Girls Can Play

The Iron Lady

2012-01-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

“It used to be about trying to DO something. Now it’s about trying to BE someone,” sneers The Iron Lady’s Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) of our changing social values. She’s right, of course, but the irony of The Iron Lady is that it’s a textbook example of that trend.

Not that examples are hard to come by. Celebrities who are famous just because they look good in the spotlight aren’t anything new (remember the Gabor sisters?), but for the last 10 years or so they’ve been multiplying like flu victims in Contagion, with Paris Hilton in the Gwyneth Paltrow role. A few of the reality shows that dominate network TV ratings are built around people who can actually do something extraordinary: How amazing is it when those contestants on Project Runway make stylish outfits out of office supplies? But mostly, we watch reality shows not because of what their stars can do but because of who they are and how they behave—-or, better yet, misbehave.

Our political process has been thoroughly infected too. Depending on where you get your news, you can easily hear more about Newt Gingrich’s marital history or Barack Obama’s birth certificate than about either man’s politics. Films like J. Edgar mirror that trend, treating powerful political figures as if the most important thing about them is who they did or didn’t sleep with.

I didn’t agree with the real Thatcher about much, but I’m with the film’s Thatcher in her disgust at this development. I don’t know whether it’s a contributing factor or just a symptom, but it’s clearly part of the bread-and-circuses sideshows that keep us safely distracted while our political system becomes an almost wholly owned subsidiary of a handful of multinational conglomerates.

And so Thatcher, a rock-ribbed conservative who transformed Britain’s economy, for better or worse, is presented in The Iron Lady as a pitiably vulnerable widow who’s missing great chunks of her memory and carrying on elaborate imaginary conversations with her recently deceased husband, Denis (an impish Jim Broadbent).

True, she revisits some of the triumphs and trials of her ascent to the position of Britain’s first female prime minister and her three terms in office in the flashbacks that alternate with her dreary present, but those highlights are sketched out so vaguely they amount to “a shorthand that resembles a chronologically scrambled British version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” (Miners’ strike/Falklands War/I can’t take it any more ....),” as the New York Times’ A.O. Scott puts it.

Yes, Streep is astonishingly good, as always. She captures Thatcher’s what-me-worry gaze and tight smile, the determined tilt of her head, and her breathy but authoritative voice. She also creates a charismatic character who you believe in every moment that she’s on the screen, whether as an young woman jousting with her pugnacious peers in Parliament or as a confused elder doddering about her house while her caregivers gossip about her in the background. But how closely does that character resemble the real Thatcher? And more to the point, why should we care?

The Queen used the battle royale between Princess Di and Queen Elizabeth to make a point about British culture. In that film, Queen Elizabeth’s reserve and stoicism, which had been so quintessentially English when she was a girl and for generations before, had been rejected by the bulk of her countrymen by the time the openly emotional, self-pitying princess pled her case in the court of public opinion, giving their fight the feel of a battle for the soul of Britain. Similarly, The Last King of Scotland focuses on Idi Amin’s mental instability in order to shed light on the film’s real subject: the terror that distorted all aspects of life in Uganda during Amin’s despotic reign.

But The Iron Lady fails to give us any coherent sense of what Thatcher did or how her actions affected daily life in Britain. Now and then, like when someone blames the unions and someone else blames her conservative government for the strikes that crippled Britain during her first few years in office, we get a passing glimpse of the controversy that surrounded the prime minister for most of her regime. But the film never comes down on one side or the other or these debates, or gives us enough information to reach our own conclusions.

Instead, it stays myopically focused on her private life, as if the most important about Thatcher’s political career was how it affected her family, not her country. When the camera focuses on Thatcher’s sensible pumps in a sea of men’s shoes at the House of Commons, or we watch her drive resolutely off to Parliament while her young children trot after the car and beg her to stay home, The Iron Lady could be a Lifetime feature about the trials of a working mom.

This is a hollow film with a great performance trapped inside it, ricocheting off the walls with noplace to go.

Written for TimeOff

Crazy Horse

2012-01-18T10:08:00.000-08:00

Asked for her definition of eroticism, one of the members of the Crazy Horse’s staff offers this: “Seduction without offering yourself. Restraint.”

That’s not a bad way of describing Frederick Wiseman’s thoughtful, undogmatic approach to filmmaking, which layers on information without commentary, letting viewers draw their own conclusions. But Wiseman’s exploration of Paris’ Crazy Horse cabaret, which bills itself as the world’s classiest purveyor of nude dancing, is the opposite of a seduction.

Crazy Horse is your grandfather’s strip club, a place where Hugh Hefner would feel right at home, with its red velvet seating area and the lookalike bodies and strictly codified movements of its dancers. The performances are basically professionally staged strutting, stretching, and hip-shaking with a few classical ballet moves and circus-style acrobatics thrown in. (Philippe Decouflé, the choreographer who took over shortly before Wiseman and crew started filming, has worked with Cirque de Soleil, and it shows).

Decouflé pontificates about artistic freedom and how he’s infusing new life in the old institution, but we don’t see enough of the choreography to judge for ourselves what he’s changed or how well it works. Director/editor Wiseman and cinematographer John Davey zoom in tight on pieces of the women’s bodies as they dance, reducing them to twisting torsos or swaying butts (Crazy Horse founder Alain Bernardin’s ass fetish is one tradition Decouflé seems happy to maintain). And after a while, wiggling butts get kinda tedious, no matter how nicely rounded and lit they may be.

Wiseman’s trademark direct cinema style can get frustrating, too. Why are those women periodically cooing into a mike? Will those sounds be incorporated into dances? The dancers themselves remain ciphers, since we almost never hear them speak and we never hear what their work means to them, though we get a couple of conflicting theories about that from the men who direct them.

The absence of the dancers’ point of view and the fetishistic focus on their body may be meant as a sly comment on their objectification, but it leaves a frustrating hole at the center of the story. This time around, the fly on the wall may just be buzzing around in circles.

Written for The L Magazine

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2012-01-13T10:17:00.000-08:00

In ex-British spy John le Carré’s Cold War novels about his former profession, the main weapons are intellectual brilliance and psychological acuity and the prize is a secret concealed within a secret. You wouldn’t think something that heady would be very cinematic. But the winner in le Carré’s mind games is generally the best watcher, the one who notices the most about his environment and the people around him, and that makes his stories ideally suited to a visual medium like film.

While body-rush fantasies like the Mission Impossible TV and movie series turn the spy/counterspy game into a question of who has the best techno-toys (and, in the movies, Xtreme fighting skills), le Carré is pure head rush, a mental game with the added thrill of feeling scarily plausible. Done well, films of his stories sharpen your senses, making you notice things and tune into frequencies you wouldn’t ordinarily pick up on. They give you the psychological equivalent of the thrill you imagined experiencing as a kid if you’d bought a pair of those X-ray vision glasses they used to advertise in comic books. And Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the latest adaptation of one of the author’s George Smiley books, is very well done indeed.

Just five minutes or so into the film comes the climactic confrontation that’s later referred to as “that bloody mess in Budapest,” a charged encounter in a public plaza that ends, shockingly, in a shooting, after a slow accretion of reaction shots and significant looks has created a dense sense of dread. The psychological and political shockwaves set off by that shooting—-which is almost the only one in the film—-reverberate through the rest of the layered, time-shifting narrative.

This might really be how it feels to be a spy, you think, especially once George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a self-contained reluctant retiree with a don’t-mind-me demeanor so convincing that even his own wife blows him off, emerges as the fulcrum of the plot. A former MI6 agent, Smiley is enlisted to find out which of the men at the top of the agency is a mole planted by the KGB. The still center in the eye of a hurricane, Smiley says little and does less, lying in wait like a lizard that flicks its tongue out just far enough to zap a passing tidbit of intelligence.

Director Tomas Alfredson proves that the eerie intensity of Let the Right One In was no fluke, often showing us one thing while telling us another to maximize the data conveyed as he leads us through a complex maze of information and misinformation, making the way clear though never simple. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s camera often seems to catch key encounters out of the corner of its eye, making sure we absorb details whose importance we learn only later. You feel yourself learning to watch differently during the course of the film, looking more closely and questioning appearances more than you usually would.

Alfredson, screenwriter Bridget O'Connor, and editor Dino Jonsäter give us just as much information as we need, never clogging up the works with clunky exposition. When Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), the young agent Smiley enlists to help him root out the mole, has to break up with his partner to cut off the risk of blackmail, one short, near wordless, beautifully underplayed scene is all we need to feel the weight of the sacrifices these agents make for their jobs.

Oldman’s performance (he says he based in partly on le Carré himself and partly on Alec Guiness’ seminal portrayal of Smiley in the great late-‘70s BBC-TV series) is a study in minimalism. It’s also a triumph for an actor who came out of the chute like a bucking bronco, specializing for years, in movies like Sid and Nancy, JFK, True Romance, and Leon: The Professional, in tormented geniuses or psychotic villains. But lately, as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, Lieutenant Gordon in The Dark Knight, and now Smiley, he seems to be specializing in doing more with less.

Like the movie itself, Oldman's performance is a small but flawless and expertly cut gem. It may not knock you out at first glance, but the longer and closer you look, the more compelling it gets.

Written for TimeOff

The L Magazine's 2011 Film Poll

2012-01-09T09:55:00.000-08:00

Here's The L's annual poll of its regularly contributing critics. We each pick 20 movies, ranked in order of preference, and the editors compile our choices into a Top 25 list.

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Like the God of Job, Malick can leave his supposed intimates struggling to make sense of themselves within his cosmos: he's burned through who knows how many editors, worked sound teams to the bone, and left composers and many actors feeling cheated. But his methods have also inspired devotional loyalty among those who've achieved their capacity for grace under his eye: in The Tree of Life, he coaxes the work of a lifetime out of Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Emmanuel Lubezki (and Jack Fisk, whose realization of Malick's hallowed spaces is his own life's work). And by prodding us to engage with our own capacities, he makes us into better, more open, attentive moviegoers. And people? Sure. Mark Asch

2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
This leisurely examination of a dying man preparing for his next life creates intense, dream-logic poetry from visuals and sounds that always register strongly but often seem disconnected from one another. Like Tree of Life, Uncle Boonmee made me tear up over the beauty, value, connectedness, and fragility of all forms of life, but I'm damned if I know how they did it. Elise Nakhnikian

Read the rest of the list--and editor Mark Asch's intro, a sharply argued case for respecting other people's opinions and holding true to your own.

Women Behaving Badly

2012-01-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

We’ll know feminism has finally taken root when the female leads in the stories we tell ourselves behave just as badly as the male leads do. We haven’t gotten there yet, but two current movies are giving us an idea of how things might look when we do.

Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the title character of David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is as grimly antisocial and borderline fanatical as any male movie vigilante (think Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name). This is one woman who could care less what people think of her, mainly because she doesn’t think much of almost anyone else. In fact, the whole purpose of the spiky Goth getup that gives the movie its name is to keep people at a safe distance.

Noomi Rapace nailed Lisbeth’s look and her wiry physicality in the original three-film Swedish series, but the directors betrayed her by focusing too much on her too-soft eyes. In the books all the movies were based on, Lisbeth’s hard-won ferocity and incredible mental and martial arts skills make her feel almost like a comic-book superhero, but the Swedish films reduce her to a wounded girl in need of protection, her bravery just so much bravado. The Swedish films also fetishize the violence she endures, which makes her come off as a victim rather than a victor.

No one can dramatize a talky, records-search-heavy quest for truth better than Fincher, so the latest Dragon Tattoo is a far better film than the flabby original. Taut editing, brilliant sound design, an uneasy Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack and smart camera placement maintain a strong sense of tension as crack researcher Lisbeth and journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) set out to solve the mystery of a missing girl. Meanwhile, the generally dark interiors contrast dramatically—and ironically—with the bright lights and blinding whites of a glass-walled house that turns out to be hiding the darkest secret of all.

But the main attraction, here as in the books, is Lisbeth, a brooding figure who nearly always keeps her own counsel and maintains her cool. The film’s ad campaign got a lot of heat for sexually objectifying its heroine, who is often shown nude while Craig is clothed. The film does the same, following Mara’s curves a lot closer and more salaciously than it does Craig’s equally buff body when the two strip down. That’s the crassest kind of sexual exploitation—and an invasion of privacy Lisbeth would no doubt have hated, as Melissa Silverstein pointed out. But if Fincher fetishizes Lisbeth’s sexuality, he honors her unapologetic, hardboiled competence. There’s nothing girlish about this Lisbeth, and no plea for pity in her guarded gaze.

In the Swedish movie, Lisbeth is toyed with and beaten by a group of toughs in the subway, as if she had to earn our sympathy by being victimized. In the American version, a thief snatches Lisbeth’s backpack in the subway and she goes after him, getting it back and escaping his attempt at revenge. It’s a dazzling chase sequence—and an economic illustration of the skills that make Lisbeth a formidable foe.

Young Adult’s Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is scary in a whole different way. As immature and unrealistic as all those Peter Pan boys who keep getting lead roles (and leading ladies) these days, she’s an id on the rampage, leaving the middling professional success and black hole of a social life she’s achieved in the big city to return to her hometown and “save” her high school boyfriend from the domestic bliss she assumes must be suffocating him.

Theron, who was so aggressively messed-up in Monster a few years ago, strides into this role with the same ferocious commitment. Mavis is an unholy, stunningly self-absorbed mess, and Theron’s vivid portrayal and Diablo Cody’s clever script, which is exaggerated enough to play like satire while mining the emotional rawness that makes Mavis run, make her just barely sympathetic without ever quite making her likeable.

“The conventional knowledge in Hollywood is that an unsympathetic female character can tank a movie,” Cody told Indiewire. “[S]ometimes I wonder if it comes down to mommy issues. The idea of a cold, unlikeable woman or a woman who is not in control of herself is genuinely frightening to people, because it threatens civilization itself or threatens the American family.”

But the stereotype of the nurturing, supportive wife/girlfriend/mother is just that, of course, and the more room opens up in our society for women to live their lives freely, the more taboos on "inappropriate" female behavior lighten up, sometimes even disappearing altogether.

TV has been reflecting social trends back at us faster and more boldly than film for a while now, and it's ahead on this curve too, building whole series around female characters who dare us to like them. Not even Lisbeth is as egregiously ill behaved or cringe-inducingly neurotic as the leading ladies of two of last season's best shows, Enlightened and Homeland. And this week, the nastily narcissistic Patsy and Edina are stumbling back for three anniversary episodes of Absolutely Fabulous, reminding us that TV was brave enough to debut a comedy about a neglectful, childish mother and her booze-soaked bestie 20 years ago. Ab Fab's Edina (Jennifer Saunders) and Enlightened's Amy (Laura Dern) care way too much what other people think of them, but their creators make sure we never mistake them for the admirable creatures they believe themselves to be.

But there’s one barrier even those shows are afraid to cross: Their main characters are played by beautiful, always thin (or thinnish), almost always young (or youngish) women. So let me amend what I said at the start:

We’ll know feminism has finally taken root when the female leads in the stories we tell ourselves behave just as badly as the male leads do—and when female characters as odd-looking as Patton Oswalt, the old schoolmate Mavis hooks up with in Young Adult, can score with male characters as spectacularly good-looking as Charlize Theron and it’s played as a positive development, not a sight gag.

Written for TimeOff

My 2011 Top 10

2011-12-29T21:09:00.000-08:00

1. The Tree of Life

The winner of this year’s main prize at Cannes and the subject of millions of pixels’ worth of online debate, Terrence Malick’s fifth feature as writer/director over the last 38 years is to cinephiles what Halley’s Comet is to astronomers: an eagerly anticipated and rarely seen phenomenon. Read more

2. Certified Copy

A French expat living in Tuscany with her teenage son drops in on a lecture by an Englishman on a book tour. (He’s James Miller; she never gets a name, but since she’s played by the great Juliette Binoche, she hardly needs one.) She leaves him her card through his Italian translator, and he shows up the following Sunday for a visit that turns into a day-long date. That sums up the action in Certified Copy, the latest offering from the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and the first he has ever shot outside his own country. But it doesn’t come close to conveying the playful charm, crafty intelligence, and emotional depth of this wholly original film. Read more

3. El Velador

“A film about violence without violence,” as the production notes put it, El Velador is deliberate, repetitive, and deceptively peaceful. Watching it feels at first as if you are eavesdropping on someone else’s daydream, as director/producer/DP/editor Natalia Almada captures the rhythms of daily and nightly life in a Sinaloa cemetery. But her quiet flow of images gains power with surprising speed, breaching the seawall of our preconceived notions to impress upon us the horror of the war being waged on civil society in Mexico by a handful of drug cartels. Read more

4. The Interrupters

It’s hard to imagine a better pairing of talent and material than director/producer Steve James, producer Alex Kotlowitz, and the street-savvy, impassioned antiviolence crusaders of The Interrupters. The documentary addresses a problem that couldn’t be more serious—the violence that literally plagues the streets of Chicago and other American cities—but talking to its open, unpretentious creators was a lot of fun. Read more

5. A Separation

A Separation seems to invent itself as it goes along. It doesn’t mirror or mock or play minor variations on some timeworn genre or theme. It just pulls you in, instantly and inexorably, to its perfectly life-sized world. If it feels familiar, it’s because it feels as poignant, precarious, and endlessly complicated as life itself. Read more

6. Poetry

Mija (Yun Jung-hee) is the antithesis of the title character in Mother, another gripping character study by a South Korean writer-director. Where the mother in Mother insisted that her son was being framed for the murder of a young woman, doggedly tracking down leads until she unearthed the truth, Mija knows as soon as she hears it that Wook (Lee David), the impassive grandson she's raising, was partly responsible for the suicide of a girl in his high school class. For Mija, the question is not how to prove Wook's innocence, but how to do something much harder: She must figure out what justice looks like in a case like this and make sure it is done, without betraying her beloved grandson. Read more

7. Melancholia

Melancholia, the latest and best from director Lars von Trier, is a slow, somber trek to the end of life as we know it. The first hour or so takes place at the opulent wedding thrown for Justine (Kirsten Dunst) by her rich stiff of a brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland) at his enormous country mansion. Justine struggles to play the happy bride, but her new union is crushed by the weight of her own chronic depression. Without histrionics or blame, Dunst and costar Alexander Skarsgård give that slow-motion collapse a dignified anguish that makes it feel both tragic and inevitable. Read more

8. Nostalgia for the Light

In this stately, beautifully shot, deeply moving meditation, writer/director Patricio Guzmán uses an observatory in the Chilean desert as the starting point for an unflinching investigation of the past, both the deep past the astronomers study ("We are really exploring religious questions: where we came from, where life began," says one) and the tortuous recent history his country has tried to bury in that same desert. In poetic voiceover musings and often wrenching interviews with the families of the disappeared, Guzmán weaves history and science together to investigate what makes us human. Once or twice the parallels may feel forced, but most of the time, as when he traces the calcium in the awful bone shards found by the wives and mothers of the missing all the way back to the Big Bang, he finds new ways to illuminate the anti-life horrors of totalitarianism.

9. Meek’s Cutoff

Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) looks like the kind of character you’d expect to see starring in a classic Western. The colorful guide of a small wagon train, his face nearly obscured by a mop of ropy hair and a bushy beard, he wears theatrically fringed buckskin and loves to tell stories about his past adventures. But this self-styled hero is a legend only in his own mind. Read more

10. Pina

Director Wim Wenders had been talking for decades to his friend Pina Bausch about capturing her kinetic choreography on film, but he couldn't figure out how to do it justice until the reemergence of 3D. Even then, it took a few years for him and his technical collaborators to develop a technique that could capture movement fluidly and without that nausea-inducing shakiness that can make 3D movies literally make you sick. The day he was scheduled to meet her and her troupe and try out the new camera setup he proposed to use, Bausch died, prematurely and unexpectedly. Wenders thought his project was dead as well, but after talking to her dancers, most of whom had been with Bausch for years, he decided the best way to memorialize her was to capture the work she had developed for the film they'd been planning so long. Luxuriously lengthy excerpts of her exuberantly expressive dances, often set in the city she loved or staged with huge hunks of the natural world--a massive boulder, a floorful of dirt, an ankle-deep pool of water--cover the gamut of raw human emotion. Meanwhile, judiciously edited snippets of archival footage about Bausch at work and talking-heads interviews with her dancers about her process capture the scent of one unique spirit.

Not to mention... I had to come up with 10 more for The L, whose Top 20 list should be out early next week, so here they are:
Mildred Pierce
The Skin I Live In
The Descendants
Mysteries of Lisbon
The Yellow Sea
Bill Cunningham New York
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Old Cats
The Time that Remains
The Adventures of Tintin

Talking to Pariah Director Dee Rees

2011-12-27T20:39:00.000-08:00

After a brief post-college career in marketing, Nashville native Dee Rees returned to college to major in film at NYU. She wrote the script for Pariah, which recently won her a Breakthrough Director prize from the Gotham Independent Film Awards, while interning on her professor and mentor Spike Lee’s Inside Man. I talked to her earlier this month in the Waldorf Hotel.

I was interested to read that Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara were two of your favorite authors, since they’ re favorites of mine too. What do you like about them in particular?
They write about coming of age in a different way, and identity and self and what is home. Their characters always had internal conflict. For me growing up, those were the stories that made me feel like I was not by myself.

Pariah is so detailed and emotionally authentic that it feels very personal, but you grew up in Nashville and it’s also very specifically about a slice of African-American and gay culture in Brooklyn. Did you have to do a lot of research to get the Brooklyn part right?
I don’t research. I just write and then check afterwards. When I was coming out, I was living in Brooklyn and going to these gay clubs, so this is the scene I was kind of thrust into.

The way I’m most like Alike is that the biggest part of my journey was not knowing that I like women. Alike’s first half hour is not “Am I gay?” It’s more about how to feel comfortable with where she fits on the spectrum of gender identity. [Her best friend] Laura is very stud, very butch, and up to this point Alike’s been going along with that, but she’s realizing that’s not really who she is. And her mother’s the opposite – wants her to wear heels and a skirt – and she knows she’s definitely not that. I wanted to show lesbians who identify differently. Just because they have the same sexuality doesn’t mean that they outwardly express themselves in the same way, and Alike’s realizing that that’s okay.

The other thing Alike’s going through that I went through is this idea that your spirituality doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive with your sexuality. That was something that I struggled with. I was being told that I wasn’t right with God. I knew that to not be true, because that’s the only way I got through those years when things were not the best with my family.

Alike is dependent, still living with her parents. When I came out I was paying my own rent, but I still had a hard way to go with my parents in terms of them accepting me and realizing that my sexuality wasn’t a problem—that it wasn’t indicative of something that was wrong.

So this was a very personal story for you.
Yeah, it was definitely cathartic to write it and to get it out into the world. And I was really impressed, in New York, to see teenagers who were out. I’d never seen that before. I was like, “Wow, you’re 17 and you’re not even afraid to be out, and I’m 27 and I’m afraid.” I wondered, if I had known at 17 that I was gay, would I have had the courage to be that person?

Spike Lee is one of Pariah’s executive producers. Can you talk a little about his significance to you?
I was watching films like Do the Right Thing when I was about to go to college. They totally changed my perspective on filmmaking, because before them I didn’t realize that there was actually a director kind of managing all that. Because he put himself in front of the camera, he made directing more visible as a craft.

What I love about Spike is that his films are outspoken. They don’t pull any punches; they don’t sugarcoat things. They’re very true to the communities that they’re representing. When I went to School Daze, I was actually considering pledging a sorority, so that film informed me on how I was going to handle that. I felt like his films were real. He was an inspiration. I think he’s a master filmmaker.

What did you learn from him?
One of the things I learned from him was to be strong in your directorial vision. In watching the way he ran his set, I understood that you never settle. You can’t accept less than what you were going for. And when we were in pre-production, he was like, “Just get it done, get it done.” Just get enough [money] to get it in the can, and then you can get enough later to edit it. Just this idea of, by any means necessary, cobbling a film together.

And creatively, the idea that it all has to be on the screen. You don't give the audience footnotes after; you don’t get to explain what you were trying to do and what you were after. It all has to be on the screen. Just put it on the screen with no excuses. Just get it done.

In terms of the film, he gave feedback on the script, and when we were getting funding he gave feedback on the budget. And then when it came time to edit, he’d watch cuts of the film and give feedback on that. When other line producers or people of lesser note didn’t have the time, he had time for us.

Your actors are quite wonderful, especially the woman who played Alike (Adepero Oduye).
Yeah! She killed it. As a director, you’re asking actors to put themselves in a really vulnerable spot, to risk failure and bare themselves on screen. She was always willing to go there for me, without self-consciousness and without flinching.

How did you work with the cast to get these performances?
I do exercises. I talk about relationships and I talk about intentions. I don’t do line readings, because I trust that they’re professionals and will come to set knowing the lines.

For Adepero and Pernell [Walker], who plays Laura, I had them go to Dave & Buster’s in costume, to see how what it feels like to be a masculine-identified woman in a straight environment. I had them go to a gay club so they could see how it feels to be a masculine-identified woman in a lesbian environment. I wanted to thrust them in so they would get this shared experience, because friendships are built on shared memories. This way, when we come to set, you have memories together, things you can draw on. You’re not just meeting each other for the first time, or only having read together.

For the family, I had a psychotherapist come in and do a mock therapy session. I gave them each talking points and made sure that some of the talking points conflicted with things other people didn’t want to talk about. By sitting on a couch together and bouncing off each other and kind of having this passive-aggressive thing, you get more out of that than you do just reading the lines, and you come to the set with a shared history, a shared memory.

The look of the film is a big part of what makes it work. How did you find your cinematographer, Bradford Young?
I met him on a student film when I was at NYU. He went to film school at Howard University, but he was shooting for a student there [at NYU]. I was gripping that day, doing a bad gel job on the windows and carrying C-stands back and forth, and I kept peeking through the monitor. He was shooting DV cam, and the stuff he was doing was amazing.

The reason I approached him initially was that I wanted to shoot Pariah on DV cam. Then we met and he talked me into shooting on film—and for good reason, because digital at that time wouldn’t really give us the depth and the darkness we were looking for.

Brad and I actually went to Liberia and shot a documentary together—

The one about your grandmother?
Yeah. So after spending a month together, eating power bars, I knew he was the one I trusted completely.

Doing the documentary also informed our style a lot. In a documentary there’s no script, so you’re using the camera to create relationships and inform the audience as to dynamics. The filmmaking and storytelling is all about behavior: People don’t say; they behave. So it was a good study in capturing behavior and creating relationships with camera positions.

There was also a sense throughout the film that she was sort of hidden—
Yeah, the color palette.

And often she was half-hidden by something or in shadow, so you felt the camera was seeking her out and finding her.
Yeah yeah yeah.

Was that part of what you—
Yeah, when we were talking about shots and shot lists, all of that was part of the conversation. Alike is a chameleon, so she’s constantly painted by the light around her, and we’re constantly peeking and seeking with the camera. We wanted it to be lyrical and expressive. Like, I don’t care what motivated the light; we don’t have to explain why this light is blue. It’s just about how the moment feels.

We wanted it to be expressive in that way, but still have a realism with the movement and the performances.

I haven’t seen any of your other films, so I’m going to make a gross generalization here based on capsule descriptions on IMDB for you to react to. It looks as if you’re interested in stories about people who feel like outsiders, for one reason or another. Certainly Alike is an outsider, since she’s gay in a pretty homophobic culture. Does that theme resonate with you?
I think identity is something I’m really interested in. Identity, and what is home, and the permanency of broken relationships.

What do you mean by “the permanency of broken relationships”?
Like with Alike and [her mother] Audrey: What’s going to happen? Can it be healed? I’m interested in exploring relationships and how things can change. It’s coming from some personal place I’m not even aware of.

Written for The L Magazine

The Adventures of Tintin

2011-12-22T20:30:00.000-08:00

The two Spielberg movies opening this week represent the two sides of this prodigiously talented but often disappointing director. A mashup of deeply personal themes (mostly boys with daddy issues and/or with no parents in sight) and high-gloss Hollywood technology and tropes, Spielberg’s work seesaws between moving and maudlin. War Horse is gorgeously composed old-school schmaltz, with its relentless score and heroic low-angle shots of blue-eyed heroes against great expanses of sky. But if that stale hunk of cornbread is Spielberg at his most suffocatingly sentimental, The Adventures of Tintin is the director at his best: playful, energetic, and brimming with genuine wonder.

To convert the popular Belgian children’s book character from comic strips and comic books to film, Spielberg chose motion capture, the method used by James Cameron in Avatar and Robert Zemeckis in The Polar Express. Motion capture involves capturing an actor’s movements and then mapping them onto a computer model. That creates a digital character that shares the actor’s body language and facial expressions but can be placed in a partially or completely digitalized setting to do things a real person couldn’t.

What motion capture characters have not been so good at, before this, is looking like anything other than plastic action figures when they’re filmed in close-up. Medium and long shots generally work well, since the characters move like real people, but getting the faces to look alive up close is a challenge that has helped defeat movies like Beowulf.

The faces in Tintin, which was art directed by New Zealand’s Weta Workshop, are exaggerated enough to look a little cartoony, and it takes a little while to get acclimated to their distorted features and unnatural smoothness. But once you do, their expressiveness almost makes you forget that dynamo “boy reporter” Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his loyal dog Snowy aren’t real. Even Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), the comically bulbous-nosed alcoholic sea captain they take up with while solving one of the mysteries Tintin is always investigating, is so lovably vivid he seems almost real, though the filmmakers obviously never intended him to look like an actual human being, with his Pinocchio nose and Walter Matthau-squared face.

The Pink Panther-esque opening credits, in which Tintin and Snowy are silhouettes moving against abstracted backgrounds that are sometimes just blocks of saturated color, promises high-energy, creative adventure and nonstop action. That promise is never once broken as the film gallops by, winding up in a brisk 107 minutes.

Another of Spielberg’s apparently parentless boys, Tintin is constantly on the move, fueled by seemingly endless reservoirs of enthusiasm and energy as he copes fearlessly with mysteries, pirates, buried treasure, and chase sequences involving just about every mode of transportation available in the first half of the 20th century. He’s always getting in trouble, but it’s the kind that just makes things more exciting, not the kind that causes nightmares: The deaths are never bloody or explicit, and the bad guys generally turn out to be incompetent.

Not that the good guys are much more impressive. One of the film’s many successful running jokes is Thompson and Thomson, a pair of lookalike Interpol cops played by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as literally clueless upperclass twits.

The filmmakers have fun with Tintin’s trademark cowlick, making it move through the water like a shark’s fin when he swims and inching him close enough to the blades of a biplane to give it a trim after he’s knocked out in a crash landing. They also create some lovely transitions between scenes, like when a pair of clasped hands turns into a mountain ridge that our heroes are traveling along, or when the captain starts hallucinating in the desert and we see his vision as the sand metamorphoses into the sea and a great sailing ship cuts through it.

