September 2009

THE BURNING PLAIN (2009)
This is the rare American film that portrays deeply depressed, psychologically damaged people without trying to turn them into sympathetic characters cured by a few well-timed hugs.

Mexican writer-director Guillermo Arriaga, best known as the screenwriter of director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s “Amores Perros” (2000) “21 Grams” (2003) and “Babel” (2006), has penned another interweaving, multi-character story, but without the over-reliance on coincidence that hampered those previous movies.

A Portland restaurant manager (Charlize Theron) who substitutes anonymous sex for a personal life, a New Mexico housewife (Kim Basinger) who feels trapped by her family and marriage and her confused, guilt-ridden teenaged daughter (Jennifer Lawrence) are the principal characters in this exploration into the effects of impulsive acts and misunderstandings.

Two incidents kick start the drama: the burning down of a trailer that leaves two lovers dead and a plane crash that critically injures a single father. But the focus of the movie never wavers far from these women’s state of mind, allowing Theron, Basinger and Lawrence to create vivid, if hard to watch, portraits of hopelessness.

The acting, as it was in his and Iñárritu’s “21 Grams,” is extraordinary. Sylvia, a lost soul drifting through life, is Theron’s most interesting and intense character since her Oscar-winning turn in “Monster” (2003), as she delivers a raw, tough, uncompromising study of sadness. Basinger’s role as a straying wife is less interesting but the actress leaves a strong impression, while 19-year-old Lawrence as the daughter shows a depth of understand of complex emotions that’s rare for an actress so young. This is her first major film role, having been a regular on the TBS sitcom “The Bill Engvall Show” for the past three years.

Joaquim de Almeida, the accomplished Portuguese actor who has had a long American film and TV career, including impressive work as a villain in the third season of “24,” is outstanding as Basinger’s partner in adultery.

Arriaga, who also wrote the powerful border drama “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005)---directed and starring Tommy Lee Jones----establishes himself with this debut behind the camera as a serious, introspective filmmaker who has a deeply felt understanding of women. Already his screenplays have helped three actresses score Oscar nominations (Naomi Watts in “21 Grams” and Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi in “Babel”) and if “The Burning Plain” can stick around in theaters for awhile, it should add to that number.

This is a dark, difficult film that requires patience and attention, but it more than redeems itself by its memorable conclusion.


WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? (1959, TV)
Budd Schulberg, who died in August at the age of 95, wrote two of the best screenplays in film history----“On the Waterfront” (1954), winning an Oscar for it, and “A Face in the Crowd” (1957)----and what may be the finest novel ever written about Hollywood, “What Makes Sammy Run?” But he’ll always be remembered as one of the “friendly witnesses” who named names while testifying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

His reasons weren’t about saving his career---he’d already been blackballed by the studios after the 1941 publication of his novel, but continued to work in small projects and on TV----but because he had grown to hate what the Communists were doing in Hollywood. He broke with the party when leaders of the writer’s branch attempted to dictate the content of his novel. As un-American as it was to punish those who were simply members of the Communist Party, it was equally un-American that any political group was making a consorted effort to control the content of Hollywood pictures. Imagine the uproar today if a large contingent of television writers were members of a rightwing group whose leaders instructed them on how to insert pro-Republican themes into their scripts?

The issue isn’t as black and white as many like to paint it. Schulberg and his friend Elia Kazan, among others, were true believers in the 1930s, who wanted to end the Communist influence in Hollywood not out of the hysterical fear that fueled the politicians but because they saw first hand the party’s methods being used to influence American filmmaking.

That controversy aside, the two-part television dramatization of Schulberg’s sarcastic, cynical masterpiece, which aired on NBC’s Sunday Showcase, is one of the finest TV productions I’ve ever seen. If this script by Schulberg and his brother Stuart, has been made into a feature film, it would undoubtedly be considered one of the greatest of its era. The black-and-white kinescope version (it was originally aired in color), put together for the first time in 2005, has to be considered one of the great found treasures of the Golden Age of television.

Sammy Glick, played with an ingratiatingly self-assured energy by Larry Blyden (who had a long career in television until his death in 1975) represents a side of Hollywood rarely seen up until that point. Lacking in morals, ethics or even a semblance of humanity, Sammy refuses to let anything or anyone slow his path to the top.

