Handyfilm etc

The White Bus

2011-11-28T21:13:00.002-05:00

The White Bus is an odd short feature (or longish short film) by Lindsay Anderson, made in 1967 just before his greatest film, If... It shares with If... the actor Arthur Lowe and the cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek. Ondricek’s work is the principal reason to see the film. Like If..., the scenes alternate between black-and-white and color photography, seemingly at random. But all the images are striking.

Change of Pace: A Holiday Recipe

2011-11-22T14:07:00.001-05:00

A spicy, delicious holiday favorite.

Tennessee Jam Cake

1 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

3 eggs

½ cup yogurt (whole-milk yogurt) – or use sour cream or buttermilk

1 jar seedless blackberry jam or preserves (12 to 16 oz)

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

1 Tablespoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon allspice

½ teaspoon nutmeg

½ teaspoon ground ginger

1 cup chopped pecans

½ cup raisins

Grease and flour a 13 x 9 inch pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and yogurt and mix thoroughly.

Mix flour, soda, salt, spices, nuts and raisins. A third at a time, add to egg mixture and mix thoroughly. Add jam. Mix thoroughly.

Bake for 45-50 minutes. Allow to cool for ½ hour. Top with caramel frosting.

Caramel Frosting

½ cup butter

½ cup milk

1 cup brown sugar

2 cups confectioners sugar

½ teaspoon cinnamon

½ cup chopped pecans

Bring butter to a boil in a saucepan for about 2 minutes, stirring constantly, until it just starts to brown (not burn). Add milk and bring to boil again for 2 more minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and allow to cool for 15 minutes. Stir in sugar, cinnamon and nuts. Mix until smooth. Spread over cooled cake.

Making the Boys

2011-11-20T20:06:00.001-05:00

Making the Boys (awkward title) has a great subject for a 45-minute documentary: the story behind the groundbreaking play and movie The Boys in the Band. It actually runs a bit over 90 minutes, so there is more than a little padding. Luckily, most of that padding is pretty entertaining, too.

The Christine Jorgensen Story

2011-11-20T16:55:00.005-05:00

Newly released to video as part of MGM’s Limited Edition Collection, The Christine Jorgensen Story is no classic, to put it mildly, but it’s an amusing period piece, already dated by the time it was released. The subject matter must have been shocking or at least titillating in 1970: the true story of the first sex-change operation to get major press coverage. George Jorgensen, uncomfortable growing up as an “All-American boy,” went to Denmark in 1956 and returned to New York as Christine. The tabloids had a field day.

But the style of the movie is not sensationalistic, or even particularly exciting. It's a by-the-numbers Hollywood docudrama.

Read more of this review at Cinema Sentries.

Shut Up, Little Man!

2011-10-23T18:10:00.006-04:00

Shut Up, Little Man! is an amusing, occasionally disturbing documentary about the origins and aftereffects of a prankish set of “audio verite” recordings that went viral before “going viral” was even a term.

The recordings were made by Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D, two young roommates in San Francisco in the late 1980s, at first in an effort to document for the police the loud and bizarre arguments in their next-door neighbors’ apartment, which were frequently disturbing their sleep. The endless drunken, profane quarrels begin to fascinate them, and eventually they shared the tapes with friends, who shared them with other friends…and an underground comedy/reality-show cult was born.

Best of 2010

2011-01-28T17:58:00.003-05:00

1. The Social Network

2. The Ghost Writer

3. 127 Hours

4. Toy Story 3

5. Shutter Island

6. The Kids Are All Right

7. Inception

8. Winter's Bone

9. The Fighter

10. Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980 [part 2 of 3 parts]

Runners-up:

The Last Station

Green Zone

The King's Speech

True Grit

Blue Valentine

A Prophet

Best documentaries

1. Exit Through the Gift Shop

2. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

3. Waiting for Superman

4. Casino Jack and the United States of Money

The Social Network is an amazing piece of work. It’s the first time David Fincher has worked with this kind of script – jazzy, motormouth, dialogue-centric in the patented Sorkin manner – and the results are exhilarating. The only depressing thing is that Fincher, who has made the best movies of three of the last four years, is currently expending his priceless talent on a why-bother remake of one of the worst movies of 2010: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer is nearly as good as The Social Network, but found a much smaller audience and relatively sparse year-end award attention except for Olivia Williams’s excellent performance. Rent it right away if you haven’t seen it.

I wonder if Martin Scorsese finally feels like an auteur now. Like some of the 1950s masterpieces of Sirk and Fuller and even Hitchcock (and juicy non-masterpieces such as Leave Her to Heaven, much admired by Scorsese), Shutter Island is a superlative job of direction applied to an extravagantly trashy and ridiculous script – and the movie is undoubtedly more interesting because of this style/substance tension.

I noted some hostility toward 127 Hours and The Fighter in Film Comment’s year-end critics’ poll, and neither made the top 50. I’d guess that this is backlash to their middlebrow themes of Life Affirmed and Dysfunctional Family Redeemed. But both movies are beautifully directed, in their very different ways, and their craft transcends and lifts their source material. Enjoying these two films along with sold-out crowds in theaters gave me a couple of my favorite filmgoing experiences this year.

I also experienced the two very worst films of the year in sold-out houses: Black Swan, repellent and purposeless, and Alice in Wonderland, an almost complete travesty of the source material and a stupefying waste of mountains of money. Both are the work of talented filmmakers who probably think they are doing great because the movies are boxoffice successes (and in one case, Oscar-nominated). Think again, fellas.

A note about Red Riding: It consists of 3 interrelated films made for British TV, crime thrillers about serial killers and corrupt government. All are entertaining, but part 2 stands out for its direction (by James Marsh, who made the documentary Man on Wire) and the lead performance of Paddy Considine. Andrew Garfield is featured in part 1, which is the next best. The 3rd film has to knit all the interrelated story strands together, but in the process it brings the whole work down to the level of a decent PBS Masterpiece Mystery. Part 2 is considerably more than that.

Other dramatic features worth seeing:

Another Year

Carlos

Easy A

Kick-Ass

Knight and Day

Please Give

The Town

Wild Grass

Red Riding, parts 1 and 3 [1974 and 1983]

Seeing Green

2010-03-26T17:46:00.003-04:00

The two most recent movies I've seen are Greenberg (written and directed by Noah Baumbach) and Green Zone (directed by a genius who happens to be named Greengrass). They have little else in common, but both are flawed movies worth seeing.

Paul Greengrass directed the amazing United 93, which recreated some of the events of 9/11, electrifyingly blending hyper-realistic fidelity to facts with the intensification of brilliant editing and camerawork. He applied similar kinetic brilliance to two spy thrillers (the second and third Bourne movies) that would have been far more ridiculous and less consequential without him.

Now Greengrass and his Bourne star Matt Damon have come up with a blend of the two approaches in Green Zone: a fictionalized action-movie plot is set within the framework of an all too real situation -- the early months of the Iraq war. The results are a mixed bag, and the film actually works better as an illustrated criticism of flawed Pentagon policies than it does as a thriller. The cat-and-mouse climactic sequences never build to the intensity of either the Bourne films or United 93.

But there is much to enjoy and admire along the way: excellent performances by Damon, Brendan Gleeson, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, and especially Khalid Abdalla as an Iraqi citizen caught up in the madness of the situation. No doubt Brian Helgeland's script oversimplifies, but it manages to convey with riveting clarity what is going horribly wrong in the Pentagon's handling of the incipient insurgency.

Now maybe Paul Greengrass should try making a movie without terrorists, spies, or guns in it. He's in danger of getting stuck in a rut. But whatever his next film is, I'll be in line to see it. He's one of the very best filmmakers around.

Noah Baumbach, from all evidence, is as unconcerned with things like cinematography and editing as Greengrass is obsessive about them. Even though Baumbach's Greenberg was shot by the sublime cinematographer Harris Savides (Elephant, Zodiac, Milk), it is not the work of a visual storyteller; it does avoid being downright ugly, like his best previous film, The Squid and the Whale. Luckily Baumbach is better as a writer, even though this script seems to me more contrived and less interesting than Squid.

Ben Stiller is wonderful in the title role, a lonely, emotionally erratic man whose habitual hostility keeps nearly everyone at a distance -- an unlikely center for an off-center romantic comedy, which is more or less what Greenberg turns out to be. Set at the fringes of Southern Californian wealth -- much of the action takes place in Greenberg's wealthy brother's house, but the main characters are precariously underemployed -- the movie at times resembles an indie version of a James L. Brooks comedy (As Good as It Gets, Spanglish). It also has an occasional resemblance to Larry David's comedy of discomfort and wince-inducing inappropriate behavior. I would certainly never have come up with those comparisons for Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding or The Squid and the Whale.

The other actors are also good, and the movie has its moments of hilarity and poignancy, but to me both the characters and situations seemed forced, as if they were cobbled together from bits of interesting observations about real people and relationships -- without being transformed into convincing art. It's also a rather sad, upsetting movie, and since it feels unfinished, suspended, the unhappiness may stick with you. Which may indeed be what is intended, and is not necessarily a bad thing for art to do, however imperfectly. Greenberg is flawed but worth seeing.

The Ghost Writer

2010-03-02T20:16:00.003-05:00

Roman Polanski's extraordinarily assured new movie is the best pop thriller in a long time. The plot, despite its topical references to politics and terrorism (specifically the Bush/Blair connection), is really just a MacGuffin. But the acerbic wit and sustained skill with which it is told is exhilarating. The cast is fine, too: Ewan McGregor, present in nearly every shot of the film, has one of his best-ever roles, and Olivia Williams stands out in support. Alexandre Desplat's Herrmannesque score is also a delight. Not to be missed.

