bulky to be brought up to Ramon’s bedroom, and Ramon has no intention of coming down to see the priest, who had previously suggested on national television that the problem here was that Ramon’s family did not love or care for him sufficiently, a charge that was both false and insulting. So the two spar amusingly by shouting up and down a stairwell. Fr. Francisco asserts that our bodies are not private property but belong to God. Ramon snorts that he thought there was no greater champion of private property than the Church, with its vast wealth. Ramon’s sister-in-law Manuela (Mabel Rivera) gets the last word, telling the priest as he departs that one thing she is sure of is that he has a very big mouth. Limited to an exploration of the pros and cons of its subject, this film could have become constipated and platitudinous, edifying but abstract, academic, dull. Instead there is a vitality in the film, a fine drama of the grit of real people bearing difficult burdens. It is in the particulars of how Ramon’s situation affects the rest of his family that the movie finds life and touches us. Ramon’s father is quietly full of grief. He takes visitors to the cove where Ramon dove the day of his accident all those years ago, and you know that for the old man, this event happened just yesterday. There is a harsh encounter between Ramon and his older brother, who has given up his life as a fisherman to make a home to care for Ramon. The brother is furious with Ramon for making an already difficult life, in which the others have made sacrifices for Ramon, even harder by bringing notoriety, embarrassment and shame upon all of them. Then there is Manuela, the brother’s wife, who has given herself completely to caring for Ramon; she lives in a perpetual state of unconditional devotion and service. Finally there is Javi, their son, Ramon’s nephew, a teenager whom Ramon loves like the son he could never have. The movie is visually gorgeous. A scene of Ramon’s fateful dive and near death experience is rerun several times with all the force of an unbidden reoccurring flashback of traumatic events. Other scenes show Ramon’s fantasies come to life, moments when he soars up and away from his confinement, flying across fields and hills to the water he loves. Bardem is perhaps Spain’s finest film actor working today . He is the youngest member of a family of actors that has been making films since the early days of Spanish cinema. He got his start in the family business at age six. His breakthrough came in Julian Schnabel’s 2000 film Before Night Falls, about Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, and he followed that with good turns in Mondays in the Sun and John Malkovich’s The Dancer Upstairs. He was only 34 when Sea Inside was made, but beyond the art of makeup, Bardem invests the role of Ramon with the gravitas and weary patience one would expect to find in a worn and sickly man of fifty. That’s not all, though. Bardem’s Ramon is also an entrancing presence in nearly every scene, bringing charisma, liveliness, passion, wit and grace to his performance purely by means of facial gesture and manner of speaking. The supporting cast are all excellent, especially the women, Ms. Rivera and several others: Belen Rueda (as Julia, a married lawyer with a degenerative neurological disorder who falls in love with Ramon and gets his writings published), Lola Dueñas (as Rosa, a young, sorrowful radio dj who is dependently infatuated with Ramon), and Clara Segura (Gené, a young legal aide). Sea Inside received the Grand Jury award for best film at the Venice Film Festival, where Bardem won also, for best actor. The film has stirred lively debate on the euthanasia question in Spain. A number of government officials have attended screenings. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, has been outspokenly negative. But surveys indicate that two-thirds of Spaniards support some type of controlled euthanasia. This splendid film works effectively as a drama and is also a highly intelligent, useful social propaganda film. I mean that, in the highest sense, as a compliment. Grade: B+ (12/15/04) SEPTEMBER 11 (11’9”01) (Youssef Chahine/10 others, UK/France/others, 2003). French production in which leading film directors from 11 countries were invited to create 11 minute short films conveying their reflections on the events of September 11. They vary widely in content and quality. Two allude to U.S. complicity in terrorist acts (in Chile against Allende, who died on September 11, 1973, depicted by Ken Loach; in Palestine by U.S.-backed Israelis, shown in the segment from Egyptian director Chahine). Two more recall other destructive acts (a Palestinian suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, shot by Israeli director Amos Gitan; the Japanese “holy war” against the west in WW II, by Shohei Imamura). Ironies abound in several. Shadows that darken the New York City apartment of a grieving old man suddenly disappear as the towers telescope to the ground in Sean Penn’s piece, bringing the man momentary joy. But in this bright light he can finally see that his wife is really gone. In Mira Nair’s film based on a real incident a missing young man, also in New York City, the son of a Pakistani family, is first presumed to be a fugitive terrorist, but later he proves to a hero that sacrificed himself trying to save others in the towers. There are poignant moments dotted throughout. Loach has his exiled Chilean man quote St. Augustine, to the effect that hope is built of anger and courage: anger at the way things are, courage to change them. Imamura tells us that there is no such thing as a holy war. Samira Makhmalbaf shows a teacher with her very young Afghan schoolchildren, exiled in Iran, trying to tell them about the events that have just transpired in New York. But they