BBS was a short-lived, yet artistically progressive production company that had an integral role in one of the most adventurous periods of American moviemaking. Comprised of Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner, the company made seven movies in the late 1960s and early '70s, some of which went on to be iconic works, some of which are not as well known. Each were distinguished by the team's commitment to working with new talent to show contemporary America as they saw it. That is why the boxed set of these movies is called America Lost and Found. The BBS productions were chronicling a turning point in modern living, and their films were saying good-bye to an old Hollywood vision and hello to something more liberating.

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story is an endlessly intriguing collection. Even if all the movies don't quite hit, they are all interesting, encapsulating the changing landscape of American cinema and of the country itself. Taken as a whole, they form a kind of anthology, each movie informing the film that would follow, building a larger aesthetic narrative. Of the seven films, three of them – Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show – are bona fide classics, and a fourth, The King of Marvin Gardens, is due to be reevaluated and classified as such. The other three – Head; Drive, He Said; and A Safe Place – round out the corners, provide the connections between their brethren, and are essential to getting the complete picture of this extraordinary collective. In any creative industry, artists would be lucky to find people to work with as supportive as Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner. The space they created for their people to work was unlike any other, and it's an experiment that can likely never be repeated – but, boy, wouldn't it be great if someone tried?

Fantasia/Fantasia 2000 (Blu-ray reviewed by Thomas Spurlin)

Fantasia started out as a way for Walt Disney to resuscitate Mickey, his trademark character, after his popularity had been clouded by spinoff character Donald Duck. He and conductor Leopold Stokowski put their heads together to construct "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", the nine-minute segment that appears in the full Fantasia program, obviously with the same idea in mind as his groundbreaking short “Steamboat Willy” -- which gave the world something they hadn't seen. After running up a production budget roughly five times that of other animated shorts of the time, Disney felt it opportune to create something bigger around his beautiful little idea of marrying classical music and his animation style, if only to try and justify his budgetary hits. In went an idea and a concentration for detail, as well as musings about how to use multi-channel sound in a theater, and out came an audiovisual experience in Fantasia unlike any other.

With Deems Taylor as the narrating guide, Fantasia sweeps through eight animated segments that mix the '40s-era Disney animation style with a forward-thinking eye for the way that its audience perceives cartoons and classical music, along with how the two can intertwine into something poignant -- instead of something that's just frivolous entertainment.

Fantasia 2000 illustrates the shift in the Disney tone over the course of sixty years, skewing more towards straightforward, easier-to-chew artistry and a more ostensibly vibrant keel. It's an ode to the original, a love letter that handles itself similarly, but it wouldn't come close to holding the same impact without its precursor's existence.

Two pieces really work, though, taking Fantasia 2000 to stunning heights during those bursts. First is "Rhapsody in Blue", an in-progress piece squeaked into the production at the last minute. It takes Gershwin's brassy Jazz essence and pairs it with the artistic flare of Aladdin artist Eric Goldberg, depicting the rhythmic emotional ebb-and-flow in New York City. The other comes in a classic but visually modern take on Igor Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite", which depicts a vegetation-spreading "Spring Sprite" and her curiosity with her fiery phoenix-like counterpart, a figure more bent on destruction than the creation of life.

>Cairo Time (DVD reviewed by the editor)

Juliette is an observer, and there's a Jim Jarmusch quality to her ramblings and wanderings, her exposure to a new way of life, and her quiet growth throughout the course of the story. Clarkson is the Blossom Dearie of actresses. She's blonde, petite, and quiet. Everything she does is deeply felt but gently communicated. She has good taste and poise, and an old-fashioned grace. Here, Clarkson suggests tastefully masked reservoirs of emotion that she and Nadda only hint at during carefully timed moments. For all that, Cairo Time never feels contrived or overworked. The film suggests the hard work that went into it only inasmuch as it all comes off so well. Siddig is also very good, portraying a man similar to Juliette in his sense of dignity and allegiance to good taste and principled behavior. He is a charming, modest old soul who prefers his own concept of rectitude over life's many temptations.

Nadda's careful work in Cairo Time places her among a growing crop of major female filmmakers, but what is most significant about this film is that it is an accomplished character study that bears the best kind of understated technical polish and two outstanding performances.

The Sicilian Girl (DVD reviewed by Jamie S. Rich)

The script here, by Amenta, Sergio Donati, and Gianni Romoli, is short on fireworks. The drama is dry, though it does move step by step with purpose. Many of the situations are ones we've seen before, but Amenta pulls them out of the more sensationalized fictions and labors for an air of authenticity. This tactic works thanks to the remarkable performance by Veronica D'Agostino. As The Sicilian Girl progresses, Rita begins to change. Her illusions of her childhood and the black-and-white "cops bad, family good" morality slowly dissipate as she realizes how deep the violence goes. In particular, she has to let go of the sterling image she has of her father. The evidence is too great to continue to pretend his hands were clean.

The Sicilian Girl takes a common mafia story and turns it into an uncommon tale of a young woman breaking free of her past and looking to end the cycle of violence that took her family from her. Anchored by a remarkable performance from Veronica D'Agostino, the docudrama takes a scaled-back approach, focusing on real-life mafia daughter Rita Atria's humanity rather than the blood and guts. Sometimes the presentation is maybe a little too chilly, but overall, it's a smart picture that delivers deeper themes in an aesthetically pleasing way.

The Quintessential Guy Maddin! (DVD reviewed by Thomas Spurlin)

Zeitgeist Video have offered a collection of five -- seven, actually, five feature-length and two short-subject -- films from the peculiar director in a set entitled The Quintessential Guy Maddin: Five Films from the Heart of Winnipeg. Essentially, this package recycles the discs they've already pressed for the films into one elegant little four-disc clear-case package, while slipping in a set of five matte poster cards and wrapping it all up with a peephole-riddled cover.

The Quintessential Guy Maddin! collection covers the underexposed corners of the idiosyncratic director's oeuvre, a kaleidoscope of unique but challenging features that might dazzle the eyes and frustrate the mind at the same time. The thing to keep in mind is that they're farcical, purposefully-stilted comedic works of offbeat expressionist art, each offering enough uniqueness to be worth some of its nerve-grinding emotional flow. Some are more captivating than others; Careful's cleverness around repressing sound and sensation to keep an Alpine village from an avalanche proves a fertile ground for the director's tongue-in-cheek quirk, while his capturing of the Royal Winnepeg Ballet's off-stage performance of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary will astound just about anyone with an appreciation for performance art, Stoker's prose, or gothic visual lyricism as a whole. Archangel and Cowards Bend the Knee both offer glimpses into his more stalwart, disquieting voice. And, without any other way to say it, the sluggish opulence of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs really didn't go down well, seeming too wooden and waxy to strike any kind of aesthetic or affective chord.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (DVD reviewed by Jason Bailey)

Stern and Sundeberg rotate between verité-style home and work footage, interviews, and Rivers' biography. There are fantastic vintage clips of her on Jack Paar, Mike Douglas, and Carson, clippings, photos, memories. She's surprisingly candid--she talks about her surgeries, talks about her marriage, her difficulties balancing work and family. "She referred to her career as 'The Career,'" her daughter Melissa remembers. "And it occurred to me one day that I had a sibling." And she remembers the rough years--the ugly break-up with Carson, the failure of the Fox show, the suicide of her husband Edgar (which, oddly enough, she and Melissa reenacted for a TV movie, a move she claims was rehabilitative but still seems mighty weird). The dynamic with Melissa is quite interesting--nobody sees through Joan quite like her daughter, and when they do Celebrity Apprentice together, we get a peek inside their relationship (Melissa seeking affirmation, or chastising her mother for turning her insecurities into criticism of their co-stars).

As a protective measure, she's her own worst critic; when she appears at the Kennedy Center tribute to George Carlin, she says of her fellow presenters, "they're all gonna be so much funnier than I am." But the toughest hits come when she subjects herself to the indignities of a Comedy Central roast because she'll make some badly-needed money. "They keep telling you it's an honor," she muses. "If I had invested wisely, I wouldn't be doing this." Clips of the roast are seen, and the cracks are predictably vile; the filmmakers slow down the tape and hold on Rivers as she tries to keep her brave face on. Moments like that might stack the deck a tad too much in the icon's favor, but who cares? Our goodwill toward Joan Rivers is strong enough even without those moments; she's a survivor, she's a hard worker, and most of all, she's hilarious.

Mademoiselle Chambon (Blu-ray reviewed by Thomas Spurlin)

Stéphane Brizé's slight but beautiful arthouse romance Mademoiselle Chambon delicately portrays an affair in the making, using glances and body language between two people to convey the emotions often forced upon audiences with words. The director's very aware of the line between staying faithful to one's spouse and stepping over into promiscuity, and exactly how discerning people approach the brink of surrendering to temptation.

Though the film's pacing isn't for the impatient, the actors offer an immense return-on-investment with the sublimely low-key electricity that generates when they're in the same room, felt in the unspoken dialogue underneath their everyday chatter. Brizé comprehends that implicit language, and his actors nimbly express his understanding.

Within that, Mademoiselle Chambon tells the pair's underlying stories in an effective secondhand fashion, allowing flickers of Jean and Véronique's personal demons to ever-so-slightly peek their heads out while the current of reserved passion extends. This isn't an affair about sexual gratification, about release or quenching one's thirst, and it's obvious through their control over acting on their bond. Brizé's film becomes potent because of the emotional gratification achieved when they solemnly flirt with the idea, almost as satisfying as actual love-making.

Army of Shadows (Blu-ray reviewed by Jamie S. Rich)

And in this wartime limbo, the freedom fighters operate as a separate society, a hidden military. They work in secret, though their actions eventually go public. They seem to move in between the moments in which the rest go about their business--the rest being either their enemy or the citizens they hope to liberate. They are shades. They are other. Their multiple voiceovers speak in past tense, voices from beyond the grave.

Army of Shadows is essentially an espionage picture. It's not a war movie, even though it does involve the war. Rather, this is about the often unsung heroes, the ones who never got their due, who slowly pushed the rock up the mountain to try to make a difference. It's about tough choices and careful maneuvers. The narrative is multi-layered, complex to the point of abstraction. It's not an A to B to C plot in that each sequence suggests the next. Instead, Melville, who wrote the script from a novel by Joseph Kessel, focuses on the unexpected, the developments no one planned for.

It amazes me that Army of Shadows has remained in the shadows for so long. Never shown in America until 2006, Jean-Pierre Melville's iron-jawed, demystified eulogy of the French Resistance is both an honest time capsule of WWII and a timeless, almost surreal, existential parable. Rarely pausing to reflect on its own meaning, this string of stories about a band of fighters is nevertheless a philosophical and moral picture of action in a time of distress. Lovingly shot and meticulously edited, the Criterion Collection already did right by Army of Shadows three years ago, and their porting over their brilliantly restored and packed DVD to Blu-Ray manages to get it even more right.

The American (Blu-ray reviewed by Jason Bailey)

The film that unwinds from there is a quiet, meditative character study; as Jack arrives in one Italian village, then moves to another, making acquaintances and lining up a job customizing a long-range rifle, Corbijn demands our patience. He's trying out a deliberate, distinctively European tone, tenor, and (especially) pace. The American has the feel of a '60s French crime pic--a Melville effort, perhaps. Of course, films like those are the precise antithesis of a modern, star-driven Hollywood action movie, which is part of the reason The American should be celebrated. This is not to imply that all of Corbijn's throwback moves work--there is a fine line between the familiar and the cliché, and certainly we could have found a less predictable way for Jack to fall in love than to find that old standby, the hooker with the heart of gold. His relationship with a local priest is intriguing; their spiritual debates less so. And so on.

Corbijn is a photographer and music video director whose debut film, the Ian Curtis biopic Control, had a great many admirers (though I was not one of them). The title of that film seems the rule of this one; there must be a tremendous temptation, for any filmmaker, to amp up the melodrama when dealing with a story of assassins and double-crosses and the like. But Corbijn keeps the narrative tightly reined, so that the climactic events, when they arrive, are devastating. He also lucks out in hitching himself to Clooney, who does some of his best work to date here. There's a sadness in his weathered face throughout the film, tracing back to the particular (and chilling) way that his eyes go dead when he pulls the trigger on that poor woman in the opening sequence. The entire performance is borne out of that moment. This is an actor of subtlety and skill, who never has to reach for effect, and The American is the ideal showcase for how much he can do by doing very little.

Double Take (DVD reviewed by Jason Bailey)

The subject is ostensibly Hitchcock, but he's no more the primary topic than Orson Welles was in his similarly freewheeling F for Fake. A bit of a structure is provided by novelist Tom McCarthy, who wrote the film's "story"--a fanciful tale (inspired by the short story "25 August, 1983" by Jorge Luis Borges) in which Hitch describes an incident in 1962 when he was called away from the set of The Birds for a phone call, and ended up meeting the 1980 version of himself.

Running parallel to the Hitchcock story is a fragmented portrait of Cold War-era America--the space race, the Nixon-Kruschev "kitchen summit," the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Cuban missile crisis. The first response to all of this, for the viewer pulled in by the Hitchcock angle that the trailers and print materials have been pushing, is simple: What the hell does any of this have to do with Hitchcock? And then the answer comes, the deeper we get into the picture: everything.  Grimonprez is both a literalist and an impressionist, in thrall to an abstract visual, the power of an odd cut, the jolt of a piece of old film (like the newsreel footage of the plane that flew into the Empire State building in 1945, and all of its worrisome allusions), the pleasure of an evocative music cue (Christian Halten's score is augmented by some of the Bernard Hermann cues it so elegantly calls to mind).

Double Take is an odd, playful, intriguing film, and while some of it is downright inexplicable, it never loses your interest. Grimonprez somehow manages to craft a film that works as an avant-garde trick, a historical documentary, and cinematic exploration, all at the same time, none at the expense of the other.

Iraq in Fragments (DVD reviewed by Kurt Dahlke; released in 2007)

Our first hazy, golden-hued tale is Mohammed, about an 11-year-old boy without a father, without much of an education, and without much love in his life. It's a truly heartbreaking piece of reportage that feels more like a drama than a documentary. Longley's unprecedented access means his camera hovers at Mohammed's eye level as he moves throughout bombed streets with uniformed American soldiers hovering mysteriously in tanks on the periphery.

Sadr's South finds Shiite city-dwellers agitating for free elections while hoping to maintain their fundamental ways. American viewers likely never even thought about how cities and regions attempted to reorganize in a rudderless society, and how much of that work transpired in boring bureaucratic settings such as this. American viewers likely never even thought about how cities and regions attempted to reorganize in a rudderless society, and how much of that work transpired in boring bureaucratic settings such as this.

Lastly, Kurdish Spring finds young rural friends grappling with the new order and American occupation, an occupation that grants them, at least for a time, more freedom than they had during the previous oppressive regime.

Iraq In Fragments is an unprecedented, lyric and staggering look at the aftershocks of the conflict in Iraq from the Iraqi's perspective. Longley's deep access and sensitive, unbiased eye (occupying forces are occasionally seen but never demonized, they're just objects of mystery) creates a poetic, heart-wrenching drama out of his chosen subject, humanizing the Iraqi people while making real their desires, fears and frustrations.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (DVD reviewed by the editor)

Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop utilizes the approach of Orson Welles' F for Fake to satirize the art world and bring renewed focus to the subversive nature and misunderstood philosophy of street artists. It is an entertaining peek behind the scenes of the street art movement, a faux-documentary farce, and extremely clever propaganda all in one. It's also surprisingly understated, revealing its layered significance more extensively upon reflection, after its short running time has ended. Banksy, as always, comes across as a ballsy self-promoter swathed in self-conscious mystery, yet somehow Exit Through the Gift Shop never really feels like it's about him, exactly, let alone the valentine to his own genius that it might appear to be upon first glance.

Banksy appears on-camera (maybe) in a hoodie, with his voice electronically altered, to announce that his film is a quasi-accident deriving from the "lost" footage of one Thierry Guetta, an expatriate Frenchman living in Los Angeles who fell in with the street art crowd and became their self-appointed documentarian. Claiming all the while that he was creating the "ultimate street art documentary," the hyper-edited film that Guetta shaped out of tens of thousands of hours of footage of artists like Shepard Fairey, Monsieur Andre, and Borf turns out to be unwatchable. To keep Guetta out of his hair, Banksy encourages him to become a street artist himself, and Guetta assiduously throws himself into producing an enormous exhibition, designed to rival Banksy's then-recent LA blockbuster "Barely Legal." Guetta sells everything he owns and re-finances his property to underwrite assembly line-style art production on a massive scale - all of which he credits to his new persona, Mr. Brainwash, or MBW. The show, which is a near-disaster in the planning stages, ultimately opens to huge attendance and commensurate sales: Guetta makes something like a million dollars in short order.

No matter how you take the story it tells - as legitimate or as a hoax - Exit Through the Gift Shop is a film of minor genius that makes a scorching point about the state of the "art world" with exquisitely aloof restraint.  In its understated and oblique way, Exit Through the Gift Shop discusses who is and isn't an artist, how the title of "artist" is or isn't defined, that art is collected for reasons having nothing to do with the reasons it is created, that fraud exists at every level in the art world, and that transparent fraud is itself often considered art by those who are in a position to profit off of such a characterization.

Banksy's film has a clear purpose and concept behind it, unlike that other cinematic hoax of 2010. The film works, not matter how you take it. Guetta is a wonderful personality - someone who would be maddening to know in real life, but whose determined idiocy makes him the perfect subject for this film which is, at bottom, a comedy.  Banksy himself is only on the fringes of the proceedings, and allows themes to emerge without seeming contrived or highlighted. Banksy's biggest achievement is to tell a story of post-modern concerns and complaints utilizing a seemingly straightforward framework and having the whole thing hang together without ever referring back to the world outside of the film itself. Exit Through the Gift Shop tweaks the nose of post-modernism while making the best possible use of its tenets.

Special thanks to Jamie S. Rich, Kurt Dahlke, Jason Bailey, and Thomas Spurlin for their contributions.

Christmas is coming early for Charlie Chaplin fans. Or maybe it's a Thanksgiving present and you have a couple of reasons to feel gratitude.

First, Flicker Alley has released a huge collection of shorts, Chaplin At Keystone: An International Collaboration of 34 Original Films. John Sinnott lays it out for us: "Today it's hard to realize just how popular Charlie Chaplin was back in the heyday of silent films. There is no current equivalent and the magnitude of his fame has never really been equaled since. Chaplin's Tramp character was a world-wide sensation since his films were easily exported to non-English speaking countries. His movies were in such high demand that scores of Chaplin imitators emerged, there were Chaplin imitation contests, he was the first actor to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine, and he was one of the highest paid people (of any profession) in the country in the teens. His films are still immensely popular today and the last time I saw a Chaplin film on the big screen, it sold out the theater where it was showing.

"Yet with all of that popularity, the earliest Chaplin films have not been available on DVD...until now. The great people at Flicker Alley have released Chaplin at Keystone, a fantastic four disc boxed set that collects 34 of the filmmaker earliest effort. Not only that, but all of the films have been restored, are accompanied by music from the top silent film musicians around, and come with an informative 40-page book by film historian Jeffrey Vance. This is a set than needs to be in any comprehensive library of silent film.

"Charlie wasn't sure what to make of Keystone at first. The company had to produce a new two-reel comedy each and every week, and the pace was frantic. Charlie didn't like the pace or the comedy. He wanted to do more refined slapstick. He didn't feel that every short had to end with a chase, and wanted longer shots instead of the rapid cutting that Sennett employed. Chaplin argued with the directors. He was upset that they would dismiss his suggestions for the films on the grounds that they didn't have time for an elaborate set-up. Chaplin had the philosophy that making one funny film was better than making many mediocre ones. He would follow that philosophy for the rest of his career. As his tenure at Keystone went on, Chaplin's movies became more and more popular. Fairly soon his films started outselling all the other Keystone shorts. With this success Chaplin was able to exert more control on his movies, which led to higher quality films and even bigger demand. Soon he was writing and directing all of his pictures.

"The Keystone films are not as polished and carefully constructed as Chaplin's later masterpieces would be, but that's understandable given the system that Sennett used to churn out an impressive number of films each month. Yet it was during his time with Keystone that Chaplin learned the art of filmmaking. He discovered what worked, how to set up a gag, and created the character that would make him the most recognized man in the world. Chaplin at Keystone is important because it shows Chaplin evolving as a screen comic. Not only that, but this collection chronicles the early Tramp character and how Chaplin tried out different personas until he hit upon the right combination traits."

If you enjoy Chaplin at Keystone, or even if you don't or find that set too daunting, Criterion has put out a fantastic Blu-Ray of one of the comedian's best known features: Modern Times. Modern Times is arguably the last great masterpiece of the silent era. Made in 1936, it was intended to be a full sound picture, but Chaplin decided to instead use sound as merely another comedic prop. The result is absolutely charming, effortlessly spanning the divide between two eras and never failing to generate a grin.

The story of Modern Times begins with Chaplin's signature character, the Tramp, working in a steel factory. He is on the assembly line turning lug nuts. The monotony of the job and the inhuman treatment by his bosses is getting to him. The need for efficiency is superseding basic decency. In one of the film's funnier scenes, an inventor brings in a machine that will feed the workers so that they never have to pick up a utensil or wipe their own chins. Naturally, this doesn't work properly, and though the Tramp is strapped into the malfunctioning contraption, the men pay him no mind as they keep trying to get their device to work. It's all about progress, who cares if the little man keeps getting pie in his face?

The elaborate sets and effects in the factory scenes are amazing. Most famously, there is a bit where Chaplin falls into the cogs and wheels and is cycled through, just another piece of the machine. It's this event that causes the Tramp to have a breakdown, getting him out of the factory and onto the series of unfortunate events that will make up the rest of Modern Times. It's an episodic story, the Tramp tumbling from one spot of trouble to the next. After a stay in the sanitarium, he accidentally happens into a Communist march and gets arrested; in jail, he foils a jailbreak and gets released; and so on. Along the way, he also runs into a young girl, billed as "the gamine," played by Paulette Goddard. The Tramp helps her, and they try to make a life together, getting a series of jobs and dodging the police where they can.

Charlie Chaplin, who wrote the music, scripted, produced, and directed Modern Times in addition to starring, has an uncanny knack for social satire. The events in the movie showcase situational comedy at its most basic: whatever the Tramp stumbles into leads to laughs. Given the theme of the picture, the things he stumbles into have something to do with life in 1936. At a time when many were out of work and going to bed hungry, the audience could identify with the Tramp. The fear that technology could eclipse the individual probably seemed like a very real prospect, and the introduction of assembly line worksites made it possible to manufacture more products at a faster rate, but at the cost of the personal touch. All of this is shown here, but it never edges out the pratfalls or Chaplin's ingenious visual gags.

John Cazale only made five movies in his short life, but when you consider what those movies were, it's arguable that he was as important to film history as Charlie Chaplin. Jason Bailey reviews the new documentary: I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale: "John Cazale appeared in exactly five motion pictures before he died of cancer at 42. But the five films he made were among the best films of Hollywood's richest decade. If you could only appear in five movies, you could do a lot worse than The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter. His entire filmography was nominated for the Academy Award. But Cazale himself never was. He tended to play the quiet role, the supporting character, the guy on the edge of the frame, while the showy roles were the ones that got the awards. But perhaps the most cogent argument put forth by the new documentary I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale is that, in his quiet skill and sometimes scary intensity, Cazale elevated the actors around him, putting them on alert to do their best work. The stats certainly back it up: his co-stars in those five films received a collective total of 14 acting nominations. Cazale was, in the truest sense, a brilliant 'supporting actor.'

"The documentary is directed by Richard Shepard, who manages to structure the film in a way that mirrors Cazale's life: it burns bright, briefly, and then it's over far too soon. Shepard uses inventive on-screen text and photos to fill in the biographical information (shades of The Kid Stays in the Picture), but mostly draws on analysis from actors and filmmakers, as well extensive clips from those five great films--allowing, in a sense, the work to speak for itself.

"Several of Cazale's co-stars show up to pay tribute: Robert DeNiro, Richard Dreyfuss, John Savage, Carol Kane, Gene Hackman, and, most extensively, his good friend Al Pacino and his lover Meryl Streep. Playwright Israel Horovitz and directors Francis Ford Coppola and Sidney Lumet discuss the experience of working with him; contemporary film historian Mark Harris (if you haven't read his wonderful book Pictures at a Revolution, then you're reading the wrong thing right now) adds invaluable insight. And then there are the contemporary actors who idolize him, who pinpoint him as an influence, supporting actors of weight and intensity like Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who form a kind of 'Cult of Cazale.' The joy of the film comes from the joy that these friends, collaborators, and admirers glean from his work"

Cazale was part of some genuine film phenomena, including the popular The Godfather series. Though not nearly as popular or, admittedly, well-made as those movies, the popularity of the adaptation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy is a modern literary phenom all its own. The second film adaptations, The Girl Who Played With Fire, is now on Blu-Ray, and it was reviewed by Brian Orndorf, who found it lacking after the original, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: "While still engrossing and pleasantly twisted, the second chapter in the Lisbeth Salander saga suffers from a flat storytelling approach, which doesn't encourage the suspense in the same urgent manner as before. Now on the run, Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) has severed all ties with her former sleuthing pal, journalist Mikael (Michael Nyqvist), looking to set up a fresh life for herself. Trouble comes calling when a young colleague of Mikael's, an ambitious writer named Dag (Hans Christian Thulin), is murdered and Lisbeth is framed for the crime. Believing in her innocence, Mikael takes up Dag's work investigating a sex trafficking ring with ties to powerful men, hoping to learn enough to clear Lisbeth's name. Carrying out her own reconnaissance, Lisbeth finds dark secrets from her scarred past returning to the light, while a hulking blonde killer who cannot feel pain stalks the night, on the hunt for the young girl and the information she's protecting.

"Due to Oplev's cinematic touch, Dragon Tattoo could be appreciated as a sturdily constructed thriller with bold international flavors, and not just as an adaptation of a best seller. It was violent, sinister, repulsive, and alive with suspense, careening through a maze of characters and motivations while keeping tension its top priority for 150 minutes. Played with Fire doesn't retain the same priorities, retreating to more stable ground as a direct projection of the page, holding to the novel's vacillation without much in the way of necessary exaggeration. Alfredson doesn't fumble the material, but he rarely challenges the plotting, keeping steady on the particulars of the tale without kicking anything into overdrive. It's a disappointment, but it doesn't smother the movie's appeal, only decreasing its lasting impact.

"Maintaining the picture's sour temper is Rapace, who's marvelous in the role of Lisbeth, once again capturing a brooding goth intensity that makes the character a substantial threat, yet sympathetic. Though Lisbeth's unwillingness to endure radical disguises to keep police attention away from her is a touch on the baffling side, the turmoil within the character is felt vividly once again. Played with Fire is primarily Lisbeth's story, with the pierced hacker barely sharing any screentime with Mikael. The separation disappoints, but the divide is a compelling tool to bring these characters back to a place of discovery as the onion is peeled, with ghastly encounters waiting to devour Lisbeth as her memory is prodded further."

Some of the stronger details of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Played With Fire have flirted with controversy. The graphic nature with which the stories deal with violence against women can be pretty strong stuff. Truly controversial, and dealing with a similar subject, Lars von Trier's Antichrist is a challenging cinematic experience. Orndorf, once again, looks at the BD: "Grief, death, and rusty scissors collide in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. A metaphysical sojourn with cinema's loudest spoilsport, the picture stuns and sickens, almost daring viewers to keep watching as it articulates the ravages of the unwound mind, filling the frame with demented acts of unspeakable violence and deeply considered thematic stimulation. For fans of Trier, Antichrist is a return to his once irresistible provocative appetites, shamelessly exploiting suffering and misogyny to generate the outrage that fuels his daydreams (and bank accounts). It's a pitch-black torrential downpour of pain, and should only be approached by those willing to allow Trier 100 precious minutes to play his madcap mind games.

"Reeling over the death of their toddler son, estranged couple He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are devastated to learn their sexual appetites contributed to the loss of their one and only child. A therapist sickened by the care afforded to his wife, He takes the devastated woman to their remote cabin in the dense forest of Eden to confront her fears and repair their relationship. Once arrived, the couple finds the woods an unbearable reminder of their loss, with She plunging further into madness, feeding upon images and research of witches and assorted feminine horrors. He tries to counteract with logic and restraint, but learns of a special evil nature infesting the environment, which soon overtakes She, urging hell to break loose.

"It's useless to get upset with Trier over the ultraviolent antics of Antichrist, as this type of storytelling has afforded him a long career of polarizing successes. Of course, a reasonable deconstruction of the film is impossible, as Trier builds an interpretive mood of sin, volatile communication, and psychological suffocation, using expansive brush strokes of gothic imagery and sexual gamesmanship to motor his ideas on grief and depression, working the material into a suitable lather of audience-baiting theatrics. I'll be the first to admit that Trier's rascally ways often get the best of him. Still, when the director finds a proper scab to pick, nobody does it better. Antichrist doesn't return Trier to the heavyweight shape of Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark, but it's an intriguing hailstorm of controversial subtext and confrontational, surreal visual mastery.

"Antichrist is a measured nightmare, monitoring the mental tug of war between She and He while they sniff out the depth of their damage in the middle of nowhere. Trier's angle is one of invasion, as He uses his position of power to unethically coax his wife back from the edge of suicide, taking the role of icy therapist to offer She a mental penetration she cannot endure. Fighting back with sexual favors and hysteria, She is tormented by the forest, fearing nature as an evil force equaled to femininity itself, as explored through her thesis work on the historical reduction of women to primal, biblical spirits of malevolence. Stillborn and self-mutilation imagery (complete with a talking fox) only enhance the suffering for both characters, along with a curious acorn motif that mocks She and He as the trees loudly rain down their surplus fertility with every available opportunity."

Bertold Brecht was a provocateur in his time, as well, and the recent documentary Theater of War chronicles a modern staging of one of Brecht's more famous plays. The result is a movie in conflict. It tries to be many things at once, but only really succeeds at being one of those things well. The documentary, directed by John W. Walter (How to Draw a Bunny), uses a 2006 remake of Mother Courage and Her Children as a springboard for exploring Brecht, the nature of political theatre, the climate of our times, and the process of staging a play all at the same time, thinking the play will tie everything together. It doesn't.

Mother Courage was first written in 1939 and was staged many times in the years that followed. Brecht had been forced to flee Germany as the Nazis took power, eventually ending up in America shortly after we entered WWII. He left America after an encounter with HUAC, which is covered extensively in Theater of War. Newsreel footage of the writer's testimony is fascinating for its apparent candor, which is promptly discredited by Brecht's daughter, who sees her father giving the performance of his life, pouring on his accent and playing his part as the dutiful immigrant. For a man who opened up the theatrical stage and advanced the notion of a theater of ideas, it makes perfect sense.

It also makes sense that Brecht would be the subject of a film like Theater of War. Dismantling the wall between audience and performer is very much in keeping with the spirit of Brecht's work. Walter shows us the cast rehearsing, using montage to illustrate the advancement of the process from one line reading to the next. This particular production was debuting a new translation of the original text by Angels in America-scribe Tony Kushner, and it starred Meryl Streep as Mother Courage and Kevin Kline as the Cook. As the work progresses, the actors and the stage crew all share their impressions of the material, while Brechtian scholars add more background.

It's the latter element that works best. Theater of War is strongest as a documentary about Bertolt Brecht. I felt more informed about the author when the movie was done, and even have an itch to go and reexamine his other work (I once reviewed Threepenny Opera for this site). I've never seen or read Mother Courage, and now would very much like to--which is one of this DVD's major downfalls. Though some of the backstage footage is interesting and the performance material intriguing, it seems a missed opportunity to not package some kind of filmed document of this particular production with the making-of documentary. It reminded me of Allan Miller's 2000 documentary The Turandot Project, about Zhang Yimou's historic staging of Puccini's opera in China. We see the efforts Yimou went through to pull it off, and we are told how important the event is, and then we see nothing of it. Granted, Walter gives us much more of Mother Courage than Miller gave us of Turandot, but it's still not enough. They've created an amazing commercial for the plays, but no way for us to see them--and neither story is that amazing that it doesn't matter. Not like, say, how involving Hearts of Darkness is even when divorced from Apocalypse Now. There just isn't that much drama.

Jason Bailey examines another war-themed documentary, Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss. "Perhaps the most peculiar sidebar of the popular and critical success of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds has been the curiosity over Third Reich film--the notion, explored in that film and explained by the filmmaker, of 'Goebbels as a studio head.' While serving as minister of propaganda, he directly oversaw the German film industry, which produced copious musicals and comedies but was best known for their works of pro-German, anti-Semitic proselytism, including Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Fritz Hippler's The Eternal Jew, and Veit Harlan's costume drama Jew Süss.

"Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss profiles that notorious film's creator, the Third Reich's most successful filmmaker, who was later tried (and acquitted) twice for crimes against humanity, so powerful was the hateful message of his best-known work. His story is told primarily through the words of his descendents, the children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews who have spent their lives coming to terms with who this man was, and what he did. For his part, Harlan claims in his memoirs that he was forced to make the controversial film; there are varying degrees of disagreement about that. Some of his relations are critics, some are apologists, and some are both. His daughter Maria Korber describes her first viewing of the film thus: 'I felt like going outside and puking.' His granddaughters, on the other hand, seem underwhelmed; they're not entirely sure why it was such a cause célèbre. But they're also seen reading aloud the letter from Himmler, directing it to be shown to all SS and policemen, and I think we can safely infer that he didn't just like the film for its costumes.

