Street Kings

By Elise Nakhnikian

“We’re the police. We can do whatever we want,” says Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) in Street Kings. “Doesn’t matter what happens: It’s how we write it up.”

Reeves’ Tommy (as most of the guys call him) is a 21st-century Dirty Harry. A maverick in conflict with his own department, he acts as judge, jury and executioner to the suspects he tracks down. But in this casually fascistic vigilante fantasy, that implacable drive to hunt people down and kills them makes him not a sociopath but a hero – or, as Tommy’s captain puts it, “the tip of the f--ing spear.”

Street Kings is nonstop action, but most of its tension comes from the interplay between Tommy and his captain, Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), who seems to be on the scene whenever Tommy needs rescuing from the trouble he keeps slipping into.

Reeves’ Excellent Adventure-era California cool has solidified into a mask-like stiffness that fits this character nicely. Tommy is a none-too-bright middle-aged hard guy gone a bit to seed. His stubbly jowls, heavy gait, and constant procession of airplane-sized bottles of vodka mark him as a man in retreat from life – and so do Reeves’ guarded eyes.

Reeves’ underacting is thrown into relief by Whitaker’s overacting. When the captain gets worked up – and he usually does – spit flies out of his mouth, his face glistens with sweat, and Whitaker’s wider eye works overtime to register emotion. The actor is the epitome of soulful peace in that phone ad where he talks about spirituality, but in recent roles like this one and his Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, he looks like he’s about to blow a gasket. You feel his pain, all right, but you don’t want to sit too close to the screen.

Street Kings was cowritten by James Ellroy, who wrote the story it’s based on. It was directed by David Ayer, who wrote Training Day. Both men are LA natives who specialize in hard-guy stories about cops, criminals, and the permeable line between the two. But Street Kings, like Training Day, has a hyperbolic adolescent swagger that undercuts the hard-edged realism it strives for. Several other directors turned down the script – including Spike Lee, which is a pity. His version of Ellroy’s cynically hopeful urban drama might have been a minor classic.

You wouldn’t want to live in Tommy’s world, but it’s a titillating place to visit. There’s a gun or a body in every car trunk and a double-cross around every corner. And there are plenty of colorful characters, like the cocky Sergeant Clady (the nicely acerbic Jay Mohr) and the enigmatic Terence Washington, Tommy’s former partner. Terry Crews, who played President Comacho in Mike Judge’s underappreciated Idiocracy, plays Washington with just the right amount of gravity - and a face that would fit right in on Mount Rushmore.

There are a couple of token love interests – most notably Washington’s babelicious wife, played by the always riveting Naomie Harris – but the only real love on display is the bond that forms between brothers in blue.

There’s no love lost between Tommy and the criminals he chases. He tracks one down by getting him snarled up in barbed wire – and leaves him there, howling in pain, after questioning him. That kind of police work looks awfully ugly. But, according to Street Kings, it has to be done – to “keep the animals at bay,” as Captain Wander puts it.

When the first of the Dirty Harry movies trumpeted that message, a lot of people dismissed it as fascist propaganda. But we’re in the age of Dexter now, and a movie like this raises barely a peep of protest.

Have our streets become that much more violent over the past 30 years? Or are we being brainwashed by the politics of fear?

Leatherheads

By Elise Nakhnikian

“I liked George Clooney’s smile,” the woman in the bathroom told her friend. “And I liked the relationship between him and Renée Zellweger. But I kept looking over and seeing Earl asleep.”

I’m with Earl. I didn’t buy the relationship between aging jock/con man Dodge Connelly (Clooney) and perky newsgal Lexie Littleton (Zellweger) in Leatherheads for a nanosecond. And when they started twitching and twinkling at one another in a strenuous effort to generate sparks, even Clooney’s piano key smile looked forced.

Leatherheads starts with the Universal logo from Hollywood’s golden age of the late 1920s and ‘30s. That’s a wink from director Clooney, who did such an elegant job of evoking the ‘50s in Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s a pledge that his latest movie will capture the stardust from those long-ago years, like some kind of cinematic Hubble Telescope, but this time he can’t keep his promise.

Set in 1925 (and how), Leatherheads is about the birth of professional football – well, sort of. It actually bears the same relationship to pro football as The Bad News Bears does to Little League: the sport is just the backdrop for a comic drama. But that’s not a fair comparison, since Leatherheads makes The Bad News Bears look like Shakespeare.

It’s impossible not to think of other films as you watch this one – and to wish you were watching them instead. A magpie of a movie, Leatherheads stuffs its nest with shards of other films: the romantic triangle in Bull Durham, the tough-cookie newsgal in His Girl Friday, the sepia-toned look of O Brother Where Art Thou, and so on. But borrowing so obviously was a mistake, since this movie suffers in comparison to every one that it pilfers. It even made me miss the flawlessly executed visual style of O Brother, itself a riff played on better films from the 30s that worked much better as a soundtrack than it did as a movie.

You can tell by their comic-book names how deep the characterizations of Lexie and Dodge are – and they’re two of the three main characters. Imagine how stunningly little is done with minor characters like the sadly wasted sports reporter (now there’s a fresh idea), who’s played by the sadly wasted Stephen Root.

The other main character is Carter Rutherford (nicely played by John Krasinski of The Office), who is all-American to the point of parody. A war hero and a football star, Carter draws far bigger crowds to his college games than Dodge’s scruffy professional team, the Duluth Bulldogs, can attract. So Dodge recruits Carter to play for the Bulldogs, figuring the publicity will draw the crowds needed to keep his team – and the sport as a whole – alive.

Will it or won’t it? I couldn’t care less, yet that’s pretty much the plot. Well, that and the inevitable love story, which plays out as a triangle between Dodge, Carter, and Lexie, whose Chicago paper assigns her to do a story on Carter.

Zellweger plays another of her patented spunky, smiling-through-her-tears, game little gals next door. She’s Jean Arthur all over again, that one, but this time she’s trying to play Roz Russell in His Girl Friday, and she just doesn’t have the vinegar or the salt – or the chemistry with her costar. When those two woo, Zellweger pruning up her kewpie doll lips while Clooney twitches his in an exaggerated pantomime of desire, you just feel sorry for them both.

Truth be told, Dodge seems a lot more interested in Carter. Homoerotic undertones are a cliché of sports movies, but they’re highlighted in this one, by the excess of male bonding over fistfights and a climactic football game that looks more like mud wrestling.

The pace is choppy, starting in a jerky setup-punchline mode and degenerating into shapelessness. It’s all strenuously underscored by Randy Newman’s self-consciously, often ironically, perky score, which leans on period pieces like “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye,” lest we forget for a moment that we’re in the ‘20s.

Things like the headlines twirling as papers come off the press in some of the way-too-many montages only make you conscious of how hard Clooney is trying to evoke the movies of the ‘30s. The joy of those movies came largely from their inventiveness and wit and the trust their makers had in the audience’s intelligence. Trying to revive those qualities by recreating now-cliched scenes like a speakeasy raid and a frenetic press conference, complete with popping flashbulbs, is like trying to create life by reanimating a corpse.

The dialogue – the crown jewel of those ‘30s comedies – lurches to life for a moment here or there, mostly when Dodge and Lexie are trading insults. But for the most part it’s either pedestrian or labored.

The camera is lumbering too, coming in tight to magnify the mugging rather than hanging back far enough to focus on relationships. And the pacing is way too slow. The great screwball comedies moved twice as fast – and that was before our attention spans had been so famously amped up.

Even the story’s internal timeline is off. If Carter was a WWI hero, why is he a fresh-faced undergraduate seven years after the war has ended? How do we go so fast from pro football being written off to sellout crowds? How did all those ads and posters with Carter’s face on them get produced so soon after he goes pro?

But hey, if Clooney doesn’t care, why should we?

Stop-Loss

By Elise Nakhnikian

Stop-Loss is a flare sent out on behalf of all the soldiers who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s partly a tribute, partly a protest, and partly a promise to never forget, either the individuals who died or what those who survived experienced. It also acknowledges the price paid by families and girlfriends when soldiers are away, when they come home, and when they don’t.

Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) as always been an upright soldier, but he rebels against the Army when he’s told he must sign up for a second tour of duty. The “stop-loss” policy that keeps him from going home is a loophole in the armed forces’ contracts that lets the government ensure that it will have the people it wants to fight overseas without reinstituting the draft. According to a title card at the end of the movie, it has been used on 81,000 of the 650,000 troops to serve in Afghanistan or Iran since 2001. Stop-Loss wants us all to feel as outraged as Brandon does when he first learns about it.

