The boundaries of documentary drama: Bernie

Richard Linklater's Bernie bears little if any resemblance to his much-acclaimed Before-During-After Midnight trilogy (or ongoing series) - none of the romantic wistfulness or self-scrutiny (or self-absorption, if you prefer) or struggles w/ relationships. It's a film that defies classification and plays along the boundaries of documentary and comedy - failing, ultimately, because it's neither, not funny or moving enough as a drama, not "real" enough as nonfiction. Based on true events, as they say, and probably pretty closely based, RL wrote the screenplay with the journalist who did the source story in Texas Monthly: about a young man who moves to the small E. Texas town of Carthage, becomes beloved in the community, befriends a wealthy and reclusive widow, becomes her servant and perhaps her lover, kills her in what seems a fit of rage, hides her body, is finally found out and convicted of murder 1, and serving time today (as so often, we see footage of the real Bernie over the credits - in fact, we see star Jack Black interviewing Bernie, a nice touch). Jack Black does a  good job here - he can be a very annoying comic actor, but the annoyance is essential to the character I think. RL also finds man very colorful Carthage folks to interview throughout the film - these are highlights, and I don't know how much they're scripted or how much they're based on quotes on the original story. Either way, pretty good. The downfall is that the film is told almost entirely through talking heads and feels very, very slow - and of course we can see all around the edges - we wouldn't trust the unctuous Black/Bernie for a moment. So are the Carthage folks just stupid, so easily conned? The film would lead us to think so - Bernie must have been more obviously likable and less nutty than JB plays him - playing him more "straight" would make the film more credible, but might dull the edge, too. Though Netflix lists this as comedy/drama, to me it's almost as much a documentary as several others that extensively re-create scenes - e.g., Thin Blue Line, Stories We Tell - though, more than those films, this one isn't design to reveal hidden truths but to re-create an event in the (regional) news that has already been fully revealed, or uncovered. In other words, there's no mystery or surprise here - compare w/ say, Dear Zachary, if you want a re-created doc w/ lots of surprise - and as a result it feels like a pretty long journey to an end we can anticipate from almost the first frame.

Lake Bell is a great new talent - In a World...

In a World ... is a totally charming and enjoyable movie, and so what if it's essentially a romantic soap bubble?, Lake Bell (writer, director, star, anything more?) has created a set of really likable young characters, quirky and shy and vulnerable and trying like so many young adults for success and happiness, not even aware of how fine and funny they are and can be - and all that in a film about the movie industry? How unusual. Well, it's an unusual take on the industry - not about the stars and brat packers, this is not a Sophia Coppola project in other words, but about the work horses of the industry, in this case about the voice-over specialists - in particular, the ones who narrate movie trailers. These guys have their own pecking order and aspirations and rituals and petty rivalries, which Bell captures and with which she skewers some of the bigger egos. Center of the story is Bell's character, a 31-year-old doing bit work as a voice coach and trying to break into the major voice-over business, where he father is a reigning star - who's competitive and jealous, even of her - he tells her in particular there's no place for a woman's voice in major-studio trailers. Of course, they end up auditioning for the same major gig: voice-over for a series of The Amazon Games modeled on you know what - and you probably know what will happen, too - not a lot of surprises in this movie, just a lot of delightful and touching moments, including funny cameos from Gina Davis and Eva Longoria. Bell is a surprising sudden arrival of major talent, and I would say she could be part of a grand trilogy of current woman comedy writer-actor-directors, alongside Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig.