are understandably more impressed with a major event in their refugee camp, where two men have fallen into a deep well, one killed, the other sustaining a broken leg. This is tragedy on a grand scale for the 6 year olds. Idrissa Ouedraogo, from Burkina Faso, creates a drama in which the son of an ailing woman spots Osama bin Laden in their village and gathers his buddies to help capture him, to get the $25 million U. S. reward. He tells his friends not to let any of the adults know their plans, for they would waste the money on cars and cigarettes, while he plans to help his mother and others who are sick and destitute. It is Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (maker of Amores Perros) who provides by far the most powerful and chilling segment, one that, for the most part, shows only a darkened screen with audio tape loops of chanting and voices and occasional thudding sounds. Brief visual flashes gradually permit us to see bodies falling from the high floors of the towers, and it dawns on us that the thuds are these bodies hitting the ground. The sequence ends with elegiac orchestral music and a still shot, bearing a phrase first shown only in Arabic, then with a translation added: “Does God’s light guide us or blind us?” (In various languages with English subtitles) Grade: B+ (10/31/04) SIDEWAYS (Alexander Payne, US, 2004). SPOILER ALERT! Here’s a highly amusing guyflick about two old college roomies, now 30-something, with a romantic subplot thrown in for good measure. Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) is your basic restive, dysphoric Everyman. He’s dumpy, lonely and he scowls a lot. He teaches 8th grade English in a San Diego middle school, and has spent years rewriting a sprawling novel that his agent cannot get a nibble for. Miles has been in therapy for two years since his wife divorced him and he takes Xanax and Lexapro. And he drinks too much. From the perspective of his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church), none of this has helped. What will help, Jack sincerely believes, is for Miles to get laid this week. The occasion is a trip the two have planned, driving up into the wine country of northern Santa Barbara county and beyond. This to celebrate Jack’s impending wedding the day after they return: it will be a moveable bachelor party. The itinerary call for golf, good food, and sampling fine wines. (Miles is a consummate wine nerd: he knows his structures and can detect the hint of asparagus in a cab as well as the strawberry and pepper.) Oh, yes, and getting laid – well, that’s on Jack’s agenda at least, his final fling. Miles could care less. Jack, I should add, is about as opposite to Miles as can be; he’s a huge hunk of a fellow, a TV actor who’s on the early downslope of his career, formerly a regular in a couple of TV series, nowadays doing some commercials and voiceovers. He’s not the brightest bulb on the tree but he’s cheerful, sensitive and devoted to Miles. And he’s perniciously horny. Before long Jack has arranged a double date (of course mum’s the word about Jack’s matrimonial plans). Miles is matched with Maya (Virginia Madsen), a recently divorced restaurant server he’s actually visited with on earlier trips to the wine country, and Jack himself is paired with Stephanie (Canadian actress Sandra Oh), a wine pourer who shares Jack’s carnal appetites. They are soon swept away in a rush of frenzied lovemaking, while Miles and Maya talk intensely about wines. Maya asks at one point why pinot noir is his favorite varietal, and when Miles rhapsodizes about the delicacy of the fruit, its sensitivity and need for constant nurturance, everyone including Maya knows that Miles’s talking about himself, not just grapes. After a couple of days in the hay, Jack goes off the deep end, starts fantasizing about a different life here in wine country, living happily ever after with Stephanie and her little daughter. Miles rages at him, calls him (quite rightly) an infant, reminding him about his fiancée and the wedding a few days hence. Jack, for his part, is furious with Miles for drinking too much, pouting and glowering at every turn, and acting avoidant toward Maya, who obviously likes him. All true. We see that these two guys are each as canny in their insights about one another as they are blind to their own foibles. They’re like two sides of the coin of narcissism: Jack is full of himself, the vain, self indulgent, would-be star who basks in admiration, like a kid in a candy shop with women, a gourmand, a guzzler of life. Miles on the other hand is supremely self critical, obsessive, finicky, always expecting the worst, a timid sniffer and sipper of life. He’s self denying when it comes to pleasure, but can also write a manuscript 8 inches thick, mainly about himself. Things get rather madcap late in the week. Miles does manage to rise above his negativity to have some intimate moments with Maya. But inevitably the secret of Jack’s wedding comes to light and Stephanie beats the bejesus out of him with her motorcycle helmet. Maya also feels deceived by this news and refuses further contact with Miles. The guys head back to San Diego on schedule, sadder for sure, but wiser? Who knows? Jack’s wedding takes place as planned. Miles returns to teaching. But then one day he gets a letter from Maya. In the final scene he comes knocking at her door up north. The picture fades to black. Everything about this film is well crafted, sure, a pure pleasure to watch. Payne and his team are very good at what they do (think of Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt before this film). Payne’s direction is impeccable, and the screenplay, adapted by Payne and longtime cowriter JimTaylor from Rex Pickett’s novel, is briskly paced and full of laughs. Photography by James Glennon, music by Rolfe Kent, and