Stop-Loss has some serious flaws. The filmmakers sometimes wander off on tangents, making Brandon’s journey feel more like a greatest hits – or misses – tour of the Iraq war’s consequences than one man’s story. They wrap it all in a loose-fitting road-trip cloak and give Brandon a problematic love interest, Michelle (Abbie Cornish), leaving the relationship unresolved at the end. And some of the characters are so underwritten that even fine actors like Ciarán Hinds (as Brandon’s father) and Mamie Gummer (as his friend Tommy’s wife) barely register. But it carries out its larger mission, delivering a love letter from America to all those kids who’ve lost their limbs, their lives, or their peace of mind in Iraq.

This is the first non-documentary American film about our post-9/11 presence in Iraq that has the heft and urgency of truth. Last year’s lugubrious In the Valley of Elah and talky Lions for Lambs were preachy fables, weighted down by their sense of self-importance, but Stop-Loss is as unpretentious as its blue-collar characters. When director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) nudges you, it’s not to deliver a moral. It’s to say something plain and true, like: “Look at what these guys have been through,” or “Look at how much they love each other,” or “Hey, guys. I know you think we don’t care, but some of us really appreciate what you have done.”

Peirce and her cowriter Mark Richard, an award-winning author of literary fiction, always keep things on a human scale. They neither lionize nor demonize Brandon and his friends, and they never judge what they do. They just look on sympathetically as these very young men mess up, joke around, and commit casual acts of heroism. That humanity, along with their fierce loyalty to one another, makes it easy to relate to them even when PTSD makes them do scary stuff.

Phillippe is particularly touching, manning up to make Brandon believable as a natural leader, even a “true Texas hero,” as a smarmy senator calls him. So are Linda Edmond as Brandon’s mother and Victor Rasuk as Rico Rodriguez, a soldier in Brandon’s unit.

Interviews Peirce did before writing the script contribute to the sense of realism. A lot of the things her characters do come from the stories soldiers told her about themselves, like when Tommy takes his unopened wedding presents to a homemade shooting range and blasts them full of holes, after his new wife kicks him out. And having a brother who served in Iraq put Pierce in touch with the family members’ feelings. “My own mother would call crying about not knowing what's happening to her son,” she told Rotten Tomatoes.

Peirce also watched a lot of videos soldiers shot in Iraq, modeling the “home videos” that stud her movie on them. Faked amateur video footage can easily feel like a cliché in a mainstream movie, but she uses the device sparingly and well, cutting to the footage for just a few seconds here and there to provide context to the soldiers’ lives in the U.S.

She and her cinematographer, the great Chris Menges, also capture some powerful images in the “present-day” shots. When Brandon visits Rico at a military hospital, the first thing you notice is how badly he is hurt, with two limbs truncated and half his face – including both eyes – half-melted by fire. Next you focus on his admirable good cheer and lack of self-pity.

Then his visitors leave and the camera stays on Rico as he gets back into bed, his blasted features settling into an expression of patient resignation that is, you sense, his new true face.

The 2008 Orphan Film Symposium: Preserving Our Cultural Past

When I first read about orphan films, in an email newsletter from Thom Powers, what caught my eye was not so much the orphans as their foster dad. Dan Streible was a good friend of mine in film school but we’d lost touch in recent years. He was teaching film history in South Carolina last I knew, but he’s in the city now, teaching in NYU’s cinema studies department – and he brought his orphan film symposium with him.

Orphans are neglected films, most of which have no copyright pending. That covers a tremendous amount of ground, of course, and that seems to be the point: Dan and his fellow “orphanistas” find and preserve newsreels, educational and propaganda films, home movies by gifted amateurs, personal movies too quirky or short to ever be shown commercially, and more. They love movies, but they're also working the same vein as the historians who archive old diaries, newspapers, and other documents of daily life: They’re studying shards from our cultural past.

Just My Imagination: America, America

There’s something about the way we watch movies, all that dreaming in the dark, that gives them a pipeline to the subconscious. You never know when something – a mood, a moment, a gesture, a line – will jump that screen/brain membrane to tattoo itself onto the insides of your eyelids.

It could be a great movie, an okay one, a really bad one. It could even be a movie you’ve never seen.

That’s how it is for me and America America. When I first read that Elia Kazan had made a movie about a Greek and an Armenian who emigrate to this country from Turkey around the turn of the last century, a ghost of that story moved into some empty attic in my brain. In the years since, I’ve seen stills from America America, read what I could find about it, and hung a beautiful Polish poster of it in my living room. I still haven’t seen it, but I think about it far more than I think about hundreds of movies I have seen.

My Armenian great-grandfather, the family patriarch, sent my father’s family to this land of opportunity when Dad was 13. The old man wanted my father, who he doted on, to make something of himself, and he probably would have been pleased at the result: Dad got a good education, became a professor, and made a comfortable living doing work that he loved. But those gains came at a price, a severing of the past that must still ache for Dad sometimes like a phantom limb.

One summer, we were walking on the beach when he stopped in his tracks. “It’s strange to have to talk to my children in English,” he said. Suddenly I saw my childhood from his point of view. How odd it must have felt to watch his thoroughly American kids experience things he never had, to realize how foreign the tastes and sounds and experiences of his own childhood were to us.

My father never liked to talk about his past, and so, more than his boyhood culture or his family’s history, his legacy to me was the aching in his phantom limb, that immigrant’s sense of isolation.

I tried forging my own connections to what Dad called “the old country” in college, studying Armenian language and history, but academic lectures left me cold. I got more from art: Arshile Gorky’s paintings of his mother, Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat, Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate, and the America America of my imagination.

Kazan was the kind of artist who I trusted to help me understand the world that both his and my father had come from. A co-founder of the Group Theater, which in turn launched the Method Acting revolution, Kazan was a great director of actors. The best of his work brims with energy, humor, and the resonant moments that can flow from even a hackneyed script when it’s acted with naked emotional honesty. And when he worked with writers like Budd Schulberg and Tennessee Williams, Kazan got close to greatness.

He also had a talent for capturing the feel of a particular place and time. On the Waterfront tackled corruption on the docks of New York City. Panic in the Street was a breakneck race through New Orleans, its plot a thin excuse to introduce a range of vivid, authentic-feeling characters and locations. A Face in the Crowd, a funny, full-blooded dissection of TV’s power to create demagogues, was so prescient in its understanding of that new medium that audiences pretty much tuned it out when it was released in 1956.

America America was Kazan’s most autobiographical film, one of the few he wrote as well as directed. It was also his favorite (“I don’t think it’s my best film,” he said. “It’s my favorite film.”) He based the story on the life of his Uncle Joe, an opportunist who came to this country on his own as a young man, showing the hardships that had turned a too-trusting boy into a too-tough adult.

“More than any of his films it achieves that simple and rather artless realism that was at the heart of his aesthetic,” wrote Richard Schickel in his biography of Kazan. But Kazan was after more than just realism. By emphasizing the essential elements of his uncle’s story while faithfully recreating a specific place and time, he said, he was aiming for “realism raised to the point of legend.”

Realism raised to the point of legend. I like that phrase. That’s a good description of the concentrated, complicated sense of melancholy I feel when I look at the mournful young man on my Polish movie poster. Since I don’t read Polish, the words across his face don’t get in the way of imagining the story behind that ineffably sad face. Even the movie itself doesn’t get in the way, since I haven’t seen it.

According to Wikipedia, America America has been on video since 1994, but it’s not easy to find. It was never in a video store when I’ve looked for it, you can’t rent it through Netflix, and I’ve never come across it in a revival theater or on late-night TV. But it’s beginning to feel a little perverse not to have seen it.

So I plan to be there next Wednesday, when it will be screened for a Princeton University film class. It’s time to see how the real thing compares to my dream.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

By Elise Nakhnikian

Just a couple weeks ago I was writing about Fool’s Gold, complaining that they don’t make romantic comedies like they used to any more. So I’m grateful to the estimable Miss Pettigrew, who showed up last weekend in a lovely blue scarf. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

When we first meet Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand), things aren’t going her way at all. A failed governess, she’s unemployed and slipping quietly into desperate destitution when she grabs at one last chance, reporting to work for Delysia LaFosse (Amy Adams).

Delysia is a small-time singer and aspiring actress with big-time ambitions. Like Miss Pettigrew, she teeters on the brink of a crisis: She can’t decide whether to follow her heart or her head. She needs Miss Pettigrew to help her choose between the three men she’s juggling, each of whom represents a very different career path. Phil, the callow young producer and playboy (the boyishly beautiful Tom Payne), can get Delysia the starring part she wants in a West End play. Nick (Mark Strong, who could be Andy Garcia’s younger brother), the slick operator who owns the nightclub where she sings – not to mention the swanky apartment where she lives –can give her anything but love. And her piano player Michael (the soulful Lee Pace) wants to be her accompanist for life.

