Lakewood, California is just north of Long Beach, and is best known for being the birthplace of the Denny’s restaurant chain.  It’s one of those post-WWII boom towns just blends into the rest of the towns blanketing the Los Angeles basin.  There’s a lot of tract housing, some small mom and pop stores, some industry.  Really, there is nothing that distinguishes Lakewood from any other cities in Southern California.  Yet, it was here, in this nondescript place, in front of a bowling alley, that I saw something I had never seen before:  a girl dressed up as a bloody toe swaddled in cotton.  It was here, at this bowling alley, that I entered the strange land of Lebowski Fest.

The Big Lebowski was released in 1997 as the Coen brother’s  followup to Fargo, which had been nominated for 7 Oscars, won two of them, and finally showed mainstream audiences what film geeks had known for years:  that the Coen brothers were legitimate artists and two of the great filmmakers of their generation.  So it stood to reason that The Big Lebowski would blow these guys up.  Then the movie was released, and audiences pretty much stayed away.  No one could figure this movie out.  Was it a comedy?  A detective story?  What was with the weird Busby Berkley style dance sequence in the middle of the movie that seemed to have nothing to do with anything?  What’s a nihilist?  The movie quietly disappeared from theaters, and the Coens continued to follow their muse, making everything from screwball comedies to Depression-era takes on Homer’s Odyssey.  But with a advent of DVD, people started looking anew at Lebowski, and in the comfort of home, something clicked.  Home audiences found a movie with distinctive characters who spouted ridiculously quotable dialogue involved in situations that were hilarious in their outlandishness.  And just like that, a cult following was born.

And so it was that I found myself at this bowling alley, standing next to people dressed up as pederasts, Vietnam vets, Viking women with giant tridents and bowling ball shaped brassieres, and the aforementioned giant toe.  This is Lebowskifest, the two day festival dedicated to all things Big Lebowski.  The fest was started in 2002 in Louisville, Kentucky by a few fans of the movie.  They bowled and recited lines from the movie.  That first festival has grown into multiple Lebowski Fests around the country, each a two day event:  day one is a giant screening of the movie, day two the bowling party.  Having just recently watched the movie 4 times in the span of one week, I figured the bowling party would be the best way to experience what the festival had to offer.

Having previously been part owner of a bowling alley, and having had the benefit of unlimited free bowling, I’m actually a pretty good bowler.  But I also need complete concentration and near silence to be at the top of my game.  I was not going to find that here, not with the soundtrack blaring loudly over the speakers and a guy with an uncanny resemblance to The Dude constantly stepping up to the line as I was getting ready to throw.  Yet that didn’t seem to matter, as I sipped my White Russian and watched as a girl dressed as Maude in the aforementioned Viking gear threw a strike.  Another guy dressed as The Dude, wearing a tool belt and cable repairman outfit, started dancing behind her, and it was like I was in the movie for a moment.

There was a trivia contest.  Specifically, Lebowski trivia.  More specifically, really obscure Lebowski trivia.  There’s a difference between knowing a movie, and being totally obsessed with a movie.  There’s a difference between knowing what type of pancakes the narcissists order and knowing how much the urn Walter and The Dude were going to buy to transport Donnie’s ashes was.  There’s a difference between knowing the name of the porn film Bunny Lebowski was in, and how many episodes of Branded Arthur Digby Sellers wrote.  And at Lebowski fest, I learned there are people who can answer ten really obscure Big Lebowski trivia questions in less than a minute and a half, and I am not one of them.

After I had been thoroughly thrashed by the trivia gods, I settled in to watch the best part of the evening:  the costume contest.  Yes, there were people dressed like the main characters, and some of them looked great.  But it was the bizarre, out there costumes that really amazed me.  There was a guy dressed as Walter’s dirty undies, and a group of guys dressed as the Goldbrickers Union.  No, there was no Goldbrickers Union in the film.  These guys took a random line said by a minor character in the film and turned it into costume.  Same for the girl dressed up as Ms. Jamtoss, Larry Seller’s teacher, whose only appearance in the film is on the homework The Dude finds in his car.  The crowd circled around with cameras, cheering every costume, no matter how elaborate or lame.

And that was it.  Lebowski Fest ended pretty much the same way the movie did, quietly, with some people still bowling.  It was the perfect way to end an evening that celebrated a film that wasn’t a huge success, but slowly and quietly became one of the big cult hits of the last 20 years.  I walked out of the bowling alley, into the night air of Lakewood, promising I would be back next year.  Just then, I watched a guy dressed a giant bottle of Sioux City Sarsaparilla get into his car and drive away.

When Steve Jobs passed a few weeks ago, a lot of the talk was about the man as co-founder and head of Apple Computers.  After all, for the last 16 years, he was the very public face of the company.  All of the companies successes (the iPod, iPad, and iPhone) as well as their failures were attributed more to Jobs than they were the company itself.  When Apple released a new product, there was Jobs, showing us this new technology that we didn’t know we needed, but soon would have no choice but to buy.  Job’s name was almost as well known as the products he brought into the world, and the company he left behind may be the most well known brand in the world.  Yet, for all of his success at Apple, for how associated he was with the Apple brand and its products, Job’s biggest success was at a company that he was not the face of, but one that may be just as well known.

It was 1986, and just a year earlier, Jobs had been forced out of the company he had helped create.  He had started a new company, Next Computers, but, as he did throughout his life, was looking for something new and innovative.  He found it at Lucasfilm, which had a small computer animation and software development department called the Graphics Group.  The group, run by Ed Catmull, created early computer generated special effects for films and commercials, as well as early computer animation software.  But Lucas soon found himself disinterested in this new technology, which seemed decades away from turning a profit.  So he decided to sell the group, and the highest bidder was Steve Jobs.  Jobs purchased the Graphics Group for $5 million dollars, then invested another $5 million more.  After the purchase, the group’s name was changed to Pixar.

Jobs was initially interested in Pixar for their hardware and software development, but the demand for high priced computers with very specific use was limited.  There were multiple times when Jobs considered selling the company.  However, he also had an employee whose story mirrored his in a lot of ways.  John Lasseter was a young genius, who saw the future before others did.  He had worked at Disney in the early 80s for some of the master 2D animators, and had tried to get them on board with what he saw as the future of film animation.  The old timers, resistant to change anyway, were put off by this upstart who probably pushed a little too hard, and Lasseter was subsequently fired by the company he had always dreamed of working for.  He landed at Lucasfilm, and began to experiment with computer animation.  He created short films that not only showed what the software the company was developing could do, but also pushed the limits of what animators could do with computers.  After moving on to Pixar, he continued to create short film, but dreamed of something bigger, knowing that one day entire animated feature films would be created using nothing but computers.  Jobs was won over by Lasseter’s passion and vision, and decided that Pixar would focus on making animated feature films.  Jobs sold off the hardware division of the company, and the rest is film history.

Toy Story, Pixar’s first feature, would go on to gross over $200 million at the box office.  That was just the beginning for Pixar, as each of their films would become huge successes.  Each of these films would go on to spawn toys, amusement park rides, clothing, which would make the company billions…but when it came down to it, the most important thing at Pixar were the movies.  They didn’t make movies to make money, they made movies because they loved making movies.  And whenever someone needed to present these films, to introduce new characters that we would fall in love with and new worlds for us to explore, our guide was not Steve Jobs, but John Lasseter.  This wasn’t to say that Jobs was completely out of the picture.  He had some involvement in the operations of the company, and say in how it was run, but Pixar shows another side of Jobs that wasn’t obvious from his work with Apple:  he knew when to get out of the way.  Jobs wasn’t a filmmaker, and he knew it, so when he made the decision that Pixar was going to be a movie studio, he found someone with vision who saw the future like he did, and allowed that person to lead the way.  By showing tremendous faith in Lasseter, Jobs was rewarded.  And rewarded handsomely.  In 2006, Jobs sold Pixar to Disney for approximately $7.4 billion, and made Jobs the largest Disney shareholder.  When he passed away, he was worth more than $8 billion, much of that from his sale of Pixar.

It would have been an amazing life if “all” Jobs had done was co-found Apple Computers, a company that continues to revolutionize our lives.  But he did it twice, creating a movie studio that has yet to produce an unsuccessful film.  Beyond just money, though, Pixar is a place that revolves around filmmakers who love their work, who had faith in their talent and their belief, and who have succeeded beyond any of their wildest dreams.  It is their luck, and ours, that Jobs gave them the opportunity and space to create such timeless works, and another lasting legacy of  a man who saw the future as a giant ocean and dove in with no fear.

by Richard von Busack

Pulling from a fifth of Overactor’s Choice blended whiskey and sobbing about the Pequod, Nick Nolte puts a third mortgage on his integrity to try to give the titanically overblown Warrior some integrity of its own.
From his first emergence out of an AA meeting on a steeltown street overlooked by an onion-domed church (“Hey, The Deer Hunter!,” said a critic nearby) to the final fingering of his tweed cap in farewell, Nolte almost floats this barge.
Director Gavin O’Connor has done some sports movies before (the not-bad Miracle), but at 2 1/2 hours, Warrior is clearly his Testament of Faith. Big books with big titles (“STEINBECK”) float on screen behind Nolte’s Paddy as he lurches through the film’s set up about the battle between two sons. Under the influence, Paddy beat his children and his wife when he was young. Now that he’s an AA-redeemed old man who tries haplessly to reintroduce himself into their lives.
In Pittsburgh, Paddy’s estranged son Brendan (Australian film vet Joel Edgerton) is a physics teacher by day, teaching the laws of “this dude, Newton” to his Welcome Back Kotterish mob of students. But he’s a parking-lot prizefighter by night, with a hot wife, Tess. Check out Jennifer Morrison’s butt—O’Connor’s camera sure does. There are also two or three kids around. Like so many good working people these days, Brendan is going glub glub glub, mortgagewise. But when a smarmsville banker suggests bankruptcy, Brendan tightly says that’s not how it’s done in his world.
How it is done, though, is Brendan will train to enter a $5 million mixed martial arts competition called “Sparta” (pronounced “SPARTAAAAAA!”) promoted by one of the hedgefund managers who made our economic calamity possible. He takes this risk, despite the possibility of being pulled limb from limb by the contender, “the legendary Russian fighter Koba” (Stalin’s nom de guerre!). And Brendan was never much of a fighter even when he was young.

But there’s another monkey in this jungle: Brendan’s long lost brother Terry Molloy, whom Brendan should have looked out for: an inarticulate dockworker…. Wait, sorry, that’s actually Tom Hardy as Tommy, who anyway has an eyebrow carved in salute of On the Waterfront. He’s actually furiously bitter from the beginning of the film, when we see him pulling from a pint bottle in public. He turns up Paddy’s doorstep after an unspecified stint somewhere; too angry to accept Paddy’s affection or to celebrate his sobriety…and yet unbitter enough to train with him, since Paddy was once the coach who led him on to hundreds of victories.
Among the other things Tommy is not talking about is the battlefields of Iraq where he fought. Fortunately, YouTube does the talking for him, showing a heroic rescue (“He ripped the door off a tank!” exclaims a commentator).
By chance the two brothers will end up in the ring together, but not before the match with Koba, literally nicknamed “The Russian Bear,” who shows up just as literally wearing the hammer and sickle on his shorts.

Warrior is a rank wrestling movie of exactly the sort Barton Fink went insane trying to write, but some people seem to be responding to its primordial badness as if it were archetypical purity. Cruise the critics’ quotes at Rotten Tomatoes and you’d think this hyped up brawl movie had a chance of redeeming America at last.
Maybe it is a symbolic tale of brothers in strife and redemption, but symbols really shouldn’t talk so much. It’s like Mortal Kombat re-written by Rod Serling; the film is so deliberately retro they even have a mohawked sub-villain.
There’s a lot we don’t see on stage (including the dread deeds of Koba, or what it was that made him so fierce. His legendary status has to be promoted by a pair of sportscasters who act as a Greek chorus.
The “wars” themselves aren’t that kinetic: shot through the cyclone fence of the hexagon, they’re a series of two-man clusterfights. What we see on the news coverage is more like closeup grapples and body slams.

Summing up the situation Brendan’s principal (Kevin Dunn) says, “Literally it looks bad, figuratively it looks worse”. There is something politically scary in Warrior’s astronomical Riefenstahlism, when it’s deep down purporting to be a story of a family trying to get together. It lacks small scale moments (and the few that there are all belong to Nolte).
But unlike the similarly generically titled The Fighter and The Wrestler, there’s no room for the women: Tess is there to throw up a minor impediment and then become another spectator. Essentially the only other female voice in the film is Vanessa Martinez, as the wife someone or other who got left behind (pardon the vagueness, I’m trying not to spoil here).

Warrior is inflated and it needs a serious lancing. This supposed emulation of ‘70s movie making, complete with split screen montages, is less Rocky than 1985’s Rocky IV. It misses the iconoclasm of the 1970s, as well as their humor. What we’ve got here is more clearly Reagan-era juicing: fireworks, helicopter shots, 300 singing Marines in khaki and the “Ode to Joy.”
Amid this, Nolte, who looks like he’s made out of flesh-toned slag, seems real. But Warrior is a shameless movie, as faux populist as Dancing With The Stars. As far as its 70s credibility is concerned, imagine showing it to the Pennsy rust-town reprobate Paul Newman played in Slap Shot. And imagine his four-lettered responses.

You’re a wannabe filmmaker, interested in making as much money as humanly possible.  You have very little use for plot or characters, but you have a fetish for explosions and computer animation.  You want to be thought of as an artist, but also like showing women’s rear ends on a regular basis.  Who are you going to emulate?  Paul Thomas Anderson?  The Coen Brothers?  Let’s get serious here.  You’re going to go kneel at the altar of Michael Bay, the ridiculously rich pyromaniac behind Armageddon, Bad Boys and the Transformers series.  Of course, if you want to BE Michael Bay, you have to know how to make a movie like Michael Bay.  Luckily, I’ve put together this primer to help you include all of the Michael Bay cliches you need to make an extremely lucrative popcorn movie that will leave your audience dizzy.

The first thing you’re going to need is a script.  More precisely, you’re going to need a concept, because Michael Bay doesn’t need a script, he just needs a concept.  It helps to have a concept that’s huge but simple to understand.  Try something like, “giant robots attack Earth,” or, “giant asteroids attack Earth,” or, “Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.”  You’ll notice a pattern here.  Have something big destroy something even bigger in your script.  We’ll get to the reasons why later.  Once you have a concept, you’re done with your script.  No, you don’t really need dialogue.  You’re not going to hear it beneath all of the explosions anyway (we’ll get to that later).  And if the actors improvise all of the dialogue, it’ll leave you more time to worry about all of the explosions (again, we’ll get to that later).

Now that you have your script, it’s time to cast your movie.  Putting together a Michael Bay cast is like putting together a baseball team:  you need some all-stars, some veterans who bring experience, some rookies with potential, and some guys who have no right being on a Major League roster.  Just look at the cast of Bay’s new film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  You have Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson, who have all survived the first two movies.  You’ve got Frances McDormand and John Malkovich, two actors making their debuts in the series but who bring some serious credentials with them.  Then there’s Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the model turned “actress” who could either be the talent in the rough or someone just taking up roster space, but neither of those matter, because she makes up another casting category:  the babe.  You’ve got to have a babe in your movie, someone the 13 year olds can slobber over between explosions (again, we’ll get to that later).  Huntington-Whiteley fits right into the Liv Tyler/Scarlett Johannson/Megan Fox mold of girls who look good but don’t detract from the mayhem onscreen.

Once your cast is assembled, get a crew.  Make sure your camera guys are fit, because they’re going to need to move around a lot.  There’s a lot of moving camera in Michael Bay’s films.  Speaking of moving, make sure you get fit grips as well, because they’re going to have to put down a ton a dolly track.  Michael Bay loves dolly shots, and so should you.  Get a good camera assistant, someone who knows how to turn the slow-mo on and off.  Find the best helicopter pilots you can, preferably those who love flying as the sun is going down, because you’ll find a shot like that in almost every Michael Bay film.  Get some drivers, and along with them, lots of cars, because you’re going to need a car chase, and your going to need car crashes.  Finally, and most importantly, you’re going to need a good explosives guy.  Why?  Because it’s time to make your movie, and you know what that means….

EXPLOSIONS!  You need explosions, and lots of them.  In fact, your movie should start out with an explosion, end with an explosion, and have explosions throughout the film.  Here’s a good barometer:  If you’ve gone five minutes without an explosion, you’re doing something wrong.  Hey, even Michael Bay knows this.  Look at Pearl Harbor and The Island.  They didn’t make as much money as his other films.  Why?  Too much story and NOT ENOUGH EXPLOSION!  So, the more explosions, the better.  If you feel like it, you can sprinkle in a little plot, some juvenile dialogue, and some booty shorts, as long as you don’t lose sight of the most important thing:  EXPLOSIONS!   If you’re really feeling creative, try this shot out:  a slow motion, 360 degree dolly shot of a hot girl working on a car, which explodes as the sun sets.  It may not be Oscar worthy, but who cares?  It’ll make you a ton of money.

After that, your movie’s done.  You just need to get some product tie-ins and merchandising, and you’ve got a guaranteed blockbuster.  So, there you have it.  You’ve got all the tools you need.  Get out there, find someone willing to give you the $250 million you’ll need to make this epic, and make your Michael Bay movie already!  And don’t forget the explosions!

by Richard von Busack

TAKASHI MIIKE’S 13 Assassins isn’t nearly as shocking as some of his films but does provide a novel take on the samurai film; it mulls over the terrible thought of being transfixed by a sword, and how much a man has to mentally prepare himself for the possibility. The action takes place in the late 1800s; samurai are used as decoration, requiring no duties. None among them, all the way to the top of the command, is ready for what sword-fighting entails. Miike shows us what that means. He opens with an elder noble committing an act of seppuku in protest. It takes some nerve-steadying for the old man. We don’t see what the sword does to him—instead, we hear what happens, a wet, disgusting sloshing, like laundry being agitated.

The self-murder is the last straw in an unignorable crisis: the shogun’s brother, Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), is a Caligula who rapes and mutilates anyone he pleases. Recruited to do something about the situation is Shinzaemon, played by Koji Yakusho, maybe the most stirring Japanese actor since Toshiro Mifune. (He has a physical resemblance to Patrick Stewart, and like Stewart he has an aura of authority that matches a personal mildness and humaneness.) Shinzaemon must organize an ambush that can wipe out this highly placed madman. Essential to the assassination will be outwitting the psycho’s all-too-sane general (Masachika Ichimura). It’s a suicide mission; the rebels will be greatly outnumbered.

The time-honored mixed-bag is assembled. The most flamboyant member is Yusuke Iseya as a ragged, mosquito-bitten hunter who is lethal with a rock in a sling. The group also includes a suave gambler (Shinzaemon’s easygoing nephew) and the usual mercenary ronin. The film is capped with a battle of some 45 minutes. It’s a war to end all samurai battles, and frankly, I hope it does. Takeshi dreams up a long, muddy siege with everything that makes war worth avoiding and more: huge mantraps that corral the troops and fire bombs that burn them alive.

The ultimate lesson is that war is less glorious than it sounds. So nothing new. It’s Yakusho’s gravity and the ragged man’s battle cry (“Why are you samurai so arrogant?”) that we take away with us, rather than the way Miike arranges the warriors, which is more of a brutal slam dance than a Kurosawa ballet.

by Richard von Busack

Let me quote Brian Lee O’Malley on the hero of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: “Scott Pilgrim is 23 years old, living in the big city with his gay roommate, just trying to get by in this crazy world. He’s in a band. He’s lazy. He likes video games.” When a publicist or an agent sums up a character in such shorthand, it’s understandable—that’s marketing. When an author does it, it’s like looking at the chalk outline on a street where a dead body was.
O’Malley is certainly hard-working; currently in six volumes, the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels are the first comics in the English language to try to fill out the gargantuan, forest-denuding proportions of the Japanese manga. The film version does everything it can to fill out the outlines with in-jokes, frame-breakers and a kind of plot about a series of video-game battles. Certainly director Edgar Wright is very experienced handling this kind of keyed-up, urban lazybone-gamer comedy from his days on the excellent British TV series Spaced.
And sometimes Michael Cera (who plays Pilgrim) seems like this century’s Woody Allen. He’s more on to himself than Allen was. Audiences know there’s selfishness and malice underneath that lambie-pie face, bad hair and strangely poreless skin. When Cera was playing the bad boy in Youth In Revolt there was wit to seeing him being mustachioed and suave, and he had line readings in Year One that were worthy of Gene Wilder.
Despite Cera, Scott is just as undynamic a character as his creator described him. He’s busy only in the sense of how he strings along two girlfriends–the old Veronica and Betty dichotomy. The nice, too-loyal Betty is a Charlene Yi surrogate called Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), a punky high school girl with whom Pilgrim is still in the cuddling stage.
But Pilgrim, a no-visible means of support bass player of the band Sex Bob-Omb, spends his time obsessing over Ramona Flowers, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, whose nationality (American), multi-colored hair (mostly magenta or ultramarine) and romantic history (long and involved) make her seem exotic.
Ramona’s ex-lovers are in league against him. When not competing in battles of the band, he must defeat these exes in video-game style: with numbers flying in score-bar insets, and showers of gold coins flowing when they’re defeated.
The attempt to make a film that looks like a video game goes back as far as the Jackie Chan movie City Hunter (1993). Scott Pilgrim takes it from the 8-bit recreation of the Universal logo, to the kind of cartoon cutaways that make this the perfect date movie for adolescents who outgrew the Spy Kids franchise.
Ultimately, I’m on the world’s side in re: Scott Pilgrim. Watching it, you don’t feel that a new kind of language is being developed before your eyes. It’s retrograde, more so than even the good-girl, bad-girl dynamic; yes, good girls and bad girls are there in real life, too—as well as the girls who are neither primarily good or bad, the kind who never turn up in guy-bait movies like this. There’s a certain kind of video game, manga and anime fan who considers themselves half-Japanese through osmosis, but when they try to reproduce their idea of Asian culture—ninjas talking without contractions, everyone a cool, unsmiling killer—it’s just a new gloss on old stereotyping.

The heavily cyber-treated visuals, from the winter exteriors to grungy basements, close in on you like the walls in an Indiana Jones tomb. While Scott’s band is OK—a fuzztoned emulation of the White Stripes—the film’s sense of music is backward-looking, too; peripheral characters called “Stephen Stills” and “Young Neil,” everything but a stuffed toy buffalo named Springfield.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is material that’s been around the block many times, despite how it’s diced into splitscreen and augmented with animated popups. And there’s no central mystery to the way Ramona’s ex-lovers turn up spoiling for a kung-fu fight. Eventually, Scott is handed a list so that we can see how many more fights we have and how long the movie is going to last (too long, at close to two hours).

SPOLIER WARNING:  If you haven’t seen these films, don’t read this article, because it contains spoilers.  You should have known that already from the title, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Movies are supposed to follow some rules.  For one, your movie star is supposed to survive until the end of the movie.  Whether it’s horror, action, suspense, or some weird hybrid of all three, you expect that character actor with the annoying voice to get shot or decapitated, but not the actor making millions of dollars to put butts in the seats.  But what happens when you do?  What happens when you’re A-list celebrity bites the big one?  You get one surprised, shocked audience that now has to be prepared for anything.  Inspired by the release of Scream 4 this week (and the first Scream film, which you’ll find on this list), here are some shocking on-screen deaths by some of the biggest movie stars in the world.

Drew Barrymore – Scream

Look at the poster above.  That’s Drew Barrymore on the poster.  Not Neve Campbell, not Courtney Cox, not David Arquette, nor any of the other name actors on the poster.  It’s Drew Barrymore, who, back in 1996, was the biggest name in this film, having recently gone from notorious party girl to legitimate actress.  It had been a long time since Psycho was released (we’ll get back to THAT movie in a minute), so horror fans who went to see Scream in theaters were unprepared for the opening scene, where Barrymore’s Casey starts out innocently talking about scary movies to a caller who supposedly dialed the wrong number, only to end up disemboweled and hanging from a tree.  Word of mouth about the opening and the movie itself helped Scream become a box office hit and resurrected the entire horror genre from its early 90s lameness.

Janet Leigh – Psycho

The one that started it all, from the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock.  At the time she filmed Psycho, Leigh was a well-known leading lady.  She had even worked with the great Orson Welles on Touch of Evil.  So you can forgive audiences for thinking that her Marion Crane, though a little morally off, would survive until the final reel.  Imagine their horror when, 45 minutes into the film, she meets her demise in that famous shower scene.  Even today, Marion’s death is still shocking, and without Hitchcock’s incredibly effective twist, this list probably wouldn’t exist.

John Travolta – Pulp Fiction

I had a tough time with this one for two reasons.  1) At the time, Travolta wasn’t that big a star.  It took this movie to bring him back from the acting dead and make him the draw he was back in the 70s and early 80s.  2) After he’s killed, he reappears…alive!  But not even Travolta’s history or Tarantino’s time jumps can’t stop Vincent Vega’s death from being completely shocking.  And Travolta spent the first half of the film completely reinventing himself, going from a guy in talking baby movies to the coolest gangster on the planet.  You could see sequels, with Vincent Vega heading to France to try a Royale With Cheese while shooting his way across Europe.  Then, he’s filled full of bullet holes by Bruce Willis’ Butch, which actually may have made the character even cooler.  It certainly made Travolta cooler.

Kevin Spacey – LA Confidential

When LA Confidential was released in 1997, no one in the US really knew who Russell Crowe or Guy Pearce were, but they did know who Kevin Spacey was.  After making a name for himself as the sadistic killer in Seven, Spacey won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Usual Suspects, and his role as cool cop Jack Vincenes was going to be one of his first as a leading man.  That’s until Vincennes starts to get close to the solving the central case of the film.  Then, he’s shot through the heart.  This unflinching move by the filmmakers helped make LA Confidential one of the best films of the year.  This surprising death gets bonus points for its reveal of the surprising bad guy, the previously “good” cop played by James Cromwell.

Brad Pitt – Burn After Reading

You can never really be surprised by anything the Coen Brothers do, but to suddenly kill off one of the biggest stars on the planet in the middle of a movie he’s pretty much carried?  By shooting him in the head, no less?  Yes, leave it to the Coens.  Pitt’s Chad is a loveable dimwit (and, in my opinion, one of the funniest characters in any Coen Brother’s movie, and that’s saying a lot), caught up in a web of spying and intrigue that’s way too complicated to explain here.  Needless to say, he ends up breaking into a house and hiding out in a closet until he is stumbled upon by George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer, who, frightened by the discovery, does what any of us would do:  he shoots the poor schlub between the eyes.  Even as someone who has seen every Coen Brothers film and always expects the unexpected from them, this kill made me jump out of my seat and scream out “Whoa!” in the middle of a packed theater.  Amazingly, I wasn’t the only one.

Samuel L. Jackson – Deep Blue Sea

I’ll end with my favorite one on the list.  Sam Jackson’s death in this otherwise ridiculous film is a perfect storm of movie star surprise deaths:  incredibly recognizable actor with shocking demise preceded by a speech that makes you think he’ll be the only one to actually survive the movie.  After all, he survived an avalanche!  He’s eaten people (at least he suggests that he did)!  If he can survive that, he and the rest of the crew of this research vessel can survive these giant, mutated sharks.  The music swells as he brings everyone together, stopping the fear and resentment that has been pulling them apart.  They will defeat these giant, mutated sharks.  And then, the giant, mutated shark leaps out of the water and eats him.

By Richard von Busack

Portola Valley producer/director Jim Kohlberg, a New Yorker gone local in 1997, has brought home a low-budget indie movie with a million-dollar soundtrack. 1960s hits, some rarely licensed for films, add to the texture of The Music Never Stopped. It’s based on a true-life story of an amnesia case’s partial recovery. Thanks to musicians calling musicians, Kohlberg got to use some key songs of the 1960s for his very low budget film.
The Music Never Stopped is a fictionalized version of a case Dr. Oliver Sacks described in his 1995 book An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. One “Greg F.”, severely brain damaged from a tumor, was able to recover some of his memories through listening to the rock records of the 1960s.
Playing the father of the amnesia sufferer is familiar character actor J. K. Simmons, best known for his role as conniving publisher J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man films.
Via telephone, I interviewed Kohlberg and the co-star of The Music Never Stopped, Lou Taylor Pucci. Pucci plays Gabriel, the music-loving invalid who is able to reconnect with his estranged father through his love of the Grateful Dead.

RvB: What was the origin of The Music Never Stopped as a film?
Kohlberg: A friend of mind who known the screenwriter sent me the script. It had been sitting around at Sony Pictures for 12 years, seemingly never to be made. I fell in love with it, and wanted to do it, but the music clearances were a big issue, I needed to get the music industry behind the film…

RvB: Was it the music budget that Sony was most concerned about?
Kohlberg: It wasn’t about price in that sense. Though this was a low budget film, we knew we needed to get these iconic bands on board. Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead got on very early.

RvB: Where did you film this?
Kohlberg: NYC, the Bronx and the environs, Mar 1- April 5, 2010. Five weeks of one of the worst winters on record.

RvB: What are the differences between the Oliver Sachs case study and this fictionalized version?
Kohlberg: They’re very alike in the medical symptoms of the brain tumor, and also some of the facts of how the father got through to the Grateful Dead. The screenwriter Gwyn Lurie did a magnificent job turning it into a character-driven story about the relationship between a father and a son, and how the ‘60s broke them apart.
Lou Taylor Pucci: When I read for the part of Gabriel, I realized the main character is actually Gabriel’s father; Gabriel is really a glorified supporting role.

RvB: You’re a young man—did you care much about this ‘60s music?
Pucci: It doesn’t feel like the music itself is stuck in its time. If anything, it’s more accessible than it was 40 years ago, with the Beatles being on iTune. It’s not like I have an iPod, though, I listen to a radio. My family is very musical…I’ve got that in my background.

RvB: Did you approach anyone for help on the research for this story?
Pucci: I was given the incredible privilege of talking to Oliver Sacks, to ask him how the character would get something and when he wouldn’t…I asked a lot of question—I learned a little guitar from him, also.

RvB: JK Simmons is the big revelation in this. It brought out sides of him I hadn’t seen, since he’s usually playing pugnacious middle managers. He’s actually quite good looking in a rangy way, enough to have been a western movie star. In fact, I see that he played Buffalo Bill once…

Kohlberg: I hope he gets discovered. I hope that this will be for JK what The Visitor was for Richard Jenkins.

Pucci: He was the easiest man to work with, no problem at all. Older actors can be jaded, they might know you for a month or too, and they might say “hi” to you at Sundance. They can have their ways, and be set in them. But JK Simmons is a regular dude, so insanely open to trying different things. This is such a huge part, and he’s so ready for it.

(Pucci and Ormond in a scene from The Music Never Stopped.)

RvB: Julie Ormond was also quite good as the music therapist. She’s had an interesting career. She’s been presented as a conventional starlet, taking over from Audrey Hepburn in the remake of Sabrina. And she starred in one of Peter Greenway’s most difficult films, The Baby of Macon… She was in David Lynch’s Inland Empire, too. She always struck me as someone who had too much unease and gravity for the kind of glamour material she was getting offered.

Kohlberg: I wouldn’t want to speculate on her career choices, but I thought she was excellent in Smilla’s Sense of Snow. She did us a favor by coming on really early. Her trust in me gave the film a level of credibility to the acting community. She’s attracted to parts where the characters are strong and intellectual, because she herself has a real intellectual point of view.

Pucci: She digs into the research, and gets to know her character so well that she seems very comfortable when she arrives. Her acting is very free and raw and easy.

RvB: How did you become an actor, Lou?
Pucci: I was sitting in front of a set and my mom put on VHS tapes with Oliver and Sound of Music on it, and that was it. My mom was just that awesome, she installed music in my life. She was also a drummer. I grew up seeing my Dad on stage, so it never made me nervous. I was a really shy kid when I was young, but I started feeling at home on stage. Later film became a part of my life. Then I had to learn to change my mannerisms from an exaggerated theater actor…I had to lose anything that has to do with a sense of theater.

RvB: And how did you become a producer?
Kohlberg: 12 years ago a friend in SF and I were looking at a bunch of different movies. We wanted to produce one…and that film became Two Family House…then our film Trumbo was released by Samuel Goldwyn 3 years ago.
We learned how to produce good small movies, and obviously how to distribute them, since distribution is the bane of the small independent producer. Fortunately, Roadside Attraction bought The Music Never Stopped right before its successful run at Sundance.  Anyone who likes it when they see it, please email and tweet everybody.

Yeah, you’ve got some weight to lose.  But you’ve made the resolution.  You’re going to the gym…tomorrow.  Maybe the next day.  But definitely sometime this month.  Well, let me help kick you in the behind.  You need a push, something that’s going to get you off that couch and onto the treadmill.  What’s better than a song?  A song that drives hard, pushes you to the limit and never, EVER gives up.  There’s only one place to find that song:  an 80s movie montage.  There’s a lot to choose from when it comes to 80s montages, but it takes a special song to really inspire you.  But I’ve done the legwork, and found you the three most inspirational 80s montage songs to help get your fat ass back in shape.

EG DAILY – MIND OVER MATTER (FROM SUMMER SCHOOL)

It’s easy for a song to inspire you to run faster, dance like a maniac or kick the crap out of someone with karate.  It’s a special song that can inspire you to…take a test harder?  “Mind Over Matter”, from the Mark Harmon classic Summer School, does just that, and oh so much more.  Harmon’s Shoop has the summer to whip a group of misfits into shape and pass an English test or he’ll lose his job.  As the clock starts on their big exam, the electronic drums start, leading into a driving, synthesizer filled romp through every inspirational cliché your speech teacher would use to get you excited for that mock trial.  Never has a montage of 20 somethings pretending to be teens putting pencil to paper been so exciting.  It almost makes you want to go back to high school and ace that test you bombed because you stayed up late watching scrambled porn.  But hey, it’ll do just as well on a treadmill.  Did I mention it’s sung by Dottie from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure?

Most Inspirational Line – Sometimes it feels like we’re losing altitude / But I’ve got a winner’s attitude.

JOE ESPOSITO – YOU’RE THE BEST  (FROM THE KARATE KID)

Yeah, it was Rocky with a kid who did karate instead of boxing.  But it was one hell of a movie.  You can’t call yourself a child of the 80s and not love The Karate Kid.  Daniel was the ultimate everyman.  He started out as this scrawny fish out of water, and with the help of an awesome old dude, learned to chop down the competition AND get the girl.  Before he could do that, he needed to get through the All-Valley Karate Tournament.  Let’s face it:  karate tournaments are long.  There’s a lot of downtime.  That’s where our old friend the montage comes in to whisk us to the important parts, but you can’t just have any song playing over this montage.  Who are you going to use?  Christopher Cross?  Boz Skaggs?  Hell no!  You need someone with gruff power of…Joe Esposito?  Well…hey, look the guy up, he’s a Grammy nominee.  And really, it doesn’t matter what the guy did before or after The Karate Kid, because “You’re The Best” has everything you could want in an inspirational song – messages of determination and strength, aimed at YOU!  It’s not the other guy who’s the best, it’s YOU that’s the best!  There’s the backup chorus of kids yelling “FIGHT!”  And you know with all of those synthesizers, someone, somewhere in that studio was playing a key-tar.  Couple that with Daniel’s inevitable dispatching of the Cobra Kai, and you have a recipe for inspiration.

Most Inspirational Line – History repeats itself, try and you’ll succeed / Never doubt that you’re the one, and you can have your dream.

JOHN CAFFERTY – HEARTS ON FIRE (FROM ROCKY IV)

I was at a Starbucks a few weeks ago, standing behind some guy and his five year old.  Out of nowhere, the kid asks his dad, “What was the Cold War?”  The dad then went into an incredibly confusing explanation of our decades long psychological battle with the Russians.  Unnecessary, I say.  If I ever have a kid, and he asks about the Cold War, I’ll pull out my copy of Rocky IV and fast-forward to the training montage.  Here’s a history lesson in less than 4 minutes.  Drago, the big Russian robot, using everything technology has to offer.  Computers, modern weights, video assistance.  Whoa, what’s that?  A syringe?  Steroids?  Damn communists!  Rocky doesn’t need any of that stuff.  He takes it old school!  He dead presses his wife and Burt Young in a giant horse cart!  He chops down trees!   And he doesn’t need a heated track.  He’ll dodge the KGB and run up to the top of a snowy mountain to the hard driving tones of the guy that wrote the music for Eddie and the Cruisers!  It’s enough to make you want to chant “USA!  USA!”  Rocky ends up defeating Drago, and bringing the Russian crowd to its feet.  Only a few years later, the wall would fall and communism would die.  A fictional character bringing down the real red menace?  What’s more inspirational than that?

Most Inspirational Lyric – Things that give deep passions are your sword / Rules and regulations have no meaning anymore

by Richard von Busack

THE OPENING of the morose and oatmeal-colored Hereafter is an act few films could follow. It’s a flawlessly animated tsunami crashing into a tropical island. When a disaster strikes in a movie, it arrives to punish us for not loving one another. The disaster is preceded by one of those squabbles that could strike any vacationing couple (boiled down: “You go out and buy trinkets; I’ll stay here and sleep”). Swept into the tide and clonked by an automobile, Marie LeLay (Cécile De France) almost joins the Choir Invisible. She is rescued just as she has a vision of human beings standing around a glowing plaza. She’s seen the Hereafter itself.
Director Clint Eastwood, working from a juiceless, sub–M. Night Shyamalan script by Peter Morgan, goes off in two other directions. We meet a too-earnest Matt Damon as George Lonegan, reluctant San Francisco psychic who is working at a factory to avoid using his gift. Before we can get a sense of his life, we cut again, this time to a pair of young twins (Frankie and George McLaren) in slummy London, whose mother is a junkie trying to get clean.
How these varied souls will be lassoed together by fate is for them to know and us to find out. LeLay’s career as a Parisian newscaster declines as she becomes obsessed by her vision of the dead. The twins are separated at death. And Hereafter seems as if it will never get started.
What’s the appeal? We hear that the dead are nurturing their pain; if you had a heart attack, it still hurts. Deathland looks like an airport concourse—not unlike that 1977 Tom Schiller short from Saturday Night Live in which the first thing you see in the next world is a take-a-number machine. The blue-white heaven is as bleakly lit as Lonegan’s sad apartment and the concrete housing project the twins inhabit.
Lonegan takes a night class and learns to cook Italian food (nice to see The Sopranos Steve Schirripa teaching it). He’s practically mugged by an enthusiastic newcomer (Bryce Dallas Howard, who displays a puppyish eagerness that’s refreshing in five minutes and annoying in 10). Hereafter’s height of sensuality is a blindfolded taste test that recalls the weird Rourke/Bassinger games in 9 1/2 Weeks; the perviness of the moment fails to wake Lonegan from his cataleptic trance. Meanwhile, having a book advance to write what sounds like Mitterand for Dummies, LeLay decides to tackle instead the “conspiracy of silence” that keeps people from describing their brushes with the afterlife. “People get quite irrational about this, but the evidence is irrefutable,” says a doctor (Marthe Keller) at a Alpine hospice who believes in the White Light Express.
That word “irrefutable” is the essence of Hereafter’s unforgivable earnestness. Not to be too blunt, but Eastwood’s age may have turned him toward these Last Thoughts; one might prefer the work of the younger man, who had a more sanguine attitude toward death.

Moonnamathoral

Moonnamathoral is the first Malayalam film to be made with digital technology.  It is a suspense thriller starring Jayaram, Vineeth, Jyothirmai and Harisree Asokan.  It is directed by V.K. Prakash and was released in 2006.  The plot centers around two young girls who rent a room in an old palace but soon discover it is occupied by a strange feminine presence.  The palace manager tries to help them as she also dabbles in black magic.  Eventually, the girls come across a married couple who move into the palace and find that the same strange presence is haunting them.  In the end, the girls discover a shocking secret about their lives.

Swayamvaram

A popular film at the time of its release in 1972, Swayamvaram was a breakthrough film for Malayalam cinema.  It dealt head on with a number of serious issues, including the process by which families in Kerala were transitioning into modern society.  The film tells the story of a young man named Vishwam who elopes with a young woman named Seeta.  They move to the big city where they find it difficult to survive, eventually landing in a slum.  The couple is mired in poverty as their baby born, leading to tragic complications for the family.

Nammal

Released in 2002, Nammal was a hugely successful film at the box-office.  Directed by Kamal and starring Siddharth, Jishnu, Renuka Menon and Bhavana, it features award winning music by Mohan Sithara.  The film is a typical college comedy about all the antics and love trials of young adults on a college campus.  The film also has a dramatic twist that threatens to undo everything all the protagonists have worked for up to this point.

Vaasthavam

Vaasthavam is a 2006 film directed by M. Padmakumar and starring Prithviraj.  The film tells the story of a young man who rises beyond poverty and emotional turmoil to a position of power where he can make a positive difference in the lives of his countrymen.  Prithviraj also won the Kerala State Award for Best Actor his potent portrayal of the lead character.

Season

Released in 1989, Season is noted for the pitch perfect performance by its lead actor, Mohanlal, who plays the lead with the perfect mix of hope, regret and awareness.  Though the film was not a success at the box-office, it changed the way many Malayalam films were made as it introduced a grittier, more realistic style than fans of Malayalam films were used to seeing.  The film tells the story of a young man named Jeevan who spends his life in and out of prison, suspected of committing murder but innocent all the while.

Jo Bole So Nihaal

Starring India’s favorite son of Punjab, Sunny Deol, Jo Bole So Nihaal is a film about an honest young man named Nihaal (Deol) who encounters a criminal named Romeo.  This encounter changes his life forever.  Romeo turns out to be an international mercenary who escapes from the authorities with the unwitting aid of Nihaal.  Nihaal is thus labeled a traitor and an abettor to terrorists.  The FBI enlists Nihaal to travel to New York and capture Romeo since he is the only one who knows what he looks like and because Romeo is now intent upon killing the President of the United States.  Nihaal accepts the challenge and in the end restores his reputation.

Amu

Amu stars the tremendous actress Konkona Sen Sharma as a 21-year-old Indian American girl who returns to Delhi to visit her relatives after graduating from UCLA.  Upon her return, she experiences an unmistakable sense of déjà vu when passing through a slum in Delhi, which leaves her concerned.  It turns out that the reason she is so bothered by her visit to the slum is because she is adopted – and adopted from the very slums she visited.  Slowly, Amu comes to realize that her family has lied to her her entire life and was involved in many atrocities, including the murder of thousands of Sikhs and the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

Rang De Basanti

One of the most popular films of the last decade, Rang De Basanti stars one of India’s greatest contemporary acting talents, Aamir Khan, alongside Waheeda Rehman and Soha Ali Khan.  The film is about a British documentary  filmmaker named Sue McKinley (played by Alice Patten) who travels to India to make a documentary about Indian freedom fighters based on the writings of her grandfather who was a jailer in India at the time of its independence.  The film includes many hilarious moments and boasts of a great soundtrack, in addition to tremendous acting by Aamir Khan, Alice Patten and the rest of the cast.  The film also won Best Picture at the Filmfare Awards that year, cementing its reputation as one of the most popular films in recent times.

Chooriyan

Chooriyan is a Pakistani-Punjabi film directed by Syed Noor and starring Moammar Rana and Saima.  Released in 1998, the film tells the story of a young city man named Bakhtu (Rana) who is sent to live with his uncle in a small village far different from the urban life he is used to.  After moving, he meets his uncle’s daughter from his first marriage, a young and ditzy woman named Billo (Saima).  The two fall in love but are thwarted by her stepmother and stepsisters who treat Billo like a glorified servant in her own home.  The climax of the movie deals with how the couple overcome Billo’s evil relatives and live happily ever after.

Dil Apna Punjabi

Dil Apna Punjabi is a Punjabi film starring Harbhajan Mann, Neeru Bajwa and Dara Singh.  It is directed by Manmohan Singh and was released in 2006.  The story revolves around four generations of a Punjabi family living under one roof and all the complications and struggles that arise out of all the family members living together.  The main character, Manwal (Mann) falls in love with a young local girl named Ladi (Bajwa) whose family disapproves of him because he seems to lack ambition.  A talent scout overhears Manwal singing and sends him off to the UK to turn him into a star.  When in London, he must decide whether he wants to become a superstar or return home to his love, Ladi.

Beaches

Often referred to as the “definitive tear-jerker”, Beaches stars Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as two women brought together by fate to become lifelong friends.  Directed by Gary Marshall, the characters played by the leads are a struggling singer named CC Bloom (Midler) and Hillary Essex (Hershey).  The plot details how the women meet at a resort in Atlantic City as children and then are reunited many years later in New York City.  Having kept in touch through letters over the years, they share an intense bond and even end up falling in love with the same man.  The film also features the unforgettable love ballad Wind Beneath My Wings sung by Bette Midler herself.

Terms of Endearment

Terms of Endearment is a 1983 film starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson based on the novel by Larry McMurty and directed by James L. Brooks.  The story centers around the relationship between a mother and daughter named Aurora and Emma (played by MacLaine and Winger) who march to two very different drummers.  When Emma gets married, Aurora tries to show her how complex and difficult love can really be, something the young woman has little understanding of.  In the end, mother and daughter come to realize that different individuals express love in different ways.

Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is one of those watershed films that stands out not only the strength of its artistic content, but on the sheer fact that it exists at all.  Billed as the “gay cowboy movie”, it recounts the love story between two male wranglers in Wyoming in the 1960s played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.  The film was a smash at the box office and garnered tremendous critical acclaim, winning several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and winning Best Director.  Though gay themed films are now commonplace in Hollywood, Brokeback Mountain remains one of the most poignant and thoughtfully told love stories in modern times.

Schindler’s List

Arguably the best film ever made by Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List is an unforgettably tragic masterpiece set in the Holocaust that remains a benchmark of artful and meaningful filmmaking to this day.  Based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, it centers on a businessman’s desire to do something good in a time and place of absolute evil.  Schindler, a greedy and vain glorious Czech businessman, turns his factory into a haven for 1100 Jews who would otherwise have been killed by the Nazis.  The film won umpteen awards, including a Best Director for Spielberg, and will continue to be one of the most haunting and tragic films ever made.

Boys Don’t Cry

Winning her her first of two Best Actress Oscars, Boys Don’t Cry stars Hillary Swank as Brandon Teena, a transgendered  teen who was born female but chose to live life as a male.  His secret is unknown until a tragic revelation makes his best friends turn against him.  Boys Don’t Cry is notable for many remarkable moments, but none more so than Swank’s beautiful and fully expressed portrayal of a young man whose only wish is to be who he believes is true identity.

Batman Actors

Spielberg Galloping Back to War

by Richard von Busack

LET’S LEAVE aside the social problem of Facebook as a privacy violator. I’m not up to the depths of tireless radio investigator Dave Emory, who reached for his Foucault when titling a recent communiqué “In Your Facebook: A Virtual Panopticon?”
The time-wasting phenomenon does have its therapeutic side, however; no more lying awake at 4am wondering if that certain someone will ever forgive you for drunkenly declaring eternal love and then throwing up in the hydrangeas back in 1996. And the real-life Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t possibly be as chilly as his namesake, the antagonist of David Fincher’s The Social Network. This is a fiendishly clever and funny movie about the creation of the Internet monster. The cry “The site’s alive!” is certainly meant to echo Dr. Frankenstein’s shout when he first saw his creature twitch.
As Zuckerberg, Jesse Eisenberg gives a master class on recessive acting: he’s beady eyed and covert, with the occasional pit-viper-like sway of a truculent, lowered forehead. People who saw Eisenberg in The Squid and the Whale know how bravely he stripped out what’s called “youthful idealism” from his lead role.
Eisenberg amplifies the quality he showed us then, without distorting it at all. His Zuckerberg embodies the kind of remorseless superiority that always looks comically childish and wounded. He becomes the kind of CEO who thinks that it’s killing wit to put an obscenity on his calling card.
Fincher makes this story of betrayal glide along between the narrows of beautifully balanced flashbacks. The film shuttles back and forth from the present-day deposition of the now arrogantly rich Zuckerberg, being sued by a quartet of burned partners (among them his former best friend Eduardo, played by Andrew Garfield).
Facebook has its origins in the dorms of Harvard in 2003. The young Mark decides, one drunken night, to get revenge on a girl who spurned him. First, he denounces the smallness of her tits on his blog; then he hacks into the computer “facebooks” of the various houses at the university, to create an online game of rate-the-hotties.

The hacking gets him suspended for six months. None of Zuckerberg’s defenses work, neither the public-spirit excuse—“I believe I pointed out some gaping holes in the security of your system”—nor the youthful-high-jinks excuse—“Don’t you have a sense of humor?”
The incident attracts the interest of a pair of Porcellians: wealthy twin WASPs called the Winklevosses (played by a digitally duplicated Armie Hammer), who want to finance a new kind of social networking tool.
Zuckerberg devises Facebook as we know it: a way to discern the singleness or availability of another person, a method to distribute trivia and chat with friends. Fincher works very creatively around the visual problem of showing a solitary man tapping at the computer. This means an extravagant (if extraneous) passage about a sculling competition in England, marvelously made to look like an antique tabletop model come to life.

The mole-person Mark forecasts a scary future: “We lived on farms, and we’ve lived in cities, and now we’re going to live online!” This prediction comes before he learns a more pleasant use of power. He meets the founder of Napster, Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake as a happy wastrel). Parker lures Zuckerberg West into everything California represents: girls, drugs, drinking margaritas out of pint beer glasses and ziplining from a roof into a swimming pool.

The Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross music here seems more like the sinister David Byrne and Eno we loved, than the flowery, love-struck Byrne and Eno in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. A little touch of “Hall of the Mountain King” recalls Fritz Lang. The music is turned up for the scene when evil goes mega; the camera makes its own zipline ride through a Ruby Skyeish San Francisco nightclub, to zero in on Parker’s face, flashing every diabolical color from the club’s lights. This is one mere touch of the taste and intelligence of Fincher regular cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, who keeps us oriented by making the walnut-lined tombs of Harvard so different from the lambency of the sun in Palo Alto.
The film is almost an all-male world, though some small room has been carved out for women: Rashida Jones is the moral center, a voir dire expert at the legal firm deposing Zuckerberg.
Aaron Sorkin’s wild, witty script hands out some punishment that goes beyond the financial: this Zuckerberg, like Jay Gatsby and Charles F. Kane, is cut off from what he most wanted in life. It probably only works that way in fiction. But The Social Network, a comedy in the Balzac sense, is a balancing act; the mockery and disgust of greed match the essential lightness of the situation. It’s only Facebook, after all.

by Richard von Busack

OLIVE (Emma Stone) is a high school student in Ojai, population 8,000; her dirty-minded best friend, Rhiannon (Aly Michalka), invites her over for a party, but Olive declines and fibs about having a big date for the weekend. Then Olive spends her weekend in good company: by herself.
There are two kinds of people in Easy A: the ones who know how to amuse themselves, and the ones who look to gossip for their entertainment. Director Will Gluck stages Olive’s weekend alone as a date with an earworm: a montage staged to Natasha Bedingfield’s horrid “Pocketful of Sunshine,” a tune that arrives delivered in her granny’s electronic greeting card.
Olive first fights off the song but eventually succumbs to it. The montage—Olive hanging around, grooming herself and her dog, lolling and reading, is an introduction to Stone. She has a glorious face for comedy, that self-amusement mentioned earlier, an inner merriment, quite wide eyes and a childish softness around the chin. No one apparently notices Olive in a school of glams. And she’s so smart that she’s smart enough to hide how smart she is.
Rhiannon demands details of the dirty weekend Olive spent, and so Olive cooks up a false tale of lost virginity, which spreads over the school at the speed of electronic chat. “That’s the beauty of being a girl in high school: have sex once, and you’re a bimbo,” Olive tells a video diary.
She is studying The Scarlet Letter under the direction of a pleasingly platitudinous English teacher (Thomas Haden Church of Sideways). When a fellow student calls Hester Prynne a slut, Olive replies with an obscenity. In detention, she meets a fellow student named Brandon (Dan Byrd), who is beaten up regularly for being gay. Since Olive’s reputation is shot already, she decides to pretend to have sex with Brandon at a party, so that he can pose as straight.
By now, Olive is considered the Whore of Babylon, especially to the Cross Your Heart Christian Club at school, led by Marianne (Amanda Bynes, perhaps doing a Sarah Palin imitation). Annoyed by the gossip, Olive decides to wear a scarlet letter A of her own.
Set to (of course) “Bad Reputation,” Olive performs the ur-scene of teen movies, the girl taking scissors to her wardrobe, a la Pretty in Pink. A montage of John Hughes films gets screen-checked, but I liked Easy A’s world better than any of Hughes’ conformist works, despite Gluck’s tendency to shoot the exteriors of Ojai homes with Nancy Meyers–like fussiness.
Easy A is a thoroughly urbane movie; the urbanity is seen best in Olive’s rapport with her parents (Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci). They’re self-amused jokers, always posed next to a bottle of wine, and they’re without helicopter-parenting skills. “I wouldn’t know how to be grounded, any more than you’d know how to ground,” Olive says.
Believe it or don’t, there’s no speech about how Mom and Dad ought to pay more attention to their daughter’s troubles. Clarkson and Tucci are the modern version of the country club types with martinis who played the parents in golden-age screwball comedy. But Clarkson’s enjoyable running gag is all her own—she knows how to gross her daughter out by hinting at her own wild sex life and by purring at her memories.
Screenwriter Bert V. Royal’s gags are almost syncopated—this isn’t relentless joke-joke-joke, as in Easy A’s inferior, Juno. The laughs come with a different kind of rhythm, with the grace of a word to the wise, and the sense on how to emphasize sting at just the right time. One sighs with satisfaction at the smooth manner with which Olive handles Brandon’s confession that he’s gay.
Stone’s endearing way with a quip persists, as when she sees the high school mascot Woodchuck Todd with his costume’s head off: “Oh, my God, the illusion is shattered.” Even the product placement is funny. Easy A is bright enough to come out in favor of personal freedom, instead of just going after the low-hanging fruit of electronic gossipers.

Harrison Ford

Harrison Ford is Hans Solo and Hans Solo is Harrison Ford.  More than any of the other iconic roles he has played over the years (and that’s a helluva lot of characters, like Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan, to name just two), Ford is identified as intergalactic space hero Hans Solo, whose story is at the center of the Star Wars films.  Just how he got the part of Hans Solo sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie: producer and director Geroge Lucas had hired Ford (who was at the time working primarily as a carpenter) to build some cabinets in his home.  That job led to a role in Lucas’s film American Graffiti, which in turn led to work on Francis Ford Coppola’s films The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.  Lucas eventually hired him for the part of Hans Solo after being impressed with the way he read lines with other actors who came in to audition for the part.  The film went on to become the second highest grossing American film in history, making Ford a superstar upon its release.  He went on to star in innumerable blockbusters, including the Indiana Jones series, Blade Runner, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger.  Currently, he is married to Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart.

Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel L. Jackson has probably appeared in more blockbuster movies than any other actor on the planet, making him one of the highest grossing performers to date.  From Star Wars (where he plays Mace Windu in the second trilogy) and Jurassic Park to Kill Bill and Iron Man, he is the man to whom producers turn when they need someone audiences love to see take on the bad guys.  It may surprise many to learn, then, that Jackson got his start in acting after joining the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s.  He studied acting at Morehouse College which eventually led him to work with Morgan Freeman and Spike Lee.  In fact, it was his work in Lee’s Jungle Fever which first earned him widespread critical acclaim and notice.  He has also appeared in kitschier fare, like Snakes on a Plane, which has led to umpteen parodies, including a few by Jackson himself.  Whatever the final judgment, we know that he will be around for many more years to come.  Oh, and in case you were wondering what the “L” stands for in his name, it’s Leroy.

Hayden Christensen

If you ask most people who their favorite Star Wars character is, most will say Darth Vader.  Why?  There’s just something delicious about the way he enjoys being so absolutely evil.  It’s as if every cell in his metal body is brimming with evil just below the surface.  So it must have been a difficult task for George Lucas to cast the role when time came to start shooting the second trilogy.  But it was Hayden Christensen who won the role, and many fans, no matter how they feel about the second trilogy (and we know that’s a big bag of mixed feelings) feel that Christensen did about as good a job as anyone could have playing Anakin Skywalker.  Christensen brought the right mix of ambition, confusion, and subtle evil to the role, making audiences fully believe that Anakin would one day become the dreaded Darth Vader.  Since the release of the final trilogy, Christensen has worked almost exclusively in more realistic dramas, such as Awake with Jessica Alba and Factory Girl with Sienna Miller.  It’s safe to assume that there will be no more fantasy blockbusters on his plate for a while.  After all, once you’ve played Darth Vader, the only place to go is down.

Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman is an incredible actress.  We all know that from her work in films like Mike Nichols’s Closer and V for Vendetta.  She is clearly an actress for whom the inclination to play roles apart from what is usually delegated to a young woman her age is incredibly strong.  Most fans know her as the young Queen Amidala in the second Star Wars trilogy where she was concerned with preserving her empire.  What they may not know about Portman is that she is a Harvard graduate (with a degree in Psychology) and a fierce advocate for animal rights.  She is currently a vegan after having been a vegetarian since childhood.  She also eschews any and all goods made from animals, including fur, feathers, and leather.  She is also a young woman who has her priorities straight: when asked if she thought going to college would ruin her film career, she replied, “I’d rather be smart than a movie star.”  We are glad that she chose both!

Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher is one of those people with multiple talents: she not only acts, but also writes novels and screenplays that everyone seems to love.  Cast as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy, she became the fantasy girlfriend of an entire generation of young men.  Feisty, fearless and full of femininity, Princess Leia is one of the all-time greatest female leads in Hollywood history.  In characteristic self-mocking fashion, Fisher claims she got the part by “sleeping with some nerd.”  Fisher was astonished not only by the attention the media gave her, but by the success of the merchandising of Princess Leia figurines, dolls and costumes.  Though she has been acting steadily since her star making turn in Star Wars, she prefers to focus her attention these days on her writing.  Her much acclaimed autobiography, Wishful Drinking, goes in depth into her battle with alcohol and drug abuse.  So popular was the book that it was turned into a Broadway play and enjoyed much success on stage.

Masi Oka

To fans of NBC’s Heroes, there is just no one quite like Masi Oka.  Adored for his unique ability to play characters that are simultaneously serious and humorous (perhaps we should say seriously humorous?), Oka has been involved in show business since he was a child when he first appeared on the CBS game show Child’s Play.  He went on to pursue a degree in computer science and mathematics at Brown University which eventually led to work at George Lucas’s visual special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. He had hoped to win an Oscar for technical work.  Instead, he landed the role of Hiro Nakamura on NBC’s Heroes, eventually earning him both an Emmy and Golden Globe nomination.  It is safe to assume that this versatile and talented actor/artist will continue to exercise his creativity in a variety of film and television projects.

Ken Watanabe

Though you may not know him exactly by name, you know that you know Ken Watanabe the instant you see him.  After all, he has featured in many of Hollywood’s recent blockbusters and soon-to-be classics, among them The Last Samurai, Batman Begins, Memoirs of a Geisha, Letters from Iwo Jima, and even this summer’s most talked about film, Inception.  He started his career on stage, gaining fame as he joined the Japanese theatre troupe En.  He soon won roles as the hero in various stage productions, earning the notice of critics and audiences alike.  From there, it was on to television for several years where he played almost every type of character imaginable, becoming a permanent fixture to fans of Japanese entertainment.  In 2003, he was introduced to western audiences in The Last Samurai, for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.  His daughter is the popular model Anne Watanabe.

Keiko Agena

Keiko Agena is an actress best known for her spitfire performance on the popular series Gilmore Girls where she played Lane Kim, the best friend of Rory Gilmore.  Anyone who has ever seen the show will recall that the performance given by Agena was almost completely dependent on her ability to deliver reams of dialogue at lightning speed.  In fact, sometimes you almost wished that they would slow down their delivery so that you (as the viewer) could keep up with what the characters were saying to each other!  Once you adapted to the pace, however, Agena’s great talent as an actress became apparent.  She not only delivered her lines flawlessly, but also altered her appearance to play the role.  Lane Kim is described as a 16-year-old in the show synopsis.  In real life, Agena was more than a decade older!  What’s her secret?  Maybe it’s good genes.  Or maybe it was her childhood in Honolulu.  After all, that can’t be a bad way to grow up, now can it?  We hope to see more of this beautiful and talented young actress.

George Takei

To fans of Star Trek, George Takei is an inimitable legend.  As the actor who played Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, he is an almost mythical figure to show’s millions of fans across the world.  But playing Sulu is only one of his many talents.  Takei studied architecture at Berkeley and then earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees in acting and theatre at UCLA.  He furthered his acting expertise by studying in England and Japan thereafter.  He won the role of Sulu on Star Trek at a time when there were exceptionally few Asian faces on television, thereby compounding the significance of his presence in the role.  It is also rumored that he had noticeable tension with William Shatner on the set of the show, though both actors seem to have put their issues behind them.  Takei recently became a prominent figure in the Gay Rights Movement in America as he came out of the closet and became a proponent of same-sex marriage.  Currently, he is married to Brad Altman, his partner of the last 18 years.

Carrie Ann Inaba

Though most people know her as one of the spunky judge of ABC’s smash reality competition series Dancing with the Stars, few seem to recall that Carrie Ann Inaba is also an actress of note, having appeared in the second and third Austin Powers films.  For the Austin Powers enthusiasts out there, she played Fook Yu (yes, we can’t say it with a straight face either).  Inaba, who is of mixed Japanese, Chinese and Irish ancestry, speaks fluent Japanese and lived in Tokyo from 1986 to 1988 where she was a popular singer.  Upon returning to the United States, she was cast as a dancer in several film and television series, including In Living Color, Monster Mash: The Movie and Madonna’s Girlie Show World Tour.  Most of us, however, know and love her as the usually supportive and encouraging judge on Dancing with the Stars where she offers generous counsel and advice each week to the celebrity contestants bold enough to show her their moves.  As the show continues to grow in popularity each year, we can expect to see Carrie Ann much more in the coming years.

By Richard von Busack

Dana Brown is the son of the man I’ve heard described as the only really financially successful independent filmmaker in history, Bruce Brown (Endless Summer, et al). Happily the guava didn’t fall far from the tree, as Dana Brown’s Highwater captures the newest generation of surfing excitement, just as his father did decades ago in his many documentaries.
The loose setting is 2008’s triple-crown of surfing at Oahu’s North Shore: the OP Pro Hawaii in Haleiwa, the O’Neill World Cup at Sunset Beach and the finale Annual Rip Curl Pro Pipeline Masters at Pipeline. (Dana Brown comments that judging a surf competition must seem subjective, but when it comes to Pipeline the rules are simplicity itself: get into these speeding, rolling tunnels of water and come out alive.) In the Hawaiian winter, the ordinarily good surfing becomes phenomenal, thanks to storm waves coming in unimpeded for two thousands miles from the North Pacific. During November and December, the quiet island countryside, where there are more cattle than people, become deluged with cameras and hundreds of spectators.
In Highwater, we watch some tremendous surfing by old and young, by the physically fit and the physically different. We see Bethany Hamilton in action, still surfing after she lost an arm to a shark. One paraplegic local can still catch a wave with a little help from his friends. The rise of women’s surfing is essential to this story: newcomers Carissa Moore and Sofia Mulanovich (the first South American to win a world surfing title) as well as pioneers Rochelle Ballard and Chelsea Georgeson.
Highwater is as much a scene report and scrapbook of North Shore life as it is a record of sports finals. On camera are figures the younger Brown grew up with, as well as those he knows as greats in the sport. Here are North Shore “soul surfers” like the brave eccentric Eric Haas (legendary for being the kind of man who’d wear a football uniform while riding a wave), and up and comers like the 13 year old prodigy Jon-Jon Florence. Brown not only has the trust of the people he interviews, he’s also a gifted sportswriter. He inverts the clichés and asks the right questions, and after an hour or so you get the feeling of being on scene, being taken into confidence by the locals.
There are worries about how long the scene can last. The North Shore is under siege by developers. Rough-hewn champ Sunny Garcia describes his prayers that a good hurricane will wash away the mansions that the filthy rich are constructing on the shore. But without exaggeration or overselling, Brown’s documentary captures the ambient sense of inner peace that unites these wave riders, whether pro, semi-pro or happy amateurs.

All in the Eye of the Beholder

Let’s just be honest: there are some ugly actors in Hollywood who have made it quite big – bigger, in fact, than their more physically appealing contemporaries.  Now, lest you think we are being unduly cruel, we should remind you that we’re only doing this to prove a point: that ugly actors (or actors who aren’t conventionally good-looking) can make it in the entertainment business.  We’re sure there are many actors and actresses out there that we don’t necessarily find physically appealing that others might (and vice versa), but for what it’s worth, let’s take a look at some Hollywood’s most successful ugly actors.

Paul Giamatti

Paul Giamatti is one of our favorite actors in Hollywood – he just isn’t conventionally handsome, so to speak.  But that certainly hasn’t stopped him from landing some of the biggest films and giving some of the best performances in recent memory.  A graduate of the Yale School of Drama where he studied and acted alongside fellow thespians Ron Livingston and Edward Norton, Giamatti first worked in theatrical productions and won a few small television roles early in his career.  By the late 1990s, he began to win supporting parts in major motion pictures, including Saving Private Ryan, The Negotiator, The Truman Show, Big Momma’s House, Man on the Moon and Planet of the Apes.  His breakthrough role, however, was that of the depressed writer in the 2004 romantic drama Sideways, for which he earned a Golden Globe nomination.  There’s been no looking back for Giamatti ever since: he’s featured in many of the most popular films and acclaimed movies of the last few years, including Cinderella Man, The Nanny Diaries, Fred Claus, John Adams and The Last Station.

Ron Perlman

It pains us to say it, but Ron Perlman has a face only a mother could love.  This fact is certainly reflected in the roles he has played over the course of his career, including the beastly Vincent in the television series Beauty and the Beast as well as the title character in the Hellboy film series.  To be sure, there is certainly something attractive and charming about the way he carries himself: with confidence and an aura that he knows his talent is more than skin deep.  Audiences have certainly warmed up to him over the years, appreciating his work in film such as Blade II, Star Trek Nemesis and The Devil’s Tomb.  Perlman also has a long history doing voice over work for both animated series and video games.  You can hear him in games such as Lord Terrence Hood, Fallout, and both Halo 2 and Halo 3.

Clint Howard

Clint Howard is an actor you probably think you’ve seen before but aren’t completely sure where.  His claim to fame extends beyond his own list of credits: he is best known for being the younger brother of actor-turned-director Ron Howard.  In fact, most of his screen credits have been appearances in his brother’s films, including Backdraft, Parenthood, Coccon, Apollo 13, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and EDtv.  Though he’s a slightly recognizable quantity in Hollywood, the majority of the media tends to have fun with his unconventional appearance.  The Phoenix newspaper honored him with the 22^nd spot on their list of the 100 Unsexiest Men in the World.  We hate to put a damper on anyone’s opinion, but we think Howard’s wife might protest just a little bit.

Vincent Schiavelli

Though he is no longer with us, we would like to pay tribute to the legacy of Vincent Schiavelli, also known as “the man with the sad eyes”.  A native of Brooklyn, Schiavelli studied acting at New York University and then began performing on stage in the 1960s.  He won a movie role in Milos Forman’s Taking Off, which in turn led to many more roles in Forman’s films, including  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Valmont and Man on the Moon.  Many fans also remember him fondly for his performance as the subway spirit in the blockbuster Ghost starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg.  He also notably played a Bond villain in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies.  Sadly, Vincent succumbed to lung cancer in 2005.  He is one character actor, who no matter how he looked, we will never forget.

We, as all fans of cinema do, love to take time to reflect on our favorite Australian actors.  Anyone familiar with Hollywood knows that the industry loves its Aussies, having made many of them top stars and globally recognized.  But our favorite Australian actors have much more than just their country of origin in common: they have talent.  And loads of it.  From acting and singing to writing and dancing, they are talented in more ways than can be counted.  But let’s say we give it a shot and count our five favorite Australian actors anyway . . .

Hugh Jackman

Often referred to as ‘the sexiest man alive’, Hugh Jackman is everyone’s favorite leading man: tall, handsome and equal parts rugged and elegant.  What more can you ask for?  But he’s much more than just eye candy.  He has consistently taken risks in his career, playing roles beyond the standard leading man part.  And the industry has rewarded him richly for doing so.  Take, for example, his award winning turn playing Peter Allen in the Boy From Oz on Broadway.  He not only showed his broad range of talents by singing, dancing and acting the part to perfection, but also won the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor.  Not bad for a guy who can also play Wolverine and was once one of the top contenders to replace Pierce Brosnan as James Bond.

Russell Crowe

Though his name may have been in the headlines for reasons other than his performances in recent years, there’s just no denying that Russell Crowe is one of the finest actors of his generation.  An Oscar winner for his fierce and brilliant portrayal in Gladiator, he (like Jackman) has carved a career out of playing more than standard issue leading man parts.  Recall his critically lauded turns in films like A Beautiful Mind and The Insider and you know that this is an actor who can command the screen like no other.  Though his recent films like Robin Hood and A Good Year may not have performed up to expectations, you certainly cannot fault Crowe for his performances.  Maybe audiences just expect to see him in better films.  And they no doubt will in the future.

Naomi Watts

Though she isn’t quite as famous as some of her fellow Aussie compatriots, you know Naomi Watts as soon as you see her.  She’s the woman King Kong fell in love with in Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake!  And King Kong wasn’t the only one, as audiences soon wondered where this elegant and supremely talented actress had been for years.  Turns out she was right under our noses, appearing in films like Mulholland Drive, The Ring and 21 Grams.   Though she was born in England, Watts spent much of her life in Australia and moved to Sydney in 1982.  Though it was the Australian film industry that gave her the success that eventually led to her dominance in Hollywood, Watts considers herself British, having spent the first 14 years of her life there.

Nicole Kidman

After nearly two decades in the film industry, Nicole Kidman is now considered Hollywood royalty.  There is an unmistakable princess quality to her, not just in terms of her beauty, but in the way she carries herself and presents herself on screen.  She has also blossomed into a performer of legendary capability, some calling her the finest actress of her generation.  Her unforgettable, Oscar winning performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours opposite Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore still stands as one of the greatest performances of the last decade.  So manifest was she in the role that many who saw the film failed to recognize Kidman as the actor on screen.  They thought they were watching someone else altogether!  And that, as any actor would tell you, is entirely the point.

Heath Ledger

Since he passed away in January of 2008, there has been praise heaped upon Heath Ledger, the charming young actor who wowed critics in The Dark Knight and who earned a permanent spot in film history after his breakthrough performance as a closeted gay ranch hand in Brokeback Mountain, for which he earned an Oscar nomination.  Ledger continues to cast a long shadow over Hollywood as no other young actor has appeared on the scene with the ability to do what he did: play characters with a rugged mix of fear and fearlessness, of charm and despair.  It is a legacy that will remembered for years to come, and will not be easily supplanted by any actor, Australian or otherwise.

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By Richard von Busack

An animator who helped shrink Julia Roberts to Tinkerbelle size for Hook told me “Even six inches of her is too much.” This seemed too mean a comment to repeat until I saw Eat Pray Love. Big as life, Roberts stars in a triple-decker sandwich of self-indulgence thick enough to choke a horse. Robert’s Liz is a chronically dissatisfied New York writer. Under cloudy financial and marital circumstances (the book made them clearer, apparently) she has a long lasting crisis over what she’s supposed to do next.
Her best friends have a baby—should she produce one too? Instead, after divorcing her husband (Billy Crudup with a thankless role and an even more thankless Dick Cavett hair cut) Liz heads off on an around the world voyage of self-discovery to Italy, India and Bali.

The prophecy was foretold; during her previous visit to the Indonesian island, a native healer (Hadi Subiyanto) she described as “looking like Yoda” told her she will lose all her money in America and return to teach him English.
It happens thus: director Ryan Murphy (the creator of Glee) goes into beautification mode. Beauty shots of perfect bowls of pasta (close-ups of Roberts slurping noodles with her new lips), exotic ashrams and emerald rice paddies. In a penance sequence in India, Liz goes to worship a photo of a female guru, scrub floors with a rag, and takes an all too short vow of silence. It’s the grand tour without Denpassar, “Bali Belly,” “Dehli Belly” or touts or hustlers of any kinds.
Eat Pray Love is a smooth fantasy, not of pluckiness but of an unlimited MasterCard, with too available or weakling men in flashback parade. It’s as rich as a spy thriller; the only difference is that Roberts isn’t shooting the natives this time.
As one of the weaklings, James Franco plays a New York actor named David Piccolo (which come to think of it is about his range here—he’s piping). The film is also hard cheese for Crudup, especially since jettisoned his own marriage, just as Roberts does here, in the movie World Traveler, and for the same reasons, too. When the Crudup film was released, you could hear the critics’ cries of moral outrage for miles.

As she tries to apologize to these dropped men, Liz gets some spiritual beating up in India at the hands of hippiesh Richard from Texas. He’s played by Richard Jenkins, in his least believable role ever, with a drunkalogue Olivier couldn’t make live.
Liz must also resist flirtations from foreign studs who offer themselves to her. First, an Italian language teacher who looks like an Armani model gives her deep meaningful looks. In Bali, an Australian or something offers her a chance to do some nude swimming last night, baring his perfect butt to the camera. At last in Bali, naturally, she finds Mr. Right: a Brazillionaire jewelry importer (Javier Bardem).
The movie is deeply overlong; the beginning sequences seem the most easy to cut. In New York, Viola Davis is there to be that kind of old movie bosom pal, there to calm the lead’s every conniption fit. So much for the feminism of Eat Pray Love, since the film has to build a long hard case for Liz doing what anyone might want to do, while insisting that it’s strange that a woman would want to do it. You can hear the studio executives saying “Wait, why doesn’t she want to settle down and have a baby with her husband? Explain it to me again.”

I gorge on travel shows. I can even can put up with the ultra-patronizing knuckleheads on Globe Trekker (Justine Shapiro, I don’t mean you). Rick Steves, the archdweeb, standing in his all-Target wardrobe in front of every old building from Lisbon to Tehran? Him I’ll watch him until my wife shrieks for the remote control.
So I have to admit that Robert Richardson’s landscapes kept me tranquilized. A little known edifice from ancient Rome, the Augustoreum, is beautifully lit, and moreover it hasn’t been on screen recently. And how long has it been since a big movie was made in Bali?
I don’t mind copping to a little disgusting envy. The report of the advance Gilbert got ($200,000 is what you hear) to live abroad is something any writer would want. And these days who doesn’t feel the ambient toxicity of life in the USA, the need for silence, beauty and good food? The USA gets it a little here, but there’s no feeling for the troubles, no grit, no misery, nothing made visual that’s like the guttery critique by Henry Miller. Not being Miller, I’ll expurgate: if he knew how to do it, an American would jump down his own stomach and shovel his own wastes out of his back passage.
There’s no way for a movie this rich to make our life look as spiritually poor mouthed as this movie claims it is. (Can anyone credit Eat Pray Love’s argument that we’re in trouble because we’re not praying hard enough?)

Liz’s crisis came because she “married too young” (we see the flashbacks, and Roberts is exactly the age she is right now today at the wedding, on the unhappy side of 40). And she stalls Bardem remorselessly, even though he’s in full force flirt mode, with a brand new Jeep and a million-dollar villa. He cocks one great warm bedroom eye, eyelid closed in half-siesta, right to the camera. The man could play a credible love scene with himself.

I was telling a friend I was going to see Eat Pray Love, and she said, hopefully, “the one with the Spanish guy in it?” We both knew which Spanish guy she meant, such is Bardem’s Iberian musk. But who could explain Eat Pray Love’s contention that a man like this has been celibate for ten years, ever since his last romantic tragedy?

What’s good about the movie, besides the vistas? Deserved royalty checks to Neil Young (“Harvest Moon” and “Heart of Gold” are played in full). Roberts has the right physique and face for saris. She isn’t quite built for the little black slip she buys in Italy; it’ll take more than an alleged 10 pounds of pasta-gained weight to turn Julia Roberts into Santa Sophia Loren.

It’s ultimately the premise which sinks the movie: The email guff she pauses over thoughtfully before sending, an appeal for money for her other Balinese healer, a request for funds that reads like it was sent from Nigeria. There’s facile relationship with the divine (“God, I’m a great fan of your work”) or the implication that sitting in a lotus position and chanting prayers to a graven image is the way out of spiritual crisis. There’s the spurious generosity of the break-up letter (“I believe, with every molecule of my body, you will find the person you want”); I guess David will have to be celibate for ten years now. There’s the glowing nimbus on Robert’s mane, as if she were the patron saint of beauticians. There are the roving accordions in Italy and the “rogue elephant” in India (a gentle old cow with pigment spots).
There’s the self-esteem issues Liz obviously doesn’t have: “He’s won the lottery,” she says, describing a man lucky enough to go to bed with her. Who thinks of themselves that way? Who is that is a line like that addressed to, if not to the courtesan-class or the women (and men, I guess) who want to be in it? And there is ultimately the lack of serious knowledge of the places visited. (Incidentally, the problem with durian fruit is that it smells like dirty feet, not that it tastes like them.)
The backbone of Eat Pray Love is Liz’s search for the one word that describes her. Again, who thinks in these terms? One word? It’s like something Don Draper would say about a product on Mad Men. After 2 1/2 hours in the company of this woman, the audience might be able to suggest a single word…maybe with an obscene gerund as garnish.
What happened to Roberts? Plastic surgery and unimaginable privilege embalmed the rangy, plainspoken, glorious haired actress with the rich, shy grin. It’s the kind of movie where everyone bends to her; Roberts might as well have put a photo of herself on stage at that Indian ashram. This kind of celebrity-worship filmmaking doesn’t do an actress any favors, despite what the publicity machines say. Her character couldn’t have gotten deeper into her navel if she were the commander of an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style Iron Mole.

by Richard von Busack

Even without the explanatory title at the end of the film, it’s clear that the Banco Chinchorro—site of the film Alamar—is one of the rarest places on Earth.
Already a marine sanctuary, this system of reefs and atolls between Belize and Quintana Roo is being selected for an even more heavily protected status by the U.N. If the BP depredation hasn’t given you an irresistible longing to go see some of the world’s reefs before they’re doomed, Alamar will make that feeling more urgent.
A picturesque setting isn’t enough to make a movie. In its elegantly simple and indirect way, unrehearsed and free of artificiality, director Pedro González-Rubio follows three generations during a brief vacation in one of the fishing shacks built into the water.
We have no narrative to suggest it—this movie is for people who like to guess—but these cabins on stilts are perhaps built to circumvent the law (and thank God there is a law) against building on the flat, driftwood- and crab-covered islands nearby. In one of these 12-by-12 wooden boxes in the water, the cast, González-Rubio and his soundman—five men in total—stayed and watched the horizon and filmed the ocean from both above and below.
The handsome, shaggy-haired Jorge Machado and the more than merely adorable Natan Machado Palombini, real-life father and 5-year-old son, play a family reunited after some years. Natan lives in Italy with his mother and has come out to visit his dad and his grandfather Nestór (Nestór Martin), a lifelong fisherman with mahogany skin and a white brushy mustache. Both Jorge and Nestór live on the remote coast of Mexico.
The visit leads to a long and successful fishing trip. We watch the passing down of skills from grandfather to father to son, as they boat out through seascapes of a profound and deep blue, snorkeling for langoustas, spearfishing or putting out a poleless line for barracudas. They bring their boat to shore only to scrub its hull with white sand, get a few supplies and chat with the other fishermen—hence one mysterious moment, with a toothless old fellow reciting a love poem to the camera.
Most directors would be tempted to create pumped-up opportunities for conflict and resolution. Here, the disharmonies between Jorge and Nestór don’t get more serious than a debate over the question of how strong coffee ought to be; the old man, like so many Mexicans, is a Nescafe drinker; Jorge’s time in Italy is signaled by the presence of a tiny espresso pot. Similarly, the only flare-up between Jorge and his son is a brief moment of impatience when the kid snarls some fishing line.
Old Nestór insists on his happiness here at this edge of the world. He tells us “Fishing is about luck and patience,” which is also what film directing is about. Somewhere along the line Jorge must have been educated, which might have been how he met a European girl (we see him in Rome in home-movie pre-titles). He knows the Latin names for the flora and fauna, and also how to help tame a lovely white cattle egret that waddles in for some free food.
Some moments foretell the loss to come: on the day when Natan is going return across the Atlantic, Jorge is glimpsed, bent over the hammock, sleeping with his head across the chest of his son. Alamar is a beautiful, brief movie that reminds one somewhat of Carroll Ballard’s visions of nature, though it surpasses them even for quietness and tenderness. It’s an unforced, languorous look at a water world, free of overcooked narrative and resplendent with tropical skies under which every day, and every scene, is a fresh start.

by Richard von Busack

The worst creeps are the most self-righteous ones, and the creepy Middle Men specializes in justifications. In the ee cummings phrase, it stinks of excuse. As he rigorously emulates the Goodfellas flash forward, reverse and sidebars, writer/director George Gallo (Homeland Security) follows the decline of innocent Houston family man Jack Harris (Luke Wilson) over the course of a decade.
The poor man is lured into a pit of sleazeburgers in the LA porn industry. It’s the 1990s; Harris is such an innocent that’s he’s even introduced surrounded with platters of corn on the cob, on the day when he meets his wife at a church picnic.

He considers himself a kind of fixer, a person who facilitates deals. Jack flies out to LA to help out a friend with a business problem at a nightclub. That’s when he gets involved with a pair of coked out Los Angeles computer geeks, Wayne and Buck (Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht), profane slobs who squabble with each other. While horsing around, two stumble across the idea of uploading porn to the internet and making people pay for it.
Jack’s addition to their scheme—third-party billing—makes them all very rich. One beneficiary if the wealth is a no-good Vegas lawyer (James Caan, doing an odd Dustin Hoffman imitation).

The geeks needed to get their models somewhere, and they recruited the girls from the nightclub of a Russian mobster, played by Rade Serbedija.
When the Russian’s relative is accidentally killed by Jack’s associate during the course of a meeting, matters get worse. Because of his guilt over the murder, Jack is susceptible to the appeal of Audrey Dawn, a blonde porn star (Laura Ramsey). Jack leaves his wife and family for the troubled girl and gets deeper into the smut business.

That’s a twist Middle Men could have used: what if Jack had been an untrustworthy narrator? As a character, Jack Harris is too good to be true, and Wilson’s pokey, resigned nice guy performance doesn’t give him any extra dimension. It happens often that producers will make a movie and suddenly be struck with nervousness for the subject matter. That’s the way you always hear it during the interviews: “This isn’t a movie about pedophilia, it’s a movie about a man’s struggle with himself… etc etc.”
In the case of Middle Men, the producers have thorough distaste for the porn people and the masturbators who consume porn: they’re presented as goggling creeps, or yokels dropping their overalls. Remember that Baudelaire quote about how sex is the lyricism of the masses? You’ll find nothing lyrical in Middle Men.

Gallo overdid the balancing act by making Jack so naive: how could a man as relentlessly square as Jack get involved with any kind of nocturnal business, starting with an LA nightclub? His narration explains it all for you: “It’s like I was living two lives.” And that’s not the only time the narration cuts it and dries it just like that; moreover, Jack’s character is so flat it doesn’t even look like he’s living one life.
The Australian actress Jacinda Barrett, playing Jack’s wife, seems to be parodying the middle-American hausfrau. I’ve seen frozen dinner commercials where the wife looked more hipsterish; but we’re meant to understand Harris as a family guy smart enough to get himself out of trouble. We’re also meant to care about the kind of life he’s trying to have, with a private school for his kids and a gated driveway. This all-important home comes undersiege when the gangsters attack, in a bit that’s a bad parody of Kurosawa’s High and Low.
Middle Men doesn’t make the world of porn look visually alluring, either, despite the yogaish poses Ramsey gets put into. The porn parties Gallo trucks his cameras through are a sea of fake boobs and pimp mustaches. Gallo leers and condemns at the same time, and the movie is sold as something red hot to R-rated audiences praying for genuine erotica. I suppose defrauding such an audience is something the filmmakers would feel proud about.

by Richard von Busack

The beauty of I Am Love is perplexing; it’s as bewildering as the beauty of its star, the lean Scottish redhead Tilda Swinton. Like Julianne Moore, Swinton is a congenitally brave actress who has matured into a performer, free of self-consciousness to an almost inhuman degree. Swinton, now nearing 50, is a vision: clear eyed, short haired, and immaculately dressed for this expensive romance. But don’t let the trailers fool you; I Am Love isn’t mere art-house swankery.

Swinton is an object d’art here; because of her snow-white skin Swinton, can wear colors that would look hideous on other people. (It’s been that way since Derek Jarman garbed her with neon fun furs in her earliest films.) The rising passion of a long-married wife is signaled during a tryst, by her wearing bright-orange trousers the color of a safety cone: on Swinton, they look modulated, the shade of a vixen’s tail.

The colors in I Am Love are a rebuke to how dismal synthetic coloring is. Using what resembles pre-flashed stock, Yorick Le Saux, who worked on Francois Ozon’s See the Sea and Swimming Pool, gradually works up to the glowing, creamy colors of the sun. The last shot fills the screen with a carpet of gold in an empty hallway in a patch of sunlight. This movie is one long visual parable of thawing.

Director Luca Guadagnino begins with arresting images of Milan in winter: locked tight under a foot of snow, the place is a city of fortresses suffused with icy mist. As John Adams’ tense music from Nixon in China simmers away, we survey a villa of almost Soviet brutality. It’s the home of the Recchis, a family that made its millions in the textile trade. (Anxious to not to use Marxism as a crutch, the director indicates the family’s wealth by abstract images of weaving looms, not showing us the workers tending them.)

The family is gathering for the big annual event, the birthday celebration of the patriarch. The pretentious old man is played by the legendary Gabriel Ferzetti, and his somewhat younger wife is Marisa Berenson, glazed as expensive pottery and stretched with cosmetic surgery. Old Eduoardo plans to retire and pass on the business to the next generation.

The heir presumptive—the handsome and kind grandson Edo (Flavio Parenti), is bypassed for reasons only the Recchis would understand. He lost a race of some sort, in which it was a family tradition to compete and win. It’s such a dishonor that they tease him about it throughout the dinner. But the decision is made; the direction of the company is given to Edo’s father, Edoardo Jr. played by Pippo Delbono, a sinister party who looks like a hybrid of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover.

The story resumes a few months later, with the old grandfather dead, and Edoardo completely consumed by the family business in London. His wife Emma (Swinton), always solitary, is now more alone than usual amid the heavy stones and dismal paintings of the villa. Adding keenness to Emma’s loneliness is the discovery of the secret love life of her grown daughter (Alba Rohrwacher) who has moved away to London. But Emma is distracted by a new character: a chef who caters the family’s formal banquets: Antonio (Edoardo Gabbrilini), a handsome devil with a tattooed bracelet. Unfortunately, this chef is her son Edo’s new best friend.

Guadagnino touches upon the best novels about adultery: the name Emma, as in Bovary, is certainly significant. There’s a most explicit love scene in the mountains near San Remo that’ll be too fulsome for some, but which is as pure a visualization of Lady Chatterly’s Lover as we’ll see: flowers, fruit and drowsy insects surround Antonio and Emma as they make love in the grass. The director has one especially intelligent idea: the idea of how food and taste express information. The first connection between Antonio and Emma through a meal he prepares—she’s thunderstruck with how good it tastes. Later, an illicit affair is discovered as much by circumstantial evidence, as by a plate of soup.

I Am Love is a rich movie—a banquet, certainly—and the richness of it may seem off-putting; in these times, there’s so much financial suffering that many may be impatient with the problems of a luxuriously clad woman of leisure. But this classic drama of adultery–spare in plot, fascinating in design-is a revenge of the world of art on the world of property. And we haven’t seen such a story this well framed in a long time.

The director is a wit, but a wise, calm one: the Visconti-like portrait of the banality of old, stagnant wealth steals up on you. The attacks on the Recchis are strictly for the careful watcher to notice. A background incident, for instance: despite the elderly matriarch’s intense snobbery, she turns her full 500 candlepower smile on an American-Asian financier of no breeding but with a well-padded wallet. Earlier we saw this upstart plutocrat give a suave speech about the beneficial side of war. For that matter, Emma herself is a kind of prisoner of class war: a lonely woman in a tower rescued by the power of love and the senses.

By Richard von Busack
Since The Kids Are Alright is getting a reputation as “the lesbian Brokeback Mountain” (so said Kathy Wolfe in a piece for B.A.R.; Wolfe is the Santa Clara Valley’s local hero and CEO of America’s largest distributor of gay/lesbian films, Wolfe Video), we can draw a couple of parallels. The first is that The first is the superior job Focus Films did unrolling this small film, the same kind of effort they made for Brokeback.

The second is that just like the Anne Hathaway/Jake Gyllenhaal scene in Brokeback, the most ardent sex in The Kids Are All Right is heterosexual—a moment of Julianne Moore’s yelp of delight when undressing a man for a fling. This tryst doesn’t at all negate The Kids Are All Right as one of the funniest and most incisive portraits we’ve got of a gay marriage.
Director Lisa Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg take their film away from the realm of the typical gay and lesbian film festival–style talkathon and move it up to speed with blogs, Alison Bechdel’s cartoons Dykes to Watch Out For and the fiction of Mary Gaitskill.
As in her early High Art, one respects Cholodenko the most for not being a utopian. In this prime, tart comedy, she creates a pair of wives as capable of passive aggressiveness, sneakiness and ruthlessness as any straight couple. How could anyone deny gay people a right to marriage after seeing that they go through it as badly as anyone straight?

We can see how the two harmonize as they share the home they’ve had in Venice Beach for at least 10 years. Moore’s Jules is a classic California girl: no intellectual, very earthy, a blurter-out-er of things she probably shouldn’t have said. Her wife, an obstetrician, Nic (Annette Bening, amusingly dour), comes back from work in a miasma of disapproval, trying to get some relaxation in the very dead bed they share. (Here is the year’s funniest scene of two long-married humans trying to get it on.)
They have two children, both got by a sperm donor: Joni (Mia Wasikowska of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson)—“Laser” must have been Jules’ choice. Joni, ready to leave for college, wants to meet the anonymous donor who fathered her. He turns up, a shaggy chef named Paul. It’s Mark Ruffalo in a classic Mark Ruffalo part: a slackerly analogue to the chef of desire Edoardo Gabbriellini played in I Am Love.
Nic and Jules’ kids get along with the man well enough that he starts to become a sort of member of the family. And Jules finds herself becoming disturbingly attracted, despite being as gay as they come.
This story carries a strong sense of place, with deft scenes of life west of the 405. The film begins with the camera taking a skateboard ride and includes a Whole Foods joke: “They push açai berries like crack.” The sense of place gives dimension to these characters, makes the acting reminiscent of the lived-in performances in Mike Leigh films. The most Leigh-like moments come when the cast gathers around a dining table and Nic gets enough wine in her to sing a Joni Mitchell song. (Mitchell is a presiding deity in the film: the Angeleno who has always insisted in her music that her morals weren’t better than anyone else’s just because she was a woman.)
The reason the “kids are all right” is that they’re young enough that their motives are clear. In this comedy, it’s the adults who dissemble and wound each other. Nic looks right through the spouse she supposedly loves; Jules sneaks out and gets sex on the side and victimizes a co-worker who seems to be learning about the affair.
And Paul isn’t any more innocent; it becomes clear that what he really loves isn’t Jules herself, lovable as the pint-size, fearless and charming Moore always is onscreen. Rather, it’s the sense of settlement that draws him in. As a director, Cholodenko is a dry wit. But the way she analyzes the needy, unpretty cores of these characters is what takes The Kids Are All Right out of the realm of the domestic comedy/drama and makes it a film to remember.

Comic book characters strike a chord with the internal pulse of the human psyche that inherently need to feel protected, have wrongs righted, and justice served to the criminals of society. If you allow a mythic figure to deliver that justice while being more than human—you have the dream of every adolescent boy. Alas, it is only a dream when the boy realizes he is only human, until he learns of Batman. Batman’s success resides in the fact that he is only human, with super cool toys that Morgan Freeman dreams up for him. Any adolescent boy could potentially be Batman is eager to watch his potential life unfold on the silver screen. Hollywood has been capitalizing upon this fact since the first Batman movie in 1989 paved the way for box office gold.

Now, regarding those rumors, we do know this; Nolan has yet to sign his name to any contract, yet is not shy to state he is not a fan of 3-D technology. His reluctance comes from his belief that the images appear too dark on the screen, and that the nomenclature 3-D versus 2-D is misleading to begin with. Nolan’s trained expertise allows him to artfully translate a captured moving image onto a flat screen while preserving the three-dimensionality of the captured image. Referring to this process as 2-D is insulting to his craft, as it dismisses the fact that the moving image was originally 3-D, and that the director preserved the three-dimensionality. Yet, Nolan is not an elitist, and understands if the audiences of America want 3-D, than Warner Brothers will support 3-D due to economic reasons and not much else, and Nolan will oblige.

Another unanswered riddle swirling the press is, who will play the Riddler? Johnny Depp was in the lead for months, but once Christopher Nolan began working with Joseph Gordon-Levitt on his thriller, Inception, the rumors shifted gears and this underdog could be giving the show pony a run for his money. Depp seems the obvious choice, almost too obvious, as if it wouldn’t even be all that exciting to watch him hit another homer– but to watch Gordon-Levitt step up to the plate and kill it? That seems more enticing to me.

Now, personally, I never dreamed of being Batman, but I did dream of being rescued by Batman—after which he would undoubtedly fall madly in love with me and whisk me off to his manor. That dream is reason enough for me to feed into these pulsating rumors and drive Batman’s demand and heroic status even higher.

by Richard von Busack

THE HISTORY of a seriously odd mallard, Wild Grass is Alain Resnais’ leisurely, cryptic satire on the extremes of male pride. Based on Christian Gailly’s novel The Incident, it concerns characters who are as much mysteries to themselves as they are to us. Georges (André Dussolier, sort of a debonair version of Ed Begley Jr.) is a 60ish suburbanite who finds a lady’s wallet. He fixates on her: a passion that demands not just acknowledgment, but serious respect. Georges is a married man, but his younger wife, Suzanne (Anna Cosigny), evinces no signs of jealousy, only a bemused sense of possession, unshakable by any rogue feelings on her husbands’ part. She is as calm as the concrete, even as her husband’s passion bursts through the cracks like crabgrass (the film’s title is explained by just such an image).
Georges’ unusual love object is a middle-aged dentist, Marguerite (Sabine Azéma, the Christian secretary in Private Fears in Public Places), a carrot-top who flies planes as a hobby. This detail captivates Georges; in his mind, Marguerite begins to resemble the image of a famous hero aviatrix of the 1930s. He amplifies his persistence—and vents his anger, when she refuses to meet with him.
Edouard Baer’s urbane narration keeps this pleasurable experiment remote as well as comedic, even if there are static moments of slow deliberation, off-putting fancifulness and a family meal that is mostly there to show just how settled Georges is. Wild Grass is the story of a man working himself up into the role of a great lover, a man of dark proud passion. What he really is, is a duffer. In one final moment of excruciating embarrassment, he resembles Leslie Nielsen in a slapstick role.

Just as Georges represents hopeless love, Marguerite represents the color red; Wild Grass is an abstraction of what movies do. If you don’t count the Mathieu Almaric’s hilarious turn as a cop taking it easy for the rest of us, the film’s highlight is the evolution of Marguerite into a cinematic love object. The frizzy yet chic woman haunts a street of glowing crimson, in which the centerpiece is one of those lovely, bijou-size revival movie theaters they have in Paris, bathed in Chinese red light.

by Richard von Busack

Actors, especially who are clearly going the distance, know enough to josh the roles that are their annuities: it’s a matter of professionalism and survival. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, coping with the typically atrocious Stephenie Meyer plot in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse keep things looser than usual. Even the stoked up audiences of teens, revved to cheer for Team Edward or Team Jacob were laughing up their sleeves a little bit. Taylor Lautner’s muscly physique, for instance: that’s funny. One of the best lines is Edward griping “Doesn’t he own a shirt?” The movie even gets a bit sublime for a few minutes: the three are trapped in a tent during a snowstorm, and only snuggling for warmth will save Bella’s life. At least the werewolf has body heat.
As if all the muscles in the world would make up for the glum-doggie devotion Lautner emotes. Jacob gives the male audience something to take home. That is, an object lesson of how not to court a woman by following her around, telling her repeatedly that you love her and she just hasn’t discovered it yet. This creepy pesky kid-brother action is not helped by Jacob hanging around with a pack of identically dressed werewolves who are more like chipmunks. Were the filmmakers worried that it would be a slur on Native Americans if they made the wolf-pack a little sexy and sinister? Why do they have to conduct themselves like a Y Indian Guides meeting?
Lautner is so noble you have to guffaw, and you can predict how it’ll go for him. No one ever rebukes Bella Swan for playing both ends against the middle; the one woman who susses Bella out as a manipulator only says something in passing, changes into a werewolf and runs away.
One supposes Bella could pass for an anti-heroine in a dim light, and certainly the light in Washington state is dim enough. She should be getting smarter. She’s finally out of high school. The same series that gave you vegan vamps and werewolves eating muffins now gives you Edward Cullen in a golden robe and mortarboard. The valedictorian is Anna Kendrick, playing Bella’s best pal; Kendrick’s eyes are clearly on the exit sign in both scenes. The date of Bella coming vampirical transformation is nigh, but it can be delayed (you know Meyer) until Edward has, and I quote, “the extraordinary honor” of marrying Bella. The “extraordinary” in that sentence sticks out like a call-bank operator’s “how can I provide you with exceptional service?” However, there is an argument against Bella taking the vamp’s path.
Newborns. The kids aren’t all right. We learn that the newly changed vampire has super strength and a raging appetite. And the vengeful Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard plays her this time) is turning loads of Seattleites into newby bloodsuckers: starting with a kid from Forks, Wa. who is attacked in a mediocre pre-title grabber.
Victoria’s mission is to attack the peaceful boring Cullen clan, a barely differentiated bag of wigs and contact lenses, led as always by kindly old doctor Carlisle (the accidentally uproarious Peter Facinelli, who I’m positive is Eugene Levy in disguise). As Bella is unaccountably beloved by both Edward and Jacob, the vamps and lycanthropes form an uneasy pact. The treaty is sealed in a scene that has all the tension of a group of business partners signing a medium-sized deal.

David Slade proves that the mark of a former music video director is that the movie will be sustainable for three or four minutes at a time. The colors are well mixed, especially by the standards of this wonkily-hued franchise; he really worked the palette in the agoraphobic Hard Candy. The early 1970s-album-cover look of the flowery fields behind Bella and Edward seems like a right choice for such brooders. Stewart is well photographed during her most plausible scene: a bit at the end where she explains that she’s been the supernatural kind all her life, even before she met Edward.
The punched up violence helps also: aren’t these supposed to be vampire movies, for God’s sake? (“You girls ruin everything!”—Bart Simpson.) Still the climactic battle of good ‘n’ evil looks like a petting zoo version of the funny-animal Gotterdammerung in Chronicles of Narnia: a semi-animated scrimmage of super-fast vamps and donkey-sized werewolves. It looks like a pick-up football game in which the players are suddenly devoured by the mascots.
As always Edward, “The `True Love Waits’ Vampire”™ delays consummation. Or does he? One scene he puts a ring on Bella’s finger. The next time we see this finger in closeup, it’s bleeding: symbolic badge of the transfixed hymen? Does this mean she overcane his concern for what he tells Bella is “your virtue…your soul.” Are we really hearing someone implying Bella will lose her soul if she has premarital sex?
No matter what heat the actors bring to it, they can’t boil the Mormon starch out of Meyer’s work. Meyer is devious, switching the genders on the traditional should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-do-it argument, with Bella Swan wanting to go, and Edward slamming the brakes. He has a speech about his old-fashionedness, about going down on one knee and asking her father that’ll make you lament the possibility of human progress. An unfathomable Indian legend about a chief’s third wife who took one for the team, underscores Meyers’ urgings that a lady’s part is to observe and suffer.

