July 2012

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES  (2012)

     No one will ever accused writer-director Christopher Nolan of making standard-issue action pictures. From “Memento” to “Inception” and especially “Batman Begins,” he has heaped his adventures with enough psychological introspective and Freudian insecurity that to hold their own at a Eugene O’Neill seminar.

     His impressively ambitious conclusion to his take on the Batman legend is no exception—even the brutish Bane, looking like a slasher-movie escapee, spends most of his screen time offering insights into society’s inequities. This tightly paced (even at nearly 3 hours) apocalyptic entertainment is a very fitting, occasionally stirring, final movement of the “Dark Knight” trilogy. Yet it isn’t without it problems, starting with the sound.

      The gravelly voice of Christian Bale’s Batman has always been a struggle to decipher but here he’s a model of diction compared to Tom Hardy’s Bane. Because Bane wears an unearthly facial contraption, his voice is a nearly animalistic growl; I understood about half of what he said (not that I think I missed anything important). Yet it further dehumanizes the film’s primary bad guy—as seemingly indestructible as he is, I never found him a real threat because he was render as more machine than man.

      Though I wasn’t a fan of Heath Ledger’s demented Joker in “The Dark Knight” (2008), he was a much scarier, immediate threat, as was Liam Neeson’s Ducard in the first, and best, installment, “Batman Begins” (2005).

     Saving the film and, more than once, the Caped Crusader, is a sexy and resourceful cat burglar (Anne Hathaway), who not only looks great in the cat suit, but never says anything predictable while staying cool as a feline. Unlike the window-dressing character of the previous “Dark Knight girls”—Katie Holmes and Maggie Gyllenhaal, both playing Rachel—Hathaway’s Selina offers Wayne/Batman an edgy, unpredictable equal who is unapologetically looking out for No. 1.

     But, of course, the point of the film is to complete the story arc of Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, again played with stern detachment by Bale. The actor is most successful as we witness Wayne’s transformation from a depressed, fragile, old-before-his-time former crime fighter into a lean, mean and determined Batman machine.

       The film picks up eight years after the end of “Dark Knight,” which, if you’ve forgotten, ended with the police assigning the blame for the death of false hero district attorney Harry Dent on the Batman (with his consent) and Wayne blaming himself for the death of his true love Rachel.

      Now he’s a reclusive, the subject of Howard Hughes-like rumors (Nolan once hoped to make a Hughes bio-pic; unfortunately, Scorsese’s mediocre version got there first) who has let Wayne Enterprises stagnant. Then Bane, setting up shop in Gotham City’s sewage system and with the support of the usual lineup of rich and influential businessmen, draws Batman back into the light. This calculating terrorist plans the total annihilation of the city (all the Gotham bad guys make al-Qaeda look like grade school pranksters).

      Beyond the “Dark Knight” regulars (Michael Caine as father-figure Alfred, Morgan Freeman as tech guru Fox and Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon), Nolan adds “Inception” stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a crusading cop with a connection to Batman/Wayne and Marion Cotillard as a wealthy do-gooder who helps bring Bruce back into society and the business world. All in all, it’s a very impressive cast with Hathaway and Oldman, as Batman’s unwavering supporter, giving the standout performances.

      The film makes good use of the impressive old buildings and brick house-lined streets of Pittsburgh. In one of the movie’s centerpiece special effects scenes, the city’s relatively new Heinz Field is ground zero for Bane’s evil machinations. (Steelers stars Ben Roethlisberger and Hines Ward and former coach Bill Cowher are shown briefly before the game begins.)

       This extremely dark and dank picture—newly half the action takes place below ground level—delivers extravagant action sequences, many featuring an impressive Transformer-like flying machine dubbed the Bat, while relying on old-fashioned fist-to-face fighting for the important battles.

   While the screenplay for “The Dark Knight Rises” often plays out like a hodge-podge of plot strands and unclear character motivations, by the last act its focus narrows down to the basics: Bruce Wayne’s dark journey into his soul. Without much fanfare, Nolan finds just the right pieces to complete the Batman puzzle, making everything this moody superhero has gone through both understandable and necessary.  

PARK ROW (1952)

     Sam Fuller, reporter, soldier, screenwriter, director, occasional actor and mentor to a generation of independent filmmakers, brought a tough-minded passion to his pictures, imbuing them with a vibrancy and immediacy that has helped them improve with age. At his peak, in the 1950s, he was considered no more than a maker of solid genre B-movies, yet, in retrospect, Fuller’s work stands with the best of that rich cinematic era. A Fuller film is unlike anyone else’s work: they hit you like a punch in the face you’re not expecting. No filmmaker has ever had the ability to grab viewers by the collar and drag them into the world’s he’s created. 

      August 12 will mark the 100^th anniversary of this cigar-smoking, colorful writer-director’s birth, as good a time as any to remember one of the cinema’s true iconoclasts. (For years, Fuller’s birth year was listed as 1911, but most sources have since corrected it to 1912.)

