Precious

By Elise Nakhnikian

“What do I mean if I say the author portrays her protagonist’s situation as unrelenting?” asks Miss Rain (Paula Patton), the Christlike teacher who saves Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), the teenage Job at the center of Precious.

Oh, Miz Rain! Miz Rain? Over here, Miz Rain! That one is just too easy.

Precious is based on Push, a well-received novel published in 1996. The story is set in 1987, and the costumes and sets invoke the period deftly, but the boom boxes and shoulder pads aren’t the only things that feel retro.

Precious is a product of the identity politics that was just finding its voice in the ‘80s, often shouting to be sure it was heard. Despite the extravagant splashes of color director Lee Daniels uses to illuminate Precious’ fantasies, this simplistic tale of victims and perpetrators, good guys and bad, darkness and light is essentially a black-and-white movie.

Darkness and light play out in terms of electrical wattage: Precious’ oppressive home is a cave, while blinding floods of light welcome her into Miss Rain’s classroom and into the fantasies she escapes into when reality gets too grim. They’re also at war in Precious’ painful awareness of her dark skin, which she experiences as a curse.

No doubt light skin plays better than dark in America -- and did even more so two decades ago -- but her melanin level is the least of Precious’s problems. Morbidly obese and functionally illiterate, she is 16 years old and pregnant with her second child by a father who seems to come home only to rape her. Her daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, is being raised by her grandmother, and she rarely sees her either. So she basically lives alone with her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), a perpetually erupting volcano of physical and emotional abuse.

Daniels would like us to think that this is gritty realism. In fact, it’s more like a ghetto version of one of those post-WWII weepies in which an iron-jawed woman – often played by Joan Crawford or Bette Davis – endures a double-barrelled assault of hell and humiliation for 90 minutes, emerging with her dignity undented.

But those movies were aimed at earning the empathy of the women in the audience, who saw the protagonists as an idealized version of themselves. Crawford and her sisters suffered for the housewives of America, their travails and eventual triumphs making their fans feel better about their own unsung sacrifices.

Precious is more of an emotional safari, an invitation to the audience (mostly, I suspect, comfortably middle- and upper-middle-class white folks) to experience the self-flattering thrill of sympathizing with an exotic Other from the comfort of their padded seats. Precious’ troubles are piled on so relentlessly that the movie starts to feel like a parody of itself. Around the time I learned that, on top of everything else, her father had given her HIV, I half expected to see one of the Wayans brothers pop up in drag to whale on her with a rolling pin.

Sidibe, who has never acted in a movie before, is getting a lot of praise for her performance. She deserves it. She tells us how shut down Precious is by showing us nothing but her impassive face, determined gait, and tendency to turn on her tormentors and whomp them until they leave her alone. Precious doesn’t always act sympathetically – she’s mean to a young neighbor who just wants to be her friend – but Sidibe always has our sympathy, letting us see the pain behind the bad behavior. She also shows us glimpses of a deeply buried sense of play.

But the actress is limited by her script. The running voiceover, presumably taken from the journal Precious writes for Miss Rain’s class, gives us some insight into her thoughts, but they’re pretty crude – mostly, she just describes things we’ve already seen or voices the naïve fantasies that keep her hope alive. Precious morphs from an illiterate to an apparently gifted writer in Miss Rain’s class, winning a literary award along the way, which presumably means she also learned to think. That sounds like a thrilling journey. Too bad we never feel her mind expanding.

The movie’s also tainted by an air of self-righteousness. The novel’s author, Sapphire, wrote it after a stint as a teacher in Harlem. The beautiful, sensitive, just tough-enough Miss Rain, who always knows just what to do or say, is all but sanctified here, a good guy with a capital G.

So see Precious if it sounds appealing, but don’t go because you think you should. In spite of Oprah’s seal of approval, there’s no enlightenment to be found in this relentless parade of pain.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

By Elise Nakhnikian

“We all are [different] – especially him,” Mr. Fox’s wife tells their son in Fantastic Mr. Fox, director Wes Anderson’s latest feature and his first to be shot in stop-motion animation. “But there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?”

Defiant yet defensive, slyly funny, and delivered by an actor at the top of her game (in this case, the great Meryl Streep), that’s a classic Anderson line. It also sums up the spirit that animates his world.

Like J.D. Salinger, Anderson always tells stories about sensitive, intelligent misfits with an adolescent combination of diffidence and arrogance. Think the sad-sack brothers and their truth-seeking mother in The Darjeeling Limited, or Rushmore’s Max Fisher and the faux family he finds at boarding school.

These are the kinds of people you either love or hate. I’ve swung both ways. I liked Steve Zissou’s spacey charm in The Life Aquatic, but I wanted to wipe the eyeliner off Gwyneth Paltrow’s face and tell her to get a job in The Royal Tenenbaums. And, though I enjoyed the ride for a while in Darjeeling, I eventually got bored by all the whining.

But even when his characters annoy me, there’s a lot to enjoy in Anderson’s movies. Like his deadpan humor, or the way he plays with color, like a kid with a new 64-piece box of Crayolas. Or the sights and sounds he creates, which can be as surreal and compelling as a recurring dream. And there’s the air of melancholy underlying it all, which bubbles up to the surface every so often to produce a moment of poetic pathos.

I can’t say I loved Mr. Fox – it’s a little too cool for me to get that fiercely attached – but I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is the first of Anderson’s movies that I’ve liked without reservation, maybe partly because it’s the first one he based on a story by somebody else – a less-known work by classic children’s book author Roald Dahl.

Dahl’s story was a lot shorter than the one told here. Anderson and his cowriter, Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding) are very faithful to the tone and plot of the original, but they flesh it out with new characters and action scenes and a much more complicated relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Fox. Anderson also slipped in one of his patented tormented misfits, replacing the Foxes’ four nondescript kids with one runty malcontent, Ash (muttered by Jason Schwartzman).

But Ash isn’t the main character this time; he’s a comically miserable supporting character. This is the swashbuckling story of a jaunty, resourceful hero, the fantastic Mr. Fox (nicely voiced by George Clooney in cocky/suave, Ocean’s Eleven mode).

After Mr. Fox enrages a trio of farmers by stealing their poultry, they vow to take revenge. But just as they’re about to extinguish him, his family, and all the animals unlucky enough to live on the same hillside, Mr. Fox organizes a clever counter-offensive.

