Bright Star

Writer-director Jane Campion came up with the idea for Bright Star while sitting with “a ragtag group of horses I used to like to sit with and read,” she told the audience after a September 14 screening at the Director’s Guild Theater. When one of the horses delicately opened Campion’s bag with her hoof and sniffed it, Campion says: “I thought, that’s what I like, that kind of tenderness and gentleness. I wanted to make a story about that.”

Mission accomplished. This deeply felt, exquisitely tender love story is infused with a closely observed specificity that ushers us into the world of the great English Romantic poet John Keats (a luminescent, gently charismatic Ben Whishaw) and the woman he loved.

Campion’s screenplay animates the story of Keats and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a stylish and strongminded young woman. It begins in 1818, when Keats is 23 and Fanny just 16. Keats’ poetry has been mostly badly reviewed and brings in almost no money, so he lives in genteel poverty, dependent on the patronage of his friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider.) As a result, he can’t marry Fanny after they fall in love, since he is too honorable to marry a woman he cannot support. Instead, the two embark on a passionate, deeply tender, but sexless affair, which lasts until Keats' death of consumption at age 25.

Like Keats' love poems, Bright Star is an intimate story that contains a whole world. Cinematographer Grieg Fraser captures an astonishingly gorgeous England, starkly beautiful in the winter and bursting with colors and life in the spring and summer. The yellow-white sunlight, the wind rustling through the leaves, and the shock of nature’s beauty are near-hallucinogenic at times.

Campion makes you feel the pressures and pleasures of early 19th-century English society, but this is no stilted costume drama. It’s the story of two vivid individuals whose feelings and motivations feel as compelling as our own – if not more so.

To create that sense of intimacy, Campion spent most of the rehearsal time getting the actors to stop acting. “I really wanted to have a sense of just being from the actors,” she said at the screening. “Whenever people were relaxed and the work was coming from that place, that’s when it felt right.”

To help the actors get past their own neuroses to that state of grace, she talked to them about “Keats’s concept of negative capability – a capacity to stay with the mystery of life, without having to create any answers.”

Keats’ own poetry was one route to that mystery, but Campion knew that a movie about poetry would be a hard sell. “People are allergic to poetry, kind of,” she said. “And they don’t just dislike it; they’re really aggressive about it.” By weaving excerpts from Keats’ letters and poems and talk about poetry organically into the script (“poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery,” he tells Fanny), Campion makes poetry part of the action, using it to deepen the intensity of the characters’ emotions.

Another “important talisman” for the cast was Fanny’s much-younger sister, Toots. Edie Martin, the gravely graceful little sprite who plays her, doesn’t have many lines yet plays a significant role, attracting the camera like a magnet. Campion said the young actress “embodied that quality of delicacy, just naturally. From the start, she had what the others were striving for, and they saw it.”

And now and then, the camera seeks out the Brawne family’s cat, a pacific black-and-white beauty that is, like all cats, a master of the art of living in the moment.

Bright Star’s impassioned but unconsummated love affair is a switch from the eroticism of Campion movies like The Piano and In the Cut, but the film falls in line with Campion’s others in one important way: There's a strong, free-thinking woman at its center.

In her own day and for decades after her death, Fanny was painted as shallow and insincere, a selfish flirt incapable of matching Keats’ depth of feeling or appreciating his genius. More recently, she has often been put on a pedestal, idealized as a sort of human muse. Campion rescues her from both forms of erasure, creating her most self-assured heroine yet.

The Fanny imagined by Campion and embodied by Cornish is self-confident, forthright, competent and kind. Hollywood rarely gives us female leads with that kind of strength and solidity, and that’s a shame. Because it’s those traits that make Fanny a fit mate for a soulful poet, and that pairing of great-hearted equals makes Bright Star a great romance.

Are you listening, Sandra Bullock?

An American Opera: The Greatest Pet Rescue Ever!

By Elise Nakhnikian

One of the few unexamined aspects of the bureaucratic bungling that made such a disaster of Hurricane Katrina is what happened to the pets refugees were forced to leave behind. That’s the subject of An American Opera: The Greatest Pet Rescue Ever!

Producer/director/narrator Tom McPhee went to New Orleans a few days after the storm to help. He wound up photographing rescued animals at a central holding area, as part of an effort to reunite pets with their owners. McPhee brought along a video camera too, and the footage he shot at the processing facility became part of An American Opera.

The greatest strength of this sometimes overwrought piece of citizen journalism is its often emotional immediacy. We see people rescuing dogs or breaking into houses to find them dead. We meet some of the volunteers who do the bulk of the rescuing, including a couple who came all the way from Canada. And then there are the animals.

Sad or scared, friendly or reserved, and almost always touchingly compliant, the dogs – the movie never gives us statistics on which species were rescued, but it looks as if nearly all of them were dogs— gaze into the lens and straight though to our hearts. Like their owners a few days before, they’re rounded up, processed, and herded onto planes, confused and alone in a strange new world.

The lack of a coherent plan makes it impossible to rescue all the animals people had to leave when they were evacuated. Volunteers provide much-needed help, but they also add to the confusion. That chaos is compounded – as it was for Katrina’s human victims – by fear, firearms, and a bureaucratic focus on controlling than on helping the victims. It’s chilling to hear the head of the Louisiana SPCA talk about the abandoned animals they’re “trapping.”

McPhee does a good job of retracing the infighting between officials and volunteers in the weeks after the storm, as differing aims and philosophies lead to friction and finger-pointing – not to mention the suffering and deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands, of animals.

He avoids showing that suffering in too-graphic detail, for the most part, though young children and the especially tenderhearted should probably steer clear of this movie. The hardest parts to watch involve two mass killings of dogs by law enforcement officers.

One of these stories is narrated by Christopher Acosta, an admirable young man who has clearly earned the right to his School of Hard Knocks T-shirt. Acosta rescued his own dogs, then commandeered boats to save scores of his neighbors before he was evacuated and forced to leave his own surviving dog behind. After all that, he returned to the school where his dog had been left with many others, only to find they'd all had been shot by the law enforcement officers in charge. His telling of that story, and McPhee’s footage of its aftermath, are powerfully matter-of-fact.

But the strength of those moments is diluted by the haphazard structure of this inchoate movie, which sometimes feels as chaotic as the situation it describes.

I kept wondering just what McPhee was trying to achieve. A challenge at the end indicates that he wants to mobilize people to action. But if so, what does he want us to do?

Does he just want us know what a great guy he is? Unfortunately, there’s enough self-promotion in here to beg that question – especially early on, when he keeps breaking into the story with his breathless voiceover to say things like: “If I ever had a time in my life to do something really important and unique and to help out, this was it.”

Or is he trying to use this story as a metaphor for something larger? In the first of several endings, McPhee dwells on the costumed dogs at a Barkus festival in New Orleans, which seems to be a kind of canine Mardi Gras. He says that event proved to him that the city would survive, but it’s never clear to me just what Barkus is or why he finds it so significant.

He also highlights a statement by a photographer who says you can measure a society by how it treats its animals. True enough, but the thing about Katrina is, you don’t need to show what happened to its animals to get to our failure as a society. All you need to do is look at how the people were treated.

The abandonment and botched rescue of Louisiana’s animals after Katrina was, as one of the movie’s subjects puts it, “a disaster within a disaster.” A shame and a tragedy on its own terms, it doesn’t need to be compared to anything else. That’s why what stays with you after watching An American Opera is not the hyberbole or the rebel rock or the garbled calls to action. It’s the quiet dignity of all those stranded dogs and cats.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

By Elise Nakhnikian

To turn the children’s picture book it’s based on it into a full-length animated feature, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs puts a lot of meat on its bones. And I do mean meat: This is no veggie tale.

It’s not what you’d call subtle, either. I had never read the book until after watching the movie, so I took the movie on its own terms, but I wonder whether its fans will accept the changes writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have made to Judi Barrett’s story, or the way they’ve amped up its energy level and dumped the book’s subdued cross-hatched drawings for a candy-colored explosion of action. The book treats its story as a fable, a tale told by a grandfather around a family dinner table. The movie explains it all to us – in Imax 3-D, no less.

