Babies

Mommy had a little baby.
There he is, fast asleep.
He's just a little plaything.
Why not wake him up?
Cute, cute little baby.
Little pee-pee, little toes.
Now he's comin' to me.
Crawl across the kitchen floor.

--Talking Heads, Stay Up Late

Babies is a Benetton ad come to life, an impeccably art-directed vision of a multicultural utopia. It was sweet enough to keep me entertained for a while, appealing to that baby love the Talking Heads were singing about, but the charm wears off before the end credits roll.

The concept couldn’t be simpler: The movie follows four babies from birth to age one, capturing highlights of their lives. There’s no narration, talking heads, or subtitles; just a series of intimate moments captured by a small crew that spent a long time with each family, enough that the babies took the camera for granted, though the grown-ups sometimes struggle to avoid looking into it.

The four live in very different cultures – Mari in ur-urban Tokyo, Hattie in beatific San Francisco, Bayar in a yurt on the Mongolian steppe, and Ponijao in a small village in the Namibian desert. The filmmakers like to stress the differences in child-rearing habits between cultures, lingering on the Mongolian nurse tying newborn Bayar into a tight swaddle or Ponijao’s mother teaching her toddler daughter how to balance a cup on her head while walking. But in the end, all four baby girls live in the same, Disney-esque world, a loving, laid-back place where the sun always shines but it’s never too hot and it never rains, where grown-ups are always kind and reasonable and kids deeply loved and well cared for.

Loosely structured montages in roughly chronological order highlight some of the basic stages of a baby’s development, from birth to learning to walk. The kids, all pretty adorable and relentlessly intense, make these highlights intermittently engaging or funny. I know you’re not supposed to have favorites, but I found Ponijao and Bayar particularly charismatic, their primal emotions impossible not to identify with.

There are lots of domesticated animals in this movie too. Every one – not just cats and dogs but cattle and goats and chickens too – are impressively tolerant of the babies, even when they’re being banged at, stepped on, or dragged across the floor by a toddler with a makeshift collar and leash.

Adults are often seen as headless collections of body parts or heard as disembodied voices, the way the babies presumably experience them. They’re mostly moms – men are barely visible in most of the segments, though Mari’s father seems to be almost as involved in her upbringing as her mother is.

The babies have a lot more similarities than differences, but it’s kind of interesting to see what other cultures consider appropriate behavior for toddlers and parents. Some of those differences read as shockingly risky in our own increasingly phobic culture: When Ponijao picked up stones and bones from the earth to gum them while her mother sat nearby without comment, the people behind me gasped.

The expansive Mongolian and Namibian settings provide some visual juice. The filmmakers often use majestic panoramics as transition shots, and the African scenery is so gorgeous that my eye sometimes wandered from the babies in the foreground to the soft colors in soft focus behind them. The mothers in Africa often function as scenery too, their soft chitchat and laughter providing a lulling soundtrack to the  beautiful sight of their dark brown faces, gold jewelry, and mud-daubed and decorated braids framed by the taupe earth in the background. The camera is particularly taken with Ponijao’s mother and another young mother, apparently a close friend or relative, whose slightly older child often plays with Ponijao while the two mothers sit and talk.

Babies is probably a good family film: At least half the adults in the theater where I saw it yesterday came with kids under the age of 10. But if you don’t come with a kid, you may find the concept a little too thin. At just 80 minutes, it felt too long to me by half.

A movie a Day, Day Seven: Looking for Eric

Eric Bishop (Steve Evets), a Manchester postman, is half-beaten by life. With his bent, bony shoulders, scruffy beard, and worried eyes, he’s a “scrawny thing,” as he puts it. It’s as if failure is literally eating away at him. But Looking for Eric is a Ken Loach film, so Eric is no helpless or pitiable pawn. He’s a fully realized character, and his working class background has endowed him with strengths as well as burdens.

A single parent to two teenage stepsons who treat him as if he were invisible, Eric is deeply ashamed of himself for having left his first wife and infant daughter, who he still adores, for reasons that remain a mystery to him 30 years later. He can’t even let loose any more at the Manchester United soccer games he and his mates used to go to, the one place where they could feel free (soccer tickets in Britain, like baseball tickets here, have gotten too pricey for working men).

Aside from his own good heart, Eric has just one thing going for him, but that turns out to be all he needs: Those mates, a burly bunch of aging lads, have had his back since he was a boy and would no sooner abandon him than they would root for another team.

After an exercise in boosting self-esteem organized by one of his lads, who's into self-help, Eric starts to conjure up the role model he chose, who appears like Bogey in Play It Again, Sam, listening gravely to Eric and giving him private lessons on how to dig himself out of his hole. Eric Cantona, a former Manchester United star known as much for his sometimes cryptic pronouncements as for his brilliant moves on the soccer field, plays himself here, bringing gravity and a touch of self-parody to the role. His exchanges with Evets are charming, shifting from daffy to dense and back again.

It may take a little while to get used to the Manchester dialects, which are thick as a milkshake, and Loach and his cinematographer and set designer make us peer through a lot of dingy lighting and cluttered environments to find our man. For the first half or so of the film, we see Eric only in long or medium shots, dimly lit or with his face half obscured. Not until about halfway through, when he's starting to emerge from the fog he's been living in, do we get a good close-up, and then the sweetness and light in his bony face, with its bad English teeth and furrowed brow lines, comes as a minor revelation.

Just as they build our sympathy for Eric, Loach and his longtime screenwriter Paul Laverty introduce conflict and tension nicely after a perhaps too talky beginning. Aside from one dinner party at Eric's house that has to shoulder more dramatic weight than any one occasion should be asked to handle, the drama emerges organically from the naturalistic setting.

Eric's love for his first wife, Lily (a lovely Stephanie Bishop), his relationship with his lads, and his journey from defeat to a renewed sense of self-worth are all moving, but my favorite part of this story was its thoroughly original and good-natured twist on the classic revenge tale.

Another new movie from England, the much more loudly hyped Harry Brown, is currently showcasing the standard approach to vigilante stories: A lone avenger goes on a bloody crusade to wipe out a plague of amped-up bad guys who threaten to stamp out civilization as we know it.
Looking for Eric offers a refreshingly realistic, sometimes even lighthearted alternative to that paranoic cliché. The nemesis this time is Zac (Steve Marsh), a sociopathic drug dealer who lures in Eric's son Ryan (Gerard Kearns) with parties and seats in his box at the soccer games, only to use him as an unwilling accomplice. When Eric finds out what's going on, he tries to free Ryan from his entanglement, which turns out to take plenty of cunning, creativity, and help from his friends.

Laced through with enough wit and grit to keep its unabashed sentiment from getting gooey, Looking for Eric gives us a life-sized, lovable working-class hero—and a whole new way to fantasize about revenge.

Written for The House Next Door.

A Movie a Day, Day Six: Mother and Child

The new week’s movie schedule in Friday’s paper triggered the same old frustration: Everyone Else, Teza and The Square all left before I had a chance to see them. I guess I need to watch a lot more than a movie a day just to keep up with the new ones that sound promising.

I did get to Mother and Child, a tasteful tearjerker written and directed by Rodrigo García. García, who’s Gabriel García Marquez’s son, has done some interesting work in cable TV, helping to develop and produce the English-language version of In Treatment for HBO and directing episodes of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Big Love, among others.

His films tend to be ensemble affairs as well, cutting between multiple characters whose stories overlap. I’ve only seen two of his features — this one and Nine Lives — but the acting in both is outstanding. Between that and the emotional content of the stories, both movies had me groping for my Kleenex, but the insights and confessions are a facile enough to make the tears feel more coaxed than cathartic. It’s like that old saw about Chinese food: a couple of hours later, you’re hungry for something more substantial.

García makes what used to be known as “women’s pictures,” structuring most of his drama around his female characters’ feelings, frustrations, and secrets. All the parents and children in Mother and Child are female, with the exception of one baby boy who makes the briefest of appearances. In a common thread that soon feels reductive, even a little formulaic, almost every one of these women and girls is defined primarily by her relationship—or lack thereof—with her mother or daughter.

