Letters from Iwo Jima

Masters of the Hollywood system like Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Preston Sturges were still making movies when Clint Eastwood was a boy. “When I grew up there was such a variety of movies being made,” Eastwood told LA Weekly. “You could go see Sergeant York or Sitting Pretty or Sullivan’s Travels, dozens of pictures, not to mention all the great B movies.”

The boy was obviously paying attention, but there was a limit to how much he could absorb. Now in his 70s, Eastwood is still making movies in the honorable tradition of the studio system of the 30s and 40s. At his best, in films as different in tone as Bronco Billy and Bird, he skates up to the outskirts of art, demonstrating a clear-eyed understanding of the world and a moving affinity for hapless visionaries. But in the end, Eastwood is not an artist but a master craftsman, and his work often slides into cliche. Shooting fast and frequently and priding himself on staying within budget, he's a polished professional whose films nearly always entertain but too often feel comfortingly familiar.

The Fountain

If you were too young or too old to get swept up in the cultural tsunami of the Sixties, you missed a lot of good times and the rare opportunity to be part of a nationwide movement suffused with hope, idealism, and love for your fellow man.

But there was a side to the Sixties they don’t talk about on VH-1 retrospectives or classic rock stations: the self-righteous, intellectually flabby side. The side that made people spout so much gaseous nonsense about things like spirituality, unconditional love, and ancient cultures they knew almost nothing about but spoke of with pompous reverence.

I’ve been thinking about that lately because I just saw The Fountain, an anachronistic gloss on the half-baked, trippy stuff that used to pass for deep thinking back in the day.

A large part of The Fountain consists of watching Hugh Jackman float through a beautifully art-directed cosmos in an oversized bubble that looks like a snow globe without the snow. (I had to read the press kit to learn that it’s a 26th-century spaceship so futuristic it has no controls or source of power. Which they decided to do, you see, because those knobs and panels would just “get in the way of that amazing view.” Dig it.) Wearing what look like silk pajamas, his head shaved for that beatific yogi look, Jackman pads pacifically around his little bubble or assumes the lotus position, as content as a cow though his only companions are an impressive-looking but nonverbal Tree of Life and the ghost of his dead wife, the annoyingly saintly Izzi.

The bubble boy sequences are just one of three melodramatic stories writer/director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) keeps leaping between, in a romance novel-ish way. All three star Jackman as a man trying to find the key to immortality and spend eternity with his love, Rachel Weisz.

In the present-day and futuristic segments, Jackman and Weisz play a married couple, Thomas and Izzi. In the third story – a book written by the 21st-century Izzi, which we see acted out as Thomas reads it – he’s a 16th-century conquistador in Inquisition-era Spain and she is his embattled (and, of course, super-hot) queen. In that story, he leaves Spain for a Mayan jungle, where he nearly winds up as a human sacrifice (bummer, man) before finding the Mayans’ sacred Tree of Life, which later winds up in 26th-century Thomas’ spaceship.

Confused? Join the crowd. In the sold-out theater where I saw it, half the audience was tittering on the way out and the other half seemed to be apologizing for not having understood it.

Not that any of its elements are hard to understand in isolation. On the contrary, artless writing and frequent repetition makes individual scenes achingly obvious. The first time we see Izzi ask Thomas to go for a walk and he rejects her to go back to work, for example, the scene feels familiar – carpe diem and all that. By the time it’s been replayed for what seems like the 15th time, you ache for a remote with a fast-forward button. There are also far too many pseudo-profound statements about the grand significance of death. “We struggle all our lives to become born, to be worthy of our deaths,” says 21st-century Thomas’ boss, Lilli (Ellyn Burstyn), in a eulogy that might have been written by that Sixties icon turned self help-tinged guru, Ram Dass.

The film’s lush, gold-toned look is the best thing about it, making the case for the beauty and wonder of life more effectively than the dialogue, the plot, or the many lugubrious close-ups. Even the cinematography can get annoying, as the camera does pointlessly showy things like starting a scene upside down and then flipping over. The light shone on Weisz is annoyingly unsubtle too, growing so intense that it washes out every feature but her blue eyes and pillowy lips and makes her glow like the celluloid saint she’s in danger of becoming, after The Constant Gardener and now this.

The filmmakers do one nice bit with the sound, sending 21st-century Thomas out of a hospital where Izzi lies, deathly ill, into an utterly silent world – no music, no ambient sound, no nothing. But too much of the time, they leave annoyingly generic, vaguely New Age-y music pulsating in the background.

Tighter editing might have helped, since the repeated lines and scenes and all those lingering close-ups of tear-filled eyes make it hard, after a while, to empathize with Thomas’ grief over losing his adored wife, let alone with his zeal to find a way to “stop aging, stop dying. But in the end, I suspect, no amount of artistry could have saved this simplistic script.

Remember Siddartha? The Fountain makes it look deep.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

A lot of the talk about the fictional Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, one of British social satirist Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedic alter egos, centers around who Baron Cohen is lampooning when he puts on Borat’s cheap suit, stiff smile, and bushy mustache and lumbers forth to meet an unsuspecting world. Is Baron Cohen making fun of Kazakh backwardness, as an offended Kazakh government initially assumed, or of American hypocrisy, as the Kazakhs recently claimed to have realized?

Baron Cohen started filming Borat and his comedic cousins -- Ali G, a faux Jamaican-spouting wannabe gangster and TV talk show host, and Bruno, a simpering fashion reporter -- for British TV. His recent shift to the U.S. seems to be more about expanding his market than aiming at a new satiric target, since the essence of his act remains unchanged. In his wonderfully funny and unpreachily insightful new movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, as in his British and HBO TV shows, he puts one of his blissfully unself-aware characters in front of a camera and let us watch while other people react to his ignorance, bigotry, and socially inappropriate behavior.

The Queen

The reaction of the British people to their royal family is “very complicated,” said director Stephen Frears in the Q&A following The Queen at this year’s New York Film Festival -- but it nearly always starts with ridicule. “The most extraordinary thing about this film,” he said, “is that it takes [the royals] seriously. That’s sort of the shocking part.”

For American audiences, the shocker may be that Princess Di, who plays a central role in Frears’ movie, is not its heroine. Instead, in the news footage that’s judicially sprinkled throughout The Queen, she comes off as a duplicitous self-promoter who used the media like a samurai uses his sword, burnishing her own legend while slicing her enemies to ribbons. Even that coy downward gaze she favored looks premeditated after Frears catches her slipping a camera a sly gaze of complicity and freezes the frame for a moment, burning her knowing smirk into the mind’s retina.

The Queen

The reaction of the British people to their royal family is “very complicated,” said director Stephen Frears in the Q&A following The Queen at this year’s New York Film Festival -- but it nearly always starts with ridicule. “The most extraordinary thing about this film,” he said, “is that it takes [the royals] seriously. That’s sort of the shocking part.”

For American audiences, the shocker may be that Princess Di, who plays a central role in Frears’ movie, is not its heroine. Instead, in the news footage that’s judicially sprinkled throughout The Queen, she comes off as a duplicitous self-promoter who used the media like a samurai uses his sword, burnishing her own legend while slicing her enemies to ribbons. Even that coy downward gaze she favored looks premeditated after Frears catches her slipping a camera a sly gaze of complicity and freezes the frame for a moment, burning her knowing smirk into the mind’s retina.

The Queen starts the day Di was driven to her death by a pack of paparazzi. Though already separated from Prince Charles, she is firmly established in the public mind as “the people’s princess,” as Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) puts it in a televised tribute shortly after her death. Blair has just been elected in a landslide vote by besotted voters eager to see the young Turk “modernize” stodgy old Britain. He cements his prodigious popularity with his response to Di’s death, his American-style emotionalism matching the mood of the crowd that was gathering outside Buckingham Palace.

Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) becomes a poster child for the stiff-upper-lip style that’s free-falling out of favor in the fading empire. Insisting that Di’s death was “a private matter,” the queen retreats to the royal estate in Balmoral, husband Philip (James Cromwell), son Charles (Alex Jennings), and grandsons in tow. Tone deaf about the changing mood of “the people,” she’s concerned only with shielding her grieving grandsons from the prying public eye and observing royal protocol – which is to say, doing nothing much about Diana’s death, since the lapsed princess was no longer technically a royal.

But “the people” will have none of that. The change that apparently took place in the British soul sometime during the Thatcher years manifests itself in the form of an enormous crowd that gathers for Diana, layering thousands of bouquets outside the palace gates, sleeping and weeping in the street outside.

