The Musicgoer: Van Morrison's Keep It Simple

VAN MORRISON
Keep It Simple
(Exile)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

When you’re on your 33rd studio album, like Van Morrison is with Keep It Simple, a little wheel-spinning and water-treading is probably inevitable—and forgivable. The man made Astral Weeks, for crying out loud; let’s cut him a little slack. But he’s still pushing his luck with songs like “Soul” (“Soul is a feeling, feeling deep within/Soul is not the colour of your skin”) and sleepy blues workouts like “Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore” and “No Thing,” both of which are celebrations of Morrison’s own boringness.

Morrison has said, “I felt I had something to say with these songs”—that line even appears on a sticker affixed to the CD wrapper—but there’s not much urgency to the lyrics here. Nothing political, no particularly tempestuous emotions getting expressed, just a lot of boilerplate Celtic-soul nostalgia about “going down to the end of the land” and “hearing the song of home.”

Morrison does provide something of a statement of his artistic philosophy on “That’s Entrainment” (his term for “living in the moment”), and the album closer “Behind the Ritual” is a genuine charmer, an evocation of Morrison’s days as a young singer, getting drunk and spinning out rhymes in the alley behind a club—over a simple ukulele riff, Morrison keeps swirling around the same three or four choice phrases, trying them out in different combinations, getting lost in the words and the memories they evoke.

Morrison may be keeping it simple, but when his music works, it does so in ways too complicated for almost anyone to duplicate.

Falling, Falling, Falling, Falling In Love

It’s not a show about cherry pie and coffee, or saddle shoes worn by teenage girls, or donuts arranged in long rows of little towers upon paper towels, or the campaign to save to pine weasel, or even about midgets talking backwards and performing an oddly sinuous dance against a backdrop of red curtains.

Twin Peaks is a show about grief. Enormous grief, grief so oceanic it’s enough to cripple an entire town of more than 50,000 people. That’s what people forget about Twin Peaks—and what I had nearly forgotten myself until I watched the “Definitive Gold Box DVD Edition” of the complete run of the series. And it’s what makes the pop culture phenomenon that Twin Peaks became in its first season even more unusual: has the public’s imagination ever been caught up in a television program that descended this deeply into pure, soul-quaking sorrow?

Time and again in that pilot episode, one character after another breaks town into tears at the thought of Laura Palmer’s murder. The first Twin Peaks citizen to succumb is Deputy Andy Brennan (played by the mysterious Harry Goaz, whose rhythmless line readings and awkward slapstick routines are either the work of an inspired pro or an inspiredly cast amateur). Michael Ontkean’s Sheriff Harry S. Truman chastises Andy for his show of emotion—and there’s a bit of irritation in his voice too (“Is this going to happen every damn time?”)—but tears seem to be the only possible response to the news.

And I’m not just thinking of that strange, stunning scene where Truman tells Laura’s father Leland (Ray Wise) what’s happened while Mrs. Palmer (Grace Zabriskie), who already has intuited that something terrible has happened, can be heard shrieking with grief through the telephone receiver which Leland has dropped to the floor. Or the two scenes where Lara Flynn Boyle, looking shockingly young and fresh-faced and girlish, starts weeping in public when she thinks of Laura.

No, I’m also thinking of perhaps the most magnificent acting moment in the entire pilot, which comes when the principal of Laura’s school delivers the news of the murder to the students over the loudspeaker, his voice echoing through the empty hallways—he’s barely able to finish what he wants to say before he turns off the microphone and dissolves into sobs. (The actor is Troy Davis, a familiar character actor getting a rare dramatic role after years of playing stereotypical crewcutted gym teachers and guidance counselors in various sitcoms and dopey big-screen comedies. It’s too bad this character never reappears in the series.)

The most memorable sequences in the entire series, it seems to me, tap into this vast reservoir of grief lying just beneath the show’s quirky surface. I was shocked to find myself breaking into tears myself, for instance, at the end of the episode where Bob (in Leland’s body) murders Laura’s lookalike cousin Madeleine—coming after that intense, absolutely horrifying sequence is a moment in the Twin Peaks roadhouse. Most people remember the iconic moment where FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is watching Julee Cruise sing that beautiful song “The World Spins,” and then has a vision of her figure dissolving into that bald, bowtied giant who tells him in that strange, kindly voice of his, “It is happening again.” But what I remember is the moment shortly after, where the doddering old bellboy we’d seen a few episodes earlier, the man Cooper’s colleague Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) had cruelly nicknamed “Señor Droolcup,” shuffles over to Cooper’s table, lays a gentle hand on his shoulder, and says simply, “I’m so sorry.”

The stricken look on Cooper’s face at these words is absolutely devastating—he knows someone else is dead, someone innocent, and he can barely bring himself to believe it. And meanwhile, there's Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), the callow young juvenile delinquent, sitting at the bar, staring off into space, a haunted look of wonderment in his eyes, as if the music is making him aware for the first time in his life that the world contains sad mysteries far beyond his understanding.

I wish I could offer a revisionist take on the much-reviled second season of Twin Peaks, that I could say Richard Beymer brings a surprising poignancy to the scene where the insane Benjamin Horne re-enacts the Civil War in his office, or that the stuff with Wendy Robie’s one-eyed Nadine acquiring super-strength is actually funnier than you might remember it. I can’t—although I was surprised to realize that Gary Hershberger, who plays Nadine’s unwilling high-school boyfriend Mike, would go on to play Matthew Gilardi, the guy from the giant funeral-home chain who keeps trying to run the Fisher family out of business in the first season of Six Feet Under. Molly Shannon, of all people, appears in an episode too.

The most I can say is that the show seemed to be on its way to regaining its footing in its final three or four episodes—enough to make me wish it had found a way to stay on the air another year. Certainly that final image of Agent Cooper, with Bob now occupying his body, shaking with laughter as he repeats the phrase “How’s Annie?” over and over to himself, is one of the show’s creepiest moments, and perhaps Kyle MacLachlan’s finest acting moment ever.

I should also say that the special features in the Gold Box Edition of Twin Peaks are unusually well-produced. I particularly enjoyed the half-hour conversation between David Lynch, Mädchen Amick, Kyle MacLachlan, and Lynch’s then-assistant John Wentworth, which is shot in a very Twin Peaks-y bar/restaurant/café, which appears to be located inside a gigantic California redwood. The protective affection everyone who works with Lynch feels toward him is palpable—as is Lynch’s avuncular crush on Amick, whose name he insists on pronouncing “Madgekin.” (My favourite moment comes when Amick mentions that her biggest gig before Twin Peaks was a guest appearance on the pilot of Baywatch—a show that Lynch says he's never heard of.)

I’m also grateful that the producers of the disc included the bizarre series of Japanese commercials for some kind of canned coffee beverage featuring many of the principal cast members, including MacLachlan. Each of these 30-second spots captures the flavour of Twin Peaks better than many of the episodes from the second season—except the pacing is about 15 times faster, and Cooper has a Japanese assistant for some reason.

There’s also a lengthy documentary covering the full arc of the show’s history, from its original conception as a murder mystery set in North Dakota called Northwest Passage, through the shooting of the pilot, its unexpected ratings success, its fatal overexposure, and the crash-and-burn second season. I wish someone had given a straight answer as to why the planned second-season romance between Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne never happened—you get the feeling that MacLachlan vetoed it not because he thought it would be too creepy for Cooper to have a romance with a high school student, but because he simply couldn’t stand working with Sherilyn Fenn, but nobody comes out and says it.

But on the other hand, the doc does contain this magical segment in which composer Angelo Badalamenti describes working with David Lynch on the show’s haunting score. I can't think of a better note to end this post on, actually—so enjoy!

Hollywood Shuffle

I think it was movie blogger Jeffrey Wells who once warned audiences to beware of any film that begins with the camera rushing toward a cityscape over a body of water: with this kind of shot, Wells said, the director is basically telling you, “I have no ideas. None. The movie you’re about to watch is going to be Hollywood boilerplate from beginning to end.”

In a weird way, the opening shot of 21, with the camera zooming towards Boston across Boston Harbor, put me at ease: it was kind of a relief, after a busy, hectic workday, to know that for the first time all day, I wouldn’t have to concentrate too hard on what was going on in front of me to follow what was going on.

Paradoxically, 21 is the story of a scam that requires unusual levels of mental focus from everyone involved in it. Our hero, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess, the Paul McCartney type from Across the Universe), is a shy M.I.T. student whose phenomenal aptitude for math catches the eye of his nonlinear equations professor Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey, smirking up his usual storm). Rosa, it turns out, has a very profitable side business going on: he’s been taking his best students, teaching them blackjack, and turning them into a crack card-counting squad. Every weekend, they go to Vegas; the girls on the team circulate through the room, playing the table minimum and locating the “hot” tables (i.e., the tables with an unusual number of high cards left in the shoe, a disadvantageous situation for the dealer), whereupon they signal the guys who swoop in, lay down some big bets, and reap the big rewards. At the end of the night, they return to their luxury suite, divvy up their winnings, and party until dawn.

Ben is reluctant to join Rosa’s posse, but he needs to scrape together $300,000 if he wants to attend Harvard Medical School—plus, he’s got a massive crush on Jill (Kate Bosworth), the cute blonde math whiz Rosa assigns to recruit him—and so before you know it, he’s taking his first flight to Vegas, a few thousand dollars in bills stuffed into his underwear because if they leave it in their luggage, it’ll show up when airport security runs it through the scanner.

The business with the underwear is one of the few tangy details to have survived from Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction book Bringing Down the House, which “inspired” this film. The filmmakers’ decision to change the race of the central figure from Chinese to white is an annoyance—as if audiences couldn’t possibly expect to be interested in this story if it happened to an Asian man—but 21’s bigger artistic problem is the way it’s managed to take a true story and dramatize it in such a predictable, canned way that you don’t believe a moment of it.