Of course, we know whose arms Miss Pettigrew will deliver her into, but it’s fun to watch them get there, as what starts out like a French farce, complete with slamming bedroom doors, turns into a more standard romance.

But in the end, this cheery fable is less about any of Delysia’s men than it is about the mutually empowering friendship developed by the two women over the course of one very full day. Sensible, loyal, and infinitely resourceful, Miss Pettigrew is just the “personal secretary” Delysia needs. For her part, Delysia makes her nearly invisible friend visible, first taking her advice and then getting her out of her drab brown clothes and into some very pretty things, starting with that beautiful scarf.

Over the course of her frenetic day with Delysia, Miss Pettigrew acquires a suitor of her own, a surprisingly romantic Ciarán Hinds. It’s a treat to watch this decidedly middle-aged, unglamorous pair charm each other – and us.

With her somewhat horsey, naturally lined face and doughy arms and ankles, McDormand was born to play aging girls next door like Miss Pettigrew or Fargo’s Marge, women whose beauty reveals itself only as you grow to love them. McDormand’s heroines ooze common sense and empathy. But those comforting maternal facades hide rich, if largely untapped, veins of mischief.

Adams’ frothy flirtatiousness glitters prettily in the solid setting of McDormand’s sanity. Ever since she stole the show as a naïve but loveable young wife in Junebug, the actress has specialized in characters brimming with open-hearted optimism, and Delysia is no exception.

I think Adams would have reminded me of Carole Lombard even if the script had not so often name-checked the earlier actress, since she channels Lombard’s ditzy but good-hearted charm as well as her delicate beauty. But there’s also a lot of Betty Boop in Adams, who’s earthier than Lombard and who lacks the hysterical edge that could make Lombard seem more infantile than madcap.

It’s a tribute to Miss Pettigrew that it makes you think about the comediennes of the 1930s and ‘40s. That’s probably thanks in part to the fact that the book it was based on was published in 1938. Director Bharat Nalluri and screenwriters David Magee (Finding Neverland) and Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) also deserve credit for maintaining the brisk pace of those fast-talking farces, their sunny faith in human nature, and their satisfying way of giving everyone just what he or she deserves in the end. And costume designer Michael O’Connor and production designer Sarah Greenwood did an excellent job of finding or creating gorgeous pre-war clothes and settings, though the extras in the party scene were somewhat less convincing than the canapes.

The period touches feel a little forced at times – the actors sometimes talk too fast, as if just speeding up the dialogue would make it funnier, and the words themselves can be a bit clayfooted, more earnest and less witty than the best of the screwball scripts. In fact, there are few if any great lines or truly memorable moments in Miss Pettigrew.

But it’s hardly fair to compare this to the best of the screwball comedies, which rank among the very best American movies ever made. Miss Pettigrew may not be great, but it is delightful. In years to come, when I get frustrated by the quality of the romantic comedies in theaters, I can easily imagine turning to this one for another fine evening’s entertainment.

The Counterfeiters

By Elise Nakhnikian

For decades, your standard Nazi movie featured SS officers so evil they might have goose-stepped out of the pages of EC Comics. We probably needed that catharsis, given the horror and extent of the Holocaust, but movies like that avoid hard questions about human nature, flattering viewers by assuring us that we’d all have been good guys if we’d had the bad luck to be caught in that time and place.

We seem to be ready now to face more complicated truths about what led to the Holocaust and what people did to survive it. A recent New York Times article said a popular graphic novel is being used in German classrooms to teach kids about WWII. The novel looks at choices made by regular citizens that either helped or hindered the Nazi agenda, “instances where ordinary individuals — farmers, shopkeepers, soldiers, prison guards, even camp inmates — faced dilemmas, acted selfishly or ambiguously: showed themselves to be human.”

Movies seem to be going down the same path. 2005’s Downfall, a German production based on a German book, looked at the fanatic loyalty Hitler inspired in so many of his countrymen. Last year’s Black Book, by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, was a dry-eyed tale of compromises made by a Jewish beauty who survives the war by passing for Christian in occupied Holland. And The Counterfeiters, another German production based on a nonfiction book and this year’s Oscar winner for best foreign film, is about what writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky calls “one of the most interesting aspects of the concentration camp phenomenon: the moral plight of the prisoners.”

A darker cousin to The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Counterfeiters tells the true story of a group of Jews brought from other camps to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they carried out the largest counterfeiting operation ever conducted, mass-producing first the British pound, then the American dollar. (The Nazis planned to flood both economies with excess bills.)

The movie starts with a shot of the ocean on a gray day when the sea merges almost seamlessly with the sky, the horizon barely perceptible. It’s a nice visual metaphor for the story’s moral landscape, where the only choices offered are usually between a terrible option and an even worse one, and where people rarely have the luxury of being sure that they are doing the right thing.

Unless they’re Adolf Burger. Burger wrote The Devil's Workshop, the book the film is based on, and he plays a prominent role in the movie, functioning as half the group’s conscience. Burger (August Diehl) and his wife were arrested and sent to the camps for printing anti-Nazi flyers and false identification papers for Jews eager to escape. To him, “the reason we’re printers is to print the truth,” and that truth is literally worth dying for (his wife perished in Auschwitz). So he persistently sabotages the Nazis’ plans, ruining plates that are meticulously created by master printer Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics).

It may be Burger’s book, but it’s Sorowitsch’s movie. Based on real-life counterfeiting genius Salomon Smolianoff, the gimlet-eyed hard guy seems at first like an amoral opportunist. But the camera that sticks to him like a faithful dog slowly reveals his soft side. It also shows him to be a natural leader, inspiring and protecting his men.

Sorowitsch was a criminal before the war, printing fake money and fake IDs just to make a buck. The flip side of the group’s conscience, he still lives by a criminal’s code of honor, doing what it takes to protect himself and his men. That means he’s torn between going along with the Nazis and covering for Burger’s sabotage. After all, as he warns one of the other men: “One never squeals on one’s mates.”

Sorowitsch and his men are nurtured, even pampered when they do what they’re told, assigned to a “golden cage” with mattresses, pillows, sufficient food, warm showers, and even luxuries like records and a ping-pong table. Better yet, the guards are under order to leave them alone.

But those privileges can always be revoked, and the penalty for being caught defying orders is death. The constant fear of discovery keeps the hum of danger in the air, making the men lash out at each other at times.

A few bits, like the subplot about Sorowitsch’s surrogate son and a montage of obtuse remarks lobbed at Sorowitsch by the camp commander’s clueless wife, strain too hard to create an effect, but nearly every scene lands with the clarity and emotional impact of a seminal memory. Naturalistic lighting and a camera that acts as an unobtrusive witness help keep you firmly grounded in Sorowitsch’s world, while chilling glimpses and sound bites keep him – and us – from ever forgetting what’s going on in the camp outside.

The Counterfeiters makes you wonder how it might feel to be trapped in a place like that – and whether you’d have enough courage and faith to buck the system.

Short Stories

By Elise Nakhnikian

Now that “independent” films often cost nearly as much, feel nearly as slick, and grab nearly as many headlines as their mainstream cousins, it can take a little looking to find a movie that reflects one artist’s sensibility -- or explores the medium in creative ways. A good place to start is with the Black Maria Film Festival, a grab bag of some of the best short films released last year.

Run out of Jersey City, the festival is named for the movie studio Thomas Edison built on the grounds of his West Orange laboratory in 1892. Like Edison’s Black Maria, this one specializes in short, often experimental films.

The quality of the films is very high, says Princeton University professor Su Friedrich, who will screen offerings from the festival on March 5. Friedrich has admired the Black Maria festival for most of its 27 years, and festival director John Columbus and his jurors return the compliment, having selecting some of her films to show in the past. “The jurors are all people who are connected to serious institutions – places like the Sundance Channel and the National Gallery of Art Film Department – so they see a lot of film,” says Friedrich. “They’re a discerning jury.”

This year’s jury culled through about 700 selections to come up with a slate of 58.

Unlike other film festivals, the Black Maria doesn’t screen its own selections. Instead, Columbus makes all the movies available on DVD and invites anyone who wants to host the festival to do so at a place and time of their convenience, either screening all 58 films or choosing among them. As a result, many versions of the Black Maria Film Festival play all over the nation, sometimes even simultaneously. “It’s a traveling festival, democratic and free-form,” says Friedrich. “I don’t know of anyone else who does that.”

For Princeton’s version of the festival, Friedrich chose a dozen films ranging from 2 to 12 minutes in length. Her lineup includes two of the festival’s four grand prize winners as well as several that won jury choice awards or citations.

