In the Valley of Elah and Days of Glory

With our country in an increasingly unpopular war, movie audiences seem to be dividing into two camps. Most people are getting enough of the war in their lives or on the news and want distraction when they go to the multiplex, but some see movies as a way of learning about how the war looks and feels to those who are caught in it. For that second group, two very different war stories are playing this week.

Days of Glory and In the Valley of Elah are both based on true stories – Glory on the experiences of the Algerian soldiers who fought for a racist France in WWII and Elah on the killing of Iraq war veteran Richard R. Davis, as reported in Playboy magazine by Mark Boal. Both focus on a young man whose life is tragically warped and wasted by the war he volunteers to participate in. But beyond that, the two don’t have much in common.

Paul Haggis, the director and cowriter of Elah, started his professional life on The Facts of Life and remained in TV for the next 20 years or so. It shows. His screenplays – which also include Flags of Our Fathers, Million Dollar Baby and Crash – always start with conventional storylines and piles them high with a self-conscious sense of social import and a heavy layer of foreshadowing. Elah may not be laden with the coincidences and binary contrasts that made Crash feel like a kindergarten primer on racism, but it’s still the kind of movie whose main character can’t go to an auto parts store without the guy behind the counter making a wise observation about his character.

A standard police procedural, Elah follows Hank (the always excellent Tommy Lee Jones, whose jug ears, simian forehead and hound-dog eyes fit this blue-collar hero to a T) as he teams up with Emily (Charlize Theron) to find out what happened to his son, a soldier who was gruesomely murdered just after making it home safe from Iraq. While Hank, a former military policeman and crack investigator, labors to learn why, Haggis and cowriter Boal dole out the usual clues, red herrings, breakthroughs and setbacks.

But Elah is also an antiwar film. Mike’s death turns out to have everything to do with the things he did in Iraq and how that experience warped him and the other soldiers he served with. We see some of the atrocities they commit played out on a digital video downloaded from Mike’s damaged cell phone. Often breaking up into unreadable patterns, those cryptic glimpses of hell force you to pay close attention, since you’re never quite sure what’s going on. And when you realize what you’ve been seeing, it’s often genuinely disturbing.

The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is the first American battle to generate antiwar movies while it’s still being waged, and studios are cranking out features as if to make up for lost time. The first English-language fiction film about the occupation, Philip Haas’ The Situation, came out just this spring, but several more will open before the end of the year. They include Grace is Gone, starring John Cusack; director Brian de Palma’s Redacted; Lions for Lambs, with Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise; and Charlie Wilson’s War, which features Tom Hanks.

Hopefully at least some of these will be memorable, but so far the most powerful images and observations have come from the many documentaries released in recent years. Compared to the docs, fiction films like Elah seem overdetermined: They may get a lot of the details right, but they package things up too neatly, turning an unholy mess into neatly resolved melodrama.

Days of Glory, in contrast, makes a long-ago war feel intensely real. The 2006 French release tells the story of several Algerians and Moroccans who enlist in the French Army in WWII to help fight the Nazis. Said (Jamel Debbouze), a sweet-natured young man and his comrades Yassir (Samy Nacery), Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila), and Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) never lose their belief in the necessity of the war they are fighting or their attachment to the adopted “motherland” they are serving, but their idealism about France slowly drains away as they endure insults and indignities from Army officials -- and from some civilians.

At the same time, they are warmly welcomed by one village, Messaoud has a tender affair with a French woman, and Said develops a fiercely close interdependence with their sergeant, whose alternate championing and mistreatment of the Arabs in his unit turns out to have twisted roots. The complexity and variety of these experiences, not to mention the bravery and gallantry of the men, who we come to care deeply about, give this story emotional range and depth.

Director Rachid Bouchareb cowrote the screenplay after conducting extensive interviews with Algerian and Moroccan veterans of the French Army, and his research paid off: The characters may be composites, but everything they do, say, and experience has the unvarnished feeling of truth without that movie-of-the-week gloss that makes Haggis’s stories feel so predictable.

It’s probably unfair to expect any movie to accurately recreate the experience of war for those of us who have never served. But Days of Glory comes as close as anything I’ve ever seen, creating a nuanced world that feels achingly real.