Best of the Decade: 2000-2009

2010-01-23T17:48:00.003-05:00

Features:

The Lord of the Rings

Hero

Spirited Away

Brokeback Mountain

Pan's Labyrinth

Zodiac

The White Ribbon

Band of Brothers

Ratatouille

The Royal Tenenbaums

Before Night Falls

Documentaries:

The Power of Nightmares

Capturing the Friedmans

Taxi to the Dark Side

When the Levees Broke

The Fog of War

Tarnation

Runners Up:

A.I.

Adaptation

All Or Nothing

Catch Me If You Can

Children of Men

Coraline

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Departed

Dirty Pretty Things

Elephant

Hedwig And The Angry Inch

Memento

Milk

Minority Report

Precious

United 93

Walk the Line

I realize I cheated a little by adding an eleventh to my ten best, and a TV miniseries at that: the remarkable Band of Brothers, now being reshown on HBO as a prelude to its companion piece, The Pacific (we can only hope it's as good).

A Look Back at 2009

2010-01-23T17:30:00.004-05:00

Ten Best Films of 2009

1. The White Ribbon
2. Precious
3. Coraline
4. A Serious Man
5. Avatar
6. Nine
7. Sin Nombre
8. Up
9. The Hangover
10. The Hurt Locker

Runners-up:

Humpday
District 9
Taking Woodstock
Bright Star
Julie and Julia
The Last Station
Adventureland

Worst Films (That I Saw):

Watchmen
Whatever Works
Two Lovers
The Lovely Bones

There have been the traditional complaints that the year just past was not a good one for movies. But when I made my year-end list, I came up with close to 30 that are worth seeing. And I only saw half a dozen or so I truly disliked. Here are notes on a few of my favorites.

The White Ribbon is an austerely beautiful, chilling, haunting film about mysterious acts of violence in a rural German village in 1914 (and about the villagers’ rather disturbingly stern customs of raising and disciplining children). Its stunning black-and-white visuals and its disquieting narrative are mesmerizing. It has changed my attitude toward its director rather dramatically: having found some of his movies irritating and emptily provocative (The Seventh Continent, Funny Games), I thought he was a somewhat less hateful Lars Von Trier-style poseur. Now I want to see more of his work.

(My only caveat is that The White Ribbon is being shown mostly in small art houses with tiny screens. I was lucky enough to catch it on the enormous screen at Alice Tully Hall during the New York Film Festival. Far more than most “arty” foreign films, this one gains exponential power when its remarkable images are projected big and bright.)

Purely as a piece of moviemaking, Precious is messy and uneven. But it packs an emotional power few recent films can match. And the performances are amazing.

There have been several entertaining and highly praised 3-D fantasy movies this year. Most of them were computer-generated. But for me the standout was Coraline, a bewitchingly dark story based on a children’s book – and crafted via “old-fashioned” stop-motion animation. It’s a brilliantly sustained piece of storytelling, and often quite beautiful. (Another stop-motion film, Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, was charming but, to me at least, it was a far less potent movie. And I’m a big fan of Mr. Anderson’s earlier – live-action – films.)

I have often found the Coen brothers’ films slick and clever and empty (and sometimes much worse than that: vide Burn After Reading). But A Serious Man is to my mind by far their best film, a fable that starts dark and spirals steadily into even darker places – while remaining disconcertingly hilarious. The brilliant cast manages to stay just this side of disastrously overdoing it.

There may not be much more to say about Avatar. Yes, the technology is more accomplished than the dialogue. And subtle it ain’t. But James Cameron has a gift for big, emotional spectacle, and he is firing on all cylinders here.

I was taken aback by the many vicious reviews Nine received. I found it enormously entertaining and fantastic to look at, with a dazzling megawatt cast. No, it’s nowhere near Fellini’s 8½, its brilliant source. No, the songs are not the greatest ever written. But it is very skillfully done on its own terms.

Sin Nombre is a brilliantly directed thriller about the dangerous path taken by countless undocumented immigrants from Latin America to the US. Tragic and intense, it is not a sentimental tale of phony Hollywood hope. It’s basically a high-voltage melodrama, but the excellent cast and direction raise it to another level.

Up is yet another delightful Pixar concoction. Hilarious, touching, a technical marvel.

The Hangover is a put-your-brain-in-neutral summer farce, but it is powered by an ingenious narrative engine and a pitch-perfect cast. It manages both to celebrate and to satirize some of the more testosterone-crazed bits of our culture.

Some will think me perverse to put The Hurt Locker (by far the most highly praised movie of the year) at the tail end of this list, right under The Hangover. Maybe I am too averse to jumping on bandwagons, even virtuous ones. Although The Hurt Locker is splendidly directed by Katharine Bigelow and acted by Jeremy Renner and others, the script seems to me very flawed – both contrived and fuzzy. Are the ambiguities intentional, or just unclear storytelling? (Nearly everyone I talk to about Renner’s encounters with an Iraqi boy seems to have perceived the events differently; why is this so foggy?) Nonetheless, well worth seeing.

Read this Book: Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris

2009-08-04T13:54:00.001-04:00

The book is over 400 pages (plus 75 pages of notes -- the level of research is phenomenal), yet I found myself wishing it were 2,000 pages or more -- it's that gripping. If you are a movie buff and love to read behind-the-scenes Hollywood lore, this must be one of the best books of its kind ever.

I do have one brief comment about a portion of the content. Harris spends considerable time discussing the decision to remove from "Bonnie and Clyde" (before shooting) all references to Clyde's bisexuality and to a menage a trois involving C W Moss, Clyde and Bonnie.

There seem to be at least two vestigial bits of this remaining in the finished film, and they are not mentioned in the book. I checked my DVD copy last night to be sure.

Near the beginning, in Clyde's "I ain't no loverboy" speech, he says: "There ain't nothin' wrong with me - I don't like boys!" - and as he says it he bumps his head, hard, on the car window he's leaning through, giving the distinct impression that "liking boys" has come up before.

Later, at about the 42-minute mark, C.W. Moss and Buck Barrow are playing checkers, and Clyde is kibitzing. He sits behind CW, his arms around him, showing him moves, while he all but nuzzles CW's neck. At the same time, Bonnie paces back and forth in boredom and sexual frustration, finally pulling Clyde into the bedroom for a brief, unsatisfying talk about whether he is really interested in her physically.

The second scene, especially, is subtle, but the implications seem pretty clear, especially in light of the bisexual ménage a trois in the original version of the screenplay.

As I say, a small point, but I was surprised by its omission.

2008 at the Movies: The Best and the Worst

2009-01-29T22:45:00.007-05:00

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

2008-12-14T19:32:00.002-05:00

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

2008-08-06T21:50:00.001-04:00

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

2008-04-18T17:01:00.001-04:00

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

2008-03-18T23:08:00.002-04:00

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

2008-02-28T12:29:00.002-05:00

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

2008-02-17T18:22:00.002-05:00

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

2008-02-12T22:18:00.006-05:00

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

2008-01-27T16:34:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-24T18:07:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-06T14:47:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-02T09:42:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-01T15:19:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-01T15:16:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-09T10:58:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-08T13:56:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-04T23:55:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-04T20:02:00.002-05:00

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

2007-11-04T12:43:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-03T21:31:00.000-04:00

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

2007-11-03T21:24:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-15T11:20:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-08T10:56:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-16T20:57:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-16T20:53:00.000-04:00

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

2007-07-15T11:28:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-24T12:46:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-17T11:55:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-13T12:59:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-06T21:53:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-15T18:07:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-01T20:32:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-11T13:54:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-11T13:52:00.001-04:00

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

2007-03-08T19:48:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-25T17:32:00.000-05:00

“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…

Short Takes – Recently Seen

2007-02-04T19:08:00.000-05:00

Performance; Lucifer Rising
One of the most bizarre movies ever released by a big studio, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance has flashes of brilliance. Its very best scene looks like an MTV music video of the eighties (the movie was released in 1970): “Memo from T,” a song performed by Mick Jagger. James Fox is effective as the sadistic gangster who takes refuge in the home of Jagger’s reclusive rock star. The photography and editing are engrossing. The script, attempting some sort of counterculture Persona, is uneven and often very bad. The hallucinatory atmosphere is the most noteworthy accomplishment.

Performance was preceded in a recent New York showing by Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, a short film from 1982. The two are well matched – hallucinatory, sometimes effective, often risible. The Anger film has no dialogue and its performers are not professional actors, to say the least. Some of the visions, ranging from Egyptian deities to UFOs, are both entrancing and a bit silly. The degree of campiness intended is not entirely clear.

Notes on a Scandal
Effective as a black comedy, especially in its first half. Judi Dench can bring the house down with the inflection she gives a single word: “Biscuit?” Cate Blanchett is also perfectly cast, and in fact all the actors are fine. But the material deals with such scabrous behavior that it inevitably veers toward self-seriousness. So the last half hour is a bit of a chore to sit through.

The Last King of Scotland
The fact-based story is vividly told by director Kevin McDonald, but something seems lacking. James McAvoy, as the fictionalized young Scot doctor who gets swept up in the Idi Amin government in Uganda, is in nearly every scene. The true historical events come forward to shock him repeatedly, but they inevitably seem to recede while we watch his story, which is less interesting. The fast pace of the film keeps it engrossing but leads to a sketchiness in historical detail. Forrest Whittaker’s fine performance as Idi Amin is technically a supporting role, but he dominates every scene he is in. Worth seeing, but it may send you to other sources for a more complete picture of those horrific years in Uganda.

