2008 at the Movies: The Best and the Worst

Although it was remarkable in many other ways (elections, the economy), 2008 was a fairly typical year for movies: no indisputable masterpieces, but quite a few solid achievements (along with some ripe stinkers). And unlike 2007, when the heavily praised (and awarded) No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood seemed to me seriously flawed and a misuse of great talent, this year the most acclaimed movies are mostly pretty good.

There are a few that I think have been overrated: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Happy-Go-Lucky, and Waltz with Bashir, to name three, but those are still reasonably good movies, as is the likely Oscar-winner, Slumdog Millionaire. Slumdog is a fine evening’s entertainment, even though it’s a bit thin and superficial and predictable. But there are at least twenty movies I liked better in the past year. Here are some of them.

Best Features of 2008

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2. Milk
3. Paranoid Park
4. WALL-E
5. Synecdoche, New York
6. Rachel Getting Married
7. The Edge of Heaven
8. The Dark Knight
9. In Bruges
10. Frozen River

Runners-up:

Wendy and Lucy
Gran Torino

Documentaries

Taxi to the Dark Side

Man on Wire

Moving Midway

Trouble the Water

Biggest Disappointments: Che; Revolutionary Road

The Worst (that I saw): Speed Racer; Sex and the City; Mamma Mia!

Twice in a row now, David Fincher has delivered the movie of the year. Zodiac and Benjamin Button couldn’t be more different – one a deliberately chilly and alienating thriller, the other a large-scale, smash-hit Hollywood romantic fantasy. What they share is Fincher’s mesmerizing sense of composition and rhythm. Button’s script is of variable quality – but Fincher ensures that the film is constantly gripping and profoundly moving. The central idea – what it really means to live and die – is powerfully rendered through masterful visual storytelling. Claudio Miranda, in his first major feature as cinematographer, delivers an extraordinary-looking film. And the score by Alexandre Desplat (The Golden Compass, The Queen) is beautifully effective.

Sharing honors with Fincher as director of the year is Gus Van Sant, with two fine and very different movies. Milk is a superior biopic, a superior political movie, and a superior period piece, and it has more first-rate performances than any other movie this year. It’s also an audience pleaser – you can feel the energy in the theater as you watch. Paranoid Park, in contrast, is one of Van Sant’s I-don’t-really-care-if-you-enjoy-this “experimental” movies, in the same vein as Elephant, Last Days, and Gerry. This one has a somewhat more conventional narrative than those three, but it's definitely an “art film” in the best sense. Van Sant is a poetic visual stylist and a brilliant editor of sound and image. Paranoid Park (a moody tale of violent death and teen anomie) and Milk (the story of a gay rights hero) demonstrate his gifts in pleasingly different ways.

WALL-E doesn’t quite match the narrative grace and wit of the last Pixar movie, Ratatouille, but its first hour is stunningly beautiful and innovative. The second half, still entertaining and funny and thoughtful, is a bit more conventional and contrived. But this story of a lovesick robot on an Earth desolated by pollution is a wonderful movie.

Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, is a mysterious and beautiful thing. It doesn’t always work (though viewers may well differ widely about which parts do or don’t ring true), and it certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of oddness. But the breadth of its ambition and imagination is exciting in itself, and often enormously moving. Kaufman is still learning as a director, and this might have been better in someone else’s hands, but it’s a startlingly personal fantasia. Synecdoche is much better experienced than described: Philip Seymour Hoffman (as marvelous here as he is disappointing in Doubt) plays a stage director whose biggest production turns out to be his own life story – and eventually the play, enormous in scope and years in preparation (never quite ready for an audience) becomes indistinguishable from his life, and vice versa. And perhaps it all takes place in his head during the moment of his death. Or not. At any rate, this deserves to be seen.

The Edge of Heaven was too little seen in its limited theatrical engagements, but it’s available on DVD – and you should rent or buy it as soon as you can. It accomplishes in an extraordinarily gripping and moving way what some earlier, over-hyped movies like Crash and Babel attempted — telling multiple stories whose characters and plots gradually merge into one narrative. It takes place among the Turkish immigrants in Germany, as did Fatih Akim’s previous Head-On, also worth checking out. Akim’s beautifully controlled and perfectly cast film takes on love and lust and cultural identity in ways you won’t soon forget.

Rachel Getting Married is a welcome return to form for director Jonathan Demme, and a splendid opportunity for Anne Hathaway to display her acting chops. In fact, all the performances are excellent. The intensity falters a bit in the extended post-wedding scenes at the end, but this is a fine and powerful movie.

As for the rest of my top 12: The Dark Knight, the year’s biggest blockbuster, tries almost too hard to avoid superhero movie clichés. But while the result is a bit heavy and self-serious, it’s often brilliant and visually breathtaking. And Heath Ledger’s performance is already a legendary piece of acting: disturbing and funny and utterly original. In Bruges unfortunately failed to find much of an audience in theaters, although people seem to be discovering it on DVD. It’s the striking film debut of writer-director Martin McDonagh, the brilliant playwright known for startling slapstick violence and lacerating wit. Both are in evidence here, and Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes do remarkably vivid work.

Frozen River and Wendy and Lucy could both be seen as movies for the New Depression, with characters who teeter on the edge of poverty and despair. Both are directed by women and both are anchored by wonderful actresses: Melissa Leo as a struggling mother who becomes a smuggler of immigrants in Frozen River, and Michelle Williams as a drifter whose cross-country odyssey comes to a grinding and heartbreaking halt in Wendy and Lucy. Both movies are deeply touching. Frozen River has a more conventional melodramatic narrative, and more humor. Wendy and Lucy bears the very original stamp of director Kelly Reichardt, who made the festival hit Old Joy. Like that earlier movie, the new one is a miniature, a pitch-perfect short story.

Gran Torino may seem like an appendage on such a distinguished list. But this new minimalist melodrama from Clint Eastwood deserves recognition for his wonderful lead performance and his steady and skillful direction. The script and the supporting cast are uneven, but this is Clint’s best since Unforgiven.

My list of best documentaries includes movies released in theaters in 2008, so Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the 2007 Oscar, tops my list: it played at festivals during 2007 but only reached theaters in early 2008 for a very brief, limited run. (As with the foreign film Oscars, the year a film is eligible can get confusing, and can be different from the year the movie actually gets released in the US.) Despite the fact that President Obama has pledged to reverse many of the detention policies that are detailed in the film, it remains a powerful document and reminder of the disturbing occurrences at Guantanamo and in American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t let squeamishness keep you from seeing this extraordinary film, the best nonfiction feature of either 2007 or 2008.

The Oscar documentary category seems to have noticeably improved, after having ignored fine films in some previous years. The nominators are apparently expanding their universe and including more movies that really are among the best around. Two of this year’s documentary Oscar nominees also made my list: Man on Wire, the amazing story of the Frenchman who walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the early 1970s; and Trouble the Water, a fine and deeply personal account of the aftermath of Katrina. And finally, Moving Midway (out on DVD in mid-February) is a lovely, funny, and also admirably personal account of how plantation life in the Old South permeates parts of our culture – while running headlong into 21st-century attitudes when the director’s relatives decide to move a plantation house away from encroaching suburban sprawl.

As for the most noteworthy disappointments and duds: Steven Soderbergh’s Che deliberately avoids being a traditional entertainment or a fully detailed biography – and although the first half has its moments, the second half of this four-hour-plus anti-epic becomes quite stupefying. Revolutionary Road is a misguided attempt to adapt the highly acclaimed novel of late-1950s suburban alienation; I recommend reading the book – and watching the comparable but vastly superior Mad Men – instead.

Speed Racer, for all its very expensive and flashy visuals, is all but unwatchable. We can hope that the Wachowski brothers find their way again soon, but after the third Matrix film and this one, they do seem lost. Sex and the City takes what was often fizzy and delightful in 25-minute doses on HBO and transforms it into sheer lead that goes on and on for 140 minutes. And Mamma Mia! is incompetent as well as ridiculous. I understand it’s now the biggest movie hit ever in the UK. Boggles the mind, eh?

Milk

Milk is brash, opinionated, in your face politically, yet utterly charming — not unlike its subject, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. The film necessarily has a tragic ending, because Milk’s political career, after a late-blooming beginning and several false starts, was a brief series of meteoric successes that lasted less than a year before he was assassinated. Yet the movie is not a downer – it’s an exhilarating entertainment. After several deliberately abstract and “difficult” movies like Elephant and Gerry and Last Days, fascinating and brilliant but hardly seen outside film festivals, Gus Van Sant here makes a triumphant return to something like the Hollywood mainstream.

When some of us heard that Sean Penn had been cast as Harvey Milk, we were a bit puzzled and skeptical. This often sullen and sometimes scenery-chewing star, with his macho persona, seemed like a less than perfect fit. But we were dead wrong. Not only is Penn utterly brilliant — after seeing him, it’s hard to imagine another actor in the part. The rush he obviously gets from taking on this terrific role is contagious, and he casts quite a charismatic spell.

Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (best known before now as a writer and producer of HBO’s Big Love series, drawing on his own Mormon background) manage to turn Milk into an epic about the modern gay rights movement, and somehow, thankfully, they avoid being grandiose about it. At the beginning there is a montage of men being busted at gay bars in the 1950s and 1960s. The ending recreates in an extraordinarily moving way the huge San Francisco candlelight procession that followed Milk’s murder in 1978. Throughout, real historical footage (and apparently some new footage treated to match the real stuff) is intercut with the vividly written and acted dramatizations that are front and center. The effect is to make the issues and events startlingly clear and potent: this is history happening before our eyes.

Harvey Milk was a relatively conservative New York businessman living an active but mostly closeted gay life from the late 1950s through most of the 1960s. But his politics began to become more radical about the time he turned 40 and moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s with his lover Scott Smith (superlatively well played by James Franco). It’s hard to imagine now, but San Francisco was not always paradise for gays – the largely Irish Catholic police force had repeatedly harassed and busted the patrons of gay bars for decades. Milk opened a camera store in a neighborhood then known as Eureka Valley, and he was galvanized by the resentment the locals expressed toward the increasing numbers of gays moving in to what came to be called The Castro. Soon he was running for political office.

The bulk of the movie follows Harvey’s series of losing, but ever closer, runs for office, culminating in his election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. This may not sound like an electrifying plot, but the storytelling and the performances are both funny and exciting. As Harvey and his allies meet their nemeses, the movie becomes more political and less personal (and it’s possible that some viewers will experience this as a letdown in sheer movie terms).

These nemeses are, on the national level, Anita Bryant (shown only in actual 1970s footage, still startling and hilarious and infuriating), who leads a religious campaign against gay rights laws; on the state level, California State Senator John Briggs (well played by Denis O’Hare), who pushes a California ballot initiative banning gay teachers; and, locally and most crucially, Harvey Milk’s fellow freshman City Supervisor, Dan White, a product of the conservative Eureka Valley community that resents the ever more numerous and vocal Castro gay groups.

Josh Brolin is Dan White, and his performance gives the second half of the movie a scary, smoldering intensity. Although he becomes the villain of the piece, Brolin’s White is never a caricature, and never completely unsympathetic. He seems like a lost soul – but one poised on the precipice of frightening violence. The conflict between Milk and White plays out with the force and inevitability of tragedy, although the post-modernists Van Sant and Black inevitably undercut this with flashes of wit and dark humor.

And I don't want to neglect three other contributors to the film's success. Emile Hirsch, ever deft and protean and surprising, is excellent as longtime Milk associate Cleve Jones (who later conceived the AIDS quilt project). The superlative cinematography is by Harris Savides, who shot last year's best film, Zodiac (another 1970s time-trip) and several previous Van Sant movies, including the visually astonishing Elephant. And Danny Elfman contributes music that underlines the epic, elegiac tone of the piece without overdoing it.

Recreating real lives and events is risky and difficult, although filmmakers insist on trying. So when they succeed as splendidly as they do here, it’s especially gratifying. Milk refuses to pull punches or feel embarrassed by either its politics or by sexuality, which is frank for a studio movie. This is, of course, the only sane way to approach the subject, and if some straight audiences stay away as a result, it’s their loss. We can hope that won’t happen, and that people will see it in large numbers. It’s one of the year’s very best movies.

Harvey Milk held office for less than a year. Yet his importance to the gay rights movement is enormous. This circumstance has often made him seem more like a symbol than a real person, and while there may have been some attempts here in the script and performances to correct that, the net effect is more likely to be to reinforce his status as a mythical hero, especially to younger members of the audience. The resemblance between Harvey Milk’s battle against the teacher ban (known as Proposition 6) and this year’s Proposition 8 gay marriage ban wasn’t planned by the filmmakers — yet it’s unavoidable. And few audience members will fail to note the painful fact that, unlike this year’s anti-Prop 8 campaign, Harvey won.

Hair in Central Park

For many of us who were teenagers in the late 60s/early 70s (or for those younger fans who came to love the album later), the songs from the Broadway musical Hair have an almost incantatory power. It may in fact be hard for us to separate our nostalgic inner teen from an objective critical perspective about Hair.

This is by way of preface to my saying: The Public Theater's new production of Hair in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park is the most exhilarating evening of entertainment I’ve experienced in a long time. If you’ve never spent time singing along to the 1968 original cast album, you may want to take my opinion with a grain of salt. But I know there are many thousands, if not millions, of others who are excited at the very mention of this new production. And to you I say: Don’t hesitate – prepare right now to stand in line for your free tickets, either in person in the park, or in the “virtual line” at the Public Theater’s web site. This engagement is playing six nights a week through the end of August.

Hair has never been perfect – its book is often thin, sketchy, even crude, and the song lyrics vary from the very charming to the impenetrable to the downright silly. (Did even the authors know what “supreme visions of lonely tunes” means?) But the score by Galt MacDermot is often spectacularly successful, and when it is as well performed as it is here, it can be completely transporting. Some are likely to write it off as a quaint or ridiculous period piece in any case. But the songs are both of their time and timeless.

The show is set in the East Village of 1968, among a “tribe” of flower children/draft resisters/dropouts who spend a couple of hours sharing with us their delight in polymorphous sex, marijuana, and communal good vibes, while playfully and sometimes fiercely mocking the racism, war-mongering, and general up-tightness they see around them. It eventually becomes the tragic story of Claude Hooper Bukowski, one of the onstage tribe, who is ambivalent about burning his draft card, with devastating consequences. (The parallels of the Vietnam era to our contemporary unpopular war in Iraq are readily apparent, and fortunately the cast and crew of this Hair don’t feel the need to hit you over the head with them.)

The first act is more lighthearted and often very funny, although it opens and closes with two now-famous numbers that foreshadow the more moving second act. You can feel the electricity in the audience as the lights go down and the superlative onstage band begins to play “Aquarius,” and there is an eruption of excitement as Patina Renea Miller breaks into the familiar, soaring opening lines sung originally by Melba Moore: “When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.” An hour later, the act closes with Claude (Spring Awakening’s Jonathan Groff) singing the wistful ballad “Where Do I Go?” while behind him the rest of the cast disrobes in a scene that scandalized Broadway 40 years ago.

In between the Act One opening and closing numbers are more than 15 other songs (Hair has more than 30 numbers in all), some only a minute or two long, nearly all delightful. In 1968, Hair didn’t sound like other Broadway scores, but it also didn’t much resemble the pop and rock being played on the radio at the time. It had its own eclectic pop sound, and this may have prevented it from becoming a moldy period piece (even if some of the words have aged less gracefully).

