Thoughts on Film

December 2011

2012-01-08T09:51:00.000-08:00

THE DESCENDANTS (2011)
I can’t imagine many plot scenarios less appealing: workaholic father forced to reengage with his children after a boating accident leaves his wife comatose. Yet in the hands of Alexander Payne, who has few equals in filtering serious issues through his offbeat sense of humor, this pitch-perfect picture offers an unusually truthful portrayal of both modern family relationships and the comedic aspects of even the gravest circumstances

Central to making the film work at such a high level is yet another impeccable performance by George Clooney, easily the most reliable barometer of Hollywood quality working today. Whether he stars in a wacky comedy (“O Brother Where Art Thou?” “Intolerable Cruelty”), an intense drama (“Michael Clayton,” “Syriana”), the combination of the two (“The Three Kings,” “Up in the Air”) or is sitting in the director’s chair (“Good Night, and Good Luck”), Clooney’s name on a film is as close as you can find to a guarantee that it will be among the year’s best.

Here he’s Matt King, a well-connected Hawaiian real estate lawyer and descendent of island royalty King Kamehameha. While he’s dealing with his wife’s condition and coping with being a fulltime parent to two daughters—a precocious pre-teen and a rebellious college-age girl—he is representing his family as they negotiation with developers to sell a large parcel of beachfront property on Kauai.

Just when you think you know where the film is headed, a very natural, but unexpected plot turn sends King and his daughters (along with Sid, the elder girl’s thick-headed friend) to Kauai for some sleuthing.

It’s the rare movie that offers such a complex and subtle father-daughter relationship, superbly written by Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ novel and fueled by two exceptional performances. Shailene Woodley, the star of the TV series “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” gives a star-making performance as Alexandra, the older daughter who can be a total pain, but shows the maturity to straighten up and take on responsibility when it’s necessary. This isn’t a one-way relationship, as Clooney, surprisingly convincing as a rather ordinary father figure, finds a center to his life while facing a series of extraordinary events with his daughters.

But the film overflows with well-written, superbly acted characters, including Amara Miller as younger daughter Scottie, a 10-year-old growing up too quickly for her father to handle; veteran actor Robert Forrester as Clooney’s feisty father-in-law; Judy Greer as the wife of a real estate agent who becomes entangled with the King family business; and Nick Krause as the continually amusing Sid.

Despite a resume that features “Election,” “About Schmidt” and “Sideways,” this may be Payne’s best film. “Descendants” walks a narrow path between the tragedy and absurdity of life to create one of the most entertaining and insightful family dramas in recent years.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011)

Why is it that the rest of the world manages to enjoy and appreciate American films without feeling the need to remake them in their own language?

There’s no French version of “The Bourne Ultimatum” or an Italian-language adaptation of “The King’s Speech.” Where’s the Japanese take on “The Fight Club?” Sounds ridiculous, yet, in this country, you can’t get people into the theater unless England-speaking movie stars are playing the major roles. Thus, the superbly made and admired Swedish film, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” has been made palatable for American audiences, the remake hitting the nation’s theaters barely a year after the original.

Putting aside the redundancy of its existence, this David Fincher-directed remake is a first-rate thriller, slicker and more direct than the original, but equally fast-paced and involving.

Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading Swedish journalist (the actors are English speaking but the setting remains frigid Scandinavia), whose work with the magazine Millennium has just resulted in a massive court ruling against him for libel. Out of sorts, he’s persuaded to investigate the long-ago murder of the teenage niece of Henrik Vanger, a retired businessman (Christopher Plummer). Blomkvist moves into a servant’s quarters on the island where various family members reside, even though most haven’t spoken to one another in decades.

While Blomkvist’s probe into this dysfunctional family methodically unfolds, the film cross-cuts to Lisbeth Salander, a multi-pierced, emotionally repressed young computer expert—who investigated Blomkvist before he was hired by Vanger—is dealing with a new court-appointed guardian (she’s a ward of the state) who’s a repulsive sexual predator.

Though Rooney Mara, who had a small role in Fincher’s “The Social Network,” doesn’t quite match the unrestrained ferocity of Noomi Rapace in the original, the relative newcomer brings a welcomed touching sadness to Lisbeth even as she’s enacting violent revenge or doing her best to steer clear of the world. It’d be easy to lose sight of Lisbeth’s humanity while portraying this spiked-haired, impossibly cool character, but Mara proves up to the task and, in doing so, makes the film something special.

Eventually these two master sleuths (Lisbeth can seemingly hack into any computer system or e-mail account) join forces; Mikael bringing out the best in Lisbeth as they get dangerously close to the shocking truth behind the mystery.

If my memory is to be trusted, there are only slight differences between the two versions: Fincher brings a flashier filmmaking style to the film, intensifying some of the action, while Steven Zaillian’s screenplay provides a bit more interaction (sexual and otherwise) between the two leads. Topping the original are the crisp cinematograph by Jeff Cronenweth and a pounding score by Trent Rezner and Atticus Ross.

All of which shows that this fascinating, if unwieldy, tale of long-hidden family secrets and the two quirky individuals charged with investigating would probably be just as good in Chinese.

SON OF THE GODS (1930) and OLIVER TWIST (1922)

While most film depictions of racial prejudice address injustice in the past, “Son of the Gods,” a rarely screened melodrama, tells a contemporary story of racism against Chinese Americans.

Unfortunately, this early sound film from Frank Lloyd (director of best picture winners “Cavalcade” and “Mutiny on the Bounty”) is undercut by casting of unmistakably Caucasian Richard Barthelmess in the lead and an utterly compromised ending.

Barthelmess plays a wealthy Chinese businessman’s son, who, when the film opens, is attending college and attempting to fit into mainstream society. Because he looks no different than any of his white friends, it’s a shock when a group of girls at a nightclub go ballistic when they find out he’s a “chink” and that he might touch them.

Later, after quitting school and travelling in Europe, a well-to-do woman pursues him, only to publically humiliate him when she learns he’s Chinese.

Understandably, Sam grows bitter and forsakes all his father stood for, making life difficult for the whites he does business with and shutting himself off from society.

I won’t reveal the surprise conclusion, but it allows for a Hollywood happy ending even as it weakens the film’s point.

Barthelmess, who always looked as if he was about to face his executioner, is unconvincing as a man anyone would think was Chinese or even raised in a Chinese community. I can only guess that he was cast in this role because he played a Chinese man (using heavy makeup) in “Broken Blossoms.”

Constance Bennett, as the woman who grows to love Sam despite his differences, shows here why she became one of the top stars of the 1930s, going on to star in “What Price Hollywood?” (1932), “The Affairs of Cellini” (1934), “Topper” (1937) and “Merrily, We Live” (1938). She’s already comfortable acting with sound, in sharp contrast to Barthelmess.

While the direction isn’t up to Lloyd’s high standards (camera movement is severely reduced because of the limited range of the microphone), there’s a short flashback sequence to Sam’s youth in San Francisco that truly looks like a clip from a film shot at the turn of the century. It’s a moment of emotional gravitas in a film that ends up pulling its punches.

Lloyd’s 1922 condensed version of the Charles Dickens’ classic is a better example of the director’s keen ability to tell a story on film. Beautifully staged and shot, “Oliver Twist” also benefits greatly from the presence of two of the era’s best actors, Lon Chaney and Jackie Coogan.

Coogan is as plucky and unpretentious as Oliver, the orphan who suffers the indignities of 19^th Century England, as he was in his legendary role in “The Kid” (1921).

Chaney is surprisingly restrained as the notorious Fagan, avoiding the Jewish caricature than has tainted the book over the years, including in Alec Guinness’ performance in the David Lean film version.

Even with those two legends in the key roles, George Siegmann gives the showiest performance, bringing out the masochistic evil of henchman Bill Sikes. Siegmann, who started in movies in 1909, had roles in D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” and “Hearts of the West” and played Porthos opposite Douglas Fairbanks in the 1921 version of “The Three Musketeers.”

The tinted print of “Oliver Twist” has been superbly restored and probably ranks as one of the better silents still existing from the early 1920s. It’s worth seeing out.

Though he worked sparingly after World War II, Lloyd didn’t retire until 1955. “The Last Command,” starring Sterling Hayden as Texas legend Jim Bowie, was his final film.

HUGO (2011)

As unimaginable as it seems that the director of “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “The Departed” would make a 3-D children film, it’s clear what drew Martin Scorsese to “Hugo.”

Beyond the cute, episodical tale of a young orphan living in the clockworks of the Paris train station in the 1920s, avoiding the clutches of a heartless security guard and befriending a prickly magic shop proprietor, the soft-hearted movie is about the rediscovery of French film pioneer Georges Méliès. When Scorsese’s not making movies, he’s one of the country’s foremost film historians and supporter of preservation and he clearly enjoyed recreating the studio and movie sets of Méliès’ groundbreaking pictures.

Méliès invented such filmmaking techniques as the dissolve, split screen and double exposure and essentially created movie special effects while making hundreds of shorts from 1986 to 1913. The magician started making movies, and soon created one of the first movie studios, after seeing an early demonstration of the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe, the first movie projector, in 1895.

Méliès most famous production, the 15-minute-long “A Trip to the Moon” opened in 1902. But his fame lasted just a few years as his short works lost popularity to more realistic and longer films. He lost his studio by 1910 and was out of the business three years later. More than a decade later, his contributions to the cinema began to be recognized and he was award the Legion of Honor by the French government. He died in 1938.

While it is a worthy effort to shine a light on Méliès’ accomplishments (though I wonder how many viewers will even realize he’s an actual historical figure), the film’s production design is the only reason to see the picture. The Méliès recreations and the wondrous world of the train station, especially the intricate workings of the station’s clocks, should win designer Dante Ferretti his third Oscar.

The story and acting leave much to be desired, as the adventures of young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) and the shopkeeper’s daughter (Chloë Grace Moretz, trying way too hard) grow tiresome quickly and the angry adults (Ben Kingsley playing the mysterious shopkeeper as a Dickens-like villain, and Sacha Baron Cohen as the fascist security guard) playing out cliché roles.

Don’t let the reviews fool you: This really is a kids’ film; a very elaborate, expertly construction one, but a movie not made for real fans of the director.

THE TRIP (2011)

As we all have learned, it’s all about the journey, not the destination. For better or worse, that’s the theme of this extended comic skit between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing characters based on themselves as first introduced in Michael Winterbottom’s “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.”

This time, Winterbottom, one of Britain’s most adventurous directors (“The Claim,” “The Road to Guantanamo,” “A Mighty Heart”), sends the constantly bickering pair on an eating tour of Northern England. During their stays at beautifully tended country inns, their meals at chi-chi restaurants and driving through the astonishingly picturesque countryside, we’re treated (aka subjected) to Brydon’s endless vocal impressions of Anthony Hopkins, Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Ian McKellen among others and Coogan’s constant putdown of his talents. (At one point, they do dueling Woody Allen impressions across the dinner table.)

Coogan, the more successful of the two (as long-running British TV character Alan Partridge and in various Hollywood films), plays the arrogant, needy superstar, picking up every young woman he meets and spending countless hours on the phone with agents. Brydon, also a staple of British TV comedy, simply misses his wife and newborn baby.

Everyone has friends who they enjoy spending time with….up to a point. And at that point, you’re tempted to strangle them. Both Coogan and Brydon fit that description. Depending on your tolerance level, “The Trip” will feel excruciatingly endless or wildly hilarious. And, if you can’t get enough of these guys’ humor, the film is actually a trimmed down version of the six-episode British television series. I think I’ll pass.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN (2011)

Despite two superb portrayals of movie legends—both going well beyond impersonations—this depiction of the making of the Laurence Olivier-Marilyn Monroe 1957 movie, “The Prince and the Showgirl” never rises beyond stagy recreation.

Based on the recollections of Colin Clark, a young assistant on the British film, the movie paints Monroe as needy, manipulative, naïve, disturbed, fun-loving, a great actress, a terrible actress, irresponsible and totally dedicated. Just like the other thousand remembrances of the actress since her death in 1962, this one offers a Marilyn everyone can pick their favorite personality for. I think that’s an important reason why this slightly talented pin-up girl from a half-century ago remains such an object of interest: you can select whatever Marilyn you want to like and it’s just as viable as anyone else’s.

This cult has turned her into the most overrated actress in film history and “My Week with Marilyn” does its part to validate the myth. Director Simon Curtis, making his feature debut, is clearly enamored of Marilyn.

It’s the classically trained British performers, led by Olivier (played to perfection by Kenneth Branagh) and Sybil Thorndike (Judy Dench), who are painted as elitists for expecting Miss Monroe (played by Michelle Williams in a performance beyond what the real Monroe could ever hope to give) to know her lines and show up for work on time. It’s really the fault of her sycophant, soul-sucking personal assistants (especially acting coach Paula Strasberg, well played by Zoe Wanamaker) who don’t really care about Marilyn the person. And, of course, it’s the terrible life of a Hollywood star that slowly eats away at her sanity. Who can blame her?

One feels pity for this woman who couldn’t handle the pressures of her chosen profession and ended her life at 36 (if it wasn’t suicide, it was pretty close), but thousand of other performers have faced the same stress, the same temptations, the same expectations and done quite well. Sometimes, listening to the Marilyn story—in this film and elsewhere—you would think she was the only beautiful woman who ever faced hardship in Hollywood.

My rant on the real Monroe aside, the film’s focus on Clark’s (played by Eddie Redmayne as a wide-eyed, dopey schoolboy) time spent with Monroe after her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, goes back to the states, doesn’t bring out anything interesting or new about the actress.

But Williams finds a way to create a character who is probably more complex and interesting than Monroe ever was, showing this bundle of contradictions as doomed to a life of despair, in spite (and because of) her fame. It’s an excellent performance, but how much of it is Marilyn is anyone’s guess.

Though Williams was equally impressive in “Blue Valentine” (2010) and “Wendy and Lucy” (2008), this performance officially moves her into the major leagues and part of the discussion of Hollywood’s best actresses.

Just as remarkable, especially considering the film’s clunky and unimaginative script (by Adrian Hodges), is Branagh’s turn as Sir Larry. He captures the great man’s vanity and bravado along with the subtle ways he altered his voice, used his eyes and mouth when acting and even how he held his head. For fans of Olivier, Branagh’s performance is worth the price of admission.

It’s especially ironic that Branagh (amazingly, at 51, a year older than Olivier was in 1957) would portray the acting legend, after repeating Olivier’s triumphs as an actor-director with his remakes of “Henry V” (1989) and “Hamlet” (1996) early in his career. Since then, Branagh’s career has stalled until his recent television work as the moody detective “Wallander” has rejuvenated his career. This role may score him an Oscar nod and accelerated his film opportunities.

The actual “The Prince and the Showgirl” was a major disappointment and my dim memory of it (I haven’t watched it in 20 years) is as a stiff, embarrassingly unfunny waste of everyone’s time and effort. On top of that, many survivors from the production have cast doubt on the veracity of Clark’s recollections about his and Monroe’s time together. But who cares: it’s just another piece of Marilyn memorabilia that fails to offer any sense of perspective to this oft-told tale.

THE ARTIST (2011)

There’s nothing worse than coming into a movie with preconceived notions. In this case, I expected to see a silent movie about the real consequences of the arrival of talking pictures. Instead, “The Artist” is a parody of a silent movie; an artificial movie in which the people act like characters in a silent movie, not real people who acted in movies in the 1920s. “Singin’ in the Rain,” a musical comedy, brought a more realistic portrayal of the era to the screen.

How can I believe in these characters if they act as if they’re silent movie clichés instead of a flesh-and-blood people dealing with the complete changeover of their industry? French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, who wrote and directed the film, seems to have a surprising hit on his hand along with a shoo-in for a best-picture Oscar nomination, but, to me, the movie fails in almost every aspect.

Jean Dujardin, a French actor best known for his turn as a comic spy in two “OSS 17” films for Hazanavicius, plays George Valentin (a little too close to Valentino for my taste), a star of American silents who finds his career all-but over when sound sweeps the business in 1927-28. At the same time, a perky extra (Bérénice Bejo) Valentin meets at an opening and gives a break to, emerges as a matinée idol of the re-tooled art form.

So begins the “A Star Is Born” plotline as these two lives head in opposite direction while never losing sight of one another. There’s little more to the script and, beyond a few beautifully staged and shot scenes, the film is slow and visually uninteresting.

Dujardin, though handcuffed by the director’s insistence for artificiality, has a handful of emotionally truthful moments, but not enough to salvage this shallow film.

One of the film’s better performances is given by Penelope Ann Miller as Valentin’s unhappy wife. It’s eerie how much Miller looks like actress Dorothy Comingore, who played a thinly veiled version of silent star Marion Davies in “Citizen Kane,” another movie this silent copies. (Later, it lifts sections of the score to “Vertigo” to intensify a key dramatic scene—that seems like cheating.)

It seems that the allure of a 21^st Century black-and-white silent—forget about its content or purpose—was all that was needed to turn “The Artist” into a critical hit.

In fact, even with all the technical advances of the past 80 years, I have my doubts that “The Artist” would make a Top 10 if it was competing against films from 1928. In many ways, this film is made for moviegoers who haven’t seen that many silents. For those who know silent filmmaking, this has to be a disappointment in that Hazanavicius makes little attempt to replicate any of the stylistic touches of the late silents or even direct the film with any of the flair of the era. This is a silent film made as if it were a 2011 Hollywood release—with little camera movement and predictable composition. Some of the most innovative filmmaking the cinema has ever seen took place before sound, but you’d never guess that from “The Artist.”

Maybe I was expecting too much. It’s not a bad film, but if it was in color and with a soundtrack would it even have been released? Like many believed about talking pictures, “The Artist” is purely a novelty.

November 2011

2011-12-05T17:35:00.000-08:00

MELANCHOLIA (2011)
This dazzling, audacious and superbly textured examination of the sanity and very existence of life on Earth dives into the same daringly ambitious pool as “The Tree of Life.” But Lars von Trier’s film avoids the spacey vagueness of Terrence Malick’s movie and adds the seemingly ubiquitous doom and gloom of Nordic filmmakers.

After an impressionistic preface that is part teasing trailer and part David Lynch-like hallucinatory trip, the narrative begins with Justine (Kirsten Dunst), still wearing her elaborate wedding dress, heading to her reception with husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård). They arrive hours late at the palatial estate of her brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland) and sister Claire (intense British actress Charlotte Gainsbourg). The reception provides a short-hand chronicle of Justine’s life (and, seemingly, von Trier’s view of lives in general).

She battles with her angry mother (Charlotte Rampling), irresponsible father (John Hurt), arrogant, single-minded boss (Stellen Skarsgård) and eventually cheats on and breaks up with her groom, all in the span of the evening’s reception.

     The writer-director, best known for “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark,” uses only a handheld camera as he follows the bipolar Justine trying to find something in “life” that will bring her a sliver of happiness. The film’s guiding theme reflects an old Woody Allen quote: “Life is miserable, painful, irrational, tortuous and over much too quickly.”

   The second half of the film also takes place at the sister’s home, beginning with Justine’s arrival looking as if she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In fact, the whole world—represented by the three adults and the sister’s young son—is a bit on edge as a previously unknown planet named Melancholia is on a path to just miss Earth in a few weeks.

     Claire grows less confident that Earth will survive this celestial event even as her husband and son anticipate it like a sporting event. Meanwhile, Justine's mental state seems to grow stronger as Melancholia moves toward Earth and she becomes content with her belief that life is about to end.

     I can't recall seeing a film that is so utterly consumed with debilitating depression, yet it soars in its uncompromising vision and unrelenting intensity. Von Trier’s films have never been known for outstanding performances (though Emily Watson was nominated for his “Breaking the Waves”), yet here Dunst and Gainsbourg, though unlikely sisters, creating complex, memorable characters. It’s a career-changing performance by Dunst, who previous had never impressed me as an actress capable of carrying a film of this seriousness and magnitude. She takes the character to the depths of depression before her catharsis.

Adding to the epic sweep of the film (as if two planets near collision isn't enough) is the use of sections of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" on the soundtrack. One of the most stirring pieces of music ever penned, this orchestral thunderbolt provides the perfect background to this larger-than-life, unsettling movie experience.

In some ways, the film reminded me of the surreal experience of "Apocalypse Now." Both films are set in unknowable worlds in which fear is always in the air and no one knows what to expect from one minute to the next.

Von Trier has made a career of putting uncomfortable moments on screen; with “Melancholia,” he’s found the ultimate unthinkable event as these symbolic humans face the possibly end to everything that ever was and ever will be.

J. EDGAR (2011)

Over the past 10 years, no American filmmaker has delivered first-rate, often great, movies as consistently as Clint Eastwood. Yet, he was the wrong director to tackle the long, controversial career of J. Edgar Hoover.

This bio-pic of the pugnacious FBI director—who served every president from Coolidge (when it was the Bureau of Investigation) to Nixon—utilizes every cliché of the genre without ever making a good case for devoting a major motion picture to his life. And while much screen time is spent on Hoover’s legendary secret files illegally complied on the 20^th Century’s most influential figures (most famously, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Kennedy family and Martin Luther King), the portrait never exposes the epic scope of this public servant’s venality.

That problem is exasperated by the casting of a charismatic, popular actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, as this petty, vengeful tyrant who set the agenda for national crime fighting for more than 50 years. No matter how many of Hoover’s dirty deals Eastwood depicts, DiCaprio, on screen almost every second of the film, is hard to hate. I was never convinced that DiCaprio, who has some terrific moments as Hoover and convincingly looks twice his age, was that famously short and fat bully I remember from news reports from my childhood.

Casting problems though can’t be blamed for the bland, stiff performances from the supporting actors, including Naomi Watts as his loyal secretary, Jeffrey Donovan as bitter enemy Robert Kennedy and Armie Hammer as Hoover’s devoted assistant Clyde Tolson, who may or may not have been his lover. Hammer also is forced to don what may be the worst old-man makeup in movie history; it looks like a Halloween mask.

Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black used the tired device of Hoover dictating his memoirs to offer his version of events, while failing to provide enough moral indignation from other characters. It’s too much Hoover through Hoover’s eyes to earn even a semblence of credibility. Even his fiercest adversary, RFK, comes off as shrill and insignificant.

Most disappointing is that while the film correctly plays up Hoover’s role in modernizing crime fighting (advocating for finger prints and other forensic evidence) it fails to even acknowledge Hoover’s cozy relationship with the Mafia (he denied its existence) and his role in thwarting the Civil Rights movement.

About halfway through the picture, I tried to imagine what Oliver Stone might have done with this material. Subtlety would have been thrown out the window (along with DiCaprio), but it would have been a wild, entertaining ride, surely an improvement over this dull walk-in-the-park Eastwood has made.

FOUR SONS (1928) and PILGRIMAGE (1933)

      What makes John Ford one of the half dozen greatest filmmakers of the past 100 years is the versatility he displayed during in his legendary career. In his time, he was pigeonholed as a maker of Westerns, yet some of his best movies were social justice pictures—“The Informer,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” and “How Green Was My Valley” and “The Fugitive.”

      Ford also directed sentimental romantic comedies (“The Whole Town’s Talking” and “The Quiet Man”), a Shirley Temple hit (“Wee Willie Winkie”), an historic epic (“Mary of Scotland”), a disaster film (“Hurricane”), a political picture (“The Last Hurrah”), a war film (“They Were Expendable”) and a series of powerful documentaries capturing fighting during World War II.

     And even among aficionados, who thinks of Ford when important directors of silents are discussed? I’ve seen a handful of his more than 50 silent picture and they are all superbly told dramas, ahead of their time. “Four Sons,” recently refurbished, is Ford at his sentimental best, showing his understanding of the power of family bonds and the pain of warfare, foreshadowing many later works. The film was among the biggest hits of 1928.

    Opening in pre-World War I Germany, we’re introduced to the Bernle family, headed by Little Mother (Margaret Mann), who is devoted to her four sons, played by Francis X. Bushman, George Meeker, James Hall and Charles Morton. But this loving family is soon splintered, as one son (Hall, later one of the stars of “Hell’s Angels”) moves to America and finds success as a restaurant owner and two others find themselves on the Russian front as Germany goes to war. Only the youngest son (Meeker) remains with his mother, but only for awhile as he is soon forced into the military.

      The script by Phillip Klein doesn’t play out as expected and balances the tragedy of war with the amusing eccentrics of the family’s Bavarian hometown, along with the key role of the postman in a country at war. The acting reflects Ford’s understated touch that marked his films throughout his career, especially in the quiet, moving performance by Mann as the mother.

      Some critics would have you believe that camera movement began with Martin Scorsese (with a slight nod to Orson Welles). But Ford, in this 1928 film, tracks up and down streets, following characters through the village and generally creating a dynamic visual storytelling style, invigorating this Old World tale of a mother’s love for her sons with the magic of a movie camera.

     Along with enjoying the timeless tale of brothers divided by war, “Four Sons” is an insightful peek at a filmmaker on the verge of becoming one of the 20^th Century’s most essential artists.

    Ford explored the American side of World War I five years later in “Pilgrimage,” a minor, but interesting picture that also focuses on a mother-son relationship and the devastating effects of war.

     Henrietta Crosman, a then-famous turn-of-the-century stage actress, plays Hannah Jessop, a tough, no-nonsense farm widow who is incredibly protective of her only son Jimmy (Norman Foster, who went on to a successful directing career). She’s especially displeased with his relationship with the daughter of a pitiful drunkard.

In the ultimate act of selfishness, she waives her right to keep an only son on her farm and signs him up for war duty. The consequences are inevitable: Jimmy dies in Europe, his fiancée gives birth to his son and the mother hates the world.

But she’s given a chance to redeem herself when she’s invited, along with other American mothers, to visit the graves of their sons in France. On the trip, she befriends a pipe-smoking Appalachian woman named Hatfield and then takes a young man not unlike her son under her wing.

     “Pilgrimage” is sentimental as all get out, but it gives now long-forgotten stage star Crosman a chance to shine in a rare leading role and allows Ford another opportunity to preach a favorite theme (best portrayed in “The Grapes of Wrath”): The eternal bond between a mother and a son.

QUINTET (1979)
    Robert Altman was responsible for some of the most interesting movies of the past 40 years, but he also directed some of the strangest pictures in that time. In fact, many of his films fit in both categories (“3 Women,” “Images,” “Secret Honor”); “Quintet” isn’t one of them.

    Like “Brewster McCloud,” “H.E.A.L.T.H.” and “O.C. and Stiggs,” this metaphor for a society growing more cutthroat and self-centered (I’m guessing that’s his point) makes you wonder how the director of “MASH” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “Nashville” suddenly can turn into a hack.

   It’s not only that “Quintet” is ham-fisted hoo-ha, but it looks like a freshman film class project--filled with sets left over from ‘50s sci-fi cheapies and shot through fogged up lenses, the frames ringed with a fuzzy, iris effect.

     Paul Newman, who had one of his best roles in Altman’s “Buffalo Bill and the Indians,” seems as baffled by what’s going on around him as I was. He plays Essex, a resident of a snow-bound, frozen futuristic world, who takes his pregnant partner to visit his brother in “the city.” He barely arrives when the girl along with his brother’s family are all massacred as part of a popular game played by some members of this mysterious society.

     Game players include Fernando Rey, Bibi Anderson, Vittorio Gassman and Nina van Pallandt, all of whom say a lot of words but communicate very little. Among all these international stars, the All-American Newman looks and sounds out of place; it’s as if Hud walked onto a Bergman set.

     The frost-bite Altman suffered in “Quintet” continued to send a glacier down on his career through the 1980s. (His best work in the era were the decidedly uncommercial “Fool for Love” and “Secret Honor.”) Not until “The Player” in 1992 did he resuscitate his reputation.

KING SOLOMAN’S MINES (1950)

I’m not sure why I avoided watching this popular film from 1950 (and Oscar best picture nominee), but it turns out to be more entertaining and less schmaltzy than I imagined.

It’s better than your typical jungle adventure film—though I’m hardly endorsing its selection as a best picture candidate over such films as “The Third Man,” “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Harvey”—in large part because of the underplayed acting of Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr and the stunning cinematography of Robert Surtees. One of the cinema’s great cameramen, who went on to shoot “Ben-Hur,” “The Graduate” and “The Last Picture Show,” Surtees won a well-deserves Oscar for the color photography of “King Soloman’s Mines.”

The plot goes down very familiar paths: the privileged wife of a lost adventurer arrives in Africa determine to hire the region’s top guide to search for her husband. Granger plays Allan Quatermain, the cynical, seen-it-all guide who agrees to take Kerr’s Elizabeth Curtis into uncharted territory along with her brother (Richard Carlson). After the film dispenses with all the city girl-in-the-jungle gags, the trio, along with a cadre of African hired men, face numerous obstacles—real footage of Africa is intercut with the controlled-atmosphere where the actors were filmed—highlighted by their arrival at a Tutsi village, the probable locale of the silver mines of the title.

    The tribe’s distinctive manner, dancing and rituals must have been stunning images for filmgoers in 1950, long before television brought every corner of the world into our living rooms.

    Granger never had a role that matched this one, but had a busy career playing swarthy, romantic adventurers in the 1950s and into the ‘60s.

     Kerr, of course, went on to one of the great careers in movie history, highlighted by memorable performances in “From Here to Eternity” (1953), “The King and I” (1956), “An Affair to Remember” (1957), “The Innocents” (1961) and “The Night of the Iguana” (1964). Here, she recognizes she’s playing a cliché, but manages to inject flesh and blood into the character, especially as she begins to fall for the macho Quatermain.

      The film was co-directed by Compton Bennett (best known for “The Seventh Veil” (1945) and veteran second-unit director Andrew Marton, who later made “Green Fire,” starring Granger and Grace Kelly.

OF GODS AND MEN (2011)
     Considering the prominence of religious beliefs in the public discourse during the past 10 years, it’s surprising there haven’t been more films dealing with the issue. In a world seemingly breaking at the seams over the distrust and even hatred between Christians/Jews and Muslims, it’s about time filmmakers confront these difficult issues.

     This film uses the true story of a group of French monks, living in a remote Algerian mountain village, deciding how to deal with a growing threat of Muslim terrorism to explore what it means to live a life of faith and their responsibility to the community they serve. Director Xavier Beauvois, who directed the thoughtful cop drama “Le Petit Lieutenant,” and screenwriter Etienne Comar put the focus not on the violence of the terrorist (which is mostly spoken of rather than seen) but on how each of the nine monks react to pressure from the local government and military to desert their monastery and the ways they balance safety and principles.

On the surface, not much happens in the film, but the filmmakers and the actors (led by familiar French performers Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale) are able to project the gravity of the moral and practical decisions these monks face and communicate their doubts and fears. It makes for a quiet, understated yet powerful sign of the times.

ALVAREZ KELLY (1966)

Though Westerns were just a decade away from become nearly extinct, in the 1960s they thrived and evolved like never before. While the legends of the genre, John Ford and Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway, continued to produce quality films, Sergio Leone (and his protégé Clint Eastwood) and Sam Peckinpah were breathing new life into the venerable genre.

While hardly groundbreaking, this Western, directed by Edward Dmytryk (more comfortable with war and its aftermath—“Crossfire,” “The Caine Mutiny,” “The Young Lions”), is a cross between the classic cattle drive tale of “Red River” and the off-beat, cynical characters that made the best of ‘60s films stand out.

Elevating the Civil War-set picture is William Holden’s cool, commanding title performance, bringing to life a renowned Mexican-American cattleman who supplies the Union army.

After driving the herd hundreds of miles to Kansas City, Kelly is forced by an arrogant Yankee colonel (Patrick O’Neal) to accompany the cattle as they’re transferred by rail to troops in Virginia. There, a rich Southern widow (stiff and chilly Janice Rule) arranges the kidnapping of Kelly by rebel troops, who demand that he help them steal the cattle from the Union army.

Richard Widmark, sporting an eye patch and providing a loud, crass counterweight to the cool, sophisticated presence of Holden, plays Col. Rossiter, the Confederate platoon leader who forms an uneasy bond with Kelly.

Beautiful wide-screen photography by Joseph MacDonald, especially of the very convincing stampedes, makes up for the rather static direction by veteran Dmytryck, who has too many scenes of three people standing in a room talking. But the real show here is Holden, one of film’s true naturals, whose soothing voice and casual manner always makes him stand out among those around him who are clearly “acting.” Holden’s impeccable enunciation raises the intelligence quotient of every line of dialogue.

After becoming a major star in the 1950s in “Sunset Boulevard,” “Stalag 17” (winning the Oscar) and “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” his career sputtered through most of the 1960s. But three years after this film, he starred as Pike Bishop, a world-weary gunslinger, in the greatest of all Westerns, Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”

The performance signaled a mature actor hitting his prime, confirmed when he gave his finest performances as Max Schumacher (the Pike Bishop of the TV age), fighting for a semblance of integrity, in Sidney Lumet’s “Network” (1975). Unfortunately, there were no more great roles for Holden before his tragic death at age 61 in 1981.

October 2011

2011-11-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

MEEK’S CUTOFF (2011) and BLACKTHORN (2011)
About the only connection between these two Westerns is that men on horses are traveling across dry, dusty deserts in search of a safe haven.

“Meek’s Cutoff” follows a ragtag group of mid-19^th Century pioneers lost on the Oregon Trail in a story that offers minimal dialogue and the most basic of plots. “Blackthorn,” set in Bolivia in the mid-20^th Century, chronicles the late-in-life adventures of Butch Cassidy, who, in this reimagining of his life, survived the legendary shootout that killed both him and the Sundance Kid.

Both rank among the better made, more interesting Westerns in recent years.

Director Kelly Reichardt, best known for “Wendy and Lucy” (2008), brings indie sensibilities to “Meek’s”: long scenes with little camera movement; short, symbolic-laden dialogue; and introspective, dispirited characters. She also becomes one of the few women to have ever directed a Western.

If you saw “Wendy and Lucy,” with its interminable takes of Wendy (played by Michelle Williams, who also stars in the new film) waiting in a small town for her car to be repaired, you’ll recognize Reichardt’s style.

This small band of travelers roams the hardscape of an unsettled West (beautifully captured by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt) in search of a coastal paradise under the guidance of hired-man Meek. This boastful, pseudo tough guy is played by an unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood, who gives the only energetic performance in the film. The dynamics of the journey change when they capture a lone Native-American and decide—against the warnings of the Indian-hating Meek—to follow him, assuming he knows where to find fresh water.

“Meek’s” is a blank canvas that viewers can draw their own allegorical conclusions on. It’s not hard to extrapolate a suspicion of America’s leaders (the blustery, fascist guide) and a push for trusting those more in touch with nature and an understanding of basic needs (the misunderstood Indian).

The acting (led by Williams, Will Patton, Paul Dano and the fine young actress Zoe Kazan) captures the naïve yet determined spirit of those who deserted their life in the East to find something more in the West.

In “Blackthorn,” not unlike another of Sam Shepard’s recent leading roles—in “Don’t Come Knocking” as a rebellious movie star—the 67-year-old stars as a celebrity on the run. In the new film, Shepard’s Cassidy is living a quiet, secluded life in a mountain village somewhere in Bolivia, having taken the name James Blackthorn. If there was an actor born to play an aging Butch it’s Shepard, who looks and sounds like a man of another century who easily could have lived that infamous life.

As settled as Blackthorn seems to be in Bolivia, he longs to see his son (or is it Sundance’s?) in the U.S. and sets out on the journey north. He’s barely started when a man hiding in the hills chases off Blackthorn’s horse along with the money packed on it. Turns out, Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega) is on the run, having stolen money from a local mining company. Blackthorn/Butch can’t help but admire this younger version of himself and they form an uneasy alliance.

What makes “Blackthorn,” directed by Spaniard Alejandro Amenábar (“The Sea Inside”), more interesting than your typical Western is how it portrays the bad decisions and miscalculations of Butch. Shepard, in one of his better performers in a long career filled with excellent work, isn’t the slick operator of Butch’s youth, but an old man who occasionally shows flashes of his gun slinging early days. What on the surface seems like heroic actions leave this one-time criminal with deep regrets.

For fans of Westerns, it is a rare bounty of discovering two thoughtful films (and neither of them remakes) in the same year—one for the traditionalists and one for those who like their movies, even Westerns, ambitious and edgy.

SKIDOO (1968)

You really haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed Jackie Gleason playing a retired gangster on an LSD trip. Or Groucho Marx as “God,” the mob boss of all bosses, dressed in Hindu robes sharing a “pumpkin-flavored” joint.