The decision to shoot in 3-D feels less inventive. The device occasionally adds a tidbit of visual interest, much of which involves looking at things through bubble or magnifying glasses, but I would have liked the movie just as much without it.

If War Horse is like one of those ponderously self-conscious live-action Disney films from the ‘50s or ‘60s, Tintin is like a classic Disney animation: lightfooted, kindhearted, and fun for the whole family.

Written for TimeOff

Coriolanus

2011-12-16T18:18:00.000-08:00

The theory that the United States is poised to fall like the Roman empire, and for pretty much the same reasons, is hardly new, but it’s rarely been presented more compellingly than in Ralph Fiennes’ X-treme Shakespeare version of Coriolanus.

In an impressive directorial debut, the actor transposes the classical Rome of Shakespeare’s play to an ashy, underlit modern-day Europe (the film was shot in Bosnia), packing the screen with all the markers of modern warfare and civil unrest. Brutal battles between Rome and its Volscian neighbors feature Humvees and RPGs, shot-up cars with slaughtered civilians spilling out of their half-open doors, and terrified prisoners in dank torture chambers. Meanwhile, hordes of Romans take to the street at home like so many 99 percenters, protesting the hoarding of goods by a thin slice of the oligarchy while the rest of the people starve.

The jackbooted-est of the jackbooted soldiers straining to impose order on both fronts is Fiennes’ General Caius Martius, who earns the nickname Coriolanus after he wastes the Volscian town of Corioles. A lot of people have been drawing parallels between Coriolanus and Fiennes’ Lord Voldemort, the reptilian evil genius of the Harry Potter movies, but he reminds me more of Harry, the Cockney crime lord Fiennes played in In Bruges. Like Harry, Coriolanus is a too-tightly-wrapped package of contradictions: a coldblooded killer who prides himself on living by a strict code of honor and a leader of men who cedes control of his own home to a woman.

Contemptuous of compromise and too proud to beg, Coriolanus runs into trouble when he’s nominated as Rome’s consul. He must be approved by the citizens of Rome in order to take office, but the people distrust him, reading his stiff-necked pride as elitist arrogance. His high-minded appeal to their best instincts wins him the wary approval of the crowd that gathers in the town square to judge him, but a pair of smooth-tongued tribunes quickly turns the crowd into a mob, manipulating them into calling for his banishment instead. As we head into the final months of our interminable presidential campaign season, the ease with which the tribunes subvert democracy by distorting or denying the truth feels as painfully familiar as the war scenes.

Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan use TV newscasters, news crawls, and commentators to convey the kinds of expository details Shakespeare sometimes had to run a couple minor characters onstage to gossip about. The bard’s iambs sound a little stiff in some of the talking heads’ mouths, but the excellent main characters all make the lines sing. Fiennes’ ferocious readings flow around and over Brian Cox’s self-satisfied oratory as Menenius, the oily senator who champions him; Jessica Chastain’s timid concern as his wife; and Vanessa Redgrave’s imperious belligerence as his mother, who rules the roost in the Martius house like one of those screaming eagles that swoop in over the credits at the start of The Colbert Report. And Gerald Butler, after spending years as the beefcake in bad testosterone-fests like 300 and even worse romantic comedies like The Bounty Hunter and The Ugly Truth, gets his shot at the big leagues and hits it out of the park as Aufidius, the straight-arrow Volscian general who alternates between being Coriolanus’ archenemy and his comrade in arms.

Fiennes and his crew obviously worked hard to translate the story to cinematic language. Many of the fight scenes are shot in the abstracted, climax-to-climax style filmmaker Matthias Stork calls “chaos cinema,” with the blurry camera work, quick cuts, and contempt for continuity that have become increasingly popular in the last few years. That style makes it hard to know what’s going on from one moment to the next, but many of the visuals clarify something about key characters or themes, as when Coriolanus’ wife walks in on his mother binding his war wounds and then backs away from their intimidating intimacy, or when the blue eyes blazing in Coriolanus’ blackened, blood-streaked face in the midst of a gory battle clearly signal his love of warfare.

But it’s not so much the booby-trapped buses or blazing baby blues as it is the precise, poetic, often explosive language of the original play that makes this tragedy about toxic mother love, ruthless imperialism, and cynical demagoguery so powerful. What Menenius says of its title character, after he vows revenge on the city that betrayed him, is true of the play as well: “This Martius has gone from man to dragon. He’s more than a creeping thing.”

Written for TimeOff

Like Crazy

2011-12-09T15:15:00.000-08:00

A connect-the-dots love story, Like Crazy works as much because of what it leaves out as because of what it includes.

Director Drake Doremus, his co-writer Ben York Jones, and editor Jonathan Alberts often start or end a scene in the midst of an action or skip months at a time in the otherwise linear timeline, so we have to keep figuring out what we just missed. That helps maintain interest in what might otherwise have felt like a pretty standard story about a first love that burns alternately hot and cold but just won’t fizzle out.

That elliptical structure also noodges us into searching the beautiful young faces of the lovers, Anna (Felicity Jones) and Jacob (Anton Yelchin), whom we peer at almost as intently as they gaze at each other. These two do an awful lot of soulful staring—at one other when they’re together and into the middle distance when they’re apart—but it almost never feels tiresome or self-indulgent, since we’re either trying to catch up with or immersed in the emotions they’re cycling through.

Felicity Jones is particularly compelling. That’s partly because of the actress’ Streep-like sensitivity, which allows her to transmit subtle or simultaneous emotions with the precision of a fiber optic cable, but it probably doesn’t hurt that her character is less sullen and conflicted than Yelchin’s.

One member of a couple is almost always more besotted than the other. In this case it’s Anna, an emotionally open and articulate English beauty, who comes on hard to Jacob one day after class (they’re college students). Jacob is more self-protective than Anna, perhaps because he’s less mature (Yelchin doesn't look as if he’s finished filling out yet; even his facial hair seems a bit tentative). But if he starts out hesitant, he warms up fast.

Their first date sets the tone for a relationship in which the two keep growing close, getting separated by outside forces (mostly U.S. immigration, since Anna gets on the wrong side of the Department of Homeland Security when she overstays her student visa), re-establishing their distance, and then getting back together to go through the same cycle again, almost always at Anna’s instigation.

Anna and Jacob’s messy, ultimately inconclusive push-pull is to the smooth three-part arc of most movie romances what the wobbly ride of a kid on her first solo bike ride is to a freight train chugging down a well-worn set of rails. Doremus and Jones gave the actors only a 50-page outline and asked them to improvise all of their dialogue and much of the action, which probably helped keep things fresh, and cinematographer John Guleserian shot the whole thing with the video function of a Canon EOS 7D still camera. The camera’s relatively small size and weight made it easy for Guleserian to follow the actors’ lead, staying close without being too intrusive.

But that’s not to say that Like Crazy is interested in kitchen-sink realism. Its expressively gorgeous cinematography, which starts out all warm colors, soft focus, and bright light as the kids do their courting and shifts to harsher blue as they grow apart, effectively amplifies the pair’s emotions. So does the way the film plays with time, not just by shifting between emotional epiphanies rather than plot points but also in sequences like a parting in the London airport, which neatly dramatizes the way time freezes for Anna when Jacob is gone. After watching him glide up an escalator and out of sight on his way back home, she stays in the same spot for what appears to be days, standing stock still as the other people in the airport stream around her in speeded-up stop motion. Then Jacob reappears, descending back down the escalator and into her arms.

For all the care taken in laying its groundwork Like Crazy leaves plenty of room for your own thoughts and feelings to roam. I filled in the ellipses that skip over chunks of plot with my own memories of the awkward glories of first love. And as the end credits rolled, after Anna and Jacob had reunited once again, trying and failing (could it be for good this time?) to penetrate the emotional armor that had grown thicker with every parting, I found myself questioning the whole concept. Is our first true love the purest romance we’ll ever know, or is it just another adolescent rite of passage? Do we love more truly and deeply as we gain self-knowledge and self-confidence, or is there something about the emotional lability and malleability of youth that makes it harder to lower our defenses and truly meld with someone else as we get older and leave more loves behind?

Like Crazy doesn’t try to answer that question. It does something better, posing it for us to decide for ourselves.

Written for TimeOff

Daguerréotypes

2011-12-08T14:52:00.001-08:00

Daguerréotypes is playing on December 12 at the Maysles Cinema.

An openhearted, unpretentious film genius who often seems to be reinventing her medium as she goes, Agnès Varda is particularly gifted at uncovering fascinating stories where most people would never think to look. In Daguerréotypes (1976), she turns her camera on her own neighbors, the shopkeepers of Rue Daguerre, the street where she then lived—and still does, 60 years after she first moved in.

She plays with theatricalism, opening with and frequently cutting back to the magician who stages a show on Rue Daguerre while she’s filming, and who will, she promises, “erase logical ideas … and lull an already still world.” But this is at heart a quiet work of unobtrusive observation, an exercise in what you can see if you look long and closely enough at any “average street with people passing, talking … the silent majority with a dreadful mask,” as Varda puts it in voiceover.
It all began, she tells us, with her fascination with the elderly couple that runs the Blue Thistle down the street, an antique shop whose “air of mystery” she captures, as she does the elderly woman’s melancholy “air of a captive.”

As Varda’s camera follows the inseparable couple at intervals during their day, the man doing all the talking and arranging while the woman follows silently in his wake, it gradually becomes clear that she has dementia and he is her loving caregiver, though Varda is never rude or crude enough to pathologize their behavior with clinical labels. Instead, she listens as the man talks about a confused “inner force” in his wife that makes her want to go out every day in the early evening while at the same time she wants to stay in, then finds the universality in what’s known these days as “sundowning.” We’re all trapped in our own routines, Varda muses in voiceover, always wanting to go out in the evening but almost always staying in.

It’s easy to imagine an anthropologist from the future studying Daguerréotypes for months for the “slowness and the patience” it finds in the merchants’ daily work and the rhythms of their customers’ routines. It’s an intimate portrait of a highly functional urban community, its class and ethnic inequities softened by old-fashioned civility as shopkeepers ask after their customers’ families and neighbors inquire into each other’s health as they pass on the street. Varda periodically reminds us that she’s just part of the mix, identifying her own daughter, Rosalie, when she shows up on camera and occasionally leaving in her own questions as she conducts cosy one-on-one interviews with the merchants, coaxing these shy, humble people into opening up with straightforward questions about things like what they dreamed about last night or how they met (many of the shops are run by married couples).

Big themes surface periodically, presenting themselves for our contemplation before ducking back beneath the surface. I found myself thinking about how immigration changed France during the last century (Mr. and Mrs. Blue Thistle are French-born Armenians, and another of the merchants is from an island off Tunisia), and about how money and art transform our lives in ways we don’t normally notice. But Varda never lectures us on theory or underlines the significance of any particular moment.

Instead, she and her editors (Andrée Choty and Gordon Swire) round up telling details and play with visual parallels to create another of the deeply personal, casually poetic, yet playful documentaries that may be Varda’s most natural form.

Written for The L Magazine

London River

2011-12-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

A Frenchman of Algerian descent, London River writer/director Rachid Bouchareb works in the didactic-humanist tradition of Alejandro González Iñárritu and Fatih Akin. When their films are good, they’re very, very good, but when they’re bad they drown out their own artistry, beating the drum so loudly for brotherhood and justice that you pull back from the story instead of leaning into it and wind up feeling numb.

London River doesn't have the emotional complexity or unpredictability of Bouchareb’s greatest film, Days of Glory, but it’s not his worst either. Grounded in a real event, the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings of three subways and a bus in London by Islamic extremists and filmed in a raw, pseudo-documentarian style, London River seems bent on reminding us that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin and that Muslims can make excellent neighbors, but stellar acting by its two leads saves it from playing like mere propaganda.

Elisabeth (Brenda Blethyn) and Mr. Ousmane (Sotiqui Kouyaté) arrive in London from parallel worlds (she’s a farmer in Guernsey; he’s a forester in West Africa), each searching for a missing adult child who they fear was a victim of the attacks. Everywhere they turn, they run into Muslim shopkeepers—including Bouchareb regulars Roschdy Zem as the children’s landlord and Sami Bouajila as an imam—who absorb Elisabeth’s prickly anxiety with almost superhuman understanding, reflecting back nothing but empathy and a fervent desire to help.

Their cross-cut stories signal their eventual rapprochement long before it happens, and of course they start off wary and sometimes embattled before discovering how much they—and their children—have in common. But Kouyaté and Blethyn travel that well-trodden arc with style and soul.

Kouyaté, who shone in a very similar role in Bouchareb’s Little Senegal, steals the show here as well. He looks like something out of a Max Fleisher cartoon from a distance, pant legs rippling over slender legs as he strides fluidly along, his walking stick, elegantly tattered suit, and long dreads giving him an air of deposed royalty. But it’s his extraordinary face that finally wins us over. Sunken deep above his prominent cheekbones, his gentle eyes gaze out at the world with what appears to be endless compassion, all but forcing us to care about his character and the people he encounters.

Written for The L Magazine

Hugo

2011-12-01T21:50:00.000-08:00

Martin Scorsese’s latest film and his first children’s movie, Hugo starts with a tracking shot even longer and more thrilling than the one at the start of Goodfellas. After swooping down from the sky, though the streets of 1930s Paris, and into a train station, the camera slows down to introduce us to the station where almost all the action will take place. It ends with a closeup of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphan who lives in a hidden room above the ceiling, as he peers out at the passing pageant.

Hugo’s child’s-eye view exaggerates and simplifies the world of the station, but Scorsese and his team bring it to richly detailed life. Whole subcultures (like the cozy bistro’s blasé musicians) and subplots (like the budding romance between Richard Griffiths’ sweetly awkward middle-aged man and his kindly crush, played by Frances de la Tour) are sketched in just a few strokes.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the children’s book (by Brian Selznick) from which it was adapted (by John Logan) alternates between words and a series of cinematically kinetic drawings. The film’s version of that interplay is long stretches of wordless action, like that fluid opener, that play almost like one of the silent films that are the real subject of this great filmmaker’s love letter to his medium.

The plot is driven by Hugo’s quest to avoid arrest by the comically scary stationmaster (Sacha Baron Cohen) while trying to unlock the mystery of an automaton he inherited from his father. His search uncovers an unexpected secret: the perpetually disgruntled merchant (Ben Kingsley) who is one of his main nemeses at the station turns out to be silent film pioneer Georges Méliès.

The slow, connoisseur-at-the-museum pace of this glowing jewel box of a movie feels sluggish when we’re just following the kids, Hugo and Isabel (Chloë Grace Moretz), an adventure-hungry girl who befriends him and helps him solve the mystery of the automaton. Butterfield’s big eyes and knobby knees do much of his work for him, establishing Hugo’s Dickensian youth and vulnerability, but they don’t give us much sense of Hugo’s inner life, and Moretz, whose performances in Kick-Ass and Let the Right One In were so nuanced and eerily self-assured, feels stiff and self-conscious here. Maybe she’s just not comfortable playing a perky/plucky type, or maybe Scorsese isn’t great at directing young actors. (Jodie Foster was phenomenal in Taxi Driver, but she credits that to Robert de Niro, who spent hours with her before shooting, reading lines with her and helping her develop her character.)

But if the kids can be a little wooden and the dialogue painfully literal-minded (“Happy endings only happen in the movies,” says Méliès), the imagery is pure poetry. As he does in his film preservation work, Scorsese approaches his subject with the passionate engagement of a fellow filmmaker, excited to be sharing something he loves. Within the setting of Hugo’s exaggerated acting styles and the heightened realism of its sets and costumes, playful excerpts from Méliès movies shimmer and shine. As Hugo shows in loving detail, Méliès was a magician before becoming a filmmaker. Scorsese connects with the magic he found in celluloid, which allowed him to create joyfully unfettered fantasies—a process we see reenacted in faithful recreations of the scene inside his glass-walled studio.

The strategic tidbits of film history that Hugo and Isabel encounter in the course of their search are also animated in lovely sequences, like the classic bits by the likes of Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. that fill the screen as the two read a book on film history.

Hugo finds almost as much mystery and magic in the mechanics of the process as in the end result. One of the most beautiful things in this achingly beautiful film is Hugo’s automaton, a metallic man with a soulfully sad expression and intricately interlocking gears that direct it to do miraculous things, and even the hand-cranked projector used to show one of Méliès’ films gets a long, loving closeup.

The rich sepia tone of the brown-dominated palette evokes the look of an early black-and-white film, but this is no slavish recreation. Instead, the filmmakers extend their subject’s sensibilities into the present, playing with the new possibilities offered by new technologies the way he presumably would have. Digitalized backdrops heighten the sense of romance we associate with Paris, and while the 3-D is sometimes used subtly, creating magical effects like falling snow and dancing dust motes, it’s also exaggerated for dramatic or (mostly) comic effect in the spirit of Méliès. Sometimes it’s both comic and dramatic, as when the stationmaster and his high-strung Doberman pinscher pursue Hugo, their long, skinny faces telescoping far into the theater.

But there’s just as much suspense when Hugo climbs out his window and onto a high ledge to escape his pursuers. That bit may be as old as the clock scene Hugo includes from Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, but done by a master like Scorsese, it can still take your breath away.

Written for TimeOff

House of Pleasures

2011-11-25T16:40:00.000-08:00

Like Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (due out next Friday), Bertrand Bonello’s House of Pleasures is a feminist film about prostitution with the languorous, trapped-in-amber feel of an ominously fractured fairy tale. But where Leigh’s alienated stranger in a strange land is almost entirely defined and ultimately engulfed by the male gaze, Bonello offers up the comforts and pleasures of female friendship as a response to the cold menace of unchecked male domination.

Except on the rare occasions that their madam (Noémie Lvovsky) or clients take them out, the dozen or so prostitutes in House of Pleasures are not allowed to leave the well-appointed Parisian brothel where they work, during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. And we stay right there with them, the camera hugging close to study their faces or capture the intimate groupings they fall in and out of all day and night. Having sex in the private rooms upstairs, mingling with the johns in the ground-floor parlor in a nightly cocktail party, or banding together to sleep, eat, and prepare for work from the very early morning to the late afternoon, they live out a kind of parody of bourgeois domesticity in which nothing is as it seems except their mutual love and support.

A muted sense of menace enters the house every night as the men come back, providing an uneasy counterpoint to the soul-killing tedium of the goings-on. (There’s plenty of fucking but very little heat here, since the sex, which is mostly either robotic or thoroughly fetishized or both, is presented from the women’s workmanlike point of view.)

That steady thrum of dread rises to an almost unbearable pitch when the film circles obsessively back to a story introduced in the opening scene, which it revisits with an insistence that ultimately feels voyeuristic. Hearing a vivid nightmare that the tragically sensitive Madeleine (Alice Barnole) recounts once too often and then seeing it acted out, in a literal-minded and lingering shot, drains the central image of its original power, and seeing Madeleine get horribly disfigured long after we’ve figured out what happened to her feels exploitative.

But the film generally uses repetition thoughtfully, reprising scenes with enough variation to convey new information and enough similarity to drive home the excruciatingly slow drip of passing time in the women’s tightly circumscribed existence. When three- and four-way split screens show what’s going on in different parts of the house, the multiple images underscore the numbing familiarity of the activities shown, and the control the women have to cede over their own bodies when they’re with their clients is echoed in the humiliatingly public gynecological exams they submit to every month and the slave-at-auction-style examination of a prospective new employee by the madam.

A present-day coda that imagines where one of the women might be if she were alive today and the use of contemporary songs in two key scenes serve as none-too-subtle reminders that the prison these women are trapped in hardly disappeared with the 20th century. But on the whole, House of Pleasures is refreshingly undidactic, a bluesy portrait of a vanished subculture that seems less interested in historical accuracy than in emotional authenticity.

Written for The L Magazine

Fall Harvest

2011-11-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of year again when distributors dump high-gloss and high-class Oscar hopefuls into theaters almost faster than we can keep up with them. Here are a few of my favorites that are playing now.

After their uncomfortable flirtation with neutered political commentary in 2008’s Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, it’s a relief to see Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) return to their absurdist roots in A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas. This sweet stoner comedy is a loosely strung-together series of goofs on 3D gimmickry, classic scenes and tropes from other movies, and the growing Harold and Kumar canon (“We’ll see you in the fourth one,” Neil Patrick Harris tells the boys at the end of his third anarchically hilarious H and K cameo). There’s a happy ending too, of course, in which Kumar learns that you can grow up without giving up your joie de vivre. Or your weed.

Like Harold and Kumar co-creators and co-writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, Alexander Payne, director and cowriter of The Descendants, is on top of his game with his latest, his best feature since the one-two punch of Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999). The Descendants is a funny, moving story about a man learning how to be more than just a “backup parent” to his daughters while coming to terms with the loss of his wife. The script, which gives all but the most minor characters at least one emotional scene in which they reveal their true face, could easily have played as stale or melodramatic, but the film is shot through with the volatility, tension, and occasional grace of real life. As the father and teenage daughter, George Clooney and Shailene Woodley both give outstandingly truthful, nuanced performances.

The Skin I Live In isn’t director Pedro Almodovar’s best work—that remains the brilliant four-film streak that started with All About My Mother in 1999 and ended with Volver in 2006—but it’s still one of the most engaging movies of the year. Unfolding like a telenovela, with overlapping tales of horrific disfigurement, kidnapping and torture, experimental surgery performed without the consent of the patient, unacknowledged children, fraticide, suicide, and rape, both real and imagined, the story centers around the almost inhumanly beautiful Vera (Elena Anaya), a captive in the luxurious but sterile home of a mysterious doctor (Antonio Banderas). Vera is studiously impassive, but as flashbacks explain how she got that way, she begins to feel like the personification of womanhood in a paternalistic world.

Melancholia, the latest from director Lars von Trier, is a slow, somber trek to the end of life as we know it, and another of the best films of this year. The first hour or so takes place at the opulent wedding thrown for Justine (Kirsten Dunst) by her rich stiff of a brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland) at his enormous country mansion. Justine struggles to play the happy bride, but her new union is crushed by the weight of her own chronic depression. Without histrionics or blame, Dunst and costar Alexander Skarsgård give that slow-motion collapse a dignified anguish that makes it feel both tragic and inevitable.

Meanwhile, we take the measure of all the people closest to Justine, from the dutiful, nerve-shot sister who tries to scold her into behaving to the icy mother and pathologically antic father who leave her to drown in her own sorrow. Only her adoring young nephew’s nickname for her, Auntie Steelbreaker, hints that she may be more than just a fragile, “difficult” woman.

There are also hints that she may be clairvoyant, but Justine’s depression seems to be a burden, not a gift. Then the speculation about a planet on a fatal collision course with Earth, which was just a faint rumble in the background of Justine’s wedding, turns out to be true. Back at her sister’s mansion, where she had gone to recuperate, Justine climbs out of her black hole and takes charge, preparing the crumbling household for the calamity she seems to have spent her whole emotional life preparing for.

That turns out to be a majestically gorgeous event, but then, this whole film is gorgeous. Its glowing light and artfully composed, often slow-motion deep-focus widescreen shots of beautiful people, landscapes, and interiors make you ache for the loveliness of life even as Justine rejects it.

Himself a depressive, von Trier seems to be saying that only depressed people see things clearly, and that death is not just inevitable but magnificent. But statements like those are too reductive to do this film justice. Like any good fable, Melancholia leaves you with a headful of dreamlike images—Justine’s panicked sister running through the lawn with her son, her feet leaving deep prints in the grass; the huge planet looming larger on the horizon as the air grows so bright it seems almost liquid; Justine sunbathing at night in the light of the planet, first in her bridal gown and then in the nude—whose significance can’t be condensed into words.

Written for TimeOff

J. Edgar

2011-11-17T06:48:00.001-08:00

Clint Eastwood is smart and savvy, a polished professional whose long career probably owes a lot to the talent he’s proven, both as an actor and as a director, for whittling things down to a fine polish. In rounding off his own rough edges, he lessens the risk of alienating viewers, but he also removes the passion and personality that can make a movie great.

He’s at his best when he sticks with the entertaining and solidly constructed genre movies, like The Outlaw Josie Wales, that make up most of his output. Now and then, he’s displayed a winningly light touch with a simple romance or character study (The Bridges of Madison County, Bronco Billy), and he’s directed a handful of original, quirky, deeply personal films that leave lasting emotional footprints, like his tribute to Charlie Parker (Bird) or his two very different meditations on violence and the cinematic antiheroes who were once his bread and butter: Unforgiven and Gran Torino.

But more often than not, he overreaches when he tries to make a statement or yank at our heartstrings, winding up with a clunker like Changeling or the Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima diptych.

J. Edgar is another of Eastwood’s stilted, self-consciously “important” costume dramas. He lights it like a film noir, sometimes even leaving the actors’ eyes unreadable as he puddles their faces in shadow. I guess this is supposed to signal that something is hidden or amiss, but most of the time it just made me wish someone would turn on the lights. Eastwood has used that combination of murky brown-black backgrounds and blazing spotlights in most of his movies since Tightrope (1984), and it feels more reflexive than reflective here.

Pacing is usually one of Eastwood’s strong points, but that’s off here too. The film is too long by at least half an hour, and we spend far too much time on one case (the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby) and far too little on others (a few brief snippets about Emma Goldman are all we get of a controversial case).

The sets are good, his rococo bedroom and office signaling Hoover’s sense of his own importance. But the makeup and costumes are surprisingly bad, constantly drawing attention to themselves. As played by The Social Network’s Arnie Hammer, Clyde Tolson, decades-long assistant and life partner to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (Leo DiCaprio) and the probably unconsummated love of his life, is aglow as a young man, his long-lashed baby blues set in skin so creamy you want to reach out and touch it. But the pasty white mask that entraps Hammer when he plays an old man is so stiff you can’t detect any difference in Tolson’s face after he has a supposedly crippling stroke. Even the excellent Naomi Watts, who plays Hoover’s loyal lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy, is upstaged by her costumes as a young woman and her zombie-white makeup as an old one.

DiCaprio’s old man mask is much better than the others, giving him the jowly bulldog look of the aged Hoover, but at times even he looks conspicuously made-up. The actor is as egregiously miscast here as he was in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, an aging playboy playing at being a nerd turned paranoid powerbroker. Delivering his portentous lines and voice-overs in a clumsy accent (“Mock my wuhds,” he warns us early on, in a challenge I couldn’t resist), striding about his office shouting and waving a folded-over newspaper for emphasis, or pulling down the corners of his mouth to signal unhappiness, he semaphores in a performance so broad it almost feels like a spoof. The frequent appearances by representations of famous figures like Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, H.R. Haldeman, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple feel underdeveloped too, since they’re all embodied too poorly to work as impersonations but sketched too lightly to quite register as characters.

But no one could have uncovered much depth in Dustin Lance Black’s script, which stays resolutely neutral on the politics of this highly political story. Keeping the focus on what Hoover did and why he did it, J. Edgar sidesteps the central question: What did his actions mean to the rest of us? We get that he professionalized the bureau (“We now had forensics, expert witnesses, and facts,” Hoover says in voiceover), scared Congress into exponentially increasing the FBI’s budget and jurisdictional power, and kept presidents from replacing him by collecting incriminating evidence about them and their families, but we get almost no sense of what effect those things had in the world outside the Beltway.

Instead, we follow Hoover like a G-man on the case, examining his claustrophically close private world for clues as to what made him tick. The answer, it seems, is Mommy Issues straight outta Psycho, right down to a scene of Hoover trying on his dead mother’s clothes. (There was a lot of knowing laughter, at the screening I attended, at the signs of his closeted angst: Maybe this movie works best as camp.)

So much amateur psychologizing and so little historical analysis throws off the story’s center of gravity. If we don’t know why Hoover’s actions mattered, why should we care what he thought or felt?

Written for TimeOff

Tomboy

2011-11-16T15:32:00.001-08:00

Like writer/director Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies, her sophomore feature is a sensitively observed, impressionistic tale of an inarticulate adolescent girl picking her way through the gender identity/sexuality maze.

The title is a bit of a red herring, though. This isn't just a film about rejecting the trappings and physical limitations of traditional girlhood for an elongated period of freedom; it's about male impersonation and a young girl's awkward first steps toward embracing her own lesbianism.

Laure (Zoé Heran) is a gawkily graceful young beauty whose family has just moved for the umpteenth time. When her neighbor Lisa (a raw-boned Jeanne Disson) introduces herself, Laure decides on the spur of the moment to pass as a boy. The longer the deception works, the more confident "Mikael" becomes, moving to the center of the restless pack of early-adolescent boys that surrounds Lisa.

The movie's strength is its nuanced emotional authenticity and its sense of realism, so its false notes matter even though there are only a few. Tomboy gives up a little of its hard-won credibility when Laure's six-year-old sister Jeanne (Malonn Lévana) reacts to the news of her sister's secret life with the aplomb of a savvy adult, or when Laure wears the makeup Lisa put on Mikael to "play at being girls" all the way home—presumably so we can see her mother's reaction to seeing her butch daughter as a femme, though surely Laure would have scrubbed the stuff off before she left Lisa's place.

But for every scene that rings false, there are a dozen that feel like little slices of childhood served fresh from Sciamma's memory or imagination. Playing out most of the action not in words but through games like Truth or Dare, 20 Questions, or soccer, Sciamma and Heran unearth a welter of inchoate emotions beneath Mikael's macho deadpan.

After studying the boys from the sidelines of their soccer game, Laure sheds her girlish self-consciousness and discovers the joy of expanding all the way into her rangy, muscular physique to play hard with the boys. At the same time, fear of discovery and the awareness of her double life makes her a bit diffident as Mikael, especially in her courtship of Lisa. Going with the flow but afraid to initiate anything, she's painfully tentative, but the slow smile that blooms after Lisa takes the lead and kisses her is touchingly eloquent.

Tomboy is a big step forward for Sciamma, whose underdeveloped first feature was all mise-en-scene. This one is still more of a mood piece than a clearly plotted story, but the mood it creates lingers long after the movie has ended.

This Is Spinal Tap

2011-11-11T18:57:00.000-08:00

At 11:11pm tonight, 11/11/11, BAM hosts a screening of "the movie that goes to 11," This Is Spinal Tap. It also screens at 7pm, to be followed by a Skype Q&A with stars Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, in character as Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls.

The mockumentary has become such an accepted film and TV trope that, as shows like Modern Family and The Office have proven, you can sketch in that frame with the broadest of strokes, just letting your characters mug for the camera or sitting them down in front of an imaginary interviewer to comment on the action every so often. But Christopher Guest doesn’t play that game. His largely improvised, almost painfully realistic, artfully artless mockumentaries commit, both to their ludicrously earnest characters and to the cheesy conventions of bad documentary films.