Its voice amplified by the tabloid papers, which call on the queen to “show us you care,” the mob’s as ugly as the one that called for Marie Antoinette’s head. And this one threatens to do away with its queen as well – albeit just the role, not the person. But Elizabeth reads its mood in the nick of time and saves the monarchy by delivering the public gestures the crowd demands.

By giving us a ringside seat at the reenactment, The Queen lets us imagine what those gestures must have cost. From the queen’s vantage point, Di’s celebrity-studded funeral looks outre. Even the bouquets outside the palace turn poisonous when she does her public viewing, getting close enough to read the hateful notes blaming her and her family for Di’s unhappy life and death.

Frears best movies – including My Beautiful Laundrette, The Snapper, and Dirty Pretty Things – have been absorbingly realistic tales of working-class Brits struggling to break free from some deadly socioeconomic trap, like flies stuck in a spiderweb. His heroine this time is no working-class hero, but this queen is just as trapped as her subjects.

Like The Devil Wears Prada, Peter Morgan’s script subverts the usual narrative, flipping a story about a vulnerable young heroine abused by a ruthless and powerful older woman on its head. With her thick ankles, sensible shoes, and helmet hair, Mirren’s queen is an unlikely star. Worse yet for this emotive age, she’s a mistress of minimalism, making an art of hiding her feelings in public -- and every part of her life is public, even the bed from which she’s awoken in the middle of the night by an apologetic aide bearing news of Di’s death.

Mirren was riveting as the queen’s fiery ancestor, Elizabeth I, in an HBO miniseries last year. Working on a much smaller and grayer canvas, she makes this dowdy Elizabeth every bit as compelling. “As an actor, you find yourself falling in love with your character, no matter who it is,” she said at the film festival. “And that happened to me. I ended up absolutely falling in love with the queen – which is very embarrassing. It’s very uncool.”

She makes us love her too, showing us the unshowy virtues that make her a good leader. A member of the World War II generation whose motto might be “never complain, never explain,” Mirren’s Elizabeth is unfailingly dignified, fair, and respectful of others. “Duty first, self second,” she says to the prime minister in one of the private audiences between the two that bookend the story. “That’s how I was brought up. That’s all I’ve ever known.”

At least in the Western world, where we’re all supposed to be the center of our own cults of personality, that attitude is a thing of the past. The Queen lets us see what we’ve lost in letting it go.

Friends With Money

Writer/director Nicole Holofcener has a gift for exploring the inner lives of women and the relationships that challenge and sustain them. Particularly interested in how women rely on one another, both for emotional support and as yardsticks to measure their own progress or stagnation, she makes movies that feel like a conversation with an old friend: affirming, engaging, and entertainingly gossipy, yet studded with thought-provoking insights.

If her movies haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, it’s probably because they’re basically art-house chick flicks, and people like to sneer at chick flicks. But brushing off movies like this is often just another way of belittling women.

The action in Holofcener’s movies is almost all talk. The things her characters do are never remarkable, though they sometimes convey a shock of recognition. But mostly her characters talk and talk, hurting and healing each other’s feelings while constantly, even obsessively, taking the temperature of their relationships.

In distilling the poignancy from everyday pleasures and indignities, Holofcener risks seeming as if she’s talking about nothing at all, and indeed some people have always found her movies too tediously lifelike. I never did before, but her latest sometimes feels a bit shapeless even to me.

The theme of Friends With Money, if there is one at all, seems to be how the friends of the title are adjusting to middle age. Holofcener’s characters are growing up along with her. The two best friends in Walking and Talking (1996) were young women not long out of college, who grow apart and then come back together after one gets engaged, leaving the other to feel neglected. The two biological sisters in Lovely and Amazing (2001) are a little older, starting their careers and their families – though their adopted sister, who seems more self-possessed and mature than either one of them, is only eight. The four best friends in Friends With Money, some of whom Holofcener says were based on friends of her own, are in their late 30s and early 40s. Settling into their lives, they’ve lost the youthful illusion that anything is possible.

Jane (the wonderfully acerbic Frances McDormand) is in a full-blown, depressed midlife crisis, railing at strangers and refusing to wash her hair because she just can’t see the point. Christine (Catherine Keener) lives in denial, building a huge addition to her house while her marriage falls apart. Only sweet, spacey Franny (Joan Cusack) seems to have no complaints, content with her life as a well-heeled housewife with a husband and son she loves.

The friends talk about each other almost as much as they talk to each other, and the subject of their conversation is usually Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), the only one of the four with no money. Olivia is still unmoored, drifting from one masochistically inappropriate relationship to another, working as a maid, and toying with the notion of becoming a personal trainer even though she hates to exercise.

As usual in Holofcener’s movies, a slow accretion of detail leaves you feeling that you know – and care – quite a lot about the characters by the end. This time around, though, some notes are sounded too loudly, as if there were one thing about each person that the director wanted be sure we would notice. Olivia is forever cadging expensive anti-aging makeup she can’t afford; Jane keeps picking fights; people keep assuming that Jane’s husband is gay; and Christine keeps hurting herself in household accidents and waiting for someone to ask if she’s okay.

But with actors this good and this well cast, there can be pleasure even in watching something play out for the second or third time. Catherine Keener has starred in all three of Holofcener’s films. She’s a kind of muse to the director, who writes parts with her in mind, and it’s easy to see why. Here, Keener’s nervous intelligence makes Christine’s clumsy neediness touching rather than gauche. Cusack’s puckish sweetness and McDormand’s ferocious sarcasm are also just right for their characters, while Aniston’s relative blandness and lack of affect fit the self-denying “pothead” Olivia.

The men are also well cast and well written, given their due though they’re at the periphery of the action. Simone McBurney is particularly good as Jane’s ambiguously gay husband, starting out as a punchline but emerging as a likeable, thoughtful, and surprisingly dignified man.

Friends With Money may not be Holofcener’s best work, but it’s an ambling, likeable tale that almost earns its fairy-tale ending. Even if it does nothing else, it’s a rare pleasure to see a movie about female friendship where both the women and the men are believable and there are no heroes or villains.

Inside Man

As the letters of Inside Man’s opening credits break apart and rearrange themselves like tumblers in a lock, an infectious Hindi song cranks up the energy inside the theater. The song, “Chaiya Chaiya,” is so good that I googled it later: It’s from Dil Se, a Bollywood film that Inside Man director Spike Lee reportedly loves and Variety’s Grady Hendrix describes as maybe “the greatest movie about terrorism every made.”

Welcome to another love letter from Lee, one of America’s best directors, to his New York City, a brash, impassioned, soulful mix of people from everywhere else on earth.

A lot of the credit for this “Spike Lee joint” belongs to first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, who came up with a story fresh enough to make it easy to forgive the occasional plothole and the ending that fizzles to a halt several minutes too late. This is a bank robbery movie with a twist: The robbers aren’t after the money, so the focus soon shifts from the usual question (how will they do it?) to a new one (what exactly are they doing in there?)

In most heist movies, you’re inside the job, watching the thieves as they race to crack that safe or complete that sting. Inside Man mostly leaves us outside with detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington). Frazier is doing his best to manage the situation – and the cops who are jockeying with him for control – but the shots are being called by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), the man inside the bank.

The pace is surprisingly languid, since neither Frazier nor Russell appears to be in much of a hurry to get the robbers and their 50 or so hostages out of there. That leaves a lot of time to savor the actions and interactions of the characters, who represent a wide range of New York types.

Salted throughout the story of the siege at intervals are flash-forwards to Frazier’s interrogations of the hostages after they escape. These flesh out Frazier’s character, showcasing his sly wit and the sweetness Washington usually reveals in brief glimpses in his movies, doling out just enough to hook us. They also give us another puzzle to solve, since every hostage is a possible perp.

The robbers made all the hostages wear the same outfits and face masks they wore and ran out of the bank with them, so Frazier can’t figure out who’s who. One of Inside Man’s running jokes is that any of the hostages could be a scofflaw: After all, these are New Yorkers, mouthy and noncompliant. Even a middle-aged woman who looks like somebody’s bubbe barks “go ahead – make my day!” when Russell points his gun at her head, and a civilian the cops call in to help shows up with a shopping bag crammed full of parking tickets she wants fixed in exchange for the favor.

The movie gets in some nicely pointed yet unpreachy riffs on racism, which show the grinding gears of “message” movies like Crash for the creaky contrivances that they are. My favorite was an economical, gently humorous evisceration of the racial stereotyping and violence of gangsta video games, but there are plenty more, including a bit about Armenians (thanks, Spike!)