A Streetcar named Blue Jasmine

I'm sure many others have made this point, but Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine seems to be his take on and update of Streetcar: Cate Blanchette, great as always, playing the lead, the eponymous Jasmine, much like Blanche Dubois, on the heels of her ruination turning up at the home of her much less sophisticated, working-class, semi-estranged sister - and trying to change her life - by dissing her boyfriend/fiance, telling her she can do better, and in the process almost wrecking everything in her sister's life. Allen's update includes the smart idea of having Jasmine the wife of a Madoff-like financier, played by Alec Baldwin (unlike Streetcar, we see many scenes from Blanche's back story - her life as a super-wealthy Manhattan socialite), he also wisely steers the narrative toward a much more happy ending, for Jasmine's sister, anyway - Ginger, played by the excellent Sally Hawkins (Poppy, of Happy-go-lucky) - Allen always gets great actors and gets the most out of their performances, as well. Mostly, the movie is about Jasmine's gradual unraveling - she becomes more unstable and unreliable over the 90 minutes, and it's a horrifying yet entirely credible demise. She is a very evil person, but to the credit of all involved we end up with sorrow and pity toward her, rather than with loathing. That is to say - we come to understand her. Allen hasn't written/directed much about working-class people, at least beyond his Brooklyn childhood so this movie is something of a break or new direction for him - the film examines and exploits the contrast between Jasmine's great wealth all fraudulent and a lie, and vanished, and Ginger's banal but honest working-class life; somewhat different from Streetcar, his fiance (and his friends, and also her ex-husband) are likable if flawed, salt-of-the-earth guys - much nicer than the other guys in the movie, not only Jasmine's detestable husband but the professional guys who hit on both Jasmine and Ginger (a lascivious dentist, a two-timing audio engineer). That said, may I quibble? Allen just is too far removed from working-class people to have a sense of what life is like outside of his Manhattan penthouse bubble: Ginger's apartment is meant to look very dubious and declasse, but in fact a flat of that expanse in SF, where movie is shot and set,would probably go for $3k a month, a bit out of the reach of a grocery-bagger. Also - Woody, do you know why there are always parking spaces in SF? It's because they clear the streets for you before you begin shooting! Pulling up to a spot right in front of your apartment in SF? Dream on. These quibbles aside, Blue Jasmine is a totally engrossing movie - insightful, honest, frightening like a great tragedy, yet warm-hearted like a classical comedy - definitely one of Allen's best in years.

Movies v. plays: Dysfunction: Osage County

It's very interesting to think about why some plays translate or have translated well into film and others are disasters. Think of how great Streetcar Named Desire seems on film - and why is that so, aside from the huge talent of the cast and crew? Perhaps the play itself seems more cramped and internal, so when it's filmed almost entirely in interiors we're in the mood of the play itself rather than feeling as if the cinema is being hampered by the material. I remember thinking that Driving Miss Daisy was a very good translation into film - in that the screenwriter had a very good sense of how to open up the material, to use exteriors effectively as part of the narration and not just as a chance to show that we're not really confined to a stage. This year's American Much Ado About Nothing was one of the best Shakespeare adaptations to film I've ever seen, taking place mostly on the grounds of a single house but using both interiors and exteriors to help define the characters and their relations (the great party scene by poolside, for example). So what makes August: Osage County such a failure, despite the all-star cast and a good, scenery chewing lead performance by Meryl Streep and a strong performance in a non-glamor role by Julia Roberts? Throughout, consistently, it felt as if we were watching a play. Oddly, we accept more artifice in a theater, we accept that actors in a play speak non-naturally (perhaps it's the long tradition of theatrical language, also that characters have to project - and we don't have access to close-ups, cross-cuts, etc.). While we accept artifice from live actors, oddly, we expect verisimilitude from characters on film. Thanks to close-ups, handheld cameras, the history of documentary realism, we expect that what we are seeing in movies is "real life," and that characters in movies should speak natural, not theatrical, dialogue. Characters who seem to be speaking dialogue in a movie are non-credible - and though Tracy Letts's script is really strong, it comes across as artificial. A few moments of high drama - such as the china-smashing scene near the end - are fine as highlights, but the supercharged language, over two hours, makes the characters seem flat rather than round. Exteriors are used very poorly - a long stupid scene when Roberts and Magregor are arguing about their marriage while carrying chairs is a case in point, no reason to bring them outside other than camera boredom. In short, the characters feel distant and abstract - in the way actors never do in live theater -making it all the harder to care about the dysfunctionality of this family and the constant outbursts of the drug-addled Streep, the embittered Roberts, et al.