Every beat of Ben’s journey spills out of this screenplay as predictably as the cards from a cold deck: training montage, initial success, high times and high living, Ben becomes a cocky douchebag, Ben loses touch with his “true” friends, disaster strikes, Ben hits bottom, Ben makes amends, Ben bounces back for one final score. Director Robert Luketic spends so much time on this worn-out plotline that somewhere, amidst the fancy computer effects showing chips growing into piles and putting cards into such looming closeups that they seem to be as big as movie posters, he forgets to explain exactly how card-counting works. Or at least why it works—why “keeping the count” is important, what it means to a counter’s strategy when a +8 count leaps to +15, and how they calculate when the time is right to cash out. All that might sound tedious, but it’s the minutiae of a scam that make it fascinating—and anyway, it can’t be much more tedious than watching Ben predictably fall out with his nerdy friends or waiting for someone to steal all the winnings Ben has stashed in the ceiling of his dorm room. (If this guy’s such a genius, why doesn’t he rent a safety deposit box?)

I don’t even have the space to address the film’s odd morality, whereby Rosa is made out to be a villain who deserves his comeuppance while Ben gets rewarded at the end of the film with everything he ever wanted—he even leverages the story of his Vegas adventures into a full scholarship to Harvard Med! Meanwhile, Laurence Fishburne, playing a security chief who loves dragging card-counters into the casino basement and beating their faces to jelly, is portrayed as a sort of a noble practitioner of a dying art.

Luketic even denies us the climactic sight of Fishburne punching Kevin Spacey’s face in—this guy just has no sense of what audiences want to see.

Moviegoer Diary: 1941, I Could Never Be Your Woman

1941

Plot in a Nutshell
Steven Spielberg’s much-maligned 1979 flop megacomedy about various Los Angeles residents running amok in the days following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Thoughts
There’s a great moment in 1941 where a pair of Army privates are riding inside a tank as it cuts a swath of destruction through a series of Los Angeles warehouses. Frank McRae plays Pvt. Jones, who all through the movie has been putting up with racist comments from Pvt. Foley, a good ol’ boy played by John Candy. At one point, a bag of flour gets dumped over Pvt. Jones’ head, and then, a few seconds later, Pvt. Foley gets a faceful of black exhaust. So now the black guy is “white” and the white guy’s “black.” They catch sight of each other, point their finger in the other’s face, and start laughing uproariously. And then an offscreen voice chimes in: “Hey, Foley! You’d better step to the back of the tank!”

Because it’s the only real flop Steven Spielberg ever made (or at least the only one that’s commonly referred to as a flop as opposed to a mere “underperformer” like A.I., Always, or The Terminal), there’s a stigma that surrounds 1941 to this very day: according to conventional wisdom, it’s the noisy, overproduced, unfunny comedy that gave Spielberg the boy wonder a dose of humility just when he needed it most.

Phooey, I say. 1941 is definitely noisy, and you could look at scenes like the one where the Ferris wheel comes loose from its couplings and starts rolling through an amusement park or the final gag where Ned Beatty’s house falls into the sea, and argue that if someone had decided there wasn’t enough money in the budget for such extravagances, those scenes wouldn’t have been missed.

But unfunny? Hardly. 1941 is one of the most raucous depictions of the insanity roiling deep within the American character since the heyday of Preston Sturges. (And the series of hilarious films that Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote between 1978 and 1985—I Wanna Hold Your Hand, 1941, Used Cars, and Back to the Future—represent one of the most inspired screenwriting streaks since Sturges’ charmed run in the early ’40s.)

That racial flip-flop between Candy and McRae is only one small example of the topsy-turvy reversals that Spielberg sets off in this movie, like a string of Fourth of July firecrackers. Everyone in 1941 has gone just a little bit insane: John Belushi’s crazed pilot Wild Bill Kelso, smashing open Coke bottles on the side of his plane and casually blowing up gas stations, is just the most obvious mental patient. Just look at Bobby DiCicco and Jordan Brian working in the diner kitchen, wantonly throwing dishes back and forth, slopping coffee and pancake batter all over the stove, too busy dancing to the Glenn Miller music on the radio to care about neatness. Or “khaki-wacky” Nancy Allen, who has such a plane fetish that just being inside the cockpit makes her ready to drop her panties. Or Ned Beatty, who’s willing to destroy his house if it means keeping the Japs from climbing ashore. You know that frenetic USO jitterbug scene from Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek? 1941 tries to sustain that energy for two and a half hours.

And it throws in an astonishing jitterbug scene too—the justly celebrated USO sequence, with Treat Williams’ psychopathic soldier stalking Bobby DiCicco across a crowded dancefloor (while the lovestruck Wendie Jo Sperber stalks him) is a jaw-dropping feat of physical and cinematic choreography. We’ll probably never see the likes of 1941 again in this age of CGI: why try astonishing audiences by doing something for real anymore—blowing up a building or flying a plane down Main Street when you can simulate it on a computer?

Maybe that’s why those flops of the late ’70s and early ’80s—1941, One From the Heart, Heaven’s Gate, Sorcerer—are so notorious, so especially despised, when much more expensive and artistically bankrupt recent box-office failures never get taken to task. If you don’t like a movie like 1941, the waste seems so much more tactile—all that money lavished on all those enormous sets and explosions and period props and period costumes! Whereas with a recent stinker like... oh, say, Van Helsing, you’re always aware, at least subconsciously, that everything onscreen is just a bunch of pixels.

How can you get irate over expenses as abstract as that? Or at money that disappears as painlessly as the files from your computer’s desktop trash can?

RATING: 4.5/5


I COULD NEVER BE YOUR WOMAN

Plot in a Nutshell
Amy Heckerling’s woefully mismarketed straight-to-DVD romantic comedy starring Michelle Pfeiffer as the producer of a TV sitcom who begins a relationship with the significantly younger actor who’s just joined the cast of her show.

Thoughts
I was persuaded to check this one out after listening to the most recent episode of the Show Me Your Titles podcast, which devoted the entire 50 minutes to discussing Amy Heckerling’s career and bemoaning the series of boneheaded decisions that kept this eminently marketable mainstream comedy from ever playing movie theatres. It was only the second time in the show’s history that hosts Erin Donovan and Cathy De La Cruz devoted an entire episode to one movie—and since the other movie that got this treatment was 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, I sat up and took notice.

I was a little less impressed by I Could Never Be Your Woman than Donovan and De La Cruz, but the lack of faith that the studio had in this project, despite its tremendously appealing leads and Heckerling’s solid comedy track record (you’d think the woman who made Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless would get a lifetime Hollywood pass), seems like evidence of a depressing studio bias against movies made from the point of view of women in their 40s and 50s.

And despite some sitcommy dialogue, some pat romantic-comedy situations, and the dubious choice to have running commentary on the action provided by Mother Nature (and to cast Tracey Ullman, a comic who’s always grated on me, in the role), Heckerling’s portrait of a city where everyone is desperately trying to pretend they are younger than they actually are rings 100 percent true. Pfeiffer’s character works on a TV show where 30-year-olds play high school students, where the slightly older producers and writers scour teen magazines for slang (ignoring the fact that the people who write those magazines are probably just as old as they are), where plastic surgery is at once commonplace and the subject of vicious gossip.

Plus, the relationship between Pfeiffer and Rudd is genuinely sweet—this is the rare romantic comedy where the two lovers really do seem to enjoy each other’s company. Their age difference is a big obstacle for Pfeiffer, but according to the logic of the script, Rudd is so good at making her laugh that he wears down her defences. It’s lucky, then, that Rudd is genuinely funny in a potentially cloying role. (I laughed out loud at the moment where a bitchy production assistant tells Rudd that there have been complaints that his performance on the show is too broad—whereupon Rudd responds with a hilariously broad spit-take.)

This isn’t a particularly graceful movie. It’s full of corner-cutting montages and musical cues, and it’s the kind of movie where the feminist messages are delivered in speeches instead of simply emerging from the situations and the way the characters interrelate. But you do feel like this script came from Heckerling’s heart, that she’s commenting on things that she’s seen first-hand, and that she genuinely wants to put a few more strong, intelligent female characters onscreen. (I also liked her handling of Pfeiffer’s daughter, played by Saorsie Ronan from Atonement, a burgeoning feminist who’s achingly clueless about how to talk to the boy she has a crush on.)

Plus, it takes its title from that great White Town song, which I haven’t thought about in years and was happy to be reminded of. In fact, let’s watch the video together, shall we?

RATING: 3/5

The Musicgoer: She & Him's Volume One

SHE & HIM
Volume One
(Merge)
*** 1/2 (out of five)
The saucer-eyed gamine Zooey Deschanel has had memorable roles in films ranging from Almost Famous to Elf to All the Real Girls to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy without ever quite becoming a star; she is, however, the fantasy girlfriend of thousands of thirtysomething moviegoers. Now, as if she weren’t adorable enough, she’s gone and recorded a charming album of retro-flavoured pop songs with M. Ward, writing all the songs (save for a pair of covers) and performing them with a strong, capable, agreeably untrained singing voice that straddles ’60s Nashville and ’70s Laurel Canyon.