It’s a simple enough story, but it’s nicely told, with plenty of that wry, borderline absurdist Anderson humor (“Beagles love blueberries,” Mr. Fox explains as he dopes a guard dog with a berry laced with knockout drugs). It’s well paced, too, holding our interest by staying at just 87 minutes and cutting judiciously between domestic drama, action, and light nonsense, like Mr. Fox’s encounters with a drunken rat (Willem Dafoe).

Stop motion – that painstakingly handmade technique, in which puppets are moved through miniature sets, their every motion broken down into pieces and shot frame by frame – is a natural fit for Anderson. His strongly imagined but relatively one-dimensional characters turn out to make very good cartoon animals. After all, who could be slyer than a fox? The DIY look of stop-motion rhymes with his trendily retro sensibility, and building every inch of every set from scratch lets him indulge his famously obsessive penchant for controlling environments and salting backgrounds with entertaining details. What's more, the visual freedom of animation sets him free to create lovely bits, like the loopily frenetic sequences in which the animals tunnel through the earth at supersonic speeds.

Anderson augmented the tactile feel of his laboriously constructed sets by filming his actors in action, rather than shutting them up in sound booths to lay down tracks in isolation and then combining them in post-production, the way most animated movies do. When the characters were outdoors, the actors were shot out of doors, and when there's a group scene or a dialogue, the actors involved got together to shoot the scene.

The excellent cast, which includes Michael Gambon and Bill Murray, does wonderful voice work, individually and together. Their sometimes overlapping dialogue and the ambient sounds captured along with their dialogue help the movie breathe, banishing the airless feel of so much computer-generated animation.

As a result, the Foxes' world feels surprisingly real, even though every millimeter is made by hand and it doesn't look the least bit "realistic."

And there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?

The Men Who Stare at Goats

By Elise Nakhnikian

There are already a lot of documentaries and a handful of fiction films about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – everything from the artful angst of Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure to the labored metaphors of John Cusack’s War Inc. and the formulaic melodrama of Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah. It’s enough to constitute a whole sub-genre of war movie – or antiwar movie.

The latest addition to the list, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is not a great movie by a long shot, but I liked it better than most of the others. A lighthearted comedy with a few dark edges, it has a deadpan irreverence that makes it fun to watch, thumbing its nose like an eight-year-old at the casual cruelty, misplaced machismo, and flat-out absurdity of war.

It may not be quite fair to call this a U.S. occupation movie, since it aims at a broader target than our current military mishegoss. Part buddy/road movie and part antiwar satire, The Men Who Stare at Goats follows a naïve reporter, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), as he uncovers a lightly fictionalized version of the First Earth Battalion. The Army created First Earth in 1979 to train soldiers to develop their paranormal abilities for use in warfare. Bob stumbles across one of the fictionalized battalion’s graduates, Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), as he’s about to embark on some shadowy mission in Iraq, and Lyn reluctantly agrees to let Bob tag along.

Clooney plays Lyn in his best earnest/cocky mode, staring up through half-moon eyes as he hammers home some urgent point like a snake oil salesman who believes his own pitch. He’s supposed to be some kind of psychic genius, the battalion’s star recruit, but Peter Straughan’s screenplay delights in undercutting him. Lyn is constantly messing up simple tasks, like the bit you may have seen in the trailer where he crashes his car on the only rock for miles around by the side of a deserted desert road.

When we’re not watching the boys venture into Iraq, we’re seeing the story Lyn tells Bob about the New Earth Army acted out in flashbacks. Jeff Bridges is fun to watch as the battalion’s creator and original leader, Bill Django, a magnetic hippie who never met a New Age trend he didn’t like. But things drag a bit when his nemesis, Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), a promising recruit turned bad, takes over.

Based on a nonfiction book of the same title by Jon Ronson, the story ranges from a Vietnam flashback to Iraq during the first year of the U.S. occupation, nearly all of it played as broad farce. When someone picks up a gun in this movie, it looks more ludicrous than scary, especially when a carload of Blackwater-style American mercenaries turns an Iraqi street into a shooting gallery, starting an accidental battle with a matching clutch of soldiers-for-hire from another contracting firm.

Django’s soldiers looks pretty silly too, so it’s interesting to learn that they’re doing a lot of things the Army’s “psychic soldiers” have actually experimented with, like attempting to walk through walls and the bizarre exercise the movie is named for: trying to stare down goats and other animals until they drop dead.

The tone shifts abruptly sometimes, which doesn’t always work. When Bob and Lyn go home with an Iraqi citizen and see how his life has gotten shredded in the crossfire, the sobriety of their response feels right, but the amped-up goofiness of the feel-good ending, which felt like a non-ironic version of the ecstatic hippie dance at the end of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, tried too hard to convince me.

There’s also too much of Bob’s back story and the odd-couple bickering between him and Lyn. I suspect those parts of the movie felt tired even to the filmmakers, since they use gimmicks try to liven up some of that backstory (even staged as a pantomime narrated by his ubiquitous voice-over, I could have done without seeing Bob’s breakup with his wife), and some of Bob’s and Lyn’s squabbles sound canned.

But the movie bubbles back to life when it’s spoofing the military, regaining a deftly edited comic rhythm.

The overexposed, desaturated palette reminds me of Three Kings, another antiwar satire about Americans in the Middle East that also starred George Clooney. For all its stylized sequences and heist-movie drama, though, Three Kings was far darker and more realistic than this one. It was also much denser, a near-great film with emotional and moral heft.

This movie is in a whole different weight class than that one. Still, there’s an art to using a light touch when dealing with a heavy subject, and except for a few minor missteps, The Men Who Stare at Goats remains entertaining without being disrespectful or flat-out inane. Like the men of its title, it’s an odd duck – offbeat but kind of endearing.

Rated R for language, some drug content and brief nudity

Paris and New York, I Love You

By Elise Nakhnikian

Ever since Méliès took his trip to the moon more than 100 years ago, there’s been a market for magic carpet movies – films whose main purpose is to transport us to a faraway place. But now that we’re well into the second century of the moving picture, it takes more than a few lightly sketched characters against a picturesque background to hold our interest.