The Italian
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.

Becket
“They don’t make ‘em like that any more,” said someone at the end of a recent New York revival screening of this 1964 Oscar nominee. Whether this is something to be sorry about or grateful for is a matter to contemplate. The material gets a rather too heavy and reverential Hollywood treatment, but the photography by Geoffrey Unsworth (2001, Cabaret) is often very beautiful, and the scenery-devouring performances by Richard Burton and, especially, Peter O’Toole, make the film well worth sitting through (it runs 2 and a half hours).

David Lynch: Inland Empire and Eraserhead

2007-02-04T19:04:00.000-05:00

One aspect of David Lynch’s uniqueness is that his “bad” films are often nearly as fascinating as his “good” ones, and his “good” ones are as likely to be perplexing and unsatisfying as his “bad” ones. The “good” group is generally thought to be led by Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and the “bad” by Dune and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. All are worth seeing, but I won’t try to predict how any individual will react to them, except that you're not likely to be indifferent.

Recently I caught Lynch’s newest, the three-hour hallucination Inland Empire, and his first feature, Eraserhead, a 90-minute hallucination from 1977. The new film has its moments, but also its irritations, and it goes on endlessly. Eraserhead, in contrast, is all of a piece, and probably Lynch’s most beautifully realized and thoroughly satisfying movie.

It’s probably pointless to describe the surrealist sights and sounds in a Lynch film. They should be experienced by any literate movie-lover. I will note that Inland Empire is best when it is most “conventional,” when it seems to be about Laura Dern and Justin Theroux acting in a movie directed by Jeremy Irons. That “plot” gets dropped about halfway through, then resurfaces at the end. There is also a wonderful recurring sequence involving big humanoid bunnies in a Beckettesque sitcom (as I say, it’s better experienced than described). Eraserhead too moves past the initial quasi-plot into a dream state. But it never lost me, the way Empire, and earlier, Mulholland Drive, did. The Museum of Modern Art’s newly restored print of Eraserhead is a beauty.

Looking Back: 2006 at the Movies

2007-01-21T19:47:00.000-05:00

Tuesday’s Oscar nominations will begin the final round of looking back at the year just past. Possibly there is just too much of this obsessive list making and nominating and award-giving. Still, it’s not a bad thing to commemorate the lasting achievements – good and bad – among the releases of the last 12 months.

It was a brutal year. Several of the best films of 2006, including my four top favorites, are rated R for their violence. No doubt a number of despicable and awful movies were similarly rated. But these four enormously powerful movies didn’t shy away from portraying the brutality their subjects and stories called for:

United 93 – Many people seem to have avoided seeing this film. I encourage you to get over this reluctance – you won’t regret it.

Pan’s Labyrinth – Unique and wonderful, it’s getting a gratifyingly big advertising push and actually placed number 7 in this past weekend’s national box office tally, while playing at only 609 theaters.

The Departed – The biggest box-office success among my favorites, it’s bringing Martin Scorsese some much-deserved praise and awards. I recommend its source material, too, the nifty Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, which The Departed follows scene for scene.

Children of Men – Also currently filling theaters, though it’s too early to say if it will turn a profit, since it cost $75 million to produce. A terrifying premise, excitingly well crafted.

In addition, Casino Royale, the best “popcorn flick” of the year, was quite brutal for a PG-13 film. And Lady Vengeance and Curse of the Golden Flower, though more flawed than the other films I’ve mentioned, were both stunningly well directed and also hyperbolically violent.

Extraordinary documentaries have been giving many dramatic features strong competition among the best films of the last couple of years. Several of these premiered on television, but they are definitely movies, not just “TV shows,” and they should not be missed.

When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s look at Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is, like United 93, a movie that many people have convinced themselves they’d rather not see. Don’t make that mistake. It’s beautiful, amazing, and yes, it will shake you profoundly.

Andy Warhol – This brilliant 4-hour biographical film about the iconic Sixties artist was shown on PBS, played briefly in a few theaters, and is now on DVD. It handles a fascinating subject superbly.

49 Up – The seventh in a series of British documentaries, following the same dozen or so individuals every 7 years since they were children. It’s utterly engrossing (watching them grow up and age before your eyes is quite an experience), and if like me you’re close to the subjects’ age, you will be moved to tears more than once. No need to have seen the previous films – they are summarized – but I recommend watching the whole series if you can.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston – moving, fascinating, completely entertaining, this is the story of an eccentric and influential musician and songwriter, whose emotional and mental illnesses have played a central role in his life and career. Barely released in theaters, this is a great “sleeper” to try if you’re looking for a good indie film to rent.

The Road to Guantanamo, a hybrid of documentary and drama, has the potential to change minds – and lives. Whatever your feelings about the U.S. prison at Guantanamo, you owe it to yourself to see this remarkable and disturbing movie.

In the category of “most overlooked” (also known as “you should rent them right now, even though you may not have heard of them”):

The Science of Sleep – not as widely seen as Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I liked it better. Think of it as Truffaut’s romantic comedy Stolen Kisses with special effects that Dali might have designed.

Half Nelson – featuring two of the very best performances of the year

Friends with Money – not as good as Nicole Holofcener’s previous film, Lovely and Amazing, but still a charming, off-center comedy

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story – a funny and imaginative “non-adaptation” of the famous 18^th-century English novel

The War Tapes – Unpolished but strong documentary featuring footage shot in Iraq by GIs.

Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple – yet another excellent documentary, scheduled to be shown on PBS in April

Most overrated movies of the year:

Little Children – Satires of suburbia are great when they work, excruciating when they misfire. And irritating when they get better reviews than they deserve.

Babel – Stars suffering glamorously. The movie deeply aches to be important – a sure-fire way to be annoying instead. A waste of great photography and editing, and a good supporting cast.

Three Times – You’ve likely never heard of this festival favorite from Taiwan, so it’s unfair of me to pick on it. Nonetheless the critical raves it received mystify me.

There is also the “not terrible, but terribly overrated” category, where I would place the charming-but-airheaded indie comedy Little Miss Sunshine and the never-before-released-in-the-US Army of Shadows, a “thriller” that failed to thrill me, although it has some well-wrought existential angst if that’s your thing.

Finally, there were three noteworthy disappointments from talented directors:

Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly,

Michael Mann’s Miami Vice,

and worst of all, Brian De Palma’sThe Black Dahlia

Not such a bad year, all in all. I hope this gives you a few items to add to your Netflix list, or even better, to go out and see in one of those endangered species, a movie theater.

Dreamgirls

2007-01-07T13:55:00.000-05:00

Dreamgirls is an enjoyable if cheesy spectacle. The problems that weighed it down on Broadway – a mostly mediocre-or-worse score and a clumsily constructed and written roman-a-clef story based on a worthy subject (the history of black pop music in the 1960s and 1970s) – remain in the film version.

Writer-director Bill Condon, to his credit, doesn’t condescend to the material and instead meets it head-on. But while there is much visual energy and storytelling verve, especially in the first half, there is little if any discernible irony. One might hope that the brainy filmmaker who gave us Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, and who wrote the movie adaptation for the more sardonic Chicago, would approach this material the way Douglas Sirk handled soap operas in the 1950s (Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind). With a stylized use of actors as well as brilliant, double-edged visuals, Sirk allowed audiences who came for soap to wallow in it, but those who were attuned to what the director was doing could relish the irony, subtle social criticism and even parody. Instead, Condon seems really to be a fan of the original show, and he successfully translates his own enthusiasm into explosive montages of sound and image that get the audience as buzzed as any I’ve seen in a movie theater in some time.

This is not a negligible accomplishment. But it’s a hollow one. At least the first hour is fun, telling of the rise of the singing group The Dreams and the eventual dismissal of their lead singer, Effie (Jennifer Hudson), who sings “too black” and looks too unlike a fashion model for the mass success with white audiences their manager envisions. This part ends with the most famous number, “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going,” as verbally clumsy as ever, but brilliantly performed by Hudson and smashingly filmed by Condon. But after this dramatic high point, the story has no clear place to go. The last hour of the movie gives us one dud song after another, including a couple of new ones, “Patience” and “Listen,” that are treated like masterpieces but most definitely are not. The showbiz-movie clichés pile higher. Condon tries to breeze past them but they inevitably gum up the works.

As noted elsewhere, Eddie Murphy is brilliant as singer Jimmy “Thunder” Early, and livens up both his dialogue and his musical numbers considerably. He and Jennifer Hudson, along with Anika Noni Rose as the third original Dream, add considerably to the movie’s charm. Jamie Foxx and Beyoncé Knowles, the nominal stars, are completely unsuited to the melodrama of the film’s second half. That melodrama is only half-heartedly concocted and staged, anyway – the movie might even benefit from some all-out hysteria to liven up the proceedings.

The often dazzling visuals come from a team of relative newcomers: cinematographer Tobias Schliessler and editor Virginia Katz (who have both worked with Condon before), along with Oscar-winning production designer John Myhre (Memoirs of a Geisha, Chicago). They’ve done fine, audience-pleasing work here. Now we can hope that they and Bill Condon will take on better material next time, and accomplish something more lasting and more worthy of their talents.