And the back story of one of the Cullen gang, Rosalie (Nikki Hale) has a real howler in it. In her human life in the 1920s, Rosalie was sexually humiliated by her drunken fiancé in front of a bunch of his friends. Proudly she snaps “I’ll see you tomorrow. Sober!” (Telling him to go away forever never crossed her mind.) That she gets turned into a vamp, and avenges herself doesn’t count: she even apologizes for her wrath when she tells the tale: “I was a little theatrical back then.”
These vamp movies could use a little theater…and a little more female wrath than Bella injuring her tiny fist on Jacob’s studly jaw. There is a slight betterness this time around because of the humor and action (instead of the endless mope of the emo undead); the stars carry it along, readying themselves for the next one. Still, Meyer’s channeling of the golden age of the Gothic novel gives one the depressing feeling of passing by a housing tract named “Wuthering Heights”. The film is basically a cheat: the two prettiest people in it don’t kiss.

By Richard von Busack
How does a director who is 101 years old make a movie? Manoel de Oliveira’s brief but poignant Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl (2009) answers that question: like no director alive.
Just over an hour long, and based on a short story by Eca de Quieros (1845-1900) the film unfolds in flashback from a train ride, just like Bunuel’s Obscure Object of Desire. There is one single line of narration: “What we will not tell a wife, what we will not tell a friend, we will tell to a stranger.”
On a train heading to the beaches of the Algarve, the fortyish Macario (Ricardo Trepa) pours his heart out to a maternal older woman, telling the story of the sacrifices he made to win the hand of Luisa (Catarina Wallenstien). Luisa was a woman he flirted with through a window facing his office: she is a well-born coquette with a round Chinese fan, which she uses as a kind of semaphore. (It’s supposed to be enchanting and exotic, but here’s evidence of distance to the tale: with its foofy dyed plume, the fan looks like the kind of novelty found in a Chinatown bin.)

Macario lives with his uncle, a merchant, and he works as an accountant for the family firm. But he loses both position and home when he asks his uncle if he can marry the girl across the way. He will eventually discover that Luisa isn’t worth what he’ll suffer to get to her; Macario is blinded to her character flaws, which soon become unignorable.
This shorter film isn’t as profoundly solid about the limits of cinema and art as was De Oliviera’s I’m Going Home; it’s very much a short-story film: enigmatic and hard to sum up with a simple moral, and it doesn’t end with any burst of irony.
What interested me, besides the brutal simplicity of the ending (a train seen from an overcrossing, barreling off into infinity), was the task de Oliveira makes himself: how to tell a story of the 19th century when setting it in the 21st? It’s this aspect that’s the most convincing, when the movie could have looked quaint and stale.
Eccentricities… is set in a checkerboard tiled, traffic-free street of old town Lisbon, within a circle of merchants and minor nobility: the sort of people who need formal introductions to someone they want to ask out, and who needs permission of their own families to marry; places where salons are still held, where poetry is read and Debussy is played on the harp. There are still lives out there like this, one feels—in the stodgier arrondisements in Paris or the richest, most blandly aristocratic neighborhoods in Mexico City.
The director keeps strict control over his actors, who play locked-in Latinos obsessed with correctness. And he keeps motor vehicles at bay—we sometimes hear the buzz of a Vespa in the distance, but that might be about it. He keeps this motif up until the last encounter between Luisa and Macario, when we see the rush of cars and the honking of horns in the near distance.
Eccentricities… has the formality of silent movies, keeping the central location even after the hero leaves. Macario goes off to the Cape Verde Islands to make his fortune; we hear letters about his life there.

Yet De Oliveira jests with the old-school technique: he cuts to a close-up of a lady’s leg, raised leg heel-backwards during the movie’s only kiss. (This convention is very dead, but it was once well known enough to be parodied in a Naked Gun movie, with Leslie Nielsen raising his leg at the same time his girlfriend did.)
The result is a film set outside time, which De Oliveira stresses by a shot of a curious church tower bearing a clock without hands.
Older directors generally get pessimistic, convinced of fatality and folly; this tranquil yet affecting movie seems serene and acute. The director is clearly not blaming the untrustworthiness of women or the foolishness of men; it’s a film that suggests the danger of idealization. The imago Luisa, with her ripe, sullen mouth, is nobody’s vixen: she promises nothing really: she does what she’s told and waits as a young lady does, while trying to get on demurely with her own personal compulsion. Promised semi-precious stones in exchange for becoming a good wife, she grabs diamonds instead.
It’s billed during this three day run with De Oliveira’s first film Douro, Fana Fluvial (1931) a silent 18 minute portrait of the Douro, “a river with a life of its own,” during at a time when oxcarts were still found in the streets of Porto. The style here is a Portuguese answer to experimental documentaries like Berlin: Portrait of a City and Man With a Movie Camera; suffused with avant-garde restlessness it shows us a suicide’s eye view of the titanic Luis 1st bridge and the glittering water underneath. The foaming prows of boats are edited into a speedy procession. In a market, fish and fowls are jammed in military rows as sharp as a cluster of knives, seen photographed point-first. The forward motion is relentless. It’s almost impossible to think that this work is by the same man who would become a calm old master 70 years later.

WHAT IS THE LITTLE TRAITOR ABOUT?

This is a movie that is based on a book by Amos Oz called “A Panther In The Basement.”  Amos Oz is one of Israel’s most pre-eminent authors.  He writes things with a political bent, and it’s all about his growing up in Jerusalem.  This particular book is about a young boy who is living under British occupation, because it was during the time of the British mandate.  It was a time when Israel was under occupation and NOT being the occupiers. At that time, they were smuggling a lot of Jews in because the British were not allowing people to come into the country.  So it was an interesting political time.  He hates the British, he despises them.  He and his friends plot ways to get the British out, with little handmade bombs and stuff.  One night after curfew, he’s caught by a British soldier, brilliantly played by Alfred Molina.  He is going to arrest him, but the two of them see there is an instant rapport.  There’s something about each of them that fascinates the other, and a friendship ensues.  He starts visiting the soldier, unbeknownst to his family and friends, and when people find out, they start to think he’s a…little traitor, that he’s passing secrets to the British.

WHAT DREW YOU TO THE NOVEL?

Amos Oz is a beautiful writer.  Everything is filled with thought and whimsy and interpretation.  [The book] deals with the idea of befriending an enemy, but not in the standard way.  The Palestinian woman falls in love with the Israeli boy, Romeo and Juliet, we’ve seen that before.  I’m not saying that’s not a good story but we’ve seen it.  To come at it from a different vantage point, the British and a young Israeli/Palestinian boy was a more interesting way, I thought, of watching two people become very good friends and very meaningful to each other even though they are supposedly enemies.

DID YOUR UPBRINING INFLUENCE YOUR DECISION TO MAKE THE MOVIE?

At this point in my life, yes, because I’m very involved [with Judaism] and everyone in my family is either a rabbi or a cantor.  Through so much of my show business life, I didn’t do things in this genre at all.  The only thing I did was, I ran a series called The Paper Chase, and when I took that series over, I put Jews into it.  How can you have a series about law school and not have Jews in it?  But this particular time in my life I seem to be gravitating towards Jewish and Israeli themes.

Tell me about the process of adapting the book.

The book is very small and filled with word play. That doesn’t always translate the best into a screenplay, so I took the essence of the character Proffy, and the idea of meeting a British soldier, and I added things to make it more cinematic.

Even though it takes place over 50 years ago, israel is still a pretty polarizing subject.  How difficult was it to get this movie made?

It was torturous, as is the process with making any independent film.  “Who wants to see this?  It’s not commercial.”  And yes, there were several people…I wanted private investors, and many people said, “Oh, Amos Oz, he’s such a left wing person, I don’t want to invest in anything that has those left wing politics.”  Even now some reviewers have called it Jewish idealism, or a muddled morality tale.  Where did that come from?  Is it because, as you say, Israel is such a polarizing subject matter?  I don’t know.  But we did find enough people eventually to come in.  It was a true co-production between Israel and the United States, and that hasn’t happened in a long time.  We got some of the Israeli film fund to put some money in, and the cable station there bought rights, and then here, we just went from investor to investor, found it and pieced it together.  It was a miracle.

IS THERE EVER A POINT DURING THE PROCESS WHERE YOU SAY, “MAYBE THIS ISN’T THE MOVIE I SHOULD BE MAKING”?

On some subject matters I would have said yes, but this was so important to because it was about Israel, it was about a period of their history that hasn’t been delved into very much.  So, because, I love the material so much, no matter what happened, I kept saying I believe in this and I’m going to fight for it.  I don’t know if I would feel the same way if I was doing [a more mainstream film].  But because I love this stuff, I always say I have to believe in something tremendously to go through this.  I’m sure most filmmakers would say that.

TELL ME ABOUT THE CASTING PROCESS.  HOW DID YOU GET ALFRED MOLINA?

I wrote the part with him in mind.  He was my dream and he knows this.  Everybody said, “Get somebody younger, get somebody handsome, get somebody thinner.”  I said no.  I see this character as an older guy in his 40’s, roly poly, corpulent, kind of gooney in a way.  And I know his manager, so when I finished the script I sent it to her, she gave it to him and he read it and said yes immediately, which was fabulous.

TELL ME ABOUT IDO PORT, WHO PLAYS THE ROLE OF PROFFY.

He had only done one other movie before, called “Dear Mr. Waldman”.  He’s a remarkable child.  He was the first person I read for the part, and I loved him.  But when you’re casting a part, and you find somebody on the first reading, you say, “No something’s wrong.  I’m too anxious.”  Then I auditioned many children after him, and came back to him.  He’s Israeli, but the reason his English is so good is because his mother is an English teacher.  So I could actually him to say the T H sound, the “tha” as opposed to the “za”.  [Ido] doesn’t want to be an actor anymore.  He wants to be a scientist, and he wants to go to Princeton.

THE MOVIE WAS SHOT IN ISRAEL.  OTHER THAN SOME OF THE ACTORS, WAS IT SHOT WITH AN ISRAELI CAST AND CREW?

Completely.  That was one of the stipulations of getting the Israeli money, was that I had to do it with an all Israeli cast and crew.  I was pretty nervous because, although I feel very connected to Israel, I was going as an American director going to direct a piece of their history, and I was nervous that they would resent that on some level. You know, “Can we trust her?  Is she one of us?  Do we like her?”  We did talk in English, because when they heard my Hebrew, they laughed.  Theodore Bikel was visiting Israel at the time, and although he lived in Israel, he was not an Israeli citizen, but it was fine.  Everybody else, 100% Israeli.

WHY WAS IT IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO SHOOT IN ISRAEL, INSTEAD OF SOMEWHERE ELSE?  TO AN OUTSIDER, IT SEEMS LIKE A DANGEROUS PLACE TO SHOOT.

That’s why there’s been very little filming, because of exactly what you’re talking about.  But I went to teach a master class during the intifada (the uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip) because no one else would go.  I couldn’t join the army, [so] this was my way of contributing.  And I learned that if I was going to be in danger, then I would rather be in danger in Israel than any other place in the world.

DO YOU THINK ALL OF THIS ADDED TO THE EMOTION OF THE FILM?

Absolutely.  We would not get into this mindset in Morocco or Toronto.  There’s something about being in the actual location. I wanted it to be completely authentic, and it was.  With the greatest art director in the world.  With every piece of ground and every tree, nothing was outside of 1947.  He wouldn’t let me film if it was.  [In other movies], when they shoot Israel, it’s so NOT Israel.  It’s like, Morocco or Crete and you can see it’s not Israel.  In “The Little Traitor”, it’s 100% Israel, and it’s a beautiful Israel.  I said to the cameraman, “Let’s make it look French.  Let’s have a love song to Jerusalem,” and he liked that idea.  It turned out that it DID become dangerous because while we were in the middle of filming the Lebanese War broke out.  I didn’t know what was going to happen.  Alfred’s whole support system became hysterical.  “We’ll fly you (out of Israel).  We’ve got connections.”  And he said, “I’m not going anywhere.  I’m making a movie.”  We also took our cue from the Israelis.  They don’t stop living because there’s a war.  You had to make certain concessions.  Our hotel was jammed full of people.  We lost lots of crew members who were called up to duty.  Every five seconds there were planes flying over to Lebanon.  The irony was enormous.  Here, we’re making a film about Israel becoming a state, and she’s still fighting for her right to be a state.  And the scene that has the most memory, at the end, the UN decides that Israel will become a state, and so, when the people found out that the vote had come in, they ran out of their houses and started dancing in the street.  So we recreated that a little bit, and [the actors and extras] were crying because they remembered this happening.  And in the middle of this, the jets to Lebanon [flew over].

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SCENE IN THE MOVIE?

Well, it’s basically a coming of age film.  There are parallels between his coming of age and Israel coming of age.  At the end, he kind of gets the little girl and is so elated and jumps off the wall.  Every time I see it, it lifts my heart.  The best scene to shoot was the scene I described to you before when they were dancing in the street.  It was such a recreation that I couldn’t discern between reality and fantasy.  It really felt like I was in Israel in 1947 until those jets flew over.

WHAT’S BEEN THE REACTION TO THE FILM?  YOU’VE WON SOME FILM FESTIVALS.

It’s been the darling of the Jewish film festivals.  Jewish audiences love this film.  We broke all house records for this movie house [in Delray Beach, Florida].  While we were there, we would be out Avatar.  People were flocking to see this movie.  We won the Audience Award at the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, the Palm Beach International Film Festival.  In Palm Springs, we made Best of Fest.  We just won an award in Armenia.  A children’s jury picked us as the best feature.  We’ve done a lot of international film festivals:  Munich, Rio de Janeiro.  We premiered at the Miami Film Festival.  And we have a full fledged release.  We’re having a nice little success.  I wanted to go to Dubai and those places, but they wouldn’t take us because we’re considered an Israeli film.

IT’S NOT A POLITICAL STORY, BUT DO YOU THINK THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL HAVE SOME AFFECT ON HOW PEOPLE FEEL ABOUT THE MOVIE?

The minute you mention Israel, you create waves.  You’ll have some people who feel adamantly one way, other people another.  There’s not a day that goes by when there’s not something about Israel, so even this film, which is very gentle, and very slice of life.  It’s a very small movie.  It doesn’t come on with any kind of political assault.  Even that creates some ripples, both for the gung-ho Israel supporters and anti-Isreal people.

IT SEEMS LIKE YOU REALLY PUT A LOT ON THE LINE TO MAKE THIS FILM.

I think it’s really courageous to make little movies.  I think it’s much easier to make big movies.  It’s much easier to create tension.  It’s much harder to make people feel and remember them.  Life is made up of little moments.  Life is not made up of blue creatures on in a land that you go to.  That’s fun, but I love those little European films, and they’ve shaped the way I look at life, more than the bigger movies.  The courage came in saying, this is a small story, I believe in it.  Two people come into each other’s lives and make such a mark, even when it’s for a short period of time.  They can have a lasting effect on each other.  These are little themes that have big emotions, and that’s what I love about film the most.

The Little Traitor is currently playing in Delray Beach, Florida; Albany, New York; La Jolla, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Detroit, Michigan.  It opens Friday, June 11 in Chicago, Illinois.  For more information about the film, go to the official website, www.thelittletraitormovie.com.

Matt Sills, the author, is a regular contributor to Movie Times.  He is a graduate of NYU’s prestigious film program at the Tisch School of the Arts and currently lives in LA.

by Richard von Busack

Stick around, past the politically creepy pre-title sequence—it’s like the fond wish of an Arizonan that the US/Mexican border was patrolled with a death ray. After that, Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team develops into the kind of breezy, tall-tale action film that so many try to make and so few have either the guts or the gall to pull off. Carnahan and the writers have a healthy appetite for taking the more outré stuff in James Bond films—the live-man-trapped-in-the-crematorium scene in Diamonds Are Forever, for instance–and giving it a final turn.

Click Here for A-Team Showtimes, Reviews and Trailers

The TV show, which ran from 1983-87, was decadent action-adventure mulch, most fondly remembered for the light comedy stylings of the humungous, distinctively coiffured muscleman Mr. T. Carnahan doesn’t mess with the premise, while triangulating a mid-east war scenario between good soldiers and evil “Blackforest” mercenaries. The unreliable CIA is working behind the scenes.

As the main slimy CIA agent, Patrick Wilson gets a chance for riffage (“I travel light. Stuff like loyalty doesn’t fit into the overhead bins”). He’s the focus of the only really military-sounding line in the film: about how a CIA man’s habit of wearing body armor into military headquarters tells you everything you need to know about the organization.

The adventure itself, following the prequel pre-title, is essentially the same kind of plot that served The A-Team 25 years ago. Four renegade ex Army rangers are pursuing some currency printing plates in the possession of a bearded Arab. The Arab is as thinly disguised as the ghost in a Scooby Doo episode. The team breaks out of jail and follows the plates to Frankfurt (it’s Vancouver, speaking of thin disguises).

The cast has solid rapport and keeps a straight face. As “Face” Bradley Cooper (the normal guy in The Hangover) ought to be incredibly annoying, but he’s so openly relaxed and self-satisfied that we feel like he shares our disbelief that anyone could be that smooth. As his ex (and the Army’s pursuer of the fugitive A-Team) Jessica Biel is almost as pretty as Cooper. The movie has sense enough to slow down and give the pair some snogging scenes, including one slightly-slowed clinch that might be based on the slo-mo Stewart/Kelly kiss in Rear Window.

The undersized Sharlto Copley of District 9 handles the broadest slapstick as the not-sane pilot Murdock. Playing the paternal senior officer “Hannibal” Liam Neeson (dyed ash-blonde) is a good swap for George Peppard—he’d be a good swap for three George Peppards, actually. By contrast, the exchange of wrestler Quinton “Rampage” Jackson for Mr. T makes for a vibe that’s more scared teddy bear than fierce grizzly.

Soaked until it swells in CG effects, The A-Team uses computer animation as it probably should be used—for ridiculous spectacle, for upside-down helicopter chases, for the tumbling of multi-ton objects as if they were dominoes. It would all look like genius if movie tickets were only $4; still, not many summer films include that flying tank we all tried to draw in the high school cafeteria, nor are any of the other examples of summer dunderhead cinema likely to match The A-Team’s best gag: the last word about 3-D fever. The A-Team’s unofficial motto is a line here, “Overkill is underrated.” Its motif, the shell game, “the old army game,” demonstrates a constant delight in trickery and ingenuity.

by Richard von Busack

Despite the use of Johnny Cash’s cover version of Neil Diamond’s best song, the film Solitary Man seems like a strange misnomer for Michael Douglas’s latest rogue-male movie. After a few years away from lead roles, solitude is the last quality he’s demonstrating. In his mid-sixties, Douglas is clearly eager for attention, to be both the wisest and the most corrupt man in the room.
Director/scripter Brian Koppelman and co-director David Levien (late of The Girlfriend Experience) intended Solitary Man to be the scarifying story of an out and out New York bastard, driven to selfishness because of his fear of his own mortality.
In the prologue, used-car tycoon Ben Kalmen gets a bad EKG at the doctor’s office… 6 1/2 years later, he’s reaping the results of his immensely bad behavior ever since. He’s broke. He’s divorced (from the ever-patient Susan Sarandon). He’s been wrapped up in a scandal; the scandal is vaguely described, but Kalmen seems to have been in on the same kind of scam William H. Macy had going in Fargo. His daughter distrusts him, though he has a grandson who adores him.
On the plus side, Kalmen is involved with a good-looking shrew of a society lady named Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker). She suggests that Kalmen escort her teenage daughter (Imogen Poots) to his old school in Boston, where he was once an important donor and where he knows the dean. Jordan hopes Kalmen can grease her daughter’s way into college. During the trip, the old man ruins what’s left of his life.
Solitary Man’s rhythms are those of a play—loads of expounding, and loads of quiet listening. The lines all have the audible clicking of a keyboard underneath them. (“Every time I lower the bar of my expectations, you limbo under it.”)
And the film has very little visual inventiveness or visual counterpoint. One clever exception: a flying Frisbee is dubbed with a jet roar, to indicate a transition shot between cities, as well as an establishing shot on a Boston campus quad.
The cooked-up explanation for Ben’s misdeeds make it hard to feel that this bad man is real, let alone an oracle. But he does persist in passing on life lessons to the next generation. And the young are all too ready to listen, especially a callow college student (a maddeningly passive Jesse Eisenberg) who befriends Ben during the college trip and accompanies him to a campus keg party.
In the film’s falsest passage, Kalmen rekindles a friendship with an old pal (Danny DeVito), a humble restaurant owner. DeVito is Solitary Man’s mandatory mensch who assures Kalmen that little guys are still behind him no matter how he behaves.
Douglas does what his father Kirk would do: he makes the mistake of plumping up this harsh material, softening it, playing it bigger than life. It’s constant movie-star grandstanding in a story that might have been worth believing if it took place on a lower key. Strangely, the nation’s critics have been responding to this splashy handling of a small-man’s tale, describing this film as a tour de force. Then again, it is critics– and other actors–who have the most interest in watching a movie star’s force of personality challenging inferior, phony material. In this case, the material wins, swamping Douglas and the rest of the cast.

This film, which is like a dunce’s version of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, is all about movies, right up into the end shot. There Douglas replays George Clooney’s silent meditative last minutes in Michael Clayton. But it’s not the movieish, vainglorious performance that makes Solitary Man such a celebration of a mawkish yet sexually aggressive character—a lewd Jack Lemmon. It’s the conviction that we’ll admire a bad man’s refusal to act his age, emulating a movie industry where so few actors really do.

by Richard von Busack

MERMAID KITSCH must be thundered against, but there’s a surprising amount of grit in Neil Jordan’s Ondine. In his 16th film, Jordan is clearly working to please himself; the Irish locations are close to his home, and maybe not since The Company of Wolves has he had so much success with Irish magical realism.
I went in unenthusiastic, but it dawned on me that once I started watching Ondine the only thing I would be able to think about for weeks would be the fate of the oceans. The incomparable photographer Christopher Doyle brings out the sparkling gloom of these waterscapes, the summer sunlessness, the lambency that’s almost as emotionally piercing as Irish music.
Syracuse (Colin Farrell) is known to all and sundry as “Circus,” because of the drunken clowning that has marked his life. He has been, however, nearly three years sober on the morning he goes out fishing and his purse seine hauls a half-dead lady out of the waters off the coast of County Cork.
Ondine (Alicja Bachleda) has a hard-to-place accent; she asks for shelter and to be hidden from the sight of the locals. Syracuse agrees and only confides in the village’s blasé priest (Stephen Rea).
Word gets out, though. Syracuse’s precocious, crippled daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), decides that Ondine is a selkie—a Celtic were-seal in human form. Early on, Jordan gives viewers room to be skeptical. After Syracuse first broaches the subject of Ondine as if he were reciting a bedtime fable about a lady in the water, Annie responds, “That’s a really shite story.”

The same, if less profane, bemusement comes from the padre, whom Syracuse uses as an AA sponsor because there isn’t one in the village. Rea genially revives the old tradition of the Irish movie priest, powerless to defeat sin but damned if he’s going to approve of it, either—“Ya wouldn’t want to say a few Hail Marys on your way out?”
The contrasting colors of the real world make Ondine’s fantasy shine. Annie’s drunken mother (Dervla Kirwan) and her boyfriend (Tony Curran) have both a good rapport with each other and a bad way with Annie. When her daughter gets a new electric wheelchair, Mom takes it for a few laps around the pool table in her local pub. The most serious display of magical powers is Ondine blessing Syracuse’s fishing; she apparently lures the catch into his nets with song.
Long-lens shots bring out Farrell’s virility through juxtapositions. Jordan poses him to look like Hercules, drawing a boat into shore from a rope on top of a cliff, the forced perspective making the big boat look like a toy. We also see him towering over a lighthouse as if he were Gulliver in Lilliput.
In close-ups, Farrell does a covert job of acting: shadows conceal his face, and hair conceals his eyes. It’s the best kind of something-missing performance yet by this actor who seems to be getting better in his recent films. That he is working alongside Bachleda, his real-life partner, ensures one of his most relaxed and touching performances.
Luckily, Farrell is working under a companionable director—friendly but with a tough, grave streak. Jordan doesn’t oversell the heartbreak any more than he oversells the fantasy. Syracuse picks up the air of nonchalance, telling Ondine, “Maybe you just walked into the sea because of a bad marriage. I did that once.”
Jordan’s previous aquatic picture, In Dreams, suffered from too many logical explanations. Eventually, Ondine comes to the section one dreads—the part that submits that there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Jordan keeps this section short, but unfortunately, this is where the film has its supposed climax. It’s a murky standoff, and Doyle’s gloaming lapses into semidarkness. These few lapses fade in the memory as if they were a coda. More memorable are the elements of Ondine: the light on the water, the salty quip, the sense of possibility.

by Richard von Busack

How to sum up the appeal of the Kuchar Brothers’ cinema? In some 40 years of strictly underground filmmaking, these two New York expatriates explored cinema in both parallel and separate directions, though never in any really lucrative form. Neither were climbers. Mike Kuchar had his mind permanently changed in the early 1970s by a hashish cake and an encounter with Himalayan monks; he approaches indie filmmaking from a symbolist stance, using mythical figures (as in his Midsummer’s Nightmare). Brother George has been a teacher of some three decades standing at San Francisco Art Institute.

Jennifer Kroot’s outstanding documentary It Came From Kuchar (upcoming at the Rialto Elmwood in Berkeley, and playing the Red Vic in San Francisco June 14-15) takes its structure from watching George and his SFAI class produce and direct The Fury of Frau Frankenstein (2005), a crazed narrative with superheroes, giant spiders and the witchy Linda Martinez, a 70 year old who doesn’t mind explicit upskirt scenes.

Yet it’s clear that Kuchar’s own efforts are less distinguished as horror parody (pretty much the first kind of movie a budding filmmaker does when he or she picks up a camera). What he loves most are the flagrant melodramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the days of bubble-coiffured, thickly powdered actresses, eyebrows painted to the size and shape of blood-engorged leeches. His is the cinema of nigh- Kabuki makeup, tatty lingerie, shadowed with lurid, cookaloris-induced shapes.

The shy but muscular brothers (perhaps identical twins; they’re not certain about it themselves) grew up as devout Catholics in a Bronx neighborhood that was just about to be bulldozed for Robert Moses’ expressways. “A perfect place,” George remembers it, with plenty of abandoned buildings and vacant lots to play in. If they speak with more fondness of a long-vanished parakeet than their own father (“A carnal man,” George calls this long-dead truck driver) it’s a little understandable. It sounds like Lulu was a great parakeet. George Kuchar’s introspective qualities, when he’s not on a set filming, makes him a natural animal fancier; his The Mongreloid (1978) is as sweet a movie as anyone ever made about a dog.

In Kroot’s series of concise and intelligent interviews with Buck Henry, Wayne Wang, John Waters, Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin (the last named has the most artistic kinship with George), she emphasizes that the humble Kuchars made a place for themselves. They were artists in an era when there wasn’t much underground. In the early 1960s, alternative film consisted of rented spaces, 8mm film, and the hopes of catching the attention of pretty much the only man writing about such film, columnist Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice. The Kuchars were the contemporaries of Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol. Among these big-name artists, they held the same place as Henri Rousseau did in the French avant-garde: working from a seat of the pants style, they were enjoyed as grade-a eccentrics.

George—a pioneer of the video diary form–alternates studies of himself with full-blown emulation of Hollywood at its most maniacal, in the Robert Aldrich/Richard Brooks vein. The titles themselves deserve a theater marquee 100 feet long: Hold Me While I’m Naked (George Kuchar’s 8 1/2); Lust for Ecstasy, Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, Sins of the Fleshapoids, and A Town Called Tempest (with its home-made cyclone, this movie beats the hell out of Twister).

The epic The Devil’s Cleavage (1973) flabbergasted me when I saw it: I suppose the idea of using stock footage to change a film’s location hadn’t occurred to me until I saw this film. Like all uneducated film viewers, I tended to take it on faith that if a movie cut to Tahiti, the whole film must have been shot there. (It’s surprising how few indie filmmakers risk a deliberate change of scene; almost none of them can see outside the restrictions of their particular art ghetto or suburb when—with a mere film clip of a street scene of Istanbul or Bali– they could have the whole world to chose from.) The changes of place in the sprawling, fevered film is less remarkable than the narrative and its hardboiled lines. One zircon in the trove: a trollop warning off her suitor with the line, “I stink so much it scares me.”

Turbulence, whether dramatic or meteorological, is George Kuchar’s métier. It’s no surprise that his hobby of many years was visiting a motel in El Reno, Oklahoma in the midst of tornado season, in the hopes of seeing what might develop in the skies. (His Wild Night in El Reno shows the unmatched drama of a severe Oklahoma thunderstorm.) As a firm Fortean, George introduces all sorts of arcane elements into his films: flying saucers (he’s seen one), Bigfoot, monsters of all shape. The work delights us with both boldness and the essential innocence; there’s nothing calculated about the Kuchar Brothers’ straight-faced satire.

George’s collaboration with Curt McDowell, an early casualty to AIDS, is part of Kroot’s story; in his friendship (or more) with McDowell, George entered more pornographic terrain: Thundercrack! is a polysexual teasing out of themes in James Whale’s The Old Dark House, complete with Kuchar playing a man in love with a gorilla. I’m also delighted to see that Kroot interviewed Bill Griffith (of Zippy the Pinhead) to describe Kuchar’s career as a San Francisco underground cartoonist. George’s piece on H. P. Lovecraft is a model for how to use the comic form for biography.

One doubts we’ll get a better biography of these important filmmakers. Still, it’s the old story: George Kuchar is yet another artist who didn’t get the props all the deserved because he stayed put in The Mission…though we see the Kuchars’ trip to the film festival at Telluride where some necessary attention is paid.

As both brothers are at an age when disappointment is as endemic as high blood pressure, it’s refreshing to see how enthusiastic Mike and George Kuchar still are: how the work keeps them young. But there is a note of deflation with the end of George’s 2005 project, as he says goodbye to his students, as they file off for the Christmas holidays. We note his sudden solitude and quietness as the students leave. Fortunately, his imagination hasn’t failed him yet.

by Richard von Busack
DIRECTOR Ken Loach has been nobly serving the cause of the proletariat with social-realist films for so long that he has earned the right to make a crowd pleaser. The genial Looking for Eric is just that. Eric (the palindromic Steve Evets), a depressed, skinny Manchester postie, gets his groove back through the good counsel of an imaginary pal: Eric Cantona (playing himself), deemed here “the greatest footballer who ever lived.”
Like a Conrad hero, Eric is marked by a failure of nerve 30 years ago; now his past has come home to haunt him. Eric’s grown-up daughter, Sam (Lucy-Jo Hudson), needs some help taking care of her baby. She reaches out to both Eric and his long-estranged ex-wife, Lily (Stephanie Bishop), whom Eric has been avoiding for decades. Eric’s emotional crisis is detected by his bald, pudgy pal Meatballs (John Henshaw), who forms a makeshift men’s group to help Eric out.
All the fellas are supposed to get in touch with a spirit guide. Eric’s choice is obvious: “King” Cantona, the postman’s idol ever since the French footballer’s stint at Manchester United in the mid-1990s. While smoking some marijuana by himself, Eric the postman is visited by Eric the soccer star; the great man materializes from a poster—just as Bogart did in the Woody Allen/Herbert Ross film Play It Again, Sam. Through Cantona’s good advice, Eric starts to retrieve himself from a 30-year-long wrong turn, returning to the moment before he broke.

I don’t know jack about soccer, although Loach’s movie just about convinced me what is so great about the game. However, I can guess what sort of charisma a Frenchman would have to have to win the admiration of so many working-class British fans. Watching clips of Cantona play, one marvels at his preternatural ability to see when to kick and when to pass; one further enjoys the suave way Cantona handled “the seagull incident,” as diplomatic a putdown to the gutter press as ever made. This real-life clip is seen in the end titles. Loach may have picked Cantona to be a counselor because of another incident in the player’s lore: how he told reporters that he went to play soccer in England because his psychiatrist advised him to do it.
The Francophobia endemic in American/English films has contributed to the death of the romantic Frenchman onscreen; he’s been replaced by the bloodless ditherer and the dialect-comedy clown. Cantona, a Marseillean from Sardinian roots, is an ugly/handsome smolderer. In him, one sees the calm, debonair warmth that made moviegoers respond to French actors for decades. Cantona had a role in the 1998 feature Elizabeth but didn’t stand out there; yet he’s a natural for the camera, and he makes a believable mentor to a man in real pain.

Looking for Eric gets a little more fantastic in the last third, when the crowd-pleasing tricks arrive. The postman has two stepchildren from an apparently disastrous second marriage. The boys are going bad from neglect and falling under the control of a sadistic local criminal. Cantona’s exhortations to “trust your team” convince Eric to take some extralegal action, and that’s when I started to feel slightly ambiguous about this film.
Loach, generally a pretty strict left-wing director (Poor Cow, Raining Stones, et al.) seems here to be turning to the methods we Americans use to deal with our own feelings of powerlessness: visualization, life coaches and fantasies of vigilante action.
This is just an undertone, and it’s not as important as Loach’s often-loving look at the city of Manchester, and the talk, the humor and the pubs therein. It’s a male world with sternness behind the fellowship: that’s clear from the William Demerest–like gargle of Henshaw, running his men’s group and urging his pals to think of “Someone who totally loves you without conditions, right?” in a sergeant-major’s bark. This is a soulful movie, but its feet are on the ground.

by Richard von Busack

WHAT BEGINS as a mess of good actors flailing for something to do devolves into a tangle of expatriate loungers keeping their secrets. The City of Your Final Destination concerns Omar (bland Omar Metwally), an apprentice academic who travels all the way to South America under the spurring of his chilly, careerist fiancee (Alexandra Maria Lara). Omar seeks to convince the surviving relations of a one-and-done novelist to cooperate in the writing of a biography. This they are reluctant to do, figuring that the dead writer already spilled kilos of the family’s beans.

But at the Uruguayan finca where they all live, Omar finds himself drawn to the writer’s waiflike mistress (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who (shock) shared the house with the great man’s embittered widow—and when Laura Linney plays embittered, you can hear it in Buenos Aires. Also on the premises: the novelist’s charming but unreliable elder brother, Adam (Anthony Hopkins), as well as Adam’s boyfriend, who has stayed with him since the boy was 15.

With Ismail Merchant gone, James Ivory directs by himself; longtime collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala scripts from the novel by Peter Cameron. I saw the 1999 adaptation of Cameron’s The Weekend and put it firmly out of my mind. Yet unbidden, I started having flashbacks to that 11-year-old film’s elegant-as-peacock-pee dialogue, little knowing that this film shared the same source author. Here also, a film of firmly struck poses and lines that must have glittered on paper—considering the kind of critical respect he gets, I would be amazed to learn whether Cameron actually does write like he’s transcribing a Bette Davis script.
Linney gets the worst of it, cracking a walnut to demonstrate her ball-busting capabilities and spelling out her angst: “painting atrocious paintings and slowly going mad,” she says of herself. Hopkins attempts to raise the film’s pulse by cat-and-mousing Omar, getting groomed and having himself spruced with a fancy cravat. The slow popping of Hopkins’ trademarked “Ah” has somehow more weight than the thudding of large symbols (lost shoes mean rootlessness; matched sets of dead parents bring two characters together; those winged symbols of industry, the bees, attacking a group of idlers). Hopkins provides the only sanctuary in this film, except for this film’s all too infrequent chit-chat-free zones.

by Richard von Busack

AS Sideshow Bob might have predicted: The chick flick’s bottomless chum bucket has claimed Vanessa Redgrave. Aspiring New Yorker writer Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is involved with a way-too-preoccupied NYC chef (Gael García Bernal in the year’s most thankless male role); the two fly to Italy for a “pre-marriage honeymoon,” but he’s so involved with quaffing chiantis and finding truffles that he has no time for his fiancee.She tours Casa di Giulieta, which the Veronese assert is the actual home of Juliet Capulet. The lovelorn have been leaving letters to the imaginary girl for years, in crevices underneath the famous balcony.

Sophie finds not only a squad of female volunteers answering the letters but also a 50-year-old message, a communiqué from an English woman (Redgrave) who had to leave an Italian lover behind. Sophie answers the letter; the lady arrives with her diffident yet cute British grandson (Christopher Egan), whose insults hide a tender bruised heart. A movie about Seyfried in various sundresses, walking through Verona and Siena, should have had male as well as female appeal. But the dialogue is absolutely unforgivable. And while we’re on the subject of Shakespeare, seeing the featherheaded Sophie being a New Yorker writer makes one want to remind that magazine’s marketing department of the Bard’s warning about having a good name stolen.

There are loads of locations, but director Gary Winick doesn’t frame them well. Note the security bars on the villas, and the empty sunburn fields look brutal: you can see this landscape and understand why immigrants fled it. The cityscapes have no bass note of funky life. Seyfried, despite divine shape and alertness, can’t make this work. You know the saying “The lights are on, but nobody’s home?” Here there’s someone clearly at home, it’s just that the lights aren’t on.

by Richard von Busack
OSS 117: Lost in Rio: Double-one-seven est de retour.

There are Bond geeks and then there are Bond geeks, but the makers of OSS 117: Lost in Rio (opening Friday) deserve an honorary doctorate in the studies of 007. Spoofs are what you get when you take on the broad outline of a genre. Real satire requires Slavoj Zizek-level interpretation about the contradictions in the material. And the OSS series—here’s a review of the first one—
is is a real satire. It adores the playfulness of the spy film era, but it doesn’t condone the whopping imperialism and sexism of it. Topped by the scintillating idiocy of Jean Dujardin, this invigorating new comedy shows the limits of a monotonous personality-fest such as the Austin Powers series.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio takes place almost a decade after the first film, though the hero hasn’t aged more than a day or two. Hippies, LSD and the swinging sixties infiltrate the world of France’s greatest secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (Dujardin)…but saying that he notices anything on his periphery is an exaggeration. He’s a basically innocent ignoramus, but a suave one. Hubert is ordered to Brazil to retrieve a list of French collaborators from a blackmailing Nazi, the exiled German war criminal Von Zimmel (Rudiger Vogler).

It must be a short list, the agent decides, because De Gaulle himself said since so few Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans. Heading to the ur-1960s city of Brasilia, the sleek, patronizing smirker gets involved with an Israeli agent seeking to kidnap the Nazi back for trial in Tel Aviv. This will be rough, dealing with an Israeli partner (Louise Monot); Hubert muses aloud: “No alcohol, veiled women…”

Dujardin’s rare comic talent spins the seemingly didactic jokes into serious levity. He’s helped by his uncanny physical resemblance to the less appealing side of Sean Connery: the self-centeredness, the hairiness, the ever-twitching eyebrow and the really unfortunate swimwear. Agent “Double-one seven’s” mission is a fiesta of blown covers and cultural insensitivities as gross as a fois-gras belch. He’s used as a pawn by a contemptuous foul-mouthed CIA agent—a gargoyle version of Felix Leiter. During his leisure hours, he tries to pick up women with all the savoir-faire of Pepe Le Pew.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio probably isn’t a movie for anyone who can’t name all the Connery Bond films in order, without looking at a list. (The Venture Bros., the cartoon series that rivals this film for deep-focus satire, also seems to confuse the uninitiated.) Still, I found Dujardin very ticklish—what Inspector Clouseau movies would be like if they had timing and were about something.

I haven’t seen anything like Dujardin since Roberto Benigni was on his game, before the unfortunate success of Life is Beautiful; he’s adroit with quips and the low comedy; he’s a happy performer in Mad magazine style scenes we’d like to see, and he’s masculine enough to carry action-man moments, such as shooting a gator and attempting to roast it on a spit.

More rarefied humor comes from the way Michel Hazanavicius unearths skeletons of French foreign policy. The bravery of this kind of comedy gets underestimated. As is the case of America’s Cold War atrocities, France has loads of defenders for her own unsavory history—perhaps the defenders are more vociferous in France, even. Happily, Hubert has his moral limits. Stumbling across evidence of US collusion with the Nazi scientists, he’s shocked: “I thought Americans hated Nazis!” Comes the response “The CIA isn’t America!”

The change of era from the first films’ 1950s Africa to ‘60s Rio works elegantly. The music and swinging sixties décor, the art direction and cinematography, evoke that glorious era of trash…including a joke about split-screen taken to the ultimate fly’s-eye view. Equally pleasurable is a finale at the Christ of the Andres–probably not used in service for a spy movie since 1966’s Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die. One more of these OSS movies is proposed, and that should be about right amount of them: the natural thing seems to take Hubert into the 1970s, the era of baby-blue leisure-suited bell-bottomed Bond.

—

With the upcoming opening of Jesse Eisenberg in the much anticipated film Holy Rollers (Reviews, Trailer) we have been getting quite a few questions about what life is like for a hasidic jew in NY.  A few of the  questions include:

Do hasidic jews vote?

Do hasidic jews drive?

Do hasidic jews pay taxes?

What is a lubavitch hasidic jew?

..and many more all focused on what this very small sect of a very small religion are interested in.

Naturally all we know is movies over here so we thought we would suggest a few:

The Chosen – Fantastic movie! This story about the love and friendship of two Jewish boys from very different backgrounds is a fascination tale. Both boys are proud to be Jews, both have a real love of learning, both love and honor their fathers, but the Hasidic culture of one of them puts them on opposite sides of the issue of creating a Jewish state in Palistine. The sixth generation Hasidic rabbi is a very wise and very kind man who is ultimately satisfied when his son does not choose the same path because he realizes that his son is a righteous and compassionate man who loves God and his fellow man.

Pi – Simply watching the first 30 seconds of the opening credits should be all one needs to realize that Aronofsky’s Pi is going to be a very unusual offering. Pi might be off-putting to those who assume that it’s nothing more than a film about mathematics and the lonely life of a scholar, but Pi has very little in common with Good Will Hunting and is more a blending of A Beautiful Mind with Cronenberg’s Spider. Pi is about madness, genius, and one man’s attempt to survive mental illness. Pi’s central character is Max, and the story is told from his point of view, so from the beginning, we are uncertain of any actual facts. What we do know (or do we?) is that Max believes that within the chaos of the stock market and the randomness of nature exists a formula of numeric order. The trick is locating the equation and then putting that discovery to work. Although Max is a loner, his work is known to people in the financial world, and they want what they believe he’s on the verge of discovering. Max is also Jewish, and after a conversation in a diner with a purveyor of the Bible Code, Max develops a belief that the Bible is ripe for his numeric applications as well. Of course, none of these people may even exist at all because Max also suffers from debilitating migraines and might also be schizophrenic. As mentioned, the entire dark story is told from Max’s perspective, so it’s all open to suspicion and interpretation, and that fact is what makes this film so compelling. The goal for Aronofsky was to capture the mind of Max and let us experience it for ourselves. Aronofsky does something similar in Requiem for a Dream. His unique close-up camera work, sound effects, and repetitive editing isn’t meant to scare us, but to put us inside the minds of his characters, and he does it better than any other filmmaker. Eerie, dark, and edgy, Pi is a haunting film that will make most anyone question his own sanity

A Price Above Rubies – Married to a strictly observant Jew, a young mother (Renee Zellweger) craves fewer rules and more passion. Along comes her jeweler brother-in-law, who sees her anguish and values her at “a price above rubies,” giving her a job and much more; with the door to freedom now open, she pursues a Puerto Rican jewelry designer. But there are no easy answers to the tough moral dilemmas she faces in writer-director Boaz Yakin’s character-driven drama.

If you have been in or near this life you may be uncomfortable watching this movie – probably why it was ill-received in the Hasidic community. The only discomfort for me came from the truth it told – my only objections to the film overall were primarily casting choices. I thought Zellweger and Margulies were very right as Sonia and the sister-in-law; the general atmosphere was accurate but other roles could have been better cast. The story it tells is rarely spoken of in the Orthodox community. These are the renegades so to speak, who leave or cannot be true to the lifestyle and culture of extreme religiosity. It also includes gay people who are closeted and still wish to be true to God.(Trembling Before G-d – (2000). The ostracism portrayed was absolutely right – it happens to daughters and wives, less often sons. Realized repression – especially of sexuality – is not uncommon and solutions other than “pray harder” are not considered acceptable for those who stray. These “outcasts” suffer greatly – usually living in silence or having double lives that backfire. I thought it told a sad story well and I think the script was well written. I was not offended as a Jew nor did I find it anti-Semitic – it crosses all fundamentalist groups and is a lesson in tolerance many could use to understand and accept human behavior that can exist anywhere, even one’s own shul or home.

A Stranger Among Us -  “A Stranger Among Us” starring Melanie Griffith as an independent police officer tries to follow the same fish-out-of-water formula that was used in “Witness”, but doesn’t quite succeed. When a member of the Hasidic Jewish community in New York City goes missing, Officer Emily Eden (Griffith) is brought in to investigate. She discovers that he has been murdered and decides that the only way she can catch his killer is to become one of them…living among them. As she learns their customs and traditions, she also finds herself falling in love with Ariel (played by Eric Thal), a devoted disciple of the scriptures. The movie ultimately was about her relationship with Ariel and a look into the life of a Hasidic Jew, and even though the murder is what brought her there, it takes a backseat. The crime and its perpetrator are ultimately laughable, but that is because director Sidney Lumet chose to focus in on the telling of the unique relationship between Emily and Ariel instead. This was not one of Melanie Griffith’s best movies, but it is still entertaining and worth a watch.

With the upcoming opening of Jesse Eisenberg in the much anticipated film Holy Rollers (Reviews, Trailer) we have been getting quite a few questions about what life is like for a hasidic jew in NY.  A few of the  questions include:

Do hasidic jews vote?

Do hasidic jews drive?

Do hasidic jews pay taxes?

What is a lubavitch hasidic jew?

..and many more all focused on what this very small sect of a very small religion are interested in.

Naturally all we know is movies over here so we thought we would suggest a few:

The Chosen – Fantastic movie! This story about the love and friendship of two Jewish boys from very different backgrounds is a fascination tale. Both boys are proud to be Jews, both have a real love of learning, both love and honor their fathers, but the Hasidic culture of one of them puts them on opposite sides of the issue of creating a Jewish state in Palistine. The sixth generation Hasidic rabbi is a very wise and very kind man who is ultimately satisfied when his son does not choose the same path because he realizes that his son is a righteous and compassionate man who loves God and his fellow man.

Pi – Simply watching the first 30 seconds of the opening credits should be all one needs to realize that Aronofsky’s Pi is going to be a very unusual offering. Pi might be off-putting to those who assume that it’s nothing more than a film about mathematics and the lonely life of a scholar, but Pi has very little in common with Good Will Hunting and is more a blending of A Beautiful Mind with Cronenberg’s Spider. Pi is about madness, genius, and one man’s attempt to survive mental illness. Pi’s central character is Max, and the story is told from his point of view, so from the beginning, we are uncertain of any actual facts. What we do know (or do we?) is that Max believes that within the chaos of the stock market and the randomness of nature exists a formula of numeric order. The trick is locating the equation and then putting that discovery to work. Although Max is a loner, his work is known to people in the financial world, and they want what they believe he’s on the verge of discovering. Max is also Jewish, and after a conversation in a diner with a purveyor of the Bible Code, Max develops a belief that the Bible is ripe for his numeric applications as well. Of course, none of these people may even exist at all because Max also suffers from debilitating migraines and might also be schizophrenic. As mentioned, the entire dark story is told from Max’s perspective, so it’s all open to suspicion and interpretation, and that fact is what makes this film so compelling. The goal for Aronofsky was to capture the mind of Max and let us experience it for ourselves. Aronofsky does something similar in Requiem for a Dream. His unique close-up camera work, sound effects, and repetitive editing isn’t meant to scare us, but to put us inside the minds of his characters, and he does it better than any other filmmaker. Eerie, dark, and edgy, Pi is a haunting film that will make most anyone question his own sanity

A Price Above Rubies – Married to a strictly observant Jew, a young mother (Renee Zellweger) craves fewer rules and more passion. Along comes her jeweler brother-in-law, who sees her anguish and values her at “a price above rubies,” giving her a job and much more; with the door to freedom now open, she pursues a Puerto Rican jewelry designer. But there are no easy answers to the tough moral dilemmas she faces in writer-director Boaz Yakin’s character-driven drama.

If you have been in or near this life you may be uncomfortable watching this movie – probably why it was ill-received in the Hasidic community. The only discomfort for me came from the truth it told – my only objections to the film overall were primarily casting choices. I thought Zellweger and Margulies were very right as Sonia and the sister-in-law; the general atmosphere was accurate but other roles could have been better cast. The story it tells is rarely spoken of in the Orthodox community. These are the renegades so to speak, who leave or cannot be true to the lifestyle and culture of extreme religiosity. It also includes gay people who are closeted and still wish to be true to God.(Trembling Before G-d – (2000). The ostracism portrayed was absolutely right – it happens to daughters and wives, less often sons. Realized repression – especially of sexuality – is not uncommon and solutions other than “pray harder” are not considered acceptable for those who stray. These “outcasts” suffer greatly – usually living in silence or having double lives that backfire. I thought it told a sad story well and I think the script was well written. I was not offended as a Jew nor did I find it anti-Semitic – it crosses all fundamentalist groups and is a lesson in tolerance many could use to understand and accept human behavior that can exist anywhere, even one’s own shul or home.

A Stranger Among Us -  “A Stranger Among Us” starring Melanie Griffith as an independent police officer tries to follow the same fish-out-of-water formula that was used in “Witness”, but doesn’t quite succeed. When a member of the Hasidic Jewish community in New York City goes missing, Officer Emily Eden (Griffith) is brought in to investigate. She discovers that he has been murdered and decides that the only way she can catch his killer is to become one of them…living among them. As she learns their customs and traditions, she also finds herself falling in love with Ariel (played by Eric Thal), a devoted disciple of the scriptures. The movie ultimately was about her relationship with Ariel and a look into the life of a Hasidic Jew, and even though the murder is what brought her there, it takes a backseat. The crime and its perpetrator are ultimately laughable, but that is because director Sidney Lumet chose to focus in on the telling of the unique relationship between Emily and Ariel instead. This was not one of Melanie Griffith’s best movies, but it is still entertaining and worth a watch.

by Richard von Busack
AUGEAN STABLES that it was, the Bush regime is going to require years of cleansing. An especially fragrant part of that era is the story of Jack Abramoff and the still-at-large Tom DeLay. The sordid tale is told in Alex Gibney’s documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money. Abramoff’s scams—influence peddling, double-crossing and slave-labor profiteering—haven’t been thoroughly explained in documentary form yet. It’s appropriate that cinema should be used to prosecute Abramoff. He was an ex-industry executive who turned to politics as a way of passing on his right-wing views through more effective means than making movies about them. (Betcha didn’t know that the felon in question produced the commie-bashing 1989 Dolph Lundgren stinker Red Scorpion.)
A weightlifter by avocation, a thug by behavior, Abramoff gravitated toward the GOP as a Young Republican organizer. He helped lead Ronald Reagan to the side of the contra “freedom fighters” and the apartheid-financed army of Africa’s Jonas Savimbi. He became a lobbyist, the doorkeeper for former Texas bug-zapper Tom DeLay, later the Republican Congressional majority whip.