Paris, a pleasant fictional travelogue now showing on the IFC In Theaters channel on cable TV, is the French version of a minor Woody Allen movie, with Paris standing in for Manhattan: A feast of luscious eye candy and finely calibrated performances, it goes down easy, though it doesn’t have much nutritional value.

Writer/director Cédric Klapisch and cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne make the city look so good you don’t just want to live there; you want to roll around in it, like a horse in clover. The background keeps becoming the focal point, as rows of yellow-leafed trees or urban vistas viewed from on high upstage the low-key drama simmering in the foreground.

The filmmakers like to make the background pop by blurring it, using shallow depth of field to set their actors against impressionistic canvases of color and light, which are almost always brightened with a splash of red. That effect is particularly dazzling when they shoot the Eiffel Tower at night, the soft focus making its lights vibrate until it dances, like a living thing coated with diamonds.

Every now and then the drama in Paris heats up enough to distract us from the scenery, thanks to electrically alive performances by Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris. Duris plays Pierre, a dancer whose terminal heart condition has kept him virtually captive for the past few weeks. Holed up in his cosily charming Parisian apartment, he watches his neighbors and daydreams about their lives, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Binoche is Pierre’s sister Elise, who moves into his apartment to take care of him until he can have the surgery that will either cure or kill him.

His illness has turned Pierre into a walking Seize the Day billboard, but Duris gives him a gentle intensity that makes the cliché work, even as Pierre urges family and friends to relish the good fortune of not just being alive, but living in the City of Light. Besides, it’s such a pleasure to watch Binoche’s hesitant Elise let down her guard and unleash a tsunami of warmth and joie de vivre that you don’t want to quibble about what made it happen.

Klapisch wants to give us a panoramic view of Paris through his story as well as his lens, so he crams the script with intersecting stories. But these generally fizzle out before they ever really get started, leaving us emotionally stranded. Some characters are barely on screen long enough to register as individuals, like a would-be Parisian from Cameroon who dies trying to emigrate illegally. Others – like a professor who falls for a student young enough to be his granddaughter – play out their thinly developed stories long enough to wear out their welcome.

In the end, you don’t really care about anything but Pierre, Elise, and the idealized city they love – and you don’t know them well enough to care very deeply. But they make good company for a couple of hours, and sometimes that’s all you want from a movie.

New York, I Love You makes Paris look profound. Like Paris, it spins several intersecting narratives at once, but this time there’s no core story to hold our interest. Instead, about a dozen directors each tell a separate and equally unengaging squiblet.

It sounds like a gimmick – and it is. This is part of a planned series of similar films set in different cities. The first one was Paris, je t’aime, which had some genuinely engaging segments though it still failed to gel into a compelling whole. This one is about as compelling as one of those circus performers who keep a bunch of plates spinning at once.

So slight they register more as notions than as narratives, the stories are cut into pieces that are interspersed with each other or reflected in even shorter transitions, an superficial attempt to create synergy that just makes them seem all the more artificial.

Only rarely do we get the feel of a real New York moment, like when Chris Cooper, playing an American businessman, surprises a Chinese drycleaner and his customer by greeting them in Cantonese after they’ve used it to joke around behind his back. The writers and directors, who are almost all from somewhere else, tend to set their stories in iconic places (cabs, Central Park, Chinatown, more cabs, Coney Island, again with Central Park …) instead of exploring less familiar parts of the city. The views are mostly unimaginative too, and the interactions are generally stagey and unconvincing, whether Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman are fighting cute as a long-married couple in Brighton Beach or Julie Christie is having an incomprehensible encounter with a crippled bellhop overplayed by Shia LaBoeuf.

New York, I Love You is a magic carpet movie with no magic. It wastes an almost criminal amount of talent, but the real shame is how it reduces the grit, grandeur, and greatness of New York to an insipid formula.

A Serious Man

By Elise Nakhnikian

Six years ago, I wrote about what makes the Coen brothers some of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. Even their worst movies burn images into your brain forever, and their best are minor masterpieces.

I also wrote about how their perpetually bemused tone and the Olympian distance from which they view their characters (these guys love crane shots) can be a liability. Some of their smart movies about dumb people, like O Brother Where Art Thou or Blood Simple, feel coldly condescending, scoring points at the expense of their characters.

But I’m beginning to wonder if that snarkiness was a phase they’ve outgrown. It doesn’t seem to have tainted any of the six features and two shorts they’ve directed since 2000’s O Brother (I’m hedging because I didn’t see Ladykillers, but seeing as how Tom Hanks is the lead character, I’m guessing it’s a snark-free zone.) And there’s no hint of cattiness in their latest movie, which could be their best yet.

A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a mid-century modern Job. He’s also a bit of a schnook, a nice guy who finishes dead last.

Larry’s cylindrical, helmet-haired wife (Sari Lennick) is cheating on him. A student at the high school where he teaches is trying to bribe him for a better grade, and it looks like he won’t get the tenure he’s up for. His shiftless brother Arthur (Richard Kind) has set up camp on his couch, and his teenage son and daughter barely notice, let alone care, what Larry is going through. Even the Columbia Record Club has him on the ropes, insisting that he pay for a membership he never ordered. And that’s just the first 15 minutes or so of the movie.

Larry’s life could easily be played as a tragedy, but the brothers (I am, of course, talking about Joel and Ethan Coen, who cowrote, codirected, coedited and coproduced this one, as they do nearly all of their movies) are after something more entertaining, more open-ended, and ultimately deeper than straight tragedy.

As always, the Coens have set their story in a particular place and time, which they and their crew bring to riotous life. This time we’re in a Minnesota suburb in the late 1960s or early ‘70s – and, within that, in the close-knit Jewish community that lives there. The world they create is so tangible you can almost smell the pot and feel the disdain of its officious, aggressively unattractive secretaries (remember secretaries?) But it’s just exaggerated enough to nudge Larry’s story into the realm of fable.

A Serious Man opens with a Yiddish tale about a dyybuk (an evil spirit that possesses a dead man’s body), which puts us into that supernatural/surrealistic realm and introduces the movie’s central theme: You can’t always take things – or people – at face value. Or, as Larry puts it: “Everything that I thought was one way turns out to be another.”

