August 2011

IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)
      What makes Nicholas Ray a filmmaker worth remembering—August marked the 100th  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

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.