2 Days in Paris

Julie Delpy is the kind of star you feel as if you could be friends with if your paths ever crossed. She’s not too vain to let her classically beautiful face look tired, even a little doughy at times, and when she plays quick-witted, articulate, socially conscious women, like the one she reprised in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Waking Life, her own intelligence, humor, and moral outrage light them up from inside like the flame in a Halloween pumpkin.

The daughter of bohemian French actors who encouraged her creativity from an early age, Delpy has been writing screenplays since she was eight. She cowrote Linklater’s movies with the director and her costar, Ethan Hawke, and the three earned an Oscar nomination for their Sunset script. She’s also a musician (her music was featured in Before Sunset). So it’s hardly surprising that she wrote the screenplay and composed the soundtrack for 2 Days in Paris -- or that she directed and coproduced it.

But I wasn’t expecting it to be so funny.

2 Days sounds a lot like Before Sunset. Both are about an American man and a French woman, played by Delpy, who are in love and in Paris. The similarities are intentional – she thought she could raise more money for her movie if it sounded like a variation on her most recent hit – but they’re superficial.

Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are elegiac romances. In both, the couple exists in a social vacuum and the dialogue between them is virtually the only action. 2 Days in Paris is a fast-moving, fast-talking comedy about dysfunctional relationships. It’s also about reaching the age -- and the point in a relationship -- where you’re ready to move past the starry-eyed stage and make a serious commitment.

Marion (Delpy), a Parisian now living in New York, is stopping off at home for a couple of days on her way back from a Venice vacation with her American boyfriend, Jack (played by Delpy’s ex, Adam Goldberg). It sounds like something out of a movie, but this film’s only interest in romantic clichés is to puncture them. Jack annoyed Marion in Venice by photographing absolutely everything. Now that they’re in Paris, it’s her turn to get on his nerves.

The two stay in the apartment Marion bought just above her parents’ place, spending most of the two days with her family and friends. Jack has never been here with her before, and he’s learning things that make him feel as if he doesn’t know her at all.

Marion and Jack are 35 and have been together for two years. That may seem a little late to be reaching this point in their relationship, but that’s part of what Delpy is getting at. “A lot of people say your 30s are like your 20s now, and I think that's actually true,” she told Salon. “We put work and career before family and relationships, and then you start thinking about the family stuff in your mid-30s. Which is really late.”

That may not be a totally original insight, but it’s a valid one. The same goes for the pronouncements made in the movie, which tend to run along the lines of “Taking pictures all the time turns you into an observer.” Unlike Linklater’s romances, which are about the thrill of connecting with a soulmate and which include a strong dose of philosophizing and talk about ethics and other big ideas, 2 Days in Paris is a comedy of manners that's studded with little gems of wry, observational wit, and permeated by the anarchic thrill of watching people indulge in wildly inappropriate behavior.

Marion, who Delpy says was inspired by Robert De Niro's Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, has what you might call an anger management problem. She’s constantly sparring with Jack, and she’s prone to picking serious fights with other people. In one wildly funny scene, she encounters an ex-boyfriend in a restaurant and attacks him like a rabid Rottweiler. The startling sight of this porcelain beauty lunging across a table to throttle her ex, toggling back and forth between apparent calm and homicidal rage, has the guffaw-inducing unpredictability of Harpo Marx’s sneak attacks.

The people Jack and Marion encounter in France – including her parents, who are played by Delpy’s real-life parents – talk about sex all the time. Yet Jack and Marion never quite manage to make love, partly because Marion just won’t stop talking, even when Jack tries to kiss her. “It’s like dating public television!” he complains.

To make matters worse, they keep running into Marion’s exes, who all come on to her as if Jack, who doesn’t speak French, simply weren’t there. Even more creepily persistent is a stalker on the subway. Jack tries to scare him off in a wonderfully funny little scene, glaring until he’s practically cross-eyed.

By the end of this compact 96-minute movie, we know the hypochondriac, somewhat paranoid Jack and the motor-mouth, rage-prone Marion well enough to like them in spite of their faults and root for their happy ending.

True, that ending feels a little tacked on. A couple other scenes don’t quite work either, like when Jack gets mistaken for a thief or Marion gets sick at a party. But that’s easy to forgive, since there’s always another laugh hard on the heels of a dud.