"Director Felix Moeller generously sprinkles in clips, from not only the film in question and the rest of Harlan's filmography, but horrifying newsreels from the era and home movies of the well-to-do filmmaker and his family. The abundance of footage is helpful; aside from those clips, the film is basically an assemblage of talking heads, and Moeller's attempts at getting out of that box (such as corny shots of relatives sitting contemplatively on beaches) don't really land. However, Marco Hertenstein's excellent score keeps our interest piqued, as does the compelling nature of the story at hand."

A fictionalized war film shows the horrors of World War I. Stanley Kubrick's classic combat movie Paths of Glory is now on Blu-Ray thanks to Criterion. This 1957 drama was based on a novel by Howard Cobb, and the screenplay was written by three different scribes: Kubrick himself, the great Calder Willingham (The Strange One, Thieves Like Us), and the astonishing Jim Thompson (better known as the novelist who wrote The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me). It stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, an officer in the French army who fights alongside the troops in the trenches and who approaches his job with reason and logic. The crux of the story is an attack on a German stronghold referred to as "the Anthill." It's an impossible task, one that even Dax's glory-hungry superior, General Paul Mireau (George Macready), knows is hopeless, but the promise of another star on his collar blinds him to the risks. Dax even tries to refuse, but he goes along rather than be relieved of his command and leaving his men unprotected. "

The script for Paths of Glory essentially follows a three-act structure. The first act is the preparation for the siege on the Anthill and then the disastrous run into No Man's Land. The troops can barely advance past their own line, and when Mireau's orders to shell his own trenches in order to push the grunts forward are ignored, he is left with egg on his face. Act Two is his attempt to wipe the egg away, calling on one man from each regiment to be brought up on court martial, charged with cowardice. Dax attempts to defend them as best he can, but fails, and Act Three is what happens on the way to the firing squad.

Paths of Glory is a pitch-perfect piece of drama. It's remarkable in its simplicity. There is no extraneous scene, no off-key moment. The dialogue crackles, and the mis-en-scene moves with precision and confidence. There are many remarkable sequences in the movie, most famous of which is the charge on the Anthill. Kubrick and his d.p. George Krause and camera operator Hannes Staudinger take the audience down into the trenches, and then they haul us over the top, racing through the bombs and the bodies and leading us right through the thick of combat. Yet, there are smaller moments too. Look at how the camera moves in the very brief fist fight between Paris (Ralph Meeker) and Arnaud (Joseph Turkel), the way the action swings with the fighters, and compare it to the way we dance with the officers a short time later when the Generals throw a party for themselves. Behavior inspires technique.

Swinging to the other side of the spectrum and, really, right off the damn thing is another Criterion Blu-Ray, the Japanese cult movie House. Stuart Galbraith IV tries to make heads or tails of this crazy film: "Nearly indescribable, Nobuhiko Obayashi's House (1977) is like a cross between Dario Argento's Suspiria and an episode of The Monkees. Though generally regarded as a horror film, it's also a teen fantasy/kung fu/erotic coming-of-age/splatter/comedy - Jan Švankmajer meets Pink Lady. Horror-fantasy film fans and Japanese cinema devotees have wanted to see House for years. It's a good introduction to the colorful career of its director, whose films deserve a wider audience in the west, and Criterion's new Blu-ray offers both a marvelous transfer struck from the original camera negative and very good supplements, including Obayashi's equally fascinating 45-minute Emotion (1966), featuring the same explosion of wild imagination.

"The plot, such as it is, concerns a group of teenage schoolgirls who decide to spend their summer holiday at a house in the country. Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) is upset when her widower father (Saho Sasazawa), a famous composer of film scores just back from Italy ('Leone said my music was better than Morricone's!'), has decided to remarry, to beautiful Ryoko (Haruko Wanibuchi). Angry at his decision, rather than spend the summer with them she decides to visit her late mother's sister (Yoko Minamida) and invites her friends along, all of whom have nicknames based on their personalities: Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo), Fantasy (Kumiko Oba), Prof (Ai Matsubara), Mac (Mieko Sato, her character a big eater), Melody (Eriko Tanaka), and Sweet (Masayo Miyako).

"House is without precedent, unlike anything that had come before it. The entire film is deliberately artificial, like the painted backdrops in The Wizard of Oz; nearly every shot of the sky, for instance, is either a matte painting or a painted backdrop. Even shots that need not be, such as a wide angle in front of Tokyo Station, are deliberately stylized, deliberately fake. Similarly, the acting, scoring, editing, et. al, are not at all intended to be realistic.

"What's most impressive about House is how almost literally every single shot in the film is infused with some form of trickery: on-set special effects, effects generated via an optical printer - the lab bill on this film must have been huge - from irises and wipes to skipped frames and split screens, imaginative and unexpected camera moves. The film includes special effects done on video using the chroma key, pixilation (a form of stop-motion animation), traveling mattes. By the end of the film, just about every effect imaginable has been employed, some dating back to the beginning of cinema and Georges Méliès. The picture is consistently amusing in a fluffy, cotton candy sort of way, referencing everything from Japanese silent and wartime propaganda films to contemporary popular cinema...The movie is non-stop, phantasmagoric eye-candy, but as the images and its thin story and characters are all there is, House is also a bit wearying before it ends, though worth the effort."

It didn't occur to me what hard times the historical epic had fallen on, or how much I missed seeing a really good one, until I watched Alejandro Amenábar's Agora. It seems lately we either get the bloated and self-important Ridley Scott style of costume drama (Kingdom of Heaven, for instance), or it's dumbed-down, dressed-up adventurin' like Prince of Persia. While Agora is not as long and grandiose as the historical pictures of old Hollywood, Amenábar's film is a richly drawn and intelligent story that hearkens back to better times, when stories of the past were seen as important parables to illuminate the present.

Agora is set in Alexandria near the end of the 4th Century A.D., as the Roman Empire is collapsing. Alexandria was an epicenter of culture and thought, renowned for its massive library. Of the many scholars and philosophers who gathered in the public square, known as the Agora, to debate the theories of the day, was Hypatia (Rachel Weisz, The Fountain), a teacher whose work has not survived but who is believed to have been ahead of the curve in regards to understanding the mechanics of the universe and the mathematical properties of cones and circles. Hypatia advanced revolutionary thinking, but at a time when a different kind of revolution was under way.

Alejandro Amenábar (The Sea Inside, The Others) and his regular co-writer Mateo Gil (Open Your Eyes) start their story at a point where Christianity is starting to become popular enough to gain real traction amongst the common populace. Having been outlawed by the Romans only until recently, it is still seen as an upstart religion, and evangelicals from either side regularly clash in the streets...Agora is an intellectually stimulating narrative, full of varied ideas and conflicts that have more to them than just blood and swords--though there are plenty of that for those who want it. Amenábar uses Hypatia's story to examine the uneasy mix of science, politics, and religion in society, as well as class structure and gender divides. Though there are clear heroes and villains, there is not an easy black-and-white morality. Hypatia, for instance, can be hypocritical, and her defense of equality amongst the differing faiths doesn't quite jibe with her failure to recognize that she treats her slaves as less than equal. Hypatia's slave Davus ((Max Minghella, The Social Network) is far from a cliché "noble servant," but is a fully rounded character often at war with himself and his ethical contradictions. Only the mad monk Ammonius and the lead bishop of Alexandria, Cyril (Sami Samir, Munich), are painted with broad strokes, but they are balanced on both sides by minor reactionaries amongst the Romans and the far more sympathetic priest Synesius (Rupert Evans, Hellboy), another of Hypatia's students. Amenábar is more interested in the complexity of the tale than he is making something that fits expected archetypes.

Less successful is the more subdued drama Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl. Manoel de Oliveira's 2009 film is a slight but well-manicured exercise in literary formalism. Based on a 19th-century novella by Eça de Queirós, who is credited with introducing realism to the fiction of de Oliveira's home country of Portugal, this short film--running at just about an hour when you exclude the credits--has the haughty air of antiquated writing, complete with an undercurrent of restrained romanticism. The end result is more Masterpiece Theatre than Merchant Ivory, but depending on your taste, that may be satisfying enough. I found it underwhelming, but still mildly enjoyable.

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl is the story of Macário (Ricardo Trêpa), a young accountant who works at his uncle's clothing story. From his office, he often spies a pretty girl across the way, and he contrives a way to meet her. Her name is Luísa (Catarina Wallenstein), a fairly unexpressive young woman, but the preservation of her mystery is possibly what keeps Macário interested. He proposes marriage, but when his uncle refuses to support it, Macário is suddenly without a job and the means for which to support a wife. Finding no work in town, he goes away to earn a tidy sum, only to be swindled out of it on his return. Lucky for him, his dedication softens his uncle and the means to have Luísa as his own open up to him. Except, well, there are those promised eccentricities to deal with, and heartbreak is still in the cards.

The most impressive aspect of this film is not the story, however, which honestly, didn't move me much at all and is somewhat forgettable; no, the best part of Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl is de Oliveira's careful construction of each frame, and the vivid digital photography of Sabine Lancelin, who has worked with de Oliveira on numerous occasions, including their Bunuel-tribute Belle Toujours (a film I intensely disliked). Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl is a lovely movie, with artfully lit interiors and an excellent external clarity. de Oliveira shows the passage of time through a series of horizon shots, letting the natural light settle over the city. While I may soon forget the particulars of the script, I'll probably be thinking about how good Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl looked for quite a while.

Sometimes films that aren't as good as they want to be can yield inspired results anyway, as Adam Tyner discovers in reviewing Best Worst Movie: "George Hardy hails from a sleepy little town in Alabama that could've been nicked straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting...the type of place where anyone new in town would be greeted with a fresh-baked apple pie and a big, cheery grin...where everybody who drives by waves hello as you're out watering your front lawn...y'know, where everybody knows your name. When George asks how you're doing with that unmistakably Southern accent of his, you can tell that he's not just being polite: he genuinely wants to know. Everyone in town likes the guy -- heck, even his ex-wife has nothing but the nicest things to say about him -- but after a couple minutes of these beaming testimonials, they all start to smirk about George's little secret. See, a couple decades back, George was in a movie...and not just any movie, either: he was the star of Troll 2, which for the longest time was rated the absolute worst of the tens of thousands of flicks on the Internet Movie Database.

"This is a movie that inspires some kind of quasi-religious fervor in its fans, and I speak from experience 'cause I've been one for a couple of decades now. We don't meekly, politely watch Troll 2 and then quietly put it back on the shelf afterwards. No, we proselytize the glory of Troll 2 to anyone in earshot, force it on them, and then look on as they start spreading the good word, too. What was a tiny cult following in the early '90s grew to be a sizeable, rabid fanbase in the age of YouTube and MySpace. George Hardy...this dentist from Alabama....had no idea that this movie he starred in all the way back in 1989 had made him a cult celebrity.

"That's what Best Worst Movie is about, really: coming to grips with finding unexpected success in unparalled failure. It's not really about Troll 2, exactly, and you don't have to have seen the movie beforehand to get anything out of it. Anyway, Best Worst Movie is told primarily through two very different perspectives. The first is George Hardy, who's led a pretty charmed life -- very successful dentist, pillar of the community, and all that -- but he wanted to be an actor his entire life. He's in awe of Troll 2's skyrocketing popularity. Revival screenings from one end of the country to the other are sold out, there are standing ovations whenever he takes the stage for Q&As afterwards, the crowd loses it whenever Hardy delivers his most beloved line ('You can't piss on hospitality! I won't allow it!'), he's signing autographs, posing for photos: it took close to twenty years, but Hardy's one and only film credit has made him feel like a real, live movie star.

"So, yeah. This documentary charts how George Hardy and director Claudio Fragasso react to being celebrated for their roles in hammering out the best-worst-movie of all time as well as how their attitudes change throughout the course of all these revival screenings...about the way they come to look at their everyday lives and their brush with stardom. This isn't a feature-length DVD extra: it's an honest-to-Gord film, complete with character arcs and everything...My Troll 2 obsession is pretty well-documented by this point, so I can't exactly say I went into Best Worst Movie unbiased. I waltzed into this documentary knowing full well that I was gonna love it, but I didn't know I'd fall for it this hard. If you've ever stumbled across Troll 2, no matter what you thought of it, thenBest Worst Movie is essential viewing. The documentary stands on its own exceptionally well, too; if I were scheduling a double-bill, I'd even put Best Worst Movie on first and save Troll 2 till the end. If you think Troll 2 is ridiculous on its own, grabbing random chunks with little-to-no context as they're shown in Best Worst Movie makes the whole thing even more surreal. The important thing to mention again is that Best Worst Movie isn't a documentary about Troll 2. It's a story about passion, about dreams, about failing when you try to triumph, and triumphing when you wind up failing. This is one of my favorite films-about-films that I've ever come across."

Intentional awkwardness makes Cyrus a high point of the month for Jason Bailey: "Everything you need to know--or remember--about how great John C. Reilly is can be found in the first ten or so minutes of the Duplass Brothers' Cyrus. As Reilly's 'John' tries to recover from an embarrassing situation with his ex-wife, then attempts to blend in at an upscale party she's dragged him to, he's funny, he's warm, he's a little bit crazy, he's a lot awkward. 'I am in a tailspin,' he tells a girl that he feels a connection with. 'I'm lonely, I'm depressed...' (It's not exactly party pick-up material.) He's doing the kind of complex, multi-layered work he was doing for Paul Thomas Anderson in Boogie Nights and Magnolia, about a decade ago when we all started to become aware of this oddly extraordinary actor. His metamorphosis from a respected character actor to a utility player in broad (though enjoyable) Apatow-produced comedies like Taladega Nights, Walk Hard, and Step Brothers was unexpected, but full-throated; there's never a sense, in any of those roles, of an actor 'selling out,' but of a performer having a great time making funny pictures...What's intriguing about Cyrus is the sly way it combines both of his screen personas--the way it takes what could be a mainstream comic plot (grown, too-attached son tries to break up his mother and her new boyfriend) and grinds it through an indie sensibility to create something altogether more interesting.

"At that party, John meets the beautiful Molly (Marisa Tomei), who is drawn to his honesty and cheerful lack of vanity. Their initial dates go well, very well, but she always mysteriously disappears before it gets too late; one night, he follows her, and in the process of checking out her house, he meets young Cyrus (Jonah Hill), Molly's son. He still lives at home, a chubby presence in checkered shirts, the kind of guy who has spent his time since school 'focusing on my music career.' But the closer John and Molly get, the more he suspects that the kid's got it in for him, and the more we in the audience sense that the film is tiptoeing up to something awful.

"It wouldn't be hard to imagine this plot in a bigger-budget studio comedy, something from the Apatow factor or Sandler's Happy Madison productions--hell, it could be done with the exact same cast, who have all logged their hours in high-concept comedies. But the potentially one-joke premise is given depth, complexity, darkness and pathos by the offbeat execution and the honest performances. Writer/directors Jay and Mark Duplass are among the founders of the 'mumblecore' movement, and while Cyrus is more conventionally written and constructed than earlier efforts like Baghead, it keeps some of the aesthetic earmarks--handheld photography, low-key and naturalistic dialogue--and adding some more artistic touches (they try out some new tricks with layering of sound and displacement of dialogue). The technique works in the obvious ways; it seems silly to make such a bland observation as 'the doc-style camerawork lends the film a grounding in reality,' but it does, so there you have it. It might be pat, but it plays. And the script has a refreshing distaste for hack situations; after a misunderstanding leads to an awkward public scene, there is (gasp) a scene immediately after in which John and Molly clear the air, just like real people would."

Real people are also the subject of Justin D. Hilliard's second film, The Other Side of Paradise. Down in Texas, Rose Hewitt (Arianne Martin) has a lot going on in her life. Her best friend Alex (John Elliott), with whom she has shared a long-term flirtation, has just returned from an extended vacation in Spain, where he presumably left his on-again off-again girlfriend for good. Rose's brother, Jamie...excuse me, James (Frank Mosley) is also being released from a two-year prison bid. Straight from picking Jamie up outside the jail, the three of them are going to visit Rose and Jamie's father (Jodie Moore) and his new, pregnant wife (Susana Gibb). This will be the first time meeting the little lady. Or so they think. Courtney was a senior in the same high school as Rose when her stepdaughter was a freshman. It's Courtney that will accidentally tell Jamie and Rose that the mother they haven't seen in more than twenty-five years is living near Austin. With that little family secret exposed, it seems about the right time for a road trip.

This is the set-up for The Other Side of Paradise, a new indie drama that, as convoluted as it may sound when distilled into an introductory paragraph, has a surprisingly natural way of telling its story. Directed by Justin D. Hilliard, and written by Hilliard, Martin, and cinematographer Ryan Hartsell, The Other Side of Paradise manages to be a whole lot of movie without ever feeling encumbered by its own ambitions. Which is a far cry from Hilliard's debut, Wednesday, in which the filmmaker got a bit tangled in his vision. They often say the second time is the hardest, but not this time.

From daddy's house, the traveling trio makes their way through Texas in search of, ostensibly, the things that are missing in their lives. For the siblings, it's to find the mother they thought had gone to Portugal and never come back, but they are also searching for a sense of purpose. Jamie seems to be itching for freedom, while Rose is just itching...well, for anything. A photographer with a gallery show on the horizon, she is in need of one last image to tie it all together. Maybe knowing where she comes from will inspire her. It might also help her trust Alex, whose way with words makes him seem too slick. As it turns out, Rose is exactly what Alex has been after, but he hasn't exactly figured out how to let himself be with her.

The more real The Other Side of Paradise gets, the better it becomes. About 3/4 into the story, Hilliard hits the audience with a dark turn that sends the movie into some pretty raw territory. It's a shift that could completely dismantle what he's built up, but the director gets away with it. These events force Rose and Alex to put all their cards on the table and then make some hard choices about which ones to pick up again.

My colleague Casey Burchby reviews the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child: "In just seven years as a practicing artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat produced over 2,000 works and made himself enormous amounts of money, gaining praise and notoriety as the defining artist of the early to mid-1980s. In Tamra Davis's absorbing new documentary, the layers of his legacy are examined and carefully demystified, from his shadowy beginnings as a graffiti artist known only (at that time) as 'SAMO' to the height of his fame as a painter whose gallery sales commanded huge sums, through his final sad years, marked by drug use, paranoia, and withdrawal from public life. Basquiat emerges as a fascinating and complicated human being, somewhat de-romanticized by Davis, and made difficult through discussion of his less charming qualities, but whose accomplishments as an artist continue to bloom as new angles of interest and significance in his work come to light.

"Davis opens her film with never-before-seen interview footage of Basquiat that she and a friend shot about two years before the artist's death. In this footage, Basquiat speaks openly and frankly about himself, his work, his peers, and his critics. He comes off as mildly uncomfortable, even though this was essentially a private video made with friends. He doesn't relish discussing his work, and betrays a certain amount of bitterness about his position in the art world. Although a success - even a sensation - in his own time, there was a sense amid the media frenzy over the artist and his work that Basquiat was an oddity, a 'special case,' coddled by the liberal art world establishment, a situation specifically highlighted by the otherwise clueless Hilton Kramer in archival interview footage. But Basquiat seemed aware of this, and that, beyond the perceived value of his art itself, there were those around him who benefitted socially and financially from turning him into a celebrity.

"Davis does an excellent job of untangling Basquiat's considerable legacy from the distancing threads of mythologizing, politicizing, hype-making, and romanticizing that occurred both during the artist's life and afterward. Davis shows us Basquiat at work in his studio, a precocious and intelligent artist capable of tapping into deep mental and emotional resources, a keen awareness of history, and a voracious consumption of cultural produce. His paintings are far removed from the crass, commercially-minded hoopla orchestrated to 'sell' the artist to the public by his handlers and the media; the irony is that the prices fetched by his paintings are far more a result of this 'inside sales' work by gallerists and dealers than they are a product of the artist's own self-promotion, and yet those prices are exactly the evidence used by Basquiat's critics to discredit him as a mere media celebrity. But Basquiat worked alone and was furiously productive; he worked to sell, it's true, but his paintings are remarkably consistent. His vision rarely falters into simplicity or bears any other traces of having been compromised for the sake of speed and income. Davis includes new interviews with many of Basquiat's contemporaries, including artists Julian Schnabel, Kenny Scharf, and Al Diaz (Basquiat's SAMO partner); gallerists and dealers like Gagosian and Bischofberger; museum curators, musicians, and a few former girlfriends. Each interviewee provides a slightly different perspective, and there is a clear divide in the tone of the comments by those who had a professional interest in the artist and those whose interest was simply personal. Davis's own interview footage from 1986 shows that the artist was well aware that he meant something different to many different people."

Finally, Casey also closes out our column with another silent classic getting a beautiful restoration this month: The Complete Metropolis. "At age 83, Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been given a new lease on life. Not that it needed it, exactly. Lang's immensely influential vision of a dystopic future society had enjoyed a full restoration of its known elements in 2001, playing theatrically to much fanfare. I saw it for this first time that year, on the big screen. I was totally dumbstruck by the movie as a technical and visual achievement, and as a moving, involving story. To that point, I had viewed silent films more or less as interesting curiosities, films that lacked a crucial communicative element; movies from the pre-sound era seemed handicapped or unfinished.

"Seeing Metropolis for the first time, I realized that silence could be used, even embraced, by filmmakers who had mastered this very specific form of the medium to tell stories in ways that sound films could not and never did again after the release of The Jazz Singer in 1928 - the film that destroyed an art form in the name of technological progress. For me, seeing Metropolis carried the realization that silent films were capable of a very specific kind of storytelling unavailable in any other medium - the highly physical acting, the use of music as a kind of 'narrator,' the development of camera movement and other photographic techniques - among other stylistic devices, these marked the silent film era as the period in which people taught themselves how to tell stories on film.

"Famously cut upon its original release (the film was a financial failure), a fully-restored Metropolis was thought to be impossible - and probably is. But a huge step in that direction was made in 2008, when a nearly-complete 16mm dupe negative was discovered in an Argentine film archive. Previously missing footage - amounting to about 25 minutes' worth - was edited back into the already-restored 2001 cut. The reinstatement of this footage rounds off the film's heretofore jagged narrative edges. The whole thing plays significantly better, providing numerous contextual shots, plus a few longer sequences that clarify plot mechanics, and character dynamics.

"The storyline of Metropolis is philosophically muddled, demonstrating a naïve and incomplete command of the socio-political 'machinery' it means to discuss. There is a strange, unexplained reliance on Christian imagery and allegory that doesn't exactly mesh with the film's already otherworldly setting. As a character, Maria is strongly mystical at some moments and incredibly vulnerable at others. Freder comes off as an over-the-top bleeding heart with no real charisma, although he redeems himself through direct action in the picture's final act.

"But Metropolis's successes massively outweigh these thematic weaknesses. Despite being cast as under-developed characters, Brigitte Helm and Gustav Frohlich shine as Maria/Machine-Man and Freder, respectively. Helm is particularly fascinating when she takes on the part of the Machine-Man-as-Maria, head twitching mechanically in gestures that come off as creepy and surprisingly un-human. The other performers are good, too, including Alfred Abel as the moody, powerful Frederson, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang, the mad inventor.

"Metropolis is enormously involving from beginning to end, even at its longer restored length of 149 minutes. A gripping plot, a gallery of individuated characters, endless visual delight, and a monumentally ambitious production scale don't just maintain our interest but make us stop to think about the prodigious skill and conceptual balls it took to pull it all off. The restoration leaves the story feeling fuller and better-shaped than any previous cut. Add in a new recording of Gottfried Huppertz's original 1927 score in 5.1 surround, and this Metropolis is easily the biggest cinematic event of 2010."

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His most recent release is the comedy seriesSpell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.

Special thanks to Jason Bailey, Casey Burchby, Brian Orndorf, John Sinnott, and Adam Tyner for their contributions.]]> http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/chaplin-keaton-and-metropolis.html http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/chaplin-keaton-and-metropolis.html Sun, 28 Nov 2010 13:01:51 -0500

Talking Out of Frame:

Art House Cinema on DVD
Vol. 13: November 2010 Edition
compiled by Casey Burchby

We lead off this month's review of art house releases on DVD and Blu-Ray with two titles from Oscilloscope Laboratories. Founded by the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch as the band's recording studio, Oscilloscope has recently become a leading distributor of independent films in theaters and on disc. Their selections are varied, idiosyncratic, and generally of high quality. Oscilloscope's DVD packages reflect a considered, thoughtful approach to putting movies on disc. With the acclaimed Howl in theaters now, and the macabre Santa story Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale on its way over the holidays, even the most jaded cinephile will want to keep an eye on forthcoming releases from Oscilloscope Laboratories.

As moviegoers, we are lucky to find one or two small, personal, under-the-radar releases each year. In 2010, one such title is Oscilloscope's Kisses, from Irish writer-director Lance Daly. Daly's short feature film is a miniature jewel that sparkles with effective moods and situations, anchored by two remarkably intuitive performances by pre-teen, non-professional lead actors. In an arc that takes us from the depressed working-class outskirts of Dublin, down the River Liffey into a fable-like vision of the city itself, Daly's film recreates the unmistakable and easily-forgotten sensation of what it feels like to be a child experiencing that first taste of freedom in a world that discovered to be larger than ever before imagined - a place where anything can happen.

Dylan (Shane Curry) and Kylie (Kelly O'Neill) are next-door neighbors in a run-down suburb. One day, they escape their abusive families and leap aboard a small riverboat, whose pilot takes them all the way to Dublin. On top of the city's unfamiliarity to Dylan and Kylie, it's Christmastime, making Dublin a sheer wonderland, alight with festivity. The two go to the mall, buy clothes, and go ice skating. Still, they can't escape the city's underbelly: at one point, after unsuccessfully searching for Dylan's older brother, they are pursued by adult male predators. The next morning, their options seem extremely limited, in stark contrast to the wild possibility of the previous evening.

Kisses is shot in widescreen; composition is excellent. The opening and closing sequences (set in Dylan and Kylie's ugly neighborhood) are shot in black and white. The slow fade into and out of color as the duo enter and leave Dublin is almost unnoticeable. These technical choices are next to nothing, however, when it comes to the notoriously difficult business of working with child actors. Daly was either extraordinarily lucky, or he was wise enough to cast young actors whose personalities melded ideally with those of the characters. Maybe it was some of both. The end result is a pair of on-the-nose performances that effortlessly create distinctive characters. Curry's Dylan is an inward, prematurely hardened kid who barely emotes at all, while as Kylie, O'Neill is voluble, emphatic, and adventurous. They are well-matched opposites whose mutual affection grows as the story progresses. Yet by the film's end we begin to sense that these two aren't exactly "meant" for each other. They are two very young people who have shared an important moment, but who will ultimately grow up pointed in different directions, despite their having experienced something unforgettable together.

Also from Oscilloscope is the recently rediscovered Jules Dassin comedy-drama, The Law, from 1959 and starring Gina Lollobrigida. Boasting wonderful restoration work, the disc received an enthusiastic endorsement from Jamie S. Rich:

"Jules Dassin's 1959 French-Italian co-production The Law (La Loi) is a flirty and fun tornado of small-town scandal. [The] ex-pat director's adaptation of a Roger Vailland novel was apparently too hot for the censors upon its release, relegating it to obscurity amongst the filmmaker's resume.

"The heroine of The Law is Marietta (Lollobrigida). Marietta and her mother and two sisters live with Don Cesare, and are essentially his harem. He currently sleeps with her older sister, but Marietta is next to be called into his bed when he grows bored with her sibling--just as it was with their mother and her eldest daughter before them. The Law is [also] a story of how social structures are governed, showing us how life in the town is dictated by two men--the Godfather-like Don Cesare (Pierre Brasseur), who has all the political and financial power, and the gangster Matteo Brigante (Yves Montand, Z), the muscle on the streets. 'The Law' is also a drinking game that was popular in Southern Italy, and its strange rules mimic the way everything else is run.

"Jules Dassin's script is an extremely agile piece of writing. He never gets overburdened by all this story, nor does he ever shy away from the heat. Visually, he and cinematographer Otello Martelli (La strada) make use of the tall buildings and winding streets of Porto Manacore to give the audience the feeling of traveling through a maze. Built on a hillside, the village has lots of stairs and many levels, and it's easy to get lost. Try to map out which way Marietta is going as you watch The Law and see if you can keep up.

"The Law is a real narrative tour-de-force, full of rich characters and surprising script developments. The actors all attack their roles with relish, and Dassin was at the height of his powers when constructing his mise-en-scene. The Law truly deserves the description 'lost classic.' Jules Dassin's 1958 story of sex, crime, and social mores is a wonderfully salacious and fascinating piece of work."

Chris Neilson tackled a new box set of films by acclaimed Czech filmmaker František Vlácil, available from UK distributor Second Run. "In 1998, Czech film critics named František Vlácil's 1967 masterpiece Marketa Lazarová the greatest Czech film of all time, but it's still not available on DVD in North America. North American viewers with region-free DVD players can turn to the United Kingdom's premiere boutique art house label Second Run. Marketa Lazarová is now available in an inexpensive box set along with František Vlácil's 1968 follow-up The Valley of the Bees (Údolívcel), and his competent though lesser Adelheid (1970), together with an exclusive bonus DVD of Tomás Hejtmánek's 2003 feature-length tribute to Vlácil entitled Sentiment.

"Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees are both set in medieval Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. Inspired by Vladislav Vancura's novelization of an actual mid-13th century feud between two landed families, Marketa Lazarová constitutes perhaps the most seemingly authentic depiction of medieval Europe ever to appear on film. Based on meticulous research, the sets, costumes, and props were constructed using authentically-historic methods and materials, the cast was compelled to live on set and essentially in-character during the two-year shoot, and the script and cinematography emphasized the thoroughly distinct medieval worldview of its characters. Collectively, these efforts created an environment both so seemingly authentic as to forever ruin the supposed realism of nearly any other historic film, and so genuinely alien from the modern world as to be frightening in its depiction of the harshness of Dark Ages.

"Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees are each worth the price of admission, while Adelheid and Sentiment are both certainly lesser but not without their own merit."

From MPI Home Video comes a disturbing but incisive look at social media and the next generation of psychopaths; Preston Jones reviewed Antonio Campos' Afterschool: "Filmmakers could do worse than emulating Stanley Kubrick or Gus Van Sant right out of the gate. Both directors (and a dash of provocateur Larry Clark) are a clear influence upon writer/director Antonio Campos, whose unsettling debut Afterschool relies heavily upon a chilly, dispassionate tone, glacial pacing and a clinical style. This approach befits a story about a teenaged boarding school student, Robert (Ezra Miller), who's something of a social outcast. He spends his days wallowing in some of the roughest stuff the Internet has to offer -- graphic porn, grim clips of violence -- and generally avoiding his Bryton Academy classmates.

"Afterschool lingers after the credits roll, in part because Campos views his protagonist dispassionately. He offers no answers to the many questions raised and intimates that an entire generation, weaned on Facebook, YouTube and Tumblr, may be heading down a very similar, psychologically destructive path.

"Although cinephiles will undoubtedly be distracted by Campos's vigorous assimilation of various influences, but look past the homage to see what the filmmaker has truly wrought: a frightening, wholly plausible glimpse of what our web-addled world may have in store. Afterschool is a ferociously accomplished debut, one marking Campos as a genuine cinematic talent worth keeping an eye on."

The world of art dealers, gallerists, collectors, and self-appointed experts receives a well-deserved send-up in the rambunctious Boogie Woogie, which Brian Orndorf found amusing if imperfect: "Boogie Woogie doesn't know if it's here to satirize or indict the modern art scene, but it certainly loves to remain in the sinister gray area it creates. A comedic look at the whirlwind nature of the art world, the film is only sporadically humorous, faring better as a perceptive jab at the egos, libidos, and nitwit audacity of a subculture that's founded in handcrafted miracles, yet prides itself on excesses of status and power.

"In London, the war of art is waged on a daily basis, with gallery owners (including Danny Huston), underlings (Heather Graham), collectors (Gillian Anderson and Stellan Skarsgard), artists (Jamie Winstone), schemers (Simon McBurney), wannabes (Alan Cummings), and observers (Amanda Seyfred) out to make a name for themselves within a frighteningly competitive, self-absorbed business.

"A hurried ensemble piece seizing fragments of characterization over a unified plot, Boogie Woogie retains a breezy, casual feel from director Duncan Ward, working from a screenplay by Danny Moynihan, who adapts from his own novel. This is a tale of pure amorality, unleashing a community of corrupt individuals inside an art world that rewards betrayal, profiting from agony. The satiric atmosphere of Boogie Woogie is pungent, but the digs are earned, with the narrative taking a plunge in these icy, shark-infested waters to survey the backstabbing soullessness that helps to keep the movement scurrying along."

Chris Neilson took a look at Michael Pilz' extraordinarily ambitious (and long) Himmel und Erde, a five-hour "ethnography of the Austrian alpine village of St. Anna. Himmel und Erde, translatable as Heaven and Earth, was recorded between 1979 and 1982. The documentary invites the viewer to contemplate the disruptive effects of technology on economic and social ties through circumscribed vignettes of village life which are oft repeated either as recycled footage or variations on a theme. The repeated vignettes explore the village school and schoolchildren, the farm and farm life, logging and road building, and the social life of the tavern and church.

"'In these modern times not everything is great,' says one farmer, who like every other local farmer must also find supplementary non-farm work to support the family. With advances in farm machinery and consequential decreases in the price of farm products, hillside family farms are too small to meet farm expenses, yet the high costs of hillside farming and the social conventions of family farming blunt the consolidation of the small tracts. The result is a slow dissolution of an agrarian way of life that accreted over centuries -- farmer's sons grow up to be mechanics and electricians, and neighbors leave.