As in the novel, Sammy is seen through the eyes of Al Manheim (John Forsythe), who first meets Sammy when they both work at a New York newspaper. Drama critic Manheim is, at first, bemused by the over-eager copy boy until Sammy maneuvers himself into the position of radio columnist and then pitches to an agent a script written by a co-worker.

After he cold-calls famous Hollywood agent Myron Selznick with his movie idea, Al asks him if he was scared. Sammy says he wasn’t, but kept thinking to himself during the call “Sammy Glick Sammy Glick Sammy Glick Sammy Glick.” Sammy is energized by his own ego.

Once in Hollywood, Sammy quickly finds that his ability to talk the talk with complete self assuredness more than makes up for his total lack of writing skills. Al follows Sammy to the West Coast when he sells his own screenplay, giving him a front row seat to the path of destruction left in the wake of his young friend’s sprint to the penthouse.

Sammy moves through the ranks of writers by taking credit for other’s scripts, stealing ideas from old movies and selling out those closest to him without a hint of regret. And he does it all by never writing a word or reading a single book or play.

The novel, published in 1941, cost Schulberg his job as a studio screenwriter and ended his father’s producing career. B.P. Schulberg had been one of the early executives for Paramount Pictures and, from the early 1930s, a successful independent producer. Louis B. Mayer famously suggested to B.P. that his son be deported because he dared write a book so critical of the movie studios. “Where the hell are you going to deport him,” the father of the American-born Budd asked, “Catalina Island?”

It clearly had no chance of being made into a film, but this version is actually the second television version; the first was made in 1949 with José Ferrer as Sammy and, amazingly, Paddy Chayefsky writing the screenplay. In the past 10 years, actor-director Ben Stiller has attempted, and failed, to bring the story to the big screen.

While the production values of the 1959 version, bare-bones sets shot in tight quarters, all indoors (I suspect the original color version looked even worse than the grainy kinescope) could easily be improved upon, the acting can’t be beat. Blyden, who had made a name for himself in “The Bachelor Party” (1957), directed by “Sammy” director Delbert Mann, was never better, showing Sammy as a repellent, but very convincing con man whose unlikely rise up the studio ladder seems all-too plausible.

Forsythe, a slick, bland actor whose biggest success was years later in “Dynasty” and, I guess, as the voice of Charlie on “Charlie’s Angels,” also gives the performance of his career as the voice of reason who keeps asking the unanswerable question: “What makes Sammy run?” But this script and its characters are so fresh and dynamic that any good actor couldn’t help but do great work.

Also outstanding in the show are Barbara Rush as a successful screenwriter who is equally fascinated by Sammy but falls in love with Al, and Dina Merrill as the dilettante daughter of the studio CEO who proves to be a perfect match for Sammy. In a single, heartbreaking scene, Sammy’s brother, played by Norman Fell (later Mr. Roper on “Three’s Company”), reveals his brother’s disregard, even hatred, for his past. This emotional highpoint is set during a chi chi cocktail party at a New York hotel (according to Sammy, “Toots says he’s bringing DiMaggio”) during which the brother barges in and pleads with Sammy to attend his uncle’s funeral.

Replacing a much longer sequence about Sammy’s family in the book, the scene is a brilliant example of what a great writer can accomplish in just a few minutes of screen time. Mann, who directed “Marty” on TV and on the big screen (winning an Oscar), and such first-rate films as “Separate Tables” (1958) and “Dark at the Top of the Stairs” (1960), deserves a good share of the credit for not only getting the most out of his cast but keeping the dialogue- heavy script from feeling like a filmed play.

One of the most controversial plot lines of the novel was the characters’ involvement in the messy creation of the Writers’ Guild, which involved Red-influenced organizers and studio union busters. It is nowhere to be found in the TV play. In a fascinating 2008 interview included as an extra on the DVD, the then 94-year-old Schulberg explains that he eliminated that aspect of the book because he knew he didn’t have enough time to properly explore the complex issue. But I doubt that any TV or advertising executive in 1959 would have OK’d a script taking on the politics involved in the union movement in Hollywood.

Sammy’s and Al’s Jewish backgrounds are also downplayed in the TV drama compared to the book. Studio moguls of the time, most of whom were Jewish, didn’t want that fact advertised, while many in Hollywood felt that Schulberg’s Sammy was a negative Jewish stereotype.

But even without those aspects, this production offers a revealing peek inside at the ruthless way the studios did (and, in many ways, still do) business: the low opinion in which actors, writers and especially audiences were held, the exploitative treatment of women, the rampant backstabbing and, topping it off, the truly scary prototype of Hollywood success: Sammy Glick.


