Passing Strange: A Spike Lee Joint Venture

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

But I don’t like this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t that just what the Nazis believed?

Paper Heart

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie and Julia

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Loop

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Movie Roundup

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?

By Elise Nakhnikian

What is a painting worth?

Whatever someone will pay for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brüno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Written for TimeOFF

Whatever Works

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever Works doesn’t.

Food, Inc.

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farewell, Farrah. Do Blondes Really Have More Fun?

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Year One

By Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Away We Go

By Elise Nakhnikian

One of the images in Away We Go pretty well sums up the whole movie: Embarking on a road trip to figure out where and how to raise the baby they’re about to have, Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) stand on an airport’s moving sidewalk. Filmed head-on through a long lens, they appear to be standing still while everyone else scurries about in the background.

Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida, the thirty-something couple at the heart of the McSweeney’s/Believer publishing fiefdom, based the screenplay on things they’d experienced or read during Vida’s first pregnancy. Their sympathies are clearly with Verona and Burt, but the other characters are mostly caricatures, flitting by just to provide comic relief, life lessons, or both. So whether you like the movie has a lot to do with what you think of its main characters.

I enjoyed Burt and Verona’s teasing rapport and the ease of their intimacy, a long-established, day-to-day kind of love you don’t see much at the movies. I also liked the idea of the search they were on. So they had me at hello – yet they kept losing me. Watching this movie felt like going on a date with someone I was attracted to but had to work too hard to connect with.

My problem wasn’t with Burt and Verona, who wield that ironic/self-deprecating Gen X thing like a force field, deflecting any criticism I might have otherwise had. I found them believable ad charming, both individually and as a couple. Rudolph’s Verona exudes a steady, sometimes cranky honesty and kindness that make her the sanest person in any room. Krasinski’s Burt, who bounds about like an oversized puppy, seems significantly younger and less mature, but the two clearly delight in each other and you can see how they might balance each other out.

The problem is the grossly oversimplified people they encounter on their journey – and the smugness with which most of them are presented. I don’t know where that came from, but I suspect director Sam Mendes.

An Englishman with a lot of cachet in Hollywood, Mendes seems determined to make Significant Statements about American life in his art-house genre movies. Unfortunately, his messages are about as fresh as the Morse Code. American Beauty and Revolutionary Road delivered the news that life in the suburbs can be, like, conformist and soul-killing, man. Road to Perdition was a 40’s-style noir gangster movie that wanted to say something deep about fathers and sons, but its story got swallowed up by its art direction. And Jarhead took a politically savvy, impassioned book about Marines in Iraq and leached out all its nuance and angry eloquence.

Away We Go’s Burt and Verona do a lifestyle tour of the United States, and what they find isn’t pretty. Searching for their home with a capital H, they check in with friends and relatives in a series of cities, observing their wildly varied childrearing methods. In the first half of the movie, everybody they visit is self-involved to the point of cruelty, their behavior and beliefs so broadly sketched that they play almost like farce.

The worst offender is an old family friend of Burt’s, a self-satisfied, New Age-y professor whose home life is practically cultlike. Maggie Gyllenhaal looks like she’s having fun with the part, speaking in hushed tones about the joys of exposing children to parental lovemaking or reacting to a stroller as if it were made of toxic waste, but it’s not much fun to watch Mendes and company torch this straw woman.

The people in the second half of the film are more sympathetically portrayed. That’s a welcome shift, but the mood turns too suddenly somber as Burt and Verona feel not just their own pain but other people’s too. The indie-folkie score by singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch can get pretty annoying too, and none of the encounters go deep enough to provide any real insight.

An All-Star cast and crew polishes the intentionally scruffy script to a high gloss. There are no small parts when minor roles are played by actors like Allison Janney and Catherine O’Hara. Cinematographer Ellen Kuras works unobtrusively to mirror the couple’s perspective, using a lot of deadpan pans and providing such loving close-ups of Burt and Verona that I’ve memorized the mole on Rudolph’s eyebrow. Kuras also captures the movie’s undercurrent of quirk by occasionally showing us something slightly askew, like a reflection of an airplane in a wall of glass that makes it look like a school of leaping dolphins.