Yet the two feel related, like siblings from a family with a strong shared sensibility. They’re both an appealing blend of whimsy and homespun wisdom. And they both center around an imaginative concept: a town where food rains down from the sky.

We are not talking manna, whatever that is. This is America, by god, so we’re talking REAL food. Hamburgers. Steaks. Spaghetti and meatballs.

Lord and Miller create a back story to explain the book’s central mystery: Where did all that food come from? They also dream up a whole new set of characters, starting with boy inventor Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), an upbeat misfit and the creator of a machine that turns water into food.

Flint’s best friend is a monkey named Steve (Neil Patrick Harris) who wears a contraption of Flint’s invention that translates his thoughts into English. It’s the same idea as the dog collars in Pixar’s Up, but it’s done better: Steve is all id and idiocy, which makes for some nice comic relief.

Our hero eventually gets a human sidekick too (she’s also his love interest, but that part of their relationship is strictly PG). Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) is a smart girl who hides her brains, acting “cute and super-perky,” as another character puts it, so she won’t get picked on. As depressing as it is to be reminded that girls still have to do that in 21st-century America (does the fact that brainy boys can get picked on too make it better or worse?), it’s a treat to see a female lead whose arc is about learning not to play dumb.

The minor characters are sketched broadly enough so little kids can get the picture, yet they don’t feel overly familiar. My favorites were an underemployed, understated Guatemalan immigrant (Benjamin Bratt) with hidden talent to burn and Flint’s father, Tim (James Caan, doing some surprisingly tender, melancholy voice work). A refrigerator-shaped slab of a man with two enormous eyebrows where his eyes ought to be, Tim is a nurturing dad who feels things deeply but can’t articulate what’s in his heart. The speech he makes when Sam gives him Steve’s translating device should resonate with every kid who feels estranged from a parent who doesn’t do well at expressing his or her support.

There are plenty of funny lines, sight gags, and humorous situations, like when the fate of the world depends on Flint being able to walk his tech-averse father through e-mailing him a file via cell phone. Tim’s interpretation of “drag it off the desktop” made me laugh out loud.

But the best part of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is Flint’s elaborate lab and the inventions that emerge from it. Animation frees the filmmakers to create some magical sequences, like the giant Jello mold pictured in the book, which materializes here as a love offering from Flint to Sam. The two slip through its rubbery rind into a hollowed-out interior, playing on its wobbly surface or diving into the translucent core in a courtship scene as transcendent as WALL-E and Eva’s dance in outer space.

Cloudy doesn’t talk down to its audience. In fact, it probably sails right over the heads of very young kids much of the time, spoofing targets like appearance-obsessed newscasters and hypocritical politicians. A running joke about the town’s slowness to wean itself from its longtime dependence on an outmoded business rings so true it almost qualifies as social commentary.

But we’re back to pure spoof when a pompous new anchor (Al Roker) reports on the huge entrees that are raining down around the world, landing first on famous landmarks like Times Square and the Eiffel tower. “It looks like the foodstorm is falling in an unusual pattern,” he remarks.

Next time I see a disaster movie that falls back on that tired trick, I hope I’ll remember that line.

World’s Greatest Dad and Extract

By Elise Nakhnikian

Four decades into the age of identity politics, are middle-class white men finally just another beleaguered minority? That seems to be the message behind Extract and World’s Greatest Dad, dark comedies about men whose bland exteriors mask some pretty big problems.

Extract isn’t just dark; it’s downright dour. I used to think writer/director Mike Judge was an amiable social satirist, tossing foam-tipped darts at late-capitalist consumerism from a La-Z-Boy somewhere in middle America. Just look at Office Space, his 1991 debut and one of the best comedies ever made about the drudgery and daily humiliation of low-wage work in America.

Granted, Judge always liked to lampoon stupidity too. 2006’s Idiocracy may have aimed mostly at deserving targets like cable news networks and show-biz politicians, but it started with the elitist premise that the USA of the future has devolved into a failed circus-state because smart people stopped having babies while dumb people kept having lots, so over the years we just got too dumb to function. Beavis and Butt-head were a preliterate pair of stoners so dumb they could barely breathe, and none of the Hills in King of the Hill are exactly the brightest bulbs in the box.

But I always thought Judge loved even the dimmest of his characters – I know I do – so I was surprised by the snarky misanthropy of his latest movie. Our hero this time around is Joel (Jason Bateman), the owner of a small factory that makes food-flavoring extracts. Joel radiates disapproval of everyone around him, like the character Bateman played on Arrested Development. He may be as selfish and shortsighted as anyone else, but he thinks he’s smarter, more rational, and just all-around better. In short, he’s a self-righteous prig, though Bateman projects a tattered goodwill beneath the exasperation that makes you empathize with Joel even when you don’t like him.

Extract consists of two parallel stories, both of which putter along with the occasional burst of energy before petering out. In the first, Joel struggles to resist, then outwit Cindy (Mila Kunis), a gorgeous but predatory young woman. Cindy insinuates herself onto the floor of Joel’s factory and into his erotic dreams – which isn’t hard, since he’s obsessed with the sex he and his wife (Kristen Wiig) aren’t having.

The other half of the movie is about Joel’s factory. The eternally self-pitying Joel surveys his employees from an office perched over the assembly line or smiles tightly as his manager, Brian (J.K. Simmons) rolls his eyes about the incompetence of some “dinkus.” Whether they’re trying to make the factory run smoothly or trying to sell it, the two keep running up against the absurdly exaggerated idiocy of their employees, nearly every one of whom is lazy, incompetent, laughably grandiose, or all three at once. I guess it’s supposed to be funny, but I just found the whole thing cynical and depressing.

There are a lot of stupid human tricks on display in World’s Greatest Dad too, but there’s also plenty of decency. Lance Clayton (Robin Williams), is a genuinely nice guy, though most of the other people he has to deal with are anything but – starting with his own son.

Writer/director Bob Goldthwait isn’t interested in straight realism here any more than he was in the standup routines that made him semi-famous in the ‘80s (he was that sloppy-looking guy with a high voice that kept cracking, as if he was stuck in eternal puberty). But this loose-limbed, oddly life-affirming story has some pretty funny things to say about the platitudes and false piety we tend to revert to when we talk about the dead.

Lance is a sweet but schlubby high school English teacher, who works at the school his son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) attends. He’s also a frustrated novelist who gets his first break as a writer in a way he never imagined. When Kyle dies in a potentially embarrassing accident, Lance tries to protect his boy’s reputation by making it look like an intentional hanging and leaving a suicide note.

The note gets printed in the school paper and becomes hugely popular, and a cult springs up around Kyle. Goldthwait has fun with the deification of a nasty loner. The students soon start sporting Kyle tattoos and WWKD tee shirts, and the faculty talk about how “sweet” and “kind” he was.

There’s also a nicely developed subplot about Lance’s sickeningly sweet girlfriend and fellow teacher Claire (Alexie Gilmore) and their perfect colleague Mike (Henry Simmons), a touching one involving Kyle’s forlorn only friend, Andrew (Evan Martin), and some funny bits about an Oprah-like talk show host, a high school “grief counselor,” a literary agent, and Bruce Hornsby (don’t ask).

But the heart of the movie is Williams, whose mercifully understated, affecting performance makes us care about a mousy man who finds the courage to follow his heart.

Cold Souls

By Elise Nakhnikian

“People come here and they all want to know if the soul is immortal, and how it functions – and we haven’t a clue,” says Cold Souls’ Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn).

It’s a funny line, but it’s also a bit of a cheat. And that pretty well sums up this moderately entertaining art-house film, which skims the surface of a lot of interesting ideas without ever diving in.

Cold Souls isn’t really about souls, any more than Hitchcock’s thrillers were about the MacGuffins he threw in to set the plots in motion. In the end, it's a dryly funny commentary on the marketing and black marketing of quickie “cures” for 21st-century angst and alienation – which are, of course, caused in no small part by our overreliance on quickie cures.

The main character is Paul Giamatti, an actor played by Paul Giamatti. A comically exaggerated version of the whiny nerds Giamatti often plays, the movie's Paul comes off like an agitated muppet, or maybe one of David Schwimmer’s less charming characters, minus the looks.