PONYO (2009)
I’m not a big fan of modern animation---if you can even call what Disney and Pixar do animation----but it’s impossible to deny the startling imagination that flows out of the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.

His “Spirited Away,” a scarier version of “Alice in Wonderland,” won the 2002 Oscar for best animation and earning a spot on many critics’ Top 10 lists. I was more impressed with his next project, “Howl’s Moving Castle” (2004), another story of a young girl forced to empower herself to survive a treacherous adventure. Magical powers, worlds within our world and characters who look more frightening than they turn out to be are among the hallmarks of Miyazaki’s films.

His new film follows the very normal life of Sosuke, the young son of a feisty nursing home worker and a hard-working sailor, who befriends an odd-looking fish he pulls out of the sea. The creature, which he names Ponyo, is actually one of a school of big-eyed fish, the daughters of a former human who is now king of the ocean. He comes looking for his lost child but the little one is determined to stay with Sosuke and, like “Pinocchio,” become a real human.

It was a relief to see a sweet, old-fashioned animated tale, minus all those clever asides and comedy club-style voiceovers. The most distinctive voices in the England-language version of “Ponyo” are Betty White, Lily Tomlin and Cloris Leachman as residents of the nursing home.


TAKING WOODSTOCK (2009)
Ang Lee’s latest picture explores the coming of age of the gay son of a Jewish couple who run a dumpy hotel in upstate New York. Elliot, a nerdy interior designer and wannabe painter is helping out his parents for the summer as they face foreclosure. Then he reads about a concert promoter desperately looking for a site for a rock ‘n’ roll festival. Elliot meets with Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), the main force behind the concert that became known as “Woodstock” and his life changes forever.

This episodical, scattershot movie, based on the real-life Elliot’s book, attempts to humanize the famous event by focusing on Elliot, the organizers of the festival who make his parent’s’ El Monaco motel their headquarters and the oddball characters of White Lake, N.Y. It works for awhile but once the concert begins, this approach runs out of steam---as an audience you feel cheated that after all the build up you don’t get to experience the show.

Demetri Martin, a standup and comedy writer, isn’t much of an actor but he brings a clumsy, wide-eyed innocence to the role and turns out to be about the only believable character in the movie. Otherwise, Lee and longtime screenwriter James Schamus populate “Taking Woodstock” with stock characters, including a wacked-out Vietnam vet (Emile Hirsch), hippie-hating locals and overbearing, clueless parents. (Elloit’s mother, played by British actress Imelda Staunton, is downright evil in her attempt to control the life of her son and husband.) The film also milks some easy laughs out of a cross-dressing ex-Marine (Liv Schreiber) who takes charge of security.

The film’s best moments come when Elliot attempts to get to the show, just over the hill at the dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur (amusingly played by Eugene Levy). He drops acid with a laid-back couple from the West Coast, slides in the mud with the Vietnam vet and gives us a ground level view of the mass of youth people streaming into the festival. In the background, Richard Havens, Canned Heat, Janis Joplin and others can be heard, but neither Elliot nor filmgoers ever see the show.

It’s a disappointingly slight film from one of the smartest and most successful directors in Hollywood. If you long to recall the festival during its 40th anniversary year, catch the new documentary directed by two-time Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple (“Harlan County USA,” “American Dream”) in which she interviews those who were there----on stage, in the audience and behind the scenes. “Woodstock: Then and Now,” which aired recently on PBS, offers an interesting retrospective on this landmark event and comes much closer to the heart of the matter than Ang Lee’s film ever does.


THE LAST FRONTIER (1955)
I’ve extolled the underrated directing skills of Anthony Mann many times in this space, but with each film of his I see I’m impressed all over again. Here he takes what could have been a forgettable B-western and turns it into a tough-minded, clear-eyed study of how pettiness and racism shaped the way the West was “won.”

The well-worn scenario (by Philip Yordan and Russell S. Hughes from Richard Emery Roberts’ novel) focuses on a vigilant, self-righteous colonel (Robert Preston) determined to annihilate the Indians remaining in the Oregon territory, ignoring the more measured approached urged by Jed (Victor Mature at his scene-chewing best), an experienced, savvy but ill-mannered and undisciplined scout.