     I recently re-watched his valentine to the early, entrepreneur days of New York journalism, when dozens of paper located on the city’s Park Row battled each other for scoops and circulation. Coming right after his two brutal, uncompromising “reports” from the Korean War, “The Steel Helmet” and “Fixed Bayonets,” the newspaper movie is equally violent as publishers resort to the lowest of tactics to cripple rival papers and editors are just as handy with their fists as they are with their typewriters.

      Gene Evans, who was the stern, commanding Sgt. Zack in “Steel Helmet,” plays the stern, commanding Phineas Mitchell in “Park Row.” This ink-in-his-blood reporter, fired in the opening scene of the film after telling off the publisher of his paper, spends the rest of the film attempting to keep his own startup paper alive while introducing the era’s advances in the industry.

      In Fuller’s version of late 19^th Century journalism, this editor invents the idea of a copy desk, bylines, columns, obituaries and is the first to use the linotype machine, which greatly decreased the time it took to set type (previously done by hand), making larger papers with multiple editions possible.

    Though the movie is occasionally over-the-top corny, Fuller brings out the excitement and intensity of the time’s competi­tion; the director’s love of the business of journalism shines through every frame.  The characters, especially Phineas and veteran reporter Mr. Davenport (Herbert Heyes), don’t speak normal dialogue as much as they give inspirational speeches about the importance of journalism and the legacy of Franklin and Greely.

Fuller’s romance with newspapers began with his first job at age 12 as a copy boy on the New York Journal. From there he worked as a crime reporter and occasional editorial cartoonist for a variety of newspapers during the late 1920s and 1930s. He also began writing fiction and in 1935 published a crime novel. The next year he contributed to the script for “Hats Off.” He continued to sell stories to Hollywood until he enlisted in the Army, at age 31.

     As part of the First Infantry Division, Fuller fought in North Africa and Europe, earning a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.

     Upon his return to civilian life, he wrote the newspa­per novel “The Dark Page” (later filmed, but not by Fuller, as “Scandal Sheet”) and was given the chance to direct his own screenplay on the life of Robert Ford, “I Shot Jesse James” (1949).

      He followed “Park Row” with his finest achievement, “Pickup on South Street” (1953), an intense crime thriller about a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) who finds himself mixed up with Communist spies.

     Fuller combined war and crime and tough guys (led by Robert Ryan and Robert Stack) in “House of Bamboo” (1955), an exciting, violent mob film set in post-war Japan.

In the 1960s, Fuller’s movies dug deeper into the seamy underbelly of society: “Underworld USA” (1961) examines the brutality of the mob and the pointlessness of vengeance; “Shock Corridor” (1963) grapples with sanity as a reporter goes nuts after spending time in an insane asylum; while “Naked Kiss” (1964) takes on the world of twisted sexuality. The last two are among the strangest movies ever made, one-of-a-kind shoestring masterpieces that manage to be both amazing and ri­diculous at the same time.

    After more than a decade of floundering, Fuller finally was able to make his long-planned World War II memoir, “The Big Red One” (1980), an episodical, unsentimental war chronicle through the eyes of infantry soldiers and their charis­matic sergeant played by Lee Marvin. The slick produc­tion values make “The Big Red One” seem less a Fuller film that his low-budget black-and-white pictures, but under the gloss is the same gritty reality and sudden violence that mark the director’s best work. (A recent reconstructed version that comes closer to matching Fuller’s vision than the film released to films is worth seeking out.)

 Strangely, “The Big Red One” was Fuller’s last hurrah; he struggled to find backing for  projects, yet, when he did get a film made, it was far below the standards he had set in his younger days (as his 1989 film “Street of No Return” convincingly proves). The director died in 1997 at age 85.

 His intensely personal work in the 1950s and early ‘60s, plus “The Big Red One,” are ample evi­dence to include Fuller among the finest postwar Ameri­can directors. He once labeled his films “cheap program fill­ers,” but the best of them offer a clear personal vision, fascinating characters and an urgency that makes them both signposts of their era and dramatically timeless.

IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY   (2011)
     One of the most compelling and emotionally draining films released last year was written and directed by an actress best known as a paparazzi-seeking mother of six.

    Angelina Jolie’s acting career thus far (except for her fine work in “A Mighty Heart”) has been negligible, yet her feature directing debut is about as sure-handed and ambitious as you’re likely to see from a first-time filmmaker.

     Taking on the harrowing and complex Bosnian civil war of the mid-1990s, Jolie frames the wide-ranging tale with an unlikely relationship between a Muslim woman and a Serbian man. Danijel (Goran Kostic) and Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) are on what seems to be a first date when a bomb rips through the nightclub; in an instant, a happy Saturday night is turned into a war zone.