The songs on Volume One are deliberately old-fashioned, so much so that many of them turn into mere pastiche—there’s even whistling in the chorus to “I Thought I Saw Your Face Today” and a Mills Brothers-style mouth-trumpet solo on “Change Is Hard.” But on the best tracks (like the opener “Sentimental Heart” and the infectious girl-group-influenced “Sweet Darlin’”), Deschanel’s heart-on-sleeve, malt shoppe-jukebox lyrics and her ear for well-crafted melodies make a winning package. It probably helps to picture her singing them, though—and it especially helps if you picture her winking saucily at you as she does so.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

You know what you’re in for with Sleepwalking’s very first shot: a closeup of a pair of cheap, battered high-heeled boots in white snakeskin, a pair of ugly prefaded jeans tucked into them. The camera pulls back a little farther, and we see we’re in a police station. The camera pulls back father still, and we see that the boots belong to... oh my God, can it really be Charlize Theron again? Yes indeed, and she’s playing yet another poor, uneducated, lower-class woman struggling to make the rent, getting into tearful, defensive, self-sabotaging arguments with landlords, cops, and judges, trying to hold her chin up high as she drives her beat-to-shit car through a wintry landscape as bleak as her career prospects. I can understand Theron’s desire not to put another Aeon Flux on her résumé, but gee whiz, after Monster, North Country, In the Valley of Elah, and now Sleepwalking, would it kill her to play a sexy secret agent sometime soon?

In Sleepwalking, Theron plays Joleen, an unemployed single mom whose boyfriend’s home has just been raided by the cops due to the marijuana grow operation he was running in the yard. With nowhere else to turn to, Joleen and her 12-year-old daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb), move in with Joleen’s brother James (Nick Stahl), who’s just barely hanging onto a crappy minimum-wage job building playgrounds.

And let me tell you: the scenes in James’ barely furnished, barely lit shithole apartment may be the ultimate achievement in relentlessly dismal Sundance Festival realism. All you other directors trying to capture the drabness of working-class life in red-state America: you can give up now: you’re never going to be able to lay on a thicker impasto of depressing, mud-brown murk than director William Maher does in Sleepwalking. James, who’s been living in this place for months, has a pale, clammy, greasy pallor to his skin—he looks less like a human being than some kind of fungus that’s been growing in the corner.

Theron exits the movie surprisingly early; Joleen ducks out one night, leaving Tara a note promising vaguely to return in time for her birthday. I can’t blame her for wanting to escape that apartment as quickly as possible, and I can even forgive her for leaving her daughter behind. What I can’t forgive, however, is the way Joleen’s departure leaves us with James as the movie’s central figure—and a more passive, inarticulate, borderline-cretinous protagonist would be hard to imagine.

Unable to figure out how to drive Tara to school and still show up to work on time, James loses his job, gets kicked out of his apartment, spends a week or sleeping on a half-inflated air mattress in a buddy’s basement, and then, as a final act of almost willfully self-destructive foolishness, he pools his last few hundred dollars and takes Tara on a road trip—destination unknown and possibly nonexistent, hitting every dreary motel and featureless strip of highway along the way.

Sleepwalking presents itself as having a commitment to realism, but what it really has a commitment to is its own self-important air of unflagging somberness, to a world utterly lacking in spontaneity or joy, to characters who seem defeated by the screenplay even before the movie starts. Sleepwalking is a particularly irritating kind of bad movie, the kind that sets out to narrow your vision of the world instead of enlarging it—all in the name of “art.”

“My whole life I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking,” James tells Tara near the end of the film, adding that now things are different, that he’s finally awake. That makes one of us.

The Musicgoer: The Kills' Midnight Boom

THE KILLS
Midnight Boom
(Domino)
**** (out of 5)

The title of The Kills’ new CD comes from the Jack Kerouac novel The Subterraneans—the narrator has just lashed out for no good reason at an earnest young writer, almost out of irritation at what an easy target he makes. Oh well, Kerouac shrugs; the world’s a mean place. “And what we gonna do? And where? When? And wha wha wha, the baby bawls in the midnight boom.”

The music on Midnight Boom shares Kerouac’s mood of appealingly misanthropic aggression, only fueled by cocaine and speed instead of Kerouac’s ever-present bottle of booze. These are lean, mean shots of scenester postpunk—guitar, vocals, drum machine—and they’re at their best when they’re hurling out insults that are no less stinging for being incomprehensible: “He’s an alphabet pony!” “Farewell, my black balloon!” “You’re the only sour cherry on the fruit stand!” “I want you to be crazy, baby, cuz you’re stupid when you’re straight.” Or are those actually compliments? I can’t tell—it’s hard to get a read on singer Alison Mosshart when she won’t take off those sunglasses. All I know is the songs are damn catchy, and they’re so sexy that I wish she were singing about me.

Moviegoer Diary: In the Heat of the Night, In the Realm of the Senses

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

Plot in a Nutshell:
Norman Jewison’s 1967 Best Picture Oscar-winner about a black cop (Sidney Poitier) from the north who gets roped into helping to solve a murder in a virulently racist Mississippi town.

Thoughts:
My interest in this film was piqued as I read Mark Harris’ new book Pictures at a Revolution, which tells the making-of stories of the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1967, a year that Harris argues found Hollywood at a crossroads between stodgy, overproduced and ruinously expensive blockbuster “entertainments” like Doctor Dolittle and provocative, edgy, youth-themed movies like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate.

Walking the middle ground between these two extremes were pictures like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night, which addressed contemporary themes of race within the context of familiar Hollywood genres—a comedy of manners starring one of the most beloved onscreen couples of the classic studio era, and a combination murder mystery/police drama. Both of the latter movies, not coincidentally, starred Sidney Poitier, a walking symbol of a bold new era of Hollywood who simultaneously never quite seemed bold enough to suit many critics and black moviegoers. (One of Harris’ surprising revelations is that Poitier was briefly courted to appear in Doctor Dolittle as well, in a role that, many rewrites later, wound up being played by Geoffrey Holder.)

Poitier is probably the most compelling figure in Harris’ book: how frustrating it must have been for him to be so widely criticized for the narrow range of roles he played—sexless, idealized “credits to his race”—when those were essentially the only roles any screenwriters were creating for him. The book captures the amazing irony by which Poitier could be at once one of the most popular movie stars in America, and yet someone who had almost nothing to choose from by way of scripts. But Harris also captures Poitier’s reluctance to break free from his image—for all his talk about wanting to play more complicated parts, he would balk when the rare opportunity arose to do so, as when he backed out of a planned production of Othello for NBC.

Poitier—or at least contemporary interviews with him—are tantalizingly absent from both Pictures at a Revolution and the anniversary DVD edition of In the Heat of the Night. (Poitier doesn’t contribute to any of the featurettes or the audio commentary. The man is 80 years old now, so maybe he felt it would be too much of a fuss, but it’s kind of surprising he doesn’t want to offer any thoughts on what is probably his signature role. I mean, Rod Steiger is on the commentary—and he’s dead!)

I like Poitier in In the Heat of the Night quite a bit—he’s one of cinema’s great seethers, and the treatment the citizens of Sparta hand out to him puts a lot of steam under his lid. I think I like the physical aspects of his performance the most: quietly examining the body of the murder victim, gently peeling off his shoes and socks, feeling under the man’s jaw for rigor mortis (a surprisingly moving scene); getting chased into some kind of garage by a bunch of young racists, leaping back and forth over a wide gap in the floor and holding them off as best he can with a length of pipe; driving past a field of black workers picking cotton and flashing Steiger a startled look when he says, “None of that for you, eh, Virgil?”, as if Steiger has read his mind; and of course the famous moment where a white cotton tycoon slaps Poitier across the face for daring to insinuate he’s a murder suspect, only to have Poitier wallop him back even harder. It’s a startling scene even today—largely because Poitier’s slap comes so fast, so instinctively and recklessly, and partly because the guy he slaps looks so much like Dick Cheney.

One other great thing about In the Heat of the Night: the way Quincy Jones wrote all the songs that you hear on the radio or the jukebox expressly for the film. This isn’t a case of a music supervisor lining up a bunch of new songs from some buzz bands to slap onto a soundtrack CD; as late as 1967, filmmakers still thought it would be too distracting for the audience if they heard a familiar, contemporary hit song playing in a movie, and so instead, Jones wrote a bunch of fake “hit singles” to go along with his score. I love this idea and wish more directors would try it out; it’s as if the world of the movie is its own hermetic imaginary environment, where every sound you hear belongs to it and it alone.

There’s this one song in the movie that I particularly love called “Foul Owl on the Prowl.” The creepy guy who runs the local diner appears to love it too—he even unscrews the lid from the jukebox with a knife so that he can hear it without paying for it. And then he dances awkwardly by himself behind the counter. I know this was the year of “Mrs. Robinson” and The Graduate, but “Foul Owl on the Prowl” is the one I can’t wait to put on my iPod.

RATING: 4.5/5


IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES

Plot in a Nutshell:
Nagisa Oshima’s controversial 1976 erotic drama, based on the true story of a 1930s Tokyo prostitute whose obsessive relationship with one of her clients comes to a violent end.

Thoughts:
I watched this one because I thought the title would make a cute double-bill with In the Heat of the Night, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for how explicit this movie would be. I hate to think of myself as a prude, but I did feel a little uncomfortable as the movie unfolded. I guess I’m not keeping up with the times, but I haven’t seen very much porn in my life, so shots of sexual penetration were something that took some time to get used to.

About half an hour, I’d say. After that, I’m happy to report that I was fine. Although I probably could have done without the little interlude with the egg. (I was going to give a more detailed description of what happens to the egg, but then the prudish side of me won out again. Also, there’s a good chance my mother might read this blog at some point, and I think she’d feel even more horrified about me if she thought this is the kind of movie I’m watching nowadays.)

But back to my original point: the constant sex scenes started to seem like a completely sensible way to tell a story—especially a story about a couple so insatiable and so shameless that they don’t stop having sex even when the cleanup staff comes into their room to take away the empty sake bottles. If anything, this movie makes the standard Hollywood romantic montage—soft-focus shots of a cute couple walking in the park, sharing a hot dogs, laughing in the rain—seem like even more of a sanitized lie. That’s not what you do when you fall in love with someone—why don’t more Hollywood movies find a way to dramatize that crazy early stage of a relationship when all you want to do is roll around in bed and make love, like, forever, when even the other person’s stink is a turn-on and even conversations where the only topic is how happy you are to be together can go on for hours and still be totally interesting? Obviously I don’t want Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey to do the egg scene, and any director who wants to get hired to do the new Jennifer Aniston movie should probably avoid telling the studio that he wants to make it “just like In the Realm of the Senses,” but after the movie had been playing awhile, I found myself kind of thinking, “Yeah... all romantic movies should be like this one!”