Part of Larry’s problem is that he’s caught on the cusp of a cultural revolution. His son is listening to Jefferson Airplane when he’s supposed to be studying Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, the sexy woman down the street sunbathes in the nude, and they’re both getting high on a daily basis. The filmmakers keep showing us messy unrest beneath apparently placid surfaces, like the pan from the outside of Larry’s son’s Hebrew school bus to the sheltered kids swearing heroically inside.

Judaism is the sea the Gopniks swim in, always part of the story but never the story itself. The Coens cast generally unknown actors to make it easier for us to see that world and the people who live there on their own terms.

The acting is universally excellent. I particularly loved Lennick, who has never been in a movie before and who is wonderfully loathsome as Larry’s self-deluded wife, and Fred Malamed, who looks like Francis Ford Coppola, acts like Dr. Phil, and is hilariously sanctimonious as her lover. Amy Landecker is mesmerizing and slightly ridiculous as the sunbathing neighbor who, when Larry finally gets up the nerve to pay her a visit, drawls: “Do you partake of the new freedoms?” And Kind is wonderfully repellent as Arthur, nearly activating your gag reflex when he turns his turtle-like back to the camera to drain an enormous sebaceous cyst.

They’re tough acts to follow, but Stuhlbarg never cedes center stage, coming up with as many ways to look bewildered or beleaguered as Burger King has to make it your way.

Like modern-day Molieres, the Coens introduce us to ourselves, satirizing human weakness and societal silliness while celebrating human nature. In A Serious Man, they’re served up a tasty slice of the American experience, toasted to a nutty golden brown.

Where the Wild Things Are

By Elise Nakhnikian

Spike Jonze’s origin story is legendary wherever hipster artists congregate. One of the first of a generation of filmmakers who got to Hollywood via music videos and ads, he started out as a skateboarder who made wildly inventive, no-budget skate videos of his friends.

He’s about to turn 40 this week, but he’s never lost his youthful energy, originality, or fearlessness, cranking stuff out so fast the Museum of Modern Art called its recent retrospective of his work “Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years.” (Yes, Spike can even get MOMA to loosen up.) And he’s equally at home in the art house (he directed Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and played a touching young grunt in Three Kings), at the multiplex (he produced the Jackass movies), and on the Internet (check out his free online broadcast channel, VBS.tv, or the YouTube videos where he plays a wannabe b-boy who rocks out in public places.)

Where the Wild Things Are, his adaptation and expansion of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, is about as mainstream as anything he’s done. But it’s still a Spike Jonze Joint, an intelligently conceived, ingeniously crafted creation as steeped in humanity as a rum cake is in rum.

A natural collaborator, Jones attracts other people as gifted and original as he is. For Malkovich and Adaptation he paired up with Charlie Kaufman, probably the most interesting screenwriter working in Hollywood. For Wild Things he enlisted the help of another brilliant youngish writer, Dave Eggers. Eggers hadn’t written any screenplays when Jonze approached him (his first feature, Away We Go, was released during Wild Thing’s long gestation period), but Jonze believed he could nail this one – and so he did.

The screenplay starts and ends at home with Max (Max Record), showing us a deceptively simple series of scenes. This part of the story is new, but it echoes the book’s poetically spare use of words. Shot with a handheld camera that follows Max so closely you share every outsized emotion, it economically conveys the anger and angst that causes Max to run away from home. His scenes with his mother (Catherine Keener) are particularly masterful, little cinematic bouillon cubes of concentrated tenderness, yearning, and unadulterated love.

Watching Max play with ferocious abandon, listen to a scary lecture in science class, or gaze up at his mother from the floor beneath her desk, we see a well-loved but lonely kid with a vivid imagination, stranded in a family where everyone else is either absent (his parents are divorced) or too busy to give him the attention he needs.

Cinematographer Lance Acord, who shot all of Jonze’s features and many of his music videos, gives Max’s home a warm tone, switching to cool greys, blues and blacks and a lot of underexposed, murky shadows after Max runs away to the island where the wild things are. The island scenes are shot on location in southern Australia, where the filmmakers found deserts, seas, cliffs, and forest – primal sites with the dreamlike intensity of the pictures in Sendak’s book.

The wild things also look amazingly like the book’s illustrations. The Jim Henson Company created the creatures, constructing giant puppet suits that look like the characters in the book. These are worn by actors whose movements make their body language surprisingly eloquent. Shot to look nearly ten feet tall (they’re actually more like seven), with enormous heads and sharp teeth, they’re terrifying at times, but they can also be tender or vulnerable.

Essentially huge children, they’re quick to make friends, prone to magical thinking and impulsive actions, and brimming over with feeling. In short, they’re the greatest playmates in the world for Max – except when they threaten to eat him.

Whatever their moods, they’re as believable as the dirt clods they heave at each other. Computer animation helps make their faces and eyes amazingly expressive. Watching the grief-ravaged face of Carol, the wild thing Max is closest to, as Max sails away moved me almost as much as seeing the look on Keener’s face when he showed up at home.

I loved this movie’s lack of pyrotechnics, paint-by-numbers peril, and preachy morals (Max does learn some important things about how to manage his own feelings and respect other people’s, but those lessons emerge organically). I also love the fact that it’s not tied down by the standard narrative arc that constricts most kids’ movies.

Wild Things has a rhythm all its own, but it’s easy to flow with it. Instead of obeying the dictates of screenwriting 101, it follows the logic of human emotion, leaping from one big feeling to the next just like a kid – or a wild thing.

Capitalism: A Love Story

By Elise Nakhnikian

One of the best parts of Capitalism: A Love Story is the footage shot in a Chicago factory whose laid-off workers occupied it for several days last December. The workers filed out obediently when they were let go but then returned, barricading themselves inside to demand the vacation and severance pay that had been denied them.

Capitalism writer/director Michael Moore’s camera was the only one allowed inside the building, and it captures some inspirational moments as downtrodden workers stand up for themselves. We also hear from a quietly charismatic union organizer, who says the workers are starting to consider options – like running the plant themselves – that they never would have thought of before. There’s no telling where this new thinking will lead, she says, but questioning the status quo is a huge step in the right direction.