Much of the movie's tension comes from crosscutting between Elizabeth and Karen (Annette Bening), a mother and daughter who were separated when Karen put Elizabeth up for adoption after giving birth at age 14. That was the era of closed adoptions, so they have no idea who or where each other is. That one fact has tragically warped both of their personalities, making Elizabeth a control freak incapable of trust or intimacy and Karen a bedraggled, tight-lipped mope. As she tells Paco (Jimmy Smits), the improbably perfect man who pursues her with even more improbable persistence: "Every idea, every thought in my head takes me back to [her missing daughter] … I have nothing else, that's my life. I have nothing to give."

The other main storyline belongs to Lucy (an immensely sympathetic Kerry Washington), an infertile woman desperate to have a child. We also spend some time with Ray (Shareeka Epps, the fiercely gifted actress who debuted in Half Nelson), an aggressively assertive pregnant teen who's auditioning Lucy as a prospective mother to her son. And of course, we also meet Ray's mother. She's played by Lisa Gay Hamilton, who radiates her usual sanity, strength and good humor in her few brief scenes.

Actresses of that caliber keep showing up. The great Cherry Jones plays a nurturing nun who's pretty much the polar opposite of the grim reaper she embodied in Doubt on Broadway. S. Epatha Merkerson is Lucy's sharp-tongued but supportive mother, and Amy Brenneman makes a poignant impression as a gynecologist. Elizabeth Peña is the shrewdly competent boss who hires Elizabeth after she runs away from her last job.

Watching these thoroughbreds go through their paces is enough to make this movie worth seeing, but I wish they had a better track to run on.

Written for The House Next Door.

A Movie a Day, Day Five: Welcome

You can tell you're early in the evolution of a society's acceptance of a minority group when most of its movies about that subculture star people from the dominant culture, focusing on how their eyes are opened or their lives enriched by their contact with someone from the minority. That template fits most of the movies I've seen about the illegal immigrants pouring into the U.S. and Europe these days, and Welcome is no exception. But it's better than most, a modestly scaled movie that's a minor success.

A little too pat and simplistic, Welcome is not nearly as good as Laurent Cantet's emotionally raw and complex The Class or Jacques Audiard's searing A Prophet, but it's a whole lot better than the overpraised The Visitor, which was to illegal immigrants what Gentleman's Agreement was to Jews and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner to African Americans.

The main character in Welcome is Simon Calmat (Mademoiselle Chambon star Vincent Lindon), a sad-eyed former swimming champ who makes a living teaching water aerobics and swimming at a public pool in Calais. In the midst of a divorce from a wife he's still crazy about, Simon has slid pretty deep into a major depression when Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), a bright-eyed Kurdish kid from Iraq, pops up in his pool.

Bilal has emigrated illegally from Iraq to Calais in a difficult and dangerous journey that included a stint on a cargo truck, his head inside a plastic bag so his breathing won't activate the sensors installed to detect the presence of carbon dioxide. He manages to get 4,000 kilometers from home, but his goal is the other side of the English Channel, where the girl he loves has recently moved with her family. He asks Simon to teach him to swim, figuring that's his best shot for getting to England.

Calais has erected a thicket of barriers to discourage illegal immigrants. At first, Simon seems to have done the same, but Bilal breaks down his resistance. Simon sees himself in the boy, identifying first with his athleticism and then with his romanticism. And as the two grow closer, Simon takes more risks to help the boy achieve his dream.

We learn a lot more about Simon's life than we do Bilal's (we never see where Bilal sleeps or get a sense of how he spends his time when he isn't with Simon), but their stories are given almost equal emotional weight. What's more, letting Bilal into his life doesn't magically transform Simon or solve any of his problems, and Simon's help is not enough to help Bilal triumph over all the obstacles piled up in his path. Paired with Lindon's and Ayverdi's emotional transparency and both characters' fundamental decency, that humanistic orientation and relatively realistic story arc give this heartfelt movie some emotional heft. But in the end, what resonates most is the political context in which the filmmakers situate this twist on a father-son melodrama.

To surface the dehumanizing brutality routinely encountered by the political and economic refugees who are flooding the Western world and largely ignored by the rest of us, we hear both from and about cops who arrest immigrants and the people who help them. We also see several examples of a perhaps even more chilling trend: the collusion of private citizens, like the xenophobic neighbor whose welcome mat earns a sardonic look from Simon and gives the movie its title.

All that demonization and repression reanimates the ghost of another evil time in France's not-so-distant past—and our own. As Simon's ex puts it, after trying to stop a supermarket security guard from ejecting a couple of immigrants while Simon and several other customers watched mutely: "You know what banning people from stores means? Want me to buy you a history book?"

Written for The House Next Door.

A Movie a Day, Day Four: Breathless

While Cannes was all a-Twitter with talk of Jean-Luc Godard's latest feature yesterday, I was at a press screening of his first, soon to be re-released in a restored print for its 50th anniversary. Which was just fine by me since I always love watching Breathless and haven't liked much of what Godard has produced in recent decades.

The film was shockingly new when it was released in 1960: It was the first feature to be shot entirely with a handheld camera and the first to make liberal use of jump cuts, which were then considered sloppy and unprofessional. But Godard needed to edit down his first cut considerably, and rather than lose whole scenes, he chose to highlight just the most dynamic parts of each scene and cut out the rest, creating the sense that characters and objects are jumping from one position to another between shots. Both of those techniques are tiresomely overused now, but the beauty of Breathless is how vital it still feels in spite of that—still crazy after all these years.

In creating his character study of a gangster poet and his reluctant moll, Godard was paying homage to the Hollywood noir and Hollywood-influenced New Wave French directors and actors whose work he was steeped in at the time. He wasn't trying to create a museum piece or an academic deconstruction. He wanted to make a movie movie, something as alive as the genre movies he loved, only fresher and more realistic (his use of handheld camera was an attempt to escape the sterility of the soundstage and make the action feel spontaneous).

He didn't succeed in making it realistic: Part of what makes Breathless engaging is how it never lets us forget that we're watching a movie. But boy, did he ever bring it to life.
Breathless is a fast-running current that draws you in and carries you along with it. This is a movie that moves. Raoul Coutard's camera circles and soars, and Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the gangster whose killing of a cop at the start of the film has him on the run, seems to be in perpetual motion.

ichel is amoral, aimless, and probably ADHD. He's a wannabe Bogey, playing at being a gangster and aping a lot of the star's mannerisms, right down to the thumb he keeps using to self-consciously trace his lip. What he doesn't seem to realize is that he's a natural-born star. Belmondo's joli-laide face and his tightly muscled boxer's body are the main landscape and true subject of Breathless.

At one point, Patricia (Jean Seberg), the American girl he takes up with, tells him she has been staring at him for 10 minutes yet knows nothing about him. When she says that she feels as if she needs to keep looking until she figures out what's behind that façade, she seems to be speaking for us. She's definitely speaking for Godard. "This film is really a documentary on Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo," Godard told a Le Monde interviewer.

Like most of Godard's female characters, Patricia is underdeveloped and sometimes improbably passive, less subject than object. But since she's an object of desire for Michel, she has a fair amount of power, and when the camera isn't ogling him, it's generally ogling her. Seberg projects a vulnerable but defiant sense of self that jibes with the jousting dialogue Godard wrote for her character.

Watching this glamorous pair, the prickly pragmatist and the narcissistic romantic, parry and thrust their way through some of the most beautiful parts of Paris is pure cinematic pleasure.

Written for The House Next Door.

A Movie a Day, Day Three: Mademoiselle Chambon

Yesterday’s movie was a press screening of 12th & Delaware, a quietly horrifying HBO documentary about the campaign to end abortion, but I can’t tell you about that now. 12th & Delaware is the opening selection for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, so Ed at Slant Magazine's blog, which is hosting this series, wants me to review it early next month, just a few days before it plays there. But rather than give you just that tease of a stub, I thought I’d tell you about another movie I caught at a recent press screening, which will probably be available on DVD in a few months after a very limited release in theaters.

A high-class soap opera about longing and missed chances strictly for and about grown-ups, Mademoiselle Chambon is kin to Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County, Ulu Grosbard’s Falling in Love and David Lean’s Brief Encounter, the granddaddy of them all. It starts with a picnicking family of three as the attractive middle-aged parents help their kid do his grammar homework by puzzling out a circular definition in his textbook. It’s a sweet, funny scene, and an economical introduction to the family we’re about to spend time with—and maybe lose.