Paul is suffering through an existential crisis, but, as Cold Souls points out with atypical literal-mindedness, he refuses to search his own soul to see what the matter might be. Instead, he visits a soul extraction clinic on Roosevelt Island, where the silver-haired, silver-tongued Dr. Flintstein easily persuades him that he’ll feel much better if he just takes the pesky thing out and stores it in one of their vaults.

That cures his blues, but it creates a whole new problem: He starts to feel "empty" and his acting suffers. He's rehearsing the lead for Uncle Vanya, so he borrows a Russian soul, which gets him back on track. Then he decides he wants his own back -- but it's missing.

Here the two main parts of the plot-heavy story intersect, as a group of Russian soul smugglers we've been getting to know gets hold of Paul's soul for the boss’s wife, Sveta (Katheryn Winnick, who looks a lot like Scarlett Johansson), a soap opera actress so vapid she actually wants an American soul. Paul heads to St. Petersburg to reclaim his soul, guided by Nina (Dina Korzun), a stony-faced Russian soul mule who turns out to be every bit as alienated and depressed as he is (or is she just Russian?).

The first feature by writer/director Sophie Barthes, Cold Souls maintains a strong and consistent tone. Cinematographer/producer Andrij Parekh, who collaborated with Barthes on a couple of short films before this one, bathes the scenes in a soft, clear light, working in a palette heavy on silvery grays and blues. The moody music also helps set the tone without intruding.

Paul's New York City is a luxe, Woody Allen-esque Manhattan of actors, pricey restaurants, and spacious apartments lined with bookshelves, though he also spends a fair amount of time floating above the city on the Roosevelt Island tram or haunting the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, where the Russian underground stay when they're in town. It's a lushly beautiful but cold city. It's also oddly empty: in shot after shot, Paul broods alone in some public place.

Cold Souls implies that the soul functions as a kind of supergo, keeping our narcissism in check and generating empathy. Giamatti has some fun with his brief period of soullessness, playing the title role in Uncle Vanya like a Hun on steroids (“I don’t think he should always be so passive, so hopeless,” he tells his director). But after installing the Russian soul, he behaves pretty much the way he did before only without the black moods, and the woman who takes in his soul doesn't change her behavior a bit.

That makes you wonder: Are those things in storage really souls? Does something other than our souls determine who we are? And just what is a soul, anyhow? But don't speculate too long or you'll lose track of this shaggy dog of a movie, which is meandering on, uninterested in exploring anything so esoteric.

If Cold Souls fails to deliver on the big ideas, it’s often good with the small stuff, including a absurdist bits like Nina repeating ridiculous phrases from a taped English lesson as she drives a silent Paul around St. Petersburg.

The movie gets in its sharpest digs in its depiction of the extraction process and the black market that grows around smuggling souls. The clinic, a sparsely furnished site dotted with midcentury-modern furnishings, borrows authority by assuming a medical mien. And the real cold souls are not so much the little lumps chilling in the clinic's storage unit as the people who take advantage of the economically or emotionally vulnerable to traffic in those souls. Among them is a smooth-talking, amoral hedge fund partner who’s bankrolling the business. More chilling than Sveta's gangster husband, he's a real modern villain.

Passing Strange: A Spike Lee Joint Venture

By Elise Nakhnikian

One of America’s best living filmmakers, Spike Lee is also one of its most versatile, equally comfortable making fiction films, documentaries, shorts, and TV movies. And every now and then, he puts his talent and production team to work in the service of someone else’s vision, creating a film that’s more document than documentary.

He did that in Freak, a film of John Leguizamo’s one-man Broadway show of the same name. And he’s done it again with Passing Strange. “Don't fuck it up -- that was really the motto,” Lee says in an IFC interview about his latest movie, which records a rock musical that closed this year. “My nightmare was they'd say, ‘I saw it at the Public, I saw it on Broadway, but that shit Spike did was fucked up!’"
Read the rest on The House Next Door

Inglourious Basterds

By Elise Nakhnikian

As a German officer who refused to betray his troops was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by a gloating American soldier, the audience at my screening of Inglorious Basterds hooted and cheered.

Did writer/director Quentin Tarantino expect that reaction? And if so, did he want it to make us feel queasy?

I hate to say it, but I think the answer is yes and no.

I’ve loved every other movie Tarantino directed. I never get tired of watching him extract gold from the genre movies he grew up on: the adrenaline-fueled kung fu death battles and the spaghetti-Western bleached landscapes and no-name heroine of Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, the charismatic cool of antiheroes like Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega, the soulful soundtrack of Jackie Brown. I enjoy hanging out with his flawed characters almost as much as he clearly does. And I love how, for all the artfully choreographed violence, his movies are ultimately more talk than action.

But I don’t like this one.

The genre this time is the Nazi movie. Tarantino’s twist is to imagine an alternate reality in Vichy France, where Jews are the tormentors and Nazis the victims. Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a taciturn Tennessean, is in charge of a special unit of American Jews, the “basterds” of the title (Tarantino mangled the spelling to distinguish it from an Enzo Castellari WWII movie he bought rights to and meant to adapt, though he wound up creating something entirely new.)

The basterds have been recruited to terrorize the Nazis by killing German soldiers as brutally as possible. Raine, who‘s “part Injun,” demands that his men scalp each of their kills. He also carves swastikas into the foreheads of the Nazis he releases, in an eerie echo of the stars of David Nazis often carved into the chests of rabbis before killing them.

The cruelty of those acts, and the cold efficiency or glee with which they’re carried out, made me profoundly uncomfortable. Worse yet was watching a roomful of people trapped in a burning building trample one another to scrabble at a locked door. That scene in particular mirrors the horrific fate of countless Jews in Nazi Germany – but the victims are here Nazi leaders and their associates, and the trap is set by a Jew.

If I thought Tarantino wants us to squirm at this, thinking about how revenge can dehumanize its subjects, turning victim into perpetrator, I’d be fine with a little discomfort. But I think we’re just supposed to cheer when the Nazis and Nazi sympathizers get what they “deserve.”

I get that Tarantino is looking at the Holocaust less as a historical fact than as a movie genre, but I expect him to know better. After all, the way movies can affect our view of the world is one of the main themes of Inglourious Basterds, whose plot revolves around the fateful premiere of a war-porn movie produced by Hitler’s favorite propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.

For a little while recently, it looked as if Nazi movies were finally growing up, ending a long line of films that were black and white in more ways than one. A recent crop from Europe, including The Pianist (2002), Downfall (2004), Black Book (2006), and The Counterfeiter (2007), told tales about Jews who survived the war by any means necessary or Germans so devoted to Hitler that they followed him right into his bunker. The Jews in these movies weren’t just passive victims – some even collaborated with the Nazis to save their own skins. And the Germans weren’t cardboard villains; in fact, some were quite sympathetic, good people caught up in a bad system. That system was also given its due, giving you a sense of how tightly the Nazi regime and its collaborators clamped down on all aspects of public life and how perilous it was to oppose them.

Not that Inglourious Basterds ignores the risk of defying the Nazis. On the contrary, it revels in it, most notably in its tense opening sequence of a French farmer facing off against the movie’s deliciously evil villain, the suavely Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz); in its long (too long, I thought) showcase showdown in an underground bar, (a “fight in a basement,” as Raine sums it up); and in a charged chat over strudel between Landa and the woman who later sets off that deadly inferno, a Jew hiding in plain sight as a Christian.

But these are movie showdowns: charged cat and mouse games between two empowered parties, which the good guys usually win. Aside from Landa and the sharp-eyed lookout in that cellar bar, the Nazis of Inglorious Basterds – starting with Hitler himself —- are cartoonish or clueless. That makes them -- and the system they represent -- seem as easy to outsmart and defeat as the buffoon Nazis of Hogan’s Heroes.

In this upside-down world, it’s the Jews, not the Nazis, who mutilate and torture their prisoners, muddying a historical record that desperately needs to be clear.

But the most unsettling part of this sadistic schoolboy revenge fantasy is its message. Tarantino and his heroes seem to think torture’s just dandy, as long as you consider the victim to be beneath contempt.