And then, of course, the woman strangles the guy, cuts off his penis and testicles and writes her name in blood on his chest. It’s worth keeping in mind, I guess, that when your crazy, obsessive prostitute lover asks if she can strangle you with a cord during your next lovemaking session, “Whatever gives you pleasure gives me happiness” is kind of a dangerous response.

RATING: 4/5

Moviegoer Diary: The Swimmer, Taxi to the Dark Side

THE SWIMMER

Plot in a Nutshell:
Frank Perry’s 1968 adaptation of the John Cheever short story, starring Burt Lancaster as a man who decides to “swim home” across the county, down the river formed by the pools in the backyards of his suburban neighbourhood.

Thoughts:
What an awkward, yet strangely moving film this is! I wish I’d watched it a couple of days earlier, because it would have made the perfect double feature with Eyes Wide Shut: two stylized movies about men who react to marital trauma by embarking on dreamlike odysseys full of troubling encounters with beautiful women.

The Swimmer is still the only Hollywood feature film to be based on Cheever’s writing (although there's apparently a French film that came out last year based on Bullet Park), and the material is so odd and downbeat that it’s kind of hard to believe that Columbia Studios actually approved the script for this one. And yet, at the same time, I can totally picture some melancholy studio executive—maybe he’s divorced or just starting to think about wriggling free of his marriage, maybe he’s started to drink too much just to get through the day—reading this script and finding the story so resonant that he gave it the green light anyway.

The film is divided against itself: scripted like an art movie, with the lighting, camerawork and production values of a bland late-’60s studio project, and a director who doesn’t quite seem to know how to achieve the transcendent effects he’s searching for. Take the sequence where Lancaster has to cut across a horse ranch to get to the next pool. He’s persuaded a cute teenaged girl—the former family babysitter—to accompany him on his journey, and flush with energy and sexual bravado, he starts showing off by leaping over the hurdles in an equestrian ring. Director Frank Perry tries his hardest to make this scene exhilarating, filming it in slow motion and giving us shot after shot of Lancaster’s grinning face, but something’s missing.

Maybe it’s the placement of the camera, the editing choices, or some indefinable sludgy quality to the cinematography, but the scene just doesn’t come to life. The movie always seems to be working so hard to achieve relatively simple effects and always falling a little bit short—look at the later scene where Lancaster, now cold and exhausted, tries to cross a busy highway. You’re aware of what you’re supposed to get out of this scene—a disorienting blur of cars whizzing by so fast that it’s a wonder Lancaster gets to the other side in one piece—even though what you’re seeing is a lot of clumsy quick edits trying without much success to make a bunch of slow-moving cars look like the home stretch of the Indianapolis 500.

But in a way, the imperfection of the film’s illusions only adds to its poignancy—after all, the illusions Lancaster’s character tries to build around himself aren’t terribly convincing either. Has there ever been a Hollywood movie whose lead actor has worn less clothing than Lancaster does in The Swimmer? He spends the entire film in nothing but a pair of dark blue trunks, and while he looks fantastic, he also does a surprisingly good job by the end of the film of convincing you that this muscular Adonis has become a shattered man, limping through rain on his cut-up feet toward a vision of idealized domesticity that might not even exist anymore.

The Swimmer is a movie that doesn’t seem to have a natural home either: too strange for the mainstream, too rooted in bourgeois anomie for the dropouts. Too hip for the squares, too square for the hipsters. And yet its unlikely premise and its evocative setting—that river of swimming pools in the dying days of summer, the backyard parties where “everyone drank too much last night,” the terrible, lonely emptiness at the end of the voyage—are such that no one who reads the Cheever story or sees this movie ever quite discharges it from their memory, like a dribble of pool water that you can’t quite shake out of your ear.

RATING: 4/5


TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE

Plot in a Nutshell:
Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning 2007 documentary about the Bush administration’s troubling willingness to use torture as a weapon in the War on Terror, and specifically how that policy led to the death of an Afghan taxicab driver at the hands of U.S. soldiers in the Bagram Air Base.

Thoughts:
There’s a lot of overlap between this film and Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib: it’s the same story of how untrained soldiers on the ground and a blithe disregard for the Geneva Convention within the White House resulted in appalling, inhuman conditions for detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kennedy’s film spent more time telling the story from the soldiers’ point of view—she gives more detailed portraits of the individual soldiers and provides a fuller explanation of the specific combination of personalities and events that set the stage for the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. But while Gibney uses a single specific homicide as his jumping-off point, he even more intent than Kennedy on tracing responsibility for the crimes in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and Bagram all the way up the chain of command to Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.

At this point, my disgust for Bush and Rumsfeld is so deep and so thorough that it would have been impossible for Taxi to the Dark Side to lower it any further. But the clip of Bush speaking to the press in 2006 after the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling that the U.S. military’s trials of detainees at Guantánamo violated Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention is pretty stunning all the same.

“Common Article 3 says there shall be ‘no outrages upon human dignity,’” Bush says. He pauses, then throws up his hands. “That’s very vague,” he says, that trademark smirk with its odd mix of contentment and confusion sneaking onto his lips. “What does that mean?”

I don’t know, George. I can’t define it. But I’ve seen many of the same photos from those prisons that you have and, like pornography, I know it when I see it.

RATING: 4/5

Notes From The Underground

Some say it was the biggest and most skillful counterfeiting operation in modern history: by the time it was finally shut down, it had introduced more than 130,000,000 pounds in fake currency into the British economy, and was close to perfecting phony American dollars as well. If you’re never heard of this amazing little chapter of history, perhaps because it was being carried on in the shadows of an even larger crime: the men creating the phony money were Jewish prisoners being held captive in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp just north of Berlin. They were part of a plan the Nazis called “Operation Bernhard,” and a lightly fictionalized version of their story is told in director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Counterfeiters.

Ruzowitzky’s central character is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a fictional creation based on the real-life Jewish criminal Salomon Smolianoff, who operated a thriving business in Berlin forging money and passports before the Gestapo finally catches up with him. For the next few years, he lives by his wits, keeping his true thoughts hidden behind a gaunt, expressionless stare and doing whatever it takes to survive—whether that means painting adoring portraits of the prison guards or supervising the day-to-day operations of Operation Bernhard. If he’s troubled by guilt, he doesn’t show it—“I refuse to let them make me feel ashamed to be alive,” he tells a fellow inmate—but the surreptitious acts of generosity and bravery he performs for his cellmates (when he thinks he can get away with them) indicate that he hasn’t lost his humanity.

But should Sorowitsch and the other Bernhard prisoners have done more to undermine the Nazis’ plan? One prisoner repeatedly delays the creation of a counterfeit dollar by sabotaging Sorowitsch’s negatives—much the alarm of the others, who know the Nazis will have no qualms about killing them if they fail to produce results. At the same time, the men also suffer tremendous guilt at being given preferential treatment (suits, soft beds, good food, even a Ping Pong table) while the sounds of atrocities keep filtering through the thin walls of their barracks.

I wish Ruzowitzky had included more details about the mechanics of producing counterfeit money into his script—if only so we could better appreciate Sorowitsch’s artistry and the technical challenges he was able to overcome. (Markovics subtly suggests that Sorowitsch is partly motivated simply by professional vanity—finally, he’s getting the counterfeiting workshop he’s always dreamed of!) There’s a nice irony in the way Ruzowitzky portrays the Nazis’ attitude toward their prisoners’ talents—as if the operation's success confirmed the sneaky cunning of the Jewish race, not the sneakiness of the Aryans who thought it up (and threatened to kill the Jews if they didn't help out).

The Counterfeiters became the object of a certain amount of mild derision among moviegoing hipsters when it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in a year when several more innovative pictures (including Persepolis, The Edge of Heaven, Silent Light, Secret Sunshine, and especially the critics' beloved 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) weren’t even nominated. Its victory also seemed to play into the Academy’s well-known tendency to reward films for the seriousness of their subject matter (especially Holocaust stories) rather than their cinematic artistry.

The Counterfeiters is definitely a conventional choice among a conventional slate of nominees—the Academy really doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the latest developments in world cinema—but as Oscar-friendly foreign films go, it’s an honourable addition to the genre, with a brisk script and a loose directorial style that value pace over ponderousness. Maybe another movie should have gotten the Oscar instead, but that doesn't make The Counterfeiters' virtues any less real.

Moviegoer Diary: Death Proof, Eyes Wide Shut

DEATH PROOF

Plot in a Nutshell:
A serial-killing stuntman tangles with the wrong group of girls in Quentin Tarantino’s half of the Grindhouse double feature.

Thoughts:
I guess I can count myself lucky for having caught Grindhouse during its original theatrical run, since now that its two halves have been expanded and divvied up into two separate DVD releases, it looks as though it might be a while before it gets seen in that form again. Going to see that three-hour extravaganza on opening night (having ducked out early from work) was an event in a way that watching a DVD—even an expanded director’s-cut edition—can never be.

That said, my reaction to Death Proof a second time around weren’t too different from my first one: it’s a movie whose structure and whose approach to the serial-killer genre are genuinely fresh and daring, but which is bogged down by some utterly tedious stretches of go-nowhere conversations.