“Part of the excitement for me is getting to see the work of newer, unknown filmmakers,” she says. “There are a number of better known filmmakers on the list that I didn’t include, because part of the point of a festival is to introduce the public to new work.

“The first time I brought it here was three years ago,” she adds. “There were a number of pieces we showed that year that I purchased for the school to use in the classroom – films that I wasn’t aware of before that I really liked.”

She also chose a few works by established filmmakers this year, people like Marie Losier and experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon. Solomon often manipulates his film directly, “hand processing it and scratching it – very visceral filmmaking,” she says. “This is a departure for him because he’s apparently working from video game images for the first time.”

Friedrich likes the fact that the festival’s jurors, like her, are interested in all types of films. “They don’t just focus on experimental or documentary or narrative or animation – they give awards in all those categories.”

About half of Friedrich’s selections are animated films. “Some are personal or poetic or humorous,” she says. “One is political, about the war in Iraq, and one is a diary about the war in Vietnam. There are several narrative films. And there’s a 12-minute documentary by a filmmaker named Tony Buba from Braddock, Pennsylvania. He’s been doing documentaries about that same town for years. It’s an interesting continuation of a theme.”

Friedrich acknowledges that many people make short movies only as “a kind of exercise or calling card for doing a feature,” but short is the length of choice for most of the artists represented here. “I like to show my students short works, because that’s mostly what they’re making in class,” she says. “It’s good for them to see what’s possible in a short film – to see that it’s a worthwhile challenge to get something good in five minutes rather than to get something bad in 45.”

Diary of the Dead

By Elise Nakhnikian

In one of those weird plot echoes that often reverberate in Hollywood, two horror films now showing -- Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead -- go for realistic chills by posing as documentaries, rough assemblages of often shaky footage taken by young adults who clung to their camcorders as their worlds cave in around them.

We’ve long since lost the shock of the new that generated so much buzz for The Blair Witch Project, the granddaddy of these mock-shock-docs. But Diary writer-director George Romero doesn’t want to just mirror the YouTube generation’s obsession with documenting their lives: He wants to comment on it. The topic of his film is the information overload that, he argues, has lulled nearly all of us into a semi-zombified state of passive nonresistance.

If that sounds like a lot for a zombie movie to bite off, you don’t know Romero, whose Night of the Living Dead kicked off a whole genre in 1968. Romero puts zombies in his movies for the same reason Deb (Michelle Morgan), the level-headed student who edit her dead boyfriend’s footage to create the film-within-a-film in Diary, sometimes adds music to the soundtrack – they want to get our attention. “I’m hoping to scare you ... so that maybe you’ll wake up,” says Deb.

Just as Godzilla was birthed by the Japanese experience with the atom bomb in WWII, Romero’s zombies bring us news about how we’re destroying ourselves and each other, serving their gore with a generous side order of metaphor. That news changes with every decade, giving us what the director, in a recent interview with the New York Times, called “snapshots of North America at a particular moment.”

This time around, Romero is mainly interested in how we’re affected by the barrage of media we’re constantly exposed to – and, increasingly, producing ourselves. He wants to explore the way that holding a camera turns us into passive observers rather than participants, even when we’re filming our own lives. And he wants to look at the way all the violence we’re exposed to has desensitized us to death.

All true, no doubt, but these aren’t blindingly new insights, so a little of this kind of talk would have gone a long way. After the second or third time Deb says: “if it isn’t on camera, it’s like it never happened, right?” you’re practically rooting for a zombie to shamble over and shut her up already.

But try telling that to Romero. Like an anxious mom with medicine to dispense, he keeps tapping your shoulder and handing you yet another dose of earnest social commentary. You know he means well. You may even think he’s right. Still, it’s a real buzz kill.

That’s not to say that Romero has lost his sense of humor or his talent for putting us right inside a scene, with his handheld cameras and his guy-next-door feel for how regular people talk.

The movie starts on a light foot, with Deb’s boyfriend, film student Jason (Joshua Close), making a mummy movie in a dark woods that could be straight out of one of Romero’s own movies. Romero good-naturedly spoofs his own work as the lead actress complains about the treatment of female victims, Jason pontificates about making “a horror movie with an underlying thread of social satire,” and Deb, the voiceover of reason, informs us that Jason really wants to make documentaries.

Then the zombies stumble back to undeath and we’re off. Jason, Deb, a disillusioned retired professor of Jason’s, and a handful of his fellow film students commandeer what looks like a film school van and head off in search of a safe haven in the fast-spreading chaos. We’re along for the ride, watching it all unfold through a combination of Jason’s omnipresent lens and the footage he gathers from sources like Youtube, MySpace and the surveillance cameras he finds everywhere.

Ironically, Romero creates the very condition of passive semi-engagement that his movie critiques. I never rooted for any particular person to survive, aside from Deb and a feisty Amish farmer the group encounters on the road. Everyone else was so underdeveloped I barely learned their names before they were gone.

Of course you want the humans to prevail and the zombies to die, preferably in showy and imaginative ways – like the one whose brain fizzes into oblivion when acid eats through his skull. But that generates about as much emotional investment as you’d get from playing a video game, along with a similar pattern of long patches of low-level tension dotted with adrenaline spikes.

Romero may have outsmarted himself this time, going so meta he lost sight of the main storyline. After all the mini-lectures were over, Diary of the Dead taught me one new thing: Too much talk about how filming something deadens its impact can really deaden a movie’s impact.

Fool's Gold

By Elise Nakhnikian

Unlike that perpetually intense ping-pong player in the Movie Fone ad, I’m usually in the mood for just about any kind of movie. But lately, after a long run of deep-dish year-end art-house movies, I’ve been longing for a light romantic comedy.

So when I settled in for Fool’s Gold, diet Coke and popcorn in hand, I was hoping against hope (I’d seen the trailer) to be transported to that rom-com fantasy island where the lead characters are gorgeous, the sidekicks are a hoot, the endings are happy, and the dialogue crackles with barely sublimated sexual attraction.

But the aptly named Fool’s Gold, it turns out, isn’t a romantic comedy at all. A herky-jerky action-adventure story, it uses a romance run aground as the MacGuffin to set the overstuffed plot in motion, then keeps throwing in distractions in a desperate attempt to maintain a brisk pace.

Screenwriters John Claflin and Daniel Zelman, who previously collaborated on the sequel to Anaconda and They Nest, a made-for-TV horror movie, appear to have conceived of Fool’s Gold as an update of The Palm Beach Story, a Preston Sturges screwball comedy. So far, so good; if you’re going to steal, by all means steal from the best. But Claflin, Zelman, and director Andy Tennant (Fools Rush In, Hitch) dumb the story down at every turn, substituting character-based humor and witty dialogue with violent slapstick and making the search for money the movie’s subject, not its subtext.

The actors playing all the major characters are also a lot more clayfooted than those in the 1942 release. The wife who’s divorcing a husband she still loves because he’s broke was a tartly enchanting creature, as played by Claudette Colbert in Palm Beach, but Kate Hudson’s Tess seems merely peevish. The rich man the wife hooks up with is a comically effete milquetoast in the original, but Nigel Honeycutt, his counterpart in Fool's Gold is given far too much gravitas by an actorly Donald Sutherland, who looks about as comfortable with a stiff upper lip as he would in a rainbow-colored Afro. He can’t even quite make the man’s speech sound human, resorting at one point to the Yoda-esque query: “Married, are you getting?”

As for the husband, the steak tartare of Joel McCrea has been traded for the McDonald’s all-beef patty of Matthew McConaughey. The actor takes off his shirt every few minutes, as if hoping that the sight of his tanned and toned flesh will distract us his surprising dearth of charisma -- not to mention chemistry with his costar.

Tess gets a job on Nigel’s yacht and McConaughey’s Finn follows her there. Setting up and then playing out the estranged couple’s cat and mouse courtship as they play tourist in the land of the rich is the sum total of The Palm Beach Story, whose characters are slyly named Tom and Gerry – and it’s more than enough to keep us entertained.

But Fool’s Gold is as flatflooted as Palm Beach is fleet. While the people in Palm Beach are constantly talking, inserting innuendoes at every turn, Fool’s Gold alternates expository speeches with long stretches of near-wordless action. As if they knew their dialogue needed propping up, the filmmakers pile on too many subplots, too many guns, and too much violence, even a couple of deaths. There are also boy toys galore: fishing boats, a sleek yacht, jet skis, a helicopter, a sea plane – and, of course, Hudson and a juicy Alexis Dziena in skimpy swimsuits and tight diving suits.