     Before long, Ajla is sent to a detention camp run by the Serbs, including Danijel, where, for better and worse, she comes under his protection. While this relationship moves from captive-jailer to a more equitable understanding, it essentially is an extension of Danijel’s conflicted feelings about the Serbian army’s actions and his role in the death of innocents.

    Jolie doesn’t pull any punches and, it must be stated, is clearly sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslims, not hesitating to label the Serbs as barbarian mass murderers. I think most agreed by war’s end that both side were at fault in this horrendous conflict for the heart of the former Yugoslavia, but it is hard to excuse the repellant actions by the Serb army, especially against women and children.

    Considering the power she wields in Hollywood, Jolie could have gotten a film made about any topic she chose and probably attracted big name actors to star. Instead, she chose to make a mostly sub-titled film about a war few Americans care, or even know, about. That on its own is admirable, but she’s also made a terrific film with two unforgettable performances.

     Marjanovic plays Ajla as the modern face of Muslim women—a independent, artistic woman (she doesn’t wear a hijab) who finds herself facing the impossible choice of being raped by brutal guards like the rest of the interned women or giving herself to a man who cares for her, but who is a leader of an army massacring her people.

     Equaling her performance is Kostic as a man whose father is a top Serbian general (an advocate of genocide against the Muslims) yet realizes that his side is morally wrong. His internal struggles lead to the inevitable heartbreaking conclusion.

     Rade Serbedziju, one of the great European actors of the past 30 years, gives a powerful performance as the unflinching father/general, who in one unforgettable scene, sits for a portrait by Ajla as he explains his hatred for her people. The actor is best known as the star of the Oscar-nominated Bosnian film “Before the Rain” and as the spooky shop owner who rents Tom Cruise his mask in “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999).

     I don’t know if this qualifies as an American film or a foreign film (the lines are getting blurrier—Woody’s latest is primarily in Italian), but “In the Land of Blood and Honey” is  definitely among the most intense war films of recent years and should not be missed just because its high-profile director is a somewhat pretentious Hollywood actress.

TWILIGHT (1998)
    When it was released, this stylish, well-written mystery was dismissed as “geezer noir,” referring to stars Paul Newman (then 73), James Garner (70) and Gene Hackman (68). Unfortunately for filmgoers, there aren’t very many younger replacements who could have brought the kind of world-weary cynicism and off-handed humor these veterans bring to their roles, old geezers or not.

    Co-written and directed by Robert Benson (“Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Places in the Heart”) this Los Angeles detective tale owes much to the 1970s films “The Drowning Pool” (starring Newman), “Night Moves” (starring Hackman) and Benson’s own “The Late Show” as it explores the tentative bonds and unresolved relationships even into the stage of life when everything should be clear.

     Harry Ross (Newman), a retired private detective, having once done a big favor for one-time movie stars Jack and Catherine Ames (Hackman and Susan Sarandon), now lives in their guest room and does odd jobs for the couple. When Jack asks Harry to deliver an envelope of money and he nearly gets killed, it reinvigorating his investigative instincts. Soon he’s knee-deep in a blackmail scheme connected to the death of a movie actor who was Catherine’s husband at the time.

    All is complicated by Harry’s attraction to Catherine and Jack’s cancer. Hanging in the shadows is Garner, an ex-cop and former studio security man who also has close ties to the Ames.

     Having not re-watched this film since it opened in theaters 14 years ago, I am happy to report that it has improved with age. There have been few detective pictures in the last decade that were populated with even half this many interesting characters. A young, fetching Reese Witherspoon plays the couple’s rebellious daughter and Liev Schreiber is her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Stockard Channing plays Harry’s former police partner while the always amusing Giancarlo Esposito is Harry’s self-appointed “backup.”

    If the same script had been shot in the 1950s—with, say, Robert Mitchum, Van Heflin and Rita Hayworth—it’d be considered a film noir classic. Half a century later, even with four star actors, it’s a dismissed, forgotten picture.

     The story, co-written by novelist Richard Russo (who also collaborated with Benson and Newman on “Nobody’s Fool”) lifts all the tropes of Chandler and Hammett and the entire history of these veteran performers. While it’s not the most original of mysteries, “Twilight” puts Hackman and Newman together for the first time and Newman and Garner together for the first time, which, for my money, is more than enough to recommend any movie.

KEYHOLE  (2012)
    Compared to most of Guy Maddin’s movies, his latest seems almost contemporary and mainstream. While filled with absurd plotlines and surrealistic occurrences, the film at its core is a simpe, mythical story (from “The Odyssey”) of a returning husband seeking his wife and the domestic life he left behind.

    Ulysses (Jason Patric) is a small-time crime boss who has instructed his gang to meet him in what seems to be an abandoned house. You know you’re in Maddin country when the gangsters have to shoot their way into the house and then Ulysses’ underboss asks everyone to line up against the wall, instructing anyone dead to face the wall.