"Pilz's methods are highly affected. In addition to the repetition of circumscribed vignettes described above, Pilz's frequent narration tends towards metaphysical poetics. The people of St. Anna are not as important as individuals as they are as abstracted physical manifestations of the ideas he attempts to convey through his poetic narration. Though Pilz may not have had a role in the DVD subtitling (but I strongly suspect he did), his devaluing of the subjects as individuals comes through clearly in how the documentary is subtitled. Although every word of Pilz's narration is subtitled, the degree to which the words of the villagers are subtitled varies in direct proportion to how well those words serves Pilz's purposes. For example, school reports and economic summaries selected by Pilz to be read by the villagers are nearly fully subtitled. Similarly, the extemporaneous answers to Pilz's questions are mostly subtitled, but dialogue between the villagers rarely earns a subtitle, presumably because such small talk doesn't advance the filmmaker's objective."

The little-seen Good is out on DVD from National Entertainment Media. The film is set during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and stars Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, and Mark Strong. How this film escaped wider theatrical distribution is a real head-scratcher. Preston Jones summarizes its themes succinctly: "When does honoring one's country become blind allegiance to evil? That's just one of many provocative questions raised by Good, a cinematic adaptation of the late British playwright C.P. Taylor's 1981 play. Effectively a character study of professor John Halder (Viggo Mortensen), who finds himself slowly assimilated into the ranks of the Nazis, Good traces the ascent of the Nazi Party in Germany in the late 1930s, as an otherwise astute intellectual is steadily seduced by the power and prestige of the nascent National Socialist movement and his shocking lack of moral outrage.

"It must've been sorely tempting for screenwriter John Wrathall and director Vicente Amorim to draw parallels to contemporary society, particularly America in the wake of 9/11, and its tendency to drift toward us-vs.-them mentalities. Yet, the film shies away from overplaying its hand and is content to let the metaphors breathe. Good flits back and forth in time, from 1933 and the heady days of Halder's debut as a serious thinker and novelist to 1938, with the rise of Nazism and the persecution of Jews, including Halder's good friend, Maurice Gluckstein (Jason Isaacs, who also helped produce the film).

"The cast, which includes Mark Strong as a high-ranking Nazi official, is uniformly great. Good functions primarily as a showcase for Mortensen, who has, by now, perfected this sort of character, a smart man with a hesitation to do the right thing until it is too late.

"As the camera slowly pulls back, during Good's horrifying finale, the full impact of Halder's inaction and (willful?) blindness is brought to bear. The playwright Taylor and director Amorim make it clear: Standing idly by while any country embarks upon a path of assured destruction will only destroy one's soul. It's a chilling and timely message -- it was not so long ago that Americans were marching in the streets in a vain attempt to influence national war-time policy -- and one which allows Good to linger long after its final frames fade. "

A master of the New Wave era returns at age 88 with a typically baffling, beautiful creations. In Alain Resnais' Wild Grass (Les Herbesfolles), many things happen that are impossible to describe. Resnais' characters speak, make choices, and interact with one another in ways that at first seems "normal." But the tension that creeps under the surface, and the filmmaker's visual choices - among other factors - subtly alter the plot and dialogue in wholly unexpected ways, placing attempts at gathering meaning and significance tantalizingly beyond arm's reach. I do not suggest that Resnais' films are in any way devoid of tangible content, but at least in the instance of Wild Grass, that content is only partially accessible to this writer. Wild Grass is rich in incident, visual information, oblique thematic gestures, obfuscatory dialogue, and hard left turns against the grain of expectation.

First, a woman named Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azéma) has her purse snatched outside a Marc Jacobs in Paris. Next, Georges Palet (André Dussollier) finds Marguerite's discarded wallet in a parking garage. Palet, a married man who lives with a dark and undisclosed secret, seeks to return the wallet personally to Marguerite. When she proves elusive, Palet leaves it with the police. Marguerite retrieves the wallet from the police and then feels compelled to thank Palet, which leads to a series of awkward phone calls and attempts at communication. Palet finds himself revealing some of his deepest desires, including his passion for airplanes; as an amateur pilot, Marguerite eventually agrees to take him up in her small plane. By this point, Palet's wife (Anne Consigny) and Marguerite's friend Josepha (Emmanuelle Devos) have been drawn into this odd relationship, which has gone through a number of iterations before finally achieving a strained mutual understanding.

Wild Grass moves in the slow but irresistible manner of a lava flow, and the film's depiction of elemental human desires suggests the bubbling action of submerged primordial impulses. Color is of immense importance, varying from neutral earth tones to crazily gaudy neons; the production design is meticulous and forceful in this regard. The loving, fluid widescreen camerawork of the great Éric Gautier and a remarkably graceful editorial style (thanks to regular Renais and Polanski collaborator Hervé de Luze) merge in some striking imagery, particularly during the film's final sequence, which concludes with a pulse-pounding series of pans and cuts across an alien, barren landscape before delivering a final blow with one of the most jaw-dropping lines of dialogue of all time.

Jamie S. Rich wrote about the elegant I Am Love, starring the sublime Tilda Swinton in another outstanding performance: "Rarely do the opening moments of a movie tell us so much in regards to what a picture is about. After a brief glimpse of a clandestine make-out session between two of I Am Love's younger characters, writer/director Luca Guadagnino cuts to a birthday party for an old man, Edoardo Recchi Sr. (Gabriele Ferzetti), the patriarch of the Recchi Family. The grandfather is opening a present from his granddaughter, Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher), and her mother, Emma (Tilda Swinton), seizes the ribbon off the gift and wraps it around her hand. It is a small gesture that reveals what kind of character she is: she maintains the family order, everything must be contained and controlled. Likewise, the old man's reaction to the gift shows us there is a conflict between young and old, between change and tradition.

"I Am Love is a grown-up melodrama. It is about many things, but most of them boil down to divisions: divisions between generations, divisions between classes, and most important, the division between our desires and our actual lives. The movie examines lives that have become stagnant and explores how some blossom by embracing change, and others flounder because they hold too tight to things they should let go of.

"I Am Love is a beautifully shot, marvelously acted melodrama. Guadagnino has created a layered story of one family's divisions and the instability caused when the lines are redrawn. The center of the drama is Emma, played with a stunning emotional range by Tilda Swinton, who discovers new love and a renewed sense of self-worth in the arms of an understanding young man. Clashes between tradition, class, and social expectation inform the larger narrative, and though the film eventually goes overboard, I Am Love is a rich meal."

Apropos of one of 2010's biggest critical hits, Jason Bailey asks, "Is there a more underrated director than Nicole Holofcener? Since her 1996 breakthrough film Walking and Talking, she's written and directed a steady stream of witty, smart, female-friendly indie comedies, pulling terrific performances out of Frances McDormand, Jennifer Aniston, Emily Mortimer, and her cinematic alter ego, the DeNiro to her Scorsese, the great Catherine Keener.

"Her new picture, Please Give, begins (improbably enough) with an opening credit montage featuring tight close-ups of women getting mammograms. Those mammograms are administered by Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), whose life consists primarily of working and taking care of her elderly grandmother Andra (Ann Guilbert). Rebecca's sister Mary (Amanda Peet) sometimes helps out as well, but she's mostly off in her own orbit. In the apartment next door, we find Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), an upscale couple with a teenage daughter (Sarah Steele) and a furniture boutique, where they resell vintage items at a high mark-up, usually bought for a song from adult offspring of the recently deceased. Kate doesn't feel right about taking advantage of people, but isn't quite sure what exactly to do about it, aside from handing out money to the homeless people in front of her building (which she hopes gives her some kind of karmic balance).

"Holofcener's screenplay uncoils slowly and deliberately--it's smart, low-key, and character driven. It carefully establishes the specific personalities in the opening scenes, then slyly slams them into each other to see what happens. The opening scenes are good, but the film doesn't really pop to life until it puts its six primary characters into the room together, and lets them go to work on each other. They get together for Andra's 91st birthday party, and the dinner is funny and awkward--both, in tandem and independently of each other (too often, the comedy of awkwardness is long on the awkward and short on the comedy, but this scene does both). These are earned laughs, and Holofcener piles them up, one banging right into the next."

Julio Medem's controversial and memorable Sex and Lucia receives new life on Blu-ray from Palm Pictures. Thomas Spurlin enjoyed the film, but not without a few considered reservations: "Billowing music and fuzzy digital typeface for the title credits accompany a swim along the ocean floor at the beginning of Sex and Lucía (Lucía y el sexo). It's an odd, mysterious juxtaposition that familiarizes its audience with a bristly behavior that'll continue throughout Julio Medem's Goya Award-winning film, one that dips its toes into the waters of sexual allure while venturing into the mind of a struggling writer. And yes, there's plenty of carnal activity to be seen, handled with a steamy, almost uncomfortable passion that breeches on voyeurism as its grips our attention.

"Lucía (Paz Vega) receives a troubling call from her forlorn boyfriend Lorenzo (TristánUlloa) -- where he cryptically reflects on the secrets of an island trip he took -- that sends her into a panic. After arriving at his empty apartment, finding only a suicide note, Lucía travels towards the island he talked about. The story then jumps back, and Lorenzo and Lucía jump into their amorous affair. Julio Medem's film begins telling the story of their mojo-driven romance through expressive, lurid scenes of love-making and conversations about their love-making, shown as they trade nude Polaroids of one another, strip for each other, and discuss the best sex that Lorenzo's ever. That level of intimacy breathes raw life into the front portion of Sex and Lucía, a heaving invigoration for the senses that's made intriguing on varied levels with the knowledge of what's to come between the lovers -- heightened further when Lorenzo's secrets begin to shape the picture's dramatic poise.

"Thankfully, Sex and Lucía reveals that the realism and psychosis of sex simply aren't the point. Conflicted novelist Lorenzo begins to write again, but when the film's characters are symbolically transposed into the images that Lorenzo paints with his words, and the drama arises around Lorenzo's past, Medem's storytelling fights against implausible plot devices that detract from the sincere gravity Lorenzo and Lucía generate early on. An anchor can thankfully still be found in [Lucia], played by Paz Vega with insatiable abandon both in and out of the bedroom. Though chaotic in its connect-the-dots inanity and scatterbrained with unrealized cathartic ideas, it still rewards its audience in an odd way as it hits expected points of intrigue with a stringent level of cinematic craftsmanship."

As always, the folks at Criterion have offered several new titles over the last month, two of which were released on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time. Jamie S. Rich took a look at them both, beginning with one of Ingmar Bergman's less-famous masterworks: "The Magician is one of those movies where nothing is as it seems, everything has two explanations, and the very notion of the 'knowable' is called into question. Its knotted narrative is full of tricks and surprises, some obvious and others not so much, and by the end, Bergman has pulled off his own cinematic magic trick, leaving the audience wondering just which of his flickering illusions to believe.

"The Magician opens in a Swedish forest somewhere near the tail end of the industrial age. We move in on a traveling sideshow led by one Dr. Vogler (Max von Sydow). Tall, dark, and bearded, Vogler is an imposing figure; he is also mute. Amongst his group are the master of ceremonies Tubal (Ake Fridell), Vogler's grandmother (Naima Wifstrand), the androgynous Mr. Aman (Ingrid Thulin), and the carriage driver, Simson (Lars Ekborg). We are given multiple explanations as to what this band of performers does. They regularly insist on their own lack of veracity--they do tricks for show, nothing more. Or do they?

"In the woods, the troupe finds an ailing actor (Bengt Ekerot). They take him in their carriage, and he dies before the group reaches civilization. They take the body to the police, but find they are in trouble for other infractions. The performers are hauled before a tribunal of three. They demand Vogler and his people account for themselves, and even push for a demonstration of the Doc's powers.

"There is a subtle comment on class here: the more common folk believe in religion and magic, the more affluent and educated do not. Yet, as Bergman holds back the curtain and shows us things that defy rational explanation, who are we to side with? There is a lot to digest in The Magician. All the characters are dealt with before the finale, all the subplots wrapped up, and together they create a dramatic tapestry that is fun to pick apart and analyze. Emphasis on fun. Bergman's movie is one of his more self-conscious entertainments. It's spooky and challenging, and Bergman uses all the mechanics of a good fireside ghost story. "

Jamie also reviewed one of David Bowie's most unlikely roles in another of this month's Criterion releases: "1942. A Japanese prison camped for Allied POWs captured in Korea and other parts of Southeast Asia. This is the setting for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Nagisa Oshima's 1983 film of hidden desires behind the barbed-wired fences.

"Tom Conti leads the film as Colonel John Lawrence, a British officer with some expertise and experience in Asia. His ability to speak Japanese makes him a valuable liaison between the prison guards and their prisoners. Lawrence is roused from sleep by the gruff-voiced Sgt. Gengo Hara (Takeshi Kitano). One of Hara's men (Johnny Okura) has been caught in a compromising position with a Dutch prisoner (Alistair Browning), and Hara wants Lawrence to both translate for the victim and be witness to what happens. Hara would like to punish his soldier without involving his commander, the aloof Captain Yonoi (musician Ryûichi Sakamoto). Homosexuality is not to be tolerated, particularly if the captor forced himself on the captive.

"Yonoi does end up stumbling into the situation, but he has little time for it. He is on his way to base where a tribunal has been called to deal with another captured Brit. Major Jack "Strafer" Celliers (bleached-hair, Let's Dance-era David Bowie) was engaging in what was apparently some pretty effective guerilla warfare before he ran afoul of the Japanese army, and his lack of cooperation now that he is in their hands has confounded the top brass. Yonoi is brought in for some outside perspective--only his superiors don't know how far outside it is.

"There's a lot of strong stuff in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. The complexity of the drama and the psychology of the characters is fascinating. Lawrence forms an unexpected bond with both Hara and Celliers, driven together by the odd behavior of Yonoi. The Captain's own secret shame ends up connecting to how he finally deals with the alleged rapist (there's some question of what really happened), and he masks his sexual frustration further by trying to assert military dominance over his prisoners. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence has an impressive final act. The melancholy denouement neatly encapsulates all the things the rest of the film touches on: war is destructive, and it causes men to act in ways that are against their nature."

Finally, Thomas Spurlin takes a look at the new Blu-ray release of Jeunet and Caro's beloved debut, Delicatessen, out from Lions Gate: "A yellow haze coating an empty corner of post-apocalyptic France clouds our vision in Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen, a marvel of the senses from two highly imaginative minds. As the camera pans towards a small butcher's shop, the directorial pair introduces us to the extent of humanity's flexibility in the wake of, well, some disaster. No, we have no clue what's actually happened, nor how long everything's been this way. The delicatessen is just ... there, with a cluster of fidgety people filing to the counter for the meat the butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) has to offer, with satchels of corn in-hand as payment instead of currency. Only, when they talk about shoulders, they're not talking about from a slab of beef or pork.

"Delicatessen bundles the components of its post-apocalyptic setting into a bizarre flourish of artistic whimsy. Shot by gifted cinematographer Darius Khonji (Se7en), it creates a sense of isolation outside the deli through those dusty shots of dilapidated buildings coated with a dense yellow fog. On the inside, however, the pallid shades become warming, even oddly inviting as the camera moves across found objects in the characters' apartments.

"Delicatessen excels as a melting pot of moods -- a soupy swirl of repulsive, warm-hearted, romantic, and unsettling tempers -- that bursts with originality. More often than not, the directorial duo experiment with the tones it generates into compellingly juxtaposed scenes, such as the "date" Louisan and Julie share that blends our awareness of the building's cannibalism with the charming fumbles of their romantic link. The most blatant exercise of their playfulness would be an absurd rhythmic sound sync between all the tenants, where rug-pounding, toy-screwing, and roof-painting follow with the squeaks under the butcher's bed mid-amore with almost a Pied Piper-like obedience.

"Before The City of Lost Children and Amelie thrust their names into the mainstream of contemporary French cinema, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro ventured into the realm of pitch-black humor with Delicatessen, a post-apocalyptic story that thrives in its mix of sinister tonality, visual flare, and a warming core."

Casey Burchby lives in San Jose, California: Twitter, Facebook, Blog.

"Michael Shannon gives what is, by now, fast becoming his stock-in-trade performance, that of a deeply troubled individual whose grip on reality is, at best, tenuous. He's played the part in countless films (Revolutionary Road and Bug, to name just a couple) and lesser actors would've been knocked for the repetition by now. But Shannon is so damned good at making viewers feel the barely contained angst that it's hard to argue his choices. Here, he plays Brad McCullum, a talented actor who becomes a bit too immersed in the role he's playing in a Greek tragedy with his fiancée Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny). One morning, with no warning, Brad slays his mother with a sword borrowed from his eccentric Uncle Ted (Brad Dourif), which instigates a stand-off with police (Willem Dafoe, Michael Pena), who're desperately trying to understand exactly why Brad committed matricide. Herzog isn't terribly interested in the mechanics of the police investigation, only in that he uses it to thread together his narrative, which concerns itself with Brad's mental state and his creepy relationship with his mother (Grace Zabriskie).

"...The film tends to meander along, in no real hurry to reach its resolution, which undermines Shannon's explosive performance. His outbursts electrify the frame, but all that energy dissipates as Herzog (as he did in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) becomes fixated on minutiae that doesn't have much of anything to do with what's taking place on screen. What could have been harrowing is merely interesting, and while Shannon's turn here is easily worth a rental, the overall experience may frustrate fans of both Herzog and Lynch. Given the men's track record, one would certainly expect more than what's provided here."

A focus on minutiae is not always bad, as demonstrated in Abbas Kiarostami's fascinating Shirin. The Iranian auteur's 2008 motion picture takes his experiments with the illusion of cinema further than ever before by removing traditional presentation methods and showing the audience a version of themselves. This is a movie where you, as a filmgoer, watch other filmgoers watch a movie.

Literally.

Kiarostami has gathered 115 actresses and shot 90 minutes of them watching a non-existent movie. As the invented film's narrative plays out for them, the director moves from face to face, recording their reactions, silently observing their private interaction with cinema. And that's it. The movie these women are watching is based on a 12th-century Persian poem. We never see a frame of it, but we hear the whole thing though dialogue, sound effects, music, and even a couple of songs. It's the tale of a prince and a princess, Khosrow and Shirin, who are fated to be together. A stonemaker named Farhad has carved portraits of both of them, and wherever they go, the images follow, until they finally meet. This star-crossed pair has too many stars crossed, however, and Khosrow's eye strays and he marries another for political reasons. Shirin is also repulsed by his warmongering, and is instead drawn to Farhad. It's a story with romance, violence, philosophy, history, and betrayal. It's also a tale about men and women, and how different they can be.

The unseen film isn't so much a backdrop for the film Kiarostami did make as it is the river that funnels into his larger cinematic ocean. His camera moves methodically through the audience, lingering on the many faces, taking its time with each one. Repeats of the same actress do occur, but there are long separations between them. The woman chosen is always center of the frame and by herself, though we do see people sitting behind her. There are men in the audience, but they are never front and center, and they mostly seem bored by the movie. As Kiarostami asks us to interpret the reactions of the women, we can also interpret that the effect the story has on them is decidedly feminine. The story of Shirin is their story, and they share the same desires, passions, and pain as this woman who lived nine centuries prior. In much the same way that the men in Shirin's life were blind to the harsh consequences of the violence they waged, so too are the men in this movie theatre cold to the soul of Shirin's story. p>In addition to the complicated fabric of what the movie is about, it seems to me that Kiarostami is portraying an inherent irony of the moviegoing experience. For as much as we can all sit in the same place and watch a movie together and react to it in the same ways, the act of watching is solitary. He is showing us something very private. These women are letting their emotions show without any expectation that they are being watched. Sure, it's a staged reaction, but as with all fiction, we are asked to forget that--and for all we know, maybe they are reacting to the tale of Shirin, Kiarostami could have been showing them a version of the story when he was directing them on set. As the final component of this experiment, we end up reacting to how their version of Shirin moves them, and if we respond with the same emotion, are we not then also moved by this non-existent motion picture? We are all united across time and fictional boundaries.

John Sinnott takes us back across space and time to early cinema--the silent era, in fact--in his review of Fantomas: Five Film Collection. "Though most people reading this have never heard of the master criminal Fantômas, there was a time when the character was internationally known. The star of a series of pulp novels, the character was created in 1911 by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. The villain captured the imagination of the public and soon the pair had penned dozens of Fantômas novels. Eventually there were Fantômas comic books, TV shows, and, of course, movies.

"In 1913, soon after the novels started, the French studio Gaumont bought the rights and pioneering director Louis Feuillade created a series of five feature films starring the dastardly villain. Restored in 1998, these silent movies have just made it to region one thanks to Kino. The entire serial of five movies has been released in a wonderful looking three DVD set that is a must-buy for fans of early cinema...This is a serial, with one movie leading into the next, sometimes with cliffhanger endings...These films are very entertaining and have a strange surrealistic touch to them that is just wonderful. I have to admit that if it had been a straight cop and robber series I would probably have grown bored, especially with the way the movies were filmed. As it is, the weird movie logic that permeate these films adds a lot by both recalling back to a simpler time and by resulting in some wonderfully unusual scenes.

"These are old pre-WWI movies that were created when the art of movie making was still in its infancy. The grammar for telling a story on film was still evolving and seen today these movies seem static and stodgy. In these films, the story is told with an unmoving camera set for a medium shot which are intercut occasionally with close ups (of objects...rarely faces or reactions.) It's as if the viewers are watching the story unfold by peering through a key hole. It's very similar to watching a play, and it's easy to see how that style became the norm for a short while. The scenes tend to go on for a long time too. It's as if Feuillade wasn't sure how much he had to show to let viewers figure out what was going on. In one scene, a man is being fingerprinted by the police, and they show all ten fingers being inked and printed.

"While these might put off some people who haven't seen a lot of silent movies, you quickly get used to the style, and that's part of the charm of these movies. It's also interesting to see how much Feuillade does with this simple and basic formula. There is one excellent scene where Fandor is trapped in a whicker basket. He cuts his way out with a pocket knife, the whole act being shown on film (though the film was sped up a bit). When he gets out, he wipes his brow and sits on the basket, relived to be free, only to find that he's in a room with a dead body. It's quite a surprising sequence that works well even within the confines of this early style. Having said that, I can't help wonder as what Feuillade would have done with these scripts if he had filmed them a decade later."

Crooks come in many forms, and Jason Bailey looks at the story of a more modern robber in the documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money: "There's plenty to be said, mostly by people smarter than me, about the corrupting influence of lobbying and campaign fundraising on the legislative process. Everyone, no matter what their political stripe, will complain that 'nothing gets done in Washington, D.C.'--that no meaningful legislation that's good for Americans can get to a vote because of the wealthy business interests who money up against it, that politicians can't get any work done because of the amount of their time they have to spend hosting fundraisers and calling people to beg for money. And thanks to the Supreme Court's 'Citizens United' ruling, now corporations can spend freely to buy even more influence. But start talking about fixing the system, about comprehensive campaign finance reform, and everybody loses their minds. You can't dictate that, genie's out of the bottle, socialism, whatever.

"'Has it always been like this?' asks Alex Gibney, early on in his terrific documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money, 'Or has something changed?' Who knows? What is safe to say is that there's no going back--not if a story like that of Jack Abramoff didn't change things. The press focused on his villainy, his courtroom attire, whether he had met Bush this time or that, how deep in it Tom DeLay was. There was more to it than that. There was much more to it than that.

"Casino Jack is a wide-ranging tale, broad in its scope, going from the Reagan years to the second Bush administration, from the U.S. to the Marianas Islands to Malaysia, from college Republican clubs to the corridors of Washington's most powerful people. Using archival footage, new interviews, wiretap recordings, and occasional reenactments, Gibney tracks Abramoff's rise to D.C. supremacy, starting with a fascinating look at the young Republicans who ended up shaping modern conservatism--Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, and a ridiculously young-looking Karl Rove. From there, we see how Abramoff and his ilk ascended following the Republican Revolution of 1994, and made a fortune defending reprehensible corporate interests and flim-flamming Indian casinos well into the Bush administration.

"Gibney is a documentarian of tremendous skill (his previous films include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side), and Casino Jack is strikingly well-made--cleverly edited, fast-paced, clear but smart. The only real flaw is in the music choices, which frequently skew too cutesy. The most fascinating element of the picture is the exposition, the nuts and bolts, how all this worked, how he moved the money, how he bought influence with it, how he chopped it up with his accomplices, how he (for all intents and purposes) laundered it for allies like Reed and DeLay. 'Lobbying is a system of legalized bribery,' contends Representative Peter Fitzgerald. There's not much reason to dispute that claim. Gibney skews more critical of Republicans than Democrats, but then again, Republicans were more complicit here (and the Democrats involved certainly get their due)."

Closing out this month's entry, we look to Brian Orndorf one last time, and the Blu-Ray of the fantastic biography picture Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. "In 1913, Igor Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen) developed 'The Rite of Spring,' an ornately designed piece of music commissioned for the ballet. Facing a riotous initial response that sent him into a creative tailspin, Igor found reassurance in the form of clothing empress Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis), who offered the composer and his family a place inside her estate so that work to bring back 'The Rite of Spring' could commence. Taking the offer, much to the concern of his ailing wife (Yelena Morozova), Igor begins to feel out his music once again. However, matters quickly dissolve into lust when the icy Coco offers herself to Igor, engaging in a torrid affair that reawakens his passion, but could destroy his marriage.

"Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is a tale told with frosted stares and fearsome posture, a hushed body language that makes the pull of lust shared between the title characters all the more secretive and destructive. Director Jan Kounen creates a hostility that's difficult to isolate, existing in the brief flashes of what passes for emotion with these iconic artists, gradually erecting what should be recognized as an extended act of unforgivable betrayal, seizing the persuasive carnality of the pairing. It's an unsettling feeling, but a dynamic directorial achievement, which asks viewers to remain invested in two individuals who are essentially charmless and free of standard morality. It's their genius and confidence that keeps us glued to the screen, that indescribable tractor beam of artistic toil that often doubles as an aphrodisiac.

"Kounen isn't shy depicting Coco and Igor's dance of the pants, viewed through graphic sex scenes that underline the more animalistic urge of the paring over traditional romantic needs. These are brave performances from the two leads, who express a universe of thought with very little movement. It's a complex psychological map of submission and colliding cultures, but Mikkelsen and Morozova are up for the challenge, finding shades to these famous faces that are off-putting (Chanel is depicted as a women left for dead by her wartime past, stripped of humanity long ago) and achingly human in equal measure. It's a film of flamboyant cinematography and slow burn ambiance, but these actors fire discreetly and directly, creating a disturbing stillness to their interaction"

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His most recent release is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.

Special thanks to Jason Bailey, Casey Burchby, Preston Jones, Randy Miller III, Chris Neilson, Brian Orndorf, and John Sinnott for their contributions.]]> http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/coco-chanel-red-riding-hood-an.html http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/coco-chanel-red-riding-hood-an.html Mon, 20 Sep 2010 08:40:02 -0500

Talking Out of Frame:
Art House Cinema on DVD
Vol. 11: August 2010 Edition
compiled by Jamie S. Rich

Retrospectives of early works by influential filmmakers kick us off this month, with two in particular from the Criterion Collection's secondary Eclipse line. In fact, our first selection, Presenting Sacha Guitry is why I like the Eclipse Series. Sacha Guitry as a filmmaker, specifically, but also what he represents in general. He now sits alongside Raymond Bernard, Larisa Shepitko, and Hiroshi Shimizu as filmmakers that I wouldn't have known about had Criterion not started their little boutique line. Eclipse is dedicated to highlighting films and filmmakers that may not have the name recognition to lead a big release, but whom could benefit from the rediscovery made possible by an affordable midline package.

Presenting Sacha Guitry is the 22nd Eclipse set, and it features four films from the acclaimed playwright turned cinematic auteur. According to the liner notes in the lead film, Guitry was the king of the Paris stage in the 1920s, and he dismissed film as a go-nowhere art form, limited by rickety technology and not capable of the poetry of live theatre. Once sound came into play, however, Guitry saw the error of his ways and, as they say, if you can't beat them, join them. After a couple of misfires, he landed on what would become his signature film.

The Story of a Cheat was made in 1936, and Guitry wrote, directed, and starred as the adult version of his title character, known simply as the Cheat (or, in French, tricheur). The narrative is simple enough, but as in all things, it's the telling that is key. In a fascinating twist, Sacha Guitry's spectacular film employs the mechanics of silent film while still embracing sound. The story is framed by the older Cheat (Guitry in white hair and make-up) writing his memoirs, and the entire run through past history is narrated in voiceover by the memoirist. Any dialogue is spoken by Guitry, it is only mouthed by the other actors. The only times we hear other performers speaking is in interludes back to the café where, in the film's present day, the Cheat is laying his story down. There, he has poignant and ironic encounters that match up with what is happening in his manuscript.

This clever device could grow tiresome under the wrong direction, but Guitry's execution is lively and playful. His camera is lithe and probing, taking cues from the narration, and the combination of words and pictures pushes the story forward at a jaunty pace. It comes to define the director's filmography, and the other four films in the set--The Pearls of the Crown, Désiré, and Quadrille--are just as lively, inventive, and fun. Front to back, Presenting Sacha Guitry - Eclipse Series 22 is energized with mirth. These are tremendously light-hearted movies that, though never shallow, never let the deeper themes and ideas tug at the smiles Sacha Guitry is so intent on putting on his audience's faces. The tone of these pictures reminds me of another Eclipse Box, the eighth: Lubitsch Musicals. Both Sacha Guitry and Ernst Lubitsch come from a stage background, and both enjoy life and the scoundrels that humans can be when pursuing happiness and love.

More serious but no less captivating is the 23rd entry, The First Films of Akira Kurosawa. Chris Neilson tackles this collection: "After serving five years as an assistant director and occasional screen writer, Kurosawa got his first opportunity to helm a film. Based on a contemporary novel by Tsuneo Tomita, Sanshiro Sagata is a martial arts/sports film set in 1882, just after the restoration of imperial rule in Japan and the beginning of Japan's rapid period of industrialization. Like many of Kurosawa's films, most notably Red Beard (1965), Sanshiro Sugata concerns the professional and, more importantly, moral progress of its protagonist. The film opens with an ambush of judo master Shogoro Yano (Denjiro Ookouchi) by a rowdy group of jujitsu practitioners, with would-be student Sanshiro Sugata (Susumu Fujita) looking on. With little effort and no malice, Master Yano bests his attackers, after which an impressed Sugata begs to become Yano's student.

"Sanshiro Sugata has a fairly unremarkable storyline, a modest budget, and is marred by significant edits by wartime censors, but it already exhibits some of Kurosawa's characteristic touches including dramatic camera movements and editing, variable camera speed, wipes from scene to scene, and extreme mood-driven weather. Though marred by heavy editing from Japan's wartime censors, and by less than pristine film elements, Sanshiro Sugata is a window on the formation of a master filmmaker. Following [its] success...Kurosawa was encouraged to make The Most Beautiful, a propaganda film to aid the war effort. When hopes to make a film about navy fighter pilots fell through, Kurosawa undertook a film about all-volunteer female factory workers producing war materials. Shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory in a quasi-documentary style, Kurosawa attempted to maximize the sense of realism by having his cast apprentice at the factory and live in the factory dormitory."

The Most Beautiful was followed by a sequel to Sanshiro Sugata. "Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two returns will all the principal cast of its predecessor, but with a storyline far more propagandist than the first, contrasting Japanese martial arts as a noble art form versus American boxing as ignoble bloodsport. During the film's first half, Sugata thwarts a bullying American sailor and bests America's champion boxer. In the second half, Sugata rises to a new challenge presented by the two brothers of the prior film's arch-rival Gennosuke Higaki. Actor Ryunosuke Tsukigata does double duty playing both the physically shattered Gennosuke Higaki and the new threat, karate master Tesshin Higaki, while Akitake Kono convincing plays the deranged Genzaburo Higaki.

"The final film in this set, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, was made during the waning days of the war, but was not released until the first days of the allied occupation of Japan. This short film recounts an episode in the life of legendary twelfth-century feudal lord Minamoto no Yoshitsune (Tadayoshi Nishina). Fearing execution at the hands of his brother, Yoshitsune attempts to flee through a mountain pass to reach safety outside his brother's dominion, accompanied by a local guide (Kenichi Enomoto) and six loyal samurai, including the warrior monk Benkei (Denjiro Ookoochi). The pass is guarded by a large force loyal to Yoshitsune's brother so Yoshitsune and Benkei are compelled to use deception not brawn to make their escape."

Back in the main Criterion line, I was positively blown away by 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg. This new collection brings together his first big studio movies, chronicling his breakthrough after many years of struggle. It's interesting to look at Josef von Sternberg's early filmography and see how many films he worked on without credit or was eventually fired from. Having spent some time earlier this year researching one of those projects, I was aware he had gone through some struggles between his scrappy independent debut, The Salvation Hunters, in 1925 and his first studio picture, Underworld, in 1927, but you have to admire the guy for sticking it out. Then again, given how headstrong and defiantly individualistic his films were, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

The new boxed set from Criterion, 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, picks up with Underworld and shows us the director's early development. Though the Austrian immigrant would eventually be best known for his sexy collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, he started off in a much different place, exploring a more realistic world than the exaggerated, opulent, and oft-times grotesque settings that would distinguish The Scarlet Empress or his Gene Tierney-led noir The Shanghai Gesture. Yet, even when the young filmmaker was re-creating the mean streets and the back alleys of urban America, von Sternberg still found ways to be von Sternberg. The trio in 3 Silent Classics are rich with memorable images and a confident command of the movie screen, rife with the kind of psychological expressionism that would set von Sternberg apart from the rest. (Be sure to watch Janet Bergrstrom's video essay on Underworld for a succinct and fascinating elaboration on von Sternberg's career prior to this breakthrough.)