Isn’t that just what the Nazis believed?

Paper Heart

By Elise Nakhnikian

Paper Heart’s Charlyne Yi, the gawky stoner girlfriend from Knocked Up, is an odd duck. So tomboyish her best friend/producer calls her “Chuck” and so guilelessly geeky I can’t watch her without wondering if she has Asperger Syndrome, she’s hardly what you’d expect from the cowriter and star of a self-described “documentary about love.” But then, that’s kind of the point of this raggedly charming little movie.

Paper Heart hints at the variety and mystery of romance by letting regular people describe how they found love – or lost it. To get those stories, Yi zigzagged across the country with her cowriter and director Nicholas Jasenovec, a small crew, and two handheld cameras, stopping to interview a series of refreshingly direct, unglamorous people.

That’s just the outer layer of this thoughtfully constructed little film.

Excerpts from those interviews are folded into a fictional story about Yi herself – or, rather, a character played by Yi who shares her name and a lot of her characteristics. After declaring that she has never been in love and doesn’t think she ever will be, Yi decides to make a movie – the documentary we’re watching – with her best friend Jasenovec. If she talks to enough people about love, she figures, maybe she can find out what it is and why she hasn’t been able to experience it.

Shot with handheld cameras, natural-looking lighting, naturalistic acting, and impromptu-sounding dialogue, Paper Heart is a fiction film posing as a documentary. Jasenovec isn’t even Jasenovic: He’s played by actor Jake Johnson. The filmmakers are coy about what else isn’t real, but I’m pretty sure everything aside from the interviews was scripted. They have fun making us guess, though, throwing in fistfuls of red herrings like the party scene where actor Michael Cera asks “Will this be in the movie?” and is told “Probably not.”

Their movie within the movie also lets us watch a romance unfold instead of just hearing the process described, when Yi and Cera (who is playing himself, or someone a lot like himself) fall in love (or something a lot like love).

Hesitantly charming as always, Cera fakes sincerity and spontaneity so well you almost believe their romance, especially since gossip magazines have been speculating for years that Cera and Yi are in fact a couple. The two definitely have some kind of chemistry, with their rhyming sweatpants and hoodies. You root for them when they make a run for it, trying to escape the prying camera when the fictional Jasenovec documents their affair obsessively, insisting that it’s part of the story. And when they play music in a wordless montage, you can almost buy them as a nerdy version of the lovers in Once. Yi and Cera even composed songs for the soundtrack.

In the end, though, their affair feels about as hot as a Girl Scout picnic. The whole thing gets a little too self-consciously meta sometimes too, like when “Jasenovec” sends Yi to a psychic, to ask about her stalled affair with Cera, or when the director and his star go to Paris for what’s supposed to be her romantic ending with the leading man – and Cera doesn’t show up.

All those wheels within wheels would be spinning away without creating any friction, as distanced from love as Yi herself claims to be, if it weren’t for those disarmingly revealing real people. In one interview, a self-contained-looking divorcé mourns the loss of what he suspects was his one true love, showing himself to be unexpectedly vulnerable. In another, two elderly high school sweethearts ooze mutual appreciation decades after they met. A dryly funny family court judge and the lawyer he fell for when she argued cases in his court tag-team their story with great comic timing, and a gay man who was just looking for sex when he met his long-time partner talks about having found more than he bargained for.

The interviews are often staged in interesting settings – the divorcé is shooting pool in his basement – but Jasenovec and Yi don’t confine themselves to that footage. Instead, Yi often acts out the stories as people talk, using childishly crude puppets that she and her father made in their garage.

Like the rest of the movie, the puppets are deceptively sophisticated and sweetly entertaining. And every so often, they surprise you with a genuinely moving moment.

Julie and Julia

By Elise Nakhnikian

Meryl Streep has played some amazing women in her time, but none more gallant than Julia Child, the gentle giant who demystified French cooking for Americans. A great soul in an ungainly body who refused to let other people define or deter her, Child was a pioneer in pearls, a reassuring, empowering, eternally cheerful emissary to the intimidating world of haute cuisine. “No excuses,” she declares in Julie and Julia. “Never apologize. No explanations!”

Until Child marched through the doors of the Cordon Bleu’s professional-level cooking classes, propping them open behind her with her cookbook and her long-lived PBS cooking show, the activity her book identified as “the art of French cooking” was off-limits to American housewives. Not that Child herself ever used the word “housewife,” which was already weighed down by layers of condescension and negative connotations by the early ‘60s, when her first cookbook was published. Instead, she identified her target audience as “servantless American cooks.”

Streep performs another of her astonishing acts of alchemy to become the captivatingly friendly, life-loving prodigy, whooping and warbling her adoration for her devoted husband Paul (Stanley Tucci), her adopted hometown of Paris, her friends, and the food that changes her life. Photos of the actress in character barely hint at how fully she inhabits the part, since so much of the magic is in her voice, her slump-shouldered posture, and the sheer wattage of the joy she projects.

If Streep's part of the movie was all there were of Julie and Julia, it would be the best of Nora Ephron’s feel-good chick flicks (Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail). Julia’s full-throated enthusiasms make her excellent company, and her long and happy marriage provides us with the rare treat of a mutually adoring, apparently lusty, almost ordinary-looking middle-aged couple on film.

A foodie from way back, Ephron finds drama in the writing and publication of the seminal book Child cowrote with two Frenchwomen – well, mostly with one, as we learn in dishy detail. And the writer/director's light and sure touch with the emotional rhythms of female bonding (remember Meg Ryan’s friendship with Rosie O’Donnell in Sleepless in Seattle? Or Streep’s with Cher in Silkwood?) does justice to Julia’s rich relationships with other women, including her sister Dorothy, another jolly giant brought memorably to life by the always zesty Jane Lynch.

Watching Julie and Julia, it’s easy to imagine how someone might be so drawn to Julia’s inclusive spirit and rich recipes that she’d want to spend a whole year with her first book. That’s just what the movie’s Julie, Julie Powell (Amy Adams), did, cooking all 524 recipes in 365 days while blogging about the experience. Unfortunately, her story isn’t anywhere near as engaging as Julia’s.

That wouldn’t matter if Julie and Julia didn’t divide its time so evenly between the two. Ephron keeps drawing parallels between them, starting Julia’s part of the story when she’s roughly Julie’s age, a housewife searching for “something to DOOO.” But the often strained comparisons only emphasize how different the anxious, self-involved blogger is from the “great big good fairy,” as Julie describes her idol.

Adams is a charming, emotionally transparent actress, and she works hard to make her character sympathetic, but it's a hopelessly steep slog. Julia’s greatness makes Julie’s concerns seem petty and narcissistic, just as Streep’s sacred monster in The Devil Wears Prada made mincemeat of the aspirations and frustrations of the young woman whose story that movie was supposed to be. Even the cinematographer makes Adams' job harder, bathing Julia in golden rays while confining Julie mostly to her fluorescent-lit cubicle or her dark, overcrowded apartment.

Julia’s main goal was to make a great cuisine accessible to a whole new continent; Julie’s main goals were to beat a friend she didn’t even like at blogging and to prove that she could stick to something for a whole year. Julia has deep friendships and brings out the best in nearly everyone; Julie mostly has frenemies. Julia forges a whole new path to create her brilliant career; Julie works so hard at emulating her role model that she sometimes seems to be trying to become her.

Or to become her best friend, in a creepy, Single White Female kind of way. In a recent New York Times essay, Lucinda Rosenfeld writes about how Facebook and other online social networking are increasingly taking the place of actual conversation. “I understand that the chick flick of the summer is poised to be Julie and Julia, a postmodern biopic/romantic comedy about Julia Child and a modern-day aspiring female chef who worships her,” she says. “Moral of the story: A girl's best friend may be the one she's never met?”

When Streep is on the screen, Julie and Julia is rich with relationships – between Julia and her husband, her friends, her Paris, her food, and the world in general. In Julie’s part of the story, we leave that expansive world for a chilly little planet where a neurotic writer frets about her imaginary friend.