In fact, I think this is the first film where Tarantino’s celebrated ear for dialogue, his gift for making scenes in which characters do little more than lounge around and shoot the shit dramatically interesting, fails him. That endless conversation in the diner where the second group of girls—Tracie Thoms, Zoe Bell, Rosario Dawson, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead—jaw on and on about car movies for so long that the camera has time to circle their table about a half-dozen times may be the worst scene Tarantino has ever shot. I wonder, actually, whether he cursed himself when he got into the editing room for insisting on doing it in a single take and leaving himself no way to pull all the dull sections out of it.

It’s also the first film where Tarantino’s off-the-wall casting instincts don’t pay off. It’s tremendously exciting to see real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell strapped to the hood of that car during the film’s epic chase scene, but in those even lengthier dialogue scenes, she’s a bit of a stiff—her comic timing is shaky and she’s seems unsure of herself in front of the camera when she should be larger than life.

Nevertheless, the majority of the reviews of Death Proof that I read when it came out seemed to love Zoe Bell, and to find her group of girls much more appealing than the first group, which gets gruesomely massacred by Kurt Russell’s “Stuntman Mike” character at the film’s midpoint. I couldn’t disagree more! What’s so likable about that second group of girls? They go on a joyride with an unsuspecting man’s car; they leave their unsuspecting, very naïve friend behind at his shack as “collateral,” practically encouraging him to rape her while they’re gone; they do a dangerous, completely irresponsible stunt on a public highway; and they have no qualms about smashing up this car that they don’t even own in order to chase down a guy who’s pissed them off.

Sure, it’s great fun to watch them beat Kurt Russell’s ass (and Russell’s 180-degree turn from cocky badass to blubbering sissy is absolutely hilarious), but if I had to pick a group of girls to hang out with, I’d take the first group anytime, especially “Jungle Julia,” the queen-bee DJ played by Sydney Tamiia Poitier. I don’t know why Poitier hasn’t become a huge sex symbol as a result of this movie—according to the IMDb, her only post-Grindhouse credit is the recent TV reboot of Knight Rider. (More cars!)

I love the insouciant way she lounges around that Texas chili joint, showing off her long legs and swinging her long, dark hair around as she dances to the jukebox. She’s so sexy but also so completely in command of her own sexuality... it’s impossible to tell if she’s going to bed with a different man every night or if it’s so hard for her to find someone who measures up to her that she almost never sleeps with anybody. And Tarantino gives her the film’s most improbably beautiful private moment—the little scene where she sends a text-message to her boyfriend while the love theme from Brian De Palma’s Blow Out plays on the soundtrack. Damn you, Stuntman Mike, for taking her out of the movie!

RATING: 4/5


EYES WIDE SHUT

Plot in a Nutshell:
Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 swan song, about a doctor who goes on a dreamlike odyssey of sexual temptation after an argument with his wife.

Thoughts:
Here’s a nitpicky, completely minor thing that nevertheless has always bugged me and which I want to clear up. In Afterglow, his extended “last interview” with Pauline Kael, Francis Davis asks Kael what she thought of Eyes Wide Shut. He makes a big deal about criticizing the film’s prudishness, citing in particular Kubrick’s decision to show Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman making out in front of a mirror while Chris Isaak’s “They Did a Bad, Bad Thing” plays on the soundtrack. “But they’re married,” Davis says. “So how exactly are they doing a bad, bad thing by making love? Is Kubrick telling us that sex is dirty, even for married couples?”

Except, of course, Isaak is actually singing, “Baby did a bad, bad thing”—a reference to infidelity that’s perfectly in keeping with the rest of the film.

I guess I’m focusing on this tiny error in a book published more than five years ago because I don’t know if I have much to add to the critical discussion over Eyes Wide Shut. I’m not much of a Kubrick fan, although there’s something hypnotic about his movies that sucks me into even the ones I can’t stand, like A Clockwork Orange. I don’t think I’m alone in that. For instance, a few years ago, I was visiting my parents for Christmas, and one night I was in the TV room with my dad. He was flipping idly from channel to channel and stumbled across a station showing Eyes Wide Shut. Now, my dad isn’t any kind of movie buff—I don’t know if he could name a single Stanley Kubrick movie if you asked him—but something about the image on the screen made him linger. It wasn’t even one of the racy parts—just the bit near the end with Sydney Pollack and Tom Cruise and the pool table. (“Just knockin’ some balls around”—is Pollack awesome or what?) It’s a really long scene that doesn’t even have much internal logic or make much dramaturgical sense, and yet there’s something about the filmmaking that holds your attention. I can’t figure it out—it’s like Kubrick stumbled on some weird, alchemical combination of long takes and stylized, slowly recited dialogue that puts every moviegoer into a lava-lamp trance.

There’s something about Eyes Wide Shut’s deadpan ridiculousness—as implacable as the expression on the mask Tom Cruise wears to that crazy orgy—that I found much more appealing watching it on DVD for the first time since it came out. (Disappointingly, my DVD was the much-reviled censored version, with cloaked figures CGI-ed over top of the more explicit images in the orgy sequence. But since Cruise never gets any action in this movie either, if anything, this touch helped me identify with his character even more.)

By the way, Nicole Kidman is amazing in this movie. She has a couple of shaky moments in her big marijuana-fueled monologue—although I fault Kubrick’s direction more than her performance—but she’s really great at straddling this line between the flesh-and-blood woman who we see sitting on the toilet, applying deodorant to her underarms, and being a mommy to her seven-year-old daughter, and this mysterious, sensuous, goddessy creature with thoughts and desires we men can only guess at. And I adore everything she does in that opening party scene, especially the bit where she excuses herself from Cruise to powder her nose, turns down a corridor, grabs a glass of champagne from a tray, and drinks it all down in one gulp with an expression on her face that seems to say, “Wow, I’m going to need a lot more of those to get through this night.” I hadn’t appreciated her performance at all the first time through—I suspect I may have been distracted by how smashing she looks in that see-through undershirt she wears while telling Cruise about her sexual fantasies.

I feel guilty about how much space I’ve devoted in this entry to ogling actresses—especially after listening to a recent Show Me Your Titles podcast in which Cathy De La Cruz and Erin Donovan talked about how annoying it is to see male movie reviewers drooling over some sexy movie star and calling it criticism. Seeing beautiful men and women on display is one of the great pleasures of moviegoing, but De La Cruz and Donovan have a point—when a reviewer carries it too far, he’s done a bad, bad thing. Maybe I’ve crossed the line, but I hope the ghost of Pauline will forgive me.

RATING: 4/5

The Musicgoer: José González's In Our Nature

JOSÉ GONZÁLEZ
In Our Nature
(Mute)
**** (out of five)

“There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.” So the poet said—and he said it so beautifully that maybe he should be the one writing this review of José González’s In Our Nature. There’s not a single song on this album that’s more complicated than it needs to be: the instrumentation consists solely of González’s acoustic guitar, some unobtrusive synths, and some gentle percussion way off in the corner of the studio; and except for the mesmerizing eight-minute long closer “Cycling Trivialities,” the tracks are as compressed and as eloquently unassuming as a William Carlos Williams poem.

Antiwar themes crop up repeatedly on the disc, but González mostly prefers to allude obliquely to the war in Iraq rather than confront it head-on, as on the quietly stunning two-minute Tower of Babel parable “The Nest.” But “quiet” doesn’t necessarily mean “dull”: indeed, González has a sense of how to give a song drama (without it turning into melodrama) that much more bombastic bands would envy. “Majesty”: yeah, that’s the word for it.

The Movie You'll Love To Hate

Wow, are people going to hate Funny Games. And I mean hate. People aren’t just going to come out of it the way they did at The Da Vinci Code, shrugging and saying, “Boy, that was a bad movie,” and then going out to grab something to eat. Because it’s not a bad movie—it’s very professionally made and skillfully acted, especially by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.

But that’s not going to matter, because Funny Games betrays the expectations of its unsuspecting audience in such a fundamental way that I’m sure most people’s reaction will be to reject it completely. The hate this movie will generate is the kind that will persist for decades. It's a hate that will bind married couples together and cause couples who see it on their first date to break up for good. I'm talking hate that will define a generation. I'm kind of eager to see it on the opening weekend, actually, if only to see how the crowd reacts to a particularly outrageous moment near the end of the film involving a TV remote control. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if people started throwing things at the screen.

But let’s back up a bit. Funny Games is writer/director Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot remake of his own 1997 German-language film, with Watts and Roth assuming the roles originally played by Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe: Ann and George, a happy, well-to-do married couple who go on vacation with their son at their lake house, only to be taken hostage by a pair of polite young psychopaths in tennis whites who proceed to torture them for no apparent reason, save their own perverted amusement. At first, Haneke directs the film in a conventional (if somewhat clinical) manner, creating an underlying atmosphere of dread even as the happy family arrives at the lake house, and lingering on details (e.g., a dropped knife forgotten in the hull of a sailboat) as if to tip us off that they’ll be reincorporated later on in the story.

But don’t be fooled! The only reason Haneke, a former philosophy student and film critic, bothers setting up these Hollywood tropes in the first place is so he can knock them down later on and shock you out of your alleged complacency. (Yes, you! Sitting there with your popcorn, expecting to be entertained! Michael Haneke’s fed up with you!)

The first hint that there’s something strange going on in this movie comes when Michael Pitt, playing one of the two home invaders, tells Ann to go looking for the family dog and then turns towards the camera and smirks complicitly at the audience, as if to confirm our suspicion that he’s killed it already. As the film progresses, Pitt begins acknowledging the audience’s presence even more overtly, asking us if he thinks the family will survive and explaining that he’s only doing certain things because it makes the story more dramatic—it’s like an episode of Moonlighting, but starring Patrick Bateman instead of Bruce Willis.