The trio of films in 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg are all full frame, black-and-white. Though far from spotless, the restoration done to these prints is still absolutely wonderful. All the prints have some scratching on them, though only The Last Command is persistent; the other two, the damage is intermittent. The images are clear, the photography has great balance between light and dark, and the resolution is fantastic. An extended round of applause would be well deserved. When you take into account how a couple of the films discussed in the extras are considered permanently lost, the fact that we have a way to preserve and watch this trio over and over is in itself a champion achievement. The result is one of my favorite boxed sets to come along this year. All the films in 3 Silent Classics are both engrossing to watch and to look at. von Sternberg had an individualistic personality, and his vision shows in every frame. From the gangster chic of Underworld to the period war drama The Last Command and through the stark melodrama of The Docks of New York, he was developing his craft and establishing a style that was all his own.

A contemporary film that I imagine could end up being influential thanks to its unique style is the French crime movie A Prophet. Jason Bailey writes: "Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (Un Prophète) is filmmaking at point-blank range, a stark, fierce criminal portrait of tremendous power. There's a reckless immediacy to it--it draws us in immediately, no backstory, no bullshit. We meet Malik El Djebana, he's nineteen years old, he's going into prison for six years, boom. Go.

"In prison, Malik (Tahar Rahim) is lost, confused, and perceived (correctly) as weak. He is also a man caught between worlds--he is part Arab and part Corsican, and in this prison, you are one or the other. He finds himself in the sights of a group of Corsicans, led by César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), who offer him protection in exchange for work performed. His first job is the cold-blooded murder of Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), an Arab, about to testify against the Corsican mafia; Reyeb has a sexual interest in Malik, who is instructed to use this 'in' to slit his throat...As Malik becomes a more proficient lawbreaker, working the system from both inside and outside the prison walls, A Prophet becomes something of a crime procedural, an examination of precisely how these things are done--and it feels like a film that knows what it's talking about, from the inside out. Over the film's expansive 149-minute running time, Malik morphs from loner to kingpin, from clueless to ruthless. Rahim's is a deceptively opaque performance; you don't see him doing a lot of 'acting,' but as the story progresses and the character gets smarter, you do see him thinking. This culminates in a phenomenal moment where you literally see his face go white, and in that moment, I realized that his work here is borne of the same cloth as Casey Affleck's stunningly subtle turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It's got that same fragility, and the same reserve of forcefulness. Arestrup's work as César is something of a counterweight--he's a frightening figure who turns on a dime, but Arestrup gives us flashes of the complexity underneath his brittle shell.

"Audiard, a director previously unknown to me (I didn't catch his previous import, The Beat That My Heart Skipped), shows tremendous skill and control; the picture has a grimy, off-the-cuff feel, and with its visceral action, well-chosen music, and inventive use of on-screen text, the film forms into a hybrid of the fierce energy of City of God and the unblinking pragmatism of Gomorrah. Audiard favors a low-down, pulpy aesthetic, but he has moments of gritty lyricism, like Malik's silent regard of the beach in a moment of potential crisis."

I saw A Prophet as part of the Portland International Film Festival, which is also where I first saw the Mussolini biopic Vincere. Actually, Vincere is less a biopic of the Italian leader, the new film by radical '60s director Marco Bellocchio is really a biography of Il Duce's obsessive mistress, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Love in the Time of Cholera). As a young woman, she stumbles into the emerging revolutionary more than once, usually while he is on the run for his life. She insists her way into his life, devoting herself entirely to her lover (played by Filippo Timi), though apparently never really clueing in to the fact that he was already married. Still, Ida gives birth to Mussolini's first-born son only to find herself increasingly shunned as the Fascist leader grows more popular. Ida becomes the living embodiment of the adage "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." Eager to bury this extra family, Mussolini has his hoods lock Ida away in a mental hospital.

The tables are turned at this point of the movie, and Bellocchio challenges our perception of events. Is it possible that our first impression of Ida as an off-her-nut stalker was a little harsh? Mussolini has so effectively cut her out, she has a right to be angry, and he has placed her in the one place where it is assured no one will believe her. Giovanna Mezzogiorno's passion not only dominates her lover's in the first half of the movie, but once Bellocchio surrenders his film completely to her, she runs with it. Ida's mental deterioration is heartbreaking, and Bellocchio pushes her by letting several scenes rest entirely on her face as she silently breaks down. Mezzogiorno is also dead sexy in that crazy kind of way, and the love scenes between Ida and Mussolini are extra steamy.

Vincere joins a spate of recent Italian movies that match political messages with cinematic vigor. The aforementioned Gomorrah played at PIFF last year, as did the less artistically successful but visually dynamic Il Divo. Something is obviously going on over there, the Italians are all fired up and ready to do some screen damage. I look forward to what's coming next.

Portraits of interesting individuals are often the subject of documentaries, too, as with the new Criterion Louie Bluie. Casey Burchby says, "Terry Zwigoff's debut film, Louie Bluie...[is] being released on DVD for the first time, a full twenty-five years after its original theatrical run. The film's eponymous subject - real name: Howard Armstrong (1909 - 2003) - was a multi-instrumentalist, a visual artist, an author, a dandy, a bon vivant, and a world-class raconteur. In short, he was perfectly suited to Zwigoff's eclectic tastes, and Louie Bluie is a hilarious, moving, and joyful tribute to this strange man whose genius mostly flew beneath the radar of mainstream American culture.

"Zwigoff caught up with Armstrong in the early 1980s, living obscurely and alone in Detroit. The film takes Armstrong back to Chicago, where he was based during his musical heyday of the 1930s. There, he reunites with his former band mates to reminisce and perform a few dates in local clubs and coffeehouses. Zwigoff also follows Armstrong back to Tennessee, where he visits family and talks about developing his musical talent in the context of regional string bands. Cutting together just an hour of footage featuring Armstrong in performance and in conversation, Zwigoff creates a loving, lively portrait of Armstrong as a man of boundless energy, limitless creativity, and accomplished virtuosity in every arena he chooses to tackle - music, art, and the spoken and written word."

Zwigoff continued to be fascinated by oddballs, and Criterion also brings us his most famous feature, Crumb. John Sinnott looks at the Blu-Ray: "Robert Crumb was propelled to fame in the mid-'60s with his groundbreaking comic Zap as well as a few high profile pieces such as the cover for Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company (for which he received $600 and never had his original artwork returned) and the at one time ubiquitous 'Keep on Truckin'.' An animated movie was made of his character Fritz the Cat, which only added to his fame even though Crumb hated the film so much that he killed the character in a subsequent comic. With fame came money and respect though Crumb never really wanted any of that.

"Told through extensive interviews with Crumb, his two brothers and his mother, a bleak picture of Crumb's early life unfolds. Growing up in an incredibly dysfunctional family, Robert learned to escape at an early age into drawing. His father, described by brother Charles Crumb Jr. as a tyrannical bastard, was controlling and domineering. At one point Charles Sr. decided that Robert should make money with his art, so he ordered the young teen to wander neighborhoods drawing houses and then ringing the doorbell and trying to sell the sketch. Glowering in all the family photos, it's clear that the family patriarch had issues himself. Robert's mother escaped into amphetamines, his older brother Charles became a recluse on anti-depressants (he committed suicide before the movie was released) and his other brother Maxon, is a monk who panhandles for money to live on. (His two sisters refused to be interviewed for the movie.)

"Crumb has always marched to the beat of a different drummer, and that's still true today. He routinely turns down incredible amounts of money for the film rights of his characters and feels only distain for most of modern American society. The man comes across as an intelligent, but complex, character that still has a hard time relating to most people. There's a lot to like about this film. It's not a fawning movie that only seeks to elevate its subject. Director Terry Zwigoff interviews art critics, magazine editors, and other underground comic artists who give frank, and often contradictory, opinions on Crumb's art. The film doesn't shy away from the misogynist and (some would claim) racist aspect of his work. It's on full view, as well as the strong sexual content that permeates a lot of his art. The thing that comes through strongest is that Crumb is no mere funny book illustrator. He's a talented artist."

Someday someone should ask Zwigoff and Robert Crumb what they think of Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud. Jason Bailey likes it, writing: "Brewster McCloud may very well be the most pure and unfiltered vision of Altman's America, because he would never again be in a position where he had as much power to make whatever the hell movie he wanted. It was his follow-up to M*A*S*H, his biggest box-office hit (a title it held throughout his career), and one can only imagine the horror that those poor MGM executives must have felt when they got their first look at it. Altman probably liked that. But he certainly couldn't blame them--here they thought they were getting another ramshackle counterculture comedy, and he gave them... well, what, exactly? It's so strange; Altman circles his plot (laid out by scenarist Doran William Cannon, greatly revised by Altman and his cast's improvisations) almost with suspicion, padding around for as long as possible as a free-floating collection of random, peculiar events and surrealist sketches.

"The title character (played by Bud Cort) is an odd little fellow who lives in the fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome and wants, more than anything, to fly. He's building a winged contraption and is being assisted in his quest by Louise (Sally Kellerman, never more fetching), an angelic figure in a trenchcoat (Altman would bring that image back in his last film, A Prairie Home Companion) and her pet crow. Those who ruffle Brewster's feathers keep coming up dead, covered in bird droppings; the Houston police bring in a 'special investigator from the San Francisco Police Department,' wild card cop Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy), who postures and preens but doesn't do much actual investigating, luckily for Brewster.

"Altman spends most of the film incongruently meshing the zonked-out fairy tale of the boy who could fly with a send-up of the already-stale conventions of cop and action movies. Shaft is a good cop who runs on instinct and bucks the system; in the way he wears his shoulder holsters and turtlenecks, he's clearly meant to echo Steve McQueen in Bullitt. The film even contains an elaborate spoof of that film's primary set piece, but this car chase concludes with a whammo, contrarian twist. Meanwhile, Altman can't resist paying tribute to [actress Margaret Hamilton, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West] by throwing in multiple Wizard of Oz references, or framing the film with a satirical analysis by 'The Lecturer' (Rene Auberjonois) that goes in an altogether unexpected direction.

"Does it work? Well, that depends on what your standards are. It doesn't in any conventional sense--the endless bird shit jokes get tiresome, the narrative is absolutely befuddling, and some of the villainous characters (particularly Brewster's vulgar, disgusting old boss, who rolls around in a wheelchair with money literally piled on his lap) are played as the broadest kind of over-the-top caricature. But then again, there's every indication that Altman was going for exactly that. In a 1997 interview, he called Brewster McCloud 'my boldest work, by far my most ambitious. I went way out on a limb to reach it.' You see that ambition throughout the film, as he's trying things, taking risks, running naked in the rain...What he comes up with is a discombobulated, far-out freak show, and that's just as it should be. Brewster McCloud might be a mess, but it's his mess."

Back to documentaries about individuals, eclectic French director Michel Gondry has put together a loving portrait of his aunt in the excellent Oscilloscope Labs release of The Thorn in the Heart. Michel Gondry has a reputation for his bizarre, pixie-dusted imagery, earned with loopy feature films like Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Yet to box him in as the maddest of hatters is to ignore how facile he is with reality, as well. The Block Party film he made with Dave Chappelle is one of the most lively concert films I've ever seen, one that has as strong an interest in the people who come to listen to the music as it does the music itself, and yet never feels like it's sacrificing one for the other. Gondry's latest film, the documentary The Thorn in the Heart, is a more quiet affair than Chappelle's shindig, but it's far more poignant. Its obsession with youth and memory also connects it back to the subjects of Gondry's fictional features. It's just now he's digging into his own memory, looking through his family history to examine a central figure that has fascinated him ever since he was a child.

The subject of The Thorn in the Heart is Suzette Gondry, by all accounts a remarkable woman. A school teacher who began instructing classrooms in the 1950s, she moved all over the mountains of France teaching children at out-of-the-way locales, many of them the offspring of Muslim immigrants and representing the first generation of their families that had the opportunity to get an education. Gondry travels with his aunt to important landmarks from her past, and she shows him where she taught, where she lived, and what happened there. He cuts this together with home movies and photos that show the Gondry family as they were back then, sometimes also peppering the narrative with news footage and even some whimsy. His longtime collaborator Valerie Pirson has created interstitial stop-motion animation to take the viewer from one remote village to another.

Things grow more interesting and several shades darker, however, when Gondry begins to delve into the story of Jean-Yves, Suzette's son. Jean-Yves was a troubled boy who grew into a troubled man, who swallowed his dreams and struggled with his sexuality and put himself through many abuses. He dresses oddly now, and he seems barely functional. Emotionally, he's a tangle of misunderstanding and misdirection. There is a distance between mother and son. She doesn't get him, and he is too busy blaming her for what went wrong to sort things out. Jean-Yves is the thorn in his mother's heart, the one element of life that causes endless pain and irritation. Gondry has no real answers for why this is, and so he lets The Thorn in the Heart conclude even if the story does not. As with any tale of a family, it's always going to be a work in progress, the healing is only beginning. The film doesn't lose any of the tender nostalgia it started out with despite the harsh shadows it uncovered; on the contrary, Suzette reveals her belief that her nephew let the story go there because he knew it had to if they were ever to get past it. The Gondry family is no different than any family really. Some of the relatives get along, some don't; some succeed where others fail. There is no more an explanation to Jean-Yves being a screw-up than there is for his mother being an over-achiever.

A tribute to an influential individual in one person's life is also made in the marvelous Film Movement title The Wind Journeys. This Colombian film is the story of Ignacio (Marciano Martínez), an old troubadour who is renowned across Colombia for his skills with an accordion. At the start of the picture, Ignacio is setting out on a journey. He has a black accordion decorated with bull horns strapped to his back, and he intends to go and return it to its owner, the music master Guerra. A young man named Fermin (Yull Núñez) chases after him and asks Ignacio to teach him to play. Ignacio refuses, but Fermin follows anyway.

Ignacio swears he has given up playing music, and he turns down some offers of money and food for doing so; eventually, however, necessity demands he join some contests where the prize is, well, money. The first is a duel between accordion players, and it's surprisingly similar to a freestyle rap battle, with the musicians shouting rhyming insults back and forth until one of them trips on his words. As we will discover on this journey, there is a whole social structure to the world of musicians, and each instrument has its own folklore. We will hear about people killing a special bird to get drumming skills, magical talismans, and even witness a blood sacrifice. Ignacio is known in the scene, loved by some and hated by others, but always preceded by his reputation. Fermin once refers to the horned instrument he carries as "the devil's accordion," and indeed, it does seem to cast a spell on Ignacio whenever he plays it.

The Wind Journeys was written and directed by Ciro Guerra. It is his second feature film, though it shows such a firm grasp of cinematic language, you'd think he'd done much more. His is a movie that is as much about silence and contemplation as it is about music and communing with melody. The long stretches of nothing give our ears time to clean out, making the bursts of song all the more striking. Guerra evokes an old-fashioned, almost mystical world in The Wind Journeys. It's like "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" with accordions instead of guitars, or a roaming samurai movie where a blast of music is more powerful than any sword. The Wind Journeys certainly looks like it's from another land. Guerra is clearly proud of the beauty of his country, favoring wide shots when the men are traveling so we can see the Point A they are leaving and the Point B they are heading to.

Another quiet story about older folks, That Evening Sun charmed Jason Bailey. "In the opening moments of Scott Teems' That Evening Sun, Albert Meecham stares out of his nursing home window, his face a hard shell of bitterness and resentment. He then gathers up his pocket watch, his suitcase, and his cane, and walks right out the door. He's about had it with that place. He's got some things to take care of. Albert is played by Hal Holbrook, who gives the kind of performance that it feels like he's been waiting an entire lifetime to deliver. Meecham is an angry old cuss who travels back to the farm he spent a lifetime working, only to discover that his good-for-nothing son Paul (Walton Goggins) has sold it off to Alonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon), the son of Albert's lifelong enemy. He is greeted by Alonzo's wife (Carrie Preston), who tells him to wait for Alonzo, 'he'll be here directly.' Albert replies, 'I'm an old man, I may die directly.'

"He does not take the news of the farm's sale lightly; he moves into the sharecropper's house on the property and decides to wait the Choats out. 'You're supposed to be at the home,' his son tells him. 'I'm supposed to be where I damn well please!' he snaps back. When Alonzo's good-hearted daughter (Mia Wasikowska) lets it slip that her father hates dogs, Albert can't find a yapping canine companion fast enough. When Albert overhears the drunken lout wailing on his wife and his daughter in the yard, the old man comes out with a pistol and gives him a piece of his mind.

"The battle of wills between the 80-year-old coot and the worthless son of his adversary could have easily been played for overheated Southern melodrama, or for black hillbilly comedy. Teems' picture (adapted from a short story by William Gay) doesn't go in either of those directions; it is a low-key back roads drama, tuned in to the specific manner in which these people would interact. Seems' screenplay is the first in over a decade to remind me of Billy Bob Thornton's Oscar-winning script for Sling Blade. The dialogue, as in that film, is simple and direct, colorful without condescending or trafficking in lazy caricatures."

Bailey covers another battle over a legacy, this time in the documentary The Art of the Steal. "The Barnes art collection, located in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, houses 'the most important and valuable collection of Post-Impressionist and Early Modern Art in the world.' In the documentary The Art of the Steal, an expert is asked what the collection is worth, and all he can do is shake his head. Others do put a rough price on it: $25 billion. Albert C. Barnes, the pharmaceuticals millionaire who assembled the collection, put it on display at his educational art institution, the Barnes Foundation, and when he died, left specific instructions that it was not to be moved, lent, or disturbed in any way--both to ensure his own legacy, and as a poke in the eye to the Philadelphia art elite. But they got his collection anyway. The Art of the Steal is the story of how they pulled off the greatest art heist in history, and did it in broad daylight.

"At least, that's the point of view of the film, and it's probably the correct one. Barnes specifically designed his gallery as a small, intimate, personal experience, and seemed to revel in his ability to let in and keep out whoever the hell he wanted. He had a specific axe to grind with Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Walter Annenberg, whom he saw as a figurehead of the rich 'art patron' who doesn't actually know or care a whit about art. When Barnes died in 1951, he made clear his wishes that the collection stay exactly as it was, but, as one former teacher at the Foundation notes, 'Once everybody's dead, they'll do what they want.'

"The Art of the Steal is not some dry tract on art politics; it's a tale of intrigue, of political dealings, of age-old grudges held and squeezed. Director Don Argott walks through the complex troubles and controversies of the half-century following Barnes's death...Argott is also, unquestionably, an advocate; he lines up early on the side of the 'Friends of the Barnes' and doesn't waver. In these [Michael] Moore-infused times, the question of the objective documentary is one that's all but unanswerable, and hey, I'm no purist. But there are points at which it feels as though Argott is stacking the deck--after all, if you're on the right side of an issue, why not let those who are wrong be heard? There are, after all, real questions to be asked about who 'owns' art, and who has the "right" to see it; are we supposed to cheer Barnes for amassing this tremendous collection and then proudly, spitefully keeping it away from the general public? (The collection didn't become available for viewing by non-students until 1961, and then only a couple of days a week, by appointment.) The film affords plenty of screen time for the self-proclaimed arbiters of art, but seems almost afraid to let anyone ask the simple question: shouldn't people be able to see this collection? (The closest it gets is Philly mayor turned Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who despairs that the collection is 'being hidden away from the world.') Yes, these were Barnes's wishes, but was he right? Probably. But it's not quite as black-and-white as is portrayed here."

Double dealings, who is doing what to whom, these are not just elements of intriguing documentaries, but also good crime stories. Brian Orndorf covers The Square on Blu-ray: "Huffing only the finest Coen Brothers fumes, The Square is a cracking Australian thriller that packs a staggering left hook. Dire, frantic, and unfailingly engaging, the picture marks the feature-length directing debut of former stuntman Nash Edgerton, and I hope there are plenty more movies to come from this fellow. He has an incredible knack for the genre and terrific eye for casting, shaping this outwardly mild picture into a rowdy ride of volatility and underhanded happenings.

"Raymond (David Smith) and Carla (Claire van der Boom) are neighbors carrying on an adulterous affair, waiting for the moment they can run away with each other, leaving their stale lives behind. To help convince Raymond of her commitment, Carla looks to steal a bag of money from her crook of a husband (Anthony Hayes), to which her lover suggests a tragic house fire to cover their tracks. Hiring an arsonist (Joel Edgerton) to pull off the dirty deed, Raymond finds his master plan flushed down the tubes when everything goes wrong, pushing him into a series of violent setbacks that involve witnesses, suspicions, and previous sins, all waiting their turn to make Raymond's life utter hell.

"Certainly, the premise of The Square is not a spry piece of originality, actually assuming an ordinary stance as Raymond embarks on the worst few weeks of his life. It's a scheme done for love, with a pretty blonde and a bag of cash promising a fresh start, away from suburban routine, wives, and a dreary construction foreman position with little use for his perfectionism. Edgerton pours a familiar brew to open his motion picture, but the ensuing sips reveal tantalizing twists and turns, taking our not-so-innocent hero down a path of total destruction as everything spoils, forcing the meek everyman to go rogue, not only to secure his future with Carla, but also to stay alive.

"Edgerton, working from a script written by brother/co-star Joel Edgerton and Matthew Dabner, keeps the hits a-comin' with The Square. Perhaps not the most polished thriller in recent memory, the film gets incredible mileage from its low-budget foundation, with a righteous dirty fingernail atmosphere to compliment Raymond's panic."

Orndorf also looks at the twists and turns on the Blu-ray of Ajami: "Ajami is an Israeli picture that closely mirrors the work of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu during his emotionally turbulent years with Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel...In a small section of Jaffa, a port city in Tel Aviv, the locals are growing restless as continued acts of aggression from political and religious sources threaten daily life. Omar (Shahir Kabaha) is out to avenge the shooting of his uncle; Dando (Eran Naim) is a Jewish cop tearing through Jaffa on a mission to find his missing brother; and Malek (Ibrahim Frege) is a Palestinian refugee in town to make the money needed to help pay for his mother's mounting medical bills. Looking to keep one step ahead of criminal commotion while every action results in a horrifying reaction of brutality, the men hold strong to their loved ones as tensions rise.

"Disorder is a key component of Ajami, the directorial debut of Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti (who appears in the film as another chess piece of distress pulled into the criminal vortex). Hostility is the backdrop for the feature film, depicting an explosive city at a tipping point of violence, emerging from longstanding feuds and seemingly harmless neighborhood disagreements. Jaffa is not lawless, but bloodshed is a daily event, leaving the majority of the community quaking with fear, while the rest elect to join the mindless cycle of revenge.

"To help explore the fractured viewpoint of the lead characters, Shani (a Jewish Israeli) and Copti (Palestinian) have divided Ajami up into five chapters, scattering the narrative to diverse corners of perspective and psychological grasp, gradually weaving the story together while preventing a clear view of the subplots until the final reel. The distance is necessary to a certain extent, getting the viewer worked up over blunt acts of ferocity without the benefit of a larger understanding of motive. The jumble sustains the film's alarm and dramatic left-turns, with extended passages of the feature utterly captivating due to this slow-burn manner of approach. Also stunning is the cast of amateur actors, who elevate the material with their feral performances and deeply rooted twitches of agony. Tearing around the landscape either encouraging trouble or desperate to escape from it, the ensemble masterfully captures an ideal pitch of paranoia as the story coils into a final lunge of severity, building to a last cruel piece of the puzzle. The performances are alert and vivid, digging into demanding areas of response. It's hard to believe most of these people are making their acting debut."

More reissues and restorations are on the slate this month, including Albert Lewin's uniquely bizarre Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. This 1951 romantic curio takes place on a strange dreamscape somewhere just on the other side of the expatriate fiction of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is set on the coast of Spain, in a town called Esperanza--the name translating as "hope," which is all that remained after Pandora opened the box of horrors in the Greek myth. Lewin casts Ava Gardner as his Pandora, an American nightclub singer who leads a bored life by the beach. She is fawned over by the male transplants in the village, and they are all too ready to be manipulated by her. There is the drunk socialite Reggie (Marius Goring) and the renowned bullfighter Montalvo (Mario Cabré), and also a race car driver that is so taken with Pandora, he pushes his car into the sea on her urging. It doesn't matter that Steven (Nigel Patrick) is engaged to another, he's now engaged to Pandora.

Fittingly, Steven's car was named for his paramour, and the night the four-wheeled Pandora is dumped into the drink, so too does the two-legged Pandora see an unfamiliar yacht in the harbor. Intrigued by this new prospect, she leaves her new fiancé and swims out to meet the mysterious Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason). The Dutch sailor is alone on his boat, where he is marking time by painting a portrait of the mythic Pandora; only, she has Ava Gardner's face. It would appear that destiny is pushing these two tragic figures together, but we can tell by the way Lewin and cinematographer Jack Cardiff shoot their meeting that having that much tragedy in one place can only cause further imbalance. While they are on the ship, the image rocks up and down, subject to the caprice of the waves.

Since the basic premise of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman has its roots in classic literature, Albert Lewin gives his tale of doomed romance a literary framework. The main story is shown in flashback, narrated by a scholar (Harold Warrender) who is also caught in Pandora's web, but who has been relegated to the role of confidant and witness. He is the one who finds the old manuscript that purports to be the real diary of the Flying Dutchman, and so it is he who puts two and two together and realizes that van der Zee (whose name literally translates as "the sea") is the eternal wanderer from the folk tales. With the Dutchman swearing he will set sail the night before Pandora is to marry Steven, this realization is like the Dutchman's ever-present hour glass--it initiates a countdown to zero. The love of Pandora has unleashed all kinds of danger. Some suitors will survive, some will not, and it remains to be seen what either she or the Dutchman might give up in order to love the other.

Photographed by Jack Cardiff, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a beautiful film, but it's also flawed. Its narrative pacing can be slow, and though James Mason is fantastic, Ava Gardner is kind of dull. Then again, Lewin may be playing it smarter than I am giving him credit for. By withholding the histrionics and playing the more fantastical elements close to his chest, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman perpetually feels like it has something waiting just around the next edit, that there is a strangeness just out of frame that one whip pan will reveal. And, really, the story does escalate as it goes. The bullfighter's mother adds to the anxiety by predicting that death is coming for the men in Pandora's life, and so every rash action they take could be their last. Steven pulls his race car out of the water with the intention making it roadworthy again and setting a speed record, while the hotheaded Spaniard has a date with a hotheaded bull. They both want to show Pandora what men they are, but it's Montalvo who takes us into the third act by escalating events and clearing the way for Lewin to deliver on all the hints and teases with a delirious finish. Myth collides with fairy tale, making for some unequaled cinematic magic.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is out now on Blu-Ray, as is another fabulous and colorful restoration. Flashier, but also literary minded, is Black Orpheus. Once again, Stuart Galbraith IV: "A deceptively simple and hypnotic work, Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro, 1959) in its early scenes appears to be one of those dated art house films: historically and culturally significant but in retrospect marginal as cinema. With its Antônio Carlos Jobim score, the picture is credited with single-handedly launching the samba and bossa nova craze in North America, across Europe and parts of Asia, and its depiction of Rio during Carnaval, of idealized racial harmony and its romanticized favela (Brazilian slums, or shanty town) drew foreigners searching for a Brazil that never really existed, an image even popular and more realistic crime films like City of God can't extinguish.

"Based on the Brazilian play Orfeu da Conceição by Vinicius de Moraes, which in turn was inspired by the classic Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Black Orpheus builds slowly, reaching an expected fever pitch during Carnaval before moving into its unanticipated dream-like final act, a fantasy made believable and spellbinding at once due to Camus's careful nurturing of the narrative and its characters throughout. It's unlike anything in all of cinema and takes the viewer by surprise.

"An opening shot of a relief, presumably Greek statuary of Orpheus and Eurydice, is ripped wide-open like the explosive opticals in a Republic serial to reveal dancing and costumed blacks in a hillside favela overlooking Rio de Janeiro. In this festive atmosphere of nearly wall-to-wall samba dancing and drum-beating enters Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), who has run away from home after being pursued by a strange man she believes wants to kill her. She arrives at the shantytown shack of her cousin, Serafina (Léa Garcia), but not before meeting popular streetcar conductor Orfeu (Breno Mello), a handsome, incorrigible womanizer, whose guitar playing, dancing, and singing are well known in the community.

"Orfeu is engaged to jealous Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira) but at once he falls madly in love with the more cautious Eurydice. They spend the night together and the next morning, as Orfeu, Mira, Serafina, and the rest of their samba school prepares to dance in the Carnaval parade, Serafina offers to let Eurydice take her place so that she can be near Orfeu. A veil hides her identity, but not for long and Mira is infuriated. Meanwhile, the mysterious man, dressed in a stylized skeleton costume, appears and begins stalking Eurydice, who by this point is convinced the man is Death itself."

From another part of the world, and another time, Thomas Spurlin looks at the excellent Korean film Mother, one of the very best things I've personally seen this year. Thomas writes of the Blu-Ray: "Korean director Bong Joon-ho has an eye for tension, cramming edgy suspense and raw spirit into his pictures, but what takes his work a step beyond comes in his understanding of the pain within family and community. Memories of Murder finds footing with its gritty tone by enacting a nail-biter witch-hunt for a murderer in a small town, while the strongest moments in his Jaws-like picture The Host exist in the familial search for the lead character's daughter in the pit of a monster's lair. Mother, the director's latest mystery, tackles that paternal angle in a more direct manner, focusing on the lengths that a parent will go to preserve the innocence of their child. Much like his other pictures, Bong Joon-ho nimbly mixes eccentricity with suspense to soften its severity, yet the straightforward focus he's concocted here pins the picture's success on the performance of, naturally, the mother. Thankfully, he's found an exceptionally good one.

"She, played by TV vet Kim Hye-ja, is a small-town mother who smothers her mentally challenged twenty-something son Do-joon (Won Bin), a stay-at-home boy who goes in and out of the local police station because of his scatterbrained activities. He's been manageable -- mounting debts aside that his mother pays off by way of her grain-selling job and off-the-cuff acupuncture sessions -- until he gets wrapped up in a murder case involving a local schoolgirl, one where he's the prime suspect. As the police crowbar him in place as the murderer, with a signed affidavit to practically close the case, it's up to the boy's mother to discover the truth. She finds herself sneaking into houses, tromping into a victim's funeral, slinging herbal remedies as payment and navigating through the town's alleyways in search of answers, all with her eyes wide open as she sinks further away from her element. She may be sheepish, but she's also resilient.

"Feeding off the same vein of tension as the veritable crime thriller Memories of Murder, Mother taps into a gripping authenticity that'd suggest something of a true story throughout its build-up -- even if it's an original work from Bong Joon-ho and two collaborators. As we follow the mother along her out-of-element sleuthing, rigidly jogging through alleyways and along dirt roads to the maximum of her age's capabilities, the film's composition grasps an earthy beauty that elegantly captures an electric tone. Amid her hunt, suggestive seeds are deliberately planted to steer us towards a viable conclusion, perhaps so well that the director has transformed a tried-and-true thriller into more of an effectual pins-'n-needles drama with anticipated twists and turns. This isn't so much a picture to watch for persistent revelations, but one to absorb for the realism in subtle thrills within a cramped societal cage."

Family drama is also at the center of The Secret of the Grain, and Galbraith's review closes out our column this month: "Hypnotically engrossing, Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain is the kind of intimate family drama that you don't merely witness - by the time the film is over it's almost as if you've personally shared in its characters' experiences. Its story is deceptively simple - a 60-year-old Arab immigrant from Maghreb, Slimane (Habib Boufares) is a longtime shipyard worker living in the French resort town of Sète, who uses his severance pay from that profession to establish a fish & couscous restaurant as a kind of legacy for his disgruntled extended family. The film unfolds leisurely, and not that much seems to happen over its 151 minutes - and the film ends abruptly. But once it's over it stays with you for days and gradually you begin to realize just how richly layered and multifaceted it is.

"The movie opens with an understated irony permeating its narrative. As patriarch Slimane Beiji is losing his shipyard job to corporate downsizing, his eldest son, irresponsible Majid (Sami Zitouni), operates a ferry tooling around the harbor, inanely showcasing Sète's quaint shipyard and tuna boats for rich tourists. Though married to Russian immigrant Julia (Alice Houri) and the father of a toddler son, Majid sneaks away from the tour for a little afternoon delight with Mme. Dorner (Violaine de Carné), the Deputy Mayor's lusty wife.

"The film is a bit like Kurosawa's Record of a Living Being (1955). Slimane is reticent much like Toshiro Mifune's 70-year-old patriarch in Kurosawa's film - women do most of the talking in this film - and likewise he straddles two discordant families that he wearily attempts to provide for. Slimane is divorced from Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk), the mother of his children, and for whom she regularly cooks extravagant Sunday meals of couscous with fresh mullet that Slimane provides. In a long, fascinating sequence depicting one of these meals, other family members are introduced, including shrewish cannery worker Karima (Farida Benkhetache), Slimane's bossy daughter, and Riadh (Mohamed Benabdeslem), the youngest son.

"Slimane now lives at a nearby hotel-bar owned by his much younger (though still middle-aged) current lover, Latifa (Hatika Karaoui), the single mother of adult daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzi). They don't mind, but he feels like a kept man. Facing an uncertain future, Slimane opts to use his severance pay to buy a dilapidated boat that he plans to restore and turn into a dockside couscous restaurant, with his ex-wife cooking the same hearty meals she serves her family, his children working as waiters, cooks, and so forth...."