As it turns out, this is mostly the father’s story. Jean (Vincent Lindon), a macho yet sensitive guy whose blue-jeaned butt the camera keeps ogling, is a Gallic version of the romance-novel ideal Eastwood played in Bridges. He builds houses, takes tender care of his aging father (Jean-Marc Thibault, whose beautiful, craggy face is used to good effect in a couple of scenes), and comes home to a lovely and loving wife (Aure Atika, whose warmth and emotional intelligence gives heft and dignity to an underwritten role). It’s a good life—or so he thinks, until he meets his son’s teacher, Mlle Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain).

Everything about her, from her pale, freckled skin and sinewy hands to the classical violin he loves to hear her play, speaks to a kind of refinement this blue-collar guy presumably hasn't had much access to, and he longs to peel off her tasteful pastel clothes and immerse himself in it. Writer-director Stéphane Brizé and co-writer Florence Vignon fill this small plot with almost obsessive care, creating a beautifully composed, deeply felt story in which every emotion is given space not just to breathe, but to gulp in lungfuls of air.

The filmmakers sometimes linger too long for my taste, holding a shot for what feels like minutes as one or both of the two moon over their forbidden love. A pervasive melancholy colors almost all the interactions of these two conscientious people, who are too burdened by a guilty awareness of the suffering they would cause if they got together (she is, after all, his kid's teacher) to lose themselves in the joy of their mutual attraction. Though that makes them more sympathetic, it also gives their love affair a sodden and tone that gets downright oppressive at times.

But the look and feel of this delicate meditation on longing is what lingers most. Cinematographer Antoine Héberlé floods most scenes with plangent, golden-hour light, artfully blurring the backgrounds to keep the focus on the would-be lovers. And the chemistry between the two feels painfully real, perhaps because Lindon and Kiberlain were married but separated when they made the film.

The filmmakers find inventive ways to tell us just enough about the main characters' backgrounds, including a presentation he gives to her class about his job and a voice mail message from her mother that she receives as we watch. Body language is filmed with unusual subtlety too. Jean and Mlle Chambon's awkward first kiss is nicely staged, and so is the distance he develops from his wife as he's falling for the teacher. And when he and Mlle Chambon are together, you feel the intimacy of bodies self-consciously sharing a space, avoiding each other with exquisite care because they so long to touch.

Written for The House Next Door.

A Movie a Day, Day Two: Iron Man 2

I know, I know; I'm late on this one. I liked Iron Man enough to be a little nervous about the sequel, especially after seeing the film's star, Robert Downey Jr., marooned in Sherlock Holmes, which reached for that same mix of cool special effects, kinetic camerawork, clever dialogue, and mildly kinky characters and missed by a mile.

I didn't even plan to see the sequel yesterday. I'd set out to see Everyone Else, but my train got stuck in the station, delayed by an investigation down the line. So I walked upstairs and down the block to another theater, where Iron Man 2 was starting in 15 minutes.

As he did in the original, director Jon Favreau tells a story as streamlined as Tony Stark's Iron Man suit. The premise is set up and the hero (Stark) and nemesis (Ivan Vanko) are introduced before the credits finish rolling. The pace never slackens or bogs down in tangents or tedious exposition, though a couple of the fight scenes feel superfluous or overly familiar.

Mickey Rourke, that ruined mountain of a man, is smartly cast as Vanko, a sociopathic Russian thug with a thing for birds and an unshakeable grudge against Stark. Walking slowly toward Stark on a racetrack, his long graying hair loose on his massive shoulders and electrified metal whips trailing from his arms while racecars upend themselves and burst into flames in his wake, he's the scariest coldblooded killer to come out of Hollywood since Javier Bardem carted that cattle-killing machine through No Country for Old Men.

The years have been good to Stark since we last saw him. Always rock-star rich, now he's rock-star famous for having "successfully privatized peace," as he puts it in a comically bombastic Senate hearing. He even has his own Shepard Fairey-style poster.

As sleek as Vanko is surly, Stark is all cocky confidence and preening self-regard. In the first movie, he wanted to atone for his weapons-proliferating past; now he just wants to burnish his shiny reputation. "I don't care about the liberal agenda any more. It's boring," he tells his assistant turned CEO, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Only Vanko, who's convinced that his own future was stolen when his father's Iron Man blueprint was taken by Stark's father, still wants Stark to pay for "all the lives the Stark family has destroyed." You can't help but root for Stark when he's fighting Vanko or Justin Hammer, a corrupt weapons manufacturer gleefully played by Sam Rockwell, but he's a seriously compromised hero. Vanko isn't so much his nemesis as his evil twin, a bitter reminder of what he could have become with a little less luck—or larceny.

That makes for a pretty chewy comic-book movie, but Iron Man 2 never feels self-important or dense. A little overloaded, maybe, but too much of a good thing is good here, for the most part. I didn't mind the ongoing tease about whether Stark's best friend, a straight-arrow soldier, will become his sidekick, and though I never doubted that Stark would win the race against his own ever-weakening heart, it was kind of fun to see how he did it. And if your interest flags for a moment, there's always something to look at or ponder, like: Whose lips are more pillowy, Rourke's or Scarlett Johansson's?

My mind wandered a lot when Johansson was on the screen, since she made a remarkably unconvincing lawyer-slash-model-slash-martial arts expert. Samuel L. Jackson's phoned-in cameo didn't add much either, and I hated to see the great Don Cheadle wasted in the lame best friend role. But the Iron Man franchise has been great for Paltrow. The actress, who sometimes seems stiff and unsympathetic, almost patrician, in her dramatic roles, comes alive in her prickly, often overlapping exchanges with Downey. It reminded me of what screwball comedies did for Katharine Hepburn, and of how invigorating fast, funny talk is—for audiences as well as for actors.

The trailers for Iron Man 2 stress the superhero suits, the sex, and the showdowns. But it's the smart, snappy dialogue, at least as much as any of those things, that gives this movie its energy.

Written for The House Next Door.

A Movie a Day, Day One

For years, I've reviewed movies on the side while doing something else for a living. I'm not complaining (who wouldn't want to get paid to watch movies?), but it's frustrating not to have time for everything I want to keep up with. I've always got a long list of films playing here in New York that I want to see, and I'm forever triaging that list, ordering some through Netflix and skipping others altogether.

So when my main paying job evaporated this March, one of the first things I thought about was all the movies I'd be able to see. I decided to watch a movie a day, prioritizing new releases playing in first-run theaters; I want to get to everything on my wanna-see list, for a change. I'll also go to press screenings, and I'll watch movies online, on TV, on DVD, at repertory theaters, and at film festivals.

At first I was thinking of this mainly as a way to structure my wide-open days. Then I realized I should write about what I was seeing. This experiment could prove a theory I've had for a while: that there are more good movies available these days than any normal person can keep up with.

If you find that hard to believe, check into my Movie a Day series for the next hundred days at Slant Magazine's blog, The House Next Door, and see what you think of the movies I'm watching. And if you have something to say about one of them, or if I missed a movie you've just seen and loved, please leave a comment and tell me about it.

Meanwhile, here's my TimeOFF review of the first of my movie-a-day movies, Nicole Holofcener's Please Give, which I saw with my husband yesterday.

Please Give

Writer/director Nicole Holofcener grew up on Woody Allen’s sets (her stepfather was his producer), and her movies have a lot in common with his – not the comedies or the deep-dish ones, but the ones, like Hannah and Her Sisters or Crimes and Misdemeanors, that draw a detailed topographic map of their characters’ internal landscapes. Like Woody’s movies, Holofcener’s have a strong autobiographical streak, so her main characters are always women, but her male characters are as strong as his female ones.

Ever since her first feature, 1996’s Walking and Talking, dissected a pair of best friends who were pushing 30, Holofcener, now 50, has chronicled the internal lives of people like herself and her friends. With her latest, Please Give, she enters the sandwich generation, splitting her time pretty equally between a middle-aged couple, Kate (Holofcener muse Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) and the twenty-something sisters, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet) who care for the couple’s 91-year-old neighbor, Andra (Ann Guilbert, The Dick Van Dyke Show’s Millie Helper).