Serving Time: The Butler

As someone has said, one of the problems in Hollywood may be that there are not enough good parts for black actors - but that doesn't mean the solution is to create bad parts for black actors. Alas, perhaps no movie in history has created more bad parts for black actors than the erstwhile and deadly dull The Butler. But don't worry, no racism here - The Butler creates lots of bad parts for white actors, too! Suffice it say that this film, which follows Forrest Whitaker across the course of his lifetime, from growing up on a Southern cotton farm where he sees his mother raped and father shot to death, to work in the hotel field and finally to a position as White House butler where he served every president from DDE to Reagan - all "based on a true story." Perhaps pretty loosely based, as the very clumsy screenplay has Whitaker overhear presidents talk about just about every major national event - and meanwhile, his older son, a Freedom Rider, manages to be present (and telecast!) at just about every major civil rights event of the 60s and 70s. The movie reminds us of another Forrest - i.e., Gump - which was not my favorite film by any means but at least was a bit light-hearted, whereas The Butler is so deadly earnest and serious. The domestic scenes of Whitaker and his wife, played by Oprah - both of them much too old for the parts - are the highlight; the clunky montages contrasting the civil rights protests with Whitaker serving tea trays and state dinners, are amateurish. Perhaps a good idea for a film - but these 2+ hour films that span decades rarely succeed at storytelling - just at pomposity and self-aggrandizement. To make this a good movie, for one thing, Whitaker should at last get a chance to tell off some or all of the bastards under whom he had to serve - even if that's not part of the "true story." I'm sure people involved with this movie felt they were doing something "important" - but how about something that feels true, alive, and even entertaining? That's important, too.

We're all Watsons - watching Sherlock Holmes

I only watched it for an hour, and I hadn't seen either of the first 2 seasons, but I think that was enough for me re the British series Sherlock. Yes, I do appreciate the imaginative attempt to re-envision SH as a 21st-century figure - taking on international terrorists, avidly pursuing crowd sourcing and text messages as sources for clues and information, to site just two examples, and some of the British humor rings true and funny, and Benedict Cumberbatch has the part down perfectly as a strange mixture of cool and savoir fair with a complete insensitivity, even unawareness, of human emotions - he's a genius and somewhere on autism spectrum. I also very much liked some of the graphics and design - how they show SH's deductive reasoning as scattered textual info across the screen. All that said, you have to have an extremely high tolerance for plot absurdities to care for the series; unlike Conan Doyle's SH who is reserved and deliberative, this SH is a genetic cross with James Bond et al, and goes careening across London on a motorbike, endures a savage beating by Russian captors, and so on. I can take the comic-book heroism, but the even bigger problem for me is that he "solves" the mysteries he comes across - many, during the single episode I saw - almost instantly, as if by magic, rather than wrestling with information and deduction. Nothing keeps us thinking, trying to keep up with Holmes or even get ahead of him. We're just plain dazzled by the speed of his intuitions - we're all Watsons here - but it's not that Holmes is so great, it's that the screenwriters are superabundant. A little more verisimilitude would go a long way.

Up against The Wall: Why this novel is not filmable

On suggestion of JS we watched the recent Austrian film The Wall (Der Wand) but found unfortunately that our tastes occasionally, if rarely, differ. Put quite simply, The Wall tells a story of a woman who goes off w/  two friends to an Alpine hunting lodge; when they head off for the village, she finds that she is suddenly living in complete isolation - a glass-like, impenetrable wall has manifested itself all around her - entrapping her and the few animals in her vicinity. She is completely cut off from all civilization; she sees some other people in a nearby cottage - but they are on the other side of the wall, dead - as if stricken suddenly by a death ray. That's the premise. The movie shows her living through what appear to be about 2 years of her life, bonding with her dog and with some other animals, using all of her survival skills - she must have been raised on a farm, although the film tells us absolutely nothing about her background (the source novel may tell more). In fact, one of the true oddities of the film is that she expresses no fear or despair about any people she may have left behind on the other side of the wall, and in fact she more or less submits to her entrapment - she doesn't appear willing or able to see if there's a way out. OK, this is not meant to be a horror story (although it does further emphasize the message about about thousand horror films: If friends ask you to join them for a weekend in a remote cottage, don't.) or an escape story a la say Deliverance - but it's an allegory of some sort: We are all "entrapped" on our planet and we must build symbiotic relationships with nature and with animals in order to survive and prosper. I think that's the point; what isn't the point is any explanation as to what's happened. I kind of thought we were in a film like The Village, and there would be a surprise rescue or breakout at the end. Don't hold your breath. A strength of the film is the absolutely beautiful cinematography. A weakness - as, after the first two minutes, there's only one human character, virtually the entire film is told in her voice-over (she's writing a journal). That works in the novel, perhaps, and maybe there's no other solution, maybe this novel is unfilmable, but it makes the narrative very slow - feels like this is an audiobook with pictures.