First come a group of numbers that introduce the main characters. The hedonist clown and swaggering male egoist Berger (Will Swenson in the role originated by co-author Gerome Ragni) sings “Donna,” about the “sixteen-year-old virgin…tattooed woman” he’s been pursuing. Woof (Bryce Ryness), who “has a thing for” both Mick Jagger and Berger, sings about some of his other interests in “Sodomy,” which can still provoke astonished laughter in audiences hearing it for the first time. Hud (Darius Nichols), an African-American, fights racism with sarcasm in “Colored Spade.” Finally, Claude escapes his dreary home life in Queens by pretending to be an aspiring “genius genius” filmmaker from “Manchester, England.”

In a reflection of the hippies’ (and the authors’) sexism, the female characters aren’t supplied with similar introductory songs. They do, however, get lead or solo vocals in three of the biggest applause-getters in the show: “Aquarius”; the plaintive ballad “Easy to be Hard” (sung by Caren Lyn Manuel as Sheila, addressed to the jauntily obnoxious Berger); and that blank-verse masterpiece of hilarity that can also make you cry, “Frank Mills” (sung by Allison Case). And the “girls” get the biggest smash comedy ensemble number as well, in “Black Boys/White Boys,” a riotous highlight of Act Two.

The “characters” are really just sketches, and there’s not a lot for the actors to do with the dialogue. Most are content to be charming or funny. Claude is the one role that requires some approximation of an extended characterization. (James Rado, who co-wrote the book and lyrics with Ragni, was the original Claude on Broadway.) It’s understandable that the producers of this new Hair would think of Jonathan Groff, fresh off his success as another rebellious youth in Spring Awakening. But just as in that show, Groff’s singing far outshines his ability with dialogue. He succeeds quite well with two of his big numbers, “I Got Life” and “Where Do I Go?” But his wig gives him an unfortunate resemblance to 70s teen idols like David Cassidy or Leif Garrett – not the best models for Claude, who is supposed to be Everyman, earnest and a bit goofy, not a callow pretty-boy or a hippie Zac Efron. (Groff is with the show for two more weeks; then Christopher J. Hanke plays Claude August 17-31.)

And yet Claude’s story still packs an emotional wallop because of the power of the big ensemble numbers that are the best parts of the show. The singing and the choreography in these numbers are just wonderful. They range from raucously funny and satirical (such as in the title song, “Ain’t Got No,” and “Three-Five-Zero-Zero”) to spacey-psychedelic (“Walking in Space” and “Be-In/Hare Krishna”). And they reach a spectacular climax in the final number, “The Flesh Failures,” which segues into “Let the Sunshine In.” I had only heard this song on the cast album, and had never seen it staged, so I wasn’t prepared for the coup de theatre with which it (and the main part of the show) end. I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice it to say that it leaves the audience stunned, breathless, overwhelmed. (You may think of “Let the Sunshine In” as a celebratory anthem; its original intent was to pierce your heart.) To break the tension, the curtain call turns into a big dance party, with audience members joining the cast onstage. Out under the stars in Central Park, it’s a bracing ending to a fantastic night.

Highest kudos to director Diane Paulus, music supervisor Rob Fisher, music director/conductor Nada DiGiallonardo, and choreographer Karole Armitage. They and the very talented young cast perform wonders. It’s possible this production will return in an indoor version, but see it in Central Park while you can – this Hair is an experience that won’t be easy to duplicate elsewhere.

The 2008 New Directors/New Films Festival

New Directors/New Films, the festival that the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center co-present each year in New York (appropriately in the early spring), is often a fantastic opportunity to sample developing cinematic talent. For me, the highlights of this year’s festival fell neatly into pairs: two narrative features and two documentaries.

Paradoxically, Frozen River is a crowd-pleaser about a family trying desperately to hold its head above the water of poverty. It features a wonderful lead performance by Melissa Leo as Ray, the single mom of two sons in a desolate small town in upstate New York. Misty Upham is also excellent as Lila, a Native American woman whose risky habit of smuggling illegal immigrants into the U.S. leads first to a nasty fight between these two scrappy survivors, and then to their becoming unlikely business partners of a sort, and eventually, friends.

This is writer/director Courtney Hunt’s first feature, and she has done a terrific job pacing the story so that its inherent suspense never falters. (Reed Morano’s photography, austerely beautiful, or beautifully austere, captures the locale incisively and enhances the emotion and the tension as well.) Wry, edgy humor is balanced with the warmth (and the ache) of Ray’s not-always-blissful relationships with her two sons. Lila, too, has a son, from whom she has been unwillingly separated, and this gives her smuggling a poignant motivation (at first she just seems like a reckless, opportunistic lawbreaker).

The ending of the film is a little too pat, and probably it spares our feelings too much; the story flirts with grim danger and horrific consequences but then finds ways to avoid them. Still, this soft landing may help the movie to become an indie hit. It was the grand prize winner at Sundance, and drew an enthusiastic crowd to the opening night of ND/NF.

XXY is an emotionally subtle, completely enthralling Argentine movie with a subject that may both attract and repel a potential audience: the teenage protagonist, Alex, has been raised as a girl, but was born with both male and female genitalia. She and her family face the possibility of “corrective” surgery — and the also alarming (for her parents) possibility that she may prefer to live her life as a man. The film takes place during one poignant and crucial weekend of this fragile period.

Never clinical, by turns wryly funny and deeply moving, XXY is best when it concentrates on Alex (Ines Efron) and a visiting teenage boy (Martín Piroyansky) and their changing reactions to each other. Their relationship takes some sharply surprising twists and turns – I guarantee that you won’t guess where the film is headed.

Some of the plot elements (the boy is the son of a plastic surgeon evaluating Alex without her advance knowledge; Alex’s father saves sea turtles whose fins have been mutilated by boats) are less subtle and more contrived than the characters and the performances. The setting, a fishing village on the Uruguayan seacoast, is unusual and lovely. The ending hits just the right bittersweet note. The film, novelist and screenwriter Lucía Puenzo’s directorial debut, deserves to find a wide audience.

Moving Midway is a marvelous documentary that ranges far beyond its nominal subject – the literal moving, on wheels, of an historic plantation home away from suburban creep into a more rural area – into aspects of history and sociology, family and friendship. Director Godfrey Cheshire revisits Midway, the North Carolina plantation home where he spent several childhood summers, and begins a very personal, discursive look at The Plantation, in myth (think Gone with the Wind) and reality, at race, and at his own relatives, not all of whom come off favorably. Along the way he discovers an African-American cousin, the descendant of slaves owned by his great-grandfather (who slept with a cook), and they strike up a really moving friendship. Technically adequate but far from slick, the movie reaches audiences on multiple levels, and is both thought-provoking and smashingly entertaining.

Trouble the Water covers some of the same ground as Spike Lee’s monumental When the Levees Broke, but whereas Lee built multiple Hurricane Katrina stories into an emotionally overwhelming mosaic of pain, sorrow and anger, this new film follows one family’s story, in depth. Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal discovered a couple who had taken home videos of their family’s encounter with the storm in one of New Orleans' poorest, hardest hit neighborhoods. This footage, though often shaky and grainy, serves as a very effective core. Then Lessin and Deal show us what happened to Kimberly and Scott Roberts afterward.

These very real people also make utterly riveting movie “characters.” You experience their anger, frustration and hope along with them, fueled by the bureaucracy and prejudice they encounter. By the time, near the end of the film, that Kimberly performs her own song “I Know I’m Amazin’,” the audience is completely entranced. This identification with the people in the film was taken a step further at the New Directors screening, when Kimberly and Scott (and their 10-week-old baby girl) took the stage with the directors afterward, and received a rapturous standing ovation. A commercial release seems likely, but has not yet been confirmed.

A More Perfect Union

Barack Obama's address today in Philadelphia has already been called one of the greatest speeches in history, which probably builds it up to an expectation impossible to fulfill. You may have seen clips of it on the news. But I invite you to watch the whole 37 minutes from the beginning.

It's pretty remarkable: An honest speech...by a politician trying to defuse a controversy? A speech about the subject of race (so rarely discussed honestly and openly in this country) that pulls no punches, and yet makes you feel good, not bad, about our prospects?

No matter your own political inclinations, you may find the speech both thought-provoking and comforting. This guy may well be our next president. Watching this may well help you decide how you feel about that. (No doubt you can tell how I feel.)

One Oscar Worth Cheering

The extraordinary Taxi to the Dark Side won the Academy Award as Best Documentary last Sunday. I hope that means a lot of people will see the film now. You can read my review here.

Polemics in Small Doses

On the web site Blogcritics, where most of my reviews run, I am also an active participant in the political discussions. I enjoy writing these, most of which are comments on/replies to articles written by others. They allow me to clarify my own thoughts. Here are some recent excerpts.

On Obama and Change

Any of the leading Democrats will be a sharp change from the current president, eh?

Obama's ability to inspire people has more to do with appealing to their better nature. He's certainly open to criticism that his resume is light and his policy statements are less than comprehensive. But he really reaches people. Don't underestimate the genuine power of this - not just to get votes, but to change the country.

Certainly there are no guarantees, especially not in government or politics. But there is excitement in seeing people genuinely moved by a positive message. We can react cynically, or we can hope it leads somewhere good.

On Terrorism: The Right Way to Address It, and the Bush Way

As the "Awakening" of Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq demonstrates, terrorists and extremists do not automatically command the loyalty and respect of other Muslims. Many of the Iraqi Sunnis have decided that for now at least they are better off opposing the terrorists and accepting the protection of the US.

But what the Bush administration has done overall is to alienate moderate Islam [the vast majority] through sins of both omission and commission. If we made a genuine effort to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world, instead of living up to the worst caricatures of our behavior and policies, there might actually be hope for this.

Think of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Iraq invasion itself, the USA Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, wireless wiretapping, our continued, uncritical 'friendships' with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and yes, certainly, our one-sided attitude in the Palestinian situation. When moderates in Iran sent an olive branch [pre-Ahmadinejad], Bush ignored it.

If we don't seriously attempt to refute and prove wrong the propaganda of the Islamists, their propaganda will of course win. That may sound obvious, but will someone please tell Bush and Cheney this?

And the Wahhabists have been running Saudi Arabia for decades without showing much interest in confronting other countries, certainly not the US.

It's a renegade group of Sulafists [better word] who align themselves with Zawahiri and bin Laden and who welcome direct confrontation with the West. Whether they are actually capable of planning and executing large plots together on Western soil is another matter. I tend to think they're mostly nutty and incompetent.

So 9/11 was what, an aberration? Dumb luck?

Not provable or disprovable. But it's beginning to look more and more like that's a possibility, yes. Most of the plots since then have been smaller in scale, only tenuously connected to each other if at all, often incompetent [e.g. Glasgow airport], or in fact mostly imaginary [this includes most of the guys arrested inside the US, like that pitiful crew in Miami]. This did not stop the government from wasting taxpayer money in prosecuting them, or from patting itself on the back for thus "keeping us safe." Pretty nauseating, really.

There is not one convincing case of another US-based plot, one that would ever have succeeded at any rate. If you believe this is because Bush's team are brilliant at law enforcement...well, I have a nice bridge for sale in Brooklyn you'll want to come look at.

We all know so little about this subject. We need to keep learning as much as we can. The ignorance of even well-informed Americans is appalling. And when we don't know something, we guess at the answers and make bad decisions based on the guessing. This is the story of the Bush debacle.

Yes, there are fanatics in the world who are willing to do unspeakable, unthinkable things. The question is whether we can actually prevent them from these acts, or whether it makes more sense to reduce the appeal of the fanatics' message and increase the appeal of our own.

By always responding to threats with more threats and with violence and with restriction of civil rights, and by invading countries without good cause, we increase the numbers of alienated young men who hate us and who are open to the ideas of fanatics.

We're digging our own hole.

Plain Facts About Taxes

Here I quote from a brilliant NY Times column last fall. It contains several bits of truth that the ideologues [on both sides] ought to consider. The title of this article, which everyone should read, is "Plain Truth About Taxes and Cuts" by David Leonhardt.

“The taxes that the federal government took in last year equaled 18.4 percent of the gross domestic product, almost exactly the average since 1980.

...moderate shifts in taxes don't dictate economic growth. Mr. Bush's father and Bill Clinton raised taxes -- and the economy grew for almost the entire decade of the 1990s. The current administration has cut taxes -- and the economy has grown for almost all of this decade.

This country really does have a high corporate tax rate, but it also has so many loopholes that companies can often avoid paying the tax. A much smarter policy, economists say, would include a lower rate with fewer loopholes.

...A family in that top 1 percent of earners paid a total federal tax rate -- including everything from payroll taxes to income taxes to capital gains taxes -- of 30 percent in 2004. That was down from 41 percent a decade before. Since the 1950s, tax rates on high-income families have generally been falling.

The top earners pay a bigger share of the government tab than in the past because their incomes have risen so sharply -- even more sharply than their tax bills.

Mr. Bush has predicted that the deficit will disappear by 2012. But that prediction depends on the fiction that the alternative minimum tax will be allowed to grow ever larger in coming years. The Democratic presidential candidates, meanwhile, are promising to pay for their new programs in part by getting rid of some of Mr. Bush's tax cuts. But those tax cuts are already scheduled to expire under current law. The official budget numbers have already taken their demise into account.

White House officials are absolutely correct when they note that the current budget deficit isn't especially large. But it will soar in coming years, as baby boomers stop working (and stop paying very much in taxes) and instead move onto the Social Security and Medicare rolls If nothing changes over the next couple of decades, the United States will build up a debt burden to resemble Argentina's...”

Signing Statements: The Cheney-Bush Doctrine of Executive Power

The signing statement on the torture ban bill in 2004 [the one with the McCain amendment] would be strong enough evidence of how these documents have been used and abused. But it's just the tip of the iceberg.

According to the Frontline program I just finished watching, Bush's signing statements challenge the Constitutional authority of Congress at least 1,000 times - more than once per bill. The Charlie Savage article in the Boston Globe [Savage is a great investigative journalist, not an "editorialist"] is a long and expertly researched piece [9 pages on the web] that ought to convince even DN that there is a there there.

David Addington, longtime associate and counsel to Cheney, and now Scooter Libby's replacement as chief of staff, is identified convincingly in the Frontline piece as the source for most of the legal memoranda [along with John Yoo] that attempted to justify torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial and other charming highlights of the "by any means necessary" doctrine of Presidential power championed by Dick Cheney.

Addington also wrote many of the signing statements, including the most notorious one, on torture. [He struck out the entire text of the bill in red ink, and substituted a single long sentence, which when it was picked up by journalists, started the whole signing statement controversy.]

I urge everyone to watch the Frontline documentary, called Cheney's War, when it is repeated on PBS. Frontline does investigative journalism, but only the most partisan would call it ideological. It's hard-hitting, convincing, and based largely on interviews with principals, lawyers and journalists. It's as riveting as a spy thriller.

Even Cheney wouldn't argue with the facts as presented, I think; but he would no doubt object to the appropriately doomy music that runs in the background.