Most movies with multigenerational casts favor one generation over the others, but Holofcener trains the same loving but clear eye on everybody. Her creations are alternately unreasonable, ridiculous, and deeply sympathetic.

There are a few moments when this comedy of bad manners touches on something approaching profundity, like when Kate, who sells mid-century modern furniture she buys from the children of people who have died, talks to another woman about how used furniture is haunted by the ghosts of its previous owners. Holofcener also has something to say about how one person’s loss is often another person’s gain – particularly, though by no means only, in Kate and Alex’s business, where things they bought cheap from clueless heirs sell for thousands of dollars.

But for the most part, Please Give sticks to what Grace Paley called the little disturbances of man. Things like Abby’s mortification over the pimple that is “eating my face,” Kate’s unshakeable liberal guilt and her sometimes comic attempts to appease it, and Alex’s determination not to let his self-flagellating wife “wreck my fun.” Holofcener is also a connoisseur of poignant moments, like the tenderness with which Kate and Alex peer around a corner at Abby when they come upon her in the drugstore.

It’s not as if nothing big happens in Please Give. People have affairs, fall in love, even die. But those things, which would be the focus of a more conventional narrative, are just part of the warp and weft of this story, which is more interested in what people say and leave unsaid, and how they help and hurt one another.

It’s easy for this kind of movie to go more wide than deep and wind up feeling shallow. That happened to Holofcener’s last feature, Friends with Money, but Please Give sidesteps that pothole. A lot of the credit for that goes to the universally excellent cast.

Keener, who has starred in all four of Holofcener’s feature films, told the LA Times that “all the great actresses want to work with her.” Several got their chance in this film. Keener keeps us close to Kate even at her worst, letting us see what could have read as self-indulgence or neurosis as the suffering of a painfully sensitive soul. Mary is so tightly defended she comes off as selfish and mean, but Peete gets at deeper truths with her measured stare, her snarling smile, and the awkward clumsiness with which she finally lowers her head onto her sister’s shoulder. Hall has an even bigger challenge in the quiet, self-effacing Rebecca, whose repressed emotions only just peek out from her soulful eyes or work the corners of her generous mouth, so it’s a great relief to see her finally let loose, grinning at her new boyfriend or crying in Kate’s arms. Guilbert earns a little sympathy for the brusque, tactless Andra when she dips her head or hardens her jaw, making clear the loneliness and vulnerability Andra’s working so hard to hide. Sarah Steele is funny and furious as Kate and Alex’s teenage daughter, Abby, a bundle of raging, pimple-ravaged hormones. And distinctive but underused actresses keep popping up onscreen in small roles. Amy Wright and Elizabeth Berridge are memorable as adult children Kate buys furniture from, and Lois Smith is luminescent as a big-hearted patient of Rebecca’s (she administers mammograms).

Intimately intertwined and perfectly life-sized, the people in Please Give are often filmed in bed, but they’re hardly ever making love. Instead, they’re lying on their sides, sitting by the remote control, or sprawled on their bellies and doing what they – and we – do most: talking to each other. Watching this film is like eavesdropping on a family you never knew you had.

My 50 Favorites (as of last year or so)

Just realized I never linked to my 50 favorite movies list, which Iain Stott asked for a while back for his blog. Those lists are always fungible; I could quibble with my own already. But I'm pretty sure those first 20 would be on any list of favorites I'd ever make.

The Secret in their Eyes

The Secret in Their Eyes is this year’s Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, but don’t hold that against it. A murder mystery, a romance, and a running rumination on the limitations of memory and the ways in which we rewrite the past, it’s the kind of thing Hollywood used to excel at but doesn’t much bother with these days: an expertly crafted adult entertainment that always entertains and never insults your intelligence.

It starts with an artfully blurred scene of a man getting on a train as a woman watches intently. Then she runs after him and catches up for a moment to his car, pressing her hand against the outside of his window while he presses his against the inside. Stylish camerawork and all, that would be a tiresomely clichéd opener – except that the next shot deconstructs it, showing us the man who wrote the scene as he thinks the better of it, striking out lines.

That man turns out to be Benjamín Esposito (Ricardo Darín), a retired investigator for the district attorney in Buenos Aires. The movie, which was adapted from a novel by Eduardo Sacheri, toggles back and forth between a gray-haired Esposito in the present and his younger (though still a bit too worn-looking) self 25 years earlier, when Argentina’s already repressive political system was degenerating into outright fascism.

The ruthlessness and corruption of the ruling junta adds to the story’s underlying sense of dread and gives its talk about what people can’t remember and what they can’t forget a deeper resonance. You also get a sense of the corruption of the court system and its systematic protection of the powerful at the expense of the powerless, but these are the least developed parts of the movie. Like 2008’s Headless Woman, Secret examines Argentina’s politics and past mainly through sideways glances – and by showing how the gulf between classes affects personal relationships.

Esposito is consumed by two passions. The first is his determination to figure out who killed a beautiful young bride 25 years earlier, leaving her new husband bereft. Most of the movie’s plot is provided by his quest first to find the killer, then to find out what became of him after a plot twist involving the junta.

Esposita’s other obsession is his boss, the bright and beautiful Irene Menéndez-Hastings (Soledad Villamil). Esposito is a charmer, funny, loyal, empathetic and good-looking in a boyish yet weathered, Pete Hamill/Richard Thompson kind of way. Yet he’s so sure Irene is out of his league that he never voices his adoration, though it pours out of him so eloquently that everyone around them is aware of it. She’s quite a bit younger than him and a lot better educated, but the real gulf is class: He’s a blue-collar guy, while she comes from one of Argentina’s ruling aristocracies. Or, as a corrupt cop puts it: “She’s untouchable. You’re not.”

Darín and Villamil have a lovely and lively chemistry, the warmth in their eyes and the pepper in their words making them easy to root for.

Esposito’s relationship with his assistant investigator, Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) is also cleverly written and beautifully acted. Part comic sidekick, part loyal best friend, Sandoval is a hopeless drunk with a black sense of humor and hidden depths. When he figures out how to find the killer, emerging from his alcoholic fog to do a good piece of investigative analysis for a change in a scene that’s funny, touching, suspenseful, and refreshingly original, his evident pleasure with himself is a delight.

There are a few clunky metaphors, like the office door Irene is always opening or closing or the typewriter that leaves out the As, which seems to lead to Esposito’s revelation that his “temo” (I fear), a word he wakes up thinking of in the middle of the night, should have been te amo (I love you).

But for every weak link there are several great scenes, like Irene’s cagey interrogation of the killer or Esposito’s twisty reunion with the husband 25 years after the murder. And when the killer steps onto an elevator with Esposito and Irene, it’s one of the creepiest things I’ve seen in a movie lately, a scene Hitchcock would have been proud of.

The 2010 Orphan Film Symposium: A Crash Course in Film History

Now that half the population seems to be filming the other half at any given moment, now that YouTube uploads 24 hours of new video a minute, how do moving image archivists decide what to save?

I’m thinking about that because I just went to the seventh Orphan Film Symposium, a biennial orgy of watching and discussing neglected, mostly uncopyrighted moving pictures from around the world. Going to Orphans is like standing behind a favorite uncle’s shoulder as he rifles through his old treasures in the attic: Some stuff is purely wonderful, some is strange enough to be fascinating, and some doesn’t interest you nearly as much as it does him.

The films and videos shown at Orphans, all shorts or excerpts, don’t always last as long as the talks that precede them. Each gets an introduction, sometimes from the filmmaker but more often from the archivist who catalogued, studied, and restored it. The presenters talk about how and why the films were made, placing them in artistic and historical context.

The symposium is just the exclamation point that punctuates an ongoing exchange among its participants, showcasing some of the work they’ve been engaged in since their last meeting. A collegial vibe unites the 300 or so arty-academic preservationists, curators, filmmakers, professors, students, and assorted other film buffs. They’re predominantly American, but there’s a large and growing contingent from other countries – including 17 of this year’s presenters.