production design by Jane Ann Stewart (all involved in the four movies) are equally impressive efforts. Mr. Giamatti’s character is much like that of his Harvey Pekar in American Splendor. Will we see more of this Giamatti persona? Is a rougher, less urbane, less rarified Italian version of Woody Allen’s neurotic antihero emerging here? Perhaps even a tougher version? Where Allen always whines when angry, Giamatti can properly get his dander up. On the golf course one day with Jack, Miles is incensed when someone in the foursome behind hits a ball close to where he’s standing. Miles snarls, yells, tees up and fires a shot right back up the hill at the other group. Now that’s what Chaplin or Tati would have done. Grade: A- (11/22/04) SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER...AND SPRING (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom) (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea, 2004). A lovely, peaceful, in some ways troubling meditation on the cycles of the seasons and life. The film is set in the present on a small lake in a secluded mountain valley. Here an older monk lives in a small floating temple. In the first of five episodes (“Spring”), he is teaching a young boy to become a monk. When the boy amuses himself by tying rocks to fish and animals, he is rebuked by the monk. In the second episode (“Summer”) the boy is now a teenager who becomes enthralled by a young woman, the first he has ever seen, sent to live at the temple to regain her health. They eventually make love. The girl recovers and is dispatched home. The young monk leaves in the night to follow her. In the third episode (“Fall”) the young monk returns, now a citified, angry, frightened man of 30, hunted by police for killing his wife in a jealous rage. He is set to work by the old monk carving calligraphic characters into the decking in front of the temple to calm his anger, characters that have first been painted by the old monk. Two police officers arrive and eventually lead the younger monk away, though at the old monk’s request they wait until the younger monk’s carving task is completed. They even help apply colored paint to the carved characters, and in the process, they too are calmed. The old monk subsequently immolates himself in a pyre he builds on his rowboat. In “Winter,” an older version of the once young monk returns, reaching the neglected temple by walking across the now frozen lake. He reopens the temple and discovers a manual on meditative physical arts. Having broken off his monastic training years earlier, he now devotes himself to learning from this guide, a pursuit captured in a series of wonderful scenes in which he performs various tai kwon do postures. One day a shrouded woman brings her baby boy to stay at the temple. She drowns that same night, walking back toward land. The monk subsequently climbs a mountain, weighed down by a huge disk-shaped stone he ties to his body, much like he had tied rocks to animals as a boy. At the top he leaves a Buddha statue perched on this stone. In the final, very brief scene (“Spring”) the monk is teaching the young boy, as the monk himself had been taught. This is a modern fable, based on Buddhist teachings and practices, written by the director, Mr. Kim, who also edited and starred as the adult monk seen in the “Winter” and the final “Spring” scenes. The film is incredibly lovely to view: the accents of each season are photographed to gorgeous advantage. It is a quiet film: there is very little dialogue. It is also a frustrating film. We never get a clue about the meaning of the characters painted on the temple deck by the old monk (using, incidentally, the tail of his cat as a paintbrush). Four actors play the younger monk at successive ages. The teenager strikingly resembles the child. But the other two actors, depicting the younger monk now grown up, do not resemble each other or the child and teenager. This is distracting. The moral lessons are also somewhat difficult to swallow. The older monk tells the child in the first episode that if any animal he has tied to a rock dies, so also the boy’s heart will be tied to a rock for life. To drive home the point the monk ties a large rock to the child’s back and dispatches him to discover and free the animals. Two – a fish and snake – are found dead. It seems a heavy curse, one that does permit redemption. But at the end of the “Winter” segment, when the younger monk has dragged his huge rock to a mountain top and left it as a base for the Buddha statue, one is left to ponder whether in fact he has redeemed himself, freed his heart. Another moral conundrum, in the “Summer” episode, is embodied in the responses of the older monk upon learning of the sexual escapades of the teenage monk and the recovering girl. The old monk first asks the girl if she is now cured. When she says yes, he then replies that the activities of the young couple were right. But then, in apparent contradiction, he tells the young monk, “lust leads to possessiveness which leads to murder.” Indeed, this statement accurately foretells the younger monk’s fate. But it’s a curious and narrowly cynical take on love’s prospects. Just the sort of thing one might expect from a hermetic old cleric. The best way to enjoy this film is to set its teachings aside and simply take in the spellbinding beauty of the place with each passing season. (In Korean) Grade: B (09/18/04) STALINGRAD (Sebastian Dehnhardt, Christian Deick & Jorg Mullner, Germany/3 others, 2003). Lengthy documentary about the infamous siege of Stalingrad by Hitler’s 6th Army that dragged on for 5 ½ months through the autumn and winter of 1942-43, until the surrender of remaining German forces, the first defeat of the Nazis and a huge turning point in WW II. A film made for television as a miniseries, Stalingrad has