That’s just a small sampling of the semi-coherent, incongruent craziness, performed by a bizarre collection of 1960s personalities, stuffed into this Otto Preminger satire that compares and contrasts the peace-loving hippie movement and a cold-blooded mob organization. While “Skidoo” is breathtakingly stupid, cast as if it was a SCTV parody, and directed by the famous Austrian in a manner that makes one wonder if he was indulging in the same hallucinogen as the film’s characters, it’s so utterly campy, seen 43 years after its release, that I just couldn’t look away. Let’s face it: a really bad movie is a heckuva lot more entertaining than a mediocre picture.

The film announces its insanity in the opening scene in which Gleason’s Tony and his wife Flo (played by the freakishly cartoonish Carol Channing), each armed with a TV remote, keep changing the channel. It continues for about five minutes longer than was necessary, but we do catch a few glimpses of a televised congressional hearing on organized crime, featuring old friends of the couple.

While Tony is demanding to know what his daughter (Alexandra Hay) is doing with an ever-smiling hippie (John Phillip Law), he gets a visit from a pair of mob goons (Cesar Romero and Frankie Avalon) who have orders from God for Tony. He’s to be admitted to a federal prison for the purposes of killing “Blue Chips” Packard (Mickey Rooney, you knew he had to be in this), who is planning to testify against the mob.

Channing’s Flo, whose outfits make any hippie garb look perfectly sensible, invites Law’s friends to their home, while she goes off to seduce Avalon in hopes of discovering her husband’s whereabouts. The film should have gotten an R-rating just for the scene in which the gangly, pale Channing strips to her underwear. No one should be subjected to that.

Among the other has-beens/famous faces making appearances in this druggie version of “Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” are Peter Lawford, Frank Gorshin, George Raft, Burgess Meredith, Richard Kiel and Slim Pickens. I’m guessing Strother Martin and Dub Taylor were out of the country at the time.

The most bizarre moments occur in prison, where Austin Pendleton (the one actor in this film still working) introduces Tony to mind-expanding drugs and, in a plan of pure genius, laces the prison’s food with LSD. It’s a seminal moment in American entertainment: Ralph Kramden on acid.

In one sequence that looks like an outtake from a Ken Kesey Acid Test party, TV veteran Fred Clark, playing a prison guard, hallucinates a music video featuring the prison’s trash cans. Standing by his side during this trip, also playing a guard, is singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson, the picture’s musical director.

It all comes to an appropriate end on Groucho’s yacht, where hippies and mobsters alike end up in the bed of God’s mistress, the razor-thin model Luna, and Channing gets to sing and dance to Nilsson’s song “Skidoo.” Then, just in case things weren’t nutty enough for you, the closing credits, down to the studio trademark, are sung.

It’s hard to believe that Preminger, director of two masterful crime pictures, “Laura” (1944) and “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) and screenwriter Doran William Cannon (whose next credit, not surprisingly, was on “Brewster McCloud”) didn’t set out to make a horribly imbecilic movie. Stupidity at this level, such as the short films of the Three Stooges or the Farrelly brothers’ efforts, doesn’t happen by mistake. Looking at it that way, I guess “Skidoo” is a masterpiece.

THE IDES OF MARCH (2011)

While offering insightful commentary on American politics and, specifically, the election process, George Clooney’s new film can’t overcome predictable plot devices, rather bland dialogue and a tightly buttoned performance by its leading man.

I wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing the film, if only for the excellent work by supporting performers Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti (as rival campaign managers), Evan Rachel Wood as an ambitious campaign worker and Clooney as presidential candidate Gov. Mike Morris, the politician liberals can only dream about.

Ryan Gosling, one of the best young actors in Hollywood, stars as Stephen Meyers, working as Hoffman’s No. 2 in Moore’s campaign as they maneuver to win a tough primary fight in Ohio. He’s a young man on the rise until he makes a couple of mistakes: he gets involved with Wood’s campaign worker and briefly meets with Giamatti, the opponent’s manager. While it seems like minor indiscretions, they are the tiny threads that lead to worse complications. It seems like a juicy role for Gosling, but I never got the impression that he had a handle on what Meyers was all about. Sometimes he’s a slick politico, sometimes he’s a naïve ideologue, but he never comes across as smart and accomplished as his character should be.

What writer-director Clooney and screenwriters Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon (working from Willimon’s play) do best is show that for all the saturation coverage of politics today, the voters are seeing just the very tip of the iceberg; a very muddy iceberg, at that. Clooney’s stump speeches can be seen as scolding the actual Democratic Party and its candidates for failing to tell the truth and stand by one’s principles even when they aren’t positions voters want to hear.

But when the conflicts become intense and personal, the acting and writing never provide the spark needed to communicate the importance of the stakes. The energy never rises to the level you’d expect from a story about the backroom deals that may decide who will be the president of the country.

MAIN STREET (2011)

The final screenplay of two-time Oscar winner and legendary playwright Horton Foote, exploring the fate of a typical, rundown American town, probably should have remained unproduced.

As interpreted by director John Doyle, who worked with Foote on Broadway, and a first-rate cast led by Ellen Burstyn, Patricia Clarkson and Colin Firth, the film begins with an interesting scenario then spins its wheels for the next hour. “Main Street” plays up its Southern atmosphere, but that can’t fix the half-developed, dead-end plotlines and inconsistent characterizations.

Burstyn, at 79 still one of the great American actresses, plays Georgiana Carr, the last of a once-powerful tobacco family living out her days in a large, unsustainable home in Durham, N.C. When she rents out one of her family’s long-idle warehouses to a fast-talking Texan (Firth, overacting and struggling with his Southern accent), her talkative niece (Clarkson, channeling one of those lonely, offbeat Tennessee Williams’ spinsters) objects to his plan to store hazardous waste. Apparently, they weren’t bothered by the moral issues of producing cigarettes.

Georgiana has two choices: lose the house and stand by her (or her niece’s) principles or take the Texan’s money and stay in her beloved house. But the controversy or the weight of her decision is never developed or explained enough to make it the least bit dramatic. The script gets very fuzzy when Clarkson’s Willa softens her stand on the storing of the waste when romantic sparks fly between her and Firth’s businessman.

Despite good acting from Burstyn and Clarkson and a supporting cast that includes Orland Bloom as the town’s young sheriff, Amber Tamblyn as local woman considering leaving town and Andrew McCarthy as her repulsive boss, the film is frustratingly pointless, not even in the same league as Foote’s best screenplays. I’m guessing that respect for the late playwright (who died in 2009) kept the filmmakers from reworking the script, but the results don’t help anyone’s career or reputation.

While primarily writing for the stage (winning a Pulitzer for “The Young Man from Atlanta” at age 79), Foote screenplays include “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), “Tender Mercies” (1983), “A Trip to Bountiful” (1985) and “Of Mice and Men” (1992). Yet Foote’s signature work on film is his World War I era trilogy “Courtship,” “1918” and “On Valentine’s Day” (from his nine-play cycle “Orphans’ Home” based on his family), a touching look at those turbulent times through a young couple and featuring a brilliant performance by Foote’s daughter Hallie.

Foote’s understanding of the complexities of the human heart and the timeless importance of one’s hometown are essential to what made him a great playwright and screenwriter. Those issues are just passing fancies in the forgettable “Main Street.”

KIPPS (1941)

This quaint amusement, a Dickens knockoff from an H.G. Wells novel that was directed by the great Carol Reed, tells the ironic coming-of-age saga of Arthur Kipps.

Played with a bumbling, boyish naivety by the impeccable Michael Redgrave, Kipps is sold into indentured servitude at age 12 to a bustling London department store and stays there into adulthood. It was a horrid life—working all day under the unforgiving thumb of the owner and then boarding with other employees in a communal room behind the store. Here it’s played for laughs but it’s a stark reminder of what life was like for the underprivileged before labor laws. Kipps gets fired when he misses curfew, but hours later he finds out he’s inherited a princely sum from a grandfather he scarcely knew.

It is no surprise that almost immediately Kipps is taken advantage of, struggling to remain in control of his own life. Turns out bring rich isn’t all it seems to be or, at least, not as easy as one would guess to hold on to your money.

If it wasn’t for the way Redgrave turns Kipps into a character you can’t help but be protective of, I would have tuned out the film early on. Needless to say, the Redgrave family has yet to produce a bad actor and Michael was one of England’s most underappreciated mid-century performers. Making his debuted in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” (1939), Redgrave’s best performances were in the World War II fantasy “Thunder Rock” (1942), as the twisted ventriloquist in “Dead of Night” (1945), as part of the dysfunctional family in “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1947) and as a scandalize professor in “The Browning Version” (1951).

As Kipps, he reminded me of a young Gary Cooper, though Redgrave’s acting skills are way beyond what the American star ever displayed.

Reed’s finest works were still ahead, with “Odd Man Out” (1947), “The Fallen Idol” (1948), “The Third Man” (1949) and “Outcast of the Islands” (1951) establishing him as a world-class filmmaker. He later earned an Oscar (for best picture and directing) with the musical “Oliver!” (1968). With “Kipps,” he brings an artist’s eye to the composition of the scenes, especially in the fast-paced craziness at the clothing store. Reed was always looking to shoot from some unusual angle or with the primary action shot over someone’s shoulder or from behind a piece of furniture.

In addition to Redgrave, the standouts in the cast are Phyllis Calvert as Kipps’ loyal boyhood sweetheart, Diana Wynyard as the “high-class” lady he’s taken in by, Max Adrian as her confidant who does his best to separate Kipps and his fortune, and Arthur Riscoe as a flamboyant eccentric who has theatrical ambitions. While not quite the collection of characters from “David Copperfield” or “Great Expectations,” Wells’ prose and Reed’s cinematic storytelling elevate “Kipps” into an amusing slice of a early 20^th Century life.

BIUTIFUL (2010)

Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director responsible for “Amores Perros” and “Babel,” again taps into the multiculturalism of the 21^st Century, finding it this time in Spain. While I’ve been underwhelmed by his previous efforts (though parts of “21 Grams” were interesting), there is no denying that Iñárritu is a superb filmmaker who constructs complex, intellectually rich and adroitly composed pictures.

While Uxbal (the extraordinary Javier Bardem) is at the center of “Biutiful,” the theme speaks to Spanish diversity and how lives are intertwined in ways we can’t anticipate.

Uxbal, struggling to raise his two young children without their mentally unstable mother (a superb Maricel Alvarez), works as a middle man between a family of Chinese importers of knockoff products and the young African immigrants who sell the illegal stuff on the streets. He also places a group of illegal Chinese workers with a building contractor. For better or worse, in the midst of Barcelona, these divergent groups are all working together for survival as they hang onto different rungs of the ladder. Though he’s repeatedly warned, Uxbal becomes too close to the illegal workers he’s helping to exploit; a black marketer with a conscious.

Though he can be cruel and foolish and makes his living in dubious ways (he also claims to hear the thoughts of the recent dead and gets paid for it), Uxbal is determined to do right by his children.

In a short amount of time—his first performance that earned notices in the U.S. was as persecuted Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in “Before Night Falls” (2000) —Bardem has established himself as one of the world’s most remarkably expressive, heartbreakingly truthful actors, digging intense emotions out of every character he inhabits. From his paralyzed man desperate to die in “The Sea Inside” (2004) to his talkative killer in “No Country for Old Men” (2007) and his smooth-talking painter in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008), the Spanish-born actor seems incapable of giving anything less than an Oscar-worthy performance.

“Biutiful,” which earned him his first best actor nomination, sometimes teeters on being too damn sad to enjoy, but Uxbal’s unlikely humanity and the far from perfect world he inhabits make this Iñárritu’s best film and well worth the emotional roller coaster.

SMILLA’S SENSE OF SNOW (1997)
There’s so much right about this film adaptation of Peter Høag’s best seller that even when the plot turns into an over-arching James Bond scenario, I couldn’t help but enjoy it.

Julia Ormond plays Smilla, a reclusive, possibly troubled Greenland native living in Copenhagen who takes up the case of a young boy (also of Greenland heritage) who dies in a fall from her apartment building’s roof. Ormond is an actress of impressive depth and subtlety, who, after Hollywood tried to turn her into a star—“Legends of the Fall” (1994), “Sabrina” (1995)—has fashioned a low-profile but interesting career. After the box office failure of “Smilla’s,” the British actress has shined in David Lynch’s “Inland Empire,” his daughter Jennifer’s “Surveillance,” David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and in the cable movie “Temple Grandin.” In the upcoming “My Week With Marilyn,” she portrays Vivien Leigh opposite Kenneth Branagh’s Laurence Oliver.

The frigid beauty of the Denmark winter becomes an important character in “Smilla’s,” especially for these Greenlanders who have an understanding of snow way beyond what we warm weather folks can comprehend.

Sweden’s Bille August (“Pelle the Conqueror,” “The Best Intentions”) is the perfect director to capture the cold, isolative mystery of the white stuff, impressively photographed by veteran cinematographer Jörgen Persson.

The supporting cast is another reason to see the film with Gabriel Byrne as a neighbor who Smilla puts her trust in, Tom Wilkinson as a corrupt medical examiner, Ona Fletcher as the dead boy’s alcoholic mother, Vanessa Redgrave as a reticent bookkeeper with a chilly secret, and Richard Harris as a wild-eyed bad guy.

Don’t get too involved in the too-numerous plot twists because you’ll be disappointed by the end, but for fine acting and an unusually gorgeous setting, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” is worth a look.

September 2011

2011-10-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

MONEYBALL (2011)
Adapting a book that primarily deals with the methods utilized by a baseball team to evaluate athletes to fit the needs of a mainstream Hollywood movie is quite an accomplishment. Director Bennett Miller (“Capote”) and two of Hollywood’s busiest screenwriters, Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) have taken Michael Lewis’ best seller, “Moneyball,” and fashioned a story of a complex man determined to revolutionize the business of assembling a baseball team.

More so than in the book, the film puts the focus directly on Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the thoughtful, outspoken general manager of the Oakland A’s, a team whose payroll is among the lowest in baseball, and his Yale educated assistant Peter Brand (Jonah Hill of “Superbad” fame), who convinces Beane that he can use statistics pioneered by writer Bill James to build a cheap, winning team.

On the surface, “Moneyball” is the move I was born to love. But there’s plenty here to bother baseball fans, especially in the manner it telescopes events. Oakland’s emphasis on exotic stats actually began under Beane’s predecessor Sandy Alderson, and the Peter Brand character (in reality, Paul DePodesta, future Dodger GM) started with the A’s three years earlier than depicted in the film.

These aren’t just nitpicks. Fudging the time frame on these events goes to the heart of many of the film’s dramatic scenes. In addition, the script conveniently ignores the on-field contributions of the team’s returning star Miguel Tejada and its trio of pitching aces to give the impression that the collection of unwanted players that Beane adds to the team are the real keys to Oakland’s winning ways in 2002.

The film also has more than a few uncomfortably fake and clunky scenes, including Beane visiting his ex-wife, showing up at a free agent’s home and meeting with the Cleveland GM and his scouts. The first two are just badly stage moments, but the visit to another team’s office to discuss trades is something that would rarely, if ever, happen. In addition, the overall pacing of the picture is ragged and disconcerting; it never feels like a coherent movie flowing toward a conclusion.

Yet I have a soft spot for a script that manages to dramatize debate among scouts on player evaluations and the frantic, phone negotiations that go on at the league’s trading deadline in July. The juggling of calls by Beane in trying to obtain a relief pitcher, playing one GM against the other, is superbly reenacted. I just wish the filmmakers would have also shown his attempt (chronicled in the book) to convince another GM to include him in a trade with Boston so that the A’s could get their favorite player: Kevin Youkilis, whom they’ve labeled “the Greek god of walks.”

The relationship between Pitt’s Beane, a one-time high school phenomenon who turned out to be a bust as a profession player, and Hill’s Brand makes the film worth putting up with its flaws. Both actors turn these very singular men into fascinating characters, quite unlike the usual sports film clichés. Hill, cowered by the scouts, the players and Beane, is the ultimate nerd who has somehow sneaked into the locker room, while Beane is a baseball lifer (he remains the GM of the A’s) who invests his body and soul into their statistical revolution.

Miscast in a supporting role is Philip Seymour Hoffman (who Bennett directed to an Oscar in “Capote”) as the team’s manager Art Howe, an old-school baseball man who fights against Beane’s idea of how to run a ballclub. It’s a case of too much actor in too minor a role.

As much as I enjoyed most of “Moneyball,” I’m not sure why anyone who isn’t a longtime baseball fan would spend their money on this film. Yet it’s doing amazingly well at the box office. I’m hoping it’s a trend: Maybe some smart Hollywood screenwriter will find a way to make a movie about the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 19-year losing streak.

CONTAGION (2011)
If you have a lingering cough or runny nose, I would advise avoiding any screenings of this very realistic, cautionary tale of a virus gone viral. You may send your fellow filmgoers fleeing from the theater.

Steven Soderbergh’s fast-paced, expertly directed movie chronicles a deadly infection that kills a Minnesota businesswoman (Gwyneth Paltrow) after she returns from Hong Kong while quickly spreading across the globe, taking millions of lives before health officials can get a handle on it.

The plot is that simple, with a few personalized stories thrown in to increase the immediacy of the emergency, yet screenwriter Scott Z. Burns invests the actions of workers with the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization with the urgent intensity of a spy thriller or war picture. What makes the film most convincing is the characters’ rapid-fire use of the language of microbiologists and other scientific jargon; at points I felt like the script was channeling the great Paddy Chayefsky’s use of the lingo of professionals in “The Hospital” and “Network.”

Along with the smart script, the film boasts a starry cast, led by three best actress Oscar winners (a rare occurrence), Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Paltrow, along with Matt Damon, Jude Law and Laurence Fishburne.

While Winslet and Cotillard, playing government health investigators, race the clock to uncover the source of the easily transmitted virus, CDC lead scientist Dr. Hextall (played by the scene-stealing Jennifer Ehle) attempts to understand its properties.

Ehle, an American actress who I had wrongly assumed was English, is best known for her spunky and touching performance as Elizabeth Bennet opposite Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the exceptional 1995 British miniseries of “Pride and Prejudice.” Since then she’s mostly appeared in small roles; she played Geoffrey Rush’s wife in “The King’s Speech” and has a supporting role in the upcoming George Clooney’s film “The Ides of March.” Here she rips through Hextall’s lines as if she’s been a researcher all her life, displaying the flat, low-keyed cool of a scientist, yet bringing out the urgency of her assignment in every scene. She outshines the stars.

As with most disaster films—and despite its intellectualism, this is a disaster film—“Contagion” loses some of its steam, growing repetitive and sentimental in the last half.

But Soderbergh’s crisp direction and photography (he does his own under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) and the flawless cast keep the film from ever being less than thoroughly entertaining and frightfully believable.

THE KREMLIN LETTER (1970)
There’s little evidence beyond the opening credits that John Huston directed this slow-moving, uninvolving spy adventure. The great director of “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The Asphalt Jungle” fails to bring much logic or energy to this far-fetched plot populated by an odd collection of Cold War warriors.

The filmmaker’s first mistake was casting Patrick O’Neal, a solid but decidedly uncharismatic television actor, as Charles Rone, chosen to lead a special-forces undercover unit sent into the Soviet Union to retrieve the title missive.

At age 43, O’Neal plays the young buck of a group—which also includes Dean Jagger and George Sanders (first seen dressed in drag, playing piano in a gay bar)—who immediate hooks up the gang’s naïve young safecracker (Barbara Perkins).

Giving a completely inappropriate, nearly comical, performance is Richard Boone as the architect of this plan to recover a foolhardy agreement between the Soviets and the U.S. With his hair dyed blond and scars disfiguring his face, Boone’s Ward barks his lines as if he’s calling out football plays and is oddly amused at the most inappropriate moments, including when most of the team is either killed or capture by the Soviets. The only logical explanation for this performance is that both Boone and Huston were in their cups during the shoot.

Faring better are those playing Russians: Orson Welles as an intimidating, corrupt (is there any other kind?) bureaucrat; Max von Sydow as the spymaster the Americans hope to turn; and Bibi Andersson (Max’s costar in numerous Bergman classics) as his unhappy, vulnerable wife.

Luckily, this turned out to be just a slight blip in Huston’s amazing career; over the next five years, he made his gritty boxing picture “Fat City,” the comic Western “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” and the epic buddy adventure “The Man Who Would be King.” He turned 70 in 1976, but some of his greatest accomplishments were still to come.

More than 40 years after his directing debut, Huston helmed three of the best films of the 1980s, “Under the Volcano” (1984), “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985) and “The Dead” (1987), which was released a few months after his death.

THE DEBT (2011)
Like any movie that recounts a dangerous undercover operation, this story of Israeli agents attempting to capture a one-time Nazi is filled with edge-of-your-seat dramatics and exciting daring-do. Yet the manner in which the filmmakers integrate the contemporary aspects of the plot with the historic scenes shortchanges both parts of the story and, not unlike “Sarah’s Key,” weakens what could have been a very compelling tale.

As the picture opens, a 1966 Mossad plot to bring an infamously evil concentration camp physician to justice is back in the news, 40 years later, because the daughter of two of the agents involved in the operation has written a book about it. The agents are hailed as heroes, yet are very reluctant to discuss the details. Adding to that mystery, the third person in their group commits suicide. Clearly, the two survivors are harboring secrets about this long-ago mission.

Director John Madden (best known for “Shakespeare in Love”) does his best work on the 1966 scenes, in which these young, dedicated Israelis (played with studied seriousness by Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas) carry out a slickly designed plan to kidnap Dr. Vogel (Jesper Christensen)—practicing genecology under an assumed name in East Berlin—and transport him back to Israel for trial. The actors create an involving love-hate triangle that grows more intense as the characters are challenged, morally and physically, when things don’t go as planned.

Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkerson and Ciaron Hinds play much less subtly observed versions of these character 40 years later, acting in ways that are both reckless and thoughtless to preserve their legacy. If there were any doubts about what the film has to say, the unsightly facial scar Mirren’s Rachel still bears from the assignment (did she ever consider cosmetic surgery?) offers a heavy-handed symbol. Unfortunately, the older versions of these characters feel like dim shadows of their younger selves and never engaged my sympathy.

The way these early relationships evolve is the one improvement this U.S. version makes on the original Israeli film (made in 2007 but never released in this country). The earlier version offers a more straightforward, less melodramatic telling of the story, putting its focus on the older Rachel’s attempt to clean up loose ends.

The 2011 script never gets a handle on who exactly these characters have become, instead turning the story into a long-winded, repetitive debate on the value of truth.
Christensen gives the most energetic, memorable performance in the film, painting Dr. Vogel as a vile but cunning anti-Semitic who has no regret for even his most heinous acts. This veteran of the Danish stage and television makes the most of his screen time, turning a Nazi cliché into a very believable, and even more threatening, human.

Chastain, in her third major film of the year, after “Tree of Life” and “The Help,” carries the film, equally charismatic as a romantic interest for her two fellow agents and a daring spy who is the most crucial element of the plot. The most riveting moments of the film are between the young Rachel and Vogel.

This 30-year-old stage actress, who made her film debut just three years ago, is clearly the find of the year. Her upcoming movies include the title role in the Al Pacino’s docudrama “Wild Salome” (from Oscar Wilde’s play) and the untitled Terrence Malick film scheduled for next year.

FOR PETE’S SAKE (1974)
This attempt to recreate the absurd antics of screwball comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s rarely rises about jaw-dropping stupidity even as star Barbra Streisand huffs and puffs her way through the agonizing plot.

Usually reliable British director Peter Yates is unable to deliver laughs even with such time-honored shtick as the hiding of an unconscious man in a closet and the obnoxious, interfering in-laws.

In the clueless-husband role is Michael Sarrazin, who scored major roles in the late 1960s and early ‘70s in such films as “The Flim-Flam Man” (1967), “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971), playing a cabbie determine to get his degree while wife Henrietta (Streisand) works at home as a cold-call telephone salesperson. Though the couple can barely afford groceries, they have a maid clean their apartment every day. Such incongruities, even in a dumb comedy, needed some explanation.

Acting as if he’s Ralph Kramden, Sarrazin’s Pete decides amid this financial crisis that he has to invest $3000 in pork bellies, based on a co-worker’s tip. So, his devoted wife enables his dreams by secretly borrowing the money from a loan shark, who ends up selling her loan to a madam who then sells it to a pair of low-life junkyard owners who then…..well, you get the idea. As the price of the loan escalates so do the crazy, illegal stunts Streisand is required to do (and, inevitably, fails at) by those she owes money to.

Stealing the picture is Molly Picon as Mrs. Cherry, a tiny, impeccable dressed silver-haired woman who contracts housewives to work as call girls. She deals with Streisand’s inability to satisfy her customers, turning both of her “assignments” in major disasters.

Other than Picon’s brief appearance, there’s nothing much to recommend this comedy unless you’re curious as to what passed for comedy 35 years ago.

Yates, who died earlier this year at age 81, was a versatile filmmaker who had hits with “Bullitt” (1968), “The Deep” (1977) and “Breaking Away” (1979), but was capable of handing more subtle, thoughtful material such as “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973), “Eyewitness” (1981), “The Dresser” (1983) and Eleni” (1985).

While he’ll primarily be remembered for the tense car chase through San Francisco’s impossibly hilly streets in “Bullitt,” he also elicited first-rate performances in nearly all his films. Robert Mitchum gives his best late-career performance as small-time Boston crook Eddie Coyle for Yates while Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay offer a virtual acting seminar as a needy Shakespearean actor and his valet in “The Dresser.” Little-known actress Kate Nelligan gives a superb performance as the title character in “Eleni” as does Barbara Barrie as the mother in “Breaking Away.”

The director had a knack for shining the camera on smaller roles, with memorable results from James Woods in “Eyewitness,” Paul Dooley in “Breaking Away,” Eli Wallach in “The Deep,” Richard Jordan in “Eddie Coyle,” the previously mentioned Picon in “For Pete’s Sake” and the wonderfully catty Michael Caine and Maggie Smith as a long-dead theatrical couple in Yates’ final feature, “Curtain Call” (1998).

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU (2011)
While the idea that a group of well-dressed, fedora-wearing men roam the Earth making sure people’s destinies are fulfilled is beyond ridiculous, this romantic thriller grounds itself with two sincere, emotionally truthful performances.

David Norris (Matt Damon) and Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) have an instant attraction for one another after they meet “cute” in the men’s room of the Waldorf Astoria hotel. This causes the boys with the hats to go into action—apparently it’s not in the interest of either that they remain together—to make sure these two never meet again. Unlike most movie couples, David, a New York politician on the rise, and Elise, a ballerina on the rise, really do seems like they’ve found true love, with Damon and Blunt giving heartfelt, charismatic performances that, sadly, are overshadowed by the plot machinations.

John Slattery (from “Mad Men”), Anthony Mackie (from “The Hurt Locker”) and veteran British actor Terrence Stamp play the humorless, angel-like gentlemen who can go from downtown to the Bronx by walking through the right doorway, yet struggle to know exactly what they can and cannot interfere with. The rules in this fantasy world are never clear and way too flexible; the film hedges its bets too often.

Writer-director George Nolfi (adapter of “The Bourne Ultimatum”) working from a story by sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick, exploits many of the same themes he did in “Bourne.” Both films involved a mysterious, very powerful organization that wants to control the main character (Damon, of course) while he just wants to live a normal life with the woman he’s met during a very stressful time. And in both pictures, it is the individual’s moral integrity that wins the day over the machine-like institution.

While “Adjustment Bureau” isn’t in the same league as the “Bourne” pictures, Damon and Blunt turn this outlandish thriller into a satisfying entertainment.

PUSHOVER (1954)
and THE PROWLER (1951)
Believe it or not, movies about corrupt cops didn’t begin with “Serpico.” These minor, but intense and very watchable ‘50s crime films star popular actors Fred MacMurray and Van Heflin as Los Angeles policemen who break more than a few laws under the spell of attractive women.

“Pushover,” directed by Richard Quine, is best known as the debut of Kim Novak, then a 21-year-old model, who plays Leona, the girlfriend of a wanted bank robber. Undercover detective Paul Sheridan (MacMurray) pretends to be a suitor in hopes of trapping her boyfriend, but before the police can establish their surveillance, he’s involved with her well beyond department regulations.

Leona, like so many of Novak’s characters to come (within two years she was one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office draws), uses her smoldering sexuality to get what she wants. She convinces Paul to kill her boyfriend before the cops get to him and make off with the loot from the robbery.

MacMurray, who always seems like a heart-of-gold type even when playing unsavory characters, makes the transition from smart, respected cop to greedy, ruthless killer believable; you can’t help rooting for him even as he turns into the bad guy.

Officer Webb Garwood, played by Heflin in “The Prowler” is a more disturbed, conniving character who stalks the wife of a radio personality after she reports a prowler. The lonely Susan (played by Evelyn Keyes) sits in her perfectly furnished living room most nights, listening to her husband’s radio show. When Webb comes back to her house to “check” on her, they discover they are both from the same small town in Indiana.

A few weeks later, they’re in each other’s arms and we’re slinking toward “Postman Always Rings Twice” territory. At some points, the film dissolves into a tired story of on-again, off-again infidelity, but the pace picks up in the last half with surprising plot turns and complex character development.

This was the final Hollywood film made by director Joseph Losey before he was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He relocated to England and continued making films, emerging as one of the top British directors of the 1960s and early ‘70s with “The Servant” (1963), “King and Country” (1964), “Accident” (1967) and “The Go-Between” (1971).

The director brings a creepy, repressed atmosphere to the film, especially in the scenes of Webb after he quits the force and holes up in his tiny apartment, playing psychological games with Susan as he plots his next move.

By the end, the pair is living in the desert ghost town of Calico (long before it was re-imagined as a tourist attraction) in a bleak, anti-social existence that reflects the twisted reality of Webb’s mind.

You just can’t beat the 1950s for interesting and entertaining crime pictures, an art sadly lost in the past half century. Every time the cast or the director of a contemporary low-budget crime picture allures me into watching, I feel like a fool before it’s half over. Part of the problem goes back to the manner in which color film turns crime into a painfully real experience and, except in very deft hands (for an example, see below), drains a story of it dark, psychological shadows.

Currently, British filmmakers seem to be more in tune with the B-movie tradition with such films as last year’s “Red Riding” trilogy, “In Bruges” (2008), “The Bank Job” (2008) and this year’s “The Guard.”

TERRIBLY HAPPY (2010)
If the Coen brothers moved to Copenhagen, this film could easily pass as their latest release. But writer-director Henrik Ruben Genz, best known as the director of the Danish TV series “The Killing” (Americanized for AMC), who also earned an Oscar nomination for his 1999 short film “Theis and Nico,” beat them to it, creating this offbeat crime picture about a deputy sheriff who steps into a very particular small town.

The laconic Robert (Jakob Cedergren), exiled to this tiny burg after getting in trouble in the capital, is immediately urged to stay clear of the town’s tough guy Jørgen (a furiously menacing Kim Bodnia), yet his mentally unstable and very flirtatious wife (Lene Maria Christensen) has other ideas. While Robert deflects her advances and timidly avoids dealing with the seemingly abusive husband, the townfolks prod him toward bad decisions. The motives of the storekeeper, doctor and a gossipy set of barflies is never quite clear, but nothing good will come of it.

I’m a sucker for movies that burst the balloon of all those kinder-and-safer clichés about small towns and “Terribly Happy,” despite its rather bland English-language title, does it in spades. These simple folks are more cunning and deceitful than any Wall Street banker or big city lawyer

For anyone who appreciates the Coens’ eclectic view of the world or the sudden and cruel violence of Jim Thompson’s stories (also filled with small-town evil), this jaundiced tale is worth seeking out.

August 2011

2011-09-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)
What makes Nicholas Ray a filmmaker worth remembering—August marked the 100^th anniversary of his birth—was his keen interest in those who lived on the edge of society at a time when America was all about conforming. An inordinate number of his characters were just one crisis away from committing some heinous crime or walking away from their responsibilities.

From his directing debut, “They Live by Night” (1949), through his best known film, “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), Ray was among the most interesting filmmakers in Hollywood, delivering a series of tough-minded, noirishly intense films. “Knock on Any Door” (1949), “A Women’s Secret” (1949), “In a Lonely Place” (1950), “Born to be Bad” (1951), “On Dangerous Ground” (1951), “The Lusty Men” (1952) and “Johnny Guitar” (1954) show a director who is a master of the moods and themes of film noir and unafraid of difficult, unusual stories.

First and foremost in Ray’s career is “Rebel;” it’s not so much a film as a manifesto announcing the arrival of a new human species—the brooding, emotionally volatile teenager. The title is a misnomer because Jim Stack certainly has a cause even if he doesn’t know it. In fact, his cause became the defining goal of all teenagers since: breaking from family and environment to find one’s own identity.

In James Dean, Ray found the perfect collaborator to bring this prototype character to the screen. Though Dean was 24, he possessed that hangdog, youthful sullenness and communicated a simmering internal struggle that turned Jim into the teenage icon, Xeroxed by actors from “Beach Blanket Bingo” to “Twilight.”

“Johnny Guitar,” my personal favorite among Ray’s pictures, is a bizarre, off-centered Western, filmed in gaudy, vivid color, starring a wild-eyed, frantic Mercedes McCambridge determined to uphold community standards and rid the town of Joan Crawford’s roadhouse saloon. It remains one of the most forceful condemnations of those righteous few who claim to know what’s best for all of us. Stylistically, it’s closer to the surrealistic work of David Lynch than the cowboy pictures of the 1950s.

Dixon Steele, played by Humphrey Bogart in “In a Lonely Place,” might easily be the adult version of Jim Stark, another of Ray’s loners who refuse to abide by society’s rules. A short-tempered Hollywood screenwriter who has hit a dry period, Steele is offered a shot to redeem his career by adapting a best seller. After meeting with the producers, he invites an attractive hatcheck girl who was reading the book when he came into the restaurant back to his apartment to tell him the novel’s plot.

     The next morning he’s visited by the police and questioned about the young woman. She was found dead along a nearby road. Though the police have no material evidence, they suspect Steele because of his reputation for engaging in fistfights and his unusually cold, nonchalant reaction to the news of the murder.

    Even after he returns to writing and falls in love with his neighbor Laurel (the director’s wife Gloria Grahame, giving a brilliant performance), it takes very little to send Steele into a violent rage. Even in the postwar era, when film noir had introduced American audiences to dark, depressed lead characters, Steele is jolting. And I doubt it’s a coincidence that Steele—probably bipolar, with a distinctively existential view of life that precludes interest in anyone but himself—works in Hollywood.

     Ray, who studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright, became involved in the Group Theater in the early 1930s, acting in Elia Kazan’s early plays. Along with Kazan, he was also mentored by producer John Houseman, who secured him his first directing job, “They Live by Night.”

      Though Ray continued to work steadily through 1963, when years of drinking and abusing drugs caught up with him and he suffered a heart attack, his films after “Rebel” rarely caught that dark urgency of his 1949-55 output. It seemed as if something of Ray died along with his young star in that car crash just weeks before “Rebel Without a Cause” was released in theaters.

     After his last feature, “55 Days in Peking” (1963), Ray taught at New York University (and attempted to make a film with his students) and had a small role in Wim Wender’s “The American Friend” (1977), in which he mimics Dean’s acting mannerisms from a scene in “Giant.” Then, as he dying from cancer, Ray attempted to collaborate with Wenders on a feature film about an elderly painter. Instead, “Lightning Over Water” is a-hard-to-watch, home movie-like documentary that depicts a skin-and-bones Ray drifting between incoherence and senility. It’s not a pretty sight. He died soon after filming was finished in 1979.

Like with so many mid-century Hollywood figures—Welles, Brando, Dean, Cliff, Monroe, Grace Kelly, Ben Gazzara (see below)—it’s easy to focus on what Ray could (and should) have been rather than what he did accomplish. It’s just a fact that some artists have long, productive careers (often with spans of mediocre work), while others spill out everything they have in a burst of inspiration. Ray’s impressive, seven-year burst was enough to earn him an important place in American cinema and sustain a legacy that still influences filmmakers more than 50 years later.

THE HELP (2011)

Critics have been debating the relative importance of a movie’s message and its artistic merit for a century. If a film tells a memorable story or illuminates an important idea does it matter if the writing is pedestrian, the direction lifeless and the characters just stand-ins for points of view? Conversely, how does one respond to a superbly made motion picture filled with memorable characters and sparkly dialogue that either has nothing to say or offers a viewpoint you don’t adhere to?

This became a major issue in the post World War II era when so-called “message” movies—“Gentleman’s Agreement,” “The Snake Pit,” “The Defiant Ones” among many others—divided critics as to what constituted a quality motion picture.

Recently, the division plays out in the reactions to such issue-oriented popular films such as “Crash,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Blind Side,” which were dismissed by most critics but box-office success earned them Oscar attention.

     “The Help” is the latest example of this quandary. It’s hard not to get swept up in this heartfelt portrait of life for domestic servants in 1960s Jackson, Miss. and the determination of a young Ole Miss grad to tell their stories.