As such, Abramoff became an uber-lobbyist: one of the biggest boodlers since Boss Tweed, fattened by money from Jew-hating Malaysian leaders, tribal casinos, Saipan sweatshops and Indian casinos.
The chapters are divided by a ragingly good R&B soundtrack—Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man” is especially on point. The director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room interviews some of the horrified witnesses to Abramoff’s career. Subjects include Bay Area Rep. George Miller, who tells a particularly stomach-turning story about the free market at loose in the Marianas Islands.

Gibney uses the image of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as a counterbalance to Abramoff’s greed. One almost needs this kind of oversimplified patriotism after witnessing such nauseating political cynicism. It’s gratifying to see footage of Abramoff right where he belonged, sweating in front of a congressional hearing and taking more fifths than an alcoholic shoplifter. A movie this cinema heavy deserves one last film reference, though. How about Geoffrey Rush’s line in The Tailor of Panama: “They caught Ali Baba, but they didn’t get the 40 thieves.”

Insane in the Mongol Brain

The Good, The Bad and the Weird: the good, the bad and the overlong.

by Richard von Busack

There’s loads of undifferentiated action in Ji-Woon Kim’s The Good, The Bad and the Weird—a Sergio Leone pastiche with Max Max overtones, set in one of Earth’s gloomiest deserts. The alternate English title Nom Nom Nom—the sounds of devouring made by a Pac-Man machine?—suggests undirected appetite among a three way tag team. (“Life is all about chasing and being chased,” says a character.)
It’s set in the days before World War II, in the Japanese governed puppet state of Manchuria; everyone is contending for a treasure map located somewhere deep in the desert. By “everyone” we include a pack of post-apocalyptic Mongols, maybe the last descendants of Genghis Khan. Eventually, about a battalion of uniformed Japanese soldiers turn up for the climactic, 40 minute long chase.
A straight-shooting, courtly bounty hunter in a cowboy hat—something like the kindly movie rangers of the 1950s, played by Woo-Sung Jun—is on the lookout for a savage psycho with a peekaboo haircut and black leather gloves. This bad guy, helpfully named The Bad, is played by Byung-Hun Lee. From Byung-Hun’s frozen slightly open-mouthed smile and his trick of gazing out of focus at the horizon, we see that Brad Pitt is this actor’s main man. The Bad is worse than he looks at first: apparently, he has the nasty habit of collecting dead men’s fingers.
Between this obvious hero and more obvious villain is mortal flesh: “The Weird,” a sloppy good-for-nothing of a bandit, wearing that particular headgear guaranteed to make you look like a sub-normal: a leather cowl and motorcycle glasses. He’s played by one of the most recognizable and likable Korean movie stars: Song-Kang Ho, who was the tormented priest in Thirst, and the oddball, narcoleptic son in the monster movie The Host.
This Eastern adaptation of a sweeping western really changes Leone’s focus in one important respect: the original The Good, The Bad and The Ugly wasn’t so thoroughly about the Eli Wallach character; we follow this slightly fim Korean expatriate in the occupied Chinese desert with more interest than we do watching the other extremes of virtue. He just wants to cash out and be a farmer anyway.
Parody or pastiche that it is, The Good, The Bad and The Weird gets into slapstick—“The Weird” uses the two-fingered Moe Howard defense to escape captors, as well as an a ultra-low comedy knife attack on a villain’s butt. At one point he slaps on bullet-repelling deep-sea diving helmet to survive a gunfight. The stunt work is zippy in spots, but the lack of any serious female action, the overlong running time and the prettiness of the flying camera make one miss the golden age of Hong Kong cinema, when efficiency matched the exuberant violence.

Steve shows how its done

As a prop, the Motorcycle has no cinematic peer. Seconds into Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O’Toole’s crazy cruising (and subsequent bruising) on his Brough Superior gives us the measure of the man; Steve Mcqueen’s heroic ride through the German countryside is a Great Escape indeed. And, of course, the tricked-out choppers of two Easy Riders did nothing less than summarize an era. In scores of lesser flicks, bikes provide Hollywood with a quick-fix option: Need a bad guy? Bring on the biker. On celluloid as in society, motorcycles are the fastest route to an on-the-fringe stereotype.

So you think bikers are a no good bunch monosyllabic hoodlums out for a bad time? The following movies won’t change your mind. And despite the image-enhancement efforts of the Motorcycle Industry Council, leather boys and girls continue to tear up the screen in the most antisocial ways-it’s a tradition. (Be sure to buckle your helmet.)

ON ANY SUNDAY (1971)  With nary a greasy bandanna or studded leather vest in sight, this pair of documentaries provides an enticing introduction to the myriad joys of riding. The original, directed by Bruce (Endless Summer) Brown, conveys its subject with vigor and enthusiasm, from high-speed road racing to a Baja endurance trial. Following the same potpourri format, the sequel sacrifices some of the joyousness for a slicker look and a surfeit of crashes. Still, seeing world champion Bernie Schreiber negotiate impossible terrain with slow, amazingly precise maneuvers is alone worth the trip to the video store. Together these tapes offer abundant stimuli-hill climbs, ice racing, Steve Mcqueen, camera-in-the-fairing footage, and all the crazy and fantastic things people do on bikes, on any Sunday of the year.

You can watch On Any Sunday here at Movie Times. This is the full length version, so relax and enjoy.

The Wild Angels are SEXY

THE WILD ANGELS (1966). A Lifestyles of the Sick and Violent that kicked off a whole slew of biker films in a new, ’60s mode. Peter Fonda plays gang leader Heavenly Blues (Fonda himself proposed the moniker- it’s a hallucinogen), and Bruce Dern plays his sidekick, Loser, who lives up to the name by stealing a police bike and getting shot in the back. Meanwhile, the Angels pursue their fun-that is, as director Roger Corman has put it, “Nazi helmets. Rapes. Drugs. Weirdness on the screen.” They spring Loser from the hospital, where he’s doing badly enough, and at his funeral all Hells break loose. This gritty film was a respectable hit for indie AlP and was invited to enter the Venice Film Festival, where it was not, um, universally liked. The real-life Angels who helped Corman with the story and the casting were likewise not amused: they sued for defamation of character!

Jack, in a saner moment

HELL’S ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967). Cashing in on The Wild Angels’ popularity, this low-budget exploitation flick is one of its very best imitators-and even more nihilistic. Its wrenching, anxiety-provoking cinematography is by Laszlo Kovacs, whose style is calmer but no less effective in Easy Rider (and whose name, incidentally, is the alias of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless). Assisted by real-life Angels (this time with their approval), writer R. Wright Campbell and director Richard Rush (of The Stunt Man fame) create ample opportunities for recklessness, violence, and sex. Jack Nicholson plays Poet, a onetime pump jockey who joins the Angels and proves he’s as tough as they are. But when he moves in on leader Buddy’s chick (Sabrina Scharf), the action gets really down and dirty. Don’t miss the fine period detail-remember body painting?

Cafe Society at its Best!

THE LEATHER BOYS (1964). England’s early entry into the restless-youth-on-cycles sweepstakes (directed by Canadian Sidney J. Furie) is the story of a young working-class couple who get married just when it becomes abundantly apparent that they should have remained teenage lovers. Gum-chomping Dot (Rita Tushingham) starts stepping out on Reggie (Colin Campbell), and he turns for solace to his bike and the buddies who truly understand him. One new friend, Pete (Dudley Sutton), wants to give him more than understanding. This being 1964, however, the plot takes us only as far as Pete’s declaration of love and then quickly retreats to a heterosexual reunion, primed by an endurance race to Edinburgh. In addition to its engaging characterizations, The Leather Boys offers an eyeful of classic British machinery.

Fem-a-biker

BURY ME AN ANGEL (1971). Appropriate to its era (the Middle Golden Age of American biker movies), this tale of rampage and revenge has it all, from its opening drug fest to an explicit shotgun murder, from gratuitous skin to surreal flashbacks with sitar accompaniment on the soundtrack. Two notable assets set it apart. The first is six-foot Dixie Peabody, as Dag, the “howling hellcat humping a hot steel hog,” who’s searching for her brother’s killer-and is tougher than any guy who dares to cross her. The second is another woman, writer-director Barbara (Humanoids From the Deep) Peeters. Dag hits the road with pals Jonsie (Terry Mace) and Bernie (Clyde Ventura), and as the western miles fall away under their wheels, they tangle with the law, brawl in a bar, experience nature, and receive a lesson in truth from a sexy Indian mystic. In the end, Dag finds her man and buries the memory of her brother’s brutal death-which, ironically enough, was the result of his having stolen the bike she’s been riding.

PSYCHOMANIA (1971). Also known as The Death Wheelers (but not to be confused with 1963′s horrific Psychomania-please), this British horror flick directed by Don Sharp has been called incomprehensible, but in fact, it all makes perfect sense. You see, star Nicky Henson’s mom, Beryl Reid, sold her son’s soul to the Devil (perhaps) or a tree frog (more probable) , and he thus has the power to cross over to the other side and live (and terrorize innocent townfolk) forever. He convinces the members of his radical bike gang- the Living Dead-to follow him to immortality. The DVD jacket of this far-out black comedy proclaims that it “must be seen to be believed.”

WAIT, YOU MIGHT SAY TO YOURSELF, BIKERS can’t be all bad. Tough around the edges, to be sure, but a core of human vulnerability might lurk under those leathers. The films below are proof-if not positive, then on the right track-that even bikers can be heroes.

SHAME (1988). Not too far into this independent Australian feature set in the outback, you’ll sense the presence of something familiar (if you didn’t already hear an echo in the title): it’s the classic western Shane. Only here, the silent stranger who blows into town does it on a 750 Suzuki Katana. And–oh, yeah-she’s a woman. Asta Caddell (Deborra-Lee Furness) is a barrister on a solo holiday. Late one night, she has a run-in with a ditch and repairs to a small town that could be any normal burg. But it’s not: the men-boorish, aggressive, small-minded are terrorizing the local women. Asta takes up the cause of a girl who’s been gang raped and becomes a one woman army for justice; she relies on her fists and deft riding when wits are not enough. That’s when the action accelerates like a motorcycle doing a wheelie. Directed by Steve Jodrell, Shame is clearly a movie with a (feminist) message. It’s also one that breaks all the biker-and manycinematic=-clichés.

EAT THE PEACH (1986). A charming Irish movie that charts the progress of a dream: its birth, its death, and the renewal of hope. Arthur (Eamon Morrissey) has been let go from a Japanese computer concern in Northern Ireland; his brother-in-law, Vinnie (Stephen Brennan), has never been much good at steady work. After watching their favorite movie, Roustabout, on video, the two suddenly come up with an answer to the unemployment blues: they’ll build a cylindrical “wall of death”-a high-speed stunt ride just like Elvis’s in the movie. To finance their enterprise, they engage in a little “commodity relocation”- smuggling-for a local politician’s brother. Come opening day, Vinnie takes his motorbike for a first ride up the wall-a triumph, but for one small miscalculation…. The end? Peter Ormrod’s film, a parable about the necessity of doomed optimism in strife-racked Ireland, is also a lovely story about the human spirit.

MASK (1985). How deep runs the “vicious biker” stereotype? Deep enough that some reviewers of this movie didn’t buy the idea that a gang could be a loving and protective family to its members. That’s their problem; Mask, after all, is based on a true story. Rocky Dennis,  affectingly played by Eric Stoltz, has grown up among just such a gang of bikers. They manage, better than anyone else, to see past his facial disfigurement (Rocky has eraniodiaphyseal dysplasia-the Elephant Man’s disease) to the heart of a normal teenage boy. His never-say-ever mom (Cher) is~ coiled spring of strength. for her son but not always for herself. Drugs and her few-too-many boyfriends become a source of friction between them, as well  as a note of complicating realism in the script. Rocky’s 5! hopes for the future are literally pinned to a map of Europe, which he plans to tour on a Harley. Some biker bromides persist: the gang’s notion of entertainment, for example, is a bit, well, wanton. And though director Peter Bogdanovich keeps sentimentality largely at bay, if you don’t let a sniffle or two escape when Rocky finds first love with a blind girl (Laura Dern), you’re a better man than most bikers.

SPETTERS (1980). Although three young aspiring motocross champions are the ostensible stars of this Dutch film from Paul Verhoeven, Futility and Meaninglessness steal the show. Imperious Rutger Hauer is the reigning race winner they’re trying to unseat; juicy Renee  out end is the prize. The plot has more curves, turns, ups, and downs than the racecourse, with bike culture (always more fervent in Europe) the glue that binds together its half-baked notions about sexuality, religion, and opportunism. And on all these counts, there’s something to offend almost any viewer. Bleak and brutal-virtually every character comes to a bad end-Spetters is a complex tale told with economy and style.

Disney Oceans

by Richard von Busack

Look at Oceans Disneynature as some recompense for that snorkeling trip to Molokini you won’t be making this year, thanks to the boys at Goldman Sachs. The lack of narrative thrust and useful informational tidbits are a downside—the creatures swimming by are sometimes identified, sometimes not. They’re arranged for cuteness, color and shape, rather than districts of the ocean, as in the sturdy zonal structure of Disney’s Earth.

Since it is so episodic, the real tension of the film becomes the question of how much bad news the children are going to be allowed to hear, regarding the state of the oceans. The answer to that is “not much.” About three minutes, if that; the ravages of the purse seine and the plastic gyre are touched upon…but it’s going to be all right, kids!
Pierce Brosnan narrates the English language version. He’s a roguish funny actor and a man concerned with ecological affairs, but it’s not his light, if pleasing, voice that makes him famous. The ocean is usually described as having a female principle—perhaps this was the job for Streep, Dench or a Blanchett?
Bruno Coulais—the rising composer whose work was key to the success of Secret of Kells and Coraline, is adept with musical scoring for the grandeur of a blue whale drifting by—a shot that resembles the cruise of the endless space battleship in the first Star Wars: the organ is never too heavy and the harp is never too light. But for the film’s most op-art moments, such as striped ribbon snakes and strobe-lit cuttlefish, one wishes the old ways of marijuana brownie and an iPod loaded with Pink Floyd.
And you’ll want to miss most of the text; the anthropomorphic angle is heavy, because this is Disney. Oceans undercuts its best ideas. In one sequence, for example, iguanas and horseshoe crabs rest in the swamp, watching a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. It’s an intelligent contrast of the Age of Man with oceanic creatures with very long pedigrees.
But then comes the reverse angle, an optical print on the rocket’s flare on the iguana’s eye, turning a fine metaphor into a moment that says “What can these creatures be thinking of the might of our flaming rockets?”

The same blocked metaphors are over the script: the ancient wisdom of a sheepshead wrasse, the smoochiness of a walrus; and, most dunderheaded: the smiling face of our friend the Great White Shark. Jaws has his place and a certain rough attractiveness, but really, what’s he got to smile about?

Oceans’ cuteness is, you know, for the kids; it’s moments to clutch like a blanket when seeing the bottomless appetite under water: a horror-sequence of a school of sardines under Scud attack by plummeting cormorants, with sharks taking up the flanks.

Frigate birds picking off a beachful of baby tortoises as if they were kernels of popcorn (a sequence used in Mondo Cane to show that the world was going to the dogs; the editing there, however, was nothing this brutal and crunchy). There’s a vicious crab/langouste bout that’s as bad as any street fight. And most inexplicable, a weird swarm of crabs in what’s identified as Melbourne Bay (though it’s actually Port Philip Bay) that looks like the battle scene in a Lord of the Rings movie.

Whether this was a mystery, a result of something ecologically averse, or an opportunity for the world’s largest crab cake—Oceans‘ “your guess is as good as mine” approach is the inevitable result of adding sugar to all that salt water.

Cool Harry Brown

by Richard von Busack

THERE’S PROBABLY no such thing as a liberal, enlightened vigilante movie, but Harry Brown’s harrowing surfaces and a sunset performance of dignity and smothered wrath by Michael Caine give this minor movie a deeper mood than you would expect.
The film is easily synopsized as a raging-geezer drama, and it’s not the first of its kind. Charles Bronson was making Death Wish sequels up into an age when he closely resembled children’s TV host Captain Kangaroo. Gran Torino proved that fans still wanted to see Eastwood preserving the integrity of his lawn at an age when he ought to be paying other people to mow it.
We’ve seen this movie before but rarely done this crazy. Where Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank showed the red flow of life in a dump of a British housing estate, Harry Brown’s location is pure mahogany-tinged death. The weirdos he encounters seem like actors in a prequel to A Clockwork Orange. The visual cues resemble Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. A stage for the action is a pedestrian underpass under the street that no one seems to be able to avoid. These horror-story people-coops in England are called “sink estates”—the tunnel leading out is the open plughole.
Caine’s Harry Brown is a cautious, ill old Londoner with little left to lose. He has a mate, named Leonard (David Bradley, your go-to actor when you need an undertaker), whom he meets at the grim local pub. Both are harassed by the thugs on the estate. Leonard is aware of Harry’s past as a Royal Marine; when things get worse, Len asks Harry if he ever killed a man during his service.
The quiet way Caine phrases the reply, “You can’t ask me that, Len,” gives us everything Caine ever had in his prime: the decency and the steel beneath it. Maddened by the way the idle kids go at him, Len hides a bayonet under his sweater before he takes a walk. And that’s the last of him. A female constable (Emily Mortimer) brings Harry the news of Len’s murder. That’s when Harry goes out to buy a pistol.

The underground gun merchant’s shack looks as if the Bobby Sands of Hunger had redecorated the walls with his own homemade pigments. The host, Stretch (Sean Harris), is a freakish stripling with wavy scars all over his torso; he tends a park-size marijuana plantation concealed behind black trash bags. When not freebasing from the barrel of his pistol, he’s taping some amateur porno. It’s going to turn into a snuff film if the star is not untied from the couch soon and taken to the hospital. (“She likes to cuddle, this one.”)
Watching Caine slowly decide what needs to be done, and conquering the fear and the disgust before he does it, makes one happy—happy as watching Noomi Repace’s Lisbeth watch the Land Rover burn in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. At such moments, a movie does the thinking for you, which is why vigilante tales always succeed. But the Dumpster-eye view gets violated when a bit of borrowed dialogue sticks out like a sore thumb: Stretch describes the effect of one gun he’s selling as “a brick through a plate-glass window,” which is the exact phrase Q used when he convinced 007 to upgrade his pistol in Dr. No.
Harry Brown isn’t dead from the neck up. Director Daniel Barber disguises the manipulation in the film as best he can. He finds pity in the story, with Mortimer, as always, a well of sympathy. The cops are otherwise inept, especially Iain Glen as a fatuous chief launching something called “Operation Blue Jay” and instead starting what looks like an urban insurrection in the housing complex. The quieter this film gets, the better it is, as in the speech when Brown finally decides to talk about his war. Caine’s acting shows you the cool side of slow.

by Richard von Busack

A crafty editor could take The Back-Up Plan and turn it into a horror story: too trusting J-Lo is lured to a rural goat farm and forced to foal the anti-Christ by cultists. (“What have you done to his eyes?” “He has his Father’s eyes! Hail Satan!”) A natural childbirth scene has a tattooed weirdette ululating like Yma Sumac, so there’d be room for the appropriately hellish wails on the soundtrack. Until that’s done, you must watch what’s on screen…or listlessly text messages to friends as the Cosmos slowly wear off.

The Back-Up Plan is padded with dog reaction shots; Nutsy the Crippled Boston Terrier gets more arf than larf. He has the final bark on the soundtrack: “So long, suckers!” is what it sounded like to me. The blinking dog adds to the running time, which also lards on the distinctions of J-Lo:“You’re this incredibly accomplished person…sweet and sassy” and so forth.

Lopez plays Zoe, your typical Manhattan boutique pet-store owner who has given up hope for Mr. Right and has decided to go for a turkey-baster babe, inserted by Robert Klein as a kindly old ob/gyn. Shortly after impregnation she fights over a cab with Stan (Alex O’Loughlin, combining the least interesting elements of Dermot Mulroney and Keanu). This is what passes for a meet-cute. It gets done twice, in case we missed it the first time. She falls in love, but has trouble telling him that she’s got a stranger’s seed in her womb.

Your typical rom-com hunk has been greenwashed here; Stan runs a boutique goat-cheese stall at the Tribeca farmer’s market, and he has a herd of goats up state. He apparently milks them through osmosis, because the farm goes on the backburner (just like the critters at Zoe’s pet shop). Making Stan a cheesemonger gives critics a free one—he even names a cheese after Zoe. But artisan cheesemakers work hard for a living, and this movie isn’t even as earthy as Kraft. Ultra-long snits and slow resolutions follow every fake-ass argument.

Speaking of ass, Lopez memorializes her salient feature: “I miss my old butt.” Sadly, Zoe holds up a snapshot of the way her rump was. Let’s go out on a limb and say that Lopez’s appeal was due to face matching ass, a pertness and insouciance at both ends. Whatever she had, has fled. Lopez tries to recall it like a politician might, through an assumption of earthiness: eating wieners from Gray’s Papaya, or chowing on pizza. The movie is a bizarre mix of the clinical—dog spew, doo-doo, vadge blood on a doctor’s gloves–and the bland, expensive and idealized: Zoe goes into labor with perfect makeup on and an orchid behind her ear.

No relief by Michaela Watkins as Zoe’s best pal, a bitter housewife; her four kids seem to be raising themselves, like the pets and the goats. When a star vehicle goes this wrong and is this out of it, one must agree with what Stan says to Zoe, after one of their 8000 pointless fights: “When you do the autopsy on this, you’ll find there’s no one to blame but yourself.”

Something strange was in the air.  It was dark, dreary day in Los Angeles, and as April Mullen, director, writer, producer and star of “GravyTrain”, described the beautiful, sunny Toronto skyline she was staring out at, I knew I had entered a world not until the world of her film.  It’s a place where things seem normal, but are off just enough to make them unfamiliar, strange, and a bit whacked out.  After gloating a little about how their weather was better than mine, I talked with Mullen and Tim Doiron (who co-wrote, co-produced and co-stars in the film) about the art of clowns, trying to clone yourself, and invading the US.

GravyTrain

What is GravyTrain about?

Tim Doiron:  Simply put, the main character in the film is Charles Gravytrain, and he is trying to avenge his father’s death.  His father was killed by this mysterious crook by the name of Jimmy Fish Eyes.  So (Charles) ends up getting partnered up with this new partner, Miss Uma Booma, and they try and find Jimmy Fish Eyes.  Along the way, this weird snuff filmmaker shows up and gets involved in the plot.  It’s just a wacky who-done-it in the weird town of Gypsy Creek that’s sort of removed from the rest of society.  In the end, it’s just a revenge story.

April Mullen:  Some people say it’s like early Coen Brothers, sort of a “Raising Arizona”, mixed with “Starsky and Hutch” and David Lynch “Twin Peaks” sense of humor.

Where the heck did the idea for this movie come from?

TD:  The idea for the movie actually came from a dream, even before we did our first movie, “Rock, Paper, Scissors:  The Way of the Tosser.”  It was a very simple dream about this snuff filmmaker guy in this 70s sort of genre thing…I was talking to April the next day, and I said, “I have this idea for this movie.  I think it would be really good,” and it just sort of grew from there.

Tell me about your history together and the obviously strange sensibility you seem to share.

AM:  We were both in theater school training for our acting degree.  It was a very small class, so you get to know everyone really well.  And in third year, we took clown.

Wait a minute.  Clown!?

AM:  Yes, clown as in red nose clown.  We did clown training.

TD:  Clown is like a comedic art form that goes way back.  It’s very popular in France.

AM:  So, Tim’s clown was really rambunctious.  He was absolutely hilarious but could not partner up with anyone else.  And for the showcase we had to have partners, so the teacher put my clown with his clown.  When you have the clown nose on, you have a different personality, and it just so happened that when we did our clown skit, we both had the exact same sense of comedic timing, and really, our clowns worked well together and sort of bounced off each other.  My clown, for some reason, could handle Tim’s clown, and Tim’s clown at least would let me be on the stage with him.  From then on, that’s when we started working together.  We sort of partnered up for other creative pieces at (school), and then we did “Rock, Paper, Scissors”, and now “GravyTrain”.

You both wore a bunch of hats on this movie.  April, you directed, and both of you produced, wrote and starred in the film.  When did you have time to sleep?

TD:  In a lot of respects, it’s fantastic, and in some other respects, you wish you had two of you at all times.

AM:  Um…Five!

TD:  For the creative process, it’s great to be there from beginning to end.  And I think getting to wear lots of hats and having a real hand in the creativity, that’s something that April and I really like to have.  When we were on set, yeah…there were days when you wake up at five in the morning and you’re running until three in the morning the next day.  But in the end it’s worth it.

AM:  Both of us love the creative stuff.  The producing end of things would always be the more challenging thing to deal with on set, but then we could always get revitalized by acting.  In terms of directing and acting…I had playback.  If a scene was off or the comedic beat was off, I could use the playback to really see what was going on, if I had the time.  Other than that, after rehearsing and setting up the shot, I would stay on my mark and direct the actors (from there).

April the director, how difficult is it to direct April the actress?

AM:  It IS difficult. There comes a point in time when, like, we were testing the film this morning, and you don’t really realize that you’re in the film.  You just sort of look at the film as a whole production, and you don’t really single yourself out or your performance.  I couldn’t really care less about cutting my scenes or anybodies for that matter.  You just try and get the best film possible.

So you’re not yelling and screaming at the actors?

AM:  If I am yelling or screaming, it’s out of excitement or laughter.

TD:  April is excellent at working with actors.  I think if you asked any actor that worked on this film, it’s probably one of her biggest gifts as a director.  Being able to understand what an actor needs to hear, what the actor can bring, and giving a lot of freedom to the actor.

AM:  I think the atmosphere on the set, especially on a comedy, has to be light and fun.  Otherwise you can see it on the screen.

You have some great improvisational actors in the film, including Tim Meadows and Colin Mochrie.  How much is improv a part of your filmmaking?

AM:  It’s a huge part of it, although, because we were shooting over 15 days, the schedule was so tight we had to make sure to always shoot the scenes and get the film down first, and then once we had a few takes we were happy with, I’d always keep the cameras rolling for a few beats at the end of the scene.  In the middle of a scene, if it seemed like something else could happen I would sort of throw it out there and say, “Let’s go back and try and have some fun and play.”  In the future (on other projects), I foresee a lot more, when time isn’t staring us in the face.

TD:  Even though we did have to move fast, the making of “GravyTrain” was very organic.  There was tons of room to play, and room for people to come up with stuff on the fly, which was great.

What was it like working with your cast, especially Meadows and Mochrie?

TD:  The entire cast is extremely talented.  The movie takes place in a zany town with over the top characters and an odd tone, so for both of us it was important to get really fantastic actors who could bring truth into the performance.  Otherwise, the film would just fall on its face.  And every single actor we got just hit their mark unbelievably.  As far as Colin and Tim Meadows, both of those characters were written specifically for them.  So, we were lucky…that they loved the roles and loved the script and they took them on.  It was really nice being in the presence of improvisational kings.  You learn a lot very fast.

AM:  A great memory of when Colin first showed up on set…we gave him his 70s outfit, and then we were looking at his hair.  I was thinking, “Let’s do something really fun with your hair.”  And he said, “Oh yeah, let’s go for it!”  His hairstyle was completely ridiculous and he loved it.  From that moment on, you just knew that he was in it to have fun and was completely enthusiastic.  He was up for any risks.  As for Tim Meadows, I worked with him when I was 16 in “The Ladies Man”, and I always had these great memories of him on set.  He’s really grounded and a serious, professional actor.  As soon as he comes on set and starts playing in the scene, he just lights up the whole set and everybody starts laughing.  There were so many moments where we just couldn’t take it and we broke down.

What were your influences when making GravyTrain?

AM:  We watched “Dirty Harry”, “Switchblade Sisters”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Police Woman”.  We watched a whole bunch of 70s flavored films and took a lot of the pans and zooms.  The zoom was almost bigger than the camera one day.  We had a lot of fun with that sort of stuff.  But, of course, our film is edited a lot quicker than those films.  You’d be amazed at how slow the editing is in those 70s movies.

Though you got a lot of influences from the 70s, the movie doesn’t seem to take place in any particular time period or any real location.

AM:  That’s exactly it.  It’s not of a time or a place in particular.  It’s just Gypsy Creek.  We’re both really big into creating a world that lives in its own bubble.  So basically, it has a Mullin/Doiron twist.  It’s not really anything or anyone in particular.  It’s our own sort of flair.

The movie comes out on Friday.  Since this is your second movie, this isn’t a big deal.  You’ll be relaxing at home, watching TV, right?

AM:  (laughing) We haven’t stopped.  We are working our butts off.

TD:  We’re just excited to get this one out there and share it with people.  We open in Toronto on Friday, then follow that up with Montreal and Ottawa, and we’ll probably do more places in Canada.  Then we’ll seep down into the States.

AM:  Yeah, we’re headed your way very soon.

Should we be afraid?

BOTH:  Very afraid!

Click for GravyTrain Movie Times

by Richard von Busack

ASIDE FROM the way it mucked up everyone’s Oscar pool, Juan José Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes offers a few memorable aspects. The most memorable is the “Forget it, Jacobo, it’s Argentinatown” view: the search for justice evaporating in 1974 Buenos Aires, which is about to spiral into the Dirty War.
The next memorable aspect is the fine Mulder and Scully anti-romance between an attractive female criminal investigator for the government, Irene (Soledad Villamil), and her crumbling, Mastroiannish male assistant, Benjamin (Ricardo Darín). He has a crush on her and feels he can’t let the secret out.
You can see why he has the crush. Villamil, who recalls both Fanny Ardant and Barbara Feldon, displays a wonderful classic-Hollywood mix of dignity and impudence. There’s macha seriousness, but she’s no prude. In the most electric scene, Irene sexually taunts a rape suspect during a good-cop/bad-cop interrogation. Her lines are all part of the film’s fine selection of really fragrant hardboiled dialogue, captured in the subtitles. I don’t at all have the Spanish to understand it, but I suspect it’s even better in the original.
The Secret in Their Eyes is a before-and-after murder mystery in the James Ellroy vein, set in 2009 and 1974. It’s about the case that got away: the unsolved investigation of a female victim, found nude in her apartment—beautiful in death, like Laura Palmer or Otto Preminger’s Laura.
In the 2009 sequences, Benjamin is no longer an investigator; he’s now an aspiring novelist, just returned from some fruitless decades out in the hinterlands. In his new solitary apartment, he tries to change the unsolved case into a narrative; blocked, he haunts his solitary room writing the words “I fear” on a tablet of paper.
Benjamin decides to look up Irene, who is now a judge, to ask her for help recalling the case. In flashbacks, we see what happened. The case seemed closed after the police rounded up a pair of punks and pounded a confession out of them. The judge who took charge of the case from Irene and Benjamin was an infamous political hack. As Benjamin gets to know the grieving husband of the murdered woman, he decides to press the case further despite warnings from the top.
Benjamin’s drunken helper, Sandoval (the Dustin Hoffmanish Guillermo Francella), snatches the key to the mystery. Caught, after an ambitiously filmed sequence at a crowded soccer stadium, a prime suspect, Gomez (Javier Godino), is interrogated—but the arrest doesn’t naturally mean he’ll really face justice.
Campanella is a regular director of House M.D., and he worked on Strangers With Candy; the look of the film is that of the smarter television shows. There are some cinematic openings-up; the best is the soccer stadium scene, beginning with a night aerial shot and ending with a cornered killer’s face flat on the ground, at a right angle to the screen. More intimate is a later horror-tableau in which a victim’s splattered blood coats the only source of light in the room: an outside window, making a bedroom look illuminated as if by crimson stained glass. And there’s one especially outstanding moment of suspense: an elevator ride with an armed madman as he toys with his gun and decides what to do about his pursuers.
But Campanella’s TV experience has its limits. The actors react to each other as if they’ve been pals forever and will always be friends. The comedy relief of Sandoval’s drunkenness is like the continuing story of a sidekick: it doesn’t grow, he always stays the same as when we first see him. The film is as restless and jokey as a cop procedural show; every scene is on the mark, there aren’t enough counterpoints to the flow of the story.

Strange that the last Argentine film to win the Best Foreign Language Oscar film was also about the Dirty War. Like The Secret in Their Eyes, The Official Story isn’t a drama about the victims of the right-wing coup, but about the people just outside their circle of victimhood. (In the case of The Official Story, the drama was about a woman who learned that her adopted child was stolen from parents who were murdered because of their politics.) Both these films represent a slightly unsatisfying, gloves-on way of handling a still hot topic.
The Secret in Their Eyes is engrossing, though. Darín’s debonair fallibility is appealing—with his shyness and slight underbite, he looks like a dashing rodent. It’s more than just Campanella’s televisionistic qualities that make you feel like you’re watching a good pilot. One is less impressed, however, by the postmodern spangles over a straightforward mystery—the sense that everyone in here is rewriting their past, polishing it for better effect. The slick, vengeance-is-mine punch line isn’t very impressive either, though it’s probably why the Academy preferred this to the far better White Ribbon, where the fascist culprits got away.
Saying that, though, would be assuming the voters didn’t have eyes for Villamil, an assured 40ish beauty whose performance is the secret in this movie’s success; her covert smile is the film’s signature piece.

by Richard von Busack

THE MUSICAL docu-drama No One Knows About Persian Cats follows the trail of a pair of indie rockers who want to get a band together so they can play Europe. The duo of Ashkan Koshanejad and Negar Shaghaghi from the real-life act Take It Easy Hospital play “Ashkan” and “Negar,” a couple trying to pick up a band to awake some interest in Europe. The duo encounters a likable but slippery promoter named Nader, as well as an elder passport forger who is promising them an array of visas if they can pony up the money. The two meet and greet with other musicians, whose music plays against a standard MTV montage of cityscapes. We see the range of illegal and semilegal rock music going on, despite the morality police. It’s a Westernized scene: smuggled T-shirts and posters are kept for their forbidden power. We hear the chattering electric guitar of New Wave, a little jazz-rock and even some not-half-bad Tehran rap.
You learn a lot about the Iranian music scene and how it exists in cracks, through disconnected anecdotes. A Metallica-like outfit practices in a cowshed in the country, where they get infections from the cows; meanwhile, the cowherds complain that music makes the cows dry up. Rock bands have to worry about sound leakage and tattletales calling the police. At a party where house music is blaring, we see a depths-of-degradation party, with the camera swiveling to peek-a-boo at the forbidden sights: a girl smoking a cigarette, a dark bedroom in which some kind of illicit sexual behavior is apparently going on, but the one taboo the film can’t show is the sight of an unaccompanied woman singing. Negar’s vocals are dubbed in as the appealingly nerdy girl looks off in the distance.
We do get one view of a solo female vocalist: an unidentified singer with a throb in her voice singing a love song with lyrics rich with Sufi-style symbolism. This music haunted me more than anything else in the film, but I doubt if we’ll ever find out who she is: the camera keeps her face, as well as the in-legal-peril audience, in a halo of out-of-focus haze.
The crackdown continues; recent news had it that Ashkan and Negar have applied for legal asylum in England after a member of their band was swallowed up by the police last year. Director Bahman Ghobadi (A Time of Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly) has made a sometimes awkward film, full of stops and starts. Even though it deals with sophisticated city people, it looks a little more strained in the nonprofessional acting than his films about peasants. That’s immaterial, though. Making this film, let alone appearing in it, is an act of bravery against a regime that gets more repressive—even as the power to dictate culture slips out of its hands.

by Richard von Busack

Many movie are called The Little Film That Could—Raymond De Felitta’s film deserves the name; the tale has tallness as well as heart. It concerns a tangle of confusion hitting the Rizzos, a suburban family who doesn’t realize how extended it is. Andy Garcia excels as Vince, a prison guard from a hidden waterside enclave in the Bronx, On the job, Vince encounters his own son Tony (Steven Strait) from a long-ago affair in Jersey and he decides to bring Tony home to do some day-labor without telling his wife his true identity. But Vince has another secret: he’s been taking acting classes in Manhattan, without informing his hostile, lynx-eyed wife Joyce (Julianne Margulies, never better). The rest of the family has secrets of their own: son Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller) is a chubby-chaser with eyes for the 400 lb woman next door, and daughter Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) has been moonlighting as a stripper. The tangle of lies is resolved nicely. City Island sports fine waterscapes; Emily Mortimer is very soulful as the acting partner with whom Vince shares a deepening friendship, the ageless Alan Arkin has six very good scenes as a weary acting teacher who has seen generations of Brando imitators come and go. Provoking a family feud at a dinner table, or gazing at a BBW porn site as if it were the holy grail, Miller is also outstanding. Hard to tell whether this is the general snazz of a cocky young actor, or something more long lasting, but Miller has everything Robert Downey Jr had at the age when Downey was making films like Back to School and Johnny B. Goode…so time will tell. Noisy at times, but so is a good episode of The Honeymooners. Always gentle and likable, the movie comes out in favor of the sins of the flesh. It celebrates the actor’s life and the actor’s luck.

Hooded like a terrorist, hiding in the cave-like shadows of his studio, his face obscured, his voice digitally scrambled…at his side, his emblem: a grinning pop-eyed monkey mask in a bell-jar, the mysterious English street artist Banksy narrates a twisted tale of fine art in Exit Through the Gift Shop. It’s a tale you might want to drop everything to hear.

The documentary’s actual subject isn’t the elusive grafittist Bansky, “the Scarlet Pimpernel of art,” as one of his journalist fans called him. Instead, Bansky narrates a parable about the career of a boutique owner named Thierry Guetta. Guetta is a friendly, mutton-chopped French-born Los Angelean boutique owner whose video documentation of a covert scene led—eventually–to Guetta’s own dreadful macking on the same.

The Frenchman was certainly in the right place at the right time, He recorded the billboard zappers of the Oughties: first, Guetta’s cousin, the pop-mosaic artist “Space Invader”; later Shepard Fairey, artist of the best known image of President Obama, as well as the Orwellian posters that urged us to “OBEY” dead Andre the Giant.

And there were other late night crawlers and shinniers, painting and postering the vacant zones of LA, NY, London and Paris. Thierry and Bansky follow the most recent artists in this scene: modern digital printers allow a perfection of line and repetition of image the pioneering 1980s punk-saboteurs could only dream about. This moonlit landscape was nothing but democratic: artists hid under nom de guerre (such as “Borf” and “Buffmonster”). And legal penalties abounded: just as the visuals became more perfect, so did modes of police surveillance.

Banksy’s art has soul as well as easily accessible political content. He takes on well-guarded subjects of oppression, from the British pound note to the Israeli security wall. Not everyone would have the nerve to zap the side of Nelson’s Column with a sign reading “DESIGNATED RIOT AREA.” The best scene in this movie may be the brief interview with a cloth-coated middle-aged English woman, as humble as a button. A journalist stops her as she leaves the scene of Banksy’s latest art crime: a mutilated, murdered red London telephone booth. The half-smiling lady murmurs to the interviewer, “I think he wasn’t very happy with British Telecom”. This glimpse of a passerby’s communion with art is maybe even more inspiring than Banksy’s later, greater bravery.
“I work in a legal gray area,” he says; could the Pimpernel—or Batman, his descendent–say that any better?  I couldn’t believe that Bansky decided to take on Disneyland to make a little public memorial to the tortured at Guantanamo. I would rather poster the side of the Pentagon than take on those Disney shtarkers. The piece, quickly discovered, is the peak of the Guetta/Bansky partnership; Banksy’s ingenuity is documented by a never bolder Guetta. Apprehended, Guetta stands up to the Magic Dictatorship’s interrogators, like a brave 1940s movie Gaul baffling the Gestapo.

Wilde’s proverb, “life copies art” never fails. Weird harmonies are everywhere. How about the simultaneous release of this documentary with the fanboy hit-to-be Kick-Ass; what a perfect double bill about secret-identitied copy-cats! Just as we saw in Batman (1989), the purity of a solitary figure inspires an evil replica. Eventually, the joker Guetta assumes an art identity, “Mr. Brainwash.”

Thanks to a minor injury, Guetta is even stuck to a wheelchair to make the super-villain metaphor clearer. Bansky states on camera he doesn’t know what the moral of this story is. But there’s an art piece on his website that might be telling–a greedy videographer, with a passing resemblance to Guetta, photographing a pink dahlia while plucking it out, roots and all.
Is Exit Through the Gift Shop a tale of fine art? The subject here is the story of any and all self-publicists: Nicholas Sparks, Sarah Palin, this week’s yodeler on American Idol: anyone who can shove their egos into the agoura.
It figures: “Mr. Brainwash’s” “art” is used to adorn the collected recordings of that certain mega-diva who has been called (by David Thomson) “an advertisement for advertisement.” What a gulf of distance between that portrait of M——na and a Banksy-decorated railroad viaduct: a poster with the simple, block-lettered words “Another Crap Advert”.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is about anonymous craftsmanship eclipsed by the sun-gun of self-publicity; of late-night lonely vigils and illegal attacks on consensus reality, elbowed aside by hucksterism on a Dali-level scale. Inevitably, hype, pandering and foolishness replaced the artist’s sacred tools of silence, exile and cunning.

DAM 999 is an emotional thriller and an ingenious attempt to highlight the unseen beauty of the maritime world in the backdrop of rich Indian culture while telling a compelling story in the backdrop of maritime life and an old dilapidated dam.  The story was inspired by the collapse of Banqiao dam in China, 1975, which led to the collapse of 61 reservoirs, killing 2,00,000 people.

The cast and crew include sixteen National Award winners.  Alleppey, the backwater city witnessed the shooting for the initial part of the movie.  People were attracted by the beautiful sets set up in Mohamma, Alleppey.  Now the whole crew is busy packing up to move on to the next location. The movie is expected to reach its audience by the end of this year.

For more information regarding the movie log on to www.damthemovie.com

by Richard von Busack

In the Meandros Valley in Turkey in 1920, a strange artifact is discovered:an ancient board game dedicated to the great god Pan. The game is refurbished, but sfter it kills its discoverers, it’s hidden on a Maine island for decades, just waiting for a group of discontented 20 somethings (there seemed to be 20 of them, anyway) to arrive and play Truth or Dare around its eldritch self.

Stare into the mirror at its center and you, too, may be victim of a guy in a goat suit who will cause you to enact your darkest desires. Thanks to the stupid movie rating system, the darkest desires we see are murderous instead of lustful. Two cast members go off to play Sappho and Bilitis (“It’s liberating!”) and we don’t get a gander. Yet every bit of chainsaw pliers and knifeplay is there for our delectation.

The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond is unusually hand made, though; the title alone is worth about $2; and Robert Patrick livens up things by going around consarning everything as a corn-pone night watchman or innkeeper or something; he sets bear traps for the local deer, which is none too sporting.

Actor turned director Gabriel Bologna is clearly one to watch: the synopsis of Girrl on imbd.com is really poetry, and his 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2007) was the long-awaited sequel made for the one and only Asylum. Here: though, some gag-worthy effects, strangely little carrying on by the muy caliente Avellan twins Elise and Electra (the baby-sitters from Grindhouse). As far the Greek stuff: the “Carnival of Curses,” the cute l’il toy skeleton turning “the wheel of Ixion,” and the film’s identification of the Eumenides as “Grudge,” “Retaliation” and “Unnamable” isn’t doing more violence to the myths than Clash of the Titans did.

by Richard von Busack

In the Meandros Valley in Turkey in 1920, a strange artifact is discovered:an ancient board game dedicated to the great god Pan. The game is refurbished, but sfter it kills its discoverers, it’s hidden on a Maine island for decades, just waiting for a group of discontented 20 somethings (there seemed to be 20 of them, anyway) to arrive and play Truth or Dare around its eldritch self.

Stare into the mirror at its center and you, too, may be victim of a guy in a goat suit who will cause you to enact your darkest desires. Thanks to the stupid movie rating system, the darkest desires we see are murderous instead of lustful. Two cast members go off to play Sappho and Bilitis (“It’s liberating!”) and we don’t get a gander. Yet every bit of chainsaw pliers and knifeplay is there for our delectation.

The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond is unusually hand made, though; the title alone is worth about $2; and Robert Patrick livens up things by going around consarning everything as a corn-pone night watchman or innkeeper or something; he sets bear traps for the local deer, which is none too sporting.

Actor turned director Gabriel Bologna is clearly one to watch: the synopsis of Girrl on imbd.com is really poetry, and his 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2007) was the long-awaited sequel made for the one and only Asylum. Here: though, some gag-worthy effects, strangely little carrying on by the muy caliente Avellan twins Elise and Electra (the baby-sitters from Grindhouse). As far the Greek stuff: the “Carnival of Curses,” the cute l’il toy skeleton turning “the wheel of Ixion,” and the film’s identification of the Eumenides as “Grudge,” “Retaliation” and “Unnamable” isn’t doing more violence to the myths than Clash of the Titans did.

By Richard von Busack

There are two schools of thought about comic books. One is that they serve our hunger for folk-tale simplicity. The friction of passing time magnetizes these stories, making them attract elements of world religion: Superman, who began as part Golem, has (per Alex Ross) been illustrated to look like Jesus.

Various comic-book writers have likened Batman to Anubis, St. Michael and—the fanciest reference of them all—the self-castrating Greek deity Attis (in the book Arkham Asylum). Another example: the uncharacteristic burst of reverence by author Cintra Wilson that led her to dedicate her book of political outrage, Caligula for President, “to Batman.”

As for the second school of thought? That would be the thought that if it’s not about guys in cool suits kicking ass, I don’t want to hear about it.

Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, hiding in the safety zone right down the middle of these two theories, should be a big hit. There’s a ferment over the film on the Internet, and the amped-up violence will also sell. The sequence about a Robin-the-Girl-Wonder type getting the tar stomped out of her is something new. Generally, children don’t get beaten up badly in the movies, and if there’s anything we’ve learned over the years, it’s that any new sensation will boost a film’s box office, no matter what side of the moral line it inhabits.

The homage to all cartoons and cartoon movies is seen during the opening titles: a flight through an audio bubble of tag lines of superhero shows and movies, a murmur of overlapping voices as the computer-animated camera sails through the clouds. We also see the reverence in the film’s last line, a quote from, yes, Batman (the Burton version).

In the middle comes the nasty fan-boy quality, a hermetic focus that doesn’t see anything but beating bad guys bloody. The ass-kicking gets enhanced even as the film tries to show how much it respects traditions, but Vaughn seems to be making a critique of comic-book violence, too, as when he indulges in the ironic gesture of using Elvis’ “An American Trilogy” for a “glory hallelujah” chorus during the film’s explosive finale.

Working from a comic-book series by silver-age cartoonist John Romita Sr. and writer Mark Millar, Kick-Ass starts us out with Dave (Aaron Johnson), a teen without qualities, beyond masturbation and comic-book reading. He decides to become a costumed vigilante. He orders a green scuba-diving suit and names himself Kick-Ass; on his first patrol, Dave gets squashed fast by bullies. The doctors who put him back together give him a metal skeleton. He’s had enough nerve damage that he feels no pain.

Resuming his patrols, Dave encounters the genuine item: a graying Batmanesque figure, portly, with a biker’s mustache. He is called Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage). His partner and beloved daughter is Mindy, known as Hit-Girl, played by Chloë Moretz, who was the wise little girl in (500) Days of Summer.

The two heroes are doing right what Kick-Ass does at an amateur level. Big Daddy and Hit-Girl have a large armory, a definite target and the good sense not to host a website. They’re both zeroing in on the crime boss of the town, Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), a savage in a penthouse who keeps (nice detail) the leathery, preserved head of one of his rivals in a vitrine near the elevator door. Strong, soon to be Green Lantern foe Sinestro in the upcoming film, adds to an already fine résumé of villains. He’s Italianoid this time, with scars that look like parentheses on his forehead: considering the material here, the scar ought to have looked like quotation marks. The thug also has a pampered son, Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), antsy to get into the family crime racket.

It’s been said that Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies demonstrate how superheroes would work in a real world. But the violence in Nolan’s films is still swift and cartoony even as his backgrounds are all plausible cityscapes. The fight scenes in Nolan’s Batman movies are meant to take care of business, not agonize. And Millar doesn’t even have the cityscapes here.

Vaughn, who directed Layer Cake and Stardust, has the problem of disguising Toronto the Good as New York the Ugly during the street beefs. Johnson’s studious lack of personality adds to the lack of a center: he’s a D.C.-style blank alter ego in a Marvel-style movie. Big Daddy and Hit-Girl are the urgent part of the movie; they vanish when Dave narrates, telling us about his friends and the girl (Lyndsy Fonseca) he likes.

Cage is an actor who, once upon a time, took his stage name from a comic book, and he’s in tune with the flamboyant mania of comics. He shows us the monstrousness underneath the mask: Big Daddy bent his daughter to the mission of climbing up walls and shooting people. (One sequence is full of sick-humored material when he coaxes Mindy into trying out body armor.)

Moretz’s grit and oddly gravelly voice—she never seems annoyingly precocious—will make a star out of her. The scene in which Hit-Girl cleans up a hallway loaded with gunmen to Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” might be some little girl’s dream; there are plenty of bloody-minded little girls out there, and thank heaven for them.

But it’s nuts to call Kick-Ass the next Watchmen. Vaughn uses the comic-book tropes wholesale, but he has no feeling for the romance or the mystery underneath them. The slamming violence and the dullard noms de guerre these obsessives picked for themselves are presumably meant to show a comic-book tradition at the end of a line. Cage carries all of this movie’s ambiguity, but Kick-Ass is a film that makes you feel beat up afterward.

by Richard von Busack

It would be hard to make a movie in San Francisco’s Mission District that wasn’t good to look at, but director Peter Bratt aims at something holier than that. La Mission is a simple story of a rough-hewn Che (Benjamin Bratt). He’s a Muni conductor, a hobby mechanic and an ex-con, single-parenting his son, Jesse (Jeremy Ray Valdez). What he doesn’t know is that Jesse has a secret life—and a boyfriend who lives in St. Francis Wood.