first rate production values. It is organized into three 50+ minute segments, entitled: “The Attack,” “The Kessel (Cauldron),” and “The Doom.” The composition and editing of all three episodes are excellent, synthesizing archival footage from both German and Russian sources, occasional brief audio clips from speeches and communiqués in those times, and comments from a number of contemporary interviews of survivors on both sides of the battle. Narration in English is provided continually in voiceovers. The narrator not only provides background and explanatory contexts, but also translates the interview segments (but not in the style of dubbing). A woman narrator translates interview segments of women survivors. The result of this strategy is a smooth, seamless audio flow and avoidance of subtitles (used only 2 or 3 times when presenting archival communiqués). The interviews are emotionally moving. Men and women recall events so vividly, some – especially German survivors - unable to hold back tears, even now. “The Attack” gives the background leading up to the German attack on Stalingrad, and the initial engagement between the Germans and Soviet defenders. We learn of the decision weeks beforehand to divide the German army, sending forces of equal size both south to seize the oilfields of Baku, Azerbaijan, and north to seize Stalingrad. This fateful decision backfired in two ways: the Soviets had torched the refineries and oil wells, so the plan to seize oil failed, while the force sent north to Stalingrad was of insufficient size to prevail. The Germans also planned inadequately for supplying their Army on the eastern front, resulting in drastic dwindling of both fuel and ammunition, hampering prosecution of the siege. The early weeks of the battle were extremely costly, with 40,000 deaths per week all tolled. Meanwhile, Stalin dispatched some of his best troops and tank corps to the area. At one point the Soviets could boast having 1,200 tanks up against a German force reduced to 100. By late November, 1942, the Red Army had encircled the Germans, assuring total cutoff of supplies and certain victory for Stalin. “The Kessel” tells the story of the disastrous efforts of the Germans to prevail, spurred on by Hitler, against the advice of many of his senior military staff. For Hitler, his personal prestige was on the line. He also wanted to wipe out a city named for the man who had become his most despised enemy. We learn of the privation - temperatures down to -50 degrees, epidemic diseases like typhus and amoebic dysentery, lack of food or any medical supplies to tend to the injured - of the German soldiers, while the Soviet troops were well supplied in every sense. The final episode, “The Doom,” documents the last few weeks before the eventual German surrender on February 2, 1943. We learn how only wounded soldiers were eligible for airlifts out to Germany, how high ranking men displaced the wounded on some flights, how more able bodied soldiers would cling to the exterior of the planes until they were shaken off or fell away once they succumbed to freezing. In the end the Germans lost 2 ½ million men, the Soviets, ½ million. Only 6,000 Germans escaped. Of the residual group of 300,000 taken prisoner by the Soviets, 200,000 died within days from wounds, malnutrition, and residual fighting. The remaining 100,000 was reduced to half that number by forced marches and subsequent toil in labor camps. On the other hand, Russians were ordered to share their food supplies with captives, and in many instances offered medical care as well. One Soviet commander said”…at this time there are no fascists, only sick men…” referring to the needs of the captives. Ultimately only 6,000 Germans were ever repatriated, and that occurred only 13 years later. This saga is not at all pleasant to watch, but Stalingrad is absorbing, edifying and important; it is a fine documentary account of one of the darkest chapters of WW II. (In German and Russian) Grade: A- (02/04) THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL (Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel) (Byambasuren Davaa & Luigi Falorni, Mongolia/Germany, 2004). “May your humps grow straight and your legs grow strong” – so runs the blessing that shepherds utter at the birth of a newborn Bactrian (“two humped”) camel on the Gobi desert in southern Mongolia. This wondrous film tells of these camels and the nomadic shepherd families who tend them. The lives of these people are entirely organized by roots, by longstanding connections: to family, to animals, to traditions, to the land. The film opens a broad window that allows us the privilege of gazing upon life in the Gobi. Its director, Mr. Davaa, is of Mongolian origin. His grandparents were shepherds like those depicted in this film. They moved to the city when his parents were teenagers. He and his film team from Germany wanted to build their story of shepherd life around the behavior and uses of the camels, and the myths surrounding them. They selected one extended family to film: father and mother, grandparents, and three children: boys roughly 14 and 10, a toddler girl. The family occupies a large, semi-permanent yurt that is amply furnished with rugs (on walls and wood floors), brightly decorated chests and cabinets, a small thangka and devotional shrine, a central iron woodstove. There are perhaps three or four other yurts in the cluster that composes this small village. There is an impressive corral for sheep, excavated several feet into the ground and ringed by a substantial rock wall. Goats and the odd cat walk about. The camels are on tether ropes attached to stakes in the ground nearby. There is no electricity, no motorized vehicles. Water is pumped up from a well, using camel power. This film is a “narrative documentary,” a loose term meaning it