     Skeeter (a spirited Emma Stone) returns home to find that the black housekeeper who was integral to her childhood is no longer employed by her parents. While they are vague about what happened (a continuing problem with this script), it spurs the journalism major to ask Aibileen (an unforgettable Viola Davis), the domestic for one of her longtime friends, to secretly and anonymously relate her experiences for a book Skeeter hopes to publish.

    The picture is at its best when we see, through the eyes of Aibileen and Minny (another domestic played with just the right amount of righteous indignation and cynicism by Octavia Spencer), the ignorant, hateful and simply thoughtless way their white employers treat them, all the while believing they are being kind and generous.

     But like many adaptations of popular novels (Kathryn Stockett wrote the best seller of the same name), “The Help” gets sidetrack with too many peripheral characters and stories. The travails of Celia (nicely portrayed by “Tree of Life” star Jessica Chastain), an outsider desperate to be accepted into the Junior League, seem to take over the movie at some points, as does Skeeter’s date woes and the growing senility of an aging matriarch (Sissy Spacek).

     Writer-director Tate Taylor does a sloppy job of integrating these stories with the central relationship between Skeeter and Aibileen and, too often, undermines serious issues by including lighthearted and comic scenes. That’s typically a problem with filmmakers tackling a controversial subject, while still fashioning the film to be No. 1 at the box office. Filmgoers want to feel good when they leave the theater, even while shedding tears.

       The reason to see “The Help” is for the extraordinary performances of Davis and Spencer, who bring to life the devotion, loyalty and unspoken pain of these dirt poor women who are essentially born into servitude. Davis, so memorable as the parent who complains to Meryl Street in “Doubt,” turns Aibileen into an anonymous hero of the Civil Right movement, a lonely, fearful woman who puts her personal security aside to expose what black domestics must face day in and day out.

     Spencer, who earned raves for her performance as a nurse in the Will Smith vehicle “Seven Pounds” and is a familiar face on TV sitcoms, knows how to communicate insolence and frustration with the subtlety of a woman who knows exactly how far she can push her employers. Spencer and Davis should be top candidates when Oscar nomination talk gets serious.

    Also memorable is Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly, an over-the-top young racist who believes that separate but equal is a fair proposition. She pushes for a state law requiring all homes with domestics to provide separate toilet facilities—because everyone knows “they” carry different diseases than “we” do. With the subtlety of a Confederate flag, Hilly makes hating her and sympathizing with the black women easy. Sadly, if it was really that simplistic, this institutionalized serfdom would not have continued more than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

THE GUARD (2011)
     We’ve all seen too many movies about a gang of ruthless drug runners, corrupt police and the outsider who sweeps in to bring law and order to the situation. “The Guard” contains all those elements, but counters them by plunking Brendan Gleeson down in the center of the clichéd plot.

     As Sgt. Gerry Boyle, Gleeson perfects the low-keyed, self-satisfied cynic, a small-town Gaelic cop who is blasé even when he and his fresh-behind-the-ears partner discover a murder victim. He’s a thorn in the side of his superiors and spends as much time in the bar as he does investigating crimes, yet may represent one of the more accurate film portraits of small-town law enforcement.

The international cocaine smugglers, who have somehow found safe haven in Connemara, draw interest from the FBI, which brings an American agent into the mix. Wendell Everett (the always excellent Don Cheadle) is both a fish-out-of-water and the smart guy dealing with morons. He and Boyle make an understated odd couple as Boyle offers a political incorrect view of life (“I thought all drug dealers were blacks or Mexicans”) and a very different set of priorities (he doesn’t let the investigation interfere with his planned day off with a pair of Dublin hookers) while Wendell discovers that this oversized Irishman is a bit smarter than he acts.

     While the interplay, much of it hilarious and profane, between Gleeson and Cheadle is the highlight of the picture, the quick-witted leader of the smugglers is nearly as entertaining. Mark Strong, quietly becoming one of the best character actors in film—with memorable turns in “Body of Lies” (2008), “Sherlock Holmes” (2009) and “The Way Back” (2010)—portrays a weird combination of intellectual (he and his fellow smugglers discuss philosophy during their down time) and tough-guy criminal.

      Gleeson, best known for his kind-hearted hit man in “In Bruges” (2008), Professor MadEye Moody in three “Harry Potter” films and the real-life Dublin mobster Martin Cahill in “The General” (1998), has become the Irish actor of choice with his wide, fleshy face and towering presence. But “The Guard” and “In Bruges” show he’s more than a colorful Irishman.

     First time writer-director John Michael McDonald, brother of “In Bruges” director Martin McDonald, finds the heart and soul of this character through Gleeson, turning this quirky little Irish picture into one of the year’s most entertaining.

LOOKING FOR PALLADIN (2008)

Few Americans have started their acting careers more impressively than Ben Gazzara. After acclaimed performances on Broadway in “A Hatful of Rain” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (but passed over for the movie versions), the 27-year-old New Yorker made his film debut in 1957 as a twisted, military academy bully in “The Strange One” (another of his stage hits), followed by an equally striking performance as an accused murderer in “Anatomy of a Murder.”

He should have been one of the most important actors of the next 20 years, possessing some of the same intensity and screen presence that made Marlon Brando a star. Possibly Gazzara was a bit too ethnic for his time (more than a decade before Robert De Niro and Al Pacino made Italian leading men acceptable), but, for whatever reason, he ended up working primarily in television, notably in the 1960s series “Arrest and Trial” and “Run for Your Life.”

On the big screen, his friend John Cassavetes’ provided Gazzara with his juiciest roles, as the hard-drinking Harry in “Husbands” (1970) and as a small-time gambler in trouble with the mob in “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976). His gave his best film performance as Jack Flowers in “Saint Jack,” Peter Bogdanovich’s film about an American lay-about working the system in Singapore. He also had the title role in a B-movie version of “Capone” (1975) and co-starred in the landmark 1974 TV miniseries “QB VII.”

Though he never stopped working, in the U.S. or Europe, he had a comeback of sorts in the late 1990s, when he had prominent supporting roles in “The Spanish Prisoner” (1997), “Buffalo ‘66” (1998), “The Big Lebowski” (1998) and “Summer of Sam” (1999).

“Looking for Palladin,” which had a short theatrical run in 2008, is the biggest role the actor has had in decades. He plays Jack Palladin, a retired American movie star working as a cook (and hiding) in Antigua, Guatemala amid a community of expatriates, including writers, wannabe filmmakers and other shady characters.

Enter Joshua, a self-obsessed junior studio executive (played with a mixture of self-confidence and naivety by David Moscow) sent to Guatemala to offer Palladin a small role in a major film for big money. The arrogant stranger in a foreign country clichés get old, but the picture becomes more interesting as Palladin’s and Joshua’s past is revealed after they finally meet.

     Though Gazzara’s gravelly voice (the result of throat cancer) makes him sometimes difficult to understand, his unpretentious coolness and his connection with this character turn Palladin into an entertaining end-of-career role for the 81-year-old. If it wasn’t for Gazzara, “Looking for Palladin” never would have seen the light of day; sometimes the presence of a great actor is all a picture needs to make it memorable.

MY WINNIPEG (2007)
    No one makes films quite like Guy Maddin. Usually shot in black and white, purposely made to look ancient, featuring performers who are more line readers than actors, with silent-era intertitles and little sense of continuity, his pictures are, to say the least, an acquired taste.

    While most of his output has been short films (he’s made 13 since 2000), his two most recent features, “The Saddest Music in the World” (2003) and “Brand Upon the Brain!” (2006), are among his most accessible and plot-driven works. Though far from mainstream Hollywood (and looking like they were discovered in an attic in Estonia), both films are strangely amusing and reasonably understandable for moviegoers who enjoy a challenge.

    “My Winnipeg,” a documentary (of sorts) about Maddin’s hometown, has all the hallmarks of his fiction films; he even casts actors to play his family, reenacting crucial confrontations in his early life to, as the narrator says, better understand them in hindsight. But, I assume, some of the film is based on facts. Do more people sleepwalk in Winnipeg than anywhere in the world? And who, other than Maddin, is keeping track?

    There’s some offbeat history about the rivers that have an underground counterpart that somehow haunts the city, and a long segment on the city’s former hockey team and an assortment of trivia about their original arena.

     Maddin even imagines a team of long-retired players skating once again in a half-demolished arena, a sequence that is as bafflingly odd as it sounds.

    It’s hard to tell if Maddin really does lament the Winnipeg of old (he’s 55) or if he is just making fun of the systemic nostalgia that permeates our society (see “Paris at Midnight”).

     In some ways, “My Winnipeg” is like a collage thrown together the night before it’s due, filled with both relevant, heartfelt images and those that make little sense at all. At one point, Maddin’s narrator talks about growing up above the beauty shop his mother operated and taking in “the smells of female vanity and desperation.”

    Like all Maddin films, you never know when wonderfully observed moments such as that will pop up as you struggle to absorb the nonstop impressionistic visuals the filmmaker collects into this one-of-a-kind picture.

SARAH’S KEY (2011)
    This French Holocaust movie should have been one of the year’s most memorable, but uninspired writing and directing prevent the story’s emotional intensity to gain the steam it deserves.

    Based on a novel by Tatiana De Rosnay, the script (by Serge Joncour and Gilles Paquet-Brenner) follows the 1942 internment of a young girl, along with her mother and father, in a French concentration camp. What’s unusual about this part of Holocaust history is that the officials taking these Jews from their homes, treating them like animals and relocating them to camps where they will be murdered aren’t Nazi henchmen, but fellow Frenchmen, acting to please their German occupiers. It would be decades later before France admit to taking part in these atrocities.

     Mélusine Mayance gives a gut wrenching performance as Sarah, who is determined to escape the camp and return home to release her younger brother from the closet she locked him in when police arrived. The historical scenes are all well done, but only make up about one-fifth of the picture. The script primarily focuses on a present-day magazine reporter (Kristin Scott Thomas), who, while researching a story about this little known part of French history, uncovers a link between this roundup of Jews and her in-laws.

     Scott Thomas, who has given superb performances in recent French films “Tell No One” and “I Loved You So Long,” and last year, in English, as John Lennon’s aunt in “Nowhere Boy,” never seems comfortable in her role as the character juggles her research and her family life.

    By the time the script works its way through too many strange turns, which all end up neatly tied up, the dramatic impact of Sarah’s story feels like an afterthought. The modern section comes off as trite when compared to the horrors of 1942.

There’s much to admire about “Sarah’s Key,” especially young Mayance’s performance, but the film really needed at least one more rewrite and a better structure to do justice to a heartbreaking story.

BARNEY’S VERSION (2010)

     This comic drama about a Canadian television writer’s obsession with a woman he meets at his wedding reception has some amusing, well-written scenes, but spends too much time treading water.

     Paul Giamatti creates yet another befuddled, frustrated and sarcastic character with Barney Panofsky, a very successful producer of a soap opera who, at the same time, is failing miserable in his personal life.

      After a doomed first marriage to a hippie girlfriend, he’s matched up with a talkative Jewish princess (Minnie Driver) who he’s clearly ill suited for. He’s already unhappy and quite drunk when he spots Miriam (the regal British actress Rosamund Pike), a New York City radio DJ. The film seems to be headed in the right direction as Barney makes a valiant attempt to win over Miriam on his wedding night. She tells him that she doesn’t want to hear from him as long as he’s married.

       So begins his years-long pursuit of Miriam while his marriage falls, tediously, apart. It’s during this period that the film loses much of its humor and, except for some nice moments between Barney and his tough-guy father (an out-of-character but effective Dustin Hoffman), starts sounding like a TV movie. Not surprisingly, the director, Richard J. Lewis, has worked almost exclusively on the small screen.

      There’s even a half-hearted attempt to add a murder-mystery subplot, and a bothersome detective, to the picture. There’s hardly a relationship cliché left out.

       The script (by Michael Konyves), based on Mordecai Richler’s novel, is in bad need of a major rewrite: Too many diversions away from the focus of the story turn what should have been a quirky character study into an over-plotted tearjerker about a man whose is extremely hard to like. Worst of all, I never detected any real chemistry between Barney and Miriam, despite nice efforts by Giamatti and Pike. Like so many romantic comedies, once the lovers are united, the film has nowhere to go.

SHERLOCK HOLMES (2009) and ROBIN HOOD (2010)
     I’m as old-school as they come, but who exactly was clamoring for new versions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s multitalented detective or the arrow-wielding medieval good guy? Hollywood studios are so obsessed with brand names, be it a comic book character, an old television show, over-worked literature figures or “old” movies, that it is shocking an original screenplay ever gets produced.

     The latest remake trend is the “reboot,” with “Batman” being the most successful of the type; but do moviegoers want to see another set of “Spiderman” films? The industry has reached the point that a movie series which began in 2002 is viewed as a dusty classic in need of an update. If Woody Allen had any marketing sense, instead of wasting his time with new scripts, he’d just remake “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” with Leo and Scarlett.

    As for these two overproduced star vehicles—Robert Downey Jr. is Holmes, Russell Crowe is Robin—neither are bad films and, occasionally, actually entertaining, but mostly just loud time killers.

   Guy Ritchie, the cutting-edge British action director (“Snatch”), brings to “Holmes” a stop-action, slam-bang energy and contemporary attitudes, yet keeps the astonishing intuitive crime fighter in the 19^th Century. The film proves that it takes more than set and costume designers to create a period piece.

    Ridley Scott, occasionally a great director (see “Alien” or “Black Hawk Down”), who has become Crowe’s personal helmsman (this is number four) tells the story of Robin Hood before his Sherwood Forest days. Following Robin’s return from the crusades, in the service of Richard the Lionhearted, he joins a rebellion to save the kingdom from the corrupt King John and French invaders. Cate Blanchett co-stars as a feisty Maid Marion while 82-year-old Max von Sydow steals the picture as her father-in-law, a defiant, proud farmer who takes Robin under his wing.

     Crowe gives another unsmiling, stoically heroic performance; sadly, he’s becoming Harrison Ford with an accent.

     Downey, at least, seems to be having more fun, reprising his smirking, winking-at-the-audience persona from the “Iron Man” films. Jude Law (didn’t he used to be a serious actor?) slums as sidekick Dr. John Watson and Rachel McAdams plays the hottest female in an otherwise grungy 19^th Century London.

     Both stars and directors were clearly seeking a big payday and a long-term franchise. “Holmes” was a success at the box office thus Part II opens later this year, but “Robin Hood” was a major disappointment. Just maybe that means that Scott and Crowe will actually seek out an interesting, original script rather than relying on safe, uninspired material.

July 2011

2011-08-11T09:31:00.000-07:00

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY
HALLOWS: PART 1 (2010)/PART 2 (2011)
As disappointing as most of the movies have been in this epically successful franchise, the final chapter comes to a very satisfying conclusion.

The two-part film manages to be unrelentingly bleak and intense yet, at the right time, appropriately sentimental. The countless famous faces who filled the supporting roles in these adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s best sellers show up in the finale, if only for a second or two. More prominent are Ralph Fiennes, as the ghostly, noseless Lord Voldemort, determined to destroy Harry; Maggie Smith as the feisty Prof. McGonagall, who leads the Hogwarts “army” against the dark forces; Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, whose hate for Harry knows no bounds; and Alan Rickman as Prof. Snape, the most mysterious and complex character in Harry’s circle.

Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Emma Watson (Hermione) and Rupert Grint (Ron) look grim and defeated as they face one incredible obstacle after another, all leading toward Harry’s destiny. Yet even after 10 years of inhabiting these characters, the threesome still seem like kids playing themselves. You’d think that Radcliffe, concluding his run as the star of the most popular series of films in cinematic history, would have at least a few impressive moments in this 4 ½-hour finale. He does not. He remains a purely reactive actor, who spends too much time staring emotionless into the camera. After all this time, when Radcliffe takes off his signature glasses, Harry Potter disappears.

In Part I (probably an hour too long), Harry, Hermione and Ron magically fling themselves across the British countryside in search of Horcruxes (objects that contain bits of Voldemort’s soul) one step ahead of the evil lord’s Death Eaters. This pitch-black adventure has an ominous end-of-time tone, but for the non-Harry Potter aficionados the purpose is a tad ambiguous.

The teens, as they are want to do, engage in petty arguments and then make up as the fate of the world or England or the witchcraft (not sure which) hangs in the balance. The film could have used a bit more of Voldemort and less of his faceless minions (excepting Bonham Carter).

Part II picks up without a break, but immediately improves on the first 2 1/2 hours by relocating the action to Hogswarts. This magical centerpiece of the previous six installments is now a gloomy, repressive, prison-like institute (I’m not sure why so many students and teachers even returned), but it remains a haven for Harry, bolstered by loyal friends and mentors, including the previously unknown brother of the recently deceased Dumbledore (Michael Gambon, still the boy’s guiding light), memorably portrayed by Ciarán Hinds.

Unlike Part I, the second half gets down to business quickly. Voldemort, slowly being diminished as Harry destroys his soul, makes a final assault on Hogswarts, in a battle fought by a seemingly endless number of wizards and witches, reminiscent of “Lord of the Rings.”

Director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves do especially good work in Part II as they summarize Harry’s history, fill in the many, many holes of the series and give everyone in the huge cast some important bit of business while keeping the intensity level at full throttle.

In one of the film’s most spectacular effects, the trio escapes the vaults of a sinister bank by hitching a ride on a very angry, Grendel-like dragon. (It’s the one sequence I would have enjoyed seeing in 3-D, but overall I prefer a 2-D movie world.) Energetic scenes like this would have done wonders for “Goblet of Fire” (2005) and “Half-Blood Prince” (2009), two of the more forgettable volumes of this encyclopedic series.

While 2004’s “Prisoner of Azkaban” remains the gold standard of these eight movies, “Deathly Hallows” memorably brings this extraordinarily imaginative (if frustratingly laborious) fantasy to its logical conclusion, allowing Harry and Voldemort to settle their feud mano-a-mano. Now, I guess, all those wizards and witches can get back to whatever they usually do on a daily basis.

CARLOS (2010, TV)
Ilich Ramirez Sánchez, a Venezuelan who was educated in the Soviet Union, was the most wanted terrorist for 25 years before his capture in 1994. Known as Carlos, he organized cells to commit bombings and murders in the name of Palestinian liberation. Most famously, he led an assault on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and took the ministers and members of their delegations hostage.

This French-German produced three-part miniseries, first shown in the U.S. on Sundance Channel, uses available facts and screenwriters’ imagination to paint a behind-the-scenes chronicle of Carlos’ criminal career. Edgar Ramirez, whose U.S. film work has included roles in “Domino” (2005), “The Bourne Ultimatum” (2007) and “Vantage Point” (2008), gives a charismatic performance as Carlos, portraying him as a strutting, hedonistic revolutionary who seems as interest in promoting himself as he is in advancing the cause.

While Ramirez’ performance is the main reason to devote six-hour to this production, it also exposes the extent that the Soviets and their satellite states were supporting terrorism against the West before the Cold War ended. At one point, the Soviet leaders offer support to anyone who takes out Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Kadafi gives Carlos millions for the same purpose.

Without the protection he received from Eastern European (and Arab) countries, Carlos would have been killed or brought to justice long before the ‘90s. Yet, the West’s willingness (especially in the ‘70s and early ‘80s) to negotiate with Carlos seems extraordinarily naïve today.

The problem with “Carlos” is that by the middle of Part II, the trappings of his life become so repetitive that it often sounds like the actors are repeating lines from previous scenes. You can only watch him mistreat women, speechify about the importance of the cause, plan bombings and make deals to acquire weapons so many times. This would have been a first-rate three hour movie.

In fact, many film critics last year were insistence about treating it as a feature film, ignoring that it was first shown on television, lured into including it on end-of-the-year Top 10 lists (both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times) by its screening at Cannes. The New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society named “Carlos” the year’s best foreign film.

French director Olivier Assayas, best known for “Irma Vep” (1996) and “Clean” (2004), impressively integrates TV clips from the actual events with the drama to create a mixture of truth and fiction that many people often object to but, in this case, makes for entertaining television. While “Carlos” isn’t the masterpiece many critics claimed, it offers an unforgettable portrayal of this prototypical terrorist, a forerunner of those who have become all too familiar in the 21st Century.

THE DIVINE LADY (1929)
Frank Lloyd, who went on to direct Oscar-winning best pictures, “Cavalcade” (1933) and “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1935), won the best director Oscar in the second year of the Academy Awards for this version of the Lady Hamilton-Lord Nelson romance. (His films “Weary River” and “Drag” from that year were also cited.)

What was unusual about Lloyd’s win—it hasn’t happened since—at the ceremony covering 1928-29 was that “Divine Lady” (nor his other films) wasn’t among the movies considered for best picture. Though the Academy didn’t announce official nominations in the early days (the process became standardized by 1930), Lloyd won over Harry Beaumont who directed the year’s best-picture winner “Broadway Melody” and Ernst Lubitsch for “The Patriot” among others.

The story’s legendary romance takes place in the late 18th Century, when Emma, in a loveless marriage to a British ambassador, falls for a young naval officer, who goes on to become one of the most famous military heroes of the Empire. As the affair becomes a well-known secret among the British upper class, Horatio Nelson earns his legendary status in sea battles with Napoleon.

Later sound versions of this story include “That Lady Hamilton” (1941) starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and “The Nelson Affair” (1973) with Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson as the famous adulterers. But, in fact, words don’t do much to improve this simple love story.

In “Divine Lady,” Victor Varconi plays Nelson in the feminized style of silent-era sensitive heroes while Corinne Griffith dominates the film as Emma, who rises from uneducated domestic to behind-the-scenes powerbroker. It earned this popular actress her only Academy Award nomination.

As well constructed and fast-paced the first half of the film is, the second half, with its elaborately staged sea battles, clearly earned Lloyd his Oscar.

Why the film wasn’t among the best picture selections probably had something to do with studio politics because it’s both technically and dramatically a far superior film than the eventually Oscar winner, “Broadway Melody.” Voters were just being trendy: they thought this faddish idea of talking pictures was actually going to change the business.

PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES (2011)
It’s not hard to differentiate a theatrical film (even a badly made one) from a TV movie. What determines which documentaries I pay $8 to see compared to those I watch for free on PBS or A&E is not nearly as clear. It doesn’t seem to be about the quality of filmmaking or depth of content or subject matter. I’m guessing that it’s just a matter of getting the right company behind a project.

In 2009, a superbly made, well-written documentary chronicling the Chandler family’s stewardship of the Los Angeles Times aired on the local PBS station. “Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times,” written and directed by veteran documentarian Peter Jones (he’s filmed bios of Bette Davis, Judy Garland and Edward G. Robinson among others), offered an insightful portrayal of one of Southern California’s most influential families, with a special focus on game-changing publisher Otis Chandler, and the financial rise and fall of the newspaper.

Comparatively, “Page One” offers a narrow, scattershot look at the New York Times and various media issues (Judith Miller, WikiLeaks, Tribune bankruptcy, mergers, layoffs, internet startups) from the past few years. Writer-director Andrew Rossi’s (co-written with Kate Novak) laundry-list approach to the subject ends up short-changing nearly every issue raised, yet the filmmaker does offer a pinhole peek behind the curtains of this legendary institution.

Despite its deficiencies, I thoroughly enjoyed “Page One” as it follows the Times’ media desk reporters covering stories that nearly all revolve around the demise of the traditional media and how newspapers are dealing with the fallout.

Having spent most of my life in a newsroom, it was déjà vu watching and listening to the Times reporters working the phones, interacting with their editors and those editors pushing those stories to their bosses. For the rest of the movie-going public, I’m not sure anyone will much care. The only aspect of “Page One” that makes it of interest to non-journalists is the presence of David Carr, an outspoken, erudite reporter who arrived at the Times late in his career (after bouts of drug addiction, time spent homeless and stops at weeklies and magazines) but is the perfect spokesperson for traditional media. His quick wit and eagerness to offer an opinion, along with his disheveled, rickety appearance, bring a reality-show craziness to what otherwise is a film short on sympathetic characters.

In what may be the most insightful moment in the film, Carr holds up a printout of a page from a website whose owner has just been preaching the worthlessness of newspapers during a panel discussion. Carr has cut out all the stories that were produced by mainstream media and then asks what the site would offer without aggregating the work of reporters getting paid by newspapers.

It was satisfying (as someone who lost his job because of these fools’ mismanagement) to see Carr working on his devastating piece that exposed Tribune executives a bunch of roguish, sexist egotists, leading to the resignation of the company’s No. 2 clown, Randy Michaels (Sam Zell’s right-hand man).

The film offers only glimpses of soon-to-be executive editor Jill Abramson and managing editor Dean Baquet (former L.A. Times editor) but the current top man, corporate-slick Bill Keller, gets plenty of screen time, mostly trying to justify things the Times did wrong.

In my ways, the documentary already feels dated, never rising above a 101 guide to the world of 21st Century newspapering as it shifts and crumbles on a weekly basis. The film would have benefitted from examining the ways the industry has gone back to its roots in a desperate bid to increase profit margins. Returning from the early days of journalism are multiple editions (now on web sites), emphasis on the sensational (once crime now celebrity) and promotion of an ideology (now found in blogs and twittering).

Many critics have ripped “Page One” as being too kind to the Times, which the leftwing still blames for promoting the Iraqi war and missing the mortgage collapse story. Yet it remains the bastion of liberalism (and I use that term as meaning giving voice to those remain underfoot of the ruling elite) and the scourge of the rightwing. When both sides hate your guts, it probably means you’re doing a reasonably fair job.

Of course, the dead-tree media makes mistakes and screws up on stories but it hasn’t been replaced—not by TV, the internet, bloggers, tweeters or any other half-ass media mode that becomes the flavor of the year. Find me a web site that can pay hundreds of reporters an average of about $100,000 a year each to dig into the corruption that permeates the government, business and most other aspects of society and I’ll admit that print is done.

As media executives like to say: we’re still working on that business model. The replacement isn’t in the wings and I’m guessing it won’t be even after the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe and this country’s other major newspapers have run their last roll of newsprint. That’s the documentary I’d be willing to pay full price for.

ROYAL FLASH (1975)
Twelve years after “Tom Jones” launched the sex-comedy-adventure genre, this deviation on the theme slipped in and out of theaters virtually unnoticed.

Despite a cast filled with British stars under the direction of Richard Lester (who had just finished his very similar “Musketeers” pictures), this late 19th Century tale of a bogus war hero (the irritatingly cocky Malcolm McDowell) manipulated by Col. Bismarck (a snarling Oliver Reed) to destabilized Germany isn’t much fun.

Actually, with a more commanding lead actor (Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Sean Connery) and played straight, this might have been a half-way interesting picture. In addition to Reed, playing the future chancellor as the epitome of German arrogance, the film features Alan Bates as his somewhat loyal assistant, Britt Ekland as the icy princess McDowell’s Harry Flashman is forced to wed, Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan as Bavarian royalty into kinky sex, and, briefly, Bob Hoskins as a British cop.

Flashman, a coward who enjoys the fruits of being mistaken for a hero during the British engagement in Afghanistan, takes pleasure in humiliating Bismarck during the German’s visit to England. But he pays the price later when he’s tricked into visiting Germany and then required to impersonate the future king by Bismarck and his minions. It’s all rather silly, made more so by McDowell, a mediocre actor whose entire career is based on his performance in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.”

Lester’s career caught fire when he hooked up with the Beatles to make the quintessential pop music movie, “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) and its follow-up “Help” (1965). He also made the superb chronicle of a disintegrating marriage, “Petulia” (1968), with great performances by Julie Christie and George C. Scott and two interesting Sean Connery films “Robin and Marian” (1976) and “Cuba” (1979). He later managed to turn the “Superman” sequels into overblown comedies, much to the chagrin of fans of Richard Donner’s original.

I also recently caught his 1962 feature debut, “It’s Trad, Dad!” (later renamed “Ring-a-Ding Rhythm!), the calling card that earned him the career-making Beatles film.

It’s less a film than a series of musical performances, featuring early 1960s artists Del Shannon, Gary U.S. Bonds, Gene Vincent, Chubby Checkers and various British Dixieland bands (popular in England at the time and called “trad” by hipsters).

The cartoonish plot involves a small town’s mayor (a Winston Churchill lookalike), who wants to ban the playing of this corrupt music that the local teens are enamored of; no one mentions that this is 40-year-old music. His campaign sends Helen and Craig (minor pop singers Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas) to a nearby radio station/recording studio to recruit acts for a protest concert.

The offbeat humor—the narrator interacts with the actors and, repeatedly, the third wall is broken—the poking fun of government and business leaders and a kinetic filming style paved Lester’s path to becoming the go-to-guy for youth-oriented pictures of the era.

SOMEWHERE (2010)
The title of this Sofia Coppola exasperating trifle is as vague and insubstantial as the picture itself.

While critics (and Oscar voters) went gaga over the writer-director’s “Lost in Translation,” it would have been just as incoherently arty if it wasn’t for the charismatic performances of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. Coppola’s other movies, “The Virgin Suicides” (1999) and “Marie Antoinette” (2006), contain a few nice moments, but without Hollywood’s love of nepotism, she’d be making cheeky commercials for a beer company.

The first 20 minutes of “Somewhere,” the least interesting of her four films, consists of two scenes showing bored movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) watching pole-dancing twins perform in his Chateau Marmon hotel room and then watching his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) ice skate. If this sounds like the beginning of something disturbing, you’ve already imagined a better screenplay than Coppola produced.

Instead, the film aimlessly follows Johnny and Cleo as they spend time together after the girl’s mother dumps her on this diffident, emotionally remote actor. They drive around Los Angeles, travel to Italy for a movie promotion and then spend a weekend in Vegas before Cleo heads to summer camp. Nothing much happens or is said as Johnny drags himself through his shallow existence (the struggle being rich and famous it such a burden) while Cleo looks past her father’s flaws and tries to forge a normal relationship. The film is filled with long takes of characters’ sitting around staring off in the distance, substituting, I guess, for actual meaningful dialogue. It also features the most insipid soundtrack you’ll ever endure.

It would be easy to dismiss this film if it hadn’t been given an end-of-the-year, for your consideration release—like her equally unpopular “Marie Antoinette”—while her father’s recent movies (beautifully made, thought-provoking “Tetro” and “Youth Without Youth”) were barely released. More than ever, Hollywood, like the music industry, is only interested in the work of the young and the hip, even when audiences reject their inferior work.

THE NEXT THREE DAYS (2010)
Five years ago, Paul Haggis was the flavor of the year in Hollywood. After writing the screenplay for the 2004 Oscar-winning best picture, “Million Dollar Baby,” for Clint Eastwood, Haggis made his directorial debut with “Crash,” which promptly won the 2005 best picture Oscar. No one had ever been the credited screenwriter of back-to-back best pictures.

Since then he’s scripted two outstanding Bond flicks, “Casino Royale” and “Quantum of Solace,” helped write two 2006 Eastwood pictures, “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima,” and wrote and directed the underappreciated home-front war picture “In the Valley of Elah.” I’m sorry to report that his batting streak has abruptly ended with this overwrought, improbable action picture.

Russell Crowe, who had his own back to back glory starring in best picture winners “Gladiator” (2000) and “A Beautiful Mind” (2001), plays as a college professor, happily married and father to a little boy. Then, one morning, police bust into their Pittsburgh home and before you can say “Hey, this doesn’t make sense,” his wife (Elizabeth Banks) is sentenced to life in prison for the beating death of her boss.

Crowe’s intense John Brennan then does what any good husband would do: plan a prison break to free her. In the best scene in the picture, John meets with an ex-con (Liam Neeson memorable in a five-minute appearance) who has written a how-to on escaping prison. He offers the basic tenants of planning an escape and John takes it from there, utilizing his vast experience (he taught English) to commit a federal crime.

The attempt to break her out and avoid capture is cleverly plotted and creates intense action, but it never feels like anything more than an outlandish movie conceit. If you can’t buy the premise, everything that follows is just a waste of time.

HARVARD MAN (2001)
With rare exceptions, Hollywood no longer serves as the refuge for rogues, charlatans and itinerant tough guys---essentially the backbone of the industry from the 1920s through the ‘60s.

When you read stories of the Golden Era of Hollywood, they are filled with filmmakers who lived wild, adventurous lives, landing in the movie business because they knew how to tell a good story. Now, the model director is Steven Spielberg, a smart, extraordinary talented but rather colorless character who will never be found drunk on a set or wake up in a Mexican jail.

It turns out that movies fueled by whiskey sours (and later cocaine) were much more interesting and inventive than those boosted by Starbucks cappuccinos.

I once held out hope that James Toback was one of those old-fashioned characters (in his own rather erudite way). A Harvard grad, obsessive gambler, one-time NYU English professor who is a born contrarian, he wrote and directed some indulgent but fascinating pictures in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Toback made his name with his screenplay for “The Gambler” (1974), a semi-autobiographical story about the dark side of wagering and then made his directing debut with “Fingers” (1978), with Harvey Keitel as a concert pianist who works as a collector for his loan-shark father. In the ‘80s, he wrote and directed “Exposed” (1983), an eccentric New York romance with Nastassja Kinski, Keitel and dance legend Rudolph Nureyev, and the documentary “The Big Bang” (1989), an exploration of life and other assorted issues.

His famed peaked when he scored an Oscar nomination for writing “Bugsy” (1991) for Warren Beatty. Since then, Toback’s work has been an odd collection of barely released pictures focusing on sex, race and those living on the margins of life.

“Harvard Man,” easily his most incoherent and amateurish effort, attempts to capture the current pulse of the student body at American’s most prestigious university and Toback’s alma mater.

Adrian Grenier, who went on to play the movie star in “Entourage,” is Alan, an irresponsible student athlete and unlikely ladies’ man who arranges to throw a Harvard basketball game (he’s on the team) for the bookie father of his girlfriend (Sarah Michelle Geller) in exchange for quick cash to help his parents. Problems ensue when two uncover CIA agents, who just happen to be involved in a kinky sex arrangement with one of Alan’s professors, set their sights on bringing down this gambling syndicate.

It’s more than just bad acting (though there is no shortage of that) that turns this simplistic story into a muddled, disjointed embarrassment. Toback’s script is more intent on deflating Harvard’s standards---its teachers, students---and, for good measure, the CIA than telling anything resembling an interesting story.

Since this disaster, Toback directed the equally dumb “When Will I Be Loved” (2004), starring Neve Campbell as a promiscuous woman who is offered a large sum of money to sleep with an elderly man, and the documentary “Tyson” (2008), in which the ex-champ tries to explain his dysfunctional life.

June 2011

2011-07-01T16:42:00.000-07:00

THE TREE OF LIFE (2011)
As much as I appreciate any filmmaker who attempts to raise the level of intellectual discourse beyond the freshman psychology typical of most American movies, Terrence Malick’s unsatisfying mixture of impressionistic, art film sensibilities with a picturesque remembrance of boyhood feels as cold and shallow as the worst of those portentous European imports from the 1960s.

What sinks “Tree of Life” is the reclusive writer-director’s reliance on a dreamy, rootless narration that attempts to give meaning to repetitive, wordless images of a domestic drama, offering only vague understanding of the characters or their place in the world. Malick attempts to wrestle to the ground nothing short of the meaning of life, all but assuring that his ambitions will fall short.

And what, in god’s name, is the point of the 20-minutes segment in the middle of the film depicting the creation of the Earth, from its simmering beginnings to the appearance of dinosaurs? The images are wondrous—a first-rate power point presentation that would impress anyone who received it in an e-mail—but the history lesson immediately grinds to a halt the little energy the story had generated to that point and makes it hard to take the rest of the picture seriously. It comes off as an idea you’d expect to find in a student film.

The story this pre-man pictorial interrupts is narrowly focused on the Waco, Texas upbringing of three boys by their very different parents (well played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain), recalled by the eldest son Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn).

Early on in the film, characters react to the news that the middle son has died at age 19. The circumstances are never revealed. What he was or what become of his other brother is never mentioned. In fact, other than the contemporary scenes of Jack (many years after the death of his brother), none of the boys are depicted beyond their early teen years. Maybe I missed some clue early on, but it took me until mid-way through the picture before I realized that the couple had three children (and I never heard the names of the other two). Clearly, people without names represent something bigger and more thought-provoking than us common folks with names.

What the film does best is offer a very authentic, richly detailed recreation of what it was like growing up as a boy in the 1950s and moving portrayals of very concerned parents. Pitt, as the obsessively strict and domineering father who bullies young Jack into becoming an equally intimating person, has rarely been as convincingly rooted in real emotions. Chastain, in her first major film and looking like Cate Blanchett’s younger sister, provides a balm for the father’s constant verbal abuse, as the luminous, life-affirming mother who never stops offering unqualified love.