     Ulysses shows up at the house looking like James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson, but instead of making plans for a robbery, he had his guys dispose of their guns and then proceed to roam the old house, with a young blind girl, in search of his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini, who starred in Maddin’s “The Saddest Song in the World”).

     There’s also a kidnapped young man who Ulysses fails to recognize as his son and an elderly man who is chained naked to a bed.

     Patric plays his role in this bizarre tale with a seriousness that allows the film to get away with all types of strangeness without seeming stupid. At one point, Ulysses instructs half of his gang to redecorate part of the house—and they do.

     The Winnipeg director—part Lynch, part Eisenstein—offers more plot and character development in “Keyhole” than he has in previous efforts. And, for once, the film stock doesn’t look like a pieced-together print from 1917; it’s shot in crisp, classic black and white.

    I’m not sure what appeals to me about Maddin’s pictures, except that he usually finds the most bizarre method to show how strangely unpredictable the world actually is. I never thought about his similarities to the great Spanish director Luis Bunuel (“Belle de Jour,” “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”) until this film, but both seem to have come to the same conclusion that the only way to explain an irrational world is by making absurdly illogical movies.

THE MAGIC OF BELLE ISLE (2012)
    The career of Morgan Freeman is the ultimate proof that talent, and persistence, will eventually be rewarded. No one has been a virtually unknown until the age of 50 and ended up with an American Film Institute lifetime achievement award.

    Starting with his charismatic performance as pimp Fast Black in “Street Smart” (1987), Freeman has evolved into one of the most consistent and believable actors of the past 25 years, giving masterful performance in “Driving Miss Daisey” (1989), “Glory” (1989), “Unforgiven” (1992), “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994), “Seven” (1995), “Nurse Betty” (2000), “Million Dollar Baby” (2004) and “Invictus” (2009). He’s earned five Oscar nominations, including a win for “Million Dollar Baby,” and, he possesses the most in-demand voice in the business. The 75-year-old has made 30 features in the past 12 years.

    In this quiet, reflective indie, Freeman plays Monte Wildhorn, a cynical, heavy-drinking writer who is wheelchair bound and without much hope for his future. He arrives in the picturesque Belle Isle to housesit for a friend and soon his tough-guy act is cracked by Finn (Emma Fuhrman, in an impressive feature debut), the pre-teen, precocious daughter of his newly single neighbor (Virginia Madsen).

     The plot quickly turns cute and sentimental as his relationship with the neighbors grows and he is inspired to get back into writing. There is even a hint at a romantic spark between Freeman and Madsen—has Freeman ever had a romantic interest in any of his films?—but never is developed.

     Rob Reiner, one of Hollywood’s most successful directors in the 1980s and ‘90s (“Stand by Me,” “When Harry Met Sally...,” “A Few Good Men,” “The American President”), had his only hit in the past 15 year with Freeman in “The Bucket List” (2007) and in “Belle Isle” the actor saves him again. Reiner, who wrote the film with Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman, doesn’t make much of an effort to bring any real edge or reality to the film, but succeeds in creating a memorable relationship between Monte and Finn.

TO ROME WITH LOVE  (2012)
     Woody Allen’s annual release (his 43th feature in the past 46 years) resembles a collection of his absurdist short stories rather than a coherently thought-out motion picture.

     He’s taken four dizzy scenarios that all connect to the allure and disappointment of celebrity as it plays out in the Eternal City and cobbled them together in a way that is both distracting and entertaining. Since the filmmaker cuts back and forth among the four segments, I kept waiting for some connection between them beyond the obvious setting and focus on celebrity. None occurs. I think a better choice would have been to present each story from start to finish and then move on to the next.

     I also, selfishly, wish Woody had titled each of the stories to make them easier to write about, so I’ll do it for him.

    The most memorable of the tales, I’ll call it “The Singing Undertaker,” stars Allen and Judy Davis as parents of a daughter who has fallen in love with an Italian. They fly to Rome to meet Michelangelo and his family, including Giancarlo (opera singer Fabio Armiliato), the father who runs a mortuary and sings like an angel in the shower. Even if you’re tired of Woody as a frightened air passenger, an uncomfortable tourist, a critical guest, you won’t be able to resist the humor he finds playing a retired opera director attempting to make Giancarlo a star.

      It’s a wondrously ridiculous idea that is typical of the occasional Allen story that shows up in the New Yorker; the filmmaker and the charismatic Armiliato bring it to life superbly.

     Another sharp commentary on the vulgarities of star worshiping is the section I’ll call “The Unsuspecting Celebrity.”

     “Life Is Beautiful” Oscar-winner Roberto Benigni gives his funniest and most convincing performance as Leopoldo, a dull office worker and family man who one day, as he’s leaving for work, finds himself the center of paparazzi attention. For no reason, the press wants to know what he had for breakfast and whether he wears briefs or boxers.