is somewhere on a continuum between truly spontaneous (verite) documentary and docudrama. Some early filmmakers like Robert Flaherty were quite shameless in using native locations and players to stage and film reenactments of traditional cultural activities that in fact had passed out of use decades or more beforehand, with questionable attention to authenticity. (A recent example of such filming at its contemporary best is the Canadian Inuit reenactment of an oral legend in The Fast Runner: Atanarjuat.) In a narrative documentary, indigenous people are directed to reenact current activities of their daily lives in a naturalistic manner, but contrived on cue for the convenience of filming. The actors presumably are all amateurs, locals recruited for the film. They all seem fit and are well dressed. Some sing beautifully. We see cooking, child care, games (adult and kids’ pastimes), a simple Buddhist worship service conducted by visiting monks, a trip the two boys make on camelback to a much larger settlement (replete with western style buildings as well as many yurts, cars, electricity, satellite TV). But the central story is a drama about a camel who rejects her newborn, and the efforts of the shepherds to help these two overcome their dilemma. Davaa had hoped to tell such a story, and chose to go to the Gobi in the spring, in March, when camels typically give birth. What luck! Two colts were born in succession late on the very day the film crew arrived. By chance, the second colt was a rare white camel, and its mother actually rejected it. We witness birthings, how the people aid the deliveries, how bonding occurs between mother and colt in one case, but not the next. We are told that the white colt was a firstborn, that the labor was very long (2 days) and painful, perhaps a reason the mother will not permit the colt to suckle. The family feed the colt milk from a horn, and try unsuccessfully to arrange contact between mother and colt. Finally the family agree that a HOOS ceremony is required. This necessitates bringing in a morin khuur (horse head fiddle) player, who arrives from the larger settlement by motorcycle. First the two-stringed fiddle, perhaps twice the size of a western violin and, like it, tuned in 5ths, is briefly attached to one of the mother’s humps, using a blue ribbon, apparently in order to have the animal feel the harmonic resonance of the instrument as ambient wind or her own breath sounds are amplified by the instrument’s box. Then the fiddler plays, at a pitch that sounds not unlike the lowing of the mother. Next, Odgoo, a woman in the family, begins to chant a song, while she leans against the mother and strokes her flank. After a while the colt is brought up close, as before, and it attempts to suckle. And for the first time in the several days since birth, the mother permits this, and afterwards allows her offspring to nuzzle her. The ceremony appears to be a great success, bonding of the two camels has been achieved, and everyone rejoices, going indoors to eat and sing, accompanied by the fiddler. The unhurried camera work in this film is stupendous, matching the measured, thoughtful pace of life on the Gobi. There are long, leisurely, steady shots: many close-ups of the faces of camels and people. I know it may sound trite, but this film leaves lasting impressions of a simple yet profound reverence for life that is made obvious by the conduct of these people. How long this culture will survive as we see it here is open to question. The very presence of the film crew is a harbinger of change. Ugna, the 10 year-old boy, really likes the cartoons he sees on the satellite TV feed when he visits the large settlement with his older brother. Back home he pleads for the family to get TV. The grandfather calls it the devil, nothing but useless glass images. Ugna’s wish seems to be a tall order, but in the film’s penultimate scenes, sure enough, there in Ugna’s yurt we see a little black and white TV with a picture showing only squiggly lines, while someone outside is adjusting the new satellite dish. That said, it still is difficult to convey fully the sense of wonder - the fascination, the special privilege - one feels, being able to gaze at Ugna, Ogdoo and their family, their way of life, the age-old connection that exists between them and their flocks. This film belongs among my all-time best, my personal “canon.” (In Mongolian) Grade: A+ (02/16/04) This is a powerful, important film. It captures so well the mood of anxious anticipation of the US invasion among the people in the Kurdish highlands of northern Iraq. As in Ghobadi’s earlier films (A Time for Drunken Horses; Marooned in Iraq) children and teens appear often to be prime movers in a wide range of activities, perhaps because the young adult men are dead or soldiering or in hiding. Certainly kids are remarkably adaptable and find ways to survive in almost any circumstances. What makes this film most poignant is the gradually revealed truth that the young toddler is in fact Agrin’s own child, the product of rape by the soldiers that destroyed her village and killed her parents. (It is not clear what faction or country these soldiers represent – they are only glimpsed in a flashback, presumably Agrin’s - but I’d bet on the Turks, based on the approximate timing and the well known scorched earth campaign waged against Kurdish villages in southeast Turkey by the Turkish army until just recently). In closeups of Agrin, one can see the countenance of trauma: the numbness, the despair, the deep reservoirs of shame, anger and fear - it's all there in the look on Agrin's face. The only downside to this film is one that is characteristic of most films from this region: at all times the characters shout at each other in monotonous, inflectionless voices, even when they are standing next to