Guest’s first mockumentary, 1984’s This Is Spın̈̈al Tap, is a textbook example of how to make a fake documentary. Guest and his frequent collaborators Michael McKean and Harry Shearer cowrote and costarred, along with Rob Reiner, who plays fatuous director Marty DiBergi. Reiner actually directed the movie too, making Spinal Tap a case study for the anti-auteurist camp, since it plays so much like the mockumentaries Guest went on to direct and so little like Reiner’s subsequent melodramas and bloated comedies.

Playing the core of the washed-up heavy metal band Spinal Tap, dim-witted Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls, Guest, McKean and Shearer committed so much that they’ve never given an interview about the movie except as the characters. Who hate the movie, of course, and are hurt that DeBergi made them look like such losers. “We thought the film was slanted toward the crap side,” Derek told DeBergi in a Vanity Fair interview.

Motoring along from one joke-crammed scene to another, Spinal Tap is a greatest-hits collection of roadie tales from the end of the era of Spandex boy bands crossed with a Marx Brothers farce. The heroic low-angle shots of the band performing, the clips of earlier incarnations of the band on cheesy ‘60s TV music shows, the costumes and hairdos, the songs and the album titles are all funny because they’re just a hair more exaggerated than the originals they’re modeled on, but the dialogue seesaws between deadpan absurdism and pomposity-puncturing satire, as studded with classic lines as Derek’s leather bracelet is with metal rivets.

Albert Brooks’ Real Life, his An American Family-inspired spoof of reality TV, was a similarly brilliant and realistic-feeling mockumentary, but he was too far ahead of the rest of us to catch much of a wave. Spinal Tap nearly flat-lined too, in part because a lot of people mistook it for what it was spoofing at first, brushing it off as a badly made biopic about a third-rate band. But by the early ‘90s it had developed such a following that Nigel was hosting a show on MTV and the band was starting to play real concerts.

Thank God we’ve wised up enough to keep this sneakily moving, utterly snark-free masterpiece alive. We may laugh at these big-haired 30-something boychiks rather than with them—mostly because they have absolutely no sense of humor—but we feel for them too. And that combination of head and heart makes Spinal Tap a comic classic.

Written for The L Magazine

Critiquing a Critic: A Life in the Dark

2011-11-09T18:43:00.000-08:00

I started reviewing movies (not very well) in 1978, at the peak of Pauline Kael’s brilliant career and the height of my own wandering-in-the-desert phase. Alienated, aimless, and only just starting to believe that other people might be interested in what I had to say, I was still in the habit of damming up my opinions until they tumbled out in an often inchoate torrent.

My neo-hippie distrust of the mainstream media and instinctive allergy to the East Coast preppie-industrial complex prevented me from discovering Kael in the New Yorker, the elevated if uneasy perch she occupied from 1968 to early 1991, but her voice was strong enough to penetrate even my defensive fog. I don’t remember when or where I picked up a paperback copy of Reeling, Kael’s fifth fat collection of reviews and essays about the movies she loved, but I remember the thrill with which I first encountered her passionate, proselytizing prose and brilliant insights.

As Brian Kellow makes clear in A Life in the Dark, his empathetic biography of Kael, she loved to go out with movie-besotted friends for dinner and drinks after a screening. Her entourage “resembled a Renaissance court, where people tended to seek her approval by agreeing with her about the film they’d just seen, or trying to move to the head-of-class position by outdoing each other with sharp, barbed, comments,” Kellow writes, but she was quick to freeze out acolytes who “crossed the line into sycophancy.”

Those same warring impulses dominate the long and luscious paper trail that is Kael’s most important legacy. Her Aspergerish faith in her own judgment (“Taste, judgment, being right were crucial,” said her daughter Gina in her eulogy for Kael. “Her inflexibility pleased her. She was right—and that was it”) and her sense of herself as fighting for the movies and filmmakers and actors she loved most gives her writing a missionary, even hectoring tone at times. As Kellow puts it: “She seemed to feel that mere criticism wasn’t sufficient, that she might be the only thing standing between some of Hollywood’s biggest talents and some form of creative bankruptcy.”

At the same time, she clearly yearned for peers, not parrots. Her vivid, impassioned reviews and essays on her beloved movies implore us to look and listen and feel as closely and deeply as she did. The best kind of teacher, she led by example. One of the main things she taught me was how much joy you can tap into if you just trust your gut and do something you love.

Kael wrote for a mass audience—for all of us out there in the dark with her. Like the movies she loved most, she respected that audience enough not to patronize it. Her writing may have been deceptively colloquial (she had to fight the New Yorker’s editors to maintain the conversational, accessible style she had developed by the time she got there at the age of 48), but it was fluid and compelling, and her thinking was original, complex, and deeply intuitive.

She was particularly good, as Kellow points out, in discussing particular actors or directors. Here she is explaining why she hated Katharine Hepburn, an early favorite, as an unhappily aging queen in The Lion in Winter:

When actresses begin to use our knowledge about them and of how young and beautiful they used to be—when they offer themselves up as ruins of their former selves—they may get praise and awards (and they generally do), but it’s not really for their acting, it’s for capitulating, and giving the public what it wants: a chance to see how the mighty have fallen. When Hepburn, the most regal of them all, contemplates her blotches and wrinkles with tears in her anxious eyes, it’s self-exploitation, and it’s horrible.

As much as any critic ever has, Kael got that we fall for the movies because they move us, making us think and, more importantly, making us feel. An instinctive populist from a working class background with a deep-rooted disdain for academia, she celebrated any movie that could sweep her away on a tidal wave of emotion, often dismissing arty foreign films and praising “trashy” popcorn movies in the process.

Kellow, a features editor for Opera News and the author of three other show-biz biographies, has a workmanlike style that seems all the more flatfooted in contrast to Kael’s excerpts, but he did his homework, talking to dozens of her friends, enemies, and colleagues and reading her archives at Indiana University. His insights into his subject seem solid, and he outlines the lucky timing that may have contributed as much to her success as her abundant talent and bulletproof self-confidence. Her luck was never better than in the late ‘60s, when she was writing for smart, small-circulation film magazines, primed to get tapped for the big leagues just as films like Bonnie and Clyde and directors like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman rejuvenated American film, shouldering aside the creaky, conservative, formulaic stuff that dominated after WWII with the kind of movies she loved.

Kellow can be enjoyably dishy, too, like when he reports Kael protégé Steve Vineberg’s reaction to a New York Times article by Wes Anderson that portrayed Kael as out of touch and confused. After other “Paulettes” complained, Anderson insisted in a letter to the editor that he hadn’t meant to mock her. “I thought, when I read [the letter], this is what’s wrong with Wes Anderson’s movies. The guy is tone deaf,” Vineberg says.

But if Kael got the devoted fans she deserved, the movies themselves let her down. By the time she stopped reviewing, Parkinson’s disease had slowed her down considerably, but what ultimately defeated her was the rise of big, dumb, critic-proof blockbusters and would-be blockbusters in Hollywood. “The strong, cautionary words, the advocacy for smart, risky, creative filmmaking that Pauline had poured forth in her column for years may have been more important than ever, but they seemed increasingly futile,” writes Kellow. “The marketing lords had figured out a way to make certain films—many films—critic-proof. Don Simpson’s power had reached its apex, while Pauline’s was on the decline.”

Since then, the Internet has changed the game again, altering the way we see and learn about movies and diluting the power of critics even further—a change, Kellow notes, that would have “shattered” Pauline. As professional and amateur opinions proliferate online along with opinion aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see the rise of another critic as powerful as Kael in her prime, when directors paid court to her, writers begged for her feedback on scripts, and one of her raves could snatch a spunky new movie back from the junk heap.

If so, that’s all the more reason to be glad we had her when we did, to help us savor her beloved American movies during one of their most creative periods.

Written for TimeOFF

In Time

2011-11-04T08:07:00.000-07:00

Writer-director Andrew Niccol’s movies must sound great in pitch meetings. The Truman Show (1998), the only script he wrote and didn't direct and, not coincidentally, by far his best movie, is a prescient look at how horribly wrong things can go when reality TV gets mixed up with reality, period. Simone (2002) is about what will happen to us humans once we’ve taken artificial intelligence far enough to create digital “people” who can pass for real. Lord of War (2005) is about the international arms merchants who feed our perpetual state of war. (It’s against them, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have some fun with those guns. Picture a bullet’s-eye view of something getting blown up and exploding into a huge fireball.) Gattaca (1997) is about a couple of beautiful kids on the run in a winner-take-all world where genetic engineering has run amok and the wall separating the haves from the have-nots is practically unbreechable. In Time is another take on that same theme, plus a cautionary message about the growing wealth gap. (It’s against that too. Hey, those Occupy Wall Street kids will love it!)

In the world tensely navigated by In Time’s hero, Will Salas (a nicely nuanced Justin Timberlake), everyone is programmed to live until age 25 and then die, unless they can add more time to the LED clocks ticking away just under the skin of their forearms. The rich pile up decades, becoming virtually immortal, while the poor run out of time and fall dead in the street, like so many Holocaust victims—only much more photogenic, since everyone also appears to be genetically engineered to stay gorgeous and shapely forever.

It’s a promising premise, but Niccols pounds it into the ground, repeating too few ideas too many times, sometimes even in the same words (“For a few to be immortal, many must die” is one of his favorite phrases). Meanwhile, he uses lazy movie clichés to keep us entertained as Will tries to take down the system by stealing time from the rich and giving it to the poor.

Car chases, rooftop chases on foot, and gunfights are all dangled in front of us like mobiles over a baby’s crib. We also get Will’s rich girl-poor boy romance with Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried, whose crimson bob, enormous eyes, and form-fitting wardrobe, which she somehow manages to keep on rocking even on the lam, making her look like an anime character come to life) and his poor boy-poor boy bromance with Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy in a Matrix-style black leather trenchcoat), the cop who vows to take him down. Predictably, the first ends well but the second is tragically doomed. (Sorry, dude, but for a few main characters to live happily ever after, many secondary characters must die.)

This is the kind of movie that can be transformed by inspired art direction, but In Time’s sets are unimaginative and oddly barren. A few of the props—the phones, the devices people slip over their wrists to upload or download time—look vaguely futuristic, but for the most part this world looks just like our own, only less so.

The set design and art direction raise questions the script never answers. Even In New Greenwich, where the rich people live, the streets are virtually empty of cars, and it’s not because there’s some cooler, more futuristic form of transportation in sight, a la Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. Where is everyone, and how do they get around? What’s more, there’s no talk of travel and no news of life anyplace aside from New Greenwich and Dayton. Has the whole work been reduced to just these two hamlets? What happened to everyone and everyplace else?

Dayton, the ghetto where Will and all his friends live, looks like any number of crumbling neighborhoods in post-industrial America, with its burglar-barred apartment doors and run-down corner bars, but its perils are more implied than felt. A small-time gangster named Fortis (Alex Pettyfer) and his boys pop up so often they feel like the only bad boys in the hood, and it’s hard to find the featureless, matte-black cop cars that cruise Dayton’s streets all that menacing when they look like crudely made toys.

It doesn’t help that there’s a Bugsy Malone feel to parts of the movie, as callow young beauties in the supporting roles try to make like world-weary sophisticates. And the supposedly impenetrable wall of privilege that protects the rich starts to seem awfully flimsy after Will and Sylvia broach it with no apparent effort, breaking into one of Sylvia’s father’s banks and infiltrating his phalanx of bodyguards.

If lack of nuance and texture push In Time to the brink of lifelessness, muddled ideas shove it over the edge. In a more kinetic movie, I could forgive the main character telling his girlfriend he doesn’t hate her for being rich because “It’s nobody’s fault what they’re born with” just before robbing a rich stranger and leaving her to die, in a move we’re clearly meant to cheer. And, much as I hate the common form of classism that involves romanticizing poverty, implying that it makes people cooler and more soulful, I can overlook it in stories that don’t take themselves so seriously. But in a movie that’s all about how the wealth gap distorts human lives and relationships, that kind of sloppy thinking and false sentimentality is a fatal flaw.

Written for TimeOFF

Bombay Beach director Alma Har’el: Documenting the demise of the American dream

2011-11-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

Israeli director Alma Har’el was making a music video when she got hooked by the location, a gone-to-seed resort community on California’s Salton Sea, and two young brothers she found living there. One of the two, sad-eyed Benny Parrish (pictured above with Har’el), became one of main characters of Bombay Beach, Har’el’s first documentary and a gorgeous, quietly eloquent meditation on life on the geographic and economic edge of America.

Elise Nakhnikian: You got pretty amazing access to the people in this film. How did you get them so comfortable with the camera?
Alma Har’el: I think it was a combination of things. One is that I moved there for four or five months while I was filming. The second is that I had no crew. It was just me. I did the sound and the camera, so it was very intimate. The third is that I used a very small, cheap home video camera that it didn't have the kind of threatening presence that some cameras have. And the Parrishes, I think, trusted me very much because they saw this music video I did with their son.

That started the trust and the relationship. Pamela [Benny’s mother] just really appreciated the creative process in general, and she always wanted to take photos herself and do creative things. They’re a creative family. A lot of people have creativity and don’t get to express it.

Also, I was a pain in the ass. I just wouldn't leave. (Laughs) So they had to get used to it.

There’s a sort of innate power differential, usually, when you have a camersomeone’s doing the shooting and someone’s getting shot—
Okay. I didn’t feel that.

I was going to say that it wasn’t so much there in your movie. Did you think of it as a collaboration with the people –
What would you say the power comes from? Just the fact that you have the power over them because you have the footage?

Well, one person is choosing what’s going to get shown and how it’s going to get shown, and which parts do and don’t get used.
Yeah, yeah. That is true, but I made it my first priority on this film to use stuff that wasn’t hurting the people I was filming and that was acceptable for them.

Did you collaborate with them in deciding what to shoot?
No. But there’s a lot of stuff that I decided not to put in because I knew that they wouldn’t be comfortable. Especially the back story of Benny’s dad. His family story goes back another generation. Benny’s father’s story is very interesting, but he didn’t want to appear in the film.

A lot of people ask me about all sorts of rules of documentary that I have to say I’m not familiar with, what’s just truth and just showing life and what’s not, and what’s legitimate, and what’s moral, and all these things. I think what’s most important to me – and maybe the only thing that I really cared about – was that the family I’m filming would be happy with the film when I finished it.

So did you show them a rough cut and take out things they didn’t like?
No, I never showed them a rough cut. They saw the film at Tribeca [Film Festival].

So you just trusted your own instincts about what they’d be comfortable with?
Yeah, it was more like an instinctive thing.

One of the things that comes through really clearly in your film is the wealth gap in America and how poor people are usually invisible to us as a culture. Do you think you see that more clearly because you’re not a native so it’s new to you, or is that something you’re familiar with from Israel?
Both. I’m definitely familiar with these sort of outskirts-of-society ghost towns that are in the desert, because we do have that in Israel. I actually, for a while, spent a lot of time in one of those in Israel. I like those places. I feel that you can very much get lost but at the same time find yourself in them, and feel something very direct about life, and see things clearly for what they are. So I responded to that.

But I also just didn’t know that America had such a side. I obviously grew up on the image of Hollywood in Israel. Coming there and seeing how people lived, and seeing the broken, turned-on-its head American dream, where a kid has to move from Los Angeles to Bombay Beach to make it to college (laughs), and just seeing the health system and just the whole thing. But at the same time, seeing the beauty and the dignity that these people have in their lives. The whole combination felt like something I should capture.

And it also very much relates to the music I love. I love Bob Dylan and Beirut [whose songs are featured in the film]. This is music that I listen to all the time. They’re kind of two bookends of America to me.

Bob Dylan is obviously the blood of this country, and he’s at the same time such an outsider. He’s both one of the most American things you can think of and he also encapsulates so much history and promise for a different America. Bob Dylan in the 60s, and the whole folk thing, rose against a lot of the stuff we see today, like Occupy Wall Street. I won’t say hippie, but what do you call that?

Beatnik?
Yeah, I guess. But obviously, it didn’t go that way. And then you have Zach [Condon, Beirut’s leader], who is kind of like a modern version of the troubadour. Zach is very much an American – grew up in the desert, by the way, in Santa Fe and Albuquerque – but he’s free of a lot of history that I feel some artists carry.

I find that both of them have the ability to be genuine and authentic, and at the same time they both have so much style and so much presence and flavor. Their authentic selves and who they are as artists always shines stronger than whatever aesthetic decisions they take, but there’s so much beauty to their style and to the choices that they make.

Speaking of style, can you talk about the look of your film–the soft, warm colors and the soft feel you get by using shallow depth of field?
Yeah, I call it a digital super-8. I fell in love with this camera when I was working with an incredibly talented DP called Matthias Koenigswieser, who shot a music video for me for Jack Peñate. We did this music video in black-and-white on this very small camera, the Canon Vixia, which costs, like, $600 in Best Buy. I loved the softness of it and I loved the colors.

I took that camera to do one more video for Beirut, which was Concubine, the one I was telling you about. I had no budget so I shot it myself. That was the first time I shot anything myself, but this camera was so small I didn’t need a crew. So one thing led to another, I guess they say in English.

But I couldn’t shoot with heavy [professional film] lenses. I was running around with the kids and I was so scared I was going to drop them. Each one was, like, $10,000 and I didn’t have very much insurance. So I brought them back and I went on eBay and bought still camera second-hand lenses. They were a lot lighter and smaller, and not very expensive – just a few hundred bucks. Part of the reason that the film has sort of a vignette to it and a shallow depth of field and a softness is that I used those lenses, and some of them were older and some of them were cheaper and some weren’t as sharp.

The whole way this film was done was half inspiration, half desperation.

Did doing this make you want to do more of your own shooting?
I love shooting. I love it.

The sound is amazing too, at least now that I know you did it. I understand that sound is one of the hardest things to get right.
I recorded all the sound on two lavalier mikes, so the kids could run around and do whatever they wanted. And then in post, I had this great guy named Dror Mohar who does sound, who just as a favor came there with me for a few days and recorded a lot of background and a lot of texture and sound. When we made the film, we added a lot of that and cleared up the sound that I had recorded. So that definitely gave it the sort of clarity and richness that it has now.

But we also kept it very minimalistic. I wanted it to be very quiet, because that’s what it is like over there. It wasn’t an action film where I needed tons of sounds.

There’s a lot of sorrow in this film, which is mostly imposed by outside forces: gun violence, the criminal justice system, racism. But it’s not a sad movie because there’s so much beauty. That’s partly because of the look we’ve been discussing, but it’s also because of the relationships between the people: There’s a lot of love and kindness there. So I’m wondering how you thought about this as you were putting it together. Did you think of it as a story about individuals, or about relationships between people, or about the relationships between people and the forces that shape their lives?
All of the above. [laughs] All of the above and me. And music.

I didn’t set out to talk about an issue. I really like the idea of how, as we grow up, we have a certain mythology about our families that we build in our heads. We hear broken stories and we know certain things and we kind of make it all up. And then we take these stories on ourselves, like Benny says, ”I was in jail for 100 years.” He doesn’t really know what jail is, but he knows his father was there and he knows it was terrible. So he says he was there, and he comes up with this whole story about how it was terrible and how it had scorpions in it and no TV and they killed kids.

I wanted to capture how we all live with half-broken, half self-invented mythologies that we carry from our pasts and our parents and our countries, and how it leaves room for the imagination, because it is so broken. That place, the Salton Sea, has such a past, and I come from a country that had such a promise and turned into such a violence place.

I grew up in a place that had a lot of beauty in it and a lot of togetherness, and at the same time a lot of violence, a lot of conflict. I didn’t really care when I was a kid, but as you grow up you realize how much it was the backdrop for everything. I think that’s the same thing with this place: the reality of the American dream and its promise. What happened to it?

You used composition and framing really nicely to make points you never spell out. Like the California girl poster that looks so out of place in a bar, or the dead fish in the foreground of shots that are about something else altogether.
One of the things that really drew me to this place is that I felt like the environment and the decay and the cultural references tell such a story that you don’t need to say anything. And I love that, because when I live my life and I go to new places, there isn’t a freaking narrator telling me what to think about everything and explaining every little thing to me.

Take Shelter

2011-10-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

Like the recurring nightmares that torment its main character, Curtis (Michael Shannon), Take Shelter is frustratingly slow-moving at times, but it lays down shock waves of dread that keep rippling outward long after it ends.

At first, Curtis hides his terrifying dreams and waking hallucinations—and, most importantly, the deepening paranoia they both reflect and intensify—from his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain). But when he finally trusts Sam with the truth, he learns the strength of the family bond that is his main motivation for trying to keep it together, and this story’s true subject.

Writer/director Jeff Nichols stages the family’s everyday life as unshowily shot kitchen-sink realism. They’re in the heartland of America, not just geographically—Curtis, Samantha, and their adorable young daughter live in a small town in Ohio—but economically, perched as they are on the uneasy edge of middle-class comfort. An elegant cut early on takes us from the big drill Curtis and his work buddy, Dewart (Shea Wigham) operate on their job site to the sewing machine Samantha is running as she sews to supplement her husband’s income. Meanwhile, references to strained family budgets and close-ups of the mac and cheese, fried pork chops, and potato salad piled onto dinner plates keep reminding us that everyone’s finances are as shaky as Curtis’ state of mind. As Curtis’s brother warns him: “You take your eye off the ball one minute in this economy and you’re screwed.”

Against that backdrop, Curtis’ dreams and hallucinations are that much more dramatic. Set during or just before spectacular, CGI-assisted storms, they are usually bathed in the brilliant, soft light of a bright sun filtered through a thick layer of clouds. The light, those clouds—broad blue-gray brushstrokes above a color-saturated blue-green landscape—and the frequent slashes of lightning or rustle of wind through the leaves are all charged with a sense of potentially catastrophic excitement. Into this surrealistic setting come figures right out of Hitchcock or zombie movies: swirling flocks of black birds and shadowy human forms that pound at locked doors or break car windows, pulling Curtis’s daughter out and away from him forever.

Curtis doesn’t know whether his dreams and waking visions are a sign of the schizophrenia that overtook his mother when she was his age or visions of a coming apocalypse that only he can see. And so, even as he seeks psychological help, he risks bankrupting his family to expand their underground storm shelter into a bunker. We don't know what to believe either, since Nichols keeps both possibilities wide open right down through the ending, which can be read literally or as another of Curtis’s visions.

Trying to figure out whether he’s a prophet or a madman gives us something to do while the pace lags during a slow, often repetitive first hour or so, during which Curtis and his family play variations on the same few themes, often with predictable consequences. But the tension builds as Curtis falls apart, coming to an almost unbearably suspenseful peak in a riveting sequence in the storm shelter.

Shannon signals Curtis’s vulnerability and instability largely through body language. Moving like a prisoner of some unseen force field, he seems stiff and tentative and awkward at the same time that his square jaw and tall body radiate menacing power. Even when his face isn’t lit from below or pooled in shadow like something from a horror film, we’re uncomfortably aware of how close he is to erupting and hurting someone, maybe even the wife and daughter he lives for.

Chastain matches Shannon’s realistic intensity beat for beat as Samantha, who is as loving a mother as the one she played in The Tree of Life but much tougher and more competent—a real woman rather than an idealized childhood memory. (Between this, her tough Mossad agent in The Debt, and her sweet peroxide ditz in The Help, Chastain has already shown more range this year than most actors do in a lifetime’s worth of roles.) When the two go head to head, especially in the storm shelter scene, Take Shelter stops meandering in and out of blind alleys and coalesces into a moving portrait of a loving family under siege.

Written for TimeOff

Drive

2011-10-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

In one of his deceptively haimish digressions, businessman/gangster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) tells the unnamed star of Drive (Ryan Gosling) about the movies he used to produce. “One critic called them European,” Rose says. “I thought they were shit.”

That’s a neat little in-joke, since director Nicolas Winding Refn is a Danish critics’ darling (Drive won him the best director prize at Cannes this year). Refn specializes in highly stylized, pulse-pounding arthouse films about hard guys in no-win situations who see extreme violence as their only way out—or, in the case of the title character in Bronson, their sole means of expression. But that line is the only hint of irony I detected in Drive. This movie-movie appears to be dead serious about resurrecting the hard-guy American vigilante films that flourished in the last half of the last century, and updating the tradition with a Refn-sized dose of grossly graphic violence.

Gosling’s driver works in a garage during the day and moonlights as a getaway driver for professional thieves. (He also has another part-time job, but I won’t ruin the surprise by telling you what that is, since it’s revealed in a tasty little bit of misdirection.) Like the taciturn tough guys played by Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood in their prime (Bullitt was Refn’s main model for Drive), he communicates almost entirely through action, his Zen-like default mode of quiet watchfulness punctuated by brief but bloody rampages.

Even his courtship with the girl next door, Irene (Carey Mulligan), consists almost entirely of doing things together without speaking. Gosling is convincing enough as a lover to sell his half of their wordless montages, with the help of Mulligan’s melting eyes. But the expressionless stare he adopts to play tough and the slow-blooming smile he reveals one or two times too many read to me as damaged sensitivity in retreat, not smoldering anger or coiled intensity or whatever they’re meant to imply.

But not even not quite buying Gosling as a ninja-style master of evasion and hand-to-hand combat spoiled the movie for me, since there’s so much else to enjoy. Bryan Cranston and Christina Hendricks do a lot with a little in underwritten roles, and Kaden Leos is charming as Irene’s son. And Brooks makes an excellent villain, kvetching and kvelling like somebody’s loveable grandpa while plotting nefarious stuff. Just watching him kill a man with a fork is pretty much worth the price of admission. As A.O. Scott put it, “In his self-authored comic roles, Mr. Brooks often exudes a passive-aggressive hostility, a latent capacity for violence held in check by neurosis and cowardice. He lets you assume the same in Drive until the moment he stabs someone in the eye with a fork. It’s a shocking and oddly glorious moment — something a lot of us, without quite knowing it or being able to explain just why, have been waiting 30 years to see.”

Drive is generally a little light on that kind of texture or emotional resonance, but from the terrific opening scene, it’s very good at transmitting information efficiently and maintaining tension and suspense. That first scene culminates in a cat-and-mouse car chase, which our guy wins as much by knowing when and where to stop as he does by being driving fast and furiously. He never speaks a word in that sequence either, but by the time it’s over we know just how smart he is and how cool he stays under pressure.

Then there’s the style Refn soaks the script in. Some is pure noir, like the rays of light that occasionally slice through darkness to create vivid black-and-white patterns, the faces half-drowned in shadow, and the chocolate-brown night-time scenes and deserted back streets that show LA as anything but a sunny paradise. Other choices—the romantically morose, synth-heavy pop music pounding away in the background; the slow, stately pans and slow motion that turn violent crescendos operatic; the fondness for overhead shots—evoke the work of Michael Mann.

That’s an awfully high bar to try to reach, and Drive doesn’t hit it, since Hossein Amini’s self-consciously stripped-down script lacks the emotional depth that makes Mann’s best antihero tragedies so great. But if you’re looking to get lost for a couple hours in a smartly plotted, beautifully acted popcorn movie, Drive can take you there, and that’s no small accomplishment.

Written for TimeOff

The Descendants

2011-10-17T19:38:00.000-07:00

The Descendants was the closing film for the New York Film Festival yesterday. It opens in U.S. theaters on November 18.

Part Coen Brothers and part James L. Brooks, Alexander Payne makes comedies about serious stuff like the abortion wars and midlife crises. His characters may verge on caricature and his scripts on contrivance, but nuanced acting and lingering close-ups make their emotions feel vividly, even painfully real.

His best film since Election, aside from the segment he directed in Paris, je t’aime, The Descendants is based on a novel written by a young woman (Kaui Hart Hemmings), which may explain why the two girls in the story feel so well-rounded. But then, Payne has always gravitated toward interestingly prickly female characters, from the glue-sniffing title character of Citizen Ruth to Election’s endlessly ambitious Tracy Flick and the impetuous biker played by Sandra Oh in Sideways.

The main women in this story are Matt King’s wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) and the couple’s two daughters, 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley), both of whom are acting out like crazy as the story begins.

Elizabeth never speaks a word (we see her first as a gigantic face filling the screen with delight as she rides in a speeding motorboat, then as a comatose husk of a body in a hospital bed), but we get a pretty good sense of her through the things other people say about her—and to her as she lies there, a pale slate for other people to scrawl their emotions on.

Her injury leaves her workaholic husband to care for the daughters to whom he has always been an absent presence. Matt, Alex, and Scottie have to come to terms with Elizabeth’s condition. They also have to learn how to be a family in a whole new way, since Matt has been just the “backup parent” up to now, as he says in a voiceover that dominates the first part of the film but fades away in the second, as he finds people other than himself to talk to.

As if that weren’t enough, everything Matt thought he knew about his marriage is upended when Alex tells him that Elizabeth had been having an affair before the accident that knocked her out.

Hawaiian culture is as strong a presence in this film as Omaha was in Citizen Ruth or California’s wine country was in Sideways. We don’t see much of the state, but what we do see is heavy on aging beach bums (“In Hawaii,” Matt tells us, “some of the most powerful people look like bums and stuntmen.”) and light on picturesque volcanoes and beaches. More than halfway through the film, Matt asks a cousin who’s driving him and his girls from the airport on Kauai to make a detour to the family holdings. (Another subplot has Matt guiding a huge clan of cousins to a decision about how to dispose of 25,000 gorgeous acres of Kauai that belong to the family, since their great-great-grandmother was a Hawaiian princess.) “Let’s see the land,” he says, and he might be talking to us, since the magnificent vista we’re about to be treated to is the first we’ve seen since the movie started.

Matt is supposed to be an ordinary shlub but, as good as Clooney is here, he can’t quite pull off ordinary. He does manage to look tired and unglamorous, his shoulders tensely awkward and his waistband too high. When Matt finds out about the affair, he takes off running with none of Clooney’s natural grace, his elbows flailing and his feet slapping the ground noisily.

But the real power of Clooney’s performance rests in his eyes, which always let us know just what Matt is feeling, whether he’s warily greeting a cousin, confronting his wife’s lover in a near-paralyzing rage, watching his daughters in frustrated silence, or gazing into space, stunned at the news of another betrayal.

Matt is not the only character whose soul is bared. All but the most minor characters have at least one emotional scene where they get to reveal their true face, often triggered by news of Elizabeth’s dire condition. (Grief is always closely linked to anger in The Descendants, and people generally cope with a blow by attacking somebody else.) But the excellent cast—particularly Clooney, Woodley, and Robert Forster as Elizabeth’s fiercely devoted father—keeps the rolling epiphanies from feeling rote.

Written for The House Next Door

The Artist

2011-10-15T21:05:00.000-07:00

The Artist screens tomorrow at the New York Film Festival. It opens in U.S. theaters on November 23.