"More than anything else, the film impresses with its intimacy. Hand-held close-ups dominate, almost nose-to-nose with the film's characters. That, and the fine, naturalistic acting by imperceptively integrated professional and amateur actors, and perhaps at least partly improvised dialogue create the feeling of being seated alongside its characters. When the film audience first sees the family get together, the discussion among Slimane's adult children, most of whom have children of their own, quickly turns to the high cost of disposable diapers. Karima, who in an earlier scene mercilessly browbeats her two-year-old for resisting toilet-training, steers the obsessive and authentically true-to-life discussion. Later, at the dinner table, talk turns to the use (or not) of Arabic in the home, by the siblings and their children...The screenplay ever so slightly exposes an underlying theme of racial discord and the self-selling of cultural exoticism. The wealthy and white potential investors and government officials are subtly condescending to their Arab-immigrant neighbors yet also attracted to their perceived exoticness. (And in turn, this prompts them to conspire against the restaurant's success, even before Slimane's establishment opens to the general public, less their own rival businesses suffer.) Mme. Dorner, for instance, is clearly attracted to Majid as a kind of 'forbidden fruit,' and later impresses her friends with a few words of Arabic she obviously picked up from her secret lover. Rym's climactic belly dance in the film's justly celebrated last act indulges cultural expectations ("with a little sex," to quote Sullivan's Travels) while her selfless self-exploitation elicits a mixture of gratitude and resentment from Slimane's family.

"The ensemble cast is superb because the acting is totally invisible; it's hard to believe we're looking at actors giving performances and unrelated to one another by blood or marriage. As [film critic Wesley] Morris puts it, 'We might as well be guests at their table.'"

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His most recent release is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.

Special thanks to Jason Bailey, Casey Burchby, Stuart Galbraith IV, Chris Neilson, Brian Orndorf, John Sinnott, and Thomas Spurlin for their contributions.]]> http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/sacha-guitry-akira-kurosawa-an.html http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/sacha-guitry-akira-kurosawa-an.html Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:51:27 -0500

One of my favorite films so far this year has been Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. An oddly compelling portrait of a misanthrope and the Florence Nightingale that gets involved with him, it's a film where soul and intelligence are at odds, seeking a middle ground where they can get along. Jason Bailey is also a fan, and he takes a look at the film on Blu-ray: "Greenberg is a very smart movie, and a very tricky one--it is not, as we might suspect from its ads, merely another tale of an introvert who has lost his way, and is brought to his senses by the love of a good woman (cue the Garden State comparisons). It is more complicated than that--Roger Greenberg is not a loveable loner, nor an amusing malcontent. He's got real problems, and they manifest themselves in ways that are not easy to get past. Florence is warned that Roger was recently released from a mental hospital, and we slowly piece together his back story; a good decade and a half ago, he was in a pop band, and he was the lone holdout when they were offered a record deal. In the years that followed, he moved to New York and went adrift. 'Right now,' he tells an old girlfriend, 'I'm really trying to do nothing.' She replies, 'That's a brave choice at our age.'

"That girlfriend is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, wife of writer/director Baumbach; she's also credited with co-producing and co-writing the story. She only appears in two scenes, but they're good ones, sticky and truthful. Particularly memorable is a painful coffee meeting between her and our protagonist--he's clearly angling to get back in her life, but as they talk, she's long forgotten even broad outlines of their time together, to say nothing of the specific details he keeps mentioning. It's a relatable but wince-inducing scene, made even more painful by her blunt, immediate response when he takes the next step and asks her out on a date.

"Her cold reception is a bit of a relief, as the film seems in danger of setting up a dull, familiar love triangle subplot; Baumbach has nothing so standard on his mind. He's more interested in exploring the hit-and-run dynamic of Gerwig and Stiller's characters; as the story begins, she seems a bit of a flake, and we're not sure how strong her judgment is when she fools around with him during what must be one of the more awkward first dates ever committed to celluloid. Baumbach's intelligent screenplay doesn't make it easy for them--or for us, inasmuch as his peculiar flashes of temper and seeming insistence on being troublesomely mean to her doesn't exactly set up the kind of rooting interest we've come to expect from our cinematic would-be romances. But the nuanced script puts the onus for the relationship on her, and when she mumbles, at a particularly vulnerable moment, 'You like me so much more than you think you do,' we know she's right.

"The script contains some of Baumbach's most quotable dialogue since his debut film, the incomparable Kicking and Screaming (no, no, not the shitty Will Ferrell movie). When asked how he's doing, Roger responds, 'I'm fair-to-middling. Leonard Maltin would give me two and a half stars.' When Ifans accuses him of 'pulling a Gatsby' by staying inside at his own impromptu pool party, Roger muses, 'I don't know that I need to document the reasons this isn't a Gatsby.' And when holding court with a group of twentysomethings at a party, he insists, 'I'm freaked out by you kids. I hope I die before I end up meeting up with one of you in a job interview.' But Roger doesn't get all the good lines, either; Baumbauch is the rare male writer whose women are perhaps more interesting than his men. His screenplay also takes some risks--he's trying all sorts of interesting ideas and unusual approaches. Not all of them work, but the ones that do pay off in spades."

One could only hazard a guess what Burt Lancaster's character from The Leopard would make of Roger Greenberg. Suffice to say, it wouldn't be good. Stuart Galbraith IV writes of the new Criterion Blu: "The greatness of Luchino Visconti's film of The Leopard (1963) isn't easily described. Even in its restored, three-hour and five-minute Italian version not very much happens: a 19th century Sicilian nobleman becomes involved in a nephew's marriage to the daughter of a newly-moneyed mayor. But most of the drama is internalized, as the nobleman tries to come to terms with his eroding power in the face of Italy's democratic unification. Though almost unbelievably opulent, there's no sweeping action in the usual Samuel Bronston roadshow sense.

"Where the film comes alive is in its central performance by Burt Lancaster, which in this Criterion presentation is offered two different ways: with the actor's voice dubbed into Italian (with an aristocratic, Sicilian accent) and supported by English subtitles in its complete 185-minute version, and with Lancaster's own voice in the 161-minute English-language version. Frustratingly, neither is completely satisfying, though his performance, said to be Lancaster's personal favorite, unexpectedly comes through (and is even better) in the Italian-dubbed version.

"But the film's truly awesome achievement is its extraordinary recreations of aristocratic 19th century Sicily. The Leopard reportedly cost $3 million (20th Century-Fox co-financed its production) but it easily looks five times that. The extraordinary costuming, lighting, set design/decoration, and cinematography are like sprawling period canvases come to life. The film's influence on Stanley Kubrick (for his aborted Napoleon and later, Barry Lyndon) and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Part II, etc.) is obvious."

Aonther opulent Criterion re-release on Blu-Ray is the Powell and Pressburger melodrama Black Narcissus, reviewed by Adam Tyner: "Fascinated -- or at least, briefly distracted -- by Christianity and Western civilization, an aging Indian general (Esmond Knight) decides on a whim to convert a crumbling harem into a proper school and dispensary to be staffed by five British nuns. Led by Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), the youngest Sister Superior in their order, they struggle to educate and care for an exotic people wholly disinterested in what Christianity in general and this group of nuns in particular have to offer. Even a fellow countryman (David Farrar) sneers at what he sees as a futile attempt at trying to impose their culture onto a people they fundamentally don't understand. With little experience to speak of, these five nuns are forced to rely purely on their faith to guide them, and even that is sorely tested as they're pitted against their impossible task and the hypnotic thrall of this mountainous, achingly beautiful stretch of India." "

Adam goes on to note that the film was released at a time when India was transitioning into independence, and as such, not unlike The Leopard, the film carries a political load with its narrative: "This is a film in part about the West's fundamental lack of understanding about the very different cultures they seek to overtake. However, with a couple of notable exceptions, the most prominent Indians are played by British actors buried under mounds of thick brown makeup, and this adds -- perhaps unintentionally -- to the layer of satire prevalent throughout Black Narcissus. The film deftly juggles its more melodramatic moments with a smirklingly satirical sense of humor, with brief flickers of comedy accentuating the drama rather than deflating it.

Black Narcissus is an astonishingly beautiful film, earning two well-deserved Academy Awards for its art direction and cinematography. The entrancing beauty of India isn't merely a backdrop -- it's one of the driving forces of the story and very much a character in its own right, largely to blame for the mental unraveling of the nuns. Black Narcissus does an outstanding job conveying the colossal scope and natural majesty of the Himalayas, and it's all the more impressive that this was accomplished through matte paintings, forced perspective, and an incomparable visual eye, with virtually every last frame of the film shot on a British soundstage. The three-strip Technicolor cinematography by Jack Cardiff continues to mesmerize more than six decades later, and despite the great strength of Black Narcissus' incisive script and outstanding performances, it would have been an almost unrecognizably different film without his talents. The craftsmanship behind Black Narcissus' ambitious visuals is nothing less than staggering. Despite the many years that have passed since the film was first produced, its visual effects work doesn't look dated in the slightest, and the matte paintings hold up marvelously under the scrutiny of this revealing high definition presentation."

It seems to be a summer for brilliant restorations, and Flicker Alley brings us Chicago: The Original 1927 Film Restored.

Long before Renee Zellweger was singing and dancing her way into an Oscar nomination, the character of Roxie Hart was scandalizing stage and screen alike with her delusions of fame and her way with a gun. The modern musical Chicago went all the way back to 1926 for its source material--a non-musical play by Maurine Watkins, who had been a journalist reporting on female murderers when she got the idea for her tale of tabloid journalism and Jazz Age virtue. A hit of its time, Chicago was ideal fodder for early Hollywood. Though most people might be more familiar with Ginger Rogers's 1942 bow as the homicidal flapper, Roxie Hart first sparkled on the silver screen in 1927 in a Cecil B. DeMille production. It's a film that was thought to be lost for a long time, until an intact print was found in DeMille's archives in 2006. Now, Flicker Alley has put together the two-disc Chicago: The 1927 Film Restored, and silent film fans can finally cast their eyes on the movie that started a tradition.

The story should be familiar to most filmgoers. The blonde seductress Roxie Hart, here played by Phyllis Haver, has been two-timing her good-natured husband Amos (Victor Varconi). Roxie is a true gold digger, and Amos's empty pockets don't turn the girl on any longer. She has been having an affair with a moneyed businessman, Rodney Casely (gravel-voiced character actor Eugene Pallette), and when Casely tries to drop her, Roxie shoots him. The district attorney (Walter Richmond) is more than ready to string the murderess up, but a reporter (T. Roy Barnes) sees a way to milk the case and sell some papers. He dubs Roxie "the Jazz Slayer" and plasters her pretty face on the front page. A celebrity is born!

Though there are some scenes with Roxie in the hoosegow, including a knock-down-drag-out catfight, this version of Chicago isn't as concerned with the jailhouse sirens as the more famous Broadway version. Velma Kelly appears briefly (depicted by Julian Faye), but once the lawyer William Flynn (Robert Edeson) enters the scene, Chicago becomes all about Roxie's trial. Flynn demands a steep fee, and Amos is forced to less-than-savory action to gather it. A big difference between this version of the movie and later incarnations is how much more of a participant Amos is. He is the closest we get to a sympathetic hero in the movie: he knows Roxie is a liar, he knows his love is wrong, but he is forced to stand by her. On the other hand, Roxie is not a very likable character. She's not even charming. The girl is rotten through and through. Which isn't to knock Haver, she's actually excellent playing the shallow schemer. So excellent, in fact, part of the fun of this early rendition is rooting for the temptress to get her just desserts.

While Roxie Hart may have been a woman of her time, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert tells the story of one who is out of sync with her time. Apparently the original title of Red Desert was actually Pale Blue and Green. These are the colors of nature, and by their nature, the most soothing stripes on the rainbow. They suggest order, rightness, and calm. Though the title has a basis within the narrative--Monica Vitti's character, Giuliana, is considering them both for the interior of her proposed ceramics store, a safe haven she is creating for herself--the phrase didn't have the effect on audiences the director felt was required. Red Desert was more evocative. It is incendiary and barren.

Giuliana is a wife and mother. She is married to Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), a manager at an industrial factory, and their boy (Valeria Bartoleschi) is of kindergarten age. The Italian town where they live is reliant on the manufacturing plants it is built around, but as with any aspect of progress, the move forward comes at a price. Not only is there strife within the citizenry (we are presented with the dual problems of a worker's strike as well as there not being enough able-bodied men around), but it also creates a tremendous burden on the local ecology. For every good thing these factories presumably make, they also dump waste into the environment. On one side of a tree line there are the bustling signs of creation, on the other destruction and decay.

This is Giuliana's problem, as well. She is a woman at odds with herself. She was in a car accident that nearly killed her, and despite some recuperation time in the hospital, she has never been quite right since. There is something just a little off about her. Monica Vitti, who also starred in Antonioni's breakthrough pictures L'avventura and L'eclisse, avoids playing Giuliana as "crazy," but instead portrays her as a bundle of raw neuroses. She has the appearance of never being comfortable where she is, but also not knowing where else to go. She chews her nails, hides in her hair, and at any time looks like she is either going to cry or fall asleep.

Though Antonioni appears to be painting with the same opaque brush throughout, anyone who understands paint knows there is no one color that is "white." There is no single, definitive "red." Antonioni's film is both narratively and visually complex. His sets are full of codes. Colors and shapes signal shifts in the psychological landscape as much as a torn-up field points out the side-effects of industry. When Giuliana finally makes a run for it, the hull of the ship she means to board is painted blood red--blood being both life and death and the confusion being which the ship offers. Shortly after, Giuliana sees yellow smoke belching from the stacks at her husband's workplace, and she tells her son it is poison. The color is another signal; the quarantine flag on the contaminated ship was also yellow. Yet, can we be sure the smoke is really yellow, or is that her perception? Did the sight of the red ship mark the border of her delusion, and she has now crossed over in the same way the fog drew a line between her and the "healthy" ones? There would be precedence for this, since Antonioni has already used sound as an outer expression of what is inside his heroine. Vittorio Gelmetti's electronic music for the film is unsettling, arising at times when Giuliana is the most discombobulated with the intention of drawing the viewer into her state of mind. Why shouldn't we be privy to her vision, as well?

Giuliana suffers from a modern disease, and there are a lot of those going around. Aaron Beierle writes about one when he reviews the documentary Collapse. "Collapse is a horror film about what we face in our daily lives. The documentary, from American Movie director Chris Smith, looks into the life of Michael Ruppert, an older man who has been an investigative journalist but who has also had ties to the CIA, both in terms of his family (while working for the LAPD, it was discovered that he had a stunning level of clearance due to the connection to his father) and in terms of his personal life (he talks about the result of finding out about the CIA's connection to drug smuggling in the '80s, which is how director Chris Smith found him - he was seeking a film on that subject, and got one on another.)

"The film is broken into different pieces. The first portion of the film takes a look into oil, as Ruppert discusses the decline in major oil fields - especially in Saudi Arabia (which is discussed in massive detail in Twilight in the Desert, the book by Matt Simmons) and the realities of Iraq (one of the first actions of the Bush administration was to create an energy committee looked over by VP Cheney; when minutes were finally released, it became clear that the task group's mission was to discuss the potential oil in Iraq) and the oil the country would offer.

"The second half of the film looks into the economic mess, which Ruppert predicted a few years in advance. Starting with the discussion of an increasingly debased fiat currency and an economy that requires infinite growth - infinite growth that cannot be sustained, especially without infinite resources and without an infinite capacity for debt. Countries are slowly beginning to crumble - states in the US are insolvent, Greece and other European countries are in serious trouble, etc. Ruppert works up to a number of conclusions, with the decline of oil leading to a possibly significant decline in population, given that the population growth since the start of widespread use of oil has been parabolic. The FDIC will be insolvent (it already is.) There will be shortages. Don't run for the hills because you will not be the first one with that idea. In the update included in the DVD, Ruppert talks about posting on the film's facebook page that certain cities in the US were turning off streetlights to save money, and got responses that other cities in other countries were doing the same. Ruppert does offer suggestions on how best to cope with what he views as an inevitable, difficult and possibly long transition for society.

"Additionally, what also gradually comes out of the film, bit-by-bit, is a portrait of a fascinating individual, who has seen difficulty and sadness (Ruppert becomes saddened by the 'No one could have ever seen this coming's from the government and media regarding the financial mess, when he and others were screaming about it in advance.) He tries, convincingly, to keep up hope and find light in simple things. Finally, the movie ends with an engaging story that illustrates Ruppert's quest. Overall, Collapse is a haunting, quite sober film that ranks alongside such documentaries as Fog of War."

Another country known for political turmoil has a different, more personal light shone on it in Close-Up, the latest Criterion from Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Coincidentally, the 1990 film also looks at the effect film cameras might have on actual lives. Close-Up is the story of Hossein Sabzian, a print maker who convinces a middle-class family in Tehran that he is filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Makhmalbaf is a renowned Iranian director, at the time best known for his 1987 film The Cyclist. The fact that the identity Sabzian adopts is that of an actual person is one of the many layers that Kiarostami, who also wrote and edited Close-Up, overlaps to obscure the separations between fiction and documentary. Hossein Sabzian is even the actor's real name, and when we finally do see the real Makhmalbaf, they really do look alike. Which probably helped when he actually did pretend to be him once upon a time. Because, oh yeah, this is based on true events.

The film opens up on a bumbling sting operation, where a reporter (Hassan Farazmand, also playing himself, as everyone in the film does) leads two police officers into the Ahankhah home to nab the alleged con man. This kick-off introduces Close-Up as a narrative construct, albeit a Neorealistic one. From a writing point-of-view, it starts with a bang, as it does drop us right down into the action--though not a typical crime movie bang. It's more of a criminal whimper, with Sabzian being carted off in a taxi cab by the arresting officers while Farazmand runs around looking for someone who can loan him a tape recorder so he can record the forthcoming interrogation. Woodward and Bernstein this guy ain't.

Only in the second sequence does Kiarostami introduce the notion of Close-Up as faux documentary/docudrama. Having read Farazmand's magazine article about the story, Abbas Kiarostami himself shows up at the police station to try to gain access to the faker. He wants to film Sabzian's trial, and Close-Up follows the steps he takes to get permission, first talking to the meek criminal and then seeking permission from the presiding judge. Kiarostami also interviews the family members who fell victim to Sabzian's scheme, whatever that may have been. That's something they hope to figure out at trial.

I hesitate to call the more traditional dramatic scenes "re-enactments," because essentially the entire film is a re-enactment. Sabzian did pretend to be a famous director, and the Ahankhahs were the intended victims, such as they were. Close-Up is not quite real, not quite fake--almost literally surreal in how it stands apart. It's like a distant cousin to Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation in that you really don't want to know what is truth and what is invention, what is technique and theory and what simply is.

Also from 1990 and also dealing with cultural change in a politically volatile country is the Chinese film Black Snow, an import of which was reviewed by Thomas Spurlin: "Some time after the collapse of the Cultural Revolution in China, the lead character in Black Snow, Li Huiquan, has been released from a labor camp. He returns home with a knapsack and an underdeveloped education, vowing (non-verbal to us, but obvious) to stray from the life of crime that crippled his youth. Only 24, he hasn't had the chance to live much of a life outside of the loosely-threaded crime syndicate he operated within, never even having a chance to lose his virginity. As he returns to 'normal' life, he mans a clothing stand that rides the line between honest work and treading over into the black market, seeing many faces from his past through his everyday routine of peddling shoes, smoking to vast degrees, and holing up after-hours in a colorful music-filled nightclub. With societal stagnancy around every corner, the grasp of criminal activity begins to slowly pull him back into the life he lived before imprisonment.

"Directed by Beijing Film Academy vice president Xie Fei, this 'slice of life' piece from 1990 embodies a truthful illustration of post-Cultural Revolution life in Beijing amid the Tiananmen Square protests, while also reflecting on the inadvertent latency of societal rejection. As we watch the wispy smoke swirl around Li Huiquan -- aka Quanzi -- within the lounge where he unwinds, we gather a sense of his disconnect with the world around him. It's only in his interaction with his old 'buddies,' term used loosely, that he lights up a bit; he tries to obtain a form of forgiveness from a guy he roughed up at a young age, by handing him fistfuls of cash and free clothing, while reluctantly meeting with a sleazy bootlegger trying to rope him back into a life of illegal activity. And, in one of the film's darker, more pointed sequences, Quanzi gets wrapped up in an alcohol-fueled brawl that leads to an act of life-altering violence, something against his well-established reform.

"As compelling or emotionally stirring as the premise seems, and as accurate of an essence it ensnares about Quanzi's post-camp reintegration, Black Snow isn't, in itself, an attention-grabbing motion picture. We spent a lot of time staring into Quanzi's eyes as he, by interpretation, reflects on the life he's lost by being imprisoned. He coolly but observably stares at a female lounge singer, listening to the lyrics sang by this innocent-sounding girl -- over and over, which grows tiresome -- while being transported to flashbacks of his childhood. One glimmer of that reflection strikes an expressive chord, yet it's the persistent glances at Quanzi's forlorn smoking that can grow tiresome. Xie Fei incorporates multihued cinematography to give these sequences personality, capturing the late-'80s aesthetic well within off-and-on shots between twilight and daytime, yet they lack the verve needed to distinguish them through the cloud of cigarette smoke."

More European intrigue is to be had in the 1981 Jean-Paul Belmondo vehicle The Professional. Stuart Galbraith IV describes it as "...a violent, clever, funny, and very sexy French spy thriller..It just dazzles. Based on Patrick Alexander's novel Death of a Thin-Skinned Animal...the story opens in the kangaroo federal court of Malagawi, a fictional African country, and obviously also a former French colony. (Unlike most thrillers set in fictional African nations, this one is entirely believable.) French secret agent Josselin 'Joss' Beaumont (Belmondo) is on trial after attempting to assassinate Idi Amin-esque President Njala (Pierre Saintons). Doped up during the trial, Beaumont is quickly convicted and begins a life sentence of hard labor.

"Beaumont eventually escapes and two years later returns to Paris - the very week Njala is due for a state visit. But Beaumont's former colleagues aren't too happy to hear the news. After ordering him to Malagawi, the political winds abruptly shifted and the French government decided they needed the ruthless military dictator after all: Beaumont's own people helped facilitate his capture. 'We sold him out,' complains one colleague. 'No,' says another, 'We gave him away.' Later on the reason is subtly revealed: Njala's in town to negotiate French access to Malagawi's oil reserves in exchange for nuclear technology.

"The at times ingenious script by Michel Audiard and director Georges Lautner carefully sets up parallel stories that come together for the exciting climax: Beaumont's determination to carry out the assassination of Njala while avoiding his own agency's efforts to bring him in and perhaps kill him. His pursuers include world-weary one-time friend Valeras (Michel Beaune), mistress Alice Ancelin (Cyrielle Clair), and ruthless Inspector Rosen (Robert Hossein), who's like Tatsuya Nakadai's saucer-eyed psychopath up against Toshiro Mifune's Yojimbo.

"From beginning to end, The Professional infuses familiar situations in a genre all but dead by 1981 with great style and enormously satisfying inventiveness. More Harry Palmer than James Bond, the film is deeply cynical about the spy game, even more so than famous examples such as The Ipcress File and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold."

Sounds like fun, as does the animated film A Town Called Panic, reviewed by Bill Gibron: "There was a time when the artform known as stop-motion animation was more or less dead. Unless your name was Rankin and/or Bass, or you had a limited F/X budget via which to render your 'money' shots, the handheld, one frame at a time process was useless to you. Oh sure, artists like Tim Burton and Henry Selick successfully resurrected the idea a few decades back, bringing to life the stellar stories of The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, The Corpse Bride, and Coraline, but unless you were trying to render your reality on the cheap, you didn't dare fly in the face of Harryhausen and his muse. Luckily, foreign filmmakers like Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier have been bucking the trend while making the irresistibly nutzoid TV show Panique au village. Translated as A Town Called Panic, it was a massive hit after appearing on screens worldwide in 2000. Now, ten years later, the pair responsible are bring the crazy characters and speedball silliness to the full length motion picture format. As usual, not only does the upgrade favor A Town Called Panic, it is guaranteed to jumpstart a whole new cult of converts.

"Toy pieces Cowboy, Indian, and Horse all live in the tiny village of Panic. Their neighbors include Policeman, Postman, farmer Steven, his wife Janine, their brood of pigs, cows, and chickens, as well as equine music teacher Madam Longray and her assistant Simon. When Cowboy and Indian mistakenly order 50 million bricks in order to build a birthday barbeque for Horse, they set off a chain of events that see their house destroyed, their efforts to rebuild it thwarted, and the discovery of some thieves from a parallel universe under the sea. In the meantime, Madam Longray is concerned about Horse. Though he's promised to attend her school and learn piano, he has so far failed to make a single lesson.

"A Town Called Panic is the cinematic definition of a hoot. It's a high energy goof, a nonstop homage to silent film comedy, kid's imagination, and plucky playthings, all accented with a surrealism all its own. It's Toy Story without the wistful adult nostalgia - or Pixar's pristine CG design. As the brainchild of Belgian artists Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier, it's the kind of perverse puppetoon anarchy that both references and reinvents the genre it is working within."

The Danish crime film Terribly Happy has quirks on par with A Town Call Panic, and ones that Jason Bailey was charmed by: "Henrik Ruben Ganz's Terribly Happy begins with a horrible story of a two-headed cow, and how it drove a small village insane before they took it down to the bog. Turns out they take a lot of their problems to the bog in this town. "This story is based on true events," ends the opening voice-over. God I hope they're kidding.

"One of the dangers of taking in as many movies as I do is that you become so immune to the formulas and structures, you can figure out the general direction that most films are going. If you give Terribly Happy nothing else, you must give it this: you do not know what's coming next. It begins as something like Hot Fuzz but played straight--Copenhagen cop Robert Hansen (Jakob Cedergren) has been reassigned to the sleepy hamlet after an accident on the job ('I did something terrible,' is about all he'll say on it), and fails immediately at fitting in. In those early scenes, Ganz exhibits a squirrely sense of pace and place, scoring a few easy laughs while simultaneously building a Lynchian atmosphere of intangible dread. Hansen visits a shop but finds that the shopkeeper has disappeared; 'The way people disappear here,' a passing woman begins to stay, and then stops herself. 'I'd better not say more.'

"...the rest of the picture unwinds with precision and smooth, unfaltering logic. The unfamiliar locations and foreign tongues discombobulate us at first, but Ganz is clearly riffing on modern dusty thrillers like Red Rock West; indeed, in its stylish photography and clockwork storytelling, it's like a Danish Blood Simple, but with enough dark humor and well-earned thrills that, yes, it did remind me of Hitchcock (particularly in one unforgivably frightening moment on a staircase)."

Another life nearly stifled by social and domestic restraint is examined in Tom Ford's remarkable A Single Man. This film is a beautiful and delicate thing, unlike anything I've seen from this year's crop of productions. It is an artful, soulful, emotional piece of filmmaking, a character study that is deeply personal and yet also examines a whole subculture and a specific time period. It's about being gay and yet also just about being a living, breathing, loving human being.

Colin Firth stars in A Single Man as George, an English professor at a small Southern California college in 1962. An older gentleman, George is a homosexual with a bit of a drinking problem, as well as some undefined health issues that make each new day a surprise just as much as his personal grief makes it a chore. George lost his long-term life partner Jim (Matthew Goode, Watchmen) in a car accident sometime in the past. Recent enough to sting, but maybe long enough for others to think he should get over it. George doesn't want to get over it, and on this particular Friday at the end of November, he's planning to make that a final decision. George is planning to commit suicide.

A Single Man is based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, the co-writer on the movie The Loved One and the author whose stories inspired Cabaret. His tale here is one of those stories that places its character in a pocket of time where all horizon lines point to a single moment. The air around George seems to bend as he moves, creating a bubble that others can see and some even venture to pierce. He meets a Spanish hustler (model Jon Kortajarena) outside a liquor store, and the young man picks up on the older man's despair, even as George ignores the possible irony of the scene being framed by a giant advertisement for Psycho. Likewise, a pretty young student named Kenny (Nicholas Hoult from the BBC's Skins) suddenly takes an extra interest in his teacher, even though George can't figure out why. (And some obfuscation from Ford makes even the audience wonder if Kenny isn't up to something.) Little kids and dogs look at George funny, too. Everything reminds him of Jim, and thus everything reminds him that he wants to die.

The name Tom Ford may sound familiar. That's because he is a famous fashion designer. For his first foray into film, he isn't content to just direct, but he's also one of the producers on A Single Man and he co-wrote it with David Scearce, another first-timer. For a couple of movie virgins, they sure seem to know what they are doing. A Single Man is a breathtaking, ambitious artistic achievement. I suppose one shouldn't be surprised that Ford, who comes from an industry where an attention to minute details is required, would be so observant of the finer things. His recreation of the early 1960s is exacting down to the most minor facet, from the music to the clothes to the tin box George's aspirin comes in. He uses color and lighting for an emotional effect, bringing the lighting up and down based on George's mood. A little girl (Ryan Simpkins) or the sudden appearance of Kenny literally brightens his day, like Ford has put a dimmer on the character's life.

Flashier, but also literary minded, is Saint John of Las Vegas. Brian Orndorf writes: "It's fairly lofty screenwriting ambition to rework Dante's Inferno into a modern comedy about insurance fraud investigation, and it's a shame Saint John of Las Vegas just isn't determined enough to sell the madness, spending a measly 75 minutes to work its way around primo psychological real estate. It's a black comedy with a few exceptional scenes, but never gels together convincingly, making the artistic swing for the fences more of a quiet disappointment than a captivating leap of faith.

"John (Steve Buscemi) is an insurance company drone looking for a step up in pay and responsibility. Assigned by his boss (Peter Dinklage) to join hard-nosed Virgil (Romany Malco) on a trip to Las Vegas to investigate a fraudulent claim on a wrecked automobile made by a stripper named Tasty D Lite (Emmanuel Chriqui), John's eyes are opened to the realities of insurance inquiry. Meeting a series of eccentric characters (including John Cho and Tim Blake Nelson) on the way to the car in question, John finds his suppressed itch for gambling flaring up again, while working out an uncomfortable relationship with Jill (Sarah Silverman), a claim operator he's recently started having sex with, to his great surprise.

"Ambitious is a great word to describe Saint John of Las Vegas. Writer/director Hue Rhodes has assembled an intriguing ode to the fallacy of luck and the dangers of temptation for his feature-film debut. For the majority of its screentime, the picture puts up a decent fight, staging properly awkward scenes for John to test his mettle in the face of overwhelming frustration with bully/co-worker Virgil, and the sinister allure of gas station scratch-offs, which impede his fight to retain a 'normal' life as an insurance industry employee. However, there's nothing normal about the journey John undertakes from New Mexico to Nevada, on a quest to carry out his duty without upsetting his eroded sense of accomplishment."

Chris Neilson reviews our next feature: Rembetiko: "Greek filmmaker Costa Ferris's 1983 feature Rembetiko is one part national epic, one part populist melodrama, and one part musical showcase. Through a highly-fictionalized biography of folk singer Marika Ninou (1922-1957), Rembetiko follows the fortunes of Greece from the evacuation from Asia Minor of more than a million resident Greeks in 1922 following the nation's defeat in the Greko-Turkish War, through the Axis occupation in World War II, and the subsequent civil war.

"Marika (played as an adult by Sotiria Leonardou) is the daughter of itinerant musicians who fled to the slums of mainland Greece from Asia Minor following the Greko-Turkish War. While still a young girl, she sees her drunken father pimp her mother and then kill her when she falls for her John. Orphaned following the arrest of her father, she follows an equally calamitous path. Taking up with a traveling performer who abandons her when she gives birth to a daughter, Marika goes from one misery to another before she herself is senselessly murdered in 1957.

"As national epic and populist melodrama, Rembetiko isn't very successful. The sense of national epic is conveyed through vintage archival footage and poorly-produced scenes of too-few local extras in ill-fitting Nazi uniforms blundering through street scenes as best they can, while the populist melodrama about the sad life of Marika Ninou relies on overdone emoting, pandering salaciousness, and contrived plot elements to paint its woebegone tale that bares little resemblance to truth. Where Rembetiko shines though is as musical showcase for Rebetiko (also known as Rebetiko) music. Referred to as the 'Greek Blues,' this amalgam of diverse musical forms springs from the urban slums of Greece. Songs of exile, poverty, violence, heartache, drugs and drink are sung with accompaniment by a troupe of stone-faced musicians playing the bouzouki, baglamas, oud, violin, and tambourine, sitting stiffly on a small stage before a cafe audience of equally down-and-out patrons."

One would never call a Yasujiro Ozu film epic, but the family dramas on the Criterion twofer The Only Son/There Was a Father do take on a higher importance in their direct relation of human emotion. The Only Son was Ozu's first sound film and the 1936 film spins a quiet tale that shows a confidence in the new technology. The Only Son doesn't suffer from the same problems of other early sound pictures. There are no awkward silences or scenes of actors standing around trying to figure out what to do. Rather, Ozu already shows as much control for this new technique as he did silent films. His dialogue is well-chosen and the pauses are natural, befitting a story of disappointment and expectations deferred.

Ryosuke is an only child living with his widowed mother (Choko Lida) in a country town. When the young boy (played in the first scenes by Masao Hayama) lies to his teacher (Chishu Ryu) and tells him he is going to middle school, he shames his mother into sending him for real, despite their finances not really allowing it. Jump ahead to the mid-1930s, and after years of toil, the mother is finally going to visit her adult son in Tokyo, where he moved to finish his studies.