one another, as if they were instead trying to communicate from opposite ends of a football field. It creates spoken dialogue that is harshly grating to a western ear, or at least to mine. (In Kurdish) Grade: B+ (02/04/05) TWILIGHT SAMURAI (Tasogare Seibei) (Yoji Yamada, Japan, 2002). Absolutely top notch, gorgeous film set in southern Honshu, in Central Japan, in the years immediately preceding the Meiji Restoration (1867-68) and the Boshin Civil War (1868-69). The story opens at the moment of a woman’s death; in narrative voiceover another woman tells us that it is her mother who has died, after a prolonged illness, when she, the narrator, was only 5 years old. She then begins to tell us a story dating from this moment long ago. It is the story of her widower father, a humble, low ranking Samurai retainer, Iguchi Seibei (played with immense skill and subtlety by Hiroyuki Sanada, at age 43 a veteran of roles in 57 films to date). Seibei is modest to a fault; he has struggled for years to support his tubercular wife, demented mother and two young daughters, on meager wages. His lack of vanity is absolute: he cannot find time enough for himself even to bathe regularly, and he dresses shabbily. Not only hasn’t he money to replace things, but now there is no one in the home even to mend his old clothing. His devotion to his mother and children is selfless to the point of saintliness. But his scruffy appearance and poor personal hygiene make him an embarrassment to his associates and the object of pity and scorn to his superiors. He manages Clan supplies and keeps warehouse inventory and requisition books in an office with other clerks. He eschews fighting and shares with no one the extent of his past training and expertise as a warrior. Years earlier he had excelled at a dojo where the master specialized in the uncommon art of using a “short sword” in combat. In fact Seibei had been proficient enough to be appointed as an instructor there. But all that was long ago. Now, however, circumstances force him to use his combat skills on two occasions. He must defend a woman, Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa), whom he has known since childhood, against an attack by her abusive, drunken husband, who in response challenges Seibei to a duel next day. Later, based on reports of his prowess in this fight, he is ordered by his Clan Chief to kill Yogo Zenemon (Min Tanaka), a master long swordsman who has defied the Chief’s order to commit hara-kari. Among others, the encounters between these two men, and between Seibei and Tomoe, who loves Seibei, are spellbinding. Weaving between short narrated segments and long flashbacks, the story unfolds seamlessly, filled in by Sanada’s subdued yet forceful presence on screen, supported by an ensemble of impeccably skillful players. The photography is brilliant and lush – interior scenes and gazes at the countryside are splendid. The intermittent music – throbbing deep drumbeats and high-pitched flute – fascinates. The fight scenes are brief but arresting. A film decidedly worth revisiting. Film won 12 awards in Japan's version of the Oscars. (In Japanese) Grade: A (02/13/04) VERA DRAKE (Mike Leigh, UK, 2004). SPOILER ALERT! Mike Leigh, like his fellow Brit filmmaker Ken Loach, has the heart of a social worker. Both are interested in dramatizing the difficulties of ordinary people in the context of societal influences that result in ironic, often agonizing predicaments. Leigh’s particular interest is families in tension. Secret and Lies (1995), for example, dealt with struggles about mixed race and identity for an adopted woman in a dysfunctional family. High Hopes (1989), one of Leigh’s best films, satirized Margaret Thatcher’s ideas, played out in the greed and self centeredness of relatives and neighbors of an aging, disgruntled old woman. Vera Drake is a superbly crafted film that depicts the daily concerns and satisfactions of a working class family in central London, in 1950, a time when the psychological shadows of wartime economic deprivation, trauma and loss still darken people’s experience and shape their perspectives and even their conversation. The Drake family actually fares pretty well. Everyone’s employed. The head of the household is Stan (Phil Davis, a Leigh regular who also starred in High Hopes), a congenial, solid fellow who has a comfortable job repairing cars in his brother’s shop; son Sid (Daniel Mays), a bit of a dandy, sells men’s clothing and chases girls; daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly), homely as putty and exquisitely shy, tests light bulbs on an assembly line. They live in tiny quarters that boast no frills. It could feel dreary there but it does not, because everyone is made comfortable by the selfless, abiding good care provided by Vera (Imelda Staunton), Stan’s wife and the kids’ mum. Stan and Vera obviously appreciate each other and treat their children with knowing respect. Vera, who’s about 50, is cheery, understated, tireless and kind. She lives to help others. She calls everyone “Dear” and has a word of support, a fresh “cuppa” tea, and some hands on assistance ready to offer for whatever problem needs attention. She extends herself without reservation to everyone: her family, her sickly mother, the invalid downstairs and his family, other neighbors. She invites the affectless, vaguely mournful bachelor Reg (Eddie Marsan) for dinner and thus, improbably, a romance of sorts ensues for Ethel and Reg. Vera works as a domestic in well off households. She also has performed illegal abortions for the past 20 years. She would never use this term, of course. Nor does she see this activity as morally wrong. To her, aiding a poor woman who is pregnant out of wedlock or already burdened by too many children is no different than fixing a meal for an ailing neighbor