Hudson looks good, all right, and so does McConaughey, but together they have all the appeal of oatmeal. We’re supposed to think they had a world-class sex life – Tess is always talking about it. But it’s hard to imagine, since they look and act like brother and sister, two hard-bodied members of some lost Kennedy-esque clan.

In the great screwball comedies, the couples always fought right up until the moment when they got together. But their mostly verbal swordplay was a game they both enjoyed – and a sign of how well matched they were. They may have sometimes doubted that they should be together, but the audience never did.

When Hudson slugs McConaughey, you just wonder why one of them doesn’t take out a restraining order already and put us all out of our misery.

Etgar Keret: Whole Worlds in a Handful of Pages

Fifteen minutes into our interview, Etgar Keret is apologizing again. He is, he explains, doing last-minute preparation for a trip to the States. “Would you mind – could you call me back in half an hour?” he asks. “My wife needs some help.”

Keret may be one of the most critically acclaimed writers in Israel, but he seems refreshingly free of ego bloat. He’s also exceedingly considerate – which, he says, is part of the reason why he loves to write fiction. “If you’re a considerate person, whenever you want to do something in life, you think about how it will affect other people,” he says. “But you can break all the windows in your fictional house, you can burn the walls down, and nobody gets hurt. If you’re rude to your characters, they don’t get hurt because they don’t exist.

"So you can connect to your inner emotions and fears – all those things that you don’t want to express because you don’t want to hurt people or get in trouble, you just want to be nice.”

Keret's short stories generally crystallize one thing – an emotion, a certain type of relationship or personality, a stage of life – while reverberating with many other echoes. Part of a seriocomic Jewish tradition that includes S.J. Perelman, the Marx Brothers, and Woody Allen, he punctures hypocrisy, pomposity, and other human weaknesses without wagging fingers. Funny, poignant, wildly imaginative, and shot through with surrealistic absurdism, his stories are intelligent but never weighty, dark but never depressing. The best contain whole worlds in a handful of pages.

One of the most popular living writers in Israel and the only Israeli author to have been published in the Palestinian Authority since the beginning of the latest intifada, Keret also has plenty of fans abroad. He’s been featured in magazines like The Believer and Tikkun and invited to contribute to papers like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian. “I’m much more successful in the US than I ever expected to be,” he says. “As a foreign writer who writes short fiction, I’m not playing in the main court.”

His stories have also made it onto the global film circuit. Wristcutters: A Love Story, a smart, English-language black comedy based on a Keret novella, hit a string of film festivals before landing in a few U.S. and U.K. theaters last year.

Foreign publications often ask Keret to write about the political situation in Israel. He finds those requests “completely legitimate” – and, at the same time, a little absurd. “I think it’s strange that people think writers should have some kind of answer,” he says. “In my mind, people who write are not usually very good at dealing with reality in the first place. I always say, if people ask me for a recipe for cheesecake, I’m happy to give them one, but they may find a better recipe on the Internet.

“Usually when I write about a political situation, I don’t want to write from this reductive point of view that says: ‘This is the way that we should go to lead us to the Promised Land.’ I like to be in a slightly more Socratic position, trying to challenge existing views or to show things in a different light. What you usually do in fiction is the opposite of simplifying the situation. You write about ambiguity, you write about character, you write about this wonderful life that is so difficult to contain and to articulate.”

Keret works in many media, writing children’s books, graphic novels, plays, screenplays, TV shows, and skits for a popular TV comedy he calls “kind of the Israeli equivalent of Saturday Night Live.” He has won significant awards as a filmmaker, most recently sharing the prize for best first feature at last year’s Cannes Film Festival with his wife, writer Shira Geffen. The two (pictured above) won for Jellyfish, a surrealistic film written by Geffen and co-directed by Geffen and Keret.

“I love experimenting with other mediums and genres,” he says. “The thing I am mostly interested in is basically telling stories. The more I shift between the mediums, the more I learn about storytelling, and many times I can transport strategies from one medium to the other. It’s kind of like a continuous education: you learn new things, and you experiment with them. For example, I’ve learned from working with film to look at a story I’m writing in terms of not just how it occurs in my head but thinking about mise en scene and other things outside the character’s reality.

But short stories – especially very short stories – are “always the home base for me,” he says. “You can write from so many places – from your brain or your heart – and I always say I write from my gut,” he adds. “And this kind of instinctive writing, it’s very difficult to write long fiction from it. My stories are like explosions, and it’s very difficult to explode slowly.

“I think basically for me, writing is an act of losing control. When you write short fiction, you don’t hold back; you just try to go as hard and as fast as you can. You’re trying to go somewhere, and you don’t know where that place is.”

So how does he know when he’s gotten there? “For me, writing is a place of honesty and sincerity, and it is always easy to know when I’m not honest. Sometimes I see I am just trying to look smart or trying to impress people or whatever. The moment I know that is it sincere, the only thing I ask myself is if it is interesting. Sometimes it can be very sincere and very boring.”

While he hasn’t been consciously influenced by any other writers since Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut inspired him to write his first story, during his miserable obligatory stint in the Israeli Army, Keret feels a kinship with contemporaries like George Saunders, Miranda July, and Nathan Englander. “I really love their stories,” he says. “I feel like they’re the same species as mine, the same kind of animal – more at the core than in the style.”

That sense of kinship, he adds, is “a wonderful thing. As a human being, you don’t want to be lonely. You don’t want your stories to be lonely either. You want them to have some friends out there.”

At 40, Keret has been writing steadily for about two decades. “I’m developing as a writer as I’m developing as a human being: I don’t necessarily think I’m becoming a better human being, and I don’t think I’m becoming a better writer,” he says.

“It’s like looking at yourself in a photo album when you were ten years younger. For some people, it would be very clear that these were the good years or the bad years, but I think for most people, you think of some things you miss from those years and some things that you have now that are better – like your family. So I don’t think I get better; I think I just change.”

How She Move

By Elise Nakhnikian

Unlike most of the heroes and heroines of dance-contest movies, Raya Green does not dream of becoming a dancer. In fact Raya (Rutina Wesley) doesn’t want to dance at all. Headed straight for med school, she wants to leave behind her impoverished, drug-plagued neighborhood and everything in it – including the tightly choreographed “stepping” that looks like a cross between ground-stomping, Savion Glover-style tap and hip-hop, with a little breakdance-style gymnastics thrown in.

But to get to med school, Raya first has to get back into the private high school she had to leave when her parents ran out of money. And the best way to do that, it seems, is to join one of the crews heading off to Detroit to compete for a $50,000 prize.

If that sounds like too much plot to know going into the movie, don’t worry: It’s all revealed in the first five minutes or so. As for the rest – well, I’m sure you’ve seen enough of these kinds of movies (Flashdance, Rize, Save the Last Dance…) to know Raya will win the big competition and get her guy. But movies in general, and formulaic movies in particular, are more about the journey than the destination, and How She Move takes us through some interesting and authentic-looking terrain on the way to the finish line.

A soulful beauty who was fresh out of Juilliard when the movie was made, Wesley portrays Raya’s emotional journey with power and depth. All coiled silence when she first arrives back home, she’s positively aglow in the final frame, bathing us in the benediction of a glorious grin. Wesley holds the screen effortlessly, even when she shares it with the dynamic dancers in her crew. Her compact, muscular body and sharp-planed face are both delicate enough to convey vulnerability and strong enough to look tough, and she explodes into action with compelling intensity when she dances.

Choreographed by Hihat, a New Yorker who has plotted the moves for other dance movies and many music videos, the dance sequences may be more “Hollywood” than the real thing (I wouldn’t know), but their drama is engrossing. The soundtrack, which includes tracks by Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes, is also strong.

Tré Armstrong is impressive as Michelle, Raya’s former friend turned nemesis, but there are plenty of other talented dancer/actors in the cast-- nearly all from Toronto, where the movie was shot. Dwain Murphy, who holds his own as Raya’s would-be boyfriend and the head of the formerly all-male crew she joins, is apparently a star of Toronto’s step scene, and several local artists play teachers and other authority figures.

Toronto has doubled for various U.S. cities in plenty of movies before, but I never would have guessed it could reproduce the culture of our black underclass, for better and for worse. Though none of the locations in How She Move are named except Detroit, it is clearly set somewhere in the U.S., and it could easily pass for parts of northern New Jersey.

Judging by this film, our northern neighbor may be nearly as culturally diverse as the U.S. Just look at the people behind it: Director Ian Iqbal Rashid, a gay Muslim of Indian descent who grew up in Toronto, has made two shorts and one other feature film, all of them gay-themed, while screenwriter Annmarie Morais has previously written for Canadian television about immigrants and other Canadians of color.