Then there’s the pure pleasure of watching Owen and Washington, both separately and together. Tall men with a cocky looseness in their loping gaits, the two are well-matched, with rhyming styles of cool. Both burn with a charisma that comes as much from intelligence as from intensity, and both can switch in mid-sentence from playful to menacing. Their characters here, both of whom operate from a strong sense of what’s right, recognize one another as kindred spirits.

In a supporting role as Madeline White, the fixer brought in by the bank president to discreetly short-circuit the robbery, Jodie Foster is mesmerizing, stalking about in heels so high it hurts just to look at them. Seal-sleek and smirking, Foster exudes a sense of steel-nerved self-satisfaction that almost disguises the fact that she’s nothing but a deux ex machina in Jimmy Choos, plopped into the plot to get Russell to explain what he’s after.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, the enormously talented British-Nigerian star of Dirty Pretty Things, is wasted here as Frazier’s nearly silent partner, and the two corrupt rich white men who represent the power structure are little more than straw men, despite the best efforts of the immensely talented Christopher Plummer to bring one of them – the bank’s president – to life.

But there’s so much to enjoy in this movie, including loving close-ups of only-in-New-York street scenes, architectural details, and settings like White’s showy office. It’s also a pleasure to see a heist movie in which nobody is killed and nothing’s blown up – except in the boy’s Grand Theft Auto game and a scenario the cops imagine, which is played out as if it were happening while they discuss it.

Best of all, it’s a joy to see Lee back in form. Inside Man may be “just” a genre flick, but it’s as inspired in spots as Lee’s last great opus, 2002’s 25th Hour.

Inside Man

As the letters of Inside Man’s opening credits break apart and rearrange themselves like tumblers in a lock, an infectious Hindi song cranks up the energy inside the theater. The song, “Chaiya Chaiya,” is so good that I Googled it later: It’s from Dil Se, a Bollywood film that Inside Man director Spike Lee reportedly loves and Variety’s Grady Hendrix describes as maybe “the greatest movie about terrorism every made.”

Welcome to another love letter from Lee, one of America’s best directors, to his New York City, a brash, impassioned, soulful mix of people from everywhere else on earth.

A lot of the credit for this “Spike Lee joint” belongs to first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, who came up with a story fresh enough to make it easy to forgive the occasional plothole and the ending that fizzles to a halt several minutes too late. This is a bank robbery movie with a twist: The robbers aren’t after the money, so the focus soon shifts from the usual question (how will they do it?) to a new one (what exactly are they doing in there?)

In most heist movies, you’re inside the job, watching the thieves as they race to crack that safe or complete that sting. Inside Man mostly leaves us outside with detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington). Frazier is doing his best to manage the situation – and the cops who are jockeying with him for control – but the shots are being called by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), the man inside the bank.

The pace is surprisingly languid, since neither Frazier nor Russell appears to be in much of a hurry to get the robbers and their 50 or so hostages out of there. That leaves a lot of time to savor the actions and interactions of the characters, who represent a wide range of New York types.

Salted throughout the story of the siege at intervals are flash-forwards to Frazier’s interrogations of the hostages after they escape. These flesh out Frazier’s character, showcasing his sly wit and the sweetness Washington usually reveals in brief glimpses in his movies, doling out just enough to hook us. They also give us another puzzle to solve, since every hostage is a possible perp.

The robbers made all the hostages wear the same outfits and face masks they wore and ran out of the bank with them, so Frazier can’t figure out who’s who. One of Inside Man’s running jokes is that any of the hostages could be a scofflaw: After all, these are New Yorkers, mouthy and noncompliant. Even a middle-aged woman who looks like somebody’s bubbe barks “go ahead – make my day!” when Russell points his gun at her head, and a civilian the cops call in to help shows up with a shopping bag crammed full of parking tickets she wants fixed in exchange for the favor.

The movie gets in some nicely pointed yet unpreachy riffs on racism, which show the grinding gears of “message” movies like Crash for the creaky contrivances that they are. My favorite was an economical, gently humorous evisceration of the racial stereotyping and violence of gangsta video games, but there are plenty more, including a bit about Armenians (thanks, Spike!)

Then there’s the pure pleasure of watching Owen and Washington, both separately and together. Tall men with a cocky looseness in their loping gaits, the two are well-matched, with rhyming styles of cool. Both burn with a charisma that comes as much from intelligence as from intensity, and both can switch in mid-sentence from playful to menacing. Their characters here, both of whom operate from a strong sense of what’s right, recognize one another as kindred spirits.

In a supporting role as Madeline White, the fixer brought in by the bank president to discreetly short-circuit the robbery, Jodie Foster is also mesmerizing to watch, stalking about in heels so high it hurts just to look at them. Seal-sleek and smirking, her muscular calves shown off to perfection, Foster exudes a sense of steel-nerved self-satisfaction that almost disguises the fact that she’s nothing but a deux ex machina in Jimmy Choos, plopped into the plot to get Russell to explain what he’s after.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, the enormously talented British-Nigerian star of Dirty Pretty Things, is wasted here as Frazier’s nearly silent partner, and the two corrupt rich white men who represent the power structure are little more than straw men, despite the best efforts of the immensely talented Christopher Plummer to bring one of them – the bank’s president – to life.

But there’s so much to enjoy in this movie, including loving close-ups of only-in-New-York street scenes, architectural details, and settings like White’s showy office. It’s also a pleasure to see a heist movie in which nobody is killed and nothing’s blown up – except in the boy’s Grand Theft Auto game and a scenario the cops imagine, which is played out as if it were happening while they discuss it.

Best of all, it’s a joy to see Lee back in form. Inside Man may be “just” a genre flick, but it’s as inspired in spots as Lee’s last great opus, 2002’s incandescent 25th Hour.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Gentle satires like Day for Night, 8½, Stardust Memories, and now Tristram Shandy are made by people who love movies for people who love movies. They take us behind the scenes of the making of a fictional film or a filmmaker’s life not to uncover any scandals but to poke affectionate fun at the needy but loveable people without whom we’d never have movies.

British comedic actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon bite into their multiple roles in Tristram Shandy with relish. They two play rival – and equally narcissist – costars in the movie within this movie, which is an attempt to film the 18th-century novel of the title. The other actors are fun to watch, too, especially the always compelling Naomie Harris, who play a production assistant, and Gillian Anderson as a Hollywood star who flies in at the last moment for a small role that gets bigger as soon as she commits to it.

Director Michael Winterbottom made this film about the impossibility of making the movie you meant to make as a tribute to the spirit of the book, whose narrator keeps trying to tell his life story but getting sidetracked, ultimately getting only as far as his birth. But you don’t have to have read the novel to enjoy the film – in fact, one of the movie’s running jokes is that none of the people making the movie has bothered to read the book first. To enjoy this funny valentine to those wacky folks whose biz is show, all you need to do is relax and go with the flow.

The Beat that My Heart Skipped

Much has been made of the man-bites-dog fact that The Beat that My Heart Skipped is a French remake of an American movie. That’s unusual, all right – in fact, James Toback, the director of the 1978 original, Fingers, thought it was the only such remake until Terrence Rafferty of the New York Times told him he knew of one other. But what’s most interesting about this movie is not that it was done at all but that it was done so well.

In an age of mindless retreads, director Jacques Audiard takes an interesting idea that was poorly developed in the original and makes it pop. The characters and situations are utterly believable and the story is poignant, thanks to impeccable acting, intimate close-ups shot with a handheld camera, and smart, colloquial dialogue by Tonino Benacquista, who also wrote Audiard’s Read My Lips.

When the movie opens, 28-year-old Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris) is caught up in a brutalizing routine his father has led him into. He works in a sleazy corner of the Paris real estate market that involves dirty tricks like infesting buildings with rats, cutting off water, or even beating people to clear them out of the buildings Thomas and his partners are trying to sell. As if that weren’t bad enough, his father periodically calls him into duty as an attack dog, sending him to rough up people who are welshing on their debts. And at night, he hangs out with his partners in bars, doing coke, picking up girls, and getting into fights.

Surrounded by people who take advantage of him – and everyone else – Thomas has learned to act tough. But he’s more sensitive than his callous father and partners, and he wants more from life than the deadening rut he has fallen into. He finds it when he comes across the manager who represented his concert pianist mother when she was alive. Thomas accepts the manager’s offer to polish up his rusty piano skills, hiring Miao-Lin (Linh-Dan Pham), a pianist who recently emigrated from Vietnam, to help him learn a challenging piece he can play at an audition for the manager. Thomas throws himself into his practicing, hoping to leave behind his job and become a professional musician.