The Best of 2006

2007-01-01T23:31:00.000-05:00

10 best features

United 93

Pan's Labyrinth

The Departed

Children of Men

Casino Royale

The Science of Sleep

Lady Vengeance

The Road to Guantanamo

Friends with Money

The Queen

5 best documentaries

When the Levees Broke

Andy Warhol

49 Up

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple

Runners-up, features:

The Prestige

Letters From Iwo Jima

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Half Nelson

Curse of the Golden Flower

V For Vendetta

Runners-up, documentaries:

The War Tapes

An Inconvenient Truth

Wordplay

Special mention for extraordinary comedy performances:

Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada

Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat

Worst films (that I saw):

Little Children

X-Men: The Last Stand

The Notorious Bettie Page

Miami Vice

The Black Dahlia

Four Recent Films: Extraordinary Images - and Brutality

2007-01-01T22:16:00.000-05:00

So many movies have opened in the last few weeks that it will take me a while to catch up. But I did see these four noteworthy ones between Christmas and New Year’s. Interestingly, they are all rated R for their violence (as are two others I haven’t yet seen, Apocalypto and Blood Diamond) – not light-hearted holiday fare. Several also feature extraordinary, phantasmagorical imagery – it’s been a fine year for brilliant cinematography. And more than one will be on my best-of-the-year list.

Pan’s Labyrinth
This is one of the most stunningly well directed and most daringly original of recent films – even though many of its elements and textures are direct homages to earlier films, paintings, stories and genres. A dark, scary fairy tale set in 1944 during the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth has an entrancing and spellbinding narrative power. Two performances are extraordinary: Ivana Baquero as the young girl who discovers an alternate reality of fairies and monsters, and Sergi Lopez as the black-hearted villain of the piece (the evil stepfather of many a fairy tale, here also a fascist military officer). And the photography and design couldn’t be improved upon. I felt a bit let down by the conclusion, in part because the first three-quarters of the story is so strong. But this is absolutely one of the year’s best films.

The Curse of the Golden Flower
Because Miramax had delayed the release of one of them for more than a year, US filmgoers were treated to two romantic masterpieces by Zhang Yimou in 2004: Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Extravagantly and very beautifully designed, with scenes of deliberately stylized and exaggerated martial arts action, they seemed like two cousins of Ang Lee’s wonderful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Hero retold a myth about the origins of Chinese nationalism via multiple perspectives, each with a distinct (and stunning) design scheme. It was my favorite film of 2004. Not far behind was the slightly more conventional House of Flying Daggers, with extraordinary action sequences incorporated into a tale of tragic romance.

Now Zhang’s third foray into historical action fantasy has opened here. Although much less satisfying dramatically and emotionally than its predecessors, it is if anything even more astonishing to look at. A slow-simmering (and occasionally ridiculous) melodrama of court intrigue in the 10th century, it features some of the most wonderful sets and costumes ever filmed. The star power of Gong Li and Chow Yun-Fat is used to full advantage in the first two-thirds of the story, involving a jaw-droppingly dysfunctional royal family. But when the extravagant battle scenes arrive at the end, they lack emotional power. One is left admiring the pretty pictures – almost never the case in Hero or Flying Daggers. So this is definitely a disappointment, but nonetheless not to be missed if you set your expectations accordingly.

Children of Men
It’s hard to think of three films less alike than Y tu mama tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Children of Men. Yet they are the three most recent works of the same director, Alfonso Cuaron, and their uniform excellence marks him as one of the most versatile and skilled filmmakers around. Children of Men is deceptively simple in its approach, and, expecting something darkly magical like the Harry Potter movie, I was puzzled at first. But the director’s technique here, without often drawing attention to itself, builds extraordinary tension and power, and by the end I was in tears.

A dystopian vision of the near future, Children of Men is based on a novel by P.D. James, best known for her superlative detective stories. The year is 2027, and all the women on earth have become infertile. In London, one of the few cities to escape destruction from unspecified war and terrorism, police state conditions exist, particularly for illegal immigrants (and apparently there are few if any legal immigrants). Our protagonist, Theo (Clive Owen), gets pulled into an underground rebellion against his will, finding out that the world’s infertility is not so complete after all – and to describe more of the plot than that would be unfair.

The style could be described as docudrama much of the time (with a few lyrical beats), and the immediacy of the brutal violence really packs a wallop. The performances are very effective, and although five screenwriters are credited, the tightly knit script doesn’t have a patchwork quality at all. Emmanuel Lubezki, the master cinematographer of Sleepy Hollow and The New World, provides exactly the right harsh, vivid look for this story. My only complaint is indicative of how well executed the whole piece is: there’s barely room to think, or breathe, during the 109-minute running time. Like me, you may find yourself wanting to turn to the novel for more background and detail. But don’t let that stop you from seeing this excellent film as soon as possible.

Letters from Iwo Jima
Told in Clint Eastwood’s signature low-key, “classical cinema” style (in some of his movies, it has seemed to me more like the lack of a style), Letters from Iwo Jima is quietly, deeply moving, a very effective meditation on the horrors of war. For an American director, particularly one associated with conservative politics and a strong, silent type of macho, telling a World War II story from the point of view of Japanese soldiers carries some significance just by doing it at all – and by doing it well, Eastwood can force viewers to reexamine their own feelings about war and patriotism. Along with its somewhat less focused and less effective companion film, Flags of Our Fathers, this movie builds a complex, thoughtful mosaic with multiple perspectives.

The performances are very good, especially Kazunari Ninomiya as the young draftee Saigo and Ken Watanabe as General Kuribayashi. The script does not always avoid the obvious and the unsubtle, especially in flashbacks to the soldiers’ lives before Iwo Jima, such as the tale of one man’s being branded a coward because he refused an order to kill a family’s pet dog. But the feeling of inevitability, of impending doom, of the tragic waste of lives, is well captured. Tom Stern’s desaturated color cinematography, closely matched to that in Flags of Our Fathers, is among the best of the year.

The Anti-Bourne: Matt Damon in a Far More Serious Spy Movie

2006-12-20T17:09:00.000-05:00

Serious and thoughtful, smoothly textured and deliberately paced, The Good Shepherd is a very different type of spy movie from Matt Damon’s Bourne pictures, which are all briskness and nervous kinetic energy, with barely a meaningful thought in their heads. This new film, written by Eric Roth (Munich, Forrest Gump) and directed by Robert De Niro, is about the origins and history of the CIA, covering the years 1939-1961 in the life of one important agent, from college right through to his involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. In fact, it could occasionally use more kinetic energy of some sort (though the Bourne type of pinball pacing wouldn’t work here), but it’s a respectable piece of work, never less than interesting – yet rarely generating the intensity or sparks one hopes for based on the fine opening scenes.

Well, not the very first scenes, which establish what will turn out to be a too-contrived spy mystery concerning the Bay of Pigs operation. That material, puzzling and murky enough to be annoying at first, alternates with flashbacks to Yale in 1939, where Edward Wilson (Damon), a poetry student, gets tapped for membership first by the Skull and Bones secret society, and then by government spies. We learn that his naval officer father was a suicide amid rumors of treason. Edward is recruited to spy on one of his professors, and then eventually to go to London as part of a new military intelligence organization, the OSS.

This part of the story fascinates, draws you right in to both the mechanics of spying and the way Edward’s personality is being formed and changed. It may actually be unfair to complain that the intrigue generated in the first hour sets you up for a later letdown. It’s probably inevitable that the payoff won’t match our expectations. But at least at first, The Good Shepherd is bracingly reminiscent of Graham Greene, if far less subtle. As we realize that many of the things required of Edward will be horrendous, morally indefensible – and as he realizes it too – the movie casts a real, if too brief, spell.

Part of the problem is the amount of time spent on Edward’s personal life: his blossoming romance with a young deaf woman (Tammy Blanchard) and his ambivalent and potentially disastrous flirtation with a classmate’s sister – and senator’s daughter (Angelina Jolie). At first the light romance contrasts pleasingly with the darkening spy plot. There’s also a disquieting, not entirely defined aura of emotional and sexual repression in Edward’s interactions both with women and with his fellow spies. But his life at home eventually takes on the arc of a rather dreary soap opera, and begins to drag down the rest of the story – with at least one too many heavily ironic juxtapositions: sentimental songs underscore The Hard Truth of what Edward does for a living, and the destruction it is bringing to his life and his family.

The best sections of the movie end with World War II. Once we have entered the Cold War, both the spy and personal parts of the plot begin to seem somewhat airless and preordained – not to mention often skimpy, lacking in nuance or detail, shallow. (There is one brilliant exception, when a dubious Russian defector, given LSD as a “truth serum,” unsettles the CIA agents by telling them the Soviets are not even a real threat; this scene is far less routine than the rest of the second half.) The model here may be John le Carre…but the results fall short. Nonetheless, the film has an indispensable secret weapon, and his name is Matt Damon.

Damon is splendid in a very challenging role. Edward’s most notable characteristic is his stony silence, expressionless, inscrutable. But Damon makes this silence mean many things: the bafflement of a shy youth encountering sex and love, the appalled realization of just how brutal and awful spying can be, the scary determination of a master adversary. He fights gamely against the soapy sludge of the later scenes, and he is genuinely frightening in a Michael Corleone-like episode of icy, heartless betrayal at the film’s climax (though the script hasn’t earned that kind of payoff, and the plot surrounding the scene is way too contrived). It’s a remarkable performance, convincingly taking us from initial innocence to final corruption (even if Edward still wants to believe his honor is intact). Matt Damon holds this movie together and flies it home.