As they clash over the colonel’s plans to send all the fort’s troops out to confront the Indian nation on the frontier, Jed is putting the moves on the commander’s discontented wife (a startling young and blonde Anne Bancroft). Also in the fine supporting cast is Guy Madison as the young sergeant who is amused by Jed and supports him against the egomaniacal colonel, and James Whitmore as Jed’s loyal sidekick.

Not only is the pictured filled with fascinating characters with all sorts of psychological problems, but Mann and his cinematographer, William Mellor, capture the unspoiled beauty of the heavily wooded terrain and find ways to keep things visual interesting inside the confines of the fort, all in gorgeous CinemaScope. When Jed and the colonel’s right-hand man engaged in an epic fistfight, Mann shoots most of it from the ceiling of the room (a trick I don’t think I’ve ever seen) and then from the rooftops once the brawl continues outdoors.

“The Last Frontier” is a smart, entertaining little Western, in a large part because a master filmmaker was at the helm.


WENDY AND LUCY (2008)
This low-key character study is exactly the kind of anti-Hollywood movie I should love. The introspective, rather depressing story finds a young woman (Michelle Williams) and her dog midway through their road trip to Alaska, a journey interrupted when her car breaks down in a small, bleak Oregon town. Then, while Wendy deals with a shoplifting charge, Lucy the dog runs off.

That’s about as complicated as this film gets. Not much else happens beyond Wendy’s repeated calls to the pound and her discussions with a kind, elderly Walgreen’s security guard.

With the pacing of a slow-melting glacier, the movie digs into Wendy’s state of mind as she faces one crisis after another (turns out her car is busted beyond repair) as she attempts to restart her life. Willliams, best know as the frustrated wife of Heath Ledger’s character in “Brokeback Mountain,” does her best to wring the most out of this rather flat character, but director Kelly Reichardt and writer Jonathan Raymond (they teamed for another recent indie favorite “Old Joy”) has given her little to work with.

Too often, indie filmmaking style consists of interminable shots of inanimate objects or characters walking in the distance and an adherence to the mundane rituals of life. At some points, “Wendy and Lucy” plays like a parody of this type of movie, insisting on rejecting all conventions of Hollywood storytelling. But, on the other hand, there’s not a single special effect, car chase or character with super powers, so why am I complaining.


INFORMANT! (2009)
Someone once said, I’m sure, that casting is 90 percent of making a good movie. It’s certainly true in this cockeyed comedy telling of the true story of an Archer Daniels Midland executive turned FBI informant. While Matt Damon has the Midwest chirpy niceness down pat as his Mark Whitacre attempts to be the best spy the bureau has ever recruited, he plays the deadpan reading of the role way too close to the vest. It’s all played as farce as the seemingly naïve, goodhearted Whitacre turns out to be a pathological liar. But as his story slowly deconstructs to the frustration of two trusting FBI agents, the film never builds up enough energy to be much more than mildly amusing.

Director Steven Soderbergh clearly wanted the corn-fed, boyish looks that Damon brings to the role, but other Soderbergh regulars Brad Pitt or George Clooney (or maybe Sam Rockwell) would have been better fits for the film. It desperately needs their quirkiness to hot wire the straightforward script and offer some contrast to the equally flat performance by Scott Bakula (star of the early ‘90s TV series, “Quantum Leap”) as Whitacre’s FBI handler. I could see Robert De Niro or Alec Baldwin bringing this character to life and offering a real comic jolt to the film.

Somewhere there’s a funny movie in this true story of an unlikely whistle blower and equally unlikely blue-collar thief who ends up making both his bosses at the powerful conglomerate and the FBI looking like fools.

Beyond the casting, Soderbergh worst decision was utilizing a voice-over throughout the film in which the audience is subjected to Whitacre’s inane observations and mundane thoughts. At first it’s slightly amusing to hear how dorky this successful businessman is, but it quickly becomes diverting and unnecessarily cruel.

For Soderbergh, this is the sixth film he’s directed in less than three years (including the two-part, four-hour plus “Che”) but nothing in that period approaches the quality of work he did at the turn of the century. No filmmaker in recent years has matched his three-year output of “Out of Sight” (1998), “Limey” (1999), “Erin Brockovich” (2000) and “Traffic” (2000). But even if he’s making misfires such as “Informant!” I prefer a director who keeps cranking them out, much like Woody Allen and the Coen brothers, to the “artistes” who take years between projects. A failure by a first-rate director is much preferred to silence.