Besides, who could hold a grudge against a movie that leaves you feeling this full of life?

Written for TimeOFF

Stardust

I was surprised not to see any kids at the crowded weekend afternoon screening where I saw Stardust. This neo-classic fantasy seems tailor-made for tweens – in fact, director Matthew Vaughn says he did it partly to make a movie that his kids could enjoy. But maybe a sweet, old-fashioned romantic fantasy is just too uncoolly sincere for the PG-13 crowd.

Vaughn started his career as a producer on Guy Ritchie’s briefly trendy hard-guy caper films, and he must have learned a lot behind the camera. The first feature he directed was Layer Cake, an elegantly assured double-cross story. With Stardust, his second film as director, he’s pulled off another pleasant surprise, adapting a novel by comic book artist Neil Gaiman into a sweet escapist fantasy.

We’re in familiar territory from the start in this meta-fairy tale, which Vaughn calls a combination of The Princess Bride and Midnight Run. The setting is a small town surrounded by a stone wall in an idealized version of Victorian England – and, in time-honored fairy tale fashion – the magic land that lies hidden on the other side of the wall.

The story more or less begins when a young man named Tristran (a blandly handsome Charlie Cox) enters that world, as his father did one night before he was born. Tristran is looking for the falling star he promised to bring back to Victoria, the flirty, flinty town beauty (Sienna Miller), but instead, of course, he finds things he was never looking for. As the plummy narration by Ian McKellen informs us, this will be a story about how Tristran became a man and won “the heart of his one true love.”

There’s barely a surprise or a moment of genuine wonder in what follows and yet, once it’s had a chance to tune up, it works, sounding that reassuring note of inevitability that resonates in all good fairy tales. But first we have to get past some rough spots, including the twee staginess of the magical market town that Tristran’s father visits and a stiff performance by Kate Magowan as Una, the captured princess he encounters there.

Even Tristran’s story takes a little while to get moving, mainly because Claire Danes as Yvaine, the fallen star come to ground as a cranky beauty, is a black hole of charmlessness at first and Cox doesn’t have enough charisma to carry those scenes on his own. Yvaine is supposed to be the soulful antidote to the narcissistic Victoria, and eventually you buy it, as the actress’ stubborn integrity grows on you. For her first few minutes of screen time, though, she leans so hard on Yvaine’s peevish discomfort that she threatens to become just another pill.

But no warm-up is needed for most of the excellent supporting cast. Peter O’Toole grins craftily from his deathbed, the self-satisfied king of the magic world. Rupert Everett and a flour-white lineup of less famous but equally adept actors make for a high-class peanut gallery as the king’s heirs, who keep killing one another to clear the way to the throne -- and then stick around like a ghostly Greek chorus. And Ricky Gervais of the original The Office is wonderfully slippery as a fast-talking fence.

Best of all are Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro. Pfeiffer plays Lamia, an ancient witch bent on regaining her lost youth and beauty by eating Yvain’s heart. Whether she’s gazing in glee at her own gorgeous gams after temporarily regaining her looks, recoiling in disgust as her age spots begin to return, or erupting in murderous fury when she is defied, Pfeiffer’s Lamia is a juicy caricature of a woman used to using her looks to get what she wants -- and an only slightly more monstrous version of the tyrannical aging beauty queen Pfeiffer plays in this year’s Hairspray. Pfeiffer is awfully young and gorgeous to be playing late-Joan-Crawford-type aging harridans, but if that’s what Hollywood’s offering her, at least I’m glad she’s having fun with them.

The middle-aged male actor’s version of playing a shrew seems to be doing comic versions of one’s youthful persona. In movies like Analyze This and Meet the Parents, De Niro has been spoofing all those tough guys he's played, and it looks like he’s enjoying himself too. This time around, he plays the captain of a flying pirate ship, a tough-talking showboat with a secret of his own.