The piano on the soundtrack is played by Duris’s sister, who is a professional musician (that’s her you hear rehearsing when Thomas listens to one of his mother’s tapes). She also coached him on how to play, which may explain why not just the actor’s fingering but his expressions seem so authentic. Laboring to master his piece, Thomas runs the gamut from frowning concentration to frustration to trance-like flow.

In the uneven original, the main character, who was played by Harvey Keitel, was a dangerous thug who didn’t seem to have any real doubts about his way of life, despite a few too many Actors Studio-ish scenes of him practicing his fingering on restaurant tables. In this version he’s far more sympathetic, treating people with consideration and struggling to balance his love for and obligation to his abusive father with his affinity for his dead mother and her instrument. Toggling between violence and vulnerability, Duris makes us feel Thomas’s ease and self-assurance in the brutal world he’s accustomed to, his initial awkwardness and diffidence in the world of classical music, and the effort required to pass from one to the other.

The relationship between Thomas and Miao-Lin is also touching. Communicating with just a few words (she doesn’t speak French and he doesn’t speak Vietnamese), they grow steadily closer as she helps him approach her implacably high standards, watching over him with quiet intensity.

Just when you might start to misinterpret Miao-Lin’s reserve as weakness, Thomas shouts at her in frustration and she shouts back and wins, earning his apology. Watching her stiffen up to rebuke his abuse, I found myself imagining the far worse trials she probably had to endure to get from Vietnam to Paris.

My first thought was that the roadblocks Miao-Lin faced would probably make Thomas’ look like tinker toys. My second thought was what a pleasure it was to be watching a movie whose characters were so real that you wondered what they did before the story began.

Written for TimeOFF

Land of the Dead

Writer/director George Romero has wrestled over a dozen movies into existence over the past 40 years and none of his favorites feature flesh-eating ghouls, yet he’s known almost exclusively for his zombie movies. “I don't think any of them are wonderful films,” he told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review of his first three. “Every one of them ... the wolf was at the door.”

Romero’s seminal zombie quartet started in 1968 with the rawly unnerving Night of the Living Dead. It continues now, 20 years after the last, with his most technically proficient and arguably most thought-provoking installment, Land of the Dead.

I’m sure it frustrates the director that so few people have seen his beloved Martin or Bruiser while so many have seen Dawn of the Dead, but he ought to be proud of his undead quartet. His zombie movies are uneven, but even the worst have great moments, and they all share a Hitchcockian wit and eye for human foibles, giving you something to think about when you’re not clutching the side of your seat in terror.

His zombie films, Romero told the Pittsburgh paper, are “me showing my political side.” Like a downmarket August Wilson, he uses each one to say something about the decade in which it was filmed. Night of the Living Dead was a Vietnam-era critique of our lack of respect for the dead – and the living. Its downbeat ending and bleak vision of a world perhaps irretrievably out of balance reflected a Sixties cynicism about authority figures and a then-new awareness of our dangerous disconnect from nature. 1978’s Dawn of the Dead lampooned consumer culture, its zombies heading to the mall where they had spent so much of their lives only to stumble around mindlessly, much as they always had. That one also looked at the dumbing down of media, showing the people covering the zombies as a bunch of preening, uninformed boobs. And 1985's Day of the Dead was a cautionary tale about how wrong things can go when technology outstrips ethical standards.

Land of the Dead casts a cold eye on the tendency of America’s increasingly pampered upper classes to insulate themselves from the rest of the world. Like all of Romero’s zombie movies, it takes place in a city modeled on Pittsburgh, where the Bronx-born filmmaker has spent his adult life, but the geography that matters most is a series of concentric circles. In the bull’s eye is a high-rise, multi-use building called Fiddler’s Green, a vertical gated community where the rich live in oblivious luxury. Outside the tower, protected by an electric fence that keeps out the zombies, the people who serve the rich live in slums, face to face every day with the zombies the privileged classes never encounter. And outside the fence are the zombies that have taken over the rest of the country.

The movie’s main hero is Riley (Simon Baker), whose quick wit, even temper, and air of quiet authority make him a natural leader. He and his developmentally disabled sidekick Charlie (Robert Joy) live in the slum and scrape out a living by making forays into abandoned, zombie-infested towns for supplies.

Riley and Charlie shoot zombies only in self-defense, but some of their coworkers, led by the coldly charismatic Cholo (a brilliant John Leguizamo, once again stealing every scene he’s in), get a thrill out of blowing them away or stringing them up for target practice. When Cholo and his boys roar through town on their bikes, blasting away as they go, Romero makes you feel the first stirrings of sympathy for the zombies. After all, they were just minding their business when the raiders invaded.

If the bikers remind you of the besieged, mistrustful U.S. soldiers patrolling Iraq, shooting at whatever moves before it can shoot at them, the reference is intentional. Romero told LA Weekly that the image of “a tank riding through a little village and mowing people down while we wonder why [the zombies] are pissed off at us” is one of the nods to our grim post-9/11 reality that he built into his long-completed script before shooting. The callousness with which captive zombies are treated in the shantytown, where they’re set loose in cages to fight or tied up so people can have their pictures taken with them as they lunge at their chains, is reminiscent of another set of images from Iraq. If that weren’t enough, Dennis Hopper, who plays Kaufman, the contemptuously cool Mr. Big of Fidder’s Green who manipulates the public’s fear to maintain dictatorial control of the city, says he based his portrayal on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

So is Romero equating zombies with Iraqi civilians? I don’t think so. More like arguing that we need to find humane ways to coexist with others – even those who want to harm us. To underscore that point, the movie’s second hero is a zombie, Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), who suffers on behalf of his more-or-less-people. Romero’s zombies have been undergoing a slow but steady evolution ever since they lumbered into motion in Night of the Living Dead, and this lot can learn by imitation. Soon enough, they follow the precocious Big Daddy as he pursues the marauding humans back to their city, learning to use tools and shoot guns along the way.

Romero has always made zombie movie for liberal-humanist types, and this one's no exception. Land of the Dead isn’t about learning that there are scary things out there trying to kill us and figuring out how to get them first. It’s about accepting them as a fact of life and figuring out how to live with them.

Batman Begins

Christopher Nolan’s ingenious second feature, Memento, unfolded in reverse. After watching Batman Begins, I wonder if his career is headed in the same direction.

In 1998, the 28-year-old director came charging out of the chute with Following, a memorably moody thriller with a twist. Two years later, Memento improved on that formula, giving the hero a memory impairment that makes him forget his own past and telling his story backwards to keep the viewers as off-balance as he is. Two years after that, Nolan added stars (Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hillary Swank) to the mix and cooked up Insomnia, another ingenious, atmospheric thriller.

You’d think a director with that much style, self-assurance, and sheer pizzazz would be a good pick to direct a Batman movie – and you’d be wrong. Sadly, Nolan’s Batman movie is just another bloated and gassy Hollywood product.

Sluggish, nearly humorless, and weighed down by phony profundities and a bombastic soundtrack, Batman Begins is close to two-and-a-half hours long, and you feel every minute of it. This is the kind of movie where people speak like fortune cookies, saying things like “To conquer fear, you must become fear” and “It’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.”

Batman really began a long time ago – in 1939, to be exact. Imdb lists more than 30 Batman serials, movies, and video games, and that’s not counting the campy ’60s TV show. Nolan, who co-wrote the script, built this movie around what serves as back story in the others: Bruce Wayne’s transformation from traumatized multimillionaire to caped crusader.

To make us care about Wayne’s struggle, Nolan strives to make his story feel real, revealing the hurting human beneath the bat ears. But that’s a losing game when you’re dealing with a guy in a rubber mask and tights and a nemesis bent on driving an entire city mad by poisoning and then vaporizing the water supply.

In classic pop-psychology fashion, every single thing that matters to Bruce Wayne (the baleful Christian Bale) – even his unconsummated love for the impossibly pure Rachel (Katie Holmes), who was his boyhood best friend and is now a Gotham City assistant DA – is traced back to his childhood. The thing that drives him batty is the guilt and anger he’s harbored since he saw his parents killed in a botched robbery. And fathers are very important to the dour bat-to-be, whose mother is a wan and wordless presence in his childhood flashbacks.