August 2009

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009)
Quentin Tarantino’s films----all seven of them---are energized, in large part, by his willingness to toss aside traditional movie storytelling methods, substituting a style that resembles a collage of vaguely connected ideas. Every finished picture looks to me as if the eccentric writer-director has taken three or four or more scenarios, some that could have been developed into separate films, and found a way to force them together. Sometimes the pieces barely fit together (“Jackie Brown,” “Death Proof” and both parts of “Kill Bill”), sometimes they fit well enough (“Reservoir Dogs”) and sometimes the parts are so fascinating that not fitting is barely an issue (“Pulp Fiction”).

In his latest cinematic extravaganza, Tarantino has tied three leisurely paced, superbly written and directed set pieces together with an honest to God theme: Jews kill Nazis in World War II. But please don’t bring the kids for a history lesson; this is World War II as a fantasy revenge story, a brazenly comical and bloody reimagining of how the war turned out, filled with first-rate performances (something you don’t expect in a Tarantino film) and intense, savage action, not to mention a primer on Nazi propaganda filmmaking.

The roguish title (taken from a correctly spelled 1978 Italian film) refers to a ragtag band of soldiers----dressed as civilians----recruited to act on their own to kill as many Nazis as they can behind the front lines in occupied France. Most are Jewish, one is a renegade German solider and all are chomping at the bit to not just kill but brutalize and intimidate the Nazi army. Their commander is Lt. Aldo Raine (sounds like Aldo Ray, one of many movie reference), a quick-witted Southerner who demands, owing to his Native American background, every dead Nazi be scalped. That’s just one of the many ways the film humiliates and terrorizes the Nazis----defeat and death wasn’t nearly good enough for those bastards, Tarantino is saying, we need to revisit this stage and really put the hammer to them.

The Nazi-killing Basterds slip into the background during the second half of the film, as a young Jewish woman (superbly portrayed by Mélanie Laurent), who escaped while her family was murdered and now runs a Paris movie theater, plots her revenge against the hierarchy of the Nazi command. In the end, it’s all about the power of the cinema to make a difference. (Heck, even a film critic turned soldier gets into the act.)

Smirking and squinting through the entire operation is the fearless Aldo, played to near perfection by Brad Pitt. He’s crazy, impulsive and having the time of his life killing Nazis. As much as I’ve been bored by the recent dramatic acting of Pitt (“Babel,” “Benjamin Button”), his comedy chops are better than ever (here and his spasmodic health club worker in “Burn After Reading”).

Yet the performance you won’t forget is given by little-known Austrian actor Christoph Waltz as the ever-smiling, talkative, cunning and ruthless SS officer Col. Hans Landa. In the mesmerizing opening sequence, Waltz’s Landa visits a dairy farmer who he suspects is hiding Jewish neighbors. The well-mannered Landa calmly discusses the farmer’s milk, his family, his recollections of the Jewish family he’s pursuing, all as a psychological battle to squeeze out the information he’s sure the farmer has. If only for that scene, Waltz’s performance would be amazing, but he keeps turning up and adding layers to this toxic mix of amused superiority and pure evil. It is far and away the best performance I’ve seen so far this year.

“Inglourious Basterds” isn’t for everyone. Beyond the usual Tarantino indulgences----cartoonish characters (truly weird are Mike Myers as an English general and Rod Taylor as a spooky Winston Churchill), long discussions about trivial subjects, glacier-like pacing and, of course, plenty of spurting blood---you have to accept the fact that he’s rewritten the story of World War II to accommodate his scenario. Yet seen simply as an action adventure war film, it’s a thoroughly entertaining movie and easily Tarantino’s best film since “Pulp Fiction.”


THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH (2009) and WONDER BOYS (2000)
While I’m not a huge admirer of Michael Chabon’s novel---it’s a good debut but with all the shortcomings you’d expect from a writer just out of college----I was taken aback by the wholesale changes to “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” made by director-screenwriter Rawson Marshall Thurber (“Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story”). In an interview on the DVD, Chabon says he gave his blessing to Thurber’s rewrite, but he also admits this was the fourth or fifth attempt to bring the book to the screen since it was published in 1988. He was probably just relieved to get it over with.