But no amount of skill can bring those other people to life. In the end, Verona and Burt stand out from their surroundings as starkly as the detective in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, lone human figures silhouetted against a cartoonish backdrop.

Summer Hours

By Elise Nakhnikian

At the New York Film Festival premiere of Summer Hours, writer/director Olivier Assayas called it his Cherry Orchard. That’s a bold analogy, but it holds up. By mining the emotions of a haute-bourgeois clan as its adult children sell the family estate, this elegiac work of art captures the ebb and flow of a family’s life across generations – and the decommissioning of an aging empire and its ruling class.

Summer Hours was conceived as part of a series of short films the Musée d’Orsay planned to sponsor for its 20th anniversary. “The notes that I was scribbling initially were about how an artwork has a life cycle,” Assayas told viewers at the film festival. “It lives its life among individuals in households and at some point it ends up buried in a museum.”

The museum abandoned the project, but not until Assayas had created a back story for his imaginary objects. In explaining what they’d meant to people over the years and how they wound up in a museum, he created a whole family, including three adult children who represent different aspects of himself, and he wanted to tell their story.

We first meet the family at its estate, a beautiful French country house with a rambling yard. Cinematographer Eric Gautier’s fluid camera follows kids and dogs as they swarm through the house and grounds, pausing to take note of the live-in housekeeper, Éloise (Isabelle Sadoyan). Also there is the kids’ elegant, strong-willed grandmother, Hélène (Edith Scob), who lives there, plus her three grown children, and their spouses, who have gathered to celebrate Hélène’s birthday.

Six months later, the family is back for Hélène’s funeral. Between mourning their mother and speculating about her life, the adult “kids” – Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), Jérémie (Jérémie Renier, a favorite of the masterful Dardenne brothers), and Frédéric (Charles Berling) – decide what to do with the house and its treasures, some of which are so special that a world-class museum wants to acquire them.

The economical yet realistic dialogue and the excellent cast, which includes some of the best naturalistic actors working today, capture the emotional ebb and flow of a family: the jokes and shared memories that keep these adult children together, their differences in temperament; the obligations and interests that pull them apart.

Assayas, an early aficionado of Asian film (he was once married to actress Maggie Cheung, who starred in two of his movies) has long been attuned to how globalization is changing life in his native France. He carries that theme into Summer Hours, which looks at how the global economy is, as he put it, “basically tearing apart families and transforming ancient, traditional cultures.”

Adrienne lives in New York and works as an in-house designer for a high-end Japanese department store. Jérémie works the other end of the global economy, managing a factory in China that makes cheap sneakers. Frédéric, the oldest son, is the only one who stayed close to home, working as an economist at a university near his mother’s estate.

Frédéric loves the house and everything in it and wants to keep it in the family. But Adrienne, who seems to have inherited her mother’s bluntness, has no use for the house or its furnishings. “France neither,” she tosses off nonchalantly. And Jérémie is less interested in the house and its contents than he is in the money they could bring, which he needs to support his growing family.

While we watch them go through the process of selling the estate and go about some of the other business of their lives, the movie’s unhurried pace lets us mull over the other things it touches on – things like what’s lost when someone dies, or how a thing can seem so alive when it’s being used and so lifeless in a museum.

There’s also an eloquent subplot involving Éloise, who the camera persistently and quietly seeks out. We learn about the intimacy and power inequity of her relationship with her employer without ever hearing it discussed, just by watching how she and the family react to her loss. After all, she lost not just her closest companion but her home and her livelihood too, though Frédéric is the only one of Hélène’s children who seems to notice.

The movie ends as it began, with a river of children flowing through the old house and yard for one last party before it’s sold. They’re beautiful kids, full of energy, yet something is off: Dressed in jeans and Converse All-Stars, listening to rap, and riding skateboards, they’re aiming for an American style of cool that they can’t quite attain.

“Like everyone else, they’re into America,” one of the adults said earlier. With their grandmother’s house no longer available to come home to, we feel, they could wind up anywhere. And without a direct link to their rich ancestral history, they would be changed and somehow diminished, like those family furnishings turned museum pieces.