    Soon, he and his wife are attending premieres and beautiful women are throwing themselves at him. He hates every minute of it, until, well, he starts to enjoy it.

    Expanded, this segment might have been a great film on its own; Allen just touches on the changes that hit Leopoldo’s life and personality when faced with instant fame.

     Much less successful is “The Wandering Newlyweds,” a story about a couple (Italian performers Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi—cast, no doubt, for their perfect names) from a small town who arrive in Rome to honeymoon and meet his rich relatives.

    Searching for a beauty shop, she gets lost in the bustle of the city and ends up stumbling into a movie set. Meanwhile, a room mix up results in a vivacious call girl (Penélope Cruz) having to pose as the young man’s bride in the real wife’s absence, along with offering him some needed lessons in the ways of love. 

    Shot entirely in Italian, the segment has some cute moments but is overly predictable (even in its impossibility) and not very funny.

    I’ve saved the worst for last: badly acted, directed and written is “The Architect’s Regret,” starring a dazed and confused Alec Baldwin. He’s a well-to-do designer of malls who revisits the Rome neighborhood he lived in his younger, more hopeful days. There he finds a younger version of himself (a nervous, bumbling Jesse Eisenberg) facing a dilemma when a friend (a miscast Ellen Page) of his girlfriend arrives for a visit. Monica, an actress, is embarrassingly honest and flirty and Eisenberg’s Jack is immediately smitten.

    Baldwin’s character sticks around even after he really should be gone as Jack’s invisible advisor (remember the Bogey character in “Play It Again, Sam”?), which is fine if the rules of his existence were properly followed. Sometimes he’s really there; sometimes he’s only in Jack’s mind. (To me, it seems clear that the entire episode is actually just a daydream of Baldwin’s character, but that’s never clarified.)

     Beyond the clumsy plotting, the advice offered by Baldwin is so simplistically obvious and the characters are so shamelessly stock that I mostly thought about the other stories while this one was on screen. The dialogue would have been more believable if the actors had been improvising.

     As has been the case during Woody’s decade-long European vacation, the scenery is magnificent (Darius Khondji, who shot “Midnight in Paris,” is back as director of photography) and most of the characters offer a relief from the usual ensemble of an America film. For those who have long considered Allen akin to a foreign director, this film clinches it. There are enough subtitles in this picture to nearly qualify it as a foreign film.

     Celebrity has always been a focus for Allen (“Stardust Memories,” “Zelig,” “Celebrity” “Hollywood Ending”) and if he had stuck with the two well-imagined segments—and maybe found a way to connect them—this might have ranked with his best comedies. Unfortunately, it only gets halfway there.

    

June 2012

 

MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012)

      Only through the very particular comic perspective of Wes Anderson could a story set in the 1960s about a pair of pre-teen runaways remain devoid of sentiment and have so much to say about contemporary relationships.

      Combining the determined silliness of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” with the rapturous earnestness of “Rushmore,” the filmmaker’s latest takes its time, but eventually evolves into a more focused and coherent movie than his recent efforts, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” and “The Darjeeling Limited.”

     The writer-director begins with his usual claustrophobic communes of socially inept people, showing a series of still-life frames that typify the orderly craziness of their lives. The terrain and history of the island on which the film takes place is solemnly narrated by Bob Balaban, looking like a worn-out TV reporter offering dispatches from some remote outpost. Actually, that remote outpost is the world of Wes Anderson.

      The Bishop family compound, sitting on the tip of this sparsely populated island off the New England coast, is headed by a pair of detached, married lawyers (Anderson mainstay Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) who manage their four children as if they’re boarders.

     On the other side of the island is the small campsite of the Khaki Scouts, led by the pitiful, insecure Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton, tapping into his inner goofball). Turns out that discontent scout Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), the Bishop’s eldest child, have been in communication and act on a plan to escape what they perceive as their unpleasant circumstances.

     The rest of the picture focuses on the whimsical adventures of these two 12-year-olds on the run, falling in some type of love and being pursued by rogue scouts, the Bishops and the island’s low-keyed sheriff (Bruce Willis).

     The script by Anderson and Roman Coppola (who also co-wrote “Darjeeling Limited”) is loaded with gently delivered irony and purposely unintentional insight and characters who spill out their emotions without showing any.

     While the film is crowded with sparkling moments of comedy from Murray, McDormand, Norton, Willis and, later in the film, Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman as a sympathetic Scoutmaster and the sharp-tongued Harvey Keitel, it’s the youngsters’ movie.

      Gilman, in his first professional acting job, offers an amazingly controlled and unpretentious performance as Sam, the young romantic with oversized ‘60s glasses and the resourcefulness to match Max Fischer from “Rushmore.” Haywood, also making her film debut, equals him with her cool detachment and confidence that young Sam (remember this is the ‘60s) will keep her safe. As their relationship grows, so do these young actors and their ability to communicate Anderson’s observations on the quirky obstacles finding and holding onto love.