Most egregious to me is the elimination of the book’s most colorful character, Arthur Lecomte, an unstoppable party animal who’s in love with the book’s narrator, Art Bechstein. Elements of the character are incorporated into another friend of Art’s, Cleveland, but all that does is make Cleveland less believable; he ends up carrying too much of the thematic and symbolic load. Art’s girlfriend (needless to say, the recent University of Pittsburgh grad struggles with his sexual identity), the quirky, devoted Phlox, for no good reason, has been rewritten for the film into a shrew and very annoying minor character (played by Mena Suvari).

Yet even putting the book aside, the film doesn’t offer much of interest; the story is softened by the passage of time and the actors seem uncertain about what to do with their flat, predictable characters.

Twenty years ago, tales of binge drinking, gay sex and a bi-sexual protagonist was edgy and controversial. Now it seems like an indie film cliché. Amazingly, as filmed, the story feels so wholesome and ordinary that I can’t believe Chabon didn’t engage in some binge drinking over the results.

Art (Jon Foster, who played a similar type in “The Door in the Floor”) decides to have fun during the summer (of 1983) after graduation and finds it when he meets a gregarious couple, Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard) and Jane (Sienna Miller). Art falls for both of them, but the film turns the homosexual angle into something of a lark and puts the emphasis on the bland Art and the blander Jane. The liveliest scenes in the movie involve Art’s mobster father, played by a very scary, very convincing Nick Nolte.

The film makes some use of the old neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, but most of the film could have taken place anywhere, despite the title.

Director Curtis Hanson’s take on Chabon’s “Wonder Boys” is a funnier, more insightful picture, populated with interesting, believable characters. When I saw the film during its theatrical run in 2000, I disliked it, finding both the socially backward, emotionally immature college student (Tobey Maguire) and the indulgent, dope-smoking professor-novelist (Michael Douglas) nothing more than literary devices. They still are, but seeing it again recently, I appreciated the literate, witty script (by Steve Kloves, who went on to do most of the “Harry Potter” films) and the wonderful supporting players. Robert Downey Jr. is a hoot as the professor’s gay book editor who brings a transvestite to the book fare being held at Pitt. Also memorable are Rip Torn as an egotistical novelist, Frances McDormand as the dean of the English department and Prof. Tripp’s mistress, Richard Thomas as her husband and president of the school who’s obsessed with Marilyn Monroe and Katie Holmes as a student who keeps trying to seduce her professor.

I must admit that when I saw the film nine years ago, Douglas’ Tripp came off like a pitiful jackass----an old guy trying to be cool. Now that I’m older than the character, I find him more believable, entertaining and even sympathetic. What that means, I don’t think I want to know.


JULIE AND JULIA (2009)
This entertaining, but forgettable movie intermingles a sweetly amusing valentine to the iconic cooking writer and TV personality Julia Child with an equally lightweight story of an unfulfilled 30-year-old woman who uses Child’s cookbook to regain a sense of herself.

Child, as impersonated by Meryl Streep, comes off exactly as she did in her popular cooking show: an unabashed, uninhibited eccentric who above all else loved food. Unfortunately, she seems about as real as an animated character. Writer-director Nora Ephron efforts to make Streep tower over others in the film (Child was 6 foot 2), shooting from odd angles and placing her in scaled-down sets, adds to the fairy-tale feeling of the film and the one-dimensional portrait of Child. Too often, Streep’s Child reminded me of Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings.”

Stanley Tucci, who, in a juicier role, was Streep’s able assistant in “The Devil Wears Prada,” here plays Child’s husband Paul, an American diplomat. He’s given little to do, but in an odd aside, his character is recalled to Washington at the height of McCarthyism and his loyalty questioned. The whole episode seems completely out of place in this story.

But for all its faults, Child’s part of the film----mostly set in Paris in the 1940s and ‘50s as she and a pair of friends toil away at the French cookbook that would make her famous----shines compared to the dreary, clichéd world of Julie Powell. This discontent New Yorker, circa 2004, working in a tedious government job, decides to cook through Child’s recipes in 365 days. And, of course, blog about it. The crazy project results in frustration and domestic problems, but mostly great food and an improved self worth. Amy Adams as Julie pulls out all her charm and pluckiness to win us over, but her tale is so predictable and artificially feel-good that I never could build up much interest in her.

At one point, Julie and husband Eric (Chris Messina) are seen enjoying Dan Aykroyd’s hilarious imitation of Child from “Saturday Night Live.” If only this film had gone beyond the insight of that comic moment and told us something about this famous and influential woman. At least, I wish Ephron had found a better way to explain Child’s importance in the world of food.