Is there an Oscar for the weirdest film?: The Act of Killing

I think The Act of Killing will win the Oscar for best documentary, at least it should, and would no doubt win if there were a category for weirdest film, perhaps of all time: the Danish filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer sets off to document the killings in Indonesia, in which the right-wing government turned the other way while bands of gangsters murdered perhaps a million people they identified as communists, which seemed to mean anyone opposed to the government in any way - killings that Oppenheimer suggests are on-going though perhaps on a smaller scale (perhaps because no longer necessary - silence has been imposed). He hooks up with two 70ish former gangsters and asks them to tell their story and to re-create the killings for his film in any way that they'd like. These two guys and some of their cronies - including an especially despicable (to me) newspaper publisher - almost gleefully tell of how they killed hundreds of suspected communists - they go to the rooftop where they committed many of these murders and proudly demonstrate the techniques they'd developed to minimize blood spillage - messy and odorous. Then they recruit some people to stage scenes in which they pretend to burn down houses or haul people away for questioning - and the people joining the scenes are really uneasy and disturbed, especially the children - they can't quite separate what's real, what's fake, and why these guys are creating these scenes. And things get even more strange: the gangsters decide to stage what looks like a music video, set against the background song "Born Free," replete with dancing women, a waterfall in the background, and most odd of all one of the toughest of the gangsters dressed up in a pink bunny suit - I'm not kidding - think the Sopranos meets Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Watching the outtakes, they marvel at how beautiful the video looks. We also see them interact with some government leaders and what is apparently a proto-fascist Indonesian youth group with a million members - very frightening. And it builds toward a dreadful conclusion in which the lead gangster begins to comprehend the horror of what he has done w/ his life. It's amazing that anyone could make a film like this - and we hope there are no repercussions; you've never seen anything like it.

Oscar snub Fruitvale Station

I agree that Fruitvale Station was unjustifiably snubbed for Oscar consideration, no doubt in part because it was released earlier in the year but also because it's not a bold and star-studded and long as some of the other bloated contenders. It's a fine and scary movie that everyone should see - only 90 minutes, written with concision and acted with understated grace, especially by the lead, Michael B. Jordan. Unlike the very loosely fact-based American Hustle, this movie seems to be about as close to a documentary re-creation of events as it could be: it tells the story of one night, when the police pulled some guys off a BART train in Oakland and, after some ruckus, shot one of them to death - an act of police violence captured on many phone video-cams, as hundreds watched the confrontation from the BART train held in the station. The film smartly begins with what certainly appears to be one of the real video clips, then springs back into the life of the main character, Oscar, and we see his sometimes difficult relations with girlfriend, daughter, mother, ex-boss, and others - the movie shows him as a young man with a troubled past who's trying, with only some success, to come clean. Now every reporter and former reporter knows that this is always the case when a gang member dies in battle - the survivors tell a story of how he was trying to come clean, overcome his demons, etc. The film accepts that, but in no way glorifies or sanctifies Oscar (what an ironic name, as it turns out) - we see his problems and misbehavior as well as his acts of kindness and his general good nature. Whether he provoked the subway fight that led to his arrest and death - the movie's not too clear about that and we'll never really know and it doesn't much matter. The movie comes in at about 90 minutes tops, a very watchable length - has a simple and tragic story to tell and does so without a hitch.