In the Loop

By Elise Nakhnikian

I never could abide The West Wing, though it was impossible to avoid for a while. A lot of people embraced it as a kind of escapist fantasy during the Bush years, but its sanctimonious tone – all those photogenic, high-minded people striding down floodlit hallways and jabbering about Important Issues – just made me itch.

For me, In the Loop is a balm for that allergy. It’s not an either-or choice for everyone: I know some West Wing fans who loved In the Loop too. But the two couldn’t be much farther apart in their take on how the sausages are made in D.C. and other global power centers.

If West Wing indulges in the self-flattery of a waning empire clinging to its own myths, In the Loop, a mordantly funny British satire based on a BBC-TV series called The Thick of It, eyes politics from the perspective of a nation grown used to watching power plays from the sidelines. The joke’s on Britain in a running gag about “room meat” – aides and low-level bureaucrats invited to meetings as human props to acknowledge the importance of a occasion or signal the support of a regime. Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), the only British politician we see, is nothing but room meat to the Americans who invite him to join their war games. Worse yet, he’s too inept to know it at first.

Foster captures the world’s attention when he makes an impolitic statement in a radio interview, implying that the rumors of a coming war between the U.S. and some unnamed Middle Eastern country are true. Foster doesn’t actually know anything about it, but he can’t resist talking when reporters ask questions, jamming his foot a little further into his mouth every time he opens it.

Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy), a savvy U.S. State Department official doing her best to avert the war, decides Foster will be a useful pawn in her game and invites him to D.C. Bumbling their way from the halls of Congress to the U.N., the minister and his newly minted aide, Toby (Chris Addison), another well-meaning incompetent playing way above his pay grade, are as starstruck as a couple of teens at a Miley Cyrus concert.

Meanwhile, Linton Barwick (David Rasche), a Donald Rumsfeld-style American hawk, coolly maneuvers his country into the war he’s decided it needs, swatting aside any facts that don’t support his case. “We have all the facts we need,” he announces. “In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is king.”

The deal-making takes place in resolutely plebeian settings, including a lot of public bathrooms and fluorescent-lit offices. At one point, Clark and a U.S. general (James Gandolfini) who shares her aversion for war are reduced to meeting in a child’s bedroom at a party, where they use a toy computer to bang out some numbers.

Clark is just one of several flawed but relatable characters – including Foster – who you can’t help but empathize with, even as they ruthlessly bully and manipulate each other. The most entertaining is ferret-faced Scottish spinmeister Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), whose tongue is even sharper than his nose. Tucker swears his way through the corridors of power with rare artistry and zeal.

It’s all very funny, and it feels alarmingly plausible – office politics with a capital P, exaggerated just a little for comic effect. This Washington, D.C. is a life-sized world full of life-like people. Most are motivated by self-interest, more interested in salvaging or furthering their careers than in winning the fight over going to war. Very young aides do nearly all the work, trading game-changing information behind the scenes. (“It’s like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns,” says one of the British spin doctors.) But in the end, Barwick’s ruthless manipulation of people and records wins the day.

The camerawork is as smart as the dialogue, capturing layers of simultaneous action in glass-walled offices or zooming in on telling expressions without drawing attention to itself. Director/co-writer Armando Iannucci, who was one of the writer/producers of The Thick of It, shot the movie as he did the TV show: “fast and free and slightly improvised … having two cameras on the go all the time," he says in an interview on the IFC website. He also likes to give his actors their lines only minutes before he starts filming, to keep them off-balance and ramp up the near-desperate intensity of the exchanges.

It’s deeply disturbing to think that this may be how such important decisions get made in our capitol, but the paradox of In the Loop is how much fun it is to watch all those Machiavellian machinations. It’s partly all the brilliant one-liners, of course. But there’s also something exhilarating about a portrayal of politicians in action that doesn’t lionize or demonize them but just seems to get them right.

“The disarming thing is when you talk to these people and realize they're just like you and me,” Iannucci told IFC. “They're all fallible, and, in fact, what drives their day are these petty little worries and stresses.”

Summer Movie Roundup

By Elise Nakhnikian

Will Smith is MIA this month, but who’s had time to miss him? Hollywood has already rolled out enough would-be blockbusters this summer to feed a whole decade’s worth of Independence Day weekends.

I thought Brüno was disappointing, though it had its moments. But there are plenty of other summer movies still playing that are worth checking out.

My favorite is Public Enemies, director and cowriter Michael Mann’s take on the last few days of John Dillinger. Like the main character of Mann’s first feature, Thief, Dillinger is a professional thief recently sprung from a long prison term and hungry to make up for lost time. “What do you want?” asks the girl Dillinger woos with his usual hooded intensity. “Everything – right now,” he tells her.

Shooting with digital video and handheld cameras and saturating the soundtrack with the same heavy, gorgeous chords he used in Last of the Mohicans, Mann imbues the beautifully shot story with its main character’s sense of urgency: everything feels as if it’s happening right now.

Johnny Depp’s Dillinger is an honorable thief. He seems not only, as he puts it, tougher, smarter, and faster than just about anyone else but also more loyal and somehow more authentic. Mann has always been fascinated by American crime – the cops as well as the criminals. As in Heat and Miami Vice, he spends time here on both sides of the law, developing subplots about the rise of the FBI under Herbert Hoover (a stiff Billy Crudup) and the hunting of Dillinger by Agent Melvin Purvis (the always intense Christian Bale). The last shot of the movie belongs to a laconic agent who helped hunt Dillinger down, and whose words to Dillinger’s girlfriend reveal him to be a man of principle and a worthy foe.

Mann’s vision of male honor and virility may be a little anachronistic – a daydream from a time gone by – but he makes his romanticized vision feel as real as your morning coffee.


The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's clear-eyed portrait of an Army sergeant who disarms bombs in Iraq, is another excellent movie about a tough guy who chooses to put himself in harm’s way. Bigelow knows how to shoot a violent confrontation or a standoff to maximize the suspense. But this movie’s real power flows from the courage and grit of the people involved, and the way we get to know and care about them. (I have to believe Bigelow deserves the props for that, since writer Mark Boal’s only other credit is for the preachy and lugubrious In the Valley of Elah.)

Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) doesn’t talk much, but by the end of this movie, you know what makes him tick and you sincerely admire his skill and commitment. You also get to know the other men in his squad, and when James comes back to the States and wanders the aisles of a grocery store, the mellow Muzak and row upon row of cereals looking and sounding almost as alien to us as they must to him, you realize how well Bigelow has recreated the feel of a guerilla war zone. The Hurt Locker isn’t overtly political, but its quiet realism speaks clearly, reminding us not to forget the people who risk their lives every day in our names in Iraq and Afghanistan.


The Hurt Locker should be required viewing for anyone who has seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. This relentlessly militaristic sequel is just another cog in the war machine that’s gobbling up most of our national resources and far too many of our young men and women. Kind of like one of the rampaging transformers from the movie, come to think of it – the one that constructs itself by sucking in every other machine in sight.


Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a big pop culture lollipop for little kids and their parents. An animated valentine to family values, it’s full of cute baby animals and doting parents, including Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano) and his mate Ellie (Queen Latifah). They’re followed by the usual motley crew of sidekicks – including Scrat, the squirrel whose desperate pursuit of an elusive nut is woven through the plot like a comic ballet. The animation is beautifully done, and 3-D makes it pop even more. During the end credits at the screening I went to, several kids sidled right up to the screen like magnets to a refrigerator, drawn to the cheery, childlike drawings that seemed to float in front of it.


If Ice Age is family entertainment candy, Pixar’s Up is a layer cake from a very good bakery: lighter and more complex, but still with that mass-produced sheen. It starts out beautifully, with an interesting setup, likeable characters, and a masterful montage of a couple’s lifelong love story. But, as in last year’s WALL-E, Pixar’s scriptwriters seem to run out of creative steam in the second half of the movie, reverting to a much more conventional, less engaging story. It’s definitely worth seeing, though. The visuals are always arresting, kids love the talking dogs, and mom and dad shouldn’t miss that marriage montage.