BAD GIRL (1931)
This simple story of a young couple who meet cute and then struggle to hold on to their love oozes with the bleak, sorrowful mood of the country during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, it’s more interesting as a time capsule than it is as a film.

Frank Borzage, who won the best director Oscar for this movie, starts out making an ahead-of-its-time statement about the mistreatment of women, as Dorothy insults every man who tries to make time with her. We see various men, including her supervisor, attempt to “date” her, but she’s not interested in guys who are just after “one thing.” But just when you think you’re about to watch the story of a liberated, Depression-era woman, she falls for Eddie and “Bad Girl” becomes a sentimental love story.

It takes an interesting turn when Dorothy’s brother throws her out of the house because she was at Eddie’s until 4 a.m., assuming she has ruined the family name. But moral issues are quickly dispensed with and the picture becomes a contrived melodrama. In a drawn-out, silly plotline, both Eddie and Dorothy believe the other doesn’t really want the baby they are about to have.

James Dunn, who 17 years later would win an Oscar as the alcoholic father in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” plays Eddie as a diffident, inexplicably bitter man, while Sally Eilers supplies the real energy to the proceedings as Dorothy. Both actors were career supporting players, but in “Bad Girls” they work well as sincere, sympathetic stars.

Not only did Borzage win an Oscar (over far superior work by King Vidor in “The Champ” and Josef von Sternberg in “Shanghai Express”) but the film was a best picture nominee (losing to “Grand Hotel”) and screenwriter Edwin Burke won for his adaptation.


LORNA’S SILENCE (2009)
This Belgian film doesn’t make for a pleasant evening at the cinema. But sometimes, believe it or not, movies are worth seeing because they illuminate a part of the world we don’t know much about. That remains the overriding concern of the best filmmakers of Europe, which includes brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, writer-directors best known for “Rosetta (1999) and “The Child” (2004). Their latest may be their most impressive, offering a look at the sleazy, dangerous world involving the buying and selling of residency papers. The film received the best screenplay award at the 2008 Cannes film festival.

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is an Albanian immigrant barely tolerating her drug-addicted Belgium husband (Jérémie Renier), who was paid to marry her so she could secure legal status in the country. Her taxi-driving partner has already arranged for her to marry a Russian man, so he can become eligible for residency and is anxious for a quick ending to her current marriage. This plan starts to fall apart when Lorna develops sympathy for her temporary husband after he shows determination to break his habit.

The characters of “Lorna’s Silence” aren’t very sympathetic, but their plights as they grind out joyless livings with one foot in the crime world, has become a universal problem that can’t be ignored. As Lorna, Dobroshi, an inexperienced Albanian actress, gives a tough, unsettling performance revealing the humanity beneath her criminal, callous surface. Nearly as impressive is Renier, who also played a druggie in “In Bruges,” as the razor-thin heroin addict who desperately wants a new life.

I’m unaware of the politics of the Dardenne brothers, but one of the strengths of this film is that it doesn’t ask you to feel one way or another on the immigration policies that have created this underworld. Without any adornment, it offers a glimpse at the desperate lives millions across Europe are living.


NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH (2008)
Writer-director, and former journalist, Rod Lurie has taken the basic outline of the Judith Miller-Valerie Plame imbroglio----turning up the melodramatic volume a bit----and fashioned an uncompromising study of the on-going threat to the First Amendment.

This being a Hollywood film, the issues become less subtle than their real life counterparts, especially when it comes to the picture’s hero, political journalist Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale). Unlike the New York Times’ Miller, Rachel is presented as a writer without an agenda or questionable connections to the administration. And unlike the real-life controversy, the film’s reporter actually writes the story that lands her in jail. In the movie, Rachel reports that an uncover CIA agent’s report on Venezuela was ignored before the president ordered air strikes and, citing an unnamed source, names the agent.

Beckinsale, the slight British actress who has become an unlikely sci-fi action star (the “Underworld” series), convincingly portrays this ambitious newspaper reporter who finds herself in the middle of a political power play, and pays a high price to maintain her journalistic integrity. By refusing to reveal her source she’s doing the right thing, but archaic laws are utilized to punish her.

Alan Alda plays her attorney, an upscale First Amendment specialist who at first seems more concerned with her wardrobe than the case but ends up becoming her staunchest ally.