Bruce is mentored by a steady progression of father figures, starting with his actual father, a saintly physician/inventor/philanthropist zillionaire, and continuing with Alfred (the refreshingly tart Michael Caine), the family butler who raises him after his parents’ death; Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson in Star Wars sage mode), the mysterious warrior who takes him in and trains him to be a member of the cult-like League of Shadows; and inspector Gordon (nicely underplayed by a nerdily bespectacled Gary Oldman), the only honest cop on the crooked Gotham City force.

The first half or so of the movie follows Wayne as he grows up, learns to fight, studies the criminal mind, and hits on the idea of fighting crime as not a man but “a symbol.” We watch him string lights in the Bat Cave, piece together his outfit and utility belt, unearth the Batmobile, and create a ditzy playboy alter ego to serve as a smokescreen, with the help of Alfred and Lucius Fox (a twinkly-eyed Morgan Freeman doing his wise-and-noble schtick), a scientist and inventor who works for the Wayne family business.

You can practically feel Nolan laboring away in some dark corner of the Bat Cave, straining to domesticate Batman’s outré accoutrements. But comics aren’t meant to be taken literally. They’re wish-fulfillment fables, their heroes just human enough so readers can identify with them. The thrill of the Batman myth is imagining a truculent trillionaire who can bungee down out of nowhere to nab a bad guy, dodge barrages of bullets, or soar through the sky held up by nothing more than his cape. Trying to imagine the psychic damage that might have caused him to spend his evenings that way might be of interest for a minute or two, but an hour of that drains the fun from the fantasy.

There’s a faint hint of satire in the way Bale plays the playboy Bruce Wayne, who seems to be a cross between Paris Hilton and George W. Bush. The pace picks up a bit when he straps on the Batsuit, but even the action scenes fall flat. The chase scenes have been done too many times before, and the fights are generally filmed as if you were in the middle of the melee, too close to be sure what was happening and too punch drunk to see straight.

Maybe they called it Batman Begins because it feels like it won’t ever end.

Million Dollar Baby

In an era when mindless action dominates Hollywood, Clint Eastwood has followed his own path to success, making smart, chiaroscuro character studies. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil wasn’t one of his best movies, but it may have been his ideal title: His turf is the dark corner of the soul where men confront their shortcomings and search for redemption.

Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood’s latest movie as both director and star, is a film noir fable, like Mystic River and The Unforgiven. Also like those two, it’s about a man who’s struggling to do the right thing while burdened by the weight of an almost unbearable sorrow. It’s already hoovering up awards, including a Golden Globe for best director, and it probably made more critics’ top 10 lists than any other movie last year. It didn’t make mine, since I tend to resist movies that pull at my heartstrings this insistently. Yet it’s so well done, and the dilemma facing the main characters is so profound, that it teased some tears even out of me.

You can almost smell the stale sweat in The Hit Pit, the rundown boxing club managed by Eastwood’s Frankie Dunn, and the other locations are just as scrupulously rendered. The platonic love affair between Dunn and Scrap (Morgan Freeman), the old running partners who run the place together, also feels real. Dunn used to work the corner in boxing matches, patching up fighters’ cuts between rounds, until he quit to manage the club and the occasional fighter. Scrap used to be one of his fighters. Their mutual affection and occasional exasperation, and the rhyming sense of bemused authority that both men exude, make them believable as lifelong friends.

Scrap serves as the movie’s witness and narrator, describing in voice-over what we see unfold as Maggie (Hilary Swank), a young woman with talent but no formal training, convinces the reluctant Frankie to turn her into a fighter. Swank has said she feels closer to Maggie than to any other character she’s played, partly because they both grew up in trailer parks and made their mark through athletics (before becoming an actress, she swam in the Junior Olympics). She makes us feel everything experienced by the valiantly stoic Maggie, and she locates the quietly determined drive that allows Maggie to fight her way out of what Scrap describes as “someplace between nowhere and goodbye.”

But virtually everyone else has the pat, one-dimensional feel of an archetype. Maggie’s snarky sister, ex-con brother, and carping mom are a greedy collection of trailer trash without a single redeeming feature among them. I don’t know how much of that characterization was in the F.X. Toole short stories the script is based on and how much was added by screenwriter Paul Haggis, but wherever it came from, it was such contemptuous stereotyping that it distanced me from the story. So did a subplot about a sweet-natured, developmentally disabled club member who dreams of becoming the next Tommy Hearns, and who might have wandered into this movie out of a Dead End Kids tearjerker. Scrap’s voice-over narration, framed as a letter to Frankie’s daughter, written to let her know “what kind of man your father was,” can also get self-consciously "literary."

We never see that daughter, who cannot forgive Frankie for something (we never learn what) that he did years earlier. He’s haunted by guilt over that failed relationship, which may be part of the reason why he’s overprotective of his fighters, who he hates to see hurt. His paternalism drives away the fighter he’s grooming at the beginning of the movie, but it’s just fine by Maggie, who needs a father as much as Frankie needs a daughter.

Those neatly matching needs feel a bit formulaic at first, but once the two engage with each other, everything – and everyone – else fades into the background. “I got nobody but you, Frankie,” Maggie tells him on their way home from a visit to her unfeeling family. From then on we generally see them alone, as even the once-bustling Hit Pit turns into a backdrop for the story of a surrogate father and daughter and the life-altering decision he has to make about how best to help her.

There’s an anachronistic feel to Million Dollar Baby, which Eastwood told Film Comment he shot to look as if “it could have taken place in the Thirties or Forties, and it’s only the cars or what’s on the radio that tells you you’re in one time and not another.” Part of the old-fashioned feel comes from its contrasty, shadow-drenched noir look. But part comes from Eastwood himself. With his lined but still chiseled face, lanky body, skeptical squint, and laconic self-confidence, he evokes the stars of his youth, particularly Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper.

Here as in his other movies of the past decade or so, Eastwood the actor makes no effort to mask his age. Frankie peers over half-glasses to read the Yeats he loves and rises painfully from his knees after prayer, and when Maggie leaps into his arms in glee he complains about his back. But these things don’t look like weakness in Eastwood. They’re just another indication of his artist’s eye for detail and his sympathy for human frailty, which seem to be deepening as he ages.

Friday Night Lights

When I lived in Texas I had a friend from Odessa who I started out just liking but grew to admire. Steve was good at a lot of things but never one to brag, so it took a while to learn things about him. The discovery that surprised me most, since he acted like someone who’d never been fussed over much, was that he’d been something of a star for a year or two. If high school football were a religion in Texas – and it very nearly is – Odessa would be its Jerusalem, and Steve had been part of the starting lineup for his high school football team. I got some idea of what that meant when his wife said she was stopped by a stranger one day in Houston, a good 10 years after Steve graduated, while wearing his jersey. “That’s Steve Caywood’s number!” the woman said.

I used to wonder how it felt to play that kind of football, but I think I have a pretty good idea now. That’s because I’ve seen Friday Night Lights, the story of Odessa’s Permian Panthers of 1988. Based on a nonfiction book by the same name, which Sports Illustrated called the best ever written about football, the movie chronicles the hard work and relentless pressure that molded the players into winners as they pursued the state championship.

Author Buzz Bissinger implies that the people of Odessa were obsessed with football because they had nothing else to feel good about. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but director Peter Berg and cinematographer Tobias Schliessler make you believe it, shooting the town in grainy, desaturated tones that turn the bleak settings they chose even bleaker. Pump jacks keep chugging away in the background, but hardly anyone seems to have benefited from the oil money they’re pulling in. As a father of one of the players (nicely played by country music star Tim McGraw) tells his son, winning the state championship is “the only thing you’re ever gonna have.”

But the kids on the team are motivated by more than just wanting that trophy. The dad who delivers that speech is a former state champ (there are a lot of them around town) turned mean drunk who takes his frustrations out on his son, Don Billingsley. As a result, Billingsley (played by Troy’s Patroclus, Garrett Hedlund) is acting out in a big way, but football turns out to be his salvation: The team gives him a stabilizing sense of brotherhood, while the game gives his aggression a socially sanctioned outlet. Quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black), a somber young man burdened by the double responsibility of leading his team and looking after his disabled mother, works at football more than he plays it, seeing the game as his chance to win the scholarship he’ll need for college. Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), the team’s charismatic star running back, doesn’t even pretend to be interested in school. Barely literate, he stakes all his career hopes on football – which looks like a pretty good bet until he’s sidelined by a serious injury.