I think Moore wants this movie to spur audiences to take that same step. Capitalism is peppered with calls to the vast majority of Americans, urging us to rise up against the wealthiest 1% or so -- along with laments about how slow we are to wake up. Can't we see how the moneyed elite controls not just nearly all of our wealth but also the legislative and regulatory checks and balances that are supposed to keep the robber barons from stripping the rest of us down to our skivvies? Like Howard Beale, the mad prophet of Network, Moore wants us all to declare that we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more.

Moore doesn’t have any more ideas than Beale did about just what we should do, once we've awoken from our capitalism-induced coma. That doesn’t seem to bother him, though. Maybe he trusts us to figure it out.

As we all know, Moore has pretty much single-handedly invented an engaging form of cinema. I think of his movies as pop docs, with the "pop" standing for populist as well as popular.

Moore frames his pop docs as a personal quest to figure out something that’s been bugging him. That can seem annoyingly self-aggrandizing at times -- he puts more of himself in this one than he does of several subjects I wanted to hear more from -- but it's an effective way of hooking us in, eliciting some kind of emotion even if it's just irritation. And he always starts out with a good question. Bowling for Columbine wants to know what’s with all the guns in America. Sicko asks why we can’t we have a decent health care system, when so many other countries manage to. Roger and Me wonders how corporate executives can sleep at night when they make millions of dollars by laying off thousands of people. And Capitalism wants to know what it will take for America's poor and middle class majority to throw off an economic system that drives thousands more into desperate instability every day.

He may not be much on visuals – his films often look like YouTube videos – but Moore is a whiz with words, coming up with metaphors and phrases that memorably characterize or caricature a problem (In Capitalism, he calls Congress’s 2009 bailout of Wall Street “a financial coup d’etat.”) He knows the value of a strong anecdote, too, and he and his researchers always unearth some wrenching real-life stories.

Most of the people featured in Capitalism have lost their homes or their jobs to the recession brought on by the games Wall Street played with other people’s money. Moore outlines the financial shenanigans and dismantling of regulations that led to our economy's near-collapse, but he doesn't go into much depth. His aim is to launch a broad ideological -- and surprisingly religious -- attack on the organizing principles of capitalism, and to show its effects on working-class Americans.

As always, he keeps the energy level high and the laughs coming fast, in part by cramming his movie full of found footage that becomes wryly funny out of context. And he’s got plenty of glib gimmicks to entertain us, like showing up outside AIG with burlap bags “to get the money back for the American people.” But his thesis is so poorly defined that many of these bits, like a segment on the low salaries of regional airline pilots, feel random -- a splattering of BBs rather than a few well-aimed rifle shots.

I’m no great defender of capitalism, but Capitalism brings out the devil’s advocate in me. A sidebar on the so-called “dead peasant” life insurance policies that corporations often take out on their employees will enrage you, but what’s the culprit here: greed or capitalism? And is the lack of democracy within the workplace really a problem only in capitalist countries?

Moore’s nostalgia about the working-class paradise of his childhood undercuts his own argument, since the economic system that allowed his family to thrive was as capitalist as they come. Moore himself claims here that our economy was strong in the 1950s and ‘60s for a couple of reasons. First, so many of the world’s other industrial nations were still recovering from WWII that there wasn’t much competition for our manufactured goods. Second, a robust system of regulations and high taxes on the rich kept Wall Street in check and reduced the gap between the richest and poorest Americans.

So does that mean capitalism could work if we put the right regulations in place -- and found a way to deal with honest competition? Moore says no, but he never says why. “Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil,” he asserts in the voiceover that runs through the film. “You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people. And that something is called democracy.”

Hold on. Isn’t capitalism an economic system and democracy a political system? So how can you replace one with the other? I’m confused.

Moore maintains his near-religious faith in unions as the best hope of the working class. He also exhibits a touching belief in the power of democracy and populist politicians.

One of Capitalism’s heroes is Ohio congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who urges her constituents to become “squatters in your own homes” if someone tries to evict them. Banks, she says, can rarely locate the mortgage on the properties they’re repossessing, because the financial deals behind them are so convoluted. And they can’t prove they own the house unless they can show you that paper.

It’s a galvanizing insight -- and a rare piece of pragmatic advice in a movie that’s rich in anecdotes but poor at analysis.

I used to know an organizer for the International Socialist Organization who told me Sicko was a great catalyst for organizing people around the need for health care reform. I can see how Moore’s movies would be useful tools for the ISO, or any other political group with a clear-cut agenda, and maybe that’s what Moore is aiming for.

But I got pulled far enough into Capitalism to be frustrated when I couldn’t go further, and that’s not the first time one of his movies has left me feeling that way. Like a lot of other Americans, I think there's something seriously wrong with our economic system, but I don’t know what to do about it. That puts me square in the middle of the audience Moore seems to be trying to reach here, yet I left the theater feeling all fired up with no place to go.

In a Q&A with Moore on the movie’s press site, a young woman -- she gave her name, but I'm not sure I heard it right -- describes the excitement she felt when she first saw Roger and Me. “I wanted to do something to make the tragedy that I’d see on the screen better,” she says. “And that’s how I’ve felt every time I’ve seen one of your movies.” She can feel that same excitement spread through the audiences she watches with, she adds, yet it never seems to translate into effective action once the movie is over.

Then she asks the question I can’t stop thinking about: “What do you think the disconnect is between the excitement, the desire for change, that we all feel together as an audience when we watch the movie and the actual change happening? And what can we do to bridge that gap?”

The young woman says she wants to make movies like Moore's. I'd love to see her make one that tackles that question.

Bright Star

Writer-director Jane Campion came up with the idea for Bright Star while sitting with “a ragtag group of horses I used to like to sit with and read,” she told the audience after a September 14 screening at the Director’s Guild Theater. When one of the horses delicately opened Campion’s bag with her hoof and sniffed it, Campion says: “I thought, that’s what I like, that kind of tenderness and gentleness. I wanted to make a story about that.”

Mission accomplished. This deeply felt, exquisitely tender love story is infused with a closely observed specificity that ushers us into the world of the great English Romantic poet John Keats (a luminescent, gently charismatic Ben Whishaw) and the woman he loved.

Campion’s screenplay animates the story of Keats and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a stylish and strongminded young woman. It begins in 1818, when Keats is 23 and Fanny just 16. Keats’ poetry has been mostly badly reviewed and brings in almost no money, so he lives in genteel poverty, dependent on the patronage of his friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider.) As a result, he can’t marry Fanny after they fall in love, since he is too honorable to marry a woman he cannot support. Instead, the two embark on a passionate, deeply tender, but sexless affair, which lasts until Keats' death of consumption at age 25.