Che’s outright rage at his son’s sexuality is tempered by the attentions of his lovely new neighbor Lena (Erika Alexander). This women’s-shelter counselor is a newcomer to the Mission, but she’s adept with the really old-time religion. Lena keeps an altar to Kali, whom she calls “The Virgin Mary … with teeth.”

Director Peter Bratt and star Benjamin Bratt have been San Franciscans and movie fans all their lives. In an interview, Benjamin said that his brother, Peter, had created “a metaphorical low-rider cruise” through the Mission to match Che’s arc. “What happens sets him on a spiritual journey, to get in touch with the divine feminine principle,” added Peter Bratt.

Benjamin Bratt commented, “Cultural pride and sensitivity don’t necessarily mean open-mindedness to sexual orientation. We tried to make Che one of those heroes we have come to revere in cinema, compelling and attractive in that kick-ass way of taking care of business, [but] what really makes him tick? What we discover is that for Che it’s love: not just for his son but for his community.” The problems of making La Mission: first, a small ($2.5 million) budget; second, a film industry that believed that releasing Brokeback Mountain meant never having to deal with gay-hatred ever again.

“Then came Prop. 8,” Peter Bratt said. “Latinos and other minorities turned out to vote against gay marriage in record numbers. When we started working on this film, with homeboys and lowriders alike, we ran into homophobia. One brother we were working with, a man who paints low riders, … we heard him talking to his 17-year-old son: ‘They’re using your car, Dad. What is this movie about?’ ‘It’s about what I would do to you if I ever found out you were gay.’” But Peter Bratt insisted, “Even that gentleman who spoke those words saw the film. A light went on. His tolerance level has been transformed.”

Any positive representation of Aztlan has to be applauded; the scenes of highly polished lowriders gliding through the Mission make their own statement of beauty and pride. Bratt is the definition of movie-star gravity: a man doing nothing but thinking about stuff and making it look interesting. The film, then, is a celebration of San Francisco.

Problem is, San Francisco may be San Francisco, but it is still a city. So some hard-to-credit idealization is here amid the more real, street-level violence. La Mission is a kind of overexemplified view of San Francisco as a city of healing and refuge: a vision of a place where everyone is wounded, and almost everyone heals each other.

by Richard von Busack

A synthespian made completely out of Black Angus beef, Sam Worthington has an irreplaceable acting talent, and he demonstrates it Clash of the Titans. What those little chemical packets in shipping crates do for moisture, Worthington can do for levity. He has a unique ability to suck out every touch of humor in a movie, so that no matter how ridiculous things get no one laughs during his scenes.
Admittedly, Worthington keeps his back covered. He even passed on the risible coiffures endemic in director Louis Leterrier’s vision of the ancient world. His head, fuzzy as a tennis ball, is unique in the land of a thousand fright wigs. The Most Hirsute award goes to Liam Neeson’s Mr. Z, in shiny tinfoil armor last seen in Excalibur—a glittering Real 3-D eyesore that looks like a flicker postcard. This glowing apparition stares down his evil brother, Hades (Ralph Fiennes): nothing says “tension” like two furry, heavily mascaraed men giving each other the eye.
As a baby, Perseus (Worthington) is rescued from the brine by doughty fisherman Peter Postlewaite. The demigod loses his family during Argos’ terrorist attack on the Twin Towers—or rather, the twin towering legs of a colossal statue of Zeus. Dragged back by the Argive soldiers to their blasphemy-rich court, Perseus arrives in time to hear the king say, “Why, my daughter would make Aphrodite look like a skank!” or words to that effect.
Swift retribution: Lord Hades materializes like a bad fairy to promise that city a visit from the dreaded Kraken in 10 days. Can Perseus retrieve the necessary weapons to repel this sea creature? And will the Argos princess escape the blood lust of the local high priest, a Kraken-hugger who (with caste mark, wound-up hair and dhoti) looks like that Hindu convert from Omaha whose gaze you try to avoid when you visit Varanasi. Yes, and yes obviously.

Luckily, there are a few moments here with the sturdiness of the old myths. Kids will agree that any movie with Medusa in it can’t be a total loss. The hunt for the creature (“The bitch!” as Perseus calls her) takes place in a shivered temple and is prepped for with Medusa’s sad story. This legend is told by Perseus’ guardian angel, Io (Gemma Arterton); she thus provides not only the movie’s too-rare girly action, but Clash’s one nod to the pathos of Ovid.
Perseus’ captain is played fetchingly by Mads Mikkelsen; Calibos the demon is barely recognizable but fierce enough in the form of Jason Flemyng. And for the fan boys, there is a rare sighting of the Robot Owl (Bubo idioticus Lucasripofficus)—as well as several ridiculous djinns, a cross between Tusken Raiders and Wookies.
Bargain-matinee filler, then, but the inevitable Christianizing has gone down. No multiculti Ray Harryhausen here: the remake is more Cecil B. DeMille punishing the impious. One god (Neeson’s Zeus) predominates; the rest of the deities hang around the Dubai-like Mt. Olympus with their hands in their togas. Evil Hades is responsible for all the mayhem.
Rather than damning the gods (“Somebody is going to have to say, enough!”), it’s clear that man’s lack of prayers started it all. Why is man warring on Zeus? Clash doesn’t say—no famines, droughts, etc. And there’s no chess game between the gods and the out-of-sight, theologically confusing goddesses. No disturbance, then, to the pimps-up, ho’s-down, manly-man cinema of 2010. You’ve seen more unfettered paganism at a Unitarian potluck.

By Richard von Busack

THE SUBJECT of the 75-minute animated film The Secret of Kells is Christendom’s greatest illuminated manuscript. It was, said one chronicler, the work of angels disguised as men. The Book of Kells survived a dozen centuries of war and occupation. Historian Will Durant described it: “Byzantine and Islamic styles of illumination entered Ireland, and for a moment reached perfection there. Here, as in Moslem miniatures, human and animal figures played an insignificant role; none was worth half an initial. … The spirit of this art lay in taking a letter or a single ornamental motive … and drawing it out with fanciful humor and delight till it almost covered the page.”
It is an Irish treasure. Ireland is contained in its Celtic knots and lines, abstracted from the native vines and briars. But other influences and the artists’ tools link the book’s parts farther away; for instance, the blue lapis used as a pigment is reckoned to have come from the lands of the Afghans. The Secret of Kells celebrates the book’s creation as a gift to the world.
Young Brendan (voiced by Evan McGuire) is a monk at his uncle’s abbey at Kells in 9th-century Meath. The merciless Viking raiders approach, and the humorless uncle, Abbot Cellach (Brendan Gleeson), is occupied in trying to fortify the monastery: “It is with the strength of our walls that they will learn to respect the strength of our faith.”
Brendan is more interested in a new arrival to the monastery: the aged brother Aidan (Mick Lally), who carries with him the last treasure from his island of Iona: a magnificent illuminated manuscript. Aidan takes Brendan as an apprentice, much to the anger of Cellach. When Aidan sends the boy out into the wolf-haunted forest to seek pigments, he encounters a fairy named Aisling (Christen Mooney has one of those cracked, old-young voices you sometimes hear—Marianne Faithfull’s, for instance).
The passages with Aisling make this film sing—her own song, sung when Aisling ensorcells a cat, is an unusually lovely Celtic air. The Secret of Kells stresses the book’s importance on its own, rather than because of the Latin gospels it contains. The film is the opposite of the “violence for the sake of Christianity” tale like The Book of Eli. What’s stressed here is art as the hope of civilization, representing something more than life.

The love of nature also radiates from this movie. The action takes place at a time when the Christian veneer over pagan Ireland was very thin. The movie is at its best in the woods with its black wolves, their silhouettes as sharp as razors. Aisling herself is able to walk among them and lead them; sweeping her spiraling, ankle-length white hair and bell-bottomed tunics, she swirls up and around tall, sacred trees.
The Secret of Kells doesn’t get too airy-fairy. When the Vikings turn up to plunder the countryside, their horned helmets and red eyes make them Picasso Minotaurs, marching in battalions. The curling dragons of their ship helms are seemingly alive and breathing fire—it’s a little touch of Tim Burton.
The film resembles pen-and-ink animation, but directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey have used digital animation discreetly to fill the screen, to insert visions of microscopic details. They have abstracted the human figures to architectural shapes. Aisling’s hair makes its own labyrinths. The hardheaded Cellach is a human missile, posed against the thick concentric Romanesque windows. The arch-shaped monks, with their knobby Byzantine hands, look ready to fit into their own stained-glass windows.
Few animators have worked with this medieval style, if you don’t count Terry Gilliam’s burlesques of old manuscripts in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Certainly, The Secret of Kells’s overdue release is conclusive proof that 2009 was the finest year in the 106-year-old history of animation. There’s an official theory for this; the upcoming documentary Walking Sleeping Beauty suggests that Disney’s renaissance in the 1980s and the building of CalArts was what triggered the phenomenal year we just enjoyed.
It’s an intriguing idea, but the visuals in The Secret of Kells owe more to animators who went to work independently after the 1941 Disney strike. The film recalls the cartoons of John Hubley and UPA of the late 1940s and 1950s, with their Matisse-like embrace of flatness, the simplicity of design, the panels of color and the patterned backgrounds, sometimes glowing through the translucent characters. There’s even a squinting, crabbed old monk who seems to be a tribute to UPA’s biggest star, Quincy Magoo. The UPA style is in the public memory hole now, and I hope that The Secret of Kells will rescue it.

(Left) from UPA’s The Invisible Mustache of Raoul Dufy (1957) by Aurelius Battaglia

In addition to reviving this once-modern limited animated look, it’s an economical way to make a cartoon. Nevertheless, Moore, Twomey and the rest of the artists at Cartoon Saloon have indeed made something unique.

Beyond the good taste, there’s serious talent; they had the humor and freshness to animate the tale of a monk’s death in flashback as a joke of X’d eyes and last gasps.
A realistic cat is the very hardest animation challenge, and the animators meet it with a beast that glides, cowers and comforts like the real thing; this cat’s face is a simple circled X, and yet it’s very expressive.

This tenderness is combined with more light-fingered animation—a Daffy Duckish moment of a goose’s reaction shots to having a few plumes plucked for quill pens. The goose’s tiny ordeal may offer up as much of a hard moral as this terrific film offers: one must suffer a little for the sake of illumination.

by Richard von Busack

How I love low comedy. In moments of exaltation, it seems to celebrate the freedom of humans from the will of God and the requirements of nature that the base clown will be ground underfoot. Comedy at its lowest is appropriately the opposite of tragedy at its highest.

Hot Tub Time Machine advertises its million-dollar idiocy in a beautiful high-concept narrative gag—advertised with the solemn Craig Robinson, showing all necessary Speilbergian awe at the phenomenon. Happily, the phenom is scientifically explained—and citing that explanation would count as a spoiler; but no, it wasn’t all a dream. In a character seemingly inspired by the Don Knotts role in Pleasantville, Chevy Chase plays a mysterious blue-collar hot-tub repairman who explains the epic time-travel.

A trio of depressed middle-aged men gathers for a ski trip reunion. One, Nick (Robinson) is a dog groomer who once harbored some hopes as a musician. The bald-headed satyr Lou (Rob Corddry) has just been rescued from an apparent suicide attempt, which may have just been mere drunken idiocy. The newly broken-hearted and cleaned-out Adam (John Cusack) packs up the car with his two old buddies and his 24-year-old nephew, Jacob (Clark Duke), a depressed middle-aged man in training.

The ski resort they remember as the site of their youthful follies and triumphs has turned slummy; shoes hang from the telephone wires of the quaint frontier-town main street. The resort is now a dump. A one-armed bellhop (Crispin Glover) might as well be dressed in black, such is the ambient heartbreak.

Getting into the whiskey and the drugs, the four go hot-tubbing. During the course of the night, they’re Jacuzzi-whirled through a time portal to a particularly significant evening of sex and drugs they spent in the haut-Reagan era. The world of 1986 sees them as if they were young men. Jacob, who rightly believes that he wasn’t born yet and shouldn’t exist, is fading in and out of sight.

Hot Tub Time Machine’s editing is ruthless, almost to the point of resembling like a coming-attractions reel, but the scenes always keep at mid-build. Cusack gives the film soul, as in a moment when he is caught, baked on psychedelic mushrooms, writing love poetry. The film is extremely fast, but the scenes seem to have bumpers around them. Rather than looking like a frenzied mess, it’s more like there was some brilliant four-hour version that was cut down to a ragged but right shape.

Director Steve Pink previously wrote the script that Americanized High Fidelity; that was film that launched Jack Black, just as this film is bound to launch Duke (already a standout in Kick-Ass), a soft-looking but razor-tongued comedian. Pink is also credited as music supervisor and, as in High Fidelity, assembles a string of ’80s hits and misses, providing the sonic ambience to give this past-party some density.

Corddry has been doing a lot of laboring in the comedy field; by labored, I mean the web-series parody Children’s Hospital, where he played a Patch Adams whose clown makeup seemed to be based on John Wayne Gacy’s Pogo the Clown. His Lou, a king of oafs who looks like a Russian Gulag guard, is astonishing profane, even cursing the very butterfly that’s the symbol of the Butterfly Effect—you know, one false move in the past causing Hitler to be elected president as opposed to the ability to right the wrongs of the present: “Like keeping Manimal on TV or preventing Miley Cyrus.”

Corddry’s comedic timing is murderous, even in spitballed semi-improv moments, such as a routine about telephoning an escort service (“I want the girl in the picture! No tomfoolery!”). Cusack and Corddry do things here that you’re certain you’ll still be laughing about 10 years from now: such as Corddry’s unplugging himself from a hospital bed or Cusack’s woebegone monologue about the day life went wrong for him, a tale as funny as the story in Gremlins about the Santa who ruined Christmas.

Hot Tub Time Machine doesn’t get mired in nostalgia jokes—the dull obvious gag about the size of antique cell phones zooms by quickly. And Pink and company make up for an unkindness done to Chuck Berry by Back to the Future in Robinson’s musical numbers. Speaking of Back to the Future raises the question of how much Hot Tub Time Machine yearns for idealized past. The film, however, doesn’t completely lionize the 1980s. There is a line that goes, “This isn’t the time of free love, it’s of Reagan and AIDS”—with justice, the script links these two different disasters.

Is this time-travel comedy really about women returning to trad roles? I’m unsure. There isn’t a bad female performance in the film. The actresses, almost all brought into be ski-bunny bimbos, do their parts proud; they’re sparkly and vacant. Lizzy Caplan shows the most spirit as an entertainment reporter coming through town fast and leaving on a midnight bus. She has some grit to her; with her hoarseness and speed, she’s tapping into the vibe of mid-1980s Jane Fonda.

The four men here are all walking-wounded types, hurt by women. Adam takes a plastic fork to the face, an incident reflecting the dining-related tragedy that ruined his life when he was a kid. The idea that women control the happiness of men is one kind of respect for their power, but the series of little emasculations are reversed, just like time’s arrow. And a wayward mother is brought back.

Hot Tub Time Machine is the grimiest, funniest thing since The Hangover. Sadly, even in the flashiest, craziest comedies there’s no room here for the funny yet soulful woman who might have wanted to see some personal improvement in her life since the old days. That’s the difference between men and women in this comedic field, as far as female feelings and male feelings go. Comedy is what happens to them, tragedy is what happens to us.

by Richard von Busack

It’s not clear what holds the new André Téchiné film together besides craft and velocity. The Girl On the Train is about a pretty, shallow young girl and the national scandal she causes, and is based on a true story along the lines of the Ashley Todd incident. A girl goes to the police after being manhandled on a commuter train by a group of Jew haters. Upon investigation, the incident turns out to be not what it seemed initially.

In this fictionalized version, based on a play, Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne of Rosetta) is the careless daughter of a single mother, Louise (Catherine Deneuve). Jeanne’s father, a soldier with the peacekeeping forces, was killed in Afghanistan. Louise is working a day-care facility out of their suburban home. She has made a tense peace with her daughter’s limitations, her lack of ambitions.
Jeanne gets involved with a fascinating but untrustworthy student named Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a tattooed wrestler with Olympic hopes.

Watching Franck assert himself at a mother/daughter lunch—he orders cognac and a cigar to show what a big man he is—one asks: What’s worse, a person who can’t get to the comfortable, joking level or a person who pretends to be able to do it?

Franck takes a dodgy job as a watchman at a small electronics firm. Jeanne moves in, and then serious legal trouble follows. The trouble calls forth a beautiful mind in a homely body, M. Bleistein (Michel Blanc), a renowned Jewish civil rights lawyer.

In his army days, Bleistein had known Louise and had a mad crush on her. This was when, Louise says, “He wasn’t bald, and he didn’t have glasses.” Now Bleistein is a wealthy widower, who watches the power struggle over his wise, precocious grandson conducted by the boy’s estranged parents.

The film’s primary motif is the speed of trains.Téchiné tracks the sensuality of Jeanne as she races through the bike paths or along the Seine on roller blades, red hair flying: an embodiment of youth and summer heat. When Jeanne is racing—listening to a favorite song on her MP3 player, Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lady”—she’s most herself. She’s skating when she encounters Franck, passing him on the trail; for a time, she has found a mate who can keep up with her.

The speed of the courtship is remarkable. Téchiné is in his 60s, but he has a velocity that shames directors in their 20s. It’s not that The Girl on the Train isn’t consistently interesting or beautiful to look at. Téchiné’s evocations of man/woman needs stress physical magnetism but never exploit it. Deneuve’s elegant cold shoulders are national monuments worth revisiting. She knows how to make withholding look like a fine art.

Téchiné explores a generation gap: two ways of seeing the way the world works. Like Louis Malle, Téchiné comes down in favor of the instantaneous, breathless approach to life. The second half, ultimately, loses this urgency, even with provocative cutting: Jeanne’s initiation into a prison cell jumps to a boy’s initiation into the imprisonment of manhood via a bar mitzvah. Whether you accept it or not, that equivalency is arguable; it’s just that it doesn’t scan at the time of viewing. The Girl on the Train lets its central mystery skate away.

by Richard von Busack
Despite the opening shot—a splotch of menstrual blood on a hot San Fernando Valley pavement—in The Runaways, director Floria Sigismondi cuts back on the blood, sweat and tears of rock & roll. The Runaways is an artfully photographed but standard behind-the-music job on the 1970s band. The main character is the frail, easy-to-exploit singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), whose autobiography Neon Angel is sourced. Currie’s partnership (with benefits) with guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) gets her to the top and then straight down to the bottom.

Currie and Jett were two of the five members of an L.A. band, mentored by the psychedelic Svengali Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), who, in this vision, seems to be the direct model for Gerrit Graham’s “Beef” in Phantom of the Paradise. Certainly, the movie delivers some moments of bad fun: Jett dropping trou and giving a golden shower to a rival’s guitar, most notably. And Sigismondi does supply some sex: a half-in-focus night with Currie and Jett swirling around toward bed (and I did love the morning-after moment, with Currie waking up, still with her roller skates on her feet).

As modestly produced as an art film, The Runaways tries creative ideas to cover the lack of a budget. In the Japanese scenes (faked in L.A.), it looks as if the band flew across the Pacific to entertain all of 40 customers. More than snark makes me mention this: it’s easier to insist on the pain of rock stars when it looks like they had no fans. The hard-work angle is stressed, lest we don’t take the band seriously: loads of practicing in a crappy house trailer followed by repeat doses of badly staged household drama. These scenes are a lesson to us all: negligent parents created victims of quail hunters like Fowley. The band becomes a success, but that just brings pervy exploitation of the hardly legal Cherie. “Publicize the music, not your crotch!” screams Jett, although the band has been stressing the girl version of below-the-belt rock.

Sigismondi gives the Runaways their props as female artists in a land of chauvinists. But it wasn’t feminists that made a success of girls in short-shorts and tight T-shirts. “This isn’t about women’s lib, this is about women’s libido,” says Fowley, and the emptiness starts to infect the movie. It’s Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ later work that stands up and barks on this soundtrack, and that’s only on the end titles. The copious needle drops make it all too clear: there’s a difference between the stature of a tune like the Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” and a tune like Iggy Pop’s “Gimme Danger.”

Stewart desperately needed a role where she wasn’t coltish neck-candy for some emo vampire. As raven-haired cock-of-the-walk musician, or alone, face floating in a milk-colored bathtub, she’s more Weimar than Woodland Hills. Fanning can’t compete: it’s an interesting conception to play Currie as a girl too young to have a determined personality. But you don’t see why Curie held the stage. The Runaways is so awfully not much fun at all, particularly for contemporaries of this scene. If I live much longer, I’ll see a biopic in which the Fifth Dimension are portrayed as rebels the Man wouldn’t leave alone.

by Richard von Busack

Aiming to pound away resistance to the Iraq War movie, Green Zone is Paul Greengrass’ most visually lucid, yet dully scripted, film. He intends to hook an audience sick of the war by first rebuilding the invasion’s heroic moment.

As U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, Matt Damon roars around Baghdad in March 2003 looking for WMD sites. He finds, no surprise, storage sheds lined with cobwebs. His instructions were vetted by a source called “Magellan,” whose info is filtered through a State Department wonk (the always-wonky Greg Kinnear); Magellan’s pronouncements were regurgitated by a credulous, Judith Miller–style Wall Street Journal reporter (Amy Ryan).

In the Green Zone—a piece of the Holiday Inn in the middle of the devastation—Damon locks eyes with a CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson) who is entertaining similar doubts about the mission. The two collaborate. In the field, Miller acquires a book listing the safe houses of a fugitive Saddamite general, Al Rawi (Yigal Naor). The general is a wanted man, the Jack of Clubs in the invaders’ deck. On Miller’s trail as he seeks Al Rawi is a black ops figure (Jason Isaacs)—ever more menacing for the fact that we never see him properly.

Naor is a big man, like the assistant villain in a Bond film; he’s there to give a you-foolish-Americans speech when we’re feeling contrite about having been suckered by the W mob. Against this massive bald figure, the ever-improving Damon stands his ground. His solitude tends to make Green Zone look more heroic: he’s one man striding forth, rather than one member of an armored squad tumbling out of a Hummer. (There is no cinematically graceful way to leave a Hummer, unless you count being blown out of it by explosives.)

The writing is credited to Brian Helgeland via Washington Post bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book Imperial Life in the Emerald City. I doubt if its father would recognize it. The fictionalization is almost risible. This isn’t Day of the Jackal territory—we never get to the “almost …” point of what might have happened in Iraq. Greengrass visually executes Green Zone with the same technique as in his two Bourne movies. The chase scenes are so visually illegible, the characters might as well be chasing themselves.

Yet Greengrass seems a lot closer to his ultimate aim: to restore the primacy of speed to cinema after it has been snatched away by video games and music videos. Computer graphics, good ones, take us swaying over the city of Baghdad. It turns out that the best perspective of Saddam’s monstrous crossed-sword Hands of Victory gates is from 300 feet up rather than street level. Green Zone’s last shot of a refinery is a no-comment finale on the truth behind the invasion—taken on to make us safer, it weakened virtually everything. Greengrass is trying to balance this revolting truth with smash-mouth action, but a despairing entertainment is a contradiction in terms.

This silent masterpiece of the horror film is the first “true” screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula, published in 1897, however, there are rumors that a Hungarian version of the novel entitled DRAKULA was made in 1921 and directed by Karoly Lajthay.

NOSFERATU was directed by one of Germany’s greatest filmmakers, F. (Friederich) W. (Wilhelm) Murnau, who, at the time, was a young director of the German school of expressionism. Murnau, along with Fritz Lang, who directed METROPOLIS (1926), is one of the greatest directors from the classic period of silent films. NOSFERATU was clearly Murnau’s masterpiece, following the success of his earlier film DERJANUSKOPF (1920), based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Murnau did not take the most ethical approach in adapting Stoker’s Dracula to the screen. Dracula was still in copyright in 1921 when the film went into production. Unlike other filmmakers who acquired the rights to adapt the story onto the screen from Stoker’s widow, Murnau simply proceeded to make his film, disregarding copyright laws, which were somewhat slack at the time. The film was adapted to the screen by Henrik Galeen. Galeen had co-scripted with Paul Wegener the first version of DER GOLEM (1914), and later went on to script Paul Leni’s WAXWORKS (1924). The script written by Galeen was quite faithful to the novel, however, Murnau took several precautions in the making of his bootlegged version. To avoid paying royalties to the copyright owners of Dracula, (Stoker’s widow), Murnau changed the name of the script from Dracula to Nosferatu. He also altered the names of the characters and the film’s setting. Transylvania became Germany and Bremen was substituted for London. Count Dracula became Count Orlock; Jonathan Harker became Waldemar Hutter; Professor Van Helsing became Professor Bulwer; and Renfield was changed to Knock.

Despite the name and setting changes, the premise remained relatively the same as the novel and, in fact, the screenplay by Henrik Galeen is more faithful to the Stoker novel than the Universal and Hammer versions that followed.

The most drastic difference from the Stoker novel and this film is the vampire’s physical appearance. Count Orlock, portrayed superbly by actor Max Schreck as a hellish demon, appears as a bald, human rodent-type creature; a monster that appears to have just risen from its foul smelling grave. Unlike Stoker’s mysterious and handsome noble character, Orlock wore no tuxedo or cloak, nor did he bid fair maidens welcome. Instead, he preyed upon innocent victims like a bubonic plague, satisfying his unquenchable thirst for human blood. Schreck’s Orlock was and still is the most hideous vampire ever to prowl the screen. With pointed ears, a pale face, razor sharp teeth and claws, the hellish demon leads his legions of rats from the subterranean levels of Germany and sails to Bremen where a terrible plague strikes the town. The demon vampire is eventually destroyed when the film’s heroine sacrifices her own life and soul to the vampire. She keeps Orlock occupied until sunrise by allowing the foul creature of the night to slowly drain her blood. In the morning, Orlock perishes from exposure to the sun’s lethal rays.

NOSFERATU was never given wide distribution. The film’s faithfulness to the Stoker novel forced it out of circulation because of copyright  infringements enforced by Florence Stoker. Murnau was ordered to withdraw the film in July 1925. The court also ordered that all negatives and prints of the film be destroyed, but obviously, NOSFERATU survived  luckily), and the film was screened in London three years afterwards, followed by its first American screening in 1929. Today, NOSFERATU is considered by film historians as one of the greatest silent horror films ever made.

NOSFERATU was apparently remade in Italy in 1971 as HANNO COMBIATO FACCIA (THEY CHANGED FACES), directed by Corrado Farina for Garigliano Films. The film follows the same plot of NOSFERATU, only gangsters are substituted for vampires (sounds much like INNOCENT BLOOD made in 1992). A more faithful remake was made in color in 1979 with Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula rather than Count Orlock.

LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT

1927; MGM (B&W); Director: Tod Browning; Screenwriter: Waldemar Young from an original story by Tod Browning; Camera: Merritt Gerstad.

During the mid 1920′s, American film companies became more involved with the growing genre of horror films, mainly as a result of many superior and commercially successful German pictures such as DER GOLEM (1914,1916 & 1920), THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919), DER JANUSKOPF (1920), NOSFERATU (1922) and several others. Actor Lon Chaney, Sr. was the leading horror film star in America at a time, several years before Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff rose to fame. The actor was most famous for his monstrous movie characterizations in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923) and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925).

In 1927, the actor played a pseudo vampire in the first American vampire film, LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. The film was based on the story The Hypnotist by Tod Browning, who also directed the film.

For years, there had been much discussion about this film and how it compared to its remake, MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), which Browning also directed and which starred Bela “Dracula” Lugosi. However, because LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT is virtually a lost film (although there seems to be a rumor that a print may exist in a private collection in England), it is therefore impossible to compare the two films equally and fairly.

Supposedly LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, like its remake, leads the viewer to believe that there really is a vampire (played by Chaney) running around an old castle, when really the vampire is later revealed as being a police detective in disguise during the film’s climax. The vampire trappings were staged throughout the film to frighten a murderer into disclosing his involvement with a killing. Chaney assumed both the roles of the detective and the vampire, and the audiences of 1927 were subject to the hoax.

Despite the prank, Chaney’s vampire is quite impressive, and the supernatural elements prior to the revelation of the hoax are quite effective. As with his highly memorable and distorted creations in both THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, the actor delivers a frightening characterization of a movie vampire,  complete with formal wear, top hat and a set of rigid fangs that cover his entire mouth.

By 1927, Chaney was the undisputed master of the American horror film. Unfortunately, Chaney passed away in 1930 just before production began on Universal Pictures’ version of Stoker’s novel. One can only wonder how Chaney’s Count Dracula would have been depicted had he portrayed the character in the Universal classic that followed in 1931. Many have speculated, but chances are his Dracula would not have been the suave nobleman that Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula is today.

This silent masterpiece of the horror film is the first “true” screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula, published in 1897, however, there are rumors that a Hungarian version of the novel entitled DRAKULA was made in 1921 and directed by Karoly Lajthay.

NOSFERATU was directed by one of Germany’s greatest filmmakers, F. (Friederich) W. (Wilhelm) Murnau, who, at the time, was a young director of the German school of expressionism. Murnau, along with Fritz Lang, who directed METROPOLIS (1926), is one of the greatest directors from the classic period of silent films. NOSFERATU was clearly Murnau’s masterpiece, following the success of his earlier film DERJANUSKOPF (1920), based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Murnau did not take the most ethical approach in adapting Stoker’s Dracula to the screen. Dracula was still in copyright in 1921 when the film went into production. Unlike other filmmakers who acquired the rights to adapt the story onto the screen from Stoker’s widow, Murnau simply proceeded to make his film, disregarding copyright laws, which were somewhat slack at the time. The film was adapted to the screen by Henrik Galeen. Galeen had co-scripted with Paul Wegener the first version of DER GOLEM (1914), and later went on to script Paul Leni’s WAXWORKS (1924). The script written by Galeen was quite faithful to the novel, however, Murnau took several precautions in the making of his bootlegged version. To avoid paying royalties to the copyright owners of Dracula, (Stoker’s widow), Murnau changed the name of the script from Dracula to Nosferatu. He also altered the names of the characters and the film’s setting. Transylvania became Germany and Bremen was substituted for London. Count Dracula became Count Orlock; Jonathan Harker became Waldemar Hutter; Professor Van Helsing became Professor Bulwer; and Renfield was changed to Knock.

Despite the name and setting changes, the premise remained relatively the same as the novel and, in fact, the screenplay by Henrik Galeen is more faithful to the Stoker novel than the Universal and Hammer versions that followed.

The most drastic difference from the Stoker novel and this film is the vampire’s physical appearance. Count Orlock, portrayed superbly by actor Max Schreck as a hellish demon, appears as a bald, human rodent-type creature; a monster that appears to have just risen from its foul smelling grave. Unlike Stoker’s mysterious and handsome noble character, Orlock wore no tuxedo or cloak, nor did he bid fair maidens welcome. Instead, he preyed upon innocent victims like a bubonic plague, satisfying his unquenchable thirst for human blood. Schreck’s Orlock was and still is the most hideous vampire ever to prowl the screen. With pointed ears, a pale face, razor sharp teeth and claws, the hellish demon leads his legions of rats from the subterranean levels of Germany and sails to Bremen where a terrible plague strikes the town. The demon vampire is eventually destroyed when the film’s heroine sacrifices her own life and soul to the vampire. She keeps Orlock occupied until sunrise by allowing the foul creature of the night to slowly drain her blood. In the morning, Orlock perishes from exposure to the sun’s lethal rays.

NOSFERATU was never given wide distribution. The film’s faithfulness to the Stoker novel forced it out of circulation because of copyright  infringements enforced by Florence Stoker. Murnau was ordered to withdraw the film in July 1925. The court also ordered that all negatives and prints of the film be destroyed, but obviously, NOSFERATU survived  luckily), and the film was screened in London three years afterwards, followed by its first American screening in 1929. Today, NOSFERATU is considered by film historians as one of the greatest silent horror films ever made.

NOSFERATU was apparently remade in Italy in 1971 as HANNO COMBIATO FACCIA (THEY CHANGED FACES), directed by Corrado Farina for Garigliano Films. The film follows the same plot of NOSFERATU, only gangsters are substituted for vampires (sounds much like INNOCENT BLOOD made in 1992). A more faithful remake was made in color in 1979 with Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula rather than Count Orlock.

LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT

1927; MGM (B&W); Director: Tod Browning; Screenwriter: Waldemar Young from an original story by Tod Browning; Camera: Merritt Gerstad.

During the mid 1920′s, American film companies became more involved with the growing genre of horror films, mainly as a result of many superior and commercially successful German pictures such as DER GOLEM (1914,1916 & 1920), THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919), DER JANUSKOPF (1920), NOSFERATU (1922) and several others. Actor Lon Chaney, Sr. was the leading horror film star in America at a time, several years before Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff rose to fame. The actor was most famous for his monstrous movie characterizations in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923) and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925).

In 1927, the actor played a pseudo vampire in the first American vampire film, LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. The film was based on the story The Hypnotist by Tod Browning, who also directed the film.

For years, there had been much discussion about this film and how it compared to its remake, MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), which Browning also directed and which starred Bela “Dracula” Lugosi. However, because LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT is virtually a lost film (although there seems to be a rumor that a print may exist in a private collection in England), it is therefore impossible to compare the two films equally and fairly.

Supposedly LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, like its remake, leads the viewer to believe that there really is a vampire (played by Chaney) running around an old castle, when really the vampire is later revealed as being a police detective in disguise during the film’s climax. The vampire trappings were staged throughout the film to frighten a murderer into disclosing his involvement with a killing. Chaney assumed both the roles of the detective and the vampire, and the audiences of 1927 were subject to the hoax.

Despite the prank, Chaney’s vampire is quite impressive, and the supernatural elements prior to the revelation of the hoax are quite effective. As with his highly memorable and distorted creations in both THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, the actor delivers a frightening characterization of a movie vampire,  complete with formal wear, top hat and a set of rigid fangs that cover his entire mouth.

By 1927, Chaney was the undisputed master of the American horror film. Unfortunately, Chaney passed away in 1930 just before production began on Universal Pictures’ version of Stoker’s novel. One can only wonder how Chaney’s Count Dracula would have been depicted had he portrayed the character in the Universal classic that followed in 1931. Many have speculated, but chances are his Dracula would not have been the suave nobleman that Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula is today.

series Dark Shadows. Gradually, outer  space overtook the undead as the

favored stuff of viewers, much as it had in the fifties–at least until Hammer Films came along and made those “B” Martian and giant bug flicks really look like junk. Within the last year and a half, however, two made-for-TV movies and one short serial have brought the vampire into prime time, and one two-part story on a regular series poked very skillful fun at vampire story clichés.

“The Curse of Dracula” on NBC’s short-lived Cliffhangers series brought the old boy to San Francisco as a professor of East  European history–night classes only, of course. He is found out by Man’, a young woman whose mother he had “killed” some ten years earlier. The daughter, aided by Kurt Van Helsing. grandson of guess whom, finds Dracula’s where abouts, and Kurt delivers the requisite coup de grace with a crossbow.

All of this sounds like the standard shtick of quickie, exploitation films, which only goes to show that you can’t judge a production by its plot. For all its slickness, “The Curse of Dracula” had that rarest of beasts meaning. This all happens because the images, allusions, and dialogue are so  carefully chosen that they produce genuine artistic effect in something which was still obviously made to cash in on tin- recent Dracula boom.

A few examples: Mary (Carol Baxter) confronts Dracula (Michael Nouri) with her mother’s death. “You killed her!” she accuses. “But I did love her,” he calmly replies. The sense of that bond between love and death was never more eloquently phrased. Mary later tells Kim, “Thai really threw me.” Later in the story, after Man- has been twice bitten, Amanda, who is now a vampire, semis her to a convent for protection.

To reach her, Dracula has to walk through the convent cemetery, in which all the markers arc uniform wooden crosses, some of which are rotting and leaning from age. For a TV series, the image of Dracula walking through a garden of his own symbol is quite masterful. As if to silence the Freud-and-the-Fantastic crowd, the show also had Amanda beg Mary to drive the stake through her heart. “You won’t be killing me, you’ll be freeing me,” she implores. The staking scene is surprisingly tame, but then the censors” toughness with networks, while letting independent stations go wild, has always amazed me.

Finally, Dracula’s death scene: his last coffin was hidden in a warehouse in which wax figures were kept. The place is already on fire when Kurt shoots him with a crossbow; Dracula falls back and, after Kurt and Mary leave, the figures melt around him— both the Count and they were imitations of living forms.

Throughout, Michael Nouri maintained the dignity and tragedy of his character, in what could all too easily have become a hokey spoof. All the pscudopsychoanalytic prattle about what blood symbolizes is dismantled when his Count tells Mary: “I do not live to partake of it; I partake of it to live.” Or at least his version of life. And the irony of his five centuries of solitude and fugitive flight is perfectly expressed when he says, “There are many addictions-drugs, alcohol. But the worst addiction of all is the addiction to life. To be alive, no matter how lonely it may be.” To put Dracula across nowadays as a tragic hero, or antihero, is a difficult business—here was one of the few and far between successes.

Anton Voteck (Richard Lynch) as ABC’s “Vampire” is a totally different animal altogether. The story begins with an interesting-if vaguely familiar-proposition: the foundation of a new church is being dedicated, with a nice panning shot of its huge cross, but, unbeknownst to the builders, it is very near the ruins of an old estate. In the catacombs of the mansion, Voteck and a priest battled it out years ago; the priest was killed, and “Vampire” has been trapped dormant since then. If the scenario is starting to echo “Dracula Has Risen from the Grave,” one shouldn’t be surprised. From here the story plods along, trying to be chic and sexy; it succeeds in the former, but fails hilariously in the latter,

The usual clichés are present: the vampire-hunter throwing open a coffin—which is hidden in an old windmill, no less—only to find his missing girl inside. But a windmill in Southern California isn’t ridiculous enough: Voteck carts another lass off to a mausoleum complete with couch. This gag  doesn’t work as well, however. Voteck calls her man in classic kidnapper style; when he orders Voteck not to touch her, the vampire replies, “Oh, I’m going to touch her, and when I do, she’s going to love it.” This is more the line of a rapist than a seducer, which may be only fitting, since Voteck runs around in a double-breasted white suit and white-lined, three-quarter length cloak which make him look more like a pimp than anything else.

Repugnant though he is, the audience doesn’t get to sec Voteck destroyed. Cornered by his opponents outside his marble love nest, he simply runs off among the tomb stones. The End. This cheat ending got a lot of complaints from viewers, including this one: the destruction of Michael Nouri’s Dracula was a four- Kleenex affair, but I would have cheered Voteck’s demise.

The problem with “Vampire” is that it is all show and no substance. The makers of “The Curse of Dracula” managed to take a gimmicky situation and turn it into something meaningful, plausible. Too, they had enough sense to know when something was just plain funny, e.g., Dracula stowing a spare coffin in a coffin factory storage house.

“Vampire,” by contrast, tries too hard to be too serious and to show the vampire as Great Lover, without working in any of the other, perhaps less desirable, aspects of undeath. Ultimately, though, the adrnen for “Vampire” were the ones who over played their hand. One of their taglines reads: “No woman can resist him.” That’s what they think.

And just when television had us convinced that, for better or worse, vampires were sexy, along came Salem’s Loi to prove them wrong, at least some of the time. Not having read the thick Stephen King novel, I cannot venture any observations on the almost inevitable divergences from the written word which occur when print is transformed into celluloid. I’ll simply say that Salem’s Lot conies across as something of a cross between Nosferatu and Night of the Living Dead, with a touch of Psycho thrown in.

In many respects, Salem’s Lot, as a story, is representative of the “Dracula Goes Main Street” school: we have the requisite spooky, old abandoned house purchased by a just-a-little abnormal stranger; the disgruntled small-town woman; the intelligent, inquisitive hero; and The Thing. The difference is, this story is really scary, and its Thing is the chief reason. The Peyton Place filler (unhappy children, cheating spouses) is unfortunate, only because too often it looks like filler, as well as suggests that this is real life in modern times, on a mass scale: who needs vampires with all this mortal chaos?

‘While originally released by CBS in 1979 as a two-part television movie special, Salem’s Lot is now distributed to theaters by Serendipity Films, Inc.

Producer Richard Kobritz, in an interview in Cinafantastique, said that he gave Barlow the Vampire (Reggie Nalder) a neo-Nosferatu look because “I didn’t want a smarmy, romantic sentimental Frank Langella vampire for Salem’s Lot. What I wanted was the essence of evil—a monster. And that’s what I got.” He certainly did. The punch line is that, while comparing Barlow to the Langella Dracula is equivalent to the classic comparison of apples and oranges, one must admit that the apples of Salem’s Lot do what they intend to (i.e., terrify) while those smarmy oranges were chloroform on film.

However, makeup isn’t everything. Insofar as he gets to “act” proper, Nalder is quite good as the repulsive Barlow. Another surprise is David Soul, late of the gang-busting Starsky and Hutch, who appears as the articulate Ben Mears, a young writer who goes home again to purge the town of the threat. Finally, James Mason as Straker, the off-kilter stranger who purchases the Marston house as headquarters for “the Master.”

Salem’s Lot’s greatest surprise, if not innovation, was its portrayal of child vampires. Ergo, anyone put off by the representations of children in the Omen and Exorcist movies should avoid this one. It’s one thing for kiddies to be possessed, demonic, or just plain weird, but the sight of Ralphie Glick (Ronnie Scribner) floating white-faced and neon-eyed into his brother Danny’s (Brad Savage) bedroom is doubtless too much for the children-are-beautiful crowd.  Now about that infant that Dracula brings to his wives. . . .

The Living Dead scenario is revived in Barlow’s vampirizing a number of

townspeople. Marjorie Glick (Clarissa Kaye, Mason’s wife) is one of them, and her resurrection in the town morgue is one of those classic scenes which are both hilarious and chilling at the same time, and probably for the same reasons. Ben Mears repels her with a cross made of taped-together tongue depressors (remember “Count Yorga, Vampire”?) and she disintegrates in true Nosferatu style. At the climax, a whole group, buried in the Marston house cellar, awakens and tries to crawl out, as Mears stakes Barlow. But this is not all: Mears and Mark Petrie (Lance Kerwin) journey to

Mexico or some such place to seek out the rest of the undead, and find one of the lovely lasses of Salem’s Lot lying undead in a hut. So much for happy endings.

Obviously, Salon’s Lot is quite the proverbial switch from the first two tales, one of which was a tragedy, the other an unwitting comedy. It is a good old horror movie, despite the spook-next-door motif, and one of those rare instances in which the gimmick works. My only criticism is that it may have worked better, viewing-wise, as a shorter, one-sitting piece, rather than a two-parter with a week between installments. Still, it was a good monster movie with a genuine monster: as Kobritz says, that’s what it’s all about.

As a closing note, I must mention “War of the Cods,” a two-parter on Battlestar: Galactica which featured Patrick Macnee as Count Iblis. In case being a Count isn’t evidence per se enough of vampirehood, here’s some more: he’s a handsome, charming, mysterious alien in a (off-white) velvet cape. He has no heartbeat, no pulse, “no signs of life” when tested on the sneak, and the young lady of the story is absolutely swept off her feet: “He’s the only man who ever really understood me!”

The point is that all of this is done to the hilt and beyond, so that one laughs with the gag and not at it. Iblis is on the run from the galactic good guys (old-fashioned angels in acetate wings) for various depredations. He still has his own angelic powers, now, of course, in fallen form, and uses them to draw the Galactica crew into his power. All except Adama and Apollo, who unmask him finally: “Don’t you remember the old leg ends about Mephistopheles?” Like Voteck, he just disappears at the end, but this time for a reason: the Devil is, in his way, immortal, and man must wrangle with him time and again.

The irony of this is that, in spite of the tongue-in-cheek satire, “War of the Gods” got the Dracula myth back to basics with the whole Miltonic/Byronic business of the appeal of the darkest villain, the Devil (or son of, as the name Dracula denotes) and the ever-presence of some dark, evil element. The setting is almost Batmanesque camp, but maybe because the story never takes itself too seriously, it gets something across while still being very funny. [If the show ever comes back in UHF reruns, try to catch this one: it's worth it just to see "Mr. Steed in Outer Space."]

I won’t go into the heavy meanings of the story, simply because there weren’t any other than the ones illustrated in the quotes from the show, but will end by saying that, like Love at First Bite, this routine managed to provoke yuks and thought from the same pool of material: an evening’s amusement in front of the TV, and some good one-liners to remember too. One can’t ask for more from prime-time, commercial programming.

artist refining his skills. Like Picasso in the winter of his lifetime or Sir Alfred Hitchcock in his later years, an unexpected cache of treasures had

been discovered and their renewed individuality, flowering in richly expressive textures, had illuminated and enhanced the supposedly barren

culture of the ageless. Such an artist, such a legend, is Miklos Rozsa, composing music for motion pictures since 1937, in his forty-second year of endeavor, creating one of the most memorable and endearing scores for Nicholas Meyer’s wondrous fantasy, Time After Time.

With Time After Time, Rozsa has created a rapturous moment of incomparable beaury, an exquisite rhapsody that is matchless in its grandeur. Director Nicholas Meyer wisely allowed the composer to follow

his own inclinations. Among these was Rozsa’s decision to begin the picture with Max Steiner’s traditional Warner Bros, fanfare, a loving salute

to the man who gave the studio its musical identity. Time After Time is in

no sense a modern film. It is a delightful throwback to a more innocent period of our culture when Steiner’s familiar prelude heralded the appearance of each new film from the brothers Warner. Thus, its inclusion. What follows is in no way inconsistent with the spirit or flavor of the familiar fanfare, for Rozsa has written a majestic main title for the film that is both stirring and provocative.

For the time-travel sequence in which H. G. Wells is transported abruptly into the twentieth century, Rozsa has created a wonderful accompaniment filled with a sense of wonder almost childlike in its structure since we, like Wells in his machine, are children innocently entering a new world. It is appropriate then that this sequence is somewhat reminiscent of an earlier journey, a similar adventure in which a child/man took the reigns of a flying

horse and flew off beyond the clouds in Rozsa’s The Thief of Bagdad.

“The Ripper; Pursuit” is brilliantly conceived and executed, as is a later chase sequence entitled “Dangerous Drive.” In both selections Wells

chases the Ripper through the streets of San Francisco, first on foot and

then behind the wheel of an automobile. Rozsa’s music in these scenes is quite marvelous, a thrilling musical pursuit, escalating to a near frenzy of agitation and suspense as the chase is frustrated again and again.

For the lovers’ first date in a revolving rooftop cafe high above the city, the composer has written the lovely “Time Machine Waltz,” a soft and charming piano solo that gently glimpses a deeper affection yet to be shared. Itself worthy of a full sym phonic orchestration, Rozsa deliberately withholds a more deserving interpretation of the piece. In lesser hands this might have served rather effectively as a primary romantic theme. For Rozsa, however, there is a second love theme awaiting its introduction in the wings. This is

certainly the piece de resistance of the score. The music is heard first

amongst the “Redwoods” where Wells and Amy come to realize their feelings for one another. It is soft, never overstated, yet clearly poignant

and sensitive to the growing tender ness of a shared and special moment.

It isn’t until “Journey’s End & Finale,” however, that the enormous power and potential of this music can be experienced properly. It is here, as the lovers prepare their farewell, that the consummate artist ry of Miklos Rozsa reaches its zenith. It is an electrifying moment, the culmination of the composer’s finest Him score in seventeen years and the awesome intensity of one of the most exquisite love themes in his long and vibrant artistic career. The score has been preserved on Entr’acte Records in a beautiful performance conduct ed by Miklos Rozsa with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This music is to be loved, to be cherished, for its like may never pass our way again.

Of considerably less importance is John Barry’s score for the Disney Studio’s failed epic. The Mack Hole. Barry, a competent, occasionally

gifted composer, is continually disregarding his obvious limitations and

getting in over his head with film assignments he cannot hope to master. The musical score for The Black Hole is hopelessly dull and unimaginative, an ill-advised and ill-conceived attempt to emulate Star Wars that, in the final analysis, is barely passable as tenth-rate John Williams. The sad but apparent truth of the matter is that John Barry’s abilities do not lend themselves to spectacle, failed or otherwise. The Buena Vista album is being advertised as a digital recording, but you’ll probably have to take their word for it. The pressing has been manufactured so sloppily that it’s difficult to hear the music through the pops, crackles, and distortions.

Somewhat better and far less pretentious is Barry’s score for the Italian-made Star Crash, a juvenile but appealing satire based upon that country’s popular comic strip The Adventures of Stella Star. Barry’s music is simplistic, yet entertaining. A soundtrack album is available on Durium Records in Milano, Italy. Barry does have talent. Certainly his score Tor Zulu is compelling and at times spectacular. He has provided a wealth of offbeat and interesting scores for such films as The Ipcress File, The Whisperers, The Chase, Monty Walsh, The Day of the Locust, Mary-Queen of Scots, and, particularly, the lovely score for television’s superb production of Eleanor and Franklin. hopefully, Mr. Barry will confine himself to projects suited to his unique style of composition and not allow ambition to stand in the way of common sense.

If John Barry’s The Black Hole is a disappointment, Laurence Rosenthal’s

Meteor is an embarrassment. In referring to Meteor as a disaster film, its producers have unintentionally handed critics a perfectly lethal response, for Meteor is an unmitigated disaster. Not only is Meteor the worst major film of the year, its soundtrack provided listeners with the most incompetent and ludicrous musical accompaniment of the era. Extraterrestrial rocks weren’t alone in their menacing crash toward the Earth. The film and its music were both crashing bores. The score is an absurd pastiche of every insipid musical cliché in the proverbial book. Charity forbids further discussion of this unfortunate endeavor.

On a decidedly higher plane is Elmer Bernstein’s Zulu Dawn, a prequel to the aforementioned Zulu. Cy Endficld’s screenplay recounts the true story of the massive battle that preceded the frightening con frontation iivthe earlier film. Elmer Bernstein, a composer misused in recent years, is in top form conduct ing the Royal Philharmonic for the soundtrack of his exuberant score. While not on the traditional Filinusic Collection label, this new release on California’s Cerberus Records appears to be a new if tentative lease on life for the celebrated Bernstein Society. It is obvious from this score that Elmer Bernstein still has a great deal to offer as an artist. His absence from the motion picture soundstages, whether by personal choice or studio bigotry, is a sad spectacle of neglect. His infrequent forays into composition in recent years have included such undistinguished musical events as National Lampoon’s Animal House, a

brilliant comedy but hardly a challenge to the man who composed The

Ten Commandments, Summer and Smoke,The Man with the Golden Arm, and The Magnificent Seven..