There was also a near-mutiny about the warrantless wiretapping. Yet in both cases, Bush granted himself the authority to continue torture and wiretapping even without the written blessing of the Justice Dept. Anyone who doesn't find that at least a little disturbing is part of the problem rather than the solution.

This administration has taken a more aggressive approach than any other in using the statements to undermine the laws. Think about it: the President is signing the bill into law, yet appending language that says the bill has unconstitutionally encroached on his authority, so he'll limit its enforcement.

Wouldn't it be more honest to simply veto more of these bills? The signing statements received no publicity whatsoever until the press got hold of them at the time of the torture ban one. It's easy to infer, at the very least, sneakiness on the part of the Administration.

Money and Politics

From the time a congressperson is elected, their main job is to raise money for the next election. Serving their constituency and making reasoned decisions about issues become a distant second and third on their lists. That's a damn shame, and don't tell me you think it's a good thing.

And 30-second television ads, the main reason so much money is required, are not, shall we say, a very thorough or nuanced medium in which to explore issues or candidates. They only serve to deliver quick hits, sound bites. They lend themselves most easily to attack and distortion. Referring to them as honest contrasts in records is embarrassing hogwash.

An honest contrast in candidates' records would obviously require far more time and far more words, and would force candidates to reveal the exceptions to their over-generalizations, and to acknowledge the rationales behind their opponents' opinions and their own.

If you actually think the state of political discourse in this country is fine and healthy, then I'd say you deserve the consequences of it. The rest of us see a dysfunctional, ugly system that distorts the basic tenets of democracy.

Another Minority Opinion

Away from Her is far too fastidious and "literary" and "tasteful" for me. And maybe I'm naive, but how many Alzheimer's patients check themselves into a nursing home after such mild episodes as putting a frying pan in the freezer and taking a walk on a bridge? Talk about soft-pedaling an issue! I was also distracted by Julie Christie's strange accent, not that that's really important. (She will always be Sixties Brit Goddess to me.) She's pretty good, but I hated most of the supporting cast...both the way the roles are written and how they're played. It's visually undistinguished, clumsily written, and the ersatz Bergman touches make it worse.

This is actually similar to the way I reacted to The Lives of Others, which nearly everybody besides me also likes. These are what used to be done as prestigious special TV movies (except TV is often better than they are now). They take an Important Subject and don't really do anything interesting or imaginative with it; they are noble - and sterile. And the awards roll in.

2007 at the Movies: A Look Back

It’s time to look back on the year just past and recall the films most worth remembering and recommending. Several of the best movies of 2007 divide neatly into contrasting pairs – very convenient for a year-end wrap-up essay.

Serial killers inspired two very different, very fine movies, David Fincher’s Zodiac and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Zodiac is a haunting, disquieting film of great technical skill and fine performances, and it was for me the movie of the year.

Tim Burton’s original and explosive talent has often been undone by inferior material. But the powerful Stephen Sondheim musical provides a perfect match. Some of us may have feared the opposite, that Burton and Sondheim would ruin each other, that the whole thing could turn into an arch, campy misfire. But the visual grace and narrative energy of this film is a wonder, as is Johnny Depp’s performance in the title role. The Grand Guignol overstatement in the bloody murder scenes seems to me a bit of a miscalculation, but the movie has an understandably powerful effect on audiences. The photography by Dariusz Wolski and the production design by Dante Ferretti are among the year’s best, and Timothy Spall and young Ed Sanders stand out in a superlative supporting cast.

Animation brilliance arrived in Pixar’s Ratatouille and in the French film Persepolis. If Zodiac is the feel-bad movie of the year, Ratatouille qualifies as the feel-good alternative. The best Pixar movie so far, it will leave you with a big silly grin on your face as you watch the story of a rat who aspires to be a Michelin three-star chef. It is a rhapsodic ode to food as art, to the romance of Paris, and to the alchemy by which Pixar’s wizards transform computer code into smashing entertainment.

Persepolis is far more bittersweet but almost as rewarding. Told mostly in black-and-white images like the autobiographical graphic novel it’s based on, it is the story of Marjane, an Iranian girl who grows up at the time of the downfall of the Shah and the rise of the fundamentalist mullahs. Her parents eventually send her to Europe, and her adventures there and upon her return to Iran make up the second half of the movie. It’s deeply moving without being sentimental, sharply humorous, and told with bracing clarity and insight.

Two phantasmagoric movies took as their starting points musical icons of the 1960s: The Beatles in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe and Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. The Taymor film features higher highs and lower lows: yet at its best, it’s the most exhilarating movie musical of recent years. The Haynes film is more consistently accomplished, and less interested in entertaining you, although I was enthralled by every minute. It steadfastly refuses to conform to the rules of real biography or of the fictionalized showbiz variety. Instead, with visual brilliance and sometimes astonishing imaginative leaps, it provides a kaleidoscopic journey through aspects of Dylan’s personality and work. (It also features one of the year’s best soundtrack albums.)

Two genre films were lifted into best-of-the-year status by the artistry of their directors: Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Dominik’s film, a meditative look at the legendary outlaw, is fairly demanding of audiences and it did not fare well at the box office. It is stunningly well made, although its script is uneven.

The newest Bourne movie is superbly crafted, somewhat mindless fun, just like the first two. It has two set pieces, one a game of cat-and-mouse in London’s Waterloo Station, the other a chase through the streets and along the rooftops of Morocco, that are among the best of their type ever. Paul Greengrass is one of the most skilled directors in the world, and I believe two of these romps are enough for him. I can’t wait to see what he does next, after making 2006’s best movie, United 93.

Two of the year’s movies take real-life stories with tragic elements (and endings) and turn them into journeys that are often joyous and exhilarating. The subject matter shouldn’t keep you from seeing these movies. Sean Penn’s adaptation of the best-seller Into the Wild, about a reckless yet inspired solo trek into the Alaskan wilderness, is remarkably compelling and beautifully acted. Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the story of a French magazine editor paralyzed by a catastrophic stroke. Able to communicate only by blinking one eye, he managed to dictate the memoir the film is based on. Schnabel, the brilliant director of Before Night Falls, handles this story with visual eloquence, sharp humor, and emotional restraint.

Lake of Fire, a wrenching and brilliantly well-made look at the abortion issue, stands far above the other nonfiction films of the year. Be warned that it’s very strong stuff (it doesn’t go down easily like Michael Moore’s Sicko), but don’t miss it if you care about either the issue itself or about innovative documentary filmmaking.

Let me also draw your attention to two fine 2007 movies that barely got released in theaters, but could make for an extremely rewarding Netflix or Blockbuster rental:

The Italian is a Russian film dealing with a fascinating, heart-wrenching and very topical subject: the effect that the adoptions of Eastern European children by wealthy Westerners have on the local culture – a corrupting, distorting effect that may not immediately be apparent to Western observers. The movie uses a neat point-of-view trick to make its case vividly. A six-year-old boy, soon to be adopted by a well-to-do Italian couple (thus acquiring the nickname that is the movie’s title), becomes obsessed with finding his birth mother instead, and goes to surprising lengths to do so. At first the audience roots against him and for the adoption – but by the end one’s opinion is likely to have swung 180 degrees (at least). A splendid movie with excellent performances, including a really remarkable one by Kolya Spiridonov as the boy.

Into Great Silence is a 3-hour documentary about monks in the French Alps – simply following their daily lives over several months. This was a surprise boxoffice hit in Germany, drew an overflow crowd to its single festival screening in New York, on a Sunday at noon, and received a brief theatrical run at the nonprofit Film Forum. It's fascinating and moving, designed as "meditation rather than information," in the director's words. You’ll need to be in a patient and receptive frame of mind, but it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.

And finally, two movies that I was fortunate enough to catch at festivals would certainly be on my list, but their theatrical releases will come in 2008. And they will be brief and limited releases, so catch them on DVD if you miss them in theaters. They are the scathing documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, about detainees held by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo; and Gus Van Sant’s latest semi-abstract look at violence and anomie among suburban American youth, Paranoid Park. Both of these movies are as vital and as brilliant as any of 2007’s “official” releases.

Atonement

Atonement is a frustrating movie that ultimately fails in its daunting task: to render in cinematic terms a story that is not just literary in tone, but in fact is actually about a novel, the novelist, and her intentions. I have not read Ian McEwan’s novel, which is widely considered a modern masterpiece, but after seeing the movie adaptation I spoke to two friends who read and loved it to try to pinpoint some of the differences.

Centrally important is the much-discussed narrative twist near the end of the story. I won’t spoil this surprise, but suffice it to say that it involves the very nature of the story we are watching/reading. Readers of the novel report being overcome by the suddenness and brilliance of this device. Yet in the film, it provides a brief, sad surprise, but not much more. There is no real equivalent for the way the narrator of the novel, a novelist herself and a participant in the story, reveals the true nature of the characters and events she has been describing. And in the film the revelation falls flat, despite being delivered expertly by Vanessa Redgrave.

But the first 45 minutes or so of the film are enthralling. The setting is a country estate shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The words and actions of a young man named Robbie are completely misconstrued by the intensely impressionable young sister of the woman he loves, and this misunderstanding cascades into a tragedy of lovers wrongly separated. The atmosphere, the emotion, the shifting perspective are all expertly and beautifully rendered by director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice), scenarist Christopher Hampton, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (The Hours, Charlotte’s Web), and especially the actors: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Saoirse Ronan (really wonderful as 13-year-old Briony). This section of the film refuses to rush, and it succeeds in establishing the deeply sad love story that is the beating heart of both novel and film.

But after this the film is much less satisfying. Although crammed with incident, it remains emotionally static and unconvincing, even before it reaches that tricky bit of storytelling sleight-of-hand at the end. The recreation of the evacuation at Dunkirk is remarkable, but it throws the film out of balance visually – nothing else is conceived on such a large physical scale. The brilliant beginning has built up hopes in the audience that are nearly impossible to fulfill.

The film’s musical score by Dario Marianelli (who also worked with Joe Wright on Pride and Prejudice) deserves special mention. It captures the intense romantic yearning and tragic regret that infuse the story. The soundtrack album, brilliantly recorded, is very beautifully performed by the English Chamber Orchestra, with outstanding solos by the renowned pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the cellist Caroline Dale. My only objection is to a device that works well in the film but is jarring and distracting for home listening: a typewriter’s loud striking provides percussion in several of the cuts. It’s another attempt to translate a written story about written stories into movie language.

See Atonement for its performances and its beautiful production and its nearly perfect opening section. Be prepared for frustration after that. It’s a good but deeply flawed film.

Best of 2007

10 Best Features

Zodiac

Ratatouille

Across the Universe

I'm Not There

Sweeney Todd

The Bourne Ultimatum

Persepolis

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Italian

Runners-up:

Into the Wild

The Darjeeling Limited

Gone Baby Gone

Rescue Dawn

Hairspray

Michael Clayton

Grindhouse: Planet Terror

Juno

Best nonfiction films:

Lake of Fire

The War (Ken Burns, PBS)

Into Great Silence

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-65

No End in Sight

Sicko

No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood

The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood are the two most acclaimed movies of the year. Both movies evoke the atmosphere and moral landscape of Westerns without actually being cowboy movies. No Country for Old Men has the plot of a contemporary crime thriller, concerning stolen drug money, with settings along the Mexican border that may remind you of Peckinpah. There Will Be Blood is a generational epic of capitalism, religion, and other “American values” that visually quotes movies such as Giant, Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, and The Searchers. But neither movie is content to be entertaining. Would that they were!

I had a similar reaction to both of them: they are prodigiously, even beautifully, well crafted, and each is filled with wonderful actors giving their all. (In particular, Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men have earned the praise and awards they’ve been getting.) Both movies’ narrative skill will pin you to your seat, spellbound throughout most of their long running times, although not always pleasurably so. And yet I was left cold and unmoved at the end of each of them, and I thought: Why would anyone want to tell these stories, and why should anyone have to sit through them? Both seem to me the products of a facile nihilism: Life is hell, and then you die. (This could apply as well to another highly acclaimed movie of the season, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.)

I don’t believe my objections are as simplistic as wanting a happy, or at least satisfying, ending, although there was a palpable sense of “Is that it?” in the audiences at the conclusions of both films when I saw them. But a film is a journey, and part of what makes it work is the pleasure of actually arriving somewhere. The final half hours of these two films deliberately deny this pleasure to audiences. There have been many brilliant films with similar qualities and flaws. But for me at least, the narrative dead ends in No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood match their moral and philosophical emptiness.

This is not really the best that our top filmmakers can do. Last year’s Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth and The Departed and United 93, and this year’s Zodiac and Sweeney Todd – violent and upsetting films all – are much better in my estimation. If you’re a film buff, you’ll of course want to see any new film by Joel and Ethan Coen and by Paul Thomas Anderson. Someday they may make films as accomplished as their talents seem to promise. In Fargo and in Boogie Nights, respectively, they came close. In these two new movies, heaviness and pretension defeat them.

Short Takes: Recent Releases

Michael Clayton takes itself very seriously. Luckily, you don’t have to. It’s a skillfully wrought, occasionally ridiculous corporate-legal thriller. Fine performances help a lot – George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton are all excellent. And the hushed, solemn tone doesn’t necessarily wreck it as entertainment. The Bourne films have also learned this trick. But the whole thing has about as much real gravity as any weekly episode of 24 (which some people take seriously too, to my astonishment). Evil Corporations who will resort to anything, even murder, to protect their ill-gotten gains, make good villains – less politically charged than terrorists.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

It’s interesting to learn that this is a first screenplay – an audacious one, to be sure, but not completely successful. The deliberately over-the-top approach, striving for something like classical tragedy, is eventually wearying, and it has the effect of making the last few plot turns rather too predictable. But Sidney Lumet maintains and intensifies both the narrative and acting tension throughout. The performers are first-rate. But the characters, a small-town jewelry store owner and his loser sons, can’t quite bear the philosophical weight that’s put on them.

Atonement

I brought high expectations to this movie, and this is always perilous to one’s enjoyment. And indeed I felt let down, particularly by the much-discussed “trick ending” which apparently worked much better on the printed page than on screen, despite the very able assistance of Vanessa Redgrave in telling that part of the story in the film. The first half hour or so of the movie is the best: it refuses to rush, it has a unity of location and time, and it has real feeling in introducing the star-crossed love story that is the beating heart of Ian McEwan’s novel and this adaptation. But while the second half of the movie is crammed with incident, it remains emotionally static and unconvincing. I have not read the novel, but I am reliably told it is very fine indeed. Much of its quality must have been lost in translation, and this would hardly be the first instance of that happening. The photography and the performances are first-rate. It’s not a bad film, but it is far from the great one that seems to have been attempted.

Lars and the Real Girl

Although the script and the supporting cast have their charms, and the direction is appealingly low-key, the only reason for this film to have been made, and the only reason to see it, is Ryan Gosling’s wonderful performance. The movie makes gentle fun of its own fey, contrived premise – a mail-order love doll becomes the object of real love – which may be the only sane way to handle it. But Gosling’s utter conviction brings truth and emotional weight to a story that would otherwise float away on a cloud of fey whimsy. You may go to this movie to laugh, but you’re likely to surprise yourself by crying very real tears.