Like Keats' love poems, Bright Star is an intimate story that contains a whole world. Cinematographer Grieg Fraser captures an astonishingly gorgeous England, starkly beautiful in the winter and bursting with colors and life in the spring and summer. The yellow-white sunlight, the wind rustling through the leaves, and the shock of nature’s beauty are near-hallucinogenic at times.

Campion makes you feel the pressures and pleasures of early 19th-century English society, but this is no stilted costume drama. It’s the story of two vivid individuals whose feelings and motivations feel as compelling as our own – if not more so.

To create that sense of intimacy, Campion spent most of the rehearsal time getting the actors to stop acting. “I really wanted to have a sense of just being from the actors,” she said at the screening. “Whenever people were relaxed and the work was coming from that place, that’s when it felt right.”

To help the actors get past their own neuroses to that state of grace, she talked to them about “Keats’s concept of negative capability – a capacity to stay with the mystery of life, without having to create any answers.”

Keats’ own poetry was one route to that mystery, but Campion knew that a movie about poetry would be a hard sell. “People are allergic to poetry, kind of,” she said. “And they don’t just dislike it; they’re really aggressive about it.” By weaving excerpts from Keats’ letters and poems and talk about poetry organically into the script (“poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery,” he tells Fanny), Campion makes poetry part of the action, using it to deepen the intensity of the characters’ emotions.

Another “important talisman” for the cast was Fanny’s much-younger sister, Toots. Edie Martin, the gravely graceful little sprite who plays her, doesn’t have many lines yet plays a significant role, attracting the camera like a magnet. Campion said the young actress “embodied that quality of delicacy, just naturally. From the start, she had what the others were striving for, and they saw it.”

And now and then, the camera seeks out the Brawne family’s cat, a pacific black-and-white beauty that is, like all cats, a master of the art of living in the moment.

Bright Star’s impassioned but unconsummated love affair is a switch from the eroticism of Campion movies like The Piano and In the Cut, but the film falls in line with Campion’s others in one important way: There's a strong, free-thinking woman at its center.

In her own day and for decades after her death, Fanny was painted as shallow and insincere, a selfish flirt incapable of matching Keats’ depth of feeling or appreciating his genius. More recently, she has often been put on a pedestal, idealized as a sort of human muse. Campion rescues her from both forms of erasure, creating her most self-assured heroine yet.

The Fanny imagined by Campion and embodied by Cornish is self-confident, forthright, competent and kind. Hollywood rarely gives us female leads with that kind of strength and solidity, and that’s a shame. Because it’s those traits that make Fanny a fit mate for a soulful poet, and that pairing of great-hearted equals makes Bright Star a great romance.

Are you listening, Sandra Bullock?

An American Opera: The Greatest Pet Rescue Ever!

By Elise Nakhnikian

One of the few unexamined aspects of the bureaucratic bungling that made such a disaster of Hurricane Katrina is what happened to the pets refugees were forced to leave behind. That’s the subject of An American Opera: The Greatest Pet Rescue Ever!

Producer/director/narrator Tom McPhee went to New Orleans a few days after the storm to help. He wound up photographing rescued animals at a central holding area, as part of an effort to reunite pets with their owners. McPhee brought along a video camera too, and the footage he shot at the processing facility became part of An American Opera.

The greatest strength of this sometimes overwrought piece of citizen journalism is its often emotional immediacy. We see people rescuing dogs or breaking into houses to find them dead. We meet some of the volunteers who do the bulk of the rescuing, including a couple who came all the way from Canada. And then there are the animals.

Sad or scared, friendly or reserved, and almost always touchingly compliant, the dogs – the movie never gives us statistics on which species were rescued, but it looks as if nearly all of them were dogs— gaze into the lens and straight though to our hearts. Like their owners a few days before, they’re rounded up, processed, and herded onto planes, confused and alone in a strange new world.

The lack of a coherent plan makes it impossible to rescue all the animals people had to leave when they were evacuated. Volunteers provide much-needed help, but they also add to the confusion. That chaos is compounded – as it was for Katrina’s human victims – by fear, firearms, and a bureaucratic focus on controlling than on helping the victims. It’s chilling to hear the head of the Louisiana SPCA talk about the abandoned animals they’re “trapping.”

McPhee does a good job of retracing the infighting between officials and volunteers in the weeks after the storm, as differing aims and philosophies lead to friction and finger-pointing – not to mention the suffering and deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands, of animals.

He avoids showing that suffering in too-graphic detail, for the most part, though young children and the especially tenderhearted should probably steer clear of this movie. The hardest parts to watch involve two mass killings of dogs by law enforcement officers.

One of these stories is narrated by Christopher Acosta, an admirable young man who has clearly earned the right to his School of Hard Knocks T-shirt. Acosta rescued his own dogs, then commandeered boats to save scores of his neighbors before he was evacuated and forced to leave his own surviving dog behind. After all that, he returned to the school where his dog had been left with many others, only to find they'd all had been shot by the law enforcement officers in charge. His telling of that story, and McPhee’s footage of its aftermath, are powerfully matter-of-fact.

But the strength of those moments is diluted by the haphazard structure of this inchoate movie, which sometimes feels as chaotic as the situation it describes.

I kept wondering just what McPhee was trying to achieve. A challenge at the end indicates that he wants to mobilize people to action. But if so, what does he want us to do?

Does he just want us know what a great guy he is? Unfortunately, there’s enough self-promotion in here to beg that question – especially early on, when he keeps breaking into the story with his breathless voiceover to say things like: “If I ever had a time in my life to do something really important and unique and to help out, this was it.”

Or is he trying to use this story as a metaphor for something larger? In the first of several endings, McPhee dwells on the costumed dogs at a Barkus festival in New Orleans, which seems to be a kind of canine Mardi Gras. He says that event proved to him that the city would survive, but it’s never clear to me just what Barkus is or why he finds it so significant.

He also highlights a statement by a photographer who says you can measure a society by how it treats its animals. True enough, but the thing about Katrina is, you don’t need to show what happened to its animals to get to our failure as a society. All you need to do is look at how the people were treated.