One of the most unusual filmed versions of any Shakespeare play

The 2012 Italian documentary Caesar Must Die, by the Taviani brothers, has to ran among the all-time most unusual film versions of a Shakespeare play - a performance of Julius Caesar that you''l not forget. Not that the acting is all that great - but the entire concept is so striking and so moving and so unconventional. The performance is by inmates of the high-security prison in Rome. We meet the inmates when a prison official tells them about the drama program - apparently they do a play each year? - and then we watch the auditions: each potential actor asked to do the same scene, first tearful, then enraged. We see the part of the first read through, and then, over the course of time, we watch the actors rehearse their scenes - sometimes alone, sometimes w/ others. Only at the end (and a few moments of intro) do we see the actual on-stage performance, the scene of the death of Brutus. By careful editing and scripting, the Tavianis give us the whole play - obviously, in a highly amended fashion, and in Italian - in sequence. It adds special poignancy and immediacy to see the scenes shot in various prison locales - a two-man cell, an exercise yard, etc. I think it's pretty obvious that this is not a "pure" documentary, that the filmmakers asked the actors to work on certain scenes in certain locales, that the "conversations" among the actors and among the guards are scripted or at least heavily directed - still, it's a film that explores the edges of documentary, and that gives us a real chill, these very dangerous guys, some serving life sentences, so committed to this passion for theater and language. In one tense moment, the guy playing Caesar, a big brute of a man, no doubt a leading mob figure in his time, steps out of character and gets mad at the guy he's playing the scene with - we don't know really what happened, but it's one of several odd moments that probes the boundary between art and reality. The "curtain call" scene is terrific - the exuberance - and then the men are led back to their cells; inevitably, we feel sorrowful, but of course we also can't lose site that these guys are hardened criminal, not petty thieves. And throughout all of this, we do get to see a much-abridged version of the play, with a Rome setting that oddly replicates the Forum and that intensifies the feeling of darkness and conspiracy that pervades this play.

The one and only end-of-the-world buddy movie

As others have noted, The World's End makes up a third in what seems to be an Edgar Wright - Simon Pegg trilogy of zaniness and over-the-top British humor and genre-bending parody, and it's perhaps the funniest and weirdest of the 3 (Saun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) - what appears initially to be a story of a drinking binge, as Pegg (Gary King) engineers a school-days reunion, pulling together five high-school pals to re-enact a legendary pub crawl they undertook in their home town some 20 years before. The friends are estranged, haven't seen one another in at least a decade, skeptical, bored, a very unlikely group to come together for this debauch, esp Andy, who's now a nondrinker and a stick-in-the-mud moralist as well. But they do get together and begin the odyssey - a pint in each of the 10 pubs along the Golden Mile, ending they hope at the eponymous World's End. For the first half-hour or so, this seems a prototypical buddy-reunion movie, albeit with the very quick verbal wit typical of much British comedy; eventually, though, things get very strange and we're in a different genre altogether - this pub crawl becomes a zombie movie - about robot-like creatures trying to take over the planet and destroy humanity - I kid you not. Very few could bring off this transformation while maintaining the humor and the pace, but Wright-Pegg have shown they can and they do it again here. In this case, without belaboring the point, there's also a message and a theme: a lash-out against the homogenized corporate culture that is taking over so much of our lives - one of the first laments is how the pubs all look alike, the Starbucksization of British pub life; as we learn more about the zombies - or, since the guys agree they're not robots but can't figure out what to call them other than "them" (leading to a very funny exchange about pronouns) - the guys settle on calling them "blanks" until they can think of something better, and the world ends up calling "them" "blanks" (example of the weird verbal humor) - the plot to take over the world begins with numbing us through cell phones, tables, the Internet - haven't you noticed these things suddenly popping up everywhere, one of "them" warns? So it's not exactly a parody but a very unusual mash-up and take on Night of the Living Dead and the many other zombie movies (a quick wiki search will show that there have been hundreds) and movies about the apocalyptic end of the world (ditto).