Sweeney Todd

Tim Burton’s original and energetic talent has often been undone by inferior material. But the powerful Stephen Sondheim musical provides a perfect match. Some of us may have feared the opposite, that Burton and Sondheim would ruin each other, that the whole thing could turn into an arch, campy misfire. But the visual grace and narrative energy of this film is a wonder, as is Johnny Depp’s performance in the title role. The Grand Guignol overstatement in the bloody murder scenes seems to me a bit of a miscalculation, but the movie has an understandably powerful effect on audiences. The photography by Dariusz Wolski and the production design by Dante Ferretti are among the year’s best, and Timothy Spall and young Ed Sanders stand out in a superlative supporting cast.

Charlie Wilson’s War

If this movie managed to sustain the smart-alecky, light-fingered satire of its first half hour, it would be a new classic. Unfortunately, it becomes more pedestrian and less skillful as it progresses. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a great comic performance as a charmingly boorish CIA operative. Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are mostly just charming. It remains an enjoyable movie, and considering its subject – the secret American funding (by a Democratic congressman from Texas) of the Afghans’ war against the Soviet invasion – that is an accomplishment in itself. But there is the undelivered promise of so much more: a wisecracking political comedy with a real edge. And whether to avoid offending some of the still-living participants in this real-life story, or for other reasons, the filmmakers really miss the boat by soft-pedaling the irony of what happened: that Charlie Wilson’s war led directly to the struggle with Islamist fundamentalism that dominates today’s headlines.

I’m Not There

A kaleidoscopic biography of sorts of Bob Dylan. In formal audacity and technical skill, this is one of the year’s best movies. I’m not sure that it has much real meat or substance – I enjoyed every minute while I was watching it, but the impact hasn’t stuck with me the way it does with many other original and well-wrought films – or the way it does with Dylan’s songs themselves in other contexts. Nonetheless, the music, the actors, the visuals are all excellent, and this is the most satisfying film Todd Haynes has made to date.

Juno

Yet another charming comedy about an unexpected pregnancy. Like Knocked Up, this is handled fairly deftly as a slightly sentimental farce (although this one is less noisy and less aggressively tear-jerking than the earlier movie). Ellen Page and Michael Cera are both wonderful as the young parents, and the rest of the cast is fine too. It’s perhaps more than a little too careful to remain cute and not to cut too deep – the perfect Sundance movie.

Short Takes: Now on DVD

No End in Sight

This is a good, efficient, effective documentary about the war in Iraq and the flawed policies that have characterized it from the beginning – although if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the last five years, you may not learn much that is new. It has been named the best documentary of the year by many major critics’ groups, but it pales in comparison to Taxi to the Dark Side, a far more disturbing film that deals with Afghanistan and Guantanamo as well as Iraq. For the many who have been paying only half attention (or less) to the war, this could be a valuable, instructive work. But they are the least likely to see it, of course.

Stardust

An entertaining little B-picture at heart, although of course in the current fashion it has been lavishly overproduced. But it remains unpretentious and charming, and it features Michelle Pfeiffer in yet another exhilaratingly skillful turn as a villain, coming just a few weeks after Hairspray.

The Bourne Ultimatum

Superbly crafted, somewhat mindless fun, just like the first two. It has two set pieces, one in London’s Waterloo Station, the other a chase through the streets and along the rooftops of Morocco, that are among the best of their type ever. Paul Greengrass is one of the most skilled directors in the world, and two of these romps are enough for him. I can’t wait to see what he does next, after making 2006’s best movie, United 93.

Superbad

A fun, silly, goofy, charming teenage sex farce. The three lead performers, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, are so good that they lift the film to a higher level than its appealing, good-natured energy would otherwise reach.

Hairspray

Fun fun fun. Nothing great, and not as exhilaratingly transgressive as the John Waters original, but a very enjoyable romp. I miss some of the music from the Waters film too, particularly “The Madison.” It wouldn’t have hurt to mix some of those oldies in with the Broadway score, would it? Michelle Pfeiffer is particularly delightful as the villainess.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

By streamlining the longest of the Potter novels into the shortest of the films, the writer and director have come up with an efficient but rather bloodless end result. The most inspired of the five Potter films so far remains Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – proof, as if it’s needed, that mere competence is trumped by directorial passion and originality every time.

Sufjan Stevens's The BQE

In one of the best pop concerts I’ve ever been to, last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Sufjan Stevens offered the premiere of a new instrumental work for chamber orchestra (accompanying a triptych-screen film he co-directed), followed by a smashing second act – a dozen or so of his own songs accompanied by his own band plus the same 30-piece orchestra. The sheer sonic energy, in a beautiful mix, was simply gorgeous.

I’ll have to hear the new orchestral work, The BQE, again before I can really assess its value in relation to Stevens’s more familiar work but it was an entertaining and skillfully arranged score comparable to Philip Glass’s work for Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanasqatsi. The film itself was a mixed bag, and I sometimes found that it and the music were mutual distractions, rather than enhancing each other.

But in the second half, The BQE begins to resemble Koyaanasqatsi visually as well, as the three screens interact with each other to show zooming traffic light-patterns shot at night, and here the music works with the visuals rather than competing with it. The whole concept, an ironically beautiful tribute to a very ugly piece of urban construction, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, borders on the precious and the whimsical, which is how non-fans have often described his songs. This quality is intensified by the Warholian addition of five dancers with hula-hoops, performing downstage in front of the orchestra and below the movie screen. But half-silly or no, the whole thing was incredibly enjoyable and I certainly hope the score is released on a CD before too long.

Possibly a good accompaniment to The BQE on that CD would be the highlight of the show’s second act, Sufjan’s brilliant and beautiful 10-minute song “Majesty Snowbird,” introduced during his last concert tour but not yet available as a recording. It’s an extraordinary work, the culmination of the style developed over the course of the albums Seven Swans, Greetings from Michigan, and Illinois, as well as some of the ambitious new cuts included in his Songs for Christmas boxed set.

Like many other audience members, I enjoyed The BQE – but I was downright deliriously happy during the hour or so of songs that closed the evening. The smashing arrangements took these very lovely songs and made them sometimes overwhelmingly powerful. A couple of the more familiar ones, “Casimir Pulaski Day” and “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” have now been performed as definitively as they ever will be, and they possibly ought to be temporarily retired from the Sufjan concert repertoire to make room for other songs from the considerable inventory on the albums. Not that they weren’t beautiful – they were quite stunning, as were “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois” and “Seven Swans” and “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” and “Chicago,” and all the rest. Even a nonsensical tall tale monologue about summer camp was captivating – and led into “Predatory Wasp,” my own favorite of Sufjan’s patented mix of the cute, the mysterious, the eerie, and the heartbreaking.

This gifted musician continues to share magnificent work with us. With mixed feelings, because I enjoy being part of a medium-sized “cult” that appreciates his work, I hope he finds the big audience he deserves very soon. It seems inevitable, if he keeps doing unbelievably fine shows like this one.

Young Frankenstein Comes to Broadway

The new Broadway musical Young Frankenstein is nothing if not too much. It has to be colossal, larger than life, overwhelming – being a fun little musical is not an option. If it hasn’t knocked you out of your seat, it’s a failure. Or so the hype and expectation would lead you to believe. The preview audience I saw it with was determined to have a great time, and indeed they seemed to get what they wanted.

Actually, this Mel Brooks show – his first since the smash The Producers – does provide a fair amount of fun for a couple of hours, although it begins rather routinely and weakly. The first two numbers, one sung by the townsfolk of Transylvania Heights and the other by Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Roger Bart) and his medical school students, are mildly enjoyable but far from brilliant – and they come nowhere near the insane hilarity generated by Gene Wilder, at the start of the 1974 film the show is based on, when he stabs himself with a scalpel.

That, in fact, is one of the few gags from Brooks’s movie that isn’t recreated in the musical. As at Spamalot, another Broadway hit based on a beloved 1970s film comedy, the audience anticipates the familiar material, and applauds and laughs at the setups, preparing to go wild over the old jokes before they ever actually happen. This phenomenon is mildly amusing in itself, but spontaneous it ain’t.

There is new material as well, some good, some less so, but the audience’s need to re-experience the movie’s highlights is a bit of a trap, at least for the book (co-written by Brooks and Thomas Meehan). Brooks’s music and lyrics may be uneven, but they are his best opportunity to create something new here. The songs are pleasingly well crafted and, I’m happy to report, appropriately ridiculous.

There are also at least two real star turns that help a great deal. Megan Mullally takes on the fiancée role played by Madeline Kahn in the movie, and from her first entrance she owns the place. She has far too little to do in the first act after her smash opening number, “Please Don’t Touch Me,” but thank God she’s back with more in Act II – just one additional big song, but plenty of chances to show off her ace comedy timing.

When Dr. Frankenstein arrives in Transylvania, he is greeted by the hunchback Igor, the role originated by Marty Feldman. Christopher Fitzgerald makes the part his own, however, and he too has a smash first number, “Together Again,” a duet that also finally allows Bart to let loose. And from here on the plot begins to gain traction as well – for a while.

One of the problems with Young Frankenstein is that it lacks the magical exploding plot mechanics of the first two-thirds or so of The Producers. That show also managed to keep the hilarity and general insanity at a much higher level than Young Frankenstein, despite some great bits, is able to sustain. Here the story builds to the first-act climax of Frederick creating a monster, just like his grandfather. But in the second act, there is less of a plot engine.

Luckily, there’s plenty of song-and-dance fun to fill this gap. But it would be better if there were both. And there’s no real way to match the black-and-white film’s hilarious dead-on parody of the classic horror movies of the 1930s. Those movies were about as far from a lavishly produced 21st-century Broadway musical as anything could be, although Brooks does often successfully capture the quality of old-horror-movie music in his underscoring.

Andrea Martin is often very funny as creepy housekeeper Frau Blucher (the Cloris Leachman role originally), and she has a great number whose title is taken from one of the big laugh lines in the movie: “He Vas My Boyfriend.” Sutton Foster, who has actually starred in more Broadway hits than most of the other headliners here, has a less inherently funny part than Mullally or Martin – she’s the sexy lab assistant Inga, and though she gives it her best and has plenty of stage time, she’s never as crazy-silly as the others. This problem also crops up with Roger Bart, who ends up playing straight man to the hellzapoppin wildness around him. It’s unfair but inevitable to compare him to Wilder (co-author of the film script as well as the star), who gave a classic screwball performance – but Bart, here, too rarely shows the gift for spectacular silliness he displayed in The Producers.

Shuler Hensley, as The Monster, and Fred Applegate, in a nifty dual turn as a police inspector and a blind hermit, provide nimble support and are called on to carry two of the best-remembered scenes from the movie: the Monster’s hilariously disastrous slapstick visit with the hermit, and the one musical number actually in the film, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Director/choreographer Susan Stroman pulls out all the stops for “Ritz,” which in the movie is just a simple (and very funny) gag. Here it is stretched out for ten minutes or so, with chorus lines of monsters and even room for Inga and Igor to join in. The number encapsulates what’s right and what’s wrong with Broadway’s version of Young Frankenstein. Everyone knows they have to be over-the-top here, and they make it even bigger, more excessive, than you might imagine. And it’s fun, but it’s also, in the end, just too much.

Sets vibrate and fly apart and whirl around, strobes flash, and the big dance numbers keep on coming and coming. The people behind this show are making a Herculean effort. But they might actually be better off relaxing a bit and just being funny. When they do that, and it does happen several times in 150 minutes, this over-amplified, overgrown theme-park ride of a show seems worth all the fuss.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This is only the second feature directed by Andrew Dominik, and the first he has made on a large scale with a big Hollywood budget. It is a phenomenal piece of work. Visually, The Assassination of Jesse James is more alive than any movie I’ve seen this year, other than the very different Across the Universe. This gifted New Zealander brings a fresh perspective to an aging genre and to a story that has been told more than a few times already. You may be reminded at some points of Bonnie and Clyde, Days of Heaven, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, but Dominik has a powerful style all his own.

However, the dramatic impact and the narrative flow are not as strong as the photography (by Roger Deakins), the editing, the whole visual conception and control. This is primarily because the script is a mixed bag, and because Brad Pitt, while not bad, is somewhat less than electrifying as Jesse James. You never catch Pitt being a bad actor here, but this film needs him to be more than competent – he needs to be the powerful center of gravity for the story. And he doesn’t manage to do it.

That’s unfortunate, because several of the other performances are very striking indeed, beginning with Casey Affleck as the other title character, the teenage would-be gunslinger Robert Ford. Affleck’s Ford is simultaneously naïve and dangerous, folksy and coldly calculating, a loser and a sharp-witted opportunist. It’s an extraordinarily vivid performance – you can’t take your eyes off him. And in supporting roles, Sam Rockwell, as Robert Ford’s more stable, less loopily ambitious brother, and Paul Schneider, as the randiest, funniest member of the James Gang (though he’s still capable of startling, scary violence), are just as good as Affleck. This is some of the most flavorsome character acting in any recent movie.

The film is too long (160 minutes), and it loses and regains the tension of its story a few times. But it’s never boring. The use of a narrator, sounding at times like a PBS special, is effective in filling in narrative gaps, although these scenes are in a different style from the rest of the movie.

It looks as though Warner Bros. may have already written this off as a commercial failure, an overpriced art film, after its disappointing limited runs in large cities. So catch it while you can – it deserves to be enjoyed on a large screen. And I’m sure we’ll be seeing much more from this brilliant new director.

Lake of Fire

Lake of Fire is a masterpiece, a landmark accomplishment in the history of documentary cinema. I can’t recommend it to everyone – its uncompromisingly explicit medical footage of abortions will be impossible for some viewers to sit through, and its straightforward inclusion of loony-bird fringe arguments on the anti-abortion side may upset both pro-life and pro-choice members of the audience.

But while it’s certainly flawed, it is a brilliant formal achievement and an extraordinarily provocative example of the cinema of ideas. The black-and-white footage, some shot by director Tony Kaye, some from other sources, has all been digitally enhanced to have the same sharp, silvery, bright, laser-focused look. This is not superficial slickness, but a superbly effective way to glue your eyes to the screen. You’ve never seen a movie that looks like this. (I saw a high-definition video projection at Chicago’s wonderful Gene Siskel Center; I can only hope other venues will maintain the high visual standard.)

In 152 minutes, Kaye (American History X) includes a wide range of material: many talking heads, but also documentary footage of events as they happened, as well as local news coverage and even a propaganda film made by anti-abortion activists. (The film was more than a decade in the making, and the sense of events unfolding is quite powerful in the first half.)

The intent is to avoid taking a point of view, to present arguments for and against legal abortions without evaluating them. The results are certainly skewed by including the most extreme pro-life advocates, whose allegedly Bible-based rhetoric verges on insanity and whose actions lead to criminal prosecution and a death penalty for the murderer of an abortion-clinic physician. None of the pro-choice voices ever come close to this sort of appalling and over-the-top quality, and so the film may be accused of pro-choice bias.

But no one after seeing this film will ever be able to make a straight-faced argument that a developing fetus is a non-human “clump of cells.” Nor will anyone who sees it ever forget the emotional journey of its last half hour, as we accompany a young woman to an abortion clinic, and watch every step of the process. Her tears after the procedure become our own. This is a movie intended to shake you up, and unless you are made of stone, it absolutely will.

In fact, another way to look at Kaye’s giving so much screen time to the Bible-thumping extremists whose rhetoric gives the film its title is to conclude that this issue is so vexing, with arguments on both sides so convincing yet so unsatisfying, that it drives people insane. That may sound glib, but after seeing this film and hearing the arguments it presents, you too may want to stand on a street corner yelling incoherently. There is no calm, rational answer to the abortion issue.