With the score for Zulu Dawn, Elmer Bernstein portrays in music a valiant life-and-death struggle between the British and the legendary Zulu warriors. “The Overture,” or “River, Crossing,” states perfectly the intention of the musical substance to come. It is a vibrant and exciting composition by a composer whose enormous talents have been sadly ill-used for too many years. It must be hoped that Zulu Dawn will signal the return of one of our finest modern composers to projects worthy of his abilities.

Few will argue that the vast assortment of film scores committed to records over the last ten years is due largely to the efforts of a single man. Prior to 1972, serious recording of film scores was rare. The vogue seemed to be rock-oriented treatments of motion picture music, a double-edged sword that acknowledged the existence of an audience for film themes but refused to take a chance by performing the music as it was written. It was during this unfortunate period that musicians such as Leroy Holmes prospered despite one-dimensional abilities and cowardly recordings that pandered to the lowest common audience denominator.

In the latter part of the sixties, however, enthusiasts began to notice a slight but hopeful trend in the noncommercial recordings of The Reader’s Digest, a series of subscription anthologies that featured the work of various unknown conductors performing mood and “easy listening” selections. Among the first of these grab-bag assortments were two anthologies entitled Great Music from the Movies and Mood Music from the Movies. Certain selections written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold began to appear on these recordings and it didn’t take a musical scholar to realize that there was a vast difference between the treatments of these recordings and the typical “Muzak” arrangements of the remaining offerings. The difference, it seemed, was due to the welcome inclusion of a young, serious conductor named Charles Gerhardt.

In 1972 Charles Gerhardt departed Reader’s Digest and sufficiently impressed RCA that they allowed him to conduct an album of serious film music with the National Phil harmonic Orchestra for their classical label, Red Seal. The album wasThe Sea Hawk: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The album was magnificent, a smash hit that took the staid classical recording world by storm. Produced by George Korngold, the son of the late com poser, the series went on to produce twelve marvelous albums featuring the compositions of Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman, and Dimitri Tiomkin. Two later albums were issued as well, though not a part of the original series. One featured leftover cuts not included in the first albums, while the other seemed an attempt to begin a new series of contemporary film music, showcasing suites by John Williams for Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and conducted by Gerhardt.

It was in fact Charles Gerhardt whose superb recordings throughout the seventies signaled a return in popularity to the classical or symphonic film score, and whose championing of the neglected form laid the effective groundwork that led to studio acceptance of John Williams, Star Wars, and the entire renaissance of the symphonic motion picture score.

Now, for the eighties, Charles Gerhardt has again taken to the podium for his first film-oriented recording in several years. Britain’s Chalfont Records has joined with Varese Sarabande Records in Los Angeles 10 take Maestro Gerhardt back to his beginnings–the full-length score of Kings Row by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Produced by George Korngold and recorded in magnificent digital sound by Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra, this superb production of Korngold’s classic  Warner Bros, score is a milestone in full-length recording, a worthy  companion to the Classic Film Score series, and a mandatory addition to any collection of record ed motion picture music.

Forever a champion themselves in the rescuing and preserving of lost and noteworthy film scores is Varese Sarabande Records, whose latest gem is Georges Delerue’s delightful Academy Award winning score for A Little Romance. Released to a small but thoroughly loyal following in the summer of 1979, George Roy Hill’s charming film based upon Patrick Cauvin’s  novel, £=M/C2, Mon Amour,     tells the wonderful story of two preteenagers who meet and fall in love against their parents’ wishes, and run away together with the aid of a romantic old con artist, Laurence Olivier. It’s hard to imagine a more charming or lovelier romantic comedy than A Little Romance, with simply magical performances by the enchanting Lord Olivier, delivering his finest performance in recent memory, and the ravishingly adorable Diane Lane and rakish Thelonious Bernard

as the young lovers.

Georges Delerue has composed one of the most tantalizing scores of his career, a joyous celebration of the innocence of first love that sparkles and comes radiantly to life, reflecting every subtlety and nuance of youth’s first delicious romantic yearnings. This is a gem.

It has generally been conceded that Jerry Goldsmith’s enormous work load over the past fifteen years has made him the most prolific American film composer in the industry, taking a backseat only to Italy’s Ennio Morricone for sheer numbers of scores composed and recorded. For his farewell 10 the seventies, the culmination of a decade of work. Goldsmith has written

perhaps the finest score of his long and varied career, the striking musical background for Star Trek, The Motion Picture. Goldsmith’s accompaniment is ‘me of the Paramount film’s most noteworthy contributions to the cinema scene despite the rather embarrassing fact that some executives at Paramount wanted to scrap the music entirely. Of course, when it comes to executive decision making, it must be remembered that executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer very nearly cut Harold Aden’s “Over the Rainbow” from the negative of The Wizard of Oz.

As usual. Goldsmith was given the assignment of scoring Star Trek very

late in the game and then expected to create miracles on a moment’s notice. As the deadline for completion of the long and complex score grew ever nearer, Goldsmith asked fellow composer and renowned musicologist

Fred Steiner to step in and assist with some of the orchestrations and even

compose a small section of the last sequence. Steiner had, of course, composed much of the finest music in the original television series and was happy lo step in to assist Goldsmith in the final stages of the project.

With so much working against him, then, it is truly amazing that Goldsmith was able to compose, with Rozsa’s eloquent Time After Time, one of the two finest motion picture scores of 1979. Star Trek is a great score, a monumental achievement from a consummate musician. From its opening strains, the main title of Star Trek commands attention. It is a solid, vibrant theme, proudly saluting the spectacle to come. And it does come, musically as well as visually. Instantly, the theme, courageous and valiant, segues into an equally strong statement of another kind, an aggressive symphonic attack dressed in the barbaric garb of Klingon savagery. This is powerful music, dominating the screen and the emotions of its audience.

While much of the score is forceful and deliberately masculine, Goldsmith’s versatility does not preclude the addition of a strangely sensitive and haunting love ballad entitled “Ilia’s Theme,” for the romance between Decker and the lovely visitor from another world. The poignancy and meaning of this tender sonnet reaches its true significance in the film’s lovely and poetic finale as Decker and Ilia join their souls together in a lasting affirmation of their love, to search the stars together … as one. Arthur Morton’s sublime orchestrations and Jerry Goldsmith’s brilliant score have combined to make Star Trek, The Motion Picture a superb listening experience.

Steven Spielberg’s 1941 for Columbia and Universal Pictures was intended as a wartime version of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, complete with John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and the destruction of nearly everything in sight. The film, while somewhat overstated and lacking in commercial appeal, did offer one saving grace–a new score by John Williams. Using the same ideas of musical counterpoint that he utilized for Star Wars, romantic music against a visual backdrop of futuristic gimmickry, Williams, in this instance, employed a fairly serious dramatic score against a visual statement of complete and total comedic insanity. In effect, playing straight man to Spielberg’s clowning, Williams has written a straightforward and exceptionally entertaining soundtrack, highlighted by a full-blown military

march destined to become a standard across the football fields of America.

The most eagerly awaited event of the season is, without any doubt, John Williams’s return to the clouds in The Empire Strikes Back, or Star Wars Revisited. Again packaged in a handsome two-record set, this time by

Robert Stigwood’s RSO Records, The Empire Strikes Back continues the

popular Star Wars saga in a science fiction/fantasy masterpiece destined

to be counted among the epic visions of the durable genre. Williams utilizes many of the character themes from the original motion picture as well as reprising his most famous work, the Star Wars theme. It’s a virtual certainty that both Williams and producer George Lucas would have been skinned alive had they chosen to depart from tradition and use an entirely new main title.

There is, happily, a wealth of new music by this composer, of which two compositions are particularly noteworthy. “Yoda’s Theme” is a wonderful addition to the John Williams repertoire, a lovely and moving tribute to the newest of George Lucas’s mad, yet ingenious, creations. The music is filled with the dignity and sense of wonder befitting this strange, ageless guru whose supernatural wisdom may ultimately be the last force in the universe to stand between freedom for the Rebel Alliance and slavery to the wicked

Empire.

The diamond among the composer’s new themes for the ongoing Star Wars series, however, is unquestionably “The Imperial March,” or “Darth Vader’s Theme.” From its opening notes, this is a majestic piece that assaults the senses with frighten ing power. This is obviously the musical identification of a being seduced by the dark side of the Force, an evil presence amongst the stars, a dastardly villain whose life-force has been warped and perverted into the service of the most terrible evil in the universe. Williams seems to relish the delicious wickedness of Lord Vader, and his artistic glee is matched by the superb playing of the London Symphony Orchestra. John Williams has become one of our greatest natural resources, a spectacular talent whose gifted visions have provided the screen with much of its most inspired musical imagery. Between his new and celebrated position as the leader of the Boston Pops Orchestra and his continuing commitment to the world of motion pictures, currently and brilliantly represented by The Empire Strikes Back, it would appear that John Williams is striking back as an artiste extraordinair

Motion picture, television, and Broadway actor Bruce Davison was born in Philadelphia in 1948. He began his theatrical experience at Pennsylvania State University and later attended the School of the Arts of New York University. His first professional roles included parts in, King Lear, and A Cry of Players at Lincoln Center. With New York theater experience behind him. he headed west where he debuted in Los Angeles in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial under the direction of Henry Fonda.

Mr. Davison’s film break came in 1969 in Last Summer. However, the film

which brought him to the attention of horror-film lovers everywhere was Willard (1971). As the shy, fumbling, under achiever Willard Stiles with an army of rats at his command, his order “Tear him up” to the rodents swarming over Ernest Borgnine has become a classic line of cinematic dialogue.

Other film roles followed: Been Down So Long It Looks like Up to Me (1971), Ulzana’s Raid and The Jerusalem File in 1972, Mame(1974), and

Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976). In between films he worked in television in

varied roles such as a psychopathic killer in an episode of Lou Grant and a drenched lifeboat occupant in the T\r movie The Last Survivors..

In 1977, Bruce Davison played the choice part of the Waspish child-molester Clark Davis, incarcerated in New York’s infamous Tombs. This film, Short Eyes, was perhaps the most disturbing and horrifying movie of his career since it realistically depicted unspeakable prison conditions.

On January 9.19HO, the two-hour film adaptation of Ursula K. Le Gain’s futuristic novel The Lathe of Heaven was aired on PBS stations nationally with Bruce starring as George Orr, a young man whose dreams literally come true. In addition to being a science fiction enthusiast and a fan of Ms. Le Guin ‘s, Bruce especially enjoyed the part because of the unusual concepts the story presented.

He is best known for portraying John Merrick in the Broadway play The Elephant Man. It is an emotionally exhausting experience both for Mr. Davison and the audience

INTERVIEWER: I’m going to start this interview with questions about

Willard. Did you have any objections to working with die 500 rats in the

film?

DAVISON: Just the normal ones. (Laughter) It was quite an interesting experience in that I went and auditioned and I met Ben right off the bat. He already had the job and I had to make certain the co-star liked me, so they put him on my shoulder and he sniffed in my ear and started to wash his hands. Everybody seemed to think we’d get along.

INTERVIEWER: Were there any casualties on the set?

DAVISON: No, none at all, which was surprising, considering all the stunts that had to be done. Not a lost rat. Of course, there was a rat wrangler from the SPCA to check that the animals were treated humanely.

INTERVIEWER: The basis for Willard, the book Ratman’s Notebooks by

INTERVIEWER: Was the original script for Willard different than the filmed version?

DAVISON: It was not too much different, but it was originally titled Ratman. The name was changed after the film was made.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have a good relationship with Elsa Lanchester

and Ernest Borgnine on the set of Willard?

DAVISON: Yes, I liked them both very much. I haven’t seen either of them for quite a while now, which is the case lots of times when you work with people; you get very close and then you don’t see them for a long period of time. I saw Mr. Borgnine in the bank a while back and he seemed to be quite happy. He’s always busy. Elsa has a house out in Pacific Palisades.

INTERVIEWER: What was your opinion of Ben, the sequel to Willard?

DAVISON: Well, I didn’t think too much of it.

INTERVIEWER: It was rumored that you appeared as one of the World War II pilots returning to earth at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

DAVISON: That’s correct. I’m the one with the cap.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you accept a walk-on role when you were

used to much larger pans?

DAVISON: Well, Spielberg is a friend of mine, and lie said, “How would you like to come down for a day and gel off a flying saucer?” So I did. I was on my way to New York to do Short Eyes.

INTERVIEWER: In Short Eyes, what kind of preparation as an actor did

you do for the role of a .solitary Wasp in the house of detention?

DAVISON: I spent an awful lot of time working on the monologue by

myself. I don’t know if you know the section the monologue appears in,

but it lasts about fifteen minutes. I mostly just worked on it on my own,

and I went home to Philadelphia. I worked on it in an empty field for a

while. The atmosphere of the Tombs does more work than one wants it to

have done on one’s character. I think if the walls could scream, they

would.

INTERVIEWER: I believe you play ed a psychopathic killer in an

episode of Lou Grant.

DAVISON: Yeah, I did.

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever appeared in a horror/science fiction/

fantasy TV series?

DAVISON: No, I haven’t, that I can remember.

INTERVIEWER: Were you intrigued by the concept of The Lathe of  Heaven, which is the idea of dreams changing reality?

DAVISON: Very much so. I loved Ursula’s novel, and I thought it was a wonderful story to be put on TV. I was really glad to be a part of it.

INTERVIEWER: What did you think of Kevin Conway, who portrayed Dr.

Haber in Lathe?

DAVISON: Well, I know Kevin from a number of years back. We did plays

that ran into each other in the Westwood Playhouse; he was doing Red

Hider and I was doing Little Foxes. I’ve always admired his work, and I

looked forward to working with him. I was delighted he was Dr. Haber. It

was a lot of fun working with him down in Dallas, especially during the

“gray” scenes. (Note: At one point in The Lathe of Heaven, Dr. Haber

commands George Orr, whose dreams change reality, to dream of a world where there is no prejudice. When George wakes up, he finds that everyone’s skin tone is now gray.  This is what Mr. Davison means

when he speaks of the “gray” scenes.)

INTERVIEWER: How long was the shooting schedule for The Lathe of

Heaven, and where was it filmed?

DAVISON: I can’t remember the shooting schedule exactly, I think it was live weeks. It was shot in Dallas, in Fort Worth, and just a bit up in San Francisco.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think of intelligent science fiction movies

such as The Lathe of Heaven as opposed to the currently popular space operas such as Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica?

DAVISON: That was my one real intrigue to do The Lathe of Heaven

because it wasn’t a space opera. It dealt with human behavior rather

than special mechanics. It was what they now call “speculative fiction.”

INTERVIEWER: Were you pleased with the finished production of The

Lithe of Heaven?

DAVISON: I thought it was good. I’ve always been a stickler for different sorts of detail that tend to wash out during the project. I’ve never been totally happy with anything, per se.

INTERVIEWER: How would you describe your role in The Elephant

Man?

DAVISON: John Merrick is a person who emerges from within a  horrendously deformed shell into a very pure and heroic soul. It’s about a

man who is deformed hut is also quite a human being.

INTERVIEWER: Would you consider your role in The Elephant Man to

be physically demanding?

DAVISON: Oh, yes. Yes, and I have the backache to prove it. (Laughter)

INTERVIEWER: What hits given yon the strength to play so many

disturbed characters when there is the possibility of being typecast?

DAVISON: Well, it’s better to be typecast than not cast. Seeing that

I’ve gotten a lot of that from Willard, my career has son of gone that way.

People who have a certain reputation can eventually find themselves being

led down other paths. Lots of times people who have been typecast, such

as Lee Marvin who has been typecast as a “heavy,” can eventually break

out and become a star through a good role in which they’ve been typecast. It’s just the way the cards fall. It’s always whether or not the part is good that makes the difference to me.

INTERVIEWER: Which role would you consider to be your favorite:’

DAVISON: The Elephant Man. It’s the best written pan I’ve ever done. It’s

just a wonderful part.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any particular interest in the horror/ science fiction genre and do you collect memorabilia from any of these films?

DAVISON: I used to. When I was younger I was really into monster magazines. When I was younger, I lived in Philadelphia, and there was

this guy named “Roland” who later went on the become “Zacherley.” Me was always a big hero of mine, and we all used to dress up like him in

the neighborhood. We would part our hair in the middle and chase each other around with chains. (Laughter)

Star Trek, The Television Program, premiered over the NBC television network on Thursday evening, September 8, 1966, and, arguably, went on through countless reruns to become the most popular series in television history. After three years, two producers, several premature cancellation notices, and enumerable adventures to galaxies where no man had gone before, the United States Starship Enterprise cruised into her hangar at Paramount Studios and prepared to make dry dock her permanent home.  In July of 1969 the final episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” aired belatedly and the seventy-nine show run of Star Trek had seemingly come to a close.

Speculation began almost immediately that a feature-length motion picture would be made from the deceased but deeply mourned series. Interviewed that summer and questioned regarding the eventuality of a Star Trek picture, William Shatner appeared to shovel the last bits of dirt over the battered hull of the Enterprise when he responded curtly “No…Nothing…Forget it.” Shatner reasoned that his career would never be tied down to an everlasting association with Star Trek, and that the creative impetus that first inspired the program had long since run dry.

Five weeks later, in the early part of September 1969, the syndicated rerunning of Star Trek episodes began in cities throughout the country and Paramount soon discovered that it had an unexpected hit on its hands.  The science fiction ratings numbers in the pasture than it had even shown on the farm.  Competition faded quickly from the channels while Star Trek clearly dominated its time block from coast to shining coast.  UHF stations had suddenly come into their own with the programming of the beleaguered network refugee.  The legend was only beginning.

The merchandising of the series was just beginning as well.  In New York, the first Star Trek convention was held at the Americana Hotel as thousand of “Trekkies” poured into the city from all over the country.  At first an isolated event in a single city, the phenomenon soon blossomed into a nationwide media event with similar conventions beings scheduled in virtually every major city in the land.  Members of the original cast began appearing at the larger gatherings, and hug profits started rolling in for nearly everyone wise enough to stage and maintain these gargantuan enterprises.  Meanwhile, thousands of signatures were being collected and patiently being submitted to both Paramount Pictures and the National Broadcasting Company in the hope that Star Trek might either be rejuvenated as a weekly series or turned into a motion picture.

If NBC was oblivious to the outcry, Paramount was not.  In the mid seventies, the studio began thinking in earnest about filming a feature version of Star Trek.  At the outset it was obvious that there would be problems, perhaps insurmountable.  Most of the cast had indicated a willingness to participate in the project with the notable exceptions of the program’s principal players, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.  Both actors had tasted and savored the popularity that the show had brought to them and neither performer wished to take what seemed tantamount to a backward step in their respective careers.  Nimoy nurtured a desire to do more important things with his life than stand before a camera covered with green face paint.  He wished to direct and place the more juvenile aspects of his career to date firmly behind him.  Shatner considered the three-year series a part of his permanent past.  He too wished to prove to the public and to his peers that Captain James Kirk was merely a tiny part of a long and highly versatile career.  Both actors required suitably fattened salaries and final, unequivocal script approval up front before either would consider an involvement in a movie.  For a time the studio had even considered making a film without Nimoy. Spock, unquestionably the program’s single most popular character, might have to be killed off.

But these were later problems.  Early on, the search for a workable script was proving futile.  Several scripts were commissioned by the studio and later rejected.  The brilliant writer Harlan Ellison, author of the Emmy winning episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” perhaps the series’ finest moment, was among the writers whose scripts we rejected.  Ellison’s work was judged too ambitious by the studio which apparently wanted to get by with a less expensive screenplay.  The picture, it seemed, would not be destined for theater screens in America but only in Europe.  In the United States, the Star Trek film would serve as the pilot for a newly rejuvenated version of a weekly or even monthly network television series.  Earlier, a wealthy industrialist named Obermeyer had attempted to set up an independent fourth network to combat NBC, CBS, and ABC with his own alternate programming.  The idea had gotten off a shaky start with only a handful of stations subscribing throughout the country.  Finally, his dreams in ruin, Obermeyer gave up his network and called off any future commitments.  Now Paramount was considering its own entry into the fourth network follies, and Star Trek was envisioned as the heavy artillery that might lure subscribers into the fold.

According to Susan Sackett in her book The Making of Star Trek (Simon & Schuster), the final script, titled In Thy Image, would be based upon a story idea by producer Gene Roddenberry which had originally been intended as an episode from Roddenberry’s unsold series Genesis II.  The original story, “Robot’s Return,” was revised by Alan Dean Foster who had written the paperback adaptations of NBC’s short-lived Star Trek cartoon series.  Roddenberry and writer Harold Livingston continually reworked and refined Foster’s scenario until they were at last satisfied that they had arrived at a manageable script.  In Thy Image would be the two-hour pilot film that would signal Star Trek’s return to the airwaves.

Alas, the intended series was not to be.  Realizing somewhat belatedly than discretion was the better part of madness, Paramount abruptly canceled its plans to organize a fourth network and hastily pulled out of the negotiations.  The major networks, happily, were safe.  It remained for Paramount to pull yet another surprise out of its bag of corporate tricks.  On March 28, 1978, it was revealed that Star Trek, rather than being scrapped for the unpteenth time, would be turned into a major theatrical motion picture. To nearly everyone’s shock and delight, the entire cast had finally come to terms and agreed to appear in the picture.  Multiple Oscar winner Robert Wise was chosen to direct the increasingly ambitious production which was now budgeted at fifteen million dollars.

Filming of Star Trek, The Motion Picture commenced on August 7, 1978, and for Gene Roddenberry, who had never given up his dream, this was indeed a dream come true.  As with most dreams, however, a number of nightmares surfaced between the hours of midnight and dawn.  Robert Abel & Associates were hired to achieve the optical effects.  Abel and his co-workers were sincere and ambitious, but it soon became horribly apparent that their skills were insufficiently developed for the enormous complexities of a wide-screen spectacular.  In the summer of 1979, which all of the film’s live-action photography completed and a mere handful of months remaining until the scheduled release of the picture, much of the optical footage already shot had to be scrapped.  Douglas Trumbull was asked to come in and leud his considerable expertise to the beleaguered company.  Trumbull and his crew labored through round the clock shifts in order to bring the picture in on time.  Reportedly, many of William Shatner’s scenes were thrown out along with the appeared that the part of Captain Kirk would be reduced to a mere cameo.  When it behooved the studio to request the actor’s cooperation in the reshooting of a number of key sequences, Shatner assignments.  Luckily, there appeared a break in his schedule and the actor was able to return to the set for the new footage.

By September, the visual effects were nowhere new completion, and nerves, understandably, began to fray.  Although Paramount was locked into a rigid commitment to open at Christmas, the studio, panic-stricken, began thinking in earnest of delaying the premiere until the spring of 1980.  It was feared, and with good reason, that the picture would not be finished in time.  After several discussions with the legal department, however, it was decided that the resultant harm to the picture and to the studio would be too great.  Theaters plan their release dates months in advance of an opening and to change their schedules so near to the well-advertised premiere of the picture would have left many chains literally out in the proverbial cold.

Spirits at the corporate level were sinking so low that Paramount began to fear that it had the financial disaster of all time on its hands.  Robert Wise, tiring of the enumerable changes in corporate planning, responded in disgust that he had washed his hands of the project. In a gem of executive decision-making it had, at one point, been suggested that the picture be released initially sans any special effects whatever until the time that the prints could be recalled and replaced with a “finished” product.  As it turned out, the picture was released somewhat incomplete with a longer version scheduled for the reissue sometime in mid-1980.

Groping at musical straws, the intelligentsia at the studio decided the Jerry Goldsmith’s score was lacking in quality and that his completed them sounded too unlike the work of fellow artist John Williams to become successful.  If Goldsmith aped Williams, they reasoned, the soundtrack album would be a hit and people would then want to see the film.  Goldsmith was furious and adamantly refused to take the suggestion seriously.  As madness filled the air, it was decided that what the picture really needed was a rock or disco main title.  Surely they would have a hit on their hands if only Jerry Goldsmith would modify his style to accommodate the Bee Gees.  When the gifted composer walked off the picture, reason reared its unfamiliar head and Goldsmith was given permission to finish the film as he’d started it.  At Gene Roddenberry’s insistence, however, the musical theme of the original television series was inserted, however briefly, at strategic points through the film.  While the familiar series theme by Alexander Courage was somewhat awkward in the context of its obviously forced placement into a larger body of music, Roddenberry reasoned that the admirers of the television program would be disappointed if the piece were excluded from the film.  Dutifully, and not a little reluctantly, Goldsmith complied.

Alarmed and dismayed by the delays and rumors of impending disaster, the cast and crew grew increasingly bitter. During a radio interview with William Shatner in Los Angeles, an interviewer asked for the actors’ impressions of the eagerly awaited film.  Replied Shatner: “They should have left well enough alone.”

Snow gently draped the streets.  A chill was in the air.  It was Christmas in America.  The world premiere of Star Trek, The Motion Picture was held in Washington, D.C. In the audience were the stars, the producer, the director, the composer, and an enthusiastic assortment of politicians, celebrities, and simple fans.  Soon millions more would witness for themselves the video molehill that aspired to the lofty peak of the snowcapped Paramount mountain.

What they saw at last would surprise and delight many, yet disappoint still more.  Star Trek, as its production would suggest, is a very mixed bag of tricks.  It should be stated at the outset that in spite of a myriad of problems both subtle and obvious, Star Trek, The Motion Picture is the script. It is entirely too ambitious for its own good.  That was in fact the problem from the start.  In Thy Image literally backed itself into a corner from which there seemed no escape.  Logically, there was no way that the story could realistically be resolved without allowing the machine to reign triumphant over mankind.  Quite obviously, it was not the intention of Messrs. Roddenberry and Wise to resurrect the mission of the U.S.S. Enterprise only to obliterate the ship, its crew, and the rest of mankind in the bargain.  Therefore, it was relatively essential that the film should have an upbeat ending.  The problem was how to do it plausibly.  Judging from the finished product, however, it would appear that the question was never resolved.

The finale, while lovely and optimistic, is just a trifle too east, too pat.  The incomparable dilemma woven so laboriously earlier in the film is all at once not a problem at all.  The solution is wrapped simplistically in a neat and tidy little package and sent off on its merry way.  It nearly conveys an impression of an hour long television episode which, racing against the ticking of the corporate clock, must suddenly resolve all of its loose ends before turning into a pumpkin… or an NBC peacock.

Briefly, Star Trek concerns the efforts of the Enterprise crew to neutralize a matter-devouring emissary from a distant galaxy threatening to make breakfast of the Earth.  The rampaging visitor is actually a probe sent to the stars by mankind to search for other forms of life.  Somewhere along the way it ran into a bad element, a planet of machines that, like IBM, sought to take over the world.  In a wedding of steel, the two machines converge and begin the long journey back across the stars in search of truth, the meaning of existence, and a creator to call dad.

If any of this sounds familiar, there’s ample reason why it should. The Star Trek television program itself has utilized this basic premise repeatedly, adding to the considerable annoyance of admirers who had hoped for a more original story to propel the Enterprise and her crew into theatrical space.  With some justification, it was hoped that the writers of Star Trek’s initial big-screen flight would venture where no man had gone before.  Instead we have an implausible pastiche of small-screen series reruns… or The Best of Star Trek.  In Thy Image, as it turned out, was a fitting title for a story that merely copied elements from three of the televisions series’ most televised episodes.  In “The Immunity Syndrome,” the giant starship penetrates a huge, single-celled, floating amoeba that is absorbing planetary systems in its path.  Once within the creature’s system, the Enterprise is pulled deeper and deeper until little hope remains that it will ever see the stars again.  In “The Doomsday Machine,” the Enterprise encounters a huge floating tree stump that is absorbing planetary systems in its path for a gastral production of “Stump the Stars.”

The episode that most clearly resembles the motion picture, however, is “The Changeling,” in which an Earth probe called Nomad converges with a malignant probe sent from another galaxy.  Assuming the characteristics of the alien probe, Nomad returns to the planet of its origin, searching for its creator and destroying virtually everything in its path.

Still, for all of its faults of which there are many, Star Trek, The Motion Picture is a visually stunning, vastly appealing endeavor, retaining many of the assets and much of the charm of the original network series.  Certainly the film is at times awkward and juvenile but it is also filled with grace and poetry.  There is a moment, perhaps the finest moment of the film, which recalls the lyrical symmetry of Stanley Kubrick’s monument to filmmaking, 2001: A Space Odyssey. It occurs as James Kirk is returning to his ship, the Enterprise, after an absence of considerable duration.  Kirk has since been kicked upstairs and promoted to a desk job, but his eternal love affair with the great star cruiser has never abated.  The ship floats in dry dock in space, being refitted for the mission to come, as a shuttle craft piloted by Scotty and carrying Jim Kirk approaches her moorings.  The elation in Kirk’s eyes in apparent as the smaller craft nears the sleek and gallant cruiser.  His excitation mounting, his pulse quickening, Kirk catches his first glimpse of the Enterprise.  This is no momentary adulation, for the silver vessel is the captain’s love, his very life.  She has been his mistress, the greatest love his heart has ever know.  Though career and ambition have forced their separation, he knows now that she is the most enduring specter of his life.

The moment is captured beautifully by Richard H. Kline’s splendid cinematography and Douglas Trumbull’s majestic visual effects.  It is a sequence of pure sensual wonder and elegance as the shuttle craft gently caresses the giant ship, savoring and fondling her every curve from above, beside, and beneath.  Kirk’s eyes are ablaze, his face a mirror of his barely concealed passion while the tiny shuttle craft acts as a surrogate for his clearly sexual advances.  This is foreplay on a grand scale., one of the loveliest and most unusual love ballets ever committed to film.

The human elements in Star Trek, however, are not a successful.  The cast performs competently, but it must be stated that the picture lacks a single standout performance.  The situation is certainly not helped by Paramount’s lack of confidence in allowing the original cast to carry the film. A similar effect was achieved from “Assignment Earth,” the final episode of the series’ second season, in which the program’s format was altered to accommodate a pilot script for a spin-off series.  Since the episode focused on an additional set of characters, created to inhabit a new and entirely; separate television show, these new characters were highlighted throughout the episode while the Star Trek regulars were reduced to the status of supporting players.  It was an awkward and uncomfortable situation, reminiscent of the structural dilemma within the motion picture.  As the story revolves around Stephen Collins and Persis Khambatta, portraying characters created for the film, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy become mere stooges, ineffectual and unimportant.  It is a major miscalculation.

In the final months of the production, with time rapidly escaping the technical crew, John Dykstra, who had helmed the miraculous visual effects for Star Wars, was imported to assist Douglas Trumbull in saving the picture.  With so little time at their disposal, the two special-effects wizards managed to achieve an astounding feat, for Star Trek is an astonishingly beautiful film.  Here again, however, the script has deserted the technicians.  After filing the screen with awesome spectacle, even they have been mercilessly backed against a wall by the limitations of a hopelessly inane finale.  After the majestic prelude to Voyager’s discovery, one cannot help but succumb to an overwhelming sense of disappointment at the sight of the tiny earthbound capsule, and the sad realization that the film’s authors had proved incapable of carrying through the sense of wonder to completion.

Admittedly, after repeated viewings the initial disappointment and incredulity become easier to swallow.  It is a lovely ending if one can just get by the maddeningly illogical denouement. One can understand how mechanized beings on another planet might have come to accept Voyager as “V’ger,” but it is difficult to imagine how the probe could have forgotten its own name simply because three letters on its hull had become illegible.  It’s rather like having to read your own name tag at a convention to learn who you are.

Still, there is a certain, indefinable sense of magic about Star Trek, The Motion Picture that defies criticism.  Perhaps it’s the hope, that invisible longing that so many of us carried in our hearts, to see a loser overcome impossible obstacles and finally make the grade.  As stated earlier, Star Trek is indeed a mixed bag of tricks.  It is neither the greatest science fiction motion picture ever made, nor is it the worst.  The truth lies somewhere in between.  More importantly, Star Trek has managed to survive, and that, in the final analysis, is the most enduring trick of all.******

Produced by Gene Roddenberry.  Directed by Robert Wise. Screenplay by Harold Livingston from a story by Alan Dean Foster and based on the television series Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry.  Music be Jerry Goldsmith.  Starring William Shatner (Captain Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock), DeForest Kelley (Doctor McCoy), James Doohan (Scotty), George Takei (Sulu), Majel Barret (Doctor Chapel), Walter Koenig (Chekou), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), Persis Khambatta (Ilia), Stephen Collins (Commander Willard Decker), Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand). A Paramount Pictures release of a Gene Roddenberry production.  Running time: 130 minutes.  Rating: G.

By K. R. Danzay

Every so often at Movietimes.com we like to look back at a certain point in an artists career and capture what they were thinking.  While a generation of fans recognizes Leslie Nielsen from movie like The Naked Gun, he enjoyed a long and fruitful career before his comedic appearances in the 80′s and 90′s.  We thought this interview, taken on the dawn of Leslie’s success in Airplane, is a good way to show the bifurcation of his career.

The Nephew of the late film star Jean Henholt, Leslie Nielsen was born in Rcgina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Nielsen’s father was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and after his reassignment, Leslie Nielsen and his two brothers were educated in Edmonton, Alberta. Following a stint as an aerial gunner in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Nielsen went to California to study cinematography at UCLA. A year later, he returned to Canada to begin his theatrical studies in earnest. While enrolled at Toronto’s Academy of Radio Arts, Nielsen received a scholarship offer from both, the Canadian Broadcasting Company and from Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse. Leslie Nielsen chose the Playhouse and followed this training with summer stock and further education at the Actor’s Studio.

After several highly acclaimed television performances, the talented actor was brought to Hollywood by Paramount Pictures in 1954  for a lead in The Vagabond King. A long-term contract at

M-G-M followed where he starred in such films as Forbidden Planet, Ransom!, The Opposite Sex, Hot Summer Night, and The Sheepman. Titles for other studios have included Tammy and the Bachelor, Night Train to Paris, Harlow, and Beau Geste. More recently, Leslie Nielsen gained many new fans among the younger generation with his portrayal of Dr. Rumack in the highly successful comedy Airplane!

Forbidden Planet is undoubtedly Leslie Nielsen’s best known contribution to the fantastic cinema. Since that film, however, Nielsen has appeared in other genre movies such as Dark Intruder, Change of Mind, The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, Day of the Animals, Prom Night, and Creepshow. Also, he was featured in the successful disaster film The Poseidon Adventure as well as in comedies like The Reluctant Astronaut and The Creature Wasn’t Nice.

In addition to more than fifty motion pictures, Leslie Nielsen has an impressive list of television credits beginning with many TV shows broadcast live during the Golden Age of Television in the early 1950s. TV roles of interest to fantastic film buffs include appearances on Lights Out, Suspense, Tales of Tomorrow, Danger, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Moment of Fear, Thriller, Kraft Suspense Theatre, The Alfred Hitchcock  Hour, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea The Wild, Wild West, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Night Gallery, Evil Touch, Lucan, Fantasy Island, and Ray Bradbury Theater. Besides numerous television series guest appearances and roles in mini-series and telefeatures, , Mr. Nielsen has been the star of five television series of his own: The New Breed, The Bold Ones, Bracken’s World, Police Squad!, and Shaping Up.

The following interview was conducted between takes on the set of The Creature Wasn’t Nice, a science-fiction comedy co-starring Cindy Williams, Patrick Macnee, and Gerrit Graham. Directed by Bruce Kimmel, the film never received extensive theatrical release, but it is available on video tape under the title Spaceship. The filming of planet exterior scenes was underway on the day of the interview, and the cast was outfitted in unventilated silver space suits as they worked under four immense arc lights. Despite the excessively hot conditions on the set, all of the actors seemed to be enjoying what they were doing. This was especially true of Leslie Nielsen who had an easy laugh that matched his casual style and who displayed a terrific sense of humor as he discussed his extensive career in motion pictures and television. (g.s.).

INTERVIEW: Your first work in the science-fiction genre was the live TV series Tales of Tomorrow, which ran in the very early 1950s. You did several episodes, including a two-part “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” with Thomas Mitchell and Bethel  Leslie,  and “Appointment to Mars.”

NIELSEN: Yeah, that was with Brian Keith and Billy Redfield.

INTERVIEW: And there was one called “The Black Planet.”

NIELSEN: Now that might have been the… no, no. I can’t recall which one it was. It was either that one or the Brian Keith and Billy Redfield one… yeah, “Black Planet.”

INTERVIEW: And one called “Another Chance.”

NIELSEN: That one I forget.

INTERVIEW: And one called “Ghost Writer,” with Gaby Rodgers. Does that name sound familiar?

NIELSEN: Oh yeah, Gaby Rodgers, right, yeah! But I don’t remember the story.

INTERVIEW: Can you tell us something about those early live TV sci-fi dramas?

NIELSEN: Well, they were, you know, live television productions and in the days when they were just beginning to find out how to try to do some effects.

They had no real electronic effects like we have today, so whatever was in it had to be in the story, Twilight Zone was like a Tales of Tomorrow, weird stuff, but in the story. They couldn’t do the effects.

INTERVIEW: It probably was a lot more hectic in live TV.

NIELSEN: Well, because things would go wrong. And in the one I did with Billy Redfield and Brian Keith we had a thing at the end of the show that went wrong, and they took a look at the kinescope, because they were really very upset. The way we ad-libbed around it and corrected it on the show, they felt they could leave it as it  stood. So, that worked out fine.

INTERVIEW: Your next science-fiction role was Commander Adams in Forbidden Planet. How did you get the part?

NIELSEN: I tested for it in late 1954, and then came out and did the role in 1955. I found the script to be very intriguing. I’m delighted that I did it. It’s rurned out to be a classic.

INTERVIEW: Oh, it is! But how did you feel about it then, when you were doing it?

NIELSEN: I always liked it; I liked it then…I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is Star Trek. I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, “Oh!” and I’m fascinated by it.

INTERVIEW: Well, Forbidden Planet was kind of a precursor to Star Trek. They were very similar concepts.

NIELSEN: Oh, yes, yes! That’s right!

INTERVIEW: What kind of relationship did you have with your Forbidden Planet co-stars?

NIELSEN: We all had a great time. Walter Pidgeon is without a doubt the most charming man that I have ever worked with. We used to play checkers together, and he was always sort of uplifting and on the “up” side, and very good-natured. A very charming, lovely man. He was so charming. He had big feet! We were playing checkers and I made a comment. I said, “So-and-so-and-so-and-so, of course if you wear size 16 shoes, and he said, “That’s uncalled for, Leslie.” And I said, “You’re right, Walter. I apologize.” It’s just that we had played this kind of repartee game, but I had stepped over the line. I had referred to, personally, to the size of his feet! So we just….kept on going!

INTERVIEW: Earl Holliman is widely known to have said that it’s his worst film.

NIELSEN: Well, you know, it just shows you the incredible errors that we can make in judgment, because I enjoyed it very much and I could be wrong! [Laughs] Earl, I thought was very good. He played the cook and [it] was kind of a comedy…and then he went on to more serious things. I love comedy!

INTERVIEW: Great! Well, you were terrific in Airplane!

NIELSEN: Oh, thank you!

INTERVIEW: Surely!

NIELSEN: Shirley! Don’t call me Shirley!!! [Laughs]

INTERVIEW: How do you feel about Airplane?

NIELSEN: Oh, I loved it! I love comedy and I hope I never stop doing it.

INTERVIEW: You must have had a tough time keeping a straight face during filming.

NIELSEN: I like that kind of “straight-faced” comedy. I like to be straight[faced and outrageous.

INTERVIEW: The Creature Wasn’t Nice, which is science-fiction comedy, sure is a far cry from Forbidden Planet, isn’t it?

NIELSEN: Well, Forbidden Planet was serious science fiction!

INTERVIEW: But again, you’re playing a commander, which is nice.

NIELSEN: Oh, yeah, but this is strictly comedy.

INTERVIEW: And is there a little of Commander Adams in Commander Jameson?

NIELSEN: Well, I suppose so, yeah. Commander Jameson is funny only if he is played like Commander Adams! [Laughs]

INTERVIEW: How do you feel about tall of the scenes cut from Forbidden Planet? Apparently, your character of Commander Adams was much more human, originally, but became very businesslike due to the cuts.

NIELSEN: Well, I remember when we were doing that, they thought that a lot of the explanatory stuff was a little to heavy to be understood, talking about what might be happening and the philosophy. I enjoyed doing that very much, but at one time somebody came to me and said, “just say it fast, Leslie, because it’s all exposition,” and I said “What!” [Laughs] I mean, if you can understand it or by it at all, it was very important to have it in there.

INTERVIEW: What are your thoughts on Dark Intruder?

NIELSEN: Oh, I loved doing that! That was really a gothic thriller! They called that Something With Claws in the beginning…this scuffling sound across the floor when this thing would materialize and to its number. It was really going to be a kind of “Sherlock Holmes in San Francisco,” but back in that period with the horse and buggy. Brett – I think was his name – a young, well-to-do playboy-around-town who seemed to be a ne’er-do-well but had his lab hidden in his mansion, and he would solve all of these crimes of occult and mystery. I loved doing it!

INTERVIEW: Since it was a TV series pilot, that’s what it would have been like then?

NIELSEN: Oh yes, if we’d gone ahead with it.

INTERVIEW: Do you know why it didn’t go?

NIELSEN: Bad judgment.

INTERVIEW: Do you think it should have gone?

NIELSEN: Well, why not? Oh, sure! It could’ve been a lot of fun.

INTERVIEW: Do you know why the decision was made to release it to theatres instead of TV?

NIELSEN: Well, I guess because it wasn’t going to be done as a series, but on top of that, there aren’t that many films that are made for television that can be released as a theatrical film. It just was well done! Jack Laird is one of the finest producers, I think, in the business.

INTERVIEW: Then you would have done the series if it had gone ahead.

NIELSEN:  Oh sure. I was already committed.

INTERVIEW: How close did it get?

NIELSEN:  I have no idea, because there’s o rhyme or reason as to why things get on the air and stay on or why things are taken off the air.

INTERVIEW: There’s another film you did, apparently originally for TV, called The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler.

NIELSEN: No, no, that was made strictly for theatres.

INTERVIEW: It was? It looks like it was done on videotape.

NIELSEN: It was all tape. That’s the first movie made all on tape; there’s not one single strip of film in it. They decided to find out if they could shoot a theatrical film on tape, on location, and they did it. But it was made very specifically for theatres.

INTERVIEW: Can you recall acting in any science-fiction, fantasy, or horror films or pilots which were never shown or released?

NIELSEN: Not that I know of. There are some things I have done that, ah…we did a Kraft Theatre that was a war picture, and they wouldn’t release that because of the philosophy.

INTERVIEW: You did an episode of The Bob Hope Chrysler Theatre called “Code name: Heraclitus.”

NIELSEN: That was going to be done as a series, too. Stanley Baker was in it, and he was playing a kind of secret agent who had had almost literally a lobotomy or something and he was a robot. And all he was, then, was a “kill machine.” And I was his boss – just as inhuman as the robot was!

INTERVIEW: Yes! And I thought the show was very inventively directed by James Goldstone. He did some very unusual things in that film!

NIELSEN: He’s a very, very, inventive director! He used to be an editor. I remember I did a, well, he directed Shadow Over Elveron also, and we’d be shooting and I would feel a little funny about the scene that he would say, “Okay, print!” Well, he was already thinking about how he was going to cut it, and he knew it would work. I would feel, Hell that scene didn’t work! It didn’t work from an acting point of view, so it was a little unsatisfactory from an acting point of view, but he knew exactly what he was doing in the editing and it did work very well.

INTERVIEW: Also for TV you did The Aquarians, which was an Ivan Tors film.

NIELSEN: I was supposed to introduce it at the outside. I didn’t realize when Ivan was asking me to do this that he was a character he was having me play. Well, it was just that I was supposed to simply introduce it. I thought I was going to be introducing it as a narrator or as myself, but Ivan had misinformed me, so I didn’t even see it. I don’t know what it’s about.

INTERVIEW: Day of the Animals is a more recent theatrical film that you did.

NIELSEN: Yeah, I worked with William Girdler [the film’s director]. He died in a crash in the Phillipines. I thought that was an interesting film.

INTERVIEW: It was! What was it like taking on a grizzly bear?

NIELSEN: [Laughs] I had to weave and play around with a honey bear, you know, and I could wrestle with him a little bit, but there’s no way you can even wrestle a honey bear, let alone a grizzly bear that’s standing ten feet to eleven feet tall! Can you imagine? But it was fascinating to work that close to that kind of animal.

INTERVIEW:  Well, that was a pretty bizarre scene!

NIELSEN: Yeah, well, when the ozone layer goes, you know, a lot of people could snap! [Laughs]

INTERVIEW: Night Slaves was a TV movie in which you played the sheriff in a town that was taken over by aliens.

NIELSEN: That was an intriguing film, and that worked, too! A fascinating premise. I like science fiction! I didn’t realize I’d done so many. [Laughs]

INTERVIEW: You did another TV movie called Hauser’s Memory, where you played a man named “Slaughter”!

NIELSEN: Yeah, the FBI Chief, or CIA Chief.

INTERVIEW: You have a good memory on these things!

NIELSEN: Well, that was another fascination, too. I actually worked in Beau Geste with a guy that was doing part of the lab things where they were experimenting with rats and put them through the maze, and when they complete the maze they get a reward. Then, when the rats died, or they would, I guess, kill them, and then take DNA or whatever it is out of the rat’s brain and inject it into newly-born rats…and they found out that those rats could duplicate the maze in a percentage that was much too high to be coincidence. The idea is, you know, you can go to the drugstore eventually and say “Give me a bottle of Spanish lessons,” and you’d take a pill or two and you might be inclined to learn Spanish easier.

INTERVIEW: Yeah, or “Give me a bottle of Theory of Relativity!”

NIELSEN: Yeah, right! [Laughs]

INTERVIEW: Recently you did a film called Prom Night and apparently when it was shown on TV there were a lot of scenes of you which were not in the theatrical version. Such as you and Antoinette Bower, playing Jamie Curtis’s parents, going to visit the doctor.

NIELSEN: Wasn’t that in the movie?

INTERVIEW: Not in theatres. The doctor doesn’t show up until the police detective asks him to come down.

NIELSEN: Oh, really! I thought that was in the movie!

INTERVIEW: And you chopping wood in the backyard…that was cut out.

NIELSEN: Oh, really! That’s fascinating! So they really had two different films in a sense!

INTERVIEW: Well, they couldn’t put the violence on TV, so they cut it out and replaced it with the previously unused exposition scenes.

NIELSEN: When I was talking with somebody, they said “I saw Prom Night – I don’t know why you did it,” and I said, “well, okay.” Then I saw it on TV and I said, “Well, it’s not bad, no big deal, not bad.” But now I realize what he was talking about! [Laughs] Since you brought it up, it was a different movie in the theatre.

INTERVIEW: In the theatrical version, you and Antoinette Bower were hardly in the film.

NIELSEN: Ahhh! I see what happened! That’s what it was!

INTERVIEW: Although you are known mostly for playing “good guy” roles, you have done some films where you are a mean S.O.B.!

NIELSEN: [Laughs] Well, it really depends. I play any kind of part that appeals to me. Sometimes I play a part the pay the rent! But that is an axiom in the business, because in episodic television you’ll have a good guy who’s on every week and that’s his show! He’s the regular on it, and you’re not going to be “gooder” than he is; I mean, he’s the guy who’s got to solve your problem! So if you’re playing a good guy, you have to have a problem, and he’s going to solve it for you. And the only really strong dramatic part is the heavy, because the meaner and crueler and rottener you are, the better the good guy looks when he whips ya’ at the end because he always is gonna whip ya! So, the best dramatic guest shot is the heavy. Generally speaking. You know, I just said “Let’s go,” because they were putting me in the roles of the sensitive-young-man-with-a-problem, and I said “Hey, let’s play some mean roles!”

INTERVIEW: In a lot of your TV roles in series episodes and telefeatures you play the mean roles. Do you have a favorite?

NIELSEN: Oh, I loved Shadow Over Elveron! He was really a beast, that sheriff, I liked Trial Run very much.  He was like a Melvin Belli/F. Lee Bailey/Clarence Darrow all wrapped in one, if that’s possible. An international lawyer. That was like Beauty and the Beast. He had married a beautiful lady, a young lady, for career purposes and because he loved her – and then she was out playing around – so he wants to demean her. I loved that role. I loved the Streets of San Francisco I did – they were all good guys. The one guy was a drunk, a drunken cop; another guy was another cop who had terminal illness and decided to take out a few people who he knew were corrupt and were enemies of the people, so to speak. And he went after them. But they were intriguing people – they were good guys, but they also had their flaws.

INTERVIEW:  If really interests me that you like science fiction so much, though, because it seems that a lot of actors don’t like it or won’t do it. It’s nice to know that you are a fan.

NIELSEN: Oh I love science fiction! I would love to see what’s going to happen with science fiction with peoples’ heads, because we still have people running around in the year 2050 or 2100 or 2200 – whatever it is – and they have all of this incredible technology and you see the effects: laser beams and rays and  beaming down and beaming up. Incredible technical things happening, but everybody is still running around jealous, fighting, whacking, cheating, you know, and somewhere along the line to reach that point in technology, maybe we don’t have to change in our heads, but there’s  got to be something going on! Some kind of change somewhere. I’d like to see something starting to happen in that area, with the psychology of the human being and how that changed. And what happens when you have the throwback? How do you deal with them, without putting them into never-never land like a James Bond movie or that kind of thing?

INTERVIEW: Will we be more civilized as we’re more technological?

NIELSEN: It might be difficult with our backgrounds to really imagine what the hell that difference would be, or how you could fit it into a story. But all I see is “Indians chasing the stagecoach” in Battlestar Galactica. It’s the same thing – it’s just up there in space.

INTERVIEW: There’s not much in the way of thought-provoking science fiction being made today, especially in TV. The public wants more sensationalism!