I saw the original Funny Games when it first came out, and I didn’t like it much. Back then, a lot of reviewers, noting the way the two killers casually refer to each other as “Tom and Jerry” or “Beavis and Butt-head,” interpreted the film as a comment on how TV has completely desensitized a generation of young people to violence. Viewed through that lens, I though the film was pretty facile. Nowadays, however, it’s clear that Haneke’s true target isn’t numbed-out TV-watching young people but the very audience who would pay money to see the kind of movie Funny Games appears to be.

Why, Haneke asks, do we regard torture and violence as entertainment? What is the nature of the pleasure we derive from certain types of onscreen death, and what happens when those scenes are taken away from us?

I think I understand Haneke’s intentions better this time out, but I still don’t think his point holds any more water. Surely Haneke realizes that onscreen violence in the context of a dramatic story and real-life violence are very different things. Only a psychotic would confuse the two, and yet Haneke seems to regard our taste for onscreen violence as being somehow immoral.

You don’t have to be some kind of film theorist to be aware on some level that any movie you’re watching is a constructed object that obeys certain established conventions. Everyone who’s ever shouted back at the screen during a clichéd horror movie knows that. And so Pitt’s winks and smirks to the camera aren’t the least bit shocking or daring—they’re just exasperating. (That said, I did laugh when Pitt petulantly remarks that we’re probably rooting for the family, as if it’s exactly the bourgeois reaction he was expecting from us.)

But Haneke’s attitude toward the audience often seems as condescending as Pitt’s. In the final act of No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers also deliberately violated thriller conventions, pulling the rug out from out identification with the apparent main character and denying us the violent catharsis all our years of moviegoing training had led us to expect. But they also gave us a deeper and more profound vision of the world in exchange. In Funny Games, Haneke doesn’t leave us with much more than an arid academic exercise, a stealth experiment in audience manipulation. Let’s hope the subjects don’t riot and tear up the laboratory.

Moviegoer Diary: Southland Tales, 12 Angry Men

SOUTHLAND TALES

Plot in a Nutshell:
In a nutshell? Lord help me... Okay, how's this? Richard Kelly’s objet de jeer at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival about an amnesiac actor, an ambitious porn star, an L.A. cop and his identical twin brother, neo-Marxist activists, citizen surveillance, a megazeppelin, and the disruption of the space-time continuum, all taking place in a crazy-quilt alternate version of present-day California.

Thoughts:
What happens when my irresistible urge to champion wildly ambitious but critically despised cinematic trainwrecks runs smack-dab into an immovable object like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales? I’m sorry to report, dear reader, that my very forgiving critical attitude did not survive the crash. If you’re looking to fix a precise time of death, I think it expired during the scene where Wallace Shawn, wearing lipstick, eyeshadow, an exquisitely styled forelock, and an embroidered cape, French-kisses Bai Ling. I’ll be holding a memorial service for my auteur-indulging instinct next weekend. You are all invited to attend; I’ll be screening One From the Heart afterward and wondering how I ever put up with the “Little Boy Blue” production number or the “Used Carlotta” interlude at the junkyard.

Southland Tales’ obsessions aren’t too far removed from those of Donnie Darko, Kelly’s previous effort as writer/director: once again, you have a character who gains the power to either save the world or destroy it after stepping through a rift in the space-time continuum, and once again you have a piece of writing (in this case, a screenplay co-authored by actor/political son-in-law Boxer Santaros and porn star/queen of all media Krysta Now) that seems not just to contain all the clues necessary to understand what is happening but to have predicted it as well. There’s a similar fondness for unexpected musical interludes and mindbending scientific paradoxes, images of characters falling unconscious, a dislike of prissy middle-aged women, a belief in acts of self-sacrifice. Donnie Darko had Sparkle Motion; Southland Tales has Fluid Karma.

What Southland Tales doesn’t have is a centre—a grounded character whose journey the audience can invest in emotionally like Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, whose overmedicated, teen-angsty struggle to piece together his life’s cosmic mysteries had surprising poignancy. True, Seann William Scott really seems to be giving everything he’s got in his dual role as twins Ronald and Roland Taverner, but the characters are frustratingly passive—I think Scott must get knocked unconscious at least six times in this movie. And Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson continues to prove himself as an unexpectedly resourceful and graceful actor for an ex-wrestler. I like Johnson more and more with each performance I see him give (although admittedly I skipped The Game Plan). Despite his enormous physical presence, his performances are always human-scaled, vulnerable, self-deprecating. In Southland Tales, he does this adorably frightened flutter of his fingertips every time something strange happens—it reminded me of Cary Grant’s nervous whinny in Bringing Up Baby.

But everyone else in Southland Tales is a sub-Pynchonian caricature with a ridiculous hairstyle, an ugly costume, and an incomprehensible agenda. Almost every performance in the film is the result of a stuntcasting gamble that doesn’t quite pay off: Jon Lovitz as a racist, trigger-happy L.A. cop? Christopher Lambert as some kind of weapons dealer who operates out of an ice cream truck? Kevin Smith, completely unrecognizable as a grey-bearded government scientist in camo gear? Saturday Night Live vets Amy Poehler, Nora Dunn and Cheri Oteri as Marxist terrorists? Did Kelly stand in front of Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant one night and hand out parts to whichever actors happened to be eating there that night? Or did he pull their names randomly out of a hat, like Secret Santa time at the office?

So many questions to answer: Is this the first movie to count Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues as a stylistic influence? Why does Mandy Moore—the star of Southland Tales and American Dreamz—hate America? And what kind of director cuts half an hour out of his movie after it gets booed at Cannes, but leaves in the scene where Wallace Shawn French-kisses Bai Ling?

RATING: 2/5 (thanks to two really good song-and-dance numbers)


12 ANGRY MEN

Plot in a Nutshell:
Henry Fonda painstakingly convinces the 11 other jurors in a murder trial to switch their verdict from guilty to not guilty.

Thoughts:
MGM kindly sent me a copy of the “50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition” of this beloved 1957 drama—being a collector, I naturally refused to buy the earlier versions and held out for this one—and it was great fun to revisit a film that I believe was one of the first “film classics” I ever remember falling in love with when I was a kid.

I remember being fascinated by the mechanics of the story—the way each piece of evidence in the case is examined and dismissed without the characters ever leaving that tiny jury room. And I remember appreciating, even at a young age, how skillfully the movie sketched in the personalities of all 12 characters, planting small character details that would pay off as the plot unfolded. And I remember loving that great, melodramatic title—12 Angry Men! There’s a brief glimpse, in one of the documentaries on the DVD, of a great vintage poster for the film featuring a drawing of the cast members’ faces, all staring out at you, wearing the angriest expressions they can. I’m laughing now just thinking of it: “Grrrrr!”

Seeing 12 Angry Men today for the first time in years, I found it as enjoyable as ever, despite a few moments that clanged a lot louder for me than they did when I was a kid—like the way Jack Warden’s character, who only wants the deliberations to be over with in time for him to catch the ballgame he has tickets to, expresses everything in baseball metaphors, or the moment where Ed Begley’s racist Juror #10 remarks how the young, slum-raised Puerto Rican defendant is just an ignorant slob who “don’t even speak good English!” only to have the Czechoslovakian Juror #11 gently correct him: “Doesn’t even speak good English.’”

And Henry Fonda’s characterization of the holdout juror got on my nerves a little this time through. Even though he spends much of the film saying he’s not sure if the kid on trial is guilty, his attitude is anything but humble or self-effacing: his obnoxious confidence that the rightness of his own argument will be borne out, and the condescension with which he addresses anyone who disagrees with him, make him a pretty insufferable hero.

But Joseph Sweeney, the elderly character actor who becomes Fonda’s first ally, is such an appealing presence that he practically saves the movie. I was surprised how many small details of his performance I remembered, from the peevish way he looks offscreen when Begley coughs in the middle of one of his speeches, to his note-perfect final exchange with Fonda on the courtroom steps: “Hey, what’s your name?” “Davis.” “My name’s McCardle! Well, so long!”

So long, Joseph Sweeney! When it comes time to decide whether my soul gets into heaven, I hope you’re on that jury too!

RATING: 4.5/5

Fist Times at Ridgemont High

Watching Never Back Down made me very nostalgic for the days, not so long ago, when I was going to high school and got involved with an underground fighting ring.

Like Never Back Down’s hero, Jake Tyler (Sean Faris), I too was an angry kid with father issues. Jake’s dad was an alcoholic who died in a drunken car wreck; my dad never forgave me for ditching the family business and going into film criticism. Yessiree, when my mom moved by brother and me across the country to Florida, I was like Jake and just wanted to lash out at the world.

Boy, I sure could identify with those scenes in Never Back Down where the stuck-up rich kids at Jake’s new school make fun of his habit of dressing in flannel shirts despite the Florida sun—“Kurt Cobain,” they call Jake, “Paul Bunyan,” they called me. Either way, the girls would turn their heads and laugh, pile into their Hummers, and drive off with their smirking boyfriends. It’s tough for a new kid at high school! Good thing Jake and I both made friends with a less sexually attractive sidekick who could always make us laugh when we were feeling down.

I have to nitpick the accuracy of Never Back Down a little bit, though, in the scene where Jake attends a party at the home of Ryan, the evil rich kid who’s the town’s best mixed-martial-arts brawler. Oh sure, the sprawling Tony Montana mansion really brought me back. The movie gets the stuff about girls walking around in bikinis pretty much correct, and the stuff about the fighting matches taking place out back is dead-on too—like Ryan says in the movie, it was one long parade of “girl on girl, black on brown, ex versus ex.” The constant girl-girl kung fu streetfights were definitely my favourite back then. (Hey—I was in high school! Can you blame me?) But the bit with the two half-naked girls making out in a bubble bath while everyone snaps pictures of them with their cameraphones? Whatever! But I guess when you’re making a movie, you have to Hollywood everything up a little bit.