When the woman arrives, she finds things are not as she expected. Ryosuke (now played by Shinichi Himori) has given up a job at City Hall and is now a night school teacher. He also has a wife (Yoshiko Tsubouchi) and a baby boy. These are developments he has kept a secret from his mother, and they form a division between them. There is a gap between the vision the woman had for her child and what he has become. What follows is a series of sorrowful exchanges where dissatisfaction is expressed, sacrifices are revealed, and the division between expectation and reality must be traversed.

The Only Son ends somewhere between renewed hope and tired defeat. A random accident gives Ryosuke's mother an opportunity to see the kind of man her son has really become. She is satisfied that he has a tender heart and a good start on a family of his own, but at the same time, he discovers new reasons to please her. In the final shots, Ozu shows us that life will go on, but there is also a deep exhale attached to it. Another long day closes, but is there any guarantee that tomorrow will bring new opportunity?

There Was a Father was made six years later in 1942 and under entirely different conditions, but it makes for an interesting companion piece to The Only Son. There are some thematic overlaps and narrative parallels between the two movies, even getting as specific as the teachers in both giving the same geometry lesson to their classes. In this film, rather than the relationship of a mother and her son, it's the paternal bond that Ozu is exploring. Chishu Ryu returns, this time playing a school teacher who, after a tragic accident on a field trip, decides to abandon teaching life and instead pursue work with less responsibility. He eventually splits with his son, Ryohei (played as a child by Haruhiko Tsugawa, as an adult by Shuji Sano), leaving the youngster with his uncle in their home town while he goes to Tokyo to earn money to further Ryohei's education. The plan was to reunite and live together again once Ryohei finished college, but he gets a job assignment away from the city, keeping the pair apart even longer.

By the time Ozu made There Was a Father, the Japanese government had started taking more control of all aspects of the country's industry. Films were subject to review by the ruling powers, and movies that promoted a positive message were encouraged. There Was a Father was made under these restrictions, and the result is less of a satisfying cinematic narrative and more of an educational film...For the There Was a Father script, Ozu and Ikeda were this time joined by Takao Yanai, though it's impossible to point a finger at any of the three and blame him for the tepid writing. The movie is devoid of any real drama. All the characters are pleasant, and they accept their lumps with a smile. There is no conflict beyond the separation anxiety, and maybe a little debate about when Ryohei will get married. That's really it. There Was a Father is mainly a talking heads film, with the characters discussing their hardships in order to agree that it's good to have them. In less stylish hands, There Was a Father would probably be unwatchable. As far as Yasujiro Ozu's filmography is concerned, this is a lesser picture (and easily my least favorite of any I've seen), but it's still an Ozu picture. The actors are so likable and the delivery so charming, even though nothing much goes on, it's still fairly agreeable medicine.

Mysteries extending back to the War to End all Wars is also central to the Swedish thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Ryan Keefer investigates the Blu-ray of the brutal literary adaptation: "The film focuses on two main characters, the first being Mikael (Michael Nyqvist), a reporter who is found guilty of libeling a Swedish businessman and has six months of freedom before he reports to prison for his actions. In the meantime, he takes on an interesting investigation, given to him by an Henrik Vanger, an elderly industrialist. The goal: investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Vanger's foster daughter, who he presumes was murdered. During the investigation, he meets Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace). Lisbeth is employed by the security firm that was responsible for gathering evidence against Mikael in the libel case. Lisbeth is also a parolee and is being sexually abused by her latest parole officer, seemingly unaware of the potential of Lisbeth's violent behavior. Together Lisbeth and Mikael try to find out the whereabouts of the missing girl, along with who was responsible for her disappearance.

"...Mikael and Lisbeth as they were written appear to be surprisingly unremarkable. Each has their own respective closet skeletons, and their kinship drifts toward the 'friends with benefits' vibe. The story itself possesses most of the same ingredients present in many other thrillers. As the story goes along, the investigation part of it with Mikael and Lisbeth is solid, though the last part of the second (and most of the third) act are a little too conventional. It's almost as if I was watching a Thomas Harris novel, set in Sweden, surrounding a 40-year-old murder; I could see the ending coming with 45 minutes left in this two and a half hour movie. It felt like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was good, but not great. Am I wrong, or did I have unreasonably high expectations? With that said, if there was one reason to watch the film, Rapace is it. She plays the perfect mix of silence and unleashed fury, and during her encounters with the parole officer, you can see that she allows herself to get pushed until the P.O. crosses the line, but (as an earlier scene in a subway station shows), if someone else starts something, rest assured she will finish it. It's that rage that serves as strength of sorts, one that you can see subtly in the interactions with Mikael.

"Rapace's performance aside, if you're looking to watch The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to see what the fuss is all about, you might be setting yourself up for a letdown in seeing that it's 'just another movie.' But when you view it as just another movie, you'll see that Oplev doesn't waste much in the two and a half hours he has, and the whodunit nature of the film keeps you involved and interested, if only until the last several moments."

The literary life is not always so fascinating, as evinced by the latest Merchant Ivory picture, The City of Your Final Destination--which has a lot in common with The Last Station now that I think about it. Omar Razaghi is a college professor hanging on to his job by a thread. When word comes that the family of a famous author he was hoping to write a biography on has refused to grant him authorization, Omar fears this is going to be the end of him. Hoping to stop being the eternal screw-up and turn things around, Omar leaves his truly awful girlfriend behind and heads to Uruguay to try to change the estate's mind.

The author at the heart of The City of Your Final Destination is an invention. His name is Jules Gund, and he only wrote one book, a tell-all about his own parents called The Gondola. The Gunds ended up in Montevideo after fleeing Germany post-WWII. Jules has left behind a brother, a wife, and a mistress, and these are the three people Omar (played by Omar Metwally) has to convince. The brother Adam (Anthony Hopkins) lives in a villa with his lover Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada), and he's not against having Jules honored in a biography. He could use the cash it might generate from renewed interest in The Gondola, and he isn't all that worried about his own life being turned topsy-turvy. On the other hand, Jules' wife Caroline (Laura Linney) doesn't want their arrangement exposed to the world, and she clings to a letter Jules allegedly sent her claiming he doesn't want to have anything written about him. In the middle is Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the mistress. She is not really against the book, but she is easily swayed by Caroline. They have gone on living together all these years, and there is a hierarchy to their arrangement.

The City of Your Final Destination has been sitting on a shelf for over a year and is currently involved in some legal tangles regarding production credits. It saddens me that the movie seems to carry these burdens with it as it trundles across the screen. The script is written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who has penned most of Ivory's films for the last several decades, and it's based on a novel by Peter Cameron. Having never read the book, I can't say whether it labors under the same literary pretentions as the film, but it wouldn't surprise me if this is a case of an author getting caught up in his own dreams of a literary legacy. I thank my lucky stars that no one attempted to create prose for the late Mr. Gund, and we are spared any purple phraseology.

The film's big finish relies on a romance between Arden and Omar that hasn't really materialized onscreen. They are about as passionate in their scenes together as a piece of ice and a dead fish. Neither can really heat the other up. The revelation of love comes too easy, as do all the changes that Omar is meant to inspire. His arrival is intended to shake things up, but really, he just bores them all so much, they either have to get away or give in, there is no other option. Which is kind of how I felt about The City of Your Final Destination overall. I didn't hate it, it merely existed as part of my life for two hours.

Literature seems to be a theme this month, from the portraits of authors and adaptations and even Colin Firth in Single Man plays a lit professor. There is even more book loving in The Eclipse, as reviewed by Brian Orndorf on Blu-ray: "To its credit, The Eclipse is a difficult film to summarize. A bizarre concoction of literary world misery and ghostly visitation, the picture takes its time unfolding, revealing horrors almost by accident as it probes the lives and loves of three characters, each with their own private reservoir of suffering to confront over the course of a long weekend in Ireland.

"A book festival volunteer, Michael (Ciaran Hinds) is dealing with several domestic responsibilities while mourning the loss of his wife. Arriving in Ireland to participate in the fest are authors Lena (Iben Hjejle) and Nicholas (Aidan Quinn), who require Michael's help to shuttle around the area, giving speeches and meeting the locals. While Nicholas is a blowhard, demanding and impatient, Lena is a more gentle personality, taking a shine to Michael and his considerate ways. Drawn to Lena's supernatural stories, Michael is hopeful the writer will help ease his mind, as his guilt has assumed a demonic manifestation, taking him to the breaking point.

"The Eclipse is not a motion picture that goes places. It's better to know that fact right up front, otherwise the film might cause unintended ire. It's a character piece, directed by Conor McPherson, who takes a rather unusual stance that merges the cold-blooded calculation of Stanley Kubrick with a lopsided romantic drama. The Eclipse defies most classification, but its peculiarity is not feigned, only puzzling, providing a healthy mental workout for viewers who enjoy their films darkly impenetrable."

The Eclipse may play it close to the vest, but there is something heroic about sharing information when required, as Jason Bailey discovers in the documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers : " The press notes for The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers don't call it a documentary; they call it a 'political thriller,' and the description is apt. The film may engage in the most familiar trappings of doc filmmaking--sometimes to its own detriment--but the story it tells is so engaging and engrossing that we're swept right up in it. It's a film about a moment in history--a specific moment, right before the entire house of cards that was the Nixon administration came tumbling down--but it is also an intimate, candid portrait of a man who had a crisis of conscience, and decided to act on it.

"The film, directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, runs on two tracks: as a personal biography of Ellsberg and a historical snapshot of what he did. The second part is easy, and part of the record: a former Pentagon insider, Ellsberg was a man transformed by the early 1970s. The once-hawk was now a dove, furious about the lies that the American government (particularly, five of its Presidents) had told the people about the circumstances leading up to our involvement in Vietnam. When his attempts to bring Congressional attention to a top-secret Pentagon study highlighting those lies failed, Ellsberg leaked the so-called 'Pentagon Papers' to the New York Times, setting up a chain of events that pitted the Nixon administration against the free press, influenced public perception of the floundering Vietnam conflict, and led directly to the Watergate scandal that toppled the Nixon presidency.

"The details of that story, the whens and hows and whos, are riveting viewing. But you can find all of that in books and other documentaries. The juice here is Ellsberg's personal journey from one of the architects of the war to one of its staunchest enemies. Careful attention is paid to the details of his psychological make-up, to the doubts that were percolating in the late 1960s, to the concerns and fears that finally led him to conclude that 'it wasn't that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.' Those are Ellsberg's own words; he both narrates the film and serves as its primary interview subject, a splitting of focus that requires a little getting used to. But that conceit does work, particularly when it leads to scenes like his powerful description of the moment when his life 'split in two'...as the narrative tightens and picks up speed in the last 30 minutes. Those Nixon tapes continue to stun (was there ever a grown man who used profanity more awkwardly?), and Ehrlich and Goldsmith do a first-rate job of conveying the real risks taken by both the Times and Ellsberg himself (he faced the possibility of 115 years in prison).

"The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is guilty of occasional missteps, but nonetheless, it is still a riveting, exciting documentary film."

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His most recent release is the comedy seriesSpell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.

Special thanks to Jason Bailey, Aaron Beierle Casey Burchby, Stuart Galbraith IV, Ryan Keefer, Randy Miller III, Chris Neilson, Brian Orndorf, Thomas Spurlin, and Adam Tyner for their contributions.]]> http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/greenberg-chicago-1927-and-the.html http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/greenberg-chicago-1927-and-the.html Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:45:44 -0500

One month into 2010, and we already have what seems like an embarrassment of riches in terms of DVDs. So, let's just jump in, shall we? Any month where we get new Steven Soderbergh is going to be a good one, but when it's as epic a release as the three-disc Che set from Criterion...well, there's a reason Casey Burchby ranked it in the DVD Talk Collector series. He writes:

"Few twentieth century figures have been so strangely abstracted from the reality of their times as Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. From a young age (I was born 9 years after his execution), I have only known his name and image. The use of Che's visage on posters and T-shirts, and the sloganification of his nickname, say much about the ability of capitalism to use even its supposed enemies for profit - while saying nothing at all about the man. Attempts at film biographies have mostly failed, not counting the recent and much-lauded The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles. Steven Soderbergh's four-and-a-half-hour two-part Spanish-language epic Che is a patient, detailed treatment of two key segments of Che's life, and while it doesn't fully succeed as a revelation of his character, the film does reveal and enliven history with an expert's storytelling technique.

"Soderbergh is an eclectic, enthusiastic filmmaker whose love of his craft is always evident. He is a director comfortable and fluent working in a number of different modes and tones, whether it's the Hollywood polish of Ocean's Eleven and Solaris, or the do-it-yourself indie scruffiness of Schizopolis and Bubble. Che lies somewhere in between. It's a labor of love and determination that finds the director utilizing something close to the journalistic approach of his Oscar-winning Traffic. The film proudly bears the influences of Francesco Rosi, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Costa-Gavras. The tone is always realistic and character-oriented. You won't find narrative or stylistic flourishes here. We are down in the grit with these people. We feel the pressure of encroaching soldiers, the desperation of near-starved guerrillas, and the calm still soul of Che guiding his men and their actions by example.

"These directorial choices reveal that Soderbergh's film looks upon Che Guevara with empathy, as a man who was driven by certain unwavering ideals. This will rile those who knew the real Che as less than saintly. Soderbergh has chosen his approach for a reason, however, and the film doesn't intend to fool us into icon-worship. In the film, Che is convincing as a character of unique, morally uncompromising strengths; yet in the storytelling, we see the weaknesses within and the ultimate failure of Guevara's belief that he alone could instigate and guide effective revolutionary warfare.

"The success of this portrayal is assisted in no small way by Benicio del Toro's quiet, controlled, inward performance. Del Toro submits himself to the character as egolessly as the Che he portrays would have had it - there are no great actorly 'moments' in Che. There are three or four scenes when Guevara exhibits naked emotion, and even those are restrained. Del Toro never indulges in theatricality, keeping his Che on an even keel; the character is guided only by an ideal - perhaps idealized - vision of himself." (Also peep Jason Bailey's Blu-Ray review.)

It's difficult to compete with the scope of Che, but sometimes a very human movie can feel just as epic. Take the Wim Wenders drama Paris, Texas, which Burchby calls "a film of countless pleasures. Every moment generates a sense that anything is possible - that feeling we all hope for from the movies, but is so rarely delivered. From the wide open spaces of the American Southwest to the Los Angeles suburbs at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, the film tracks the physical and emotional journey of a damaged man who struggles to put the pieces of his life back in their proper place. In the lead role, Harry Dean Stanton delivers a performance of unmitigated perfection - a weathered image of a man who self-destructed but lived to tell about it. As Wenders takes us through deserts, mountains, and cities, he shows us some of the subtle ways in which the American landscape has defines the character and fate of American people.

"A lone figure wanders across a beautiful but desolate wasteland in South Texas. Out of water, he stumbles into a tiny settlement - not big enough to be a town - and collapses. The doctor who revives him calls a number in the man's pocket, belonging to Walter Henderson (Dean Stockwell). Walt rushes from his home in LA to collect the man - his long-lost brother Travis (Stanton). Travis doesn't talk to Walt until they are well into their drive back to LA, and even then doesn't explain his whereabouts for the four years he's been missing - and presumed dead by Walt, his wife Anne (Aurore Clement), and Travis's son Hunter (Hunter Carson), who has lived with Walt and Anne since Travis's disappearance. Back in LA, Travis struggles to make sense of his situation, and to get to know his son, now nearly eight years old. Finally Travis decides to track down Hunter's mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and takes his son on a road trip back to Texas to find her. The screenplay, a delicate work by L.M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepherd, provides a probing framework for powerful performances and the striking photography by frequent Wenders collaborator, Robby Müller. I think it's fair to say that Müller's work on Paris, Texas not only influenced a generation of photographers, but has trickled down to every facet of photographic media, including music videos and fashion magazines. This is the look of the 'modern' American West, where rusted automobiles, dilapidated buildings, and human beings themselves are dominated and reclaimed by the forces of nature. The landscape, despite the best efforts of people to stake their claim to it, always wins."

Another drama on the human scale is Kenneth Bi's The Drummer, a 2007 Chinese film just released by Film Movement. In that film, Sid (Jaycee Chan) is the rebellious teenage son of Kwan, a mid-level Hong Kong gangster (Tony Leung Ka Fai). When not pissing off his dad, he plays drums in a rock band--though even this activity is meant to get under the old man's skin. It's at one of the band's shows that Sid comes across Carmen (Hei-Yi Cheng), the moll of his dad's boss, and decides to bed her. Too bad the top dog, Stephen Ma (Kenneth Tsang), catches wind of their steamy rendezvous. He demands that Sid's father remove his son's hands as payback. Though Kwan is a monster and a nutjob, this is too heinous and crazy even for him, and so he sends Sid to hide out in Taiwan with his best man, Chiu (Roy Cheung). But what Sid finds in Taiwan proves more important than what sent him there. On a hike with Chiu, the boy stumbles on a camp where a group of monk-like beat worshipers practice the art of Zen drumming. Attracted both by the intensity of the drum circle, and by the pretty face of drummer girl Hong Dou (Angelica Lee), he decides to join their group and become part of the music. Only, it's not exactly as advertised. The group leaders have him schlepping water, making soup, and just about everything but drumming. You see, to drum, first you must not drum. Sid's absence causes people back home to re-prioritize, and though everything doesn't necessarily work out for the best, the boy and his family come to some real understanding. Sid's spiritual transformation is also very convincing, and he makes the right choices to avoid going down the same path as his father.

Second on the disc for The Drummer is a short animated film from Sweden. In Love and War, director Frederik Emilson works with puppets to tell the tale of Bunny and Bear, star-crossed lovers who meet at a time of war. Bear is a fighter pilot, and he must go into battle, where danger and possibly death await him. The story is told entirely through music, from courtship through the fighting and into the bittersweet ending. The puppets have limited movement, but that works well with the operatic storytelling--literally operatic, as all the dialogue is sung. What is not communicated in the song is communicated instead by gesture. Emilson does well with the romance, and even manages to inject a little humor, and the unique art style makes up for the fact that the puppet battles aren't very exciting. I might have actually liked Love and War better than The Drummer when it comes down to it.

Cameron McGaughy was also mesmerized by the French character study Give Me Your Hand: "If you find yourself asleep--or yelling at the screen--at the end of Give Me Your Hand, you only have yourself to blame. Knowing that it's French is ample warning, and for many viewers I imagine the film (a.k.a. Donne-moi la main) will be too slow, empty and (sometimes) annoying to enjoy. There's minimal dialogue--the first words (a prophetic 'We're lost...') aren't spoken until more than six minutes into the film, which is filled with long stretches of quiet. There's also very little character development (we don't even learn the names of the two protagonists until 35 and 52 minutes in) and action, and the ending will most likely leave you unfulfilled.

"So why did I like it so much? There's something hypnotic about the visuals constructed by director Pascal-Alex Vincent and cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine, who have weaved together a mesmerizing 72-minute poem. There's a dark yet beautiful tone to the film, brought to life by the haunting performances of real-life twins Alexandre and Victor Carril. They play young twins Antoine (Alexandre) and Quentin (Victor), who we slowly learned have left their humble French home--and their father, a baker--on a road trip to Spain. They hike their way through the dark yet beautiful countryside en route to the funeral of their mother--a woman they never knew (a plot point the film shares far too soon, robbing it of a more intense ending)." Casey concludes, "...it's all about setting a mood open to interpretation. The lead performances--built more around expression and movement--are suitably intense, taking you on an emotional journey as you try to piece together their past and their future. Not much happens in Give Me Your Hand, which will frustrate most viewers--and an unsatisfying ending may annoy the rest of you. Still, I was surprisingly involved with this quiet, visually arresting film, one filled with mystery, anger, sexual intensity and love."

Director Chantal Akerman takes us on a journey of her own, one that is creative and personally expressive, in the boxed set Chantal Akerman in the Seventies - Eclipse Series 19. There are five films here: Le chambre, Hotel Monterey, News from Home, Je tu il elle, and Les rendez-vous d'Anna. When the young Beligan artist left home to go to New York in the early '70s, it started her on a pilgrimage that required her to travel great distances both physically and artistically. Across the films, we see a developing talent that is grappling with the idea of space and time, as well as wrestling issues about her own identity and how she relates to others. The first short film, Le chambre, features Akerman all alone in a small apartment, while the last movie, Les rendez-vous d'Anna, is a semi-autobiographical tale of a nomad-like film director on a journey toward home.

At the end of News from Home, an affecting juxtaposition of real footage from New York with actual letters written by Akerman's mother wondering when her little girl will return to Brussels, there is an extended shot of leaving New York City. Filmed from the back of a boat, we watch as the traveler gets farther and farther from the shore. It's one move in a journey that began prior to La chambre when Akerman left Belgium for the Big Apple. It's one that is turned to metaphor in Je tu il elle, and that is completed by the cycle of the successful filmmaker Anna passing through various stops in her life in Les rendez-vous d'Anna. The mother's letters receive their response and personal questions about art and sexuality and personal connections are at least broached, if not answered. The result is a radical redefining of cinema, one that stretches its boundaries and shows us a truly unique point of view in full bloom.

Jason Bailey gives us an evaluation of another artistic transplant with his review of An Englishman in New York. He says it is "a slight, minor work, but it is absolutely worth seeing as a showcase for a brilliant John Hurt performance. Quentin Crisp, the famed writer, raconteur, and all-around gay icon, is a role Hurt has played before (the 1975 TV version of Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant was a breakthrough role for the British thesp), but he brings to it the full skill of his decades as an actor; it's a snappy, razor-sharp performance, full of bitchy charm and devilish grins. It's also a warm, likable turn that pauses for pathos without clobbering the audience. If only the movie were having as much fun as he is. They're sometimes in sync, particularly in the opening scenes, which find Crisp arriving in New York in the early 1980s, thoroughly delighted by what he sees--he struts through the village to the sounds of Donna Summer and Rhinoceros, his voice-over assuring us that 'without her outcasts, the metropolis would be a very dull place indeed.' Brian Fillis' screenplay has moments of punchy exhilaration, but it often verges on didacticism; Cynthia Nixon is compulsively watchable as performance artist Penny Arcade, but her first set of scenes are written like position papers. And Fillis doesn't trust his own subtext. An early scene finds Crisp, at a cocktail party, failing miserably to connect with a young gay man who has been told to admire him. The awkwardness of their encounter is palpable, but that's not good enough--he has to walk away with a friend and sneer 'Welcome to the 1980s' under his breath.

"Director Richard Laxton has some difficulty staging big scenes. The theatrical sequences are too clean and easy; the Q&As feel scripted and tightly controlled instead of spontaneous (which they presumably were), and when that one goes wrong, the direction is too on-the-nose. The entire audience turns immediately, shaking their heads and muttering and overacting like extras in a high school play. It's a major moment in the plot (as it should be), but it's handled with the clumsiness of an amateur. In smaller, quieter scenes he fares much better; he appears to like actors, and is smart enough to stay out of Hurt's way...However, Laxton finds exactly the right nimble tone in the closing scenes, and has the good sense to hold that tone for as long as possible. Its final moments are just perfect, and they, along with Sting's closing title song (it's from his 1987 album ...Nothing Like The Sun and is based on Crisp, who was casual friends with the singer), leaves the viewer with a warmth and good cheer that the film may not have entirely earned."

Familiar stories can also make for intriguing transplants, as Jeremy Mathews finds with Jerichow. "Like a new interpretation of an old song, Christian Petzold's Jerichow twists a familiar tune and entrances with surprising variations. The setup recollects The Postman Always Rings Twice and Ossessione, but Petzold translates it to modern times and modifies the story's structure and essence into something fresh that's consistently compelling and suspenseful. He creates three main characters who are both mysterious and vivid, and slowly moves them toward a devastating finale.

"The film's anti-hero, Thomas (Benno Fürmann) isn't a drifter, but a man cornered in the German town where grew up, imprisoned by debts and roots. The excellent opening sequence finds his mother's funeral interrupted by an angry friend and/or money-lender who seeks to confirm that Thomas has no funds with which to renovate his childhood home or begin a new life. Thomas is the quiet sort, one who, for most of the film, seems resigned to go wherever life takes him. He soon finds himself working for Ali (Hilmi Sözer), an alcoholic Turkish businessman who runs a series of snack stands. He has driven his car off the road enough times that he now needs Thomas to drive for him. Ali enjoys being a big shot, and enjoys calling attention to Thomas's interest in his wife, Laura (Nina Hoss). But inevitably Thomas and Laura's interest will evolve into something deeper.

"Writer/director Petzold has a keen eye for striking visuals that accentuate the tension of his scenarios. He understands not only each character's relation to one another, but how to demonstrate it, often revealing more in one shot than many filmmakers do in 10. The simple matter of someone entering or leaving the frame alters the dynamics so dramatically that it's hard to ignore the impact these people have on each other's lives."

Jeremy also finds the joys of old tales recontextualized in Nina Paley's wonderful animated feature Sita Sings the Blues. "Myths and legends have a way of reinventing themselves. As they travel from place to place, they're retold in new ways, with different variations and emphases that reveal as much about their teller as the characters in the story. Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues manages not only to give new perspective to the centuries-old Indian Ramayana epic, but to do so in a fun, constantly inventive way.

"Made almost entirely by Paley on her Mac, the film proves that anyone with the proper skills and sensibilities can make a great-looking computer-animated feature without the mammoth staff and render farms of a Pixar production. Paley wisely avoided comparison by not trying to compete with 100-million-dollar 3D extravaganzas. Instead, she used flash to create a potpourri of style, feeding off a century of tradition to create a film entirely her own. She repeatedly cycles through three modes, effectively telling each chapter through a discussion of the Ramayana and its various incarnations, a musical number culled from an old recording by the charming (and in most circles forgotten) 1920s blues singer Annette Hanshaw, and a parallel modern-day story of her breakup with her husband. Semi-psychedelic interludes, one with a wild roto-scoped dance sequence, punctuate the proceedings.

"Due to the prohibitive cost of licensing the compositions that Hanshaw sings, Sita Sings the Blues almost never received a proper release. But lucky for us, Paley found a way to release the film for free over the internet, raise money and eventually distribute her film in art-house theaters. It may have been a long journey, like Sita's, but it was worth the effort."

From recycling stories to recycling for the environment, we next have a documentary called No Impact Man. Jason Bailey tells us, "Colin Beavan's heart is in the right place, but you can see how he'd be a little insufferable. No Impact Man is the documentary account of how he decided that he was going to spend one year making no environmental impact. He did it as an experiment, and also to provide himself with subject matter (Beavan is an author--he kept a blog throughout the project and just published a book about the experience); more importantly, it gave the self-proclaimed 'guilty liberal' the chance to put his money where his mouth is.

"The rules of the 'no impact' year are multitude: no automated transportation (biking only), no non-local food, no material consumption, no new clothes, no trash generation, no packaging. No meat and no television (there's the part where you'd have to count me out). Six months in, no electricity. And (gulp) no toilet paper. What keeps No Impact Man, directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, from descending into the well-intentioned but dull rhythms of most liberal eco-docs is the fact that Colin doesn't take on the experiment alone: he also has a two-year old daughter (she's charming and good on camera, which helps) and a wife, Michelle, who writes for Business Week and loves her retail and Starbuck's coffees. Her presence in the picture is absolutely invaluable; she's funny and interesting, and provides a valuable counterpoint, particularly in the early scenes.

"The picture doesn't really come to a definite ending--it ends more with a dash than a period--but I prefer that kind of modest, unassuming ending to the moralizing and monologues of something like Super Size Me (which the filmmakers pinpoint as an influence)...Worth a look, particularly by those who are down with the cause."

The Hurt Locker is all about impact--the imapct of explosions, how to stop them, and what might happen if you don't. Casey Burchby calls it "...an intense war picture that balances gripping suspense with thoughtful character development while eschewing the politics of the highly divisive war that it documents. As with most great war movies, this is one of its biggest strengths. There was a time when it was understood that war was simply hell - and that relative considerations of a war's justness or legitimacy paled beside that naked, raw reality. The Iraq War has been the subject of nonstop politicized abstraction - but The Hurt Locker does us the service of bringing the hellishness back to the surface.

"The film follows a three-man bomb disposal unit (technically an EOD, or Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit) with the Army's Bravo Company in Baghdad circa 2004. After the unit's leader is killed, Sgt. Will James (Jeremy Renner) joins the group. The others, Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), are put off by James' reckless methods. Tensions mount as James insists upon suiting up and approaching ordinance in person, manhandling explosives and placing himself unnecessarily in harm's way, instead of sending in a sophisticated bomb disposal robot. The stakes are ratcheted up when James comes to believe that a young boy who sells DVDs at the base has been killed by insurgents; this leads to an increasingly risky series of events that results in Eldridge sustaining a leg wound and being shipped out. As Sanborn and especially Eldridge show increasing signs of having been broken down by the war, James remains resolutely enthusiastic about his work.

"The script by Mark Boal is alternately patient and punchy. Dialogue is appropriately sparse yet effective. Character development is parceled out in tiny pinpointed doses. Director Kathryn Bigelow - whose sense of the military is both more charitable and more realistic than her ex-husband's bizarre, fetishistic mistrust of the armed forces - allows the longer set-pieces to develop slowly, downplaying unexpected moments, rendering them far more effective. I'm thinking specifically of sequences in which James pulls a pistol on an errant taxi cab driver who finds himself in the middle of a disposal perimeter, and the scene in which James carefully directs Sanborn as he picks off snipers miles across the desert floor. Patience and restraint of the type Bigelow displays here is exactly what make suspense play on film, and is in direct opposition to the offensively overblown carnival of horseshit thrown in our faces by the likes of Michael Bay."

Impact is also the focus of another documentary that Jason Bailey reviewed, though Brick City is interested in people who make an impact, but ones who do something rather than doing nothing to have a positive effect on their community. "The electrifying 2005 documentary Street Fight introduced filmgoers to Cory Booker, the young underdog mounting an uphill battle for the Newark mayor's post against 16-year officeholder Sharpe James (a corrupt member of the political 'old boys' network,' later convicted of five counts of fraud). In 2008, filmmakers Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin (Slam) went to Newark to embark on a multi-faceted documentary portrait of the city in flux, focusing not only on Booker's progressive administration, but the attempts to change the city's fates from within the police department, school system, and gangs. The resulting miniseries, Brick City, is a fast-paced, fascinating look at the complexities of city government and urban life; multiple critics dubbed it a nonfiction version of The Wire...it's an accurate (and deserved) comparison. The five one-hour installments span from Spring 2008 through the historic November election, as Booker watched another charismatic young African-American with an impressive academic history and a gift for oratory ascend to the highest office in the land.

"The show's six months in the life of the city are seen, probably accurately, as a series of crises and potential disasters: shootings, arrests, gang warfare, budget shortfalls, politics and in-fighting at the police department, and a looming, possibly unfeasible opening date for a new high school ten years (and $100 million) in the making. There are some concerns up front that the filmmakers are trying to take on too much, and doing it too fast, in too fragmented a style--we have to work a little to keep up. But once we have our bearings, the series draws the viewer in; it is gripping, riveting, intelligent television, and by the second episode, even something as seemingly mundane as a budget meeting makes for a compelling scene. The directors' only real misstep is in their use of occasional visual trickery (like slo-mo and faux-step printing); the filmmaking is so seamless otherwise, this unnecessary stylization calls attention to itself.

"The various disparate elements are pulled together in the show's knockout final hour, which juggles the city council race (in which the Booker-endorsed candidate faces off against the Sharp James-ish Charlie Bell), the Obama campaign, and the 'Blood Initiation Day' (with the gang announcing a goal of 25 murders) with real urgency and power. Principal Baraka speaks plainly, openly, and heatedly to his students, telling them that the dangers and odds that they face on a daily basis 'doesn't mean you're tough, it means you're oppressed.' It's a stunning moment, the kind of speech that any actor worth his salt would sell his soul to deliver in a film. The fact that this is no actor, but a dedicated educator who faces these problems every day, makes it all the more powerful"

Politics as performance, to true perfomance. Bailey also reviews Passing Strange, a new documentary from the increasingly versatile Spike Lee that Jason calls "a thrilling, energetic performance film of the vibrant Broadway musical...[Passing Strange] only ran 165 performances (symptomatic of a Broadway environment where critical kudos are seemingly less important than big stars or recycling of material). Lee was taken by the show, however, so he and his cinematographer, the brilliant Matthew Libatique (Iron Man, The Fountain), took their cameras to the Belasco Theatre to capture the show's final performances in July 2008.

"Singer/songwriter 'Stew,' with the backing of a terrific on-stage rock band (including his collaborator Heidi Rodewald), narrates his story. It begins in South Central Los Angeles in 1976, where the his 'Youth' alter ego (Daniel Breaker) decides to shake off his roots (and his loving mother, beautifully played by Eisa Davis) to pursue his dreams of musical stardom. He becomes obsessed with punk rock, and decides to broaden his horizons in Europe. First he visits Amsterdam, where he is intoxicated by the lax attitudes towards drugs and sex (of the latter, he sings: 'I love that they're so nonchalant/ About the only thing I want'). In the second act, he ventures to Berlin, where he is drawn into the underground political art scene; he amps up (and fibs about) his background for street cred, but is ultimately drawn to reassess his trajectory and sense of self.

"Passing Strange gets considerable mileage out of its inventive, funny book and clever lyrics--early on, for example, Stew sings that he's reached a good place for 'a showtune/ an upbeat, gonna-leave-town kind of showtune/ but we don't know how to write that kind of tune...' The use of the older musician and his younger counterpart is ingenious (he comments and interacts with his alter ego), while the staging is inventive and dynamic. And the music is just miraculous--memorable, soulful, wonderful."