So how do Jack and his brothers turn out? How were their lives affected, for better or worse, by their childhood? Malick leaves that out. He gives clues that the adult Jack is troubled, maybe suicidal and there’s a glimpse of a woman who may be his wife. That’s really the extent of the character development provided this character whose childhood is the focus of most of the film. Instead, Malick offers metaphysical meanderings about the creator’s intent. At least, I think so.

Frustrated and disappointed would best describe my feelings after watching this movie with no tension, no arc, no drama. Malick’s last two pictures, “The Thin Red Line” (1998), also short on traditional structure but grounded on the battlefield during World War II, and “The New World” (2005), reconstructing the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, are among the handful of great films made in the past 20 years. In those films, he found a balance between the interior intellectualizing of big ideas and traditional dialogue, action and character development.

Director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki’s (“The New World, “Children of Men”) impeccably composed, soft-focused scenes—nearly every shot in this 2-hour and 18-minute movie could stand alone as an evocative still photo—never amount to anything substantial; they’re just a seemingly endless collection of pretty pictures.

Of course, greater minds than mine have anointed “Tree of Life” as a work of genius: it won the Palme d’Or (the top prize) at Cannes and Roger Ebert, in his laudatory review, wrote that “the only other film I’ve seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick’s ‘2001: Space Odyssey’ and it lacked Malick’s fierce evocation of human feeling.”

To me, Malick’s bold vision plays like an unresolved poem asking the same unanswerable questions man has been ruminating about since the dawn of time. But, like so many artists before him, Malick has confused ethereal dialogue for insight; substituting pristine images for substance.

HORSE FEATHERS (1932)
This Marx Brothers classic essentially amounts to three brilliant set pieces along with musical interludes (all four brothers offer a version of Harry Ruby-Burt Kalmar’s “Everyone Says I Love You”) and a tedious football scene that fills out the film’s 68 minutes.

But these three comic gems never grow old. The film opens with Groucho, as Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff taking over Huxley University, addressing the student body and then offering his education philosophy by singing “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” (another gem from Ruby and Kalmar).

He berates everyone in his sight, including a pushy professor who he orders to “go home to your wife…I’ll tell you what, I’ll go home to your wife, and outside of the improvement, she’ll never know the difference.”

The film’s highlight is the scene in which Groucho interrupts an anatomy class, duck walking in front of the large, bearded professor and then, after the teacher offers a flurry of 10-cent words, peering up at the man and asking: “Is this stuff on the level or are you just making it up as you go along?” He eventually takes over the class, with Chico and Harpo as his most interested students. (Zeppo, 11 years younger, plays Groucho’s son!)

And then there’s the speakeasy scene with Chico and Groucho trading absurd repartee as Groucho seeks the password for entrance (don’t tell anyone, but it’s “swordfish.”)

“Duke Soup,” “Night at the Opera” and “A Day at the Races” are more fully formed pictures, but “Horse Feathers” is always worth a look just for these classic moments and the presence of Thelma Todd, as the “college widow,” who also starred with the brothers in “Monkey Business” (1931).

A star of silent films, Todd made a smooth transition to sound and was on her way to a successful career when she died of carbon monoxide poisoning, at age 29, in 1935. Though a reportedly corrupt Los Angeles DA’s office ruled it a suicide, many believe (and still do) that her and her husband’s refusal to sell their Hollywood restaurant to mobsters led to her suspicious death.

SUPER 8 (2011)
Though he wasn’t behind the camera, the touch of vintage Steven Spielberg is all over this wonderfully rendered boyhood adventure in 1970s Middle America.

Somewhere between “E.T” and “War of the Worlds,” this Spielberg-produced and J.J. Abrams-directed made-for-summer entertainment never descends into out-of-control special effects extravaganza, remaining rooted by its heroes (a small band of budding high school filmmakers) and its genre lineage back to small-town monster invasion flicks of the 1950s.

Set in an Ohio valley town during the summer of 1979, “Super 8” captures the enthusiasm and know-how of a group of friends making a vampire film when a train wreck upends their community. Yet even as the crisis escalates and grows more mysterious, the boys (and their newly recruited leading lady) continue to plug away at their Super-8 movie.

The film has many (maybe too many) moving parts, but it’s all held together by Joe (played by 15-year-old Joel Courtney), the immature, soft-spoken make-up expert of the crew. As the film opens, Joe, who has just lost his mother in an industrial accident, struggles to adjust to life with his sheriff’s deputy father (Kyle Chandler) while attempting to play it cool around Alice (an impressive Elle Fanning, Dakota’s younger sister, but already a veteran of two dozen movies and TV shows). Not only does Alice (and Elle) turn out to be quite an actress, but she possesses the same adventurous spirit as Joe and his buddies.

The rest of the troupe is Charles (Riley Griffiths), a chubby, bossy auteur who runs the show; Cary (Ryan Lee), the pint-sized explosive expert; and Martin (Gabriel Basso) the nerdy leading man. A rare combination of excellent casting and Abrams’ understated writing creates high schoolers who are both true to their time and clearly defined individuals. Not since “The Wonder Years” was cancelled have I seen a group of teens that rings as true as this collection.

Abrams, creator of TV’s “Lost” and director of the excellent “Star Trek” reboot, doesn’t try to do more than tell the story and that’s a good thing. His smartest decision is to keep the “plot” in the background as long as possible and the kid’s vampire movie and their relationships in the foreground.

And please, don’t leave your seat before the credits have run—it may turn out to be the most entertaining five minutes you spend in the theater this year.

TOO BIG TO FAIL (2011, TV)
It’d be easy to dismiss this HBO docudrama about the 2008 financial meltdown as checklist picture making: familiar faces keep popping up portraying the key players and offering talking points as this frightening tale of unchecked avarice and slippery ethics unfolds.

But director Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential,” “The Wonder Boys”) and scripter Peter Gould (from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book) understand that these names—everyone is identified with subtitles—have to become flesh and blood if viewers are to appreciate the intricacies of the investment bankers’ schemes and the maneuvering by the government to extricate the country from the mess.

First and foremost is Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson (William Hurt in his best performance in decades), the Bush Administration’s point man forced to cajole, beg and eventually threaten these improvident bankers. Paulson carries the weight of the crisis on his shoulders, but his resolve never flags as he battles private industry greed and legislative dithering. Hurt’s ability to portray both intelligence and world-weariness turns him into a compelling, determined figure.

Also leaving impressions are Billy Crudup as the jittery Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Fed and now Paulson’s successor; Paul Giamatti as the gloomy Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; and Topher Grace as a cynical Paulson advisor.

On the other side of the negotiation table are James Wood as the arrogant, self-serving Richard Fuld, head of the doom Lehman Brothers; Bill Pullman as sensible Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan; and Tony Shalhaub as John Mack, Morgan Stanley’s head man. Somewhere in the middle of the infighting are Warren Buffet (Ed Asner), seen having ice cream with his grandkids while giving financial advice, and Christopher Cox (Peter Hermann), SEC chairman who acts like a deer in the headlights when asked to act.

What “Too Big to Fail” dramatizes is how reluctant the men who caused this disaster (by selling bundles of bad mortgages) were to make personal compromises to save the nation. For those who question the need for government regulation, this movie should be required viewing; the greed of these men (a quality clearly necessary to some degree in their business) as their community burns around them is jaw-dropping.

Less reported in the mainstream media were the heroic efforts by a group of Bush appointees whose natural instinct were to kowtow to business interests. Paulson, former head of Goldman Sachs, Geithner and their advisors, hardly a liberal among them, use their financial smarts and the power of the government—in ways we never saw on CNN while the crisis unfolded—to avert what they all agreed would have been a quick plummet to a depression as bad or worse than the 1930s version.

But no matter how powerful the message, it would have been lost amongst the lingo and multiple characters without Hurt’s masterful performance. Not since his 1985 Oscar-winning turn as a political prisoner with wild imagination in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” has this thoughtful actor had a role equal to his talent. After making his film debut in the high-profile, confusing sci-fi picture “Altered States” (1980), Hurt quickly became a star with memorable performances in “Eyewitness” and “Body Heat” in 1981 and “The Big Chill” (1982) before winning the Oscar. His work took on a studied passivity, even in good films such as “Broadcast News” (1987) and “Accidental Tourist” (1988), which seemed oddly out of date by the 1990s.

He occasionally had roles in major films—“Lost in Space” (1998), “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), “Syriana” (2005)—but most of his work over the past two decades has been in small, little-seen pictures. He did score an Oscar nod for his very uncharacteristic, manic performance in “A History of Violence” (2005) and was quite good as the father in “Into the Wild” (2007), increasing his visibility as a character actor.

He’s 61 and, obviously, a cable TV movie isn’t going to revive his career, but it’s good to see an actor who seemed destined for greatness 30 years ago show he can still deliver a powerful performance.

ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO (1940)
This overstuffed melodrama was Warner Bros.’ answer to “Gone With the Wind” and not a very convincing one.

Based on a popular novel (by Rachel Lyman Field), it follows the bittersweet, unrequited romance between a loyal, loving governess (an unusually mellow Bette Davis) and the children’s doting father (Charles Boyer), set in 19th Century France.

It’s not worth sitting through unless, like someone writing this review, you’re determined to see ever film nominated for best picture (amazingly, nominated over more deserving 1940 films “The Shop Around the Corner,” “His Girl Friday,” “The Sea Hawk,” “Pinocchio,” “The Westerner” and “The Mortal Storm”) or just can’t miss any movie starring the legendary Bette.

No doubt, the only reason it scored a best picture nod was because Warners sunk so much money into the production. It looks great and is efficiently directed by Anatole Litvak, but the story never catches fire and the characters aren’t very memorable.

It also earned Barbara O’Neill, who overacts in nearly every scene, a surprising supporting actress nomination for her role of the mentally unbalanced wife of Boyer. Not coincidentally, she played Scarlett’s mother (though she was just four years older than Vivien Leigh) in “Gone With the Wind” the year before. In “All This, and Heaven Too,” her obsessive jealousy toward Davis’ younger, prettier governess turns into tragedy for everyone.

Boyer, an underrated actor whose French accent and classic good looks too often stereotyped him, gives the best performances in the picture as a man struggling to hold his family together while caught between these two women. The actor was in the middle of the American portion of his career, having starred in three classic romances: the comedy “History is Made at Night” (1936) with Jean Arthur; as the much-imitated Pepe le Moko in the ultimate Hollywood exotica, “Algiers”; and opposite Irene Dunne in the original “Love Affair” (1939). He followed “All This” with excellent dramatic work in “Hold Back the Dawn” (1941), “Gaslamp” (1944) and “Arch of Triumph” (1948).

A MURDER OF QUALITY (1991)
Before launching his career as the pre-eminent chronicler of the Cold War, British writer (and former spy) John le Carré wrote this Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery, set in a small university town filled with an assortment of flawed, secretive residents.

George Smiley, who later served as the protagonist in more than one of le Carré’s spy tales, slums in this story as Miss Marple’s stand-in. This BBC television movie stars Denholm Elliott as Smiley, on break from his government work, who is asked by his wartime espionage friend (Glenda Jackson in one of her last acting gigs before turning to politics) to check on a woman who wrote her an ominous letter.

Needless to say, this mysterious woman is murdered and Smiley arrives in town just in time to tag along with the local police as they investigate most of the town’s population as suspects. Everyone has a story—and a reason to dislike the victim—and Smiley’s soft-spoken, insinuating manner turns out to be the key to unlocking their true feelings.

Le Carré, who adapted his novel for the teleplay, brings his acerbic, cynical tone to this highly entertaining whodunit. The acting is all first-rate, led by Elliott, a character actor whose long career in film and TV includes playing the museum curator and mentor to Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and as a love-starved gentleman in Woody Allen’s “September.” Two-time Oscar winner Jackson, arguably the greatest film actress of the 1970s and early 80s, is a lively presence in her few scenes here.

Also memorable are Joss Ackland as the pompous, retiring headmaster of the boys school, whose brother was a colleague of Smiley’s during the war; Billie Whitelaw as a violent, mad homeless woman who seems to be the perfect suspect; Matthew Scurfield, playing the put-upon, sardonic chief inspector and 17-year-old Christian Bale as a student whose cheating on a science exam turns out to be a crucial clue to the crime.

Few writers’ work has been so successfully translated to the screen (small and big) as often as le Carré. First and foremost is the brilliant miniseries made from “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People (1982) starring Alec Guinness, which capture the moral and political duplicity of both sides of the post-war “war.” Fine films were also made from “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” (1965), featuring one of Richard Burton’s best performances; “The Russia House” (1990), with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer attempting to trick the Soviets; and the more modern works, “A Tailor of Panama” (2001) with Geoffrey Rush and “The Constant Gardener,” which investigates the underhanded world of the legal drug trade.

“A Murder of Quality” seems minor in comparison, but this fast-paced amusement is well worth seeking out while we le Carré fans await the film version of “Tinker, Tailor” coming to theater’s later this year, with Gary Oldman as Smiley.

GET LOW (2010)
Few modern actors have defined a character type to the extent that Robert Duvall owns the cinematic version of the Southern eccentric. Starting with his Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), this San Diego-born actor has been drawn to unbalanced sons of the Confederacy, including in the Faulkner tale “Tomorrow” (1972), as an obsessively strict father in “The Great Santini” (1979), a senile landowner in “Convicts” (1991) and the raving revival preacher in “The Apostle” (1997).

These roles offer an unending array of opportunities for fussy acting and pretentious personality traits and the 80-year-old Duvall has fallen prey to letting his “acting” dominate a performance. Yet when he finds the more subtle balance of comic quirkiness and stubborn righteousness, these portrayals can be memorable.

His Felix Bush in “Get Low” is one of his more entertaining and believable oddballs, a short-tempered, unhappy hermit who decides to hold a wake while he’s still alive and well. Speaking only when absolutely necessary, Felix negotiates with the local funeral director (a seriously exasperated Bill Murray) over the details of the get-together. He originally wants anyone who has something to say about him to attend and then decides to raffle off his substantial property, which ups the expected crowd considerably.

Behind his plans is his desire to finally confess to the circumstances, from many years ago, that spurred his anti-social lifestyle. Complicating matters, an old sweetheart (Sissy Spacek) has returned to town---the film is set in 1930s Tennessee---after the recent passing of her husband.

While the film occasionally grows frustrating as characters continued to put up with this old coot’s nonsense, it is hard not to be won over by these characters’ lived-in emotions and the unsentimental portrayal of Depression Era life crafted by director Aaron Schneider (a cinematographer making his feature debut).

Spacek, who quietly continues to have an exceptional post-50 career, plays a tough-minded but forgiving woman who finds out she understand less about Felix than she thought.

Another always welcomed supporting player, Bill Cobbs, memorable as the barkeep in the little-seen, superb 1987 TV series “Slap Maxwell” and the narrator in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” plays a minister who knows the best and worst of his old friend Felix.

If “Get Low” (Felix’s phrase for being six-feet under) had done better at the box office when it was released late last year, it probably would have earned Duvall his seventh Oscar nomination. It’s this great and busy (he’s been in 13 films since turning 70) actor’s best performance since his memorable turn as a cattleman in “Open Range” (2003).

BEGINNERS (2011)
Writer-director Mike Mills wastes the touching story of his father’s coming out of the closet at age 75, by focusing his movie on his own relationship problems instead of those of his gay father.

It’s always dangerous to build expectations based on reviews and trailers, but I came to this film expecting to see a funny, insightful and probably teary tale of a long-married senior exploring gay life and how it changes the man’s relationship with his son. That 81-year-old Christopher Plummer, who seems to be at the peak of his career with recent memorable performances in “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” “The Last Station,” “Syriana” and “The New World,” portrays the gay father signaled that “Beginners” had the chance to be something special.

Instead, the film offers bits and pieces of the final years of Hal’s life as occasional flashbacks while the bulk of the story follows the dull, repetitive romance between son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) and a charming French actress (Mélanie Laurent; she played the Jewish theater owner in “Inglourious Basterds”) and Oliver’s too-cute-it-hurts relationship with his father’s dog.

Not only does the structure make for a sluggish movie but it leaves one wishing for more than just the few superficial scenes that address how Hal denied his sexuality for nearly his entire life. Plummer gives another smart, nuanced performances but he’s a supporting player as we endure Oliver and Anna slowly coming together and then apart. The character of Hal’s partner, played by Goran Visnjic, is less developed than the dog’s.

In many ways, “Beginners” plays like a picture made in the 1970s or ‘80s, when the subject was still being treated by Hollywood with kid gloves. The picture even makes a point of offering mini-lessons in gay pride and Harvey Milk. (Did the filmmakers forget that Sean Penn won an Oscar for portraying Milk just three years ago?) As hard as it tries, this film never figures out whether it’s a romantic comedy or a social-issue drama.

May 2011

2011-06-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011)
In a rare pre-credit prologue, Woody Allen and cinematographers Darius Khondji and Johanne Debas take viewers on a seductive picture postcard tour of Paris, from sunlit landmarks to rain-swept narrow streets and the spectacular nighttime illumination, with jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet’s evocative music as the soundtrack. It sets the stage perfectly for a fairytale adventure into the city’s artistic past and romance present.

Allen’s alter ego in the film is Gil Pender (played with scruffy innocence by Owen Wilson), a successfully Hollywood screenwriter who, while visiting Paris with fiancé Inez (a blonde Rachel McAdams) and her haughty “tea party” parents, considers giving it all up to become a starving artist in Paris and finish his novel. Nothing could be more ridiculous to Inez, a practical, material-oriented woman who seems to find Gil more of a bother than companion.

The picture starts out in familiar Allen territory with Gil tossing out asides as the bozos around him play narrow-minded straight men; the thoughtful romantic stuck in a world of pompous realists (most amusingly, Michael Sheen’s know-it-all professor). The weakest aspect of the script turns out to be the inexplicable relationship between Gil and Inez. She treats him like a child, seemingly only interested in his Hollywood paychecks, while Gil doesn’t show any signs that he ever listens to what his pretentious girlfriend is saying. It’s obvious from their first scene that they’ll never last.

But “Midnight in Paris” isn’t about their relationship. Allen’s focus is exploring how Gil comes to grip with his attachment to the past as a way to avoid tough choices of the present and his realization that everyone is responsible for creating their own golden age.

The picture becomes something special when a drunken Gil gets lost walking back to his hotel and accepts a ride from a group of revelers riding in an antique automobile. He soon finds himself at what looks to be a fancy costume party with a 1920s theme. He’s amused when a couple introduces themselves as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and a familiar looking piano player croons Cole Porter tunes. But when Scott, Zelda and Cole take him to the famous nightclub Bricktop’s (where Bechet performed regularly) and then to a café where Ernest Hemingway to holding forth, Gil starts to believe that he’s actually been transported to his favorite era.

Allen finds the perfect balance of awe-inspired homage and comic caricature in his recreation of the oh-so-serious artists of the ‘20s and their interactions with Gil. You don’t necessarily need to be a scholar of the arts and literary world of the Paris café set, but the comedy quotient rises considerable if you are familiar with Hemingway’s prose, Zelda’s mental history, Dail’s paintings, T.S. Eliot’s poetry, Luis Bunuel’s films and the general disposition of the surrealists. Anyone acquainted with Allen’s short stories won’t be surprised by how he turns these legends into comic relief; he’s been poking fun at these folks since the ‘60s. But he’s also making light of his own nostalgic glorification of the writers and visual artists of the early 20th Century.

Much credit must be extended to the marvelous collection of actors who make these characters believable at the same time they are serving Allen’s wild imagination. First and foremost is Corey Stoll (a homicide detective on “Law and Order: LA”) as a self-indulgent, talkative Hemingway, who hilariously speaks in the same short, dramatic sentences found in his prose.

Bringing a serious, humane tone to the film is French actress Marion Cotillard (Oscar-winner for “La Vie en Rose” and the most interesting character in “Inception”), as Adriana, a lover of Picasso and other painters, who shares Gil’s longing for a simpler, more meaningful past. Then, among many others, there’s Adrien Brody as a flamboyant Dali, Alison Pill’s hysterical Zelda and Kathy Bates as the tough-talking, but kindhearted Gertrude Stein, who finds time to advise Gil on his novel. And, adding to the Parisian scenery, Carla Bruni, the wife of French president Sarkozy, plays a helpful tour guide.

The 75-year-old Allen continues to be the most productive filmmaker in American even as his fan base, both moviegoers and critics, shrinks. Even his biggest supporters recognize that he’s made some bad films in the past two decades (led by “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” and “Anything Else”) but if a young director named Allan Konigsberg had made “Match Point,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “You Will Met a Tall, Dark Stranger” over the past five years, he’d be the toast of Hollywood and in talks for the new Angelina Jolie comic caper.

But even considering the undervalued work he’s done recently, “Midnight in Paris” is probably his best film since “Bullets over Broadway” (1994). This magical romantic comedy, which taps the artistic giants of the last century for both wisdom and buffoonery, just may convinced his doubters that the old man still has a good joke or two up his sleeve.

EVER IN MY HEART (1933)
Unlike the other great actresses of the 1930s—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert—Barbara Stanwyck spent that first decade of sound working in films that are now barely remembered. The family dramas “Stella Dallas” (1937) and “Golden Boy” (1939) are the best-known pictures of the era; hardly the Oscar-winning classic her contemporaries were starring in.

Yet Stanwyck’s performances in the first few years of her career, in pictures such as “The Miracle Woman” (1931), “Forbidden” (1932), “The Purchase Price” (1932), “Baby Face” (1933), “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933) and “Annie Oakley” (1935), reveal an actress who had already mastered the subtlety and naturalism she needed to craft emotionally truthful, understated characters. Whether she played a cynical evangelist, an ambitious prostitute or a farmer’s wife, Stanwyck found the simple humanity within these women.

Her screen-filling vibrancy in on display in this underrated World War I romance in which she plays a New England debutant who falls for and marries a German-born college professor. Their lives seem perfect until war breaks out in Europe and Germany becomes the hated enemy. Suddenly, their friends and neighbors, previously portrayed as warm, supportive people, turn on them, displaying fearful racism that strains their marriage and costs him his job. Otto Kruger, a veteran character actor who usually played unassuming doctors and lawyers, gives a solid performance as the husband as does Ralph Bellamy as the couple’s best friend.

Eventually, the war separates the couple and takes the film in surprising, emotionally complex directions.

In just 68 minutes of film, director Archie Mayo (“The Petrified Forest”) and screenwriters Bertram Millhauser and Beulah Marie Dix aren’t given enough time to fully explore this intriguing story of a couple divided by prejudice. “Ever in My Heart” plays like an outline of a better movie surrounding Stanwyck’s rich portrait of this naïve Yankee awakened to a cruel, often confusing world.

THE LINCOLN LAWYER (2011)
In previous generations, the role of Mick Haller, an ethically challenged Los Angeles lawyer who works out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, would have been played by Paul Newman or Jack Nicholson. In 2011, the colorful character is portrayed by goofball comedy star Matthew McConaughey. In other words, I wasn’t expecting much.

Turns out McConaughey offers just the right amount of smirking sarcasm and righteous determination as Haller defends a well-heeled young playboy (Ryan Phillippe) charged with the brutal beating of a prostitute.

Haller and his trusted investigator Frank (William H. Macy) utilize their resourceful, often legally questionable methods to undermine the prosecutor’s case, but end up finding out more about their client than they counted on.

The story, based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling novel, like so many detective/crime plots, is cleverly entertaining and chock full of energy until it comes time to wrap up all the loose ends. Having not read Connelly’s novel, I don’t know if he handles it any better than director Brad Furman (whose only previous feature was the action flick “The Take”) and screenwriter John Romano. The film stumbles to its end with a series of plot turns that grow less and less believable and a denouncement that goes on forever.

The strength of “Lincoln Lawyer” clearly isn’t its story, but the thoroughly engaging Haller and the fine-turned attitude McConaughey brings to the role. Unfortunately, the supporting characters, despite the fine cast, aren’t nearly as interesting.

There’s the tough-talking, sexy and still supportive ex-wife who’s also a prosecutor (the ubiquitous Marisa Tomei); the annoying, spoiled rich kid (Phillippe), the street-wise sidekick (Macy); a sleazy, underhanded bail bondsman (John Leguizamo); the jack-of-all-things-illegal driver (Laurence Mason); the cloying family attorney (Bob Gunton); and the snobbish and supportive mother (Frances Fisher). It’s a virtual encyclopedia of stock crime-picture characters.

Yet despite the shortcomings, it’s hard not to enjoy “Lincoln Lawyer” and hope that McConaughey’s Haller returns to the screen.

TOWER OF LONDON (1939/1962)
For reasons that are unidentifiable to me now, the 1939 treatment of this semi-historical royal bloodbath was one of my favorite films when I was a teenager. Maybe it was the scenes of the club-footed executioner, menacingly played by Boris Karloff, torturing various enemies of Richard III that impressed me; or the little dolls, Richard keeps in a diorama depicting those in line to the throne.

Watching it forty years later, this version of the 15th Century battle for the British crown that, most famously, inspired William Shakespeare’s “Richard III” turns out to be an over-plotted, poorly acted melodrama that manages to turn the maniacal Richard into something of a bore.

More entertaining, or something close to that, is Roger Corman’s low-budget drive-in treatment that stars his best collaborator Vincent Price as the steely eyed Duke of Gloucester who, in this version, does his own killing.

Price’s Richard, complete with the hump and page-boy hairdo, not only wastes little time offing everyone between him and the crown, but is haunted by the ghosts of his victims. He lurches around the minimal sets in his oversized capes, planning his next move as the late King’s widow and her supporters huddle in another part of the castle.

Price plays the role as half comic, half Shakespearean (something he did more successfully in “Theatre of Blood”) as his Richard splits his time between being an evil genius and teetering on the brink of insanity, shouting at his otherworldly visitors.

Price had one of his earliest film roles in the 1939 version, playing Richard’s weak, greedy brother, Duke of Clarence, who famously dies in a vat of Malmsey wine.

Basil Rathbone doesn’t bring much sizzle to this 1939 Richard and he doesn’t have much of a hump either (compared to either Price’s or Laurence Olivier’s in the Shakespearean version released in 1956), but the real problem is the over-plotted script. It tries to cover all the complicated maneuverings of this messy ruling family and by the end, a score card is needed to know who is left standing.

If it wasn’t for Karloff, who was born to play an enthusiastic executioner, the film would be completely forgettable. The tale of Richard III loses its teeth without Shakespeare’s verse; the magnificent “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech and the warrior-king’s battlefield plea, “A horse, A horse. My kingdom for a horse.”

13 ASSASSINS (2011)
I’ve never been much of a fan of martial arts action pictures, but this slice of bloody Japanese history is filled with very human, but amazingly skilled, sword-wielding warriors and some of the most thrilling, intense hand-to-hand battle scenes I’ve seen in awhile.

Lord Matsudaira (Goro Inagaki), a young, sadistic warlord-in-the-making, considers it an obligation of rulers to occasionally kill and torture (so much more fun) the local peasants so they appreciate their status. When a respected leader’s son and daughter-in-law are slaughtered, he enlists retired samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho, best known outside Japan for “Shall We Dance?” and U.S. films “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Babel”) to take revenge on Matsudaira.

Like “Seven Samurai” and its remake “The Magnificent Seven,” a motley crew of loyal fighters is recruited and plans are made to ambush the heavily guarded evildoer.

With just 12 samurai (plus Koyata, a talkative goofball they find en route to the battle), they prepare to take on a well-trained, well-equipped militia of about 200 by jury-rigging an entire village (in a sort of 19th Century version of “Mission: Impossible) and luring the target into their trap. In the final 40 minutes, the combatants wage an unrelentingly intense, complex and ridiculously entertaining fight to the death that makes everything that came before it in the film child’s play.

Veteran director Takashi Miike, remaking a 1963 Japanese film, in addition to choreographing the amazing set pieces, brings out the personality of the various samurai, especially Shinzaemon, his young cousin and Koyata, the hyper dude who leads them out of the forest.

For aficionados of this genre, this is a must see and even for those who find much of this stuff laughable, this is crazy action and great fun.

THE VISITORS (1972)
If this dreary, heavy-handed critique of America’s involvement in Vietnam hadn’t been directed by Elia Kazan, it would have long been forgotten.

The film ranks as the legendary director’s most disappointing, both in its didactic script (written by the director’s son Chris) and oppressively dim look. The added cachet of the movie being James Woods’ starring debut is a nice bit of trivia, but it’s a thankless role that’s more about talking points than creating real character.

Woods plays Bill, a vet who serves as caretaker on a rambling, rural property owned by his girlfriend’s reclusive novelist father.

The unfriendly father (veteran TV actor Patrick McVey) spends his days drinking and writing in the guest house, while his daughter (Patricia Joyce) and Woods tend to the property and their newborn.

Their routine is disrupted when a pair of Bill’s war buddies show up unannounced, immediately putting him on edge. Steve Railsback, who later played a very convincing Charles Manson in the 1976 TV movie “Helter Skelter” and starred in the cult favorite “The Stunt Man” (1980), and Chico Martinez play the mysterious visitors who, we eventually learn, spent time in military prison because Bill reported their rape and murder of a Vietnamese civilian. Despite their assurances to the contrary, they are clearly out for payback and Bill and the audience sit around waiting for it.

The low point of the picture is a long, insufferable, testosterone-fueled discussion of war experience between the alcoholic writer (a WWII vet) and the visiting Vietnam vets, which ends with the killing of a neighbor’s dog. (Just in case you didn’t get Kazan’s point of view.)

There are elements of Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” (1971) and the 1955 melodrama “The Desperate Hours,” but while Kazan’s movie contains the same tense threat of danger, it offers no insight into the issues of violence in modern society, the nature of passivism and the dead end of blind loyalty and retribution. The film just lets those fascinating issues remain bottled up in this frustrating set of characters.

If the film accomplishes anything, it’s to perpetuate the ridiculous belief that all Vietnam vets are either sensitive souls who regret their role in the conflict or twisted psychopaths destined to commit some heinous crime once they returned stateside. Unfortunately, that became the fall-back position for too many Hollywood depictions.

The director took one more chance behind the camera and the results were exceedingly better: the 1976 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon” starring Robert De Niro and an all-star supporting cast. But it wasn’t enough to earn Kazan, then 67, another directing gig. He spent the remaining 25 years of his life writing novels and his memoirs, while maintaining his position as both a mentor to young acting and directing talent and a pariah to those who never forgave his testimony during the blacklist era.

TEMPLE GRANDIN (2010)
In the 1950s, when 4-year-old Temple Grandin was first diagnosed with autism, doctors believed the condition was caused by a lack of affection from the child’s mother. Just as ridiculous and scientifically unsound, today many believe vaccinations are the cause. It remains a devastating neurological disability, leaving many sufferers with limited communication skills, an inability to show affection to others or interact in society and unusual cognitive processing methods.

Grandin’s parents were advised to place her in an institution (remember “Rain Man”?), but instead her mother dedicated herself to teaching the girl to speak and function in the world. This thoughtful, inventive bio-pic made for HBO follows Temple (played to perfection by Claire Danes) from college to her success as an expert in the humane treatment of cattle.

Grandin’s interest in cows begins when she spends a summer at her aunt and uncle’s Arizona ranch and observes the cattle being herded into a squeeze machine used to settle them before they receive an inoculation shot. She constructs her own “hug” machine (substituting for human contact) that calms her enough to allow her to survive college and then graduate school. Soon she’s writing articles about the treatment of livestock and designing ways to improve the slaughtering process.

Along the way she encounters the usual array of obstacles, mostly in the form of old-fashioned ignorance and prejudice. It’s pretty hard to avoid these types of clichés when filming a bio-pic, but director Mick Jackson (a veteran British filmmaker best known for his early ‘90s hits “The Bodyguard” and “L.A. Story”) does a superb job of not trying to do too much or turn the picture into highlight clips. The idea to visually show how Temple thinks---she remembers every image she’s ever seen---gives the film the skewed perspective of its subject, while offering fascinating insight into the autistic world.

Jackson has assembled an impressive cast---cable movies are attracting better supporting actors than feature films these days---including Catherine O’Hara in a rare non-comic role as Temple’s aunt, Julia Ormond as her devoted mother and the always memorable David Straithairn as her high school science teacher who first taps Temple’s potential.

But this is Danes’ show, fulfilling the promise she’s shown since her acclaimed work on the TV series “My So-Called Life” at age 15. She’s given good performances (“Romeo + Juliet,” “Shopgirl”) but this is a career-making role, winning an Emmy and Golden Globe. Had this been a feature film, it surely would have earned her an Oscar nomination. The way she modulates her voice, distorts her rubbery face and utilizes an unbound energy to create a character both frustrated and distinguished by her autism is mesmerizing.

Grandin, now 64 and a professor at Colorado State University, is an exceptional and inspirational person; the movie matches her on both counts.

HOW DO YOU KNOW (2010)
I guess this James L. Brooks film must be considered a romantic comedy, despite lacking in much romance and devoid of comedy. As excruciatingly painful to sit through as any movie in recent memory, the writer-director of “Terms of Endearment” (1983), “Broadcast News” (1987) and “As Good as It Gets” (1997), fails to produce a single line of dialogue that should not have been rewritten or create a single character that rises above the level of serviceable.

In addition to the sophomoric, pointless and leaden script, the acting is nearly unwatchable. I had no memory of ever seeing Paul Rudd in a film (in checking his filmography, he’s appeared in a handful of movies I’ve seen, including “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy” and “The 40 Year Old Virgin”), so I hate to damn an actor for one role, but in “How Do You Know” he exudes the energy of a 2 by 4. I kept waiting for his character to display a glint of personality and then the film was over. His performance would barely be acceptable in a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

His opposite is Reese Witherspoon, who seems to be under a spell here, unable to connect to her character—a Team USA softball player who becomes disoriented and vulnerable after she’s cut from the team—to anything close to reality. She jumps in and out of the bed of an obnoxious chauvinist (Owen Wilson as a dumber-than-a-rock professional baseball player) while George (Rudd) keeps running into her in typical romantic-comedy plotting.

I guess we are suppose to feel for George because he’s been indicted by the government for stock manipulation, which he clearly is clueless about. Actually, his character would have been more interesting if he had committed the crime.
The poor acting in this picture extends to Jack Nicholson, who has been guided to two Oscars by Brooks (supporting actor in “Terms of Endearment”; best actor for “As Good as it Gets”) and has appeared in four of the director’s six films. Here he plays George’s frantic father and conniving boss who shouts his lines without much conviction and, worst of all, is never once funny. He gives better performances at Laker games.

It’s clear that Brooks was attempting to create another offbeat female character struggling to find her way in the world (following Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News” and Helen Hunt in “As Good as It Gets”), but Witherspoon’s Lisa is a cipher who doesn’t seem capable of sticking to a decision. Brooks’ writing and direction has left this fine, energetic actress all made up with nowhere to go.
Most critics ripped the director’s last film, “Spanglish” (2004) for its clunky writing and strained performances, but that was a masterpiece compared to this mess.

April 2011

2011-04-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

NETWORK (1976)
What made Sidney Lumet, who died in April, such a compelling filmmaker for a half century—from his high-powered debut, “12 Angry Men” (1957) to his innovative, cynical final film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)—is that he never ventured far from his signature theme: the struggle to remain moral in an amoral society.

Whether it’s an honest cop navigating the streets of New York, a thoughtful juror, a guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor, a determined district attorney, a cynical TV executive or a down-on-his-luck lawyer, Lumet’s characters are defined by their principles and their ability to resist the temptation of corruption.

Those characters, challenged emotionally and ethically, attracted great actors and, under the director’s Midas touch, produced some of the most intense, complex and exciting performances of the past five decades. Under Lumet’s direction, 18 actors earned Oscar nominations, but that doesn’t include Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb in “12 Angry Men,” Jason Robards in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962)—arguably the greatest performance by an film actor—and Ralph Richardson in the same film, Sean Connery in “The Hill” (1965), John Cazale in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), Treat Williams and Jerry Orbach in “Prince of the City” (1981), Jeff Bridges in “The Morning After” (1986), Christine Lahti in “Running on Empty” (1988), Nick Nolte and Armand Assante in “Q&A” (1990), Ian Holm in “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1997), Peter Dinklage in “Find Me Guilty” (2006) and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”

Yet as memorable as the acting always was in a Lumet picture, what elevated his best work was his impeccable ear for intelligent, sophisticated screenplays, honed during his years directing TV dramas in the 1950s. And leading that list is Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network.”

For this filmgoer, only Woody Allen has made more pictures than Lumet that I’ve watched over and over again, inevitably finding them just as compelling and entertaining the third time as I did the first time. And leading that list is “Network,” Lumet’s greatest achievement and one of the 50 finest American films ever made.