The Artist is a feather-light gimmick spun into a feature-length film. Writer/director Michel Hazanavicius’s tribute to silent movies starts with a movie buff’s tongue-in-cheek premise: What if we made a silent movie about the silent film era, where the stars all act the same way in their real lives as they do in their film-within-a-film movies?

The film begins at the end of Hollywood’s silent film era, as star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and aspiring starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) meet cute and fall for each other. The rest of the movie chronicles their long journey to a happy ending while their careers careen in opposite directions as he laughs off the talkies as a fad, fading into impoverished obscurity, while she embraces the new technology and becomes one of its biggest stars.

The two mug like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, exaggerating the already extreme expressions and gestures employed by most of the stars of the teens and early '20s. George flashes his blindingly white grin on the red carpet like Dudley Do-right, and Peppy’s signature move—onscreen and off—is a two-fingered whistle followed by a blown kiss. But then everyone in this world overacts, even the studio head (John Goodman) who bellows things like “the public is never wrong!” and the audience members who radiate oversized emotion at a screening, some clapping their hands to their cheeks in amazement.

The best thing about The Artist is its look. Crisply lit black and white photography, and anti-panoramic 4x3 aspect ratio, periodic iris cuts, and the clearly phony painted backdrops in some of the film-within-a-film scenes evoke early American films nicely. So do the distinctive faces and forms of supporting players like James Cromwell as George’s faithful manservant, Ken Davitian as a pawnshop owner, and Goodman’s blustering studio chief.

Dujardin, whose mustache, piano-key smile, and heroic poses make him look like a cross between Gene Kelly and John Gilbert, also channels Douglas Fairbanks and Fred Astaire, among others. Peppy is the quintessential perky, spunky, beautiful but sexless early American movie heroine, while the icy wife who ditches George on his way down (Penelope Ann Miller) conjures up the grim, lace-collared, straw-man matriarchs played by the likes of Esther Dale when the jazz babies were sending up Victorian values. Even the adoring Jack Russell terrier that sticks like a burr to George is a doppelganger for the dog who played Asta in the Thin Man movies.

The Artist is as much about what we know (or think we know) about how those movies were made as it is about the movies themselves. We laugh knowingly when a series of credits illustrates Peppy’s rise, starting with one that misspells her name at the bottom of a long roll, and the story of George’s John Gilbert-like descent bangs out a comfortingly familiar chord.

But there’s something a little disingenuous about the whole thing, which feels like a spoof masquerading as a tribute. Singin’ in the Rain covers similar ground, looking at how careers rose or fell when Hollywood discovered sound, but it’s upfront about its attitude toward the mugging that was rampant in the silent era, portraying it as loveable but laughable. In The Artist, Peppy voices that sentiment (in title cards) and then apologizes for it, saying she didn’t really mean it, but why not? Watch a truly great actor in one of the truly great films of the silent era – John Barrymore in Don Juan, Buster Keaton in just about anything – and you’ll see no mugging or posturing or winking or two-fingered whistles, just comedy, tragedy, and raw human emotion.

The Artist could have used a few more little bits of business like the one where Peppy fondles George’s jacket, putting her arm through one sleeve and then around her own waist to pretend that he’s holding her. It also could have used a lot fewer scenes that tell us things we already know in not-clever-enough ways, like the recurring bit where George’s wife defaces pictures of him, adding florid mustaches and goofy glasses. Instead, it relies too much on the charm of its leads, making their exaggerated gestures feel a bit desperate at times.

This might have made a lovely 15- or 20-minute short, if anyone out there would fund such a thing. But at 100 minutes, it’s a joke stretched too thin.

Written for The House Next Door

The Ides of March

2011-10-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

Toward the end of The Ides of March, Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), a presidential candidate maneuvering to win the Democratic primary, gains the crucial support of a powerful senator by promising to appoint him secretary of state if elected. It’s an important compromise that Morris earlier vowed not to make, since the senator “wants to cut the top 10 floors off the United Nations.”

Political protests are toppling governments around the world. In our own country, people on both the right (the Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Wall Street) are becoming increasing vocal about their disgust at the corporations and other unfielded players who call so many of the shots in our political system, controlling politicians mainly through financial contributions but also by delivering blocs of special-interest voters. The time seems ripe for a mainstream movie with the guts and the smarts to dramatize the pressures that make candidates speak in slogans and backtrack on important decisions, sometimes even betraying their own core principles. I had hoped that The Ides of March would be that movie—certainly Clooney, his frequent creative partner Grant Heslov, and the excellent case of this film would have been up to the challenge—but it turns out to be something much blander and less interesting.

The Ides of March is not about its leading candidate or the choices he makes. Morris is never even seen or heard from in Farragut North, the book on which Clooney and Heslov based their screenplay. He has a couple of brief but important scenes in the film, but for the most part he’s in the background if at all, a face on a heroic campaign poster, a body in a makeup chair, or an orator briefly glimpsed on a monitor or half-heard from backstage while making another in a series of plainspoken, left-of-center speeches.

In fact, this movie isn’t even about the political process. It’s just another coming-of-age story about an ambitious young man—in this case, media-handler prodigy Stephen Myer (Ryan Gosling, who goes from starry-eyed to dead-eyed without showing us much in between)—who gets a job in a cynical system that he fully intends to reform but gets corrupted by instead.

Stephen’s road to ruin passes through some pretty dirty double dealing, both by him and by his campaign-management colleagues. Rather than finding the fun in their one-upmanship, the way Duplicity did with corporate espionage, or locating an interesting middle ground between outrage and pathos, like Up in the Air or The Informant!, The Ides of March goes for a moralistic gravity that makes the film feel as naïve as crack reporter Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei) accuses Stephen of being before his change of heart.

The film’s relatively humorless authorial hand weighs even heavier when a pretty young intern (the always vivid and sympathetic Evan Rachel Wood) winds up in mortal danger after developing clandestine relationships with both Stephen and another key player. There are some good lines (after planting a rumor with the gullible media about Morris’ opponent, Stephen tells an assistant: “I don’t care if it’s true. I just want to see him spend a day denying it”), but at least as many feel scripted and glib. “Mark Morris is a politician…. He will let you down, sooner or later,” says Ida in a speech that might as well come packaged with a blinking neon sign that spells out “foreshadowing.”

Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman turn in rock-solid bookend performances as the former allies turned rivals who head up the competing campaigns. The film kicks into high gear whenever either or both of these grizzled pros is on screen, with Hoffman in particular giving it a much-needed jolt of rumpled realism.

But then Stephen gives the camera another long tragic stare or Morris delivers another liberal-wet-dream speech, making a clear, cogent, uncompromising and unapologetic case for secular humanism or abortion or higher taxes on the rich, and we’re reminded that The Ides of March is nothing more than a comfortingly familiar fable for fans of CNN. After all, no one who talked the way Morris does could remain a serious presidential candidate in this country for long.

Written for TimeOff

Policeman

2011-10-13T20:36:00.000-07:00

Policeman will play at the New York Film Festival on October 15 and 16. It is not scheduled to open in U.S. theaters.

Why does everything always have to be about the Palestinians? Natanel (Michael Aloni) asks Shira (Yaara Pelzig) as she reads the first draft of a manifesto she’s writing for their tiny group of anti-capitalist rebels. Can’t we just make this about what’s happening within our country—the social equities, the wealth gap, the relentless violence?

Natanel gets his wish in Policeman, an Israeli film that was one of NYFF sleeper hits among the press and industry types who saw it last week. Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is just one small part of the backdrop here. The showdown is between two insular tribes with a shared love of violence: the young protesters and a clique of not much older cops, whose fatal collision has the somber inevitability of a Greek tragedy.

Writer/director Nadav Lapid starts with the cops, all members of an elite counter-terrorism unit. An insular pod of hard-driving, hard-bodied, testosterone junkies, they’re the kind of guys for whom a new arrival at a backyard barbecue sparks a noisy orgy of back-thumping and chest-bumping.

After marinating in their culture long enough to get to know their leader, Yaron (Yiftach Klein), pretty well, we switch to the protesters. Natanel and Shira are humorless, near-expressionless true believers, but their sidekick Oded (Michael Moshonov) is more like a faithful puppy than a comrade. Impressionable and emotionally volatile, he seems to be loyal to the cause mainly because he’s hopelessly in love with Shira.

We linger a while with this group, too. In a Q&A after the press screening, Lapid explained the logic behind his unusual and effective way of showing the two groups consecutively rather than cutting between them from the start. He dispensed with the parallel cuts, he said, because he didn’t want the focus to be on when or how the two groups would meet. “The question for me was, who are these people? Who are these groups? I tried to describe their existential essence.”

Natanel is officially in charge of the protesters, but it soon becomes clear that Shira is the group’s emotional fulcrum, the one who naturally winds up in charge, as Yaron does with his buddies. She and Yaron each get one lingering extreme close-up that underscores the parallels between the two as they stare into the camera, all willpower and seemingly unshakeable self-confidence.

The two groups meet after the “killer babies,” as the bride contemptuously calls the young protesters, take three hostages at a society wedding. They take hostages to attract media attention to their manifesto, but they chose these particular ones for a reason: they see them as guilty of a long string of capitalist crimes that include privatizing the nation’s salt mines and cruelly exploiting their workers.

Lapid grants every character his or her dignity, and he makes most easy to empathize with even if they’re not particularly sympathetic. Touching ties between fathers and children help humanize the people involved, motivating heroic acts from both hostages and hostage-takers in the final showdown. But there are no feel-good happy endings in Policeman. These characters are boxed into rigid roles, and though their actions can make things marginally better or (more often) worse, there may be no way out of the mess they wind up in.

Hmm, maybe this is a metaphor for the Israelis and the Palestinians after all.

Written for The L Magazine

Substance Over Style: 2011 Trenton International Film Festival

2011-10-12T20:18:00.000-07:00

The 2011 Trenton International Film Festival will run from October 14 through 16 at the Mill Hill Playhouse in Trenton.

"The theme running through this year's selection is the complexity of human relations—in communities, in larger societies, and between individuals and people of differing religious and political beliefs,” says Trenton Film Society Executive Director Cynthia Vandenberg of the 2011 Trenton International Film Festival. “In each of the films we see how people can transcend the normative behaviors that surround them and how, consequently, they challenge others to do the same."

Watching the films in this year’s festival, you get the sense that the programmers were more interested in substance than style. In the opening of Scheherazade: Tell Me a Story, for instance, the camera drifts around the Cairo apartment where the main character, TV journalist Hebba (Mona Zaki), lives with her husband Karim (Hassan El Raddad), a reporter yearning to become editor-in-chief of his state-owned newspaper. The intention is probably to introduce us to the power couple’s über-consumerist lifestyle, but badly lit spaces and painfully slow pans make it hard to see anything much. And in the opening scene of Kinyarwanda, a dark room looks washed-out as the camera shoots toward the light pushing through the windows, the saturation levels briefly and distractingly correcting themselves whenever someone walks between the camera and the window and temporarily blocks the glare.

The storytelling and acting are often a little rough around the edges too. In Scheherazade, Hedda replaces the political programming on her show with personal tales of everyday women to please Karim, who’s been told he won't get the job he’s angling for if he doesn’t put a lid on his outspoken wife. Most of the stories Hedda airs are interesting, if only in a gossipy sort of way, but the movie feels inorganic and schematic, thanks in part to ham-fisted dialogue. “You veil me, take my money, impose your conditions and your mother’s. If marriage just means having sex, I’ll pass on you!” one of Hebba’s guest yells at her fiancè during a flashback, in a speech that would sound graceless and unnecessary even if we hadn’t just heard him do everything she accuses him of.

The festival’s opening film, Kinyarwanda, is fictional, but it’s based on testimonials from Rwandans who found refuge at a mosque and a madrassa during the 1994 genocide of Tutsis by their Hutu countrymen. Its earnest effort to document the bravery of those who resisted the calls to slaughter and to explain the reconciliation process that followed sometimes feels didactic. Some of the actors are also stiff, including Zaninka Hadidja, who plays young Jeanne, a central character who goes on the run after finding her parents murdered in the home she shared with them.

But if Hadidja does not have sophisticated acting chops, she does have an innate sweetness and strength of character that radiate out from the screen, almost as compelling as a commanding performance. And the stories that unfold in the film’s overlapping multipart narrative, in which a scene glimpsed in one segment may be played out in full in another, are so inherently dramatic that they can’t help but capture your interest.

At the same time, Kinyarwanda never lets you forget that life has a way of getting in your face even in the midst of a genocide. More than once, like when Jeanne’s parents fight over the affair her mother has just learned that her father was having, the murderous talk on the radio and the rampaging mobs outdoors are just a dim background accompaniment to a heated exchange about something else altogether.

That’s not to say that the filmmakers soft-pedal or ignore the horrors that were part of that genocide, but they make them clear without rubbing our noses in them. Instead, they focus on acts of heroism by brave people who risked their own lives to save others and on the resilience of the human spirit.

Kyrgyzstan’s The Light Thief stars writer/director Aktan Arym Kubat as the man everyone calls Mr. Light, an electrician who jerry-rigs connections for village elders and others who can’t afford to pay for electricity. Either an antic drama or a comedy with a heavy heart, it’s an unusual, sometimes uneven mixture of light and dark, silly and serious.

At times, the film seems to be lurching from point to point like the boyishly open Mr. Light and his friends after they’ve been on a bender. If it’s not moving from one loosely connected set piece to another–Bekzat the town capitalist, tries to bend other people to his will; Mr. Light gets electrocuted and survives; the village major dies; Bekzat tries to woo a group of Chinese investors–it’s showing us seemingly random shots of village life, the horses and donkeys as well as the people. It’s interesting, in a purely ethnographic sense, to see how these people work, play, and keep house, but it’s not always clear what a given scene has to do with the main story, which is about the enlightenment and eventual disillusionment of the charmingly naïve Mr. Light.

Uruguay’s A Useful Life stars Jorge Jellinek, who is an actual film critic and looks it. His Jorge, a pale and pudgy mole of a man, is a longtime employee of a grant-supported arthouse whose sheltered routines are shattered when his cinema loses its funding, forcing him to rediscover the modest pleasures and unexpected joys of real life. Filmed in black and white with a droll sense of humor that comes out mostly in the visuals (Jorge gets his first heroic close-up as his head is being shampooed, and that shot is followed by an artily askew one of the shampooer’s upside-down face), A Useful Life could have been a clever film student’s response to the challenge: “Make a film about the most uncinematic subject you can think of.” It’s a deliberately small-scale character study, an island of sly subtlety in a sea of films with far grander intentions.

Written for TimeOff

This Is Not a Film

2011-10-11T19:48:00.000-07:00

This is Not a Film will play at the New York Film Festival on October 13. It is not scheduled for commercial release in the U.S.

Alternately funny, sad, and infuriating, This Is Not a Film is a shiv smuggled out of a prison and slipped into our hearts.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi made his ironically titled movie with the help of a good friend, documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, after being sentenced to six years in prison for the crime of “preparing an anti-government film.” (Mirtahmasb has since been arrested as well.)

Judging by the digital footage we see here, which was shot while Panahi waited for the results of an ultimately unsuccessful appeal, the prospect of prison was nothing compared to the sense of nerve-shot entrapment brought on by the other half of his sentence. Panahi’s real tragedy is that he has been silenced as an artist in the prime of his creative life, forbidden to make films, write screenplays, leave the country, or give interviews for 20 years.

The pain of that gag order is half of the subject of This is Not a Film. Its conjoined twin is the exhilarating creativity that allowed Panahi to find one last way around his gag rule, creating this remarkable movie and somehow getting it smuggled out of the country on a USB drive baked into a cake.

At first the filmmaker just moves in and out of the frame before a stationary camera while he eats breakfast, cleans up, makes and drinks tea, and talks on the phone. He could be making an updated Jeanne Dielman, with the housewife’s self-imposed imprisonment replaced by the restrictions imposed on a free spirit by an oppressive regime. But Panahi’s soul turns out to be as expansive as Dielman’s is crabbed, so the scope of the film soon swells to include other people and ideas. It even makes room for his daughter’s surprisingly affectionate iguana, Igi, who is often in the foreground or background of Mirtahmasb’s casually elegant compositions, giving us something compelling to look at while Panahi surfs a heavily censored internet or talks to a friend.

Most of This is Not a Film was apparently shot in one day, on the 2010 Muslim New Year. That’s either a happy accident or another example of the filmmakers’ savvy, since the New Year fireworks constantly cracking in the background and the reports of unstable excitement in the streets magnify our sense of the world outside Panahi’s cushy Tehran apartment as a perilous place. Panahi remains under a kind of unofficial house arrest, never once leaving his apartment building, but people keep coming to him. A neighbor tries to drop off her neurotically yappy dog, Micky, with him for a few hours; a delivery boy drops off an order of food; a handsome and personable young man comes by to collect his trash.

And, of course, there’s Mirtahmasb. He arrives after Panahi calls with a cagy invitation, his request worded carefully to avoid getting his friend in trouble with eavesdropping officials, and the two never stop collaborating, discussing lighting, camera angles, and settings and fighting amiably over who gets to call “cut.” They sometimes film each other simultaneously, Panahi with his iPhone and his friend with a semi-professional-looking videocam that belongs to one of Panahi’s children. They don’t always seem to know why they’re filming, but they agree that it is of the essence. “They say when hairdressers get bored they cut each other’s hair,” says Mirtahmasb, after noting that Panahi would have captured some “important moments” if he started filming when he was arrested. “It’s important that the camera stay on.”

Panahi talks a lot on the phone, his seemingly unscripted conversations with friends, family, and his lawyer telling us a lot about his situation, including the fact that his sentence was “100% political and not legal at all,” according to his lawyer. He also keep popping his movies into his DVD player, fast-forwarding to certain scenes and then talking to Mirtahmasb about what he got or failed to get there that he’s looking for now, in their contraband film.

Meanwhile he keeps circling back to the activity he asked Mirtahmasb over to film: his reading aloud of a screenplay he’s been forbidden to film. He busies himself with this project like a kid playing house, outlining the set with colored tape on his floor and unself-consciously acting out the rudiments of his plot. And then he stops, visibly agitated and frustrated by the limitations of his self-imposed exercise. “If we could tell a film, then why make a film?” he asks, a question that lingers in our minds as it no doubt does in his.

In his final encounter of the day, Panahi rides his apartment’s elevator down with the trash collector and we have the pleasure of watching the neorealist director, who has always loved working with nonprofessional actors, ease into action. Under his gently persistent questioning, their brief encounter yields humor (Micky’s owner tries to foist the dog off on the young man), social commentary (his subject talks about how hard it is to find jobs, even with an advanced degree), and human interest to spare.

It also supplies a powerfully poignant ending to the film, whose last lines are spoken gently by the trash collector as he heads out into the chaotic courtyard. “Mr. Panahi,” he says, “please don’t come outside. They’ll see you with a camera.”

Written for The House Next Door

My Week with Marilyn

2011-10-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

My Week With Marilyn played on October 9 and 12 at the New York Film Festival. It's scheduled for release in U.S. theaters on November 23.

At the Q&A after the press screening of My Week With Marilyn, director Simon Curtis said he fell in love with the two Colin Clark memoirs the script is based on because of the insights they provided into Marilyn Monroe.

A funny thing must have happened on the way to Film Forum. Either those insights just didn’t make it into the screenplay or else Curtis knows a lot less about Hollywood’s Lady of Perpetual Sorrow-slash-sex appeal than I had thought was possible for any reasonably well-educated citizen of the developed world.

Michelle Williams’ Marilyn is a thinking, feeling human being, but My Week With Marilyn’s script is so banal (“I’m not a goddess. I just want to be loved like a regular girl,” the poor girl has to say) that she relies almost entirely on body language and facial expressions to convey Monroe’s essence. Viewed from a distance, she looks remarkably like her, especially when she recreates the funny little dance Monroe’s character performs to amuse herself when she’s left alone for a bit in The Prince and the Showgirl, the godawful romantic comedy Monroe was filming under the direction of her costar, Laurence Olivier (brayed by Kenneth Branagh), during the week of the movie’s title.

Williams looks pretty convincing from the neck up too, as long as she’s wearing dark glasses, but when she takes them off there’s just no forgetting that she isn’t Monroe. That’s partly because the actress can’t quite empty the personality from her face or the intelligence from her eyes, a trick that was part of Monroe’s signature come-hither, no-boundaries/no-judgment sex-doll expression. But it’s also that Williams just doesn’t look much like Monroe, and lord knows we all know all what Monroe looked like.

That might not have mattered much if we’d been offered more of Marilyn than her too-familiar surface, but the film only tells us tired truisms about her. Did you know that she never got the love she needed as a child? That she popped too many pills as an adult? That she was afraid everyone she loved would abandon her, maybe because just about all of them eventually did? That she longed to become a great actress but never believed she had made it? Of course you did.

The most interesting questions are left unanswered, if they’re even asked. Was she a great actress or just a “natural,” born to seduce the camera? And what was behind her notoriously difficult behavior on the set? Miriam Bale’s article about Monroe for Mubi provides far more detailed and interesting answers to those questions than the movie does.

Colin Clark (the perpetually gobsmacked-looking Eddie Redmayne) was a sheltered manchild of 23 when he got his week with Monroe. They spent much of that time playing hooky from the film set when the star got tired of Olivier’s constant sniping, the pressure she felt to excel, and the hackneyed script (“She doesn’t feel real,” she says of her character.)

It’s fun, at first, to watch Colin fulfill his fantasy of working in the movie business, hanging around with glamorous types like Olivier, and his flirty wife Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), the menschy Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench), and, of course, Monroe. But he loses us as surely as he does the spunky wardrobe girl he was wooing (Emma Watson at her most wooden) when he tumbles for Monroe and (oh dear, oh dear) imagines that she’s fallen for him too. With his stunned-animal gaze, late-adolescent lack of self-knowledge or perspective, and laughable romantic fantasy, it’s impossible to take Colin seriously: He’s a comic foil who’s been written as a dramatic lead.

The relationship between Monroe and Olivier, who are portrayed as roaringly needy narcissists with competing agendas, is more interesting than the one between Monroe and Colin. Unfortunately, it’s more talked about than shown, consisting mostly of Branagh spitting out elegantly bitchy insults (“Trying to teach Marilyn to act is like teaching Urdu to a badger,” he declares.) In one of the best lines, Colin tells Monroe that Olivier is a great actor who wants to be a movie star, she is a movie star who wants to be a great actress, and this movie won’t do either one of them any favors.

At times like that, I wondered what Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges or Howard Hawkes might have done with this material, reworked as fast-talking comedy. Just think of the possibilities: A wildly popular and hopelessly insecure actress crosses the ocean to make a meretricious piece of junk with a bunch of aging theatrical stars to show the world that she can act, but all she does is inadvertently prove that the stage actors can’t hold a candle to her on film. Meanwhile, a star-struck kid goes gaga over the actress and tries to “save” her from the profession she’s trying so hard to be worthy of.

Come to think of it, it’s just the kind of role Monroe would have played the hell out of.

Written for The House Next Door

The Skin I Live In

2011-10-10T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Skin I Live In is playing this Wednesday and Friday at the 49th New York Film Festival. It opens in the U.S. in limited release this Friday.

Like a Spanish Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar has directed a movie every year or two since 1978, and if not every one is great, almost all are worth seeing. And like a latter-day Douglas Sirk, Almodóvar loves stories about gorgeous, creamily photographed people who commit soap-operatic acts in picturesque settings. His subversive sense of humor and convoluted plots, which often circle back through time, keep his films from being merely melodramatic, but at their worst they can seem frenetic, all color-saturated surface and no substance.

The Skin I Live In lacks the fire and emotional depth of his best work, which includes the brilliant four-film streak that started with All About My Mother in 1999 and ended with Volver in 2006. But it digs deep into the aging wunderkind’s bag of tricks to keep us entertained while slipping in a few pointed observations about how our bodies define us and what people—particularly women—will endure to survive.

The sometimes overly complicated plot begins with a mysterious captive, the almost inhumanly beautiful Vera (Elena Anaya) who lives in a large room in the luxurious but sterile home of Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas). Projected on a huge monitor so Dr. Ledgard and his rabidly protective housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) can watch her 24/7, Vera is clearly the subject of some kind of experiment by the doctor, who is developing a genetically engineered form of artificial skin, but his obsession with her seems more than medical, despite the purely clinical way in which he insists on treating her.

To reveal just what the doctor has done to Vera and why, Almodóvar tells us a series of overlapping tales that would feel right at home on a telenovela, with their news of horrific disfigurement, kidnapping and torture, experimental surgery performed without the consent of the patient, unacknowledged children, fraticide, suicide, and rape, both real and imagined.

The eye in the center of this hurricane, Vera remains studiously impassive in the present, but as flashbacks explain how she got that way, her porcelain surface takes on new depth. Whether she’s submitting to a rape in order to stay alive, playing on the doctor’s growing lust/love in order to break free of the prison of her room, or simply submitting to the hungry gaze that always follows her, she becomes the personification of womanhood in a paternalistic world.

Written for The House Next Door

Sleeping Sickness

2011-10-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

Ulrich Köhler's Sleeping Sickness plays this Wednesday evening at the 49th New York Film Festival. It is currently without distribution.

Sleeping Sickness feels more like sketches for a painting than a finished work of art.

In the first half, a German doctor, Ebbo Velten (Pierre Bokma), and his wife (Jenny Shily) are preparing to leave Cameroon, where they were stationed for years while he worked for Doctors Without Borders. They’re going back to Germany, but they’ve been in Africa so long they’re not sure it will still feel like home.

In the second, a French aid worker dispatched by the World Health Organization travels to the village where the doctor is holed up three years later. It seems he stayed behind after all, without his wife or their grown daughter, taking on an African family and launching a program to treat sleeping sickness. The Frenchman, Alex Nzila (Jean-Cristophe Folly), is there to observe and report on that program—an anemic enterprise centered in a scruffy open ward that houses more chickens than patients.

Writer/director Ulrich Köhler spent a chunk of his childhood in Zaire while his parents did aid work, his father as a doctor. His film is dotted with emotionally authentic moments, like the one where Velten’s wife lavishly (and slightly paternalistically) praises a dish made by her African cook, who smiles brightly while the wife is in the room, her expression turning far more complicated the moment the white woman leaves.

But the second half of the movie loses focus, giving us an episodic series of snapshots of Nzila’s Heart of Darkness-lite journey that occasionally becomes borderline surreal without ever quite feeling profound. In once scene, he wakes up in what appears to be a hospital with an IV in his arm. We have no idea where he is or why, and neither does he. It could be a deft metaphor for his trip to Cameroon but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, so it winds up as a random snippet of experience, vivid enough in its own right but not really meaningful. It’s as if the filmmakers were sliding into African time along with Dr. Velten, inhabiting the moment so thoroughly they’ve half-forgotten what they were doing there.

Written for The L Magazine

Moneyball

2011-10-07T07:50:00.000-07:00

After going rigid with rage in this year’s Tree of Life, Brad Pitt is all fluid energy in Moneyball, marshalling his considerable gifts to rampage through the Oakland A’s clubhouse like an alpha dog off its leash. It’s an intense performance—you’re as conscious of the intelligence behind his level, measuring gaze as you are of his sheer size and strength—but its delivered with the looseness and grace of a man who knows who he is and where he wants to go.

It’s a good enough performance to make the movie worth seeing, but even Pitt’s effervescence can’t quite oxygenate Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin’s script, which sputters to life for the subplots but keeps stalling when it returns to the main story.

Beane’s barely-there home life is sketched out nicely in a handful of scenes, including just one resonant snapshot of his California-girl ex (Robin Wright) and her insufferably mellow new husband (Spike Jonze, in a very funny uncredited cameo). Keris Dorsey also makes a strong impression in a short time as his touchingly reserved daughter, and her jauntily wistful rendition of Lenka’s The Show gives the film its emotional resolution.

But the meat of the story is left a little too raw. Moneyball is about Beane’s transformation of an underfunded, struggling baseball team into a near-winner (in 2002, the year in which the film is set, the A’s tied the record for consecutive wins), which he achieved with the help of a Yale-educated numbers wonk who had embraced a new way of evaluating players through computer analysis of statistics. The Michael Lewis book on which the film is based reportedly explains just how they did that, but the movie leaves it frustratingly vague, the camera often panning over columns of numbers that are left unexplained.

We see the team turn around after Beane trades away a few players and starts holding two-on-one sessions with the players and his numbers guru, Peter Brand, helping his athletes recognize and play on the strengths he and Pete see in them. We hear the philosophy behind his and Pete’s use of statistics, which they see as a way to replace the old-school, from-the-gut method of evaluating players that inevitably overvalued some and undervalued others. By cherry-picking undervalued players, they assemble a winning and relatively cheap team Pete calls “an island of misfit toys.” And we get a glimpse of how it worked when Beane recruits players because of how often they get on base, regardless of their batting averages or other statistics. A walk is as good as a hit, he later tells one of them: What counts is that you get to first base, not how it happens.

That’s an intriguing premise, but imagine how much more interesting the film would have been if it had explained more about how the players were being evaluated and then shown how those criteria translated into wins on the field. And where they failed, since, as Beane himself keeps pointing out, the A's didn’t get any farther in the playoffs right after he changed his recruiting strategy than they had in the two years before.

Instead, we just watch our motley collection of underdogs do badly and then do better, in classic sports-underdog fashion, without quite understanding why, though we are saved from choking on formula by the team’s failure to capture the coveted pennant—and by Beane’s decision to turn down a chance to cash in on his (limited) success.

There’s nothing visually inspired about this film, which features way too many scenes of Beane driving around alone in his car, a motif so uncinematic that I bet it came from the book, which presumably clued its readers in on what Beane was thinking behind the wheel. Without the benefit of X-ray vision, though, not even Brad Pitt’s chiseled profile can hold your interest forever.

Even the baseball scenes rely on the game’s inherent drama rather than interesting camera angles or lighting for their interest. When a ball in one key game is shown arcing through the darkness from on high at night, heading toward the camera as it falls, it seems to have arrived from another movie altogether.

But there’s some nice, snappy dialogue, and someone—maybe Sorkin, since that’s one of his signature themes—does an excellent job of portraying the peculiar form of love that can develop between workaholics who bond over work. Jonah Hill plays Pete as the perfect lapdog acolyte to Pitt’s big-dog leader, spitting out numbers and names on demand with a brilliant nerd’s awkward mixture of diffidence and confidence.

In the end, their little team of two is the only one that counts in this sports story. Moneyball makes you feel the excitement of their gamble and the thrill of their victory, even if it never quite explains how they did it.

Written for TimeOFF

4:44: Last Day on Earth

2011-10-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth, an IFC Films release, screens tonight and Saturday night at the 49th New York Film Festival.