After seeing Ryan beat Jake up in front of all the guests, I sat there hoping that Jake would be as lucky as I was and find a mentor who could take his fighting technique to the next level. My teacher was a retired Israeli army commando who’d spent some time as a soldier of fortune in Southeast Asia and who taught me a potent mix of Krav Maga and Muy Thai kickboxing, with a little old-school bare-knuckle brawling thrown in for good measure. But Jake’s trainer is pretty cool too—this tall, ripped Senegalese guy played by Djimon Hounsou.

And Jake gives Hounsou almost as many headaches as I gave Ari back in the day. Guys like Jake and me—we chafe under any kind of authority figure, and it takes us forever to realize that they’ve got our best interests at heart. When we do, though, they take us on the training montage of our lives! Truth be told, I was kind of jealous that Kanye West’s “Stronger” plays under Jake’s montage when for some reason mine was set to some old Belle and Sebastian song.

Anyway, I was excited to learn from Never Back Down that they still run massive no-holds-barred streetfighter tournaments in Florida. The one Jake takes part in is called “The Beatdown,” and even though mine was called “Punchapalooza,” they’re pretty much the same idea—you strip down to your waist, show the roaring crowd your rippling abs, and defeat as many colourful ethnic opponents as it takes until you face your nemesis while your gorgeous blonde girlfriend cries and begs you to end the fight after you get so much as one measly broken rib.

I don’t want to say whether Jake wins or not—I’m not about to reveal any spoilers! But my big fight against my archnemesis ended exactly the same way, so I guess you can Google my name if you’re curious. That’s all part of my past, though. I’ve given up fighting for good, but sometimes when I type out a particularly enthusiastic movie review, I can still feel my knuckles sting a little.

Moviegoer Diary: Wild 90, In Bruges

WILD 90

Plot in a Nutshell:
Norman Mailer’s rambling 1968 improv experiment about three mob guys shooting the shit and fantasizing about shooting each other during a week holed up in a tiny unfurnished room somewhere in New York.

Thoughts:
I first heard about this movie more than 25 years ago in Harry and Michael Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards, where Mailer won the prize for “Worst Performance by a Novelist.” I was pretty young and had only a vague idea of who Norman Mailer was, but I remember being powerfully struck by the notion of someone shooting a movie without a script. I can remember wanting so badly to make a movie of my own that the idea that you could leapfrog over the entire process of writing a script or lining up a gigantic cast and crew was tremendously appealing, and for years I harboured ridiculous fantasies of going out one night, walking around the streets of my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario and just saying whatever came into my head into the camera. Yes, that’s how fascinating I thought I was when I was 15.

So I found it pretty funny to watch Wild 90 and realize that Mailer never quite grew out of this adolescent phase. Playing Prince, the alpha male in the film’s trio of “Maf Boys,” Mailer never lets having nothing to contribute to a scene stop him from demanding the audience’s attention: the moment he senses the camera drifting away from him and towards his co-stars Mickey Knox and Buzz Farber, he starts punching the back of his chair with his fists or smashing a crate to pieces or simply yelling inarticulately at the top of his lungs. Halfway through the movie, Mailer inexplicably adopts a belligerent quasi-African-American voice, all the better to bark out obscenities with.

I think I may be echoing something that Pauline Kael wrote about this movie, but I’ll say it anyway on the off-chance I’m actually being original: as a movie about mob guys, Wild 90 is pretty tedious (and the murky photography and muddy sound recording, which made about two-thirds of the dialogue unintelligible to me, don’t help matters), but after about 20 or 30 minutes, the film subtly changes into a documentary about a bunch of swaggering actors and writers pretending to be mob guys, and on that level, it exerts a certain limited fascination as a cultural artifact.

Also, if that’s actual alcohol Mailer is consuming throughout the film—and Mailer was such a macho guy that I have no reason to doubt that it is—then Wild 90 surpasses Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Leaving Las Vegas as the drinkingest movie I’ve ever seen.

And while Mailer comes off as a supreme asshole in this movie—when he gets on all fours and starts barking at a German shepherd, you actually feel sorry for the dog—I can’t imagine Jonathan Franzen or Michael Chabon ever exposing himself to the public the way Mailer does here. Rest in peace, Norman Mailer. I hope you’re having a helluva time up there in Drunken Asshole Heaven.

RATING: 2/5


IN BRUGES

Plot in a Nutshell:
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are Irish hitmen cooling their heels in Belgium after a botched job.

Thoughts:
In Bruges is an infinitely better constructed, better acted, more watchable, and sheerly enjoyable movie on every level than Wild 90, and yet while I’m rating it higher, somehow I respected it less. When Norman Mailer decided he wanted to pretend to be a gangster for a few days, he didn’t feel like he had to rope a gigantic British/Irish film crew into helping him, or shut down half an entire Belgian city.

I had the same reaction to In Bruges that I had to many of writer/director Martin McDonagh’s plays, like A Skull in Connemara and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. They’re all wildly entertaining, with lots of amusingly testy interplay among the characters, a volatile mix of violence and black comedy, and a knack for creating plots that may not be plausible, exactly, but which obey a certain relentless theatrical logic all the way to their bloody climaxes... and yet, I’m not sure there’s all that much to take home with you intellectually after it’s all over. That’s especially true of In Bruges, which flirts with themes of grief, sin, and morality, but which throws away any claim to seriousness with its utterly ludicrous final act, which wobbles between black comedy and tragedy without ever finding its footing.

At least McDonagh writes great parts for actors. Ralph Fiennes coasts through his extended guest-star role as a crime boss, but Brendan Gleeson has a lovely, jug-eared avuncularity that really sells the notion that this gangster is seriously considering moving to Bruges permanently; and Colin Farrell’s little-boy-lost routine, guiltily scrunching up his mouth and knitting his thick black eyebrows, is as affectingly vulnerable here as it was in a similar part in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream.

I wonder: does Farrell use that face whenever his girlfriends catch him cheating on them? If it is, I bet they forgive him every time.

RATING: 3/5

The Musicgoer: Janet Jackson's Discipline

JANET JACKSON
Discipline
(Island)
** 1/2 (out of five)

I will never understand why so many music critics slam Janet Jackson for supposedly being too old to be singing so obsessively about sex. If you’re that freaked out by the thought of a perfectly healthy 41-year-old woman still being active in the bedroom, then I’d suggest your sexual hangups are a lot worse than Jackson’s excursions into S&M. And who would you rather hear singing about S&M anyway? Better a mature woman like Janet Jackson than, say, Miley Cyrus.

Too bad the title track on Jackson’s new disc Discipline is so slow and monotonous that listening to the song’s psychologically revealing “punish me, daddy” fantasies is like trying to walk through quicksand. While ballgagged. Jackson could learn something from Madonna: despite the presence of serviceable assembly-line dance tracks like “Luv,” “Feedback,” and “Greatest X,” Discipline suffers from a fatal lack of humour or irony about her carnal tastes. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the eight insufferable “interludes” scattered throughout the disc in which Jackson carries on pretentious conversations with her computer, “Kyoko.” The problem with Discipline isn’t its obsession with sex; it’s that the only man in Jackson’s boudoir is a laptop. And the laptop... well, he's kind of an idiot.

Moviegoer Diary: I Know Who Killed Me, God Told Me To

I KNOW WHO KILLED ME

Plot in a Nutshell:
After good girl Aubrey Fleming escapes from a serial killer—albeit minus an arm and a leg—why does she insist she’s actually bad-girl stripper Dakota Moss and has no memory of her life before her abduction? The answer may surprise you!

Thoughts:
I watched I Know Who Killed Me as an act of protest against the Golden Raspberry Awards—a.k.a. the “Razzies”—which are handed out the day before the Oscar ceremony to the worst Hollywood films of the year.

I can’t begin to describe how much I hate the Razzies and their smug founder John Wilson. I’ve certainly made my fair share of snarky comments at the expense of lousy movies, but I hope that as a critic I stand for more than the relentless, unvarying sneer that pervades the Razzies website. I’d be willing to cut Wilson and the Razzies some slack if their critiques contained some genuinely funny bile or even just a little linguistic panache, but instead the site is characterized by features with names like “The Worst New Movie of the Weak.” That’s Wilson’s idea of wit—in this year’s official list of nominees, he lists the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie as Pirates of the Carob-Bean: At Wit’s End.

There’s nothing satisfying about seeing even a movie you hated getting nominated for a bunch of Razzies—no more than hearing George W. Bush get insulted by Jay Leno. (In 2004, the Razzies tried to do their own version of a Jay Leno joke, when Bush won Best Actor and Donald Rumsfeld won Best Supporting Actor for the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 911. The joke, due to its making absolutely no comic sense, bombed.)

The Razzies also have an ugly zest for kicking celebrities when they’re down—never more apparent than this year when the much-derided Linsday Lohan thriller I Know Who Killed Me won a record eight Razzies. Unable as ever to resist running a lame joke into the ground, the Razzies gave Lindsay Lohan two Worst Actress Razzies for her dual role... and then gave her another Razzie as Worst Onscreen Couple. They also invented a brand-new category, Worst Excuse for a Horror Movie—in order, I suspect, to make sure I Know Who Killed Me got as many Razzies as possible.

I really like Lindsay Lohan as an actress—I even though she gave a pretty decent performance in the widely dismissed Georgia Rule—and so I fervently wished I Know Who Killed Me would turn out to be a misunderstood gem, simply to satisfy my Razzie spite.

But alas, such was not to be. While the film exerts a certain fascination simply as a strange pop-cultural artifact—a dark twin to Lohan’s breakthrough film, the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, another story about estranged sisters—its content is simply too tawdry and sleazy for it to be much fun. Lohan looks decades older than her 21 years (as Stephen Metcalfe noted in a recent Slate podcast, she looks like mid-career Ann-Margret these days), and it’s hard to know which is more exploitative: Lohan’s ridiculously protracted striptease scenes, or the truly repellent sequence in which her skin is literally stripped off her hand.