Casey Burchby tackles a tale of fandom gone wrong in his review of Big Fan: "For some, an allegiance to sports teams comprises a big part of their identity. I continually encounter individuals who know more about their beloved baseball or football franchises than they know about their spouses. Self-identifying members of the 'Raiders Nation' or 'Colts Nation' exude a quasi-patriotic fervor that can at times be alienating and downright frightening to those on the outside. First-time director Robert Siegel's Big Fan asks a lot of questions about the limits - or lack thereof - of one sports fan's loyalty to his team, casting a darkly satirical eye on this dominant feature of American culture.

"Patton Oswalt plays Paul Aufiero, a Staten Island parking lot attendant and die-hard fan of the New York Giants. Paul's nightly routine is to compose long, enthusiastic calls into a late-night sports radio talk show, which he makes after his shift. These are usually barbed responses to a caller known as 'Philadelphia Phil' (Michael Rapaport), a supporter of the Giants' rivals, the Philadelphia Eagles. Paul and his best - and only - friend, Sal (Kevin Corrigan), go to Giants games but stay in the parking lot watching them on TV. One night, the pair spot Giants quarterback Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan - not Jon - Hamm) in a Manhattan strip club and a misunderstanding leads a drunken Bishop to beat Paul within an inch of his life. Paul's devotion to the team, however, means that he refuses to divulge details of the assault, which releases Bishop from league suspension.

"Siegel's dark script keeps the satirical elements of the story embedded in Oswalt's character. It's a solid approach that makes for appropriately uncomfortable comedy. Oswalt's performance is very good, although the cadences of his stand-up persona occasionally sneak into an otherwise convincing portrayal. Corrigan is one of several actors who lend authentic, restrained support to Oswalt's lead. His Sal is another loser, but more of a hapless sidekick to the more aggressive, articulate Paul. Oswalt's round, bestubbled face is harshly-lit and unflattering. Paul's surroundings are dingy and he doesn't take care of himself. The photographic style has a washed-out look favored by filmmakers looking for an unpleasantly-heightened reality. It's a common approach that nevertheless works well here. The film is short and punchily directed by Siegel, whose debut is auspicious, entertaining, and constructively subversive."

Completely different than much of what we have been seeing here this month is Goodbye Gemini. Ian Jane reviews this 1960s cult movie: "Alan Gibson, best known for his output for Hammer Studios which included the infamous Dracula A.D. 1972, directs this quirky tale of twenty-year old twin siblings Jacki (Judy Geeson) and Julian (Martin Potter). The pair is a bit out there, almost on their own planet, and they don't really seem to feel much of a connection to anyone in the outside world. After playing a cruel prank on their landlady that winds up sending her to the hospital, they head out to a pub where a drag show is in progress. Here they meet a young man named Clive Landseer (Alexis Kanner), a swinging type who invites the pair out along with one of his female companions for the night. When Clive sets his sights on Jacki, Julian proves to be a very jealous thorn in his side and to get him out of the picture at a party one night, Clive gets him drunk and sends him off with two 'women' who turn out to be drag queens. Before Julian realizes what's happened, Clive's taken a series of photographs which he'll use to blackmail Julian for the cash he needs to pay off his bookie.

"More of a mod-style thriller than a flat out horror film like Gibson's Hammer offerings were, this movie works well both as a piece of psychologically twisted storytelling and as a time capsule of the London that was in its swinging heyday. Astrology, go-go dancing, cross-dressing and the big beat sound that was popular at the time all collide under Gibson's guidance and the mixture turns out to be quite good indeed. You almost get the impression that this was being filmed around the corner from where mod-mondo movie Primitive London was being shot, as it has the same sort of fashion conscious and (at the time) trendy aesthetic to it. By today's standards, it's horribly dated, but that's half the charm of the picture in a nutshell and exactly what gives it its time capsule qualities."

And just as we began this month, so do we end, with the scope of history told on a human scale. Criterion has really knocked it out of the park with their new boxed set Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy. Watching this collection doesn't feel like you're just watching movies, but like you are watching history. The history of cinema, to be sure, but also a bonafide historical document. The films contained herein--Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero--were made between 1945 and 1948. They were shot on location, documenting the ravages of World War II by setting the drama in the bombed-out ruins of Italy and Germany. Working with many non-professional actors, operating on a shoestring budget and often shooting with scraps of film, this is the birth of Italian Neorealism.

From what we can gather from what the director said about these films, his intention with the War Trilogy was to make sure that the people remembered. Moving on from what happened was useless unless we remember what happened, and so while much of what is portrayed in Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy is bleak, it's not unnecessarily so. Also, given the faith that Rossellini had in the power of cinematic images, he likely knew that filmgoers would walk away with the more hopeful messages tucked away in their hearts. The resistance fighters in Rome Open City, the people offering aid to one another in Paisan, even Eva hanging on to her principles when it would be so much easier to do otherwise in Germany Year Zero--these positives dominate over the negatives. Granted, we have the benefit of history to know where it will all go, but we also have the knowledge that history does repeat, having seen that governments and their people can still go in the wrong direction. Some will always refuse to learn from past mistakes, and we can only cross our fingers that there will always be more people like Roberto Rossellini and those he portrays that will do everything they can to stop the bad guys from getting away with it.

I ranked this group of movies in the DVD Talk Collector Series because Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - Criterion Collection is amongst the best of the best. Its like a treasure chest and a time capsule all in one! The packaging is fantastic, and the supplemental features are an extensive excavation into this compelling project. It belongs in any cinephile's collection.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the forthcoming hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His next project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.

Special thanks to Jason Bailey, Casey Burchby, Ian Jane, and Jeremy Mathews for their contributions. ]]> http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/che-paris-texas-and-the-hurt-l.html http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/che-paris-texas-and-the-hurt-l.html Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:56:07 -0500

Talking Out of Frame:


Art House Cinema on DVD

Vol. 4: January 2010 Edition
compiled by Jamie S. Rich

Well, it's a new year...whatever that means. For film fans, I suppose, we're going to see a lot of early-in-the-year DVD releases of Oscar contenders. This will pick things up after the regular slowdown in late December and early January.

One movie that is getting the year kickstarted rather quickly, however, is In the Loop. Helmed by Armando Iannucci, creator of the BBC series The Thick of It. That series, which has so far run four seasons since 2005, details the ins and outs of the day-to-day work of British government. In the Loop is a spin-off of sorts, and it features the show's foul-mouthed politico Malcolm Tucker, played with saliva and brimstone by Peter Capaldi. Don't let that scare you, though. I have never seen The Thick of It (something I plan to rectify immediately), and I understood In the Loop just fine. You don't have to pass a test, there is no prior knowledge required for entry.

Set in a period of time where a possible Middle Eastern war is brewing, In the Loop details how minor politicians move both the United Kingdom and the United States toward conflict. A slip of the tongue by a minor minister, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), nicknamed Simon Fluster due to his regularly tripping over his own words, makes a similarly minor U.S. official, Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy), think she has an anti-war ally in the British government. Simon's backpedaling takes him so far away from his original statements, however, that he ends up on the radar of Karen's hawkish rival, Linton Barwick (a remarkable David Rasche, last seen in Burn After Reading). This farcical satire is more than its cat's cradle of a plot, though. In the Loop has drawn rather obvious comparisons to David Mamet and Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog, and the coupling is more than a superficial relationship of narratives about building phony wars. Armando Iannucci, who wrote In the Loop alongside Simon Blackwell, Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, and Ian Martin, also have the same gift for the poetry of profanity that distinguishes Mamet's more Mamet-y efforts. The difference is that these fellows aren't shackled to Mamet's usual syncopation, and so they are free to let the invective fly at whatever pace suits their mood.

In the Loop is so stirring because of the realstic, if comedicallly charged, portrayal it creates of politicians on the job. In the new documentary, Kobe Doin' Work: A Spike Lee Joint, noted filmmaker Spike Lee takes a look at another kind of job: that of basketball player. Jason Bailey writes, "Spike Lee's new documentary, Kobe Doin' Work, is a great movie for sports fans and a passable one for the rest of us; when it was over, I was still ready for a new Spike Lee joint. Make no mistake, it does what it does very well--presumably as well as it could possibly be done. What may come into question is whether it needed to be done at all...On one hand, it's a bit of a wax job. On the other, Lee isn't making some kind of a comprehensive documentary portrait. The conceit of the film is right there in the title--this is Kobe going to the office. It takes place over the course of one evening, during one important game (playing the Spurs in the Staples Center on April 13, 2008). Lee and his cinematographer, the brilliant Matthew Libatique (Pi, Iron Man), shadow Bryant as he suits up, stretches, watches game tape with Jackson, and gets ready for the game. Once it begins, they put 30 cameras on the game and put a wireless mic on Bryant, getting into his space and his head during an important play-off game.

"The cutting is fast-paced without going overboard; it moves, yes, and the multi-camera set-up is fully exploited, but this isn't an MTV job. Lee stays with shots during slower moments and lingers on close-ups when necessary. Visually, the film is at its best when Spike stops worrying about the game and starts to play--he trots out some pretty inventive tricks. Slow motion is used at a couple of key moments but not abused; on a couple of other occasions, he shows a play or a trick move in a series of black and white stills rather than moving images (shades of his very first feature, She's Gotta Have It). He also spotlights a couple of crucial moments with a series of quick replays; I don't mean this in the style of a TV-sports 'instant replay,' but rather showing the sinking of a decisive basket from three different angles, rat-tat-tat, with the sound (say, Kobe saying 'gotcha') repeating each time. It's a neat trick and, again, not overused."

From an artist on the basketball court to artists of the more traditional painterly kind--though with a quirky modern sensibility. Beautiful Losers is a documentary named for a recent art show reuniting a group of NYC-based artists who had come through the same galleries and reached prominence in the early 1990s. This documentary film chronicles the road to that retrospective, looking at the disparate backgrounds of the various creators and searching for the commonalities that brought them together. Some of the people profiled will be familiar to pop culture junkies, some will not. Mike Mills, for instance, is a filmmaker and artist who has directed music videos for the Beastie Boys and the movie Thumbsucker, and Shepard Fairey is the designer behind the Barack Obama "Hope" poster. Harmony Korine wrote Kids and directed Gummo. I imagine many of the others will be under most people's radar unless they read Giant Robot or keep up with other arts publications.

The movie tracks how all of these artists came together, digging into their background and what compelled each artist to begin creating. Interviews are illustrated with generous helpings of archival footage and actual images of their art, and the knotted storytelling style tangles everyone up in one DNA strand. Their focal point was a shabby New York gallery called Alleged, run by Aaron Rose and encouraging a do-it-yourself philosophy. Incorporating skate boarding, punk and indie rock, and street art, these talented folks discovered, like most famous misfits, that they were actually speaking for a far greater audience than they had realized. Soon, they were creating high-end advertising campaigns and designing album covers for Sonic Youth. There is a little bit of self-mythologizing going on in Beautiful Losers. Aaron Rose, the man behind Alleged and the organizer of the titular art show, is the director of Beautiful Losers, as well as one of its more active commentators. The question of how one can go from street art to accepting huge advertising contracts from global conglomerates is pretty easily swept aside, with only Stephen Powers, a.k.a. ESPO, expressing displeasure at the supposed subversion of letting yourself be used by the man. He actually does something about it, too, and his project to repaint Coney Island is an admirable and quite impressive practical application of his artistic skills. It seems like there could be a whole extra documentary just on that.

The arty folks at Wholphin have released the 10th volume of their DVD anthology. Francis Rizzo III writes of Wholphin: Issue 10: "Wholphin, part of the McSweeney's empire, releases a quarterly DVD magazine, which collects, as the subhead says, rare and unseen short films. The material ranges from old to recent and well-known to incredibly obscure, and as a result, the issues are an amazing gift for anyone open to unique entertainment. Nine issues have been released previously, and DVDTalk has reviews of all issues." He then goes on to explain about his reactions to all ten films, concluding: "I'm a fan of a lot of TV shows and creative types, but nothing, honestly nothing, gets me more excited to warm up the DVD player than when a Wholphin DVD arrives at my door. I know, without a doubt, I'm getting something good, something odd and something I've never heard of before that will blow me away. This collection is a touch below the more amazing issues I've reviewed, but even so, it was a joy to experience, and the quality was of the level I've come to expect."

The review I am most jealous of not having written this month is for Argentinian director/writer Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman. John Wallis got the assignment, and he says, "...Martel has taken up the mantle of exploring the existential crisis of the idle rich much like Luis Bunuel and Michelangelo Antonioni so deftly did throughout their careers...A pair of boys and a dog are playing in an empty canal by a dirt road. Soon, a middle-aged bourgeoisie woman, Veronica/Vero (María Onetto), distractedly drives by and violently hits a bump. She looks in her rear view mirror and sees a dog lying in the road. Upset, she stops for a moment, then goes to the hospital where she gets her head scanned. Something is not quite right with Veronica. She walks away from the hospital without filling out her forms. She avoids speaking much, just blankly smiles while others chatter around her. It is like she is sleepwalking through her life. She confesses to her husband that she thinks she may have run over and killed a child. A local boy is missing. A body is drug from the canal. Life continues around her but without her. On the surface, one would assume the central aspect of the film is whether or not Veronica actually hit the child or just believes she hit the child. But, The Headless Woman just uses that mystery (which is left ambiguous and unresolved) as a linchpin to explore guilt and the ennui of the pampered social class.

"Lucrecia Martel creates an amazing sense of mood, paranoid, off kilter, dour, yet painted with naturalism. Her unobtrusive camera always keeps Veronica within in the frame in tight close-ups or slightly out of focus as everyone bustles around her. Small moments speak riches about self-condemnation and the difference in social classes, be it between lowly workers and the rich or between women and men: Veronica reacting to a knocked-out child on a playground, listening to her husband and brother-in-law's matter-of-fact conspiratorial talk as they look over her car for damage, or Veronica nervously doting over a boy the family hires to do chores."

We stay down in Argentina for Lion's Den, one of my favorite surprises of 2009. Lion's Den pretty much had me from the word "go." It's been a long time since I've seen as good an opening to a thriller as the first ten minutes of this film. Following a disconcerting animated credits sequence featuring a sing-a-long with South American children--I wondered it they had switched screenings on me--we get a series of quick-cut scenes where the film's heroine, Julia (Martina Gusman), slowly comes out of a state of shock to realize that there have been two bloody murders in her home. The way director Pablo Trapero (alongside three other writers) pulls you into the plot is deftly executed, moving rapidly to knock the audience off balance and put us in Julia's shoes.

Because from there, Lion's Den isn't really a thriller, but a prison drama about a young mother in a situation that has gotten out of her control. Unable to give a feasible account of the evening--which involved her lover and his boyfriend in a knife fight, leaving the boyfriend dead and the lover, Ramiro (Rodrigo Santoro), badly wounded--Julia is locked up pending trial. Since she is a couple of months along in a pregnancy, she is assigned to a maternity ward where convicted mothers can raise their own children until they are four. Depressed and nauseous with morning sickness, Julia takes a while to adjust to life inside, but eventually she becomes part of the community, even taking a lover, Marta (Laura Garcia), and using her outside connections to get goods for the inmates. Several years pass, and all the while Julia keeps fighting for her freedom. When her mother (Elli Medeiros) tricks Julia into taking her young son away, however, everything unravels. Lion's Den is a harsh story filmed in a gritty style and lacking in any overt sensationalism. The script taps into a universal fear--of being caught in a legal system you can't get out of and incarcerated--and adds a specific and unique wrinkle I don't think we've seen in cinema before. The maternity prison is like a daycare center in Hell, a lethal combination of violence, boredom, and dirty diapers. A unique setting is nothing without a great character, however, and Julia is a fully realized human being with a real journey to undergo.

Happier times are to be found in AnimEigo's Tora-San: Collector Set 1, the debut North American collection of the venerable Japanese comedy hero, bringing together his first four films (forty-eight movies were released nearly two a year from 1969 to 1996, starring the same actor in the lead and almost all directed by the same filmmaker). I was less than half an hour into the lead film, 1969's Tora-San, Our Lovable Tramp (Otoko wa tsurai yo), before I was completely smitten with this quaint yet effective comedy. There is something undeniably endearing about the hapless blowhard Tora-san and the universality of his familiar (and repetitive) predicaments that are identifiable beyond all culture lines. This drifter with a mouth matched only in size by his heart is played by actor Kiyoshi Atsumi, a man with the face of a bulldog and a demeanor to match. They seem gruff and fearsome, but they're really kind of sweet once you get past all the snarling and the slobber. As Tora-san tells us in voiceover, he is a drifter, having left his family some time before. His mother was always absent, his father has died, and he has left his last immediate relation, his sweet half-sister Sakura (played faithfully episode to episode by Chieko Baisho), with an aunt and uncle in Shibamata, a suburb of Tokyo. He is returning to visit them for the first time in many years, having wandered Japan as a "salesman." Read that as con man, a pitch man if we are being kind. He calls himself "yakuza," but Tora-san is too harmless to be a gangster. His crimes are not ones of ill intent; rather, he's paving the road he travels with misplaced good.

There's a pleasing formula to the Tora-San movies. In each installment, the film basically begins with some kind of predicament that doesn't go Tora's way, often centering around the return to his family in Shibamata (in this way, being a little like the movies themselves, visiting the audience periodically). If Tora-san doesn't return home at the start, such as in the fourth film Tora-san's Grand Scheme (Shin otoko wa tsurai yo), the middle act ends up being the reunion. The second act generally has Tora-san reacting to the fallout of his latest misstep, and usually meeting his love interest for this particular movie. The final act is when he finds out that this love interest is already betrothed to another, and in a lot of cases, he helps her secure her situation before he heads out on the road again, disappearing into the sunset via whatever mode of travel will carry him.

Another set of old films, but one that is far less satisfying, is the 3-movie The Brigitte Bardot Classic Collection, bringing together one of the buxom actress' earlier efforts with one from her internationally popular period in the late 1950s, as well as her last film, 1972's Don Juan (or If Don Juan Were a Woman). Brigitte Bardot is one of those interesting figures from cinema, an iconic actress known more for her image than her acting. A sort of French combination of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, she lacked the former's filmography even if she was more talented than the latter. Bardot's reputation is built largely on a series of tease films she made through the 1950s and 1960s, many of them alongside her husband, Roger Vadim. Consider them the model for Bo and John Derek, with hubby coming up with film scripts that were more concerned with the various states of undress he could show his wife in. You know, the way there is always water around for her to either fall into or have poured over her. I know I come off as judgmental, but I'm not saying this is necessarily a negative. You get what you expect with a Brigitte Bardot film, at least in terms of the three movies on the three discs that make up The Brigitte Bardot Classic Collection.

The earliest film is Plucking the Daisy, and it's also the most entertaining. The light sex comedy, which sees Bardot playing a naïf from the country trying to make her way through the big city, is as enjoyable as it is inoffensive. Absolutely rotten, however, is 1958's The Night Heaven Fell, a troubled production from the Vadim formula that puts schoolgirl Brigitte on a road trip/flight from justice with a hardened laborer and details the various perils that await a young woman's clothes. Better is the last picture, also directed by Vadim, Don Juan. The mature and gorgeous actress plays a woman scorned who sets about breaking hearts of deserving men as a kind of revenge. There is an arty pretentiousness to Don Juan that makes it kind of fascinating, but Vadim has no idea how to end it. To get out of the jam he created, the director neutralizes her, literally burning her down. Don Juan in Hell. The film seems to display delusions of something more, but really, it's just more soft-core titillation

We end this month with another oldie, but this time a goodie! John Sinnott tackles the lost gem Miss Mend, "[an] unusual film [Miss Mend] is a three part serial, with each chapter running about an hour and a half. What's more interesting is that it was made in communist Russia by a pair of directors who were trying to emulate western adventure films. The result is a very good flick that will have viewers entranced for the entire five-hours that it takes to watch the show. Set in the United States (something that's not clear at the beginning and had me scratching my head in a few spots) this action starts at a cork factory (??) where the workers are striking and demanding a living wage. The evil Organization has a member on the cork company's board and he sends the police in to beat and arrest the men.

"Boris is sent to cover the strike for his pro-company newspaper along with a photographer Vogel, and a clerk for the company, Tom. When they arrive the police have just gotten to the scene and the captain is about to attack the union leader, only to be stopped by a plucky typist for the cork company, Vivian Mend. The three men are taken with her bravery and help her to escape from the resulting riot. In order to escape, Miss Mend jumps into a passing car and meets a man who introduces himself as 'Engineer Johnson.' He too is attracted to the rather homely Miss Mend and not only drops her at her home (where he discovers that she's raising her dead sister's child all by herself) but also prevents the police from arresting her when they arrive. That's because he's really Arthur Stern, the son of the cork factory's owner."

"Now this wouldn't be a serial if there wasn't a convoluted plot," Sinnott reminds us, and there is plenty of more story to be had. That's just the beginning. "[Miss Mend] was a fun series that has a lot of action and chase scenes as well as an interesting and twisting plot. It's easy to tell that they were really trying to mimic Western movies and that this was a conscience departure from the more well-known Russian films from that period such as the work of Eisenstein. They do a good job overall though it's not quite up to the standards set by the best action films Hollywood was putting out at the time. Even so, there's plenty of action. One chase scene features a car trying to drive through a field followed by the three reporters on horses that they stole from the police, who are being chased by a motorcycle and finally the three horse-less cops on foot. The directors really tried to insert a sense of fun and comedy into the adventure, and for the most part it worked. The serial does have its serious side though, and people are killed on screen to point out the gravity of the situation.

"It's easy to tell from the synopsis that this serial is filled with propaganda, but the message is never too overt and it's not as bad as many US movies (especially B-films released during WWII). The Organization is a typical evil group trying to take over the world and while they're targeting communists they are not any more over-the-top than your typical serial villains...Miss Mend is also an interesting historical footnote which makes it even more enjoyable to watch. Flicker Alley and their associates have done another magnificent job with this release. The picture looks much, much, better than it has any right to, the orchestral score is very good, and the extras are interesting. This is another Flicker Alley release that comes Highly Recommended."

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the forthcoming hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His next project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.

Special thanks to Jason Bailey, Francis Rizzo III, John Sinnott, and John Wallis for their contributions. ]]> http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/talking-out-of-frame-in-the-lo.html http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/talking-out-of-frame-in-the-lo.html Sun, 03 Jan 2010 06:29:22 -0500

The holidays are upon us, and no corner of the film world is safe! Doesn't matter how low or high your brow, there are movies for the season out there. Below find a round-up of some of these, along with other choices from the artier side of the aisle.

One of my favorites for this time of year is John Huston's final film, The Dead. It was released in 1987, mere months after the veteran director's passing. Adapted from a story by James Joyce, The Dead takes place in Dublin, Ireland, on Christmas Eve 1904. Three sisters (played by Helena Carroll, Cathleen Delany, and Ingrid Craigie) are hosting a dinner for family and friends. The guests come, they enjoy a little song, and then they partake of a goose feast. Amongst the guests is Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), the nephew of the two older hostesses, and his wife, Greta (Huston). Throughout the meal, the many attendees share their love of music and their memories of favorite singers, discuss religion, and largely get on well. It's what happens after the dinner, however, a revelation of Greta's lost love and the flight of melancholy in inspires in her husband that shows us how fragile life can be.

The Dead was nominated for an Oscar for Dorothy Jeakins' costume designs, and a large part of why this film works so well is the meticulous attention to detail paid by Jeakins, as well as production designers Stephen Grimes and Dennis Washington. The clothes and the sets are elaborate without being ostentatious. They make the story believable without ever overshadowing it. The whole of The Dead is understated in a way that makes it all the more realistic. It is not as attention grabbing as most costume dramas are, John Huston prefers the focus to be on the writing and the people and not the setting. His is a quiet film, one that grows quieter the longer it runs, from the sounds of a party all the way to silence. The final image is of snow falling in the sky, no words, only accompanied by plaintive music that hangs on to the very end, then stopping for a breath, the sky turning to nothing.

Note, there was a bit of a glitch with this first release of The Dead on DVD, but check the full review for info on how to exchange faulty discs. There is a Santa Claus!

A more recent holiday choice is A Christmas Tale, Arnaud Desplechin's multi-leveled yet somehow easily assembled family drama that tracks the Vuillards over the course of four days, December 22nd through 25th--not including the considerable history they bring with them to their holiday celebration. Desplechin sets the table for this feast in the very first scenes, using cut-out puppet theatre to catch us up on the family dynamic. The heads of the clan are Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), who is in the fabric dye business, and Junon (Catherine Deneuve). They had four children together, though their oldest, Jonathan, died of a rare condition when very young. Neither his parents nor his sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) could offer him the transfusion he needed, and even little Henri (Mathieu Amalric) was tested in the womb to see if he could help. No dice, Jonathan passed, and his specter has haunted the family ever since, particularly settling on Henri, who was born right at the same time, yet somehow leaving the next down the line, Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), alone.

When A Christmas Tale picks up in real life and real time, the kids have grown up and mother Junon has been diagnosed with a cancer much like Jonathan's. Once again, there is a scramble to find matching marrow. There are complications, however, Henri has been in exile for six years, his sister having banished him in return for assuming his debts. He is a drinker and a screw-up, and everyone else has gone along with Elizabeth even though they don't have any idea why she chose to be so extreme. Henri is about to return to the family, joining them for Christmas, a move largely precipitated by Elizabeth's teenage son Paul (Emile Berling). Paul has recently been diagnosed as schizophrenic, apparently at the same age that Ivan had similar mental problems. It would appear that when it comes time to fill out a hospital form, the Vuillard's can check "yes" next to "a history of mental illness."

In terms of holiday movies, A Christmas Tale hits some major points. It's about family coming together, and it's about a hope for a better tomorrow that comes through reconciling the past. There are also elements of magic that tie into psychosis, something we see in films as far flung in time as Capra's It's a Wonderful Life and Bergman's Fanny & Alexander (here, it's Paul's visions). Arnaud Desplechin is playing it a little coy at the finish. The final scene between Henri and Junon ends with raised eyebrows and a question, and the very end of the film has Elizabeth quoting Shakespeare, wondering if anything is truly mended or if this dream merely cycles into another one. Whether or not you walk away from that deciding A Christmas Tale reaches a positive or negative conclusion is down to you. It's how you choose to make your own peace that makes all the difference, something that puts you right in line with the Vuillard family dynamic.

For those of you not wanting to give up on Halloween and transition into the yuletide just yet, you can always try out the new vampire movie from Old Boy-director Chan-Wook Park. It's an adaptation of Emile Zola's Therese Raquin to boot. As Chris Neilson's explains it, "Thirst is more than a modern retelling of Zola's tale of sex and murder; with the introduction of vampirism and Catholicism, it's essentially a genre-defying, convoluted morality play. Sang-hyeon, played by Song Kang-ho (Memories of Murder), is a Catholic priest posted to a hospital where he ministers to the ill and dying. Though universally beloved by the patients and their families for his compassion and devotion, Sang-hyeon feels called to do even more. When he volunteers as a test subject for an ultra-risky medical experiment to find a cure for an Ebola-like blood disease, Sang-hyeon is accidentally infected with vampirism. Seemingly returned from the dead, Sang-hyeon finds direct sunlight intolerable, craves human blood, is overwhelmed with carnal desires, and imbued with superhuman strength and powers of regeneration.

"The confused Sang-hyeon begins covertly helping himself to the blood of coma victims at the hospital a pint at a time, but his world really turns upside down when he visits his childhood friend Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun). Kang-woo is a slow and sickly man who lives with his domineering mother (Kim Hae-sook) and his beautiful young wife Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), an orphan taken in by Kang-woo's mother as a girl and later married off to him. Despite Sang-hyeon's best efforts to keep his desires in check, he and Tae-ju begin a torrid affair. Eventually, Tae-ju manipulates Sang-hyeon into helping her kill her husband, and convinces him to make her a vampire too. Before long, Sang-hyeon is living with Tae-ju and her now paralyzed mother-in-law and the materialized ghost/guilt of their crime, the drowned Kang-woo.

"At one-hundred-and-thirty-four minutes, Thirst is at least a half hour too long, but it's a psychologically engaging, visually innovative, and cliché-free vampire romp. Alas, this bare-bones, visually middling, release from Focus Features will be a disappointment to Chan-Wook Park's ardent fans who will have to decide whether to settle for this, or wait for a Korean-release special edition." (I didn't like Thirst as much as Chris when I reviewed the theatrical release, but I still recommended it.)

Christmas in the Italian slum that is the centerpiece from the new Criterion release of Gomorrah is probably not all that great, but as Thomas Spurlin discovered, the movie is something special in its own right. "[The film] bases its content on Robert Saviano's partly non-fiction novel of the same name, an exposé on the Camorra organized crime syndicate and its Neapolitan underground dealings. It focuses on five interlinked stories that tackle different corrupt elements: training and recruiting young upstarts to the gang, sketchy waste disposal, monetary distribution to imprisoned gang members' families, the Camorra's foot-in-the-door with popular culture textiles via a couture designer (Salvatore Cantalupo), and the ways that the lifestyle's greed can appeal to and contort teenage minds. Director Garrone zeroes in on an observational manner with soaking in the dialogue and witnessing the myriad of character reactions, concentrating on the damaging human effects that the cutthroat, heartless network of activity has on individuals.

"Within its length and grace of motion, Gomorrah becomes a highly demanding crime drama. Dialogue mixes half and half with deliberate close-ups and wavering camera movement, creating a sense of both disorientation and awe within the viewer witnessing the realistic, gritty modern-era portrayal of the Camorra's many layers. Leanness isn't exactly a claim to its visceral success, however there's something beguiling about its earnest capturing of Naples' troubling underbelly. Energy doesn't come barreling around every single corner, though a slow, gut-churning burn can be felt from start to finish as we watch illegal waste dumps. Instead, strategic bursts of force are experienced throughout the film, and every last one of them becomes memorable because of their precise placement. " (Also available on Blu-Ray, reviewed by Jason Bailey.)

More lightheared is Toi & Moi, a French comedy by Julie Lopes-Curval that tries a little too hard to make itself seem like more than it is, as if it were above the romantic-comedy genre at the same time that it is an active part of it. Julie Depardieu stars as Ariane, the author of cloying photo comics in the romance magazine Toi & Moi. Her scripts tell the twisty tales of lovers in peril, of heartbreak and the easy soothing of class division that comes with unexpected, but apparently all-too regular, financial inheritance. The implication of the fantasy is that the windfall of love will cure all. Scoundrels will be routed, and an endless supply of rich aunts and uncles will fall so that even the lowliest gardener may find love.

Of course, Ariane is no good at making her own daydreams real. Her long-term love affair with Farid (Tomer Sisley), a Muslim whose commitment issues may be faith, but may also just be down to him being a jerk, leaves her confused and alone most of the time. Her sister is no better. Lena (Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard) is a cellist who is content to be in the orchestra where she can fade into the music, rather than a soloist out front. She has settled into a similarly anonymous relationship with Francois (Eric Berger), a schoolteacher. That is until she meets handsome violin virtuoso Mark (Jonathan Zaccaï), who hears the music in Lena that no one else hears. Skyrockets in flight! The connectiona and re-enactment of Ariane's romantic stories ends up being an unnecessary conceit, and to be honest, it makes Toi & Moi come off as a little lazy. The comics give Lopes-Curval a shortcut around the difficult stuff. She wastes a very good cast on trite scriptwork. The basic plotting is fine, this story could work, but there is never any real passion nor any real gravitas to make it more than any other average romance film on the market. The fact that one sister gets a happy ending while the other doesn't is no salvation, either. Again, there's that wink. Lopes-Curval might as well appear and point it out. "You see what I did? You thought it would be all sentimental, but only one girl inherits her true heart's fortune." Blech.

Much stronger narrative machinations are to be had in the Israeli drama Lemon Tree. In Eran Riklis' drama, the contrived social structure and the divisions between people is part of the point. Hiam Abbass, recently seen in The Visitor and also this month's release The Limits of Control (see below), stars in Lemon Tree as Salma Zildane, a widow whose children have grown and who spends her time tending to a lemon grove planted by her father. Her world is turned upside down when the Israeli Defense Minister (Doran Tavory) moves in next door. Soon there are armed guards, secret service agents, and surveillance cameras keeping an eye on Salma's lemons. Seeing the trees as a place for terrorists to hide, the security force decides it would be best if they cut them down. They expect Salma to just roll over and take it, as so many Palestinians have been made to do before. Instead, Salma hires a lawyer, Ziad Daud (Ali Suliman, The Kingdom), to fight this action. They end up taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, igniting a media controversy and stirring up trouble in the Minister's home. His wife, Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), is shocked by her husband's inhumanity and his quick capitulation to policy.

Eran Riklis, who co-wrote Lemon Tree with Suha Arraf, could have easily turned this movie into a cheerleading political polemic. At one point, Ziad compares Salma's battle to that of David versus Goliath, and it would have been no great leap to ratchet up the crusading and give the audience a big cause to get behind. It's been done before, and it's been done well. It's also something pretty easy to do bad, and while Riklis doesn't entirely keep Lemon Tree from getting preachy, the grandstanding moments evolve naturally from a story that is more nuanced and complex than your usual heavy-handed agitprop. Salma is a quiet woman with a simple goal, one that makes perfect sense compared to the kneejerk, self-serving establishment that is standing against her. Mira even tells her husband that she would sue him, too, if she were Salma. Her case is justified, plain and simple, no need to overdo it.