You get a sense of their sense of this community in Streible’s affectionate introductions of the people introducing the films, who may be half-jokingly described as "the world’s most famous film archivist – for the last two years, anyway" or "the world’s leading expert on 17.5mm film in Europe before 1910." You also see it in things like the thank-you gift Streible got from the group, a clock in the shape of a frog to commemorate the star of Ro-Revus Talks about Worms, a funky educational short starring a rubber hand puppet in the shape of a bullfrog that has become the Orphanistas’ unofficial mascot.



So what do they preserve? Mostly newsreels and other commissioned short films, advocacy films, home movies, underground or experimental films, and short animations, plus a smattering of outtakes, raw footage, and other equally noncommercial odds and ends. There’s even some vintage porn, most of which looks touchingly innocent by today’s standards.

The politics of the orphan films are solidly liberal-lefty. Most date from the first half of the 20th century, but some are older and many are newer, a few even brand new. Two young women won this year's Helen Hill Award for recently completed work, Jodie Mack for Yard Work is Hard Work, a whimsical mixture of animated and filmed footage that sends up the notion of marriage as the land of "happily ever after," and Danielle Ash for Pickles for Nickles, a stop-motion film about Brooklyn's rapidly changing storefronts.

Most orphan films are by and about people you've never heard of, but even archivists aren't immune to the star factor. Streible, who teaches cinema studies at New York University, says he's looking for things that have "kind of a wow factor." That often seems to translate to neglected works by well-known artists, like the intermittently interesting Warhol factory films screened this year, or Henri Cartier-Bresson's first film, With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. Made by Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline in 1938 to raise funds for Americans wounded in the fight for republican Spain, Abraham Lincoln Brigade is a beautifully composed mixture of dignified individual portraits and group shots that vibrate with idealistic energy.

Some of the orphans are interesting mostly for their historical significance, like Tales from Tamiment, a promotional film from 1932, and a remarkably clear partially restored version of the seminal A Trip Down Market Street.

Shot in 1906, A Trip Down Market Street records the view from a cable car moving down San Francisco's Market Street to the Ferry Building, then surveys the scene to the left before ending. As the streetcar makes its leisurely way down the street, pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and early automobiles cross in front of it seemingly at random, since the streets are too new and the traffic too slow to require lanes or laws, let alone lights. It's a mesmerizing view of a thriving city just before the earthquake of 1906 changed everything. The Orphans screening was accompanied by a moody score, which seemed to foreshadow the coming quake.

Tales from Tamiment is a jauntily captioned silent portrait of a Socialist summer camp in the Poconos in the early '30s. Its energetic, apparently unstaged footage showed campers participating in a wide range of physical activities, competing in a beauty contest, mugging for the camera, or just hanging out. The spontaneity, collegial close-ups, and gently self-mocking humor made it feel surprisingly contemporary, despite a range of tints that made it look as if it had been left to seep in a series of pots of differently colored teas.

Episode 4 of Orson Welles' Sketchbook, a slyly subversive and deliciously entertaining tale, is a reminder of how much surveillance we've come to accept in these terrorized times. Part of a series Welles recorded shortly after the end of WWII, it starts with him sketching a line drawing, marker squeaking on the page. Then he shows us the drawing and starts to spin the rambling story that goes with it, facing the camera or looking down as if lost in thought. Welles' orotund voice draws us in as he slides from one masterfully told anecdote to the next, winding up with a rant about the then-new practice of demanding documentation and personal information when people cross national borders. "There's something about being ticketed and numbered that gives a man a feeling of being a piece of baggage or a convict," he says before calling on his listeners to refuse to go along with this outrageous invasion of privacy. You can see it on YouTube, divided into parts one and two.

The Cry of Jazz, a 1959 film, anatomizes a volatile junction in the racial evolution of the United States. The film was introduced by a very enthusiastic Jonas Mekas, who called it "a masterpiece" and remembered seeing it first when it came out, in "a busy, very busy time" for New York independent filmmakers. The only film ever made by composer Edward Bland, who shot it on a shoestring, it's aggressively uncinematic, essentially an essay captured on celluloid. It starts painfully slowly, the only action a stiffly acted and worded argument between an uneasily biracial group of jazz fans in Chicago. But it warms up when one man commandeers the discussion, carving out a coolly intelligent case for how the structure of jazz mirrors the barriers faced by black people in America. Bland illustrates some of his points with documentary footage shot in segregated Southside Chicago, but unlike the well-meaning white liberals who made One Tenth of Our Nation, a 1940 documentary also shown at Orphans, he doesn't focus only on deprivation and hardships. Instead, he looks at how black Americans faced with "a futureless future" react by making the most of the now, showing supple dancers jitterbugging, beautiful young men striding down the street with rhythmically asymmetrical steps, and other vivid examples of people making the most of a moment.

Other orphans are notable mainly for their artistry. Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin of CalArts are conducting inventive experiments with the medium of film, exploring how digital compression affects the 35mm image by digitalizing iconic film sequences and then taking out the key frame. They showed five of their short films at Orphans. The originals they started with were always clearly recognizable, yet their footage looked entirely new. Galloping cowboys and Indians from The Searchers dissolved into and out of the background as if birthed by the earth, breaking up into pixilated squares of color that flowed past the stationary background. The dancers in a floral-themed Busby Berkeley bit devolved into purely organic shapes, their individual bodies disappearing into the larger pattern. And, in the pair's most interesting experiment, Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, a mandala-like meditation on a hallway in which metronomically timed changes in focal length create a sense of movement, is converted into pure lines of bright white dancing on a black background. It's an utterly stripped-down abstraction, nothing but light, dark, and movement—and yet, almost magically, it clearly evokes the original.

Other highlights:

• let's just kiss + say goodbye: This witty 1995 Robert Blanchon film pieces together nonsexual bits of gay porn films, often scored to the 1976 song that gives the movie its title. Absurd, badly acted, and patently staged, these encounters somehow add up to a poignant sideways look at the specter of death that was then stalking the gay community (Blanchon died of AIDS in 1999.)
  
• A scene from a Warhol factory film showing Warhol with a clueless reporter. A mirror image of the one in Don't Look Back where Bob Dylan spars with reporters, this shows Warhol as bemused as Dylan was contemptuous. He deflects a series of dense questions by spacily admiring the light reflected onto the ceiling by a giant disco ball, gently inviting his interviewer to join him. The reporter winds up on the floor next to Warhol, clutching his mike as they stare at the ceiling.
  
• A didactic German short from the early '30s about how to create a soundtrack by drawing soundwaves directly onto celluloid.
  
• A kitschily vivid excerpt from 1908's The Life of Christ in which Jesus moves soulfully through the stations of the cross while actors in colorized clothes emote in the background with the stylized gestures and expressions that dominated during the silent era.

The 80 films shown at Orphans 7 spanned almost the whole history of filmmaking, providing a crash course in filmmaking technique and the creative process and teaching us something new about our shared history. I left Orphans—just after midnight on a Saturday night—feeling grateful to the people who save all those frozen moments in time, making sure they come to life for at least one more audience. Film is a shark that must keep moving to stay alive, but without archivists and preservationists and historians to keep track of where we've been, how would we know where to go? Written for The House Next Door

Sunflower

The enormous changes that keep engulfing China, rolling in like the breakers on Oahu Beach, have been the subject of lots of fine contemporary Chinese films: everything from documentaries (Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze) to haunting narratives (Jia Zhangke's Still Life, The World, and 24 City) to a transcendent Hou Hsiao Hsien love story (Three Times). In Sunflower, a 2005 film I just caught up with this weekend, director Zhang Yang looks at those changes through the lens of an ordinary family in Beijing.

In an interview on the DVD, Zhang says this was his most personal movie to date. “Watching this film is like watching myself grow up,” he says. The family in it – a mother (a successfully deglamorized Joan Chen), a father (Sun Haiying), and their son, the independent-minded Xiangyang (who is played by three actors at ages 9, 19 and 32) – shares the director’s last name, and what happens to them has the feel of closely observed daily life, though it sometimes feels a bit simplified or sentimentalized.

Zhang’s other movies include Quitting, a melodramatic documentary-style narrative in which real people play out a dramatized version of things they actually lived through, as an actor becomes a cult hit in the city, gets addicted to drugs, abuses everyone around him, and tries to kick the habit with the help of a surprisingly supportive family. Zhang also directed Getting Home, an As I Lay Dying-style black comedy about a rural man who journeys through Southwest China with the body of a dead friend, determined to bury him in his home town.