or straightening up her mum’s apartment. It’s simply another instance of being helpful to someone in need. A friend, Lily, makes the arrangements, for women who cannot afford the costly services of a medically approved procedure (we see one such arrangement for the daughter of a rich woman whose house Vera cleans). Characteristically, Vera provides the service – a lye soap and water douche – without charging any fee. Unbeknownst to her, Lily does charge and pockets the money for herself. Inevitably, a young woman develops a uterine infection after Vera’s ministrations, and nearly dies. As luck would have it, the girl’s mother, present at the procedure, knows Vera from years ago. The hospital reports the event and police pressure the mother into revealing Vera’s name. Arrest and a night in jail come on the worst possible day, when Ethel and Reg’s engagement is being celebrated. Ultimately, Vera is convicted and sent away to prison for 2 ½ years. The impact of these circumstances in the family plays out in various ways, all convincing. Stan, his brother, Ethel and Reg all rally without hesitation around Vera. Reg is especially supportive. Referring to his own family, he says that too many children made life very hard. He stuns everyone when he breaks a leaden silence on Christmas Day to say, apparently in truth, that it is the best Christmas he has ever had. Sid finds his mother’s conduct morally reprehensible; he’s furious with her. In one of the film’s best scenes, Stan confronts Sid, admits his own anger, but demands that Sid honor his love for his mother by showing forgiveness. Sid, to his credit, comes around. The brother’s wife, Vera’s sister in law, a classic materialistic social climber, is also deeply disapproving and stays that way. She’s the only one who doesn’t show up for Vera’s trial. In the final scene, we see Stan, Sid, Ethel and Reg sitting around the dinner table, dispirited, mute, immobilized. We are struck by the terrible truth that Vera, in her steady, positive, quiet manner, had been the animating force in this family, and without her the others are emotionally numb and adrift. This film succeeds in several ways. As a study of a family, it is impeccable. As an evocation of life for many British citizens in the years immediately following World War II, it feels authentic and believable. (Production design is excellent with a single, literally glaring exception: the cheese grater Vera uses to create lye soap shavings for douches is shiny bright, new off the shelf, not dull gray from use as it should be.) The story depicts several forms of injustice and inequality. There is, of course, the obvious and ever timely issue of unequal access to abortion based on economic advantage, the inevitable result when repressive antiabortion laws or rules hold sway. But the larger, more ironic injustice, one that has no easy answer, is that a truly good woman is punished for acts which were always well intentioned, afforded Vera no personal gain, and had nearly always produced beneficial results. Yet these same acts always carried the potential for harm, and possible death. These issues are depicted by Leigh without didacticism. There’s no note of preachiness in this film, another strength. Mike Leigh here, as he nearly always does in preparing to shoot a film, worked with his actors for several months collaboratively to develop the characters and final script. Although all the supporting roles mentioned above are performed splendidly, this is Ms. Staunton’s film and she is wonderful. She is not well known for film roles but has enjoyed great success on the London stage, winning awards for roles in both dramatic and musical productions. She was judged Best Actress for her Vera Drake at the 2004 Venice Film Festival, where the movie was also honored as Best Film. Grade: A- (10/25/04) VODKA LEMON (Hiner Saleem, Armenia/France + others, 2003, 90 min.). Here is a marvelous little gem of a film that brings a double delight: it offers you a window into a remote place in the world you’ve never seen before while at the same time treating you to a sly and quirky comedy. The place is Armenia, a small independent country now, sandwiched between Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran. The time is the present, years after the fall of Armenia’s former rulers in the USSR, and in the small village in the hinterlands where this film is set, unemployment, failed pensions and poverty are a common lot. The season is winter. The village is located at the base of a low mountain range. Everywhere it is white with snow. The film opens with an old bedridden man in his metal bed being dragged along through the snow by a jeep, so that he can play in a musical elegy for a recently deceased member of the community, as soon as he takes out his full dentures, of course. Is this an homage to that wonderful scene of the bed moving through the street in A Taste of Honey? Who knows. But this scene sure does set a proper tone for the off beat humor of this film. The photography, scene arrangement and editing in this film are all accomplished well. Hamo (Romen Avinian) is an older widower who keeps hoping in vain that his oldest son, living near Paris, will send money. Meanwhile, he must sell off various household furnishings to make ends meet and assure a steady supply of the local intoxicant of choice, for which the film received its name. (At one point a customer asks why it’s called vodka lemon when it tastes like almonds. “That’s Armenia,” is the vendor’s response.) Hamo visits his wife’s gravesite daily and carries on long conversations with the likeness of her face etched on the gravestone. In time he notices Nina (Lala Sarkissian), who also comes to the cemetery to visit her dead husband’s likeness a few rows away. They ride the same bus, but do not sit together, not until