International politics also get some attention in Unimistaken Child, a documentary reviewed by Elizabeth Neilson. The movie "...follows the 4-year journey of Tenzin Zopa, a gentle 28-year-old monk tasked with finding the reincarnation of his renowned Tibetan master (Lama Konchog) who died in 2001. Tenzin is provided a variety of clues: there are signs in the cremation ashes and a Taiwanese astrologer predicts that Lama Konchog will return to a region with the letters TS and be born to a father whose name begins with an A. Equipped with these leads, Tenzin searches for his master throughout the astonishingly beautiful countryside of Nepal, providing a rare glimpse into the ancient traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.

"While on his quest, Tenzin inquires about children between the ages of 1 to 1 ½ in the hopes of finding a candidate who can pass rigorous, ritualistic tests (recognizing favorite belongings from the previous life and sometimes recognizing people they knew before) meant to distinguish enlightened beings. When a rosy, chubby toddler in the Tsum Valley is found watering a tree planted by Lama Konchog and correctly identifies the monk's prayer beads and hand drum, it's the beginning of juxtaposed tranformations. The cherub embarks on a new life to regain his previous knowledge and reduce the world's suffering; Tenzin emerges from a devoted disciple who feels unworthy and unsure about finding his master, to become a confident mentor who is prepared to teach his reborn, spiritual father. Some viewers may be frustrated that Baratz doesn't tackle certain issues (for example: what happens if the toddler grows up and - having sacrificed family and traditional childhood for monastic life - comes to regret or rebel against his circumstances?) However, I found the film's gaps to be trumped by the story's compelling arc - the tremendous devotion Tenzin has for Lama Konchog, the deep grief following his death, and Tenzin's commitment to finding and serving his master again."

Another documentary about enlightenment is the somewhat more cheeky Enighten Up!, a film about accepting change as it comes. As Chris Neilson explains, "Documentaries in their initial concept and final form often diverge, but rarely more so than in filmmaker Kate Churchill's Enlighten Up!. Churchill, a longtime devotee of yoga, intended to make a documentary about the transformative power of yoga. Her plan was to follow a yoga novice, 29-year-old unemployed journalist Nick Rosen, for six months as he sought out a spiritually transformative yoga practice. But that's not how things worked out. How Churchill's plan went awry and the theme which emerged to take its place, fortunately, make for an interesting story nonetheless.

"[Yoga] novice Nick Rosen, with Kate Churchill's camera crew in tow, embarks on his search for a transformative practice with visits to several of NYC's premiere yoga studios. Though the studios are filled with enthusiastic students with the kind of limber and lean-muscled bodies rarely seen in the malls of America's heartland, the new-age claptrap espoused by many of the NYC gurus featured is at best unpersuasive to Rosen. It's at this point that one can begin to sense Churchill's growing misgivings about selecting Rosen who as a professional journalist, religious agnostic, and adult child of former back-to-the-land hippies, has a degree of skepticism far exceeding that likely of most others who might have signed on for Churchill's project.

"Unable to bend Rosen's experiences to her preconceptions, Churchill spent 30 months working with editors Khari Streeter and Jonathan Sahula to turn the 500 hours of footage into a coherent documentary, albeit one very different from the kind Churchill set out to make. In listening to seven hours of Rosen reading his daily journals, and the many conversations caught on camera between Rosen and Churchill never intended for inclusion in the documentary, the trio in the editing booth refocused the film on the personal dynamics of Rosen and Churchill's working relationship, and their unique expectations and experiences during those six months together. The final product is actually a fairly brave choice for Churchill who frequently comes off looking frustrated and hectoring in comparison to Rosen who always seems amiable, curious, and even-keeled."

Speaking of a stories with gaps or that fail to conform to expected narrative lines, not all cinephiles are going to love Jim Jarmusch's latest, The Limits of Control, but I found its mysterious nature to be extremely compelling. Isaach De Bankolé stars in the movie as the "Lone Man." He is some kind of deliveryman, a gangster, a solitary traveler who is the connecting thread for a puzzle that takes him all the way across Spain. He meets a variety of characters, trading matchboxes with them. In each box is a coded message, and sometimes payments. The new agents in this plot also deliver cryptic instructions. "The guitar will find you," "The Mexican will bring the driver," etc. Who these people are, what their goal is, it's never explained. Jarmusch runs through an international cast for his messengers: Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal, Paz de la Huerta, Hiam Abbass, John Hurt, and Bill Murray all make appearances. They come, they go, and if they are seen again, it's usually not good. The Lone Man continues on regardless, mostly silent, unfazed. In a way, the comings and goings remind me of Jarmusch's own anthology film, Coffee & Cigarettes, in which randomly placed pairs of people come together for short conversations.

The Limits of Control may appear to be aimless fluff to some, but those who stick with it will see that the Lone Man's journey does have a purpose. Jarmusch is wrestling with metaphysical and philosophical ideas, questioning how we perceive the world and our place in it. I also thought the movie was intended to make a statement about the artistic process. The Limits of Control is Jarmusch punching at the ghosts that haunt moviemaking. The Lone Man seeks to create something beautiful, but his path is beset by challenges from unseen forces who have little idea of how a true artist gets results. When the Lone Man finally reaches his target, he finds a corporate stooge that can't even fathom how this mysterious stranger penetrated his world. "I used my imagination" is the Lone Man's reply. Imagination is a difficult commodity to quantify. Jarmusch even gives it bigger implications, adding a political wrinkle that would suggest that the same stranglehold the moneymen have on the motion picture industry is choking the human spirit worldwide. The control they take is at the sacrifice of your own power and destiny.

Control is a key word for two of Criterion's releases this month. First is the Robert Redford vehicle Downhill Racer, about a professional skiier, a sport that requires rigorous attention. Casey Burchby reviews the disc: "Michael Ritchie's debut feature...is a quietly thrilling, beautifully-shot film about a particularly American theme. What does it mean to be a champion? Is it a worthy goal in and of itself? These questions are posed in a far more elegant fashion within the film, but what's interesting about them is the fact that they are in a 'sports film' at all. Downhill Racer is a rare film. Anchored by a character who doesn't do a whole lot of talking - and therefore dependent upon a skilled performance by Robert Redford - the movie takes us inside a highly competitive mind and reveals the empty places therein."

The other place where control takes on real importance is live televison. The Golden Age of Television is a three-disc collection of eight rare broadcasts from the 1950s. The collection is named for a PBS series that showcased this exciting time. The original presentations were performed live on the East Coast, shot with multiple cameras, but in the days before video tape, so no clean way to capture what was happening. The filmmakers edited as they went, it wasn't on film. What PBS resurrected and what they showed when this series first ran back in the early 1980s, bringing these vintage teleplays back to the air for the first time in decades, were recordings called "kinescopes." Essentially, kinescope was a process of photographing the broadcast by pointing a special camera at a video monitor. Like if you took a camera yourself and set it up in front of your TV and recorded a show. It wasn't perfect--you can sometimes see the curve of the screen, or a speck of dirt on the glass, or any number of glitches--but it was the only way to prevent these programs from just disappearing into thin air.

The material here is the cream of the crop, chosen from hours of television. Amongst the shows, we get early scripts from writers as revered as Paddy Chayefsky, Ira Levin, and Rod Serling, direction from future legends like John Frankenheimer, and performances by Ed Begley, Andy Griffith, Rod Steiger, Elizabeth Montgomery, George Peppard, Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Jack Palance, Mel Torme, and Piper Laurie in roles both big and a small. There are also small-screen turns by established big-screen stars like Everett Sloane, Edmond O'Brien, and Mickey Rooney. Structured more like the legitimate theatre, these high-wire acts show a precision of craft and a dedication from the talent we don't see all that much anymore. There were no do-overs. They only got one shot.

The thing about watching The Golden Age of Television is that you would never know these productions were recorded live if you weren't told. They aren't gimmicky or shambolic, they aren't simply one-room sets like filming a stage play within its confined space. What is still amazing to see is how deftly these filmmakers pulled this off, how seamlessly they move from one location to the next, from character to character, never letting the cracks show. These are fine-tuned productions, expertly rehearsed, carefully honed to come off without a hitch. These dramas were meant to compete with motion pictures--and they do. Quite easily.

Thomas Spurlin takes a look at another potent drama, Shohei Imamura's Black Rain, a film that looks at the aftermath U.S. dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and "delivers one of the strongest narratives that I've encountered in foreign cinema. This intricate masterwork does innumerable things correctly where other war films go awry. Instead of slapping on too much material and lambasting the viewer with ridiculous levels of military stratagems, Imamura's piece instead concentrates on afterthoughts and character reverberations through an acute visual style. Outside of the condemnation of military strife, this film serves more as a portrait of the time period instead of a message-based delivery. However, Black Rain does take on a theme revolving around the effects of human inflicted devastation, and the willpower it takes to combat succumbing to hardship.

"Black Rain can be looked at predominately as a dramatic insight into humanity's capacity to cope with such a past, as well as a dissection of how they suppress both physical and emotional repercussions from the attack. However, it's also effective as a disturbing physical film displaying the direct horrors of atomic warfare. When a younger boy stumbles up to his elder brother with skin dripping from his bones, chills trail up and down your own skin at the thought -- and at the dramatic implications. It's not just the unsettling vision of his body, but also the evocation felt for the normal child swallowed whole by this menace. Imamura doesn't just show this to invoke fear or grotesqueness within the viewer; he thrusts this boy, as well as an implausible number of other bodies, in hindsight to illustrate the extreme effects of the atomic explosion, effects that would be mildly infused into each and every victim. "

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the forthcoming hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His next project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.

Special thanks to Jason Bailey, Casey Burchby, Chris Neilson, Elizabeth Neilson, and Thomas Spurlin for their contributions.]]> http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/a-christmas-tale-the-dead-and.html http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/a-christmas-tale-the-dead-and.html Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:08:55 -0500

Talking Out of Frame:

Art House Cinema on DVD
Vol. 2: November 2009 Edition
compiled by Jamie S. Rich

Roger Ebert has commented that once the summer blockbuster season is over, true cinema fans get treated to a rich autumn full of more delectable pictures, movies that are smarter, artier, more thoughtful. Some of the reason the fall is such a good time for going to the movies is that studios release their Oscar-bait and so we get films that are more about people than special effects. I think there is also something more instinctual about it, something akin to hibernation, resting, storing away something for our souls at the time of year when we might most likely want to stay inside and bask in the glow of whatever screen is serving up our entertainment at that particular time. This seems to hold true for DVDs as much as the cineplexes, as the last six weeks or so have seemed packed with good releases.

So, let's celebrate, and what better way to do so than starting off with a big family gathering? Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding has returned to DVD as a souped-up double-disc Criterion edition. Though on the surface Monsoon Wedding may seem like your average romantic soap opera draped in brightly colored saris, the more you look at the finely constructed story, the deeper the family revelations turn out to be. Director Mira Nair and writer Sabrina Dhawan have concocted a sweet confection that has lots of hidden treats at its center, making for one satisfying movie. It's a family tale, beautifully shot, draped in many tangled narrative strands. Love affairs new and old, family secrets, petty irritations, underlying jealousy--with all of these primal emotions swirling around, it's no wonder that the filmmakers would turn to a symbol as primal as the weather to represent them. In the days leading up to the wedding, the weather is as scorching as the drama. By the time the titular monsoon comes to drench the wedding party, it's not a tempestuous explosion a la the madness storm in King Lear but a full-on release.

If Monsoon Wedding is one candy, then that would make this new Criterion double-disc set a Whitman Sampler. A gorgeous new video transfer is joined by a bunch of great extras and seven short films directed by Nair. These are all rare pieces helmed by Mira Nair, spanning three decades, from 1982 all the way up to 2008, three documentaries and four fiction films, and they work many of the same themes as Monsoon Wedding (and really, that we see in all of Nair's work). Some of the fictional shorts are a little obtuse, but they are all intriguing. They are also quite lovely, shot with Nair's usual eye for detail and sometimes sporting more experimental framing than in her more conventional narrative pictures. The documentaries also shed some light on Nair's creative origins and how she used nonfiction to develop her incredible powers of observation. These are like the missing links in the cracks of a filmmaker's evolution.

Our next movie is far more intimate and detached that Mira Nair's. Though many might see him as the master of Hollywood glitz, the ever-wily Steven Soderbergh continues our Art House column this month with the neorealist verite of The Girlfriend Experience. This challenging film is, at its heart, the portrait of a call girl. The title refers to a particular high-end service where the escort acts not just as a sex partner, but in some degree as the client's girlfriend, be it out in public or private intimacy. In such cases, conversation can be as necessary as the buyer's particular peccadilloes. In the case of this film, the girlfriend-for-hire in question is Christine, who goes by the name Chelsea and is played by adult film actress Sasha Grey. Chelsea is a smoky beauty, a girl of quiet charms. She listens and responds and mostly leaves room for the men to indulge the illusion of being in charge. Most of her clients are well-to-do businessmen, and so quite a few of them give Chelsea advice about what to do with the money they pay her. This is of particular importance given that The Girlfriend Experience is set during the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election, when the financial crisis was just getting underway. There is talk of the impending bailouts and how they will not be enough. The hole in the system is seemingly too big to fill.

The Girlfriend Experience has the appearance of being a film largely composed in the editing room. Yet, the various pieces that Soderbergh, who both shot and cut this movie himself, dismantles and reassembles suggest that there is at least some kind of map, that writers David Levien and Brian Koppelman devised the tools with which he would need to work. The narrative is told out of order and jumping around various continued encounters between Chelsea and other people. Much has been made of the casting of Sasha Gray in the title role, and it would be easy to assume that Soderbergh chose a porn star just for the sake of publicity. If that were the case, however, one would expect him to be far more exploitative of her assets. Instead, the director smartly stays out of smutty territory. To have done otherwise would have been to have the focus fall on the wrong things. Instead, he wants to use Gray's image to his advantage as a storyteller, to play with audience expectations. Surely her chosen profession provides special insight into Chelsea's character, of projecting an image of oneself that appears to be showing everything but is really showing nothing at all. To say this is all the role requires, however, would be a severe misreading. The scenes where she cries or expresses herself more vehemently show obvious sparks of acting talent, but it's the times when the actress is alone that are the true tests. Gray has more than empty charisma. In simple, seemingly throwaway scenes where she crosses the street or silently enjoys a cocktail, she shows the full extent of her screen presence. The solitary world of this lonely girl is a complete construct, and here we see her peeking out from behind the barricade.

Full control may benefit a director like Soderbergh, but sometimes maybe restraint isn't always a negative. Jeremy Mathews looks at The Jean-Jacques Beineix Collection: Roselyne and the Lions, a restoration of the French director's 1989 film to the original three-hour length he intended. As Jeremy discovers, however, such "fixing" doesn't necessarily mean the movie won't end up suffering from being too much. The restored cut "shows off [Beineix's] gift for visually immersive scenes and grand gestures. Where he falters is in crafting his characters, who lack the spark of the young dreamers they're supposed to be. I haven't seen the theatrical cut of the film, so I can't compare the two versions, but the problem lies less in the amount of time we see the characters and more in how they're written and portrayed. The undisciplined, troubled high school student Thierry (Gérard Sandoz) ditches out on detention one day to go to the zoo, where he falls in love with the world of lion taming and with the old tamer's apprentice, Roselyne (Isabelle Pasco). He starts doing janitorial work for Frazier (Gabriel Monnet) in exchange for lessons, but with no future ahead of him in school, he decides that he's ready to chase his destiny and head out for greater things."

In this case, greater things means joining the circus. "The film captures an air of nostalgic yearning, despite being set in contemporary times upon its 1989 release. There's a certain mesmerizing quality to the scenes in the lion cage, and not only due to Beineix's fixation on his heroine's breasts, thighs and ass, which peaks during the film's climax. The lion cage is a naturally gripping setting. When someone tells a mighty maned predator what to do, they're guaranteed a certain risk and a thrilling rush. Tension naturally surrounds every command. Will the lion obey as usual, or will it decide that it would rather have a snack? The film goes awry when it starts trying to grow some conflict between its characters as they grow nearer to their dream. It's not that conflict wasn't needed to fill out the three hours, but that it feels so utterly contrived. Our characters avoid having any sort of meaningful conversation about their feelings so that they can act like petulant jerks without good reason."

While some DVDs disappoint, others suprise, as Phil Bacharach pleasantly discovered with Tulpan. He says it right up front in the enthusiastic introduction to his review, "Tulpan is a gem of a discovery, one that deserves all the adulation it likely won't get. A Kazakh dramedy about sheepherders is a tough sell for movie audiences - even in Kazakhstan, probably - but this narrative-fiction debut of documentary maker Sergei Dvortesvoy spills over with warmth, humanity and a quirky charm that's difficult to define. The title is the name of a beautiful, albeit unseen, young woman who lives with her elderly parents on a remote steppe in southern Kazakhstan. She is not the focus of the story. Instead, Tulpan embodies an all-too-elusive dream for the true central character, an open-hearted, jug-eared Russian seaman named Asa (Askhat Kuchencherekov) who has just ended a tour of duty. Now, he has returned to his native land to learn the sheepherding business from his older sister, Samal (Samal Esljamova), and his no-nonsense brother-in-law, Ondas (Ondas Besikbasov)." He goes on to say, "Wry and funny, the movie benefits from a documentarian's eye that Dvortesvoy brings to the script he co-wrote with Gennadi Ostrovsky. Events unfold quietly and at a leisurely pace. A veterinarian with an injured baby camel in the sidecar of his motorcycle is doggedly followed by the patient's irked mother. Ondas' young son listens to news on a transistor radio, memorizing it so that he can repeat it later, word for word, to his father. In this bleak and unforgiving environment, Tulpan celebrates - pardon the cliché - the indomitable spirit of humanity. Don't wince. Amazingly, Dvortesvoy embraces the resilience of these people without striking a note of fake sentimentality. Asa's perseverance and Ondas' grit are both illustrated by a mesmerizing pair of scenes involving the births of lambs. The film's characters have hard lives, certainly, but their weariness does not translate into defeat."

Documentarian Marc Isaacs looks at real lives in his art, and Chris Neilson looks across the ocean for a UK compilation of some of the filmmaker's work. "Lives caught between where they've been and where they're going is the transcendent theme of the recent release from the UK label Second Run entitled Three Films by Marc Isaacs," Chris writes. "The transience pervading Isaacs' documentaries is both physical and psychological: physical in that Isaacs's interviewees are literally in transit from one place to another; psychological in that Issacs' camera and questions prompt introspection from his subjects about past experiences and future hopes and fears." The three films in question are Lift, Travellers, and Calias: The Last Border, spanning three years of work, 2001 through 2003. In all of them, the camera explores very different lives that have all reached some kind of extreme. "There's apparently something extraordinarily disarming about Marc Isaacs that makes so many people of such different backgrounds willing to confide in him whether it be a wish for genocide, a desperate suicide pact, a plan to run away in the night from overwhelming debt, or a despondent confession of utter despair. Though I still can't explain how he does it, I'm in awe of his ability to draw his subjects out, and eager to see more of his work."

A more challenging experience is had by Casey Burchby, who undertakes the task of analyzing Peter Greenaway's new film, Nightwatching. "A densely layered experience such as Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching challenges a critic's ability to rearrange something that has been especially sculpted for cinematic presentation. Translating film content into prose is often easy; at least, a summary description is usually accessible to one used to working with words. But Greenaway has fashioned a film that unites so many ideas and textures - many of which are utterly foreign to mainstream filmmaking - that it is difficult to arrive at a fair representation of them for the purposes of a review...Rembrandt van Rijn (Martin Freeman) receives a commission from a local Amsterdam militia to paint their group portrait. In the midst of personal turmoil - including the death of his wife Saskia (Eva Birthistle) after the birth of his son Titus - Rembrandt reluctantly completes the painting known as The Night Watch, but not before uncovering a conspiracy among the militia that has resulted in the assassination of one of their members, Piers Hasselburg. The painting is ultimately executed as an investigation of the murder and an indictment of the militiamen themselves."

The thing is, Greenaway doesn't give his audience just one film, he gives us two, breaking off from his main feature to explore theories of his own on a documentary on the second disc in this impressive set. "On Disc Two is Greenaway's indispensible companion film to Nightwatching, an art history documentary essay on The Night Watch called Rembrandt's J'Accuse. This is one of the best documentaries I have seen on a fine arts subject. Over the course of this 100-minute film, Greenaway himself (as both filmmaker and narrator) elucidates his theory that Rembrandt intended The Night Watch to reveal the treachery of Hasselburg's killers by examining 34 'mysteries' associated with the painting. Starting off with the assertion that contemporary society has an 'impoverished' visual literacy, Greenaway proceeds to teach viewers to 'read' The Night Watch as one would a text. In the course of reviewing the 34 mysteries - each of which comprises some facet of the painting, such as its setting or the individuals represented in it - the director performs an even more generous and valuable service by refreshing the way we look at art. In my experience, museum visitors spend more time reading the text panels adjacent to a painting or artifact than they do looking at the object itself. Greenaway reminds us that there is far more to observe in a work than any text can adequately summarize. This leads me back to the point I was trying to make in my opening paragraph. Impossible to encapsulate, these two films operate on many levels simultaneously; for that reason and others, I look forward to seeing them again. Taken together, Nightwatching and Rembrandt's J'Accuse represent a singular vision and a deep engagement with the many prisms through which art may be observed. Greenaway's creation is an odd, rare thing. He has pulled apart and reassembled a great work of art - and in doing so, has made another."

Just as challenging as the Greenaway is the new Eclipse release Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical, collecting the three earliest films from the experimental European director. Made in the mid-1960s, these freewheeling efforts, which span fiction and documentary in much the same way as Nightwatching, show a style that is coming into its own, marrying Neorealism and the French New Wave in an exciting new way. Man is Not a Bird, Love Affair, and Innocence Unprotected have all aged incredibly well. If what was radical yesterday was content on being merely radical and nothing more, it can appear predictable or mundane today; if it has a solid foundation to give the experiment something firm to stand on, the material can sustain its freshness and speak to audiences regardless of the era. Such is the case here. This trio is playful, creative, culturally rich, and full of insightful commentary on the human condition, particularly the way our personal lives become entangled with society's imposed restrictions. Dušan Makavejev proves himself to be every bit as inventive as his European contemporaries, and as full of cinematic whimsy and film knowledge as anyone who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema. This boxed set is a true treasure.

Makavejev's films have a political subtext that is quite potent, and Hungarian director Costa-Gavras proves you can take the politics out of the subtext and stick them up front and still make something powerful and thought-provoking. The 1969 film Z, out now as part of the Criterion Collection, was ahead of the curve in predicting how placing cameras in different places could show us the same event in different ways. Z is shot a lot like a documentary, an investigative procedural that has aesthetics in common with the Nouvelle Vague and the films of Francesco Rosi, and would in turn inspire Alan J. Pakula, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh. Z could almost be seen as a stylistic fulcrum on which the two sides of that equation balance, the link between Salvatore Giuliano and All the President's Men, The Battle of Algiers and Zodiac. The new Criterion edition presents the movie with a beautiful new transfer and a handful of informative extras, shedding new light on an important picture.

Z is a remarkable recreation of a volatile political tragedy. The director sifts through the events before and after an attack on a Socialist leader (Yves Montand) in Greece, building his case and challenging audience perceptions without ever being dogmatic. Costa-Gavras takes us through the investigation step by step. He lines up each piece in their natural order, only taking minor detours into extraneous character stuff (a villain's sexual predilections; the heartbroken wife of the murdered man, played with stalwart grace by Irene Papas, and even glimpses of their marital strife). Working with renowned cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot the bulk of Godard's 1960s films (and who also shows up on the other side of the camera as a British surgeon), he shoots most of the action as if it were a documentary. Coutard's camera is rarely nailed down, but often moving with the flow of activity, acting more as a cold witness than an active part of the story. The fact that we can be everywhere at once creates a kind of hyper-naturalism. Z looks real, but it's not bound by time or space. Flashbacks are common, quick glimpses of memory, and even moments of minor comedy.

A fascination with a particular historical figure, even an artist, can lead a filmmaker in a variety of directions, as Chris Neilson points out in his review of 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris. "In 1991, jazz pianist and filmmaker Raymond De Felitta (Two Family House) heard 'Paris in Blue' on the radio and was instantly mesmerized by the melodious voice of the singer. After discovering that the song was written by Charles Mingus especially for vocalist Jackie Paris, De Felitta set out to find everything he could by Paris, but didn't turn up much beyond one Japanese import. After reading in a noted (but erroneous) jazz encyclopedia that Paris died in 1978, De Felitta mostly abandoned his search until March 2004, when De Felitta happened to read in The New Yorker that Paris, very much still alive, was performing two nights in Greenwich Village at The Jazz Standard. De Felitta showed up with camera in hand and recorded what would turn out to be Paris's last performances. Though Jackie Paris would be dead within three months of bone cancer, he graciously granted De Felitta several interviews over those final months.

"De Felitta's documentary 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris is partly a tribute to the memory of a great jazz vocalist whose fame never matched his talent, and partly an attempt to answer the question why that fame eluded him. In addition to the performance footage from The Jazz Standard and the subsequent interviews with Paris, De Felitta interviews a who's who of jazz performers and journalists, a devoted Jackie Paris fan and amateur archivist, as well as relatives and ex-wives of the performer."

Carlos Saura is another director who blends music and documentary to create something wholly different, though I found his 2007 performance film, Fados, to be less inclusive than his movies that focus more on dance. Fado, as it turns out, is a form of music most associated with Portugal, but that also has roots in Africa and Brazil. The songs are performed with guitar and voice as their spine. Other instruments are, of course, allowed, and more modern versions are more rhythmic, incorporating hip hop and rap. It's not a static art form, it flows with the times and the people. The subjects of most of the songs on this disc are lovers in peril, the day to day plight of workers, and fado itself. As the introduction to the film explains, it is the songcraft of immigrants and travelers. It's the only time Saura stops to explain anything, though. I learned more about fado from the back of the DVD case and a little independent research than I did watching Fados on its own. Saura is using this film to share something he loves more than he is to educate. As I've mentioned, it's one of many films he has made on Spanish dance and music, some of which are narrative driven and some of which are purely performance driven; this is the latter.

Continuing with this theme of artfully captured reality, David Walker examines a long-lost film called The Exiles, directed by Kent MacKenzie. "Set in the Los Angeles community of Bunker Hill and shot in the late 1950s, The Exiles offers an intimate portrait of Native Americans that have relocated to the big city from the reservation. Spanning a little over twelve hours--just before sunset and shortly after sunrise--Mackenzie follows a small group of Indians as they go about the sad business of their lives after dark. There is not much of a story to speak of, beyond the pursuit of drunken thrills and looking for some deeper meaning to a life that is empty and meandering. Homer leaves his pregnant wife alone as he traverses the city in an alcohol-fueled sojourn that by his own admission has been going on for years. His wife, Yvonne, ponders her life and her marriage, recalling how she dreamed of something better while she was growing up on the reservation, but has yet to find whatever that something is. Rico wanders around, hoping to earn money by gambling with what little cash he has, while Tommy, who loves to just get drunk, is looking for action, be it a fight or making time with a woman. And therein lies whatever may pass for a story in The Exiles. That's to say there isn't much in terms of exposition or even character development."

"Written by Mackenzie with the aid of his cast," Walker continues, "The Exiles certainly has some the tone of neo-realist cinema, where real people essentially played themselves in films that sought to capture life as it was. The Italians had it down, but in America, where studio-produced films dominated both the industry and the market, the seemingly voyeuristic stories that unfolded as if the camera were simply filming real life have long been relegated to student films and arthouse cinema. As both, The Exiles came along just as John Cassavetes was first beginning to shake things up in American film. In many ways, Mackenzie's film was ahead of its time, while also sadly being all but lost to time."

Casy Burchby also found a compelling portrait of realistc struggle in Lake Tahoe, though one with a more controlled guiding hand: "...director and co-writer Fernando Eimbcke displays a gentle but controlled sensibility in telling a quiet story that has an almost universal resonance. To clear up confusion straight away, I should point out to those interested that the film's title has no relation to its locale. Lake Tahoe is set firmly in contemporary Mexico, although I can't be more specific than that. Nevertheless, there is logic behind the title, which I won't explain here. Eimbcke's film won major prizes at the Berlin and Cartegena Film Festivals, and at the Mexican Academy Awards (the Ariels), yet it only had a limited theatrical release in North America. We are lucky that Film Movement snapped up the DVD rights of this fine film.

"A young teenager named Juan (Diego Catano) crashes his little red Nissan sedan into a telephone pole on the outskirts of town. He spends the better part of the day trying to find a new distributor harness so he can restart the car, which is otherwise not terribly damaged. He patiently contends with Don Heber (Hector Herrera), a retired mechanic, and his pet mastiff; Lucia (Daniela Valentine), a female clerk at an auto shop; and her young martial-arts obsessed colleague, David (Juan Carlos Lara II), in trying to get his car fixed. When Juan takes a break from these proceedings to check in at home, he finds his younger brother Joaquin (Yemil Sefani) playing in a tent erected in their sandy yard, and their mother sulking and smoking in the bathtub. We come to understand at about this time that Juan's father has recently died. This set of circumstances drives Juan once again from the house, determined to get his car fixed and impose some sort of order on his life....Lake Tahoe feels less scripted than storyboarded. The camera takes us through the story with more authority than the dialogue does. Each shot is part of a series of shots; each series of shots is part of a longer cohesive sequence; and so on. The film feels simultaneously hermetic and organic. In my view, its visual and editorial composition represents a masterwork of storytelling economy, especially when taken together with the very limited dialogue. At a mere 81 minutes, Lake Tahoe feels fuller and richer than its short length might suggest...[Its] heart is Juan, and we follow him closely. His behavior, more than his words, is what interests us. Diego Catana, playing Juan, carries the entire film and is simply remarkable. He invests the role with an ego-free awkwardness endemic in many young men of that age. It's a seemingly effortless performance of a sort we almost never see from teenaged actors."

Back in the world of politics, Italian director Paolo Sorrentino goes full-tilt boogie toward a destination somewhere beyond realism for his 2008 film Il Divo. In terms of aesthetics, Sorrentino is as far away from Costa-Gavras as one can get. The term "Il Divo" means "star" or "celebrity," and it's one of the nicer nicknames given to Giulio Andreotti, a leading politician in Italy who served as Prime Minister seven times. The film begins with his final regime, and it shows the inaugural meeting of his cabinet. Andreotti's political capos gather around him to talk shop, while the big man gets his face shaved with a straight razor. I couldn't help but think of another reality-based movie villain and the scene where Al Capone is getting shaved in De Palma's The Untouchables. Thankfully, the barber doesn't cut Andreotti the way he cut De Niro in the other movie.

Il Divo doesn't follow any conventional narrative. Rather, Sorrentino employs a loose, vertiginous structure that he hopes will allow him to cram in as much information as possible. The first part of the movie piles on the characters, giving us the full role call of everyone involved in this monolithic tale. Even lively onscreen indicators aren't much help in keeping all the participants straight. Good luck remembering who half of them are or what they do. At its most basic, Il Divo is more like a tally sheet than a movie, the gathered footnotes of a much larger story. In some ways it's a procedural, in some ways it's high drama distilled into digestible chunks. Essentially, it's an elevated talking-heads picture. Seeing that this material would be fairly dry all on its own, Sorrentino and cinematographer Luca Bigazzi (Bread and Tulips) have decided to keep 90% of the shots moving. The camera rarely stands still. It is always pushing in or pulling out or circling the room, sometimes doing more than one move without even cutting. It gets dizzying, and a little overwhelming, and it's very hard not to get lost in all the glitz.

The result of all of Sorrentino's stylistic jumping around is a movie that is not very human. For the final two discs this month, however, I'd like to look at two movies that are all about being human, with all the flaws and surprising ingenuity of living.

1987 must have been a good year to go to the movies, since it was the year that filmgoers got to experience the splendor of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, newly re-released in a stupendous double-disc package from the Criterion Collection. Wings of Desire is a film that could not be made by anyone else, that could not be made at any other time. This was two years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I think that fact alone would have changed the tenor of Wenders' masterpiece. Though there is very little mention of the political situation in Berlin at the time, the separation that city felt was very much a part of the subtext. Wings of Desire is about a world divided, about the line between the spiritual and the physical, the fanciful and the practical. Between the poetry of words and thought and the true poetry of life.

Bruno Ganz stars as Damiel, one of an army of angels assigned to Berlin. In this reality, angels act not as guardians, but as witnesses. They wander through our lives, silent and invisible, observing our activities and eavesdropping on our thoughts. They might follow one person in specific, or they might roam through a crowd, sampling a little something from each. Call it divine existentialism. Our earthly version of that philosophy ponders what it must be like to transcend the physical and join the divine; for an angel, the crisis of identity involves shedding your wings and eternity and becoming flesh. Damiel has grown tired of watching, he wants to start doing things. The final catalyst for "taking the plunge," the human idiom for what is essentially a fall from grace, is a beautiful trapeze artist, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), that the angel has become smitten with. She is his human analogue, soaring above the ground as she does, even wearing a pair of feathery wings. Marion dreams of flying, Damiel dreams of walking--opposites, prepare to attract!

Wings of Desire is the work of an artist who can see a better world on the horizon and is using his art to reach out for it, to pull it closer. His message remains in the abstract, but it's no less effective for not being spelled out. That angelic power of observance, the god's eye view afforded by the camera, equalizes all life in our vision, let's us find ourselves within it, and forever changes how we see things in the process.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the forthcoming hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His next project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.

Special thanks to Phil Bacharach, Casey Burchby, Jeremy Mathews, Chris Neilson, and David Walker for their contributions. ]]> http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/wings-of-desire-monsoon-weddin.html http://www.dvdtalk.com/arthouse/wings-of-desire-monsoon-weddin.html Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:37:31 -0500