If De Niro’s captain and ship remind you a bit of Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow and his beloved Black Pearl, it doesn’t look as if Stardust is going to burn half as hot as the Pirates of the Caribbean series. I like it much more, though. Both are kitchen-sink fantasies, throwing in elements from all kinds of fantasy genres, but the Pirates movies feel too frantic to me, piling on the special effects and the gimmicks as if to distract you from the thinness of the plot. Stardust keeps things much more low-tech, and the pace is less frenetic; Even the inevitable chase scene is a low-key, CG-free affair, with everyone either on foot or in a horse-drawn carriage.

Stardust keeps its feet on the ground too, moving at a nice clip without ever spinning out of control. In the end, there’s nothing transcendent about this old-fashioned fairy tale, but it makes for a satisfying afternoon’s entertainment.

SXSW 2007

When a friendly young woman with a fistful of flyers and a headful of curls worked a line I was in at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival last week, inviting people to a screening of her first feature, her enthusiasm and the “great stories” she promised convinced me to give it a try.

The curly-haired young woman is 29-year-old Naomi Greenfield. Her co-director, another first-time filmmaker – and a native of Princeton Junction -- is 27-year-old Sara Taksler. And their movie, which they call a “balloonamentary,” is Twisted, a charming, warmhearted, surefooted, often funny and sometimes deeply moving look at a close-knit community of people who twist and tie balloons into animals and other shapes.

Nominated for an Emerging Visions award, SXSW’s prize for first-time directors, Twisted isn’t about balloons per se, though it does show some amazing latex creations made and displayed at an annual balloon-twisting conference. It’s really about the collaborative culture of the balloon-twisting “family,” and how balloons helped several of the convention regulars transform their lives. “We wanted it to be stories about people,” says Sara. “And we lucked out, because it’s about life and love and death and race and all of those big themes. For us, it’s really a movie about finding your life – following your passion.”

The movie also includes a short animated sequence on the history of balloon-making narrated by Jon Stewart, who the filmmakers were able to book because Sara’s day job is helping to produce the field segments on The Daily Show. “We were trying to find somebody who would have a familiar voice and who would let people know right off the bat that it would be a funny movie,” she says, “so I asked if he’d do it. He said as long as there were no anti-Semitic balloons he was fine with it.”

Another excellent documentary that was looking for a distributor at the festival and seemed likely to find one (the Film Forum in Manhattan had already agreed to show it) was Manufacturing Dissent, an investigation of filmmaker Michael Moore by documentarians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine. The filmmakers decided to make a film about Moore because they admired his work, but they developed a warier stance after being given the runaround by Moore, getting harassed by the handlers who surround him at public appearances, and hearing disturbing stories about how he distorts the truth in his films and how he can be, according even to his one remaining self-professed friend, “a little bit megalomaniac at times, with a tinge of paranoia.”

Melnyk and Caine practice what they preach, generally avoiding cheap shots and innuendo and giving Moore his due at the same time that they question his methods. In the end, they say, the most disturbing thing about Moore’s often glib, self-focused, rabble-rousing style is what its popularity says about the rest of us. “If there were a vibrant political left in the United States, Michael Moore’s milquetoast populism would be laughed at rather than laughed with,” says political journalist and critic David Marsh.

Documentary is usually the strongest category of film at SXSW, but a lot of my favorites this year were fiction. The best was Exiled, a 2006 Hong Kong action thriller scheduled for release in the U.S. this June. Director Johnny To is huge in his own country and deserves to be here, but pretty much the only Americans who get to see his taut, clever, and stylishly soulful films are cinephiles and Hong Kong movie buffs. A cat-and-mouse game between a tight-knit group of gangsters and the boss they are trying to outwit and outrun, Exiled is studded with To’s expertly choreographed gunfights, which are usually held at claustrophobically close range.

Like its older sibling, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, director Judd Apatow’s latest starts with a plot that’s exaggerated for comic effect and stuffs it full of perfectly pitched set pieces about contemporary life that get you humming like a tuning fork. Also like its older sibling, Knocked Up radiates genuine affection for every one of its characters. I don’t want to spoil it for you, since it will be in theaters this June. Just go see it, and tell me if Ben’s “dice move” and the exchange between Debbie and the bouncer don’t make you inordinately happy.