Lousy movies about poets

Kill Your Darlings is not what you might expect, which is to say it's not about Hemingway but about Alan Ginsberg - a writer for whom, well, let's say I think most of his darlings survived. I thought I might like a movie about Ginsberg's days at Columbia, a portrait of the artist as a young man, and a look at the nascent beat generation - Kerouac, Burroughs, and, central to the movie if much less so to 20th century american literature, Lucien Carr. Unfortunately, my interest in and affection for these writers made me like the film less rather than more - I can accept that these guys were young writers with grandiose ideas and an antic spirit, but this movie makes them seem like, act like, a bunch of prankish high-school kids. I hated the overly determined scenes, so typical of a bad biopic, in which topics and ideas are artlessly put forward by having our hero confront a obvious targets and straw men - the tweedy English prof who argues that all literature must have meter and rhyme. Much better would be to dramatize Ginsberg's intelligent interactions with a truly smart prof and critic, such as Trilling. In the end, couldn't manage to watch the whole picture - leaving me thinking it's a movie only for those who love the Beats and they'll probably hate it (to paraphrase a famous review of a movie about Search for Lost Time). Why do poets make such lousy subjects for movies? Remember the dreadful Bright Star, about Keats - declaiming love sonnets and coughing blood? Anyone working on a TS Eliot biopic - Coffee Spoons? KYD is by no means a dreadful movie, just a let-down - you can use your time better by reading Ginsberg, or any poet, for 90 minutes.

A Goodfellas wannabe, that ain't: American Hustle

I know it's an Oscar favorite and a five-star across the board from major daily critics, but I found American Hustle to be long, dull, and confusing. Apparently it's loosely based on the facts and events of the ABSCAM scandal and honestly I would rather it were closely based on those facts and events - I'd like to know more about that event, now washed from (my) memory. As it is, this movie comes across as a Goodfallas wannabe - same era (set in 1978), same loose connection to actual events, punk L.I. hustler turned informant, mob doings set against backdrop of domestic strife, contrast between tough street scene and split-level suburban life, even the Italian-Jewish dynamic - but in any comparison, AH comes up way, way short - not even close to the tension, excitement, humor, and insight of its forebear. I'll say, Bradley Cooper and a few of the other leads (Louis CK) do a good job with what they've got; Jennifer Lawrence always brings something to any film she's in. I do admire attempts to cast against type, but then the miscast actor has to surprise us and show us they can carry it off - Amy Adams is so badly miscast from the get-go as a small-time grifter that she throws the whole film off track. The plot is a mess, so many betrayals and and stings it's hard to keep it straight and finally do we care? Not really, because we, or at least I, don't buy into the characters - the FBI agent who falls for the moll, the small-time hoodlum able to scam numerous mokes in a loan-shark scheme (people paying him a $5k finder's fee to get them a $50k loan - are you kidding me? No one would do business with this guy - he's so obviously a con artist). I know there's a sucker born every minute, but still ... And the final sting - when the FBI is hoist on its own petard so to speak - well, won't give it away but will just say that M. saw through the flaws in it in about 2 seconds - yet nobody in the movie was able to smell a rat? Movie does a good job re-creating the 70s era - the hair, the glitz, the music, the dancing - but who really wants to go back there anyway? There might be a 90-minute OK entertaining movie lurking inhere somewhere, but in its aspirations and its attempt to be the definitive gangster movie of our time this film so over-reaches and is so jumpy and disjointed, with little continuity from scene to scene - J Lawrence starts off as an agoraphobic stay-at-home mom and before we know it she's flirting w/ mobsters in a club, Jersey politician supposed to be smart and shrewd and powerful and believes this two-bit gangster is clean and his best friend and working in the interest of his constituents, and I could go on - that by the end I was completely uninterested and numb with boredom. Goodfellas may be too violent for some, for many in fact - but I'd watch it again any day and cannot say the same for American Hustle, sorry.