The Brothers Bloom

“I started with the notion of doing a character-based con movie, where the payoff at the end was an emotional one,” said writer-director Rian Johnson at a recent screening of The Brothers Bloom in New York. “The biggest challenge was making you care about the characters.”

It’s a nice idea, but the strain shows. Too slow in spots for a caper and too shallow in its too-frequent philosophizing for a deep-dish art house film, The Brothers Bloom tries so hard to be so many things that it feels like nothing at all. For all its self-consciously artful construction, it breaks up and floats away the moment it’s over, like a dandelion gone to seed in a strong gust of wind.

A story about telling stories, as the script keeps reminding us, Bloom is about two brothers who split a name between them. Orphaned as kids, they learn early on how to take care of each other and game everyone else. Stephen (a raffish Mark Ruffalo) is the mastermind, whose notebooks contain the plans for years’ worth of elaborate cons. Bloom (a broody Adrien Brody) is the younger brother who goes along to get along. He hates playing parts in his brother’s scripts, but he’s too depressed to make a life for himself.

When we first see the brothers, they’re kids who have already assumed the anachronistic uniforms they maintain throughout the movie: black-and-white clothes and black bowler hats. These early sequences, which feature amateurish child actors mouthing dialogue that’s meant to be witty and world-weary, reminded me of Brick (2005), Johnson’s first feature, a cult favorite that plays like a teenage Bugsy Malone.

Like Brick, Bloom loads up on stylistic quirks like a kid piling on Mom’s jewelry, invoking the look and feel of a lot of classic film genres. Its best moments are sheer nonsense or non sequiturs, like a Hunter Thompson-esque bit where a shambling, vaguely menacing character played by Robbie Coltrane shoots huge holes through his own front door when the brothers knock, then opens what’s left as if nothing had happened. (“I’ve been drinkin’,” he says, by way of apology.)

Johnson may have tried to make his characters likeable, but he made each such a collection of oddities that the burden rests even more squarely than usual on the actors to bring them to life. Ruffalo comes the closest, looking genuinely pained, amused, or concerned as needed while pulling off a raffish elegance. His bemused style of cool rhymes with the tough-tootsie pizzazz of his wordless sidekick, Bang Bang (the mesmerizing Rinko Kikuchi, who played a very different kind of silent girl in Babel.)

But Brody, who plays the main character, is more of a black hole than a star. His dour, one-note performance weighs down this picaresque movie like the lead on a fishhook.

As Bloom’s love interest, the beautiful, rich, and improbably cloistered Penelope, Rachel Weisz makes an inarticulate ditz seem lovable, sexy, and oddly courageous, but even she can’t strike any sparks with Brody’s sad-sack Bloom. One of Penelope’s many quirks is that she gets sexually excited by lightning, and she gets a lot more worked up by a summer storm than she ever does by Bloom.

A lot of thought and talent clearly went into making this forgettable film. Production designer Jim Clay, who also worked on Brick, found and dressed some extravagantly showy settings, most of them in old European cities like Belgrade and Prague that amplify the script’s feel of a past-haunted present. The cinematography is beautiful too, featuring lots of saturated blues, greens and grays.

But Johnson keeps poking holes in his own balloon. The shallow-dish philosophizing draws too much attention to itself: It’s clear he wants to say something about living an authentic life, but what exactly? The only genuinely thought-provoking and insightful comment – “a photograph is like a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know” – is a ripoff, an uncredited Diane Arbus quote.

The soundtrack doesn’t quite jibe either. Two familiar and lovely songs from the ‘70s – one by Bob Dylan and another by Cat Stevens – stick out from a mostly undistinguished folk-rocky soundtrack by Johnson’s cousin, Nathan Johnson, who also scored Brick. (“We’ve been making movies together since we were ten,” Johnson said at the New York screening, conjuring an image of a brothers Bloom-style collaboration.)

What stayed with me longest are the deadpan visual jokes that play out now and then in the distance, tasty little bits silhouetted against the adolescent hijinks at the center of the screen. But they seemed to belong to another story altogether, as if the ghost of Buster Keaton were filming a genuinely inventive comedy on the set of this strenuous misfire.