Raya and her friends and crewmates are all children of struggling, striving Jamaican immigrants. Their parents sacrifice daily to make a better life for them, and they expect their children to work as hard as they do. The emphasis on academic achievement in Raya’s household is a refreshing departure from the usual contest-movie formula: Dancing is never Raya’s whole purpose or identity. Instead, it’s a path to self-discovery, a way to integrate her emotional and academic lives.

Rashid’s direction and Morais’ script are far from perfect. You can see most of the plot twists coming a mile off, some key conflicts are resolved far too neatly, and several bits, like one about a locket Raya’s sister gave her that turns up missing, are telegraphed way too far in advance. But Wesley’s charisma and the emotional authenticity of many of the scenes spice up the formula, making this more than just another Similac movie.

There’s often real artistry, too, in the way the filmmakers convey information. You learn a lot about Michelle’s contemptuous anger at society’s low expectations from the fact that she and her crew suit up in nursing assistant uniforms for one of their furious dances. The near-wordless scene where Raya’s father leaves her mother is played out with the same eloquent economy. Raya goes to each one in turn, hugging first her tenderly sad father, then her deeply wounded mother, who has retreated so far into herself that she can’t even hug back. It’s a poignant moment, much sadder than it would have if the three spouted the expository speeches that would have littered a lesser movie.

Mad Money

By Elise Nakhnikian

Have you heard about that great Queen Latifah movie about a group of girlfriends working as janitors who decide to rob banks? It’s called Set It Off, and it’s well worth checking out on DVD.

But Mad Money, the one in theaters now? Forget about it.

Set It Off set Latifah off nicely in the kind of big, bold, ballsy role she never seems to get any more, even pairing the reportedly gay actress with a hot female love interest. The equally fierce Viveca Fox and Jada Pinkett Smith played close friends of hers, both of whom were radicalized by recent traumas and looking for a way out of the dangerous dead end of ghetto life. (The fourth friend, played by Kimberly Elise, was a diffident single mother.) You root for them all, but the movie doesn’t let them off the hook. In the end, the robbery is just an even deader end for all but one of them – and hardly worth the price even for her.

Mad Money phonies up just about everything Set It Off gets right, starting with the female friendships that make up the core of both movies.

This time around, the thieves are led by a middle-aged, white, upper-middle-class housewife temporarily down on her luck. When her laid-off husband starts to despair of ever landing another job, Bridget (Diane Keaton) goes to work as a janitor at the Federal Reserve. But her salary isn’t nearly enough to support the life she feels entitled to, so she cooks up a plan to rob the Reserve, filching some of the old money that’s been taken out of circulation to be shredded.

To help carry out her plan, Bridget enlists two younger women who have so little in common with her that it’s hard to believe they’d ever team up on anything, let alone become best friends. Nina (Latifah) is a no-nonsense, straight-arrow single mother who just wants to do right by her boys. Jackie (Katie Holmes) is a perky ditz. Perpetually flinging herself about to the music on her iPod and mugging madly whenever she delivers a line, she comes off as some kind of muppet.

Actually, nearly everyone overacts broadly, even the wonderful Steven Root, who plays their humorless boss, and whose comedy is usually rooted in inhabiting a completely believable character. Keaton skulks around so conspicuously, while planning and executing her heists, that you stop believing in the airtight security that’s central to the plot: Anyone watching her shoot sideways glances at the security cameras or jabbering away on her cell phone in the ladies’ room would surely have gotten suspicious enough to investigate. And when they give each other the agreed-on hand signal, the three make themselves more rather than less conspicuous, dragging their fingers across their brows with exaggerated theatricality.

Their motivations for stealing the money also distance you rather than pulling you in. True, Nina wants to put her sons in a good school, but Bridget just wants to maintain the swanky lifestyle she’s been in danger of losing since her husband lost his job, and Jackie wants to travel. For this we’re supposed to cheer when they get their loot to a safe place and start (yes, really) tossing bills around in the air?

The format doesn’t help, either. This is one of those movies that jump back and forth in time for no good reason. Perhaps to make up for the confusion that could create, there’s a lot of exposition in the form of confessions by the three women and their husbands and boyfriends. But the writing’s pedestrian, and we generally see what they’re telling us acted out later anyhow, so those deposition scenes just slow down the pace, making the movie seem longer than its 100 minutes.

In the end, this thoroughly predictable, emotionally hollow movie is just another superficially feminist chick flick from director Callie Khouri, who made her bones with the screenplay for Thelma and Louise. Khouri also wrote and directed Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and this has the feel of that one. It asks us to revel in the self-satisfied, mutually enabling behavior of a group of not particularly appealing women, assuming that we will love them as much as they, inexplicably, love each other.

Persepolis

By Elise Nakhnikian

Speaking truth to power is never easy, but when you live under a totalitarian regime, simply saying what you think in public can be a heroic act. The faithful film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis graphic novels contains several scenes of people speaking out in Iran despite the risk of beatings, torture, imprisonment or even death. Their courage is thrilling, but it’s only part of what makes this movie so exhilarating.

Persepolis is the story of a rebellious young woman who fights for her right to party. Okay, that’s not all she wants, but it’s an integral part of it. Because the first step to resisting political repression, Persepolis tells us, is being true to yourself.

In the spirit of Art Spiegelman’s mouse rather than Disney’s, Satrapi’s series is about growing up in Iran and looking for freedom – not always with success – in the West. Satrapi was a girl when her country jumped from the frying pan of the shah’s oppressive reign through the euphoria of a revolution and into the fire of rule by religious extremists. Her fictional alter ego, Marji, is a well-loved child with a rich inner life and no shortage of strong opinions. She’s proud of her Communist grandpa, who was imprisoned by the shah for his politics, but the real head of the household – and her main role model – is her straight-talking, irreverent grandma.

The film takes its graphic style from the novels, whose stylized black-and-white drawings focus on expressive faces and body language against minimalistic backgrounds. Simple but not simplistic, the drawings convey emotions – especially exaggerated ones like elation and terror – at least as effectively as live action. A soundtrack packed with ambient sounds also helps make the story feel real -- for the most part, that is.

Every so often, the filmmakers take advantage of the medium to take a side trip into pure fancy. There’s a very funny recurring bit with a slavering, disgusting dog at a house where Marji boards for a while, and an animated “clip” of Godzilla trashing Tokyo from a movie Marji watches with her grandmother is even more hokily scary than the original. And all we need to know that Marji has finally found a hospitable new homeland is theWizard of Oz-like color that suffuses the end of the movie, bathing the formerly black-and-white film in warm colors as her cab heads into Paris from the Orly airport.

Satrapi’s first trip to the West is not so successful. When the war with Iraq gives the ayatollahs an excuse to become more repressive, as Marji (Chiara Mastroianni) tells us in her voiceover, the bombs raining down are matched by a flood of talk about blood and martyrs, propagandizing teachers at school, and glowering cops patrolling the streets for signs of “Western decadence.”

At home, Marji gets her ya-yas out by rocking out in her room to the Bee Gees and Iron Maiden, but when her rebellion spills over into wearing punk rock slogans in public and talking back to her teachers, her terrified parents send her abroad for her own safety. There’s plenty to like in Vienna, but Satrapi finds that the city can also be a cold and unwelcoming place, where a young woman on her own can go into free fall without ever hitting a safety net.

Meanwhile, she’s going through the usual physical revolutions of the teen years, “a time of constantly renewed ugliness,” as she puts it. A very funny sequence shows her body mutating rapidly, first one part and then another growing out of proportion to the rest. Satrapi also has fun with her romances, showing Marji blissfully falling for men who seem dreamily perfect – and then reimagining their history in a much blacker tone after they’ve disappointed her.

Marji also tries to rewrite her relationship with Iran, heading back home and trying to stay out of trouble. We see enough of her free-thinking family and their rich social life to see why she’d feel Teheran’s pull so strongly, even though the city, she finds, has come to feel “like a cemetery” after years of war with Iraq and executions by the government. (That image presumably explains the title as well: A once-great cultural center of ancient Persia, Persepolis was sacked by Alexander the Great.)

No wonder she’s so depressed after she comes home. And thank goodness she recovers, reigniting her rebellious spark. The greatness of Persepolis lies in how much it means to see this teenager rock out in her room to The Eye of the Tiger. Marji’s in the house, and we’re all the better for it.

Manufactured Landscapes

By Elise Nakhnikian

The first scene of Manufactured Landscapes is nearly wordless, but it tells us everything we need to know about this brilliant and unsettling documentary. A minutes-long tracking shot through a seemingly endless factory in China, it shows us one of the places that cranks out the disposable stuff we consume. It’s so enormous it makes the Ford plant I visited in Detroit as a kid look like a dollhouse.