The large supporting cast is often excellent, with the standouts being Michael Gambon as Edward’s mysterious poetry professor, Tammy Blanchard as the heartbreaking first girlfriend, and Oleg Stefan as a Russian spy code-named Ulysses. Director De Niro has a couple of effective scenes as a character based on the OSS/CIA’s founding father Bill Donovan. But as a fictionalized Kim Philby, the usually marvelous Billy Crudup is hampered by a fey British accent that fits him uncomfortably. And while Angelina Jolie and Eddie Redmayne give their valiant best as Edward’s wife and son, their unconvincing roles ultimately defeat them.

The physical production of The Good Shepherd is of a very high caliber. Robert Richardson is a peerless cinematographer, and the movie often looks just stunning, both in shadowy rooms with dramatic, noirish lighting and in vivid exteriors set on several continents. The costumes (by Ann Roth) and production design (by Jeannine Claudia Oppewall, who also did Seabiscuit and Catch Me If You Can) take us convincingly through the various eras and settings. (Let’s also give some credit to whoever aptly decided to fit Matt Damon with perhaps the least flattering pair of eyeglasses in the history of the cinema; this is not the right movie for a sexy, glamorous spy.) But the gloomy and beautiful musical score, by Bruce Fowler and Marcelo Zarvos, is far too plentiful, overemphasizing every emotional moment and leaving very little room for a viewer to breathe, much less respond spontaneously.

Considering that this is only the second film Robert De Niro has directed (and that it has been 13 years since the first), his storytelling ability and skill with actors is impressive. And still it’s almost impossible not to imagine what Martin Scorsese or Alfred Hitchcock (or Paul Greengrass, who directed the second Bourne movie, brilliantly, as well as this year’s finest film, United 93) might have done with the same material. With the touch of a film artist, the audience might feel real terror, might gasp with laughter at some perverse, daring bits of business, and might be whisked more confidently past the soap and contrivance; without it we have to settle for an interesting, flawed story well told – not the worst of compromises.

Short Takes – Recently Seen

2006-12-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

Casino Royale
Simply put: the best Bond in nearly 40 years. It may not have the pop-classic panache of the first five Sean Connery films, but it shows up all the ones between starring Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, for the silly monstrosities they are. Daniel Craig is nearly perfect as a steely, scary, sexy 007 without a trace of camp. Martin Campbell’s direction, the photography, the editing are extraordinarily skillful. The only spy film to compare to it in recent years is Paul Greengrass’s equally amazing The Bourne Supremacy, which surpasses Casino Royale in artistry though not in pop fizziness. Although slick spectacles like this are not to be confused with art, let me quote Pauline Kael’s review of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the last really first-rate Bond: “I know that on one level it’s not worth doing, but it sure has been done brilliantly.” The only really shoddy element is the wretched theme song, which we have to endure twice.

Babel
Babel’s heavy ache to be important and worthy reminds one of Crash, and like that widely overrated film, it has good elements: a strong cast, good photography and editing, the skill to hold an audience’s attention through multiple connected stories. But it only rarely seems spontaneous, or as stirring as it wants to be. The best scenes involve the two Arab shepherd boys who put the main part of the plot into motion; and also Adriana Barraza as the ill-fated Mexican immigrant nanny of two Anglo California kids. Tied for worst are the scenes set in Japan concerning a deaf teenager whose longing for emotional comfort turns into a dangerous (and ridiculous) obsession with sex; and Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as glamorously suffering American tourists in Morocco. Babel lacks the intricate jigsaw structure and cutting of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s previous film, 21 Grams, but it is also less annoying than that picture was.

Happy Feet
Some of the visuals are stunning, and there is the novelty of skilled tap dancing incorporated into animated animal characters using miraculous new technologies. But the script is far from being as compelling or delightful as Babe, George Miller’s earlier entertainment for smart kids of all ages. And I had a mixed reaction to the grab bag of contemporary tunes that periodically turn the movie into an Antarctic MTV for 8 year olds. Still, much of the comedy is charming and the adventure quest of our penguin hero will hold your interest.

The History Boys
Although this film has been nearly as overpraised as the slick, empty play it’s based on, it can be very entertaining if you don’t take it too seriously. The mostly excellent performances of the stage cast (playing the students and faculty of an English boys’ school in the 1980s) have been preserved for posterity, and especially in the cases of Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, and Samuel Barnett, the preservation is very valuable. Some of the more glaring examples of gay self-hatred that were woven uncomfortably tightly into the play’s script have been toned down or omitted, and I was happy to see this change, since these elements were not handled skillfully enough by author Alan Bennett to have much resonance beyond an unpleasant aftertaste. I think of The History Boys as a sophisticated sitcom, and its nominal subject, two approaches to learning represented by two teachers, seems to me just a McGuffin on which to hang the jokes, many of which remain quite charming. The look of the film is cheap and it feels like a rush job, but this is not too damaging to the breezy writing and acting that provide most of its appeal.

For Your Consideration
I’m not the biggest fan of Christopher Guest’s satirical mock-documentaries, but they all have moments and performances of sweet-sour charm and hilarity, and this is no exception. Wild-eyed, unpredictable Catherine O’Hara is the standout here, and it’s of course amusing that she is garnering year-end award recognition for a film that not-so-gently skewers Hollywood’s obsession with such awards. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the film-within-the-film, Home for Purim, is too silly and sketchy to be completely effective as satire. But there are plenty of laughs, and if you don’t expect too much, this is a pleasant little movie.

Miraculous Moments: Company on Broadway

2006-12-10T16:08:00.000-05:00

I don’t really go to all that many plays and musicals, but this season I’ve been lucky enough to experience three wonderful scenes that had an electrifying effect on audiences. The musical plays that surrounded these moments have all three been very uneven, but the best parts were good enough to make them worthwhile:

In Spring Awakening, when one of the students (in a play set in Germany in the 1890s!) first pulls a microphone from the inside of his jacket, and his classmates follow suit, as they sing “The Bitch of Living,” a rock song about the frustrations and excitement of adolescence.

In Grey Gardens, the opening scene and number (“The Revolutionary Costume for Today”) of the second act, which brings the cult documentary film to startling and hilarious musical life.

And now, in the new revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, the final song, “Being Alive.”

The actors also serve as the orchestra in this production of Company. Our protagonist, Bobby, a single man in a group of mostly married friends, is the only character not to play an instrument during the first two hours. Then at the end, he walks over to the piano, sits down, opens the keyboard, and begins to play – beautifully – “Being Alive.” And when he starts singing, Raul Esparza’s gorgeous and heartfelt performance brings the house down – no dry eyes anywhere.

The song and the performer are so good, in fact, that they highlight the shortcomings of the rest of the evening. You realize just how shallow and unmemorable the script is, as well as the overall conception. There are other very fine songs, but few carry the emotional impact of “Being Alive.” The direction and design are excellent, as they were in last season’s excellent production of Sweeney Todd. Even better than in that production, the music here is particularly well served by the actors-as-orchestra setup. But it all comes together with full power only in that last scene. And yet it’s enough, and it’s more than one gets from most musicals.

"Is the 'War on Terror' a Myth?" and Other Questions

2006-12-03T13:23:00.000-05:00

This is an article about questions, not answers.

In the blogosphere, especially, many people shout out very loud, confident answers, explanations, conspiracy theories, and name-calling tirades. Some of these blustery monologues could be improved just by starting with the right questions – and by admitting that we don’t necessarily have the answers.

In America as a whole, the culture of conformity rules. Entirely too many people prefer to eat at the same chain restaurants, wear the same brands of clothing, have the same opinions about the same movies and television shows, and most insidiously of all, either ignore politics and world affairs altogether, or else follow the group-think political inclinations and worldview dictated by their chosen tribe – roughly and broadly, either the Red State Club or the Blue State Club. It’s the duty of citizens in a democracy to be skeptical both of those currently in power and those who would like to take their places. And skeptical citizens should be asking questions.

I have a few.

Is the “War on Terror” really a war, or is it an advertising slogan? Is it necessary? Is it making us safer or less safe? How can we tell? Whose word can we trust?

Was military action the best and only possible response to 9/11? Or did we blow an important opportunity to win hearts and minds? Did our hunger for “justice” (i.e., vengeance) blind us to the long-term consequences of our actions?

Why was so much of the world sympathetic to us, “on our side” in the weeks immediately after 9/11, and why does so much of the world now, in Europe as well as the Middle East, think of us as the Big Bully on the Block? Are they right? Do we care what they think? If not, why not? What will be the consequences of years or decades in which most of the countries of the world see us as a club-wielding empire?

If most of the potential terrorists in the world are angry young Muslim men, taught to see the US as the Great Satan and the killer of children and the friend of autocratic Arab regimes, shouldn’t we try to change their minds, demonstrate that they’re wrong? Why instead do we bomb first and ask questions later, keep hundreds in detention for years without charges, maintain our largely uncritical “friendships” with the oppressive governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, prefer threats to diplomacy – in short, why do we go out of our way to prove to these young men that we are exactly as awful as they have been taught we are?

Do terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, Bali and elsewhere confirm the existence of a sinister network of terror? Or were they the work of separate groups of extremists inspired by similar ideas? Is the distinction worth making? Is Al Qaeda an actual group with members, or is it the “brand name” of a style and strategy of anti-Western violence? If in fact we are facing separate groups of extremists, not a global network, what does that tell us about how we should be answering this threat? Have our efforts to date accomplished anything? Have they inspired new extremists and thus led to new danger?