The action in Sunflower is much more mundane: One of the most touching scenes involves young Xiangyang’s separation from his beloved kitten. The drama is supplied in equal parts by Xiangyang’s lifelong power struggle with his father and the family’s fight to survive under the capricious Chinese bureaucracy in the years closely preceding and following Mao’s death.

Xiangyang’s (and director Zhang's) generation is rebelling against Confucian ideas about omniscient parents and obedient children, encouraged in part by the cultural revolution that elevated the young members of the Red Guard. The tension between father and son is also intensified by the fact that his father’s choices in life were so limited by the turbulent times he lived through. His personal frustration makes him all the more determined to see his son succeed where he failed.

Xiangyang’s father, an artist, was sentenced to six years in a reeducation camp where they broke one of his hands as part of a campaign to redirect him to a less effete occupation. He comes home a half-beaten man, prone to drinking too much and expecting too little of everything but his son, who he grooms as an artist against the boy's will.

The family lives in an old-fashioned compound in Beijing. The camera swoops through its alleys, over its rooftops, and then down to the ground for a look at the life within its walls, showing us the beauty of the old buildings and the strength of the connections between its residents, who share much more than a courtyard. (Cinematographer Jon Lin also shot Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet.)

Those ties are not overly idealized – Xiangyang’s father grows far more distant from one of his closest neighbors, for instance, when he learns that the neighbor was coerced into inventing the report that led to the father’s arrest and detention. But the joy the kids find in each other’s company and the matter-of-fact way the adults pitch in to help one another makes you feel the loss as these compounds get razed when a the forest of Western-style high rise apartments, shopping malls and freeways take over Beijing.

Not everything is so deftly done. There’s no music behind most of the scenes, which adds to the sense of reality, but when music is added it’s ladled on thick, slow piano music and syrupy strings amping up the pathos while one of the characters makes one of those deadly speeches in which someone spells out just what he or she has been thinking and feeling all these years.

The best parts of Sunflower are the ones that seemingly capture people unaware as they go about their lives, freezing in place to listen warily when an official announcement comes over the local loudspeaker, watching a crudely rousing patriotic movie in the square, or erupting into battle over who has the right to one of the coveted new apartments the Party is doling out. It's also interesting to see the kids amuse themselves with handmade toys and games, growing up without TV in an era that seems far more than a couple of decades removed from the last third of the movie.

What interests Zhang most is what happens within the family units, since that’s where we spend most of our time, form our deepest attachments, and are most truly ourselves. Sunflower feels like an art-house soap opera at times, but at its best it’s a tribute to the power of that love. Radical shifts in a culture may test family ties, this movie says, but it can never break them.

Vincere

Vincere is a magnificently melancholy metaphor of a movie. A poetic examination of Italy’s love affair with Benito Mussolini and his brand of Fascism, it refracts that story through the prism of Il Duce’s relationship with the woman who bore his first child and claimed to be his wife – a claim he denied.

As the movie begins, Mussolini (Filippo Timi) is a firebrand of a young journalist. He doesn’t quite know what he’s for yet, but he’s against almost everything: the king, the Pope, even God himself. As he mesmerizes the audience at a debate where he’s arguing that there is no God, the camera picks up the rapt face and shining eyes of Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno.)

The two are soon locked together like magnets. Ida leans into his kisses as if she’s dying of thirst and his mouth is a fountain, but his interest in her seems to be all about control and domination. Even when he takes to the street with his Socialist comrades to demand peace and justice, he sounds ferocious, bellowing until his neck turns ropy.

Their affair doesn’t last too long (no one knows just why it ended, and the movie leaves the details vague), but Dalser refuses to give up. Even after Mussolini takes up with another woman, eventually marrying her and claiming her publicly as his wife, Dalser insists that she is his wife and their son is his legitimate heir. When she starts writing letters to the pope and all the politicians she can think of, calling on them to pressure Mussolini to do the right thing by herself and her son, she is put under close surveillance and then confined in a mental hospital. Her son is then kidnapped from the sister she had appointed his guardian and given into the care of a Fascist bureaucrat who leaves him in a Catholic boarding school where we see him only on holidays, the only student there.

Mother and son pine away in parallel isolation, forbidden to see one another. (Playing the son as a young man, Timi creates a distorted-mirror image of the father, a discarded and damaged man who’s both pitiful and terrible.) Their very existence is denied by Il Duce, who has by then become the dictator of a mostly all-too-willing Italy. He seduces the populace as confidently as he seduces his women, enveloping them in an orgiastic atmosphere of nationalism and brutality before plunging the country into WWII as Hitler’s ally.

Writer-director Marco Bellocchio, who has served as a member of the Venice Film Festival jury, creates an impressionistic crescendo of emotion by layering together a series of densely textured, often nonlinear moments. He and cinematographer Daniele Ciprì draw us into a scene by focusing on tangible, often sensuous details. In one scene, Balser’s catchlit eyes, marcelled hair, and satin nightdress gleam in a dimly lit room as she succumbs to Mussolini . In another, she strides across a field to press her case with one of Mussolini’s trusted aides, then stops to put on dress shoes with busy, nervous hands.

There are many movies within this movie, attesting to the power of the image and to Mussolini’s canny use of propaganda. In newsreel footage from the time, we see the real Mussolini speechifying and playing with a lion cub, a trick he used to show off his courage. It’s fascinating to see the real Mussolini, but hard to imagine this stiff, obviously self-satisfied bully being as successful as seducer as the much more elastic and charismatic – and much better-looking – Timi.

The beautifully composed green- and blue-tinged images shot for the movie, along with its military score, create a tone of somber significance, while its frequent use of medium and long shots places its characters in context and makes their actions vivid. In one dreamlike setup, gunshots sound and smoke billows into a high-arched ancient walkway as people run first toward the camera and then away from it. Then Dalser emerges from the smoke, walking calmly toward us with her baby carriage. In that scene and several others characters are shown in silhouette or with faces obscured, amping up the drama even further.

We experience everything intensely, but we often don’t know what we’re seeing. In the scene in the arched walkway, for instance, we don’t know who’s running from the cops or just what they’re demanding or protesting.

Rather than detract from the power of the movie, however, that uncertainty enriches it, driving home Vincere’s message by example. Letting their emotions get whipped up for a poorly understood cause was what got Italians in trouble during the Fascist era, and her blind devotion to the lover who seduced and abandoned her was Dalser’s ultimate downfall.

Kick-Ass

In an essay about violence in the movies in last Saturday’s New York Times, A. O. Scott clucks about the carnage in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Kick-Ass. “We will, I suppose, each find our own limits and draw our own boundaries, but it may also be time to articulate those and say when enough is enough,” he says.

I’d go along with that. What I don’t understand is why so many people are drawing the line at this little wink of a movie.

Deciding how much violence is too much is not an easy line to draw. It falls in different places for different people – and it can move. Personally, I hate movies that exist just to rub our faces in scenes of extreme and realistic-looking mayhem, or that present war or gore as the solution to a problem. But I can take a lot of violence if it’s abstracted enough not to feel real, or if it’s used to tell a story about something deeper than the shock and awe of torture porn. That’s why I love most of Quentin Tarantino’s gorgeous, word-drunk movies. For me, they’re about the pleasure of marinating in an expertly executed genre story in the company of memorable characters. Well, yeah, some of those characters kill people, in elaborately choreographed torture sessions and death matches that are staged for our entertainment. But what really interests Tarantino, I think, is why his characters do what they do. His movies don’t exploit violence; they explore it.

The same goes does Kick-Ass, though it’s jokier and less stylish than Tarantino’s stuff.

Born of a comic book, Kick-Ass touches on our worship of cartoonish violence and revenge fantasies, with a pointedly light tone and level of analysis. At first glance, there’s nothing new about this tale of organized crime-fighting superheroes in New York City, aside from the fact that it stars an 11-year-old girl superhero. Whether or not you like the movie will probably depend largely on whether you find Hit Girl (the excellent Chloe Moretz) refreshing or shocking. A lot of people were offended by seeing a girl that young using such salty language and perpetrating and enduring such extreme violence. Some are also concerned about the 13-year-old actress who played her.