The information here is almost purely visual. We never even learn what the factory is making. In fact, we don’t hear a word about anything until Edward Burtynsky, the photographer whose work the movie documents, starts talking about the philosophy behind his photography, explaining that his aim is to “look at the industrial landscape as a way of defining who we are and our relationship to the planet.”

When Burtynsky says “look,” he really means it. His photography, and director Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary, are about truly looking at – and thinking about – things you’ve probably never seen before, although they’re intimately connected to your daily life.

Burtynsky homes in on some creepily fascinating places. For the first decade or so of his 20-some years of documenting our “industrial landscape,” he shot the mines and quarries from which raw materials are extracted, often leaving denuded land and fiery red or lime green rivers and lakes in their wakes.

In Manufactured Landscapes, Baichwal and director of photography Peter Mettler follow Burtynsky as he researches a book on China, the ultimate developing nation. We see raw materials shipped overseas and turned into commodities that are shipped back out again, used, and then returned to China (where, we learn, 50 percent of our discarded computers wind up) to join mountains of homogenous trash, sifted through by workers who salvage the reusable parts.

To learn about the power required to make and transport all those things, we watch the construction of the world’s largest dam – an undertaking so huge that 13 whole cities were razed and about a million people displaced to create it. We also take a side trip to Bangladeshi shipbreaking yards where, as the photographer puts it, “18, 19, 20-year-old boys in oil up to their necks” tear apart retired oil tankers.

Burtynsky doesn’t want to preach; he just wants to help us think about the consequences of our actions. “I think many people today sit in that uncomfortable spot where we don’t necessarily want to give up what we have, but we realize what we’re doing is creating problems that run deep,” he says in an interview included on the DVD. “It’s not a simple right or wrong. It needs a whole new way of thinking.”

He doesn’t claim to know what that way of thinking might be. On the contrary, as he points out, he can’t even document the problem without contributing to it. When he photographs something, “I arrive in my car made of iron, filled with gas. I pull out a metal tripod and grab film that’s loaded with silver and start taking pictures. So everything that I’m doing is connected to the thing I’m photographing.”

Baichwal and Mettler document Burtynsky’s process as well as his images, showing him as he researches and composes photos. It’s interesting to watch him direct the people in his shots, urging them into the frame or moving them to create a more compelling composition. Maybe that’s why the people in his pictures are used so effectively, making you think about the effects of our blighted landscapes on the people who live in them -- children for whom this is all they know, workers who make a meager living creating or recycling our stuff, and elders who have to adjust to this strange new world.

The filmmakers also sometimes include interviews with people onsite about what’s going on, or zoom in for close-ups of the people he shoots. “A lot of what we were doing with the film was to try to bring you into the situation, to experience the place that he’s taken this monumental image of,” says Mettler in an interview on the DVD.

Like Sebastiao Salgado, whose gorgeous images of things like South African coal mines tell a brutal story, Burtynsky makes pictures so beautiful that you linger enough to think about the ugliness behind them. When cautious bureaucrats try to keep him from shooting a scene that they fear may “cause some negative influence,” Burtynsky’s translator reassures them: “Through his camera lens, though his eyes, it will appear beautiful.” And, amazingly, it always does.

His intentionally oblique narration generally provides context rather than telling you what you are looking at. “The idea here was not to create a direct narrative that follows the film, but to create embankments as you go down that river that keep you going downstream or not going in the wrong direction,” he says in the DVD interview.

That may bother you – I sometimes found myself wanting to know a little more about what I was looking at -- but in the end, it worked for me. And if you don’t have the patience for slow-moving movies, this one is not for you. But if you’re willing to slow down and really watch, the eerie images of Manufactured Landscapes contain a world of information.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

By Elise Nakhnikian

A painter before he was a filmmaker, Julian Schnabel specializes in stories about artists and writers. All three of his increasingly light-footed films -- Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and now The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – were based on true stories about men who lived large, like Schnabel himself, ambitious in their art, voracious in their love lives, and ardent in their pursuit of happiness.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of Elle magazine who wrote the memoir of the same name on which The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based, was in the prime of life, accustomed to having his way with just about everything and everybody, when a stroke left him with a rare condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” His mind and senses were left intact, but his body was paralyzed – except for one eyelid.

The movie starts as Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) wakes up in the hospital and learns the extent of his impairment. We stay there with him for the rest of the film, often seeing the hospital from his stationary-camera point of view, sharing his fantasies and memories, or hearing his dryly funny, unself-pitying commentary.

His words are taken from his book, which he calls “motionless travel notes.” Bauby dictated the book in the hospital, using an ingenious method devised by his speech therapist that let him spell words out by blinking his good eyelid. That method also let him communicate surprisingly well with his doctors and caregivers and with the friends and family members who had the patience to master it, making for a richer social life than you might expect.

Other than his eye, Bauby tells us, he has two things left: his imagination and his memory. Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski give his fantasies and flashbacks the supper-real, emotionally charged feeling of a vivid dream.

The real world of this movie is also full of exquisite beauty. Bauby’s two therapists, the woman who takes his dictation for the book, and the mother of his three kids are all gorgeous young women, soulful and chic. Even his hospital room is picturesque, decorated with flowers that look like something from the pages of, well, Elle magazine. Schnabel filmed in the actual hospital where Bauby lived. The walls of his airy room are a lovely Mediterranean aqua, and there’s a long terrace where he likes to sit, overlooking the sea in a spot that looks, as he points out, like a movie set.

Yet even in this surprisingly humane and supportive atmosphere, assisted by what appears to be a respectful, responsive and caring staff, Bauby must cope with enormous frustration. Sharing one annoyance or indignity after another with our irritable hero, even the healthiest of viewers can begin to imagine how it must feel to be unable to perform the slightest physical act without assistance. Sometimes it’s a minor annoyance, like having the soccer game he’s watching switched off by a doctor just as a goal is about to be scored. Sometimes it’s a major dilemma, like having to ask the mother of his children, who’s still in love with him, to translate a charged conversation he needs to have with his lover. A Tom Jones-style fantasy sequence of Bauby sharing a seductive feast with one of his caregivers is a reminder that the simple pleasure of eating is lost to him, and it’s poignant to see Bauby propped up in his wheelchair on the beach, unable to touch or talk to his children as they play nearby.

In a way, what Bauby experiences is an exaggerated and accelerated version of the effects of a serious chronic disability or extreme old age, as Bauby’s elderly father (a stately Max von Sydow) points out. “You try using the stairs when you’re 92!” he says.

Johnny Depp was originally slotted to play Bauby (he gave up the part when it conflicted with his acting in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise). It would have been interesting to see what he did with the part, but the puckishly charming Amalric makes it his own. The actor, who looks a little like a young Roman Polanski, captures both the charisma and the restless intelligence of the acid-tongued Bauby.

The rest of the cast -- which includes Schnabel’s wife, Marie-Joseé Croze, as one of the therapists – is also first-rate. Together with Schnabel, Kaminski, screenwriter Ronald Harwood, and the rest of the crew, they bring Bauby’s story vibrantly alive, celebrating the fragile beauty of life and the adaptability of the human mind.

2007 top 10

By Elise Nakhnikian

For me, making an annual top 10 list is an excuse to think about the year’s movies as a group, and to decide whether I agree with the people who cluck over the decline of the movies. It’s an encouraging exercise because the answer is always no. In fact, this year I couldn’t narrow this list down to 10.

I couldn’t pick a particular favorite, either. So, instead of ranking these from 1 to 10 (or 12), I’m grouping them the way I think of them, according to certain themes or characteristics they have in common.

This list is also an excuse for me to catch up on promising-sounding movies that I missed during the year: December is the one month when I wallow in movies as much as I would for the rest of the year, if my day job didn’t get in the way. But there are always a couple I don’t manage to get to. Some of these -- like Monster in 2003, Caché in 2005, and Pan’s Labyrinth last year -- would have made it onto my list if I’d seen them in time. The ones that got away this year were Persepolis and There Will be Blood. I didn’t see them until after I wrote this list. If I’d gotten to them earlier, they’re be on it too.

Meanwhile, here are some movies well worth seeking out if you haven’t seen them yet.

The moral development of children
Kids in movies tend to be pretty one-dimensional, played either for sympathy or for for laughs. But two of this year’s movies take the kid’s point of view to show something as rare on film as it is common in life: the moral awakening of a child.