As 4:44: Last Day on Earth putters to an end, Skye (Shanyn Leigh, director Abel Ferrara’s girlfriend) tells Cisco (Willem Dafoe in patented tragic-hipster mode) not to worry because they’ll be spending eternity together. It’s presumably supposed to be tragic or transcendent or something, but all I could think was: Good luck with that.

Ferrara’s overheated hipster-boy tales work pretty well when his lead actor is memorable and quirky enough to spin the maudlin material into fool’s gold, the way Harvey Keitel did in Bad Lieutenant. Better yet is a star with a sense of humor, who can counterbalance Ferrara’s shallow depth and leaden self-pity with a lightness of spirit, maybe even a little fancy footwork, like the seemingly impromptu little dances Chris Walken tossed into King of New York. And best of all is when the supporting cast, including the obligatory babes, can command our attention even with their clothes on.

But pair Ferrara with an equally self-regarding star like Dafoe and a charisma-free leading lady like Leigh, who alternates between doughy impassivity and hysteria, and you’re in for a long 82 minutes.

As usual in Ferrara’s movies, a fashionably sinewy man sins and a pulchritudinous woman pays the price. And as usual, we learn a little more than we want to know about the director’s penchant for big butts and dirty dancing.

Cisco and Skye are a May-October couple facing the end of the world (“Al Gore was right,” as a newscaster on their big flat-screen TV puts it) in a fashionably artsy downtown loft. She never sets foot outside their door for the whole length of the film, which delineates the last day for planet Earth. He goes out only once, to score some dope she confiscates when he brings it home. And oh my God, when he’s out there he runs into Paz de la Huerta, decked out in a party dress and platform heels and acting out on some picturesquely seedy downtown street. Just what we needed.

Aside from that abortive drug run, Cisco spends his time fretting, watching the news, and Skyping his friends and family in the apartment while Skye paints it black, splattering paint Pollock-style onto a mediocre-looking canvas that gets an awful lot of reverent camera time. She changes her clothes a lot. He goes out on their rooftop terrace and yells some.

Together, they dance, have sex, fight a little, meditate, order takeout, and let the delivery man Skype his family in Vietnam on their computer, an unsubtitled exchange that provides the film’s only genuinely moving moment.

Meanwhile we hear from such cutting-edge luminaries as Charlie Rose, Al Gore, the Dalai Lama, and Joseph Campbell. Okay, now I’m just being snarky. I’m sorry. These people just bring out the worst in me.

Written for The L Magazine

A Separation

2011-10-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

A Separation played at the 49th New York Film Festival on October 1 and 2. It's due to be released in U.S. theaters on December 30.

A Separation seems to invent itself as it goes along. It doesn’t mirror or mock or play minor variations on some timeworn genre or theme. It just pulls you in, instantly and inexorably, to its perfectly life-sized world. If it feels familiar, it’s because it feels as poignant, precarious, and endlessly complicated as life itself.

We first meet Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) in what appears to be a divorce court hearing. The camera assumes the unseen judge’s point of view, so the couple talks directly to it, making their impassioned arguments to each other or to us. Meanwhile, the judge’s disembodied pronouncements provide the first of several male voices of authority, embodying Iran’s paternalistic, often repressive social structure and justice system.

Simin wants to leave Iran with the couple’s 11-year-old daughter, Termeh (writer/director Asghar Farhadi’s daughter Sarina). “As a mother, I’d rather she not grow up under these circumstances,” she says. “What circumstances?” the judge asks, the first of many questions the film pointedly leaves unanswered. Nader won’t join her because his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who lives with them, has an advanced case of Alzheimer’s and he refuses to abandon him. He doesn’t try to stop Simin from leaving, a decision that clearly hurts her deeply though it seems to be motivated by his principled respect for her autonomy. But he won’t let Termeh go and Simin can’t take her out of the country without his permission. So they’re stuck in a standoff, one convinced she must leave for her daughter’s sake and the other convinced he must stay for his father’s.

The fact that we learn all this in the first five minutes or so of the movie, and that those five minutes play out with such fluid and compelling drama that you never once feel the heavy hand of an author doling out expository information, should give you some idea of how elegantly and intelligently this tale is told. In a somewhat clumsily translated Q&A following the press screening, director Farhadi said it is very important to him that his films be shown in his homeland, so he has developed a few ways of making sure that happens. “One way is, I don’t speak loudly in my films,” he said. “Another way is that I don’t force my judgments on the audience. And there are other ways that, if I tell you about them, I won’t be able to show my films [there] any more.”

I’m sure there are veiled references to conditions in Iran in A Separation that I missed, but there was still plenty to chew on. When Nader hires a very devout woman (Sareh Bayat) to look after his father after Simin moves out, a new dimension of class differences is introduced. And when that arrangement comes to an abrupt and disastrous end, the fault lines created by class, wealth, and gender inequalities crack under the stress, creating chasms deep enough to swallow whole relationships.

Farhadi, who worked in theater for years before becoming a director (the first movie he directed was 2003’s Dancing in the Dust), said he always rehearses with his actors for 6 or 8 weeks before shooting, letting them use that time to discover their characters for themselves. “I want whatever happened in me to cause the creation of that character to happen in the actor,” he said. Whatever he’s doing, it clearly works: The cast is universally excellent, inhabiting their characters so fully that it’s easy to forget they’re acting. All the characters work hard to hide things from each other, but they can’t hide much from us, thanks to the strategically placed camera and the emotional transparency of the actors.

At the same time, Farhadi is playing a cat-and-mouse game with us, often ending a scene just before a key event occurs or keeping us behind closed doors with some of the characters while unseen others do something crucial on the other side. Some of that information is withheld only temporarily, but we’re left to guess at a number of things. “This is a detective story, but the detectives are the audience,” he said, and some of the questions the movie raises are not easily answered.

Nader is constantly schooling his daughter, drilling her on math and Arabic and other academic subjects, but the most important lessons she learns are the ones we absorb along with her. When is a lie the morally correct choice? How much of your own safety and comfort should you risk to stand up for the truth, and how much are you entitled to risk of other people’s? How do you decide whether to stay or to go if either choice will mean abandoning someone you love?

Unpredictable twists, a gathering sense of dread, and the tender humanism that infuse it all make Farhadi’s film absorbing, but it’s fundamental ethical and moral questions like these that make it great.

Written for The House Next Door

The Guard

2011-10-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

Considering the deep, generally unslaked thirst so many people I know have for movies that are just plain fun to watch—entertaining and absorbing without being too deep-dish or depressing—I’m surprised this delightful little black comedy hasn’t gotten more buzz. Fortunately, there’s still a little time to catch it before it slips out of the local theater—and if that doesn’t work, you can always look for it on Netflix, or whatever other service you’re using these days.

Writer/director John Michael McDonagh’s brother, Martin McDonagh, wrote and directed the similarly exhilarating In Bruges, which also costarred the magnificent Brendan Gleeson. The Guard isn’t as quirkily splendid as that brilliant little bit of business—this one is just a change nicely played on a well-worn theme—but it’s rooted in the same rich Irish loam.

In classic Dirty Harry style, Gleeson’s rogue cop (Sergeant Gerry Boyle of the Irish guard) breaks every rule in sight, teeters on the edge of suspension, and gets matched with another outsider (Don Cheadle’s Wendell Everett, a straitlaced FBI agent) in an odd-couple pairing that winds up as a true partnership as our flawed hero cracks the big case. But The Guard goes light on chase scenes and explosions and heavy on the wordplay and character development, creating a rich Irish stew that tempers deep sentimentality with smart skepticism and self-mocking wit.

The story is set in Connemara, but this is no tourist-board view of Galway. The action generally takes place at night or inside dark rooms, mostly shot in a strenuously anti-glamorous high-contrast, super-saturated style, with harsh, interrogation-strength lighting emphasizing the crags and crannies in Gleeson’s broad mug. When he’s not sitting in front of a supersized photo of water and swimmers (one of the many ways forms of foreshadowing the filmmakers have knit, mostly seamlessly, into the narrative), he’s often surrounded by some garish color, whether it’s the sickly green of his bedroom wall or the checkerboard floor and cherry-red accents of a faux-American diner.

There’s just one consistent exception: a freckle-faced little boy who keeps popping up on his bicycle, his disheveled dog in tow, always outdoors and filmed in rich colors. The heroic angles from which he is shot and the gorgeous landscapes that often stretch out behind him make him a symbolic, almost mythical figure: the sole witness to Boyle’s hidden heroism and maybe even the soul of the town.

But there’s nothing mythic about Boyle. Reaching inside his baggy briefs to scratch his balls as he stumbles across his bedroom one minute and drawing information out of his partner’s widow with surprising delicacy the next, Gleeson’s sergeant is a walking Rorschach test. Everyone with the sense to see his own carefully cached sensitivity trust and confides in him, while the rest heap him with abuse. He takes it all in with an air of bovine indifference, punctuated every now and then by a goofily mischievous grin.

Cheadle plays off Gleeson’s deceptive passivity beautifully, his sense of humor getting a rare and welcome airing as Everett goes into slow burns at Boyle’s bouts of apparently blissful insensitivity (“I’m Irish, sir,” he protests at one point. “Racism is part of my culture!”) Watching these two play off one another is one of the movie’s great pleasures.

Another is the interplay between the villains, especially Mark Strong’s tightly wound Clive Cornell and David Wilmot’s sociopathic Liam O’Leary, who looks and acts something like an ungroomed terrier. Between bouts of violence, the bad guys kill time Tarantino-style, comparing favorite philosophical quotes, parsing the fine points of each other’s statements, and chafing at the quality of the people they’re forced to put up with. “That’s the payoff, yeah?” Cornell hisses when his contact asks if all the money he promised is there. “That’s the dynamics of this situation. Why the f--- would I cheat you out of the money? … That would defeat the entire freaking purpose of the entire interaction!”

Every so often—including, unfortunately, in an ending that feels more canned than candid—the supple script strikes a false note, pulling you out of the story for a moment. But then someone says or does something so smart or touching or funny or all three that you’re immersed once again in this entertaining fable. After all, that’s the dynamics of this situation, right? And you can trust this crew to respect those dynamics.

Written for TimeOFF

Contagion

2011-09-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

You don’t need to bring any Kleenex to Contagion, but you might want to pack some Purell.

For a story about a brain-liquefying virus that decimates the human race worldwide, Contagion is surprisingly unemotional. As he did in other recent films like The Informant! The Girlfriend Experience, and Che, director Steven Soderbergh films like an alien sent here to create a documentary on the human condition. Even the film’s sickly-beautiful look holds us at arm’s length, its precisely framed, yellow-tinged compositions making most of the environments feel sterile and unwelcoming.

In some ways, the film’s coolness comes as a relief. It’s a pleasure to simply sidestep those persistent disaster movie clichés Airplane! skewered three decades ago: There are no saintly clerics or estranged couples brought together by crisis here, and though there is a pair of young lovers, their separation is played more for dark laughs than for tears. Just a click or two more of empathy might have drawn me in closer to the people in Scott Z. Burns’ script, who are glimpsed in such brief snippets and from such an emotional distance that I never really cared what happened to them.

But it’s impossible not to root for Team Human in movies like this, especially one with such a first-class cast. Soderbergh plays on that instinct with intelligence and bone-dry humor, turning a battle for survival into a morality tale. The pandemic is started by a cheating wife (an alarmingly pallid Gwyneth Paltrow) and cured by a phalanx of noble scientists, including a nurturing and perpetually concerned Kate Winslet; a sly Elliott Gould, his face sagging like a half-melted candle but his wit still sharp; a mostly wasted Marion Cotillard; and a fierce Jennifer Ehle, who steals the stage out from under all the rest as an obsessive-nerd hero.

Paltrow’s Beth may have started the fire, but the real villain is a blogger played by a hammy Jude Law, who’s perpetually photographed by a camera that floats somewhere just under his chin, the better to emphasize a set of jagged prosthetic teeth meant to make him look seedy and unattractive. (Yeah, right.) Profiting off the crisis by peddling misinformation and seeding mistrust of the vaccine our scientist heroes are sweating to produce, Law’s Alan Krumwiede is a proxy for the internet, which is seen here as a 21st-century twist on Newton Minow’s vast wasteland. “Blogging isn’t writing,” Gould tells him, in one of the film’s best lines. “It’s graffiti with punctuation.”

Contagion sometimes seems to be another of the tales our anxious age keeps telling itself about the end of civilization as we know it. It starts in the epitome of pampered civilization, at a bar in a glossy hotel, where the lithe and lovely Beth is rapidly degenerating into a splotchy-skinned, sniveling mess—not to mention, as the probing camera keeps reminding us, a teeming colony of contagion who spreads death every time she picks up a drinking glass or reaches into a bowl of nuts.

From there, we head out into less privileged public places, watching people collapse in planes, on buses, and in hospitals, before retreating into the houses where the panicked survivors hole up, forced to rely on that infernal internet for the human contact they can’t risk getting in person.

Soderbergh and crew do a good job of conveying the claustrophobic comfort of the warrens people create, from the cavernous house where Beth’s widower, Mitch (Matt Damon) retreats with his increasingly resentful teenage daughter to the cramped apartment where Krumwiede hunches in front of his webcam, a great spider weaving its web. But the film’s quick-cutting, episodic approach is less successful at conveying the big picture.

The snapshots we see of panicked crowds making runs on drugstores and grocery stores, two men breaking into the house across the street from Mitch and apparently shooting its owners, and people siphoning gas from cars in a parking lot indicate a total breakdown of civilized society, yet Mitch and his daughter manage to keep going for months in that house. Sure, they’re lonely and antsy, but they seem perfectly comfortable and well fed. Where are they getting food and water, not to mention the money to buy them? Who’s making sure that the electricity and phones are still working?

A more textured sense of that social context, a little more focus on the main characters’ emotions, or both might have turned Contagion into a hauntingly resonant classic. But even without them, it’s an engaging evening’s entertainment—and a creepily effective reminder of why mom was right when she told us to wash our hands.

Written for TimeOFF

Granito: How to Nail a Dictator

2011-09-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

Granito is director Pamela Yates’ attempt to spread the gospel of collective action she learned while making her debut documentary, 1983’s When the Mountains Tremble.

Both films are about the war waged by Guatemala’s government against its own people in the early ‘80s, a ruthless campaign that resulted in the deaths (often by torture) of an estimated 200,000 indigenous Mayans and political activists. The strength of the first flowed from the impressive access Yates got to both sides of the conflict, and from the charisma of gravely eloquent young Rigoberta Menchú, a Quiché woman whose personal testimony and historical analysis put the killing in context. Yates bivouacked with guerillas, interviewing shy teenage recruits and their not-much-older commander/comrades. She recorded hundreds of their rural supporters as they emerged into a clearing as if from the mountain itself, filling the field for a few minutes before melting back into the woods. And she gained the trust of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the main officer in charge of the campaign, capturing chilling footage and quotes as she interviewed him or rode shotgun in trucks and helicopters with his soldiers.

Granito begins about a quarter century later, as Yates pores over outtakes from When the Mountains Tremble in search of evidence for Almudena Bernabeu, an international human rights lawyer who is trying to convince a judge in Spain to convict Ríos Montt and other former generals of genocide. (Guatemala refuses to put the general on trial.) Yates works hard to organize her material, structuring it like a detective story (Will Yates find the footage Bernabeu needs in her outtakes? What’s that crucial document someone else just stumbled across? Will they be able to find hard evidence, or will the judge dismiss the case?), personalizing it with a voiceover, and dividing it into three chapters.

The third chapter, Grains of Sand, elaborates on the collective philosophy that is the movie’s real subject. Granito de arena is a saying the guerillas adopted to describe the slow accumulation of effort that gradually brings about change as each individual makes a small but crucial contribution to a communal effort. It’s a humble philosophy, Menchú notes, since everyone is equally important and “there are no heroes.”

It’s also an effective way to keep a broad-based movement going for the years, even generations, that are clearly required if the Guatemalan activists are ever to get the delayed justice they want, as they are pushed back a step for every step they take forward. (A new setback too recent to be mentioned in the film is currently making headlines: Mexican drug cartels have made life so dangerous in parts of rural Guatemala that some people want to vote the military back into office.)

Unfortunately, Yates muddies her own message the first two chapters. This time around, the only inside track she has is with the other educated professionals who are helping to gather evidence, so she gives that group most of the screentime. Besides the director herself, who is often shown noodling with a projector or gazing moodily at the camera, we see a lot of Bernabeu, the Spanish judge, a Guatemalan forensic anthropologist who moved to the Bronx as a boy, and two more New Yorkers: a forensic archivist and a former journalist.

Some of them seem off-puttingly self-involved at times, like when the journalist says she left Guatemala after realizing that the country hadn’t changed despite all the work she’d done there. But the real problem is simply the nature of the medium: People we see and hear more of are bound to feel more important than the people we see not at all or in passing.

Yate’s detective-story scaffolding provides some structure and suspense, but the real drama is in the interviews, either conducted or captured by Yates, of Guatemalans who are working for change. When the president of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation matter-of-factly describes the day when 95 people in his small town were massacred, or a young woman whose father was “disappeared” when she was a baby talks about how she dreamed as a child of becoming a butterfly and flying into the dark prisons to find him, tears streaming down her face unheeded, we sense the pain, the strength, and the thirst for justice that motivates them—and, presumably, all their fellow granitos.

Written for The L Magazine

The Help

2011-09-10T17:30:00.000-07:00

The Help wants us to feel bad about the mistreatment of black maids in the Jim Crow South while making the white people in the audience feel good about themselves. These two sometimes competing goals make for a bumpy ride that stops considerably short of confronting the dark heart of white privilege.

I wish it were a more historically accurate portrait of racism—and I wonder whether it would be as effective if it were. The feel-good tone I recoil from may be just what has drawn in so many other people, making them comfortable enough to share their thoughts and feelings about racism online, in long comment threads that have grown up beneath several thoughtful essays over the past month.

The film filters the experiences of African American maids in early-‘60s Jackson, Mississippi, through the pen of Skeeter (Emma Stone), a young white writer who collects their testimonials for a book called The Help. Skeeter is an avatar for Kathryn Stockett, the white Southern woman who wrote the novel the movie is based on, and her mediating presence is a problem for The Association of Black Women Historians, which issued a statement saying that The Help “distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers” and calling it “the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own.”

That syndrome of using black people’s stories as fodder for a white protagonist’s journey of enlightenment has bothered me enormously in other films mentioned by Matt Zoller Seitz in an impassioned attack on The Help in Salon, but I don’t agree with his conclusion that The Help belongs in their ranks. Basing the pivotal character of Aibileen (Viola Davis) on the black woman who helped raise her, I think Stockett just built on what she knew, focusing on what the maids experienced at work and on the charged relationships they formed there. During their long days in white women’s homes, performing often intimate tasks, the maids form complex relationships with their employers and their children, relationships—like Stockett’s with her family maid’s—that are sometimes infused with real love. True, the movie sometimes veers away from those relationships to focus on the relatively uninteresting problems of the white women. But the black women are not in this story to solve problems for the whites. On the contrary: The white women are there to cause problems for their maids.

In fact, one of the movie’s main weaknesses is that the white women are one-dimensional to the point of stereotype. Even Skeeter never becomes much more than a tomboyish career girl, and the young women in her social set are even more firmly pigeonholed, from queen bee Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) to body image-obsessed ice queen Elizabeth Leefolt (Ahna O’Reilly).

Their group dynamics are just as oversimplified, creating the impression that racism in 1960s Mississippi was purely a matter of personal integrity. While Skeeter, the author and audience surrogate, interacts with the maids with an anachronistically respectful humility, the psychopathic Hilly rides herd on Minny (Octavia Spencer), her maid and Aibileen’s best friend, just because she can. Meanwhile, Hilly’s cowed friends all follow her lead, motivated by insecurity and peer pressure.

Sure, there’s talk now and then of the other powerful institutional forces that are keeping Mississippi’s racial divisions in place, including the KKK and the governor himself, but none of that feels as real as the high school clique-like dynamics of the town’s Junior League, or the personal power of the mean girl in charge. And that makes it too easy for white people watching to reassure ourselves that we would have seen the racism that colored everything at the time for what it was as clearly as Skeeter does and resisted it as easily.

What’s more, by setting up a conniving villain as source of the group’s racism, the movie distorts the nature of the insults the maids of the time endured, which no doubt sprang far more often from the thoughtless exercise of white privilege than they did from intentional cruelty.

Misrepresenting the extent to which unquestioned racism underlay every aspect of social relations between blacks and whites in Jackson at the time also undercuts the sense of dread that any maid who dared tell tales out of school about their employers would have felt, which is more spoken of than felt.

But just as you’re starting to slip out of the story, the great Viola Davis reappears and lets us hear the release in the explosive laughter Aibileen lets out with Minny in some white woman’s kitchen. Or she tells Skeeter/us the story of her son’s death, slowly surfacing all the pain she carries with her to present us with a burden that’s almost too much to bear.

Spencer is excellent too, unleashing the ferocious intensity Minny must bury in her interactions with employers in exchanges like her hurried coaching of her oldest daughter as the girl heads to the bus to launch her own soul-bruising career as a maid.

Are moments like these enough to overcome the movie’s many weaknesses? Your answer will depend on how you feel about “the eternal question faced by minority groups who have to fight for space onscreen,” as Dana Stevens put it on Slate: “Do we count ourselves glad to make any inroads we can, or do we demand rich, nuanced, subtle representations right from the start?”

Written for TimeOFF

The Pianist

2011-09-07T15:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight, MoMA kicks off a comprehensive Roman Polanski series, running through the end of the month, with The Pianist. Oddly for a retrospective of this magnitude, the filmmaker himself won't be on hand for the opening night screening, but star Adrien Brody will be there to introduce.

Much as I hate edicts about what kind of art people should and shouldn’t make, I’m sometimes tempted to go along with Claude Lanzmann’s that no one should make fiction films about the Holocaust. Especially in a world where Holocaust deniers are looking for any excuse to say the whole thing was faked, it seems irresponsible to falsify any facts about it, or to try to make its savage lessons go down easy by breaking them into easily digestible bits. As Alain Resnais argued so ferociously and prophetically in Night and Fog, unless we look squarely at what the Nazis did, acknowledging the human impulses within us all that allowed the German people and the Nazis’ many collaborators in other countries to help perpetuate Hitler’s Final Solution, we’re doomed to repeat that hellish slice of history—or something very much like it, as we already have in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, among other places.

But the line separating good and bad Holocaust films is not drawn between fiction films and documentaries. Rather, it separates films that help us understand something about that massive crime against the very concept of humanity from films that cheapen their subject, usually by using it as the backdrop for some photogenic protagonist’s tale of suffering and survival—or, worse yet, spiritual growth.

By that standard, The Pianist is one of the best Holocaust movies ever made. Director Roman Polanski grew up in Poland during WWII, where he was on his own for much of his childhood after his mother was killed by the Nazis and his father was sent to a concentration camp. After becoming a director, he looked for years for a Holocaust story to film. Then he found a memoir published by Wladyslaw (“Wladeck”) Szpilman in 1946, which went out of print soon thereafter. Polanski gravitated toward the book, he says in a DVD commentary, because it was “extremely accurate, and that’s because it was written immediately after the war,” while the author’s memories were still fresh.

This is not only one of the best Holocaust movies ever made but probably the film Polanski was born to make. The closest he’s ever come to making an autobiographical movie, it combines the best of his other best work, including the slowly accumulating sense of menace of Knife in the Water and the breathlessly casual cruelty of Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, whose protagonists are also fighting for their lives in opaque power structures presided over by ruthless psychopaths.

If there were an antonym for sentimentality—a word that describes a compassionate but clear-eyed view of the human condition as devoid of mawkishness as it is of cynicism—The Pianist could be its dictionary illustration. When the movie opens, it’s 1939 in Warsaw, and the city is literally exploding outside the sound booth where Szpilman (an admirably reined-in Adrien Brody) is playing Chopin for a radio broadcast. Wladeck and his fellow Jews are about to be systematically stripped of all their rights and possessions, stigmatized, corralled like so much livestock into an increasingly filthy and overcrowded ghetto, and ultimately killed by the millions. Yet Wladeck has a sense of himself, and a sensitivity to the humanity around him, that not even six years in Nazi-occupied Warsaw can extinguish.

Polanski’s determination to be faithful to the book extended to the pianist’s empathetic attitude, which colors the story. That allows The Pianist to document a steadily escalating parade of horrors without resorting to nihilism, adolescent revenge fantasies or sentimentality.

The film also steers clear of the simple-minded, good-guy Allies vs. bad-guy Nazis dichotomy that characterized nearly every movie made about the Holocaust between the war and the turn of this century, a period during which filmmakers and audiences were presumably far enough from the war not to remember it with Szpilman’s accuracy yet close enough to need to comfort of self-flattering assurances. (I mean, good people like us would never go along with anything like that, right?)

There’s no need for fictionalization in this gripping story, which also includes the Warsaw ghetto uprising and Szpilman’s eleventh-hour discovery by a Nazi officer who becomes his unlikely champion. Rather than sell the drama or pathos, Polanski and team go for a painstakingly detailed, consistently underplayed sense of realism, recreating the ghetto’s crowded streets and peopling them with a vivid collection of lost souls, including a woman driven crazy by grief and a starving man who wrestles an elderly woman for her gruel.

Some of the most “cinematic” scenes in the film, like the woman who meekly asks a Nazi where he is about to take her and is answered by a bullet in the forehead, are taken from Polanski’s life rather than Szpilman’s, but they all happened to one of the two and made enough of an impression to be remembered years later. That may help account for how many scenes from The Pianist are burned into my brain, like the sight of a woman shot in the street as she runs, who drops to her knees and then folds forward onto herself, as if she were suddenly sleepy. Or the little square of caramel Szpilman’s father buys with the family’s last coins as they await their final deportation, carefully dividing it up into equal bits so they all get a precious piece.

Meanwhile, we see so many Jews killed in so many ways that we start to understand the inexorable yet random nature of the violence—and the numb silence with which the starving survivors eventually face the sight of another dead or dying comrade.

No movie could ever make us fully understand what they went through, of course. But this one, like the frosted windowpane in one of Szpilman’s hideouts with a hole he peers through, gives us a vivid if limited view of a terrifying world—a place we may need to study for all the clues we can get.

Written for The L Magazine

Happy Anniversary, NJFF

2011-09-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

Crazy Beats Strong Every Time is a powerful 24-minute, black-and-white short about the dilemma faced by Markees (Dante E. Clark, pictured), a young African-American man who finds his estranged African stepfather passed out on the doorstep when he comes home one night with friends. It’s also the second short film by Moon Molson, whose Pop Foul made such a strong impression on me at the 2007 South by Southwest film festival that I recognized his name in the credits of this one even though I hadn’t read anything about him or seen anything by him in more than four years.

In both films, Molson plants us at the intersection of poverty and inchoate machismo in an American city and then watches closely as his frustrated characters get sidetracked by the threat—or, worse, the reality—of a life-threatening beatdown or gun battle. Crazy Beats Strong never leaves any doubt as to what Markees is feeling, yet it creates an unsettling sense of uncertainty. As in certain charged moments in real life, we feel as if anything could happen at any time, creating a tension that pulls us deep inside the story. The acting, cinematography, sound, and other technical elements are also impressively assured and nuanced, especially considering that they're being overseen by a relatively inexperienced director.

You can’t see Crazy Beats Strong Every Time in a theater or on DVD, but you can catch it on September 9, when it opens the fall 2011 New Jersey Film Festival with Molson (one of Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2007) in attendance. This is the festival’s 30th anniversary, making it the state's largest and longest running non-profit film program as well as one of the first film festivals to run nearly continuous programming year-round, according to founder and executive director/curator Albert G. Nigrin.

Nigrin started screening films on the Rutgers campus as a graduate student. Enamored of movies in general and the French New Wave in particular, he was frustrated by the lack of local alternatives to the big Hollywood movies on the big screen. “The Garden and the Montgomery had just one screen each then, and there was the Brooks in Bound Brook, and that was it,” he says.

Using $300 of his own money, Nigrin launched a free film series in “a smelly classroom,” equipped with uncomfortable plastic chairs and without a proper screen. The next semester, the school gave him a small budget and he created the Rutgers Film Co-Op, bought a screen and projector, and moved to the more hospitable graduate student lounge.

At first, he showed just old classics like Man Ray movies, Man with a Movie Camera, and Metropolis, but he soon started mixing in first run movies that weren’t going to make it into an area theater. After VHS, DVD, the Internet, and cable movie channels started making it much easier to see old movies, he changed the focus once more. He still shows a few hard-to-find classics, like Dreams That Money Can Buy, a personal favorite that he screens at the beginning of every season. But mostly, he shows small independent films, many of them experimental and many of them short, that have never been shown in a commercial theater and probably never will be.

Nigrin calls his series a film festival because filmmakers so often attend the screenings and because the offerings are submitted by filmmakers and chosen by judges. The committee picks 30 to 40 films to show out of the several hundred submitted each year.

One of the best in this year’s lineup is Sandman, a surrealistic subtitled German feature about an arrogant stamp store employee who slowly rediscovers his humanity, with the help of a waitress in the restaurant downstairs. Mixing tones in a movie can be tricky, but Sandman pulls it off, balancing gracefully in an absurdist sweet spot somewhere between humor and pathos.

More uneven but ultimately fascinating is In God We Teach, a homegrown documentary about the battle over teaching religion in class that played out recently in Kearny High School. The conflict started when 10-grader Matthew LaClair made an audiotape of one of his teachers, David Paszkiewicz, proseletyzing about Christianity in history class. LaClair took the tape to the school board, asking it to put an end to a practice that he knew was illegal (LaClair’s father is a lawyer) and believed was inappropriate and coercive. Instead, most of the members of the board turned against LaClair and his parents. So did his fellow students and the town as a whole, ostracizing and demonizing him and even issuing death threats.

LaClair makes a surprisingly unflappable and articulate spokesman for his cause, his poise trumping the acne and braces he sports at the start of the film. Helping make his case are powerhouses like Alan Dershowitz, Barry Lynn of Americans United, and Anderson Cooper, who covered the situation on his CNN news show.

Paszkiewicz, who had chosen not to speak about the charges before the movie was made, preferring to “let the community speak for me,” offers the camera his side of the story as well. Good-looking and soft-spoken, he seems reasonable and likeable too, so at first, as Paszkiewicz denies having said what LaClair keeps saying he said, this looks like a he said/he said standoff. Then the camera catches the teacher in action, talking at his church about his obligation to evangelize wherever he goes and leading the kids in the school’s Christian Club by the nose in a faux Socratic-method discussion,.

Clearly, Paszkiewicz is using his classroom as a pulpit, and he’s clearly convinced that he’s right to do so, even if it violates the constitutionally mandated separation between church and state. “I don’t believe that my religious beliefs trump the constitution, but I do believe the word of God does,” he says.