There is one sequence that made me uncomfortable and seems a bad miscalculation. A priest’s mad rant involving Hillary Clinton and short skirts as they relate to our decadent, baby-killing society is given an inordinate amount of screen time. His scabrous idiocy is intercut with a passionate speech made by then-Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who is fiercely eloquent. The intercutting between these two monologues goes on for several minutes, and one is left wondering at the filmmaker’s intent. My best guess is that since there are many with pro-life views who see Elders as an extremist and a villain and a laughing-stock, it seemed appropriate to pair her with the loon priest – but his irrational rhetoric represents only his own sad mind, not anyone else’s. The effect is unsavory and uncharacteristically off-key compared to the rest of this amazing film.

More successful are the lucid and riveting talking-head interviews with academics such as Alan Dershowitz and Noam Chomsky (whatever your opinions of these two, you may be surprised by what they say here). And there is an astonishing sequence that follows the true story of Norma McCorvey, the real life Jane Roe in Roe vs. Wade, now a born-again anti-abortion activist! The irony is brilliantly conveyed.

See Lake of Fire as soon as you can, if you dare. Its release will obviously be a limited one, but the strong-hearted (and strong-stomached) will not want to miss it. It is by far the most powerful film I have seen in 2007.

Into the Wild

Into the Wild succeeds in spite of itself. Sean Penn’s adaptation of the Jon Krakauer best-seller falls into an almost inevitable trap. It tells the story of the doomed eccentric Christopher McCandless, who cut off all contact with his family right after graduating from college to explore the West without money, a car, or other material possessions, adopting the name Alexander Supertramp, and eventually setting off alone into the Alaskan wilderness.

The trap is that Penn, and by extension the audience, buys into Chris’s dream too unquestioningly. There is little or no distance or irony. What Chris does in the film could be described as selfish, reckless, and foolish, although he is a visionary of sorts. But as portrayed by the gifted young actor Emile Hirsch, and as seen and heard through Penn’s camera and script, Chris is utterly charming, beloved by nearly everyone he meets, and ever true to his dream – virtually a saint. (He’s even celibate, sweetly turning down the sexual advances of a teenage girl he befriends.)

But even though the film would be much stronger if it took an edgier and less rose-tinted stance toward Chris’s adventures, the story itself has a powerful pull, gravitational, magnetic, almost magical. It becomes a classic road movie, with an irresistible hippie-environmentalist twist. Though you may know it’s going to end sadly, the journey itself is often exhilarating. In fact, the film seems to be suffering commercially because potential viewers don’t want to go watch a young man die. But while the film is emotional, the emotions are overwhelmingly weighted toward joy rather than sorrow, as you might expect from Penn’s infatuation with Chris and his story.

The entire cast is excellent. Hirsch is in nearly every scene of a 140-minute film, and rarely if ever hits a false note. His likability and spirit carry the film (even as they push it away from the harder edge of art). Catherine Keener, Brian Dierker (whose first film as an actor this is) and Vince Vaughn are all very fine as people whose paths cross with Saint Supertramp in his travels. And Hal Holbrook has one of the greatest roles of his career, giving one of the year’s best (and, surprisingly from Holbrook, least actorish) performances as an aging widower who is the last person to speak to Chris before his final journey. (The Keener and Holbrook characters are the only ones who try to tell Chris directly that what’s he’s doing is hurtful to his family and potentially dangerous to himself. Not surprisingly, their scenes are the most emotionally resonant in the film.)

The first-rate photography by Eric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries, Kings and Queen) captures the beauty and excitement of Chris’s travels without falling into nature movie clichés. The Eddie Vedder songs that fill the soundtrack are not my cup of tea, but they blend in with the movie’s ambience and don’t become a distraction. The film is a bit grandiose and overlong, with superfluous prologues and asides and portentous bits of dialogue, but these qualities are all part of Penn’s conception. He has made the movie he wanted to make. And in this case it may be better to enjoy it for what it is rather than complain about what it’s not.

In the Valley of Elah

In the Valley of Elah is intensely absorbing, and it features an extraordinary performance by Tommy Lee Jones. Its first two-thirds seemed to me much more satisfying than Paul Haggis’s previous film, the Oscar-winning Crash – less gimmicky and more assured. But the resolution of this murder mystery, set at and near a military base among soldiers returning from Iraq, is singularly jarring and almost ridiculous in its lack of credibility (even though this is supposedly based on “actual events”). Then this cockamamie revelation is used to make some sort of ill-conceived antiwar political statement. It threw me out of the movie entirely, and retroactively diminished the accomplishment of the first 100 minutes. But as the father of the murdered soldier, Jones makes the film worth seeing.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Blade Runner looks wonderful. It always has, but the new digitally tweaked version being shown at the Ziegfeld is extraordinary. I still find it problematic as a narrative, as drama, as a movie. The minimalist story reveals no new nuances on a second or third viewing; the characters remain barely sketched ciphers; and the restored pessimistic ending may leave an audience feeling cheated of any real resolution, so it’s understandable that something more conventional was tried in the original release. In addition, I find the recent claims that Ridley Scott “predicted our future” in this film to be fatuous nonsense. But as a futuristic fever dream experience, it remains one of a kind.

The 45th New York Film Festival

The New York Film Festival serves each year as a preview of many foreign and independent movies that are to be released over the following several months. It can be a mixed bag, but is often very rewarding. This year, in addition to the opening night feature, The Darjeeling Limited (which I reviewed here last week), I saw eleven movies ranging from interesting failures to downright brilliant movies that you won’t want to miss. Here’s a look at what I saw:

Margot at the Wedding

Noah Baumbach still hasn’t found a visual style to give form to his skillful writing and the excellent performances he elicits from actors. This new movie, like his last one, The Squid and the Whale, is visually murky and uninvolving. Both films are about dysfunctional families among New York’s literati, but this script is not as consistently excellent and piercing as was Squid. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh are marvelous as sisters who hate and love each other just about equally. Kidman has the showier part of a near-psychopath whose deep insecurities lead her to lash out at the people she most cares for. Jack Black is also quite effective as Leigh’s sensitive loser of a fiancé.

Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant’s new movie is the third in a loosely connected “trilogy” of strange and beautiful meditations on youth and anomie and violence, following Elephant and Last Days. Possibly Van Sant has left the mainstream, commercial cinema behind permanently, and both he and his audience may be the better for it. This film shares some of the amazing visual qualities of Elephant and Last Days, and their critical view of American culture and conformism and what this does to misfits. But it is based on a young adult novel and has a much more conventional approach to narrative and characters than the two earlier movies, which turned off many filmgoers with their avant-garde refusal to entertain in any “normal” manner. As he often has in the past, Van Sant gets a remarkable performance from a non-professional actor, in this instance Gabe Nevins, in the lead role of a Portland, Oregon skateboarding high schooler who gets involved in a grisly crime. The photography, the use of music, the overall look and feel are hypnotic, but in a way that evokes the sort of post-modern installation art you might find at the Whitney or the Tate Modern, rather than other movies you would see in a theater. This will come and go quickly. Don’t miss it if you care about cinema as a living, evolving art form. But escapist entertainment it most certainly is not.

Flight of the Red Balloon

This too feels more like a post-modernist art thing rather than a conventional movie. But I found it more baffling and irritating than satisfying. The same could be said for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s widely overpraised last film, Three Times, which I saw at last year’s New York Film Festival. Taking the famous 1956 French short movie for children, The Red Balloon, as a starting point, Hou provides a nearly plotless, mostly inert two-hour film that is likely to drive most audiences to distraction. (It certainly will hold no interest at all for young children.) Hou’s aesthetic is one I don’t share. Yet there are haunting moments, mostly involving the unexplained “behavior” of the vaguely anthropomorphized red balloon of the title. The photography and the Paris settings are lovely. And Juliette Binoche gives an effective performance as a high-strung performer involved in artsy puppet plays. Just don’t expect anything resembling a narrative; the film floats and drifts along, like a big red balloon.

I Just Didn’t Do It

This effective Japanese film concerns a young man falsely accused of groping a teenage girl on a Tokyo subway. We follow him methodically, step by step, through the Japanese police and court systems. The practices and customs of the detectives, the lawyers and the judges seem just odd and exotic enough to American eyes and ears to add an extra fascination to the story. At 143 minutes, it is certainly long, but never tedious, and the length probably adds to the impact of, and our sympathy for, the young man’s plight. The excellent actors add greatly to the moving humanism of this sleeper. This is director Masayuki Suo’s first film since the hit Shall We Dance in 1996.

Actresses

As I have noted before, the protagonists of French movies are often exasperating and charming at the same time. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the writer and director of this film, also stars as a decidedly neurotic stage actress involved in a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. She’s experiencing a midlife crisis, acutely feeling the lack of romance (and children) in her life. The resulting comedy in this well-acted movie often nears slapstick silliness, and our heroine has entirely too many visions of dead people from her past (as well as the fictional character she is playing on stage). But the movie is nonetheless entertaining in a bittersweet way.

Redacted

Before seeing Redacted, I was working myself up to write an impassioned political opinion piece on Blogcritics defending it against the Bill O’Reillys of the world. Unfortunately, Brian De Palma’s Iraqi war film is a real disappointment. Technically it is mostly impressive and rather innovative, using YouTube-like video clips taken by the (fictional) soldiers themselves, or excerpted from (also fictional) websites. But De Palma’s showy, hyperactive, elaborate camera style has always been his trademark, and he has in effect cut himself off from that sort of technique here. In addition, the pseudo-documentary feel of the film is constantly marred by actors acting – the performers all too rarely seem like real soldiers caught on video; they are professionals reading a script. The subject, drawn from the horrifying headlines about GIs raping a teenage Iraqi girl and then murdering her and her family, is a powerful one, and there are scenes that genuinely chill. But overall, Redacted falls short. And the montage of actual bloody shots of civilian casualties at the end feels exploitative and unearned.

A Girl Cut in Two

A minor effort from the great French master Claude Chabrol. He has made over 50 films, some of them sublime. Rent Le Boucher or La Rupture or La Femme Infidele instead.

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-65

I didn’t even know this footage existed before the film festival. This wonderful documentary is essential for fans and may be revelatory for everyone who sees it. Bob Dylan was idolized during his three annual performances at the Newport Folk Festival in the 1960s. This straightforward collection of performance clips (there are a few brief interview excerpts) is extraordinarily powerful. You hear the protest songs in the traditional folk idiom that made Dylan a cult icon. You hear the hit ballads that made him into a pop star. And finally you see two numbers from the set he played with a rock band that scandalized the Newport festival in 1965, when he was booed after what now seem like utterly brilliant performances of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Both a beautiful time capsule and an ageless collection of brilliant art, this is an indispensable document and you shouldn’t miss it. Its theatrical release is uncertain, but Sony plans to put out a DVD shortly.

In the sidebar to the festival, I saw three wonderful revivals at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s marvelous, intimate Walter Reade Theater:

Underworld (1927) is a silent gangster film/love triangle from master director Josef von Sternberg. It was presented in a glisteningly beautiful new print, with a new accompanying musical score performed live by the sublime Alloy Orchestra, a trio who use percussion and electronics to bring new vivid intensity to every silent film they touch.

Martin Scorsese was on hand to personally introduce screenings of two restored Technicolor gems from 20th Century Fox:

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) is an early color film from John Ford, set during the Revolutionary War. Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert star. The action sequences are first rate, the color production is gorgeous, and Edna May Oliver is priceless in a supporting role.

Leave Her to Heaven (1946) is nearly everyone’s favorite florid Hollywood melodrama (at least if you exclude the Douglas Sirk masterpieces from the 1950s that seem to be its first cousins). It’s a truly over-the-top story of a psychopathic beauty (Gene Tierney) and the lives she destroys. The color gives it the quality of a fever dream.

After eleven movies in ten days, I’m happily exhausted! Watch for these films to open during the coming fall and winter season around the country.

The Darjeeling Limited

This very entertaining new film from Wes Anderson is a step up from the uneven The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, although it never reaches the heights of the extraordinary The Royal Tenenbaums. The visuals are splendid – not only the breathtaking photography of India, where most of the film is set, but also Anderson’s unique cartoon-geometric composition and editing. It’s a brightly colored delight to watch. And with Anderson’s already justly renowned taste in music, the soundtrack is, not surprisingly, a treat.

Most of the acting too is very fine – particularly Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzmann as two of three tragicomically dysfunctional brothers staging a reunion on the train that gives the film its title. Adrien Brody, the third brother, is sometimes too mannered and self-conscious, an easy trap to fall into when playing Anderson’s heavily whimsical, minimalist material. Wilson and Schwartzmann, as previously initiated members of the Anderson stock company, appear far more at ease, and devise something approaching three-dimensional – and often very funny – characters. Anjelica Huston (as the trio’s mother, now a nun!) and Waris Ahluwalia (as the train’s no-nonsense Chief Steward) are two of the standouts in a great supporting cast.

But even though this movie only runs about 90 minutes, it feels longer, unlike the nearly-two-hour Tenenbaums. I would attribute this to an imbalance of charm, of which there is almost too much, and narrative and emotional resonance, both in rather short supply – despite such inventive bits as a beautifully executed flashback (moving from one funeral to another) that is also a dramatization of the Schwartzmann character’s autobiographical short story.

Imperfect as it is, The Darjeeling Limited is well worth seeing, as is Anderson’s prequel short film, Hotel Chevalier, viewable free on iTunes. Featuring Schwartzmann and Natalie Portman in an extended deadpan, bitterly comic romantic vignette, it was shown before the feature at the New York Film Festival screening, and each of the two films makes the other better, more satisfying.

It’s good to have this gifted young American filmmaker back on the screen, even with something less than a masterpiece. No doubt he’ll give us more of those in seasons to come.

3:10 to Yuma

I thought James Mangold’s last movie, Walk the Line, was the best American movie (and best non-documentary from any country) of 2005. Even with a by-the-numbers, fairly ordinary script in a tired genre (showbiz bio), it had the mythic power of a folk tale, anchored by two extraordinary performances. Mangold’s visual style was hard to pin down, but there was some sort of alchemy between the director, the performers, and the material that resulted in rare magic.

I wish I felt that way about Mangold’s new film, a remake of a 1957 western. It’s certainly vivid and suspenseful (and loud!), but in aiming for the tragic grandeur of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, seasoned with a bit of Sergio Leone’s glowering close-ups and ultraviolence, the movie is a chore to sit through. It is, in short, way too solemn, and not much fun.

The photography and editing are fine, the two lead performances by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are first-rate, several members of the supporting cast (especially Ben Foster) are excellent. It’s by no means a terrible movie, just a disappointment. And along with Mangold’s interesting but uneven previous movies, including Girl, Interrupted, Identity, and Cop Land, it makes the achievement of Walk the Line seem more like a fluke and less like the flowering of an important talent. He’s admirably willing to take on genre and melodrama and to try to make them fresh and new. I look forward to seeing what he’ll do next.