Berg, who has more credits as an actor than as a director, gets first-rate performances from his cast. Lucas projects a touching sense of principled torment as Winchell. He also gets the flat Odessa accent just right. And as coach Gary Gaines, Billy Bob Thornton uses little more than his eyes to telegraph the thoughts of a straight-arrow, benevolently paternalistic authority figure who’s 180 degrees from the social outcasts and tortured souls he usually plays.

The games are shot from a player’s perspective, the camera and mike so close to the action that you practically feel the blows and smell the blood. You can also feel the weight of the town’s expectations. Players are treated like rock stars, getting freebies from local merchants, being asked to pose for pictures with fans, and getting interviewed by journalists. When the Panthers make it to the state finals, the game is held in the Astrodome and 64,000 people show up to watch.

But all that attention can be oppressive. Every move the team makes is analyzed on a radio call-in show, and the verdicts are often harsh. Coach Gaines, who gets more than his share of abuse, passes on the pressure to the players, urging them to “be perfect.” No wonder Winchell resists when Billingsley suggests that they “lighten up,” reminding him that they’re only 17. “Do you feel 17?” Winchell replies. “I don’t feel 17.”

The Panthers won five state trophies between 1965 and 1989, but Bissinger chose to write about a year when they didn’t quite make it. That helps make the movie feel real: After all, even the Panthers lost more state championships than they won.

It also keeps the focus on the effort the boys put into trying to win – and that, as the coach points out in his final speech, is what really counts. Being perfect, he says, is not about winning. It’s about doing your best, living fully in the moment, and “being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down.”

Who knew West Texas football could be so spiritual?

Hero

Upon its release two years ago, Hero became a Chinese pop culture phenomenon. With a budget of $30 million, it was the most expensive movie ever made in that county, and it became China’s biggest domestic hit to date. Impressed by all the hype and certain he’d nabbed the next Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein paid a monumental $20 million for US and other distribution rights. Yet this movie almost didn’t make it into American theaters.

Weinstein kept stalling Hero’s release, apparently fearful that it wouldn’t appeal to American audiences after all. Meanwhile, he chopped about 20 minutes from a version that got a limited European run. But he finally released the US version, uncut, after Quentin Tarantino urged him to – and agreed to let Weinstein advertise it as a Tarantino “presentation.”

That explains why Tarantino’s name appears at the beginning of the credits, but chances are you’d be thinking about him even if it didn’t. Like Tarantino’s Kill Bill two-parter, Hero is an art house version of a “grind house” martial arts movie.

Director Zhang Yimou started as a still photographer, and it shows. Like Zhang’s first feature, Red Sorghum (1987) – and like the first part of Tarantino’s double feature, which loaded most of its character development into Volume 2 – Hero is light on plot, heavy on atmosphere, and a Chinese wedding feast for the eyes.

The movie, set over 2,000 years ago, begins as a sword fighter so anonymous his name is Nameless (nicely underplayed by martial arts superstar Jet Li) is ushered in to see the king of Qin, one of seven warring provinces that made up what is now China. It seems that Nameless has killed the three assassins who were trying to kill the king, and now he’s claiming his reward. We see the story play out as Nameless tells the tale of how he killed the killers, Long Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) – and then, challenged by the king, retells it. In the process, we see the fairy-tale romance between the sad-eyed Broken Sword and the defiant Flying Snow come to not one but three tragic ends. We also get an earnest message about giving peace a chance.

Hero has been compared to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, since it uses that movie’s copiously copied device of telling different versions of the same story. But what’s more impressive is the way its meticulous compositions and painterly use of color echo the Japanese master’s visuals.

Hero borrows one of Kurosawa’s favorite set-ups, shooting long shots with long lenses against spectacular backgrounds to capture the pageantry and power of a platoon of cavalrymen on the gallop or an army of foot soldiers massing at a gate. Those majestic landscapes and expertly choreographed crowd scenes give his sparingly used close-ups that much more impact, as our eyes, coaxed wide open by the sumptuous visuals, search the actors’ faces for signs of the emotions their characters are often trying to hide. His use of color also wakes up the senses as each of the three versions of the story plays out in a different hue.

The fight scenes are magnificent, starting with the contrast between the actors’ lethal-looking moves and the serenity of their flowing hair and clothes. That contrast is magnified by camera tricks like the mix of stop-motion and slow-motion photography moves that were pioneered in Hong Kong martial arts movies and popularized in this country in The Matrix (think water droplets suspended in mid-descent until they’re dispelled by the slow-motion thrust of a sword), and by gravity-defying wire fighting that lets combatants run through the air or literally walk on water. Zhang and director of photography Christopher Doyle film it all against stunning backdrops, orchestrating gorgeous gusts of falling yellow leaves in one scene and sending Nameless and Broken Sword back and forth above the placid surface of a mountain-fringed lake in another.

Japanese kodo drummers and haunting, steel-guitar-like ancient lute give a timeless feel to a soundtrack that features violin music by Itzhak Perlman and a score by Tan Dun, who composed the music for Crouching Tiger.

Zhang, one of the best-known of China’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers (so called because they were in the fifth graduating class of the Beijing Film Academy), is also one of the most versatile, constantly trying new genres and visual styles. His first few films, which included Judou and Raise the Red Lantern, were historical dramas. His next three were about life in contemporary China. As he told Asia Connections shortly after completing that series: “they all come with different styles. Not One Less is like a documentary. The Road Home is like a poetic essay, while Happy Times is a comedy. So for me, I'm satisfied with this trilogy, but it's time for me to move on. That's why I'm starting to make martial arts films.”

Zhang hit the ground running with his first martial arts movie, creating a story as evanescent but lovely to watch as Nameless and Broken Sword’s duel on the lake.

Written for TimeOff

Intimate Strangers and Open Water

By Elise Nakhnikian

Practically everyone agrees that there aren’t enough good film scripts these days. But what does that mean, exactly? I’ve been thinking about that since watching Open Water and Intimate Strangers last weekend.

Open Water should have been a stone cold summer chiller. Loosely based on the story of two people who were left behind by their dive boat off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and never found, it takes us into the ocean with our couple as they to see what will get them first: the bloodthirsty sharks circling them or the rescue boats that they’re slowly losing faith in. Yet Intimate Strangers, whose story is far less dramatic, is a more interesting movie.

Intimate Strangers is a variation on a theme seen in countless other movies: A repressed man and an unhappy, perhaps unreliable beauty free one another by falling in love. But inventive touches and deft handling orchestrated by director Patrice LeConte keep things unpredictable and intriguing.

Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) and William (Fabrice Luchini) meet when Anna knocks on the wrong door on her first visit to a psychoanalyst, ending up with the tax analyst next door. William, the tax analyst, listens sympathetically to Anna’s marital woes, taking her for a new client in need of help with a divorce. When he realizes her mistake, he’s too rattled and she’s too rushed to get things straight. The confusion continues for a session or two, and by the time it gets sorted out Anna and William have come to depend on their talks.

They keep meeting, and Anna gains confidence as she sees the effect she is having on William, growing more light-hearted and seductive. William lightens up a bit too, even doing an ecstatic little shimmy one night to Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.” Bonnaire and Luchini make us care about these two and believe in their growing attraction, but there’s more to the movie than the self-effacing charisma of its stars.

A few well-drawn minor characters, including William’s meddlesome secretary, his sad-eyed ex-lover, and the psychoanalyst down the hall, who William consults about how to “treat” Anna, keep popping up, taking on new shadings each time. His interactions with these other people tell us a lot about William – and provide some wry comic relief.

In contrast, Open Water focuses relentlessly on Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis). The only other character who gets more than a few seconds’ screen time is a boorish passenger aboard their dive boat who’s featured in an overlong sequence illustrating the confusion that allowed Susan and Daniel to be left behind.

Ironically, that sequence is more dramatic than most of what happens after Susan and Daniel are abandoned at sea. Except for the occasional outburst, the two seem remarkably nonplussed, alternately bickering and nurturing each other just as they did at home or in their hotel. As they argue over whether to swim for a distant boat, their lack of affect borders on bizarre: It’s the bland leading the bland.

The married couple the movie was based on disappeared sometime after their dive boat departed. (Nobody knows when, since it took a couple of days for anyone to realize they were missing and mount a search, by which time they were nowhere to be found). That lack of knowledge gave director/writer Chris Kentis a blank slate. He chose to fill it by creating banal characters, making them react to the crisis largely as if it weren’t happening, and shooting in aggressively lackluster digital video. His purpose may have been to make us feel like we’re watching a home movie as it unspools (he likes to call the movie “Blair Witch meets Jaws,”), but he succeeded only in draining most of the thrill from an inherently suspenseful subject.