The Plame character, Erica Van Doren, played by Vera Farmiga (the girlfriend in “The Departed”) with her usual clenched intensity, also is very easy to hate at first but ultimately gains sympathy as she faces untenable choices.

Movie critic turned filmmaker Lurie has made some heavy-handed political movies (“The Contender” and the polemic “Deterrence”) but here he’s written sympathetic, believable characters and put them in very real, stressful circumstances. There’s no need to fabricate crazy scenarios (as in his previous films) to examine the corruption of American politics and government---just turn on the evening news.

While lacking both the thriller energy of “Body of Lies” and that film’s big-picture interest in the future of journalism, “Nothing But the Truth” offers a very personal and poignant look at the costs journalists often pay to stand up to a power-abusing government.


WORLD’S GREATEST DAD (2009)
Don’t be fooled by the title or the fact that the movie stars Robin Williams: This is an unpleasant, irrational picture about a sexually perverted teen and his inept father who lies his way to fame. Not exactly the family film the title implies. And all attempts at dark humor or sarcasm fall victim to the jackhammer-like touch of writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait, longtime standup and friend of Williams.

A miscast Williams plays Lance Clayton, the single parent of a pornography-obsessed, hate-spewing, ignorant son who ends up accidentally killing himself (trust me, you really don’t want to know the details). His father, a high-school English teacher, attempts to give his son some dignity he never had when alive and composes a suicide note for him, painting a picture of a depressed, poetic, lost soul who was misunderstood by everyone. The rest of the film plays out accordingly: the vile boy becomes beloved by his former classmates and teachers as Lance fabricates a journal and encourages the fake image of his dead son he’s created.

Some critics have applauded the film as a comedic indictment of the culture of over-praising those who die young. But the son is depicted as so repulsive (Hitler was better liked than this kid) that Bobcat’s points are lost in the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.

Lance is a childish, scared rabbit of a man who struggles to carry on a conversation with fellow teachers. He’s such a sad excuse for an adult that it’s pretty clear why his son turned out to be such a social outcast. But it’s more than the character’s flaws that sink this film and performance. Half the time, Williams looks totally confused, expressing emotions that are out of place and unconnected to what the other characters are saying. Motivations change drastically from scene to scene and no one seems to be listening to what anyone else is saying.

“World’s Greatest Dad” makes most straight-to-DVD films, or even recent Williams bombs such as “Patch Adams,” “Bicentennial Man” and “Jakob the Liar,” play like Oscar contenders, so I have no idea how it rated a theatrical release. In fact, I can’t understand why Williams didn’t have all the prints destroyed. It’s really that bad.


SURVEILLANCE (2009)
Unlike Sofia Coppola, whose films bear little resemblance to her father’s, Jennifer Lynch is clearly a disciple of her strange, brilliant father.

Her second movie comes 16 years after her controversial debut “Boxing Helena,” which gained more fame in court than on the screen because of a legal battle between the studio and Kim Basinger, the film’s original star. The picture told the bizarre story of a surgeon who amputates the limbs of the woman he’s in love with. Considering the high-profile critical and box office failure of “Boxing Helena,” it’s not surprising that it took her this long to get a second chance behind the camera (though she also was hampered by physical problems after a car accident).

This bloody, amoral tale filled with psychotic policemen, spaced-out druggies, an irritating family on vacation and two very odd FBI agents unfolds as the survivors of a murder rampage are interrogated. The family’s quiet but intuitive young daughter, who notices details the adults around her are too distracted to see, offers the only respite from the picture’s parade of unpleasant people.

But this being a Lynch film, everything isn’t as it seems on the surface and when secrets are revealed, it makes everything that happened before more interesting. While the picture never achieves the nightmarish, disjoined hyper-reality of her father’s best works, it lives in that world, especially in the twisted performance of the cops and the federal agents played by Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond.

Both of these fine actors, who haven’t had good roles in years (Pullman in 1998’s “Zero Effect” as a wonderfully bizarre detective; Ormond since she burst on the scene as the title character of the 1995 remake of “Sabrina”) re-establish their acting chops with these puzzling, off-kilter characters and are the best reasons to see the film.

The seemingly pointless bloodletting can be hard to endure, but “Surveillance” has much more going on. While the film can’t be called a success, it certainly indicates that Lynch (who co-wrote the film with Kent Harper) has the potential to be more than just a famous filmmaker’s daughter.