Across the Universe

Julie Taymor’s ambitious movie has already divided critics right down the middle, and it may do the same with audiences. (Its 49% on Rotten Tomatoes' "Tomatometer" and 59 rating on Metacritic represent a near-balance of wide-eyed raves and vicious pans from critics around the country.) When I saw it Saturday in Manhattan, at least half a dozen people walked out. Yet there was sustained applause and cheering when the credit “Directed by Julie Taymor” appeared at the end. (In case you don't recognize the name, Taymor is the gifted, innovative director of The Lion King on Broadway, The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera, and two dazzling but uneven movies, Frida and Titus.)

Even my own reaction is somewhat divided. At several points in the movie, I was happily and deliriously transported in a way that is all too rare in recent movies. The music, the hyper-stylized theatricality, the extraordinary visuals provide a direct, hardwire jolt to one’s nervous system and emotions. I wept at the beauty of it more than once. And it’s not surprising that this sort of power is impossible to sustain for 133 minutes. It’s certainly wildly uneven, but the best parts are as amazing as anything you can see at the movies right now.

The conception, which sounded ridiculous to me when I first heard it and may well sound ridiculous to you now, is to tell an iconic love story set in the 1960s in which the characters express themselves by singing Beatles songs. “Iconic” in this case means that the characters are constantly at risk of becoming symbols. There’s little room for depth in this conception, and indeed none would call the results deep on an intellectual, sociological, or political level. The theatrical shorthand used to depict Vietnam, demonstrations, race riots, and other Sixties iconography comes off as shallow and facile in several instances. But it reminded me at times of Milos Forman’s film version of Hair; if you love that movie as I do, you won’t want to miss this one.

Despite its very real weaknesses, in individual scenes the movie can be surprisingly powerful and wonderfully entertaining. There are 29 Beatles songs, which means hardly two or three minutes go by between musical numbers. They are performed by the cast, in simple, straightforward arrangements that are often achingly beautiful. (I am mystified by the critics who have attacked the soundtrack as a Muzak or karaoke bastardization of the original songs. I adore my Beatles records, yet I also enjoyed nearly all of the rearrangements here. Judge for yourself.)

As the two young lovers at the movie’s center, Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood are quite remarkable. Sturgess has a beautiful voice and a vital, charismatic screen presence, and his genuine Liverpudlian accent helps in the dialogue scenes, which are far less effective than the music. Wood is given several early Beatles songs to sing as heartfelt solos, used to express her innocence in the first half of the film; this works startlingly well.

A few highlights stand out for me: The marvelous opening with Sturgess as Jude, sitting alone on a beach, turning to the camera to sing “Girl” (“Is there anybody going to listen to my story/All about the girl who came to stay?”); a startling and moving “Let It Be,” sung by a young boy killed in the Detroit riots, backed by a gospel choir; a ferocious, phantasmagorically violent “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with strawberries dripping blood and smashing gorily against a backdrop of Vietnam battle scenes; “I Want to Hold Your Hand” transformed into a plaintive ballad of longing (in this case, lesbian longing!); the inevitable but beautiful moment when another character begins singing “Hey Jude” to our hero.

The film does run at least 20 or 30 minutes too long. It would probably benefit from losing several numbers (they should have saved them for the DVD). (The walkouts all occurred just before the 2-hour mark. There is a limit to how much of this some people will tolerate, however well done it may be.) But when it works, there’s real magic in it.

If I had to guess, this movie will have a cult following but not a mass one. So catch it quickly when it opens near you. And try to see it on the largest possible screen, with digital projection if you can. The visuals and the sounds of Across the Universe provide some of the year’s great pleasures.

Short Takes: Recently Seen, July 2007

Ratatouille
Scene for scene, this is the most sheerly enjoyable of recent releases. If Zodiac is the feel-bad movie of the year, Ratatouille is the feel-good movie of the year. The story is fairly simple and nothing especially noteworthy in itself, but the execution is phenomenally good. Certainly the visuals are exceptional, even beautiful - and in addition, the slapstick timing is spot on, there is genuine wit in the dialogue, the vocal characterizations are marvelous, the dreamily romanticized notions of food and of Paris are transporting. But what really sets the film apart is its emotional impact – it manages to be really moving without icky sentimentality. I don’t pretend to understand how Pixar does it, turning computer programming into art, and I haven’t always been their biggest fan – the first several films were entertaining and well engineered while remaining mostly trivial. But this one, even more than The Incredibles, also directed by Brad Bird, has the kind of deeply satisfying arc that most current live-action movies don’t even approach. A home run.

Rescue Dawn
Werner Herzog’s belated first Hollywood movie may not be a total success, but it’s distinctive enough (and weird enough) to cut through all the potential clichés of the POW genre. Christian Bale is excellent, as usual, and Steve Zahn is just amazing as the saddest, most defeated character in recent films: a man without hope who still manages to be engaging and even, at first, quite funny. And I rather liked the much-criticized triumphal, stylized ending, which provides a needed release after the more-or-less realistic scenes in the Laotian/Viet Cong POW camp and in the surrounding jungle. Warning: there is some very harrowing, intense material here – but it never seems as hyped-up and exploitative as it would no doubt be in a typical American action movie.

Knocked Up
A one-night stand results in an unplanned pregnancy, and the consequences are played as both wildly profane verbal slapstick and sweet-natured sentiment. This may not sound very promising, but the movie is enormously entertaining, with a top-notch cast, although at 135 minutes it does eventually overstay its welcome. Director-writer Judd Apatow plays to the strengths and tones down the weaknesses of his earlier The Forty Year Old Virgin. Katherine Heigl is very winning as the mother-to-be, and Leslie Mann (with a deft, tightrope-walking turn in an often starkly unsympathetic role) and Paul Rudd provide sterling support. I’m somewhat less taken with Seth Rogen in the lead, but he has charming moments and is certainly in tune with the distinctive Apatow worldview. In the end, there is too much of the loudly chortling frat-boy in that worldview for my personal taste, and the balancing sweetness threatens to turn unpleasantly sticky at several points as well. But I had fun anyway, and you will too.

Transformers
A good counterexample to 300, which is a Damn Loud Stupid Movie that serves only to dismay and depress. This is a Damn Loud Stupid Movie that exhilarates. Who would have thought that Michael Bay could manage a thoroughly entertaining junk-food movie? But this tempers the annoying qualities of his earlier awful epics (e.g. The Rock) with a rather light, deft touch. The Spielbergian plot elements involving a Suburban Boy And His Pet Robot/Camaro are probably what help the most, although of course they bring along their own clichés. Shia LaBeouf is very winning as the young protagonist, and in fact he provides the only real personality in the movie. Some of the “jokes” are sophomoric groaners, too. But the darn thing moves right along, and the action sequences are great fun.

Sicko

Michael Moore’s new movie, just like his earlier movies, is both exasperating and exhilarating. It gets a lot of individual things wrong, sometimes very wrong: logic, an organized and complete presentation of facts, the construction of an argument as opposed to throwing out a naïve polemic full of sentimental anecdotes and non sequiturs. And yet…and yet. Moore manages to get the big things remarkably right: Sicko is often uproariously funny, and it will also likely leave you in tears. It poses a simple question and demands an answer: Why is the U.S. the only Western democracy without universal healthcare? Why are we willing to let our fellow citizens suffer?

The film seems designed to make free-market partisans apoplectic while inspiring everyone else to chant alongside the righteous. Personally I’d prefer a documentary along the lines of PBS’s excellent Frontline series, which could lead you through the history of healthcare and the arguments for and against a single-payer system, and leave you feeling like a well-informed citizen ready to make a decision. But good as it is, Frontline won’t galvanize people, get them buzzed, the way Michael Moore can. He’s about to make a very big splash with this movie. He’ll succeed in getting people talking about an important issue, one which already promises to be a big part of next year’s presidential race.

Behind the opening credits we get a few stories about the uninsured, told quickly and with bemused, ironic twists. “But this movie is not about these people,” says Moore, as he proceeds to turn his attention to people who do have health insurance, yet were turned down for treatment, often with tragic results. He then offers a whole series of these anecdotes designed to appall you and make you cry. My heart actually sank a bit during the first half hour. While some of these stories are effective, they are overlong and rather clumsily told, and Moore’s voice takes on a wheedling “Isn’t this saaaad?” tone that made me want to fight back.

This section is followed by a brief and very incomplete history of health care in the United States. Moore scores cheap points by painting Nixon as the architect of Evil Managed Care. (This may remind you of the pointless conspiracy mongering about the Bushes and Saudi Arabia in Fahrenheit 9/11.) He’s a bit more successful in describing the efforts of the doctors’ and pharmaceutical lobbies to demonize “socialized medicine,” from the 1950s right through HillaryCare in 1993.

But it’s when Moore turns to the state-run healthcare systems of Canada, Britain, and France that the movie takes off. The contrasts between these systems and our own, and the pitying, disbelieving looks he gets from Canadians and Frenchmen when he describes the U.S. way of caring for the sick, give the movie the comic and dramatic engine it needs. Yes, you can argue that Moore deliberately ignores the fact that people in these countries have to wait for months to schedule surgery, or other disadvantages of a state-run system. But fairness, schmairness: Moore makes his point, smashingly well – these countries care, and we don’t.

After this, when we get more of the sad anecdotes of people falling through cracks of the greed-based American system, they take on new power – I resisted the tears earlier in the film, but they flowed freely from this point on. The great hour of polemical entertainment in the middle of Sicko overcomes the weaker first half hour. And it even carried me through the final half hour, a grandiose and borderline ridiculous trip to Cuba with a group of 9/11 rescue workers with health problems. When Moore stands in a boat and uses a bullhorn to demand that his companions be treated at the Guantanamo prison (where the terrorism-suspect detainees, unlike American citizens, get free universal healthcare), and failing that, takes the workers to an idyllic hospital in Cuba, where they are cared for by the Kindest Doctors in the World, the filmmaker may lose some of his audience again. This is almost too much. But the points he scores earlier help make this section of the film palatable to me.

Sicko will certainly irritate health insurance and pharmaceutical companies and their congressional allies, as well as those of us who are wonkish devotees of factual argument and logical persuasion. But why should Michael Moore care? He’s going to please a large audience with this movie. They’ll laugh, they’ll cry, and they may even write their congressman or write a check to John Edwards or some other universal healthcare advocate. Sicko may not be art, and it may not be “fair,” but it is a social phenomenon to be reckoned with – and for at least half of its two hours, it’s also a hell of a movie.

Katharine Hepburn: The 100th Anniversary Collection

2007 is the centenary of quite a few who touched the movies one way or another:
The poet W.H. Auden, novelists Robert A. Heinlein and Daphne Du Maurier, singers Gene Autry, Kate Smith, and Connee Boswell, bandleader Cab Calloway, film score composer Miklós Rózsa, director Fred Zinnemann, and the actors Dan Duryea, Cesar Romero, Buster Crabbe, Laurence Olivier, John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck, Fay Wray, Burgess Meredith – and one Katharine Houghton Hepburn of Connecticut.

We have already seen tributes to Wayne, and no doubt Olivier and Stanwyck will also be acknowledged. In honor of Miss Hepburn, Warner has issued a rather odd and quite endearing 6-disc boxed set of films not previously available on DVD. They range widely in both chronology and quality, and few would put these particular films at the very top of the Hepburn canon, even the one that won her her first Oscar. But as I watched this motley group of films – two from RKO in the 1930s, three from MGM in the 1940s, and one TV film from the late 1970s, I was reminded what a treasure she was and is. Even in the midst of misguided melodramas and not-quite-good-enough romantic comedies, she gives unique, memorable performances. In two cases, her acting may in fact be memorably off-key rather than memorably wonderful, but she makes all these worth seeing.

Morning Glory (1933) won Hepburn an Academy Award. She’s excellent as a stage-struck young woman who is trying to make it as a Broadway actress. Her eccentric, fascinating performance can even be seen as a stylized self-portrait. The film itself, directed by Lowell Sherman, is dated in fascinating ways: the stilted storytelling, the 1920s/1930s view of Broadway as the ultimate place to become a dramatic star, the sexual mores. Although it’s presented rather obliquely, the parts of the plot involving Hepburn ending up in bed with big producer Adolphe Menjou, falling instantly in love with him and being just as summarily dumped, may leave your jaw dropping both at the “adult” subject matter and the attitudes of another era. Of course, Hepburn eventually understudies for a star-making part, and gets her chance to shine. The bittersweet last scene is both wonderful and a bit ridiculous; this isn’t just from an earlier time – it seems to be from another planet.

Without Love (1945) is often described as the worst of the pictures Hepburn made with Spencer Tracy. It’s no classic, but if you set your expectations accordingly, it’s very entertaining. Defense-industry scientist Tracy and well-to-do young widow Hepburn decide to enter into a marriage “without love,” based on mutual respect rather than, well, sex. This being Hollywood, you can guess how long that lasts (about 10 minutes less than the running time). Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn have amusing supporting roles – it’s fun to see Ball playing a sexy sophisticate, leagues away from Lucy Ricardo. The competent but uninspired direction is by Harold S. Bucquet. His name was up to now unknown to me, but he co-directed another film in this very DVD set (see below), after doing mostly Dr. Kildare series movies before that. And although this is based on a play by Philip Barry, in which Hepburn starred on Broadway in 1942, it is a much less satisfying piece than Holiday or The Philadelphia Story, two earlier Barry-Hepburn collaborations. But she’s very charming and perfectly cast.

Dragon Seed (1944) is the oddest of these six movies. It features a largely Caucasian cast playing poor Chinese farmers during the Japanese invasion of the 1930s. It’s just about impossible for a 21st-century audience not to respond with appalled laughter at what seems now like a stunt. But the script, based on a Pearl S. Buck novel, is nothing if not sincere, and it has its effective moments. Still, seeing the inconsistent and almost entirely unconvincing ways the Hollywood makeup artists try to make Hepburn, Walter Huston, Agnes Moorehead and others look like Asians – well, this is entertainment in itself, after a fashion. But only for half an hour or so, and the film runs a stultifying 148 minutes. It was lavishly produced by MGM. The co-directors were Bucquet (of Without Love) and Jack Conway. Hepburn manages to project some real feeling through the silly makeup and the platitudinous dialogue.

Hepburn gives the nearest thing to a poor performance (in this set, I mean) in Vincente Minnelli’s noirish melodrama Undercurrent (1946). Married to yet another war-era defense scientist (Robert Taylor), this one with a mysterious past, she’s supposed to be meek and scared, and as we all know, that just ain’t Hepburn. But the glossy production, along with Minnelli’s gift for décor and movement, keep this one interesting, even, or especially, when it’s ridiculous. Robert Mitchum plays a supporting role that many have called inappropriate for him, but I think he’s just fine, as is Edmund Gwenn as Hepburn’s father (he turns up again in this set, too).

Although it’s flawed, George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (1936) is probably the best movie in the set. It features a fierce, sexy and delightful performance by Cary Grant as a Cockney con man – a role quite different from most of his starring parts. Hepburn is on the run from the French police with her gambler father (Gwenn again), and to put them off the trail she cuts her hair and dresses as a boy – Sylvia becomes Sylvester. This leads to some startling and very entertaining scenes with a bit of bisexual innuendo: a woman kisses and tries to seduce “Sylvester,” and both Grant and Brian Aherne find themselves strangely attracted to this young man. At one point, Grant and Sylvester are set to bunk together in close quarters. “It’s a nippy night out,” says Grant, “and you’ll make a nice little hot water bottle.” Sylvester flees in fright, even though Sylvia of course has a crush on Grant. The Grant and Aherne characters are both visibly relieved when Sylvester transforms back into Sylvia, but the audience may feel a letdown: Sylvester is a captivating, unusual presence, while Sylvia tends to mewl and whine too much. The later twists and turns in the comic-melodramatic plot are far from convincing, but it’s all stylish and fun nonetheless.