It’s easy to dismiss Lumet’s contributions to this daring critique of American values and the loss of humanity in the race for money and power in honoring the erudite script by Chayefsky. While the screenplay is among the most literate and thoughtful ever written, there are good reasons why Chayefsky chose Lumet to direct his prize.

First, Lumet shared with the writer roots in early TV and was equally versed in the vagaries of the industry. Second was Lumet’s acumen with actors: he elicited great performances from no less than six actors in “Network” (not to mention Lee Richardson’s commanding narration). And third, Lumet was not a director of comedies: he never makes a show of the incredulous situations—TV news taken over by the entertainment department; Howard Beale’s on-air rants; a show starring terrorists—treating them as seriously as the 6 o’clock news used to be. If anything, this approach makes the comic aspects more authentic and the realistic plotlines compellingly immediate. In lesser hands, the film could easily have turned into an over-the-top, dark yukfest that might have been hilarious, but not a timeless masterwork.

What also makes Lumet the perfect director for “Network” is his comfort with talky pictures. His two superb Eugene O’Neill (the ultimate writer of long monologues) adaptations, “The Iceman Cometh” for TV in 1960 and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” along with “12 Angry Men” and “Fail-Safe” were perfect preparation for the heartbreaking, soul-searching speeches, many taking place in tight quarters, that make “Network” such a memorable movie.

The famous “Mad as Hell” scene (it’s on YouTube if you don’t have the DVD) offers a prime example of Lumet’s mastery of storytelling. Starting outside in the rain with the lone figure of Howard Beale, the scene moves into the TV studio as Beale takes his place behind the anchor’s desk. Lumet moves us back and forth between Beale’s rant, the frantic excitement in the control booth with its wall of monitors and then finally to a single TV in the living room of Max Schumacher (Holden), where his daughter opens the window onto the sight of the neighbors mimicking Beale’s rant. The camera pulls back to show an entire block of open windows and screaming New Yorkers: the power, for better or worse, of television demonstrated starkly and dramatically in about five minutes.

As Lumet reveals in “Network” and in so many other films, understanding the human heart is more important in creating great movies than flashy camera movement or breakneck editing.

In his excellent 1995 book, “Making Movies,” in which Lumet details every aspect of the filmmaking process, he summarizes his career philosophy:

“I have no preconceived notion that I want the body of my work to be about one particular idea. No script has to fit into an overall theme of my life. I don’t have one….The movies will define themselves as I make them. As long as the theme is something I care about at that moment, it’s enough for me to start work. Maybe work itself is what my life is about.”

THE CONSPIRATOR (2011)
What is most surprising about this fascinating historical sidebar to the Lincoln assassination is that it took over 100 years of cinema before it made it to the big screen. Despite a few TV movies on the conspiracy, only a 2009 short film has previous focused on accused conspirator Mary Surratt. But, judging by this presentation directed by Robert Redford, it might be a story better told in a documentary.

Surratt (Robin Wright), whose son Johnny was a member of the John Wilkes Booth-led plot to kill Lincoln and other government officials, is tried by a military tribunal organized by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline). In fact, there’s little interest in determining her guilt; officials hope to draw in her fugitive son.

A young lawyer and Union war hero Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) is engaged by a forceful senator (Tom Wilkinson), disturbed by Stanton’s disregard for the Constitution, to defend this much-hated women.

That the trial is a sham enrages Aiken, turning him into a true advocate for Surratt despite the damage his actions have on his personal and professional life.

If this all sounds familiar, it is because the scenario—with other names and involving other cases—has been the fodder of movies since actors began talking. Redford’s handsome, well-acted, impeccably staged picture (written by James D. Solomon) never catches the tinder-box fever that engulfed the nation as the war came to an end and Lincoln was buried. And his choice of McAvoy to carry this passion play (and its inevitable comparison to the contemporary military trials for accused terrorists) overestimated the young actors’ skills. In the three previous films I’ve seen him in, “The Last King of Scotland,” “Atonement” and “The Last Station,” I’ve been underwhelmed; I’m at a loss as to why he’s the star of a major motion picture.

Even the flashbacks of the conspiracy in operation the night Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre add little energy or excitement to the film; they look like those reenactments done for TV crime documentaries.

What saves the film from being purely educational is the powerfully stoic, austere performance of Wright. Looking gaunt and plain, Wright does more with her eyes and body gestures than most actors can do with pages of dialogue. Central to this character is her unwavering determination to protect her guilty son and in Wright’s hands that emotional resolve turns her into a martyr of nearly Biblical proportions.

Wright has been giving intensely emotionally performances for more than 20 years, thought mostly in films few saw, including “The Playboys” (1992), “She’s So Lovely” (1997), “A Home at the End of the World” (2004), and “State of Play” (2009). She’s best known as the hippie girlfriend of “Forrest Gump” (1994) and the ex-wife of Sean Penn.

The top-notch supporting cast—Wilkinson, Kline, Colm Meaney, “Gilmore Girl” Alexis Bledel, Evan Rachel Wood and Danny Huston—keeps you thinking that something will spark the film beyond a by-the-numbers recreation of a crucial moment in American history. But it never happens.

RAWHIDE (1938)
Though Lou Gehrig, one of the most accomplished hitters in baseball history, has been one of my favorite players since boyhood and his life was chronicled in the Gary Cooper movie “The Pride of the Yankees” and later in a TV movie, I either forgot or never knew that he starred in this B Western.

Susan King, the invaluable film writer for the Los Angeles Times, mentioned the movie in a roundup of baseball-themed pictures marking Opening Day. Through the magic of Netflix, I was watching it a few days later.

Gehrig, a strapping 6-2 athlete with Hollywood good looks, seems perfect for the movies. Yet he’s required to do very little in this by-the-numbers cowboy flick, playing himself on a visit to his sister’s Montana ranch during the offseason. It’s hard not to cringe when he jokes about quitting baseball for the cowboy life knowing that he was forced to retired a little more than a year after the release of the picture. (The mysterious muscle disease that took his life in 1941, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, became known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”)

Gehrig even gets to sing (the song features the lyrics “I used to chase flies, now they’re chasing me.”) but most of the warbling is left to Smith Ballew, a popular recording artist and minor singing cowboy of the 1930s, who plays the lawyer who helps Gehrig and his sister escape the clutches of the town’s evil syndicate.

The highlight of the hour-long programmer is the comical bar fight featuring Gehrig and his cohorts tangling with the gunslingers who work for the town’s boss. At one point, Gehrig starts hurling billiard balls at the bad guys, knocking them out of the fight, as if he’s firing baseballs across the diamond.

Gehrig has a hard time keeping a straight face in the serious scenes, but isn’t half bad when he strikes a joke and flashes his wide grin. For fans of baseball history, this curio is a must-see, offering the rare opportunity to see “The Iron Horse” just being himself while wearing an enormous cowboy hat.

WIN WIN (2011)
The characters that populate writer-director Tom McCarthy’s films act and sound just like your friends and neighbors and face the same insecurities and problems. That’s not necessarily a good thing in Hollywood, where ordinary is difficult to package and market for a big opening weekend. That probably explains why his latest and most accomplished movie opened in March.

As in his first two films, “The Station Agent” (2003) and the much better “The Visitor” (2007),” McCarthy brings an odd assortment of needy people together to form a modern version of the extended family and he does it without turning them into sentimental stereotypes.

In “Win Win,” Paul Giamatti, the ultimate “regular guy” actor, plays Mike Flaherty, a small-town lawyer with a wife (Amy Ryan, Oscar-nominated for “Gone Baby Gone”) and two young daughters. But he’s worried: about the lack of clients, a ready-to-die generator in his office, pending bills and the high school wrestling team he coaches that lose every meet.

Then a meal ticket comes Mike’s way when he convinced the court to name him the conservator for Leo (Burt Young), an elderly client entering dementia. The ethically questionable deal pays him $1500 a month and since the old man hasn’t heard from his only offspring in 20 years, Mike feels safe.

Then, Kyle, Leo’s grandson (played with just the right amount of James Dean cool by Alex Shaffer) shows up and everyone’s lives are altered.

At the center of the film is this troubled teen with his distinctive dyed blonde hair and a Zen-like demeanor who wins the heart of Mike and his family, while turning out to be a championship-caliber wrestler.

The bones of the plot—a needy kid, a losing sports team inspired by an outsider, a battle between a negligent parent and a caring new family—could have easily become a shallow, teary melodrama but McCarthy avoid the traps and never allows the characters to slip into caricatures.

There aren’t any showy performances here, just actors inhabiting their characters, bringing messy truths and hard-earned hopefulness to the film.

While Giamatti and Shaffer are the most interesting and developed characters, “Win Win”—like all of McCarthy’s pictures—is filled with wonderful supporting players who all have their moments. Ryan, who was devastating as the selfish, white trash mother in “Gone Baby Gone,” plays the exact opposite here, creating a nourishing, giving mother-wife who helps turn around Kyle’s life.

Then there’s the eternally sulking Steven (Jeffrey Tambor, the veteran TV comic actor) and the clueless, optimistic Terry (Bobby Cannavale from McCarthy’s “Station Agent”) as Mike’s best friends who help him out with the wrestling team. Watching these three as they coach their colorful collection of mostly inept teen wrestlers is the definition of pitch perfect comic acting.

Easy to overlook is “Rocky” jokester Young, who gives a poignant portrayal of a feisty, but confused man who just wants to stay in his home. All these characters represent what McCarthy does best: Give voice to a community of people who need each other more than they know.

BREAKTHROUGH (1978)
If this World War II actioner had been made in the late 1950s or early ‘60s, when stars Richard Burton and Robert Mitchum still resembled front-line soldiers, it might have been slightly interesting. By 1978, the actors look more like World War II vets than participants, offering comically bad performances as they walk through their roles with the energy of a nightlight.

Burton plays a thoughtful, discontent German sergeant (reprising a role originated by James Coburn in Sam Peckinpah’s vastly superior “Cross of Iron”) who, as the war nears its end, tries to broker a cease fire before a bloody fight over an Italian village begins. Mitchum is the laid back American colonel who ends up being Burton’s messenger after an encounter in no man’s land.

Mitchum seems amused by the war and those serving around him. In his first scene, in which he’s meeting with his commanding officer (Rod Steiger in a small role), he pulls out a foot-long cigar and lights up. It would have been a funny moment in a comedy (even Steiger’s character is startled by it) but is totally out of place in a serious war picture.

But nothing Mitchum can do or say can upstage the specter of Burton. For some reason, the uniform emphasizes the actor’s small shoulders and torso and his enormous head; he looks like a comic figure wearing a costume (remember Arte Johnson from “Laugh-In”?), ill suited to combat. Adding to his out-of-place appearance is his stern, pained expression he maintains throughout the film. Burton looks more like a man in his 70s than his actually age of 53.

Even his distinctive, commanding baritone cannot overcome the sense that you’re watching an actor going through the motions, barely cognitive of the role he’s playing. Meanwhile, Mitchum seems to be enjoying the scenery and reciting the cliché-riddled lines.

Director Andrew V. McLaglen (“Shenandoah,” “Chisum”) doesn’t do much to keep this mostly uneventful story moving and fails completely to create any sense of tension or doom as soldiers prepare to engage each other in battle.

“Breakthrough” may not be the worst war picture ever made, but it may be the most disappointing considering it stars two of the finest actors of the postwar era. Just the year before, Burton had given an excellent performance in the film adaptation of “Equus,” while Mitchum, three years earlier, delivered one of his most memorable performances as Philip Marlow in “Farewell, My Lovely.”

I trust that Burton and Mitchum drank themselves to sleep each night after the shoot and had a great time exchanging “war” stories. As for watching the resulting movie, I would not advise doing it sober.

ONE FLEW OVER THE
CUCKOO’S NEST (1975)
When I first saw this movie, I was 19 and on a date. My mind was clearly on other matters, because I left the theater unimpressed.

I’ve seen “Cuckoo’s Nest” a few times since and now recognize it as an American classic, among the 100 best pictures in history. A recent viewing, after re-reading Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, increased my appreciation of the film, especially the screenplay by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben.

The back story on how the book became a movie would make for an interesting film itself. Kirk Douglas bought the rights to the novel—based on Kesey’s work as a volunteer at a veteran’s hospital--before it was published and eventually had writer Dale Wasserman turn it into a play. The actor starred in the 1963-64 Broadway production, which also featured Gene Wilder and Ed Ames. A few years later, on a goodwill trip to Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, Douglas meet a young director and was impressed enough to offer him a chance to direct the film version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Douglas promised to send him a copy of the play.

The director, Milos Forman, never received the book (Communist censors had confiscated it) and assumed the famous actor was all talk. But when Douglas’ son Michael took up the cause to get the film made in the 1970s, he offered it to Forman, now living in America.

Douglas chose Jack Nicholson for the role of R.P. McMurphy, a seemingly untamable rebel stuck in an institute where rules and discipline dictate life, after seeing his performance as the foul-mouthed Navy tough guy in “The Last Detail.”

Forman went with unknowns for the rest of the roles, including eventual best actress winner Louise Fletcher as the unrelenting Nurse Ratched and Will Sampson, a 6-5 Creek Indian discovered by a Portland car dealer.

Playing Chief Bromden, a patient who pretends to be deaf and dumb while constantly sweeping the floors, Sampson brings this unforgettable character to life and went on to play Indian roles in two dozen movies and TV productions until his death at 53 during lung-heart transplant surgery. Also playing patients were a very young Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, William Redfield and, as the stuttering Billy Bibbit, Brad Dourif.

The Chief narrates the book, using his apparent deafness as a cover to hear conversations he otherwise would never be privy to. Also, in the novel, it is the Chief’s depiction of the Combine and the Fog, imaginary elements of the vast machinery utilized by Nurse Ratched and her staff to control the patients, which transforms the book more than just a collection of adventures inside the nuthouse.

Goldman and Hauben brilliantly strip away the interior narrative of the book, making it McMurphy’s story rather than the Chief’s, without losing the theme of society’s crushing effect on individualism. Instead of the Chief being a prominent character from the start, he slowly emerges as an important ally of McMurphy and, ultimately, his protector. (The change greatly displeased Kesey, who also wasn’t happy with the casting of Nicholson, preferring Gene Hackman for McMurphy.)

What connects with audiences is McMurphy’s sanity; he’s an unruly troublemaker, but there’s nothing wrong with his mental state. He finagles his way into the facility hoping it will be an easier ride than the work farm he was confided to. At first, he’s quite pleased with himself, as he takes over the place, turning it into a virtual gambling parlor and then leading the inmates on a renegade fishing trip. But little does he know what fate has in store for him.

The screenwriters took a great novel, disassembled it and put it back together for the cinema in a way that utilizes the book’s best ideas, its heartbreaking moments and singular characters while creating their own work of art.

IN A BETTER WORLD (2011)
About halfway through this Danish drama that won the 2010 Oscar for foreign-language film I was baffled as to why anyone thought it worthy of any honor. Then, what appeared to be a rather ordinary tale of a pair of teenage boys with family and emotional issues, turns into a thought-provoking, intricately plotted thesis on the insidious nature of violence and how we confront its perpetrators.

This deceptively straight-forward story opens in an African refugee camp where Anton, a Danish physician (Mikael Persbrandt, looking like and with the calm resolve of a young Max von Sydow) is attending to the sick and injured, including a pregnant girl whose stomach has been cut open by the henchmen of a ruthless strongman for pure sport.

Back in Denmark, he attempts to teach him son, a regular victim of the school bully and his new friend, who just lost his mother to cancer, that responding to violence with more violence is a hopeless, losing battle.

In the boys’ black-and-white world, the father’s intellectualizing is lost and they seek revenge, first on the bully and then on an angry auto mechanic who gets into it with the doctor.

Christian (a memorably intense William Jøhnk Nielsen) is a very troubled boy who blames his father for his mother’s death and, in confused desperation, strikes out against the cruel world, bringing the more naïve Elias (Markus Rygaard) into his schemes. On the surface, Elias seems to be adjusting to the separation of his parents—his mother is also a doctor—better than they are, but nothing in this film stops at the surface. The story goes back and forth between Africa and Denmark as it depicts both children and adults relying on violence to vent their anger and express frustrations.

Director Susanne Bier and writer Anders Thomas Jensen, whose “After the Wedding” (2006) also received a foreign film Oscar nomination, display a steady hand as the film steadily becomes more emotionally involving and its issues move to the forefront. Yet Bier’s camera refuses to turn away from the violence or its devastating aftermath, whether it’s in a poor African village or on the playground of a suburban European city.

I can’t offer an opinion as to whether “In a Better World” deserved the Oscar, having not seen any of the other nominees (don’t get me started on why the year’s foreign film winner isn’t released in the U.S. until the following April), but I’m certain it will rank among the best films of 2011.

March 2011

2011-04-01T08:57:00.001-07:00

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
There’s no question that Elizabeth Taylor’s greatest performance was playing herself. By age 40, she was all but retired from the movie business, relegating her career to a minor part of a life of ever-changing husbands, highly publicized addictions and illnesses and fundraising for social issues. But, first and foremost, she was Elizabeth Taylor, the celebrity of celebrities and the final torchbearer of Hollywood’s studio-era glamour. The fire went out March 23, when she died at age 79.

Watching her early films, it’s obvious that she was more than a pretty little girl; the camera adored her and she possessed the ability to appear completely relaxed and naturally animated on screen. Even in her few minutes in “Jane Eyre” (1944), as a fellow orphan who befriends young Jane and pays the ultimate price for giving her food, Taylor is unforgettable. That same year she became a star for her role as the feisty, horse-loving pre-teen in “National Velvet.” She was 12.

By age 17, she gave her first great performance (though the film wasn’t released until two years later) as Angela Vickers, a head-strong society girl who sets her sights on an easily manipulated factory worker (Montgomery Clift), igniting a series of tragic events in George Stevens’ “A Place in the Sun” (1951). The screen-filling close-up of Taylor and Clift in a long, passionate kiss in many ways marked mainstream Hollywood’s entry into adult sexuality.

Though she utilized her sensuality as the hot-blooded Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958) and as the high-class call girl in “Butterfield 8” (1960)---both featuring substantial screen time for Taylor’s form-fitting slips---some of her best work was done in roles in which her looks were secondary.

Though rarely mentioned among her best performances, she’s superb as the wife of an alcoholic writer (Van Johnson) in “The Last Time I Saw Paris” (1954). She evolves from a carefree party girl to a responsible mother and wife struggling to understand her husband’s demons.

The more times I watch “Giant” (1956) the more I’m impressed with Taylor’s quiet, unpretentious portrayal of Leslie Benedict, who goes from a Texas trophy wife to an independent woman and voice for ethnic equality. As a reflection of 20th Century America, few films can match the sweep of “Giant” and at the moral center of the film is Taylor’s Mrs. Benedict.

The infamous extravagance and love affair of “Cleopatra” (1963) forever changed Taylor from a movie star to a gossip-column celebrity, with Richard Burton at her side. But she managed to deliver one last great performance, as Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966).

As the foul-mouthed bitch of a wife to an introverted college professor, Taylor dives head first into this jolting, uncomfortable examination of the state of marriage and the games we play to disguise our true selves. This seemingly proper, intellectual couple (she’s the daughter of the university’s president) have invited a newly hired professor and his young wife to dinner. They have no idea what they’ve walked into. This very American couple (George and Martha) pick this evening, as the stunned innocents look on, to unmask the hypocrisy and lies of their marriage, tearing down each other neurosis by neurosis.

First-time film director Mike Nichols transfers Edward Albee’s landmark play nearly directly to the screen (censors required the language to be cleaned up a bit) as these four actors, trapped in this house and their marriages, destroy one another in a long night’s journey of twisted game playing and alcohol-fueled amateur psychoanalysis. With “Virginia Woolf,” Albee pulled the curtain back on the “perfect” world of the 1950s and sent us crashing into the ‘60s.

Martha includes a bit of a decaying Maggie the Cat and a bit of the royal personage and ruthlessness of Cleopatra, but Taylor’s performance was a revelation from this one-time child woman; a loud, blood-curling, spit-spewing film-long rant of the like rarely seen on American screens. That she and Burton were known as a volatile couple in real life just added to the potency of the picture and earned her a well-deserved second best-actress Oscar (as opposed to the less-than-impressive winning role in “Butterfield 8”).

This should have been the launching point for the rest of Taylor’s acting career—she was just 34---but in just a few years after this second Oscar-winning performance she was no longer a major actress.

Her star still was bright in 1967-68 with three interesting performances as unhappy, often unpleasant women, including the discontent wife of a closeted gay man (Marlon Brando) in “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967), another wife with a roving eye, co-starring with Burton in “The Comedians” (1967), and as a brazen, one-time prostitute who pretends to be an emotionally disturbed woman’s mother in “Secret Ceremony” (1968). Taylor also played the wild, untamable Kate opposite Burton in Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967).

Then a series of strange, forgettable pictures---“The Only Game in Town” (1970), “X, Y & Zee” (1972), “Hammersmith Is Out” (1972), “Ash Wednesday”
(1973)---marginalized her acting career. Looking back, it is almost as if she was trying too hard to escape the confines of mainstream Hollywood that had defined her career. Quickly she lost interest and became a part-time actress, taking small roles in little-seen pictures.

Why wasn’t she in “Nashville” or “The Day of the Locust,” or “Murder on the Orient Express” or played any number of Anne Bancroft, Joanne Woodward or Geraldine Page roles? Instead, by the mid-70s, she was a punch line (remember John Belushi’s imitation?) and, like Brando and Welles, a bloated exaggeration of decaying glamour. Yet, despite the disappointment of her post-40 career, from 1951 to 1968 she delivered on the promise of her childhood, becoming a dominating screen presence and one of the industry’s biggest stars.

The last act of her life as a fragile, soft-spoken salesperson for perfume, the Betty Ford Center, Michael Jackson’s innocence and the rights of AIDs patients defined her for a generation (or two) that had never seen her in a movie. Too bad, because beyond being an occasionally amazing actress, she kept the Golden Era of Hollywood alive long after the shimmering silver screen became colorized and the stars stopped wearing tuxes and tiaras.

WAITING FOR ‘SUPERMAN’ (2010)
Two years ago I would have responded in a completely different way to this high-profile documentary on the state of America’s public education system.

Since then I’ve been immersed in education issues as a way-too-old student, observing high school teachers and finally teaching on my own in the process of earning my teaching credential. And though I’ve seen only a small fraction of the system compared to actual working teachers, I’ve learned enough to know that there are no simple answers to the problems in public education.

But even before beginning my teaching studies, I think I would have detected the holes and half-baked arguments filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (Oscar-winner for “An Inconvenient Truth”) and co-writer Billy Kimball put forth in their attempt to uncover the reasons behind the apparent failure of schools over the past 30 years. I write “apparent” because by many measures, including SAT scores, students are learning just as well as they did in 1980. The average score on the verbal section of the SAT in 1980 was 502, in 1990 it was 499 and in 2008 it was 501. In math, the average in 1980 was 492, which rose to 500 in 1990 and 515 in 2008. What has frightened the politicians is that the rest of the world has caught up (and surpassed) U.S. students in that period.

Guggenheim focuses on four minority grade school students, children of concerned, involved parents attempting to enroll them in exclusive charter schools because they are headed toward low performing middle and high schools. Though the filmmaker spreads the blame around (with little evidence) he paints teachers’ unions as the primary villains and impediments to education reforms. Yet, with the same breath, he talks sarcastically about 40 years of reforms that have only made the system worse.

No one can deny that some of the stances held by the union are simply ridiculous---there’s no reason why poorly performing teachers shouldn’t be fired just like any other incompetent worker---but as satisfying as it would be to fire the handful of bad teachers in every school, it’s not going to do much to improve a system that is broken in so many ways. Guggenheim found one researcher who claims that if the worst teachers were replace by average teachers, students’ learning would equal the best in the world. Anyone who believes that unscientific pipe dream hasn’t been in a classroom in awhile.

Guggenheim doesn’t mention a word about the parents who take no role in their children’s education (for a multitude of reasons, some understandable) and fail to provide incentive or encouragement for these students to do well.

Nor does he ever mention that by most measures, charter schools, even though they rarely admit English Language Learners or disable students, have failed to deliver any better results than traditional schools.

The filmmaker gives plenty of positive screen time to controversial reformer Michelle Rhee, the former superintendent of Washington, D.C., schools. Rhee, like so many of the documentary’s experts, offers no concrete solutions, but is certain that if it wasn’t for the union, real changes could be made. It will be interesting to see the improvement schools make in the states now in the process of eliminating teachers’ tenure.

My favorite “fact” offered in support of the theory that teachers are at the root of educational problems is that many African-American boys go from being “B” students to “D” students from age 10 to age 12. I don’t need to be a parent or child psychologist to recognize the difference between age 10 and 12 and how that might affect interest in school. But in the paradigm created by education reformers, students aren’t responsible for either their success or their failure.

Guggenheim concludes the documentary with a dramatic sequence in which these minority students (plus a white student from Silicon Valley) attend lotteries to gain admission to charter schools. These are all smart, hard-working students who will do well in any educational setting with the help of their supportive, outspoken parents. But instead the scenes are presented as the last chance for a decent education and a tragedy for those left out.

Like most of “Waiting for ‘Superman’,” simplified, emotional pleas for justice (how can you resist these cute, sincere students) crowd out any rational, measured accounting of the problem. The filmmakers scored the headlines and op-ed commentaries they sought, without answering a single question.

The real tragedy is that despite all the rhetoric of the past decade, the majority of parents still show little interest in the quality of their child’s school or teachers. They should be shouting at the top of their voices at overpaid boards of education, asking why students often don’t have a textbook of their own, go weeks without ever working on the handful of school computers, have no librarian to guide them and spend way too much time in the classroom preparing for meaningless standardized tests. Even the most inspirational teachers would struggle to overcome these shortcomings. Maybe Guggenheim will address these issues in “Waiting for ‘Superman’, Part II.”

CERTIFIED COPY (2011)
I’ve always been fascinated by films that explore the fuzzy line between art and life, starting with the archetype, Federico Fellini’s “8 ½.” Among my personal favorites dealing with this topic include Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories,” Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz,” Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show” and Charlie Kaufman’s “ Synecdoche, New York.” A fascinating, mysterious addition to this subgenre is this French/Italian film by acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.

The peerless Juliette Binoche stars as a Tuscany gallery owner with a young son who arranges to meet an English writer (William Shimell) in town promoting his new book about the relative value of an original and a copy. His argument is that all artwork is essentially a copy, just as all people are copies of their parents.

The pair, who seems to have never met, ends up spending the day together, drifting from a gallery to a coffee shop (where a very outspoken older Italian woman weighs in on marriage and men) to a wedding celebration.

As the day progresses, Binoche’s Elle becomes more and more upset at James, projecting her anger she has for her absent husband (whose characteristics oddly resemble James). When he starts playing along, identities become confused and “acting” and “art” become intertwined with real life. Of course, the filmmaker, best known for “Taste of Cherry” (1997) and “The Wind Will Carry Us” (1999), even as he comments on how art influences our lives, is manipulating an art form to make his point.

It’s the kind of film that asks---or inspires---more questions than it even attempts to answer. What does it really mean to create something original? And why is that so highly valued? What makes art important and who decides? And why is what we do in life judged so differently than the art we create? Do we imitate art or vice versa?

Shimell, who isn’t a professional actor, but a leading British opera singer, occasionally offers stilted, clumsy line readings, but in a way that works for his character as James attempt to “act” as if he’s someone else or another version of himself. And Shimell certainly shows an understanding of the attitude and carriage of a man who thinks highly of himself.

Binoche gives yet another in her never ending string of astonishing performances, leaving doubt as to whether Elle is insane, obsessed or just a disappointed wife. While she regularly plays smart, articulate women, the actress is able to find the small, often barely noticeable flaw that makes each character unique. Her Elle is part flirt, part intellectual, part insecure little girl as she grows more mysterious, more elusive as the film goes on. It’s rarely a compliment to say that a movie is more confusing as it ends than it was in the beginning, but in the case of “Certified Copy” it’s exactly what’s called for.

DOWNTON ABBEY (2011)
It’s rare I see anything on television worth recommending but this British miniseries from the screenwriter of “Gosford Park” is a must-see for Anglophiles or anyone who enjoys well-written drama.

Julian Fellowes has captured a world that is near extinction as the privileged Crawley family finds itself close to getting tossed out of its centuries-old estate after the Titanic goes down. Among the dead is the male heir to the family’s title and riches who was engaged to the Earl of Grantham’s eldest daughter. Without the heir marrying one of the Earl’s daughters (as he has no son), the daughters and their families will suddenly find themselves commoners when their father dies, losing everything previous generations of Crawleys have worked for.

Though it seems idiotic that only sons could inherit the family fortune, in this drama it is the perfect metaphor for what was going on in British society. Women, including the Earl’s daughters, are starting to show their independence, thinking about careers and politics along with husbands and children.

Fellowes fashions the drama as an “Upstairs, Downstairs” homage, with Mr. Carson (the regal Jim Carter) running a large staff with its own share of infighting and controversy, mostly surrounding the Earl’s new valet Bates (Brendan Coyle).

Veteran British TV actor Hugh Bonneville (he played the young John Bayley opposite Kate Winslet in “Iris”) and Elizabeth McGovern (her most challenging role since her breakthrough at age 19 in “Ordinary People”) are the Earl and Countess of Grantham, parents to three very different unmarried daughters who face uncertain futures. Hovering over the proceedings is the Earl’s mother, the highly opinionated Dowager Countess perfectly played by Dame Maggie Smith, at 76 still the most entertaining actress on the face of the earth. She’s the guardian of the family legacy and makes herself an old-fashioned bore when the new heir---scandalously, a lowly lawyer!---joins the family’s inner circle. Like most miniseries, there are a dozen subplots going on at once and Fellowes has seamlessly woven the threads of this plot together.

And if you think this is all tea pots and crumpets, in one important subplot, a visiting Turkish diplomat drops dead while visiting a young lady’s bedroom.

It’s the clash of the old world and the coming new one as World War I approaches and the earth shattering changes of the 20th Century begin to escalate. Part two of the series will arrive on these shores later this year, so you have plenty of time to catch up with this four-part drama that may be derivative, but highly entertaining.

THE STRIP (1951)
Stanley Crouch, essayist and music critic, succinctly described one of life’s biggest frustrations when he wrote: ‘‘Somebody before us always got a little-bit-bigger piece of something we dreamed about, and someone coming after us is going to get a fatter portion of something we want ourselves.’’

I would have loved to have tasted a bit of the nightclub scene of the late 1940s or early ‘50s, be it in New York or Los Angeles. While the club scene in Manhattan is more legendary (if only for the jazz clubs of 52nd Street), L.A.’s Sunset Strip was just as star-studded, with clubs such as Ciro’s, Café Trocadero, Player’s and La Rue. Serving as the playground for Hollywood royalty and the music industry, legendary entertainers were both on stage and sitting at the next table.

It was the end of an era when the best entertainers in the world performed in cozy clubs and ballroom-style restaurants, before VIP rooms and exclusive resorts priced the middle class out of this world. A shoe salesman and his wife could land a table next to Bogey and Bacall and for the price of a meal and drinks watch Nat King Cole or Tony Bennett perform. This scene was equally democratic when the rockers replaced the crooners, until someone figured out that you could charge $15 (now $80) and pack 10,000 paying customers into an arena.

This pedestrian, B-level crime picture takes place during those glory days of the Strip, with Mickey Rooney playing a vet just out of the military psych ward who heads to L.A. to make it as a drummer.

Improbably, he lands a gig with Louis Armstrong’s All Star band (sort of like walking into a contemporary club and ending up as Paul McCartney’s drummer). But not before he has hooked up with a local mobster (James Craig), working for him as a bookie.

Rooney’s Stanley tries to change his ways when he meets Jane, a cute cigarette girl/dancer obsessed with becoming a movie star. But the plot and characters dim compared to the presence of Armstrong and his band, which includes his longtime trombone partner Jack Teagarden and piano legend Earl “Fatha” Hines. Satchmo, singing and playing, is mesmerizing, giving his best musical performance on film, at least that I’ve seen.

Otherwise, the film offers some interesting shots of Hollywood in the ‘40s (it’s amazing how undeveloped Sunset Boulevard was back then), the always entertaining William Demarest as the club owner who gives Stanley his break and the smooth vocal stylings of Vic Damone.

Rooney, even at age 31, seems too much like a kid to believe as a jazz drummer or mobster’s associate or a legitimate suitor to the sexy, ambitious Jane (Sally Forrest). She shows plenty of screen presence, but other than her starring role as a tennis protégé in Ida Lupino’s “Hard, Fast and Beautiful” (1951), this one-time dancer spent most of her career in small TV roles.

What’s most disappointing about “The Strip” is that they don’t show one real L.A. nightclub exterior. Few films ever did and I’ve never understood why; what could be better publicity for the clubs? Instead, they show the cliché montage of neon signs displaying the clubs’ names.

99 RIVER STREET (1953)
I’m convinced that low-budget crime pictures of the 1940s and ‘50s offer more insight into the American character than any film genre. These movies typically depict regular American men (nearly exclusively), disappointed in life, tempted by alluring women and the easy money of crime who inevitably resort to violence, resulting in either their downfall or a type of redemption. This little gem, directed by Phil Karlson, among the masters of the genre, even includes a female character who experiences changes.

John Payne, who starred in another Karlson crime classic “Kansas City Confidential,” plays Ernie, a retired boxer whose marriage to a disappointed gold digger (Peggie Castle) is on the rocks even before he spots her kissing another guy (Brad Dexter). Unbeknownst to Ernie, his wife and this small-time thief are attempting to unload stolen diamonds and skip town. Meanwhile, Ernie’s gal pal Linda (Evelyn Keyes) comes to him in a panic, saying she’s killed a Broadway producer after he came on to her during an audition.

Before Ernie knows what hit him, the cops are after him for assault and murder. He keeps getting the short end of the stick as circumstances quickly go from bad to worse, dogged down every dark alley he encounters.

Karlson and screenwriters Robert Smith and George Zuckerman keep the plot twists coming, while smoothly integrating three distinct story arcs.

The beefy, serious Payne was never mistaken for a great actor, but he has an intensity and vulnerability that serves him well in these types of roles. His most famous role, as the boyfriend in “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947), shows him at his blandest.

Keyes, famously married to directors John Huston and Charles Vidor and then jazz musician Artie Shaw, is exceptional in the scenes where she’s “in character” for her Broadway play and then later when she attempt to allure the thief. Keyes’ was an underrated actress of the era who was also memorable in “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” (1941), “Ladies in Retirement” (1941), “Johnny O’Clock” (1944) and “The Prowler” (1951). She remains best known for playing Scarlett’s younger sister in “Gone With the Wind” (1939).

After years of working in B-movies, including “The Phenix City Story” (1955) and “The Brothers Rico” (1957), Karlson directed an Elvis flick, “Kid Galahad” (1962) and a Matt Helm (Dean Martin) actioner, “The Silencers” (1966), before making the “Willard” sequel “Ben” (1972) and the surprising box-office hit “Walking Tall” (1973). It’s almost as if he morphed into a different filmmaker after the 1950s.

CYRUS (2010)
The scenario of this offbeat film sounds like a canceled television sitcom, but it turns out to be a serious study of two unstable men and the woman they love.

John C. Reilly, one of the best and least appreciated actors in Hollywood, plays John, a whinny, immature 40something divorcé whose ex-wife (Catherine Keener) continues to be his best (only?) friend. He reluctantly attends party with her and her fiancé and displays the social skills of a ten-year-old. Yet he hooks up with the most attractive woman in the place (just in case you forgot it was a movie), the effervescent, down to earth Molly (Marisa Tomei). Within days, the relationship escalates into serious status---and then he meets Cyrus (Jonah Hill).

The husky, intense, 21-year-old son of Molly, not only lives with his mother but they have an uncomfortably close relationship, excessively reliant for anyone over the age of 12. In other words, his maturity level is about the same as John’s.

In front of his mother, he seems to be quite accepting of John, but, in fact, he’s doing his best to undermine their relationship. It’s almost like an extended, darker episode of “Seinfeld”: I can imagine George in Reilly’s role, determined to unmask Cyrus’ true intentions. (In fact, didn’t Tomei play George’s potential girlfriend in an episode?).

The writing/directing team of Jay and Mark Duplass---clearly influenced by the sensibilities of the Coen brothers (isn’t everyone; see below)---strike a nice balance between the quirky and the mundane as they find humor in uncomfortable situations. At times, the story becomes a bit repetitive and as visual filmmakers the brothers have a long way to go, but these two child-like men, goofily personified by Reilly and Hill, make “Cyrus” a one-of-a-kind romance.