     Much like last year’s “The Descendants,” “Moonrise Kingdom” finds humor in everyday family life and the different ways we all make connections.

ACROSS 110^th STREET (1972)

      I’ve always been faintly aware of this Harlem-set police drama but assumed it was just another slipshod Hollywood depiction of black America. Between 1970 and 1975, dozens of films were released in the aftermath of the surprising (at least to the studios) box office success of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and “Shaft,” both set in the black community starring black actors. Though the interest in films featuring African Americans ended as quickly as it started, the trend resulted in some entertaining action pictures and introduced a more macho, street-wise black hero than Sidney Poitier ever played.

      “Across 110^th Street” deserves mention with the best of the so-called blaxploitation films. Anthony Quinn stars as the racist cop who “understands” how to deal with the residents of Harlem –“I know these people”—but is shoved aside when a daring, high-profile robbery of the Italian mob leaves seven dead, including two police officers.

       Lt. Pope (Yaphet Kotto, who made a career of playing feisty cops), brought in to bring a more level-headed approach to the investigation, tries to work with Quinn’s Capt. Mattelli with mixed results. While these two work out their differences and their investigation sputters, the mob uses more persuasive methods and locates the three robber-murderers before the cops.

     The film parallels the investigations of the police and the mob, showing the corruption and self-interest that undermines both groups. Yet what makes this film memorable is its depiction of life in Harlem.

     Two of the three robbers are men who have been pushed to the limit, frustrated by a dead-end life (Harlem was devastated by drugs and crime in the ‘70s) that creates desperation. For a small taste of the good life, they don’t regret ripping off the mob and the repercussions. Paul Benjamin and Ed Bernard give touching, intense performances as first-time robbers who wait too late to leave town. The exception is Jackson (Antonio Fargus), the stereotypical black criminal who immediately buys flashy clothes, a trio of prostitutes, drugs and booze to celebrate his third of the take; guess who the mob finds first?

     Turning the tough-mob cliché on its head, the film paints the gangster assigned to track down the robbers (well played by Anthony Franciosa) as an insecure coward who turns into an over-the-top masochist to hide his weakness. Also well-drawn is the complex relationship between the uptown Mafia and the black criminals who run the mob’s operation in Harlem. Veteran screenwriter Luther Davis (“The Hucksters,” “Lady in a Cage”), working from Wally Ferris’ novel, finds the perfect balance between the crowd-pleasing violence and introspective social commentary, creating more than a half dozen memorable, flesh-and-blood characters.

     Longtime television director Barry Shear (“Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Ironside” among dozens of others), making his feature debut, doesn’t bring much style to the picture, yet he never lets the film slip into parody or easy clichés that mark most films about race relations in this era.

    I never thought I’d still be discovering gems from the 1970s a dozen years into the 21^st Century, but “Across 110^th Street” is definitely an essential movie of the era.

ROCK OF AGES (2012)
   I know, I know. It’s just a silly musical cashing in on the continued (and unexplainable) popularity of 1980s stadium rock. Yet this stage hit turned movie is such a bowdlerized version of the Los Angeles rock scene of the era that I couldn’t take it seriously even as a mindless entertainment.

    A group of third graders could have pieced together a more original plot: Wannabe singer (Julianne Hough) arrives in Hollywood after a bus ride from Oklahoma, immediate has her suitcase full of albums stolen, meets and falls for an employee (Diego Boneta) of a famous rock nightclub and is given a job at the club. Piling on the clichés, the club is facing financial problems and counting on a free performance by an unpredictable rock star, all while the new Los Angeles mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is leading a campaign to shutter the club. She wants to “return” family values to the Sunset strip, as if the area was ever anything other than a street of vice.

      Before dissecting this sad excuse for a musical, I must admit that the hilarious, unhinged performances by Tom Cruise, as a spacey, comically hedonistic rock god, and Alec Baldwin, as the aging hippie who owns the Bourbon Club (a barely disguised Whiskey a Go Go) nearly make the film worth seeing. They have all the clever lines and offer the only sense of edge to the otherwise bland, PG-13 remembrance of decadence.

     Cruise’s Stacee Jaxx, proudly displaying his tattooed chest and long, stringy hair (he resembles Iggy Pop on steroids), not only has a very angry baboon as his traveling companion but seems unaware of anything other than the next bottle of whiskey and the nearest willing female. As for Baldwin, few actors can deliver sarcasm as effectively; he seems alone in realizing what a ridiculous film he’s in.

     Yet surrounding these two authentic characters is utter nonsense.