The most interesting thing about Open Water is the fact that the sharks you see circling the actors were all real – and really in the water with Ryan and Travis – but you can’t tell that by watching the movie. With computer-generated special effects as good as they are these days, using real sharks has the feel of a publicity stunt – or a cost-saving measure, since the movie was made for less than half a million.

If Open Water is Blair Witch meets Jaws, then Intimate Strangers is Vertigo meets Sex, Lies and Videotape, with its copious sex talk, fascinating female lead, and besotted leading man. I thought of Vertigo during an unexplained scene in a train station where Anna faints, and during the frequent close-ups of just part of her face or body, which deliver her to us in shards that echo the disjointed stories she tells William about her life.

Open Water favors low-angle shots too, but the reason is more prosaic: surface-level shots of the ocean help us assume Susan and Daniel’s vantage point – which leaves us struggling to see clearly, our line of sight broken up by waves so small they’d be almost invisible if viewed from above.

In movies as in every other kind of storytelling, what ultimately matters most is not what story you choose to tell but how you tell it. And that’s why Intimate Strangers teases while Open Water tanks.

Before Sunset

Before Sunrise went quickly to video after its release nine years ago, written off by many critics and most moviegoers as a talk-heavy, anachronistic chick flick. So when they released their sequel, Before Sunset, director Richard Linklater and his stars and cowriters, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, must have been braced for another brush-off.

Maybe that’s why Hawke’s character Jesse, defends love stories at the start of this film. Jesse is in Paris at the end of a tour to promote his new novel, the story of a young American man and a young Frenchwoman who meet on a train, fall in love, and spend a day and night in Vienna before parting. He wrote a love story, he tells a group of journalists, because one of the most dramatic things that ever happened to him was “to meet somebody, to make that connection.”

That’s true of a lot of us, of course, which explains why we love movie romances – and why this seamlessly constructed little beauty is so emotionally resonant.

The affair Jesse fictionalized in his book was also the subject of Before Sunrise. That movie ends with Jesse and Delpy’s Celine continuing on their separate journeys after promising to meet again in Vienna in six months. But, as we learn in the sequel, one of them failed to show up. So when Celine shows up in this sequel nine years later, just as Jesse’s interview is ending, the two have a lot to catch up on – and only about an hour before Jesse has to catch a plane home to the States.

Born talkers, the two rely mainly on words to connect, yet their torrent of talk hardly ever feels scripted or stiff. That’s partly because they joke and tease easily, but it’s mostly because of how deftly Linklater and his stars translate talk into action. Speech is a form of recreation for them, and they bat words back and forth like pros.

The combination of sweetness and wit in the intelligent but unguarded Delpy, who has an emotional transparency that seems more American than French, warms up the sometimes off-puttingly cool Hawke, whose Jesse gazes at Celine with pure adoration. Jesse may have a wife and son across the ocean and Celine may have a boyfriend and a comfortable life in Paris, but they’re so clearly right for each other that we root for their reunion.

The will-they-or-won’t-they tension grows as Celine and Jesse shed layers of defenses and acknowledge their attraction to each other. When they first met, as Celine points out, they were too young to realize how rare a thing the connection between them was, but now they’re old enough to appreciate it – and so do we. “It seems like we've seen this a million times: First, youthful romanticism and ideas, and then adult disappointments,” Linklater told Salon. “But what about adult growth and adult passion? You take passionate, intelligent people, and you add age -- that's a nice formula.”

There are other nice formulas at work in this movie, like having the time that passed in the story match the time that has passed between movies, so we can search the actors’ faces as closely as they examine each others’ for signs of age. It’s also a nice idea to give Julie and Jesse only as much time with each other as is left in the movie, so we don’t miss a single gesture or word.

Linklater and cinematographer Lee Daniel, who shot Linklater’s first feature film and several others since, change the picturesque backgrounds frequently enough so you don’t feel as if you’re watching a monologue. Yet they don’t play up the glamour of Paris as much as they might, leaving the klieg lights and cranes back in Hollywood. Linklater told Salon that his aim was to make it “seem like a documentary, like we're just following these people.”

Ten or twenty years ago ago, a movie like this would probably have been made by a European director, but Linklater is part of a new generation or two of inventive American directors with distinctive styles, a diverse group that includes Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, and Sofia Coppola. Of his peers, he may be closest in sensibility to Alexander Payne, the director of Citizen Ruth and Election, whose work as grounded in Omaha as Linklater’s usually is in Austin.

Linklater has a more benevolent world view than Payne, and he tends to be fonder of his characters, but the real hallmark of his style is the delight he takes in listening to people talk. Whoever ambles into range of his bemused gaze, you can be sure Linklater will hear him out, whether out of curiosity, for the sheer fun of it, or just to be polite. He’s a quintessentially American type: the artist as regular guy. And with Before Sunset, he has presented us with a deceptively simple gift – a love story that he calls “a romance for realists.”

Written for TimeOFF

Osama

The first movie made in Afghanistan since the Taliban came into power in 1996, the first feature-length film by director/screenwriter/editor Siddiq Barmak, and the winner of this year’s Golden Globe award for best foreign-language film, Osama catapults its director into the first rank of filmmakers. In just 82 minutes he conveys the helplessness and corrosive fear of life under a totalitarian regime — with a minimum of dialogue and without the wall-to-wall mood music that carpets so many movies these days. Instead, Barmak simply and unhurriedly tells an elegantly constructed story, letting us share his characters’ trepidation and horror as it unfolds.

As the movie opens, a group of women swathed in burkas gather to demonstrate for the right to work. They’re chased off the street by Taliban with cudgels, guns, and high-pressure hoses, and those who don’t escape are herded into cages. Later on, we see the “infidel” journalist who was filming the demonstration sentenced to death for his transgression while another Westerner is sentenced to be stoned to death for “advocating profanity,” a trumped-up charge apparently aimed at getting rid of a woman who doesn’t know her place.

Meanwhile our heroine, a 12-year-old girl (Marina Golbahari) who lives with her mother and grandmother, starts out as a virtual prisoner in her one-room house. The men in the family have all died in the warfare that has been decimating the country for decades, and the Taliban forbids women to attend school, to work, or even to go out in public without a male escort.

With no money left and no way to earn more, the women of this shrunken family are reduced to disguising their beloved child as a boy and sending her out to work, although she’s terrified of what will happen if her secret is discovered. We see enough of how the Taliban operate to understand something of the risk she takes every time she sets foot outside her door — especially once she winds up in a madrassa under the watchful gaze of a black-bearded Talib.

What we can’t imagine from the comfort of our easy chairs we can read in the actors’ faces and body language. Filming began less than a year after the fall of the Taliban, and “the shadow of the Taliban was still in their own minds and their hearts,” Barmak says of his cast on his DVD commentary. The director spotted Golbahari, who was 12 at the time, when she was begging on the streets of Kabul. “I was so moved by her eyes,” he says. “I was sure she had seen a lot of suffering.” He later learned that her father was arrested several times for selling music, which was forbidden by the fundamentalist regime. The trauma Golbahari lived through is expressed in her gravity and stillness as Osama, who smiles only once, and then only briefly. It’s also in the hopeless sound of her crying and the wariness with which she moves through the world.

If you’re getting the impression that this is a dirge of a movie, you’re right. But there’s too much life in here to leave viewers totally deflated. For one thing, there’s the poetry of cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafuri’s work, from the opening scene in which a cloud of incense released by a lively street kid wafts over the women streaming past on their way to the demonstration, their blue burkas bright against a cartload of deep orange pumpkins.

For another, there’s the porthole offered by fantasy. When things are at their bleakest, Osama sometimes pictures herself skipping rope. There’s an elegiac tone to the slow-motion footage, since conjuring up her lost childhood makes her sad, but her memories also offer her a means of escape.

Then there are moments of black-comic relief, like when the potbellied mullah at the madrassa teaches the boys how to do their ritual baths, enjoying himself a little too much. Or when Osama plants one of her newly cut braids in a pot of dirt, watering it with an IV tube her mother brought home from the hospital where she used to work.

A wide and welcome streak of kindness also runs through the story. The Afghanistan of Osama is a deeply civilized nation temporarily under the thumb of barbarian invaders. The boys at the madrassa can be mindlessly cruel, but almost everyone else helps one another, even at great personal risk. That gives us reason to feel hopeful, since we know, as Osama does not, that the Taliban’s days in her country are numbered.