But another fiction film by an established writer-director, Reign Over Me, left me stone cold even though it co-starred one of my favorites, the always excellent Don Cheadle. As in The Upside of Anger, director Mike Binder dresses up a melodramatic screenplay with big-name actors, pairing a gifted artist (Joan Allen in Anger and Cheadle in Reign) with a star who can act if he tries, but doesn’t always bother (Kevin Coster in Anger, Adam Sandler here). Binder, an actor himself, coaxed fine performances out of both Costner and Sandler, but his overwritten scripts squeeze the life out of his films despite the casts’ best efforts. Reign Over Me opens today, probably in way too many theaters.

Young directors worth watching for include Ry Russo-Young, whose first feature, Orphans, is a smart, sad story of a difficult relationship between two sisters that conveys an impressive amount of emotionally complex material without a word of excessive or unnatural-sounding dialogue. Moon Molson’s heartbreaking 20-minute short, Pop Foul, had far more heft than almost any of the full-length films. Shorts are often calling cards for a longer film the director hopes to make on the topic, if he can raise enough money. If that’s what Molson has in mind, I hope someone has the sense to fund him. He clearly has a lot to say about the Siamese-twin diseases of urban poverty and violence and their close cousin, misplaced machismo, and I’d like to hear it all.

Written for TimeOFF

Hot Fuzz

There’s a big difference between riffing on material you love and mimicking something you don’t feel in your bones. It’s the difference between first-class jazz and Muzak. It may also be the reason why Shaun of the Dead soared and Hot Fuzz fizzles out.

Hot Fuzz is the latest from actor/cowriter Simon Pegg, actor Nick Frost, and cowriter/director Edgar Wright, the talented English team behind Shaun. A fanboy mashup of romantic comedy and zombie movie clichés (or, as its creators put it, “a rom zom com”), Shaun was also a clever satire on the stalled rhythms of life in middle-class London, grounding its laughs in authentic-feeling relationships, emotions, and routines. Hot Fuzz sounds similar on the surface. In an interview with The Onion, Wright says: “we pretty much cover the corruption cop genre, the fish-out-of-water cop genre, the serial-killer thriller cop genre, the buddy-action film.” But this time the parts don’t quite mesh.

An amiable Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, Hot Fuzz as hard to dislike as the eager-to-please, childlike cop played by Frost. It works hard to win our love, creating an internally logical world from its mismatched parts, but it can’t breathe more than fitful life into its creation.

The main joke in Fuzz is the disconnect between the mundane routines of a rural police officer’s life and the heroics and pyrotechnics routinely displayed by Hollywood cops. “There is no way you can perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork,” observes Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Pegg) after watching a blow-em-up cop movie with his partner, Danny (Frost).

The fish-out-of-water box gets checked off early as Angel, a hotshot London cop who has alienated his fellow officers by outperforming them, is packed off to the quiet little village of Sandford. His starstruck new partner, Danny, follows him around like a St. Bernard puppy, asking if he’s done any of the things cops do in the movies, like “firing your gun up in the air and going ‘AAARGH!’” But things aren’t as quiet as they seem in Sandford, and Angel is soon coping with more than stray swans.

The film is shot in the picturesque town where Wright grew up, which is portrayed as a place where the biggest concern is what one of the village elders refers to as “the extremely irritating living statue” and one farmer’s accent is so impenetrable it takes two translators to make it intelligible: one to break it down to somewhat less garbled form and another to turn that into the Queen’s English.

Sounds funny, right? And so it is, in spot, but it plays best on paper. Onscreen, the pacing is off, as the filmmakers spend much time spent establishing characters and situations or repeating jokes too fragile to bear the extra weight.

The trouble with writing your film after putting in, as Pegg told The Onion, “a 138-film research period” is that you can end up with a glorified Oscar-night montage. Knowing that the countless chase scenes are takeoffs on the “real” ones isn’t enough to make them funny after a while, especially when they’re too predictable, like the bit where the trim Angel vaults a series of backyard fences as his portly pal lumbers after, crashing right through the first one.

Some of their riffs inject new life into an old tune. When Angel finally warms up to his partner, agreeing to go out to the pub after work, what ensues is a funny, nicely understated spoof of the homosexual subtext underlying buddy movies, as the two go on what amounts to a romantic first date. There’s also a nice variation on that chestnut of running from an impending explosion to dive to safety in the nick of time, like a base runner sliding home.