This is, of course, a widespread view in the United States these days, and In God We Teach debunks it with the speed and precision of a sushi chef assembling a tuna roll, cutting between Dershowitz and Lynn as they explain what we mean when we talk about academic freedom and the separation of church and state, and why the founding fathers thought they were needed.

On the 10th anniversary of the fall of the World Trade Center towers, the festival will show a pair of documentaries about the aftermath of that horrific day. New York Says Thank You documents a program of the same name, in which New Yorkers grateful for all the volunteer help the city got in the aftermath of 9/11 take time off every year in September to help victims of other U.S. disasters (mostly tornadoes), joined each year by people from the places they went to in previous years. Too many of the same points are made too many times, and there’s too much talk about how paying it forward this way is “what America is about,” as if nobody in other countries helps neighbors in need. But some of the stories survivors tell of the disasters they lived through are inspiring, as is the generosity and grace with which they respond to adversity.

So are the projects we learn about in From the Ground Up, all created by 9/11 widows, which include helping orphans and funding group homes for autistic children. After getting over the shock and initial paralyzing grief of losing their husbands, these women set out to serve their communities. Their achievements may be remarkable, but they treat what they do with a lack of self-importance that is just as impressive. As one of them says, the best way to honor the dead is not by devoting your life to mourning them; it’s by doing good works in their name.

Molson’s is not the only interesting short on the schedule. Enter the Beard uses blaxploitation-style music and a charmingly goofy lead character to explore the oddball world of the 2009 World Beard and Mustache Championship. It may end with flags and fireworks too, but it does it in an un-self-serious way that’s a refreshing contrast to the jingoism the 9/11 films occasionally lapse into.

Other strong shorts include The Confession, a touching tribute to the kind, beautiful women who soften and brighten a sensitive young Latino boy’s life, and Melt, a beautifully shot performance by dancers, choreographed by director Noemie LaFrance, who perch on ledges attached to a cement wall below what looks like an elevated train track.

“There are so many films out there now, with the digital revolution in full swing,” Nigrin says. “Our mission is to try to find a really original film that we think is deserving of an audience.“

Written for TimeOFF

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

2011-08-31T12:55:00.000-07:00

A kitchen-sink kick in the pants, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame keeps so many plates spinning at once that you don’t really mind that a few of them are pretty wobbly.

Unlike other recent imaginings of Chinese history, like Red Cliff or Curse of the Golden Flower, Detective Dee has no delusions of grandeur, just a bedrock appreciation of spectacle, a love of martial arts, and an irreverent sense of humor. That humor lightens things up right from the start, as the opening voiceover sets up the situation (China’s first female emperor is about to be inaugurated into office and her many enemies, who think no woman is fit for the job, are plotting against her) in the formal diction of historical credit sequences everywhere and then ends with a flippant: “All hell was about to break loose.”

And that may be an understatement.

The action sequences are directed by the great Sammo Hung Kam-bo, who directed the action on the Ip Man movies and Ashes of Time and assisted on Enter the Dragon and Kung Fu Hustle, among many others. The half-parkour, half-martial arts wire fighting that predominates here has been done better – including on some of Sammo’s other films – but it’s still plenty fun to watch here, especially in a fight over water that starts with a rain of telephone-pole-sized logs. Even when they’re not fighting, the main actors move with a gymnastic fluidity that’s a beautiful sight in itself.

So are the elaborate costumes and monumental sets, which the camera often gazes up at or down on or lingers over, inviting us to stare. And what is there to gawp at? A giant Buddha statue anchored by an 82-yard-high metal pole, magical deer that can talk, killer beetles, a noble albino, and that mystery of the title, which the empress hires our man Detective Dee (the always intense Andy Lau, playing straight man to the rest of the cast) to unravel: Why are so many people, most of them key ministers of hers, spontaneously combusting in broad daylight? (Those talking deer may look laughably fake, but director Tsui Hark has an excellent thing with the burning effect, and he knows it: We see several people and a songbird go up in smoke, and it never gets old.)

There’s also the excellent cast, starting with Lau but also including Richard Ng, Tony Leung Ka Fai, and Carina Lau. And, as Joe Bob Briggs might point out, there’s all that kung fu, including woman warrior fu, blind beggar fu, even magic deer fu. (Though seriously, dude, we’re supposed to think you’re tough because you can beat up a bunch of deer?)

Like the empress, Dee is a real historical figure, though it’s probably safe to assume that the real guy couldn’t defeat several enemies at once in hand-to-hand combat, in part by leaping about like a giant (wire-assisted) frog. He’s portrayed here as a pragmatist who doesn't believe in magic or divine intervention, but keeps looking for the rational or mechanical explanation for all the apparently supernatural things he keeps encountering – and finds them. There’s even the hint of a theme there about this period maybe being the beginning of the modern age in China, what with the first stirrings of real empowerment for women, the amazing advances in technology, and the rise of rationalism.

But Tsui isn’t really interested in pursuing that sort of thing. He’d much rather play around with who’s doing what to whom in a death-match power struggle that involves constantly shifting identities and allegiances. And if some of those twists and turns get a little confusing at times, you can always just sit back and luxuriate in the movie’s visual pleasures.

Written for The L Magazine

I’m Glad My Mother is Alive

2011-08-31T12:45:00.000-07:00

Based on a tragic true story, I’m Glad My Mother Is Alive is a Grand Guignol horror show staged as reality TV.

Made by, say, Antichrist’s Lars von Trier, this overheated tale of unrequited love between a mother and the son she gave up for adoption when he was five would have been a hot and spicy psychological soup kept at a rolling boil. Instead, mostly for better but sometimes for worse, it’s filmed in a stripped-down, doggedly realistic style almost as severe as the one laid out by von Trier’s dogmatic Dogme rules. No music is audible to the audience that isn’t heard by the characters, sets look realistic to the point of drabness, no artificial light is apparent other than what comes from lamps controlled by the characters themselves, and hair, makeup and costumes are carefully calibrated to make beautiful actors look ordinary.

That last effort is particularly noticeable with Sophie Cattani, who plays Julie Martino, the mother of the title. In flashbacks to her son Thomas’s early childhood, when Julie was a young party girl, Cattani’s strong, Slavic-looking face looks model-gorgeous, the way Thomas remembers her looking. But when a near-grown Thomas (played by a smoldering Vincent Rottiers) shows up at Julie’s door 15 years later, leaking a volatile mix of fury, grief, and repressed sexual attraction, she’s someone you’d pass on the street without a second glance, with her baggy sweatpants, stringy hair and lined, slightly lumpy face. Has life has aged her prematurely, or was she never the glamour girl her young son saw her as? Either way, her transformation works, helping us understand that Julie is a shape shifter and can never be the emotional anchor Thomas longs for.

If the Dogme-lite approach works there, it slows things down when the narrative should be heating up. The film maintains the same neutral tone as Thomas tries to blend in with his rediscovered mother and five-year-old half-brother while keeping his adoptive mom, Annie (Christine Citti), at bay, slapping away the unconditional love she keeps offering him. The film starts to feel as stuck as Thomas as he shuttles back and forth between the two houses, occasionally ranting at one of his mothers but mostly keeping his emotions reined in.

Meanwhile, we toggle back and forth between the present and frequent flashbacks to Thomas’ childhood. The flashbacks start out informative and vibrant, conveying five-year-old Thomas’ perspective pungently. We see his mother and her lover the way he does, mostly as torsos bending over him or pairs of thighs passing by, their motives and words mostly inscrutable. And when his mother leaves pre-school-age Thomas alone for several days with his infant brother, charged with caring for him, it feels just right when the five-year-old first plays with the baby and then yells in frustration, throwing something when the crying baby can’t be consoled.

After a while, the flashbacks start to have rapidly diminishing returns, providing less significant information and feeling more like random anecdotes. But just as you’re almost lulled into thinking that nothing is going to happen, Thomas erupts, doing something that seems to surprise him as much as anyone. The scene is shocking precisely because it feels so realistic: It’s as if you went to sleep watching a movie and woke up just in time to witness an actual assault.

Written for The L Magazine

A Night at the Opera

2011-08-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

"Ocean Liners on Screen" is a brilliant idea for a film series, and it begins today and continues through Tuesday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A Night at the Opera screens today at 5, and tomorrow morning at 10:30.

Directed by Sam S. Wood (who? Exactly) and, more to the point, produced by Irving Thalberg, A Night at the Opera, from 1935, is the Marx Brothers’ Maginot line: an elaborate structure constructed in hopes of avoiding the decline that inevitably followed.

Their loose-limbed, thrillingly anarchistic Paramount films had just peaked with Duck Soup when the box office flop of that masterpiece sent them scurrying to MGM, primed for grooming by prestige-happy Thalberg. Instinctively allergic to authority and entitlement, the brothers only bent over so far even for the Boy Wonder: After Thalberg made them wait for him once too often, he returned to his office to find himself locked out while the brothers sat inside, naked, roasting potatoes in his showy fireplace.

But MGM’s conventional plots and creamy production values eventually proved too much for the brothers, drowned them in a tub of canned corn, and the first few niblets started falling here. This is one of those movies that’s best seen at home, where you can fast-forward through the bit where Harpo and Chico play piano and harp for a crowd of condescendingly exalted salt-of-the-earth types in steerage, the camera ogling kitschily costumed cherubs who materialize to smile fixedly for the camera. And then there are all the sappy looks and highbrow warblings exchanged by teddibly sweet young Rosa (Kitty Carlisle) and her hunky beau, Ricardo (Allan Jones). They’ll give your fast-forwarding finger a workout, since the plot revolves around Rosa and Ricardo and their thwarted romance/musical ambitions. (They just want to duet, you see, both onstage and off, but they keep getting thwarted by the evil star of their opera company.)

That effectively makes the Marx brothers supporting characters in their own movie, but their old pals George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ruskind give them plenty to do around the edges. Kaufman and Ruskind’s screenplay is full of brilliantly absurdist exchanges (“You remind me of you. Your eyes, your throat, your lips. Everything about you reminds me of you. Except you,” Groucho croons to Margaret Dumont in the opening scene), and the brothers’ horseplay occasionally erupts into the kind of choreographed chaos they did as well as anyone ever has, before or since. One of the best scenes in the movie, in which all three wake up in one hotel room, floats above the rest of the film like a blimp, with only a tenuous connection to the plot. The brothers seem loose and relaxed as they run through a series of farcical bits, starting with a breakfast at which Groucho watches in awe while Harpo eats everything in sight. (“He’s half goat,” Chico shrugs.) “You know, I’ve been looking forward to this breakfast. I’ve been waiting all morning,” Groucho says to nobody in particular, eyeing Harpo with a half-apprehensive, half-delighted fascination that looks unrehearsed.

The classic stateroom scene is in this movie, and it’s a classic not because of how many people are crammed into Groucho’s cramped cabin, all determined to accomplish whatever they came there to do, though that is pretty funny. What makes it great is how Harpo sleeps through the madness, winding up on a catering tray like a crowd-surfing stoner, while Groucho keeps welcoming more people in, as unflappably polite and bemused as the Dalai Lama.

The film ends with another prolonged sight gag as Harpo wreaks havoc backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, ruining the evil singer’s debut. Slashing his way down backdrops like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. riding his sword down a sail in Sinbad, Harpo’s impeccable timing and simian agility are genuinely impressive, but where they were always the point with Fairbanks, they’re just a lagniappe here. The real joy of this scene is in watching Harpo demolish the pious production onstage. It’s an exhilarating display of the triumph of the (un)common man.

If only he could have done the same thing in that steerage scene…

Written for The L Magazine

The Hedgehog

2011-08-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

Like its title character, the prickly concierge of a high-end Paris apartment building, The Hedgehog is hard to warm up to at first. The film, which is adapted from Muriel Barbery's global bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog, ends badly too, sputtering to a halt after a gimmicky climax reduces the concierge to the Gallic version of a Magical Negro, her compelling story a mere life lesson for the precocious 11-year-old tenant she's befriended. But every time your attention starts to break free, the film's stellar cast reels it back, their acting waging a heroic battle against a clunky script.

Garance Le Guillermic is nicely acerbic as Paloma, the 11-year-old prodigy who announces in the movie's opening scene that she plans to kills herself on her 12th birthday to avoid following in the footsteps of her hopelessly bourgeois family. That setup feels contrived, and Paloma's supposedly offhand remarks are sometimes painfully overwritten (she says the concierge is "prickly on the outside, a real fortress, but I feel that inside she's as refined as that falsely lethargic, staunchly private and terribly elegant creature") or on-the-nose (the thumbnail character descriptions she whispers of her narcissistic sister, oblivious mother, and workaholic father while filming them for her documentary on the emptiness of their lives don't tell us much we haven't already gathered). But Le Guillermic earns our sympathy anyhow by playing straight down the line. Free of pandering self-pity or cuteness, she shows us the loneliness of a child prodigy who is nagged when she tries to retreat into herself and scolded or gawped at when she speaks her mind.

Togo Igawa uses warm eyes, ramrod posture, and a politely tentative way of speaking to infuse Kakuro Ozu, an elegant Japanese widower who homes in on Paloma and the concierge soon as he moves into the building, with a compelling mixture of directness and reserve. But the real standout is Josiane Balaska as the concierge—or, as the subtitles put it, the janitor, as if the class divide between her and her new friends needs to be widened any further. Balaska's Reneé Michel starts out reclusive, grim, and convinced that happiness is too much to hope for. She winds up basking in the companionship and appreciation she has gone so long without, and watching Balaska slowly relax her guard is a real pleasure. (Her first laugh, which takes place in Kakuro's bathroom, is as transformative as Garbo's in Ninotchka.)

Yes, cats and Russian novels are clumsily fetishized, and recurring themes like the goldfish in a too-small container and the mother too busy talking to her plants to see her own daughter are un peu exagéré, non? But then we get something like the lovely embrace between Paloma and a grieving Reneé and all is forgiven, as Reneé's complicated reaction to the arms the little girl fastens stubbornly around her puts the facile hugs littering Hollywood movies these days to shame.

Written for The L Magazine

Mysteries of Lisbon

2011-08-19T13:16:00.000-07:00

R.I.P Raul Ruiz, who died today at 70, defeated by the liver cancer he was battling while making this film. Here's my review.

In movies, as in any form of storytelling, it helps to have a good tale to tell, but what really counts is telling your story well. Their aggressive lack of imagination is what makes all those Frankenstein’s-monster summer sequels and superhero movies so tedious, with their obligatory explosions, mind-numbingly generic characters and dialogue, and by-the-numbers crises and resolutions.

In sharp, refreshing contrast, the expertise of longtime director-producer partners Raul Ruiz and Paulo Branco makes Mysteries of Lisbon one of the most absorbing movies I’ve seen this year, although it’s ultimately just a high-class soap opera, produced as a six-part series for Portuguese TV and boiled down to a little over four hours for the big screen.

Ruiz, a Chilean expat who has been making movies since the 1960s, is famous in his adopted homeland of France and among cinephiles worldwide, though few of his more than 100 films have made it to the United States. An intellectual filmmaker prone to quoting Bertolt Brecht and other seminal thinkers, Ruiz says Mysteries of Lisbon is “probably one of the most theoretical films I’ve made,” yet it never feels the least bit dry. Beautifully shot and acted and expertly paced, it pulled me in and kept me close with the ease of a seasoned seducer.

A few of the things people say in this movie, like “That’s what youth is all about: Naivete and arrogance,” are worth chewing over, but in general words are used more to obfuscate than to clarify. In the opening scene, contradictory reports of a war being waged offscreen are left unresolved: We don’t know which version to believe — if either. That’s a fitting introduction to this meandering movie, in which the minimal present-day action is constantly being interrupted so yet another narrator can deliver another in a series of incomplete, sometimes conflicting, almost always engaging tales about dissolute nobles, doomed love, children separated at birth from their parents, and other melodramatic staples.

Whether they’re prisoners of social convention or self-invented free spirits, the people in these stories are rarely what they seem — or maybe it’s just that whatever they seem to be at any given moment is only a small part of the picture. Even the main character, a boy called Joao (Joao Arrais), is a shapeshifter whose true identity is as elusive as smoke. Shortly before we learn that his real name is Pedro, he introduces himself by saying: “I was 14 and I didn’t know who I was at all.”

As Pedro and Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), the wise priest who raised him, search for answers to key questions about their lives, stories within the story unfold. The first, the fairy-tale tragedy of Pedro’s high-born, low-status parents, leads to others in ever-widening, overlapping circles.

Ruiz and screenwriter Carlos Saboga keep all that talk interesting, partly by switching from narration to re-enactments but mostly by balancing the melodrama inherent in the material (the screenplay is based on a novel by popular Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco) with a wry authorial reserve. People — most of them servants spying on their masters — often peer at or eavesdrop on one another through windows and doors, creating another layer of distance between us and the narrators and reminding us that, for all their troubles, they are the lucky ones, part of the ruling class in a society where social standing is paramount. The result is an unusual mixture of emotional investment and contemplative reserve that pulls you close without making you feel as if someone’s playing Twister with your intestines.

The excellent cast helps maintain that balance, delivering a grave and stately style of acting that fits the formal, somewhat antiquated dialogue. Their characters may be hard to pin down, but they’re never less than fully human. When a society lady feigns a faint in the midst of a party, we see the wounded pride, sheer panic, and faint hope of rescue that motivate her.

Ultimately, though, it’s the mysteries in Mysteries of Lisbon that give all that drama psychological depth, leaving you with the rare and satisfying sense of having seen a whole life unfold. Pedro’s story is sometimes tragic and sometimes ridiculous, but its telling is suffused with the bemused and loving wisdom of old age.

Written for TimeOFF

Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood on finding the story in Kesey’s Magic Trip

2011-08-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has a gift for taking chunks of recent American history that we think we know all too well and making them feel new, either by clarifying complex issues (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) or by showing old facts in a new light (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer). He’s at it again in Magic Trip, the story of how Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters helped ignite the ‘60s, starting with their cross-country bus trip in 1964. I talked to Gibney and Alison Ellwood, his editor on five earlier films and his co-director here, in New York City last week.

This seems like it would be a hard movie to market because Baby Boomers might either go or skip on the assumption that it’s a nostalgia trip, which it really isn’t, and younger people are sick of hearing boomers go on about how great things were in the ‘60s. What are you doing to try to break through those preconceptions and convince people to see the film?
Alex Gibney: The trick is to try to get them to hear that this is not another ‘60s nostalgia film. This is the origin story, or one of the origin stories.
Alison Ellwood: The kids I talk to say that they’ve heard a lot about the ‘60s, but it’s so mythologized to them. This is the closest that they’ve come to feeling like they’ve actually gotten a real taste of it.

In the film, you call Kesey “The man who invented the ‘60s.” Of course, history is never created by a single person.
AG: Right.

But one person can help crystallize something that’s in the air and push it in a certain direction. How do you think Kesey influenced the way our culture evolved in the ‘60s?
AG: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a classic ‘60s novel. It’s all about –

Fighting back against corporations.
AG: Yeah, the combine. And it’s about freedom—personal freedom. That’s what Kesey was really into. Part of that is sort of bedrock Americana, but part of it is what the counterculture became: We want to wear our hair long; we want to paint our buses. At the same time, as much as he advocated for broad cultural change, as a person, I think Ken was very distrustful of moments or movements that proscribe for people what they should be. I always think of him more like Bob Dylan, who was the ultimate shape shifter. Every time the culture seems to catch up with him, he gets uncomfortable and moves off someplace else.

One of the ways he was ahead of his time is that the Merry Pranksters filmed every step of their journey and then shared it with as wide an audience as they could. Their weekly screenings afterward at Kesey’s farm of the movie they made of the trip were about as viral as a film could get before YouTube. Do you think the way they mythologized themselves, documenting everything they did and assuming other people would find it fascinated, was an important part of their appeal?
AG: I don't know if the narcissism was part of the appeal, but I think Kesey understood the power of mythmaking. On the one hand, you can look at that footage and say: This is just a bunch of kids going on a road trip. But I think Kesey was already starting to imagine it as something bigger.

The problem was, it was very hard for anyone except for the Pranksters to get anything out of those movies. They were filling in the blanks, but everyone else was, like “What’s all this jittery camera stuff?”
AE: “What are they doing? Where are they going?”
AG: Yeah. Nobody had any kind of context for the story.

So was it just kind of playing in the background of a big party?
AG: Right.
AE: They put it together for themselves, so it only made sense to themselves. It was complete inside baseball. I told Alex the scariest part for me on the project was when their films started making perfect sense to me. [laughs]

I was really impressed by how you took a tangle of old footage and turned it into a coherent story about American culture. Sometimes this does just feel like a bunch of kids on a road trip, but the context you bring to it makes it more than that, by picking out trends like the birth of the drug culture and the reflexive distrust of authority and the DIY movement that rose up in reaction to slick consumerism and mass production. And you really stick a pin into the birth of that moment where, as Kesey puts it, “the trip became more important than the destination.” How did you find a story in all that footage?
AE: well, we had the chronology of the trip, there and back, and we had certain events that happened after they returned as it got later in the ‘60s.

So you knew from the start that that chronology would be a narrative thread?
AE: Well, we weren’t going to have them start in New York. [laughs] They had a destination, they got there – and there was a dramatic turn, because they were excited to get to the World of Tomorrow, but it’s the world of yesterday. And they’re the world of tomorrow, so they need to go on and find tomorrow.

But how to context to help give it a bigger meaning, that’s what took the longest time. If you understand that this bus was exploding out of the ‘50s, not out of what we think of as the ‘60s, that’s a huge thing to know. The Yellowstone thing was a big turning point for us in figuring out how to tell the story. When they go through Yellowstone and Ken sees the sign: Beware of the bear. And he says, what did that used to mean? It used to mean, “Be aware of the bear.”
And now it means, “Be afraid of the bear.”
AE: Yes. We said, okay, each scene has to have that kind of double meaning, deeper meaning.

Yes, it was really interesting what he was saying about how Americans were becoming much more ruled by fear. You cut from his quote to the famous daisy ad that helped get LBJ elected.
AG: Fear was really in Ken’s mind. He felt that one of the things they were trying to accomplish with the trip. They were going out and saying to everyone: “Come on out of your bomb shelters and join us. Have some fun! Play—we’ll do some magic tricks.” Everyone was too afraid. And the antidote to that was being ready, willing, and able to play.

It’s kind of ironic that it was the CIA that turned him on to acid in the first place.
AG: that is very ironic. I think that contains within it a certain larger irony about the ‘60s itself: That acid, which was seen as a force of liberation, was being developed by the CIA as a force of just the opposite, a force of imprisonment and interrogation.

One of the contrasts you play with a lot is the one you just brought up – that the Pranksters are the face of the future, while this World of Tomorrow world’s fair they’re headed for in New York is anything but. Is that contrast something the Pranksters themselves were having fun with in the films they made of their trip, or is that something you guys drew out of it?
AG: I’m not sure they had the sense at the time that they were the future, but they continued to explore. That’s what’s so interesting about this trip: It really is a big exploration. They didn’t quite know what they were looking for, but they were doing stuff that would later become very fashionable.

In fact, the things that they thought would be the most meaningful often turned out to be the least, like their “summit” with the East Coast acidheads.
AG: Right. That was a bust. Kerouac: disappointment. World’s Fair: disappointment. Leary: disappointment. Everywhere along the road, they’re trying to make connections with people they think are their guiding lights, and, whether they realize it or not, they’re the ones who are more vital. So they just keep on going. Later on, Kesey looks at his own group and says, “Maybe we’ve gotten stale too,” and then he moves on. But they were constantly looking for inspiration.

Did you tape any new interviews for this or did you use only old ones that you found?
AG: We started out doing it in a much more conventional way, which was to videotape interview with the survivors and get them to talk. We even played around, for a trailer, with an interview we had with Tom Wolfe from Gonzo. We intercut it with the material, and it didn’t look right at all. The footage kept looking much more present and interesting than the commenting upon it. But at the same time, the footage on the own wouldn’t explain itself. We had to find something. We found these audiotapes, which had been recorded not too long after the bus trip.

Who were they recorded by? Where did you find them?
AG: Kesey had them. A guy named John Teton had gone out and recorded interviews with all the Pranskters – some of them very bad quality, which necessitated having actors re-record them. We couldn’t go back to the original people, even if they were still alive, because their voices would have been much too old. Some of them, only the transcripts survived. But if we could, we used the real voices.
AE: He did them for research purposes. He was doing something called Further Inquiry, which was basically a screenplay—
AG: —for a movie they kept trying to make. Part of the beauty of them, for our purposes, is that as they were recording [the people making the tapes] would show [the Pranksters] the footage. That would spark their memories – oh, I remember this! There’s Sandy scratching his balls. Or I remember this: That day didn’t do anything for me.
AE: Or, in Stark’s case, I remember this; I don’t remember any of that. [laughter]
AG: The music of that time is kind of interesting, because 1964 is right at the moment when things are changing. The Beatles come in that year. We put in a lot of songs that people might recognize, but the versions are different because they’re the original R&B versions. Like Twist and Shout – it’s not the Beatles; it’s the Isley Brothers. R&B was just being discovered and made into rock and roll by white kids. Also, jazz was still very present then. Jazz kind of disappears in the later ‘60s, but for these guys it was really present. And there are kind of half-country, half-blues songs, like King of the Road. It was a moment that was kind of right on the edge.

I remember hearing some music that was on their radio.
AE: Yeah. Some of it is just on the soundtrack – it’s what they were listening to. A lot of Coltrane is like that.
AG: We would pick stuff based on the kind of stuff they listened to. They did listen to a lot of R&B. And you could hear Cassady singing Love Poition Number 9 as they’re going up the Jersey Turnpike.

That was also an interesting year because so many historically significant things were happening then, not just in music but that was right after JFK had died, and the year MLK was marching.
AG: It was a really tumultuous time. That was one of those moments where you needed just enough context. That moment with Martin Luther King, Jr. was much longer in an earlier cut.

It’s like, let’s focus on this and see something that’s a little bit different than maybe we all remember. The stereotype has been so prevalently conveyed. Those shots of Haight-Ashbury used to be a longer section too, but we realized that Haight-Ashbury is so familiar that you get it in a second. All you need to do is show a little bit of it and then you can move right on.

Interview conducted for TimeOFF

Joan Blondell

2011-07-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

The axiomatic Depression-era Warner Brothers star Joan Blondell shows up frequently in Film Forum's ongoing Essential Pre-Code series, including this weekend, including Saturday's double feature of The Public Enemy and Blonde Crazy, as well as Thursday's Three on a Match and Union Depot on Tuesday the 9th.

Forget those diamonds, sisters; Blondell is a girl’s best friend. Especially in the films she made during the Depression, when she and the country were young and brave and cracking wise, Joan Blondell comes off as the kind of loyal and level-headed, funny and fun-loving pal who can make even bad times fun, her big eyes shining and her bullshit meter clicking like a Fukushima Geiger counter.

The cheery nature and bedrock reliability Blondell radiated sometimes got her miscast as a wide-eyed innocent in films like the vacuous Good Girls Go to Paris, in which she seems chagrined as the one-note title character, tossing off what feels like a half-hearted Shirley Temple impersonation. But she spent most of her onscreen time in a niche that fit her much better, playing a broad with a heart of gold. In Public Enemy, which screens this Saturday, Blondell plays the girl who marries the James Cagney’s character’s best friend, their happy relationship providing a counterpoint to Cagney’s tortured tap dances with his mistreated molls. And in Night Nurse, which screened earlier in the series, she plays a droll, eye-rolling, gum-chewing nurse who shows Barbara Stanwyck the ropes. Blondell’s B. Maloney is too cynical to object to the corruption she sees everywhere, but she’s too good a friend not to support Stanwyck when she rises up against it.

With her kewpie-doll eyes and lips, bright smile, and voluptuous curves, Blondell was gorgeous in a ripe, pre-War way. That lush beauty was undoubtedly part of her appeal (check out all the shots of her peeling off or putting on clothes in Film Forum's series), but she never seemed vain about her looks. In Center Door Fancy, her lightly fictionalized biography, she explains having won a beauty contest by saying she entered only for the $2,000 prize (her family, which did a vaudeville act that she was part of from the age of three, was perennially broke), and she won not because of her looks but because of her experience onstage. “I said to myself: ‘I’m going to pretend I’m a great actress, and I’m playing the part of the most beautiful contestant in the world,’” she writes. In Gold Diggers of 1933, which also screened last week, her Carol is by far the best-looking of her gang of gal pals, standing out enough to be “featured” in the play-within-a-movie that they all put on (the gruff producer says he can’t wait to see “This gorgeous woman singin’ a song that’ll tear their hearts out”), yet she never preens or claims extra attention, blending happily into the background in the group scenes.

Maybe growing up on the road in that close-knit showbiz family knit teamwork into her bones. Or maybe her story is just another chapter in the ancient saga of women putting family before work. (“You’re an enigma in a lot of ways, Nora,” a boyfriend tells her alter ego in Center Stage Fancy. “No drive to be an actress, really. It’s just a job to you that may pay off and take care of your troupe, as you call them, in style… Yet it seems you’re more pleased with yourself when you’ve placed a vase of flowers strategically in your room than—than at the sound of applause!”)

Whatever the reason, her cheery, we’re-in-this-together attitude was as good a fit as her looks for the Depression era. Blondell made 56 features between 1930 and 1940 (29 of then came out before 1934, the year Hollywood began enforcing the Hays Code). Her tough-but-tender vibe and feisty attitude (“Don’t you dare!” is the first line she speaks in Gold Diggers of 1933) made her a particularly good fit for scrappy movies about people fighting their way through hard times. No wonder she costarred seven times with Cagney, more than any other actress, and appeared in more Warner Brothers movies than any other actress.

Maybe she was too much of a team player for her own good. In her book, she writes that she “yearned for deeper, more meaningful roles” than “the happy-go-lucky chorus girl, saucy secretary, flip reporter, dumb-blond waitress, I’ll-stick-by-you broad,” but hints that she wasn’t ambitious enough to land them. “Once in a while I’d like a real heavyweight part, like the kind they give to Garson or Bette,” she wrote. “I can do them, too, but I don’t fight for them.”

I bet she could have done them. You can see her range in Gold Diggers of 1933, a slapdash variety show whose high points are its Busby Berkeley choreography—and a couple of scenes featuring Blondell. In the first one, she tries to fight off the man she’s falling for when he makes a drunken pass, convinced that he has only contempt for her and won’t be interested once he sobers up. She plays the scene in profile, so she can’t rely too much on those expressive eyes, but her alternately stiffening and melting body tells us all we need to know. The second is the final number that producer was talking about. In it, she sing-talks her way, Rex Harrison-style, through a sad song about “the forgotten man,” the Depression’s metaphor for the fast-growing army of indigents spawned by that grim era. It’s a corny number, but Blondell succeeds where the rest of the film mostly falls flat, injecting a flimsy backstage dramedy with real dignity and feeling.