     The filmmakers—director Adam Shankman and a trio of screenwriters reworking the stage musical—make no attempt to capture the environs of Sunset Boulevard circa 1987, instead relying on stagy recreations (including the late, lamented Tower Records) that make the strip seem bright and clean, as if it was a hip mall. What’s worse is that they’ve made a movie about the LA rock scene of the ‘80s without mentioning or showing or even hinting at the extensive drug use.

    The drug and music scenes were so intertwined in that era that separating them is like cutting apart Siamese twins. Plenty of booze is dispensed, but the high of choice is nowhere to be seen; it’s almost as if Zeta-Jones’ character wrote the script.

     And then there are the songs. Hearing so many of the hits from that era, poorly sung by amateurs, offers a stark reminder of just how bad the music of the ‘80s was. Bloated, self-indulgent shadows of the great rock of the 1960s and ‘70s, that era’s music was what put the final dagger in rock ‘n’ roll. The only first-rate songs on the soundtrack are Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.”

     Maybe my favorite dumb plot point in “Rock of Ages” is that while the church ladies are enthusiastically protesting a rock club, a few blocks over on Hollywood Boulevard there’s high-end strip joint with women dancing in display windows. (Not in real life, but in the movie’s version of Hollywood.) My only guess is that the protesters share my feeling about the music of Def Leppard, Foreigner and Journey.

THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER (2011) AND
IN THE ELECTRIC MIST (2009)
    You’d be hard pressed to find two films with less in common as far as story, setting, style and mood. Yet French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, who directed both of these, finds the connecting thread: a morally unwavering elder attempting to guide a young protégé. He utilized this device often in his long, illustrious career, including in “Coup de Torchon” (1981), “’Round Midnight” (1986), “Life and Nothing But” (1989) and “Daddy Nostalgia” (1990).

    “The Princess of Montpensier,” his latest, follows the romantic calamities of a young 16^th-Century French beauty set amidst the blood war between Catholics and Protestants reformers. Though based on a 1662 short story, the film features characters imbued with a 20^th Century independent spirit and intellectual curiosity even as they suffer through the religious and political intolerance of the time.

    Wilson Lambert, the distinguished French actor who was superb in last year “Of Gods and Men,” plays Chabannes, a veteran soldier who throws down his bloody sword after killing a pregnant woman in the heat of battle. Wanted by both sides, he finds protection in the castle of the Prince of Montpensier, who in a political arrangement concocted by his father, marries the beautiful, flirty Marie against her wishes.     

     Chabannes becomes Marie’s teacher and advisor and, like everyone else in the film—including the reckless soldier Henri de Guise (a memorable Gaspard Ulliel) and the effeminate son (Raphael Personnaz) of the French queen—falls in love with her.

     Unfortunately, the prince turns out to be the least interesting and most petulant character in the film, which, since the plot revolves around his actions, sucks a good bit of the energy out of the picture. But the other performances and Tavernier’s attention to detail make this a fascinating, if overly long, period piece.

      “In the Electric Mist” is only the second big screen adaptation of a book by Robert Lee Burke, one of American’s finest crime novelists, (The first was the straight-to-DVD “Heaven’s Prisoners.”) His Louisiana police detective, Dave Robicheaux, is a no-nonsense, occasionally violent investigator who displays a keen understanding of people, while constantly reminding everyone that he’s a recovering alcoholic.

    Tommy Lee Jones constructs a bull-headed, persistent-to-a-fault Robicheaux, who in this story investigates the death of a local stripper and the discovery of the remains of a black man killed decades ago.

    Intertwined in these mysteries is an obnoxious crime boss (John Goodman at his slimiest) and Elrod Sykes (Peter Sarsgaard), an alcoholic movie star and his devoted, long-suffering girlfriend (the superb Kelly Macdonald, as memorable here as she was as Josh Brolin’s wife in “No Country for Old Men”).

    While the film’s characters bring out the local flavor, the slick, bright cinematograph seems a bad choice for a story that wallows in the gritty underbelly of rural life. Also, like so many English-language pictures made by foreign directors, the occasional clumsy, overly talky scenes undercut the script sense of reality. Yet the film deserved more than the limited release it received in 2009, considering the cast, the director and Burke’s reputation.

     There’s an oddly fascinating magical realism aspect to the story in which Robicheaux communicates with either a Civil War re-enactor or the ghost of a real general. In other words, this isn’t your by-the-book detective yarn. (Burke’s book is titled “In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.”)

     The lively supporting cast is thoroughly entertaining, including Goodman’s “Baby Feet” Balboni, Mary Steenburgen playing Robicheaux patient wife, the gravelly voiced James Gammon as retired racist cop, Levon Helm as a Civil War general, guitar legend Buddy Guy as a knowledgeable local source and John Sayles as the arrogant, impatient director of the film within the film. The key relationship though is between the alcoholics. Just by being himself, Robicheaux is able to offer Elrod a new lease on life.