If, as some have said, our post-9/11 stance has been based in part on that of Israel, a state that has faced Arab terrorism for decades, do we have lessons to learn from the Palestinian conflict that we haven’t heeded? Does following a policy of always striking back after each and every attack in fact give the terrorists what they want – an escalation of conflict and another step away from any possible peace or resolution? Are there similar lessons from other “intractable” tribal conflicts, as in Northern Ireland and the Balkans, where extremists on either side who don’t want peace only have to blow something up to derail any ongoing negotiations?

Does the fact that there has not yet been another 9/11-scale attack, or even a smaller one, inside the US, mean that the Bush policies are working? Or does it mean that the actual threat has been poorly understood and described – or in fact deliberately distorted?

If we are facing an imminent threat of more massive violence here at home, why have so many of the “plots” uncovered in the US since 9/11 (e.g., in Lackawanna and Detroit) been so puny or in many cases actually nonexistent? Why have so many of the “dangerous terrorists” (“These are really bad guys,” we were reassured by Donald Rumsfeld) held at Guantanamo been released? Why have so few of the rest been charged? Did we possibly overreact and arrest a lot of innocent people? Is this something we should be proud of?

Why have we spent so many billions on an air travel security system that many experts warn provides only an illusion of safety? Why do we have laws like the US Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act (and non-laws like warrantless wiretapping of US citizens) that seem to contradict our own ideals as expressed in our Constitution, as well as international ideals as expressed in the Geneva Conventions? Have these documents become irrelevant in a more dangerous modern world? What other bits of our democratic heritage are now dispensable?

Why are we in Iraq? Why did we go to begin with? Why were so many of us so gung-ho to go originally, and why are so many of us now in such a hurry to leave? Did we ever really know what was going on there before the invasion, or what the potential consequences of invading a country and dismantling a government could be? Was Saddam a genuine threat, or just a gigantic pain in the ass? Which would have caused more death and suffering: allowing him to remain in power as a mass-murdering thug, or deposing him and setting in motion the murderous conflicts (featuring new casts of mass-murdering thugs) going on in Iraq now? Was he in league with terrorists? Who says so? Is there proof? If not, what have we done?

Why is Afghanistan no closer to genuine democracy or stability now (beyond Kabul and a small perimeter around it) than it was five years ago? Does the US government give a damn?

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, what will be the ultimate consequences of wiping out the sitting authoritarian governments, replacing them with nominally democratic but very weak regimes – and then turning our attention elsewhere? Have we set up big disasters to follow in the near future?

Did the brilliant BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis get it right in The Power of Nightmares, a movie so radioactive no film or TV company in the US will touch it? Was he correct in describing 9/11 as the last desperate act of a small, failed group of Islamists – an act that did more than they could have imagined to revive both radical Islam and American neoconservatism, which was also at a dead end in 1999-2001? Is it possibly true, as Curtis asserts, that governments and politicians, striving to maintain their power in the post-Great Society, post-Cold War world, have latched on to the War on Terror as their means of survival? Have they taken advantage of the fear and lack of knowledge among ordinary people to say, “Don’t worry – this stuff is too complicated and frightening for you to understand or for us to even reveal it to you – but we’ll protect you…just keep voting for us”? Does the Republican rhetoric of the last two elections (“A vote for the Democrats is a vote to let the terrorists win”) back up this assertion? Do the Democrats offer any kind of viable alternative, or just a craven me-too-ism?

Is anyone telling us the truth? Are we interested in pressing the point until they do?

I’m just asking.

Remembering Robert Altman

2006-11-26T20:38:00.000-05:00

Robert Altman’s free-flowing, improvisatory style remains unique. Although he has been widely eulogized during this last week as one of the great filmmakers, and had inspired a near-reverential devotion in many directors as well as filmgoers, few have tried to imitate him (and fewer have succeeded). The closest offspring may have come on television: the improvised content (and wickedly knowing satire of Southern California) of Curb Your Enthusiasm; the off-center, pseudo-documentary style of The Office; the multilayered characters and storylines and camera movements of the best early episodes of ER and The West Wing. Even this is not an exact comparison, but those shows are closer to Altman than, say, Crash, the multi-character, multi-plot Oscar winner that could be compared (unfavorably) to Nashville and Short Cuts.

Altman’s career was remarkably long, and he successfully reinvented himself more than once, but his greatest achievements nearly all came in the seven year period that started with M*A*S*H (1970) and ended with Three Women (1977). He made seven brilliant movies in that time, and only he could have made them: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville, bookended by and M*A*S*H and Three Women (the first half of which is quite wonderful). He even made a few other movies during the period that are generally less highly regarded: Brewster McCloud, Images, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians. A Wedding, which directly followed Three Women, was skillful but rather pedestrian and ordinary, and a long dry period followed.

I was in film school at USC during the 1976-78 period, and several of the professors at that industry-oriented school were openly contemptuous of Altman: “He lets actors improvise…He’s being irresponsible with other people’s money.” That he could make a wide-ranging masterpiece like Nashville for slightly over $2-million meant nothing to them. Since M*A*S*H was the only big money-maker he ever directed, the studios never really respected him. And that may be a clue to the lack of imitators.

Where did that unique ‘70s Altman style come from? Nothing before M*A*S*H had prepared anyone for it. Howard Hawks had successfully used overlapping dialogue in several great films of the thirties and forties, and there is some of that spirit in Altman, combined with a hippie/antiwar/anti-establishment attitude. (He pioneered the use of Dolby Stereo and multilayered dialogue tracks, enhancing the "everyone talking at once" atmosphere with cutting-edge technology.) There’s also a lyricism that balances the hard satire. This is especially apparent in McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Then there is the unique visual beauty of the films, the wide, wide Panavision images with their slow glides and zooms. Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography in both The Long Goodbye and McCabe provides some of the most innovative visual highlights of that decade.

The use of music is also enormously creative. Nothing could complement McCabe & Mrs. Miller better than Leonard Cohen’s songs. John Williams creates brilliant and amusing variations on the title song of The Long Goodbye to accompany different scenes and moods. The actors created their own songs in Nashville, and while any country music fan will tell you those songs weren’t genuinely country, several of them serve beautifully to expand on the characters and situations in the film.

Last but far from least are the actors. Actors loved Altman and lined up to work with him. The results of the improvisations could be variable, but when they worked, amazing performances could happen: Elliot Gould in M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye and California Split; Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller; Lily Tomlin, Ronee Blakley, Henry Gibson, Geraldine Chaplin, and several others in Nashville; Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek in Three Women.

Of the movies that came later, everyone has a few favorites, but not many would argue that the work comes close to that first flowering (made mostly when Altman was in his mid to late forties). I like best among them Vincent and Theo, a marvelous biography of Van Gogh that too few have seen, and the smashing entertainment Gosford Park. Perhaps I need to see The Player again, since I notice it turns up on nearly everyone’s list of favorites. My impression at the time was that it was pretty good but was being overrated because of critics’ affection for the director.

I grew up 50 miles from Nashville, and I attended the local premiere of the great Altman film there in 1975. (I had naively written to the director the year before offering my services as an assistant for little or no pay; I was only 17, so this was unlikely to happen, and at any rate I never got a reply.) My friends and I absolutely loved the movie, and I envisioned it doing great boxoffice and winning Oscars. But although it lasted three months at that first-run theater, many people in Nashville were less than thrilled with what they saw. “I guess we didn’t realize we were all so stupid,” said my parents, meaning the way locals are portrayed in the film. And Minnie Pearl was interviewed on the local news. “That’s not the Nashville that I’ve known and loved my whole life.”

And Minnie was right. Brilliant as the film is, it is not a realistic depiction of Nashville. It is a beautifully wrought, satirical fantasy, and it takes place in another city entirely…call it Altmanville – the place, in fact, where nearly all his films are set. I go back there to visit periodically, to see some of the finest, most unusual movies ever made. They form Mr. Altman’s legacy, and it’s a powerful one. He will be missed.

Sufjan Stevens's Songs for Christmas

2006-11-26T20:32:00.000-05:00

Sufjan Stevens is on the cusp, moving from cult figure into some sort of stardom:

His summer release, The Avalanche, a collection of outtakes from his masterful Illinois album, was a very mixed bag, with some very good cuts, but far from his best work. Yet for the first time he broke into Billboard’s top 100 albums chart.
His three-night concert run at New York’s Town Hall in late September sold out almost immediately (helped by a $25 ticket price). When I wrote to his Brooklyn-based record label, Asthmatic Kitty, to bemoan the fact that I (and I assume many other fans) would be missing the concerts, I got a reply that indicated that Sufjan and his company were taken aback by the success, surprised by the quick sellouts. They admitted that the $25 price may have been a miscalculation, since tickets were immediately, inevitably being offered on Craigslist and through brokers for $200 or more – and fans were the losers. (An amazing new 10-minute song, “Majesty, Snowbird,” was captured by someone at one of the Town Hall shows and is currently a popular clip on YouTube.)
A recent half-hour set on PBS’s Austin City Limits probably introduced Sufjan to more new listeners than ever before. (See clips on PBS’s web site.)
And now there is another good news/bad news announcement on the Asthmatic Kitty web site…Sufjan’s new boxed set, Songs for Christmas, is sold out and backordered. (Amazon seems to still have stock.)

All this growing popularity is immensely well deserved. Sufjan Stevens’s “orchestral folk-pop” is unique and often breathtakingly, heartbreakingly beautiful. The soft-spoken yet incantatory power of songs like “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!” and “Casimir Pulaski Day” helped make Illinois the best album I’ve heard in the last few years. And Seven Swans, his most overtly religious album, contains several songs (such as “We Won’t Need Legs to Stand” and “All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands”) that move a cynical old agnostic like me to tears. Poetic and mystical rather than preachy, Sufjan’s Christianity remains in the background and on the edges of his very fine “secular” works, Michigan and Illinois, the first two in a projected series of 50 albums named after the 50 states.