To me, it seems naïve at best, and possibly paternalistic, to protest the corruption of Hit Girl’s innocence when our culture routinely exposes girls of that age and younger to much rougher stuff. Kids these days have a lot to deal with, and cartoonish revenge fantasies are probably a very effective way to deal with some of it. And it’s about time the superhero boys’ club started admitting girls, if you ask me.

But Hit Girl isn’t the only thing that makes this story stand out. As he did in Stardust, cowriter and director Matthew Vaughn spices up a straightforward fantasy a little bit by commenting on it, giving it enough self-awareness so media-savvy 21st-century kids won’t find it too corny. This time, he and his cowriters (Mark Millar and John S. Romita Jr. wrote the comic and Jane Goldman cowrote the screenplay) create a meta-fantasy by telling Hit Girl’s story through the lens of a regular guy who aspires to do what she does.

Dave Lizewski (a likeably self-effacing Aaron Johnson) is a better-than-average-looking but otherwise unremarkable high school student. He longs to be a superhero, although, as he laments in a nicely written voiceover, his only superpower is “being invisible to girls.” He goes for it anyway, mail-ordering a dorky-looking jumpsuit and mask to become Kick-Ass, a self-made capeless crusader.

Kick-Ass gets a serious beat-down on his first outing, but on his second he saves a stranger from a gang. His awkward battle is captured on cell phone video, making him “the latest Internet phenomenon” – and bringing him to the attention of Hit Girl and her father/trainer, Big Daddy (a surprisingly restrained Nicolas Cage), who enlist him as an ally.

A fanatical pair of self-taught vigilantes with a fantastic arsenal of weapons, Hit Girl and Big Daddy can do incredible things, although they don’t actually have any super powers. We’ve heard that story before, of course, in Batman. In fact, most of what happens in Kick-Ass feels deeply familiar, a fact the movie cheerfully acknowledges with winks like Big Daddy’s Batman-ish superhero getup, Dave’s Taxi Driver-esque practice moves in front of the mirror, a slow-mo shot of two guys running out of a blazing building, and too many nick-of-time saves to count. There’s even a nod to the murderous schoolgirl in Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

But watching a regular guy struggle to make it as a superhero while a little girl goes in for the kill gives Kick-Ass enough kick to make it worth seeing.

If you like this kind of thing, that is.

Muhammad and Albert

I just saw a kick-ass double dose of docs about Muhammad Ali (to be fair, one was also about Larry Holmes, who seems like a very decent guy, and understandably peeved at having lived his life in Ali's shadow) at Harlem's Maysles Cinema. The first, Muhammad Ali: The Greatest, is a visual knockout by the gifted photographer/filmmaker William Klein, who filmed extreme close-ups with a wide-angle lens to crowd his frame with telling details, then punctuated those kinetic scenes with iconic images of America in the '60s and '70s.

The second one, Muhammad and Larry, was harder to watch, since it traces the beginning of Ali's decline and his defeat at the hands of his friend Holmes. It's a sensitive and moving look at the two fighters, supplementing 1980 footage shot by Albert Maysles (yes, it's that Maysles) and his brother David with contemporary interviews shot by Albert and Bradley Kaplan. The film was made for ESPN's 30 for 30 series.

The movies also sparked an interesting conversation between the audience and Maysles, Kaplan, and Laura Coxson, who produced Muhammad and Larry (that's her with Albert Maysles in the photograph above.) But I'm burying the lead.

Probably the best part of the evening for me was getting to chat with Maysles before he screened his movie, then hearing him talk about his humanist, unpretentious way of making documentaries during the Q and A. It's easy to see why he's put so many subjects at ease in his documentaries: he's a warm, approachable man who radiates kindly interest in whoever's in front of him.

I got some of what he said on my cell phone video camera, so you can see for yourself. You might have a little trouble hearing, though, since I was sitting a few rows back when I shot it and his voice is low. So turn up the volume -- or, better yet, use your headphones.

Green Zone

My husband and I have a running disagreement about the movies. Not which ones to go to or what we think about them, so much: just how to order tickets. He always wants to get them online in advance to make sure we get a seat; I almost always want to save a couple bucks by buying when we get there.

But when I went to Green Zone with a friend a couple weeks back, I ordered my ticket ahead of time. Surely the combination of Matt Damon as an action hero and director Paul Greengrass’ frenetic intensity, not to mention the topical subject matter, would bring people to this barely fictionalized story of how we got into Iraq, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Tumbleweeds were pretty much rolling down the aisles of the theater, though the movie had been open for less than two weeks and we went to an after-work showing in a centrally located Manhattan theater.

Conventional wisdom has been saying for a while that American audiences aren’t ready for a movie about our occupation of Iraq. As proof, people point to the lousy box office for other studio films with big-name directors or stars or screenwriters, like In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, and The Messenger. But I thought all those movies were too preachy and sanctimonious.

That assumption about why people shunned those movies reminds me of the one you often hear about how a certain star can make a movie a hit. I always wonder how the people who make those pronouncements can know what audiences are reacting to. It seems to me most of us decide what to see based partly on the cast, but we won’t see a movie we don’t think we’ll like just because it stars someone we like, and we won’t stay away from a good one just because we don’t know who’s in it. Was Spider-Man a hit because of Tobey Maguire or because Sam Raimi makes kick-ass genre movies – and maybe because the blue-collar hero and evil-businessman villain resonated for audiences after our economy went south? Unless you do a whole lot of exit interviews, I don’t see how you can really know, so I wondered if people were just exercising good taste when they stayed away from the Iraq features.

But audiences treated the unpretentiously affecting Stop Loss and The Hurt Locker, an astonishingly good movie, like redheaded stepchildren (though the Oscars saved Hurt Locker from oblivion). And then there was that wind whistling through the empty seats when I saw Green Zone, another fine movie that deserves – maybe even needs – to be seen.

So now I have to wonder: why aren’t people going to these movies?

Like the second and third Bourne movies, which were also directed by Greengrass and starred Damon, Green Zone is a current events lesson dressed up as a breakneck thriller. The history lesson was buried deep enough in the Bourne trilogy to be pretty generally ignored, which may explain its popularity. Even during the Abu Ghraib scandal, the reviews said surprisingly little about the realism and relevance of the movies’ depiction of CIA indoctrination, undercover ops, and torture. But there’s no way to miss the politics this time around.

Green Zone is based on based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a history of life inside Baghdad’s Green Zone in the months after the invasion, and of the ideological battles fought in the early part of the occupation over how to reconstruct Iraq. It also looks at how the U.S. fabricated reports about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion. Greengrass focuses mainly on that deception, using Damon’s character – Roy Miller, an upright Army officer in charge of finding WMDs shortly after the invasion – to trace the story and bring home the human cost of the Bush Administration’s head fake.

After leading his men into danger at suspected WMD sites several times and finding nothing, Miller embarks on a rogue investigation that leads him to one of Saddam’s generals, into a hellish American interrogation center, and down a lot of scary streets and alleys with shaky hand-held cameras, suspenseful cross-cutting, and breakneck chases adding to the almost constant sense of instability and urgency.

This time the CIA is the good guy, the one American agency with an understanding of the area’s history and politics and a realistic plan for rebuilding it. But the arrogant ideologues in charge don’t want to hear the facts. This leads to a three-way battle, with nearly as much distance between the two American factions as between the U.S. and Iraq.

The movie starts on March 19, 2003, with the “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad. This time, though, we see it from the Iraqi point of view, so there’s no danger of mistaking those bombs for distant fireworks. The Iraqi point of view continues to get plenty of screen time, partly through the character of Freddie, a local patriot who volunteers to help the Americans, despite his frequent frustration and anger at their treatment of him and his country.

The fictionalized versions of U.S. puppet/puppetmaster Ahmed Chalabi and the smug bureaucrat played by Greg Kinnear, an amalgamation of Donald Rumsfeld and the ideologues in charge of the Green Zone, have real bite, though the reporter played by Amy Ryan is a much kinder and gentler version of New York Times reporter and misinformation mouthpiece Judith Miller, who never seemed to be as wracked by conscience and self-doubt or as bent on uncovering the truth as this character is throughout the movie.