CQ  (2001)
     This amusingly insightful and technically sure-handed homage to the French New Wave and experimental filmmaking of the late 1960s might not have made a dent at the box office but is smarter and better acted than most Hollywood films. I’m not sure why this directing debut by Francis Coppola’s son Roman, who has spent his film career primary as a second-unit director (for his father, his sister or Wes Anderson) and screenwriter (the above mentioned “Moonrise Kingdom”), wasn’t the beginning of a productive directing career. (The 47-year-old’s second film is due out this year.)

    In “CQ,” Jeremy Davies plays Paul, a soft-spoken but ambitious American living in Paris with his disgruntled French girlfriend while working on a first-person experimental film and serving as an editor on a cheesy sci-fi flick.

     The sci-fi film’s loud, pretentious director (Gerard Depardieu), who can’t come up with a decent ending, is replaced by a younger, beret-wearing, even more pretentious hot shot (a perfectly cast Jason Schwartzman) whose main interest is to bed Valentine (Angela Lindvall), the sexy star of the picture. He lands the girl but a car accident removes him from the director’s chair.

     The flamboyantly idiotic producer Enzio (Giancarlo Giannini at his best) offers Paul his big break, if he can come up with a decent ending.

    The film meshes a collection of hip 1960s movies, including “Barbarella”

(Lindvall wears the same form-fitting jumpsuit as Jane Fonda and Fonda’s co-star John Phillip Law has a role in “CQ”), the psychedelic female spy film “Modesty Blaise,” Fellini’s “8 ½” and Antonioni’s “Blow Up,” borrowing from those pictures’ style while making light of them. The futuristic film Paul is working on captures the primitive, but flashy effects and bland acting that defined most of that era’s “coolest” movies.

      Davies, a familiar supporting actor on TV and in films (he was the confused son in “Spanking the Monkey), is believable as a talented, inventive filmmaker who is also lacking in any sense of self-worth. At points, Paul loses his grip on reality and imagines himself in the sci-fi film as he falls hard for Valentine.

      Lindvall, in her only substantial role, fills the bill as the cool blonde beauty that was so prominent during the era (Catherine Deneuve, Julie Christie, Faye Dunaway). The scene-stealing Dean Stockwell shows up for about three minutes playing Paul’s easily distracted father.

      Coppola, whose more successful sister Sofia has a cameo as the producer’s mistress, manages to have fun with the oh-so-serious characters of the ‘60s European cinema while exploring the timeless frustrations of a young filmmaker trying to get his vision on film. Clearly, a story about a filmmaking era more than 40 years ago has limited appeal and Coppola hurts himself by throwing everything in but the kitchen sink, but “CQ” (Morris code for “seek you”) is an impressive directing debut.

    Coppola’s second film, “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,” starring Charlie Sheen and Bill Murray, is set to be released later this year.

FEAR AND DESIRE (1953)

     After making two short documentaries, a 25-year-old former Look magazine photographer secured the financing, wrote, directed, photographed and edited this low-budget allegorical anti-war feature. Poorly acted, slow moving and heavy-handed, “Fear and Desire” offers few clues of what an accomplished and innovative filmmaker Stanley Kubrick would become. (Just three years later he would directed the critically acclaimed heist film “The Killing.”)

      Yet this debut feature established a running theme of the director’s career: the absurdity of war. He would expand on the idea in three of his greatest works, “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) and “Full Metal Jacket” (1987).

      This low-budget, black and white film (at 68 minutes and its minimal sets make it seem more like a TV episode) opens abruptly with four soldiers, lone survivors of a skirmish, stuck behind enemy lines. While the men seem American, there are no countries or a specific war mentioned, making it hard to miss the film’s attempt to represent all war, all nations.

    Lt. Corby (Kenneth Harp), an uninspiring leader who gets no respect from his troops, decided they will slip by the front line by travelling down a river that cut through the enemy stronghold. Their plan is somewhat altered when they spot a desolate airstrip and an enemy general bunkered in a small house. While Corby could care less about attempting to kill the general and just wants to escape to safety, Sgt. Mac (Frank Silvera) convinced him that they can’t ignore their duty to defeat the enemy.

     Probably the most interesting aspect of the picture is Kubrick’s decision to cast two of the actors as combatants on both sides of the war. Also of note is the nutty performance of future film director Paul Mazursky (“An Unmarried Woman,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”) as Pvt. Sidney, who flips out under the stress of the situation, deserting what’s left of his platoon. 

      In later years, Kubrick did all he could to keep the film out of circulation, apparently ashamed of this nascent effort. As far as I know, this recent TCM showing was the first television airing of the filmmaker’s debut.

     If “Fear and Desire” had been made by almost any other director, every print would have turned to dust by now. It’s a pretty bad film—even compared to Kubrick’s next cheaply made picture, “Killer’s Kiss”—yet it’s fascinating to see how quickly he transformed himself from a struggling filmmaker to one of the true masters of the cinema.