Love and Fame to Nothingness: Cutie and the Boxer

Zachary Heinzerling's 2013 documentary, Cutie and the Boxer, is very low key - in the style of many fine recent documentaries the cinematography is completely transparent, we just watch the two artists at the center of the film as their life unfolds over several weeks - there are no interviews, with them or with anyone else, they only occasionally address the camera, other than for some well-integrated archival video or film that the artists must have provided, it's all just unmediated (seemingly) observation. What we're seeing is a somewhat elderly couple, both immigrants from Japan to NYC, who met in NY when he, Ushio Shinohara, a struggling artist, was about 40 and she, Noriko Shinohara, was about 20. Today, he's 80, she 60. Both still struggling. They live in a rented apartment in near squalor, and the studio they use is a cramped and crowded mess. His main artwork seems to be supersized constructions made with mostly salvaged cardboard boxes - replicas of motorcycles and other machinery. In my view, the works are quite ugly - but who knows what will attract an dealer? Her work is mostly a cartoon, with characters based on her and her husband, called Cutie and the Boxer - following the story of their life and struggles. It looks pretty good, and not all that different from many, many other graphic novels out there seeking a readership. He's clearly the star - though that's a big issue in their marriage, as she feels very much in his shadow. It would be one thing if he were a major, successful artist - but he's obviously lived through a serious drinking problem and has squandered much of his talent, his money, perhaps his life. But things are changing, as he is working to mount a show at a NYC gallery - where in particular his "action paintings" attract attention: these are paintings in which he literally soaks boxing gloves in buckets of paint and then punches the canvas or paper, creating various designs. Each covers a whole wall - and takes him about 2 1/2 minutes to complete. Make of that what you will. In what to me was the most telling scene, a buyer for the Guggenheim comes to see his work and she's interested in these paintings - and we get a real glimpse of how the art market works - it's all about connections and speculation and following the crowd. As she, Alexandra, notes, it's as if she's running a start-up. Though the whole enterprise feels fraudulent to me - the guy devotes his life to these painstaking sculptures and then winds up in a major museum collection with stuff he slams together in minutes?- at least he may at last get some $, and recognition, very late in life. That will please Noriko, but will not salve her wounded ego - though maybe this film will draw a publisher to her works as well (she does share a gallery showing w/ Ushio, but in a side room). The film does a fine job of leaving these questions and issues unresolved, and in making us think about art and about fame in a new way.

Should note that over past few days we started two movies that we abandoned: Berberian Sound Studio, about a sound engineer recruited to work on what may be the world's worst horror film - was kind of funny for a while, but the joke wore thin and film seemed to be headed nowhere in particular; and the 1990 The Grifters - which now seems ridiculously dated, slow-moving, noncredible, and miscast in every lead character. 

Remembrance of Things Past?: The Swedish film Together

The very fine, funny, and surprisingly moving Swedish film (ca. 2000), Together, perfectly captures the mood of its time - 1975 - and of its place: the film is about a small Stockholm commune of political and sexual progressives; many American viewers will well remember houses such as this one, with posters of Ho and Che on the walls, Jimmi Hendix on the stereo, chickpeas on the menu, couples uneasily trading mates and crossing gender barriers, the various liberations from clothing and hygiene, the tense and endless debates about global politics, the sexual warfare over who would do the dishes, the disregard for material possessions, the accusations against those seeking "bourgeois" comforts, the inevitable splits and rifts over issues of ideology and jealousy. What Americans won't quite get is the particularly doctrinaire nature of Swedish radicalism of that era - having lived there during the time, I know that these groups were fewer in # than in the U.S. but much more unflinching and serious-minded - in the U.S. there were so many things to easily oppose - the war of course, and racism, and LBJ and RMN - that it was pretty easy to lightly wear a mantle of progressive and radical views and "lifestyles." Harder to do so in the near-socialist and egalitarian state of Sweden - so their animus was more fierce and in a way more abstract. The beauty of this film is, from out of all this chaos, several plot lines to develop - as we watch several of the characters grow, evolve, change - some leave the commune, others join. The emotional center of the film are the two children of the abused wife whose brother brings her into the commune for her safety - watching their adjustment struggles in this very alien, at first, setting is very moving and sorrowful. There's lot of sorrow, joy, and humor throughout, culminating in a riotous free-form soccer/football "match" at the end that brings a lot of the people - vastly different in so many ways - "together." Very good film - wish more people had seen it, but that would have required a U.S. remake, which was/is not likely to happen.