The abandonment and botched rescue of Louisiana’s animals after Katrina was, as one of the movie’s subjects puts it, “a disaster within a disaster.” A shame and a tragedy on its own terms, it doesn’t need to be compared to anything else. That’s why what stays with you after watching An American Opera is not the hyberbole or the rebel rock or the garbled calls to action. It’s the quiet dignity of all those stranded dogs and cats.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

By Elise Nakhnikian

To turn the children’s picture book it’s based on it into a full-length animated feature, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs puts a lot of meat on its bones. And I do mean meat: This is no veggie tale.

It’s not what you’d call subtle, either. I had never read the book until after watching the movie, so I took the movie on its own terms, but I wonder whether its fans will accept the changes writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have made to Judi Barrett’s story, or the way they’ve amped up its energy level and dumped the book’s subdued cross-hatched drawings for a candy-colored explosion of action. The book treats its story as a fable, a tale told by a grandfather around a family dinner table. The movie explains it all to us – in Imax 3-D, no less.

Yet the two feel related, like siblings from a family with a strong shared sensibility. They’re both an appealing blend of whimsy and homespun wisdom. And they both center around an imaginative concept: a town where food rains down from the sky.

We are not talking manna, whatever that is. This is America, by god, so we’re talking REAL food. Hamburgers. Steaks. Spaghetti and meatballs.

Lord and Miller create a back story to explain the book’s central mystery: Where did all that food come from? They also dream up a whole new set of characters, starting with boy inventor Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), an upbeat misfit and the creator of a machine that turns water into food.

Flint’s best friend is a monkey named Steve (Neil Patrick Harris) who wears a contraption of Flint’s invention that translates his thoughts into English. It’s the same idea as the dog collars in Pixar’s Up, but it’s done better: Steve is all id and idiocy, which makes for some nice comic relief.

Our hero eventually gets a human sidekick too (she’s also his love interest, but that part of their relationship is strictly PG). Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) is a smart girl who hides her brains, acting “cute and super-perky,” as another character puts it, so she won’t get picked on. As depressing as it is to be reminded that girls still have to do that in 21st-century America (does the fact that brainy boys can get picked on too make it better or worse?), it’s a treat to see a female lead whose arc is about learning not to play dumb.

The minor characters are sketched broadly enough so little kids can get the picture, yet they don’t feel overly familiar. My favorites were an underemployed, understated Guatemalan immigrant (Benjamin Bratt) with hidden talent to burn and Flint’s father, Tim (James Caan, doing some surprisingly tender, melancholy voice work). A refrigerator-shaped slab of a man with two enormous eyebrows where his eyes ought to be, Tim is a nurturing dad who feels things deeply but can’t articulate what’s in his heart. The speech he makes when Sam gives him Steve’s translating device should resonate with every kid who feels estranged from a parent who doesn’t do well at expressing his or her support.

There are plenty of funny lines, sight gags, and humorous situations, like when the fate of the world depends on Flint being able to walk his tech-averse father through e-mailing him a file via cell phone. Tim’s interpretation of “drag it off the desktop” made me laugh out loud.

But the best part of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is Flint’s elaborate lab and the inventions that emerge from it. Animation frees the filmmakers to create some magical sequences, like the giant Jello mold pictured in the book, which materializes here as a love offering from Flint to Sam. The two slip through its rubbery rind into a hollowed-out interior, playing on its wobbly surface or diving into the translucent core in a courtship scene as transcendent as WALL-E and Eva’s dance in outer space.

Cloudy doesn’t talk down to its audience. In fact, it probably sails right over the heads of very young kids much of the time, spoofing targets like appearance-obsessed newscasters and hypocritical politicians. A running joke about the town’s slowness to wean itself from its longtime dependence on an outmoded business rings so true it almost qualifies as social commentary.

But we’re back to pure spoof when a pompous new anchor (Al Roker) reports on the huge entrees that are raining down around the world, landing first on famous landmarks like Times Square and the Eiffel tower. “It looks like the foodstorm is falling in an unusual pattern,” he remarks.

Next time I see a disaster movie that falls back on that tired trick, I hope I’ll remember that line.

World’s Greatest Dad and Extract

By Elise Nakhnikian

Four decades into the age of identity politics, are middle-class white men finally just another beleaguered minority? That seems to be the message behind Extract and World’s Greatest Dad, dark comedies about men whose bland exteriors mask some pretty big problems.

Extract isn’t just dark; it’s downright dour. I used to think writer/director Mike Judge was an amiable social satirist, tossing foam-tipped darts at late-capitalist consumerism from a La-Z-Boy somewhere in middle America. Just look at Office Space, his 1991 debut and one of the best comedies ever made about the drudgery and daily humiliation of low-wage work in America.

Granted, Judge always liked to lampoon stupidity too. 2006’s Idiocracy may have aimed mostly at deserving targets like cable news networks and show-biz politicians, but it started with the elitist premise that the USA of the future has devolved into a failed circus-state because smart people stopped having babies while dumb people kept having lots, so over the years we just got too dumb to function. Beavis and Butt-head were a preliterate pair of stoners so dumb they could barely breathe, and none of the Hills in King of the Hill are exactly the brightest bulbs in the box.

But I always thought Judge loved even the dimmest of his characters – I know I do – so I was surprised by the snarky misanthropy of his latest movie. Our hero this time around is Joel (Jason Bateman), the owner of a small factory that makes food-flavoring extracts. Joel radiates disapproval of everyone around him, like the character Bateman played on Arrested Development. He may be as selfish and shortsighted as anyone else, but he thinks he’s smarter, more rational, and just all-around better. In short, he’s a self-righteous prig, though Bateman projects a tattered goodwill beneath the exasperation that makes you empathize with Joel even when you don’t like him.

Extract consists of two parallel stories, both of which putter along with the occasional burst of energy before petering out. In the first, Joel struggles to resist, then outwit Cindy (Mila Kunis), a gorgeous but predatory young woman. Cindy insinuates herself onto the floor of Joel’s factory and into his erotic dreams – which isn’t hard, since he’s obsessed with the sex he and his wife (Kristen Wiig) aren’t having.