Inevitably Jesus is somewhat more prominent in the new boxed Christmas set. It consists of 5 EP-length discs, 42 cuts in all (some, as on all his albums, brief instrumental fragments or transitions), two hours of music for slightly more than the price of one CD. Sufjan has been doing an annual mini-album each Christmas, mixing traditional and original material, both religious and secular, and this set collects the four previous discs and adds a new, longer one for 2006. His melodic style is well matched to holiday songs. If the thought of new renditions of “The Little Drummer Boy,” “The First Noel,” or (three times, no less) “O Come O Come Emmanuel” makes you gag, this may not be the best new album for your collection. But if you’re a fan (as you may have gathered, I am), you won’t want to miss it.

Several of the best original songs are sad or wistful or even angry. They provide a good counterpoint to such whimsical fun as “Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance.” Among these new blue-Christmas classics are “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” – a possibly autobiographical piece, simple and lovely and sad; and “Did I Make You Cry on Christmas Day? (Well, You Deserved It!)” – a good quarreling-lovers holiday weepie in the tradition of Joni Mitchell’s “River.” (And actually, that’s only a medium-length title for a Sufjan song.)

The new 2006 disc closes with three of these less-than-joyful songs in Sufjan’s patented mini-oratorio mode. They are wonderful: “Jupiter Winter” is cosmic in scope, channeling Gustav Holst for its ending (according to Sufjan’s notes); “Sister Winter” is a much more personal song of sadness and loss, building to a rock-symphonic close that resembles “Majesty, Snowbird,” the new concert-only opus that is creating such a stir; and “Star of Wonder,” mysterious and gorgeous, sustains itself for seven magical minutes.

Certainly the new material provides the most artistically satisfying and exciting parts of the box. But the traditional carols are well done too, and will make excellent additions to your iPod Xmas playlist. Some of the better ones include “Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming,” “I Saw Three Ships,” “We Three Kings” and “O Holy Night” (the two blended into one seamless cut), the slightly retitled “What Child Is This Anyway?” and the great-for-kids “The Friendly Beasts.”

The set includes a 40-page booklet, stickers and a poster. Get it while you can. By next year, Mr. Stevens may have become too big to do this kind of homemade Christmas present for us again.

Short Takes: Recent Films

2006-11-19T13:54:00.000-05:00

Running with Scissors
A valiant, uneven attempt to translate the bestselling memoir to the screen. It often ends up resembling a John Irving novel or the TV series Six Feet Under, with its absurd characters and plot twists that are allegedly all true. Director Murphy [Nip/Tuck] tries hard, possibly too hard, to find a visual and rhythmic style to match the material, and mostly fails. But his cast is always interesting and occasionally very fine, especially the three leads: Joseph Cross, touchingly vulnerable and funny as the narrator-protagonist, Augusten Burroughs; Brian Cox, startlingly convincing as the psychiatrist, loonier than most of his patients, who adopts Augusten; and above all, Annette Bening, superlative as Augusten’s astonishingly dysfunctional mother. Jill Clayburgh also has a good if not entirely convincing role as the psychiatrist’s wife, who becomes a second mother to Augusten.

The Science of Sleep
Michel Gondry’s last film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was skillful but, to me at least, irritating and smug. Its script by the heretofore excellent Charlie Kaufman seemed miscalculated and unsatisfying, and the two leads, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, were often all wrong for their roles (which didn’t prevent them from getting extravagant praise).

I’m happy to report that all the charm I found lacking in Sunshine is present in abundance in Gondry’s new The Science of Sleep, which he wrote himself. It reminds me of Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, but with loads of witty special effects. Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg are completely captivating as the two young lovers who keep missing each other’s signals and slipping between dreams and reality with alarming ease. One of the most entertaining and beautifully directed movies of the year.

Flags of Our Fathers
While it is never less than admirable, and its visuals are often remarkable (the muted color of the photography has certainly been used before, but rarely so effectively), this Clint Eastwood film, about the famous Iwo Jima photograph and its effects on the soldiers involved, never really takes off. Its confusing narrative structure, although one can see why it was used, is one problem. There is a curious lack of fire and passion, with one big exception: Adam Beach as the Native American Marine Ira Hayes is wonderful, totally riveting. Everything else seems a bit listless.

Borat
It’s no insult to say that Sacha Baron Cohen’s brilliant, subversive humor works best in small, concentrated doses. The Borat sketches on his Da Ali G Show on HBO are scathing, gasp-inducing wonders of ruthless satire, with the help of unwitting participants who believe they are making a documentary rather than serving as foils for a wicked put-on. There are several great moments in this feature-length collection of zingers, and lotsa laughs. But the narrative connecting the hilarious bits is not nearly as interesting as the bits themselves, and some of the jokes are just potty humor with little satirical point at all. It’s entertaining, and only occasionally really terrible, but I was hoping for some momentum, a cascade of shock and awe. Alas, no. Still, Baron Cohen’s improvisational comic acting as the lovably boorish Kazakh journalist is quite inspired throughout.

The Prestige
A splendid entertainment – basically a sophisticated and intelligent comic-book adventure. Christopher Nolan showed his talent for grounding outlandish plots to genuine emotion and superlative storytelling craft in Batman Begins. In this new film, not tied to the constricting expectations of a multibillion dollar DC Comics-Warner Bros. franchise, he is free to use a fuller range of his considerable talent. This tale of a deadly rivalry between two stage magicians a century ago has a literally tricky plot that will have you hanging on every quietly spoken line. Visually, it’s top of the line, with Nolan’s usual cinematographer, Wally Pfister, once again showing how extravagant adventures ought to be photographed. The cast is mostly excellent, with some oddities among the accents: Christian Bale speaks Cockney, Hugh Jackman disconcertingly speaks American, Scarlett Johansson disconcertingly speaks British, and David Bowie does a pretty good Serbian as Nikolai Tesla. Michael Caine speaks more or less in his own intonations and is wonderful. Only if you stop to think about the basically thin premise does the movie suffer. While you are watching, you’ll barely have time for such questions.

A Favorite Revisited: Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life

2006-11-15T09:54:00.000-05:00

It’s a Wonderful Life is not only the best of all Christmas movies – it’s one of the greatest American films. It’s often mistakenly thought of as a big pile of corny sentimental mush. But as someone who’s allergic to fake sentimentality, I can promise you there is a much more substantive – and dark – achievement in Frank Capra’s 1946 masterpiece.

I first saw this movie in the best possible way, and I feel very lucky. I was attending USC’s film school, and they were showing a retrospective of Capra movies. USC has connections at the film studios, and they can often get pristine prints from studio vaults. This was way back in the 1970s, kids, before It’s a Wonderful Life had gone into the public domain and become a Christmas staple on every local TV station in the country. And I, a fairly experienced young film buff, had, believe it or not, never heard of this movie! So I went to see it with zero expectations of any kind, and no knowledge at all of the plot. (And also, by the way, it was nowhere near Christmas, and this was L.A. anyway, where it never feels like Christmas.)

What unfolded before my widening eyes was a glistening, gorgeous 35mm print. If you’ve only seen Wonderful Life on television, you’ve only half seen it. It is beautifully crafted – the photography, the editing, the storytelling itself are models of fine workmanship, probably Capra’s very best movie. The cast, from the leads down to just about every supporting role, is nearly perfect. And as the film proceeds, it develops an astonishing emotional pull, as powerful as a freight train, a nuclear missile, an earthquake.

I was 20. As far as I can remember, I had never cried at a movie before. It came upon me out of nowhere in the last scene, when our hero’s brother toasts him as “my big brother George, the richest man in town.” I was overwhelmed with emotion, suddenly sobbing uncontrollably. And it shocked me. What the hell was going on?

It’s a Wonderful Life is about a man driven to despair and attempted suicide. The story begins with others praying for him, on Christmas Eve – and then quickly goes back to trace how he got there. How did George Bailey, popular, sweet-natured, generous, fall so low? We follow him from childhood on, as his big dreams get shot down one by one. Other people get opportunities and success over the years; he stays in his small town, stuck running his family’s modest, struggling business, a savings and loan. And as the story reaches its climax, he’s about to lose even that. The situation turns him into a snarling, bad-tempered Mr. Hyde, yelling at his family and picking fights — and finally wandering out to a bridge near town, standing still, staring down into the water, about to jump.

The secret to the emotional wallop the film packs is that we share in George’s despair. This story takes you to a very deep, dark place. Certainly it’s leavened by humor along the way, and the fact that we see George’s tale as it is being told to his rather goofy guardian angel adds a big dose of whimsy (maybe too big a dose for some). But James Stewart is very skilled at finding the creepy, obsessed souls of nice guys (as he did later to even more stunning effect in Vertigo), and he takes the audience right along with him.

So when the magical conclusion of the film takes us first to an even darker place (a fantasy alternate universe), and then lifts George, and the audience, out of the darkness and into the warm light of family and friends, the effect is extraordinary. This is why it’s one of the most surefire tearjerkers in Hollywood history. And the fact that it makes people cry, and includes Christmas carols, and cute kids, and a banker villain of Dickensian meanness, and a stammering elderly elf of an angel, has led to its reputation as pure cornball. But I don’t see how anyone who watches the movie in its entirety could still feel that way about it.