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP (2010)
In an odd reversal, Chinese director Zhang Yimou has remade, in a manner, an American film, “Blood Simple.” This 1985 neo-noir, the first feature made by Joel and Ethan Coen, tells a complex tale of back-stabbing and shifting loyalties as a wife and husband take turns in plotting the murder of the other. The Coens’ sparkling, Dashiell Hammett-like dialogue, first rate performances (especially Frances McDormand and M. Emmit Walsh) and Barry Sonnenfeld’s evocative camera work turned this little-seen picture into a brilliant opening salvo in the brothers’ iconoclastic careers.

Zhang’s version turns up the comedy, featuring exaggerated almost clown-like characters as he uses the duplicitous plot to assail the government of China. The visuals, like in all of Zhang’s films, are stunning, with cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao (Oscar nominated for “House of Flying Daggers”) turning the richly colored costumes and the surreal browns and reds of the rolling hills into an exotic fairytale atmosphere.

Yet for all its beauty, locating all the action in this small, rural outpost, where a rich man and his young wife opera a noodle shop and employ a handful of oddballs, becomes tedious. No one ever visits the restaurant; in fact, the only visitors to this remote compound are the police after they hear rumors of a cannon being fired. That’s about as interesting as this picture gets.

The story doesn’t have half the snap or energy of the original and after the husband is killed, the movie sinks into loud, annoying bickering among those left to point fingers and make off with his riches.

I’ve been critical of Zhang for wasting his talents on superhero martial arts epics (“Hero” “House of Flying Daggers”) but at least you’ll never fall asleep during those actioners. I won’t guarantee that for “A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.” In fact, the title is the only clever thing about it.

Best of 2010

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Films
1 The King’s Speech
2 Another Year
3 Winter’s Bone
4 The Social Network
5 The Ghost Writer
6 Rabbit Hole
7 Toy Story 3
8 Solitary Man
9 The Town
10 Blue Valentine

11 You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
12 Ondine
13 Fair Game
14 Red Rider 1974
15 127 Hours
16 The Fighter
17 True Grit
18 Please Give
19 Fish Tank
20 Hereafter

Directors
1 Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech
2 David Fincher, The Social Network
3 Debra Granik, Winter’s Bone
4 Mike Leigh, Another Year
5 Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer

Actors
1 Colin Firth, The King’s Speech
2 Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine
3 Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
4 Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech
5 Michael Douglas, Solitary Man

Actresses
1 Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
2 Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone
3 Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
4 Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole
5 Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Supporting Actors
1 Christian Bale, The Fighter
2 John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone
3 Jeremy Renner, The Town
4 Andrew Garfield, The Social Network
5 Oliver Platt, Please Give

Supporting Actresses
1 Lesley Manville, Another Year
2 Melissa Leo, The Fighter
3 Gemma Jones, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
4 Olivia Williams, The Ghost Writer
5 Rebecca Hall, Please Give

Screenwriters
1 David Seidler, The King’s Speech
2 Mike Leigh, Another Year
3 Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
4 Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini, Winter’s Bone
5 David Lindsay-Abaire, Rabbit Hole

Cinematography
1 Wally Pfister, Inception
2 Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, 127 Hours
3 Jeff Cronenweth, The Social Network
4 Roger Deakins, True Grit
5 Robert Elswit, The Town

Foreign-Language Films
1 The Secret in Their Eyes (Argentina)
2 A Prophet (France)
3 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden)
4 Mother (South Korea)
5 The Girl Who Played With Fire (Sweden)

January/February 2011

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2010 OSCAR NOMINATIONS
The announcement of the Academy Award nominees, which used to include a half dozen surprise selections, both outrageous choices and unexpected recognition for small films, now feels more like a coronation. Much of the problem is that the mainstream press has turned the prognostication game into a full-time beat. Once only we Oscar-obsessed nerds and a handful of movie critics looking to fill out their weekly column weighed in on the possible nominees. Now it dominates entertainment coverage for three months.

The Los Angeles Times treats it as if its college football, with weekly listings of the most likely nominees, gauging films’ prospects as the year progresses. But it’s not just in the industry’s hometown paper. It’s all over TV and the internet; I’m sure people are twittering about it. Casual moviegoers who go to the theater three times a year were predicting in November that “The Black Swan” and “Winter’s Bone” would score best picture nods.

The other change, which becomes more evident yearly, is the astonishing lack of viable candidates. I’m not talking about films that were favorites of a handful of critics (“Ghost Writer,” “Please Give”) or barely released indies (“Ondine,” “Get Low”) but legitimate, high-profile movies. The only picture I thought might be among the 10 best picture nominees that fell short was Mike Leigh’s “Another Year”; not because it is a brilliantly written and acted movie (it is) but because Leigh is a high-profile director whose films the Academy has showered nominations on in the past. And to the point of this shrinking pool: Leigh is the only nominee in the writing categories whose film isn’t in the best picture race.

I read newspaper reports that mentioned “The Town” and “Burlesque” as best-picture snubs, but that seemed like writers straw grasping. I wouldn’t be surprised---if we could ever learn the voting totals----that “Winter’s Bone” and “127 Hours” received only slightly more votes than the amount of moviegoers it would take to fill a small screening room.

As for the acting nods, only five were selected from films not among the best picture nominees: Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Williams, Jacki Weaver and Jeremy Renner. It’s becoming more and more difficult for performers in less-than acclaimed pictures to snag a nomination.

From my perspective, leading the list of 2010 Oscar omissions is Lesley Manville from “Another Year,” whose portrayal of a middle-aged alcoholic desperate for companionship is as affecting a performance as I’ve seen this year. In addition, Olivia Williams, best known as the love interest in “Rushmore” (1998), deserved a nomination for her perfectly measured performance as the manipulative wife of a politician in Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer.”

It was a rare banner year for actresses. Others who I would have give nods to include Gemma Jones, who played the divorcee entranced by a fortune teller in “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” and Rebecca Hall, who was memorable in three films, “Please Give,” “The Town” and the British crime picture “Red Rider 1974.” Other actresses just missing my lists of the best performances were Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame in “Fair Game,” Diane Wiest as the mother in “Rabbit Hole” and Bryce Dallas Howard (Ronnie’s kid) who was stunning in a small but crucial role in “Hereafter.”

But the biggest surprise in the supporting category is the absence of Noomi Rapace, who played the intense loner and title character in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and its sequels. Her visceral performance was the talk of Hollywood last summer---but I guess it’s asking too much of voters to remember that far back.

Among actors, Ryan Gosling’s intense performance in “Blue Valentine” deserved a nomination as did Michael Douglas’ surprisingly insightful work as a disgraced businessman denying his own mortality in “Solitary Man.”

I also thought that Hailee Steinfeld and Geoffrey Rush were misplaced in the supporting category. But that’s the Oscar voters kowtowing to the studios’ requests. Paramount clearly believed Steinfeld, as a child, had a better shot at a nomination (and maybe a win) as a supporting actress, while Harvey Weinstein wanted to separate Rush and best actor nominee and Oscar-favorite Colin Firth. To me, Steinfeld was the clear lead of “True Grit” and Rush was equal partner with Firth in “The King’s Speech.”

For those of us who make a big deal out of a performer’s Oscar nominations, it is interesting to note that Amy Adams, at age 36, now has as many supporting actress nominations as such star character actresses as Shelley Winters, Claire Trevor or Dianne Wiest.

While I’d never list Jeff Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn as among his best performances, I’m always pleased to see this great, unappreciated actor add to his trophy case. While it doesn’t make up for the nominations he deserved but never got for “Cutter’s Way,” “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” “The Fisher King,” “American Heart” and “The Big Lebowski,” it does move him into the same Oscar-total group with Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall and Michael Caine. Nice company.

(If you missed the American Master’s documentary on this down-to-earth, multi-talented child of Hollywood, “Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides,” be sure to rent it when the DVD is available.)
As for the winners on Sunday, I expect “The Social Network” to win the best picture Oscar, in large part because the academy members want to appear hip even if they’re not. Director Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin will also take home Oscar gold as will Colin Firth and writer David Seidler from “The King’s Speech.”

Despite the wave of unexplainable support for Natalie Portman in the best actress category, I trust that voters will come to their senses and finally give Annette Bening an Oscar.
In the supporting categories, Christian Bale seems a shoo-in and I thought Melissa Leo, also from “The Fighter” was too, but I think Hailee Steinfeld is making a late-hour push and will pull the upset.

For a full list of the films and actors I thought were the best of 2010, see the web site. Here’s my Top 10:

1 The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper)
2 Another Year (Mike Leigh)
3 Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik)
4 The Social Network (David Fincher)
5 The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)
6 Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell)
7 Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
8 Solitary Man (Brian Koppelman/David Levien)
9 The Town (Ben Affleck)
10 Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)

ANOTHER YEAR (2010)
At the center of this emotionally raw, unflinching dissection of aging are Tom and Gerri, a warm, giving, positive couple who do their best to raise the spirits of their less-satisfied friends.
This 60ish couple, played by veterans of Leigh films Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, he’s a geologist and she’s a counselor in a hospital, have embraced growing old, content in their work, weekend puttering in their communal garden plot and thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.

In contrast, little has turned out well for Mary (Lesley Manville), who works at the hospital with Gerri and is the focus of the first of the film’s four “chapters.” This irritatingly chatty alcoholic is desperate for something good to happen in her life, clinging to Tom and Gerri as her surrogate family. At one point, she shamelessly makes a ploy for their unmarried son---at least 20 years her junior---in a pitiful attempt o be part of the family.

In other chapters, Leigh introduces Tom’s old pal Kenny (Peter Wight), also a sad, unhealthy drunk who hates his job and being alone; Ronnie (David Bradley), Tom’s stoic, emotionally stunted older brother facing life as a widow; and Ronnie’s angry, anti-social son who shows up late for his mother’s funeral.

This episodic movie has plenty of funny, joyful moments and Broadbent and Sheen turn Tom and Gerri into people you’d just love to have as friends. Yet as in any film about aging, there’s a heavy sadness that hangs over everything. When young characters make bad choices or have those choices made for them, they still have years to improve their lot. For Mary and Kenny, they’ve sealed their fates and seem destined to live out their lives in a haze of bitterness and alcohol.

You won’t see many films with such an impressive collection of performances, yet even in this sparkling cast Manville steals every moment she’s on screen. It’s a career-making performance for this 54-year-old veteran of British TV and a half-dozen Leigh films. That she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar is an embarrassment; this is as heartbreakingly sad and uncompromisingly truthful as any performance I’ve seen in awhile. Her Mary is like a car wreck that, as much as you want to, you can’t look away from. At points, you feel as if you’re intruding on someone’s dirty, family business---remember how you felt watching Leigh’s “Secrets and Lies”?---as Manville and the other actors burrow deep into the fragile state of human emotions.

Leigh’s screen work over the past 20 years---“Life Is Sweet,” “Naked,” “Secrets & Lies,” “Career Girls, “All or Nothing,” “Vera Drake”—compares favorably in its probing examination of contemporary life’s disappointments and the misguided choices people make to Woody Allen’s decade long stretch starting in the late 1970s and Ingmar Bergman’s mid career work from “The Seventh Seal” (1957) to “Cries and Whispers” (1972).

FISH TANK (2010)
You won’t see a better portrayal of a confused, sad and unfocused teen (is there any other kind?) than Katie Jarvis’s Mia in this gritty British picture.

She and her little sister pretty much fend for themselves as their mother (Kierston Wareing) spends her time drinking and picking up men. Her latest lover Conner (Michael Fassbender from “Inglourious Basterds”) starts spending time with the girls, taking them on outings and creating a sense of family.

He encourages Mia to pursue her interest in dance, giving her a bit of self-confidence after years of being berated by her mother. But nothing good lasts for this neglected girl and she’s soon forced to take back control of her life. Jarvis manages to bring out both the vulnerability and the anger of Mia.

Writer-director Andrea Arnold follows in the tradition of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh in portraying trouble youths without letting the story become trite or melodramatic. In Hollywood, this script would have been reworked into a fairy tale ending with Mia winning a talent prize or a scholarship and her mother deciding to settle down with the right man. “Fish Tank” paints another, less perfect, picture that shows life a bit darker and dirtier than your typical Lifetime channel movie.

RABBIT HOLE (2010)
Spending 90 minutes with a couple struggling to rebuild their lives after the shattering loss of their young son can be a rough ride. But the script by David Lindsay-Abaire, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, finds the right balance of heartbreaking sadness and dark humor and utilizes tightly would, emotional performances by Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Diane Wiest and Miles Teller to turn this film into a cathartic, hopeful experience.

The script is essentially a collection of uneventful moments in the lives of Howie and Becca in the months following the car accident that killed their son Danny. Nothing extraordinary happens, but the small moments add up, all leading to this couple rediscovery the meaning in their lives. Director John Cameron Mitchell, best known as the director-star of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (2001), sustains the tone of the piece through the ups and downs of the couple’s relationship and does a superb job of eliciting just the right kind of performances from each cast member.

Just as Becca nears the end of her rope, she spots Jason, the high school student (Teller) who was driving the car that struck and killed her son when he ran out into the street. After following (stalking?) him for awhile, they begin to talk and form a kind of two-person support group. That’s in contrast to her impatient response to the organized support group she and her husband attended for awhile.

Teller gives an impressive portrayal of this smart, creative young man who becomes a surrogate son for Becca and helps her makes sense of a senseless death.

While Kidman has the showier, more complex role, giving one of the best performances of her rich career, Eckhart’s Howie is never reduced to just an argument partner. He responds as anyone would who is being push away by their spouse, but he never gives up on seeking a way to mend the marital wounds.

Providing another sounding board for Becca is her mother, played by veteran character actress Wiest. But her sympathy is both compromised and amplified by the fact that she too lost a son, Becca’s brother who died of a drug overdose at age 30. Wiest, playing a very different role from the flighty romantics she perfected in Woody Allen films of the 1980s and ‘90s, creates a very real, flawed mother in her best performance in a decade.

Even with the help of an Oscar nomination for Kidman, “Rabbit Hole” was lost among the big-ticket, upbeat end-of-the-year movies and should have been released a few months earlier. It’s a shame more won’t see it because it’s an intelligent, moving story that speaks to the way we mourn, the ways we connect to one another and the ways we survive, day after day after day.

GREENBERG (2010)
I’m continually attracted to the scenarios of Noah Baumbach’s movies but the final results inevitably disappoint. “The Whale and the Squid” and “Margot at the Wedding” both focused on eccentric, self-consumed individuals who were clueless to the emotional distress they inflicted on their families.

“Greenberg,” the movie and the character share many of the traits of the writer-director’s other characters, but he’s also the ultimate slacker. Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a former musician currently lacking a profession or a passion and fresh off a nervous breakdown, seems to be just floating through life as a slightly interested observer. There’s a hint of existentialism in Greenberg but that would imply that he displays some level of intellect---hardly.

We first meet him when he arrives in Los Angeles to house/dog sit for his brother, who has gone on vacation with his family. Greenberg plans to hook up with his old bandmates but, in truth, only one of them, Ivan (Rhys Ifans, giving the most believable performance in the film), can even tolerate him. Instead, he latches on to his brother’s efficient but rather needy nanny (Greta Gerwig), who puts up with his standoffish posing and general rude behavior. It’s actually hard to work up much sympathy for either of these mismatched oddballs. He acts like an ass and she keeps coming back for more.

A couple of parties he attends expose him to what apparently represents L.A. shallowness, but Greenberg makes these supposed lightweights seem like type-A workaholics. The story goes nowhere as Greenberg apparent maturity is seen in his growing attachment to his brother’s sick dog, but, toward everyone else, he acts as if he’s a 7-year-old.

Once again, Baumbach tricked me into watching one of his movies. Hopefully, I’ve learned my lesson: his films make for good trailers and not much else.

BLUE VALENTINE (2010)
Two exceptional performances turn this emotionally raw examination of a marriage on the rocks---not unlike “Rabbit Hole” but with less traditional plot---into one of the year’s most demanding and truthful films.

Much has been made of the sexual scenes of the film, almost earning it an NC-17 rating (which would have tanked any hopes of box office success) but the sex in the film is far from titillating (as it was in the more mainstream “Love and Other Drugs”). The sex we see is joyless and desperate as Dean and Cindy attempt to save the relationship with a trip to a cheesy fantasy hotel. The night turns out to be their matrimonial end game.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, two of the most skilled actors of their generation, play an unlikely couple, married, after a brief affair, when Williams’ Cindy discovers she’s pregnant from a preview relationship.

Five years later, the daughter is what holds them together, especially for Cindy, who gave up her dream to become a physician and now works as a nurse. As Dean sees the relationship falter he becomes more and more desperate to hold it together, angry that he may lose his wife and daughter. But nothing is black and white in this film; both characters have moments when you hate them.

As we learn from the numerous flashbacks to their courting days, they never had much in common beyond their sexual attraction and struggle to communicate. In fact, there’s not much in the dialogue that explains the rift between these characters, but the method-style, intense performances express the emotion they don’t verbalize. “Blue Valentine” reminded me of “Love With the Proper Stranger” (1963) with Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood vainly trying to articulate their feelings and any number of John Cassavetes’ films in which conversation feels unrehearsed and unpredictable. This is the rare movie that presents inarticulate characters without degrading them.

Director Derek Cianfrance, whose previous work has been in documentaries, shoots much of the film in severe close-ups, holding shots until the character has nothing more to say and the viewer starts feeling uncomfortable. Williams and Gosling both deserved Oscar recognition (she got it, he didn’t) but Gosling should be used to getting slights at award time---his excellent performance in “Lars and the Real Girl” (2007) also was ignored by Oscar voters.

SOLITARY MAN (2010)
I’ve never been a big fan of Michael Douglas. He’s an old fashioned actor---a chip off his old man’s block---with more charisma than acting chops, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (As witnessed by the continuing fine work of such performers as Clint Eastwood and Richard Gere). It’s Douglas’ smarmy swagger, overly studied smirk and self-satisfying bravado that has put me off for most of his career. Even in his best films (“Wall Street,” “Basic Instinct,” “Wonder Boys”) he’s never completely won me over. Until now.

In this small, under-the-radar picture in which he plays a down on his luck one-time car dealer, Douglas gives the performance I’ve been waiting for since “The Streets of San Francisco.” It’s a classic lion-in-winter role, coming just before his current bout with throat cancer.

We meet Ben Kalman after he’s screwed up his life (literally and figuratively) with a series of affairs with women half his age and a reckless scheme that ruined his business and his marriage to his down-to-earth wife (Susan Sarandon). He’s the kind of guy that doesn’t want his daughter calling him dad in public because he’s looking to pick up the even younger woman at the next table.

He sinks his already troubled life when he sleeps with his current girlfriend’s daughter while they’re on a trip to his alma mater in Boston. Beyond wrecking his relationship, it kills the backing of the woman’s powerful father for Ben’s plan to get back in the car business. Some of the film’s best moments are set at his old college, where he longs to recapture the magic of better days, hanging out at a frat party with new friend Daniel (“Social Network’s” Jesse Eisenberg) and getting reacquainted with old pal Jimmy (Danny DeVito), who owns the local deli.

No matter what the consequences, Ben just can’t pass up yet another chance to deny his age, and his mortality, by smooth talking a younger woman into his bed. But even as one cringes at some of his actions, you can’t help like the guy or at least feel a tinge of sympathy as he foolishly stumbles into his senior years.

Veteran screenwriter turned director Brian Koppelman and co-director David Levien, have fashioned a quirky, funny and thoughtful examination of the smartest guy in the room now reduced to sleeping on a friend’s couch. And, best of all, they elicit the best performance of this popular actor’s 40-year career.

THE EXPENDABLES (2010)
It seems appropriate that early in this paint-by-numbers, bloody action film tattoo artist and retired mercenary Tool (Mickey Rourke) finishes off the extensive body art that covers cohort Barney’s (Sylvester Stallone) body. Having commented on how plastic surgery has sadly altered the looks of some of our best actresses (Jessica Lange, Barbara Hershey, Meg Ryan), I’d be negligent in not mentioning the wreck the lifestyles/surgical procedures have done to Sly and Mickey. It’s hard to believe these guys were considered heartthrobs when they entered films, Stallone in the 70s and Rourke in the ‘80s.

I could care less about an actor’s looks as long as they create a convincing character, but the “look” these guys have created makes it hard to concentrate on their performances---they might as well be wearing a hat adorned with oversized fruit.

If you can get past his face and bizarre outfits (he smokes a long stemmed pipe right out of the Plymouth Rock collection), Rourke gives his usual quirky, highly entertaining performance in the middle of this blunt-force, ham-fisted picture.

The other “big” stars of this film—the casting earned it 10 times the publicity it deserved---are Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they appear in just one pretentiously humorous scene (it’s like a Bob Hope walk on) and then disappear. Also joining this washed up brigade of tough guys is Dolf Lundgren, a couple of oversized pro wrestlers, current action star Jason Stratham (who can act but isn’t required to here) and Jet Li, the Hong Kong martial arts star.

The plot involves this thick-necked squad of amoral killers being hired by “the agency” to take out a South American dictator, who turns out to be a pawn of an ex-CIA egomaniac, played with his usual overheated intensity by Eric Roberts.

This is the kind of film where bullets rip men’s heads off and a single man can kill dozens of enemy soldiers in mere seconds.

Did I mention that Stallone directed this exercise in excess? He provides the same scattered, slow-moving style of storytelling he brought to the later “Rocky” pictures.

But you’ve got to give credit to Stallone: He’s survived in the film industry against all odds. He should have been doing dinner theater productions of “On the Waterfront” in South Florida by now, but instead he’s starring in and directing major movie releases. What can you say about a guy who, at age 64, is still willing to take his shirt off and fire a huge gun at any nonwhite who dares to cross his path?

And if you missed this gunfest, Part Deux is already in the works.

PLEASE GIVE (2010)
I found Nicole Holofcener’s previous pictures, “Lovely & Amazing” (2001) and “Friends With Money” (2006) insufferably trite, filled with boring, self-indulgent characters. These characters are still around in her latest picture, but the writer-director has layered her screenplay with plenty of dagger-sharp sarcasm and self-deprecating laughs.

Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt are a daffy New York couple who resell furniture purchased at estate sales, while setting their sights on buying the apartment next door. The only thing standing in their way of expanding their home is the orange-haired, grumpy elderly woman (hilariously portrayed by 82-year-old Ann Morgan Guilbert, Millie from “The Dick Van Dyke Show”) who still lives there.

Kenner’s Kate has the worst case of liberal guilty, insisting on giving money to every homeless person she walks by and inviting the neighbor woman she’s counting on dying soon and her two granddaughters to dinner.

The sisters have little in common, with Rebecca (portrayed by Rebecca Hall, quietly becoming a major star), a soft-spoken, thoughtful radiologist, who focuses her attention on her ungrateful grandmother while Mary (Amanda Peet) is a self-absorbed massage therapist more interested in her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend than her grandmother.

Tying all these people together with varying degrees of empathy is Alex and Kate’s teen daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), a smart, observant girl with blemish problems and an obsessive need for an expensive pair of blue jeans.

As I wrote last month, Platt brings authenticity to every film he’s in and here he manages to come across as both the most sensible half of the couple and the most reckless. He’s perfectly matched with Keener, who’s been in all four of Holofcener’s films, but has never been more effective than in “Please Give,” creating an authentically mopey and misguided woman.

TV veteran Guilbert steals every scene she’s in, giving laugh-out-loud reading of her dry, cutting lines. Since her days as Mary Tyler Moore’s best friend on the early ‘60s landmark sitcom, she’s been a constant TV presence with her most recent prominent role being the outrageously dressed, senile grandmother on “The Nanny.”

CORRECTION: In my write-up of “Black Swan” in the December posting, I confused Vincent Gallo with Vincent Cassel. French actor Cassel stars as the ballet director. Gallo is a wacky American who works mostly in independent films. He would have been perfectly cast as Natalie Portman’s boyfriend in the film, but, in fact, he wasn’t in “Black Swan.”

December 2010

2011-01-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

THE KING’S SPEECH (2010)
A man being treated by a speech therapist for stuttering hardly seems like the plot of a great film. Then again, it doesn’t hurt that the patient is the future king of England.

Tom Hooper, director of last year’s underrated “The Damned United” and the acclaimed cable series “John Adams,” has made a near-perfect character study of a pivotal figure of the 20th Century as he faces both his frustrating disability and the dark clouds of war.

Colin Firth portrays Prince Albert, know to his family as Bertie, second son of the gruff, cold George V and brother of Edward (Guy Pearce), the dashing and well-spoken heir to the throne. Albert prefers to be in the background, limited by his inability to speak fluently and his reserved personality.

Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), in her continual pursuit of a cure for her husband’s speech problem, visits unorthodox Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who agrees to take on the royal patient, but only under his terms.

The give and take between Firth’s taciturn Bertie and Rush’s gregarious, plain-speaking Lionel is superbly written (by David Seidler) and realized, painting a difficult relationship that goes from royal and commoner to brothers. The performances are career bests for both of these excellent actors.

Raising the dramatic stakes is the biggest crisis faced by the Royal family since Richard III started killing off heirs to the throne: Edward refusal to give up American divorcee Wallis Simpson even after becoming King. The possibility of having to take his brother’s place on the throne doubles Bertie’s insecurities, especially with the newly popular medium of radio requiring the country’s leader to speak directly to the nation.

The film captures the intensity of the times---Hitler is about to launch his assault on Europe---while never losing its focus on the therapy process and the growing bond between these two, very different, men.

Firth, who earned a 2009 Oscar nomination for his subtle portrayal of a gay man mourning the death of his partner in “A Single Man,” finds the right balance of royal macho and frail human in Bertie, as this accidental monarch slowly becomes a warmer, more likeable person. These two performances elevate the 50-year-old Firth to the top ranks of film actors. Yet Rush, who won an Oscar for his first major role in “Shine” (1996), is equally impressive as a nervy eccentric who treats the King as just another patient and also deserve a spot in the best actor category.

Bonham Carter captures Elizabeth’s earthy, no-nonsense persona and unflagging confidence in her husband, foreshadowing her role in leading the country through the harsh times of World War II and her beloved status as “Queen Mother” until her death in 2002.

The film is filled with impeccably acted supporting roles, including Pearce, displaying both the bravado of the young King and the anguish behind one of the most celebrated romances of the era; Timothy Spall as Churchill; Derek Jacobi as the Archbishop; Claire Bloom as the Queen; and Michael Gambon as George V.

While “The King’s Speech” has the trappings of a “Masterpiece Theatre” production, the movie also possesses an unhinged, unpredictable undercurrent that makes the political issues come alive and the characters seem very contemporary.

There’s a poignant, insightful moment when Bertie’s children----future Queen Elizabeth, then 10, and Margaret----greet him with curtsies rather than hugs now that he’s also their King. The difficult balance between personal and public, country and family, turns this story of a very private, privileged man and his informal, working man friend into a fascinating study of class and individual priorities in an unpredictable, changing world.

TRUE GRIT (2010)
More than 40 years ago, this comic Western was viewed as a remnant of old Hollywood, a relic in the midst of a revolution. It earned just a single Oscar nomination (for John Wayne) and was out grossed at the box office by the hipper “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” And the Western movie critics were raving about that year was “The Wild Bunch.”

The Coen brothers’ remake, which offers only cosmetic changes from the original, has benefitted from the rarity of Westerns today and the filmmakers’ cutting-edge reputation to earn critical raves. But what’s on the screen is too often a by-the-numbers horse opera that doesn’t match the energy of such recent Westerns as “3:10 to Yuma” (2007) or “Open Range” (2004).

What saves the picture is its perfect casting: Jeff Bridges is a more disheveled, inebriated Rooster Cogburn than Wayne; Hailee Steinfeld, a 14-year-old newcomer, nails the precocious Mattie; and Matt Damon brings to life the egotistical LaBoeuf, a character than had been left on the page in the original by amateur actor Glen Campbell.

Both films, based on the acclaimed novel by Charles Portis, follows Mattie’s determined pursuit of the low-life drifter who killed her father, a successful rancher, for no good reason. After much hemming and hawing, she hires Cogburn, a federal marshal, to help her bring the killer, who has escaped into Indian Territory, to justice. Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, after the same man for another crime, joins the hunting party.

Even with the spunky, self-reliant Mattie as the focus, the film never picks up much speed until the mismatched trio hits the trail, and even then the Coens add little spin to the tale.

The only interesting addition to the new version is the brief, oddball appearance of a medicine man/trader wearing a bear skin (including the head). A few more “wild” animals could have done wonders for this movie.

Bridges, like Wayne, was born to play Rooster and he does have some fun with the role, but not as much as you’d expect. He plays it pretty straight just like everyone else in the picture.

Steinfeld, discovered during auditions for the role after having very limited acting experience, shows the character’s steely resolve and verbal maturity while displaying real cinematic charisma. Not once is she out acted by Bridges, Damon or Josh Brolin (who has a small role as the killer) and should not be stuck in the supporting actress category just because she’s a juvenile. She is the film’s lead actress.

Unquestionable, this version is better directed and acted than Henry Hathaway’s 1969 movie, and, from all reports, sticks closer to the novel. Yet, overall, it’s the same picture; an occasionally amusing, run-of-the-mill Western.

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY? (1966)
While it’s hard to take seriously a director who made eight “Pink Panther” films---each progressively less funny and more embarrassing---Blake Edwards, who died a few weeks ago at age 88, is hard to dismiss. The grandson of a silent filmmaker, Edwards started in Hollywood as an actor (he played a soldier in “The Best Years in Our Lives”) and then a screenwriter before making his directing debut with “Bring Your Smile Along,” a 1955 B-level musical comedy starring pop singer Frankie Lane. Four years later, he scored his first hit with the military comedy “Operation Petticoat,” starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis.

For television, Edwards created the short-lived 1959-60 series “Mr. Lucky” about a profession gambler and the better remembered “Peter Gunn,” with Craig Stevens as a cool private eye, which ran for three seasons starting in 1958.

He was just hitting his stride. For his next film, he turned Truman Capote’s novel about a New York City party girl named Holly Golightly--- with the help of Andy Hepburn’s iconic performance---into a classic, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961). The next year he directed one of the era’s most memorable dramas, “Days of Wine and Roses,” featuring searing performances by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as an alcoholic couple.

Then he created the anchor, for better or worse, of his career: “The Pink Panther” and “A Shot in the Dark,” both starring with Peter Sellers as the thick-headed, clumsy French detective, Inspector Clouseau. Essentially, a Hollywoodization of the absurdly goofiness of the English comedies of the ‘50s combined with the silent pratfalls of the Keystone Cops, the 1964 comedies made Sellers a star in America. But it was another ten years before the pair returned to the series.

A string of box-office failures and high-profile battles with studio chiefs marked Edwards’ last ‘60s career, culminating with his move to England after his married to Julie Andrews in 1969. One of his misfires was the oddly titled 1966 World War II satire, “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” The film starts out promisingly, when a ragtag platoon ordered to take an Italian town finds the enemy troops more than willing to surrender. All the Italians want is to celebrate their festival that evening and then, in the morning, they’ll become prisoners.

James Coburn and Aldo Ray, as leaders of this troop of partiers, have no problem with the arrangement and, with the right measure of alcohol and the affections of the local beauty, neither does the uptight lieutenant from headquarters, played by Dick Shawn.

The next morning, the plan goes awry and so does the William Peter Blatty (“The Exorcist”) script, turning into a series of flipped-out officers and mistaken identities. Once the Nazis show up, the film loses any sense of intelligence it started with, wasting the first-rate comic skills of Coburn and Shawn.

During this dry period, Edwards occasionally made interesting pictures, including “The Party,” a satire of hipsters of the ‘60s starring Sellers; “Wild Rovers” (1971), an entertaining Western with William Holden; and “The Carey Treatment” (1972), a murder-mystery starring Coburn.

Then came Edwards’ impressive return to box-office glory with the daring sex comedy “10” (1979), followed by the hilarious, uncensored assault on Hollywood in “S.O.B.” (1981) and the gender-bending comedy “Victor/Victoria” (1982), his best film since “Tiffany’s.” All three movies featured Andrews.

Between the never-ending “Panther” retreads, Edwards explored the theme of “10”---the anxieties of middle-aged men especially in regards to sex---for the rest of his career. “Micki & Maude” (1984), with “10” star Dudley Moore; “That’s Life!” (1986), a high-profile acting platform for Jack Lemmon; and “Skin Deep” (1989), with John Ritter in the Dudley Moore role, were Edwards’ late-career best. His final picture was, appropriately, “The Son of the Pink Panther” (1993), this time starring the nutty Italian actor Roberto Benigni.

Though Edwards only helmed one great film, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and produced at least four too many “Panthers,” this writer-director had his finger on the pulse of what made audience laugh for more than four decades, a rare skill considering the ever-changing tastes of moviegoers. And in between the sophomoric sight gags and pratfalls, his movies always possessed a dark, sarcastic undercurrent that kept him relevant longer than most of his generation of filmmakers.

THE FIGHTER (2010)
Great acting cannot turn a predictable, simplistic screenplay into a good movie, but it certainly makes it a more entertaining two hours.

This true story of a pair of prizefighting half-brothers, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky Ecklund (Christian Bale) from a small town north of Boston follows the template that’s been used in boxing films since the 1930s. Dickey had his shot at glory (he never tires of boasting that he knocked down the great Sugar Ray Leonard) but now is the wild-eyed, irresponsible, cocaine-addicted trainer of Micky, a welterweight struggling to get a shot at a decent fight. Offering little help is his trashy, ambitious mother/manager Alice (Melissa Leo) who dotes on the washed-up Dicky and only sees Micky as a way to keep the money flowing for her and her seven big-haired, loud-mouth daughters.

Under the influence of a feisty bartender (Amy Adams), the soft-spoken Micky break with the family and starts getting better fights. About the same time, Dicky’s robbery scheme lands him in prison, where he attempts to right his life.

If you’ve seen many boxing films, or nearly any sports movies, the story arc and characters are as familiar as an old sock. Yet the ferocious, authentic performances by Bale and Leo are worth the price of admission.

Bale, the reigning “Batman,” who showed what an extraordinary actor he can be in “Rescue Dawn” (2006), turns this sad, drug-addled goofball into an unforgettable character; outrageous, funny and frustratingly human.

Leo’s brassy, overbearing dame runs the family as if she’s a Vegas monster, giving her troubled son and dependent daughters free rides. The actress’ best performances---she was Oscar nominated for “Frozen River” (2008) and deserved to be for “21 Grams” (2003)---have been portrayals of uneducated, determined women and she finds just the right balance again with her Alice, making her both cartoonishly funny and horror-movie scary.

The film is the pet project of Wahlberg, a longtime fan of Ward, having grown up in the area, and he gives a solid performance, especially in the very authentic looking fight scenes. But he should have demanded a better script.

Director David O. Russell (“The Three Kings”) keeps the movie lively and makes great use of real locations in Lowell, Mass., but he’s stuck with the “true story” and sometimes that’s not the best source of convincing drama.

BLACK SWAN (2010)
I’m never surprised when I see a bad film---I feel lucky if 20% of the new movies I watch are any good. What amazes me is the number of bad or mediocre pictures every year that receive the big-budget studio push for prestigious awards. Of course, some of these bad films end up winning awards, which might never have happened if they had slipped into theaters in March.

Example number 186 is “Black Swan.” This overwrought melodrama about an immature, mentally unstable ballet dancer is a glossy version of a low-budget exploitation film. I half expected characters to sprout fangs or wings or, like in a 1970s Roger Corman picture, transform into some kind of beast.

Natalie Portman matches the skin-and-bones look of a prima ballerina and, at age 28, is still believable as a child-like adult. Her Nina lives under the domineering thumb of her mother (Barbara Hershey), a former dancer whose controlling behavior has never allowed Nina to develop relationships or emerge from childhood.

That Nina holds on to a spot in a prestigious New York City dance company is hard to buy; as the movie keeps hammering home, it takes more than physical perfection to be an artistic dancer. Nina has zero personality, lacking any interests beyond her tights and slippers.

The plot involves Nina’s struggle to portray the Black Swan in a production of “Swan Lake” staged by the dance company’s demanding director (French actor Vincent Cassel). What little confidence she possesses is crushed by the arrival of a younger, sexier dancer (Mila Kunis), sending Nina into schizophrenic, disturbing visions.

The performances are alarming poor, led by Portman’s one-note portrayal of this fragile young woman. Her look of pained fear never changes (she’s on the verge of tears for the entire two hours) until she somehow becomes completely possessed in the grand finalé.

Hershey might as well be carrying around a wire coat hanger---it would have provided a more subtle insight into her character than she ever approaches. Gallo hits all the clichés of an overbearing choreographer while Kunis’ character is made to fit whatever the disturbed mind of Nina’s requires.