I considered cheating a bit on this review and skipping the 1979 The Corn Is Green, also directed by Cukor. But although it is formulaic, it hooked me right away and I enjoyed it right through to the happy-teary climax. The story is a familiar one, a la Pygmalion and To Sir With Love, an 1890s period piece about a teacher, done up in the Hallmark Hall of Fame manner, and Hepburn is probably 25 years older than the part as written. (Bette Davis, born a year later than Hepburn, played this same role in a 1945 film when she was about 36; Hepburn was about 71! Still, Ethel Barrymore was over 60 when she played the part on Broadway in 1940.) There is beautiful Welsh scenery and a fine cast, and Cukor guides it home like the old pro he was by 1979.

Produced under the auspices of Turner Classic Movies, the discs all offer splendid picture and sound quality, and all include short subjects from their era, such as a Tex Avery “Wolf” cartoon and a fabulous Technicolor travelogue of Los Angeles in the Forties. Maybe you only want to see the pedigreed Katharine Hepburn classics like Little Women and Adam’s Rib and Summertime; if so, only Morning Glory and Sylvia Scarlett come close to that grade here. But the other, less familiar movies offer aspects of Hepburn you may not see elsewhere, and their Hollywood craftsmanship, as wrapped by Warner and Turner Classics in nice shiny packages, provides several hours of great entertainment.

Tribeca Film Festival

In addition to Taxi to the Dark Side, I saw six other films at this year’s Tribeca festival.

Miss Universe 1929
The home movies (a relative rarity in the 1920s and 1930s) and still photographs in this documentary open a world to us – certain facets of Austrian middle-class life before, during, and after World War II. The central figure, Lisl Goldarbeiter, is the title character, the first non-American to attain the Miss Universe title when she came to Galveston for the pageant as Miss Austria. Her cousin (whom she later married) took many of the pictures and provides narration. The problem is in the continuity – home movies are rarely shot with a dramatic narrative arc in mind. So we get the story in fits and starts, with ungainly gaps. This proves somewhat unsatisfying, and even at 70 minutes the film feels padded and overstretched. Still, much of the early footage especially is fascinating. Directed by Péter Forgács.

The Tree
This Argentinean film is a very personal essay, with elements of autobiography. Yet it fails at the basics of making clear what we are watching and why. So I didn’t know until reading the festival notes afterward that the elderly couple in the film are the director’s parents, or that the ailing tree they are debating whether to cut down was planted the day the filmmaker was born. The opaqueness and the quasi-poetic style (lingering shots of the sweeping of leaves, the washing of pavement) are an ordeal for an audience. Only 65 minutes long, the film seems endless.

Nanking
Like Taxi to the Dark Side, this is a very well crafted documentary about a heart-rending case of human-rights abuse. Yet I found it far less intensely moving than Alex Gibney’s award winner. Possibly it is the device of having actors read the parts of some of the people involved (interspersed with the reminiscences of survivors who are still around) – as tastefully and skillfully as this is handled, it still seems to add a layer of artifice and remoteness to the storytelling. It is nonetheless an extraordinary story – the Japanese army massacring a Chinese city, and the Westerners who managed to protect a fortunate few Chinese in a Safe Zone. Mariel Hemingway is particularly effective as one of those protectors. Directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman.

Autumn Days
Popular melodrama is one interesting way of peering into another culture. This Mexican “woman’s weepie” from the early 1960s, occasionally reminiscent of Douglas Sirk, is fascinating in part because of the time and place. And when the protagonist, a rural woman working in the big city as a skilled cake decorator, feels compelled to pretend to co-workers that the man who has abandoned her has instead married her, then that she is pregnant, and finally that she has been widowed, her stories begin to lend an element of the fantastic, of magic realism, to the novelettish milieu. A small-scale movie, nicely shot by master cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, this was one of the more entertaining and satisfying movies I saw at Tribeca. Directed by Roberto Gavaldón.

The Pelican
Gerard Blain, best known to Americans (if at all) as the handsome star of a couple of early Chabrols and as a supporting player in Howard Hawks’s Hatari, also wrote and directed several films in the early 1970s. Very personal art films, they were seen mostly at European festivals, and were never released in the U.S. This is one of them. Although not a great film, it is an interesting one, and Blain, who also stars, is effectively intense and smoldering as a divorced father denied visitation rights with his son. The deliberate minimalism of the direction is only intermittently successful. The effect is distancing and anti-realistic, which may not have been the intent, and the incidents that set the plot in motion are contrived, murky and unconvincing. But the scenes between father and son do pack an emotional punch.

Taxidermia
This is surely (and deliberately) one of the most repellent movies ever made. It tells the story, more or less, of three generations of a very strange Hungarian family, and divides into three distinct sections. The opening sequences contain elements of explicit yet intentionally unpleasant, anti-erotic sexuality. The second, concerning a quasi-Olympics of “speed eating,” is made up mostly of the disgusting shoveling-in of the nastiest looking food imaginable, followed by endless, absurdly hyperbolic vomiting. And the final section features the Grand Guignol spectacles of an immobile, obese man eaten by his overgrown pet cats, followed by the self-embalming and self-beheading of his taxidermist son. Sound like fun? In fairness, the film is lovingly crafted, with sometimes brilliant visuals, and there are moments of wit and hilarity, especially in the first section. But why make it? And, certainly, why sit through it? I don’t think many people will, although there were few if any walkouts at the packed screening I attended. The director is György Pálfi, who also made the highly acclaimed Hukkle a few years ago.

Taxi to the Dark Side

Taxi to the Dark Side won the Best Documentary award last week at the Tribeca Film Festival. An eye-opening look at US detainee policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo, it’s a stunning film, and one that deserves to find a wide audience.

Two years ago at the Tribeca festival, I saw another overwhelming documentary, Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares, a film examining the so-called “war on terror” that quite literally altered my consciousness. While Taxi to the Dark Side, directed by Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), is not an imaginative leap like Curtis’s masterpiece, it nonetheless provides quite a jolt.

Far from being a lefty cry of hysteria, it deliberately and devastatingly lays out its case through interviews with and news footage about a wide range of subjects, from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to soldiers imprisoned for abusing detainees, and to lawyers of Guantanamo inmates. If like myself you feel that Guantanamo is one of the worst blots ever to stain the democratic ideals of our country, you may find your eyes welling with angry tears by the end of the film. Even if you disagree with me about the significance of Guantanamo, you owe it to yourself to see this movie, and then ask yourself whether you have been asking the right questions up to now.

The film’s title comes from one particular case, that of a meek Afghan taxi driver falsely accused by the Northern Alliance and imprisoned by the US at Bagram. He died in custody after his legs were "pulpified" in repeated, horrifying beatings. Dick Cheney’s solemn insistence from a post-9/11 Meet the Press interview that the US must now begin using tactics of “the dark side” (i.e. torture) in order to vanquish terrorism provides the rest of the title.

The material in the film leads inescapably to some disturbing conclusions:

• Most (over 90%) of detainees are in custody because they were captured by other Afghans or Iraqis for reward money or other compensation. Particularly in Afghanistan, the source of many of the original Guantanamo detainees, very few were captured by US personnel – and many if not most are not terrorists at all. (Although as one Guantanamo guard is quoted saying to a prisoner being released at the insistence of the British government: “If you weren’t a terrorist when you got here, you’d have reason to be now.”)


• The mistreatment that came to light at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison (the unedited versions of those infamous photos are included in the film) has been widespread, and is based on instructions and encouragement from the very top of the command (Rumsfeld, Cheney, top generals), but MPs and other lower-ranking soldiers have been shamefully scapegoated, and they are the ones serving time in a few high-profile cases. The interview footage with some of these soldiers is both electrifying and chilling.


• Once an individual is in custody, it is very hard to get him out, despite evidence of innocence, or lack of evidence of guilt. The system is designed to be open-ended, even permanent.


• The US government has no intention of trying most detainees, and no interest in admitting that most of them are innocent. The description of Kafkaesque hearings, at which the “secret evidence” allegedly incriminating the detainees is not revealed to them or to their lawyers, is likely to disturb anyone who cares about freedom and democracy (as opposed to simply mouthing the words).


• 9/11 is seen as justifying any and all of this. It’s a dangerous world, and if innocent people get swept up in security measures, it’s worth it to catch a few terrorists… even if the non-terrorists are subjected to long detention without charges or trials, and to mistreatment that most thinking, feeling persons would agree amounts to torture. (And even if it’s debatable how many actual terrorists have been arrested.)

For a film that depends heavily on talking heads, Taxi to the Dark Side has great visual grace and assurance. The shots of the Afghan countryside near the beginning and end are breathtakingly beautiful and unexpectedly tranquil. These shots give the story of Dilawar, the unfortunate taxi driver who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” an added poignance. And as he did in his Enron film, Gibney edits the material for maximum clarity and impact.

If you can watch this film unmoved, you are made of stone. Like The Power of Nightmares, as well as the excellent Road to Guantanamo, this is a movie that could change minds and shift policy, if only enough people see it. (If only, in fact, it could be made mandatory viewing for top leaders of the administration and the military.) Don’t even think of missing it when it’s released later this year.

Short Takes – Recently Seen: April 2007

Grindhouse is a formidable technical achievement, but a very mixed bag as either entertainment or art. Director teammates Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have a lot of fun with the trappings of the movie – the parody “prevues” of coming attractions, the scratches and missing frames, the general air of rowdy sensationalism in the 1970s exploitation films to which they are paying affectionate homage. And Rodriguez’s half of the double bill, Planet Terror, is actually pretty entertaining. The hyperbolic gore throughout the nonsensical zombie tale is astonishingly overdone, and often funny in itself. (As in Rodriguez’s Sin City, the limits of the R rating are stretched to meaninglessness.) The performers get right into the spirit of things and Freddy Rodriguez is particularly good as the hero.

But Tarantino’s Death Proof, while skillful, is never as interesting as the best parts of Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill. It divides itself into two similar stories, involving sadistic weirdo stunt driver Kurt Russell’s encounters with two different groups of young women. (If there is a narrative connection between the two stories, or even an indication which one is supposed to come first chronologically, I missed it.) Again, the actors are fine, and the movie is technically accomplished. But the stories don’t add up to much, and they don’t have the baroque asides of Tarantino’s best earlier work. The ending seems particularly lame, attempting to put a lighter-hearted gloss on a very sadistic storyline, or pair of storylines. Possibly by then I was just weary of the whole meta-movie concept. If each feature could have been just an hour or less, the whole thing might be more satisfying.

300

Despite a well-executed visual style that is not quite like any other movie, the dumb-dumb-dumb thud of 300’s dialogue and narration can deaden a viewer’s mind and senses. The ‘triumph’ of this movie is in art direction, not art (art is no doubt far from the first thing on the mind of these particular filmmakers). There is very little genuine feeling in 300, despite the lip service given to the grief caused by war and the sacrifice of good men for ‘freedom.’ Its gigantic boxoffice success is puzzling - apparently this is actually rousing to a sizable number of young men. Perhaps they love the idea of a video game blown up to Imax size, with plenty of beheadings, blood splatters, and adolescent attitudes toward sex and nudity. As for historical versimilitude, the film could as easily take place on another planet as among the real Greek city-states of the past.

The Hoax is about Clifford Irving’s nearly successful publication of a fake Howard Hughes biography. Well acted and competently directed, it’s an interesting story well told, rather than a fascinating story rivetingly told. Based as it is on Irving’s own account, it sometimes seems to buy into his aggrandized self-image. Despite Richard Gere’s surprising charm as Irving, this portrayal of his scam as something of great importance is not entirely successful.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

You’d think this would be a likely movie to compare and contrast favorably with 300: with its deeply felt stands on war and politics and power and freedom, this should be the kind of historical drama that shakes you with the force of art. But Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner is a real disappointment, more respectable than 300 without being a great deal more moving. The story of the Irish rebellion against the English in the 1920s is handsomely photographed and well cast and acted. But putting a political point of view front and center, as the characters speechify to each other and to us, is a far less effective method than genuine dramatization, and the result is oddly remote. The sadness may still get to you, but the narrative is too spare, lacking in depth and resonance. It's rare to wish a movie were longer, but this one could use more incident, more texture, more of the exhilaration of an epic.

New Directors/New Films 2007

New Directors/New Films is the little sibling of the autumn New York Film Festival. It’s less expensive and less crowded, and I have had a somewhat better track record seeing worthwhile movies there than at the fall festival. Co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, it has given us the New York premieres of movies like Half Nelson, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Darwin’s Nightmare, I Shot Andy Warhol, and Welcome to the Dollhouse – plus a whole lot of movies that never got a commercial release. This year I caught 9 of 26 films. As luck would have it, I missed two of the breakout successes of the festival, the Belgian film Congorama and the American The Great Wall of Sound, but I expect they will turn up in theaters in six months or so. Here’s what I saw:

Once, a “verité musical” from Ireland, has only a wisp of a plot, but it does gain considerable charm from its leading man, Glen Hansard, playing a musician who sings on the streets of Dublin for change when not working in his dad’s vacuum repair shop. He meets a Czech émigré (Marketa Iglova), who turns out also to be a songwriter, as well as a classically trained pianist. They are drawn to each other (and of course the audience roots for them to get together), but circumstances keep their friendship platonic – while their aching longing expresses itself in a dozen or so songs, artfully worked into the course of the film. Hansard, lead singer of the band The Frames, is a natural on screen, and gives a very affecting performance as a lonely, big-hearted artist. Iglova, less surefooted with dialogue, is nonetheless appealing, and just fine in the musical scenes. In the end, there’s not much to it as a movie, but Hansard and the songs will stay with you. The CD The Swell Season contains several songs from the film, performed by the two leads.

Glue

This film from Argentina covers familiar territory – disaffected adolescents – but the setting provides a different cultural prism from the many American movies on the subject. The houses and landscapes in the part of Patagonia where our hero, Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), lives are fairly bleak (until the very end, when a camping trip reveals a bit of breathtaking landscape) – they resemble lower-middle-class neighborhoods in semi-rural sections of Texas or Florida (for American equivalents, think of Thirteen or Bully). Lucas’s parents don’t get along, and in fact don’t spend much time together. He’s bored and unhappy and restless, and he thinks endlessly about sex – mostly with girls, but also sometimes with his best friend, a football hunk named Nacho (Nahuel Viale). The film’s frank eroticism may attract or repel some viewers. Although too long, it’s very well directed.

Audience of One is an entertaining documentary, of the “stranger than fiction” variety. It follows a San Francisco-based Pentecostal minister who says he had a vision from God ordering him to make the greatest movie of all time. He proceeds to try to raise $100 million (later $200 million) for his chosen story, a science-fiction reimagining of the Biblical story of Joseph called Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph. Believe it or not, things turn even stranger after that. At first I was queasy about the potential for condescending cheap shots on the part of the filmmakers. My concerns were unfounded: they let the story tell itself, and let the subjects be themselves. The cult-like devotion of the minister’s parishioners, and the Bay Area setting, may uncomfortably evoke Jim Jones – but although the flock’s delusions may border on mass insanity, the results are fairly benign. And just wait until you hear what else is on the preacher’s agenda, in the climactic scene.