Management

By Elise Nakhnikian

Like Mike (Steve Zahn), its socially impaired main character, Management wants us to fall in love with its good intentions and all-too-evident sincerity despite its many – and sometimes downright disturbing – flaws. It also wants to be a madcap comedy. And it wants to be taken seriously as a relationship story, with Mike and Sue (Jennifer Aniston), the buttoned-up businesswoman he falls for, changing and growing to become true soulmates.

Some filmmakers could combine that many different colors into a work of art, but writer/director Stephen Belber just winds up with a lumpy, brownish mass that’s about as appealing as the “corporate art” Sue sells to hotels and office buildings.

This is Belber’s first attempt at comedy, and maybe it should be his last. He seems to do better with straight drama, like his three-character play Tape, which director Richard Linklater turned into a taut little movie (Belber wrote the screenplay), or The Laramie Project, the play turned TV movie about the murder of Matthew Shepard, for which he was part of a team of writers.

Here, he’s aiming to make one of those movies where a guy falls for a girl (or vice versa) who’s just not that into him and then pursues her until she falls for him too. We’ve all seen that movie a thousand times, probably because most of us like to fantasize either about landing The One That Got Away or being pursued with that kind of single-minded devotion. But Management pushes the premise too far, making it more creepy than romantic.

Mike’s not a lover: He’s a stalker with the emotional IQ of a two-year-old. It’s hard to imagine a competent adult falling for him. But this appears to be a male fantasy based on the premise that someone who looks like Jennifer Aniston could really be a mass of self-sabotaging neuroses in need of nothing more than someone who will be "sweet" to her. Under her façade of brisk efficiency, we soon learn, Sue is depressed and utterly lacking in self-confidence.

Even their meet-cute moment – which is echoed in a final clinch that feels as uncomfortable and implausible as everything else in this faintly unsettling movie – is just uncomfortable: One of them grabs the other one’s buttocks and holds on for dear life.

The rest of their early encounters feel just as desperate. Mike, the painfully geeky night manager at his parents’ cheesy motel, falls for Sue when he sees her checking in. He comes to her room at night with a bottle of wine, pretending it’s a standard gift for the guests “from management” – and asking her to share it with him. For some unfathomable reason, his exquisitely awkward come-on works, earning him a quickie in the laundry room. She’s convinced that’s the last they’ll see of each other, but he keeps pursuing her even after she leaves, sending letters, leaving voice mail messages, and showing up unannounced.

In a haiku Sue writes later, she says Mike “keeps showing up like UPS,” but he’s more like a lost puppy. Gazing up at her with bright, expectant eyes, he doesn’t seem to have a thought in his head except that he wants her to love and take care of him.

Their story alternates with a truncated and somewhat maudlin subplot involving the death of Mike’s mother (a very healthy-looking Margo Martindale) and its effect on Mike and his father. The always indelible Fred Ward is reduced to playing Mike’s sadsack dad (no wonder he looks depressed) in a handful of underwritten scenes.

Then there’s Al (a charismatic James Liao, who appears to have a gift for comedy), the friendly Chinese-American guy Mike conveniently runs into when he follows Sue to the town where she just moved in with an ex-boyfriend. Al gets Mike a job and a place to stay and becomes his instant BFF. And a good thing too, since Lord knows Mike needs help.

Sue is appropriately wary of this manchild’s obsessive attention, even getting angry with him sometimes. Yet she keeps giving in – even letting him spend the night in her house when he shows up on her doorstep with no money or ticket home.

Watching the pursued slowly succumb to the pursuer’s charms is supposed to be the appeal of movies like this, but I just kept worrying about Sue’s mental health. I felt pretty sure that Mike wasn’t going to hurt her, but how could she know? How low must her self-esteem be for her to take him seriously as a romantic prospect? And why, oh why, when she sends him home after his first unannounced visit, does she tell him he can’t see her again – for his sake? “I’m not good with people,” she says sadly. Oy vey.

Sue’s reunion with her borderline psychotic ex (Woody Harrelson, who seems to enjoy going all Gary Busey on us) is supposed to confirm how right Mike is for her. Instead, when she winds up in the final clinch with Mike, clasping his butt cheeks in that too-long embrace, all I could think was: Poor girl! I wonder how long this one will last.