Written for The L Magazine

Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz on The Interrupters

2011-07-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to imagine a better pairing of talent and material than director/producer Steve James, producer Alex Kotlowitz, and the street-savvy, impassioned antiviolence crusaders of The Interrupters. The documentary addresses a problem that couldn’t be more serious—the violence that literally plagues the streets of Chicago and other American cities—but talking to its open, unpretentious creators was a lot of fun. That’s partly because James likes to tease Kotlowitz, noodging his long-time friend out of the somber sincerity that seems to be his fallback position. It was also nice to hear that Kotlowitz had fond memories of my husband, who hired him in the ‘80s to write copy to accompany a photo essay on children living in Chicago’s Henry Horner housing project for Chicago Magazine (Kotlowitz parlayed that assignment into his excellent book on the subject, There Are No Children Here.)

So, Alex got this started with your New York Times article. How did you initially find this group?
AK: It goes back to your husband, in some ways. I say that because, working on There are No Children Here was following these two boys over the course of two years, but in many ways it was about the violence that affects their lives, and that was pretty overwhelming. I remember being pretty depressed in the midst of that, and subsequent to the book coming out, three of the kids I befriended were murdered. It haunts you.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way, as a storyteller and as somebody who cares about these issues, to grapple with it. And then this guy that worked with them who I play basketball with convinced me to go spend some time with Cease Fire, and I came away impressed.

I think there are two things that really most impressed me. One, that it offered a different way to look at the violence. Gary Slutkin, who founded Cease Fire, is an epidemiologist who looks at violence as an infectious disease. That takes the moral judgment out of the equation, so it’s not about good and bad people, and I think that’s really important. And the other thing is that I began to spend time at that Wednesday meeting where the interrupters gather every week, and after that first meeting I was hooked. You look at the faces of all of these men, and there are a couple of women there, and you just think, my God, there’s just a bundle of stories there.

And 500 years of prison time.
AK: [laughs] Right. So I ended up doing a story for the magazine about it, and it was one of those rare experiences as a writer where I felt, boy, if you could get the kind of access you need, this would be a great film.

I knew the access would be tough. One of the things that eluded me in working on the magazine piece was getting at the personal stories of the interrupters. It was one of the things that really intrigued me.

Well, you sure got it. I often found myself watching a scene and thinking: “Damn, there was a camera in here?” You get into the middle of some pretty deep stuff, and you obviously had to develop real trust to get that kind of access.
AK: The access question was not so much a question of trust. Partly, but it was really a question of whether you were going to compromise their situations--
SJ: Whether they’d let us close with a camera. These are delicate negotiations, some of them, and there are legal issues involved.

Did you start with the individual interrupters you wanted and then follow them, or did you look for dramatic mediations and then follow whoever happened to be involved?
SJ: We knew from the get-go that we wanted to follow interrupters, but we didn’t know which ones or how many, except that we knew we didn’t want too many. We knew Ameena was one, and then the process became one of filming the meetings they had every Wednesday. That helped with getting our finger on the pulse of what was going on week to week and getting them comfortable with us. That was also our way into getting to know more of the people around the table.

Tio Hardiman, who created the program, would tell these guys about us every week. He’d say, “They’re here; they’re trying to make this film; it’s important to us that we do this film. I want you guys to step up and get them into some mediations.” Cobe was the guy who really took it to heart and started calling us. We didn’t even notice him at the table until he started calling us. He wasn’t a guy that took over the room. He’s a gregarious and wonderful and funny guy, but not a guy that just kind of jumps out at you in a meeting.

Like China Joe.
AK: Yeah, China Joe!
SJ: China Joe was one of the guys we were interested in, but it just never happened with him.

Looking around that table at those meetings, it’s striking how charismatic most of these former gangbangers are: so good looking and smart and personally powerful. It makes you wonder if some of the best and the brightest people in that neighborhood became gangsters.
AK: Well, they were the leaders. Each of them, in their own right, were leaders when they were in the gangs. People would listen to them, just as they do now. One of the things Steve and I talked about is, the easy thing to say would be that they’ve changed, but in many ways I think they’ve figured out who they were all along, using all the same skills and tools and assets that they had back then, just for something very different. So you’re absolutely right. There’s no question. When Cobe was running the streets, that affability, that humor, that disarming nature – it got him places.
SJ: He wasn’t that threatening leader. He’s the best kind of leader. He’s the guy you want to do right by because he’s a good guy and he’s a fair guy and he’s a man of his word. And Ameena, of course, you can see that powerful charisma that would make her a good force. It’s almost like she took her dad’s power and charisma. [Ameena’s father, Jeff Fort, was one of the most famous and powerful gang leaders of his time.] And now look what she’s doing with it.
AK: You had asked whether certain people jumped out at us. We pursued Ameena, in fact, Steve and I would joke early on about how it reminded us of high school, chasing some beautiful girl. She would sometimes return your call and sometimes she wouldn’t –
SJ: I was calling her for a while and then she wouldn’t call me back, so I said, Alex, you call her, since she wouldn’t recognize the number. That worked once. [laughs]
AK: With Eddie, we knew we wanted a Latino. And Eddie, of course, is this incredibly thoughtful guy, who’s still wrestling with --

Doing penance, basically, every day, for having killed someone when he was on the street as a kid.
AK: Yeah, trying to find a way to forgive himself. He constantly questions himself, and he’s also questioning Cease Fire. He believes in their philosophy but he asked questions about what they’re doing.
SJ: “Are we a Band-Aid?”
AK: Yeah. It was really important to have that self-questioning voice in there.

He was also great with kids, as were all three of the people you followed. You’ve both done a lot of stories about people who never really had got to have a childhood. In this film, a lot of why the interrupters want to do what they’re doing is that they regret what they did when they were young. They want to help other young people who are falling into the same trap, and they understand the importance of having a supportive adult in your life. [To Alex] I mean, the title of your book was There Are No Children Here. are you conscious of that as a theme in your work?
AK: I hadn’t really thought about that, but I think you’re right. I think it’s a really interesting observation. You do see that here, certainly with Eddie. He talks about when that young girl is crying because she’s seen a shooting, about not wanting the kids he works with to have to go through what he’s been through. He identifies with them.

And Ameena identifies with Caprysha, the girl she’s working with.
AK: Right. She tells her at one point, “You’re a little Ameena.” I think that’s what makes the interrupters so effective, their ability to put themselves in the shoes of these kids.
SJ: One of the themes I’ve noticed, not just in the films I’ve done but really in life– because there is a difference. Not much, but a little – is that the people that make seemingly profound change in their lives, like the interrupters, have a real anchor at a crucial moment in their life. With the kids from Hoop Dreams, it was their mothers. With Ameena, it was her grandmother. With Cobe, it was his grandparents. With Stevie, it wasn’t there.
I think what’s really moving to me about what the interrupters are doing is that they’re trying to fill a vacuum in these people’s lives. You see this especially strongly with Caprysha. [Ameena] is in essence, trying to be that surrogate mother.

Yeah. And with Cobe and Flamo. At the end of the movie, after he’s been turned around, Flamo tells Cobe something to the effect of: “You just would not give up on me. You kept calling and coming around.”
AK: Absolutely.
SJ: It’s crucial. That’s why we picked that song at the end, Solomon Burke’s Don’t Give Up on Me. Jack Piper, our coproducer, found it, and we felt like it really encapsulated what we want the audience to walk away with. Which is: Don’t give up on the Flamos of the world. Don’t give up on these communities. Don’t give up.

In the past, both of you have generally told stories to middle- and upper-middle-class people about low-income people. You could say the message was always “don’t give up”—don’t demonize these people; don’t write them off; don’t oversimplify or overlook them or just give up on them. The Interrupters could work for those same audiences in that same way, but it seems like it could also work for the people in communities like the one that’s being portrayed, give them ideas and inspiration that could help them improve their lives. I know Kartemquin likes to use its films as a catalyst for community organizing. What do they have planned for this one?
SJ: We totally agree. This is a film that can work for those two audiences, in a big way.
One of the many great things about Kartemquin as an organization is that they take seriously the whole civic outreach part of filmmaking. They just did an outreach with The Interrupters a couple weeks ago in Chicago, where they brought together about 80 kids who are part of various youth media groups in Chicago. These are kids from the same kind of neighborhoods that this film takes place in. they watched the movie, and they went for it big-time. They were like, this movie needs to be in my school; people need to see this movie. They were laughing at the funny moments.
AK: Another great thing is that, in Chicago, the film opens in the Siskel but it’s going to open at the I.C.E. theaters in Lawndale and Chatham, which are similar to the neighborhood where we shot.
SJ: Chatham is just a little south.
AK: And Lawndale is on the west side.

Are you going to go to those openings?
SJ: Our VIP premier of the film, which is on the 27th of next week, is at the Chatham I.C.E. theater, and Cobe’s aunt is catering it. And we’re going to have everybody who’s in the movie there.

[To James] You said in the press notes for this film that you became a documentary filmmaker because you “wanted to understand people and communities other than the ones I’ve lived in.” I was interested to see that because I have this theory that all really good filmmakers make movies partly to learn more about whatever they’re filming. So to what extent is that still your driving force? What else have you gotten from making documentaries over the years?
SJ: Well, I have found over the years that it’s not always obvious or conscious, but I end up making films about subjects that I am either troubled by or troubled by my own feelings. Like The New Americans, which is an excellent example.

Why The New Americans?
SJ: Well, this was at a time when there was much debate about where was America going ethnically with all this immigration. And if I looked in my own heart at the time, I had my own questions, if I was really honest with myself, even though I’m a good liberal. Part of what I wanted to do with that series – and it’s not the reason in total we made the series, but it’s what sparked my interest – was to try and understand who the immigrants really are who are coming to American today. With Stevie, I think it’s fairly self-evident what drove that. With Hoop Dreams, it was realizing that I had grown up playing basketball with a lot of African American players and never really been their friend, just their teammate. And I knew that this game meant more to them—the stakes were higher for them than for me, much as I love the game.

And the same in the Iverson film too.
SJ: Yeah, in the Iverson film I kind of articulate that. I think, for this film, like Alex was saying with his book, the issue of urban violence has haunted me since seeing Bo Agee [the father of one of Hoop Dreams’ two main characters] murdered in 2004 and William Gates’ [the other main character] brother Curtis murdered in 2001 and seeing the devastating impact that both those senseless losses had on those families and those young men. So that was, for me, the personal part of this that made me want to engage with this and try to understand it, just like Alex wanted to understand it.
So, yeah, I feel like every film should be an act of discovery.

For the filmmaker as well as the audience?
SJ: Absolutely. In fact, I think when a film works best, it is, for you as a viewer, the distillation of the years that we spent making it and all the discoveries we made and all the ways that it surprised us.

Alex, you’ve worked in newspapers and magazines and books, but is this the first movie you’ve been involved in?
AK: I’ve done TV. I used to be, years ago, a correspondent on the NewsHour and I’ve done some Frontline documentaries. This was my first film.

So how does this film compare to the other things you’ve done as a way of telling your story and getting it out into the world?
AK: There’s a real power in doing intimate filmmaking. There really is a sense that you’ve really gotten to know the characters.
My big concern going in, given my experience, was twofold. One, the last film I had worked on, we had a seven-member crew going in to film seven people. It felt incredibly unwieldy, even clumsy at times. It took away any sense of intimacy. And the other thing was that we would always—which is common in TV—go in and pre-interview people, so that took out all the freshness and spontaneity from what they said.
What I appreciated, working with Steve, is that we kept our crew really small, just three of us: Steve with the camera, and myself, and Zak Piper, our co-producer.
SJ: Zak did sound.
AK: And for the interviews, we didn’t pre-interview anybody, and they were long, often marathon interviews. I think you get the sense of intimacy [created in those wide-ranging talks] in the film.
The other challenge with film is that you really have to be there. When I’m writing, I can sit in a room and reconstruct a scene without being there –
SJ: Yeah, I always used to complain: that’s cheating! [pretending to mock Kotlowitz] “And then you make it sound like you’re the-e-ere.” [sincerely again] Which is an art, really, to make people feel like they’re there.
AK: So there was something exhilarating about that. For the course of the year when we were filming, we were on call 24 hours a day, essentially. You’re going out at all hours of the day and night. And every time we went out, I felt like there was something new to discover.
Another thing that’s been a little scary and also exhilarating is that, when people read my books, they do it in private. If they don’t like it, I’ll never hear, and if they love it, maybe I’ll hear from them, maybe not. But in the film, you’re watching and listening to the reactions as the film unfolds.
SJ: But, I have to say, it’s been mostly a blast—
AK: Right! It’s been a blast! They get it.
The final thing is that writing is such a solitary experience, and this was so much fun. I mean, it’s fun to work with Steve, and then also with the interrupters. There’s something to be said for having a collaborative experience.
SJ: Yeah. Film is an inherently collaborative experience, in the best sense. I must say, it doesn't get any better than doing this film, even though the subject matter at times was hard, obviously, and upsetting and depressing and tragic. The overall experience, and what we took away from it, was a blessing.

You think you guys are going to work together on something else?
SJ: Never. [laughter]
AK: We’ll probably work together on something else. Probably a fiction film.

Really? [to James] You’d want to do a fiction film? You’ve never done one, have you?
SJ: Well, I’ve never one a strict fiction film because when Hollywood was willing to let me do some things, they were always biopics. I did the lowest-budget feature in the history of the studio system, Prefontaine, and then I did a couple of cable movies. But they were always biopics – and always sports biopics. That’s what they would let me do.
AK: That’ll change.
SJ: So, yeah, I would like to do a fiction film. We’ve talked about different ideas. ‘Cause Alex wants to write.
AK: I want to write.
SJ: He wants to write a script. [pause] And I want to rewrite it. [laughter]
AK: That was a good one.
SJ: Well, they say writing is rewriting.

Written for Slant Magazine

Animation Block Party

2011-07-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

Friday through Sunday, Animation Block Party holds its Animation Weekend in Brooklyn: after tomorrow night's outdoor opening night, at Rooftop Films, BAM hosts five additional shorts programs and an animation trade show/gallery exhibition. The films discussed below screen on Friday night at Rooftop.

In La Plage, a lively animated short drawn in pretty pastels, a lovely summer beach is ruined by an invasion of loud, fat, chain-smoking, beached-fish-tormenting, butt-scratching boors—until a giant hand descends on the sand and shovels them into a mammoth catbox pooper scooper. That one-joke plot makes La Plage less subtle and/or ambitious than most of its companions at this year’s Animation Block Party, but nearly all share its wry take on stupid human tricks—and its empathy for the non-human animals who put up with us.

Birdboy introduces a happy little mouse family in an apparently placid world only to vaporize it all in a mushroom cloud (talk about your nuclear families). In the film’s best sequence, the explosion turns the colorful landscape into a somber black-and-white dance of death, nuclear rain and blackened leaves from dead trees morphing into dead animals and fish as they fall. Birdboy, a bird who can’t yet fly, is one of the few survivors. The filmmakers seem to want to say something through him about how we demonize “others,” but that part of his story never quite comes into focus. Birdboy’s longing for the adored daughter of that happy family is never in doubt, though, and it’s even more poignant after the disaster makes his dream of being with her seem not just improbable but impossible.

She Was the One, one of the self-recorded oral histories captured and then animated by Story Corps, is another sad love story set in the aftermath of a manmade disaster. Comically exaggerated figures represent the teller, Richard Pecorella, and his fiancée, Karen Juday, one of the Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died in the World Trade Center on September 11. Pecorella’s Brooklyn-accented tribute to the woman who “toned me down” and “taught me to be nicer to people” is touching in its straightforward simplicity, which is well served by the warmly funny animation style.

The danger is mostly imaginary in The Girl and the Fox and 7th, two tales of young girls making their way through perilous landscapes—but that doesn’t leave the people in them off the hook. The girl of The Girl and the Fox, a latter-day Red Riding Hood lost in a desaturated woods, is rescued by a sweet silver fox, but she mistakes it at first for an enemy, nearly killing it before realizing her error. The fox-POV shot of her snarling face above a raised knife makes it clear who is the scarier of the two predators. In 7th, a terrified young woman takes the bus into the outerboroughs at night and gets off on an underlit street, her fears imbuing both the bus and the street with exaggerated menace. Afraid she got off at the wrong stop, she’s terrorized by a man who seems to be pursing her—and turns out to be returning the cellphone she dropped. A happy ending follows, but it’s upended in a crisp post-credits coda.

Notes on Biology uses stop-motion in an interesting way, making live action appear animated by presenting it in a stuttery style, as if several frames had been taken out for every one left in. An arty kid stuck in a high school biology class amuses himself—and us—by creating a flip-book cartoon hero: Robot Elephant, a gun-toting vigilante who flies through the kid’s notebook, blowing stuff up as he goes. The filmmakers make Robot Elephant feel much more real to us than the biology teacher, as he does to the kid, shooting the teacher from above and at such an angle that you never see his face and turning his voice into a background drone that disappears altogether—until he asks the question whose answer tidily wraps up this cleverly told story.

A more traditional use of stop motion, complete with Claymation figures, is used to tell the non-traditional love story in Venus. A couple suffering from the seven-year itch visits a sex club, where the woman, who was initially reluctant to go, winds up making the dolls in Team America: World Police look pretty tame.

The Inkwell Shuffle also looks familiar if you’ve ever seen a Max Fleischer cartoon. In the black-and-white film, little critters of some indeterminate species jump out of an inkwell and dance to old-fashioned jazz, until a big pig comes out and tries to destroy them. Flesicher did it all much better close to 100 years ago in his Out of the Inkwell series, but this homage is pleasant enough, and maybe it’ll lead some people back to the originals.

Written for The L Magazine

Fire in Babylon

2011-07-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Proving that anything can serve as a platform for self-actualization and ethnic pride, Fire in Babylon tells the story of the record-setting West Indian athletes who used cricket to beat their former colonizers at their own game, "like slaves whipping the ass of the masters," as graying Rastaman Bunny Wailer says with a carnivorous grin.

Yup, cricket. The game we Americans think of as a leisurely pastime played by polite men in white, that imperialist leftover Robin Williams called "baseball on valium," became a whole different thing in the hands of the West Indian players of the late '70s and '80s. Fast bowlers like Colin Croft and Michael Holding and hard-swinging batsmen like "master blaster" Viv Richards injected as much fire, flash, and eye-popping athleticism into their sport as the African American stars of the same era did to basketball—though, to be fair, the cricketers learned their fast-bowl style from the Aussies.

A humiliating loss to the trash-talking Australian team in 1975 motivated the West Indians to find a new way of playing, inspiring them to prove that they were, as Richards puts it, "Just as good as anyone. Equal, for that matter." After a symbolically significant win against England, they dropped back into first gear for a while before getting fired up for real. The catalyst was a pep talk by the backer who bankrolled them for an unofficial "World Series," but the ultimate inspiration was the Black Power movement and the team’s newfound sense of responsibility to a multitude of fans hungry for yes-we-can role models.

Roaring back to glorious life, and beautiful to watch in the clips from old games, the team launched a 15-year run as the champions of cricket’s prestigious test series. As a crawl at the end of the film informs us, it was the longest winning streak achieved by a professional team in any sport.

Thicker than they were in their youth but just as charismatic, the middle-aged former stars of the team provide most of the narrative, looking back on their glory days in talking-head interviews. Clive Lloyd, the coach and mentor who first inspired them to prove themselves to the world, adds context about the team’s significance to members of the African diaspora worldwide. A few musicians and other cultural observers also chime in, some literally singing the team’s praises.

The film is as slow off the block as its subjects were, pounding away on some issues like a woodpecker working a log while leaving others almost unexamined. Did those fire-breathing Aussie bad boys of the 70s, who had the English "literally running for cover and begging for mercy," as Richards recalls, get any heat from the press and the public for their potentially lethal fastball? We don’t know, since Fire in Babylon reports only on the vitriol heaped on the West Indians for their life-threatening speed. If the Aussies got a pass for the same thing, showing us the evidence would have shored up the statements made by the talking heads in the film, who credit the criticism of their team entirely to racism. And if the Aussies caught flak too, exploring the differences in how the two teams were treated might have let to a subtler and more enlightening discussion of how racism affected the media’s and the public’s reaction to the team.

Meanwhile, way after we’ve gotten the point, people keep talking (and talking and talking) about how cricket was a way for West Indians to reclaim their pride. The war metaphors got tiresome after a while—does every game really have to be a battle and every player a warrior?—and there’s nothing particularly artful about the narrative, which follows an arc burned into our DNA by countless sports films about underdogs that bite back. The camera work and editing are strictly utilitarian, too.

This is one of those features that would probably work better trimmed down to an hour and shown on TV, yet even at a bloated 84 minutes, it’s generally engaging and occasionally inspirational. The story and subjects deserve a better film, but they’re appealing enough to make even this one worth seeing.

Opens July 22 at the reRun Gastropub Theater

Written for The L Magazine

Stevie

2011-07-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

Tonight, Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams and the forthcoming-next-week The Interrupters, will be at IFC Center's Stranger Than Fiction series for a Q&A following a screening of his 2003 documentary Stevie.

A few months before Capturing the Friedmans nabbed an Oscar nomination and torrents of positive press for its portrayal of a suburban father and son accused of child molestation, this documentary about a downscale young man facing the same charges slipped by without much notice. Maybe Steve James’ portrait of the messed-up manchild he’d tried to mentor years earlier as a Big Brother is just too damn depressing for most people, but those who stick with it are in for an engrossing meditation on the necessity for and limits of personal responsibility.

The film starts when James returns to rural Illinois to try to reconnect to Stevie after having lost touch for a decade. Feeling guilty for having abandoned a boy who was failed by so many others and who needed so much, he says in his voiceover that he wants “to understand Stevie in a way that I and others had failed to all those years.”

What he finds is a fiercely defensive bearded boy who was beaten and then abandoned by his mother, raped in the group foster home where he lived for several years, and used as an emotional pawn in a feud between his mother and the step-grandmother who helped raise him. Bubbling over with rage and insecurity, Stevie tests the patience of everyone who gets near him. And then he molests his eight-year-old niece and has to grapple with being a victimizer as well as a victim, leaning hard on his two old friends, denial and drunkenness.

The slow progress of Stevie’s case provides the narrative through-line for the movie, which ends shortly after his sentencing. In the meantime, James gets to know Stevie, inserting himself into his world with deceptively gentle persistence. (“Why do you get into all this shit?” Stevie’s mother asks as he interrupts a pleasant exchange between her and her daughter to probe into why the two were feuding a few days earlier.)

A lot of people—including James himself and his social worker wife—care a lot about Stevie, and we both hear about and feel for ourselves the mangled charm that attracts them to him. As his girlfriend Tanya puts it, with a shy smile: “I don’t know what it is about Stevie, but I love him.” James earns the trust of everyone in Stevie’s circle, putting them sufficiently at ease to collect revealing comments about and interactions with him. In the process, without ever forgetting or condoning Stevie’s heinous act, he pushes through it, showing us the “12-year-old boy that’s lost” that his aunt, the mother of the girl he molested, still sees in him.

So why couldn’t any of those people help that boy grow up and decide not to perpetuate the cycle of abuse he was born into? Maybe, as James’ wife says, the system was doomed to fail because no system can fill the hole left by parental abuse and neglect. But James keeps asking the question, either mulling over his own guilt or filming others as they wonder what they might have done differently. As one of Stevie’s former teachers says: “We had a lot of intelligent people working on him over the years, trying to come up with something that would either motivate him or help him control himself, and we never came up with it.”

Written for The L Magazine

Web Crawling

2011-07-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

From Roger Ebert's excellent blog:

Christopher Walken reads The Three Little Pigs (above) and

Roger's take on the rise and fall (could it be?) of Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Sun Times while Roger was working there

All About Eve

2011-07-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

BAM's "Marilyn!" concludes this weekend; All About Eve screens today.

As long as she’s strategically parked in Margo Channing’s stairwell, a radiant young Marilyn Monroe walks away with every scene she plays as a cunning young climber in All About Eve. But even she can’t upstage Bette Davis’s Margo when they meet at the older actress’ real home turf, the thee-ah-tah, and that’s as it should be. All About Eve is all about Davis, a lioness raging against the onrushing winter with a rare opportunity to play one of her own breed.

Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whose genius was strictly on the left-hand side of that hyphen, staged All About Eve pretty much like one of the plays its characters’ lives revolve around, filming mostly stationary actors as they pour out torrents of talk before a mostly stationary camera. But the syncopated symphony of wised-up wisecracks, snide asides, and perfect putdowns they throw down is so intoxicating I don’t mind the staid camerawork.

“What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end,” says Margo’s dresser, Birdie (Thelma Ritter, God love her) after Margo’s meek acolyte, Eve (Anne Baxter), tells Margo and her friends her pathetic backstory—and that’s before Birdie sees through the cotton candy Eve’s spinning. And when Monroe’s Miss Caswell is pointed in the direction of a powerful producer, she pauses before going after him to ask: “Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?”

In fact, it’s Eve’s overplayed meekness and false humility that marks her as untrustworthy—and, ultimately, as an operator of the worst kind, “a true killer,” as cynical critic Addison Dewitt (the always imperious George Sanders) observes. Margo, in contrast, is all heart and soul. “Lloyd says Margo compensates for underplaying onstage by overplaying reality,” says her best friend, Karen (Celeste Holm), quoting her beloved husband, as usual.

Margo’s penchant for melodrama sometimes irritates her closest friends and boyfriend—Eve worms her way into their inner circle by exploiting its weakest link, Karen’s desire to take Margo down a peg or two—but it also makes her a complex and compelling character. Margo may “detest cheap sentiment,” but she loves the real thing, and she’s never shy about broadcasting her most vulnerable feelings and fears. “Infants behave the way I do, you know,” she tells Karen. “They carry on and misbehave—they'd get drunk if they knew how—when they can't have what they want. When they feel unwanted and insecure, or unloved.”

Not that she doesn't have plenty of reasons to “carry on.” All About Eve is a tragedy disguised as a comedy, the portrait of an artist forced to face her own obsolescence just as she’s coming into her prime. Its two main arcs are the ascent of Eve and the descent of Margo, and though it looks for a while as if the first one is causing the second, Margo actually bows out of her own free will. The real villain isn’t Eve after all: it’s sexism and ageism that make this great star, whose talent is never in question, feel over the hill at 40, mortified by the thought of playing another ingenue and terrified of losing her 32-year-old lover. Davis, who was almost exactly Margo’s age when she played the part, was struggling with the same problem in her own career, and she gives a sometimes bravely unglamorous performance, perhaps her least mannered ever, encompassing everything from maudlin self-pity to loving generosity to diamond-sharp sarcasm.

So I’ve always hated the self-denigrating speech Margo makes to Karen as they sit in a stalled car. “Funny business, a woman’s career,” she says. “The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you go back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman.”

Granted, there’s some hard-won midlife wisdom in what she says. Most of us come to terms with the limitations of our options and our once seemingly boundless potential at some point—usually right around age 40. And with that realization tends to come a greater appreciation of the little things in life, and of the importance of having someone to share them with.

But that wisdom is all but drowned by the sexism drenching that speech. Mankiewicz was enough a man of the theater to love his magnificent heroine, but he was enough a man of his time to believe that she couldn’t be a real woman without at man at her side, and that having a career was somehow incompatible with being a woman. So how did he solve a problem called Margo? By marrying her off.

I could never quite buy her final retreat into happy housewifery—especially since it happens entirely off-screen, making me wonder if even Mankiewicz really believed that keeping house would keep Margo happy. But what lingers after watching All About Eve is not that unconvincing resolution but the tension underlying Margo’s gallant struggle—and the ever-younger, ever more ambitious wannabes crowding the wings as she fought to maintain her place, both onstage and in her partner’s heart.

Written for The L Magazine

Baby Face

2011-07-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, Film Forum starts their "Essential Pre-Code" series, a monthlong compilation of many of the early-30s gems they've returned to circulation in recent years. Things kick off tomorrow and Saturday with a double feature of Two Seconds and Baby Face.

One of the last tough tales of a poor girl on the make to slide into theaters mostly intact before the Hays Code kicked in the following year, Baby Face (1933) shocked the New York censors enough that it had to lose or tone down several scenes. But the shock to me, when I recently revisited the film for the first time in years, was the sappy-happy ending. What had stuck was not where brazen, bad-ass Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) winds up but how she gets there: sleeping her way to the top of the heap after a grim start as a sullen victim tricked out by her own father.

But that happy ending, which has a suddenly softhearted Lily giving up all her hard-won loot for her hubby, is no post-Code coda intended to put an uppity woman in her place. That kind of ending did get tacked onto the version that made it into theaters: Lily and her husband wound up doing hard labor back in the steel—country Pennsylvania of her youth. But the original conclusion is just the logical extension of a screenplay that never sells out its heroine, making it clear that—no matter how heartless she may seem—she’s a good kid making the best of a bad situation.

Lily’s innate decency is revealed mainly through her bond with Chico (Theresa Harris), the black woman who works at her father’s sleazy speakeasy and then lights out with Lily, becoming her personal assistant/maid. In the opening scene, Lily’s father yells at Chico, firing her as Lily enters the room. “Hey, easy on the whip,” she tells her father contemptuously. “If Chico goes, I go!”

The relationship between the two, which inspired Lynn Nottage to write By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, is as much of a revelation as anything else in Baby Face, owing nothing to the template, typical to movies of the that era, of an imperial white mistress and a sycophantic and childlike (and often morbidly obese) black maid. Until Lily finally lets herself fall for her husband, Chico is her true life companion. She expresses her love for her comrade in the unsentimental, mostly unspoken way in which she deals with all her softer feelings, but the two clearly cherish and understand one another, and Lily remains staunchly loyal to her friend even as she motors through men like a speedboat roaring through a herd of manatees. When one of her conquests suggests that she “get rid of that fantastic colored girl,” she drops the baby talk and gives him a look that would have cut like a laser, if only he’d had the sense to notice it.

Film Forum is showing the original version of the movie, which was discovered in a Library of Congress vault in 2004. It may not seem scandalous by today’s standards, but there’s nothing coy about it either. Perhaps the biggest loss to 1933 audiences was the speech Lily got in the original from her fairy godfather, a crusty old customer at the speakeasy who sees her “potentialities” before she does. Schooling her on Nietzsche (why is it always Nietzsche?), he urges her to “get out before it’s too late” and use the power she has over men for her own good. “Look here!” he says, “Nietzsche says ‘All life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation….’ Use men! Be strong, defiant! Use men to get the things you want!”