Hannah Arendt and the Brooklyn Dodgers

Has anyone ever done this before? May I be the first? Let us compare Hannah Arendt with - Jackie Robinson. Near contemporaries, I bet they knew absolutely nothing about one another. Each a subject of a recent biopic, I bet M. and I may be the only two people to see both. And yet - there are similarities, both between them and between the two movies, 42 and Hannah Arendt. Both suffered discrimination and even oppression, both stood up for their beliefs, both alienated many people by doing so, both exhibited bravery in the face of challenge and hatred. JR, however, did so in the popular arena of sports, with the backing of a brave and wise mentor and with the support of his people - he felt he was standing up for the entire black race in America. For Arendt, as we learn from the film, the playing field was quite different - a European refugee, a world-renowned scholar of political theory, she took on a journalistic assignment, covering the Eichmann trials for The New Yorker - as the film makes plain it was a risk for editor Shawn to hire an academic for such a prominent and time-sensitive assignment. Arendt insisted, in her reporting, to include a section on Jews who abetted the Holocaust by collaborating with the Nazis. Though it appears, at least from this movie, that her critique was accurate, many readers accused her of blaming the victim or worse. So the film is not about her standing up for Jews but about how her stubborn idealism made her a pariah - many of her closest friends turned their back on her. In that sense, HA is a pretty good film about a moment of social trauma in U.S. history that's now barely remembered. In fact, I'm surprised anyone could get backing to make a film about a German-American philosopher of totalitarianism. No chance this would knock Catching Fire off the top spot in weekend gross. That said, I wish it could have been a better film dramatically and cinema-graphically. Just like 42, HA is a kind of leaden - lots of very didactic conversations that are there to obviously make a point, and not enough drama or emotion. In fact, many key elements are left unexplored - would have liked to know a lot more about her relationship with that Nazi professor Heidegger. And would like to know more about what made her tick emotionally, not just intellectually - to see her actually wrestling with how she should, or should not, write about the collaborators, for example; or to see more of her loneliness after her estrangement from many close friends. One thing that HA does and that 42 did not do was use archival footage effectively - this movie integrated actual footage of the Eichmann trial very well into the contemporary narrative. This movie does preserve, in amber, a nearly forgotten chapter in the history of journalism and of Judaism.

My favorite films

New Year's Even discussion last night led to the provocative and seldom-asked question: What is your favorite movie of all time? Such a difficult question, really, because the scope of movies is so broad, comparisons across genres are so quirky, and favorite is a surprisingly elusive concept. Favorite doesn't necessarily mean "best." There are probably movies we recognize as great that we don't necessarily love, and movies we love that we recognize as deeply flawed. I think, thought, that "favorite" movies of all time have to be ones we've enjoyed repeatedly on re-viewings and that we expect to and anticipate enjoying again in the future. Off the top of my head, a few films came to mind last night. First, Rules of the Game, which I consider perhaps the best film ever made and one that I've enjoyed re-viewing numerous times. I can join the legions and say that I have watched Citizen Kane numerous times and enjoyed it repeatedly; ditto for Some Like It Hot. For pure schmalz and sentiment, how can you not like It's a Wonderful Life? And what would our world be w/out Duck Soup? I've also enjoyed several viewings of Annie Hall - it holds up so well over time. Another one that I was just blown away by on re-viewing was The Godfather - when I came back to it for a second viewing I expected to be entertained by the overall story line and found instead that every single scene was stunning in composition and presentation - many great parts that combined to make an even greater whole. Others in the gathering offered their personal favorites, including, from EP, Wild Strawberries (which should more accurately be called The Wild Strawberry Patch) and , from JP, The Lives of Others, which she said was her favorite in recent years. I haven't re-viewed too many recent pictures, but I believe two, both of them (like Lives of Others) very dark, will hold up to the test of time: Pan's Labyrinth and The Secret in Their Eyes. And can there be a more smartly plotted film than The Sixth Sense? Two of us agreed on their worst film of all time (this doesn't mean trashy films that are obviously meant for the garbage bin but films that aspire to greatness): FK and I would put Kurosawa's The Lower Depths at the top (or bottom) of that list (with Daughters of the Dust in the running, too.) To show the oddity of film-making, though, The Seven Samurai could be another one of my all-time favorites.