The Art of Crying is a well-crafted but ultimately tedious comedy-drama from Denmark about a dysfunctional family, based on a semi-autobiographical novel. It’s difficult to make the oft-told subject of incestuous child abuse dramatically fresh, although the filmmakers attempt it valiantly, telling the story from a young boy’s viewpoint. (In his naiveté, he sees his family as normal until his eyes are finally opened near the end of the story.) The oddball members of his extended family are apparently less amusing than intended, and the overall impact is quite flat.

Although Red Road, from Scotland, is intensely well wrought, it is often deeply unpleasant, and you may ask yourself afterward if the squirm-inducing story was worth telling. It begins fascinatingly, with a young woman doing her job watching banks of police security-camera monitors in Glasgow. The atmosphere is eerie, icy, foreboding – we are drawn to the images even as we may be appalled by the Big Brother setup. The woman spots someone she knows, a man she thought was in prison, who she finds out has just been released. She takes some very extreme steps to follow him, find out more, and then, disturbingly, to interact directly with him. We find out only gradually what their connection is and why she is so obsessed. Many of the ensuing scenes are very suspenseful, even terrifying, but ultimately I thought the story was a bit contrived and the resolution too pat. Nonetheless, director Andrea Arnold is undeniably a talent to watch, and she gets great performances from leads Kate Dickie and Tony Curran.

Euphoria is a beautifully photographed weirdie from Russia. The characters are more like archetypes, with little depth or background: the nominal hero, a strange young man inexplicably obsessed with a married woman; the woman herself, restless and impulsive and mysterious; her intense, brooding husband. The relatively simple story of adultery and vengeance (along with a subplot about a vicious dog attacking a child) seems secondary to the vivid images of a rural area on the arid steppes by a winding river. The director has a painterly eye, and there are beautiful compositions and stunning aerial photography. The film, intense and bizarre, leaves audiences baffled, but it is certainly out of the ordinary.

By far the most satisfying and enjoyable movie I saw was Stealth, directed by and starring Lionel Baier, the Swiss director who made Garcon Stupide. It begins as a light comedy of manners, almost trivial, but becomes unexpectedly warm and moving as it moves unpredictably forward. The lead character, who also has the name Lionel Baier, after finding out that he has a great-grandfather who was Polish, becomes suddenly and utterly obsessed with his newfound ancestry. Lionel is one of those characters (they turn up especially frequently in French-language films) who are both exasperating and lovable. When he leaves his warm-hearted and handsome boyfriend for a woman, a Polish au pair he meets on the street, intending to marry her so she can gain citizenship, the audience reacts like the other characters: Stop, Lionel, you’re being ridiculous. Then the film takes a sudden left turn and becomes a road trip to Poland, where Lionel goes with his sharp-tongued sister. It’s on this trip that the movie shows its true colors, deftly mixing the delightfully comic and the deeply moving. This charming movie is nothing earth-shattering, but it certainly deserves to find an audience, so let’s hope an American distributor picks it up soon.

Reprise is a smart, talky movie from Norway about two young would-be novelists and their circle of friends. At times, it resembles Diner remade by Ingmar Bergman, if Bergman were 30 and immersed in punk rock. (It also sometimes resembles Diner’s source, Fellini’s masterpiece I Vitelloni.) The film is absorbing and entertaining and very accomplished technically, but I found the young men and their friends often very unsympathetic and hard to relate to. This may be entirely intentional – the director’s attitude is ambiguous. Although Reprise was one of the most enthusiastically received movies at the festival, I can’t jump on the bandwagon. But like nearly every movie I saw, it’s worth a look.

Padre Nuestro took the big prize at Sundance earlier this year, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s a well-made, emotional melodrama on the hot-button subject of illegal immigration. The story depends so thoroughly on heavily ironic coincidence that it often seems to want to be a folk tale or fable. Two young men from Mexico buy their way into the US, and on the long truck ride to New York, one tells the other about his father, who owns a restaurant in the big city and who he expects to welcome him comfortably and provide a secure future. Upon arriving in New York, they become separated, and the second young man, finding the father, passes himself off as the son, Pedro. It turns out that the father is a humble dishwasher and lives in very simple circumstances. Meanwhile the real Pedro, lost in New York with no English, continues to look for his father, entering into an ambivalent friendship with a tough, streetwise woman who squats in a vacant apartment. The two stories are vividly staged and skillfully cross-cut, almost skillfully enough to hide the contrivances. The pitch-perfect performances are a great help. Padre Nuestro may be a bit overwrought, but it’s likely to be one of the big indie successes of the year.

Early candidate for year's most overrated film

Is it too early to declare The Most Overrated Movie of the Year? Possibly, but The Lives of Others will no doubt still be in the top 3 or 5 of that category 10 months from now.

To be clear, I am not saying it’s a terrible movie. It is reasonably well done, and it takes on a fascinating subject (the Stasi secret police in East Germany, and its web of informants, during the last years of Communist rule) with admirable moral insight. But, to this viewer at least, it does so with a bare minimum of imagination and cinematic interest. It’s like an efficient TV movie about the Stasi. And its plot mechanics, based though they may be on “actual events,” are leaden and predictable.

I seem to be the only person in the Western Hemisphere with this dissenting opinion, but there you have it.

Zodiac

Zodiac is a meta-thriller: it comments on itself and other serial killer movies, and in a broader sense, on our obsession with real life and fictional serial killers – especially the unsolved cases, from Jack the Ripper on, that we keep picking at, without resolution. The movie's spiraling structure, and what to some will seem excessive length and detail, are intrinsic to this self-examining quality. I think it’s smashing – the best big commercial film I’ve seen since The Departed.

The three lead performances are excellent: Jake Gyllenhaal as the nerdy-obsessive editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith, on whose books the film is based; Mark Ruffalo as the San Francisco police detective who worked the Zodiac case for many years; and, most entertainingly, Robert Downey Jr. as the maverick reporter Paul Avery. The widescreen images, shot in high-definition video, are often startlingly clear, and they have been masterfully edited. Director David Fincher is a master technician, and possibly not a very nice man. It’s the perfect combination for this material.

The three murders recreated in the movie are horrific to watch, but far from exploitative, and they all occur early on. The investigation, and the obsessions it engenders, are the real subject. Although the film posits a plausible theory and suspect for the Zodiac killings, it remains deliberately foggy, ambiguous, unresolved. This may well leave many viewers dissatisfied. But it is one reason why this is no ordinary thriller.

The tone deftly mixes engrossing suspense with sly humor, notably in scenes that could be read as tributes to, or affectionate parodies of, paranoia classics of the '70s (All the President's Men, The Parallax View, The Conversation, the our-daddy-is-an-obsessed-weirdo scenes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The production design, without calling undue attention to itself, quite brilliantly recreates the 1969-1978 era - or possibly a more accurate way of putting it would be that the look of the film captures our own changing attitudes toward the styles of those years. The soundtrack makes very potent use of period songs as well (I always loved Donovan's slightly creepy "Hurdy Gurdy Man," but after seeing this movie you may never be able to hear it again without shuddering). I’ve seen the movie twice now, and I was surprised that the 155-plus minutes flew by the second time. Fincher is a warped wizard of cinema, a gifted storyteller who can twist a viewer's perspectives and perceptions and leave you wanting more.

I had my own experience with serial-killer obsessiondom, involving Jack the Ripper. I became fascinated by the case and bought several books, determined to come to my own conclusions. But at some point I began to see the truth: from this distance, with the evidence long fading, there are many, many suspects, and convincing reasons to consider nearly every one "likely." And none will ever be conclusively proved or disproved. I tossed the books aside, half read. Yet the unanswered mystery still gnaws at me. This tantalizing, exasperating mood of discovery and frustration is what Fincher’s movie is all about.

Graysmith's own first book Zodiac is both intriguing and rather stupefying. (It’s a mere 350 pages; his sequel, Zodiac Unmasked, is an intimidating 560-page doorstop.) He's not a skilled prose stylist, to put it kindly, and the material is sometimes crudely edited. He's obsessive about detail, and finds connections in the evidence that others missed - yet he often seems unable to distinguish important facts from unimportant ones, or compelling logic from irrelevant coincidences (he devotes page after page to the dubious significance of the phases of the moon).

The filmmakers gently rib this aspect of Graysmith when Robert Downey’s Paul Avery sarcastically adds "Washington Street" to a list of "water place names" associated with the killer; Gyllenhaal's Graysmith misses the humor in the suggestion, saying, "You really think so?" And indeed in the book Washington Street is included in all seriousness in a "water place names" list – which is about as enlightening as all those moon phases and equinoxes. The movie takes another subtle dig at Graysmith, who’s described more than once as a “boy scout,” when Avery asks him what his angle is in pursuing the case, as opposed to the “business” reasons for the newspaper and the police to do so. “What do you mean by ‘business’?” retorts Graysmith, meaning he’s only in it to find the truth. And yet of the main Zodiac figures, who has gotten the principal commercial payoff ? With two best-sellers and a movie deal, it’s the Boy Scout himself.

Is the movie telling us we’re selfish fools for fixating on the unknowable, while possibly prolonging the suffering of the victims’ families? In director David Fincher's hands, we're all only too willing to become nerdy serial killer obsessives like Robert Graysmith. Then he invites us to look in the mirror. Zodiac is a disquieting movie, and possibly a great one.

The Host

A nifty little monster movie with post-modernist touches that both add to and detract from its effectiveness, writer-director Bong Joon-ho’s The Host gets right to the good stuff. After a quick introduction to Gang-du, who works at his family’s food stand (sort of a mini 7-Eleven), and his spunky young daughter Hyun-seo, the movie shifts immediately to a strange sight nearby, drawing a crowd to the bank of Seoul’s Han River: something is hanging off a bridge right in the middle of its span. Suddenly, it drops into the water, swimming, and the excited crowd watches its approach. They start to throw food – and cans of beer – at the shape in the river. But when that shadow comes to the surface, the playful tone shifts, and the film quickly gets scary as hell: the shape is not the least bit friendly, and it immediately starts chasing, and eating, humans.

The Korean title translates as Creature, and indeed the creature is the single most accomplished thing in the movie: a co-creation of two special effects houses, The Orphanage (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Superman Returns) and Weta Workshop (The Lord of the Rings). This very frightening beast is part giant cockroach, part carnivorous tadpole, with the terrifying multiple fanged mouths of Alien’s alien, plus a really long tongue. Whenever It is on screen, or even threatening to appear, this is a splendidly effective scare picture.

But Bong Joon-ho has other things on his mind. The store-owning family members are a vivid group of eccentrics, and they become outlaws on the run after one of them is snatched by the creature and the authorities refuse to help them rescue her. The family escapes from the quarantine that has been imposed, and ventures out to find the monster’s lair. The American title, The Host, is ironic: the behavior of the police and the national health officials is handled with sometimes bitter satire, as they come to the conclusion that the creature has introduced a deadly new virus into the world. The authorities (and a mob of conformists following their orders) become co-villains in the story – but they act out of blind stupidity, while the creature itself is only doing what comes naturally.

In its mix of superb film craft with sophomoric jokes, slapstick, shocking violence and sometimes satirical social commentary, The Host reminds me of another recent movie from Korea, Park Chanwook’s Lady Vengeance. The disparate elements don’t always gel, and American genre fans expecting an ordinary sort of action picture are likely to be unhappy with some of the odd, and sad, plot twists – but after seeing either The Host or Lady Vengeance, you know you’re in the presence of a major talent. (Both of these movies played at the New York Film Festival, and roused crowds accustomed to rather more sedate fare. Bong’s earlier film Memories of Murder, available on DVD, is also a genre picture with downbeat twists, and it has some interesting similarities to, and differences from, the new film Zodiac.)

The photography and editing of The Host are top-notch. The Han River location is vividly evoked, and the chases that take place near – and beneath – the riverbank are breathtakingly well done. The Park family’s journey isn’t very long geographically, but it takes on the nature of a heroic quest, even though as heroes they have their ups and downs. Gang-du’s sister Nam-joo (played by Bae Doo-na) is a champion archer (well, a bronze medalist) whose Achilles heel is being a little too…slow to let the arrow fly – and this becomes a witty visual joke at various points in the movie. Their brother Nam-il (Park Hae-il) seems at first a worthless, belligerent young drunk, but he proves his worth as the adventure continues. Gang-du himself is a bit of a goofy, shiftless layabout, but as events give his life a grim purpose, actor Song Kang-ho skillfully transforms the character into a real hero of sorts. (Actors Park and Song were also in Memories of Murder.)

The plot is sometimes sketchy, unconvincing, even silly, as is the satirical way the army and health officials are portrayed. But the movie has enough energy to ride over these faults. When the family’s quest takes a tragic turn, however, it feels like a miscalculation – the tone has been mostly fast and smartass up to that point, and one may not know how to react to the jarring shift. This may be just what director Bong has in mind, however, being a bit of an absurdist, gleefully mixing the comic and the sad.

So you may or may not feel completely satisfied by the story itself. But if you’re a monster movie aficionado, this is a monster you won’t want to miss. And if you’re interested in the Asian movies that have been expanding and subverting genres, such as Lady Vengeance and Infernal Affairs (the Hong Kong film on which The Departed is based), Bong Joon-ho is a director to watch – and The Host is a good place to start.

How I Lost My American Idol Virginity

“I have been completely corrupted,” I announced to co-workers on Wednesday morning. “I actually voted.”

After five years of ignoring and/or rolling my eyes at the pop-culture phenomenon known as American Idol, I decided to check it out this year. Pop-music snob that I am, you can be sure that none of the 8,000-plus tracks on my iPod are performed by any Idol alums. But I am also a pop-culture obsessive, and it was hard not to be curious about something that enthralls 30 million Americans every week.

A DVR has helped – allowing me to watch at my own pace and skip the very numerous commercial breaks. But to my astonishment, I have skipped very little of the program itself.

In a word, I have become an addict.

The four weeks of audition tapes were a bit much. The ghastliness of the many untalented hopefuls is appallingly funny at first, then eventually just appalling. But for a novice, learning about each step in the process of this well-engineered entertainment machine has its own fascinations. And the tears of the losers and the winners, while often laughably artificial, occasionally hit home with real emotion (usually when the contestant has real talent combined with real vulnerability).

Once the judges have winnowed the field down to 24 semifinalists, the real fun begins. But the time commitment required of a viewer is really excessive. Five hours this week alone! (It’s down to four next week, and continues to decrease as the contest progresses.)

The episodes keep to a strict timetable and a proven formula. The “tension” between robotically efficient, unflappably empathetic host Ryan Seacrest and amusingly acerbic judge Simon Cowell (as well as the spats Cowell evokes with squishy-silly fellow judge Paula Abdul) are about as convincing as the catfights on Desperate Housewives. Everyone has a role to play, and by now they have it down pat, an entertaining schtick.

But what’s likely to keep me watching are the contestants themselves. I still won’t buy their records (will I?), but several of them seem worth rooting for (or against!). Go Melinda! Show ‘em, Blake! Oh my God, they cut Rudy!

I am hopelessly ensnared…