Update: Just read this September 2010 New York Times story and learned that the practice of girls dressing as boys has a long history in Afghanistan.

Kill Bill Vol. 2

By Elise Nakhnikian

Writer/director Quentin Tarantino has been playing elaborate riffs on what makes homicidal people tick ever since Reservoir Dogs, but he’s never been better than in Kill Bill Vol. 2.

If the luscious eye candy of Vol. 1 was an exhilarating swoosh down a water park ride, Vol. 2 is a tidal wave that sweeps you up as it gathers momentum. Both halves (it was originally shot as one movie) are gorgeous to look at, often funny, and jam-packed with striking-looking people doing or discussing campily cool things, like “the five-point palm exploding-heart technique,” a fatal martial arts move introduced in Vol. 2. Both have vibrant, visceral soundtracks. But Vol. 1 devoted all that creativity simply to showing a killer at work, leaving audiences wanting a little more substance. Vol. 2 slakes that thirst, letting us see what was behind its heroine’s “roaring rampage of revenge,” as she sardonically describes it. In the process, it casts her — and Vol. 1 — in a whole new light.

Kill Bill is the story of The Bride (Uma Thurman), a creation of Tarantino and Thurman, who came up with the idea for the character while working together on Pulp Fiction. In Vol. 1, she’s a female version of the archetypal “man with no name” played by Clint Eastwood in his Sergio Leone Westerns, as two-dimensional as the silhouettes Tarantino likes to shoot against brightly colored backgrounds, in a nod to Hong Kong chop-socky movie credit sequences.

In Vol. 2, the silhouette gets fleshed out. We see The Bride as a vulnerable young woman in wide-eyed thrall to Bill (David Carradine). We learn her name (Beatrix Kiddo). We find out what made her reject the life that the pimp-like Bill trained her for, as the most talented and most favored member of Bill’s professional hit squad. And we learn why she’s determined to dispatch the remaining members of the squad, who left her for dead about five years earlier — especially Bill, who also happens to be the father of her child and maybe the love of her life.

Vol. 2 revives one of Tarantino’s signature techniques, using artfully indirect talk as a counterpoint to brutal, bloody action. In one creepily compelling domestic scene, Bill makes sandwiches in his kitchen, telling a story about how his five-year-old daughter learned about death while trimming the crusts with a butcher’s knife.

Like the wink from Beatrix that ends Vol. 2, these quirky conversations remind us that we’re safe inside what the director likes to call “Quentin Tarantino world.” At the same time, because they’re usually so firmly grounded in the mundane details of consumer culture, they blur the line between Tarantino’s world and ours, making his sociopaths and professional killers feel unsettlingly familiar.

Also familiar is the multicultural texture of Tarantino’s world, which looks a lot like America. A hybrid inspired by spaghetti Westerns and Chinese and Japanese martial arts movies, Kill Bill is part of an emerging international cinema that emulates and adapts movie traditions from Asia as well as Europe and the Americas.

Tarantino is at the top of his form here, and Tarantino in top form is one of the best moviemakers working today. From the beautiful, high-energy camera work to the side-winding dialogue to the slyly referential songs to the old-style characters filling out small parts (look for a deliciously oily cameo by Tarantino favorite Michael Parks as a Mexican pimp), he knows just how to construct what he calls “a movie-movie,” layer by juicy layer.

As in Vol. 1, the fights are lovingly choreographed. There’s less fighting and a lot less blood this time around, but when people do battle they clash like bull elephants.

Sound is also chosen for maximum impact, heightening if not creating a scene’s emotional heft. When Beatrix is captured and tortured by Bill’s brother Budd (Michael Madsen), for instance, Tarantino and his sound crew convey her panic by letting the screen go black as they crank up the ragged sound of her breathing, the taunting laughter of her captors, and the sound of their horrible work.

You don’t have to have seen Vol. 1 to enjoy Vol. 2, but it’s worth renting one of these days if you haven’t caught it yet. In the meantime, if you love movies and don’t mind stylized violence, treat yourself to Vol. 2 while it’s still in theaters. Movie-movies this engrossing don’t come along often.

Touching the Void

In 1985 two young Englishmen, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, scaled a 21,000-foot peak in the Peruvian Andes. Their climb had never been attempted before and it hasn’t been done since, but they crested the mountain without much difficulty. Then they began their descent.

What happened next has caused a lot of people to vilify Yates or glorify Simpson, but the story dramatized in Simpson’s 1988 book, Touching the Void, and in Kevin MacDonald’s documentary of the same name is much more interesting. These two are neither heroes nor villains; they’re just ordinary guys who survived an extraordinary ordeal.

Well, okay, not entirely ordinary. Simpson and Yates are climbers, which means they’re unusually fit, unusually self-reliant people whose idea of a party is playing Spiderman at altitudes too high to support indigenous life forms. “We climbed because it was fun,” says Simpson. “And every now and then it went wildly wrong, and then it wasn’t.”

Things went wrong on this trip when Simpson fell, shattering his right leg. His first thought, he says, was: “If I broke my leg, I’m dead,” but Yates didn’t leave him to die. Instead, he spliced two ropes into one 300-foot length and began lowering his partner down the mountainside in stages. “What he did was quite extraordinary,” Simpson says, and it almost worked. But just before they reached the bottom of the slope, Yates lowered Simpson over a yawning chasm.

For about an hour and a half, the two sat in suspended animation, Simpson dangling helplessly while Yates sat in the snow bucket he had carved to hold his weight. Separated by 150 feet and a blinding snowstorm, they had no way of knowing what was happening to each other and no way to pull Simpson back up. Meanwhile, Yates’ seat was gradually shifting out from beneath him. To save himself, he finally cut the rope and found his way back to base camp, where he hunkered down to recover.

Amazingly, Simpson survived the fall after Yates cut the rope, but he landed in a crevasse with no apparent way out. After a night of horror (crevasses, he says. “have a dread feel. Not a place for living”), he gathered the courage to drop even deeper into the abyss, gambling that he’d find something other than empty space before reaching the end of his rope. The bet paid off, but now he faced a new dilemma: How could he travel the miles to base camp, over rough terrain, with no food or water and a badly broken leg?

The physical hardships undergone by the two were almost unimaginable. Yates was unrecognizable by the time he reached base camp, his fingertips blackened by frostbite and his face discolored and raw from exposure and dehydration. The pain was exponentially worse for Simpson, who lost a third of his body weight as he dragged himself back to base camp. At one point, he hopped over a stretch of broken rocks so uneven that he fell on almost every hop. “It was like having your leg broken again every time,” he says.

But their psychological ordeal is even more grueling. Although Yates plays only a supporting role in this drama, it’s clear that he suffered deeply for the Hobson’s choice that led him to abandon his partner. As for Simpson, his long dance with death has a terrible vicarious fascination. “It was a slow, steady reduction of you, really,” he says. “You didn’t have any dignity, care if you were brave or weak.”

The story is told by the three survivors: Yates, Simpson, and Richard Hawking, who manned the base camp. All three share a plain but eloquent style of speaking, a good memory for details, and a typically British aversion to self-glorification. Yates admits, for instance, that he thought about creating “a decent story that would make me look better” to explain Simpson’s presumed death, and Hawking says he was afraid to rescue Simpson from the darkness the night he made it back to base camp because “if he was out there, he was going to be a horrible thing.”

Sometimes the narrators speak to the camera, but often they provide a voice-over while actors play out their story. It may take a little while to get used to this technique, which is used more in cheesy History Channel movies than blue-chip documentaries, but MacDonald, a seasoned filmmaker who won an Oscar for his documentary about the Israeli athletes killed at the 1972 Olympics, was smart not to let that stop him. The narration in Touching the Void tells the story, but the reenactments put us right on that mountain, turning us from listeners into observers.

MacDonald hired actors who can climb, even using Yates and Simpson themselves in some of the long shots. The performances are mainly physical, and they’re painfully convincing: I winced every time the actor playing Simpson landed on his bad leg. Aside from the talking head segments, which were shot in a studio, the movie is filmed in the Alps and the Andes, and after a while you can see the terror in that beauty and the benevolence in a sunny day.

Even close to two decades later, Simpson was unnerved by the mountain where he had felt his personality disintegrate. “I wasn't shaking, but I felt like I was,” he says. “I had forgotten just how appalling it was being reduced to almost nothing."