For bigger kids, there’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The Harry Potter movies could never quite reproduce the intensity of J.K. Rowling’s prose or the density of detail that brought Harry’s world so vividly to life – not to mention Rowling’s sly sense of humor. They got much better and less sanitized after director Chris Columbus was replaced, but the later installments lean a little too far in the other direction, often feeling too solemn or self-important. It doesn’t help that Daniel Radcliffe in the title role and Emma Watson in the key supporting role of Hermione have too little range to pull you in – though the adult cast is always a delight, and Rupert Grint is a treat as Harry’s other best friend, Ron.

Director David Yates makes The Half-Blood Prince as good as any of the Potter movies yet, with truly menacing bad guys and teenage love pangs that will make you tear up one minute and laugh the next. But too many sequences feel too long and somber, and the meticulous art direction and CGI effects keep upstaging the actors, making the film lose that grip on the everyday that is the bedrock of Rowling’s series. Get that right and Harry’s world is truly amazing. Leave it out and all you’ve got is another special effects movie – a better than average one, granted, but nothing magical.

If you’re looking for a purely entertaining action movie, try The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a fast-paced, well-acted update of the story of a hijacked subway train featuring John Travolta as a convincingly psychotic bad guy and Denzel Washington as a flawed hero.

And if it’s a date movie you want, The Proposal or (500) Days of Summer are both perfectly adequate. I actually liked The Proposal a little better, though it’s more formulaic. It’s hard not to root for Sandra Bullock or Ryan Reynolds, even if there’s hardly a surprise or a genuine moment to be found in the movie.


Summer’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt is pretty irresistible too, but the object of his character’s unrequited obsession, Zooey Deschanel’s Summer, is so underdeveloped that the movie feels repetitive at just 95 minutes. What’s more, some of the “interesting” stuff thrown in by director Mark Webb, whose background is in music videos, just distracts from Tom’s feelings rather than illuminating them.

I’m out of room, so let me just add that The Hangover, an imaginative and funny road movie about a bachelor party gone awry, has been a breakout hit this summer and deserves it.

Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?

By Elise Nakhnikian

What is a painting worth?

Whatever someone will pay for it.

Like a Zen koan, the more you think about that answer, the harder it is to understand. How can a piece of art be worthless if it’s by an unknown artist but priceless if it was painted by an anointed master? Who does that anointing, anyhow? Does the price of a painting have any relation at all to how good it is?

The growing chasm between the ultra-rich and the rest of us has made the relationship between the price of a painting and its artistic merit more tenuous than ever. Using art to invest – and flaunt – their money, the superrich have driven prices for name-brand works into the stratosphere over the past few years. So the time is right for Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? (2006), the true story of a bullheaded, dumpster-diving, 70-something truck driver named Teri Horton and the splatter-painted canvas she bought for $5 at a thrift shop.

Horton got the unsigned painting as a kind of joke to cheer up a depressed friend. “It was ugly,” she says. “There was nothing to it – it was just all these different colors all over a canvas.”

Her friend didn’t want it either, so Horton tried to sell it – until a local art teacher told her it might be a Pollock. “Who the fuck Is Jackson Pollock?” Horton asked. When she learned that his paintings sold for millions, she tried to find someone to tell her if hers was the real thing.

But the art dealers she contacted were so certain that a Pollock could not have eluded the grasp of collectors for half a century and then fall into the callused hands of a thrift store shopper with an eighth-grade education that they froze her out without even looking at the painting.

Outraged by their disrespect, Horton vowed to get her answer. “I thought, who in the hell do these people think they are?” she says. “What if this thing is really real? It became a challenge for me.”

Writer-director Harry Moses tries to remain neutral on the question of whether the painting is a knock-off, but his sympathies clearly lie with Horton. Shooting her in the cab of her truck, at home in her trailer park, or drinking beer and smoking cigarettes with her friends at a scruffy VFW bar, he portrays her as a plain-spoken working-class heroine taking on an art-world elite.

Some of the art experts he interviews are open-minded and appealingly humble, but others seem to wield “artistic integrity” as a sword to protect their turf and keep the hoi polloi at bay. Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, comes off worst. Blinded by a patrician sense of entitlement, he insists that Horton has no right to feel bitter about her treatment by the art world. “She knows nothing,” he sniffs. “I’m an expert.” Moses and cinematographer William Cassara feed our alienation from Hoving by letting us watch him contort himself like a flamingo as he examines the painting, then shooting him from close up with a wide-angle lens that exaggerates his florid hand movements.

Facing off against the art elite is Paul Biro, the equally smug forensic scientist Horton eventually hires to authenticate her painting. Biro prides himself on working like a detective, and a partial fingerprint he found on the back of the canvas forms the bedrock of his claim that the painting is a Pollock. But the art world is suspicious of his methods, convinced that the best way to judge a painting’s authorship is by assessing its aesthetic merits and technique, not analyzing fingerprints or paint chips.

We see just enough of the rich clients who buy multi-million-dollar art – mostly unprepossessing-looking men with heavily Botoxed and bejeweled wives and girlfriends – to get a sense of what drives their decisions. Hearing a potential “investor” from Bear Stearns patiently explain that you can’t expect people to pay millions of dollars for a painting unless it comes with the right paperwork gives you a new appreciation for Hoving, who at least talks about a painting’s soul rather than its pedigree.

Ironically, the director’s own voice-over commentary can be almost as off-putting as Hoving’s pompous pronouncements (he sounds a lot like John Lithgow.) But that’s mostly counterbalanced by Terence Blanchard’s energetic soundtrack and by the often engrossing interviews that make up most of the movie’s 114-minute running time.

Moses has a knack for getting his subjects to open up on camera. The stories they tell and the opinions they express are entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking, and the moral is clear: Question authority, no matter how cocksure it may be.

Brüno

Brüno is the third of social satirist Sacha Baron Cohen’s clueless characters to get his own movie after debuting in Baron Cohen’s brilliant TV sketch comedy, Da Ali G Show. Ali G was the standout on TV, but Baron Cohen’s aggressively awkward, prejudice-ridden Kazakh reporter, Borat Sagdiyev, translated best to film. In the explosively funny Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), Borat conducted his own personal shock and awe campaign, focusing the world’s attention on the British comedian and his inventions.

Brüno is following in his big brother’s footsteps, making an estimated $42 million on his opening weekend, but if this had been the first of the three movies to open, I don’t think it would have done very well. Like the first in Baron Cohen’s series, Ali G Indahouse, Brüno has some laugh-out-loud moments, but it feels like a series of sketches stitched together with very thin thread. After starting out strong, it gets progressively weaker, feeling slow or repetitive in spots and ending with more of a whimper than a bang.

Like all three Marx Brothers rolled into one, Baron Cohen combines physical slapstick, sophisticated wordplay, a healthy disrespect for the status quo, funny accents, and inspired moments of pure comic anarchy to throw prejudice and arbitrary social mores into sharp relief – and to provide some intensely satisfying, “oh-no-he-didn’t” belly laughs. This time around he’s targeting homophobia, and he lands a few good jabs.

Brüno is a witless, narcissistic stereotype of a gay fashionista, a man as campily effeminate and fame-starved as Zsa Zsa Gabor. Baron Cohen also makes him “Austrian,” the way he made Borat “Kazakh,” as another entrance through which to mine our stereotypes and fears.

Soon after the movie begins, Brüno is “schwartzlisted” from Austrian TV for an unfortunate incident involving an all-Velcro suit he wears to a fashion show. (His mishap with the suit is a classic piece of physical comedy—which you can see it in the trailer on YouTube, along with almost all of the movie’s other best moments. )

So he heads to Hollywood, his adoring personal assistant in tow. Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm) stick to their winning formula for Borat here, boomeranging Brüno from L.A. to the deep South and back again as he does increasingly outlandish things in his search for fame.

But where Borat’s best encounters were memorable because of the bad behavior they brought out in other people, the humor in Brüno comes mostly from seeing Brüno himself do outrageous things. This movie’s biggest shock for me was the anal bleaching salon he goes to (who knew?), though some people may be bothered by how often he puts his naked penis on display.