Darren Aronofsky, whose best known films examined the agony of drug abuse (“Requiem for a Dream”) and the pain of an aging pro wrestler (“The Wrestler”) is clearly fascinated by the physical abuse people are willing endure for their obsessions, but this latest version never rises above TV-movie disease-of-moment dreck.

Yet “Black Swan” has already picked up four Golden Globe nominations and looks to be a shoo-in for a best picture Oscar nomination. Timing is everything.

MADE IN DAGENHAM (2010)
This British docudrama, about a landmark strike by female workers at an English Ford Motors plant in 1968, plays like a TV movie, except for the vibrant, cinematic performance at its center.

Sally Hawkins, who received numerous accolades for her high spirited performance in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008), portrays Rita O’Grady, one of the seamstresses producing seat covers at the plant, who steps into a leadership role when the women strike for a pay raise that had been promised by the company. This working wife and mother, who never pictured herself as an activist or leader, finds it comes naturally as she confronts arrogant company executives, sexist union leaders and suspicious male co-workers who lose their paychecks when the company locks out all the workers.

Hawkins’ spunky, unaffected performance turns these 40-year-old events into relevant issues in a way that William Ivory’s script, Nigel Cole’s direction and the stock characters who surround her can’t do.

Bob Hoskins gives his usual feisty, bemused performance as the union rep on the women’s side, but Miranda Richardson overplays her role as the Labor Secretary who takes an interest in the dispute. All the officials---government, company, union---are portrayed as narrow-minded fools, which makes the accomplishments of O’Grady and the strikers seem less impressive. In fact, this group of small-town women changed the way one of the world’s largest corporations paid workers, eventually leading to equal pay laws across Europe and North America.

One can’t help but admire “Made in Dagenham” for bringing this little-noted but far-reaching bit of history to the screen, even if it makes for predictable, by-the-numbers cinema.

WILD GRASS (2010)
Legendary French director Alain Resnais’ latest film falls well short of his 2006 effort, “Private Fears in Public Places,” though both share a neon-light look that makes you wonder if it isn’t all a dream. If it had been, “Wild Grass” might be more convincing.

When a retired, somewhat unstable man (veteran actor André Dussollier) discovers a wallet in a parking garage, he becomes obsessed with the owner, in large part because the wallet contains her pilot license. Though he turns the lost wallet into the police (in an extraordinarily laborious scene), he calls and then writes the woman in a desperate attempt to meet her.

Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), who is a dentist and flies planes for pleasure, can’t decide if she wants Georges out of her life or, in some bizarre way, enjoys his attention. When he slashes her car’s tires, she finally goes to the police, but still ends up tracking him down for a meeting.

As with most of Resnais’s films---the best known being “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959), “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) and “Providence” (1977)---“Wild Grass” unfolds at a leisurely pace and the motivations of the characters change on a dime. Most irritating in this movie is the incessive narration of the character’s thoughts that offers bland details rather than real insight. The script, by Alex Reval and Laurent Herbiet, from a novel by Christian Gailly, seems to be attempting to comment on the difficultly in making connections in a modern society and that fate sends us down unexpected paths, but it never made much impact on me. Seriously, the dramatic conclusion hinges on a broken zipper.

But what do I know: critics polled by Film Comment magazine selected “Wild Grass” as one of the ten best films of the year.

That vote probably speaks more to the director’s status in world cinema than the quality of his latest film. Following the deaths in 2010 of Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, 88-year-old Resnais is the only major figure of the French New Wave still making commercial films. (I’m not sure what you call the recent work of Jean-Luc Godard. His films have become so polemic and indecipherable that you need to be one of his acolytes to appreciate them.) Amazingly, Resnais is shooting another film scheduled to be released in 2012, when he turns 90.

BAD MATH: In last month’s review of “Howards End,” I casually threw out the “fact” that 80% of movies are adapted from books. One of “Thoughts on Film’s” more careful readers pointed out that I was way off the mark and he was correct. In a survey of a two recent years, 78% of movies were original screenplays and just 22% started as books. Of those “original” screenplays, 18% are remakes, sequels or based on real events.

November 2010

2010-12-11T08:48:00.000-08:00

HOWARDS END (1992)
I’m convinced that the most popular gripe about movies isn’t that they stink; it’s that they aren’t as good as the book.

The impression comes from the fact that people are more discerning readers than they are moviegoers---paying for plenty of crappy movies but only taking the time to read books written by the best or most popular authors. Probably 80 percent of American films are based (many very loosely) on a book, yet out of those, most moviegoers have read maybe 10 percent of those books.

My point, if there is one, is that many movies are better or at least more entertaining than the book they’re based on, or at least do a good job of conveying the themes of the written word. Just like in the multiplexes, bookstores are filled with dumb, badly written books, sitting next to masterpieces.

Clearly, the more profound and complex the novel, the more difficult it becomes to whittle down its meaning to a two to three hour film. To me, the perfect examples of the screen version improving upon the novel are “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940), the John Ford-directed adaptation of John Steinbeck’s book in which the visuals and powerful acting tell more than the author’s words and “The Godfather” (1972), for which author Mario Puzo and the film’s director Francis Coppola created a screenplay far superior to what’s on the page.

The film version of “Howards End,” written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for director James Ivory, shows that a novel filled with philosophy, social issues and hard to explain characters can successfully be brought to the screen. I recently watched the film for the first time since I saw it during its initial run in 1992. At the time, I ranked it as the year’s eighth best film. Now, having read E.M. Forster’s novel in the interim, I’m doubly impressed. It’s one of the great novels of the 20th Century, so I could hardly say the movie surpassed the book, but it certainly does it justice.

Ivory and Jhabvala follow Forster’s multilayered plot about the Schlegel sisters and how their lives become entangled with the more reserved and richer Wilcox family, owners of the picturesque home of the title. Along the way, the subtle, beautifully crafted screenplay touches on the social issues so crucial to the importance of the book---the growing feminist movement; the changing nature of the roles of men and women; the value of an inner life; the plight of the poor; changing class distinctions; and the crumbling of the pillars of 19th Century England.

It’s a credit to the filmmakers that this period piece never feels like a visit to an ancient world. The novel was contemporary, written in 1910 and set in the same era, and the movie reflects the immediacy of the social issues and the way they inform the characters and their actions.

The nearly perfect performances by the entire cast accounts for much of the reason this thoughtful novel translates so well to the screen. First and foremost is Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Wilcox, who loves Howards End beyond anything else in her life and attempts to convey her feelings along to her new friend, Margaret Schlegel. While Mrs. Wilcox dies early in the film, her spirit---in the form of Redgrave’s piercing, sad eyes and low whisper of a voice, creating a nearly ethereal presence---remains essential to the story and other characters.

Emma Thompson’s Margaret, in many ways, makes the novel’s most confusing, almost contradictory, character more understandable. At the heart of the movie is how Margaret finds a way to go from a free-thinking, literary, independent woman to devoted, forgiving wife of a proud, short-sighted businessman. It helps that he’s played by Anthony Hopkins, equally convincing while portraying both the dashing and the pigheaded side of Henry Wilcox.

While Helen, Margaret’s determined, principled younger sister, is a more static character, Helena Bonham Carter brings to life this feisty, articulate harbinger of the hippies of the 1960s. She refuses to abide by society’s rules and sees life simply as a choice between doing right and doing wrong.

Forster had earlier written “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (made into a 1991 film with Bonham Carter) and “A Room with a View” (filmed in 1984 by Ivory and also starring Bonham Carter) and then later wrote “A Passage to India” (becoming a David Lean film in 1985), and, “Maurice,” published posthumously and filmed by Ivory in 1987. If not for him and Jane Austen, British cinema would have been considerably less interesting in the 1980s and ‘90s.

I do think “Howards End” needed to be 10 or 15 minutes longer, which would have allowed Ivory to let some of the scenes play out a bit more leisurely; the editing more than once ends a scene frustratingly early and I have no doubt some the more off-the-plot, but fascinating dialogue was trimmed for time.

It seems appropriate that this masterful piece of literature, which ends with Howards End---representing the privilege and principles of the British upper class---ultimately going to the bastard son of a working class man, will end up best remembered as the source of a great motion picture, the entertainment of the masses.

LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS (2010)
This Pittsburgh-set romance misfires on so many levels that I barely know where to start. An uncomfortable, misguided mixture of raunchy sex, social critique of the pharmaceutical industry, sophomoric slapstick and weepy romance, the Edward Zwick-directed film tries to be both hip and tradition, risky and safe. Yet despite all these elements, the film isn’t even close to being ambitious.

The screenplay (by Zwick, his writing partner Marshall Herskovitz and Charles Randolph from a novel by Jamie Reidy) establishes its dysfunctional credentials in the opening scenes, first with Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal in his most gregarious role) acting like an overgrown kid at his sales job at a electronics store (has a salesman ever danced with you?) and then at his parents’ home, where his more successful siblings and disappointed father (who else but George Segal) come off as self-satisfied pains.

Younger brother Josh (Josh Gad), who just sold his startup for millions, arranges a gig for Jamie as a Pfizer drug rep, one of those slick pill pushers who persuade physicians to prescribe their product. Since Jamie’s only obvious skill is his ability to seduce women, he uses his charisma and amorality to become a top salesman, especially once Pfizer brings out its little blue pill (the film is set in the mid-1990s).

But forget about all that: The main attraction of this film is Anne Hathaway’s Maggie, a reclusive artist (of indeterminate skill or success) who is well acquainted with the drug industry as she copes with Parkinson’s disease. They meet cute (when Jamie pretends to be a medical intern) during an examination and soon are ripping each other’s clothes off in a series of unbridled sex scenes, exuding the kind of heat (and nudity) rarely seen in a mainstream Hollywood release. (The pair previous were a less-than-perfect couple as husband and wife in “Brokeback Mountain.”)

Both actors have their moments of exceptional acting, but overall I struggled to find the humanity of these characters; too often they’re just a collection of personality quirks that pop up just when the plot demands conflict. Coming off better than the principles is Oliver Platt, as a crafty drug salesman who sees Jamie as his ticket out of Pittsburgh and back to Chicago, where his family lives. This veteran actor manages to brighten every film he’s in with his ever-expanding but very familiar face and ability to create quirky but reality-based characters.

Making her final screen appearance, Jill Clayburgh plays Jamie’s mother, getting a few funny lines in the opening dinner-table scene.

On the other hand, Gad, as the brother who moves in with Jamie when his wife throws him out of the house, does a weak imitation of Jack Black and is at the center of all the pointlessly crude Judd Apatow moments in the film. Ridiculously, this millionaire willingly sleeps on his brothers’ couch rather than finding his own place, moving in a hotel or, if he insists on clinging to his brother, finding them a bigger apartment. I think he can afford it: this is Pittsburgh not New York. But this isn’t about making sense; it’s about creating “Odd Couple” moments.

Zwick, who’s directed some exceptional films, including “Glory” (1989) and “Blood Diamond” (2006), stuffs his latest with something for everyone, and ends up failing to do much of anything well.

FAIR GAME (2010)
Political conspiracy movies are among the few genres Hollywood does consistently well. Doug Liman, whose “The Bourne Identity” (2002) set the contemporary bar, delivers a more cerebral thriller with “Fair Game,” based on the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby scandal.

If you’ve forgotten this particular Bush Administration criminal/ethical breach, this is the one where Dick Cheney and his minions decided to ruin the career of a longtime foreign operative of the CIA because her husband disputed the president’s claims of proof that Iraq was close to constructing a nuclear weapon.

Naomi Watts, as consistently impressive as any actress during the past decade (since her startling breakthrough in “Mulholland Dr.”) plays Plame as a daring agent venturing into the political hotspots of the globe. While in the midst of an undercover operation to convince an Iraqi nuclear worker to defect, Plame is blind-sided by the reaction following a Robert Novak column in the Washington Post that names her as a CIA agent, outing her to her friends and enemies.

Suddenly, after 18 years of devoted service, she’s cut off from all her field operatives and relegated to unimportant desk duties by the agency.

The movie, to its credit, is less about the investigation that leads to the indictment of Libby and more about the effect this political attack and knee-jerk reaction from Bush’s lieutenants has on these highly esteemed Beltway insiders. Also taking a deserved hit is the media, which willingly airs any dirt dished by the White House no matter how baseless, frivolous or simply false.

While Plame just wants it all to go away, holding fast to her Federal training by accepting the media onslaught and keeping silent, her husband (Sean Penn) believes the best defense is an unrelenting offense. Former ambassador and African expert Joseph Wilson, whose op/ed piece in the New York Times all but called the president a liar, shows up on every media outlet that will have him to assail the Bush Administration and dispute the claim printed by Novak and others that he was sent on the Niger fact-finding mission at his wife’s request.

Penn and Watts, who also played husband and wife in “21 Grams,” display genuine chemistry even as their relationship nears the breaking point under the pressure of the controversy. These great actors, simply by their screen presence, probably make Plame and Wilson more appealing people than they may be in real life, and, to a great extent, paint these bureaucrats as intellectual saints. But Liman makes no pretense about his sympathies. And he shouldn’t when peoples’ lives are forever altered by politicians whose only concern is covering up the lies manufactured to rationalize a war.

RAMONA (1910)
This 17-minute silent short is basically the picture-book version of the Helen Jackson’s classic novel of early California. Without inter-title dialogue, the film pantomimes the story of Ramona, the love struck adopted daughter of a wealthy Spanish family who falls for Alessandro, a proud native Californian Indian who works for the family.

More complete versions of this tale of racism in the 1850s (it’s subtitled, “A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian”) can be found in the 1936 movie starring Loretta Young and at the annual “Ramona Pageant” held in Hemet, Ca., each summer. The influence of this 1887 novel can’t be overstated: tourist flocked to the state to see any site associated with “Ramona” and the book all but invented the cultural identity of the region.

The short is worth a look because it was one of 98 shorts directed by D.W. Griffith that year (though he’s uncredited) and stars 17-year-old Mary Pickford, soon to be “America’s Sweetheart” and the biggest star in Hollywood. The picture is so short that there is hardly time for Pickford to do much except look distraught as Ramona, but at least she’s playing a character that is age appropriate. By her late 20s, she was mostly cast as young girls (she played Pollyanna in 1920).

The Griffith touch is evident in the way he frames his shots (a signature, used often in “Ramona,” is keeping all the actors on the right side of the frame) and his use of the rolling hills of Ventura County, Ca., photographed by Griffith’s pioneering cinematographer Billy Bitzer. Griffith shot scenes at the adobe and chapel at Camulos Rancho, believe to be Jackson’s inspiration for the Spanish ranch of the novel.

Pickford and Henry B. Walthall (as Alessandro) play out the tragedy---they are ousted from their community because of their forbidden love---with slightly more subtlety than the exaggerated acting style of the time.

What struck me, in a watching a complete film made 100 years ago, is how quickly the art form evolved. Just 25 years after this crude film, cinema had transformed itself into a form very close to what we experience at newly minted multiplexes every weekend. The leap from “Ramona” to, say, “It Happened Once Night” (1934) was astonishing; the advance to the latest “Harry Potter” much less so. In fact, many would argue that there’s been no progress in the art since the late 1920s.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (1995)
If not for its impressive quartet of stars, this cartoonish homage to the Westerns of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood would have gone straight to video.

Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio all play gunfighters who enter a dueling contest in the corrupt desert town controlled by Gene Hackman’s Herod (just for good measure some Biblical symbolism is thrown in). Stone rides into town on a mission of vengeance (a version of Clint’s Man With No Name), while Crowe and DiCaprio have scores to settle with Herod.

Sam Raimi, best known for helming the “Spider Man” franchise, steals liberally from the Spaghetti Western cycle, repeatedly showing close-ups of the characters’ eyes, utilizing a soundtrack that clearly was influenced by Ennio Morricone’s and filling the screen with an amusing collection of gnarly characters, each meaner than the previous.

Raimi shows off all the camera and editing tricks up his sleeve, but the story (by Simon Moore) has the depth of a Yosemite Sam short. You know you’re in the world of make believe when there’s a downpour nearly every night but there’s not a single tree, bush or blade of grass in sight.

Not surprisingly, Hackman gives the standout performance, savory every rotten thing he gets to say or do, not unlike his Lex Luther.

Pre-stardom Crowe---his breakthrough performance came two years later in “L.A. Confidential”---acquits himself well as the hired gun turned preacher who is dragged back in town by Herod just for the fun of it. The 21-year-old DiCaprio is still too much of a kid (in fact, that’s the character’s name) for his role as the town’s hot shot gunman. DiCaprio was in that uncomfortable in-between period that many actors experience: After his exceptional juvenile work in “This Boy’s Life” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and before hooking up with Martin Scorsese and developing into a mature actor.

Stone has the most complex role and it’s through her eyes the viewer enters this vicious community, but she can’t pull off the balance of being a shaky, over-her-head neophyte and a tough cowgirl/hero. A bit more of her “Basic Instinct” persona might have helped, but the screenplay doesn’t give her much to work with. Later in 1995, she was on screen again giving her finest performance to date, as the drug abusing, money-hungry Ginger in “Casino.”

There are plenty of familiar faces among the other gunmen (Lance Henriksen, Keith David) and Gary Sinise has a small role in flashback scenes as Stone’s father.

Raimi doesn’t do a bad job of keeping the numerous pistol duels interesting but when it comes to back story and character development, it’s just one cliché after another.

127 HOURS (2010)
Considering that most everyone who sees this film knows how it ends, the level of tension and anxiety it conveys rarely flags. Dramatizing the experience of Aron Ralston, who was trapped in a deep, narrow crevice when a boulder lodged against his right arm while hiking in the Canyonlands National Park in Utah, this movie is mostly a one-man show for James Franco.

Franco, who made a name for himself on the TV show “Freaks and Geeks” and then as Peter Parker best friend and worst enemy in the “Spider Man” franchise, isn’t asked to turn Aron into someone more than just a regular guy trapped in an extraordinary circumstance. He’s an upbeat pleasure-seeker whose enthusiasm for life sustains him as he faces death and Franco pulls it off convincing. It looks like he’ll be a shoo-in for a best actor Oscar nomination.

But there’s just not enough to the story, most of which consists of Aron recording his reflections about his situation and life on his digital video camera. Once he’s trapped by the rock---not long after an encounter with two cute female hikers---the film treads water until he does what made him famous.

British director Danny Boyles, whose nonsensical, sentimental “Slumdog Millionaire” won the 2008 best picture and best director Oscars, tries to jazz up “127 Hours” with split screens, odd flashbacks and hallucinations, yet the devices feel very forced. Maybe if the film had offered more background on Aron or shown him interacting with others in his daily life, I would have been more engaged. Despite the incredible bravery and resilience this man displays, the movie has little to say about anything beyond the facts of the incident.

The actual amputation doesn’t last long but it is wrenchingly realistic and quite painful to watch (and hear). And because that moment is recreated so believable, feeling the exuberance of his freedom becomes difficult. I was still ruminating about how I would never have the nerve to do what he did when, not much later, the credits were rolling. Maybe Boyle needed to apply some of that sugar he used to excess in “Slumdog,” at least to induce a tear or two at the conclusion of those grueling “127 Hours.”

ME AND ORSON WELLES (2009)
The idea, from a novel by Robert Paplow, to tell the backstage story of the creation of Orson Welles’ legendary 1937 staging of a modern version of “Julius Caesar” is inspired. Unfortunately, the resulting execution of that idea is rather ordinary, with its focus on a romantic triangle within the company and overblown portrayal of the great director.

Zac Efron, of “High School Musical” fame, plays Richard, a high school senior obsessed with the theater who stumbles his way into a role in Welles’ production despite his lack of experience. He becomes our eyes and ears during the confrontational rehearsals and backstage sniping insured by Welles’ already oversized ego and his obvious need for conflict. As someone tells the new recruit: “You’re not getting paid anything except for the opportunity to get sprayed by Orson’s spit.”

Christian McKay, a British stage actor, does an impressive impersonation of the large-than-life director, but there’s little effort---in the script, in Richard Linklater’s direction or the actor’s affects----to show the man behind the pretentious act. Too much of what Welles says sounds like lines from one of his own theatrical productions.

While there’s enough “Julius Caesar” to keep theater buffs entertained, the heart of the story revolves around Richard’s crush on Sonja (Claire Danes), the troupe’s ambitious “girl Friday.” Deceptively, the film presents Welles as much older and wiser than the 17-year-old, yet the director was just 22 in 1937. Essential, Welles comes off as a very gifted high school bully who has the power to get away with treating people like dirt.

The best scene in the picture isn’t on stage, but a recreation of a radio broadcast in which Welles shows up late and then adlibs most of his lines---he steals liberally from “The Magnificent Ambersons,” the book he tells Richard he’s going to turn into a movie---as rest of the cast watches with jaws dropped. The sequence reveals everything about this amazing artist: his genius for invention, his charismatic line reading and his bravado personality that dominated every room he entered.

Welles has been portrayed more than 30 times in film and on TV---including prominent portrayals by Vincent D’Onofrio in “Ed Wood” (1994), Liev Schreiber in “RKO 281” (1999) and Danny Huston in “Fade to Black,” (2006)---but there’s still no full-blown biopic of this cinematic wonder. His fascinating life---from child protégé to “Citizen Kane” to the unfinished films and lunches at Spagos---is ripe for a screen treatment, a five-course movie meal compared to the appetizer of “Me and Orson Welles.”

October 2010

2010-11-08T07:42:00.000-08:00

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010)
While this relentlessly clever, hip and surprisingly humorous movie chronicles the creation and formative months of Facebook, it also offers a snapshot of contemporary college life.

It’s more than a comic aside that Harvard computer whiz Mark Zuckerberg (played to perfection by Jesse Eisenberg) creates his first web success---a site that allows students to select the “hotter” of two girls---during a long night of drinking after his girlfriend dumps him. If there is even a modicum of truth in “The Social Network,” the best and the brightest young men at our prestigious universities have less regard for women than ever before; it’s as if the 1960s and ‘70s never happened.

The atmosphere of college life as seen in this film resembles a high-class gentlemen’s club more than a dusty library. I’m hardly trying to preach here---I partied my way through four years of higher learning---but if I didn’t know better I’d think that Harvard was bringing in coeds on alcohol binging and stripping scholarships. At every phase of this film, while the boys are reinventing how the world sees itself and displaying their high-powered, never-at-rest creative instincts, the girls are shamelessly begging to be chosen by one of these future masters of the universe. I can only imagine what a parent of a high school girl headed for the Ivy League would make of this movie.

The smartest aspect of this David Fincher-directed picture is the framing of the story with the two lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg not long after Facebook became a money-making machine. From the testimony and charges made across a law-firm conference table, the movie flashes back to the actual events, revealing how Zuckerberg screwed over the Winklevoss twins (a very funny Armie Hammer playing the pair), jocks who actually came up the germinating idea that led to Facebook, and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Zuckerberg’s original partner and one-time best friend.

Eisenberg, who played the older son in “The Squid and the Whale,” captures the speed-talking, flat affect, dead-eyed, anti-social persona that---whether or not it bears any resemblance to the real person---typifies the nerd geniuses of our time. Zuckerberg isn’t just unlikeable and petty; he’s a psychotic egomaniac who probably would have ended up doing drugs under a freeway overpass if he hadn’t come up with Facebook.

Few films have the nerve to make the lead character so thoroughly unworthy of the rewards he reaps. Yet he’s so hopelessly alone that you can’t help but feel sorry for him. And Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing,” “Charlie Wilson’s War”), working from Ben Mazrich’s book, never turn away from the giant irony that the creator of the most popular resource for connecting people struggles to connect with anyone.

The picture loses some of its focus in the second half when Zuckerberg comes under the influence of hotshot party animal and Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). There’s nothing interesting about this character; he’s pure ego and hot air and shallow as a Kleenex. Yet he pushes Zuckerberg out of the film’s spotlight for large chucks of the film. Amazingly, I wanted Zuckerberg’s hateful character back on the screen.

The acting is uniformly excellent, with the performers actually looking and sounding like students (at least the boys). The one female student who comes off believably is Erica, Zuckerberg’s straight-shooting girlfriend who breaks up with him in the opening scene. She’s played by Rooney Mara, the offspring of the families that founded NFL teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers (Rooneys) and the New York Giants (Maras), who will portray the title character in Fincher’s remake of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” She’s the only coed who doesn’t exhibit the manners of an overpriced hooker.

This is probably Fincher’s best film since his breakthrough film, “Seven” (1995). Fast-paced and thoughtful, impeccably crafted and beautifully photographed (by Jeff Cronenweth), “The Social Network” is unquestionable a film for our times as it attempts to decipher human interaction in the 21th Century. Is it the truth? Who cares? I can’t imagine that the whole truth and nothing but the truth would be nearly as entertaining.

AN UNMARRIED WOMAN (1978)
I’m not sure if this feeling is universal among men, but while I can absolutely adore and admire a performance by an actress, rarely do I connect with it in the way I do with an actor’s role. That bias made the way felt when I first saw Jill Clayburgh’s performance as Erica in “An Unmarried Woman” so memorable.

While she played a thirtysomething married woman living in luxury in Manhattan and I was a recent college grad living along in a small Pennsylvania burg, this singular character had an immediate and lasting effect on me.

It was more than just the independent spirit she displays when her marriage breaks up or her refusal to let another man control her life. Facing her trauma, Erica discovers her inner self, her artistic bent, her personality, all formerly buried in the roles life had assigned her. And she does it all in the incredible vibrant world of New York and the alluring energy the city exudes.

Coming on the heels of “Annie Hall” and a handful of weekend trips I’d made to the city, the film’s atmosphere was like catnip to me. I longed for this exotic world where I could leave my mark as an important writer and reinvent myself into something more glamorous than a reporter on a small-town paper.

Clayburgh, who died last week from complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, never came close to matching the fever-pitched gestalt of “An Unmarried Woman,” but who could have? Writer-director Paul Mazursky fashioned for Clayburgh one of the iconic female characters of an era when feminism was being discussed at cocktail parties and at the PTA.

There’s a scene early in the film when, after learning of her husband’s indiscretion, Erica, confused and stunned, walks aimlessly along the sidewalk until she vomits in the street. It’s an incredibly uncensored moment of truth, punctuated by Bill Conti’s energetic theme, signaling that this portrait of a woman wasn’t going to be like anything I’d seen before.

Clayburgh, in part no doubt because of her illness that she dealt with for over 20 years, never had that great late-career role that would have bookend her early successes. It’s easy to forget that in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, she was among the biggest stars in Hollywood: “Silver Streak” (1976), “Semi-Tough” (1977), “Starting Over” (1979) and “First Monday in October” (1981) were among her hit films.

More recently, she displayed her clear understanding of eccentricity as the happily nutty wife of a psychotic therapist in “Running with Scissors” (2006). Later this month, she’ll be seen as Jake Gyllenhaal’s mother in the romantic comedy “Love and Other Drugs.”

But what Clayburgh’s career shows is that if an artist (of any stripe) can achieve something transcendent even once, they have done more than their fair share for the world. Watching Erica struggle through New York carrying an oversized painting at the end of “An Unmarried Woman” all those years ago---on her own, struggling, but moving forward----it was inspiring and liberating and helped me understand myself and what I wanted out of life. And, maybe even more lasting, it kept me going back to the movies, in hopes of being swept away by the kind of uncompromised, emotionally rich performance Jill Clayburgh delivered 32 years ago.

HEREAFTER (2010)
I was a bit apprehensive going into Clint Eastwood’s new move about the connection between the living and the dead. Not only don’t I believe in the concept, but attempts to deal seriously with details of the afterlife have resulted in such misfires as the Robin Williams film “What Dreams May Come” (1998) and last year’s “The Lovely Bones.” Yet this extraordinary filmmaker makes you care about and root for the film’s characters to such a degree that what they believe becomes believable.

It turns out that this Peter Morgan (“The Queen,” “Frost/Nixon”) script isn’t so much about the “Hereafter,” as it is about characters who heal themselves through their belief in “the other side.”

Matt Damon gives his usual, seemingly effortless, convincing performance, here playing George Lonegan, a very ordinary man who was once a world renowned, apparently authentic, psychic. Since a childhood operation, George has been able to connect with the dead just by touching a family members’ hands. But the burden of the gift has made a normal life difficult, so he’s given up doing readings.

On the other side of the world, in an amazing special effects creation, a French TV journalist is nearly killed during the tsunami that struck Indonesia in 2004 and remains haunted by her near-death experience.

Meanwhile, in England, a young boy is left traumatized when his twin brother dies when he’s struck by a car. The boy’s determination to connect with his deceased sibling and the journalist’s insistence on understanding what she has experienced and sharing that with the world, plus a bit of coincidence (supplied by the master of that device, Charles Dickens) bring these three plotlines together.

Cécile De France, a Belgian actress virtually unknown in the U.S., makes the TV reporter a compelling figure as she leaves her job and puts her reputation on the line to pursue evidence that proves the existence of an afterlife. And as the young twins, Frankie and George McLaren are stoic and intense as they deal with an alcoholic mother and then their own separation. In a smaller, but crucial role, Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron’s daughter) deserves Oscar consideration as George’s surprisingly complex cooking partner.

The exception to the film’s spot-on casting is comedian Jay Mohr’s performance as George’s brother; he seems to have walked in from a different, more ordinary movie.

“Hereafter” isn’t a great film---the pacing, at points, is painfully slow and too much of the dialogue is redundant---yet it may be Eastwood’s most tender picture. For all its heady discussions about life after death, the movie is really about how we go about making sense of our lives down here on the terra firma.

NIGHT MOVES (1975)
Arthur Penn, who died last month at the age of 88, was so closely linked with “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) that you could get the impression that he never directed another memorable film.

While nothing in his career tops the landmark success of the film that, for all intense purposes, launched the second golden age of American cinema, my favorite movie of Penn’s career is the seriously cynical detective tale, “Night Moves.”

Gene Hackman plays private detective Harry Moseby, a former professional football player who hides from his unhappy personal life by taking his cases, at least according to his dissatisfied wife, much too seriously. His latest client is a slutty, washed-up actress (Janet Ward) who hires Moseby to locate her precocious 16-year-old stepdaughter (Melanie Griffith in her film debut) and bring her home. The trail leads the detective to a New Mexico movie shoot where Griffith’s Delly had gone with her mechanic boyfriend (James Wood in an early role) and ended up in the bed of a reckless stunt pilot. She’s since moved on, but Mosby hangs out with the stunt crew, including stunt director Joey (Edward Binns), digging up enough dirt to determine that Lola plans to sleep with all her mother’s ex-lovers.

That clue sends Moseby to the Florida Keys where Lola’s former stepfather Tom (John Crawford) and his coy, mysterious girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren) raise dolphins and run boats and drink heavily. And staying with them is Lola, who immediately attempts to seduce Harry.

The film proceeds to pick away at Harry psyche while disillusioned, amoral characters swirl around him. The script by Alan Sharp is one of the smartest and darkest of the ‘70s while Hackman conveys both the off-the-cuff sarcasm and deep-seated demons of Moseby. Griffith is also impressive as she brings out the troubled little girl just beneath the surface of Delly’s flirty confidence.

Hackman delivers the film’s most quoted line when his wife (Susan Clark) asks him if he wants to attend an Eric Rohmer film with her. “I saw a Rohmer film once; kinda like watching paint dry.” Ironically, “Night Moves” is among the most French of the era’s films, marked by ambivalent dialogue, little action and sharp, jolting editing—Penn could have been considered an honorary member of the French New Wave.
Moseby sums up the film when he says near the end, “I didn’t solve anything---it just fell in on top of me.”

Penn, who started directing on stage and TV in the early 1950s, was behind the camera for just 13 features, including the brilliantly acted version of “The Miracle Worker” (1962), which he had also done on TV and Broadway, the offbeat, cult-favorite “Mickey One” (1965) starring Warren Beatty as a comedian in trouble with the mob and “Little Big Man” (1970), an epic Western with Dustin Hoffman as a white man raised by Indians. His later work was solid---“The Missouri Break” (1976), “Four Friends” (1981), “Targets” (1985)---but never achieved the greatness of his best films from the 1960s and ‘70s.

After the acclaim of “Bonnie and Clyde,” there was really nowhere to go but down, yet Penn held his own before his approach to filmmaking went out of style. As Beatty once said of him, “His intelligence is the factor that resonates most strongly, his intelligence and a lack of interest in pandering.”

YOU WILL MEET A TALL
DARK STRANGER (2010)
No director has populated their films with as many fascinating, multi-faceted female characters as Woody Allen has over the past 40 years.

In addition to the many incarnations of flighty females played by Diane Keaton and the vulnerable waifs portrayed by Mia Farrow, the prolific screenwriter has written memorable characters for Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton in “Interiors”; Diane Wiest in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Radio Days,” “September” and “Bullets Over Broadway”; Barbara Hershey in “Hannah and Her Sisters”; Elaine Stritch in “September”; Gena Rowlands in “Another Woman”; Judy Davis in “Husbands and Wives” and “Celebrity”; Mira Sorvino in “Mighty Aphrodite”; Samantha Morton in “Sweet and Lowdown”; Tracey Ullman in “Small Town Crooks”; and Penelope Cruz in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” And that’s just the cream of the crop.

You can add Gemma Jones to this astonishing list. The 68-year-old British actress, best known as the mother in both “Sense and Sensibility” (1985) and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001), plays Helena, a recently discarded wife of the ironically named Alfie (a rather tense Anthony Hopkins), who is determined to deny his mortality.
When Helena falls under the influence of Cristal, a smooth-talking fortune teller (Pauline Collins, in a subtle, funny performance), she finds a new lease on life in the hopeful predictions, even as she becomes a constant irritant to her daughter (Naomi Watts) and son-in-law (Josh Brolin).

As Brolin struggles to finish and peddle his latest novel and his marriage teeters, Helena regular drops in to tell them the latest inane fortunes foretold by Cristal. Meanwhile, while both Watts and Brolin have their eyes on prospective new lovers, they are shocked when their father introduces his fiancée, Charmaine, a high-priced, amusingly dumb call girl.

Needless to say, bad decisions result in disasters as the cruelty of fate looms just beyond the frame. After 40 films, Allen has made it pretty clear that he believes most people, especially when it comes to romance, inevitable make foolish choices.
“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is one of Allen’s better recent efforts as it explores the capricious way we make important life decisions and the lengths many are willing to go for the nebulous idea of success.

I also liked the film’s European style. It resembles the talky, insightful French films of Rohmer and Resnais, in the way it drops into these characters lives at a crucial moment and then ends without a clear resolution to all their problems or new flirtations.

While it seems counterintuitive to say after listing all the exceptional performances above, I think Allen is often hamstrung by having the availability to cast nearly any star-actor in his movies. A fresh face of unknown quality can be an invigorating aspect to a picture and, in this case, the most interesting characters are played by Jones, Lucy Punch as unabashed Charmaine (replacing the originally cast Nicole Kidman) and Freida Pinto (the star of “Slumdog Millionaire”). Pinto portrays a brainy music student, first spotted by Brolin from his office window as she practices in her apartment, who brings a quiet sensibility to a story that tends to ramble.

But it’s Jones’ Helena that you’ll remember. Not unlike Patricia Clarkson’s character in Allen’s “Whatever Works,” Helena, at first, is a basket case as she tries to understand the end of her longtime marriage. But as she accepts the new direction of her life, she embraces it and becomes a quirky, unlikely affirmation of what humans do best: adapt and make the best of what’s given to them.

TO EACH HIS OWN (1946)
and THE SNAKE PIT (1948)
Watching Olivia de Havilland’s performances in these two films back to back during one of TCM’s actor-themed evenings, along with parts of “The Heiress,” offered a mesmerizing lesson in unpretentious, supremely focused acting overflowing with heart-tugging, but truthful emotions.

It’s hard to call de Havilland underrated considering she won two best actress Oscars and was nominated another three times, yet she never reached the level of stardom achieved by Better Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn or Claudette Colbert. At her peak, in the late 1940s, she was as accomplished an actress as any of them and might have had a more distinguished career if Warner Bros. hadn’t kept her in undemanding supporting roles for so long. She finally gained her freedom from the studio in a landmark suit, but it cost her two years in the prime of her career.

Famously discovered while a freshman at San Francisco’s Mills College by theatrical legend Max Reinhardt, she was cast by the German producer as Hermia in a 1934 staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Hollywood Bowl and also in his 1935 movie of the comedy.

That same year, at age 19, she played Errol Flynn’s love interest in the romantic adventure “Captain Blood.” In 1938, de Havilland was Maid Marion to Flynn’s Robin Hood, but it took David O. Selznick (casting her on-load from Warner’s) to provide the role that changed her career.

As Melanie, the kind, sensible rival of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” de Havilland showed the calm demeanor and emotional range that would mark her best performances.