Taking his advice to “go to some big city where you will find opportunities,” Lily gets a free ride to New York by seducing the railyard goon who comes to throw her and Chico off the empty freight car they’d hopped. Shots of Lily retreating into the shadows at the back of the car, the railyard man’s gloves hitting the straw, and his hand turning out the lantern leave no doubt as to what came next—not that the long, slow slide of his eyes up and down her body and her exchange of looks with Chico left much to the imagination. (The theatrical version cuts from the two on the train to the city, leaving the man out altogether.)

Once in New York, Lily heads straight to a bank, of course—like Willie Sutton said, it’s where the money is—and seduces the chubby mark in personnel. “Have you had any experience?” he asks. “Plenty,” she says, before disappearing behind a door with a coy backward glance. She starts as a file clerk and promptly works her way up, literally moving higher as the camera pans up the skyscraper that houses the bank, showing us the ever-classier departments on ever-higher floors that she sleeps her way into.

Based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck (under a pen name), the screenplay is as efficient as its heroine, moving forward as smoothly and inexorably as a shark. It’s not exactly subtle (Lily’s last name is Powers, after all), but it’s knowing, smart, and often slyly funny. “Would you like to motor through the chateau country?” one suitor asks. “And see all those lovely 14th-century ceilings?” she replies.

John Wayne makes a surprising cameo as the sap who nicknames Lily Baby Face, a wage slave she uses and then shoulders aside at the start of her climb. But the real draw here is Stanwyck, whose coolly dignified, always calculating Lily wins our love because she never asks for or expects it. Like Stanwyck’s Jean in The Lady Eve and Nora in Night Nurse (also at Essential Pre-Code), Lily is one of the great broads of the American cinema, a heroine whose measuring gaze, dry wit, determined stride, and unself-pitying pragmatism feel as fresh and refreshing now as they must have back then.

Written for The L Magazine

Bedevilled

2011-07-08T19:35:00.000-07:00

The New York Asian Film Festival continues this weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Bedevilled screens on Sunday evening.

Bedevilled opens on a black screen as a disembodied male voice tells a forgettable tale he builds up as “the story of the week.” Then we see a busy street where two boys brutally beat a young woman and then saunter after her as she tries to escape, pleading for help from an uncaring crowd. One of the bystanders is the unseen driver from whose perspective we’re watching (the calm male voice we hear is on her radio), who rolls up her tinted window as the terrorized woman bangs on the car. Welcome to the world of Bedevilled, a soulless Seoul and an even harsher nearby island, where men brutalize at will and women go along with it.

The woman in the car is Hae-won (Seong-won Ji), an ice-queen loan officer who seems to have shut out every instinct or shred of human feeling except self-preservation. At first, the film seems to be heading into Drag Me to Hell territory as Hae-won denies a mortgage to a desperate old woman. But things take a much more interesting turn when she takes a forced vacation to the island of Moo-do.

Once there, the focus shifts to Bok-nam (a vibrant Yeong-hie Seo), Hae-won’s friend from girlhood summers on the island. Her big brown eyes glittering with emotion in her expressive face, Bok-nam brims with the humanity and essential decency Hae-won has repressed, despite being treated with cruelty and contempt by everyone on the island. Raped, beaten, mocked, and treated like a pack animal, it’s no wonder she doesn’t know enough to realize what a false friend Hae-won is, though it’s clear to us when we see Hae-won being dismissive in the present and cruel in childhood flashbacks.

But there’s a limit to what even Bok-nam can tolerate. In the classic revenge scenario, women and children get raped and/or murdered and men get revenge, but Bok-nam has to rely on herself for everything, including revenge. In stalking and dispatching her tormentors, she follows in the bloody footsteps left by The Bride in Kill Bill, the Jennifers of I Spit on Your Grave and Jennifer’s Body, and the mothers of them all, Thelma and Louise.

It’s a feminist twist on an old formula, but that doesn’t mean women are let off the hook. The first people Bok-nam goes after are the women who went along with the sadistic men, empowering them with their silence and their outright collusion. And the last is Hae-won, whose betrayal cut deepest of all.

There’s some sickening satisfaction in seeing Bok-nam wreak her revenge, but Bedevilled doesn’t luxuriate in its own gore. The killings are gruesome: Bok-nam’s victims don’t do much screaming or pleading or even crying out in pain much, and there’s almost no background music to distract from the magnified sound of blades ripping through stubborn sinew. This is no reactionary exercise in bloodlust; it’s a condemnation of the evil men do and, counter-intuitively, a battle cry for kindness and social consciousness. The triumph in Bedevilled isn’t that Bok-nam gets back at the people who abused her. It’s that her killing spree breaks down her former friend’s apparently unbreachable defenses and inspires her to abandon the code of silence she has been living by, fingering the thugs from the opening scene who she had been too afraid to identify.

Gi-tae Kim’s beautiful camerawork and Mi-joo Kim’s editing quietly reinforce the mood without drawing attention to themselves (an exception is a series of jump cuts, shot from below, of Bok-nam chopping away at her unseen husband while red “blood” sprays onto her face and the camera’s lens). One example is the way the dark tale is shot, mostly at night or under the sickly greenish cast of fluorescent lighting at first and then blossoming into bright daylight after Bok-nam roars into action.

The final scene is a stunner, too: a cut from Hae-won’s prone body to a long shot of Moo-do that reveals the fact that the tormented island is shaped like a woman on her back. It’s an eloquent metaphor for the oppression of women, and an elegant end to this thinking person’s revenge movie.

Written for The L Magazine

James Marsh Will Not Throw His Shit on You

2011-07-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

I got the last interview of the last day James Marsh (Man on Wire) devoted to flacking his latest documentary. The story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimp ripped from his mother’s arms in the ‘70s to become the subject of an aborted sign language experiment, Project Nim is a sometimes funny, often horrifying parade of stupid human tricks, attempts at penance, and occasional acts of unalloyed kindness. Tired but engaging in our 20-minute talk, Marsh was a winning combination of nonjudgmental grace and forthright observations—especially while insisting that he’d never throw his shit at me.

You’re English, but all but one of your documentaries is set in America.
There’s a connection between those two things. I’m a sort of a refugee. I lived in New York for 14 years, and I live in Copenhagen now. As a filmmaker, one wants to look beyond the immediate horizons of the place where one lives, and I, of course found so much interesting culture, stories, whatever here. New York is the very first place I came to in America, and I totally adored it—thought I should actually have been born here. It became my second home.

At the same time, as an outsider, you’re responding to things with a slightly different kind of background and agenda. This film is a New York story and a very American story, but no one had yet to do it, so I came and did it. And I guess that’s true of other films I’ve done too.

Herb Terrace [the Columbia University scientist in charge of the Project Nim language experiment] – what a hissable villain. And some of the other people in the movie didn’t come off much better, yet they all seem so comfortable on camera, saying these often very self-incriminating things. How did you manage that?
I’m asking them to tell me their view of things, their recollection of things I’m not asking them to judge themselves or to incriminate themselves. Clearly, some of the things that happen in the story don’t reflect terribly well on some of the people involved, but I’m not trying, in the film, to make a judgment about that. You can, as an audience member, and you should. But we try to tell a story that did happen, as opposed to one that didn’t happen or should have happened.

Also, people like talking about experiences that mean something to them. Sort of in line of what I’m doing here now. (Laughs) I think the people in this story, this relationship they had with the chimpanzee was very important to them and had a big impact on their lives, and they recall it with a great deal of detail, clarity and emotion.

Of course I pushed it into also the human relationships, and that got into a trust one had to establish with the people involved, so they were able to talk about these personal things. Not all of them did. The professor [Terrace] resisted talking about personal things. That was very revealing.

One of the things I found most interesting in Man on Wire was the group dynamics, the way the people on Petit’s team—his friends and especially his girlfriend—were drawn to his vision, which was so much stronger than their own, and then wound up feeling betrayed by him. There’s a similar dynamic in this movie, with all the faux families that form and disband around Nim, and the kind of shady sex.
Yes, even interspecies sex. Chimpanzee and cat, for example. (Laughs)

The reason it’s relevant in this story is these relationships that start and finish around Nim have an impact on his life. When both Stephanie and Laura end up leading the project or being kicked out of the project, it’s because of the complications they’re having with the authority figure, the professor, which are colored with the romantic and sexual dealings that have gone on.

Your film intentionally skirts the question of what scientists think they learned by teaching Nim sign language.
I don’t think it skirts it, but I don't think there’s much to say about it. One of the reasons the film skimps on the science is that the project was a failure. Well, not a failure: We learned something from it. But the experiment concludes that Nim is imitating using language very superficially for his own ends, not being grammatical with it.

Well, yes, Herb Terrace says that in the movie, but do you think he was right? I felt like there was plenty of room for other interpretations.
There are two things that I think about this, on reflection. One is that the question [Terrace] asked in his experiment was very narrow: Can a chimpanzee construct a sentence, i.e., use an exclusively human kind of grammatical construct? The answer to that, we find out, is probably not. The question being asked was not: Can we communicate with a chimpanzee? Can we have an exchange of ideas, a dialogue? And that does appear to be a much more open-ended and debatable question.

The other observation I had was that they spent four and a half years looking at this chimp, doing all this stuff, interacting with him, and no one said, “Guess what, he’s cheating.” Terrace looked at the data later and said, “Guess what, he’s having us on.” And yet all these humans were there, signing with this chimp and having these interactions and saying yes, this is working well. But then, they were perhaps blinded by their expectations and higher hopes.

The Clever Hans thing.
Yes, that’s exactly it. That you’re seeing what you want to see. But these are scientists, and therefore one would hope that they would be more sensitive to what’s going on. Perhaps.

So what do you think this experiment teaches us about our species, if not about language?
Well, that’s a very good question. There’s a debate about nature and nurture that’s dramatized in this chimpanzee’s early life. Can you take a creature that’s hardwired to behave a certain way and inhibit that behavior to allow him to live with us? I think we learn, from this part of the story, that nature will out, and that whatever kind of adjustments they try to make to Nim to change his behavior, it’s very superficial. Nature is a very, very powerful force in this chimpanzee’s life. And probably in our own too.

There’s an interesting quote at the end about how chimps are a forgiving species. Do you think we should be forgiven for what we’ve done to them?
Well, I’m not sure about that. But the idea is offered by the vet, Jim Mahoney [who did medical experiments on chimps for years before becoming an advocate for freeing primates from labs], and I think he would know, as someone who probably needs their forgiveness. I was wary of the idea of ascribing such a complicated mental attribute to a chimpanzee as the idea of forgiveness. But the way I would put it is, he [Nim] does not bear grudges against people.

As you studied the footage of Nim, did you find yourself liking him?
I did. I liked him, but I wouldn't want to meet him as a fully grown chimpanzee on my own. I would be scared of him, and he’d know that, and he would then monster me, or try to hump me, or something.

Before I made the film, I spent a couple days with chimpanzees here and in a place in Louisiana that I knew about, just to be near them. They try to entice you. They’ll put out a stick [through the bars of their cages] and try to invite you over to hang out with them. Of course, I knew by this point that one would never put your hand through a cage, but they’re always trying to get you to do that so they can bite you. Because they’re not really happy in cages. They don’t like it. They spit at you. They throw their shit at you. And can you blame them?

Yeah. It’s like prison.
Absolutely. Nim was treated like a prisoner who’s put in solitary confinement. That’s exactly what happened to him. The story of his life is one of increasing confinement and lack of freedom that gets progressively worse.

Who can blame them for being utterly pissed off about that and throwing their shit at us? I would do the same.

What struck me …
Well, no, I wouldn’t throw my shit at you. I wouldn't be happy to see you, if you came to stare at me in a cage. But I wouldn’t throw my shit at you.

Well, hey, you can’t know until you’ve been there, right?
No, I take that back. I wouldn’t throw my shit at you. Or at anybody else.

Okay, I believe you. What struck me about this story was how it highlighted the arrogance and the ignorance of our species.
The word I’ve always thought of is hubris, which is the attempt to overreach on something that might be honorable, might be noble, might be worth doing. If there’s a sin here, it’s a sin of hubris.

In science, we need people to think big and boldly and imaginatively about the frontiers of knowledge, so I’m glad scientists ask these kinds of questions. But clearly there wasn’t any consideration of the chimp’s well-being. We owned him. We controlled him. And he was a sentient, intelligent creature. The question the film poses is: What responsibility do we have if that’s the relationship we have with him?

We don’t come off only badly, because it doesn't end as badly as it might have done. Ultimately he is behind bars, but there’s an effort to understand what he might need. Jim Mahoney, the vet, actually becomes a heroic figure by providing Nim with chimpanzee companions he can live with and interact with. That’s what he needs. He doesn’t need people, at this point. They’ve let him down.

Written for The L Magazine

Page One: Inside the New York Times

2011-07-02T10:15:00.000-07:00

Ironically, this is the last of more than nine years' worth of weekly reviews I wrote for TimeOFF, the entertainment supplement for about a dozen papers in Central Jersey. Last week I got a call I'd been braced for: In the latest of a series of cuts, they'd trimmed the pages down too far to accommodate more than the occasional movie review.

Page One: Inside the New York Times ends with a series of updates on journalists featured in the film. Tim Arango, a young general-interest reporter, becomes head of the Times’ Baghdad bureau six months after his arrival in Iraq. An executive of the Tribune Company resigns after media reporter David Carr’s investigation of that company explains how it brought several great newspapers to their knees. And technology reporter Brian Stelter loses 80 pounds.

That hodgepodge pretty much sums up what’s wrong with this movie—and what it gets right. Listening in on Carr’s phone interviews and consultations with his editor as he develops the Tribune story is thrilling, but director Andrew Rossi has an irritating inability to distinguish between hugely important issues like that one and mere trivia, like Stelter’s weight loss. Worse yet, as the bit about Arango illustrates, Rossi almost always fails to ask the questions any decent journalist would ask. We’re told that Arango is diligent and talented, but we also hear him joke with his colleagues about how the old pros at the Baghdad bureau are bristling at the news of his impending arrival, sure he’ll soon be on TV opining about the situation after just two or three weeks in country. So what are we to make of the news of his promotion? Is it another example of the kind of clubby favoritism that often operates at places like the Times, or is it a bracing example of the recognition and promotion of outstanding talent that helps makes the paper great?

Unfortunately, Rossi never makes room for that kind of introspection. Despite the movie’s title, we don’t get far inside the Times: Aside from a few privileged glimpses of reporters at work, all we see of the paper are some not terribly interesting conversations at the daily editorial confab and a few self-congratulatory speeches.

What’s worse, the film provides almost no insight into the media revolution that has the Times’ knickers in a twist, its editors and writers fretting about how to respond to Wikipedia or whether they need to start Twitter accounts.

As you may have noticed, the paper you’re reading is struggling to survive, and we’re hardly alone. The bad economy isn’t helping, but the main reason most papers are fighting for their lives is the Internet, whose ever-growing gusher of facts and factoids is redefining how we get our news and how we pay for it—or, more often, don’t.

How will this mass migration from print to pixels affect the content and quality of the information we receive? Will anyone pay for real reporting, not to mention the non-factual content provided by people like me? And if the traditional gatekeepers fall, will we find other ways of getting at the truth that are just as effective—perhaps even better, since our current news media are hardly paragons of virtue? Rossi touches on some of these urgent questions but he doesn’t explore any in depth, flitting from issue to issue like a hyperactive five-year-old.

Half video press release and half time capsule, Page One starts and ends with the premise that journalism as we know it and need it cannot survive without the Times. Now and then someone questions that premise, but only so he can be swatted down by a Times loyalist, most often Carr. The perpetually hoarse old warhorse is well cast as the paper’s chief booster. A gifted writer and reporter, he promotes his employer as fiercely as he does himself, riding his redemption story about being a reformed crack addict hard to establish his grizzled hipster cred.

It’s fun, I gotta admit, to watch Carr take down a self-styled citizen journalist from the Vice website who talks about having reported on things the Times missed. (“Just because you put on a f---ing safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you a right to insult what we do,” Carr snarls.) But it would have been more enlightening to have heard more about what Vice does and why its users like it.

We don’t even learn anything about the Times’ own website, long lauded as one of the best in the news business. Rossi was shooting when the paper started charging nonsubscribers for access to its site, so we hear a few references to that decision, but we learn nothing about why they decided to charge what they did or what they hope for or fear as a result.

Instead, we just keep hearing how much the world needs the Times. Didn’t anyone ever tell Rossi that reporters are supposed to show, not tell?

Written for TimeOFF

Bonding with Aza Jacobs over Hallucinogens and More

2011-06-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

Best known in arty zip codes in New York and LA, Azazel Jacobs is by far the most mainstream member of a staunchly unconventional family (his dad is avant-garde pioneer Ken Jacobs and his sister is video artist/performer Nisi Jacobs), with a BAM Cinématek retrospective on his resume and the second of two nationwide releases rolling out this Friday: Terri, the story of an overweight teenager and the assistant principal (John C. Reilly) who makes a project of him. But his upbringing has given him a healthy respect for people who resist the pressure to conform, a theme that keeps popping up in his films. Like his movies, Jacobs is a winning blend of hip and accessible, emitting a snark-free force field that turned a hotel room into a comfortable free-speech zone.

I didn’t see The GoodTimesKid, but I’ve seen almost all the rest of your movies. I liked them all, but I particularly connected with Nobody Needs to Know.
Really! No way. Where were you when that film came out? We got nobody. Letting that thing off the shelf and allowing it as a download was one of the best things I ever did. It was almost impossible to get into festivals, and the idea of distribution was completely impossible. So when I hear that it’s finding its way to homes, it’s just… it’s really encouraging. I get these random emails maybe like once a month, or someone on Facebook will contact me or I’ll meet somebody.

I love the film. Every time a critic would point out what was wrong with it, I’d go, “Yeah, I know that! I worked on it! I understand everywhere that it failed, and I can point out a bunch more places. But look how hard I tried, and how high I aimed!” I don’t think I’ll ever have those guts again.

Really?
No way.

Why not?
I wasn’t really risking anything. It wasn’t going to be a calling card. And I had maybe a better, more self-important image of who I was and what I could do. I just don’t have that kind of strength or willingness to fight any more. It’s a constant fight to make a movie where you’re trying to change the world. It left me exhausted and unsure what it was about movies that I liked any more. The GoodTimesKid is what brought me back into it, that reminded me, this is what it’s about. But my aspirations are much lower. They’re just generally to make films that I really care about and let the world go how it goes.

Terri feels like the most mainstream movie you’ve made. This is your widest distribution so far, isn’t it?
Yeah, it is.

Was trying to reach a broader audience part of your thinking when you were making it?
I think the pure thing would be for me to say no, but I’m sure it played a part, in that I got a taste of what it feels like to communicate with a lot of people with Momma’s Man. That did very well for the size of film it was, and it came out in theaters across the world. And that gave me the ability to tell a bigger story.

I have a lot of stories inside of me; some of them are bigger than others, and I felt like I wanted to take advantage of whatever momentum I had to tell one of these bigger stories. Because who knows what’s coming next?

Your father claims you told him that you want to make movies that people see.
It’s not that I don’t find what he does extremely respectable, it’s just that the stories I want to tell, I felt, could be accessible for more people.

I listened to an interview your dad taped after Momma’s Man came out in which your mom felt awful because people had come up to her afterward crying, asking for advice on how to raise their own problematic adult children. Are you getting very personal responses to Terri now from, like, former fat kids?
It’s not just fat kids. It’s kids that felt marooned growing up, that felt alone. It’s true I had this dream of making movies that people see, but that’s kinda snarky. Because the reality is that, even if my father’s films emptied out most of the theater, there’d always be at least one person left who said they felt less alone in this world, who saw something familiar that they thought they were crazy for seeing before. And I feel the same with Terri. I’m definitely getting that kind of response from people that say yes, yes, this is true. It was ok for me not to be that way. There was no way for me to fit in.

You also said in that interview that you wanted to make actual money with your movies, buy-a-house money. Have you been able to do that?
I have. I’ve been making a living from my movies since getting out of AFI, for almost the whole time, the past 10 years. Sometimes it’s a better living than other times, but it’s never been anything to complain about, the fact that I keep being able to work. That’s why I’m in Los Angeles. It’s been extremely embracing for me in allowing me to think about work first and everything else second.

Your dad obviously feels like he can’t make a living from his films without compromising his artistic vision, and your sister presumably feels the same way, since she’s a teacher. What made you so weirdly almost-normal, coming from that family?
It was the Clash. Honestly, it was The Clash. They were constantly playing both sides of the field. They were saying and doing things that weren’t for the money and still making money, still selling out shows, still doing contradictory things.

I’m full of contradictions. I mean, I land yesterday in New York City and there’s a car waiting for me, and this is the life! I love it, you know? Just a little big of cuddling and I turn into a docile kid. It takes very little to feel like—you feel worthy, you know? You feel like you’re valuable. I’m hoping there’s a way that I can do all those things without being hypocritical.

Do you and your dad watch movies when you’re together?
Yes.

What have you watched lately and liked?
Well, now I’m in Los Angeles, so right now we’ll talk about movies, and I get films from them on a weekly basis, DVDs. A Harold Lloyd collection just showed up. The Busby Berkeley collection. They’re constantly giving me things that he tapes off TCM. I pushed Frownland his way. The last time we sat in the theater, besides my own work, we went to see War of the Worlds together and we actually both really enjoyed it.

Let’s talk pjs. Iris starts wearing them instead of her pretty dresses when she rejects the New York hipster scene in Nobody Needs to Know, and Terri wears them to school after giving up all hope of fitting in. Did you ever wear your pajamas in public, and if not, do you wish you had?
Growing up in the city, I was way, way too self-involved to do anything that would be comfortable. It was at least an hour in front of the mirror figuring out how to put my hair up this way or lace my shoes this way. So if there’s anything that comes from, it’s probably some kind of envy. I definitely like these people that don’t give up. They just become. They give up on a certain thing, and it allows them a freedom that hardly anyone has.

You said you used to be a kind of cowardly mean kid in high school, but everyone who works with you now talks about how supportive you are, and you seem very kind in person. And, more importantly, Terri has a loving and nonjudgmental attitude toward all its characters, even when they do stupid things. Did you make a conscious decision to become a mensch at some point, or did it just happen naturally over time?
I think two things happened. One, hallucinogens were really important for me to step out of myself and my own issues.

What age were you then?
15. Now I’ve got too many fears built up to really be able to experience anything like that, but at that age, I had no experience with the things now that scare me now from being able to trip, because I feel like I could dwell too much on them.

That was important, and also falling in love for the first time, at 19. I remember a lot of the kids that I was still friends with from high school being really disappointed in the person I’d become. They really, really missed the dick-y version of me because, I think, I was a lot of fun. I was quicker at making fun of everything and judging everything. And then suddenly—I think this happens to anyone that falls in love—none of that matters and a whole new world opens up to you. And even though that love didn’t last, it constantly stayed with you and made you realize your world was expanded.

Also making movies. It’s a constant state of learning how to open up and realizing how much more you get when people really care about what they’re doing. The fight, for me, with each movie, gets less and less about something external—how are we going to get that crane over there? Those little things that can become very personal, like “Do not change my vision.” First of all, I’m assembling a group of people who have seen my work and are asking me to do what they know I can do. And secondly, there’s a much bigger fight out there. The fight is not onscreen or on set. It’s making work that you care about and getting it out into the world.

You said John C. Reilly brought a lot to his part, that brought that character to life, stuff you’re still discovering as you watch the film.
Every time. What drew me to Patrick Dewitt’s script in a big way was the amount of space that was inside the script that I could see, that I had a way in. That people weren’t rushing to get to one point, to the next point, the next point. There was space to be in these situations and experience them and see how could we explore this story in visual ways and with sound and in every way that film can offer. And John was fantastic at being able to find those spaces and explore and fulfill them in a richer way, building up Fitzgerald’s character. I think that he brings a gravity to a character that could very much have served as a one-note joke.

He doesn’t come off as a joke at all. I thought he was the moral center of the movie.
For me, he’s the landing strip. He’s the runway. Especially in the beginning of the story, we’re trusting where the movie is going because John is there. Every time we hit a scene with John, you feel it with the audience: people feel comfortable because they know him. And because he’s letting them know, we’re stuck in a room and it seems like nothing is happening, but keep going. Trust me. This is going someplace interesting.

Also, his character just confronts things so directly. He just says what’s happening in a way that you wish people would do in life but they rarely do. It’s refreshing.
Yeah. He is good at what he does because there are things that are immature about him, including the fact of coming down and saying what you mean. Which was probably the biggest motivation for me in wanting to tell this story. What other age is there when people have these moments when they say exactly what they mean?

I love the audition scenes in Nobody Needs to Know. There’s so much in there that I imagine actors can relate to in terms of how things can go horribly wrong. Do you ever hear from actors who thank you for making the film?
No. I don’t know how you’re even seeing the movie. But to get back to your question, I wonder sometimes if the film could have been more successful if it was just entirely about the audition scenes. That would be kind of sellable concept: the director that doesn’t know what he wants and keeps on casting. That would be something I would probably do now. But I like that I wanted to say something about everything.

Yeah, that movie was about a lot of things. But ultimately, to me, it was about how phony people can get when they’re trying to be part of some scene, becoming an actress or a New York hipster or whatever. You have several examples of that, not just the auditions. And then Iris says no and reclaims her dignity.
Yeah. It’s true. I thought that if we could give credit to the people that say no to doing horrible things all the time, what an encouraging world this would be. When we walk by some horribly offensive billboard, maybe it took years for them to cast it, because so many thousands of people said “No, I won’t be part of that thing.” But we’ll never know. Maybe they had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get to that place. I like that idea.

Yeah. But I also think, “Nah, there aren’t that many people who say no.” But maybe I just think so because we don’t get to see them.
Yeah, I’m being hopeful. You can see where the hallucinogens came in. [laughs]

You know Cary Grant was a big hallucinogens-taker.
I had heard that. One of the first times that I tripped, I thought, wow, this whole world was built on tripping! It’s made for people who are tripping!

When I did it as a kid, I felt like it was a way of just really being in the moment. I grew up in a city and then moved to Indiana. I really hated being there, but when I took acid it was like, “Wow, look at the leaves and listen to the wind! It’s all so beautiful!” I appreciated where I was for the first time, in a way.
Absolutely. I just got in last night so I went back to my parents’ place, and for me this place is full of memories and ghosts. So I’m up bringing my bags up the stairs and I had this memory of spending a couple of hours on that first level of stairs with my best friend Izzie after we had both eaten mushrooms for the first time in City Hall Park across the street. I remember sitting in City Hall Park and me going, “This grass is really green.” And Izzie said “Yeah, it’s green,” and I went, “No, it’s REALLY green, man.” And he went, “It’s true, man! It is really, really green.” [laughs]

Written for The L Magazine

Muhammad Ali, The Long-Lost Movie

2011-06-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

This Friday evening at Anthology Film Archives, Anton Perich presents, for the first time, a compilation of video footage of Muhammad Ali taken in the early 1970s.

Ever since brain-trauma-induced Parkinson’s slowed down his elegant body and trickster tongue, it’s hard to watch Muhammad Ali box. But that’s only because it was so exhilarating to watch as he talked, moved, and interacted with people—especially kids—in his prime.

There are some long boxing sequences in Muhammad Ali, The Long-Lost Movie, but mostly we just get to tag along as the champ goes about his daily life, training (the sight of him skipping rope is a beautiful thing), talking to people, or overseeing the workers who are realizing his vision of a country retreat that he describes with the ghost of a grin as being fit for “old Jesse James, Belle Starr—American outlaws.”

Anton Perich shot the footage in 1973 and ’74, when Ali was preparing for his Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman. Perich first went to Ali’s Deerlake, Pennsylvania camp with Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, who had contacted Ali because they were interested in his poems. The two invited Perich, who was shooting a lot of video at the time for a groundbreaking underground cable TV show here in New York, to document one of their meetings.

“I thought I was going to go there for 16 minutes or something, so I used the camera I used for my TV show,” Perich told me. “I never had any tripod or anything, and my camera was always really bad.” Perich visited the camp several more times over the next few months, collecting hours’ worth of half-inch black-and-white video on his Sony Portapak. He played some of the footage on his TV show, but most sat in boxes for years, some of it getting lost in moves and the rest probably deteriorating somewhat. Last year he started going through the tapes, digitizing the half-inch videos and editing them into this two-hour movie.

The result looks so raw that Ali breaks out of one of the monologues he delivers to Bockris and Wylie to deliver an impromptu rap about it: “I like your interview and I admire your style, but your camera’s so cheap I won’t talk to you for a while.” And if the visuals are mostly pretty crude, the sound is worse, sometimes fading out so much that it’s hard to hear the champ (hopefully the ace projectionists at Anthology will be able to compensate for that). As Perich puts it: “You have the most sophisticated mind and body imaginable in front of you and you’re capturing it with the most primitive instrument imaginable.”

But that crudity is less of a handicap than you might think. Anthology is billing this as a “home movie,” and that feels right. The amateur-hour quality of the footage merges with the relaxed, intimate encounters to create what feels like an unfiltered look at Ali on his home turf. When Perich does film Ali fighting, in a long bout staged for a bunch of enthusiast kids, he’s so close to the ring that you can hear the fighters breathing.

The film opens with a lot of footage of Wylie and Bockris (I only know it’s them because Perich told me, since there are no subtitles or voiceover to tell us what’s going on; Bockris is the one who looks like Adrien Brody), touring the camp and talking to Ali, whose soft, quick voice covers a lot of ground. His interviewers react with awe as he reads poems and sayings that sound like the aphorisms you’d find in a fortune cookie, indisputably true but not necessarily earthshaking: “The man who has no imagination stands on the earth. He has no wings; he cannot fly." But the depth and originality of his thinking emerge as he talks about things like how African-Americans need to become self-sufficient or the world of hurt he sees in store for the U.S. (He compares the nation to a poor person pretending to be rich, someone with a refrigerator full of food who will be able to keep up the pretense of being just fine only until that stash runs out.)

Amazingly approachable considering that he may have been the most famous man in the world at the time, Ali gives the filmmakers all the time and space they need. He’s just as generous with the people—especially the women and kids—who hang on him like pilot fish on a whale as he moves through the grounds of his camp, standing shyly beside him as if they can hardly believe their own fortune or chanting his name like a prayer as they vie for his attention.

Ali could have done and been almost anything (and he knows it too: he’s not bullshitting when he calls himself The Greatest). Except that he couldn't, of course, given the time and place and skin he was born in. What he made of boxing, one of few roads to fame and fortune open to a poor black kid in apartheid Louisville in the 50s, was amazing, but what a price he paid. Perich’s found footage of the great man in his prime is a piece of American history. It’s also an aptly human-scaled tribute to a champion who has always been—first and foremost, fully and deeply—a human being.

Written for The L Magazine