Contagion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for TimeOFF

Granito: How to Nail a Dictator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for The L Magazine

The Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for TimeOFF

The Pianist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for The L Magazine

Happy Anniversary, NJFF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for TimeOFF

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

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

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

And that may be an understatement.

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

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

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

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

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

Written for The L Magazine

I’m Glad My Mother is Alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for The L Magazine

A Night at the Opera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for The L Magazine

The Hedgehog

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

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

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

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

Written for The L Magazine

Mysteries of Lisbon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for TimeOFF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted for TimeOFF

Joan Blondell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for The L Magazine

Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz on The Interrupters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for Slant Magazine

Animation Block Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for The L Magazine