NIELSEN:  That’s true, and that’s the way it goes! And that’s what will happen, because I don’t think anybody can really sit down and decide that their mission in life is to make people think. I think their mission in life is to leave people alone! [Laughs]

ON THE SUBJECT of the political fix and a priceless collection of art, The Art of the Steal is the post–Errol Morris documentary at its technical best and ideological worst. The film moves beautifully, even if it’s a trope-trove (the typewriter keys slamming in tight close-up against paper, the churning wheels of magnetic tape), and handles the complex subject of the annexation of an art gallery with skill and speed.

The level of fury runs high in this surprising story about the Barnes Foundation, a small gallery 4 1/2 miles from downtown Philadelphia. The museum is the legacy of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a physician and self-made millionaire who came from a poor background and entered the boxing ring to pay his way through medical school. His invention Argyrol replaced the costly silver nitrate solution dabbed into newborn baby’s eyes to ward off blindness.

Having saved the eyesight of countless thousands, Barnes decided to further improve the vision of humanity. He spent his money on one of the most important private collections of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art in the world. Barnes’ excursions to France allowed him to bring home seven van Goghs, six Seurats, Matisse’s The Joy of Life and dozens of Renoirs; he contextualized these paintings with an excellent selection of African sculpture.
When he exhibited these paintings in the early 1920s, the local newspapers trashed them. Thus Barnes started his own academy in a suburb of Philadelphia, where he could control access and be the final arbiter. To be allowed in to see the Barnes Foundation was to see masterpieces in a quiet setting—“the only sane place to see art in America,” Matisse himself said.
Barnes died in a car accident, in 1951, leaving no children; he willed the collection to be taken care of by a small African-American college. And here’s where the trouble began: the trustees of the school were no match for the pressure to deal with what became, in the fullness of time, an astonishing $30 billion worth of paintings. That value attracted bigger museums, political envy and out-and-out greed. One understands The Art of the Steal’s umbrage as the collection began being pulled, as if by a magnet, from Barnes’ quiet space into Philadelphia’s museum row.

Remember what H.L. Mencken said about Americans being unable to recognize ideas unless they have white wings or a forked tail? See interviewee Julian Bond of the NAACP in the dignified milky glow of negative space (the negative space the crowded paintings at the Barnes never got, frankly). By contrast, Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania and former Philadelphia mayor, is filmed in a medium close-up. He muscles into the side of the frame, like Tony Soprano confiding a crime. Dr. Barnes considered the Philadelphia Museum of Art “a house of prostitution” doing the bidding of the Main Line. Director Don Argott underscores this opinion by filming the venerable museum to look like Castle Grayskull, crouched under lowering clouds.

The limited access to the Barnes helped seal the fate of the place: neighbors objected to stinking tour buses and crowds. The scheme to relocate the collection to a handier location is dismissed as a ploy by politicians trying to lasso tourists. We watch here, in its entirety, a silly TV commercial promoting Philadelphia to prove that politicians are trying to attract visitors to Philadelphia. Horrors!
The Art of the Steal makes and overmakes its case. We’re meant to think of Barnes as a rebel—some John Lee Hooker licks on the soundtrack reinforce this idea. The real question is whether only a purchaser can contextualize a painting, and whether they get to do so beyond the grave. There’s an essential elitism concealed in this documentary, persuasive as it is. In life, Barnes had his revenge, and his joke on the powers that were in Philly. But art is eternal, Barnes is dead, and he doesn’t get to be the gatekeeper any more.

The modern museum megashow is an evil, perhaps a necessary one: head-phone-wearing herds, lines, surcharges, milling crowds and appalling gift shops. But blame the marketers, not the curators. And the important thing are those moments of communion with an art work, those moments that occur even in the most crowded museum. That flash of insight: that’s what this documentary ignores. The Art of the Steal is well-built, but it has the soul of an attack ad.

by Richard von Busack

LAST YEAR’S Coraline by Henry Selick, with its locked tiny chambers and prowling sardonic cat, still feels like magic. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is more of a fashion show, which may be the point. This Alice in Wonderland will likely be the defining event of the Gothic Lolitas’ generation.
Burton, who worked with Selick and got most of the credit for The Nightmare Before Christmas, now does his 3-D live-action Alice as a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s original. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast) is sensibly trying to do a Wicked on the famous tale—within the safety zone of Disney, which would prefer Alice to be another Disney Princess.
Mirroring Wicked is the rivalry between women, the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the ghostly yet sugary White Queen (Anne Hathaway). The White Queen is a witch of sorts, working with grisly spells; the Red Queen is the execution-loving dictator of a plundered “Underland,” which the young Alice once mispronounced with a “W.”
In early Victorian times, the fatherless Alice (Mia Wasikowska), almost 20, is about to be affianced to a chinless aristo, Hamish (Leo Bill), by family pressure. Alice’s (badly phrased) taste for fantasy is dismaying; Hamish urges her to keep it to herself. But then the familiar rabbit arrives to lead Alice to the world of her childhood reveries.
The creatures are skeptical: she doesn’t look like the Alice they all remember. And the real Alice will have a quest to perform. The Oraculum, the Bayeux Tapestry of Underland, foretells that Alice will slay the Jabberwocky. (That should be Jabberwock, yes?) Once the dragon is dead, the land will be free of the dreaded, hydrocephalic Red Queen.
The female power in this movie is worth celebrating. Carroll’s Alice appeals uniquely to adolescent girls who are never certain what size they are in real life: grown-up or childish. Using an older Alice removes questions of sexuality and menace that might prove sticky. And yet that unease is the very point that has drawn fans and postmodern rewriters alike.
Wasikowska is a strong asset to this Alice: a subtle, full-grown beauty who adds a physical reality to the tale of dreams. A touch of romance between her and Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter arises. Depp’s marvelous flexibility comes through clearly. The makeup is unsettling: carrot-colored hair; staring, too-large tiger-green eyes; a dialect that changes at the drop of a hat. Depp is an actor who twines around our memories of actors gone before: here the memory seems to be of Peter Sellers.
Alice in Wonderland revels in its cameos. Matt Lucas’ two Tweedles are Cockney Cabbage Patch kids. The blue-green Cheshire Cat, avatar of particle physics, has a portly, insinuating voice (by Stephen Fry) and several hundred teeth. Alan Rickman shows off a fine sneer as the Caterpillar. Bonham Carter’s snarling, willful queen is a brat whom custom never stales.
I’m a helpless Tim Burton fan, and I’m not sorry I went to Alice in Wonderland. But the colors here aren’t state of the art; they go from tinted postcard to faded bed sheet. Compared to Coraline’s solitude and thoughtfulness, Alice in Wonderland is a forced march. The 3-D makes us jump with tossed crockery and the spears of the army of cards, but it doesn’t add real depth to the visuals. The finale turns out to be familiar dragon slaying; ultimately, it’s not just Alice who has been here before.

by Richard von Busack

THE SETTING of Roman Polanski’s freezer-burned comedy/thriller The Ghost Writer is a brutal concrete bunker. Here, several people are trapped under constant surveillance beneath cold and stormy skies. The bunker is beachfront property on a thinly disguised version of Martha’s Vineyard, and it must have cost at least $15 million: but this only adds to the general angst. A former British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), has settled in this spot to finish his memoirs.

Robert Harris’ very witty script, not quite up to its promise on paper, has it that the PM got a $10 million advance for an absolutely unpublishable book: reams of boredom about Lang’s Scottish roots, the queen’s little-known sense of humor and his modest hopes for a better world. Unfortunately, the PM’s last ghost writer met with an accident. So his swine of a publisher (a shaven-headed Jim Belushi) assigns a new hired hand, known as the Ghost (Ewan McGregor), to come in and complete the text.

As soon as the Ghost arrives at this fascist pillbox of a beach house, Lang is subpoenaed by the Hague to discuss his participation in the extraordinary rendition plan, which ended with the death under torture of a British citizen. Meanwhile, the PM’s sexy shrew of a wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), noses out her husband’s affair with his assistant, Amelia (Kim Cattrall).

One admires how much Polanski got out of two TV hobgoblins like Cattrall and Belushi. Cattrall’s tightly packed curves are less important to this film than her mastiff-like jaw line. Williams does the older-woman role proud against McGregor, who seems to have been 25 for a decade. The surprise in this plot is revealed through some expertly played Boston Brahmin threat by Tom Wilkinson. His scenes are full of promise: one waits in vain for a really sweeping moment.

The Ghost Writer has merit as an easily read satire of Tony Blair. Like most world leaders, Blair looked like a man of greater stature across his national borders. He never receives in the United States the ignominy he deserves, not only for rolling over like a spaniel for Dubya but also for some tremulously goofy New Ageisms. (Reportedly, he and his wife were rebirthed in a Mayan sweat lodge. Not to unduly mock the New Agers, but a British PM ought to have a little more faith in the material world.)

Brosnan—who has an odd, slightly mincing accent here and is rationed out in too-small doses—proves his excellence at playing privileged weaklings. Anyone who still considers him this year’s Richard Chamberlain (that is, anyone who didn’t see him in The Tailor of Panama or Matador) will learn how good Brosnan is getting.

This is a typical old director’s movie: slow, morbid, never quite sexy enough and full of self-reference. Compare the word-play scene in which the secret is revealed with the Scrabble scene in Rosemary’s Baby. The film will look much better on TV. Trapping us in the house is a classic Polanski maneuver, but leaving us there is something like an act of forgetfulness. Both the Ghost’s serious naiveté and the way he’s dealt with leach more pleasure and juice from this paranoid tale.

By Richard von Busack

WILDLY AMBITIOUS and thoroughly brutal—I mean, Saw-level brutal—the Red Riding trilogy gets in there and hits spots that Shutter Island could only acknowledge by homage. The three films—Red Riding: 1974, Red Riding: 1980 and Red Riding: 1983 (each about 100 minutes long)—are by directors Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker working on Tony Grisoni’s massive adaptation of a series of crime novels by David Peace.
The engine of this epic British mystery is a serial killer, or killers, at large over the course of nine years: angel-makers, leaving behind violated corpses of little girls, with wings cut from dead swans stitched to their bare shoulder blades.
A jest in Red Riding: 1980 between a crusading police inspector and a priest sums up the threat. The usually mild-mannered Inspector Hunter (Paddy Considine) asks, “If someone kicks down your front door, kills the dog and rapes your wife, who you gonna call?” The priest (Peter Mullan) replies, “It certainly wouldn’t be the West Yorkshire Police. They’d be in there already, wouldn’t they?”
Red Riding’s story of corruption and skullduggery centers around these dangerous cops: eager to immolate a Gypsy camp, torture a journalist or frame a handy moron. The moron is named Myshkin, a la Dostoevsky’s The Idiot; no, Red Riding ain’t subtle.
These movies may be hard on “the filth,” as British citizens sometimes call their constables, but the West Yorkshire cops were discredited during the murder spree of the Yorkshire Ripper. Those real-life killings are essential to Red Riding when the cops try to piggyback a murder onto the Ripper’s death toll of 13. Red Riding: 1980 mentions the true details. The West Yorkshire police had collected so much paper that they had to bring in contractors to reinforce the floor of an evidence room. Sometimes diligence and incompetence can go hand in hand; the convicted killer, Peter Sutcliffe, had been questioned nine times before he was finally arrested.
Local details may be stumbling blocks for American audiences. “Peter Sutcliffe,” asks the Yank viewer, “wasn’t he the guy John Lennon replaced in the Beatles?” The dialect is tough on the ear—low, muttered and glottal. Subtitles are just about needed during some of the most intense parts.
Red Riding: 1974 concerns the fate of a self-loathing journalist, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), who is out of his depth dealing with a vastly confident developer (Sean Bean, excellent) and a policeman named Craven (Sean Harris), who is still trying to figure what side of the law he’s going to be on.
Rebecca Hall plays Paula, the mother of a snatched child who begins as Dunford’s source and turns into his lover. Grief is such an aphrodisiac, but director Julian Jerrold stresses the awkward angles and hard labor of bodies in bed; we don’t get relief from the constant threat of violence through anything lyrical.
Red Riding: 1980 picks up the thread as a love story: a Graham Greene dilemma for the Catholic detective Hunter (Considine—in his first five minutes you can tell this is the best acting he’s ever done). Despite his marriage, he still has a thing for one of his employees. Duty is wearing him down; he has taken over the investigation of the child murders without much help from the officers under him. They’re not worried, since, as Craven says of the victims, “They’re slags.”
Lastly comes Red Riding: 1983, beginning with the flashback that allows us to see the men behind the curtain. Robert Sheehan plays a traumatized, half-sane male prostitute called BJ, who has the key to the problem—a key he never relinquishes for fear of his life.
You get lost, but the faces carry you through it: Cara Seymour is touching as a wilting flower of a woman. Harris’ slicked-back, liver-colored hair is a sight to affect the gorge. Bill “The Badger” Molloy leads the cowboys of the force, meaty bad bastards all; he is played by Warren Clarke, who once upon a time was the treacherous droog Dim in A Clockwork Orange. Age has given him the truculent snarl one might imagine on a “Big Brother Is Watching You” poster. Opposing all these bulls is plump lawyer John Piggott (Mark Addy), the show’s most trustworthy yet fallible character: “I’m disgusting, but my heart is pure.”
Produced for England’s Channel 4, Red Riding makes a strong argument for the primacy of adult television. Judging by this and shows like Mad Men, we can probably agree that there is something about the serial narrative that leads to more deep involvement than screenwriter Syd Field’s traditional three acts.
The on-the-cheap atmospherics are compelling: a plastic-wood-paneled basement pub named for Shakespeare; an ever-decaying coal town shadowed by a half-dozen mammoth cooling towers. Through exposure to brown light, stasis and despair, the people in Red Riding are devolving into brick walls.
Reportedly, these three individual films work on their own, but I don’t recommend that experience. The way they fit together is essential to the trilogy’s power and scope. It is worth it to schedule a marathon viewing.
A compelling murder story ought to be about a crime worse than murder. Just as Philip Marlowe was always in vain pursuit of the real culprit—the villains who made the monster city of Los Angeles—the villains here are the powers that be in Yorkshire. Red Riding is not about the 20 or 30 lives taken; it’s about the thousands of lives ruined. The trilogy’s most quotable line expresses the misrule of the area: “This is the North, where we do what we want.”

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By Richard von Busack

WILDLY AMBITIOUS and thoroughly brutal—I mean, Saw-level brutal—the Red Riding trilogy gets in there and hits spots that Shutter Island could only acknowledge by homage. The three films—Red Riding: 1974, Red Riding: 1980 and Red Riding: 1983 (each about 100 minutes long)—are by directors Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker, working on Tony Grisoni’s massive adaptation of a series of crime novels by David Peace.
The engine of this epic British mystery is a serial killer, or killers, at large over the course of nine years: angel-makers, leaving behind violated corpses of little girls, with wings cut from dead swans stitched to their bare shoulder blades.
A jest in Red Riding: 1980 between a crusading police inspector and a priest sums up the threat. The usually mild-mannered Inspector Hunter (Paddy Considine) asks, “If someone kicks down your front door, kills the dog and rapes your wife, who you gonna call?” The priest (Peter Mullan) replies, “It certainly wouldn’t be the West Yorkshire Police. They’d be in there already, wouldn’t they?”
Red Riding’s story of corruption and skullduggery centers around these dangerous cops: eager to immolate a Gypsy camp, torture a journalist or frame a handy moron. The moron is named Myshkin, a la Dostoevsky’s The Idiot; no, Red Riding ain’t subtle.
These movies may be hard on “the filth,” as British citizens sometimes call their constables, but the West Yorkshire cops were discredited during the murder spree of the Yorkshire Ripper. Those real-life killings are essential to Red Riding when the cops try to piggyback a murder onto the Ripper’s death toll of 13. Red Riding: 1980 mentions the true details. The West Yorkshire police had collected so much paper that they had to bring in contractors to reinforce the floor of an evidence room. Sometimes diligence and incompetence can go hand in hand; the convicted killer, Peter Sutcliffe, had been questioned nine times before he was finally arrested.
Local details may be stumbling blocks for American audiences. “Peter Sutcliffe,” asks the Yank viewer, “wasn’t he the guy John Lennon replaced in the Beatles?” The dialect is tough on the ear—low, muttered and glottal. Subtitles are just about needed during some of the most intense parts.
Red Riding: 1974 concerns the fate of a self-loathing journalist, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), who is out of his depth dealing with a vastly confident developer (Sean Bean, excellent) and a policeman named Craven (Sean Harris), who is still trying to figure what side of the law he’s going to be on.
Rebecca Hall plays Paula, the mother of a snatched child who begins as Dunford’s source and turns into his lover. Grief is such an aphrodisiac, but director Julian Jerrold stresses the awkward angles and hard labor of bodies in bed; we don’t get relief from the constant threat of violence through anything lyrical.
Red Riding: 1980 picks up the thread as a love story: a Graham Greene dilemma for the Catholic detective Hunter (Considine—in his first five minutes you can tell this is the best acting he’s ever done). Despite his marriage, he still has a thing for one of his employees. Duty is wearing him down; he has taken over the investigation of the child murders without much help from the officers under him. They’re not worried, since, as Craven says of the victims, “They’re slags.”
Lastly comes Red Riding: 1983, beginning with the flashback that allows us to see the men behind the curtain. Robert Sheehan plays a traumatized, half-sane male prostitute called BJ, who has the key to the problem—a key he never relinquishes for fear of his life.
You get lost, but the faces carry you through it: Cara Seymour is touching as a wilting flower of a woman. Harris’ slicked-back, liver-colored hair is a sight to affect the gorge. Bill “The Badger” Molloy leads the cowboys of the force, meaty bad bastards all; he is played by Warren Clarke, who once upon a time was the treacherous droog Dim in A Clockwork Orange. Age has given him the truculent snarl one might imagine on a “Big Brother Is Watching You” poster. Opposing all these bulls is plump lawyer John Piggott (Mark Addy), the show’s most trustworthy yet fallible character: “I’m disgusting, but my heart is pure.”
Produced for England’s Channel 4, Red Riding makes a strong argument for the primacy of adult television. Judging by this and shows like Mad Men, we can probably agree that there is something about the serial narrative that leads to more deep involvement than screenwriter Syd Field’s traditional three acts.
The on-the-cheap atmospherics are compelling: a plastic-wood-paneled basement pub named for Shakespeare; an ever-decaying coal town shadowed by a half-dozen mammoth cooling towers. Through exposure to brown light, stasis and despair, the people in Red Riding are devolving into brick walls.
Reportedly, these three individual films work on their own, but I don’t recommend that experience. The way they fit together is essential to the trilogy’s power and scope. It is worth it to schedule a marathon viewing.
A compelling murder story ought to be about a crime worse than murder. Just as Philip Marlowe was always in vain pursuit of the real culprit—the villains who made the monster city of Los Angeles—the villains here are the powers that be in Yorkshire. Red Riding is not about the 20 or 30 lives taken; it’s about the thousands of lives ruined. The trilogy’s most quotable line expresses the misrule of the area: “This is the North, where we do what we want.”

THE RED RIDING TRILOGY (Unrated), directed by , written by Tony Grisoni, based on a novel by David Peace, and starring Warren Clarke, Sean Harris, Paddy Considine and Paddy Seymour, opens March 5 at Camera 3 in San Jose.

It’s hard not to marvel at the movie poster for “Valentine’s Day” and the amount of celebrity faces they were able to squeeze recognizably into a heart shape (adorable). The average movie-goer might even be skeptical as to why so many name-actors would agree to share two-hours of screen time in a heart-tugging love story about the interconnectedness of relationships (a la “Love Actually”). As I watched this film I began to get a strong sense of déjà vu and realized that all the actors in the film are linked in a strange way that paralleled the movie’s premise of connected relationships. I couldn’t help but play my own version of “Seven Degrees To Kevin Bacon” in my head while watching this film. Ready for it?

Emma Roberts played the hormone-driven teenager Grace in the film. She is the niece of Julia Roberts, who played the keenly observing Army Captain/mother Kate Hazeltine. Julia Roberts reached her stardom through the smash hit “Pretty Woman”, which was directed by “Valentine’s Day” director Gary Marshall. Hector Elizondo, who played the faithful grandpa/husband Edgar, has been in 8 Gary Marshall movies including “Pretty Woman” and “Runaway Bride”(another one with Julia Roberts). Shirley MacLaine, who played Elizondo’s naughty wife, was in “Steel Magnolias” with Roberts right before “Pretty Woman” came out. Anne Hathaway played the receptionist/adult phone operator Liz. Hathaway’s big screen debut was alongside Elizondo in “The Princess Diaries” directed by, of coarse, Garry Marshall (and the squeal too). Topher Grace, who played Hathaway’s love interest, reached his fame on “That 70’s Show” alongside Ashton Kutcher, who played hopeless romantic Reed Bennett in the film. Have déjà vu yet?

Jennifer Garner played Kutcher’s best friend in the film. She also was in the “The Kingdom” with Jaime Foxx, who played the anti-Valentine sports reporter. Bradley Cooper played the generous jet setter Holden and was a regular on the TV show “Alias” alongside Garner. Eric Dane, who played quarterback Sean Jackson, ended up having an interesting relationship to Cooper’s character that was revealed at the end of the film (I won’t spoil it). Dane reached his notoriety on Grey’s Anatomy (McSteamy) alongside Patrick Dempsey (McDreamy), who played the three-timing no-good Dr. Copeland in the film.

Unfortunately this game leaves out Taylor Swift, Queen Latifah, Jessica Alba, and Taylor Launter. Wait, that gives me an idea: Gary Marshall’s next film should be a country/jazz musical about shirtless werewolves fighting against super hero babes with Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway playing mother/daughter vampires and Hector Elizondo as the wise old sage who obtains the secrets to the mythical forest in which they all live. That’s genius.

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Do Academy Award winners Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins give enough star power to the new “Wolfman” movie to do the 1941 original film justice? Or maybe the question to ask is whether the actors can live up to the fantastic movie wolves that have come before them. Del Toro and Hopkins have more than proved their acting chops in a long list of modern classics, but may I present an argument that might convince you that the wolf-shoes they must fill are much larger than you might think. I’ve compiled a list of the werewolves that are going to be quite hard to top.

1.     The Original Wolfman

Lon Chaney Jr. was truly the original movie wolf. Not only did he play the Wolfman in the 1941 original “Wolfman”, he reprised his role as Larry Talbot/Wolfman for four subsequent Universal films! Chaney was known to the whole baby-boomer generation who grew up watching these films as the ultimate werewolf, and us younger folk must tip our hat to the original!

 2.     Teen Wolf

A teenage werewolf that can dance, has crazy basketball skills, and is smooth with the ladies? Totally believable to me. Michael J. Fox was the first guy to play a werewolf that every guy wanted to be. Unlike the movie wolves before him, Teen Wolf went through sort of a wolf-puberty that allowed him to change into a werewolf whenever he wanted to dunk on somebody or put on a show on the dance floor. Who wouldn’t want to be a werewolf after watching that movie?

 3.     American Werewolf In London

This American werewolf becomes a monster much like the movie wolves before him (he gets bite by a werewolf) but is much more murderous than his predecessors. This film is known now as a campy cult classic, but its makeup effects were so impressive at the time that the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences created the category of Outstanding Achievement in Makeup to give this film an Oscar. Impressive.

4.     Twilight’s Jacob Black

Don’t hate. The “Twilight” films may be super cheesy but Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black actually makes the most recent film “New Moon” watchable (if you can handle the unnecessary camera pans up his body). Lautner’s character also incorporates the element of Native American werewolf folklore into the film, which is very underrepresented in most Hollywood werewolf movies.

5.     Harry Potter’s Remus Lupin

Remus Lupin is one of the more honorable werewolves in my book. He is dedicated to fighting evil alongside Harry Potter and takes a special potion to control his werewolf urges. Maybe if Lupin were able to give the American Werewolf the same potion it would have saved London from some very gruesome killings that not even Lord Voldemort would be capable of performing (just a thought). Also, I’m pretty sure he’s the only movie werewolf who doubles as a powerful wizard. I think that gives an extra point to Gryffindor!

Read Arts & Entertainment tips: http://www.tipisland.com/arts_entertainment

Do Academy Award winners Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins give enough star power to the new “Wolfman” movie to do the 1941 original film justice? Or maybe the question to ask is whether the actors can live up to the fantastic movie wolves that have come before them. Del Toro and Hopkins have more than proved their acting chops in a long list of modern classics, but may I present an argument that might convince you that the wolf-shoes they must fill are much larger than you might think. I’ve compiled a list of the werewolves that are going to be quite hard to top.

1.     The Original Wolfman

Lon Chaney Jr. was truly the original movie wolf. Not only did he play the Wolfman in the 1941 original “Wolfman”, he reprised his role as Larry Talbot/Wolfman for four subsequent Universal films! Chaney was known to the whole baby-boomer generation who grew up watching these films as the ultimate werewolf, and us younger folk must tip our hat to the original!

 2.     Teen Wolf

A teenage werewolf that can dance, has crazy basketball skills, and is smooth with the ladies? Totally believable to me. Michael J. Fox was the first guy to play a werewolf that every guy wanted to be. Unlike the movie wolves before him, Teen Wolf went through sort of a wolf-puberty that allowed him to change into a werewolf whenever he wanted to dunk on somebody or put on a show on the dance floor. Who wouldn’t want to be a werewolf after watching that movie?

 3.     American Werewolf In London

This American werewolf becomes a monster much like the movie wolves before him (he gets bite by a werewolf) but is much more murderous than his predecessors. This film is known now as a campy cult classic, but its makeup effects were so impressive at the time that the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences created the category of Outstanding Achievement in Makeup to give this film an Oscar. Impressive.

4.     Twilight’s Jacob Black

Don’t hate. The “Twilight” films may be super cheesy but Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black actually makes the most recent film “New Moon” watchable (if you can handle the unnecessary camera pans up his body). Lautner’s character also incorporates the element of Native American werewolf folklore into the film, which is very underrepresented in most Hollywood werewolf movies.

5.     Harry Potter’s Remus Lupin

Remus Lupin is one of the more honorable werewolves in my book. He is dedicated to fighting evil alongside Harry Potter and takes a special potion to control his werewolf urges. Maybe if Lupin were able to give the American Werewolf the same potion it would have saved London from some very gruesome killings that not even Lord Voldemort would be capable of performing (just a thought). Also, I’m pretty sure he’s the only movie werewolf who doubles as a powerful wizard. I think that gives an extra point to Gryffindor!

Read Arts & Entertainment tips: http://www.tipisland.com/arts_entertainment

Directed by Martin Campbell, starring Mel Gibson

When the daughter of a Boston homicide detective is murdered, the police assume her father was the intended target. Her father goes on the trail of the killer, gradually uncovering his daughter’s secret life along with an intricate web of government and corporate corruption. 

Mel Gibson makes his screen lead comeback as detective Thomas Craven, a single father grief-stricken over his daughter’s death and hell-bent on discovering the killer or killers—he’s “a guy with nothing to lose.” The opening shot features several bodies surfacing in a lake on the edge of the evening—a foreshadowing of what is to come. Many bodies will fall, slump, or be pounded.

Ray Winstone plays Darius Jedburgh, a government agent who may or may not be inclined to help Craven in his search for the truth. Jedburgh proves to be one of the most interesting and philosophically minded characters in the film, observing at one point that, “Everyone’s terminal.”

There are some humorous parts, as in the repeated line, “Everything’s illegal in Massachusetts.” The film also tries to have some heart, as in Craven’s flashbacks of his daughter and imaginings that she is still with him.

Intrigue builds as Craven’s investigation cuts deeper into a puzzle bigger than he had ever imagined. As the conspiracy is uncovered, it becomes more confusingly convoluted, and there are a couple loose ends and incongruities (if Craven is under police protection at his house, why is he allowed to leave without a bodyguard?).

Mel Gibson’s performance is nothing to be sneezed at, and the actress who plays the young Emma Craven is a delight to watch.

Based on an eighties TV series of the same name and directed by Martin Campbell of Casino Royale and The Mask of Zorro renown, Edge of Darkness strives towards some sort of depth, but most of the potential is lost in the gradual pileup of bodies, and it becomes at the last little more than a revenge flick.

“Deep down, you know you deserve this,” Craven tells an unarmed bad guy before gunning him down. The camera lingers over the bloodied, dying man as an audience member laughs.

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by Richard von Busack

Louis Mellis and David Scinto (of Sexy Beast) here have a dark-comic script is clearly about actors interacting with one another. The debuting director, Malcolm Venville, copes well with the fact that what we have here is a filmed play, with several of the loose cannons of the English stage firing at each other.

44 Inch Chest

A London made man Colin (Winstone) has been cuckolded: his buddies have kidnapped the waiter who slept with Colin’s wife (Joanne Whalley), kidnapped him, and stuffed him in a wardrobe in their hideout, a disused building next to the gasworks. During the course of a long booze-sodden night, they’re deciding what to do with the home-wrecker. The situation has a nasty undertone: the presence of an openly gay member of the gang (Ian McShane, the film’s standout) indicates that the victim maybe sentenced to the classic Roman punishment for adulterers: summary buggery, a fate some would say was worse than crucifixion.
The ancientness of the situation and the terrible pagan justice considered is reflected in incidentals: the neo-classical façade of a gambling club; McShane’s ironical “Saluta” as he gives a senatorial ave to the gang, and the scenes taken from DeMille’s sensationally kitschy Samson and Delilah (1949).

And then there’s the matter of the 5 AM exteriors: brick walls, empty streets, the distant barking of outraged dogs. It’s a city landscape that hasn’t changed much since the Caesars. And the condemned waiter, hands tied and folded in front of him, is slumped in the ecce homo pose, like Jesus in a painting…and mocked like him, too.
At times the speech trips like the so-called blank verse in Force of Evil (1948): “I just can’t believe it, it’s unbelievable isn’t it” or, most quotable and less printable: “You f’d his f’ing wife, you wife f’er.” Mostly the dialogue is a fountain of profanity—delivered beautifully, as fans of Deadwood know, by McShane.
His Meredith has the advantage of the criminals here for being out and proud. Everyone else is in dread for their manhood.
Zestily evil is Hurt as a cackling old Tiberius called Old Man Peanut. Tom Wilkinson is a pleasure, playing a gentle thickhead who still lives with Mom. Stephen Dillane has the customary Stephen Dillane part: standing around waiting to be directed to do something. Winstone is a phenomena at the worst of times, but he gives a monologue about marriage that you expect actors will be quoting for years; he’s the torn-up, merciful soul of this exercise of words and Roman decadence in today’s London.

Absorbing in the way that being in a bad mood is absorbing, Edge of Darkness can leave you with something like the malaise that comes with the onset of a 48-hour bug. Only a really Catholic script could have gotten the creator of the ultimate crucifixion movie back in a starring role for the first time in eight years.

Scriptwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell have shaped this remake of a 1985 British TV series for Gibson. There’s an inside joke about the actor/director’s knowledge of Latin, for example, and Gibson’s character, police detective Thomas Craven, sums up his moral stance: “Either you’re hanging from the cross, or you’re banging in the nails.” Where that particular either/or leaves a movie audience is a matter of debate. Craven is a bereaved dad, as well as judge, jury, executioner and bailiff, so he likes to do a bit of both hanging and hammering.

Returning from her new home, a lefty town in rural Massachusetts (“Northmoor” equals “Northampton”), the cop’s daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic) arrives for a visit. Emma is unwell. When her sickness grows urgent, she tries to tell her father about the real nature of her new job, but on the front porch, she’s the victim of a drive-by shooting. Damming up the pain and leaving his fellow coppers out of the loop, Craven goes on search for the killers.

The trail leads to Emma’s workplace, a sinister government-run nuclear facility on the palisades overlooking the Connecticut River. Meanwhile, the feds send out an operative of their own, Jedburgh. He is played by a sleek Ray Winstone, by miles the best thing in this movie, given urbane lines like “When someone has a national security problem, they call a number in Norfolk, Virginia. Then I decide what happens next.”

Dourer than ever, Gibson tries to fill the function of the blank detective in a vortex of weirdos. But Edge of Darkness doesn’t have enough weirdos, even though Danny Huston tries his best as the plant’s evil operator, Bennett, surrounded with grip-and-grin photos with various presidents. Bennett makes a sadistic query about Craven’s bereavement, and in the finale, he swans around in a Sulka-style dressing gown.

Up until the final shootouts, which are brisk as firecrackers, Edge of Darkness plods through its one-clue-per-scene story. The visuals are mud in your eye, and when you think that the reason Craven’s house is so brown is because he’s in a constant moral/religious crisis, we see the inside of Emma’s flat. It’s photographed the same way, and the only difference is that she has some more insouciant refrigerator magnets.

It’s not too much to ask that neo-noir should give us some bad women in tight skirts; Edge of Darkness has no women to speak of, except for two victims and one female reporter. The solution to the mystery is recorded as a video diary—as exposition, it’s the least satisfying way to solve the problem. And it’s hard to forgive the filmmakers for showing us the villain being held at gunpoint and then letting him go. The atmosphere of paranoia is politically nondenominational. With its scheming senators, sinister SUVs and Taxachussets bashing, tea baggers would love it.

Craven gives the head of some kind of eco-looney group called “Nightflower” a good old-fashioned punching out, even though the punched one headed a group that was also trying to bring the villain to rights. Not having any hope in justice whatsoever, the movie gets moony-metaphysical. This too must have attracted Gibson. During an eye exam, Jedburgh asks his doctor, “Do you see a soul in there?” We can see two of them at the end: the movie’s hell-on-Earth, heaven-in-the-next-world finale is worthy of a Christmas movie.

EDGE OF DARKNESS (R; 117 min.), directed by Martin Campbell, written by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell, photographed by Phil Meheux and starring Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone, plays valleywide.

EVEN THE TITLES for The White Ribbon inform us of director Michael Haneke’s rigor: tiny type, white on black, lingers onscreen to try to get us used to the slower tempo of life a century ago. The camera sits still and watches, as if it will get punished if it squirms. Here is stark black-and-white clarity. Here is the kind of bleak Germanic humor that makes English comedy seem fulsome and obvious.

The White Ribbon is the kind of movie where a child tied to his bed is advised to “sleep tight.” Amid the 10-ton pressure of life in a traditional farming town, we witness acts of open rebellion: small acts, as if they were the brake lights flashing on a car going over a cliff.

In the insignificant village of Eichwald (“Oakwood”), just before World War I, we hear a series of stories. These stories concern acts of violence that disturbed the orderly progression of the years. The events are narrated by an old man who was, long ago, the town’s vacant-looking schoolteacher (Christian Friedel).

He advises us that everything we will see is based on things half-heard and half-remembered. We can take this ineffectual man’s word for it. Clues pass him by, and he can’t provide a solid resolution for the story. He doesn’t seem to understand that Eichwald is poisoned, root and branch.

The teacher is one of three members of a social class located between the town’s baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the farm people, who are treated like two-legged cattle. The rest of Eichwald’s intelligentsia consists of two men. One is a self-confident, beefy pastor (Burghart Klaussner) with two splayed white ribbons of purity at his throat. The pastor’s tranquil savagery to his family makes him as spine-chilling a preacher as ever seen in a movie.

The other man is the village doctor (Rainer Bock), a sardonic but correct widower. The doctor’s horseback-riding injury—caused by some anonymous party’s tripwire—begins the film’s legend of punishment and reprisals. Not long after the doctor is injured, a farm laborer’s wife is killed working in the baron’s defective mill. Anonymous retaliation is swift: first, the baron’s crop is attacked, and then the nobleman’s young son is kidnapped, stripped and beaten; later, a barn burner strikes.

Between these sensations, we watch the education of the pastor’s young son, Martin (the touching Leonard Proxauf), who is first subjected to ritual corporal punishment then accused of sinful, deadly masturbation.

We also see the unwinding of an affair between the doctor and the town’s midwife (Susanne Lothar). In The White Ribbon, where all the real violence takes place behind closed doors and between the scenes, it is the emotional cruelty that affects us most.

The schoolteacher comments that what we see will help us understand “the events that came after.” By “the events,” Haneke may mean Germany’s next 30 years. Eichwald is a serpent’s-egg hatchery: the village’s obedient children will be participants in the kaiser’s war and Hitler’s crime wave.

So it’s the Holocaust again? Maybe, but there’s more going on in Haneke’s scheme. As the cities grow, a longing for the rural life grows with them. Some people blow their paychecks at Whole Foods because it’s the next best thing to being able to pet a lamb. The White Ribbon is a striking reminder of what got our great-grandparents off the land. Eichwald is a previously unseen combination of squalor and regimentation. Even the garden cabbages are so tightly set in their rows that it sets your teeth on edge to look at them. Here is the kind of Old World that made people risk everything they had for a new one.

Yet the film gives us more than relentless grimness. It isn’t meant to bathe us in the stinking mud, like Béla Tarr’s Satantango. There is hopefulness in the courtship of the schoolteacher and Eva the governess (the appealingly nerdette Leonie Benesch). Eva’s father is strict, but he startles us with gruff kindness.

We see some evolution in Eva after she gets away to the big city, something that almost makes her look exuberant. During a horse-drawn drive in the country with the yearning schoolteacher, Eva requests not to be taken for a picnic by the lake. This is as much of a refusal to a man’s pass as a working-class girl gets to make in this film. In Eichwald, as in the old Scottish joke, foreplay consists of the phrase “Brace yourself.”

The White Ribbon is perplexing. Haneke (Funny Games, Hidden) taunts us with withheld information. The film is most specifically about the German lands. Looming over Eichwald, and studied from various angles, is a squat brick tower that looks like it ought to have armed guards on top. The casual viewer would call it picturesque. The heavy dusty drapes, the lines of deer skulls on the walls, the trinkets and carved lintels are all part of the kind of Germany that old German restaurants tried to re-create.

Yet Haneke’s film applies to any place where the pig stalls are raked and the wheat is harvested—to any place where downtrodden, blinkered rurals have only one escape from their lives: the army. In this, Eichwald could have sister cities in Afghanistan or Nebraska. The movie warns us of what happens when spirits are crushed today, and it mourns for all those who suffered in the past.

More a luminous artwork than a movie, Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum is a story about a cluster of people connected to the transportation industry. It’s a small world of the sidelined and the elsewhere. Here are lives half-seen by the mainstream Parisian movie (and as much as I liked Cédric Klapisch’s Paris, that film counts as one such mainstream effort).
35 Shots of Rum takes place in an unlovely Parisian suburb of high-rises, yet gifted cinematographer Agnès Godard makes even this area beautiful in a way. One lady, gazing out of her apartment at night, looks into abstract field of square windows across the street—some iodine-reddish, some radiant with blue TV light. Denis studies black faces reflected in black glass; she even puts a touch of grace into the silent changing of the shifts in a locker room.
The action focuses on a series of on-again, off-again relationships. The central one is the love between a father and a daughter who are as close and yet as isolated as Prospero and Miranda. Lionel (the startlingly handsome Alex Descas) works as a train conductor. The subtitles identify Lionel’s train system as the Metro and so have some of the critics. But the double-decker carriages appear to me to be the RER, the Paris commuter line that is equivalent to BART, running through the same edge cities and industrial zones, leading to the same cramped suburbs of bridge and tunnel people.
When not working his long hours, Lionel is doted upon by his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop). She is a college student in the social sciences who works nights at a Virgin Records store. They have the kind of closeness that challenges an audience: What’s really going on with them? Is it devotion or something unnatural?
Josephine and Lionel, like almost all of the other characters in 35 Shots of Rum, have strong Afro/Caribbean roots, even though they’re also sturdily French. White viewers can even feel a little ashamed of themselves for suspecting incest. What do we know about the way other cultures allow a father to hold his daughter in his arms?
And the slippery Denis gives us no solid evidence of anything shameful. There are embraces that might (or might not) go further, but she cuts away. There are significant lines of dialogue: “We do what we want to,” says Josephine to her father. This could just mean that they don’t have to face the outside world if they don’t feel like it. Or?
The reverse angle on the story doesn’t solve the mystery. Watching Lionel and Josephine closely is Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), a spiky, lonely female taxi driver who lives in their building. Once upon a time, Gabrielle carried on some kind of affair with the train conductor; it’s over, and yet she can’t declare it over. She still looks out her window half the night, hoping for Lionel to turn up.
35 Shots of Rum is Gabrielle’s story, too. We see her exchanging some saltiness on the job with a customer. Gabrielle grouses about not being able to find any airport fares, so a passenger gives her what he considers good advice: “If you’re not happy, change jobs. It’s called ‘flexibility.’”
Josephine shows a kind of interest in another person in the building: Noé (Grégoire Colin), a diffident young man with one foot out the door. Josephine finds him appealing, and he’s high-spirited enough to jump into a canal when the two of them are out jogging in the neighborhood. But he’s not putting much push into the courtship. Noé is what some people call carefree; he’s actually really careless.
Denis also includes a political angle in this profoundly psychological film. Josephine’s class takes up the matter of the international debt that keeps Africa in chains—and implicitly what keeps émigrés coming to Paris to land dead-end jobs.
And the dead-end relationships, too, are finally catalyzed during a late-night party at a cafe. The party happens by accident, while the father and the daughter, and their two sort-of lovers, are heading out for a concert. The four are thrown off-track by a car breakdown and a cloudburst. The happenstance seems to be what Gabrielle has been praying for: “We’re a family again,” she says.
Here 35 Shots of Rum slips free of language and continues its storytelling through a succession of dances, with Gabrielle getting a chance at last to hold Lionel for a minute on the dance floor before he turns his attentions elsewhere.
As a study of a solitary workingman, 35 Shots of Rum contains passages that are worthy of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. The way Lionel unpacks himself after a workday, shedding his jacket and taking off his boots, is fraught with eloquence.
But the ménages here are far more tense and braided than in Burnett’s masterpiece; and the flute and electronic keyboard score by the band Tindersticks gilds this restrained exercise in sorrow and tendresse. Mysteriously, trains frame the shots; again we join Lionel on his wordless, subterranean voyages; 35 Shots of Rum does for trains what Jean Vigo’s L’atalante did for barges.

Any film adaptation of a celebrated novel is a sort of X-ray; any manipulation or self-importance in the text will be laid bare.
The success of the book The Lovely Bones is easy to understand. The horrific subject matter has substantial Gothic appeal, and it’s an irresistible fantasy of a family mourning without cease, for you and only you.
What adolescent hasn’t thought, “If I were dead, they’d be sorry”? And the appalling way the 14-year-heroine, Susie Salmon, is brutalized before she dies sticks with the reader: the worst thing in the world. The italics are by author Alice Sebold, who experienced this worst thing, as she noted in her memoir Lucky.
Peter Jackson’s film of The Lovely Bones is set in Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. Susie (Saoirse Ronan)—who has never even been kissed—is dealing with high school life. One winter day, on her way home through a stubbly cornfield, she is lured into an underground lair and raped and murdered by a neighbor.
From the antechamber to heaven, Susie watches what else happens to her family in the years that come. She’s serene, if lonely.
The way station to heaven is her own invention, a paradise with all the pet dogs and candy and peppermint ice cream she wants.
Sometimes, this twilight limbo is phantasmagorical: with a harbor full of three-masted ships in bottles and forests of butterfly trees. Sometimes, it’s comfortingly childish, as when Susie has her own floating planet like The Little Prince.
Other times, it’s alien: something like outsider artist Henry Darger’s view of an alternative world of young girls. What keeps Susie from moving on is her murderer. He has killed before and may kill again: an element of vigilantism keeps The Lovely Bones from looking too much like the cover of a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet about heaven.
Jackson goes into this film having already made the sublime Heavenly Creatures, about the reveries of a pair of teen girls.
But the executive-producing credit for Steven Spielberg says it all—here’s an unhealable contrast of horrible event and candyish fantasy, similar to The Color Purple.
When I learned that Brian Eno was lending his ’70s classics to the soundtrack, I expected his dreamiest, saddest music: “Julie With” from Before and After Science, or some of the tracks from Another Green World. Actually what is used are the rave-ups: an early scene of a car race to a hospital, with no real effect on the plot, is there to show off the bass solo from “Third Uncle.”
Jackson and production designer Naomi Shohan have built a ’70s mall that you could walk straight into as if the film were in 3-D; the polyester, Sears Lemon Frog shop wardrobe makes The Lovely Bones surpass The Ice Storm as the ultimate dense ’70s visual time capsule.
Jackson’s approach to the scene of violence is symbolic. The murder is suggested through focus on inanimate objects: a straight razor, the broken rung of a ladder. Jackson’s gift is taking a “What would Hitchcock do?” approach to the material. The most satisfying moments come in the too-orderly lair of the maniac and in the close-ups of the souvenir he took: a silver house from Susie’s charm bracelet, a symbol of the home that he destroyed. Jackson can get intense with the classic stuff: the minute clicking of a loose floorboard that lets the killer know there’s an intruder in his home. It’s easier to respond to the thriller than to the spun-sugar heaven.
As in most movies aimed at young adults, the adults are freakishly dressed weirdoes. Stanley Tucci, following up the most endearing acting of his career—as Julia Child’s dapper husband in Julie and Julia—is lamentably miscast as the murderer: equipped with bug-eyed blue contact lenses and a limp, combed-over Peter Stormare hairdo.
Mark Wahlberg, as the father, has essentially the same hair he had in Boogie Nights; the hair has creative differences with the way Wahlberg wants to play his scenes. Mom Rachel Weisz goes on some weird hegira to Sonoma County to pick apples; the orchard has the same animated pollen as Susie’s heaven. Standing in the gap, for welcome if broad moments of comedy relief, is the grandma (Susan Sarandon), hitting the cigs and guzzling the cooking sherry.
Really metaphysical fantasies usually give all the harsh logical lines to the drunks: it’s their job to throw the cynics in the theater a bone. This happens when Sarandon’s Lynn tells Susie’s brother, Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale), that his sister is in heaven. And when Buckley contradicts her, Grandma snaps, “She’s dead, OK?” In this instant, the X-ray quality I described earlier shines through the movie: the grieving and haunting looks petulant instead of eternally sad.
Ronan makes an effectively macabre staring angel, but she’s not quite the mousy nerdish girl turned into a master of a universe.
One can’t feel what it was that made this book seem unreadably sad. There’s no good way to patch the illogicalities. Take the iron safe that somehow holds the bones of the title: decomposition gasses have no place in a fantasy, but most of the audience are inveterate watchers of autopsy shows on TV, so it’ll stick in their craws. The January release is telltale of the film’s off-putting nature; strange that The Lovely Bones didn’t get wide release by Christmas, since it’s essentially It’s a Wonderful Life with child murder in it.

Ledger's Last Role

FOR Terry Gilliam, Don Quixote is still the ur-text. Despite the various stops and starts he has had adapting the Cervantes classic, Gilliam repeatedly makes films about fantasy as an escape from a cruel world. This is an odd way to look at Don Quixote—it shoves aside the counterpoint: Sancho Panza’s view that the world has its lovable and sensual side that only a stubborn old madman would ignore. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a very personal and not-so-coherent fantasy, has Christopher Plummer in the Man of la Mancha role this time, with Verne Troyer (never better, really) as Percy, a dwarf Sancho Panza.

Plummer plays Doctor Parnassus, an immortal sage reduced to busking in a horse-drawn Gypsy wagon. He and his crew set up their stand in the streets of modern-day London at its vilest, trying to lure patrons in to a world beyond the doctor’s mirror. (The model for this mystic carney could be found in Charles G. Finney’s novel The Circus of Dr. Lao, or the 1964 film made from it, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao.) On board are the old man’s apprentice, Anton (Andrew Garfield, in an underwritten part), and his daughter, Valentina (the Botticellian Lily Cole). Valentina doesn’t know that she has been promised to the devil on her 16th birthday; Mr. Nick (Tom Waits) is sniffing around already. During their travels, the group rescues a hanged man named Tony (an irresolute Heath Ledger); he may or may not be on the side of Nick, especially since the devil has decided to make a new wager for the souls of five strangers.

Certainly, Gilliam’s love for antique theater is true—although the greasepaint and cardboard make one wonder why he didn’t stage this story instead of filming it. The autobiographical angle is plain regarding the showman’s heartbreak—begging for money and coaxing an audience. We can understand why it’s hard for Gilliam when we see his vision of what the audience really is: rich matinee dames; wide-mouthed tarts coming out of a pub; a scurvy, violent little brat with a Game Boy.

This kind of misanthropy is a valid stance, but when mixed with the film’s urging us onto the higher plane, it gets wonky. The images of Nick’s red-neoned adultery motel and his Hellmouth pub represent a new kind of finger wagging in Gilliam’s work. They fit as strangely as Gilliam’s concluding filch from Stella Dallas. Striking images? Certainly. Waits, dressed like a ’30s British politician in bowler hat, cigarette holder and fur collar, brings a common sensual note to this film. I like the growl when he calls the dreaming mystic “Parny.” Cole is luscious, laid out like Isolde in an Anubis-headed boat. The various added faces Tony grows when he’s in Parnassus’ kingdom belong to Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell, all of whom came to the rescue of a movie suffering from Ledger’s untimely death.

Gilliam and co-scriptwriter Charles McKeown make a bald statement of their theme; Parnassus says that his work is to remind us of “the power of imagination to transform and illuminate our lives.” When one looks at the state of the world, the lack of narratives doesn’t seem to be the problem. Most of the planet is lost in fantasy permanently—rapt in idealized pasts, power dreams and invisible worlds. Gilliam could have hinted at a way to create more positive reveries, but that would have been stating an opinion regarding philosophy or religion, and he’s too slippery for that. Trying to puzzle out the theology here is like reading a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle.