In the four years after that breakthrough (earning her a supporting actress nomination) she was stuck in more mediocre Warner Bros. fare, while Davis was given all the studio’s plum roles. Post “GWTW,” a time period that overflowed with fascinating female roles, she had one, “Hold Back the Dawn,” playing a wide-eyed schoolteacher visiting Mexico, before she took Jack Warner and his accountants to court. No doubt, she was inspired to seek independence, at least in part, after seeing her younger sister, Joan Fontaine, cast in plumb roles in “Rebecca” (1940) and “Suspicion” (1941), which earned her a best actress Oscar.

From 1946 to 1949, de Havilland made six films, earning nominations for half of them and Oscars for two.

In “To Each His Own,” she’s a small-town girl who finds herself pregnant as her boyfriend heads off to World War I. Though she becomes a successful businesswoman in New York, starting a cosmetic company with her bootlegger friend, she never gets over the loss of her son, who is raised by a high-school boyfriend and his wife.

Though the picture, directed by the underrated Leisen Mitchell (he previously worked with the actress in “Hold Back the Dawn”) and scripted by Charles Brackett (Billy Wilder’s writing partner), is just one stop up from a soap opera, de Havilland’s performance never becomes melodramatic as she deftly shows the intense, all-encompassing devotion she feels toward the son.

Though she won the Oscar for “To Each His Own,” the actress was equally impressive in Robert Siodmak’s mysterious “The Dark Mirror” (1946), playing very different twins.

Her next role was one of the most challenging and ground-breaking of the era, playing a woman institutionalized following a mental breakdown. Her Virginia struggles to understand where she is or who she is as she faces the still-crude methods of mental health practices. “The Snake Pit” doesn’t sugar-coat the realities of mental illness and avoids turning the inmates into cartoon freaks. Director Anatole Litvak and screenwriters Frank Partos and Millen Brand have turned a social-issue picture into a strong drama, in large part because de Havilland creates a real woman whose roller-coaster ride with sanity rings powerfully true.

This memorable run of intense roles peaked with her portrayal of Catherine Sloper, the love starved New York City heiress in William Wyler’s superbly realized, thoughtful adaptation of Henry James’ “Washington Square,” retitled “The Heiress.”

Made up to look plain and severe, de Havilland bring to life this complex character who lives under the oppressive thumb of her cold-hearted father (a brilliant Ralph Richardson) and then is seduced by a smooth-talking fortune seeker (an impossibly young Montgomery Clift). This tragic, stubborn 19th-Century woman is one of the most memorable in modern literature and de Havilland’s performance matches the emotional arc of her heartbreaking story. It earned her a second best actress Oscar, but also was the end of her career as a major film actress.

Maybe freedom from the studio wasn’t as appealing as she imagined, but, whatever the reason, the actress took leave of Hollywood. She appeared on Broadway and then moved to Paris after marrying a French magazine editor. From the mid-50s, she acted in just a few pictures each decade, her most substantial work coming in the lavish soap opera “The Light in the Piazza” (1962) as a overprotective mother and supporting Bette Davis in “Hush Hush….Sweet Charlotte” (1965). In the 1980s, she appeared in a handful of TV movies and the 1986 miniseries “North and South, Book II.”

De Havilland remains one of the few surviving stars from the 1930s; she received the National Medal for the Arts in 2008 and earlier this year, at age 94, she was awarded the Knight of the Legion of Honor by the French government.

September 2010

2010-10-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

HOME FROM THE HILL (1960)
I’m still struggling with the concept that 1960 was a half century ago. In film history terms, that means that a movie from 1960 is now as ancient as a silent picture was when I was in college in the ‘70s. That just doesn’t seem possible.

Looking back at that year’s top movies shows a decisive break from the conservative ‘50s and themes that foreshadow the revolution that was to hit Hollywood later in the decade. The Oscar-winning best picture, Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment,” depicts corporate executives borrowing an underling’s downtown digs for sexual rendezvous and both Oscar-winning actresses, Elizabeth Taylor in “Butterfield 8” and Shirley Jones in “Elmer Gantry” portray prostitutes. In the same film, best actor winner Burt Lancaster plays an evangelist who practices all the sins he preaches against.

More shocking than this overt sexuality in mainstream movies was the groundbreaking violence of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” the picture that created the template for every horror film since.

These movies was released the same year Jack Kennedy was elected president, teens started dancing “The Twist” and Pittsburgh won its first World Series in 33 years---maybe 1960 is a long time ago…..

More old-fashioned but still centered on illicit sex, is the year’s most underappreciated prestige film, “Home from the Hill.” Impeccably directed by Vincente Minnelli, one of the cinema’s great visionaries of the 1940s and ‘50s (“Meet Me in St. Louis,” “An American in Paris,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “Lust for Life,” just for starters), this gorgeous wide-screen, high-class soap opera chronicles the dysfunctional Hunnicutt family, a Southern version of O’Neill’s Tyrone clan.

Dominating the 2 ½ hour film is Robert Mitchum’s commanding, emotionally complex performance as patriarch Captain Wade Hunnicutt, outdoorsman, womanizer and the most feared man in this small Texas town. Though he’s used to having his own way, his wife Hannah (a miscast Eleanor Parker) sleeps in a separate room to punish him for his constant philandering and he’s had little to do with the raising of his son Theron (George Hamilton). While Wade has never acknowledged him as his (bastard) son, Rafe (George Peppard, holding his own with Mitchum) is more like the old man than Theron could ever be.

Even when Theron takes up hunting and chases down a wild boar that is terrorizing the area ranchers he’s a fish out of water; a sensitive soul trying to be a man’s man. The relationship of these half brothers and how they deal with their father and his expectations gives the film a timeless, almost Shakespearean, breadth.

But what really separates Minnelli’s picture from the domestic dramas of Douglas Sirk or “Peyton Place” are its long, exquisitely photographed (Milton Krasner) scenes in the woods outside of town. It’s in the forest, among the wildlife, with their dogs at their sides and their rifles on their shoulders that these men feel most at home. The boar chase may be the most thrilling and frightening hunting sequence ever filmed for a feature, but most of the outdoor sequences create a magical, serene escape for these troubled characters.

Considering that Minnelli’s “Gigi” had won Oscars for best picture and director just two years earlier, it’s odd that “Home from the Hill” didn’t receive a single nomination. Seen a half-century later, with its emotionally searing story---written by the great screenwriting team of Irving Ravetch (who recently passed away) and his wife Harriet Frank Jr. from a novel by William Humphrey---and its stunning, richly colored visuals, the film deserves to be remembered as one of the most insightful movies about family of its time.

THE TOWN (2010)
The plot points of this Boston-set crime film have been used and re-used since moving pictures were invented: neighborhood crime gang led by friends who were “raised as brothers”; the sensitive one wants out of the business; the more violent one sees him as a traitor and blames his new “outsider” girlfriend. Yet all these clichés are made fresh by three superb performances, a thoughtful, reflective script by director Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard (from Chuck Hogan’s novel) and the breakneck direction of three audacious heists.

This is Affleck’s second effort behind the camera and, for my money, a vast improvement over his 2007 debut, “Gone Baby Gone.” Less reliant on plot twists and featuring a more interesting lead character, “The Town” shows Affleck to be a confident director capable of handing intense, fast-paced action and eliciting remarkable acting from his entire cast (as he proved in “Gone Baby Gone”).

One of these performances is by Affleck himself, playing Doug MacRay, a one-time local hockey phenom who is the brains behind a quartet of bank robbers working for veteran Charlestown (an Irish neighborhood) crime boss Fergie, played by an intimidating Pete Postlethwaite.

The bulldog of the group is Doug’s boyhood friend Jem (Jeremy Renner), who is becoming increasingly out of control, which leads to his taking a hostage (Rebecca Hall) after their latest bank job. They release her but later worry that she might help the FBI identify them (despite wearing rubber masks during the robbery). Doug, attracted to Claire during the heist, volunteers to keep an eye on her and before you can consult your “How to Write a Screenplay in 21 Days” handbook they are meeting cute in a laundromat.

Hall, who sparkled as the adventurous tourist in Woody Allen’s “Vicki Cristina Barcelona,” plays the one innocent in the picture, the only unarmed character who offers Doug the hope for a normal life. She’s such an unpretentious, naturalistic actress that her presence goes a long way to make the calculated plot believable.

Renner, nominated last year for his similar performance in the Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker,” exudes Cagney-like zeal as a man in constant turmoil, simmering below the surface while enjoying delivering punishment to those he sees as disrespectful. His small, animated face tells you more about this character than any dialogue. This performance should earn Renner yet another Oscar nod.

Affleck, who has been the poster boy for vacuous acting since he became a star in “Good Will Hunting” (1997), gives his best performance of his career in “The Town.” He finds just the right amount of grit and romantic hopefulness as his character struggles to escape the life of crime.

As a director, he does a great job of casting the smaller roles, including Postlethwaite as the hateful crime boss, TV actors Jon Hamm and Titus Welliver as the determined FBI agents, Blake Lively as Jem’s slutty sister, and, in one memorable scene, Chris Cooper as Doug’s bitter father who is serving time in prison.

Considering his devotion to the Red Sox, it’s not surprising that Affleck stages the final shootout/standoff at Fenway Park, but even as the bullets fly, it’s the small, actorly moments that make this a film worth seeing.

BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER (1952)
This British version of “The Right Stuff” features astonishing aerial photography along with a compelling story of test pilots obsessed with going faster and faster. While not the kind of picture you’d except to see David Lean’s name on, it’s the great director’s sense of character development and eye for spectacular images that elevate “Sound Barrier” above the standard-issue flyboy movies.

Ralph Richardson, one of England’s most acclaimed stage actors who later portrayed Alexander in Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago,” plays single-minded aeronautics engineer John Ridgefield, whose experimental jet propulsion planes push man closer to the unknown barrier of the speed of sound. Driven by his love of flying, which he expects all who are around him to share, pushes his son (Denholm Elliott) to become a pilot, leading to the young man’s death. But Ridgefield barely blinks and immediately recruits his new son-in-law (Nigel Patrick), a war-hero pilot, to become his top test pilot.

While the film has plenty of thrilling and intense aerial sequences, the heart of the story is back on the ground, where Ridgefield’s daughter (Ann Todd, Lean’s real-life wife) tries to dissuade both her husband and her father from pursuing this dangerous dream of the sound barrier. The script, by playwright Terence Rattigan (“The Browning Version,” “Separate Tables”), is smart and adult as it confronts both the positive and negative aspects of these men’s obsession.

This film represents the finest achievement of Lean’s somewhat undefined middle period, after his brilliant Charles Dickens’ adaptations (“Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist”) and before his signature epics (“The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago”).

Richardson, despite affecting an off-putting accent, dominates the film as this father who struggles to show affection to his children but has unbridled passion for his profession. One-third of the trio of larger-than-life British stage actors (along with Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud), Richardson also had an impressive, underrated film career.

For director Carol Reed, he was simply brilliant as the suspicion butler in “The Fallen Idol” (1949) and then played a savvy South Seas trader in “Outcast of the Islands” (1952). In William Wyler’s “The Heiress,” he has a similar role to “Sound Barrier,” the emotionally vacant father who, in trying to control his daughter’s life, ends up destroying her chance at happiness. It earned Richardson a supporting actor Oscar nomination. In “Richard III” (1955), he upstages his longtime stage rival in their scenes together, playing the Duke of Buckingham to star-director Olivier’s Richard.

But his crowning achievement on film was as the talkative, hammy retired actor James Tyrone who refused to face up to the fate of his crumbling family in Sidney Lumet’s nearly perfect film treatment of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962). It’s simply one of the great performances ever put on film as his Tyrone insists on arguing about everything with everyone all day long. His long scene with Jason Robards, playing his alcoholic son Jamie, ranks as one of the acting high points of the American cinema.

Through the 1960s and ‘70s, on both stage and screen, Richardson embraced experimental, existential drama, with film roles in Richard Lester’s absurd “The Bed Sitting Room” (1969) and Lindsay Andersen’s “O Lucky Man!” (1973) and, with his old pal Gielgud, repeating their stage success in a TV version of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” (1978). He and Gielgud even showed up in a skit on “SCTV” not long before Richardson’s 1983 death.

Richardson earned a posthumous Oscar nomination (that he was ignored for “Long Days Journey” is a crime) for his role as Tarzan’s wealthy grandfather in the overblown “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes” (1984).

What made him such a compelling screen presence in a long, varied career was his somewhat off-kilter looks and everyman disposition; he always seemed like a safe, familiar face. Yet he inevitably turned every character he played into the most interesting man in the room.

THE AMERICAN (2010)
The entire script for this chilly, detached character study of a nihilistic professional assassin must have been all of a dozen pages. George Clooney, who stars as Jack, an American hiding out in a small Italian village after an attempt on his life, has had more lines in the opening scene of any of his Coen brothers’ pictures than he does in the entire film of “The American.”

While holed up in this quaint, hillside town, he spends his time pretending to be a photographer, sharing wine with the local priest and getting familiar with a cute prostitute. Meanwhile, his Rome controller sets him up with a female assassin who requires a tailor-made rifle for her assignment. It turns out that Jack is also a master gunsmith. In fact, the most interesting scenes in the film are of him turning out a perfect killing machine out of bits and pieces from a local garage.

Directed by Dutch filmmaker Aton Corbijan, a veteran of music videos, and written by Rowan Joffe, the picture offers few real surprises as it proceeds down an existential trail toward the unattainable; this is Antonioni without anything memorable to say.

Clooney’s Jack isn’t without interest---he’s a darker, more troubled Michael Clayton----but there’s just not much there there. Other than Clooney’s star power and the beautiful Italian scenery, “The American” is so elliptical it nearly disappears.

A PROPHET (2010)
Convict Malik El Djebena barely has time to figure out where his bunk is before he’s recruited by a Corsican mobster to kill a man set to testify against the mob. After much agonizing and hesitation, Malik (an impressive Tahar Rahim) commits the murder, beginning an association with the prison mob and opening the door to all kinds of illegal opportunities.

This French film, one of last year’s best foreign-language nominees, ranks with the best prison films ever made, a violent but reflective study of a relative innocent’s indoctrination into organized crime and a damning examination of the French penal system. A less-glamorous “GoodFellas,” this picture adds into the usual criminal apprenticeship plot line the aspect of ethnic/religious distrust between the Corsican and Islamic inmates. It’s reminiscent of the much chronicled uneasy relationship between Italian and Jewish mobsters in this country or the Latino/African-American prison gang rivalries.

Veteran French actor Niels Arestrup plays the smug, imperious Cesar Luciani, with a stare that can kill, who has the run of the prison but is having a hard time keeping the reins on his criminal enterprise outside the prison. Arranging for day-long furloughs for Malik, Cesar uses him to negotiate deals and take care of outside business, while Malik sets up some money-making operations for himself.

This unusual alliance changes through the years as Malik matures (he’s in for six years) and the Arab inmate population grows. The political dynamics of France, and all of Europe, is reflected in this prison drama.

Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard (with Thomas Bidegain) has created a world so ferociously real that the episodical nature of the film never feels artificial or jarring. The movie manages to be both rich in detail and fast paced as it focuses on the bond between Malik and Cesar. Yet it’s the perfectly measured performances that drive the story.

The 29-year-old Rahim, in his first substantial film role, and Arestrup, best known in this country as the violent, controlling father in Audiard’s “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” play characters that mostly likely would never glance at one another outside the prison gates, but inside the Big House they end up essential to one another as they evolve from master/slave to something much different.

BRIGHT LEAF (1950)
Sluggishly paced and saddled with two badly miscast stars, this story of the rise of the modern tobacco industry is both fascinating and frustrating. Clearly, veteran filmmaker Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) and screenwriter Randal McDougall saw this as better than the typical star-vehicle melodrama and attempt to bring an epic, tragic hero arc to the story. Unfortunately, it falls short of this ambitious vision.

At the heart of the problem is Gary Cooper’s performance as Brant Royle, the son of farmer, who returns to his North Carolina home town years after his family had been run out of town by the dominate tobacco baron Major Singleton (Donald Crisps). From the opening scenes, when Royale comes back to town and encounters his old flame, Singleton’s daughter Margaret (a cool, distant Patricia Neal), Cooper plays the role as if he’s a bitter old man, not an angry young man. At age 49, Cooper had lost his roguish youthfulness that made him so convincing in roles such as “Meet John Doe” (1941), “Ball of Fire” (1941) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943).

Royle’s chance to take revenge on Singleton comes in the form of an automated cigarette-making machine invented by a nervous, talkative Northern (Jeff Corey). Securing financing from his old gal pal Sonia (Lauren Bacall), who runs the town’s (obvious but never mentioned) house of ill repute, Royle and a traveling show con man (the always energetic Jack Carson) take the industry by storm when their pre-rolled, manufactured cigarettes spread across the nation in the 1890s. Little do they know that they have not only created one of the most successful consumer products ever invented, but started the most lethal habit in human history. (This being 1950, nary a word is mentioned about the possible health hazards of tobacco.)

The story is a fictionalized telling (from a novel by Foster Fitzsimmons) of the rivalry between Washington Duke and George McElwee, scions of the industry. In 2003, documentarian Ross McElwee (“Sherman’s March”) made “Bright Leaves,” which references the 1950 film in connection with his great-grandfather’s battles with the legendary Duke and examined the tarnished legacy of the cigarette industry. In real life, Duke cheated his one-time partner McElwee out of his tobacco fortune, but Cooper’s character seems to be a bit of both men.

Near the start of “Bright Leaf,” this group of upstarts is easy to cheer for as their success surprises the big boys, who had scoffed at pre-made cigarettes as a viable money-maker. But then the true nature of Royle (even as Cooper struggles to portray it) comes out. Not only is he obsessed with destroying Singleton but he’s determined to marry Margaret, an uninteresting, manipulative woman, and begins to ignore the business as he focuses on these goals. He quickly alienates Sonia, who long has held out hope that Royle will come to his senses and marry her, and then turns against his partners. Much like in “Citizen Kane,” an obvious influence on this film, the rebellious innovator turns into a ruthless megalomaniac and loses all sense of what’s important.

Cooper lacks the acting chops to make the changing nature of Royle believable; it’s as if one day he wakes up a different person. His idea of showing the emotional turmoil of the character is to grimace as if he just took a bullet to the stomach. It’s also clear that Cooper’s inability to handle large chunks of dialogue is partially responsible for the sluggishness of the film. Especially in the last half, there are long pauses after either Carson or Bacall spill their guts to Cooper and then he responds with two or three words.

Countless actors of the time (I can imagine James Stewart, Gregory Peck, John Garfield or Kirk Douglas) could have turned this rich role into a career highlight. Equally miscast is Neal, who at the time was having an affair with the married Cooper, which started when they starred together in “The Fountainhead” (1949). Their on-screen chemistry is nonexistent; you’d never guess they were involved. The usually reliable Neal recites her lines as if she’s working in a foreign language.

The supporting crew---Bacall, Carson and Crisp---are all first-rate, but they can’t make up for the vacuum in the center of the picture.

BROOKLYN’S FINEST (2010)
Antoine Fuqua looked to be poised for a major directing career after the success of “Training Day,” his 2001 movie about a brazenly corrupt cop starring Denzel Washington. It earned Washington a best actor Oscar and Fuqua entry into Hollywood’s A team. Since then, Fuqua has made three star-driven films----“Tears of the Sun” with Bruce Willis, “King Arthur” with Clive Owen and “Shooter” with Mark Wahlberg---and all have been box-office duds and his latest didn’t do much better, disappearing quickly after its March release.

There’s plenty to like about “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a thorough condemnation of the ethics of that borough’s police force that follows three very different detectives as their fates’ collide. Richard Gere plays Dugan, a burnt-out case days away from retirement, who seems to have little to live for other than his occasional visits to his favorite prostitute; Don Cheadle is frustrated with his deep-cover role in the midst of drug dealers; while Ethan Hawke, burdened with a young, growing family is continually tempted to make off with some of the cash he handles regularly during drug busts.

Each of their stories is compelling at the start, but the details of their lives become repetitive as the script tries to dig deeper into their characters and then manipulates the plot so that the bloody ending of all three tales culminates at the same housing project.

Supporting the trio of stars is the always efficient Will Patton as Cheadle’s manipulative lieutenant; Ellen Barkin, way over the top as a vile, racist federal agent; Lili Taylor as Hawke’s sympathetic wife; and Wesley Snipes, in his first major role since his tax problems, as the charismatic drug lord Cheadle is trying to protect.

The film is well directed and includes moving scenes for each of the stars, but too much of the guts of “Brooklyn’s Finest” plays out night after night on television in the countless police procedurals. In the era of “Law and Order” and “CSI,” the bar has been raised for cop movies and this one doesn’t make the grade.

August 2010

2010-09-02T13:15:00.000-07:00

WILD, WILD PLANET (1965)
and PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965)
There’s something irresistible about low-budget sci-fi movies. How can you not smile at a cast of intensely serious characters surrounded by “special effects” that look as if they were purchased at the local toy store? These two dubbed Italian productions also offer a preview of the costumes, sets and character interaction that became the staples of “Star Trek,” which debuted the following year. The influences are undeniable.

“Wild, Wild Planet” is the loopier of the two, a strong contender for the worst sci-fi film of all time. It takes the entire film before space station commander (played by the lone U.S. actor Tony Russell) figures out the connection between a rash of missing people on the base planet (it looks like Earth but is never identified) and Mr. Nurmi, the scientist running organ transplanting experiments. This madman (Massimo Serato) has gone to the effort of creating a collection of odd-looking bald men, outfitted in too small fedoras and oversized trench coats that hide a smaller, second set of arms, to do the kidnapping. They approach their victims with an attractive, brain-washed girl at their side (she does the talking) and then quickly sweep the target under the trench coat, injecting them with the potion that shrinks them to about a foot high. The why of all this is left to the imagination.

More humorous are the shots of the space station, which looks like the plastic space set I played with when I was 10, and the transportation device, which whirls around the space station over and over again no matter where it’s going.

Inside the station, there are the usual boards of unmarked flashing lights, sliding panels and even a nightclub, a sort of international NASA a Go-Go. And then there’s the very off-Broadway dance troupe, which seems to be a popular entertainment. Apparently, television has been eliminated in this version of the future.

More visually interesting and thoughtful despite its campy title, “Planet of the Vampires” follows two space ships, exploring under the flag of a united solar system group, as they crash land on a mysterious planet. After landing, the crew awakes with the powerful desire to kill each other, but return to normal after being roused from their semi-conscious state. While the crew led by Captain Markary (American TV veteran Barry Sullivan) survives the hypnotic assault, they find a few dead crew members from their sister ship while the rest are nowhere to be found. Not unlike “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” it soon becomes clear that some life form is taking over the dead bodies and won’t stop until every Earthling is a vampire/zombie.

Artfully directed by Maria Bava (who later did the cult classic “Dr. Goodfoot and the Girl Bombs”) and shot in a popish color scheme by Antonio Rinaldi, “Planet of the Vampires” is not unlike an episode of “Star Trek” and also shares plot similarities to the 1979 sci-fi classic “Alien.” If it wasn’t for the bizarre space suits and the diverting voice dubbings, this film might be remembered as an important link between the preachy sci-fi morality tales of the 1950s and the great leap forward in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).

The black leather outfits----zipped up to the chin and featuring high, flaring collars, and topped with a skull cap----make the women look like Catwoman and the men leaders of some medieval crusade. As if battling an alien life form isn’t hard enough, doing it in these outfits should have been a union violation.

Between the Dick Tracy video phones and the all-important meteor rejecter, the film displays, with no fanfare, something nearly unseen in most movies of the era: men and women working side-by-side as equals. While mainstream films were still portraying career women as either wasting time before they find the right man or a complete aberration, once movies went into space, women were accepted as equal parts of the team, just as smart and capable as the men. For filmmakers, it was the only way to get a female presence in these space-bound movies, but it also made a (unintended?) pro-feminist statement.

In “Planet of the Vampires,” the female crew members scream more often than the men, but their professional skills and knowledge are never questioned.

The film, despite its many flaws, most due to its miniscule budget, stands with the best of the 1950 cycle of sci-fi pictures, and if only for its ominous ending, is worth seeking out. As for “Wild, Wild Planet,” with its miniaturized humans and four-armed killers, only those who savor bad cinema will truly appreciate it.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2010)
and THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (2010)
In the first two adaptations of the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s mystery trilogy Noomi Rapace inhabits “The Girl” with a fearless intensity that few actresses could match. Lisbeth Salander is an expert computer hacker with a troubled past who has the survival instincts of a wild animal trapped in a corner. As her sexually abusive court-appointed conservator discovers, she knows how to enact punishing revenge.

In “Dragon Tattoo,” she takes a sympathetic interest in Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), an investigative journalist who is hired by a retired industrialist to unlock the unexplained disappearance of his niece nearly 30 years ago. Eventually Lisbeth agrees to work with him as he unravels a trail of murders that began in the 1940s and may involve Nazi sympathizers, religious cultists and family secrets. Because so much of the investigation involves studying old photographs and digging into dusty company records, these two strong characters are essential to maintaining interest.

The film is as much about their past and how they bond during the investigation as it is about the solving of the mystery. Lisbeth, a lean, dark bundle of nerves, trusts no one and is always ready to bolt if anyone treads too close to her messy past, while Blomkvist is too trusting, even after being tricked into committing libel.

Director Niels Arden Oplev and his screenwriters Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel have taken a dense, overflowing plot (reportedly the novel is even more complex) and distilled it into a fast-paced two and a half hour movie in which the plot turns never seem forced or unrealistic. There’s no shortage of violent, disturbing sequences in this film, but as guided by actors Rapace and Nyqvist, it never feels exploitive or over-the-top.

“Fire” finds the anti-social Lisbeth wanted on double murder charges, when one of Blomkvist’s writers, working on a story about the Eastern European sex trade, is killed by the same gun used to end the life of Lisbeth’s repulsive conservator. Bodies start to pile up as a blond killing machine named Niedermann (Micke Spreitz) takes out anyone keeping him from finding Lisbeth.

In this film, Blomkvist is one step behind Lisbeth, as he reinterprets clues left to incriminate her while attempting to intercept her before the bad guys do.

A new director (Daniel Alfredson) and screenwriter (Jonas Frykberg) manage to maintain the style and look of the first adventure while filling in the details that were left ambiguous in “Dragon.”

Maybe because of the length (each are nearly 2 ½ hours) and the episodical nature of the multi-character stories, they seems more like well-made television than feature films, but that doesn’t diminish the edge-of-your-seat drama and superbly drawn characters.

While “Fire” feels a bit more conventional than “Tattoo,” Rapace’s Lisbeth remains one of those rare movie characters whose intriguing back story and emotional resolve make her unforgettable. The final chapter, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” is due in October.

S.O.B. (1981)
In the past three decades only Robert Altman’s “The Player” (1992) has matched this Blake Edwards’ comedy in capturing the surreal insanity of the movie business. The good news is that “S.O.B,” a free-wheeling, darkly cynical screwball, remains both hilarious and insightful a generation later.

The film within the film is a sweet-natured musical starring Sally Miles (Julie Andrews) and directed by her husband (Richard Mulligan) called “Night Wind,” which bombs in spectacular fashion. The failure sends the self-obsessed director into a suicidal funk and the equally egotistical star into career damage control.

Felix’s failed attempts to end his life---driving through his garage wall and into the Pacific Ocean below his Malibu home---brings three old friends to his side: pessimistic studio executive Culley (William Holden), pill-dispensing Dr. Irving Finegarten (Robert Preston) and his simpering agent Coogan (Robert Webber). While the frenetic story follows the director’s battle with the surly, heartless studio chief (Robert Vaughn) to reclaim control of the film and rework it into an erotic spectacular, the heart of “S.O.B.” is the Greek chorus of Holden, Preston and Webber ruminating on the industry and the disturbing priorities of the film community.

This was Holden’s final performance and a worthy curtain call for this versatile, charismatic star. He died just months after the release of the film when, drunk, he fell and cut his head in his home. For Preston, whose star had waned since his popular turn as “The Music Man” (1962), “S.O.B” led to one of his best roles, as the transvestite nightclub performer in “Victor/Victoria” (1982), also directed by Edwards. It earned Preston an Oscar nomination.

Webber, one of the busiest supporting players of the 1960s and ‘70s, usually played fast-talking, corrupt businessmen, which makes his over-the-top childish agent even funnier. As the three of them drink to their pal, Webber’s Coogan puts Hollywood tradition in perspective: “Standard Operational Bullshit. They kill the poor, sweet SOB and then they give him a sendoff like he’s some kind of saint.”

But “S.O.B.” is overflowing with these types of perfectly measured Hollywood caricatures, including Vaughn, Larry Hagman as a studio yes-man, Loretta Swit as an obnoxious gossip columnist, Larry Storch as a industry-savvy spiritual guru, Stuart Margolin as the ultimate sycophant who as the personal assistant to Sally really wants to be a producer, and Andrews as the bitchy prima donna, essentially satirizing her own squeaky clean imagine. (The Edwards-Andrews clunky 1970 musical “Darling Lili” became one of the signature death-knells of the studio era.)

“S.O.B.” was the second in a trio of hit comedies for Edwards, breaking his run of “Pink Panther” retreads. His mid-career surge began with “10” (1979), which made Dudley Moore a star and Bo Derek an icon, and ended with “Victor/Victoria” (1982), a thoroughly entertaining movie with Andrews as a stage performer pretending to be a man so she can pretend to be a woman on stage. The 88-year-old writer-director hasn’t made a film since his last stab at “Panther” magic with Italian goofball Roberto Benigni as the sleuth in “Son of Pink Panther” (1993).

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (2010)
It’s so rare to see a sophisticated, adult comic drama from Hollywood that it’s tempting to overlook its faults and over-praise it. That seems to be what happened with this film, which suffers from a flabby, unfocused script that isn’t helped by director Lisa Cholodenko’s inability to create any sense of narrative flow.

Cholodenko, as she showed in the equally inconsistenant “High Art” (1998) and “Laurel Canyon” (2002), is more than capable of creating memorable scenes and emotionally powerful acting moments, but falls short in pulling the bits and pieces together into a cohesive narrative.

That said, there is plenty to enjoy and appreciate about “The Kids Are All Right.” The set-up is packed with possibilities.

Nic (Annette Bening), a controlling wife-mother-surgeon is sent spinning into a midlife crisis when her two teenage children with her longtime lesbian partner, Jules (Julianne Moore), seek out the man who donated the sperm used to create them. When he turns out to be an organic-restaurant owner who everyone but Nic immediately likes it just increases her anxiety.

Nic and Jules are already going through a bit of a rough patch and things in the bedroom aren’t perfect when Paul (a jittery, talkative Mark Ruffalo) is brought into their world and upsets a teetering apple basket.

Unfortunately, the plot goes in a dozen different directions at once as Paul sincerely attempts to get to know his biological offspring, Jules agrees to landscape Paul’s backyard and the teens (Josh Hutcherson and Mia Wasikowska) try to establish their own personas. All of these threads feel like retreads from less serious films.

The most off-putting aspect of the screenplay involves Jules’ time spent at Paul’s home, working on his backyard. She becomes less likeable, less sympathetic as her relationship with Paul deepens, especially in her treatment of the Latino worker she’s hired to help her.

It was never clear if I should be laughing at Jules’ irresponsible and flaky approach to life or questioning her loyalty to her partner and family.

Yet Bening’s performance as Nic is worth the price of admission. Even as Cholodenko and co-screenwriter Stuart Blumberg are painting her as a party-pooper who is overly fearful of outside influence on her family, Nic is facing a future of an empty nest and a less-than-committed partner. Bening does an impressive job of capturing both her real fears and her imagined ones.

Her performance culminates memorably during a dinner at Paul’s house. Things are a bit tense and everyone is waiting for Nic is lash out when she comments on his record collection. She’s impressed that he’s a fan of Joni Mitchell, joking that she meets so few straight men who like the singer-songwriter. Then, together, she and Paul spontaneously sing Mitchell’s sad, soulful “Blue.” Bening, who has given her fair share of fine performances in a career than includes a best actress Oscar for “American Beauty” (1999), has never created such a true and telling moment on screen. In this simple celebration of a great songwriter, Bening shows her age, her longing for the past, her inner trepidations about the future and her fragile emotions coloring her relationship with Jules.

Few films could sustain that kind of beautifully realized open window to hard realities, but this picture doesn’t come close. Instead, Cholodenko falls back on easy bromides, and, just like the cookie-cutter Hollywood movies she is trying so hard to distance this film from, puts the blame for problems on the outside intruder rather than facing the enemy within.

THE SCALPHUNTERS (1968)
This unusual Western, Sidney Pollack’s third feature, expertly mixes comedy, action, social commentary and plenty of scene-chewing acting. Leading the charge is Burt Lancaster as Joe Bass, a quick-witted, cock-sure fur trader who forms an uneasy bound with Joseph Lee, a runaway slave played by Ossie Davis.

Bass heads after a gang of Indian scalphunters (apparently, a money-making endeavor) after they ambush a party of warriors who had just robbed Bass of his pelts. The scalphunters are led by Howie (Telly Savalas), a ruthless killer and racist whose leadership is continually undercut by his imperious wife Katie (a perfectly cast Shelley Winters). It’s a testimony to Pollack and screenwriter William W. Norton that they are able to milk so much comedy out the Savalas-Winters relationship, especially after they capture Joseph Lee and he plays them off one another, considering the serious issues being addressed.

But the secret weapon of this picture is Lancaster, who for me is the acting version of comfort food. Just watching this nimble, energetic performance at work, whether he’s jumping from rock to rock as he avoids gunfire or reacting with his darting eyes and toothy grin to a putdown from Joseph Lee is a reminder of what a larger-than-life screen persona brings to the cinema.

The film is loaded---maybe overloaded----with contemporary issues about the relationship between European and Native Americans and the ever-changing status of blacks, all played out on the rocky, desert foothills of Texas.

Davis’ dances the fine line between playing the obedient “Negro” and outmaneuvering the thick-headed whites. Ironically, at the height of the civil rights movement, Hollywood did a better job of dealing with the issue of race and the country’s racism than they do now. In large part, that’s a reflection of an era in which directors and writers had unprecedented freedom to address issues they felt strong about. Today, the central issue is how to make the film more audience friendly.

The next year, Pollack helmed his breakthrough film, the Depression-era drama “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They,” starting a two-decade run that included the popular romance “The Way We Were” (1973), the comic masterpiece “Tootsie” and the Oscar-winning “Out of Africa” (1985).

While there are few obvious similarities between “The Scalphunters” and “Tootsie”---except the presence of Dabney Coleman in the cast---they were the director’s only comedies and, in both, Pollack found a way to deal with serious issues between the laughs.

THE EXTRA MAN (2010)
Few would have predicted that Kevin Kline’s days as a comic star would end with “In & Out” (1997), a finely measured portrayal of a man who, days away from his wedding, is forced to confront his sexuality.

During the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Kline was the subtle, smart alternative to Steve Martin and Robin Williams, with memorable comic turns in “A Fish Called Wanda” (1988), “Soapdish” (1991) and “Dave” (1993).

Lately, he’s turned cloyingly serious with “Life as a House” (2001) and “De-Lovely” (2004), as a dreary Cole Porter, misfired in a goofy role in “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006) and, a true low, co-starred with Martin in a 2006 “Pink Panther” remake.

“The Extra Man” is a return to character-based comedy, but it didn’t last long in theaters and Kline’s role is more of an over-written, one-note supporting part. He plays Henry Harrison, a professional curmudgeon who scratches out a living by escorting well-to-do elderly women to dinners and openings around Manhattan.

It’s one of those characters who at first seems amusingly quirky but quickly turns irritating and, eventually, tiresome.

His co-star is the naturally quirky Paul Dano (“The Good Heart” and “There Will Be Blood”), playing a fired English professor who moves to New York City to become a novelist and, for no good reason, agrees to rent a tiny little room from Henry. Dano’s Louis spends his time agonizing over his attraction to a co-worker (a stiff, rather dull Katie Holmes) and his secret desire to become a transvestite, but he’s so confused he fails to commit to either.

Writer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (working from a novel by Jonathan Ames) have loaded the film with so many oddball characters----there’s also John C. Reilly playing a very hairy neighbor who speaking with a Mickey Mouse-like voice----that they just cancel each other out.

The best scenes in the picture are those featuring Marian Seldes, one of Kline’s elderly “dates” who struggles to stay awake as a strange collection of men vie for her attention. Otherwise, this menagerie of hopeless, pitiful characters ends up being more tragic than funny.

CORRECTION: In last month’s review of “Flame & Citron,” I incorrectly placed the World War II actioner in Amsterdam. The film is set in and around the Denmark capital, Copenhagen.