But even the clever bits are sometimes overused. At first it’s funny when the camera zooms in and music pulses ominously at the least eventful moments, like when Angel throws his coat onto a hook, but after a while that bit gets as annoying as that living statue.

“Riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula,” Wright told The Onion. “When you watch so much of the [TV shows] and the films that you just think you've seen before, it's kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place.”

Maybe that’s where they went wrong. In Shaun of the Dead, it didn’t feel like they were trying.

Abbas Kiarostami

“I don’t like to engage in telling stories,” says Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami in an interview packaged on the DVD of his masterful 2000 feature, The Wind Will Carry Us. “I don’t like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don’t like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt.”

As a result, his films can seem meandering and slow-moving, even a bit boring at first, to attention spans calibrated by Hollywood movies and cable TV. Time and again, in fiction films like Ten, Taste of Cherry, Crimson Gold, and The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami follows a frustrated protagonist as he or she traces and retraces a path through the Iranian landscape. The talk reveals character and conflict that can be literally life-and-death as the lead character interacts with various locals – mostly nonactors playing people much like themselves – in a seemingly random series of encounters.

Even a documentary like ABC Africa feels loosely structured and somewhat repetitive. Bearing witness to the millions of Ugandan orphans who lost parents to their country’s long-running civil war or to AIDS, Kiarostami does the usual interviews with local experts and films evidence of the ravages of the disease, but he and his crew also walk or get driven around a lot, filming as they go, and they frequently linger on groups of kids mugging for the camera, on people singing and dancing, or simply on the signs and scenes they’re passing in the street.

But the rich texture of his settings and the realism of his characters reward those willing to slow down for a walk through one of Kiarostami’s worlds. His work is simple without being simpleminded, always accessible yet never predictable or trite. Kiarostami credits the children he worked with for years early in his career, when he made movies for and about children, with simplifying and clarifying his approach. He has made a conscious effort, he says, to see things as clearly and honestly as children do and to live as fully in the present. And his movies, he thinks, have developed “a kind of childlike playfulness.”

One of the leading directors of the Iranian New Wave film movement that took root around 1970, Kiarostami won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for 1997’s Taste of Cherry and the Jury Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival for 1999’s The Wind Will Carry Us. His films are thoughtfully and intricately constructed. Mixing long shots that situate people in their environments with close-ups that stay on one face for minutes, not cutting away even to show a glimpse of the people or animals we hear offscreen, Kiarostami concentrates our attention like an observant host giving a visitor a tour of his town, always aware of what is happening off screen but always filtering it through the perspective of his protagonist. Slowing down to look through his eyes, we start to tune into the soul of the person or place he’s observing.

In one memorable sequence in the African documentary, Kiarostami and his men venture outside their hotel during one of the nightly blackouts imposed to conserve the scarce electricity in Kampala. As they talk about how isolated it feels to be someplace with no lights whatsoever – not to mention no TV, no radio, no internet, and no other electronic distractions – we peer with them into the oppressive blackness, humbled by its power to shut down almost everything. Then a storm boils up, illuminating the landscape with crackling bolts of daylight-bright lightning.

A gifted photographer with a deep love of nature, Kiarostami has published some of his landscape photography. New York's Museum of Modern Art is holding a major retrospective of his films and photography this spring, and the filmmaker will stop briefly in Princeton during a visit to the U.S. for that event. He’ll join Ivone Margulies, a film historian and critic who has written about his work, for a Thursday afternoon discussion, following a Sunday afternoon screening of 1994’s Through the Olive Trees.

That’s a rare chance for local film lovers to see a movie by a gifted director whose movies seep quietly and unobtrusively under your skin. “I absolutely don’t like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them,” he says on the Wind Will Carry Us DVD. “I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater…. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.”

Written for TimeOFF

Letters from Iwo Jima

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

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

The Fountain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember Siddartha? The Fountain makes it look deep.

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

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

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

The Queen

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

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

The Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends With Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

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

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

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

The Beat that My Heart Skipped

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for TimeOFF

Land of the Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Batman Begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Million Dollar Baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday Night Lights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who knew West Texas football could be so spiritual?