Next Day Air

By Elise Nakhnikian

Next Day Air is a heist comedy about men acting tough – with an emphasis on the acting.

Leo (Donald Faison, Scrubs’ goofily endearing Dr. Turk), a weed-addled delivery man for the Fed Ex-like Next Day Air, kicks the plot into gear by delivering several bricks of coke to the wrong South Philly apartment. The box lands in the laps of Guch (Wood Harris) and his sidekick Brody (Mike Epps), a pair of inept small-time crooks who have just botched a robbery.

Seeing the drugs as their chance at financial salvation, Guch and Brody arrange to sell them to Brody’s cousin and his sidekick. Meanwhile, the deadly dealer who sent the bricks flies in with a sidekick of his own to hook up with his South Philly connection, Jesus (Cisco Reyes), and reclaim the drugs.

This is the first feature for screenwriter Blair Cobbs and director Benny Boom, who made his bones shooting music videos for hip-hop artists. Tired of “urban” (i.e. black and Latino) comedies without any smarts or edge, they wanted to make an urban version of a Guy Ritchie/Quentin Tarantino-type movie.

I wish he'd aimed a little higher, since those two have been so widely imitated by now that even their own movies can feel derivative. Still, here’s always room for a smart, stylish crime caper that gets inside the minds of its characters — especially if it’s funny to boot. And Boom and Cobbs get close to their goal, delivering the smarts, the humor, and a Grade-A cast.

Faison’s innocent stoner and his cynical workmate Eric, who’s played by the always wonderful Mos Def, don’t get as much screen time as you might expect, if you’ve seen the trailer, but they make the most of what they get. Mos Def is especially distinctive as a world-weary ex-con whose easy charm helps him scam people just enough to get by – and gets him out of a very tense yet funny stickup.

Wood Harris, whose calculating Avon Barksdale was the cold, hard center of The Wire’s first season, shows a very different side here, playing a whole set of subtly comic variations on blustering incompetence. And Yasmin Deliz is a delight as Jesus’s take-no-prisoners girlfriend, Chita, the funniest tough-talking beauty to hit the screen since Rosie Perez.

The dialogue is good – sometimes very good—and the filmmakers amp up the energy with a Latin-flavored soundtrack and frequent cuts to flashbacks shot in high-contrast video. But they also switch the whole tone of the movie at times, and that’s not done so deftly.

Most of the time, we’re in a world of comically exaggerated criminality where everyone’s on the make and no one’s getting hurt, the kind of place where Guch’s gun jams when he tries to shoot a guard after a botched bank robbery and Leo’s truck is aswarm with people trying to steal his boxes the moment he stops to buy some weed.

These criminals work hard at being hard. Jesus practices talking trash in front of his mirror, pulling out a series of ever bigger guns until he’s satisfied that he looks scary enough. He may remind you of Travis Bickel in front of a mirror in Taxi Driver, but this dress rehearsal is funny rather than frightening because Jesus isn’t fired up by paranoia or zealotry. He just wants to make some easy money.

So does just about everyone else. Leo, who tosses around his “handle with care” express delivery boxes as if they were Frisbees, is the closest thing we get to a responsible working man. But then, it’s the women who really get things done here. We get a glimpse of the fierceness of the women in Leo’s boss (Debbie Allen) and an eyeful in Chita, who insists on going along when Jesus looks for the drugs — so she can protect him.

Making Jesus’s glossy, long-legged girlfriend the most fearless of this movie’s tough guys is one of several recurring bits – like Brody’s habit of botching jobs because he mishears Guch’s orders – that Next Day Air tosses into the pot to add a little flavor.

But just as it all starts coming together, the filmmakers throw us off by throwing in some violence so realistic it’s hard to watch. The ending is the worst offender, a protracted bloodbath that drags the movie to a near-halt, spelling out a don’t-try-this-at-home moral about not risking your life for cash – and then switching tones one last time to undermine its own message.

If only they’d stuck to character-based humor and kept the violence stylized or off-camera, the filmmakers might have created a minor cult classic. Instead, they’ve cooked up an entertaining but uneven diversion for people who don’t mind a little graphic violence.