Then again, the final twist cooked up by screenwriter Jeff Hammond—which is like The Double Life of Véronique by way of Cheech & Chong’s The Corsican Brothers—is one of the loopiest in recent memory. And all the business with Lohan’s new artificial limbs is entertainingly ridiculous, especially the moment where the serial killer starts chasing Lohan... just as the battery runs out on her artificial leg. Of all the worst times!

RATING: 1.5/5



GOD TOLD ME TO

Plot in a Nutshell:
Larry Cohen’s cult 1976 B-movie about a New York cop (Tony Lo Bianco) investigating a wave of unmotivated spree killings whose perpetrators all explain their actions by saying, “God told me to!”

Thoughts:
I’ve always wanted to see this movie ever since reading the long interview with Larry Cohen in Re/Search’s Incredibly Strange Films issue some 15 years ago. Now that I’ve finally tracked it down, I don’t know whether to be awestruck by this film’s audacity or frustrated by its sloppy execution.

It’s full of amazing images: a cop (Andy Kaufman, in his first screen role!) going berserk and shooting bystanders at a St. Patrick’s Day Parade; naked women levitating into spaceships; a hermaphrodite Christ figure swathed in a buttery cocoon of sunlight; Sandy Dennis, twitchier than ever! At the same time, Cohen’s script never quite knows how to fit its wild ideas into a dramatic structure—the writing is either too obvious (the early scenes of Lo Bianco following up leads on the killings) or too incomprehensible (the encounters between Lo Bianco and the mystical being with whom he turns out to share some kind of familiar bond).

On one hand, Sylvia Sidney gives a terrific single-scene performance as an old woman troubled by memories of being abducted by a UFO; on the other, Deborah Raffin is a stiff in an underdeveloped role as Lo Bianco’s girlfriend. On one hand, Cohen’s resourcefulness in shooting a scene at the actual St. Patrick’s Day parade, thereby gaining the services of thousands of free extras, is a triumph of low-budget wiles; on the other hand, his aimless handheld cinematography in the indoor scenes is distractingly amateurish. (I note, however, that assistant cameraman Stefan Czapsky and co-editor Chris Lebenzon both went on to become regular members of Tim Burton’s crew.)

This is a classic case of a movie that begs to be remade, even though the premise is so outrageous that if the wrong director got hold of it we could have another Wicker Man on our hands. I’d love to see what David Cronenberg could do with this material, for instance. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a fan of the movie already. (The image of half-alien messiah Bernard Phillips with a large vaginal slit in his side anticipates the videocassette-hungry slit James Woods grows in Videodrome, while the climactic battle between psychically linked superhuman brothers anticipates the ending of Scanners.)

Come on, David—what do you say? The Tony Lo Bianco part would be perfect for Viggo Mortensen!

RATING: 3/5

Animation With Bite

Just about every feature-length cartoon Hollywood has produced over the last three years has been a computer-animated story about talking animals. Of course, no genre that’s produced Ratatouille can be all bad, but it’s invigorating to finish watching The Best of the Ottawa Animation Festival 2007 (a compendium of prizewinners and finalists from the largest animation showcase in North America) and realize that no two films looked remotely alike.

Bert Gottschalk’s experimental “Framing” combines black-and-white photographs of old building façades, cut up and recombined with snippets of 8mm film, the shape of the sprockets echoing the shapes of the windows; meanwhile, in “The Old, Old, Very Old Man,” Elizabeth Hobbs uses splotchy, watery ink drawings upon white tile to tell the story of 152-year-old Thomas Parr’s fatal meeting with King Charles I. Juan Pablo Zaramella’s “Lapsus” is a very funny little doodle of a movie that’s sort of like Chuck Jones’ “Duck Amuck” crossed with the monochromatic drawing style of Persepolis; and at the other end of the technological scale, Michael Langan’s “Doxology” uses state-of-the-art computer technology to create some souped-up live-action images that would have made Norman MacLaren’s eyes pop out of his head—especially the brief shot of a man dancing the tango with a car.

Probably the highest-profile film in the collection is Josh Raskin’s “I Met the Walrus,” which was one of the nominees for Best Animated Short at this year’s Oscars. The film has a delightful backstory: in 1969, when producer Jerry Levitan was 14 years old, he sneaked into John Lennon’s Toronto hotel room with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and managed to score a brief interview with the former Beatle before security asked him to leave. Lennon’s earnest, occasionally fuzzy-headed observations about politics, music, and non-violent protests provide the film’s soundtrack, which Raskin visualizes by means of some witty, amazingly fluid ink drawings that recall Yellow Submarine, ’60s op art, and the kind of formal illustrations you normally find in dictionaries and 19th-century newspapers. (Signe Baumane’s hilarious “Teat Beat of Sex” also uses animation to illustrate a pre-existing recording, with much raunchier results.)

I’m not sure what this says about me, but my two favourite shorts in the collection are both told from the point of view of disturbed little boys. “T.O.M.,” a three-minute-long oddity by Welsh filmmakers Tom Brown and Daniel Gray, is the more lighthearted of the two: the hero is a precocious schoolboy who describes with childlike simplicity his increasingly bizarre daily routine. It’s probably the least adventurous visually of the shorts in the collection, but the brightly coloured storybook images and the just-slightly-askew perspectives are perfect for the material.

My other favourite is called “Milk Teeth,” it was directed by Tibor Banoczki, who’s got a very striking visual style that combines photorealistic 3-D backgrounds with characters who resemble two-dimensional paper cutouts, and I think it’s close to a masterpiece. There’s no dialogue, and the plot is as skeletal as the withered ears of corn that provide its backdrop: a young boy follows his older sister into a field, where she has a midnight rendezvous with her boyfriend. But Banoczki is so good at using sound (and he’s made the little boy so creepy-looking) that you almost don’t want to breathe for fear of breaking the eerie mood he’s created. You probably wouldn’t want to show this one to your kids, but that’s okay—not everything has to be Ratatouille.

Here's the car-tango scene from "Doxology"...

And here's a taste of "I Met the Walrus"...

And here's a clip from "Milk Teeth"...

Yeah, I forget to mention... there's a hippopotamus in it too.

Gone Baby Gone

Very few American (or Canadian) films tell you much about how the world works. You could spend an entire year in the neighbourhood multiplex, and come out 12 months later with almost no concept of how people make a living, the duties that working at a particular job entails, how the political system operates, how laws are enforced, how any piece of machinery is put together, how to build something, how to make love, how babies are born. Maybe you could go to the movies and learn how to dance or fire a gun, but the kind of movies with dancers and assassins as heroes tend to be edited so chaotically that they don’t wind up being very educational.

Perhaps one of the reasons that some of the recent films coming out of Romania—in particular 2006’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and the new drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—have gotten such enormous critical acclaim is their refreshing focus on process. These are very patient movies, movies that take the time to show you every grim, tedious step of a complicated bureaucratic procedure (getting admitted to a hospital in Lazarescu, procuring an illegal abortion in 4 Months): making appointments, having to find somewhere else to go when the original appointment falls through, filling out paperwork, begging favours from petty authority figures—some of them merely obstreperous, others downright malevolent. Your reward for sitting through all this is, I think, a deeper understanding of the mechanics of repression. Repression and bureaucracy aren’t abstract ideas in these Romanian films; they’re concepts as real and tangible as a dingy hotel room or a hospital admittance form.

The films, which consist largely of long, unbroken takes and employ a naturalistic, understated acting style, have the flatness of a documentary, but the emotional impact of great drama. They’re banal yet gripping. In 4 Months, for instance, the stakes of the story are so high that a long scene involving nothing more than a woman trying to book a hotel room from a suspicious concierge becomes as excruciatingly suspenseful as the dentist-drill scene from Marathon Man.

The woman is Otilia (Anamaria Marinca, whom Canadians might recall from her role in the CBC TV-movie Sex Traffic). She’s a college student in 1980s Romania whose friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) wants to terminate her pregnancy, but who’s delayed the procedure for a dangerously long amount of time and who now has relied on the more resourceful and strong-willed Otilia to arrange the details: not just to find an abortionist, but to chip in for the hotel room, and then find an alternate hotel room at the last minute when the first one refuses to admit them.

Soon the abortionist—an unremarkable-looking fellow with the incongruously cheerful name Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov)—arrives, and in a masterfully written, directed, and acted scene, immediately takes stock of the situation, noting the two women’s barely concealed desperation and gauging exactly what extra demands he can exact from them before getting down to business.

To his great credit, writer/director Cristian Mungiu doesn’t shy away from depicting the abortion, or, a few scenes later, from showing its gruesome aftermath. (This is not a film for the squeamish.) But perhaps the film’s most agonizing scene doesn’t take place in that hotel room, but at a party in the apartment where Otilia’s boyfriend Adi’s parents live—Adi has obliviously pressured her into putting in an appearance there, and Mungiu’s camera sits on Otilia’s face for what seems like an eternity as she silently listens to the shallow dinner conversation droning on around her, while for all she knows, Gabita could be bleeding to death on the other side of town.

This film was the subject of a lot of outraged newspaper articles last month when it failed to get an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film—it was enough of a scandal, in fact, that nominating committee chairman Mark Johnson admitted a massive reform of the nomination process was probably necessary. It’s a shame Mungiu’s film wasn’t recognized, but do you know what other films weren’t nominated in this category either? The Seventh Seal. Andrei Rublev. Breathless, The 400 Blows, Belle de Jour, The Conformist, Tokyo Story, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Contempt, Persona, Last Year at Marienbad... basically the greatest foreign films of the last half-century.

I’d say 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days belongs in their company—and not just because of its lack of an Oscar nod.