A lot of Brüno’s targets are too-easy marks: a barrel-scraping agent desperate enough to sign Brüno despite his glaring lack of talent, a psychic who pretends to contact one of Brüno’s lost loves and then gets visibly uncomfortable as Brüno mimes graphic sex with the dear departed; a pair of vacuous PR twins who can’t pronounce “Darfur.”

Now and then, one of Baron Cohen’s satirical arrows hits home. Paula Abdul, who has admitted that she was lured to Brüno’s unfurnished house by the promise of a fictional award, burbles on about how helping people is her whole life – while sitting on one of the Mexican gardeners Brüno has enlisted to serve as “chairs.” A bit where a series of stage moms agree to submit their children to all kinds of dangers and abuses in hopes of getting them into a video is also horrifyingly hilarious.

But Brüno’s so obnoxious himself that I sometimes sympathized with the people he ambushed. When three good ol’ boys take him hunting in Alabama and he tries repeatedly to climb into one guy’s tent in the middle of the night, or when he tries to seduce former presidential candidate Ron Paul in the middle of an interview, I can’t blame them for getting mad. True, the intensity of their rage is a little scary, but is that homophobia or just anger at being come onto so aggressively after making it clear that you aren’t interested?

If you’re looking for a light summer movie that will give you some laughs, Brüno may be just the ticket. But for a transgressive social satire – something that makes you think as well as chortle – you need to take my man Borat out of retirement.


Written for TimeOFF

Whatever Works

By Elise Nakhnikian

A friend of mine once told me he always goes to see Woody Allen’s movies, even when they’re getting bad reviews. “I just want to make sure Woody’s okay,” he said.

I knew just what he meant, since I’ve hardly ever missed one of Woody’s movies myself. But trust me; you can take a pass on this one.

Whatever Works feels like a rough draft of a parody of one of Woody’s thinner efforts. Just thinking about it makes me as cranky as its tiresomely misanthropic lead. Do I really have to tell you what’s wrong with this thing? Can’t I just give it a thumbs down and be done with it? And what’s wrong with me, anyway? Why am I whining about doing something I usually feel lucky to get paid for?

Woody wrote this anemic script more than 30 years ago. Then he had the sense to put it in a drawer – until he needed something to shoot during the recent writers' strike.

It starts with a setup he could probably write in his sleep: A neurotic Jewish New Yorker on the downhill side of middle age hooks up with a lovely young shiksa. They eventually drift apart. Meanwhile, the New Yorker (who we think of as Woody, regardless of whether Allen is playing the character or how much he denies the similarities) tosses off a lot of sardonic asides and a few observations about the meaning of life.

Woody’s great or near-great movies of this ilk – Annie Hall, Play It Again, Sam, Manhattan – pair laugh-out-loud one-liners and sight gags with all the elements of great film drama, including magnetic actors, resonant relationships, beautiful cinematography, high emotional stakes, expert editing, and subtly evocative soundtracks. They pull me in every time I see them – even if I’m profoundly uncomfortable with parts of the story, as I am with the romance between a middle-aged man and a high school student that anchors Manhattan.

But almost all the elements that make the others click are missing from Whatever Works. Even the great acting Woody is usually so good at marshalling is missing from its center, though there’s plenty of it around the edges. As Boris Yellnikoff, the dyspeptic “Woody” character, Larry David windmills his arms and declaims his lines like a nervous ninth-grader in a school play. "I called him and said, 'Are ya nuts? I don't think I can do this,'" David says he told Woody when he realized he was being asked to play the lead. Too bad Woody didn’t listen.

Watching the rest of the cast concentrate its formidable skills and charisma on bringing their characters to some semblance of life is a lot like watching Dr. Frankenstein labor to reanimate a corpse: you sincerely admire the effort, but you cringe at the result.

Each of the supporting characters is a walking stereotype, with one defining characteristic that keeps getting harped on. At first you think Boris’s child bride, the angelically innocent Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), is the most fictional figment of Woody’s imagination you could ever hope to meet, with her jailbait ponytails, her bottomless naivete, and her broadly generic Southern accent.

Then Melodie’s repressed Southern-belle mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) shows up to praise Jesus and flutter about in color-coordinated outfits, actually fainting dead away at one point - until Manhattan’s art world declares her to be a brilliant “primitive” photographer and she starts swanning about in black leotards and silk scarves, living with two men in what she calls a “may-nage ay twa.”

And then, just as you’ve readjusted your credulity meter, in comes Melodie’s busting-out-of-the-closet father John, (Ed Begley Jr.) and you have to crank it up to 11.

Speaking of going to 11, Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean also shows up – too briefly – as one of Boris’s three closest friends, who pop up every now and then to provide transitions between sketch-like scenes.

Woody did the same thing in Broadway Danny Rose, and it worked. But that’s because the guys in that Greek chorus were just the kind of third- and fourth-tier acts Danny Rose represented. The tales they told, the language and gestures they used, and the deli where they met were all an integral part of the story. Whatever Works’ underwritten, barely differentiated trio adds nothing but the narrative glue Woody was presumably too lazy to introduce more organically.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing to like in Whatever Works. I enjoyed its view of New York as a kind of Emerald City, where everyone finds his or her true self. I also appreciated the fact that, this time around, Woody is not idealizing the creepy dynamic of an anhedonic old fart pairing up with a girl literally young enough to be his granddaughter.

At least, I don’t think he is. But then, I can’t be sure that any of what I got from this joyless romp is what Woody intended.

Whatever Works doesn’t.

Food, Inc.

By Elise Nakhnikian

Food, Inc. ought to come with a warning label: This movie may change your life.

Michael Pollan, one of the main talking heads and sources for this brisk documentary, changed mine 10 years ago. His vivid, detailed descriptions of the mechanistic, inhumane, and ecologically unsound ways in which we raise, slaughter, and process cows and chickens made a vegetarian of me after the New York Times Magazine published excerpts from The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Much as I love movies, they are not my favorite way to get this kind of information. I’d rather absorb the facts in depth than watch the highlights, especially when some of those border on torture porn, animal-style. And I prefer movies that are more subtle or entertaining than Food, Inc., whose title cards and well-polished speeches feel at times like a Power Point lecture by a tag team of college professors.

Granted, these are the kinds of professors I would have loved to have had in college. Pollan and Eric Schlossberg, the film’s other principal source, are investigative reporters with a mission. Both are gifted at illuminating industrial processes and the political systems behind them. They’re also great at explaining what’s wrong with our food chain in a clear, compelling way that makes you want to do something about it. Food, Inc. is studded with memorable statistics, quotes, stories, and guest lecturers, like Joel Salatin of the idyllic-looking Polyface Farms, whose rap about the need to go back to agricultural basics has been honed to a fine edge.

Like any adaptation, though, Food, Inc. has to leave a lot out. And though its streamlined running time feels right – you can only sit so long in a lecture hall – just over 90 minutes isn’t much to cover the nine meaty issues the film touches on.

Director Robert Kenner and editor Kim Roberts rarely take time to explain anything in depth. They don’t even always stop to explain why something matters in the first place. We’re never really told, for instance, why Stonyfield yogurt, whose self-satisfied owner gets a lot of air time, is better for us or for the environment than any of its competitors.

We never hear why we should fear the genetically modified foods the film warns against, either, though it would have been easy enough to have listed the suspected risks. But we do get a good look at the dark cloud spread over the American family farm by Monsanto’s genetically modified soybeans.

One of the more poignant stories in Food, Inc. is that of Moe Parr, a mild-mannered man who made a modest living cleaning seeds for farmers, so they could plant what they salvaged from last year’s plants rather than investing in a whole field’s worth at the start of each season. Farmers have been doing this for generations – Parr’s seed-cleaning machine was over 100 years old – but Monsanto forbade the practice, asserting that planting seeds would be property theft, since the compay owns the patent on the seed strain. The conglomerate went on the warpath, blacklisting many of Parr’s customers (and lifelong friends) and suing him until he ran out of money, driving him out of work.

That lawsuit could never have happened, the movie points out, if the U.S. Supreme Court had not made it legal to patent life forms in the 1980s. That’s a connection the movie keeps making, as it weaves in two closely intertwined threads: the power of a handful of conglomerates over what we eat and how our government helps them amass that power.