Green Zone also flatters the American military – surely if they were this good at tracking people in Iraq, they would have found Saddam and his generals and Imperial Guard a lot sooner. But its recreation of the streets of Baghdad generates a sense of danger and deterioration strong enough to make the party scene by the pool in the Green Zone feel appropriately surreal and insulated from reality.

I loved the ferocity with which this movie pursues the truth, and its touching, almost naïve belief in its importance. When the Kinnear character says it no longer matters whether there were WMDs, Miller explodes. “Of course it matters,” he says. “The reasons we go to war always matter. It’s all that matters!”

Maybe most people don’t feel that way. Maybe there are still a lot of people who think there were WMDs that just never got found. Or maybe it’s just that most people don’t go to the movies to get worked up over something as depressing as the war in Iraq.

I don’t know, but I do know Green Zone only made about $33 million in U.S. theaters by April 4, and it cost about three times that much to make. So whatever those empty seats are saying, it looks like they’ll have the last word.

Date Night

Not great but not half bad, Date Night is a soothingly predictable fable about the appeal of predictability.

This is one of those movies where nice middle-class people from the suburbs or a small town get jolted out of a comfortable routine when they fall into an adventure, usually in a big city. This time around, as is often the case, the main characters are a married couple who need to add a little spice to a marriage grown bland.

It’s no wonder so many of us love these movies so much. They provide thrills by pretending to celebrate change and adventure, but their moral is always the same audience-flattering message. As Dorothy put it, in perhaps the most famous of all the involuntary adventure movies: “There’s no place like home.”

Date Night starts well by giving us Steve Carell and Tina Fey as Phil and Claire Foster of Teaneck, New Jersey. Their home is a combat zone, between the two kids cannonballing onto their bed and the drawers Phil keeps leaving open for Claire to bang into, a recurring theme that stands for all the little things he does that drive her nuts.

But the two really love – and like – each other. We like them, too, and believe in their chemistry, since Carell and Fey both bring genuine warmth, self-mocking humor, and an appealingly low-key, low-drama brand of sanity to their roles. These two seem like real grown-ups, an endangered species in Hollywood movies – especially comedies – these days.

Josh Klausner’s so-so script and Shawn Levy’s equally uninspired direction don’t give the actors much to work with, so they have to manufacture almost all their own appeal and romantic wistfulness. If the outtakes at the end are typical of what happened on the set, they improvised a lot of their lines too. That’s not a bad way to go when you’re working with comic talents like the two leads, not to mention supporting players like Kristen Wiig and J.B. Smoove, but the results are too often slack, delivering half-funny lines or one of those moments where someone says something that was meant to be funny but doesn’t quite come out right and then laughs at the wrongness of it. I like sharing that kind of laugh with a friend, but I expect a little more from a romantic comedy.

Some of the physical humor is half-baked, too. A pole dance by the Fosters that’s supposed to be an uproarious set piece, for instance, is awkward enough to be genuinely painful to watch.

A pole dance? I guess you need a little plot so you know how they got there. But not too much, since the plot is never the point in these movies.

Claire and Phil are about to go to a movie for their weekly date night when, spooked by the news that some good friends are getting divorced, they decide to splurge on a trendy Manhattan restaurant instead.

Sent to purgatory at the bar (the filmmakers get in some good digs at the snotty staff), they get a table by poaching the reservation of another couple who didn’t show up. But that couple turns out to be hoarding something that some bad guys want. Before they can even finish their truffle risotto, the Fosters find themselves on the run, dodging guys with guns while figuring out what’s going on and how to get out of this mess alive. Meanwhile, they encounter the requisite characters and make a few pit stops to discuss and revive their relationship.

There’s some mildly funny stuff about a bare-chested Mark Wahlberg (the men who encounter him keep trying to get him to put on a shirt, while the women keep admiring the view) and a lively scene with James Franco and Mila Kunis as the couple whose reservation the Fosters took, which gives the movie a welcome jolt of genuine unpredictability and manic energy.

Now and then the Fosters waken the ghosts of old romantic comedies that make this one feel pretty anemic, like when Phil and Claire invent dialogue for strangers in a restaurant, a low-rent version of a brilliant bit by Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, or when Claire offers up a pale variation on the famous line about Ginger Rogers, telling Phil: “Everything you’re doing, I’m doing in heels.”

But in the end, the actors’ charm and the appeal of the genre carry us to shore on a warm wave of goodwill. If the Fosters had gone to a movie as planned on their date night, they could have happily seen one just like this. It would have given them a few laughs and made them feel good about their marriage, and what’s not to like about that?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Lisbeth Salander, the title character in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is a heroine for the 21st century. A computer hacker with a near-impenetrable set of defenses, she’s also a survivor and an implacable avenger of sadistic abuse, as humorlessly single-minded as Christian Bales’ Batman and almost as freakishly gifted.

Salander’s gift is research, and she has a photographic memory and a knack for seeing patterns that most people miss. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist, the novel’s main character, speculates that she may even have Asperger’s syndrome, that very 21st-century neurological condition.

Salander’s thirst for justice and constitutional inability to be the least bit ingratiating – not to mention her talent for kicking ass – make her a deeply satisfying modern heroine, especially for a novel whose subject is the vicious brutalization of women (its original Swedish title translates to Men Who Hate Women.) So it’s too bad the movie version sands down her edges, zooming in to reveal soft eyes behind her night-black curtain of hair. Noomi Rapace looks the part as Salander, but she leans too hard on the girl’s uncertainty, making her toughness seem like a brittle shield rather than a thick carapace.

Besides being an indictment of misogyny, Larsson’s enormously popular Millennium trilogy, which starts with Dragon Tattoo, also speaks to the times with its anti-corporate fervor, though its touching faith in investigative journalism feels a little retro. (Larsson, who died recently, was a journalist and political activist who did a lot to uncover racist and right-wing organizations in Sweden.) The series is named for the fictional magazine where Blomkvist is publisher, part owner, and principal investigative reporter, and one of two main subplots in the book version of Dragon Tattoo concerns a corrupt financier Blomkvist is trying to nail in print and the magazine’s struggle to survive after the financier sues Blomkvist for libel and wins.

Larsson has a healthy respect for technology (his books single out so many computers and programs for praise you’d think he was on Apple’s payroll) coupled with an old-school, near-religious appreciation of research. Dragon Tattoo contains countless scenes of people pecking away at computers or conducting interviews to search for clues – and holds our interest in the process. Some of the most dramatic sequences in the film involve poring through files in an archive or piecing together still photos from a newspaper morgue to recreate events from years past.

Director Niels Arden Oplev and screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg cut out almost all of the magazine’s internal politics and most of the details about the financier, bringing the other main story center stage. Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger, the aged head of a once-powerful company and the family that runs it, to find out what happened to his favorite niece, who disappeared decades ago. He thinks she was murdered by someone in the family, but who? The Vanger family is a viper’s nest of ruthless industrialists. Between them, they exhibit nearly every odious trait imaginable -- some are even Nazis. For a while, it looks as if Dragon Tattoo is going to turn into one of those Agatha Christie mysteries where the detective goes through a group of people in an isolated place until he finds the killer, as Blomkvist moves into a family-owned house in a small town in northern Sweden and starts digging for clues, hiring Salander to help. But Larsson goes places Dame Christie would never have dreamed of.

The filmmakers always let us know where we are without tipping us off to what’s coming next, and they hug close to the curves of the original story as they condense nearly 600 pages of often complicated storytelling into one smooth-flowing, two-and-a-half-hour movie.. But some of their elisions make the characters less complex and well-rounded. The Swedish sexual politics of the original become more Puritanical in the movie, which erases Blomkvist’s affairs with both the married editor of Millennium and Henrik Vanger’s niece Cecilia. The movie whites out the daughter to whom he is a laissez-faire absentee father, and it makes Lisbeth a more conventional heroine, less emotionally inaccessible and more omniscient.

The movie also sentimentalizes a key scene that the book underplays nicely – making a soap opera of what happens after Mikael learns what happened to Harriet. Still, it faces up to violence against women unflinchingly – enough so that it’s often hard to watch.

So if you want this story straight, get the book – but that doesn’t mean the movie’s not worth watching.