after Hamo notices that Nina is not able to pay her fare and he gallantly pays for her arrears. This breaks the ice and they become more friendly. Meanwhile a village crisis is stirring: Hamo’s granddaughter has got herself into a family way by the son of Hamo’s best friend. Her father, Hamo’s son Dilovan (Ivan Franek), is a wild sort who’d as soon shoot the young man unless he agrees to a quick marriage and a good dowry to boot. The marriage takes place but Dilovan ends up shooting his new son-in-law anyway when the latter fails to meet the terms of the dowry. Every few minutes someone rides through a scene on horseback. A touch or two of magical realism seep into the story, but not obtrusively. In the end no one has died and the romantic prospects for Hamo, if not his granddaughter, seem promising. (In Armenian, Kurdish, Russian & French) Grade: B+ (03/13/05) Add: Mr. Saleem, the director, is a Kurd, which is interesting insofar as the Kurdish population of Armenia is quite small, estimated variously between 1% and 6%. Most are not Muslims but belong to a secretive religious sect called the Yezidi faith or Yezidism. Presumably the place where this film is set is a Kurdish village. THE WOODSMAN (Nicole Kassell, US, 2004, 87 min.). Kevin Bacon plays Walter, a man just released from prison after serving a 12 year term for molesting young girls, in the most frank and complete fictional account of pedophilia I know of on film. Walter tries to restart his life, but multiple stressors heighten his anxiety and, with this, his irresistible obsessive interest in little girls returns. His situation is complex, and his prospects are poor despite some positive forces in his new life. This was a directing debut for Ms. Kassell, who collaborated with Steven Fechter to adapt his original work done for the stage. The film is very well crafted, neither lurid nor judgmental in tone, and the dialogue and flow seem highly cinematic, often a very difficult thing to achieve in adapted stage dramas. As noted by many reviewers, it was a brave act indeed for both Ms. Kassell and Mr. Bacon to take on a project addressing a theme that is so repugnant to most people. Mr. Bacon gives an extraordinary performance here, somehow conveying the many nuances of the problem of his character’s pedophilia. We can see that Walter’s compulsion to repeat acts that could be so ruinous to the young girls and to himself at times outstrips all reason and prudent judgment. The complexity and mystery of his pedophilia are portrayed but never explained, and this is as it should be. There are no pat answers to such problems, only the fact that such patterns and impulses are not easy to overcome on a permanent basis, no matter what the stakes. For a more extensive review, see the posting on this film at my other website, www.Psychflix.com. Grade: A- (01/30/05) THE YES MEN (Chris Smith, Dan Ollman & Sarah Price, US, 2004). Chris Smith created perhaps the funniest documentary movie I’ve ever seen, American Movie (2000), about a zany character named Mark Borchardt, himself an amateur filmmaker and world class natural slacker comedian. Smith’s next (and most recent) film was Home Movie (2002), a disappointing study of five eccentric houses and the people who created and lived in them. That film proved it was Borchardt, not Smith, who made the earlier film so good, and that when it comes to probing the lives of unusual people, Smith is no Errol Morris. Now, with help, Smith takes a different tack, entering the fast paced, highly competitive world of polidocs: documentaries about hot political and social issues, a burgeoning film genre these days. “The Yes Men” are a group of prankster activists, led by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who oppose the Bush Administration and the current trends in global trade regulation and the WTO, which exploit developing nations to make rich countries richer. They have had a website with a domain name close to that used by President Bush as his official website. On it they have posted many items that are sufficiently critical of the Administration that Bush operatives tried to bluff these fellows into removing the site. They have also succeeded in sending representatives to speak at international trade conferences masquerading as official representatives of the WTO. Actually, they use the same man, Andy, as speaker, but he uses a variety of humorous aliases. His top performance to date was one in Finland, where he removed a carefully constructed pull away business suit, to reveal a shiny gilt colored superhero suit underneath, replete with a three foot long penis (also covered in the same shiny gold fabric) enlarged at the end to encompass a small TV screen. This suit was proposed by Andy as a useful work costume for a third world shop superintendent to watch over the work force. What amuses is the way that Andy gets away with outrageous statements (always made in deadpan, serious mode) and even his soft porn spacesuit getup before audiences of professional accountants, corporate officers and government ministry types. When he tried the same thing with an audience of college students in Plattsburg, New York, they caught on to the artifice quickly. Do people at international trade-related conferences actually listen to the speakers? Do language barriers get in the way? Or are those people more gullible or hip than the rest of us? Who can tell? I found this film mildly funny but crippled by its superficiality of content and sloppy editing. Not only is no effort made to elucidate the issues of world trade problems, there isn’t even an attempt at coherent presentation of the anti-WTO position. To my surprise, this film was the Audience Award Winner just last month at the 2004 International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. Grade: C+ (12/19/04) |