Perhaps the main culprit is the federal subsidy of corn, which has made it the nation’s most popular crop. Artificially cheap corn has changed what we consume, as manufacturers find ways to use this adaptable plant in everything from peanut butter to diapers – not to mention the high fructose corn syrup that sweetens far too much of what we eat and drink. Most of our foods, the movie says, are just “a clever rearrangement of corn.”

Subsidized corn makes fast food like sodas, chips, and hamburgers much cheaper than fruits and vegetables, making it impossible for low-income families to eat well and difficult for everyone to resist snacking on empty calories. And that leads straight to our skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes.

But I’m beginning to sound like a professor myself.

If you want to know more about how we’re choking ourselves with our own fouled-up food chain, I’d recommend reading Pollan’s and Schlossberg’s books. But if you just want the Cliff Notes version, go see Food, Inc. Maybe it will whet your appetite to learn more – or to rage against the machine.

Farewell, Farrah. Do Blondes Really Have More Fun?

By Elise Nakhnikian

I'm not usually moved by by celebrity deaths, but the news of Farrah Fawcett's passing stabbed me with a shard of that sorrow and pity you feel when someone dies before they had a chance to fulfill their potential.

Strange way to think about someone who got so much more than her share of fame and attention, I know: That poster of her with the corkscrew curls and piano-key grin apparently sold several hundred thousand copies a month at the peak of her popularity. But I think the attention she got for her looks was like the poison in Sleeping Beauty's apple, freezing her in time and keeping her from developing her potential as an artist.

I say "artist" because I think that's how Farrah saw herself, at least when she was young. She studied art at UT in Austin before getting snatched up by the clanking maw of the entertainment machine, which promptly spat her out as the international symbol for California Girl and the original blonde on Charlie's Angels.

Amazingly, she was only on that show for one season, but she was identified with it and with that poster for the rest of her life, assumed to be a not-quite-real, none-too-bright has-been whose only claim to fame were a fortuitous combination of hair, teeth, and bone structure.

I met her in the early '80s. It must have been six or seven years after she'd escaped from the show, but she was still really prickly about it. I was living in her home town of Corpus Christi at the time, working for Corpus Christi Magazine, which sent me to interview her in New York where she was starring in an off-Broadway version of Extremities, a fairly simplistic but hard-hitting story of a woman who turns the tables on a rapist. Fawcett was really good in the part, much to everyone's surprise -- not that that helped her get many good parts afterward.

That wasn't the only thing about her that suprised me. She was smaller than I'd expected, as stars usually are, but she was also much stronger. Muscular and wiry, with ropy veins in her arms, she came off as an athlete, not a beauty queen.

She was clearly smart and funny, though she and I didn't laugh much. She was too busy countering the stereotypes everyone held about her. The article I wrote is in some box deep in my storage space and doesn't seem worth digging out at the moment, but I remember that one of the first things she said to me, maybe the first, was the phrase: "In my defense..." That was before I'd said a word, but I didn't need to: she knew what I was thinking.

People who knew I was going to interview her loved to show me how clever they were by asking things like "Find out who her dentist is." When I got back home and wrote an article that talked about how good she was in the play, another editor at the magazine added a snarky lead about how "Of course she'll never win a Tony." I fought to get that out of there, but they wouldn't let me eliminate that snide tone altogether. I won a journalism award for that piece, but I always felt like it was tainted by that faint undertone.

But hey, sneering at Farrah was just one of those things the smart set did back then: It proved you were in the know.

Lord knows I did it myself, when I was an alienated young hippie type and you couldn't escape that poster of hers. Aaron Spelling's now-ubiquitious brand of plasticine cheesecake was new then, so Charlie's Angels made a handy target for my friends and me, when we were bemoaning the death of the handmade and the heartfelt and all that other, less manufactured stuff we were so pleased with ourselves for appreciating.

I didn't learn much about Farrah when we met -- she'd had years by then to fill in the chinks in her armor -- but she gave me a lot to chew on afterward. You don't get looks like that without working at it, so some part of her must have enjoyed the attention her beauty earned her. But how frustrating it must have been to have dealt with all those stereotypes and sneers over the years. And what a shame that hardly anyone in the industry ever seemed to see what she was capable of as an actress.

Good on Robert Duvall for giving her that juicy part in the Apostle. She played the hell out of it, too.

Year One

By Elise Nakhnikian

I don’t get the backlash against Year One. Are people just getting tired of Jack Black and Michael Cera playing the same characters? Is Year One’s glib, good-natured vibe too retro – and not retro in a cool way, but in a Hope-Crosby road movie kind of way? Or is it just that humor’s a subjective thing and lots of people didn’t find it funny?

All I know is, I hate to see all the hating that’s being done on this amiable little goof of a buddy movie.

Year One is set in the same alphabet soup of ancient history that spawned Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man. Its bumbling buddies are Zed and Oh, a failed would-be hunter and a suspiciously girly gatherer who start out in a tiny Stone Age village and wind up in Sodom, the ultimate city.

Zed is played by Black and Oh by Cera, so you know who these guys are from the moment you see them. The two work well with each other and with the movie’s Fractured Fairy Tales-ish settings, maybe because both actors have honed their personas to such a fine point that they feel almost like animated characters.

Zed’s another of Black’s demonically cheery Ritalin babies, a bouncing ball of id who lives to break the rules. Oh is one of Cera’s patented beta males, a sad-eyed, sweet-natured innocent who just wants to stay out of trouble and land the girl of his dreams.

When Zed gets kicked out of their village for breaking its one unbreakable rule, Oh tags mournfully along, seemingly against his own will. They amble out into a whole world of trouble, most of which lands on Oh’s hunched shoulders.

Director and cowriter Harold Ramis sends the two ping-ponging from one mythical tableau to the next, like extras wandering through a series of soundstages. The scenes they bumble into are generally either spoofs of costume dramas about prehistoric times or retellings of Old Testament tales by way of the Borscht Belt.

Before they wind up in Sodom – which the script keeps comparing to Vegas – Oh and Zed come across Cain (David Cross) and Abel (Paul Rudd) just as Cain is trying to kill his brother. They also round a corner on Abraham (a bug-eyed Hank Azaria) as he’s about to kill his son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Superbad’s McLovin) – though he doesn’t see it that way. “I wasn’t going to kill him,” Abraham insists. “I was going to sacrifice him. There’s a tremendous difference.”

“Not to him, I’m guessing,” Oh responds.

At each new setting, the two do a little shtick, fall into mortal danger, and wriggle free. Sometimes they also reconnect, in a cursory sort of way, with their obligatory love interests, two girls from their village who wind up on a compulsory road trip of their own.

There’s a lot of Mel Brooks in Year One, which likes its humor broad and liberally laced with gay jokes, fart jokes, and physical humor. There’s some Woody Allen in its tossed-off one-liners (“We are the Hebrews – righteous people, but not very good at sports,” Abraham tells Oh and Zed as he shows them around his village) and its loving spoofs of movie clichés, like the flawless 21st-century hair and makeup on Oh’s and Zed’s otherwise primitive mates.

There’s even a little Monty Python in its potshots at arbitrary religious customs – but only a little. Ramis and his co-writers, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (The Office), are going for a less conceptual, more potty-mouthed humor than the Pythons, so where Life of Brian spoofed things like the religious splinter groups that sprang up around the birth of Christianity, Year One doesn’t ponder anything much deeper than the pain of circumcision.

The best parts of Year One are pure shtick, like Cain’s protracted murder of his surprisingly resilient brother, or the long list of crimes ending in “-try,” (idolatry, etc.) for which Zed and Oh are condemned to death – including puppetry and punditry. I also loved the bit where Zed and Oh first enter Sodom and a woman tries to arouse their interest by fellating a banana. “She’s really making that banana last,” Oh remarks .

Some of the jokes about the religious dogma reminded me of Bill Maher’s Religulous, and comparing this silly business to that self-righteous lecture made me like Year One that much more.

Year One doesn’t take anything all that seriously – including itself. It may try to tack on a moral at the end about thinking for yourself, but it’s not fooling anyone: all it really wants to do is make you laugh. I was smiling when I left the theater, and what’s not to like about that?