Also unforgettable is the love story the movie tells between the Stewart character and Donna Reed as Mary, his wife. There’s a particularly memorable scene, brilliant and atypical for Hollywood, where the two, who have been quarreling, end up tangled in the cord of an old-fashioned phone as they listen to a long-distance call, and then suddenly find themselves weeping and kissing passionately, utterly in love. It’s capped by Mary’s mother walking in on them and hissing her disapproval. Stewart and Reed are amazing here. (Unfortunately, Donna Reed also gets the dumbest scene – near the end, when George is shown what the world would have been like without him, and Mary is discovered to have become a mousy, bespectacled librarian. It’s ridiculous and unconvincing, but at least it’s over quickly.)

It’s that climactic, Christmas Carol-derived sequence that most people remember – where the angel convinces George of his life’s value by showing how bad a place the world would have been if he weren’t there. It’s skillfully, even superbly, done, except for the librarian part. But it would be just a gimmicky plot if the emotional tug of what comes before and after were less intense.

There’s a very high-quality DVD available, and NBC now shows a really fine print as well, usually twice during the holidays – though it’s interrupted by dozens of ads. So there’s no need to suffer through the terrible, washed-out prints from the era when the movie’s copyright lapsed. If you haven’t seen this one for a while, give it another look. It may be impossible to watch it through completely fresh eyes, as I was fortunate enough to do 30 years ago. But it’s still a great movie, one that hits you right...there.

Political Aside - Reasons to be Cheerful, or: The Far Side of Paradise

2006-11-12T13:53:00.000-05:00

I can think of at least four broad reasons to be happy and relieved about last Tuesday’s election results. None of them requires that you believe liberal Democrats are saints or saviors - only that a dialogue is better than a monologue in Washington.

1. It wiped the smirks away

On Election Night, I was stuck at the Atlanta airport trying to get back to New York. By a stroke of luck, they boarded us early, at 7, for a flight that didn’t end up leaving until 9 and didn’t land until 11. I say ‘luck,’ because it was on one of Delta’s formerly-Song planes, featuring satellite TV. So, political nerd that I am, I happily watched CNN, Fox News and MSNBC for 4 hours. (I realize that this, even more than a Democratic Congress, may be some folks’ idea of hell.)

By far the most satisfying moments in those 4 hours were on Fox, as the right-wing anchor Brit Hume and commentators like Fred Barnes struggled to put a positive spin on the Republican debacle. These men wear perpetual smirks and sneers, and relish every opportunity to mock and deride their opponents while praising and/or excusing even the most disgraceful acts of the Bush administration. But that night, they eventually gave up trying to pretend. Those smirks were wiped off their faces. It was wonderful to see.

And the next day, our Smirker-in-Chief presented a remarkably gracious and humble face as he reacted publicly to the “thumpin’” his party had received. His words at the post-election news conference and during meetings with the incoming Democratic leaders of the House and Senate were on some level, of course, just well-rehearsed, politically necessary bullshit. We will no doubt get back to sniping and partisan hot air shortly. But one of the most exasperating things about the Bush government has been its pigheaded insistence that it has done nothing wrong, as evidence to the contrary has risen to mountainous heights. So even a momentary pause in that very destructive attitude is something we can all be grateful for.

2. Accountability has the chance to make a comeback

Much has been said, both before and after the election, about the scary left-wing extremists who will take over Congressional committee chairmanships in January. I believe this is nonsense, for several reasons, but the most important cause for cheering is that committee hearings, full of partisan bloviating as they certainly will be at times, will provide the currently lacking counterpunch to Republican policies. If they are used properly, they will have real teeth as they find and reveal the corruption, inequity and plain wrong-headedness that inevitably riddle the foreign and domestic policies of any government. For most of the last six years, the Republican Congress has served as an echo chamber for these policies, and dissenting voices were given little chance to be heard or acted upon.

The largest issue facing Congressional committee oversight is the war in Iraq. As Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker puts it, the “mendacity, incompetence, lawlessness, and ideological arrogance surrounding the origins and conduct of that war” need to be fully aired in public hearings. A lot of this will be backward-looking finger-pointing, but it’s still a healthy exercise, and it is the constitutional duty of the Congress, a duty Republicans have understandably let lapse.

As for future policy directions, the bipartisan Baker commission report will come out next month, and we can hope it will provide a starting point and a blueprint to finding a way out of the frightening chaos the war has become. At least two polar opposite points of view will have to be reconciled: with equal vehemence John McCain says send lots more troops and win the war militarily, and John Murtha says bring them home now, because our very presence is a major cause of the chaos. I don’t believe either of these viewpoints is nearly as ironclad as their proponents do – but a public hearing based on a bipartisan report can begin to formulate some policies to propose to the administration. And we can hope that Bush will actually listen to these voices rather than continuing to charge boldly forward with his failed policy.

Domestically, here are three examples of areas Congressional committees should look hard at:

* The stealth insertion by California Republican Duncan Hunter of a provision that kills the Office of Inspector General charged with finding waste and corruption in defense contracts in Iraq. This was sneaky and reprehensible, and certainly has the appearance of undue influence by defense industry lobbyists.

* The provision in the Medicare drug plan that forbids the government to negotiate prices on medications. Again, this has the unpleasant odor of corporate lobbyists creating policy that protects their industries at taxpayer expense. Billy Tauzin, former Republican congressman, now head of the pharmaceutical lobby, helped craft this provision right before he left Congress to take the lobbying job.

* The aftermath of the Abramoff-DeLay scandals. Nancy Pelosi has been quoted as saying, “We will make this the most honest and ethical congress in history.” Let’s hope these are more than simply politically expedient words. A genuine cleanup of the ethical mess involving lobbyists’ money would affect Democrats as well as Republicans. Will they have the nerve to take this issue on in a meaningful way?

3. Fiscal sanity can at least be talked about, if not yet enacted

I know my Republican readers will laugh or become apoplectic, or both, at this notion. The stereotype of Democrats is as champions of Tax and Spend. But a couple of things have happened during the last three Presidencies to change that. Both Bush pere in 1992 and Bill Clinton in 1993 pushed through deficit-reduction packages that included both tax increases and spending cuts. This caused much uproar among those for whom taxes are an ideological flash point rather than an economic tool. But the public had learned to despise the huge budget deficit, and there was widespread relief that by 1999-2000 the government’s budget had actually gone into surplus. There were plenty of disputes about who or what deserved the credit, but no one was unhappy to see the deficit disappear.

It was understandable that in 2001, an incoming Republican administration wanted to return some of the budget surplus to the public through tax cuts, also thereby stimulating an economy that was reeling from the collapse of the dot-com bubble. But then came 9/11, followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And what may have seemed sensible in peacetime looked very different during an expensive war. But in another example of the ideological pigheadedness that has characterized the Bush administration, for the first time in this century, the government cut taxes during wartime. The result was, duh, the deficit ballooned again. The surplus seemed a distant memory. This year’s deficit is $260 billion. $1.5 trillion has been added to the national debt since 2001.

Again, there has been much fear-mongering about what Democrats may do about taxes starting in January. The short answer is, nothing – because with a narrowly divided Senate and a Republican president, any significant tax increases are dead. But Congressional committees will have a bully pulpit to raise questions about the size of the deficit and who really has benefited from the Bush tax cuts. They will, if they are smart, look for revenue streams beyond the personal income tax, and point out that not all taxes are income taxes. They can take advantage of the fact that a majority of Americans still hate the deficit and would rather see it reduced than have taxes cut further. The Dems could propose rollbacks of tax cuts on the very wealthy, and the public would support them. These rollbacks still wouldn’t get past Bush or the Senate. But there is a chance to change the debate.

Republicans have tended, for the purposes of public argument, to lump all taxes together, and imply that they are all personal income taxes targeting everyone; they prefer to gloss over corporate taxes as well as the benefits to the very wealthy. They like to pretend that the patchwork political package of Bush tax cuts is perfect and shouldn’t be touched, even though of course those cuts could be altered without abolishing them. They even embarrassingly gave huge tax breaks to oil companies right before oil price increases drove profits through the roof.

If there are hearings about all these things, we should rejoice, not cringe. And if the liberal old lions of the Democratic party overreach, there will be a backlash. I believe they know this, and I believe they will tread more carefully than some expect them to. But isn’t it better to have this dialogue, even if it turns into a shouting match? Certainly it’s better than the one-party echo chamber we have had for six years.

4. The rise of the moderate-conservative Democrat

I have mixed feelings about this one, because I disagree with these freshmen Blue Dogs on many issues. I’m to the left of them on gay rights, gun control and abortion; and to the right of them on free trade and globalization. The combination of social conservatism and economic populism seems to me an uneasy throwback to the Dixiecrats of the ‘50s and ‘60s. But the reason their election is good news is that it may signal a cooling down of the polarization of politics that has poisoned our national dialogue for the last dozen years or so. (In fact, this began in the Reagan years, but it became much worse during the Clinton administration, and hasn’t let up since.)

Democrats have opened up their party to non-ideologues who want to get things done. Maybe the Republicans will follow suit, although in the short run, Congressional Republican moderates have all but disappeared – several of them were defeated on Tuesday night. But whatever one may think of them, Republican figures like John McCain, Susan Collins, Rudy Giuliani are much more popular with the general public than ideological firebrands. The public hates partisan extremism, and always gravitates toward the middle. For true believers, this always seems a disappointing compromise. But for the rest of us, it seems the only way to stay sane.