The other half of the movie is about Joel’s factory. The eternally self-pitying Joel surveys his employees from an office perched over the assembly line or smiles tightly as his manager, Brian (J.K. Simmons) rolls his eyes about the incompetence of some “dinkus.” Whether they’re trying to make the factory run smoothly or trying to sell it, the two keep running up against the absurdly exaggerated idiocy of their employees, nearly every one of whom is lazy, incompetent, laughably grandiose, or all three at once. I guess it’s supposed to be funny, but I just found the whole thing cynical and depressing.

There are a lot of stupid human tricks on display in World’s Greatest Dad too, but there’s also plenty of decency. Lance Clayton (Robin Williams), is a genuinely nice guy, though most of the other people he has to deal with are anything but – starting with his own son.

Writer/director Bob Goldthwait isn’t interested in straight realism here any more than he was in the standup routines that made him semi-famous in the ‘80s (he was that sloppy-looking guy with a high voice that kept cracking, as if he was stuck in eternal puberty). But this loose-limbed, oddly life-affirming story has some pretty funny things to say about the platitudes and false piety we tend to revert to when we talk about the dead.

Lance is a sweet but schlubby high school English teacher, who works at the school his son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) attends. He’s also a frustrated novelist who gets his first break as a writer in a way he never imagined. When Kyle dies in a potentially embarrassing accident, Lance tries to protect his boy’s reputation by making it look like an intentional hanging and leaving a suicide note.

The note gets printed in the school paper and becomes hugely popular, and a cult springs up around Kyle. Goldthwait has fun with the deification of a nasty loner. The students soon start sporting Kyle tattoos and WWKD tee shirts, and the faculty talk about how “sweet” and “kind” he was.

There’s also a nicely developed subplot about Lance’s sickeningly sweet girlfriend and fellow teacher Claire (Alexie Gilmore) and their perfect colleague Mike (Henry Simmons), a touching one involving Kyle’s forlorn only friend, Andrew (Evan Martin), and some funny bits about an Oprah-like talk show host, a high school “grief counselor,” a literary agent, and Bruce Hornsby (don’t ask).

But the heart of the movie is Williams, whose mercifully understated, affecting performance makes us care about a mousy man who finds the courage to follow his heart.

Cold Souls

By Elise Nakhnikian

“People come here and they all want to know if the soul is immortal, and how it functions – and we haven’t a clue,” says Cold Souls’ Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn).

It’s a funny line, but it’s also a bit of a cheat. And that pretty well sums up this moderately entertaining art-house film, which skims the surface of a lot of interesting ideas without ever diving in.

Cold Souls isn’t really about souls, any more than Hitchcock’s thrillers were about the MacGuffins he threw in to set the plots in motion. In the end, it's a dryly funny commentary on the marketing and black marketing of quickie “cures” for 21st-century angst and alienation – which are, of course, caused in no small part by our overreliance on quickie cures.

The main character is Paul Giamatti, an actor played by Paul Giamatti. A comically exaggerated version of the whiny nerds Giamatti often plays, the movie's Paul comes off like an agitated muppet, or maybe one of David Schwimmer’s less charming characters, minus the looks.

Paul is suffering through an existential crisis, but, as Cold Souls points out with atypical literal-mindedness, he refuses to search his own soul to see what the matter might be. Instead, he visits a soul extraction clinic on Roosevelt Island, where the silver-haired, silver-tongued Dr. Flintstein easily persuades him that he’ll feel much better if he just takes the pesky thing out and stores it in one of their vaults.

That cures his blues, but it creates a whole new problem: He starts to feel "empty" and his acting suffers. He's rehearsing the lead for Uncle Vanya, so he borrows a Russian soul, which gets him back on track. Then he decides he wants his own back -- but it's missing.

Here the two main parts of the plot-heavy story intersect, as a group of Russian soul smugglers we've been getting to know gets hold of Paul's soul for the boss’s wife, Sveta (Katheryn Winnick, who looks a lot like Scarlett Johansson), a soap opera actress so vapid she actually wants an American soul. Paul heads to St. Petersburg to reclaim his soul, guided by Nina (Dina Korzun), a stony-faced Russian soul mule who turns out to be every bit as alienated and depressed as he is (or is she just Russian?).

The first feature by writer/director Sophie Barthes, Cold Souls maintains a strong and consistent tone. Cinematographer/producer Andrij Parekh, who collaborated with Barthes on a couple of short films before this one, bathes the scenes in a soft, clear light, working in a palette heavy on silvery grays and blues. The moody music also helps set the tone without intruding.

Paul's New York City is a luxe, Woody Allen-esque Manhattan of actors, pricey restaurants, and spacious apartments lined with bookshelves, though he also spends a fair amount of time floating above the city on the Roosevelt Island tram or haunting the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, where the Russian underground stay when they're in town. It's a lushly beautiful but cold city. It's also oddly empty: in shot after shot, Paul broods alone in some public place.

Cold Souls implies that the soul functions as a kind of supergo, keeping our narcissism in check and generating empathy. Giamatti has some fun with his brief period of soullessness, playing the title role in Uncle Vanya like a Hun on steroids (“I don’t think he should always be so passive, so hopeless,” he tells his director). But after installing the Russian soul, he behaves pretty much the way he did before only without the black moods, and the woman who takes in his soul doesn't change her behavior a bit.

That makes you wonder: Are those things in storage really souls? Does something other than our souls determine who we are? And just what is a soul, anyhow? But don't speculate too long or you'll lose track of this shaggy dog of a movie, which is meandering on, uninterested in exploring anything so esoteric.

If Cold Souls fails to deliver on the big ideas, it’s often good with the small stuff, including a absurdist bits like Nina repeating ridiculous phrases from a taped English lesson as she drives a silent Paul around St. Petersburg.

The movie gets in its sharpest digs in its depiction of the extraction process and the black market that grows around smuggling souls. The clinic, a sparsely furnished site dotted with midcentury-modern furnishings, borrows authority by assuming a medical mien. And the real cold souls are not so much the little lumps chilling in the clinic's storage unit as the people who take advantage of the economically or emotionally vulnerable to traffic in those souls. Among them is a smooth-talking, amoral hedge fund partner who’s bankrolling the business. More chilling than Sveta's gangster husband, he's a real modern villain.

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!’"
Read the rest on The House Next Door

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.