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ONCE, I GOT called a pseudointellectual by a person who pronounced it “sweedo.” Youth in Revolt is a date movie for all of us movie sweedoes: people who brandish copies of La Strada in the pathetic hope of cinema cred. In Youth in Revolt, a bullying high school kid sees Michael Cera’s Nick Twisp carrying a DVD of the Fellini classic. He snorts, “Do tampons come with that? For your vagina?” However else its chips fall, the writing here is very ticklish. Considering the movie’s retro qualities, about which more in a moment, it’s fair to mention Dobie Gillis and Lord Love a Duck as long-ago models of what director Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl) has in mind.
Young Nick is a virgin in the leafier part of Oakland, and he can’t stand it. His mom’s boyfriend of the day, Jerry (Zach Galifianakis), has to leave town suddenly after one of his scams goes wrong. Jerry, Nick and the mom in question (Jean Smart, a cougar’s cougar) go vacationing at “Restless Axles,” a sad trailer park by a lake. There, Nick meets a girl who is too good to be real: Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), kept under lock and key by her parents, the kind of religious fanatics who use “Rock of Ages” for their doorbell music. Nick is determined to get next to her at all costs—even if it means creating the identity of “Francois Dillinger,” a kind of Big Lots version of the breezy heel Belmondo played in Breathless. Small-scale mayhem follows in Francois’ wake. This reign of minor terror backfires, since Mom’s latest boyfriend is an officer with the Oakland police.
Based on a self-published novel by C.D. Payne that used to be plugged in The Nation’s classified ads, Youth in Revolt invokes numerous local sites, from Ukiah to Santa Cruz (though for budget reasons, the movie was shot in Louisiana and Michigan). Animated interludes by Peter Sluszka—ranging from Play-Doh to Ralph Bakshi–style 2-D XXX filmmaking—keep the tone light. The writing (the screenplay is by Gustin Nash) is so crisp that one ignores the incidents of dead air and the jokes that fail to build. We watch Cera, this whey-colored meerkat, pose as a woodsman: “Like John Muir said, ‘I enter the wilderness with nothing more than my journal and a childlike sense of wonder.” Dream girl Sheeni tries to bring things down to a more realistic plane: “Kiss me, you weenie.”
Youth in Revolt sports good turns by Steve Buscemi and Adhir Kalyan (for once, the Indian immigrant is a suave Ronald Colman rather than a malapropism-spouting Hindoo). Fred Willard has a fine ’shroom-addled scene studying the nap of a shag carpet, and Justin Long plays a debonair but dangerous stoner. Despite a nod to computers at the beginning, this is a film that carries out its scheme of rebel cool against a background of vinyl LPs, French New Wave references, pay telephones and a thinly veiled version of the book The Joy of Sex. Is Youth in Revolt supposed to be set vaguely in the past, without any historical references—or is this is a vision of non-Internet cool that will define a generation? As Nick says, when asked whether the director of Tokyo Story was Ozu or Mizoguchi, “Who can say?”
Richard von Busack

YOUTH IN REVOLT (R; 90 min.), directed by Miguel Arteta, written by Gustin Nash, based on the novel by C.D. Payne, photographed by Chuy Chávez and starring Michael Cera and Portia Doubleday, opens Jan. 8.

A HANDY WINNER of the award for Most Improved Performer of 2009 is Colin Firth, whose performance in A Single Man is a model of frosty yet sensitive acting. The film debut by director Tom Ford is beautiful, but it’s the kind of beauty that it’s hard to feel anything about. Ford is working from Christopher Isherwood’s novel, essential reading in the gay canon. But the designer-turned-director films as if he’s adapting a classic; the material doesn’t have any room to take on a life of its own. Firth plays professor George Falconer, an Englishman in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, when the Brits were still a novelty in that city. He’s a bereaved figure; being in the closet, he isn’t permitted to show his sorrow after the death of his longtime male lover in an automobile accident. (In flashbacks, we see the lover, played by Matthew Goode.) This single man’s secret is known only to his friend Charlotte, called Charley (Julianne Moore), also a former flame, who has never quite gotten over George.
Falconer keeps another secret, though; he is putting his affairs in order, with the plan of committing suicide that night. During the course of one long day, people reach out to him, offering themselves. These include Charley, who has a standing date with George for cocktails; Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), a handsome, persistent college student in a white-pink cashmere sweater. George also encounters a stranger, a Spanish actor (or perhaps rent-a-Romeo) named Carlos (Jon Kortajarena). Ford’s nostalgia factor is strongest in the passages in which Kenny tries to push his way through George’s resistance. This uncertain romance is classic movie stuff: attraction plus resistance—and an element of danger.
Certainly, Firth looks like a man of the era in question. This George resembles George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on 1950s television. Firth has just that kind of attractive remoteness. This English control is contrasted with the riotous French-provincial-on-mescaline décor of Charley’s house, inhabited by Moore in hopped hair and triple-decker earrings; she’s a woman living on Tanqueray and gold-filtered pink Sherman’s cigarettes. Moore practically mainlined her eye shadow to get that zonked 1960s look. Charley re-creates one of those dance sequences that were popular in art movies of the 1960s: those moments where we’re not supposed to be sure if we’re watching a well-off white woman twisting and shouting, or if we’re supposed to be watching a metaphor for the breakdown of society.
The sight of Moore reminds us of the great suspense of those passages in The Hours, dealing with her character’s imminent suicide. Despite the opera on A Single Man’s soundtrack, it couldn’t be less operatic: nothing seems like a matter of life and death. Ford is good with the placement of actors on a set; he’s a tableau-maker. The art direction is all in order, but the classic-movie looks of the film just add to the air of beautifully appointed early 1960s soap opera. The fine clothes don’t make the men.
Richard von Busack

A SINGLE MAN (R; 89 min.), directed by Tom Ford, written by Ford and David Scearce, based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood and starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, plays valleywide. (Keep up with Richard’s reviews and film news at movietimes.com)

IN SANTA BARBARA, Jane (Meryl Streep), a successful restaurateur, hooks up with her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), despite the fact that Jake is married to a younger woman. Meanwhile, a shy, sad sack of an architect, Adam (Steve Martin), also shows some interest in her. It’s Complicated serves its core audience well—women of a certain age who wouldn’t be caught dead at Avatar. Certainly, classic-era romcom bones are visible under the expensive skin of Nancy Meyers’ newest, and she had the inspiration to make Martin into Ralph Bellamy, not to mention making Alec Baldwin into Jack Nicholson.
Commentators often note the rich staging in Meyers’ films, largely because there isn’t enough going on in the foreground. The film may flaunt chocolate croissants and croque monsieurs and in several other ways indicate French farce as its source, but it’s about as French as French’s mustard. Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give, What Women Want) puts the solidly practical, American view of what the kids will think of this affair (even though the kids are grown up). And Meyers frets over the possibility of offending the sensibilities of the audience; Jake’s injured spouse, Agness with an extra “s,” is portrayed as a harpy. Lake Bell plays Agness, and Meyers photographs this powerful-looking woman’s teeth and jaw to make Bell appear as ruthless as Burt Lancaster.
Baldwin’s low-down comedy is delightfully uninhibited; the man will do anything for a laugh, including pants-down jokes. It’s strange though to see Meyers’ vision of what it’s like when an older woman gets romantic: a reversion to girlhood with loads of consumption of chocolate. (Even bearing in mind that eating sweets is a metaphor for sex in the movies, there’s a lot of it going on here.)
Jane’s good points are her ability to cook and to cultivate very expensive real estate, but this doesn’t involve what most of us men really like in women past 40—the wisdom, for one thing, and the lack of coquetry. The movie has its moments, including a pretty hilarious marijuana-smoking scene, but It’s Complicated is overly complicated—it lasts too long, and it ends with an audible thud.
Richard von Busack

IT’S COMPLICATED (R; 118 min.), directed and written by Nancy Meyers, photographed by John Toll and starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, plays valleywide. (Get showtimes and movie news at movietimes.com.)

IN SANTA BARBARA, Jane (Meryl Streep), a successful restaurateur, hooks up with her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), despite the fact that Jake is married to a younger woman. Meanwhile, a shy, sad sack of an architect, Adam (Steve Martin), also shows some interest in her. It’s Complicated serves its core audience well—women of a certain age who wouldn’t be caught dead at Avatar. Certainly, classic-era romcom bones are visible under the expensive skin of Nancy Meyers’ newest, and she had the inspiration to make Martin into Ralph Bellamy, not to mention making Alec Baldwin into Jack Nicholson.
Commentators often note the rich staging in Meyers’ films, largely because there isn’t enough going on in the foreground. The film may flaunt chocolate croissants and croque monsieurs and in several other ways indicate French farce as its source, but it’s about as French as French’s mustard. Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give, What Women Want) puts the solidly practical, American view of what the kids will think of this affair (even though the kids are grown up). And Meyers frets over the possibility of offending the sensibilities of the audience; Jake’s injured spouse, Agness with an extra “s,” is portrayed as a harpy. Lake Bell plays Agness, and Meyers photographs this powerful-looking woman’s teeth and jaw to make Bell appear as ruthless as Burt Lancaster.
Baldwin’s low-down comedy is delightfully uninhibited; the man will do anything for a laugh, including pants-down jokes. It’s strange though to see Meyers’ vision of what it’s like when an older woman gets romantic: a reversion to girlhood with loads of consumption of chocolate. (Even bearing in mind that eating sweets is a metaphor for sex in the movies, there’s a lot of it going on here.)
Jane’s good points are her ability to cook and to cultivate very expensive real estate, but this doesn’t involve what most of us men really like in women past 40—the wisdom, for one thing, and the lack of coquetry. The movie has its moments, including a pretty hilarious marijuana-smoking scene, but It’s Complicated is overly complicated—it lasts too long, and it ends with an audible thud.
Richard von Busack

IT’S COMPLICATED (R; 118 min.), directed and written by Nancy Meyers, photographed by John Toll and starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, plays valleywide. (Get showtimes and movie news at movietimes.com.)

Downey’s performance seems to be based a little on Nicol Williamson’s nervous-breakdown sufferer in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, but there’s less of Olivier in Downey’s performance than there was in Williamson’s, less raising of the voice to let it ring off the proscenium arch. Downey’s schizoid man arouses a note of pity for his own solitude and, at the same time, admiration of his infernal speed. There’s a note of a scandalous Bohemian in Holmes when he’s cleaned up, something of the Pre-Raphaelite decadent in him. (“Ah, putrefaction,” he says, flaring his nostrils at a clue.)

He is certainly gratifying to look at. When on his game, Downey’s Holmes is a dandy in high Victorian regalia, smoked glasses, ascots and the kind of slanted hats worn in Oscar Wilde’s circle. But we also see another side of Holmes—a hermit crab in a dank flat, huddled under a dressing gown so raveled it looks as shaggy as a bear skin. The film’s saddest moment comes when an anxious Holmes can’t let his stream of deductions stop when meeting Watson’s then-girlfriend Mary (Kelly Reilly). It’s compulsive observation as a kind of OCD.

Ritchie follows the sturdy paradigm of one of the best Holmes movies, 1939′s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, from a horse-drawn coach race at the start to the fight on a towering London monument. Mark Strong’s staring and broad-faced Lord Blackwood—a Victorian Aleister Crowley—is apprehended by Holmes in mid–black mass and ushered in to a well-deserved hanging. “You and I are bound together,” Blackwood promises Holmes before he takes the last drop.

Naturally, Inspector Lestrade (a beautifully cast Eddie Marsan, looking more like a bull terrier than ever) decides that the case is closed. But it seems the grave cannot hold Blackwood: we cut to a family tomb that looks as if it had been blown apart from the inside. In the meantime, Holmes is approached by two different clients: the ever-troublesome Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams, decorative but dull) and the head of a Masons-like group, who are troubled by the specter of Blackwood.

Ritchie’s now-traditional fast-forward and fast-rewind techniques are used cleverly to revisit crime scenes: a little something for all of us who see but fail to observe. The stopping points include horror laboratories, a steam-powered abattoir, deadly copper bathtubs and spontaneous immolation. The look has more to do with David Fincher than Basil Rathbone.

And yet the muddy streets and bad teeth aren’t an unviable idea: Ritchie’s Cockneyfying of the adventure gives it some fresh texture. The movie keeps coming back to a serene partnership—when Holmes says, “The game’s afoot,” Jude Law’s formidable Watson picks up the rest of the Henry V quote.

Sherlock Holmes’ CGI animation is sometimes impressive; one Thames-front scene seems to go back into the frame for miles. Too bad the backdrop in the final fight scene is far more indifferent. Ritchie struggles with the usual problem of trying to illustrate the kind of public panic that would occur if the Antichrist were to rise and stalk London. Only a few agitated picketers cross the screen. Compare the aimless hubbub to the thrifty effectiveness of Fritz Lang establishing the same sense of civic emergency in M.

The big explosion—a slow-motion jump in front of a flaming green screen—is a custom that needs to die right now. With luck, this will be the final nail in its coffin. A nude scene is one deficiency of taste. So is a hulking French giant brawler who keeps turning up, as remorselessly and to as little purpose as Richard Kiel in the lousiest Bond movies.

Ritchie filches a line from The Terminator to lead us into the sequel. We see where it’s headed; we have a few satisfactory visions of the Napoleon of Crime, seated in corners of trains and carriages. These visions are much more like Lang: Professor M. is portrayed as an apparently untenanted suit of black clothes, gleaming gloves and top hat, with a tell-tale smudge of blackboard chalk on the lapel. Bring him on. Sherlock Holmes rattles our cages with superstitious craziness, then turns into a celebration of pure reason, unique in a season of movies meant to leave your brain in a molten puddle of crypto-religious awe.

Gnar Wars by Mike Benson from Mike Benson on Vimeo.

Just in time for the season Star Wars themed snowboarding at Mountain High.  Directed by Mike Benson. Starring Casey Wrightsman, Geoff Isringhausen, Cory Whetstone, Nick Sibayan, and Eric Miranda.

Sadly we could not get David Marceau, the greatest snowboarding Jedi (in this universe at least) in the video.

BLOCKBUSTER Total Access gives you movie night, any night

BLOCKBUSTER Total Access gives you movie night, any night

Frustrated temporary secretary Julie Powell embarks on a year-long culinary quest to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She chronicles her trials and tribulations in a blog called “The Julie/Julia Project: Nobody here but us servantless American cooks”.

Julie & Julia covers the years Julia Child and her husband spent in France during the 1940s and 1950s. With her husband working at the American embassy, Child decided to dive into cooking classes at the famed Cordon Bleu to fill her days.

The movie shuttles back and forth between Julie’s year of obsessive compulsive cooking and blogging in Queens in 2002 and Julia’s discovery of French cuisine half a century earlier, as recounted in “My Life in France”, a book Child wrote with her nephew Alex Prud’homme , that was published after her death in 2004 at age 91.

Julie & Julia is about much more than just cooking, food and Child’s pioneering role in shaping the way Americans eat: It’s an account of two women, generations and decades apart, determined to cook their way out of their dull lives and discover their true selves in gourmet cooking.

Get a taste of Julia Child’s cooking with these 5 delicious recipes from the Recipes Cookbook, an online culinary resource for cooks and food lovers.

JULIA CHILD’S BRAISED WHOLE FILLET OF SALMON
Ingredients
1 Large carrot and onion cut into neat 1/4-inch dice
2 Or 3 tender celery stalks, neatly diced
2 Tbs. Unsalted butter
SEASONINGS: Salt
Freshly ground pepper and dried tarragon
2 lb. Skinless fillet of salmon, about 1/2 inch thick
1 1/2 c. Dry white French vermouth

Directions
For 6 to 8 servings. Special equipment suggested: A no-stick frying pan for the diced vegetables; tweezers or pliers to remove bones; a lightly buttered baking dish that will just hold the fish comfortably (or an ovenproof baking and serving platter, or, lacking either, cut the fish in half crosswise, and reassemble it after cooking the vegetables to mask the surgery); buttered wax paper to cover fish. THE AROMATIC VEGETABLES: Cook the diced vegetables slowly in the butter until quite tender but not browned- about 10 minutes. Season lightly with salt, pepper, and a big pinch of dried tarragon. PREPARING THE FISH: Go over the salmon carefully with your fingers to detect any little bones; pull them out with tweezers or pliers. Score the skin side of the fish. Dust with salt and pepper, and place best side up in the baking dish. ASSEMBLING: Spread the cooked diced vegetables over the fish, and pour 1/2 inch of vermouth around them. Cover the fish with the wax paper, buttered side down. *Ahead-of-time note: May be assembled an hour or more ahead to this point; cover and refrigerate. BAKING: 12 to 15 minutes at 350F: Preheat the oven to 350F. Set the fish in the lower middle level, and, when beginning to bubble lightly, baste the surface with the liquid in the dish, basting several times again until the flesh feels lightly springy to the touch. Remove from the oven, and, holding the fish in place with a pot cover, drain the cooking juices into a saucepan. Slide the fish onto a hot platter; cover and keep warm while making the sauce. VARIATIONS: AU NATURAL: Braised Salmon Served in Its Own Juices: Rapidly boil down the cooking juices in the saucepan until almost syrupy. Pour them over the fish and vegetables, and serve. AROMATIC WHITE BUTTER SAUCE: The usual and lovely butter sauce of modern cookery can be as rich and buttery as you wish-from 3 or 4 Tbs. to half a pound. Using the preceding boiled-down juices as a base, proceed to beat in the butter as in the lemon-butter sauce for the broiled fish on page 83. WINEY CREAM SAUCE: A reasonable and equally delectable compromise is a light veloute sauce made with the cooking juices, then boiled down with cream, as follows. Cook together 2 1/2 Tbs butter and 3 Tbs flour 2 minutes without coloring; off heat whisk in the hot braising juices and 1 cup heavy cream. Boil slowly until reduced to 1 1/2 cups; season carefully. (Full details for veloute sauce are on page 272.) Either serve the fish cloaked in its vegetables and accompany with the sauce, or fold the vegetables into the sauce and spoon over the fish. From The Way to Cook by Julia Child, Alfred Knopf, 1989. ISBN 0-394-53264-3.

BACON QUICHE LORRAINE
Ingredients
1 Unbaked 9-in pastry shell
4 slices of bacon
1/4 c. Finely chopped onion
1 1/2 c. Shredded cheddar cheese
4 ea. Eggs slightly beaten
1 1/3 c. Milk
3/4 Tsp. Salt
1/2 Tsp. Dry mustard
1/8 Tsp. White pepper
1/8 Tsp. Ground nutmeg

Directions
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Bake pastry shell for five minutes. Remove from oven. Set oven temperature to 400 degrees. Fry bacon until crisp; drain, and crumble. Cook onion until transparent in small amount of bacon fat. Drain. Sprinkle bacon and onion over bottom of pastry shell. Cover with cheese. Blend together eggs, milk, and seasonings. Pour over cheese. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 and bake for 30 to 35 minutes longer or until a knife inserted in center comes out clean.

HEARTY VEGETABLE BARLEY SOUP
Ingredients
1/2 lb. Lean ground beef
1/2 c. Chopped onion
2 Garlic cloves; minced
7 c. Water
16 oz. No-salt-added tomatoes, undrained, chopped
1/2 c. Medium QUAKER Barley*
1/2 c. Sliced celery
1/2 c. Sliced carrots
2 Beef bouillon cubes
1 Tsp. Basil
1 Bay leaf
1/4 Tsp. Black pepper
9 oz. Frozen mixed vegetables

Directions
In 4-quart saucepan or Dutch oven, brown ground beef. Add onion and garlic. Cook until onion is tender; drain. Add remaining ingredients except frozen vegetables. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low; cover. Simmer 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add frozen vegetables; cook 10 to 15 minutes or until vegetables and barley are tender. Add additional water if soup becomes too thick upon standing. Ten 1-cup servings.

JULIA CHILD’S CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
Ingredients
8 oz. Sweet or semi sweet baking chocolate, melted with 1/4 c. Strong coffee
3 oz. Unsalted butter (6 Tbs.)
3 Egg yolks
1 c. Heavy cream (make sure it’s the heavy variety)
3 Egg whites
1/4 c. Instant (finely ground) sugar
OPTIONAL: Whipped cream

Directions
Beat the soft butter into the smoothly melted chocolate. One by one, beat in the egg yolks. Beat the cream over ice until it leaves light traces on the surface. Beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks. While beating, sprinkle in the sugar by spoonfuls and continue beating until stiff shining peaks are formed. Scrape the chocolate mixture down the side of the egg-white bowl, and delicately fold in the whipped cream. Turn the mousse into attractive serving bowls. Cover and chill several hours. You may wish to decorate the mousse with swirls of whipped cream, or to pass whipped cream separately. From The Way to Cook by Julia Child, Alfred Knopf, 1989. ISBN 0-394-53264-3.

CREME BRULEE
Ingredients
4 each egg yolks
3 Tbs. sugar
Pinch of salt
2 cup table cream
1 Tsp. vanilla
Sliced peaches, fresh
Strawberries, fresh

Directions
Beat egg yolks until slightly thickened. Gradually add sugar and a pinch of salt. Scald table cream and pour slowly into egg mixture, stirring. Add vanilla and pour into baking dishes. Set them in a pan with 1 inch of water and bake at 350 degrees for 45 mins to 1 hour.
Test with clean knife. Can be prepared a day ahead. Sprinkle top with sugar and/or top with fresh sliced peaches or strawberries.

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The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker brings the audience to the edge with an almost schizophrenic style of cinematography that is the best example of the never ending tension of war we have ever on the screen.  Director Kathryn Bigelow is best known to us for directing Point Break (it has taken years of therapy to admit this in public) but the star of this movie is definitely cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and his cameras: A Super16mm with Aaton XTR-Prods and A-Minimas and Canon zoom lenses, with Fuji 250D 8663 and 500T 8673 film and the Phantom HD camera for the great high-speed material.

Kippur

Kippur is a great Israeli war movie that Roy Elghanyan, our former special forces neighbor turned Krav Maga Trainer to the stars, brought by our office the other day.  Set during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel was attacked by Syria and Egypt on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar (imagine if the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Christmas day), there’s very little plot to the movie; just death.  One character goes straight from making love to his girlfriend onto a battlefield of brutally disfigured bodies.  No heroic speeches or charges in this movie, just shots of destruction followed by the effect they cause on human bodies.

Stalingrad

Stalingrad embarrasses Saving Private Ryan with its accurate portrayal of German soldiers during the horrific siege of Stalingrad.  There are a few instances of humanity in Stalingrad — like a enemy soldiers exchanging food, but these are exceptions. Stalingrad’s visual power comes from  portraying  of terrible reality of war – decapitations, amputations, horrible deaths, and mutilations. Nothing is gratuitous; everything is effective. Director Joseph Vilsmaier puts us in the trenches with men, who he would like to show are no different from soldiers on any side in any war.  There is no doubt that German soldiers suffered during the war, but if I have an issue with this movie it is that they are still Nazi’s who invaded the country and committed horrible atrocities everywhere they went.  Trying to pawn responsibility for this on the SS is the weak link in this movie.

Ozzies Being Ozzies

The Odd Angry Shot is a great Australian movie set during Vietnam.  War sucks, hardly an original theme, but showing how you get through it with the help of your mates is what makes this movie work.  Not quite an Australian version of Platoon, but a movie with great performances through and through.  Combat scenes don’t really shine, but then again it was shot for $600,000.
Sadly  our UPS guy was slow this week, but  we hope to have a part two to this list shortly.

The Girlfriend Experience isn’t about sex.
It’s about a more troubling subject: money. Having a chance to hire that most intimate of orifices—an ear—some New York tycoons spend their expensive sessions with Chelsea moaning about their soon to be lost jobs. (“Thanks for listening” become the new “Thank you, ma’am.”) Set in October 2008, the film is suffused with career struggle. Everyone in this affluent world is surprised out of their consumerist torpor by the giant flushing sound of the Lehman Brothers collapse. Chelsea, too, has career worries. A younger escort seems to be scooping her regular clients. In a movie with no serious sex acts, save for one odd orgasm at the finale, it’s hard to tell how far down the line Chelsea’s boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), goes. Chris is there for consolation, and he upbraids Chelsea when she breaks an important rule of their otherwise open relationship. What’s clear is that Chris’ body is not really his own. One of the film’s few funny scenes has a gym manager wheedling Chris into wearing a corporate logo T-shirt on the job.

Does it all work? In the real world, even a Chelsea could have held her own against a predatory webmaster (channeling Laird Cregar, film critic Glenn Kenny plays a horny, back-stabbing charlatan—the one definitely amateur performance in this movie).
Soderbergh visualizes Chelsea’s world as largely bereft of natural surfaces. Mostly, we’re inside expensive boutiques—a parody of the shopping montages in Pretty Woman. Later, the dutiful record of Chelsea’s clothes, tricking and shoe-shopping are typed into a computer, against a background of McCain talk as the election rolls around. (“If I hear ‘maverick’ one more time, I’m going to throw up.”) A double-bill of this with sex, lies and videotape would reveal much about Soderbergh’s obsession with sex as performance. Loads of prostitutes onscreen, and yet there are so few films that get an authentic sense of the trade, such as might be picked up from blogs or diaries (just like the one Chelsea is writing). But it is acting; the bug-eyed sunglasses, the overmoisturized face and Chelsea’s chilly poise are all stances meant to alienate, not titillate.

With Terminator Salvation opening in a few days we decided to take a look at some of our favorite movie motorcycles.  Doing a list like this is always hard, and we found ourselves constantly having to make tough choices about who made the cut and who did not.  Ignoring Vanilla Ice in Cold as Ice was easy, and reading that another magazine included Tom Cruise on a similar movie motorcycle list just mades us giggle.  The hard part of doing this was really breaking down what it means to ride and the feelings associated with it.  Here is our list, feel free to comment if you love it and run away if you don’t.

Bad Ass

10 – Terminator Salvation – We don’t want to be the site putting up Terminator Salvation spoilers, so just trust us when we tell you that these machines are badass.

Honor and Headwear Don't Mix

9 – Knightriders – Honda CBX driven by “King William”: Knightriders stars Ed Harris as the ‘King’ of a troupe of motorcycle ‘Knights’ struggling to live by the code of King Arthur in a corrupt modern world.  Before you label us a bunch renascence fair geeks think how reassuring the solid feel of your bike on the highway feels after a day of dealing with all the deception we face every day at work.  While we may not think of ourselves as knights of the road the way Ed Harris did on his Honda CBX, almost everyone who rides can appreciate the honest, no-compromise ideals that it takes to ride.  We don’t want to give away the ending of this movie, but no real rider will admit to not being moved by it.  Maybe it is a bit too much of a cult movie for some, and we admit that there is a trippy/boring 70’s thing going on that we don’t do enough drugs to get, but honor and bikes go together which is why it is on our list.

MovieTimes.com is a Mod

8 – Quadrophenia – Lambretta Li150:  People that dress/talk/act  just like their friends but don’t ride are losers without independence, but if you do ride you are allowed to dress and act like your crew, or as Jimmy says in Quadrophenia “I don’t wanna be like everybody else – that’s why I’m a Mod, see?”  Okay, maybe this makes no sense to an adult, but for generations of angst ridden teenagers disillusioned with their parent’s way of life and the dead end jobs they enter every day, this makes all the sense in the world.

BFF's of the Apocolypse

7 – Mad Max – Kawasaki K-1000, Rickman Framed Kawasaki 900: We all know that part of the appeal of motorcycles is their badass nature, and Mad Max includes the two scuzziest and at the same time coolest badass guys on bikes ever – The Toecutter and Bubba Zanetti. (No relation to the pump and dump Zanett.)    Freaky looking with a snarl that creeps you out, and how could we forget Bubba’s lines.
Bubba: Good afternoon.
Station Master: Good afternoon.
Bubba: We’re here to meet a friend. Come in on the train.
Station Master: Nothing come in on the train except a couple of crates and a [pauses, glances at Bubba]…coffin?
Bubba: Our friend.
The first time we saw this movie, sometime in the 80’s, we were blown away by the beautiful cinematography, fast paced action and awesome motorcycle stunts that make this film a winner.

Ahead and Behind its Time

6 – Tron – Lightcycle:  Isn’t it comforting to know that even in the future motorcycles will still be the cool expression of the power of the individual?  We think so.

Pre Bloat

5 – The Wild One  – Triumph Thunderbird 6T:
Does anyone ride motorcycles because it is the rebellious thing to do..ummm…what do you have to rebel against.  Maybe we are rebelling by not making this movie number one, but frankly if it were not for Lee Marvin, we would not be big fans of this movie.  Still, bikes are all about rebellion, which is why it is on our list.

Vintage Metrosexual

4 – Shampoo – Triumph T-140 Bonneville:  Is a movie about a male hair stylist the best example of independent, gather no moss lifestyle that we all dream about when we ride our motorcycles…yes!  This a great movie, and if you are a single guy this is probably the only movie on the list you can show a girl and actually stand a decent chance of scoring.

This IS Cool

3 – The Great Escape – Triumph TR6:  Maybe it is the marvel mystery oil in our veins, but we can’t think of a better movie metaphor for the struggle of an individual against a repressive regime than the Steve McQueen motorcycle chase in The Great Escape.  It does not matter if he makes the jump across the border or not, it is the irrepressible human spirit that we feel on motorcycles that makes this one of the best movie scenes, motorcycle or not, ever.

The Origional

2 – Easy Rider – Harley Davidson Hydraglide:  “You know Billy, we blew it,” explains Wyatt (Peter Fonda) to Billy (Dennis Hopper) when he realizes that their search for freedom, while financially successful, was a spiritual failure.  Against a backdrop of the rise and fall of the hippie movement, generations in conflict and the increased polarization of American society Easy Rider also shows that there is no better way to really see a country than by doing it on a bike.

House Favorite

1 – My Bodyguard – Honda CB175: Two sad and lonely teens rebuild a bike from the bottom up with junkyard parts, and once the bike runs they become kings of the world that can do anything – this is exactly what riding is all about!  It does not matter what you motorcycle looks like, how fast it rides or how badass your outfit looks, just get on your bike and the world gets better.  We are not even 100% sure what motorcycle was used in this movie and we still made it our favorite motorcycle movie…yeah, that’s how much we liked it.

By David Brin

I won’t comment on the plot of the new Star Trek film, or the way director  J.J. Abrams re-layers a familiar cosmology with glittery action, snappy dialogue and voluptuous intricacy.  Unlike many fans, I am cold to the “old pals effect” – the tedious crutch of re-introducing the same characters, in every sequel.   I care little about James T. Kirk, or even Mr. Spock. No, what always entranced me about Trek – helping turn this physicist into a science fiction author – was the vision it offered, exploring human destiny, confronting big issues and pondering a unique notion, seldom expressed anywhere else – that our descendants might somehow be admirable.

Optimism doesn’t come easily to post-Hiroshima science fiction, nor should all tales of tomorrow be sunny.  Some futuristic cautionary tales, like George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” warn usefully about potential failure modes. If they gird us sufficiently, these stories  rise to the august level of self-preventing prophecy.  Other works, and a majority of sci fi films, base their pulse-pounding, heroic action on a single assumption, that civilization is — and will always remain – stupid.  A cliché that can’t be helpful to our can-do, problem solving spirit.

But that spirit has a home. It’s embodied in Star Trek, an epic storytelling universe that broke with reflex cynicism, asking instead: “What if children can learn from the mistakes of their parents?”  Suppose (oh, unique thought!) our heirs begin living up to some of our deepest hopes?  Won’t they still have interesting problems?

Like what to do when we become mighty star-travelers?  Humanity has yet to crawl beyond the Moon,  yet we are already contemplating how to behave, under the light of distant suns.  Shall we interfere in the development of younger intelligent species, for example?  Could a mix of pragmatism and sincerity prevent us from repeating the mistakes of the conquistadors?  Premature or not, such thought experiments may be a sign of a precocious maturity, a lifting of the eyes.  And many of these ruminations – engaging millions of fascinated minds – have taken place under the banner of Star Trek.
Central to Trek is the image of a large, quasi-navel vessel called Enterprise, based on 19th Century sailing ships like HMS Beagle, dispatched to practice peacemaking and war, diplomacy and science, tutoring and apprenticeship, all in equal measure.  How different from the tiny fighter planes featured in Star Wars, each piloted by a solitary knight, perhaps accompanied by a loyal squire, or droid, symbols as old as Achilles.
In contrast, the federation starship in Trek is a veritable city, cruising toward the unknown. Its captain-hero is a plenipotentiary representative of his civilization and parent figure to the crew . . . but any one of those normal men and women may suddenly matter, during the next adventure, and perhaps become heroes themselves.  Moreover, this ship carries something else, the Federation’s culture and laws, industry and science, its consensus values—like the Prime Directive—all embodied in the dramatic diversity of its crew. Each time Enterprise passes a test, so does civilization. Perhaps even one worthy of our grandchildren.
Compare this to the Old Republic, in the Lucasian universe — a hapless, clueless mélange of bickering futility whose political tiffs are as petty as they are incomprehensible. Sound familiar? The Republic never perceives, never creates or solves anything. Not once do we see any part of it function well. How can it? The people, the Republic, decent institutions . . . these cannot be heroes, or even helpers.  There is no room aboard an X-wing fighter for civilization to ride along. Only for a knight and squire.

Are critics right that Star Trek is naïve?  For portraying technology as useful and liberating—if at times also dangerous?  Or for calling education a great emancipator (as in Starfleet Academy)?  For putting trust in the potential for an honest, decent society?  In fact, the films and television episodes often dealt with outbreaks of incompetence, secrecy, corruption and suspicion of authority. Only with some faith that these will be exceptions. When authorities are defied, it is in order to overcome their mistakes or to expose particular villainies, not to portray all government as inherently hopeless. Good cops sometimes even come when you call for help!  Well, it could happen.

Ironically, this image fosters useful criticism of authority, because it suggests that any of us can gain access to our flawed institutions—if we are determined enough—and perhaps even fix them with fierce tools of citizenship. That has happened, now and then.  Imagine it happening more often.

Today, for now, cynics rule.  But if this hope is futile and naïve, then shouldn’t we give up?

Suppose – just for a change — it isn’t. What if there truly is a path ahead, through the minefields of our times? One leading to a posterity we might be proud-of?  Aren’t we more likely to find that twisty, arduous way… and won’t our descendants feel much better toward their ancestors… if we embrace this challenge in the spirit of Star Trek?

*David Brin is Hugo-Award winning author of best-selling novels Earth, The Postman, and Kiln People.  His non-fiction book  -  The Transparent Society – won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

“We are pleased to offer our loyal visitors thought provoking content from award winning authors,” stated Ari Lee Bayme, CEO of Movie Times, Inc.

David Brin is a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War. (The Postman inspired a major film in 1998.) Brin is also known as a leading commentator on modern technological trends. His non fiction book — The Transparent Society – won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

Farris & Rogen Get Strange

OBSERVE & REPORT: You will either love this movie or hate this movie – but we don’t expect any in-between reviews.  Although the advertiisng for this film portrays what might seem to be yet another ‘bromance’ type of movie that would star Will Ferrel or be directed by Jud Aptow, Observe & Report will probably be the strangest movie I expect to see from a Hollywood studio for the rest of the year.   There were times we felt that this movie is a brilliant exploration of a paranoid character that you can’t help but root for, even if he does creep you out, and sometimes we were just plain bored.  Rarely does a movie like this come out of Hollywood – so give it a chance. Observe & Report Movie Times

More than F/X

DRAGONBALL Z EVOLUTION: This special effects laden adaptation of the beloved Japanese comic book series is so much more than another digitally induced joke. “Dragonball: Evolution” is focused on the stubborn young Goku as he embarks on a dangerous quest to obtain the seven mystical Dragon Balls following the death of his grandfather at the hands of sorcerer Lord Piccolo.  This movie is much better than you might think, and also much more intelligent.  While most of this genre is rarely more than a long commercial of the toys, this is one you can enjoy. Dragonball Z Movie Times

Fans Will Love

HANNAH MONTANA: THE MOVIE: Fans of Hannah will love this movie.  This big screen movie for “Hannah” finds Miley Stewart letting things go to her head, culminating in a shoe store cat fight with Tyra Banks. Deciding his daughter needs an extended time out, father Robby (Billy Ray Cyrus) drags Miley back to the farm and her hometown of Crowley Corners, Tennessee where her childhood pals Lilly (Emily Osment) and Oliver (Mitchel Musso) bring her back down to Earth.

Showtimes

Another Cinequest event that left an indelible impact on viewers was the showing of “Witch Hunt,” a powerful and emotional documentary about parents who were arrested and jailed on child molestation charges in the 1980s by a politically grandstanding Kern County, California district attorney. Later investigation cleared the convicted, but not until lives had been destroyed by jail sentences that lasted up to 20 years in places like San Quentin. A human face was put on a system gone wrong when the released prisoners appeared after the Cinequest showing on the California Theater stage with their accusers, now adults, who had been coached as six-year-olds by social workers into providing false testimony against their parents and neighbors. Even though they were too young to know better, it’s a hell of a burden to carry around knowing you sent your parents to jail.

Another Cinequest event that left an indelible impact on viewers was the showing of “Witch Hunt,” a powerful and emotional documentary about parents who were arrested and jailed on child molestation charges in the 1980s by a politically grandstanding Kern County, California district attorney. Later investigation cleared the convicted, but not until lives had been destroyed by jail sentences that lasted up to 20 years in places like San Quentin. A human face was put on a system gone wrong when the released prisoners appeared after the Cinequest showing on the California Theater stage with their accusers, now adults, who had been coached as six-year-olds by social workers into providing false testimony against their parents and neighbors. Even though they were too young to know better, it’s a hell of a burden to carry around knowing you sent your parents to jail.

The Road to Roubaix brings to American screens a celebration of one of cycling’s most difficult one-day races, Paris – Roubaix, which has long gone by the deserved nickname “Hell of the North.” Directors David Deal and David Cooper present a montage of panoramic views, gripping race footage, and behind-the-scenes interviews that engage the audience from beginning to end and offer a rare insight usually reserved for the sport’s insiders.

Proceeds from these special screenings go to benefit the Northern California High School Mountain Bike Racing League.

February 12, Larkspur – Lark Theater – 8:00 p.m.

Feruary 13, Berkeley – Florence Schwimley Theater – 7:30 p.m.

February 15, Palo Alto – Campbell Center for the Performing Arts – 7:30 p.m.

February 16, Santa Cruz* – Rio Theater – 7:30 p.m.

February 20, Folsom – Jill Solberg Theate – 7:30 p.m.

February 21, Pasadena – Vosloh Forum Hall – 7:00 p.m.

*February 16 event presented by The Bicycle Trip, The Amgen Tour of California – Santa Cruz, and The Rio Theater

Tickets are $12. For more info and to purchase tickets, visit:  www.norcalmtb.org/events/roubaix/index.htm

In addition to being a handy odds-calculator for the Oscars, the
Screen Actors Guild awards have one advantage of the other dozen-odd awards being
passed around this season: a Best Ensemble award. Slumdog Millionaire won in that category.

Sean Penn took the lead actor role away from some stiff
competition (admit it, Brad Pitt was pretty stiff in The Curious 1,500-hour
Long Case of Benjamin Button). Also running: Richard Jenkins, the dark-horse candidate
from The Visitor, Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon and Mickey Rourke in The
Wrestler.

Meryl Streep’s killer nun in Doubt took the Best Actress
title in an unusually strong field, leaving behind Anne Hathaway’s
straight-out-of-rehab performance in Rachel Getting Married, Melissa Leo’s rather
excellent lady smuggler in Frozen River, Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road and Angelina Jolie in Changeling.

To no one’s surprise, Heath Ledger’s zeitgeisty Joker won Best
Supporting Actor. Winslet’s Dietrechesque war criminal in The Reader took Best Supporting
Actress. 

For the TV awards, Hugh Laurie’s sardonic Dr. House won best actor
in a drama over Jon Hamm in Mad Men, proving that a physically maimed role will
always be more popular than an emotionally maimed one. (Making up for this snub
of the best show on TV is the fact that Mad Men won best dramatic
ensemble.)

Sally Field was really liked enough to get the lead actress for Brothers
and Sisters, with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin picking up best acting honors in
a TV comedy for 30 Rock. 30 Rock also won best comedy ensemble. Paul Giamatti
and Laura Linney took Best Actor and Actress in a miniseries as Mr. and Mrs.
John Adams.

Finally, James Earl Jones won a lifetime achievement award, as
long as he promises to do the Darth Vader voice every time he shows up.

Ricardo Montalban was, for years, best known as the ravishing
voice extolling the “Corinthian leather” of a Chrysler Cordoba. Unless GM was
processing its car seats in Greece, this “Corinthian” would apparently be an
adjective. As the poet Horace wrote, not everyone is lucky enough to go to
Corinth; the city was sort of the Fantasy Island of ancient Rome. Montalban’s
years at MGM need some rediscovery, particularly the John Sturges detective
movie Mystery Street (1950). He also appeared in Border Incident (1949), one of Anthony
Mann’s film noirs.

There were three parts Montalban will be remembered for: the voice
of Chrysler, the affable but not to be trifled with Mr. Roarke and, ultimately,
the vengeful Khan Noonien Singh, on the royal hunt of James Tiberius Kirk in
1982’s Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (expanding on the character he played in a 1967
episode of the TV show).

Rolling his r’s, and baring his handsome 60-year-old breast, here
is your blood-questing alien. He apparently had some vengeful Sikh in his
family tree, just like his literary forebear Capt. Nemo, peppering Kirk with
Melville and Choderos de Laclos quotes as he chases the Enterprise. Montalban used
everything he had: the theatrical magnetism, the polite Latin irony, the
savory, colossal pleasure of an actor with a juicy role in his teeth. “Ah Kirk,
my old friend, do you know the Klingon proverb that tells us that revenge is a
dish best served cold? It is very cold in spacssse.”

He was working until the end. Montalban was given
computer-generated legs by Robert Rodriguez to act again in the Spy Kids movies after he’d been
wheelchair bound by spinal trouble.

Montalban’s name recalled that great ruined city in Oaxaca, with
its pyramids and observatory, thriving 1,000 years before the Europeans came;
Montalban’s career survived the era of accent-and-serape parts; he lived to see
100 different styles of Latin actors and directors in the American cinema. He
seemed quite deathless, and maybe it’s because of this one role that one would
prefer to think of him in the present tense. Death, shmeath. Richard von Busack for Mr. Movietimes.com News Bureau

Patrick McGoohan has passed
away at the age of 80. Generations of TV cult fans knew McGoohan as the suave
Number Six in the British show The Prisoner, which ran for 17 memorable episodes in 1967 and ’68.

McGoohan played an ex-British
agent exiled to an island village/prison for mysterious reasons. In the series,
McGoohan tried to escape and to undermine some of the other numbered by unnamed
inmates in the elaborate control hierarchy of the island. The most indelible
image from the series was probably the enormous white beach ball that rose from
the ocean and thwarted all escape attempts. The short-lived show spawned
endless debates about its various allegorical and political meanings.

McGoohan also started in a
the British spy series Danger Man (a.k.a. Secret Agent) and had movie roles in
Ice Station Zebra, Escape From Alcatraz and Braveheart. He received two Emmys
for appearances on Columbo.

Best Quote from Number Six: “I
am not a number. I am a person.” —Mr. Movietimes News Bureau

Tipsier, blowsier and
with more cleavage than the Oscars, the 65-year-old Golden Globe awards went on
with its show last night. The telecast faced tight competition from Jack Bauer
and the ladies of Wisteria Lane. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association
ceremony is best known as the group unhampered by having to decide whether
comedy or tragedy is better—or (more specifically) whether Sally Hawkins was a
better actress than Kate Winslet in 2008.

The Golden Globes get to
have it both ways, and for that they lack a certain drama. And a new generation
needs to be reminded that this was the group that gave Pia Zadora “The Best New
Star of the Year Award,” an all-important fact missing from the award’s
Wikipedia listing of winners in that category.

Danny Boyle got best
director for Slumdog Millionaire,
which also won Best Drama and Best Screenplay, Mickey Rourke landed Best Actor
in a drama for The Wrestler. Winslet
won for Best Actress as the desperate housewife  in Revolutionary Road; Vicki Cristina Barcelona landed Best Musical or Comedy, just as In Bruges got Colin Farrell for Best Actor in a Musical
Comedy.

Heath Ledger posthumously
received the award for Best Supporting Actor Who Happened to Be on the Damn
Movie Poster. Similarly, Winslet took Best Supporting Actress in The Reader, a movie with apparently no female lead performance
in it.

In the “No, duh?”
category: WALL-E for Best
Animated Feature, and Mad Men for Best Television Drama. And Tina Fey won the best Tina Fey award for Best
Tina Fey in 30 Rock Starring Tina Fey. 

The new push for 3D will include the Super Bowl. DreamWorks
has just announced that it is creating a 3D trailer for “Monsters vs. Aliens,”
to run Feb. 1 at the big game. The film is slated to open March 27. In order to
get the point, and the effect, across, the studio will flood the country with
125 million pairs of 3D glasses in various retail outlets. If you can’t find a
pair, you can call 1.800.646.2904 to order some. The 3D blitz will continue with a 3D TV episode of “Chuck”
on Feb. 2 at 8pm. —Movietimes.com Movie News Bureau

Effective immediately Movietimes.com is offering a cash reward of $500 for anyone providing information leading to the arrest of one or more of these vandals.

Movietimes.com is a long time supporter of animal rights.  Lucas, a terrier mix and our corporate mascot, was rescued from an LA shelter by the Lange Foundation before being adopted by Movietimes.com CEO Ari Lee Bayme in 2008.

More information on this story to follow.

Effective immediately Movietimes.com is offering a cash reward of $500 for anyone providing information leading to the arrest of one or more of these vandals.

Movietimes.com is a long time supporter of animal rights.  Lucas, a terrier mix and our corporate mascot, was rescued from an LA shelter by the Lange Foundation before being adopted by Movietimes.com CEO Ari Lee Bayme in 2008.

More information on this story to follow.

A fat suit
obviously improves any actor’s performance, especially Tom Cruise, as the
soon-to-be-a-good-Nazi-in-Valkyrie earned a Golden Globe nod for his not-a-good-Nazi comic
turn in Tropic Thunder. That choice probably pleased everybody except co-star
Robert Downey, Jr., who will be competing for the same Best Supporting Actor
honors.

In other
categories, Slumdog Millionaire got nominated for Best Picture, Director and
Screenplay. Another independent offering, In Bruges, was singled out for Best
Picture in the Comedy or Musical category.—Movietimes.com
Movie News Bureau

Cuban
audiences cheered the performance of Benicio del Toro as Ernesto
“Che” Guevara in two films director Steven Soderbergh has made about
the iconic Cuban guerrilla figure.  Del Toro also produced the films.

“A circle is closing and it seemed it was difficult to close the circle.
I’m very pleased that it could be done and the Cuban people can see the
film,” said Del Toro to the press shortly after the film was screened to
the public at Havana’s popular Yara theater.

Cuban audiences showed great enthusiasm for all of the characters in the film,
not just Che.  Cheers and laughter went to Demian Bichir’s portrayal of
Fidel Castro and Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro in his role as Raul Castro.

 In comments before the films’ showing, the Puerto Rican actor expressed
thanks to the Cuban Film Institute and the Center of Studies about Che, saying
that they had done “most of the work” that can be seen in the films.
“It’s a privilege to be here presenting the film,” said Del Toro amid
an enthusiastic ovation.

The
30th annual Latin American Film Festival of Havana — or more simply, the
Habana Film Festival — features 114 competing films from 14 countries in the
region and elsewhere.

The Habana Film Festival (www.habanafilmfestival.com)
continues through Friday.  Please return to Movietimes.com for continued
coverage.

Cuban
audiences cheered the performance of Benicio del Toro as Ernesto
“Che” Guevara in two films director Steven Soderbergh has made about
the iconic Cuban guerrilla figure.  Del Toro also produced the films.

“A circle is closing and it seemed it was difficult to close the circle.
I’m very pleased that it could be done and the Cuban people can see the
film,” said Del Toro to the press shortly after the film was screened to
the public at Havana’s popular Yara theater.

Cuban audiences showed great enthusiasm for all of the characters in the film,
not just Che.  Cheers and laughter went to Demian Bichir’s portrayal of
Fidel Castro and Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro in his role as Raul Castro.

 In comments before the films’ showing, the Puerto Rican actor expressed
thanks to the Cuban Film Institute and the Center of Studies about Che, saying
that they had done “most of the work” that can be seen in the films.
“It’s a privilege to be here presenting the film,” said Del Toro amid
an enthusiastic ovation.

The
30th annual Latin American Film Festival of Havana — or more simply, the
Habana Film Festival — features 114 competing films from 14 countries in the
region and elsewhere.

The Habana Film Festival (www.habanafilmfestival.com)
continues through Friday.  Please return to Movietimes.com for continued
coverage.

Actor Tommy Lee Jones has filed a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures

and its subsidiary involved in the production of No Country for Old

Men, according to an AP story published in Variety. Jones’ lawsuit

alleges that he was promised “significant box-office bonuses” to

compensate for a reduced upfront fee for his appearance in the film.

While the Oscar winner was a hit, making over $160 million, Jones

hasn’t received a penny. He wants an auditor to review financial

records and decide how much he is owed, and anticipates it will be

over $10 million.—Movietimes.com Movie News Bureau

Actor Tommy Lee Jones has filed a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures

and its subsidiary involved in the production of No Country for Old

Men, according to an AP story published in Variety. Jones’ lawsuit

alleges that he was promised “significant box-office bonuses” to

compensate for a reduced upfront fee for his appearance in the film.

While the Oscar winner was a hit, making over $160 million, Jones

hasn’t received a penny. He wants an auditor to review financial

records and decide how much he is owed, and anticipates it will be

over $10 million.—Movietimes.com Movie News Bureau

French director Mathieu Kassovitz let loose in an interview with

AMCtv.com, describing his new movie Babylon A.D. as “pure violence and

stupidity.” While some directors may strive for that, Kassovitz is

“ready to go to war” with Fox because “They made everything difficult

from A to Z.” Instead of portraying “geopolitics and how the world is

going to evolve” he found in the source novel, “Babylon Babies” by

Maurice Georges Dantec, Kassovitz blames studio interference for the

film’s resemblance to “a bad episode of 24.” For what it’s worth,

critics agree with Kassovitz—the few who have actually seen the

thing. Fox isn’t doing critic screenings of Babylon A.D., a common

practice when studios know they have a stinker on their hands.—Movietimes.com Movie News Bureau

French director Mathieu Kassovitz let loose in an interview with

AMCtv.com, describing his new movie Babylon A.D. as “pure violence and

stupidity.” While some directors may strive for that, Kassovitz is

“ready to go to war” with Fox because “They made everything difficult

from A to Z.” Instead of portraying “geopolitics and how the world is

going to evolve” he found in the source novel, “Babylon Babies” by

Maurice Georges Dantec, Kassovitz blames studio interference for the

film’s resemblance to “a bad episode of 24.” For what it’s worth,

critics agree with Kassovitz—the few who have actually seen the

thing. Fox isn’t doing critic screenings of Babylon A.D., a common

practice when studios know they have a stinker on their hands.—Movietimes.com Movie News Bureau