Blame it on Fidel. In this emotionally honest, often funny film, writer-director Julie Gavras (daughter of political filmmaker Costa-Gavras) tells the story of an idealistic Parisian couple who desert their bourgeois life to devote themselves to leftist politics in the early ‘70s. The decision infuriates their nine-year-old daughter, Anna (the wonderful Nina Kervel-Bey), who resents their moves to ever smaller and dingier quarters, the replacement of her beloved right-wing nanny by someone more PC, and the invasion of the family’s cramped kitchen by bearded men who talk politics into the night. As true to her outrage as her parents are to their communist principles, Anna excoriates the adults who turned her life inside out without warning, let alone permission. To their credit, they listen, hearing her out with love and leaving her plenty of room to reach her own conclusions about right, wrong, and individual rights versus group loyalty.

This is England is set in a working-class neighborhood in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, when unemployment was high and morale was low. Twelve-year-old Shaun (the mournfully expressive Thomas Turgood) has a loving mum but not much else: his father was killed in the Falklands, he has no friends, and he’s being bullied at school. He finds solace and a sense of belonging in the unlikely form of a group of adult skinheads. But when one of their old comrades returns from prison spouting racist bile and takes over the group, Shaun learns that belonging isn’t everything. The story is autobiographical, which explains why writer-director Shane Meadows got everything so right, starting with Shaun but including the motley skinhead crew.

The World of Long-Term Care
You know how several movies with identical themes often wind up in a sprint for the theaters? Sometimes it’s easy to understand why (Make way for zombies!); sometimes not (what was it about Truman Capote in 2005?) This year, for some reason, we got three excellent movies about a topic we tend to shun: what it’s like to live with a crippling long-term disease or disability, or to love someone who’s living with one. Maybe baby-boomer screenwriters and directors are finally filming what they know. But whatever the reason, I’m grateful for the winning trifecta of Away from Her, The Savages, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Away from Her, an adaptation of an Alice Munro short story, is a delicate character study of a couple who have been married for 50 years. When Fiona (Julie Christie) develops Alzheimer’s, Grant (Gordon Pinsent) begins losing her in stages. First the disease changes her in subtle ways and erases chunks of their shared memories. Then she moves into an Alzheimer’s facility, where she promptly forgets him and forms a marriage-like partnership with a male resident. The excellent cast is headed by a radiant Christie, whose soulful beauty and sense of perpetually keeping some part of herself in reserve embody the “direct and vague, sweet and ironic” Fiona – and erase any possible doubt about why Grant might still be so besotted with his wife.

The Savages is a sometimes fierce, sometimes farcical dramedy about two contentious middle-aged siblings who take charge of their estranged father’s life when he develops dementia. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins nails everything from the texture of daily life in a nursing home to the unceremonious arrival of death, and it feels good to laugh with a theaterful of strangers at things that are nearly taboo even in our talk-happy culture. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as the siblings and Philip Bosco as their father all do astonishing work, making the prickly Savages irresistible to watch and impossible not to empathize with.

Also unexpectedly good company is the sardonic hero of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel’s poetic adaptation of a memoir of the same name. Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the editor of Elle, is a man in the prime of life, accustomed to having his way with just about everything and everybody, until a stroke leaves him with a rare condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” His mind and senses are intact, but his body is paralyzed – except for one eyelid. Amazingly, with that eyelid and a method devised by one of his therapists, Bauby communicates with his caregivers, family and friends, even dictating the book this movie is based on. Filmed mainly in the actual hospital where Bauby lived after the accident, receiving care in a beautiful room from a trio of gorgeous young women, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly celebrates the fragile beauty of life and the adaptability of the human mind.

Genre Classics
In a very good year for genre pictures (I Am Legend, Grindhouse, Michael Clayton), these two were my favorites.

Though, having said that, I’m not sure just what genre No Country for Old Men fits into. Definitely not Western, though it’s set mostly in west Texas. Psycho killer thriller? Heist movie? Or do movies by the Coen brothers constitute their own genre by now? Whatever else it is, No Country is hound-dog faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel, which tracks an implacable killer, the good ol’ boy he has on the run, and the sheriff who’s trying to stop him. The action is relentless – Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh leaves corpses in his path the way Hansel and Gretel left bread crumbs – but there’s plenty of humor and humanity too, not to mention gorgeous cinematography, impeccable pacing, excellent acting, and dialogue that’s pure Texas: full of wry understatement and as much about what isn’t said as what is.

The Bourne Ultimatum is so fast-paced it makes No Country look leisurely, but there’s more to Paul Greengrass’s final contribution to the Bourne trilogy than the famously breakneck and brutal fight and chase scenes he shoots at such dizzyingly close range. As Jason Bourne unravels the mystery of what turned him into an amnesiac killing machine, he unearths an all-too-real secret history of CIA torture, assassination, and unchecked power. Matt Damon’s Bourne was a blank slate at the beginning of this series, but he ends it as a hero for our times, fighting the faceless bureaucrats who order up death and destruction from their sleek glass and steel bunkers.

True Grit
Sure, it’s cool to see people skiing down or climbing up mountains, but it’s a lot more interesting to watch an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances rise to the occasion.

Rescue Dawn is an odd duck. It’s a scripted story played by professional actors – including a riveting Christian Bale as the hero, Dieter Dengler – yet everything they’re acting out really happened. A German-born American pilot, Dengler was captured and tortured by Pathet Lao during the Vietnam War when his plane was shot down over Laos. He not only survived but escaped, thanks to his ingenuity, apparently unshakable optimism and practical skills learned a welder, a soldier, and a starving kid in war-ravaged Germany. Director Werner Herzog had already shot his story once as Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a documentary starring Dengler himself, but he was smart to remake it. The re-enactment packs more of a punch, showing us scenes Dengler could only describe or act out unconvincingly. Rescue Dawn also touchingly dramatizes a touching relationship that’s barely mentioned in the documentary: Dengler’s friendship with a fellow prisoner who escaped with him but did not make it out of the jungle.

The Golden Door. Using minimal dialogue, this visual stunner follows the members of an Sicilian family as they leave their grinding rural poverty for the United States in the early 1900s. Fine acting, a generous use of ambient sound, and the unhurried pace anchor us in their world as we learn as they do, by watching the sometimes incomprehensible actions of strangers. The occasional lush fantasy scene breaks up the rigorous reality, cluing us in on the immigrants’ unspoken hopes. This movie also includes what may be the year’s best visual metaphor: As the family’s boat leaves for America, a space opens up, then slowly grows between the people lining the deck of the boat and the friends and relatives crowded onto the pier to see them off, who started out as one indistinguishable mass. The filmmakers hold the shot long enough to let you think about the distance those brave people put between themselves and everyone – and everything – they’ve ever known. Their Ellis Island reception by disdainful immigration officials is a sobering lesson in the xenophobic politics of the day.

Days of Glory is about the North African Arabs who fought for a racist France in WWII. Their idealism about their adopted “motherland” slowly drains away as they endure insults and indignities and are sent into the worst spots and given the least equipment. Yet they never lose their heart for the fight against the Nazis. Director Rachid Bouchareb cowrote the screenplay only 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 feel of truth.

Everything Old is New Again
Killer of Sheep. Shot on 16mm for just $10,000 in 1973 as director Charles Burnett’s film school thesis and released for a very brief run four years later, this poetically told story of a working-class African-American family’s struggle to make it into the middle class was restored and given its widest theatrical release ever this year. The black-and-white photography is beautiful, but what makes this a masterpiece is the range and depth of emotion Burnett captures in one claustrophobic LA ghetto. Like August Wilson’s plays, Burnett’s movies bring to life and preserve chunks of our country’s psychic history that might otherwise be lost. As hard as it is here to watch stoic slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and his patient wife (Kaycee Moore) hang on to the knife edge of the lower-middle-class while their kids fend for themselves on the street, it’s even sadder to think how much further guns, drugs, and the corrosive effects of poverty have eroded the quality of life, and the ability to hope, for many South Central residents in the two generations since this movie was made.

Blade Runner: Final Cut. I didn’t think much of Blade Runner when it first came out in 1982, but I was blown away by the final cut released this year. I’m sure the difference is mostly in me – when I watched Final Cut this year, I realized how many images from this fiercely original neo-noir had burned their way into my brain way the first time around and wondered how I failed to appreciate them then. It’s also fascinating to see how much of Scott’s dystopic vision of a then-futuristic LA has already come true, or likely will soon.

I do remember disliking the improbably upbeat ending, which didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the movie. Thankfully, it's been replaced by a much better one. (Director Ridley Scott put back the darker ending he’d always wanted when he made other changes, including digitalizing the already detailed sets to make them look even more realistic.) But maybe it just took two viewings for me to appreciate the depth and intensity of this hallucinatory masterpiece.